Jacaerys Velaryon x wife!reader - House of the Dragon (spoilers for s3 ep1!!)
Summary: Jacaerys survives the Gullet, so naturally the maesters have opinions about what he should and should not be doing during his recovery. Unfortunately for them, Jace has opinions too.
A/N: this works as a standalone or sequel to Saltwater, except this fic is significantly less angsty and significantly more "what if jace spent a month trying to argue with medical professionals." :) must admit i cracked myself up a lil writing this and also PLEASE send in reqs im running out of ideas
MASTERLIST - REQUESTS (open) - WC: 4.0k
A month after the Gullet, the castle still smells faintly of medicines, as though the sea itself has followed Jacaerys home and settled in the stone with him.
You have grown so accustomed to it that you hardly notice anymore.
A month ago, you would have given anything to smell it. A month ago, there had been blood. So much blood. But now there are only maesters, all the time.
Three of them stand gathered around the table right now near the window, speaking in low, serious voices while Jace sits in a carved chair looking increasingly irritated with every minute.
Sunlight spills through the narrow panes behind him, catching in his dark curls and turning the edges of them gold, softening him in a way that makes him seem almost boyish despite everything he has endured in the last couple weeks.
His injuries have faded from terrifying to merely alarming. The worst of the bruising is gone, the cuts have begun to heal, and colour has returned to his face, though not yet enough for you to relax.
Unfortunately for everyone else, so has his stubbornness.
You stand beside him with one hand resting lightly on the back of his chair, partly affection but mostly precaution if you're being honest with yourself, because the prince has developed an unfortunate habit of forgetting that nearly dying is supposed to slow a person down.
"Your Grace is recovering admirably," Grand Maester Gerardys says at last.
Jace straightens immediately, as if the words themselves have restored him. Gerardys clears his throat with the patient air of a man who has spent his life delivering unwelcome truths to the powerful. "Recovering admirably, however, does not mean recovered."
Jace slumps back with all the theatrical suffering of a man condemned to the Wall. Gerardys continues as though he has not noticed the prince's offence.
"Your ribs are still mending. The wound to your side has not fully healed. The fever has passed, but weakness remains. Any unnecessary strain could set back his recovery considerably."
Jace folds his arms. "What strain?"
The three maesters exchange a glance, and you immediately become suspicious. Jace notices it too, his brows drawing together. "What strain?" he repeats, sharper this time.
Nobody answers.
The silence stretches, and stretches, and then stretches a little further, until finally the old maester clears his throat again, looking faintly pained. "This includes physical exertion."
Jace nods at once. "Yes, I gathered that, obviously."
"Excessive physical exertion."
"Yes."
"Particularly..." Gerardys pauses, and one of the younger maesters suddenly finds the floor fascinating. "...marital exertion."
The room falls completely silent.
For a single moment Jace simply stares at them. Then his face changes all at once, horror and outrage arriving together.
"I beg your pardon?"
You turn away quickly because you can already feel laughter rising in your throat and you know if you let it out now you will never stop. Beside you, Jace looks scandalised beyond measure. "What do you mean?"
"My Prince-"
"No." The word echoes off the stone walls. "Absolutely not. This is absurd and I refuse to accept it."
Gerardys remains maddeningly calm. "It is only temporary."
"Temporary?" Jace sounds personally betrayed. "You are forbidding me from bedding my own wife."
The younger maester goes slightly red. You stare very intently at the tapestry across the room, because if you look at Jace now you will lose whatever dignity you have left. He points an accusing finger at the entire collection of healers. "I survived a naval battle."
"Indeed."
"I was shot."
"Yes."
"I nearly drowned."
"Correct."
"And your conclusion is that my greatest threat is my wife?"
The maesters look vaguely embarrassed. Jace looks outraged. And suddenly, despite the lingering ache that still lives in your chest whenever you remember the sight of him bleeding on a bed, you feel lighter, because this is familiar. This is your Jace. He's alive enough to argue and complain. Alive enough to glare dramatically at innocent old men and be stubborn.
Your hand slips from the chair to his shoulder, and immediately he covers it with his own. Gerardys notices, and his expression gentles. "My Prince," he says, "the restriction is not punishment."
Jace groans. "I would beg to differ."
A few of the maesters smile despite themselves. Gerardys gathers his papers, "It is only another month."
Jace nearly chokes. "A whole month?"
"Perhaps less, if recovery continues."
"A month."
"You survived the Gullet. Surely you can survive a few more weeks."
Jace mutters something deeply disrespectful under his breath, and you squeeze his shoulder in warning and affection both. His fingers immediately tighten around yours as he looks up at you, exhaustion and frustration playing on his features.
You smile at him, and his expression softens immediately.
Then Gerardys speaks again, and the spell breaks at once. "And separate beds may also be advisable."
Jace's head snaps around, "No."
Silence settles over the chamber. Jace's hand remains wrapped around yours, firm and warm and immovable. "I nearly died, so I am not sleeping without my wife."
They exchange glances and then, wisely, surrender. "Very well."
You lower your head to hide your smile, because truly, there are battles even the maesters cannot win.
That evening the matter should have been settled, at least in theory.
The maesters had spoken, their instructions delivered and their warnings had been repeated no fewer than six times over supper, as though saying them often enough might somehow make Jace more inclined to obey.
Instead, he is attempting to negotiate, which is perhaps exactly what you should have expected from him and yet still feels faintly absurd when he is sitting there shirtless on the edge of the bed, looking incredibly offended by the very concept of restraint.
You sit beside him with a fresh roll of linen in your lap while he holds one arm lifted so you can reach the wound along his side.
The chamber is quiet except for the crackle of the fire and the distant, steady sound of waves striking the cliffs below; night has fully settled beyond the windows, leaving only darkness on the other side of the glass and the warm gold of candlelight within.
Carefully, you peel away the old bandage, and he hisses through his teeth at the movement. You glance up at once. “You are being dramatic.”
"Three arrows pierced my body.”
“A month ago.”
“It still counts.”
You make a skeptical sound and reach for the ointment, though you cannot quite keep the corner of your mouth from twitching. For a few moments silence settles between you. You smooth the salve across healing skin, studying the angry scar that is beginning to form there, the sight still makes something twist painfully in your chest.
There are moments when you look at him and see only Jace; your husband, your best friend, the boy who once raced you through castle corridors and stole lemon cakes from the kitchens with the shameless confidence of someone who had never once been told no in his life.
Then there are moments like this, when memory comes back all at once and with it the blood, the fever, the endless waiting, the terrible certainty, however brief, that you might lose him. Your fingers pause before you can stop them.
Immediately, his hand settles over yours.
He notices. Of course he does.
You lift your eyes, and his expression softens at once. “I am all right,” he says quietly.
“Mm.”
His thumb brushes slowly across your knuckles.
Then, because Jacaerys Velaryon possesses the survival instincts of an overconfident golden retriever, he says, “I still think the maesters are being unreasonable.”
You close your eyes for a brief, weary moment. You had been wondering how long it would take.
“You are recovering from grievous injuries.”
“I am recovering exceptionally well.”
“You still tire walking up stairs.”
“Well, I dislike those stairs.”
You begin wrapping the fresh bandage around his ribs. “They are not unusual stairs, Jace.”
"They are steeper than other stairs."
Despite yourself, you laugh, and his grin appears immediately. He tilts his head, thoughtful in the way that always makes you suspicious.
“What exactly constitutes marital exertion?”
You nearly drop the bandage. “Jacaerys.”
“It is a reasonable question.”
You finish tying the linen perhaps just a little tighter than necessary, and he winces. You feel no guilt whatsoever.
“They were quite vague,” he says after a moment.
“They were not vague. They were, in fact, extraordinarily clear.”
Jace considers this with the air of a man weighing evidence in a trial he has already decided to win. “Perhaps to you.”
“To everyone.”
“Not to me.” His smile widens, and you are suddenly struck by the realisation that the maesters should perhaps have prescribed confinement in separate castles.
“They said strain,” he says, as though he's continuing a perfectly sensible conversation.
“Yes.”
“And exertion.”
“Yes.”
“So theoretically-”
“No.”
“What if-”
“Jace.”
He stops, though only because he is laughing now, actually laughing, and the sound fills the room so easily that for a moment you forget everything else.
“You are impossible,” you inform him.
“I have been told.”
He reaches for your hand, and you let him take it. His fingers close around yours with a warmth that feels almost unbearably familiar, and when he speaks again his voice has lost its teasing edge. “Another month is a very long time.”
You shake your head, smiling softly, but before he can begin constructing another ridiculous argument, you lean forward and press a kiss to his mouth.
The effect is immediate. Jace falls silent, blessedly, wonderfully silent, and when you pull back he blinks once, then twice, as though he has forgotten every thought he was having.
A second kiss lands at the corner of his mouth, then another against his cheek, and with each one his smile grows slower, softer, warmer, until by the third he has entirely abandoned his campaign against the maesters.
You feel rather proud of yourself.
He grins and reaches for you, and you allow him to pull you nearer. The blankets shift around you both as you settle beside him carefully, because he is still healing and you are both painfully aware of it.
His arm slides around your waist. Your head finds its familiar place against his shoulder.
The first week after the maesters' decree is irritating.
The second becomes ridiculous.
By the third, it's infuriating.
Jacaerys Velaryon approaches recovery the way he approaches every obstacle in his life: by refusing to accept that it is truly an obstacle at all.
If the maesters insist upon restrictions, then he will simply find exceptions.
One evening, as you sit beside him on the bed with your book open in your lap, he glances over and says, almost casually, “I stand by my opinion that their instructions were imprecise.”
You do not look up. “No.”
“They never actually provided definitions.”
You turn a page. “They are maesters, Jace, not scholars debating philosophy.”
He sighs, long-suffering and theatrical, and shifts a little closer.
Recently, he has become fond of finding excuses to sit beside you, or hold your hand, or drape an arm around your shoulders, or rest his head in your lap while insisting he is 'too weak' to move despite having spent the entire afternoon arguing in council.
“What if,” he begins. You close your eyes.
“What if,” he repeats, undeterred, “the concern is specifically overexertion?”
“It is.”
“Then surely the solution is simply avoiding overexertion.”
At last you lower the book and look at him properly. His expression brightens at once, as though he has won something merely by drawing your attention.
“Jace.”
“Yes?”
“No.”
He groans, and you return to your book.
Three nights later, he appears to have developed a new argument. You discover this when he is sprawled across the bed with his head resting against your shoulder, warm and comfortable and entirely too pleased with himself.
“What if,” he says thoughtfully.
You nearly laugh. “Again?”
“I have had several days to refine my position on the issue.”
“Gods preserve me.”
“What if I simply did not move very much? You could do all the... moving... uh, like difficult parts.”
You lower your embroidery hoop and glance down at him. He looks entirely sincere, which somehow makes it worse.
“Jacaerys.”
“I am not going to do any part because we are not going to do anything.”
He studies the ceiling for a moment, then turns his head just enough to look at you. “I think you are dismissing my proposals too quickly.”
“I think you enjoy hearing yourself talk.”
“I enjoy talking to you.”
Oh, you hate how good he is at being charming.
His arm slips around your waist. “You know,” he says quietly, “I do understand why you’re worried.”
The humour fades a little. You look at him, but his gaze remains fixed on your joined hands.
“You frightened me,” you admit.
Something flashes behind his eyes. “I know.”
Silence settles between you, gentle and sad and comfortable all at once. Then, because he is incapable of allowing a serious conversation to remain serious for too long, he lifts his head and says, “So that is still a no?”
You stare at him.
Jace immediately begins laughing, and when you throw a cushion at his face he catches it easily, looking delighted by the rejection.
Which, unfortunately, only convinces you that recovery is proceeding exceptionally well.
One morning at the beginning of the fourth week you're standing at the edge of the bedchamber, the salt-laced wind moaning through the open shutters as the last embers in the hearth crackle low.
Jacaerys is desperate today, even more than usual
He lies propped against the pillows, his bare chest rising and falling with quick, restless breaths, the angry red scars along his ribs and hip still mapped in fresh pink, but they are scars now, nonetheless.
It's been two months since the Gullet.
To the naked eye he seems fully recovered — he partakes in council meetings, goes on long walks with you along the shore, is no longer winded by those particularly steep stairs — but the maesters’ edict remains iron.
No strain, no exertion, no touch that might tear what they say has barely knit. Yet here he is, dark eyes fixed on you with shameless hunger, voice low and frayed.
“Please,” he murmurs, the words thick with frustration, his hand extended, palm up, fingers flexing as if he can already feel the shape of your waist.
“I cannot do this, I’m not some broken thing anymore. I feel you every night in my dreams, and then I wake up and you won't even let me touch you properly. I need your hand, your mouth, anything. Just… let me feel you again.”
He sits up a little straighter, a small grin finding his lips, voice dropping to a growl. “You’re aching too, I know it. Two months without feeling how wet you get for me-"
"Jacaerys, stop being so crude, you cannot possibly think-" but he continues, completely disregarding your objections.
"Gods, I’d give anything to see you under me like I used to, but I won’t move. I swear it. Just you, I'll even lie still.”
Your fingers tighten on the bedpost, because you cannot dent he's right. You do miss him, painfully so. You miss the feel of his hands on you and the stretch of him inside you, but reluctance still coils tight in your chest.
You take one hesitant step closer.
The cool stone floor beneath your bare feet gives way to the softness of the mattress as you perch carefully at his uninjured side, your fingers brushing the edge of the linen without yet touching him.
“Jacaerys,” you whisper, “I cannot, the maesters said-” But the way his hips twitch, just once, desperate and involuntary, stops the protest on your tongue.
A soft, helpless sound escapes him, and something shifts inside you, because this, in a way, is also him in pain, except this time you actually have the power to help him.
Your hand drifts over the sheet, hovering just above the bulge you can just start to see emerging beneath the linen.
“You must promise me you’ll lie perfectly still,” you remind him, the words gentle but unyielding, “There are reasons they forbid it; you could open one of the wounds.”
His dark eyes flash, jaw tightening as if he might argue, but apparently the months of forced stillness have left him too raw, too aching, and he nods once, a bead of sweat tracing down his temple.
You smile then, small and maybe a little teasing, and let your fingertips graze the linen over the head of his cock.
Slowly you peel the sheet down, then work on the laces of his breeches before pulling them down and finally revealing him fully to the firelit air.
His cock thick and flushed dark, the vein along its length pulsing visibly as you wrap your fingers around the base with deliberate lightness, still not quite sure how this is going to go.
He groans, low and broken, head tipping back against the pillows, but he holds himself rigid as promised, muscles trembling with the effort.
You lean in, breath ghosting over the sensitive head, and press the softest kiss there, tasting the salt of him while your free hand rests lightly on his uninjured hip to remind him of the boundary.
“Only on my terms tonight, dearest husband,” you whisper against his skin, stroking him once, slow and torturous, savouring the way his breath hitches and his fingers clutch the bedding instead of reaching for you.
“I will give you this, you just lay there and let me take care you.”
You tighten your grip just enough to draw another shuddering groan from him, your thumb circling the slick head of his cock in slow, deliberate strokes that make his thighs tense against the sheets.
He’s so hard it must be painful, the heavy length twitching in your fist with every pass,
The sight of your big, strong husband, normally so commanding, now reduced to biting his lip to keep from thrusting stirs something warm and aching in your chest.
It feels like the biggest relief.
You still remember every moment of the last two months, watching him wince at every breath, lying awake beside his bandaged body while fear gnawed at you both, and now here he is, flushed and leaking for you, trying so hard to obey even as his hips give one tiny, involuntary roll.
It’s adorable, that stubborn flicker of dominance surfacing in the way he grits out your name, only for it to dissolve into a whimper when you lean down and drag your tongue along the underside of his shaft.
His fingers fist the bedding harder, knuckles white, and you can see the war in his eyes, the urge to grab your hair and guide you deeper warring with the maesters’ warnings and his own fragile healing.
“Fuck… just like that,” he rasps, voice cracking with need so raw it makes your own neglected body clench.
You take him deeper into your mouth, hollowing your cheeks with a soft suck that has him arching his head back.
It's as if you're watching him heal in real-time, because he’s becoming himself again, that fierce, passionate man who once pinned you laughing to the furs.
You hum around him, savouring the salt-bitter taste of him while your free hand strokes soothing circles over his tightening stomach.
You pull off just enough to murmur against the flushed skin, teasing the slit with the tip of your tongue until his breath stutters.
“Still, Jace.”
Then you resume your rhythm, slow, twisting strokes of your hand paired with wet, deliberate licks. He trembles beneath you, every suppressed sound proof of how desperately he’s craved your touch.
You quicken your pace with deliberate mercy, not seeing a point in dragging this out any longer than you have to, lips sealed tight around him as your tongue swirls and your hand pumps in steady rhythm, feeling the way his thighs quake despite his vow to stay still.
His voice breaks on your name, half-command and half-plea, while one of his hands finds your hair and grips tight, not that you mind at all.
Finally, he spills hot and pulsing across your tongue, thick spurts you swallow with a soft moan of your own. You keep stroking him through it, gentling your touch as the last tremors fade, watching the tension drain from his battered body until he lies boneless and breathless, dark eyes glassy.
For a long moment afterward, neither of you says anything.
The chamber is quiet except for the soft crackle of the fire and the distant rhythm of the sea beyond the windows. The candles have burned lower than either of you realised, leaving the room washed in warm gold and shadow.
Jace lies beside you with that same dazed, contented smile still lingering on his mouth, as though he has not quite remembered how to put it away.
You glance at him from the corner of your eye and shake your head. “What?”
His smile only deepens. “Nothing.”
“Mhmm.”
He gives a quiet, breathless laugh and reaches for your hand where it still rests atop his stomach, threading his fingers through yours. His thumb moves over your knuckles, warm and absentminded.
The sight of him like this, softened and unguarded, makes something in your chest loosen.
You fuss over him out of habit more than necessity, fetching a washcloth, straightening the blankets around his hips and making certain he is comfortable, searching his face and posture for any sign that he has overdone himself despite every promise he made.
Jace watches the whole business with open affection, his expression growing gentler by the moment.
“My darling,” he murmurs, though there is no real complaint in it. You ignore him. “You are checking on me.”
“Someone has to.”
His teasing fades then, leaving something softer in its place. For a moment he simply watches you, and when he lifts your joined hands and presses a kiss to your knuckles, the gesture is so familiar that it catches you off guard all the same.
“Thank you,” he says quietly.
You look up at him.
The words are not playful nor triumphant, not even particularly clever. Your chest aches unexpectedly, because beneath all the bargaining and persistence and impossible shamelessness, you know what this has really been about.
Weeks of fear. Weeks of recovery. Weeks of being careful. Weeks of wondering whether life would ever feel normal again.
You squeeze his hand, and his fingers tighten around yours at once.
“You do not need to thank me.”
“I do.”
His voice is gentle. “I know I was insufferable.”
You giggle softly. “Do you now?”
Without either of you needing to say anything, Jace opens his arm toward you. You move into it at once, as naturally as breathing, as though you have done it a thousand times before. Because you have. Your head settles against his shoulder, his arm folds around your waist, and the blankets shift around you both as you settle more comfortably together.
Eventually you feel his lips brush lightly against your hair, a sleepy, lingering kiss that makes you smile before you can stop yourself.
“Tired?” you murmur.
“A little.”
“You should sleep.”
“So should you.”
The waves continue their endless song beyond the walls.
somehow i ended up writing a several-thousand-word account of jace velaryon attempting to find loopholes in doctor's orders. i regret nothing <3 lemme know if you guys liked this, trying to decide wether to write more for jace or not.
SUMMARY: A prince washes up on the shore outside your cottage, and you must decide whether you’re going to leave him to his fate or save his life. Either way, you know there will be consequences.
WARNINGS: fem!reader, commoner!reader, eventual dragonseed!reader, jace lives, eventual smut, class differences (jace is obviously a prince and reader is a commoner). Reader is not too fond of him at first because she is from Sharp Point. This is a bit of a mix of show canon and book canon in that Jace went to the Gullet to save his brothers and Rhaena still claimed Sheepstealer
AUTHOR'S NOTES: i HADDDD to do a fic for our beloved boy </3 i miss you jacaerys velaryon, prince of dragonstone, heir to the iron throne. I will truly never move on from this death </3 so we need a world where he does not die. I'm saur excited for this because it's my first time writing a reader who comes from a commoner background, AND I finally get to write the dragons ... originally she was not supposed to be a dragonseed, but I just cannot help myself. If I'm going to be writing a hotd era fic, our girl is going to have a dragon. ANYWAY I hope you guys enjoy! please leave a comment or reblog mwah mwah
You wonder whether it is chance or divine intervention that a Targaryen prince washes ashore beside your cottage.
By the time you get to the edge of the sea after catching a glimpse of the corpse from your porch, it is half buried in the wet sand, lying limp at your feet, and there is a lump in your throat that you cannot seem to swallow away.
You do not know how you didn’t notice the sigil sooner.
It should have been the first thing that caught your eye, considering it was only a fortnight past that the Prince Aemond brought the great dragon Vhagar over the town you were raised in and razed it to the ground. The green and gold banners have been flying over the area since, and soldiers from the Reach have been constantly patrolling the roads, seeking out rebels and sympathizers.
You know better than to involve yourself in the affairs of any man that dons the three-headed dragon, you tell yourself, trying to will yourself to walk away from the corpse before anyone can catch you standing near it.
Red or gold, black or green—it does not matter to you, the wars of nobles are graves for common folk, and you have no desire to meet an early one. You have done well enough for yourself since your father passed. You refuse to squander the life you’ve built because a prince washed up on the shore near your home.
The boy at your feet is young, you cannot help but notice—your age, perhaps—dark of hair and fair of skin. At a distance, he had looked like any other body the sea had decided to return, and your first instinct had been to rush toward him rather than avert your gaze and pretend you had seen nothing.
Your hands tremble at your sides, and you have to forcibly still them as you take in a deep breath.
This is war, you recall the soldiers saying when the survivors demanded to know the reason for the tragedy that took place at Sharp Point—mothers with tears in their eyes and no bodies to bury, fathers who had lost their livelihood and the children for whom they built it, your neighbors, your friends. They say Lord Bar Emmon sits on the usurper’s council, so all of the commonfolk who were unfortunate enough to be born beneath his banners have been made to pay the price of his loyalties, allies of a queen they have never seen and casualties of a war they never chose.
This is war, they will tell you the same as they cut off your head if they see you kneeling beside this corpse and call mercy treason. Because it is always the burden of the commonfolk, paying the price of noble quarrels. Princes speak of honor and succession, of rights and oaths and stolen crowns, and it is fishermen and farmers who have to bury their dead. They will not care to hear what you have to say if they think you're affiliated with the Black queen and her supporters, just as the Prince Aemond did not care whether the people of Sharp Point had declared for the Blacks or merely happened to be born beneath the wrong lord.
But now, a prince lies dead upon your shore, and you wonder if this is how it begins again.
You should leave him.
The thought comes immediately, sensible in light of the circumstances, even if it does make your stomach flip. You should turn around and go home, bolt your door, and tell no one what you saw. The sea will reclaim him, or the crabs will pick his bones clean; maybe the patrol will stumble upon the body before the tide rises, and they can parade it through the streets the same way you heard they did to Princess Rhaenys’s dragon.
By the morning, he will be gone one way or another, and you can move on with your life as though you never saw him at all. He will be somebody else’s misfortune, or more hopefully, no one else’s at all.
It is a corpse, anyway. The boy has not moved since you arrived, and his chest does not seem to be rising and falling. There are two arrows through his shoulder, and a blueness to his lips that you’ve only seen in the dead, so—
As though to mock you, he lets out a wet, ragged cough, water bubbling at his lips, lashes fluttering just enough for you to catch sight of dark, hazy eyes that slip over you once before they slide shut again.
You feel sick to your stomach.
He does not stir again. One side of his face is bruised an ugly purple, his dark hair plastered to his brow with seawater and blood. He cannot be much older than you—the traitorous thought crosses your mind again. There is something terribly young about him, lying there half-drowned in the surf, one hand curled weakly into the sand as though, even unconscious, he is still trying to cling to something.
He does not look like a prince, you think miserably. He looks like a boy who is going to die.
The sea foams around your boots, and his body twitches as it threatens to reclaim him—the only feeble resistance he’s capable of in his state. You do not know how he still breathes—the fires might still burn on the Gullet, but the fighting ended days past. How long has he been floating about, dragged around by vicious currents and tossed by waves? It doesn’t even seem as though it should be possible, as though the Seven themselves intervened and—
—and dropped him on your shore, in your hands, and you are contemplating leaving him to die.
The thought is unpleasant, a heavy stone in your chest in place of your heart.
You are not a cruel person. You have cared for gulls with broken wings, and you leave scraps outside your door for the old orange cat that wanders the area. During the winter three years prior, you spent a fortnight nursing a lamb that did not even belong to you because you could not bear the sound of it crying.
And now there is a boy at your feet—bleeding, drowned, scarcely clinging to life—and because there is a dragon sewn onto his chest, you are trying to convince yourself to let the sea finish what arrows and war could not.
His lashes are dark against his cheek. Young, you think again, even more traitorous than the last, no older than ten and nine, if even. There is salt crusted at the corners of his mouth and blood soaking through his tunic in sluggish, rusty streams that stain the pale sand beneath him.
He looks cold—traitor, traitor, traitor.
He looks like a prince, you try to insist. A dragon prince, fire and blood and ruin, dangerous.
Cold. Hurt. Dying.
You need to walk away, you tell yourself again, desperate this time, because the longer you stand there staring at him, the more you fail to convince yourself of the correct path.
A prince's life is worth more than yours, more than your cottage and your little patch of land and the fishing boat your father left you. It is worth armies and dragons and castles and men willing to kill for a name.
If this boy lives, others will come looking for him.
And if the soldiers discover him in your home, they will not ask questions. They will not care that you found him by chance or that you never bent the knee to Queen Rhaenyra—that you could not even tell anyone why one half of House Targaryen wishes the other dead. They will see the three-headed dragon on his breast and the roof over his head, and that will be enough to condemn you.
Worse, the Prince Aemond and the dragon Vhagar could return. You think of Tom, the miller’s son, pulled from the boiling river after dragonfire reached the gristmill. You think of little Grace’s face as she searched the ashes for her mother. You think of all of your neighbors, all of your friends, who hardly survived the first time fire rained from the sky, and you think of all of those who didn’t.
He is not worth it. He is not worth the risk. A prince is only a man born with a special name, there’s no reason you should save him and condemn countless others—he bleeds the same, he dies the same, and when the Stranger comes for him, he is no more spared than any other man.
Except, he didn’t, did he?
He should be dead—any other man would be dead.
Two arrows through the shoulder, half-drowned, tossed upon the sea for days on end—there is no surviving that. Yet he breathes still, ragged and shallow though it may be, his fingers twitching every now and then.
The Stranger came for him and left empty-handed.
The Stranger came for him and left him with you.
Why?
There are no prophecies in your life, no gods whispering in your ear. You are a fisherman's daughter with a cottage by the sea and enough coin to keep yourself fed through winter if the catch is good. You know little of the gods save for the prayers your father taught you as a child and the candles you light for him on his nameday. The Seven did not save your father or your town; they did not save Tom or Grace’s mother or any of the others who screamed as dragonfire turned their homes to ash.
So why? Why this boy? Why this prince? Why should the gods spare a dragon's son when they had not spared children and fishermen and mothers? Why have they left him for you?
You do not have an answer. The only answer before you is a body on the sand, breathing when it ought not to be.
You stare down at him, furious and distressed and so, so unsure. He looks dead again—still as driftwood, cold and pale, stiff. His lips are blue like the dead, and his chest hardly rises and falls. You wonder if you imagined what you saw before. If your guilt conjured a cough where there had been none, if your conscience simply could not bear the thought of walking away even from a corpse.
Slowly, you sink to your knees beside him, damp sand clinging to your knees, the sea foam wetting your trousers. Your hand is still trembling in spite of all efforts to still it. You lift it to his throat, hesitating only for a moment.
If there is life, you will do what you must.
If there is not, you will turn and walk away.
You have never prayed for someone to be dead before.
Please, you think now miserably. Please.
Your fingers brush the skin of his throat—it is cold. He must be cold. So cold, that for a brief, terrible moment, hope flares in your chest, and then—
There is a flutter—it is weak and uneven, so faint that you almost miss it, but it is there.
Your head hangs forward, and you blink away the tears that prick in your eyes, because you know this action will have consequences. You know that there is no going back once you have entangled yourself with dragons. You know that every story told of House Targaryen ends in blood and fire and ruin for everyone foolish enough to stand too close them.
You know that this boy could be the death of you.
The soldiers could discover him. Your neighbors could discover him—as much as they care for you, they fear Vhagar more. If word spreads that a prince of the black faction lives and is hidden beneath your roof, you could hang for it. They could burn your cottage to the ground. They could drag you through the streets and call you traitor.
Worse still, he could recover.
Because then he would not be a half-dead boy on the sand. He would be a prince again. A son of the house of the dragon. He would leave, and the war would continue, and perhaps one day you would hear his name in some tavern and learn that he had mounted a dragon and burned a town much like your own.
The sea rushes forward again, cold water washing over your boots and his legs alike. He does not move. He is so cold.
“Why did you have to wash up here?” you breathe out—frustrated, angry, resigned, because you have never been one to turn your back on someone in need.
His pulse flutters once more against your fingers, and he does not stir.
Then, because the gods have a cruel sense of humor and because your heart has always been softer than your head, you slide your arms beneath the prince’s shoulders and knees.
With a soft curse and the sea at your heels, you gather the dragon prince into your arms and carry home your ruin.
—————————
He is Jacaerys Velaryon, son of Queen Rhaenyra, Prince of Dragonstone, Heir to the Iron Throne.
Three days have passed since you found him on the shore, and he has hardly stirred since you dragged him into your cottage. You have been riddled with anxiety since, jumping at every sound and fearing the worst when someone addresses you. It is only a matter of time—whenever a rider passes on the road beyond the trees or the patrol sweeps down your shore, you think they care coming for him. Coming for you.
You spend the first day trying to keep him alive.
You drag him home, soaked to the bone and half-frozen, laying him atop your bed as you get a fire going and wrap him in your blankets. For a while, you can only stand there staring at him, because it is one thing to decide not to leave a boy to die and another entirely to realize you have no idea how to save him.
You have to cut away his tunic to remove it, and it makes it easier to breathe once the three-headed dragon is out of sight, but then you have to address the monstrosity beneath it—bruises darkening one side of his ribs, yellow and purple and black, cuts everywhere, salt crusting his skin and body a ruin of blood.
You wonder how many rocks the currents slammed him into before he finally washed to shore. The sea around Sharp Point is, well, sharp. Jagged rocks and narrow inlets line the coast, and more than one fisherman has vanished into the sea after his boat drifted too close to reefs beneath the tide.
It is a cruel stretch of sea—crueler still to a boy half-dead and alone.
And then there were the arrows.
The shafts protrude from his shoulders at awful angles, the flesh around them angry and swollen. You cry while removing them, because you have never done something like it before, and your hands cannot stop shaking. A part of you wonders if the gods left him for you so that his blood could be on your hands instead, and you cannot fathom what you’ve done to deserve this.
You expect him to wake once you start removing them. At the very least, you expect him to scream. The first shaft pierced cleanly through his shoulder and is easy enough to ease out, but the second lodged itself deep in the flesh, refusing to budge until you brace your foot against the bedframe and pull with both hands.
It should have been agony—any man would have cried out.
The prince does not so much as flinch.
You remember staring at him afterward, the arrow clutched in your hand and your own cheeks wet with tears, wondering if he had died while you were removing it. You press your fingers to his throat with a panic that borders on hysteria, and you aren’t sure if you’re relieved or disappointed when you feel the fluttering pulse still there.
A traitorous part of you wishes that he had died.
A corpse is a tragedy, but a tragedy can be dumped in the sea and abandoned. A tragedy will not bring more war to your ravaged home.
A living prince, on the other hand, is a catastrophe that you do not know what to do with. Your home has already faced ruin once, and the longer he remains in your care, the more at risk you will be of bringing it upon you all again, because if he is captured in your care, then that means war and blood and fire and more dragons. The whole town, all of the survivors, everyone will be branded traitors to the crown.
But the prince lived, so you can only hope that he will heal quick enough and be gone before you have the chance to regret helping him.
The fever comes on the second day, and the corpse in your bed finally gives to life.
You notice it when you are wiping the blood from his face, and your hand brushes his forehead. It’s as though all of the cold of the sea had fled his body at once and left only fire behind. It’s what you expect of a Targaryen prince, really—the burning heat, closer to dragon than man— it feels more natural than the cold, but you are scared anyway.
You do not know much about treating battle wounds, but you do know about fever.
Your younger brother died of it during a long winter a decade past—no matter how hard your mother worked to keep it at bay, he was dead by nightfall. Your mother passed in the same moon, to the same sickness, as did half of the children in Sharp Point, because fever does not care whether you are young or old, rich or poor, prince or peasant.
His skin is flushed, sweat beading along his brow and soaking the dark hair at his temples as he twists in the sheets violently, threatening to reopen the wounds you just stitched close. His breathing changes too—no longer the slow drags of air, shallow and erratic, like he had spent days at sea only to begin suffocating on dry land.
You fetch water from the well until your shoulders ache. You lay cloths upon his brow and change them whenever they grow warm. You feed the fire, then fear you have made him too hot and let it die down, only to panic that he would grow cold again and build it back up.
Every few minutes, you find yourself pressing your hand to his forehead or his throat, checking for fever and pulse alike. There is never a change—still alive and burning, and you don’t know whether to be grateful or terrified.
At one point, he begins muttering. You cannot make out most of it—the words are slurred, little more than broken sounds spilling from fevered lips. Names, you think. Places, maybe. Some do not seem to be spoken in the common tongue.
Once, very clearly, he whispers, "Mother.”
You have to change the cloth on his forehead afterward and pretend your eyes are not stinging with tears. You curse the gods throughout that second day—you wish that you’d never left the cottage at all the morning you found him, you wish you’d left him to die, you wish, you wish, you wish, as though any of it matters anymore.
You sleep little that night, sitting beside your bed and watching him breathe. Terrified every time his breathing slowed, and equally terrified every time it quickened. You count the moments between each breath until dawn creeps through your shutters, and by morning, you feel like you have lived a lifetime in a single night.
The third day—today—you have to make the trek into town.
You have used the last of your willow bark, and there is only a heel of stale bread left, a few onions, and enough drinking water to last another day if you’re careful. You need fruit and vegetables, more barley, and you have a catch that you never got the chance to bring to the market to trade the morning you found the prince.
You cannot put it off any longer, much as you may wish—the prince needs supplies, and unfortunately, so do you.
You do not like going into town. You have never liked going into town—you have always been fond of your neighbors and your friends, but you were not fond of the way they circle and crowd you whenever you make your weekly appearance for trade. You got overwhelmed too quickly, and you didn’t know how to make an exit without seeming rude, so you ended up staying there for hours when there were many chores you had to get done at home.
Now, it is like a graveyard. The destruction following the Prince Aemond’s attack on Sharp Point has yet to be cleared. The soldiers are too busy with war and patrols, and the survivors are too busy trying to salvage what they can of their ruined lives.
When you enter the town, you can still smell charred flesh and death.
The children usually run to you when you arrive, chattering about the games they’ve played and the rumors they’ve heard, if you saw the wild dragon Grey Ghost while you were out on your boat this week, and you smile and nod along with them. But all of the children are dead now, and you are not crowded by friends and neighbors eager to make conversation with you, because most of them are dead now too.
It is in the market when you overhear green-cloaked soldiers talking about the battle that took place in the Gullet, and you finally put a name to the face of the prince in your home. You try to pretend that you’re not eavesdropping, fingers shaking terribly as you sort through the fruits and vegetables that Wylem carted in from his farm, because you need to know if they have figured out what you’ve done, if they know the prince is in your care, under your roof.
But they only laugh as they speak of dead dragons and a mourning pretender queen. They say the Blacks have lost two dragons, and the bastard prince, Jacaerys Velaryon, is dead. Any man who can find his body washed up on the shore to deliver to the King will see unfathomable riches.
Momentarily, you are angry at yourself because the royals brought this war and have caused all of this suffering, but when your lashes flutter shut, for a split second, you can only picture the haunted look on your mother’s face as she held your dead brother in her arms. You think of Miss Ellyn, who tossed herself into the sea when she found out her son had been killed on the Kingsroad. You think of your friend, Marie, who you found screaming, fisting her infant daughter’s ashes after the burning of the town. You think of them, and then you think of the black queen on her throne, and you feel the same lump in your throat.
Then you remind yourself that this is her doing.
Her doing, her half-brother’s doing, the other nobles’ doing. They brought this war to Westeros, they brought death and destruction, fire and blood, and you force yourself to shake your head and push it all away, trading some of the fish you caught for fruits and vegetables and barley with a watery smile that you’re sure Wylem took notice of.
There are more important things to worry about: if there is a bounty on the prince’s body, everybody will be searching for him. Not just soldiers, the people too—your friends, your neighbors, everyone. Many starve, more struggle, so if there is an opportunity for gold, they will all be on the hunt. You need to burn his cloak and tunic when you get back to the cottage, anything that associates him with House Targaryen.
You nearly trip over your own feet racing back to the cottage, second-guessing every conversation you had in the town. Wylem asked you why you were getting twice as much food as you usually get—you do not remember how you responded.
Did you imply that you had a visitor? Why can’t you remember? What excuse did you give? Did the soldiers overhear? Are they following you? Do they know? Why can’t you remember? You’re scared—you do not think you’ve ever been so scared in your entire life.
You look over your shoulder every five steps, worried that they’re going to come charging after you, demanding you to bring them to the Prince Jacaerys before taking your head. You’re not cut out for this—you’re the daughter of a fisherman. There’s no world where you should be worrying whether soldiers are going to hunt you down for saving a prince.
There are tears in your eyes when you make it back to the cottage, and your fingers are trembling around the bags Wylem packed for you. You shut the door behind you, and it takes you three tries to bolt it properly. When you finally do, you rest your forehead against the wood and let out a trembling sigh.
You—
“Who are you?”
There is a knife to your throat.
You stare at the crack in the wood of your door, breath catching, desperately trying not to move lest you risk the knife slicing through your skin. The crack appeared last winter, you remind yourself, trying not to focus too much on the fact that you can feel the cool edge of the blade. Your friend, Evander, was meant to fix before the next, but Evander is dead now, and you may well be too, if the knife at your throat presses any deeper.
“Answer me, who are you? Where am I? Wh—” the prince—Jacaerys Velaryon, Prince of Dragonstone, Heir to the Iron Throne—falters suddenly, and you can only breathe again when the knife drops from your neck, and you feel the presence at your back disappear. “You—you are a woman.”
You do not turn to look at him immediately, eyes sliding shut as you fight to steady the frantic beating of your heart, drawing one slow breath after another until your shaking eases enough to trust your legs. Your fingers tighten on the bags cradled in your arms before you force yourself to turn around.
Prince Jacaerys Velaryon stands three paces behind you, one hand braced against the edge of your table, pained, pale, barely conscious. He is bare from the waist up, and the stitches you painstakingly worked through his torn skin have pulled loose, fresh blood soaking the bandages and dripping down his chest and back.
You see more clearly in the light of the afternoon sun just how ruined his body is, bruises and cuts—you think his ribs must be broken, you did not notice just how bad off he was when you had him lying in the dim corner where you keep your bed.
For a moment, you forget that you are face-to-face with a Targaryen prince—it is only the boy you dragged in from the sea and spent hours trying to keep alive.
Your lips curve down into a deep frown, brows knitting together. You exhale as you say, “You reopened your wounds. It took me an hour to get them properly closed.”
The prince stares at you.
As soon as the words fly from your mouth, you remember who it is before you. The son of a queen. The heir to the Iron Throne, if one listens to his mother. A pretender's heir and bastard, if one listens to her enemies. You do not know which of them is right, nor do you particularly care. Such questions belong to lords and knights and people with far too much time to argue over crowns.
To the likes of you, prince is title enough for you to keep your mouth shut and your head bowed.
He does not immediately respond, gaze flicking around your cottage uncertainly. Your bed, stained with his blood. The dying hearth. The table where you left out the last bits of the bread, just in case he awoke while you were gone and was hungry. The bandages you left at his bedside. The basin of pink water you forgot to empty before leaving for town.
His lips, dry and cracked, part as he stares at you and murmurs more to himself than to you, “You tended my wounds.”
You hesitate, then nod, swallowing once. “I found you on the shore a few days past, my prince—” Your Grace? What is the proper way to address a prince? My Lord does not seem grand enough for the heir to a queen. Prince feels the safest—whatever he may be, no one seems inclined to dispute that part. “—I… you should probably be resting.”
“I need to know what happened,” he says instead, stepping closer to you. He is too pale, sweat beads at his forehead, dark curls matted to his skin. His eyes are wide and wild, pupils dilated the same way you’ve seen in men mad with grief or fear or fury, moments before lashing out at the nearest person. You find yourself tensing instinctively. “What do you know of the battle that took place on the Gullet? Did Baela make it back to Dragonstone? And Rhaena—she was on that wild dragon, and—my brothers, did my brothers make it back? How long has it been? Where are we? How far is it to Dragonstone? I must return immediately, I—”
The prince only just seems to realize how you’ve drawn away, back pressed against the door to your own home, arms tightening around the sack in your arms whenever he comes closer. His tongue darts out to wet his cracked lips, gaze flicking to the knife he dropped onto the floor and the fear in your face.
Shame crosses his expression instantly.
“I—” His expression twists as he puts space between the two of you again. You wonder whether it’s from pain or from struggling to force out an apology. Both, likely. He continues, “You have helped me—saved my life, most like—and here I am frightening you. I… I thought I’d been captured. I woke in an unfamiliar place. I didn't know where I was. I didn't know if I was a prisoner or if the battle had been lost. I heard the door open and…”
He trails off, and you stand there awkwardly, tension easing slowly from your shoulders. He is still on guard, but he does not seem so inclined to pull a blade on you again. Your lips part to tell him where he is, what little you know of the battle on the Gullet.
Instead, you ask, “Do most enemy strongholds look like a fisherman’s cottage, my prince?”
You are mortified the moment the question spills from your lips—he is a Targaryen prince, they are known for blood and fire and madness, dragons and crowns, and you speak to him as though he’s one of your peers.
Prince Jacaerys stares at you for a long moment, and then, to your astonishment, his gaze flicks around the inside of your home again, and something suspiciously like embarrassment crosses his face.
“I suppose not.”
The corner of your mouth twitches despite yourself, and you let out a soft puff of air through your nose before making your way across the room to place the sack you’ve carried from town onto the table. You will have to sort all of what you’ve got later; for now, you need to get the prince resettled before he opens up any more of his wounds.
You turn to look at him again, faltering when you see the pained expression that crosses his face, so sudden that it steals all the color from his cheeks. His hand shoots to his side, fingers digging into the bandages wrapped around his ribs.
“My prince?” you ask hesitantly, taking half a step forward, arm only slightly extended. It is one thing to carry him to your cottage and treat his wounds while he’s unconscious; it is different now that he’s awake.
Prince Jacaerys inhales sharply through his teeth. He is swaying on his feet, breath gone shallow—he looks as though he’s moments from collapsing hard onto your wooden floor. Still, his jaw clenches and the muscles in his neck tighten as he draws himself upright through sheer stubbornness.
“I am fine,” he insists.
“You should sit, my prince.”
“I am standing,” he replies with a tight smile, as though a bead of sweat isn’t rolling down his temple from strain to remain upright and his lips aren’t trembling with pain.
“Barely.”
The prince blinks as though caught off guard by the response, casting a look that is partially confused, and mostly offended in your direction. Your lashes flutter shut as you brace yourself for a volatile reaction, because he is a prince and you are a fisherman’s daughter, and you are arguing with him as though he is an equal and not one of those dragon-riding royals people compose songs about. You think you must have lost your wits entirely these past few days.
Instead, he shoots back, with all the dignity he can muster while visibly swaying, "I have endured worse."
You stare at the blood soaking through the bandages wrapped around his shoulder, uncertain if you believe him. You say with less heat, "That is not the same as being well, my prince."
His jaw tightens, and you fight a sigh. Gods, he actually looks as though he is preparing an argument.
You wonder, briefly, what your life has become. Three weeks ago, your greatest concern had been whether the currents would ease up enough for you to take the boat out of the shallows to catch some fish. Now, Sharp Point has burned and you are standing in your cottage, arguing with a dragon prince about his injuries.
The absurdity of it nearly makes you laugh, wondering if perhaps this entire ordeal is some fever dream brought on by bad fish and Leila’s uncle’s dubious ale.
Then, Prince Jacaerys’s left leg buckles.
He reaches for the table and misses, injured shoulder slamming into the edge hard enough to wrench a strangled cry from him, and before you can think better of it, you're moving.
You let go of the sack of fruits and vegetables and barley you were keeping steady on your table; it topples over, and all of your pristine apples go rolling across the floor of your cottage, but you barely notice, panicked when you realize that he careening right toward the hardwood floor.
You catch the prince around the waist just as he starts to fall, but he is heavier than you expect.
You brace yourself, convinced that he is going to take you down with him, but you manage to steer him sideways toward the chair beside the table. He collapses into it heavily, breath hissing through clenched teeth as pain flashes across his face.
Momentum carries you forward with him—far, far too forward.
One hand lands against the uninjured side of his chest to steady yourself, the other gripping the arm of the chair. For a horrifying second, you are practically sprawled across the heir to the Iron Throne’s lap. You jerk away so quickly you nearly trip over one of the escaped apples, face burning and hands shaking.
"Sorry," you blurt, mortified. “Sorry. Sorry, I did not mean—”
“I believe,” Prince Jacaerys begins with a grimace, “that was my fault.”
You do not respond, flustered, trying to put more distance between you to calm yourself down. Your gaze flicks back over to him, but he is too busy grinding his teeth as he glances down at his wounds to pay you any mind. You let out a soft puff of air through your nose before you look at the apples rolling about your floor, and then reach for one still on your table—you might have lost some sense over the past three days with the little sleep you’ve gotten, but you are not about to feed a prince food off your floor.
You make your way back over to him and hold the apple out to him. He blinks once at it before his gaze lifts to yours questioningly.
“I do not know when last you ate—a while, certainly,” you tell him quietly. “You should get something in you while I redress the bandages. I’ll cook some stew once I’m certain you’re not going to bleed out.”
Prince Jacaerys exhales through his nose before he takes the apple from you, rolling it between his fingers. You step past him so that you can move the basin of water closer to where he’s sitting, grabbing a clean rag and the bandages that you left next to your bed.
You come to stand in front of him again, hesitating before you motion to the wounds on his shoulder. You ask, “May I?”
His dark gaze flicks up to yours briefly before he nods, and your throat tightens as you shift closer, fingers fumbling a bit as you grab for the edge of the bandages to unwind them from around him. It is much more intimidating doing this while he’s awake, inches away from you, and eyes tracking your every move.
“I found you three days ago, my prince,” you tell him at last, trying to remember all of the questions he asked earlier so that you can busy your mind with something other than the fact that you can feel his skin hot against yours. “Before that, the fighting died another three. In truth, my prince, I do not know how you survived so long at sea.”
Prince Jacaerys says nothing in response. His attention remains fixed somewhere beyond the wall behind you, expression distant. You suspect he is counting the days since the battle, the hours his family has believed he is dead, the minutes his mother has spent mourning him. You keep your gaze trained on his shoulder as you unwind the last of the bandages and set them down on the table.
You press your lips together when you see that the stitches have loosened at the back of his shoulder—where one of the arrows had dug deep, but not deep enough to pass cleanly through. Pulling it free had torn through muscle and flesh alike, leaving a ragged injury that had taken you nearly an hour to clean, stitch, and stop bleeding.
You exhale as you run the pad of your finger briefly over the stitches, trying to figure out if you can salvage what effort you already put in or if you would have to pull them out and redo them entirely.
“And my family? My younger brothers? Baela and Rhaena? Have you heard what has become of them?” the prince asks, and you glance up just enough to see how his jaw tightens when your finger brushes over the wound. “Did we win the battle?”
“I do not know if anyone can be said to have won that battle, my prince,” you answer quietly, tongue darting out to wet your lips as you finally start to get to work at reclosing the wound. Your gaze slips to the side when he finally starts to eat the apple you passed to him. He makes a noise in the back of his throat, as though he’s only just realized how hungry he is. “Both fleets were decimated. The dead still wash up on the northern shore.”
How did Prince Jacaerys make it to your shore, then?
Not for the first time, you have to wonder if the gods themselves placed him directly into your hands.
Most of the rest of the dead have washed up on the northern and western shores of Sharp Point, as it is where the currents run strongest, but the prince somehow made it to where your cottage sits on the eastern shore. If he had washed up anywhere else, the patrol would have certainly found him by now. You've heard they have spent the last several days combing the beaches, hauling bloated corpses from the tide and turning them over with the tips of their spears, searching for the dragon prince they are certain the sea claimed.
Prince Jacaerys’s breath hitches when you tug lightly at the stitches holding the skin of his shoulder together. Already, he’s finished the apple you handed him, absentmindedly turning the core between his fingers while his thoughts remain leagues away.
It is only when the last bite is gone that he seems to notice, and his gaze drifts toward the table. He hesitates, and you think it is almost comical—this is the heir to the Iron Throne, a dragonrider, a prince who has flown into battle, and he looks as though asking for another apple might be an imposition too great to make when he’s been floating at sea for at least a week.
You hold the stitches carefully with your right hand so that you can lean forward and grab another apple from your table to pass to him. His cheeks color slightly when he realizes that you noticed.
“I did not mean to stare,” he murmurs, taking the apple from you and cradling it carefully between his hands. He asks again, “Have you heard what has become of my family?”
You shake your head, focusing on tending to his wounds again. You think that you’ll be able to salvage your work. It is good, you think—you can get him resting and then cook some stew for the two of you. You didn’t eat much yesterday, frazzled by the fever and trying to keep him comfortable, and you’re starting to feel a lightness in your head.
“I’ve only heard what the soldiers say in town, my prince,” you murmur, trying to figure out how to go about speaking the news he certainly won’t take well. The last thing you need is for grief to send him bolting for Dragonstone before he can so much as walk across your cottage without collapsing. If he does not kill himself by straining his body when it is not ready, then the patrols will certainly catch him and have his head—and then yours.
You let out a soft sigh as you tie off the stitches on his shoulder blade and lean down to wet the clean rag before lifting it to his bloody skin. You’re careful around the edges of the wound, trying not to disturb the stitches, working slowly at the dried and wet blood from the curve of his shoulder, over the collarbone, down the length of his back.
You try not to think too hard about what you’re doing.
If you do, it begins to feel far too intimate.
It is one thing to drag an unconscious stranger from the sea. It is another to stand so close that you can feel the warmth radiating from his skin, to brush your fingers across the line of his shoulders. You have spent three days tending him without much thought, because there had been no room for embarrassment while the Stranger lingered at his bedside.
Now he is awake and watching you, and every accidental brush of your knuckles against his skin seems to linger a heartbeat too long. He is a prince of the realm, and you are a fisherman’s daughter—people like you are not supposed to touch people like him, and yet—
You exhale through your nose harshly. You busy yourself with the rag, scrubbing a little harder than necessary at a streak of dried blood along his collarbone simply to distract yourself, and his jaw pinches.
“Sorry,” you say quietly.
“It does not hurt,” he replies—a lie, surely, any man would be in agonizing pain. But maybe not; any man also would have died in the sea. Maybe the rumors are true: the Targaryens are closer to god than man; they do not feel pain or have to fear the Stranger the same way people like you ought to. “What have you heard from the soldiers in town? Where are we?”
“Half a league from Sharp Point, my prince,” you answer, still evading the question, which he seems to realize from the way he glances at you over his shoulder, gaze sharp and accusing. He knows you are withholding something. You exhale lightly through your nose and then say hesitantly, “They say two dragons fell over the Gullet. I could not tell you which.”
“Two?!” Prince Jacaerys demands, immediately rising to his feet, so quickly that the chair scrapes against the floor, and you fear he might rip back open the stitches. He whirls on you, eyes wide, pupils large as coins, and you almost flinch. “Two dragons?”
You swallow thickly as you nod. “My prince—”
“One must be—” His voice catches. He cannot finish the thought. For the first time since he awoke, real grief overtakes him completely. It drains his face of what little color had returned, leaves him staring at nothing as though he can already see the answer waiting for him. “I need to know the second. Whose was it? Which dragon fell?”
It unsettles you how close he sounds to pleading when moments before, you had been wondering whether the stories of the Targaryens’ deism held some weight, because gods do not look like this. They do not stand in a stranger’s cottage with fear plain on their face, hands trembling as they wait for an answer they already dread.
The same lump forms in your throat now that did when you heard the soldiers mocking a grieving queen and couldn’t help your thoughts from turning to your own mother, to Miss Ellyn, to your friend, Marie. For a moment, he is not a Targaryen prince or a dragonlord; you see a son and an older brother. A boy your age who knows there are only a handful of dragons flying over the Gullet, and every one of them belongs to someone he loves.
“I do not—”
“I need to return home,” he says immediately, as though his face isn’t white with pain and his stitches don’t strain every time he moves. His eyes glaze over you as though you’re not even there, and he takes a step toward the door to your small cottage. “Sharp Point—there must be passage to Dragonstone, there—”
Panic flares in your chest when he makes as though to leave. It is noon, and the patrols have become more frequent along the shores outside your cottage. They’ve spent a week carding through the western and northern shores, and they’ve been sending more and more men to the east—you worry they’re becoming desperate. The longer they go without finding a corpse, the more they may fear that there isn’t one.
If they have an inkling that Prince Jacaerys is still alive, they’ll start kicking down doors, and if they start kicking down doors, they will find him, and your life will be forfeit for harboring him.
“You cannot,” you say before you can think better of it, lunging forward as though to grab his wrist, but you stop yourself before you can make a terrible mistake, stopping a hairsbreadth from brushing his skin.
What is wrong with you? you think furiously. You need to rest tonight before you do something you cannot take back. Already you have gotten snide with and you have argued with a prince of the realm—now you have commanded him and nearly tried to seize him. You would have been lucky to only lose your hand in any other circumstance. Had he been standing in a hall instead of your cottage, surrounded by knights instead of rough-hewn furniture, you might have lost your head.
“I cannot?” Prince Jacaerys turns to you, bafflement momentarily eclipsing the fear that had consumed him only seconds before, as though he cannot quite fathom that someone has just told him no.
“My prince, you can scarcely stand,” you say. His gaze drops to where your hand is still hovering near his arm, head cocking to the side and brows lifting, and you snap it back to your chest immediately, heat flooding your face. “You have lost a lot of blood, you have barely eaten in a week, your wounds have only just been stitched again, and there are patrols searching for you every road between here and the sea.”
He continues to stare at you, disbelief riddling his expression. You have the distinct impression that no one has ever spoken to him this way before—certainly not a fisherman’s daughter. You force yourself to press on while he’s silent, hoping to make your point and rid him of this futile endeavor before he gets you both killed.
“The Prince Aemond burned Sharp Point’s harbor. There are no ships capable of navigating the currents of the Gullet, and the water still burns besides. I do not have a horse for you to ride to Stonedance. You could not get to Dragonstone even if you were not hurt,” you insist. “I will return to town tomorrow to try to get more information, but please, my prince, you mustn’t leave. You will only be putting us both at risk.”
For a long moment, you think that he will invoke his title or duty and insist upon leaving anyway, or maybe he will simply walk out the door despite everything you have said, and there is nothing you could do to stop him.
Then, his expression changes, twisting into something pained as he looks away, a shuddered breath escaping his lips. His shoulders, held tense since the moment you uttered the word two, sink ever so slightly. The panic that had driven him to his feet has nowhere left to go, draining from him all at once, leaving only exhaustion behind.
One hand drops back down to his ribs, pain crossing his face. Whatever strength carried him to his feet abandons him just as quickly as the panic, leaving him swaying where he stands. He closes his eyes for a moment, and when he reopens them, the panic has been replaced by a type of defeat that is infinitely more difficult to look at.
You step forward cautiously when you see how his body is trembling, hand hovering uncertainly between the two of you, silently asking permission to help him. Prince Jacaerys stares at your outstretched hand, then at the bed on the far side of the room; you think, for a second, that he will attempt to cross on his own, but then his nostrils flare as he exhales, inclining his head just enough to grant you the permission his pride refuses to voice aloud.
Carefully, you slip beneath his uninjured arm, taking care to avoid the fresh bandages. He is warm—still warmer than he ought to be—and you can’t help but wonder if his fever has returned or if this is just how hot dragon prince’s typically run.
He leans into you only slightly, weight settling lightly against your shoulder—you suspect he is trying very hard not to. The journey from the door to your bed is scarcely a dozen paces, but it feels much longer.
“We were supposed to win this victory for her,” Prince Jacaerys says after a moment, voice breaking, the words slip free before he can stop it. You do not think the admission is meant for you, so you stay quiet. His throat works as he swallows. “We were supposed to—”
He cuts himself off, looking away again as you help him ease back down into your bed. As soon as he is seated, something close to relief crosses his face, lashes fluttering; the pain is still there, but not quite as terrible as it was when he was straining on his feet.
“The fact that you are alive at all is a victory, my prince,” you say quietly, even though you do not think the words will be of any reassurance. “You should rest. The sooner you are well, the sooner we can figure out a way to get you home. I’ll cook up a stew and wake you when it’s finished.”
He exhales again, jaw tightening as he looks away with a resigned expression. You turn your back on him to deal with the mess you made of the kitchen area, grimacing slightly at everything spilled across your floorboards and the table.
“What is your name?” Prince Jacaerys asks you suddenly. “I think I ought to know the name of the woman who saved my life.”
You let a soft breath, glancing over your shoulder at him. He is pained still, but there is an earnest look in his eyes that makes you falter—you remember how close you were to leaving him to his fate, and you have to look away again before he can catch the guilt that crosses over your face.
With a shaky exhale, you give the prince your name, and you cannot help but feel as though your life has irrevocably changed, and you do not think for the better.
————————————
The sea is on fire.
Jace cannot tell where the flames end and the water begins. Ships burn around him, masts collapsing into the waves with deafening cracks; men scream as they’re consumed by the fire, and dragons let out terrible shrieks as they dive low to bring down another ship full of Myrish mercenaries.
He tries to focus.
He chases after the rogue dragon, hoping to kill the rider before the dragon can burn any more of the Velayron fleet—or worse, catch Baela and Moondancer. But there is panic clawing at his chest, and smoke and salt clogging his throat and stinging his eyes. He’s screaming at Vermax to fly faster, to kill the rider, and then—then he sees Rhaena.
He sees Rhaena atop the wild dragon, and she is screaming, crying, desperately trying to get it under control, and Jace is confused, reeling as he yells at Vermax to stop at the last second. He and dragon both diving down away from the chase before Vermax could breathe fire on his cousin.
Rhaena does not have a dragon, he thinks, trying to figure out what is happening, and Rhaena is supposed to be with his brothers, and his brothers are captured by the enemy, and he isn’t sure if Stormcloud and Aegon made it to shore, and there is too much going on, and—
—and Vermax is falling.
Vermax is banking hard, being dragged down into the sea, and Jace’s stomach lurches. He’s yelling—begging—Vermax to fly, and Vermax is trying, he’s trying so hard, wings beating smoke through the air. He shrieks as another bolt catches him in the wing, and Jace feels the pain himself—he feels the pain, the primal fear, everything that Vermax does, because Vermax is his, and he is Vermax’s, and they are bonded, and Vermax is drowning, and the water is so cold, and Jace cannot feel his legs or his hands or his face.
He fumbles as he tries to unhook himself from the saddle, choking on water and air, maybe a sob, as Vermax sinks into the sea, a stream of bubbles rising to the surface as he cries for Jace, slowly disappearing into the dark waters. Jace desperately tries to dive after him, as if he has the strength to hold them both above the sea, because Jace has already lost Luke, and he—he cannot lose Vermax.
Not the dragon who had slept beside his cradle before he was old enough to walk, the hatchling he had grown up alongside, whose neck had once fit beneath his arm, whose first uncertain flights had ended with both of them tumbling into the sandy shore of Dragonstone while his mother laughed herself breathless.
Jace does not know a life without him—he does not want to know a life without him. His earliest recollections are not of nursery songs or wooden swords, but of warm green scales beneath tiny hands and the deep, rumbling croon that had lulled him to sleep when he was scarcely more than a babe.
When Jace learned to walk, Vermax learned to fly; when Jace’s voice deepened, Vermax’s roar had too.
There has never been a Jacaerys without Vermax.
But Jace’s lungs are burning, and he cannot see the familiar green scales anymore, and his body is reacting, seizing and spasming because there is no air left in him and water all around. He does not know which way is up and which way is down, the water is too dark and too cold, and he cannot think, but—but he sees the bubbles. He sees the bubbles, and he follows them, and even as Vermax sinks to the bottom of the sea, he saves his rider one final time.
He reaches the surface with a gasp, gulping the smoky air, and everything hurts. His arms ache, his chest is too tight, his eyes burn, and he cannot breathe, because Vermax is gone. He can feel that Vermax is gone; there is a gaping hole in his chest where his dragon used to be, and Jace does not know what to do, he does not know how to live anymore, and he wants—
He wants his mother.
He just wants his mother.
He hears the cheers before he feels the first arrow, gaze lifting to the sky as he searches for Baela and Moondancer—they are not too far, he thinks, she'll come for him.
And then, there’s a dull throb in his shoulder blade as he pulls himself over a floating piece of driftwood, but he hardly takes note of the pain, because everywhere hurts, because Vermax is gone, because he wants his mother. He turns when he hears the cheering, and he sees the men on the ship, and he sees the crossbows and the bows and the Myrish banners, but he does not see anything at all, really, blinking once, staring.
The second arrow catches him closer to the chest.
And then—then all he remembers is sea.
White foam and bubbles, vicious currents and sharp rocks. He thinks he is dead more than he thinks he is alive, but there is so much pain. There is pain and emptiness, and Jace just wants—
“... prince, the stew is ready.”
Jace startles awake, breath hitching in the back of his throat. His body tenses immediately, because he does not remember where he is—he remembers the sea and the waves and rocks and pain and Vermax, but he does not remember…
The cottage. Waking up alone. The door opening, the fear—was he captured? Where is he? Where are his brothers? Where is Baela? What was Rhaena doing on the wild dragon? Mother, mother, mother—
You avert your eyes suddenly, an awkward expression on your face, and Jace suddenly remembers. He remembers you, the apple you passed him as you tended to his wounds; how he held a knife to the throat of a woman who is risking her own life to save his. He remembers that he is stuck bedridden in the bed of a commoner while his mother thinks he’s dead and fights for her throne alone.
He opens his mouth to apologize—to tell you that he will leave as soon as he is able, that he will ensure you’re properly compensated for saving his life—but he falters when he feels something hot and wet drip down his face.
He lifts his hand to his cheek and wipes at his face, looking down at the wetness smeared on his fingertips. For a long moment, he does not understand—seawater, maybe? But he is no longer being tossed around by the sea. He is warm in your cottage, the hearth burns low and your blankets are tangled around him. He blinks once, and another fat droplet of water rolls from his eye down his cheek.
Is he crying?
Heat rushes to his face so quickly he thinks it rivals the fever. He wipes away furiously, not sure if it’s more or less humiliating that you’re pretending not to notice for his sake, turning your back to him to ready the table.
Jace has wept before, more than most ought to—for the father who taught him fishing and sea shanties, and the other who passed before either of them could speak the truth out loud, for the grandfather he never truly knew, for the brother who felt less like a brother and more like his other half—but never, never in front of a stranger.
Jace promptly clears his throat and pulls himself together. He glances at you, praying that his face does not betray him, an excuse on his lips as takes a deep breath. Then he falters, mouth watering instantly, gaze cutting to the side where you are busy ladling stew into two chipped wooden bowls, back politely turned, as though you never noticed anything at all.
Jace doesn't think he’s ever been this hungry. He has dined in castles all his life—roasted swan, lemon cakes, arbor wines. He has consumed the finest meals Westeros has to offer and found them lacking, but he almost feels dizzy with need and pleasure at the scent of the stew you made.
“It—” Jace’s voice is hoarse from sleep. Embarrassed, he clears his throat again to try to even it out. “It smells good.”
You look at him over your shoulder with a small smile and murmur demurely, “I’m sure nothing compared to what you’re used to, my prince.”
“I do not know that,” he says lightly as he forces himself to his feet, grimacing as pain immediately shoots through his body.
Everything aches—his chest, his shoulders, his legs, his arms, his head. In truth, all he wants to do is curl up and sleep more; he cannot bear to keep going. Not now. Not after Vermax, after Luke, after making such a terrible mistake that he might have cost his mother her throne. His stomach flips at the thought, and he fights a shuddered breath.
He needs to keep going—there is no other choice. He needs to get back to Dragonstone as soon as possible.
You pause in the middle of setting the bowls on the table at his words to give him a questioning look. “My prince?”
“I have not tasted it yet,” he tells you, forcing levity into his tone, because you have saved his life, tended to his wounds, and now stand over a pot of stew you cooked for him, worrying that it is not good enough to satisfy a prince. The least he can do is ease your mind. "It would seem unfair to compare a meal I have not eaten yet.”
You blink at him once, and then you smile slightly—it’s a genuine one, not like the small one you forced in his direction just before—and Jace tries his best to return it as he crosses the small room. He shuffles the last few steps toward the table with considerably less grace than he would have liked.
“Perhaps” you reply softly, waiting for him to take a seat at the table before you do as well.
You do not immediately lift your spoon, and Jace hesitates—for a brief moment, an old childhood lesson surfaces. Do not eat until someone else has tasted it. Feasts at King’s Landing and supper at Dragonstone had been meticulous about such things—cups were poured and tasted before his mother, and plates were sampled before any of them took a bite of their food. The paranoia claws at him and disappears as quickly as it comes.
You had dragged him half-dead from the sea, spent days stitching his wounds and breaking his fever, and gave up your bed so he could sleep comfortably. If you wished him dead, you need only have left him on the shore.
“I never thanked you for what you’ve done for me,” he says at last, fingers grazing the wooden spoon dipped into the broth. “When I return to Dragonstone, I shall speak with my mother. She will see you properly rewarded.”
“There is no need,” you murmur, finally taking a sip of the stew when Jace lifts the spoon to his lips.
The broth is hot enough to sting his tongue, but he scarcely notices. It is a simple meal—carrots and celery, chunks of what he thinks is rabbit. It is the plainest thing he has eaten in years, and yet somehow, the best meal he can remember.
His stomach twists painfully as warmth settles into it, and before he can stop himself, he takes another spoonful, then another, the hunger of the past week overwhelming whatever restraint court etiquette had once led him. It is only when half the bowl is gone that he realizes how quickly he is eating.
Embarrassed, he forces himself to slow, lowering the spoon.
“My apologies,” he says, clearing his throat. “I fear I may have forgotten my manners.”
“You haven’t had a meal in over a week, my prince. You’re allowed to be hungry,” you say with a faint smile.
Jace lets out a half-hearted huff of amusement through his nose, though his smile fades as quickly as it came, returning to conversation to try to force himself to slow down and show a modicum of etiquette before he embarrasses himself further.
“There is every need for reward,” he disagrees, leaning forward slightly to look at you. For the first time since he woke in your cottage, he actually observes you—you cannot be much older than he is, beautiful certainly, but there’s a weariness in your expression that Jace cannot help but feel as though is his fault. “You saved the life of the heir to the Iron Throne. You surrendered your bed, tended wounds that would have killed most men, and risked the wrath of the Greens simply by allowing me beneath your roof. I cannot allow that debt to go unanswered.”
You stare at him for a moment, a conflicted expression on your face, and Jace shakes his head slightly as he presses.
“I do not possess enough coin to repay such a debt myself—” nor, he suspects, does anyone “—but my mother will. You needn't live here any longer if you do not wish to. We could see your cottage rebuilt if the fighting has damaged it, or grant you land elsewhere, if that is what you'd prefer. Whatever you ask, so long as it is within my power, I will see it done.”
You are quiet for a long while as Jace finishes off the stew, but he expects hesitation as you mull over what to ask for: gold, land, a better ship, perhaps. Your gaze drifts off to the side, and Jace’s follows it, faltering when he realizes that you’re looking in the direction of what remains of Sharp Point.
That’s right, he remembers—you mentioned your cottage was less than a league away.
From where he sits, he can just see the destruction through the small window. The town is little more than scorched foundations and splintered timbers now, dragonfire having reduced generations of work to ash in the span of a single afternoon. He cannot look at it for long, stomach twisting so unpleasantly that he fears the stew you just cooked him might come right up.
You stay silent for so long that Jace wonders if you have not heard him, and his lips part to repeat himself futilely.
“We used to think they were beautiful, you know?” you say, voice barely over a breath. “We would watch your family fly from King’s Landing and Dragonstone. The children would cheer and call out the names of whatever dragon and royal was passing overhead, even though they knew you could not hear them.” A wistful smile tugs briefly at your lips, and Jace suddenly feels a rock in his stomach, a heaviness that he cannot seem to push away. “There is a wild dragon in these parts—we call him Grey Ghost. He hunts fish along the eastern shore. I see him frequently when I take my father’s boat out. We lived alongside him for years—sometimes he swoops down close when we have a big catch, but he never bothers us. My father always said he was curious—shy, but curious.”
You exhale suddenly as you rise to your feet; Jace wonders if he should ignore the unshed tears in your eyes the same way you politely did for him.
“Then the Prince Aemond and Vhagar came,” you say at last. “The only thing I want, my prince, is for this war to end, but I know you cannot give me that. If you don't mind, I should see to my father's boat before the tide turns. There is more stew in the pot if you would have it. Then you ought to rest. You'll not heal by arguing with your own body.”
Jace opens his mouth.
He does not know what he intends to say, caught between guilt and indignation, because everybody wants the fighting to end—he does, his mother does. Maybe not Daemon, but why do you say it as though he stands opposed to peace? He did not choose this, nor did his mother. It is not his fault that the Greens usurped his mother's throne.
He desperately tries to formulate an answer, but how is he supposed to respond to that? What were they meant to do? Yield to the usurpers? Stand aside while his mother’s birthright was stolen? Let Luke die for nothing? Should he say that he is sorry for your loss? That his mother would never have done this? That Vermax would never have burned a fishing village? That this was all the Greens? That they fight to avenge what happened here?
That dragons are not cruel creatures, he feels the need to tell you when he sees the disdain on your face—it is the people who ride them. It is the Greens. It is Aegon and Aemond, Alicent Hightower and her father.
His lips are parted as though to respond, but he only finds himself staring at you helplessly.
You incline your head politely before slipping out the door, the cool air rushing briefly into the cottage before it shuts behind you once more. Jace remains where he is, staring into the last of his stew until the steam no longer rises from it, the reality of his situation settling over him—Vermax is dead, Luke is dead, and his mother believes them both lost. He does not know whether his brothers and cousins are safe, if his mother still fights for her crown. He is useless, wounded in a fisherman's cottage, alive only because a woman from a town his family failed to protect chose mercy over sense.
He does not think he has ever felt less like the heir to a kingdom.
─ summary: you're not speaking to them. how long before they break?
─ pairing: Gwayne Hightower, Ormund Hightower, Aegon II Targaryen, Aemond Targaryen, Daeron Targaryen, Valarr Targaryen, Jacaerys Velaryon x f!reader
─ content: 18+ MDNI | fluff | a little angst | implied smut | annoying husbands | hardheaded men
─ a/n: i wanted to add onto the original by doing the other AKOTSK/HOTD men. as always, thank you so much for the likes, comments, reblogs, requests, and asks. 🖤
AEGON — Three Days.
The first day he pretends he is not bothered at all. He drinks, he acts out, he stays up the whole night through, making a great show of being a man who doesn't care. By the second day the show is wearing thin, because the truth is that he cares a lot. All he wants is to be near you, but he is stubborn, and some part of him is convinced that you ought to apologize first. By the third day, he cannot bear it another hour. He comes to your room pouting like a scolded child, saying he is sorry, begging you to speak to him again. "I cannot continue!" Dramatic to the very last. You give in, partly because you did miss him, and partly because you would rather not have the whole keep hearing him carrying on like this.
AEMOND — Two Days.
More than anything, Aemond is desperate for love; the love you give him so freely, that no one else ever has. He knows he was wrong. He knows you are right not to speak to him. But he will not say so, because his pride is a vast and immovable thing. He lies in his own bed that second night, cold and alone and sleepless, and decides at last that his pride is not worth this. He rises, sneaks into your chambers and climbs silently into your bed, wrapping his arms around you and pressing a kiss to your forehead. "May I stay?" he asks. He cannot make himself say the words I was wrong, that is not his way, but the look in his eye, and the tears standing in it, say it loudly enough. You nod.
DAERON — Forever, Potentially.
He does not remember the fight, or you telling him to sleep elsewhere. He simply wakes to find you not speaking to him, and being who he is, assumes your love for him has finally run dry, that you no longer have it in you to endure him, and he is crushed by it. But he understands. Someone like you deserves a far better husband than the likes of him. So he resolves to disappear, to stop being a burden, to never trouble you again. It goes on like this for almost a week while you slowly lose your mind, because what in the actual hell is happening?! You confront him at last. He is stunned, he remembers none of it, but more than that, the revelation that you still love him undoes him completely. He pulls you into his arms and kisses you hard. The kind of kiss where his arms are around your waist pulling you impossibly close and your hands are curled in the front of his doublet. You're left so breathless you don't even remember why you were upset. He apologizes, swears he will change, he does not want to live in a world in which you have stopped loving him.
GWAYNE — An Hour.
The sweetest, most devoted husband, completely undone by the barest hint of your displeasure. If you are upset and not speaking to him, he lasts an hour at the very most before he comes to you with a little gift and a very big apology. He is so sorry for being so careless, he will never do such a thing again, never ever, he swears it. And he is so handsome and so sincere as he says it that staying angry is simply not an option available to you. You step into his arms and let him hold you and kiss you.
JACAERYS — Less Than an Hour.
The stress he carries makes him irritable sometimes, careless, a symptom of his youth as much as anything, and he says something snippy when you were only trying to help. He does not even let you leave the room. The words are barely out of his mouth before he regrets them and is apologizing. You try to walk past him and he stops you gently, both hands on your shoulders, his eyes piercing straight through you. He is putting an end to this before it can go anywhere at all. He repeats his apology, his hands sliding from your shoulders down to hold both of yours. You nod, but you need a moment, and he gives it to you. Your silence is the only thing he can think of, occupying him entirely until, an hour later, you come and find him, and climb into his lap, and let him hold you. He will never speak to you that way again.
ORMUND — A Day.
He is a pain in your ass, and he wants to break you. "Hmm. Not speaking to me now?" he says with that infuriating smile the moment he realizes what you are doing. He crowds your space all day, and he is, frankly, impressed by the sheer iron of your resolve. If only all his soldiers possessed your discipline. "How long do you imagine this can continue? You must speak to me sooner or later." After a full day of it, you do indeed snap. "Seven hells, do you ever stop talking?!" You storm out of the room, slamming the door behind you. He will not tolerate that in his house; he follows you, his fury matching your own, as he pulls you into the bedchamber. What follows is a fight indeed, a battle for dominance, each of you determined to have the upper hand. You win.
VALARR — Until Supper.
You and Valarr are in the middle of a thunderous fight, the first of your marriage. You and he on opposite sides of the room, nothing but tension and frigid air between you, when you decide to stop speaking to him altogether. He wants to fix this, but he also does not think hashing it out in the heat of the moment is particularly productive,not while you are both still upset. He lets you be silent, but you do not get to be angry at him all day. He comes to dress for supper and makes it clear he means to talk about it now, and he apologizes thoroughly for his part in it. It is difficult to maintain anger against someone so clearheaded. You apologize, forgive him, and ask him to help you with your dress. He decides to skip supper in favor of eating something else entirely.
cw: hotd season 3 spoilers, fix-it fic!, heavy angst, hurt/BIG comfort, fluff so much fluff, mention of violence, mourning but no death, yearning, kissing, jacaerys loves his wife more than anything, (3.8kw).
synopsis: He promised. To you, to himself, right before giving the order. "I will come back to you," Jacaerys whispered, pressing warm lips to wood, as if sealing his silent vow through the door.
a/n: mama will hold ur hand through this. it'll ALL be okay! bawled my eyes out at this but god i needed it. translations for the high valyrian used at the end!
He had never felt so cold before.
A chill seeping into the marrow of his bones and encrusting muscle and tissue, making it hard to move; to breathe.
His eyes battled the shroud of darkness, yet no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t halt the certainty, which in that instant appeared like his end. Not slumber, not unconsciousness, but his demise’s unyielding grip curled around him like a serpent and squeezed until it wrung every bit of life out of him.
Jacaerys felt the bite of the arrows like a brand, pulsing like another denominator of what was to come, to swallow him whole. One in his neck, one near his heart, and others in places he couldn’t name, but remembered your hands and mouth touching countless times before.
The Gods were cruel to punish him right where your sweetness had been, where your love had touched and imprinted itself onto him, now stained by sharp steel and blood.
He hopes you’ll have it in your heart to forgive him, for he cannot do so for himself. The more the world feels like a distant memory, the more his heart aches, its beating slowing, as if trying to mimic the syllables of your name one last time before it inevitably stops. One last call out to you, willing to see if you would answer, even if he knows that to be impossible.
Would you cry, he wonders, as if he doesn’t already know the answer. Would you curse him? Would you hate him? Would you damn every moment you’ve spent together, turning it into poison and ash?
Jacaerys would not fault you if you did, but his chest feels hollow at the prospect of causing such vile emotions to bloom in your tender heart, most of all towards him.
You are his most precious jewel, and losing his life is one thing, but knowing that means losing you as well? It tears at him more than those arrows have.
He thinks of his mother, who was so delighted knowing he had found someone to love, and someone to be loved by in return, truthfully and wholeheartedly. You two were meant to have a Valyrian wedding in a few moons, as it is custom, and he had been ardently awaiting to see how beautiful you would look in traditional garments. Trying to imagine it now, just as he had many times before, feels like another arrow aimed straight at his heart, plunging deep. Now, he will never get to teach you how to recite the vows in High Valyrian, won’t get to see the sparkle of joy in your eyes when you’re face to face, exchanging them, binding your destinies together for all eternity, even in death.
Death. Jacaerys supposes that if he dies without binding his soul to yours before his ancestors, he won’t have any pieces of himself that he knows will certainly be kept in the sanctity of your heart.
But maybe it is better this way, for you will not have to carry such a heavy burden ensnared in the crevices of your chest, reminding you of all you’ve lost; of all he’s made you lose.
It might seem callous of him to think so, but the thought of you mourning him brings warmth to his veins, even through the chill of the sea. Knowing you have loved him enough to let tears fall from those pretty eyes of yours makes the inevitable hurt a little less.
Someone had cared for him and felt strongly enough to weep at his departure. That, in itself, is a gift. One of the many you had given him. You yourself have been the greatest one, blessing his days and easing his worries with nothing but a look, a word, a kiss. It had come like breathing to you, and he had never felt like he was out of air until now.
The sea is seldom merciful, and no matter how much he tries to beg the Gods to spare him, Jacaerys knows this time it might be in vain.
But how can he not beg? How can he not plead? If not with his voice, then with the remaining beatings of his heart, with the last vestiges of the memories he has of you.
He wishes he would’ve said I love you more often, for it seems like he had been scarce in his vocalization of it. Now, every day doesn’t feel like enough, because no matter how hard he tries, his throat is clogged with water and the words he means to say, if only for the last time. He would’ve hoped it enough to ease the grievances he knows you would feel upon hearing of his demise.
Jacaerys wonders if you would eventually surrender yourself to another. If there would come a day where another man would sweep you off your feet, chipping away at all the parts of Jace burrowed deep in your flesh and blood. The thought makes him want to weep. You forgetting him, replacing the memories you have of him with those of another, as if painting anew on an old canvas one has no use of anymore.
If his promise would’ve rung true, Jace would be by your side now, celebrating the victory at the Gullet, hugging his mother, then you so tight it would’ve knocked the air out of you both. He would’ve twirled you around while laughing, leaning in to press a multitude of kisses onto every patch of skin he could reach, knowing it’ll make you laugh, cheeks flushed, looking at him like he’s your whole world.
May that be the last thing he wishes for before the sea takes him. May your face be the last thing on his mind before there is nothing but darkness, engulfing every bit of light that was you. May he always remember you, even when buried beneath the sea and the sand, wishing for nothing than to hear your voice saying his name one last time, your gaze softening upon looking at him, and maybe, if the Gods allow him one last mercy, the feel of your soft lips upon his own.
He knows he is not worthy, for if he were, Jacaerys would’ve held onto his promise to come back to you, to his mother, to the Realm. But he couldn’t. The Gods were ever cruel and took from him the very essence of his being, cursed to wait for his impending doom.
And wait, he had. Was it another punishment to still feel like he was hanging on but never sinking deep enough? To will him to replay every single memory of you and imagine thousands of others? To feel so close but so far away from the object of all his affections and desires?
Jacaerys would know you anywhere, he thinks. Even blind, hard of hearing, or sinking into nothingness, he would not fail to know you are close.
So why does it feel like you are? Is this another cruel trick before the ancestors welcome him to them? He swears he can feel the soft lilt of your voice somewhere in his vicinity, and it makes him want to move, to lean towards it and taste it. Make sure it’s real.
Please let it be real. To the Old Gods and the New, let it be real. Don’t dangle such hope in front of him only to take it away, for it would feel like getting speared with arrows again and again and—
“I shall watch him,” your voice sounded, just as sweet and lovely as he remembered, but also tired, croaky at the edges. What had happened? Why were you — “You need rest, my queen. Let me, for now.”
My Queen? Mother?
The sounds were a bit muted, but he could hear footsteps, then the creaking hinges of a door, followed by a thud.
A long, hitched sigh followed, the one people do when they try not to let it show they were hurting, right before the tears inevitably fall.
Were you crying? He couldn’t bear when you were. That pretty face he loved so much, marred by tears, undid him every time.
Jacaerys had to see, had to make sure you were okay, that nothing had befallen you too, that the Gods had been merciful to an angel such as you.
He was struggling. His body was not responding the way it should, barely able to feel his hands and feet properly. But that didn’t matter now, for he only needed his eyes to will open so he could glimpse you, even if it was all a cruel fiction of his imagination, probably allowing him one more wish before taking him to the depths forever.
Please.
Please let him see his wife. His lady. His love.
Please.
One last time is all he asks.
If the Gods had ever looked down upon him and smiled, let them look down and smile once more. Grant him this one mercy. Just this once. Only this once.
He knows he’s begging, but what is there to do other than implore with all the strength left in him for one last look at you? In case he is to meet his end soon, let the sight of you be what he goes down feasting upon.
Blessed be The Mother, for I beg for one last mercy, for I shall gaze upon the one I hold most dear before my death and meet my end with a settled heart—
Jacaerys wonders if you are wearing one of your soft gowns, the ones he loves most, for you look like a Fae from the library tomes you so love. Would you still wear the necklace he had given you, or have you thrown it away in a fit of grief and anger because of his recklessness? He wouldn’t fault you for it. Just wished he could give you another to atone for his many sins, for how much sorrow he must’ve brought you.
But he is wrong.
You are wearing the pendant. Your fingers are wrapped around it, settled at the base of your throat, holding so tight your hand shakes, lips pressed to it, murmuring to yourself, eyes closed in prayer.
Are you praying for him to come back to you, just as he was? The thought makes warmth bloom beneath his ribs, licking upwards towards his chest, weaving until it finds his heart, willing it to beat faster. Even so close to dying, he supposes, you still manage to affect him just the same.
If this is but a dream, he hopes he never wakes up. Because standing here, looking at you, just as beautiful as the day he lost you, brings him more peace than any prayer he could’ve uttered. You are so pretty. His pretty girl. Always, always so very pretty. Even now, looking worn out, expression pinched, and hands shaking.
He wants to see your eyes, at least once, before he can't do so again.
"M-may you look at me, my love? For I want to—"
Jacaerys is startled from finishing his sentence by the loud gasp you let out, body jumping beside him, startled and alert, like a doe sensing hunters on its tail. Your eyes are so, so wide with disbelief, watching him with the sort of bewilderment one would when seeing a creature unknown or some oddity come to life. Why were you looking at him like that? If this were but a dream, then why—
"Jace," you whisper, shaky and soft, like a petal swept by the wind, hands trembling so hard the pendant slips through your fingers. "Jace," he hears you repeat, as if the sound of his name in your mouth is something foreign you have to taste again. "Gods, Jace!" Your voice cracks along the syllables of his name, before moving closer, gazing at him with those pretty eyes he near plead to see, now teary and wide, sweeping over him as if checking to see if he's whole. He knows he isn't, for the battle must've left him with more than grievances and a hollowness in his chest that could only be filled if he still had a chance to live.
Your movements are shaky and hesitant, wanting to reach for him but shackled by a fear he does not know yet. Why won't you touch him? He can tell you want nothing more than to feel him beneath your palms, and yet you waver. Why? If this is to be the last mercy before his death, why is he imagining his beloved faltering instead of pressing close, so close and grasping at him like the air one needs to breathe?
Jacaerys tries to lift a hand, grimacing when his body again does not count him as its master, and makes it hard to move properly, feeling a sharp pain lance through his forearm, pulling a hiss from between his teeth. One to which you react instantly, shaking your head as you plead with him not to move, cradling his hand between both of yours, letting Jace feel the softness of your skin again. "No, no, my love, do not move," you sniffle, blinking back those stubborn tears lining your pretty eyelashes. "Please, you must rest. The Maesters said you are not to tire yourself any further."
The Maesters? What ever could you mean?
Blinking his eyes rapidly to dwindle the fog clinging to his vision, Jacaerys's breath catches when your own room comes into view, surrounding both of you. He supposes his imagination could not help but want to remember you in the place where you felt most at ease, the one where you shared your first kiss, first bedding, and many, many other milestones that now feel like a vice around his heart, squeezing tight. Will this be the last time he gets to pine for what once was and for what could never be again?
"H-how do you feel?" Your voice shakes again, snapping him out of his reverie, gaze finding its way back to yours, feeling himself melt just at the sight of you anew. Gods, you couldn't be more gorgeous. "You had been asleep for half of a fortnight. We didn't know if you would ever wake—"
And oh, his heart shatters into pieces when your words trail off into hiccuped sobs, soft chin wobbling, not being able to hold the weight of your grief and sorrow. His sweet wife was crying beside him because of his own foolishness, and there was no punishment severe enough for his transgressions. He could be put to the sword, and it would never erase the guilt in his chest at making you shed even a tear.
It takes him but a few moments to rear his mind from blame to the words you spoke, eyes widening in bewilderment as he registers the information you bestowed upon him. "Asleep?"
His voice is rough and unpolished from disuse, and he's watching you like you brought both salvation and perdition to his door.
But you only nod, squeezing his hand tighter, bringing it up to your mouth to press warm lips upon his skin, feverish and lingering, before cradling the back of his hand against your tear-streaked, warm cheek. "Yes, my love," you confirm, tone lightening with pure relief. "The Gods were watching over you, breathing life into you anew, just like we prayed for."
Breathing life back into you.
Does that mean—
But he cannot hope yet. What if this is nothing but another trickery? The cruelest way to tear his heart asunder by making him believe he escaped from the unforgiving claws of the sea and is now granted another chance at spending a lifetime with you?
Jacaerys can feel a lump form in his throat, near choking him, his lashes dampening rapidly. "Do not forsake me, please," he pleads, willing his hand to clutch at your fingers again, with what little strength he has. "I cannot bear knowing this is but a dream." It is hard to speak as his chest heaves, blubbering like a child as he begs for a miracle from you, who he now hopes is all flesh and bones and not smoke and ash in front of him.
Your expression pinches, studying him carefully, as you so often used to do with your tomes and books in the low candlelight before bed, thumbing each page as you uncovered the secrets written through the dried ink. He feels like one now, as your eyes narrow, before those soft lips part in a round shape, understanding dawning on you.
"Oh, my sweet prince," you whisper, voice damp from your tears, but then the sweetest sound of all accompanies the wetness of your eyes.
A laugh.
Amidst all this confusion, all this befuddling turmoil between dream and reality, you laugh as if a weight has been lifted off your shoulders, and your mouth dared to form the shape of happiness again.
You turn your head to press a fervent kiss to his hand before moving closer, cradling his face between your palms. Thumbs soften the traces of tears onto his own pale cheeks from being under slumber for so long, willing to see a flush to them soon. "I am flesh and bone, not a mere mirage," you assure, another soft, disbelieving laugh tinkling between you, as if the mere thought of him believing this to be a play of the mind is ridiculous. "The Gods brought you back to me, just as I wished for, my love."
Gods, he thought he'll never get to hear that sound fall from your lips again. It makes his vision blur with tears, lips trembling as he chokes back from babbling again like a babe, but eager to quiet the ghosts of his mind that insist this is a delusion.
"P-prove it to me," he hiccups wetly, no longer preoccupied with how weak he must look, nothing like a prince and all like a man at the end of his hope, begging you to pull him towards salvation. "Please, ñuha jorrāeliarzy," his tongue wraps around the endearment like it never forgot it, full of longing and desperation. "Show me I still have you, for I cannot bear the thought of losing you again—"
He feels his heart breaking and mending itself back together over and over, waiting for you to grant him this one certainty in his hopelessness.
And Gods, you do.
Your lips are on his before he can blubber another supplication, palms tilting him the way you want to as you slot your mouths together so, so tenderly, like two wings of a butterfly touching while they flutter.
He feels it. He tastes it. Your tears, his tears, your promise, his desperation.
Jacaerys wishes he were stronger, for his body is weakened by the tragedy that befell him, not being able to grasp you as fiercely as he would if his limbs had not forsaken him. He can only will his fingers to brush against the folds of your skirts onto the bed, curling into the material until his hand shakes with the ardent want of closeness; of wanting to do more but being cursed into only hoping.
"You have me," you whisper against his mouth, branding the truth on his lips as you continue kissing him. He can feel you smiling into it, and it is unbecoming of him how that only makes him weep harder, his own tears trailing down your cheeks and chin now, too, from how close your faces are pressed together, smushed in your eagerness to prove what he so feared was nothing but a cruel twist of his mind. "And I have you, dārilaros ñuha."
Gods, your tongue tangles around the words so clumsily, no matter how many times he had patiently taught you the right way before, and still, he would never trade it for the world. Jacaerys wants to hear it a thousand times more, and then tenfold that, for the rest of his days.
He's overwhelmed. All the hopelessness he felt before, thinking he would never get to hear the sound of your voice, taste the sweetness of your lips, feel the warmth of your love. And now you are offering him all of those and more, and he feels like he cannot breathe if you dare stop for even a moment.
"Avy jorrāelan, " he sobs, trembling lips barely able to return the soft kisses you so kindly confer to him still. "Avy jorrāelan. Always," the words tumble from his mouth, choked and utterly devout. "Not a moment went by when I did not plead with the Gods to bring me back to you. I curse the sea for trying to wrench me from your side. For its greed and its cruelty, for—"
But you silence him with a firmer press of lips, swallowing the last of his blubbering with the sweetness of your mouth, tasting salt and love and life. You exhale shakily, drawing back so your gazes meet, lips brushing, leaning to nuzzle your noses together as you whisper, voice fervent with conviction. "No more talk of misfortune," you say, nudging his cheek in reprimand with the tip of your nose. "Let me rejoice in having you again."
Jacaerys had always been weak to your whims, never one to deny you anything, least of all when spoken with such longing, such relief, bodies close and shaking with lingering grief and solace alike.
He nods, gathering strength enough to nuzzle you back, eyes fluttering at the feeling, to which you shakily let out another one of those honeyed laughs as you whisper. "But do not think I shall forgive you for trapping me in mine own chambers before rushing to battle with such recklessness."
Oh.
In the midst of all this, he forgot the events that led him to this whole predicament. Closing his mother's door, then yours, vowing to come back in the end, no matter the cost.
"But I have—"
"Coming back in such a state is hardly enough for me to count this as you honoring your vow," you say, eyes narrowing, even teary and full of adoration as they were. And he couldn't find it in himself to feel anything, but the fullness of his chest as it filled with so much love for you, it damn near burst open. "We shall discuss more of this when you've healed properly."
"Yes, my lady," he whispers, having the gall to look a bit sheepish, but alas, a small smile curls at his lips, the normalcy of your reprimand willing his senses into solace.
You harrumph, trying to show displeasure, but he knows there is too much relief blooming between you two now, softening even this attempt at being stern.
He makes an effort to tilt his chin up until his lips brush your tear-streaked, warm cheek, kissing it softly, not moving for a very, very long time.
"I'm sorry," is pressed against the damp skin, and he knows it'll take time and an exuberant amount of grovelling to will you to forgive him, but he wouldn't have it any other way.
Now that he has escaped death's grasp, he has a lifetime ahead of him to try to gain your favour.
And Gods, what a fortunate way to live out the rest of his days.
tag list: @silkaurum @oldtowrs @mademoisellepetite @dreamgirlevill @0nlybitt3r4may @rhaenyras-crown @ghostlybfgf @pinkdoeweirdo
Synopsis: He fell from the sky. She rose from the deep. When an unlikely savior pulls a prince back from death’s door, neither of them can quite stay away from the shore that brought them together.
Word Count: 6.0K
Pairing: Prince!Jacaerys Velaryon x Mermaid!Reader
Genre: Mermaid au, Jace lives!, fluff
Warnings: Mermaid descriptions of reader but nothing too specific about looks, Jace and Baela aren’t betrothed, vermax :(, brief mentions of nudity.
A/N: Based off THIS REQUEST, I hope this doesn’t seem rushed :) lowkey used my physics knowledge to make bs up 🥴
Divider credits to: @uzmacchiato <3
In a world where dragons roamed the sky and stranger things still lurked in the far reaches of Sothoryos, the existence of merfolk was hardly a thing beyond belief.
Yet for centuries the merfolk had kept to themselves, hidden from human eyes by choice rather than necessity, for the sea was their domain, vast and forgiving, older than any castle built of stone, and they had little wish to share it with a race that seemed forever at war with itself and everything around it.
In time, that same secrecy had turned them into little more than legend, tales spun by sailors over cups of watered wine on nights when the wind howled and the deck rolled beneath them. Sirens were known to lure ships onto rocks with voices sweet enough to make a man forget his own name, and feast on whatever remained once the rocks had finished their work.
Mermaids were a gentler breed by comparison, prone to guiding lost sailors safely home as often as they were blamed for storms and ill weather they had no hand in at all. Two natures entirely, wearing similar faces, and precious few humans who lived long enough to learn the difference between them.
They were beautiful creatures beneath the waves, long tails the colour of pearl and coral fading seamlessly into human torsos, faces too fine and too still to belong to any mortal woman, gill feathers tracing delicate lines along their throats that fluttered faintly with every breath of water drawn through them. Webbing caught the light between their fingers and along the curves of their ears, and their eyes, when a sailor was unlucky or lucky enough to catch one open beneath the surface, ethereal was the word men reached for, when they had any words left at all.
It had been pure chance that placed you so close to the Gullet on the day the battle came, chance and your own incurable curiosity, which your sisters had scolded you for since you were small enough to hide behind their tails.
You had always had a weakness for collecting things. Rings slipped from dead men's fingers, buckles and buttons and the little bronze bells that sailors sometimes wore for luck that had done them no good at all in the end, coins gone green and soft with centuries beneath the salt.
You kept them in the hollow belly of an old sunken hull you had claimed as your own years ago, arranging and rearranging them the way a child arranges shells on a beach, and you were forbidden, absolutely forbidden, from ever breaking the surface to retrieve anything that had not already sunk deep enough to be safely yours. The deep waters near the wreck sites were permitted. The world above the waterline was not.
You had seen fleets pass overhead before, dark hulls cutting shadows across the sunlit shallows, and it had never troubled you much. Ships came and went. Men fought their wars on the surface and left their dead to sink down to you eventually, and you had learned not to think too hard about where the trinkets came from.
What startled you that day, what sent ice through your veins even in water still warm from the summer sun, was the sound. A battle breaking out with no warning at all, not the slow grinding approach you were used to but something sudden and enormous, the water shaking with it as though the sea itself had been struck. Fire that should not have been able to burn beneath the waves somehow did, hissing and spitting where it touched the surface, and ash sifted down through the water like grey snow, and wood came apart in great splintering chunks, and bodies. So many bodies, falling and falling, sinking past you like stones dropped from a terrible height, men who had been laughing and cursing and praying only moments before.
You very nearly got swept into the worst of it yourself. Your pale pink tail caught for one heart-stopping instant on a length of trailing rigging, and you fought and thrashed to free yourself, kicking hard for clearer, deeper water, away from the chaos above. It was then that something struck the surface with such force that the shockwave of it rolled straight through your chest, and you turned back despite every instinct screaming at you to keep swimming, and saw a dragon.
Only the one. You did not know his name yet, though you would come to learn it soon enough. Vermax, green as new leaves, thrashing against water he had never been built to fight, wings beating in great useless sweeps, trying and failing again and again to claw his way back up into a sky that no longer wanted him.
And strapped to his back, tangled in leather that should have kept him safe and now threatened only to drown him with the beast, was a boy.
A very pretty boy, you thought, even through the horror of it, because you had always had a weakness for pretty things as well as shiny ones, and some habits did not care what was happening around them.
He fought his harness with a growing, panicked desperation, one leg caught fast beneath a buckle that would not give no matter how he wrenched at it, and you watched the fight slowly bleed out of him as the water rose past his chin and then his mouth. You watched him press his palm flat against his dragon’s scaled hide, whether in farewell or in simple desperate comfort you could not say, and something inside your chest twisted so hard and so suddenly that it hurt, a feeling you had no name for and no time to think about, and you were moving before your brain had caught up to it.
The buckles gave easily enough beneath your fingers, quick clever things built for human hands rather than merfolk ones but simple enough once you understood the shape of them, all but the one pinning his leg fast, which would not release no matter how you pulled. It was your sister's whalebone dagger, tucked always at your hip, that finally cut him free, the leather parting in one long stroke. By then the boy had gone entirely still, his eyes half open and unseeing.
You spared one moment, only one, though it cost you dearly to spare it, to press your palm flat against Vermax’s scales in something like an apology, for jot being able to save him. The great beast simply closed his eyes, as if content that his rider had found safer hands than his own to carry him the rest of the way, and sank without a struggle into the dark below, leaving no trace but a slow drift of green scales catching what little light remained.
Surfacing was a huge mistake. You broke into open air in the very heart of the wreckage, ships burning on every side, smoke thick enough to sting your eyes, and had barely a breath to get your bearings before an arrow split the water beside you, close enough that you felt the wind of its passing against your cheek and almost hitting the boy in the neck.
You looked up into a row of crossbows all trained your way, men shouting words you did not understand but whose meaning was plain enough in the set of their shoulders, and understood with sudden, terrible clarity exactly how little difference they would see between a dragon’s rider and whatever monster had come to finish the work the sea had started.
You went back under. Humans could not breathe water, but neither, you thought grimly, dragging the boy's dead weight down with you, could you survive a volley of bolts meant to end lives.
You swam hard and fast and low, keeping to what cover the drifting wreckage offered, dragging him through water gone thick and stinging with smoke and ash, until the sounds of battle fell away behind you into a dull, distant roar and the nearest shore rose dark and welcoming against the horizon. You hauled him up onto the sand with strength you did not know you possessed, adrenaline lending you what your body alone could not, and only then let yourself look at him properly.
Your stomach dropped. His lips had gone the deep, bruised blue of a man already claimed by the sea, his skin pale as the underbelly of a fish, and his chest did not move at all.
The old stories. Your grandmother had told them half as warning and half as wonder, back when you were young enough to still believe every tale she spun, of how a drowned man's lungs might yet be coaxed back to life if the sea inside them was driven out in time, before the body forgot how to want air at all. You laid both palms flat over the centre of his chest, unsure of your own strength, and pressed down hard.
Once. Nothing happened. Panic clawed up your throat.
Twice. Your own breath caught, tight and painful.
Thrice, and you pressed with everything you had left in you, uncaring now whether you cracked something beneath your palms, because a bruise, even a broken rib, was nothing at all set against death.
On the fourth press he convulsed beneath your hands and turned sharply to one side, retching a lungful of seawater onto the sand, coughing so violently his whole body shook with the force of it. You sat back, tail curling instinctively beneath you, heart hammering, and watched the grey slowly bleed out of his face as air, found its way back into him at last.
He did not understand, in that first hazy moment, anything beyond the fact that he was somehow, impossibly, still alive. The world swam in and out of focus around him, blurred and ringing. The last clear memory he had was of Vermax beneath him and the water closing over them both in a great green rush, of struggling against a harness that would not give no matter how he fought it, and then a blurred pale shape cutting toward him through the murk like something out of a half remembered dream, and then nothing at all.
He sat up too quickly. Pain lanced through his skull bright enough to make him gasp, and he only dimly registered that he had knocked someone backward in the process, hearing a small startled sound beside him.
"I am sorry- I did not mean to- are you..." The words died somewhere in his throat.
A hand still rested lightly against his shoulder, small and cool and strange. He gaze followed it down past a bare collarbone, down a torso, and then no legs at all, only a long tail the colour of pale coral, still trembling faintly where it lay half in the surf, catching what little light the dying sun still offered.
His eyes came back up to meet yours. Yours were already wide with fright, caught somewhere between diving straight back into the water and staying just long enough to see what he would do with the knowledge now sitting plainly on his face.
"You," he breathed, and could not seem to manage a single word more than that.
You did not wait to find out what he would say next. You began dragging yourself backward toward the water on your palms, tail scraping over wet sand, and that seemed to break whatever had held him frozen in place, because he scrambled after you across the shore despite the state of his own battered, aching body.
"Wait, please, don't go, who are you? What is your name? Why did you save me? Why?" The questions tumbled out of him faster than you could possibly have answered even if your voice had worked properly, one tripping over the next, desperation making him clumsy with his words. When you opened your mouth to try anyway, nothing came at all, no sound, not even a whisper. You touched two fingers to your throat and shook your head slowly.
"You cannot speak?"
You nodded, something apologetic in the tilt of your head.
There was no simple way to explain it to him, not with gestures alone, that merfolk voices were shaped and tuned for the weight and pressure of deep water and simply could not survive in air thin and empty as this, so you only looked at him, sorry, and slid a little further back toward the tideline, the cool water lapping welcome against your tail.
"Wait!" He was on his feet now, unsteady, swaying slightly as he turned to take in the shore around him properly for the first time. "This is Driftmark- I think- and that," he pointed to a dark shape rising jagged from the water in the distance, smoke still curling faintly from somewhere within the battle behind them, "that's Dragonstone. That is where I live. I must find some way to thank you properly, I do not even know how yet, but I will. I swear it."
You gave him one last long look, drinking in the sight of him properly now that the worst of the danger had passed, pale and shaking and utterly unlike anyone you had ever pulled from the wreckage before, and nodded once before the water closed silently over your head.
What he did not know, could not have known, was that you had not truly gone. You lingered just beneath the surface, hidden in the shallows where the light still reached, watching as the full weight of what he had lost caught up to him at last.
You watched his shoulders begin to shake, watched him sink slowly to his knees on the wet sand as the grief he had been too shocked to feel finally broke over him, grieving the bond severed so suddenly with his dragon, a bond you understood was not so different from the ones your own kind shared with the great whales that sometimes let mermaids ride upon their backs through the deep currents. You felt sad and helpless and entirely too far away to do anything about either, your own chest aching in sympathy for a boy you did not even know the name of yet.
Trinkets, you thought at last, retreating slowly deeper into the water where the cold and the dark could swallow the strange, unfamiliar feeling sitting heavy in your chest. I will bring him pretty things. Pretty things always help. Everyone knows that.
By the time Jace made it back to Dragonstone, disguised as best his battered state allowed, the sun had long since set and the castle had already begun to mourn a prince presumed lost at sea.
Rhaenyra, who had spent the whole of that day and the one before convincing herself, against every hope, that he was truly gone, very nearly lost her composure entirely at the sight of him standing whole in the doorway of her solar, swaying but breathing, and threatened violence on anyone who dared suggest it a cruel trick before she was even certain of it herself.
Then he was close enough to touch, close enough that she could feel the warmth still clinging to him despite the cold seawater soaked through every layer of his clothes, and she crossed the room in three swift strides and pulled him into an embrace so fierce it near cracked his ribs, one hand cradling the back of his neck the way she had when he was small enough to carry on her hip.
She pulled back only far enough to strike him hard across the face, the sound of it sharp in the quiet room, then dragged him straight back into her arms before he had time to recover from either the blow or the embrace that followed it.
"Never," she whispered fiercely against his hair, "never again. Do you understand me?"
Jace made no complaint about any of it. He only held on, breathing in the familiar smell of her, flowery and something that had always simply meant home no matter where in the world he found himself, and let himself be scolded and forgiven in the very same breath, over and over, until the shaking in his hands finally began to still.
There would be time to explain everything later, the mermaid and the potion he did not yet know he would go looking for and the strange ache already settling in his chest at the thought of never seeing her again. Tonight he only wanted this, his mother’s arms and the solid stone floor beneath his feet and the simple, overwhelming relief of being alive.
It was two full days before he saw you again, two days that felt considerably longer to both of you than their number suggested.
He had taken to walking the shore each evening as the sun went down, though he offered no one an explanation for it beyond a vague murmur about wanting air, and Rhaenyra, watching her son closely for any sign of the grief she knew still sat unresolved in him, chose not to press the matter, not yet.
On the second such evening, with the light turning gold and heavy across the water at the very edge of dusk, a small shape broke the surface some distance out from where he stood. Only your eyes showed at first, wary, scanning the beach with the caution of a creature that had learned, however briefly, exactly what danger humans could pose. Once you were certain he was truly alone, no soldiers, no crossbows waiting in the shadows, you swam closer, arms full of things gathered carefully from the seafloor over the two long days you had spent working up the courage to return.
He laughed before he could help himself, disbelieving, because you had brought him what looked like a small fortune of drowned treasure: coins gone green with centuries of salt, sea glass worn to the smoothness of river stones in every colour from deep emerald to pale, milky blue, pearls still crusted faintly with the ghosts of the shells that had once held them, all of it cradled carefully against your chest as though it were the finest gift any king had ever received.
"For me?" He pressed a hand to his own chest, incredulous, and you beamed and nodded so hard your whole body shook with the force of it, tail flicking once against the shallows in what he would later come to recognise as excitement.
"I have nothing half so precious to give you in return," he said, quieter now, kneeling properly in the wet sand so that he was closer to your level, and you shook your head firmly, as if to tell him that was hardly the point of any of it, that gifts given freely required nothing given back.
He knelt at the waterline for a long while that evening and talked, filling the silence you could not, telling you his name, his House, that he was a prince of Dragonstone and heir to something called an Iron Throne that sounded, from the little he explained, far heavier a burden than any crown ought to be. Your eyes lit at the word prince, delighted, and you pointed to your own chest in turn, tapping it twice for emphasis.
"A princess, then?" he guessed, and you nodded, pleased as anything with yourself, and something in his chest that had been wound painfully tight since the moment the water closed over his head two days before finally began, slowly, to loosen.
You tried, that first proper evening, to tell him other things too, though the telling was slow and clumsy without words. You drew shapes in the wet sand with one finger, a rough sketch of a tail, of waves, of something that might have been a whale or might simply have been a very poor circle, and Jace watched with a fascination that made you strangely warm beneath your scales, guessing at your meaning and laughing softly whenever he guessed wrong, which was often.
When the moon rose high enough that you knew you had to leave, you leaned in and pressed a quick, shy kiss to his cheek, as if to tell him not to be sad any longer, that you would return, that whatever grief still lived behind his eyes need not be carried entirely alone. That Vermax lay peacefully beneath the sea. And if he had been pretty enough to catch a second glance from you even amid the chaos of a burning battlefield, well.
You had always liked pretty things, and you saw no shame in admitting it, even silently, even only to yourself.
In the days that followed, Jace found himself buried in the library far more often than seated at council, a fact that did not escape his mother's notice for long. The war, if it could even still be properly called that, had cooled in the aftermath of the battle into something closer to a wary, watchful peace, both sides circling cautiously around the idea of parley rather than open slaughter, and so Rhaenyra could afford, for the first time in longer than she cared to admit, to spend her worry on her son rather than entirely on her crown.
It was on the seventh day since his return that she finally cornered him about it, finding him hunched over a table stacked high with scrolls he had clearly been picking through for hours, Daemon lounging nearby against a bookshelf with a look of a man who had already scented an amusing story and had no intention whatsoever of leaving before he heard the whole of it.
"The one who saved me from the water," Jace admitted at last, ears burning red under his mother's steady gaze, "was a mermaid. I have been meeting her at dusk every evening since. She brings me gifts."
Silence, and then Daemon's low, delighted laugh rang out across the quiet library. "A fish," he said, "has stolen my son’s heart. Rhaenyra, did you hear that? A fish."
"She is not a fish," Jace snapped, mortified, colour flooding all the way up to the tips of his ears, and would say nothing further no matter how Daemon pressed him for details, though his ears stayed scarlet the rest of the evening and he refused, quite pointedly, to look either of them in the eye.
It was only once they were alone, Daemon finally chased off by some matter of ships needing his attention, that Rhaenyra asked, more gently now, what exactly he hoped to find buried in all those old scrolls.
He confessed it slowly, haltingly, that he was searching for some means of letting you speak properly above the water, because you listened to him so patiently each evening, tilting your head at his every word as though nothing he said could ever bore you, and he found, to his own quiet surprise, that he wanted very badly to hear your voice in return, to know what you sounded like when you laughed instead of simply seeing it in the curve of your mouth.
Something in her face softened at that, the last of the earlier sternness melting away entirely. She crossed the room and pressed a kiss to the crown of his head, something she would often do when he was but a babe and even now.
"I nearly lost you once already," she said quietly. "I do not think I would survive losing you a second time, not truly. If this girl from the sea brings you peace after everything, then that peace is worth more to me than I can properly measure. I will help you find your answer, if I am able. You have only to ask."
He thanked her, throat tight, and went to bed that night lighter than he had felt in a very long time.
By the tenth day, though, his search had turned up nothing but dust and disappointment, page after page of tidal charts and shipping records that told him everything about the sea and nothing at all about the creatures who lived beneath it, and he was scowling so fiercely at a particularly useless scroll that he did not hear Baela approach until she dropped a stack of books onto the table hard enough to make him jump nearly out of his seat.
"What have I told you about pouting, cousin? It hardly befits a prince, especially not one so recently returned from the dead."
"I am not pouting," he said, pouting.
She laughed, unbothered, and pushed the books toward him anyway, settling into the chair across from him with the satisfied air of someone bearing very good news. "Found these buried in the old archive, behind a shelf half the household seems to have forgotten existed. Scrolls on sea creatures, potions, that sort of thing, all written in the old tongue. Some of it looks to go back to Old Valyria itself, if the binding is anything to judge by. Thought they might serve you better than moping about the library like a wet cat."
His whole face changed, disappointment giving way so suddenly to hope that Baela laughed again just watching it happen. He thanked her so earnestly, gripping her hands in both of his, that she looked half embarrassed by the whole display and waved him off with a mock scowl of her own, and then he buried himself in the texts for the rest of the day and well into the night, barely stopping to eat, ink staining his fingers as he copied out passage after passage by candlelight.
The gods, it seemed, had finally decided to smile down upon him after everything, because tucked among the brittle, crumbling pages he found precisely what he had been searching for all along: an old Valyrian draught, described in cramped, faded script, said to grant a creature of the sea, mermaid or siren alike, a brief and temporary span of human legs, the magic bound to fade again once enough days had passed.
Gathering the ingredients took the better part of two more days, some of them common enough to find in any well stocked kitchen and others requiring correspondence sent quietly to a maester on the mainland who asked no questions he clearly did not wish answered, and finding an alchemist both skilled and discreet enough to brew the whole of it properly took longer still. But by the fourteenth day since the battle, Jace stood at the shoreline at dusk with a small vial clutched tight in one hand, its contents glowing faintly violet in the fading light, and his heart hammering somewhere up near his throat.
You surfaced as you always did by then, cautious first, scanning the shore out of old habit, then delighted once you saw him standing alone, swimming in swiftly with your usual haul of shells and drowned bottles clutched against your chest. He knelt at the waterline and, for once, did not simply talk about his day or ask after yours in the halting, gestured way you had both grown so used to.
He explained the potion instead, slowly, carefully, holding the vial up so you could see the strange violet light swirling within it, watching your face closely all the while for any sign that this was too much, too strange, too great a thing to ask of you.
You went very quiet. Your brow furrowed the way it always did when you turned something over carefully in your mind, weighing it from every side, and Jace, who had come to know that expression well over a fortnight of evenings spent together, made himself sit still and wait, though every part of him wanted to fill the silence with reassurance.
"It is only if you wish it," he said softly, when the silence had stretched long enough that he could not help himself any longer. "I would never have you feel forced into anything on my account, not after everything you have already given me. If you would rather not, I will understand completely, and I will still come to see you each evening, just as I have."
You studied the vial a long moment more, turning the choice over one final time, thinking of your sisters and the warnings you had grown up hearing about the dangers of the world above, of legs that were not truly yours and a voice that might vanish again the moment the magic faded.
Then you looked at him, at the earnest hope he could not quite hide no matter how he tried, and something in your face settled at last, resolve chasing out the last of the hesitation, and you nodded.
He could have wept from the sheer relief of it. He handed you the vial with hands that were not entirely steady, and you drank it down in a single determined swallow, immediately screwing your face up at the taste, which was somehow both bitter and sickly sweet beneath it, like rot dressed up in honey, and Jace laughed at the disgusted noise you made.
The change came almost at once, faster than either of you had quite expected. Your tail began to glow faintly from within, the violet light spreading through the coral pink scales, and then, slowly, the scales themselves began to dissolve and reshape, splitting and lengthening before your very eyes.
You watched it happen to your own body with something closer to wonder than fear, propping yourself up on your elbows in the shallow water to see it better. It did not hurt, not truly, only felt strange, an unfamiliar pulling and settling sensation that ran the length of what had been your tail only moments before, and then, quite suddenly, you had legs. Two of them, unfamiliar and entirely new to you, kicking weakly in the shallows as you tried, with no success at all, to make them do anything useful.
It was Jace who first remembered, with a start that nearly gave him whiplash, that you now had absolutely nothing on at all beneath the water. He spun to face the other direction so fast he nearly lost his footing on the wet sand, hurriedly unclasping his own travelling cloak and passing it back over his shoulder to you without turning around, ears burning scarlet all over again.
"Here, please, wrap this around yourself, I am so sorry, I did not think- I should have thought of it before you drank the wretched thing."
You took the cloak, bewildered by the whole strange business of clothing, and wrapped it clumsily about yourself as best you could manage with limbs that still refused to cooperate properly.
"Why," you whispered, voice thin and strange and entirely your own, and both of you went utterly, completely still.
"You spoke," Jace said, turning back around despite himself, eyes wide with wonder, all thought of modesty forgotten entirely.
"I did," you said, marvelling at the strange, thin sound of your own voice carrying through open air, so unlike the way words moved and pressed through water, lighter somehow, and stranger, but yours all the same.
He knelt properly before you then in the wet sand, something almost formal in the gesture despite how thoroughly absurd the whole moment truly was, both of them soaked and shivering and grinning like fools, and asked if he might finally know the proper name of the maiden who had pulled him back so stubbornly from death's door.
You told him. Your name, spoken aloud for the first time in your life, and that you were the seventh daughter of a house that ruled beneath the narrow sea, a true princess in every sense, just as you had claimed all along through nothing but gestures and a proud tilt of your chin.
"I know this may only last a short while," Jace said, still kneeling, still holding your hands as though he feared letting go might undo the magic.
"And I mean to keep searching, if that is what you wish, for some way to make it last longer, or even permanent. But for now, will you come and meet my family properly? They ought to see, with their own eyes, the girl who saved their prince from the bottom of the Gullet."
You tried to stand at that, eager and entirely too confident in limbs you had possessed for all of ten minutes, and discovered immediately that legs demanded a coordination and strength the sea had never once asked of you. You stumbled, pitched forward, and landed hard on your knees in the wet sand with a startled, frustrated huff.
You tried again, gripping his shoulder for balance this time, and managed perhaps three wobbling steps before your legs betrayed you a second time, sending you tumbling sideways with a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a groan of pure exasperation.
Jace, biting back a laugh of his own though it clearly threatened to escape, knelt beside you and tightened the cloak properly around your shoulders, then slid one arm behind your back and the other beneath the crook of your knees, lifting you up into his arms with far more ease than his still-recovering body should reasonably have allowed.
"I will teach you to walk properly," he promised, adjusting his grip as you settled, somewhat stiffly, against his chest, your new legs kicking experimentally against nothing at all. "Though I think that particular lesson is better suited to daylight and a rather softer patch of ground than this. Just now I have limited time before the magic fades, and I intend to make the very most of it while I can."
The jaws that dropped when Jacaerys Velaryon strode into Dragonstone’s great hall carrying a girl in his arms, salt still drying in tangled waves through her hair, wrapped in nothing but his own travelling cloak and kicking her bare feet with open, delighted fascination at the strange new sensation of having feet at all, were a sight none of the household would soon forget, and several among the kitchen staff would still be whispering about weeks later.
Baela nearly dropped the tray she was carrying. Rhaena’s mouth fell open mid sentence and simply stayed that way. You met Rhaenyra and Daemon’s twin looks of open astonishment with wide, curious eyes of your own, entirely unbothered by the attention, as though growing an entirely new pair of legs within the hour were the most ordinary thing in all the world, and gave the queen a doe eyed stare that made it very difficult indeed for anyone in that hall to remain suspicious for long.
Daemon was the first to find his voice, low and disbelieving, a slow grin spreading across his face. “Well- damn. He wasn’t kidding about the fish.”
Rhaenyra’s palm found the back of his head before he had even finished speaking, a sharp, swift smack that made him yelp and rub at the spot, wounded.
“Mind your tongue,” she warned, though there was little real heat in it, her gaze already softening as it moved from Daemon back to her son and the girl held so carefully in his arms.
In the end, there was little else for anyone present to do but believe it, however improbable the tale sounded when spoken aloud: that the lost prince of Dragonstone had indeed been pulled from the bottom of the sea by a little mermaid, and that she, in turn, without quite meaning for it to happen at all, had followed him all the way home.
this was inspired after i read a kinktober fic by @wholoveseggs with this same prompt… which is a trope i love so much
“gods above.” your newly husband, jacaerys velaryon, had groaned, one palm pressed against the space where your neck met your shoulder, fingers dancing along your spine with your back faced to him. “is this corset supposed to be a labyrinth of sorts?”
his palm moved down the expanse of your back, nimble fingers tangling in the laces of your corset. tonight had been your wedding, and after years of betrothal and courting, years of pining and longing, jace finally had what he wanted in the palm of his hands.
the entire night, jace had been staring at you longingly, imaging when he was finally able to rid you of the albeit gorgeous dress you wore so he could ravish your skin. he’d wanted this for as long as he could remember, and now that it was finally happening, his eagerness ran hot and his patience ran thin.
a laugh bubbled from your lips, hands clasped in front of you in excitement and nervousness. “the maids made sure it was superbly confined to my frame.” your response had come out in a whisper, leaving jace to forget his frustration for a second to coo at your breathless voice. “i’m sorry, my love.”
“oh sweet girl,” jace breathed, the fingers entwined in your laces tugging harshly so your back pressed firmly against his front. you gasped, a blush creeping along your cheeks as jace’s nose bumped against your jaw. “don’t apologize. if you would only give me a moment…”
with a harsh downwards motion, jace yanked at the laces, the sound of fraying and pulled apart silk permeating through your ears as your beloved husband ripped the back of your corset wide open. a gasp so intense it shocked your bones tore from your lips, body jolting with jace’s ministrations.
the brute force of it all made you bite your lip, core becoming impossibly wet as you thought about jace using that type of strength with you when you finally bedded each other. as the corset loosened around your body, the hungry eyes of your husband took in your exposed frame, his tongue kissing his teeth before he spun you around, leaving the dress to pool at your feet.
“now theres my pretty girl.” you didn’t even have time to chastise jace for ripping your dress, the wily prince crooking two of his fingers, beckoning you over with a grin.
“c’mere.” jace ordered, voice holding a stroke of softness and dominance. “i can’t spend another minute not touching you.”
“i was told sirens drag men to their deaths.”
“we do.”
jacaerys velaryon x fem!siren!reader
words: 23.2k
notes: this was written before s3e1, but still contains major spoilers. non canon compliant. i have a lot of new followers since i last posted & im v happy to be back writing here; pls feel free to stop by my inbox to chat or request something <3 description of reader is intended to avoid physical features, including skin tone. this is relatively unedited so sorry for any errors.
warnings: heavy discussion of death. fear. angst/grief. graphic injuries, mild horror & gore, vomiting, allusions to blood eating. fluff tho! reader is a siren and not human so (?). sex - piv, nudity. light praise kink, inexperienced jace, experienced (?) reader. light power dynamics but relatively tame smut. fluff & a surprisingly happy ending for me !
WHEN HE FALLS FROM THE SKY, THE SEA DOES NOT CARE THAT HE IS A PRINCE.
In fact, it does not care that he is the story of the sky and the sea both, nor that he carries within him both a line of an old empire and a claim to a kingdom. No, the sea does not care that Jacaerys is a prince; it takes him all the same.
Scorched by a burn down the throat of Dragonfire – though not in flame, but the aftertaste of it, he sinks; orange veins through black, smoke threaded deep into his lungs with the craning roar of Vermax long since vanishing from his ears through the crushing depths around him.
There is no color left now, not enough to discern banner from banner or hull from hull, scale from scale. Bizarrely, what remains is red, and it lingers both in the water and his mouth; And soon, true as the gods and their cruelties, it is also drifting in thick ribbons from his shoulder.
Though he is well submerged in water, in an instinct at the basest of his kind’s nature, Jacaerys inhales.
Choked immediately by the force of salt down into his very being, Jacaerys tastes iron and brine and something scorchingly distant, the residue of dragonfire made to liquid, swallowed back down into the deep as it tugs at himself, too; rolling in fizzing bubbles of fire and thundering waves overtop his back.
He does not remember the fall, and he hardly remembers the splitting of both sky and earth; Only that glassy world between the two, reflecting in depths and in minds alike, echoing the sound of groaning hulls and roaring beasts and the warbled screams of dying men.
It is a deep descent, crushing with a searing pain that emanates in the ribbons of red that float out from him, flying leathers heavy, dragging him down, down, down.
He is learned enough to cease his useless inhales as the salt hardens and grows deeper, meeting that which flows through his veins, dizzying his mind until water and salt and blood are all he tastes. The fire of war becomes a distant thing high above his sinking body as his consciousness loses him for what might be the last time.
Indeed, he hardly feels it when the sudden, ripping jerk tugs his body; up, or sideways, or some elsewhere – through something darker than anything he’s ever known.
WHEN HE WAKES, JACAERYS BLINKS AGAINST A SKY FAR TOO VAST.
The smoke of battle has thinned into a distant smear upon the horizon, a notion he gathers only after coming to and completely emptying his stomach of kelped water, scraped with barnacles and blood and shipwreckage splintered into his throat in their ascent from his guts.
A length of broken timber presses beneath his spine, which is his second gathering; Perhaps a spar from his grandsire’s fleet, or perhaps merely the rib of some lesser ship cracked open like a carcass to be feasted by the vulturous gulls of the Narrow Sea.
When at last, sluggish and stinging, his eyes open – they do so with a fluttering knot of long lashes, and he must squint into the vastness above and around him, feeling the wilt of hope dying like a low wyck in his chest. There are no sails near him now; nor cries, nor banners.
Jacaerys well and truly and fully floats alone.
He lets himself stare, just for a moment, to gather himself. A fine day, by any standards less measured with the smoke and searing screams of both sky and sea, the sun hanging upon its bright band in the heavens and oppressive enough to give Jacaerys need to close his lids once more. Gulls circle lazily in the distance, a sole sign of life in a deserted plane of rocking water.
Well, then. He is far from the Gullet now.
Indeed, he is far from anything, as indicated by squint of his eye; The sea rocks him on his raft like the cradle of a cherished babe, horrible but lulling as his mind drifts further than his body. He lies flat upon it, cradled by splintered wood that dips and sways with the sigh of the sea.
Perhaps it would be a gentle thing, if not for the arrows lodged deep through the flesh of his shoulder and chest.
He had not felt their strikes, though now he indeed feels them. Each shift of tide drives the shaft in his shoulder deeper, grinding splintered wood and barbed iron into bone and muscle alike, a searing ache that permeates each stretch of his being. The shallower one, Gods be true, lies in the fleshy muscle of his chest, lodged but loose enough to flounder like a babe newly-horsebacked with each shift of wave. Because of this, breath fractures into something ugly and thinly agonized, pressed by cheek against the splintered wood beneath him.
He does not give himself more than a moment with this unceasing pain; instead a hand rises, weakened and trembling and searing with the protest of barbed metal against bone, to tug at the wood protruding from his chest. The shoulder, he knows, is no use to try and save now; but the nearly insouciant rhythm of the shallow arrow upon his chest mocks him with its pulsing agony, and thus he tugs at it with all the dwindling strength he may remain. A roar rips from chapped lips, burning with the taste of bile and dragonsmoke; and still he pulls, the sinewy rip of arrowhead as it dislodges itself from its shallow grave and frees, violently, into the salty air. Jacaerys lets out no more than a whimper at the gaping, pulsing pain now ebbing from his wound; the arrow in his grasp is listlessly cast from his palm, down into whatever depths now lie below him.
The wound pulses with every faint heartbeat, and though he should surely press it to fend too much loss, he finds himself weakened with agony and exhaustion. Water still lives there, salty and ancient, in his lungs; he feels it with each inhale he takes. A warmth both viscous and determined seeps sluggishly down his side and crawls into the dip of his collarbone and throat, pooling in a glistening ruby shimmer before diluting pink into the endless blue beneath him.
Jacaerys watches the darkest parts of him go with not so much a single sound besides wafery breaths delivered sparsely between groans of aching ribs and short, wet coughs.
A prince should not bleed so quietly, he thinks.
Though it is for hours Jacaerys floats like this – if he is so to believe the lies spun by the sun in the sky – shifting upon agonizing weight every few moments, feeling the life of him seep out with every weak pump of his tremored soul. He floats limply, one weakened boot dragging in the cold water beneath his torrid liferaft of broken war.
It is too lonesome for a boy like him, perhaps. All that emanates from his brain is an ache of heart, the memory of screeching; of the jerking strike and dragging descent, such a slow death. Jacaerys floats for hours and hears wailing; sees the final glance of his lifelong companion, his truest friend; feels the sinking again, the horrible moment when he and his Vermax were swallowed beneath the surface. He wonders, in that dim place between consciousness and sleep, if there are those looking for him. If Rhaena and that wild beast are back on land; if Corlys and Baela and the rest are safe, dry perhaps, unscathed; if his mother remains still untouched by danger. It was a fair trade, he thinks. Their lives for his own.
The agony in his chest and shoulder grows as the sun slips into a smoky horizon. He is blistered by the sun and drained of half his life, memories of his drowning roving sluggishly in his mind more as sensation than coherence: A sharp tugging, far less than natural, from the very depths of the sea. He recalls, only faintly and through some hazy delirience, that he did not resurface, nor did he pull himself rightwards onto this very raft; He has hardly the strength to move his arm at all, and knows best that he did not, indeed, save himself from the death that found him just hours ago in the Gullet. A horrible thought pulses just beyond coherence; the sensation of wrongness permeates the prince as he lies, motionless and alone, in the middle of a silent sea.
Jacaerys falls in and out of the world with heavy, tear-laced eyelids and a ceaseless ache in his torso.
WHEN HE NEXT FINDS HIS CONSCIOUS, THE SUN HAS BEGUN TO DANCE VIOLET AND ORANGE ALONG THE GLISTENING RIPPLES OF SEA.
He stirs not from pain nor hunger nor any kind of distant tremoring sound; instead, he is roused by the sensation of something brushing his ankle.
Unable to do much else, he only stiffens; The water beneath him is darker than it ought to be, sheared in half by a bright and burning glint reflecting from the horizon, a shifting pane of glass so v ery fathomless and swallowing in its wholeness. He squints at the burning orange searing the water and lives, for a blissful for moments, in the belief that it is only delirium of a dying man that makes him feel the brush against his boot, surely only the blood clotting his sight into the watery depths which his leg splays into.
But then he sees a flicker.
Silver, or perhaps its more shyly shimmering cousin; some reflective thing which catches the light, winking like ancient dragoncoin beneath sand, glinting against the oppressive glare of dying sun splitting his vision in half.
Blinking salt and dying sun from his gaze, he lulls his cheek back upon the raft, tasting his blood as it resides within the grain of wood and the split of his lips alike. His wounds are near dried now, though he is no fool. He suspects the Stranger will visit him quite soon.
But then, a drifting, long-winding vision once more through the water, near his boot beneath the shifting of his splintered raft. Long and swirling like weeds at sea, it coils and slinks just out of sight; though still, Jacaerys is given a startled pause.
Hair?
A squint against the sting of salt in lashes, hazeled eyes catch not the jerking dart of fish, nor the rolling glide of a seal or any such beast. It is real – perhaps only in the way visions might be real to one on the brink of death – though real all the same as the arrow through his shoulder or the wound in his chest.
Whatever it is, it circles.
His pulse thunders weakly, and in a delirious moment recalls stories of pirates across the sea who leak from the cracks of the Stepstones and surface from the sea itself; men who swim upon unattended boats to thieve the pockets of men who lie shipwrecked.
“Go,” he rasps madly, though his voice is hardly more than wind over broken mast, matted with pain and expiring life. It takes the last of his very soul, the raw and trembling memory of green scales sinking into the sea, that he presses. “Please. I’ve…I’ve nothing left to steal.”
And a tragic truth his words are. The sea answers the Prince with a soft lap against wood, echoing gently as a kiss against his cheekbone; and then, as though relenting, the shape vanishes.
Wildly, perhaps madly, Jacaerys laughs once; though the salt and brine have made a home in his lungs, and blood slicks his lip now. Yes, death will find him quite soon, it seems. He tastes himself again, metallic and fading. If this is death, he thinks, it is far quieter than he imagined.
He lets his head fall back, and the sky blurs.
HE DREAMS OF WINGS BURNING.
Or something of the sort. Scales which rot, boys with laughter like bubbles in the depths, a garden with a rusting gate and a fog that seeps into his mind and twists his feet until his boots are gnarled roots; he dreams of dragons sweeping in from the skies, of an ancient beast swallowing an entire dragon in its maw, of fire upon fire, claws tearing and blood weeping over entire ships until the whole ocean lay rubied and burning. He sees odd things, indeed, in his dreamy death: girls trapped under ice, brides kneeling at empty graves, men growing into trees; he sees moons and suns dance, he sees women with sharp teeth and soft skin, he sees tears that fall like moonlight. He sees poisoned teacups, singed butterflies fluttering out of spiderwebs; black cats slinking like shadows around breathing roots.
It is peculiar, perhaps, that he dreams so many deaths so vividly, and yet Jacaerys wakes only after their horrors subside.
He jolts to consciousness violently to find that the sky is enormous above him, a vault of black pricked with viciously indifferent stars. His wake comes body-first, mind trailing behind as the residue of sleep melts away, fading thoughts of smooth skin giving way to coyish glints and roaring waters and sighing voices.
And there, nearly indistinguishable from above or below, the sky’s twin yawns in a stretch, that dark mirror – the sea. He watches that glassy expanse breathe slow, tidal sighs against the splintered timber that keeps him from sinking.
For a moment he does not remember where he is, only that the world is vast and he is very small within it.
But then it is when he takes a breath, and in such a daring intake, shifts his shoulder just partially; then true, raw agony explodes down his arm and across his chest. A broken noise spills from him before he can swallow it back, dampened only by the largess of the world around him, the depths swallowing the pain of one mere boy.
The pain, it seems, tears more than breath from him. Memory follows, from the expiring mind: of smoke and fire and ships and men dying and women screaming on dragonback. The moment comes to him far too soon and with it, a wash of agony so raw and true that he suspects the last time he felt such a way was when he lost his brother.
“Vermax,” he calls, throat raw and cracking, and like a boy he waits, tears slipping and burning against his sun-scorched visage, staring up as though a shadow might pass over the stars. As though green wings might descend from the heavens or surge up from the starry depths below. He knows, though, that even beyond the horizon – beyond wherever he is, now – there does not remain a dragon searching for him.
The sob which escapes him is restrictedly delved in searing pain from his wounds; his cries die on the water, so unlike a prince, as he whispers the name once more into the dark, followed only by a weak call for his mother.
The name is swallowed there, along the starry water, as is his grief.
In a turn of mercy, the pain surpasses enough to render him lack of thought; after only a final hitching breath, Jacaerys is stricken mind-numbed with a plaguing grief, tamped only by the unending agony haunting his form. A turn of cheek presses a metallic mouthful of seawater through sunscorched lips, and he coughs it back out into the deep with tormented effort.
The glint strikes him, then, as he coughs his blood back into the sea.
Across the glassy pane of stars, just an arm’s reach away: A lurking thing, reflecting back whatever meek light survives the night’s breath across the sky.
He cannot make it out fully, but it ceases his mind cold with a sharp turn of familiarity, that lingering horror of nails trailing down the back of one’s nape or the draught of chill in an empty graveyard.
Jacaerys blinks at it with that same low strike of horror; At first he deems it merely the moon fracturing the water’s skin, some trick of depth and distance. He blinks once, slow and heavy, as if that might wash the vision clean; But the shape does not break. It lingers there until the doubt in him thins, until even his certainty of illusion begins to feel like a falsity he has begun to assure himself for the sake of breathing; and only then, in that false security, does he come to understand what the shape truly is.
Eyes.
Eyes, true as the gods, fixed upon him and tilted upward from the depths below, bewilderingly catching the moonlight instead of merely catching it. As the raft dips in a slow wave and relevels, he catches the curve of a forehead, too – and then, gods, the slow inky spread of salt-threaded hair; he sees it then, flowing out its tendrils like weeds of the sea towards the measly splinter of wood upon which he lies.
Panic surges up raw and ancient in Jacaerys; older than any crown or dragon or war, something buried deep in marrow that recognizes the shape of a predator in the basest part of a man before his mind might dress it in the common tongue.
There is a woman in the water, a strange thought comes to him, lucid in its stillness, and he begins to wonder whether delirium has perhaps granted him some courtesy of idiocy. A woman, where no woman should be.
A lurch of the body, called upon by sole instinct; Every lesson beaten into him since boyhood demands that he rise and reach for a sword no longer hanging at his hip, that he make himself larger than his fear and meet such danger standing rather than waiting for it to devour him.
Instead, agony flowers white through his shoulder and chest, so bursting and complete that his limbs answer with little more than a miserable tremor, feverish and vitiated, and his near-valiant effort dies unborn. Among the shards of moonlight glass shattering the sea, he is pinned not by rope or chain, but by his own ruined flesh and the arrow lodged deep within it. Should this woman – this creature – wish to come for him, there is naught left with which to refuse her.
His eyes, ambered in the brightest of his days but now sooted with the grim ash of war and loss, do the only thing left to do; stare back. And this creature, this nightmare, this woman – whomever she may be, she remains there in her pool of ink and watches him in patient return.
And so, time sifts.
The moon lays a narrow road of silver across the water, and in that thin illumination he conjures only fragments of her horror as she finally nears; the smooth curve of forehead breaking the surface, a sharpened gleam fixed upon him, so unnerving in its patience; the breath of cheekbone and brow, far too fine to belong to any storm-battered sailor’s daughter. When the sea parts, next come her tresses, which fan outward along the surface like ink spilled in the dark night, water-darkened tendrils drifting and coiling as the lulling coax of kelp swaying in the tides.
Perhaps Jacaerys has gone mad. For, as he stares helpless as a babe unto a descending knife, he comes to understand that she is beautiful.
A vision of moonlight upon ruins: she is jagged, obscured and sharpened only where soft sighs hide themselves away; though he is not a man wholly mad-made yet, for her beauty – however intrinsic it might be – does not beget the wrongness of her presence, the impossibility of eyes at this hour, in this emptiness, so far from shores that even gulls have long abandoned him.
His pulse stammers painfully against his ribs, and the sharded arrow in his shoulder throbs in time with it, each beat threatening to unmoor him from the fragile raft entirely. Though fear licks itself in shivers of agony across his spine, he dares not move again.
Eyes – those glinting coins so mad under the grace of moon – do not blink once.
The prince swallows against a throat flayed raw by salt and smoke and swallowed seawater, and his lengthed voice is scarcely more than wind dragged over broken wood.
“Are you real?”
A question which drifts uselessly into the air, swallowed by stars both hanging in the sky and swallowed in the depths below; she nor the sea answers his question, only rippling and sighing, only her eyes ever-staring, unceasing.
She remains still for so long that Jacaerys begins to blink out the thought of the eyes at all, wondering if his mind had tricked him into conjuring up company in the middle of the world where there is none.
Perhaps that is all there is to death, Jacaerys thinks: some slow unspooling of the mind, a final merciful trick where pain and terror are softened into symbols and story until what remains is merely a dream stitched together from drowning thought and fading blood.
What strange mercy, he thinks distantly as consciousness slips from him, that the mind, standing upon the threshold of oblivion, should choose not horror but a beautiful woman waiting beneath the water.
HIS DREAMS, IT SEEMS, DO NOT CEASE EVEN ONCE HE WAKES.
When he stirs again, it is to a sky rinsed pale and enormous above him. And, he registers in turn, to her.
A startled jerk drives a battered back to jerk faintly against waterlogged wood; an agony of dying-man’s pain ripples from sunscorched lips which part in raw, pulsing horror. Fire explodes through his shoulder; his ribs protest with a sickening ache; his vision burst in lurching lashings of white, until sea and sky become one blinding smear which remains even when his lids sew shut.
He breaths out a disbelieved sigh. Cursed as they are, Jacaerys always thought dreams to be faithless things, ones which vanish with coming daylight. Though here one lies, lurking in the dredges of nightmarish deep waters even in the forgiving breath of day.
A petrifying thought, which permeates his sleep-laced mind with a strike of cold deeper than the sea itself: She remains here, in the silver light of dawn, as though she had kept watch through every pained unconscious hour.
He finds the strange woman half-emerged from the deep blue waters, elbows resting lightly upon the broken spar of wreckage which keeps him from the deep. Her chin is balanced upon interlaced fingers in a posture nearly – gods preserve him – nearly girlish; the pose occurs so absurdly innocuous that, in any other place or perhaps upon any other woman, he might have mistaken it for idle curiosity.
Though there is nothing idle about this creature, no thing innocent at all in the incessant bore of her gaze; a luminous thing, glowing like mother-of-pearl and flashing deep as his stare of horror meets her own hungered one.
Then, with the flow of tresses across a bared shoulder and the sharp flash of a blinding, pearly smile, she speaks.
“Am I real?”
The fear finds its home burrowed beneath the wounds of his chest, the splintered wounds seeming suddenly to send dark roots through his body, tendrils of fever and terror winding together in a spreading, helpless dread. He stares, and stares, and stares; a gaping thing, a helpless thing, marooned upon a floating shard of war with a woman he believes is far too beautiful to belong anywhere land might dare reach.
Jacaerys finds no words to offer; instead a gaze skitters in disbelief, lower and lower, until it dares the water itself.
The tide, it seems, remains loath to surrender her entirely from its foamy grasp; yet the dawn has stripped away the moon’s deceptions. Jacaerys sees, in its bareness, the horrible line where soft flesh churns into something iridescent and blooming; a vision of scales delicately breathing down curve of hip, only to vanish beneath the shifting blue. Light fractures there, living colors or breath – silvered coin to heavy moss to bruised violet; it is the sight of crushed old jewels and of forgotten gods, a thing from so deep it seems to swallow the sun.
Within his ruined chest, a fevered breath snags.
The stories conjure to him in a half-breath’s moment, swirling in his mind with the faintness of memory; His father's voice upon the deck of a ship as he taught his sons to read the currents and to never hearken singing over open water.
His grandsire’s grim tales at Driftmark, softened by the spray of ocean as he told how the sea keeps daughters as well as tides. There too had been stern faces of septas beneath vaulted ceilings of that keep of Red, with their hands folded within sleeves and eyes far too sharp for jest. There are creatures whom the Stranger did not intend for the land.
There were things in the sea, they all said; things older than the kingdoms who watched ships and learned of the longing which laced itself into the weak fabrication of human hearts.
Old stories shake loose from childhood until they drift before him like wreckage: Sirens whose bellies hung swollen with the flesh of drowned men; whose true faces, septas insisted, belonged only to the daylight: slack with rot, mouths split too wide for any mortal smile, eyes filmed pale by the abyss; and yet when the moon pours itself across the sea, that same cold light becomes their greatest deceit, veiling evil beneath impossible loveliness until lonely sailors mistake hunger for some kind of beauty.
He remembers an old captain, spoken of as though he had once truly lived, who abandoned his helm to answer a woman's laughter floating over calm water; how weeks later they found him cast upon the strand, tangled in flowering kelp with his body bloated white and his eyes pecked hollow by gulls unwilling to look too long upon whatever he had seen beneath the waves.
There were darker tales still: Of fishermen, taken whole into the green-black depths, where the sunlight and the Seven alike surrendered their potency; of merchant princes lured ashore into hidden coves by women whose songs promised warmth and whose mouths promised kisses, until those same hands opened a man from throat to belly and peeled apart their ribs like the bars of a cage.
It was said, too, that sirens slept inside the hollowed remains; nesting deep within the boned ruins of the men they lured.
There had been a time that Jacaerys had laughed at such tales. After all, there is little room for fear of monsters in the heart of a boy who commands one of his own; though now, upon a broken raft with death bleeding slowly through his flesh, he finds the old tales returning with only sufferance.
He lifts his eyes to her once more.
But he finds that, despite the tall tales which ebb and flow within his fevered mind, she is not the grotesque nightmare promised by septas; he finds no slack-jawed carrion thing crowned in weeded sea nor whale bone.
Indeed if anything, the dawn is crueler still – for it reveals that her beauty belongs only to her.
Her hair, lighter now with the glint of early sun and lacking in distortion of depth, spills over her shoulders, threaded with strands that catch silvery and oddly pearlescent when the light tilts just so; wet tresses cling to the graceful hollow of her throat, to the slope of her collarbones, garnering affection from the droplets of seawater which gather there greedily before falling one by one upon the weathered timber. Her eyes are clear, no longer luminescent but merely intent, fixed upon him with an unwavering and unsettling stillness.
Jacaerys stares at this creature because he cannot do otherwise.
She is the only solid thing in a world that hours ago dissolved into blood and brine; and those eyes, wide and reflecting and sweet and hungry, watching him back without embarrassment, without coyness, as though he is the creature newly risen from myth and she has been only patiently waiting; stilled in predatory wait for centuries, to examine him. Perhaps he should feel stronger fear than has settled into his bones; Perhaps he should scream, or merely attempt as much, with what little life he has left to fight.
“I’ve died,” he says instead.
His voice is thin, scraped raw by salt and disbelief, and it falls along the flat plane of sea that stretches around him farther than the eye can strain. From his rather blunt observation blooms the faintest crease between her brows, a consideration almost scholarly in its descent over so sinless a visage. For a moment her eyes travel along the span of his ravaged, waterlogged riding leathers, the ripped remnants of war – then up to the lick of his exposed, blood-beating skin; Her gaze deepens. He feels his heart, a slow-march but suredly still there, thump within the mass of his chest’s swollen flesh.
But then a slight intake of breath breaks loose from her parted lips in a sudden laugh.
The sound is the quick silvered cry of a gull cutting across morning air, not dissimilar to those harkenning echoes of song which wailed across the sea in the darkest hours of night past. Shivers rise beautifully along Jace’s chest at the sound and he watches her eyes follow their trail over the exposed skin of his neck. The echo of her laugh stills the salt air and cloudless sky high above; and, though it fractures the heaviness between them, it does not fully dispel it – for it rings chillingly and yet entirely captivating nonetheless, a note plucked from the sweetest, coldest reaches of the sea itself.
“No,” she sighs just then, a tilt of head to expose a curve of throat, the water which lives there so sweetly in the junction of neck and chest. The water pearls, too, where her palms cradle her chin. Her eyes do not blink. “Though… you nearly did.”
Her voice is wrong, he thinks, for a nightmare; for it falls so incredibly soft, so full of wonder and voracious low-buried hunger, and he finds himself more unsettled by it than any shriek might have rendered him – though still, some low-reaching part of his gut shivers in an expression less than fearful. Hungry, he thinks faintly.
And she is wrong, he thinks; indeed, the proof of it is there, in the souring wound of his chest, in the blood which has begun to seep once more from the arrow lodged firm in his shoulder upon his startling wake and the feverish haze which has crept through base of skull to linger front-of-mind. No man survives such wounds.
No man survives drowning.
Breath grows shallow from both injury and the vastness of what he does not understand – and then comes the growing churn of unease within his stomach that might possibly be starvation, too. Might a dead man starve?
“What are you?” he asks faintly; the question trembles upon that string of reverence and accusation and she studies him with an unsettling seriousness, lonely only to the wake of lapping waves. It is too quiet for far too long in that solace of sights, rocking upon his death.
“Hungry,” she answers at last.
The word slips into him and coils low in his gut once more, birthing a horrid sensation which is not wholly fear but perhaps something darker and more unknown, the basest of human instinct sacrificed to churn instead some anticipation he knows not how to tame.
Though accompanied with a bitter, half-delirious laugh, his voice carries a fragility; the cadence of a man who has already crossed one threshold and suspects another waits nearby.
“Have you eaten me, then?”
That same laugh touches her mouth again, soft enough to be swallowed by the very foam of the sea which cradles her, and it sends a new jolt of shivers through his whole being; though seared pain chases those quivers immediately. The moan of suffering he lets out at the shifting of his shoulder draws her gaze to the faint rust-colored pond of the junction of his throat, where his blood has pooled and since half-dried into a congealed offering before the sea might fully claim it.
Her head tilts with the rocking of the raft. “Not yet.”
It is a thing that would make a sane man recoil.
He knows he ought to perhaps demand whether her teeth hide long and sharp behind that gentle curve of lip – whether she means to devour him and take his bones to whatever cathedral of wreckage lies beneath her domain; But the sea around them is impossibly calm, stretched glassy and infinite to a horizon so distant it seems to play more of a trick of eye than any such reality, emptied of sails and smoke and war and left only in calm.
There is nothing but the prince and the siren and the fragile slab of driftwood that, in this moment of death and between, binds them bizarrely together.
Perhaps from his startle, blood has begun to leave him once more in streams; little rivulets this time, which twist down and drip in lurches onto salt-swelled wood. Jacaerys’ head grows heavy, and the dizziness comes creeping through like fog at the corner of garden gates, slinking through the darkening edges of his mind, rendering him aired and heavy in the same labored breath.
“It was you, then.” The words come as wreckage to rocky shore, splintered into odd sensations of memory into near-coherence, laced with strange visions of women with teeth lodged within their cheeks and talons long as his own sword; of bubbles swallowing a massive beast and the shock of sharp chill as his own body sunk to a watery grave in the Gullet’s roar. “You pulled me from the deep.”
When his eyes open once more, he finds hers resting upon him with that same patient stillness. “No.”
A crease grows upon his brow. His neck slackens against the splintered timber, too weary now to hold itself upright, landing below with a weak breath of expiring life. Above him the sky yawns open without end; he imagines it swallowing him whole.
“I promise you,” her voice comes, a soothing balm, so very cool where the sun has left him burning. “I kept you from it.”
He might have responded, in another life. Though now, pain has ceased to belong to any single wound; It wanders him now, crawling beneath skin – living fire, it finds fresh places to bloom and scorch until he can no longer remember what it felt like to possess a body untouched by suffering.
Somewhere beneath the fever, Jacaerys accepts that his consciousness will soon be lost; to either the tide, or the Stranger himself.
The knowledge, as it comes, is strangely peaceful. So in his last moments, Jacaerys lets himself mourn as he stares at the strangely beautiful woman in the water, at the dawning sky and stretching sea behind her.
His mother's face comes first, as it always has; followed by his brothers, blurred by memory until laughter and quarrels and childhood become indistinguishable in his slogging mind: and Baela, Rhaena, Joffrey, Aeg and Viserys; all of them, in the breath of a moment. The sea rocks him in agony as he thinks of Dragonstone rising black from the sea, of Vermax banking through cloud and soaring through breathless air; of the long hall of the Keep, of the salt upon Driftmark’s shores; of the gleam of Ser Steffon’s blade when Jacaerys squired for him in that final tourney; of his grandsire’s knee, upon which he perched on that throne of swords and heard the promises he’d been deigned since birth.
Whole kingdoms rise and vanish behind his closed eyes; wars begin and end, lives he has lived and those which he will never reach – hundreds of deaths and hundreds of lives split apart and seal themselves in the seams of his mind, all in the space of a single trembling breath, before dissolving into the tide.
His cheek settles once more upon the weathered wood, eyes drowsy in the pale-lilac of early morning. You pulled me from the deep. The fight in him is nearly gone; only one question remains upon his tongue.
“Why?”
A shift below the depths as she pushes upon the raft with flattened palms, and Jacaerys watches in awe how water yields so willingly round the soft flesh holding her ribs; the sensation of the war-battered raft tilting him down, tantalizingly closer to those singing depths hardly breathes across his mind.
A tongue passes thoughtfully across glossy lips. “You were sweet,” she murmurs at last, a chill of breath crossing over his own cheeks, loosing a wave of shivers through his spine. He can only watch as her arms give way once more to sink down, as the sea – so resentful to lend even this much of her to daylight – claims all but her shoulders and head.
There is blood in his mouth now; he tastes iron upon tongue as his eyes fall shut, a spinning sensation conjuring to his mild the felled taper of a feather, fluttering to lie at rest upon a pond. An odd death for a prince, indeed. His voice escapes him as little more than a frayed whisper. “S-sweet?”
He can think of no stranger a word to be labeled in those last moments of battle. Sweet. His eyes slide beneath their lids, a slogging thing in their sun-dried, salted shells, laced shut with exhaustion and perhaps delirium.
“Your blood,” her voice murmurs, and it has become near enough now that he can hear the movement of water bubbling when she breathes; a lulling sweetness which sticks to his teeth and dances upon his tongue. Just a taste, he thinks just then, rather absurdly.
“It tasted of the sky,” comes that voice once more, a bubbling wet sound as though her mouth has descended to taste whatever now leaks into the water. “And… I wished to know you.”
Nausea finds him at the thought. “You tasted me,” he grunts through pain-wired teeth, delirious, odd visions of swimming scales and lace-frilled fins skittering from outreached hands. He imagines that river of blood seeping from him now, flowing into an open, hungered mouth.
“I did.”
This pain is too much for life, he believes. It consumes him, so intense it has numbed him, bled a fever into his mind and stretched the tendrils of infection through each last vein in his body.
“Then I am dead,” he decides quietly. For what else would he be?
The water stirs, and when he feels her presence once more his gaze strains to return, blurry and searing when he pries his lashes apart.
She leans close enough once more, close enough that he might smell the sweetness of her, something so peculiar for mid-sea; breeze and softness and shadowherbs lace through his inhale and stir some hollow hunger in his gut, a piercing, ravaged thing that brings a bout of nausea to return.
“If you were dead,” her lips are glossed with the sea, “you would be far below me.”
His pulse answers in a hare’s pace, quickening beneath skin rotting and infected and plagued with a slow death. “Then,” his tongue darts out to soothe the pain upon sunscorched lips, but instead is met with dry air and dripping blood, slicking from his mouth. Her eyes glint at the sight, an observation which twists unease deeper within his gut. “...Where am I now?”
The smallest smile touches her mouth – a thing soft enough that once more, upon another countenance, it might almost have nearly been kind.“The sea,” she says. “Of course.”
Of course. Heavied, his head falls once more against the weathered timber, a movement slow and borne from exhaustion; drowsy eyes gaze into the endless blue where sky and water seem forever to pursue one another without meeting. Here he lies suspended between them all the same: neither upon the land nor surrendered to the abyss, neither wholly living nor yet claimed by death, merely adrift upon that trembling boundary where one world dissolves into the next.
The woman watches him stare out at the expanse for another long while before speaking again.
“You must rest, Prince.”
The title bears itself foreign upon her tongue; Jacaerys wonders, with a rather dislocated peculiarity, how she might know it belongs to him at all. In three-and-twenty years, he has never once heard a tale in which a siren urged a man to sleep for any purpose save to ease his passage into her hunger; though still, true as the gods, fever laps at the edges of his thoughts.
His eyelids descend by degrees, each blink lingering longer than the last against the shimmering yawn of morning, until the daylight begins to disappear between his lashes, swallowed by that other abyss. “If I do,” his breath utters weakly, wondering to himself whether he asks from futile hope or some simply morbid curse of curiosity. “Will I ever wake?”
His vision is betrayed; all which he knows are the steady rock of his rotting raft and the ache of his agonized body. The plaguing sun scorches one side of his visage whilst the sea cools the other; and he thinks, as his lashes flutter again sun-oranged lids, that he hears a voice once more through the waters:
“Perhaps.”
THROUGH HIS UNCONSCIOUSNESS, JACAERYS STILL FEELS.
Peculiar enough that his mind churns even as it once did when he lived on land and rode through the sky; And yet it is more peculiar still that he so faintly in his fever registers himself being turned; dips with the wreckage as it tilts beneath him, feels the lick of sea shift its grasp upon his failing, limp body. An interruption of the boiling heat; some chilling presence pressing firm against his chest and splaying over the slow, weakened pulse of his heart. Agony is a memory, a faint pulse like the outer ridge of a bruise or rime over spring fields in the Vale.
While Jacaerys dreams of a hundred deaths, he dreams, too, that the arrow in his shoulder leaves him without the violence of pain.
There is no fresh burst of agony as when he’d expelled the first one, no sharp white flare behind the eyes; It is as though the wound inhales and exhales and then merely forgets its own carved carnage, the blood that had been pulsing from him like a rubied river beginning to reverse its direction.
The deaths come to him in fits not unlike the rolling pangs of arrow wounds: He dreams of Vermax dragged from the sky, of Luke swallowed by stormy sea; of his mother’s crown dripping and glinting red as fresh meat.
Most peculiar yet in this sluggish purgatory between slumber and awake, he feels something freezing and dragging against his throat; lapping, like the waves upon the shore. He feels, too, how that chilling sweetness spreads within him in a foreign rush, coming as nothing so familiarly savage as dragonfire – that blaze he has known since childhood – but instead as something slower and stranger, a cooling calm which seeps instead of burns, which travels along his veins like tides instead of flames.
Only then does he wake once more.
THE SUN, THAT GREAT OPPRESSOR, HANGS MIDDAY WHEN HIS EYES OPEN.
For several moments Jacaerys mistakes waking for dying once again; Light pours over him, molten vast sheets which strike the water until the sea becomes a field of shattered mirrors, the sky above a merciless blue, immense and empty as eternity. He lies upon the slab of rotting wood and wonders if this is what remains after death has finished with a man.
Though grief, such a fickle thing, sneaks itself back through his weary bones, tearing with a force that casts his mind about and settles where fever once lived. Only then does he become aware of his body: a shift in his chest as he lets a small sound escape him, ragged as he wakes.
He swallows, bracing instinctively for the agony of grinding iron lodged in bone; but there is nothing.
It occurs then that his shoulder is bare to the slight seabreeze, and wholly unburdened. The arrow is gone; the wounds which had poured him into the sea exist now only as faint blushes of new skin, smoothed and unbroken with the passing of months which could not have passed in the space of a single night. Even the salt-burn that had left his skin raw and flayed has disappeared, flesh warm and sun-browned rather than blistered and fevered.
Impossible. His riding leathers are gone; everything above his waist has vanished entirely – save for the leather riding boots which sit propped sidelong near his breezed, salt-laced trousers – left only in bared skin and a scattering of freshly silvering scars. Wonder and horror mix within his gut as fingers flex experimentally, braced for pain which never comes, save for a faint weariness of tightened muscle.
It does not occur to him that this was anything else but the work of that creature from the water. And so, habit asserts itself; for he is still Prince as much as he is castaway, it seems, and dragonlord still before any such prey.
“Show yourself,” he commands to the shards of mirrored ocean, voice hardened with some falsity of health he has yet to fully take to mind – for he knows, indeed, that this was no immaculate recovery of mercy from the gods.
Though the fever has left him, weakness remains; he cannot yet sit wholly upright, the cords of his stomach quivering with an insatiable hunger and exhaustion.
The day lives on silently, for a moment, and within him grows an impatience sprouted by nerves; he is healed, miraculously so – and in those odd, faint memories of dying rest, did he not feel touch, feel that chilled drag laving over his very skin as a parched hound might a fresh pond?
The sea stirs and then, only after another moment, she surfaces several yards away.
With her comes no violent breach of the surface nor shrieking gulls; she comes to the glassy glint of eye with the sea parting its dark skirts, water streaming from her in glistening threads to cling to the lengths of long tresses and running in shining rivulets over bare skin of sunbreathed beauty. A sight to be seen – particularly for a prince so lonely.
Jacaerys stares once more, stripped of every certainty and left with only wonder and dread to keep him company. A wonder it is, her bareness hinted only by the breaking surface of reflected pools at the soft turn of her chest; and Jacaerys draws away his eyes in some gathered lucidity of shame, no longer coaxed to desire by fever. He swallows back a hoarse laugh, cheeks heated by not merely the sun’s glare but her beauty so raw and unmodest in front of him.
She waits for him, all those reaches away, watching with a peculiar apprehension as though he might perhaps take her down to the depths instead to give some odd, murky end to her own life.
“You healed me,” he says at length, accusation and gratitude so closely twined in his words that neither might be separated from the other. The sea seems to breathe for her, and it trembles with some unknown nerves.
Her head inclines by the smallest degree, that odd glint in her gaze once more. “Yes.”
The simplicity of it disturbs him, he believes, far more than denial might have done. “You admit it so easily,” he says then, because he can think of little else to say.
A flash of a pearled, glinting grin that brings even the sun-kissed sea to shame. “You wished to know.”
As though this were answer enough; As though all truths are equally plain to her and require no ornament nor human ceremony of explanation. Jacaerys draws a slow breath, tasting salt and sunlight and the faint metallic tang of his own fear lingering upon his tongue.
“I was told sirens drag men to their deaths.”
She, it is no denying, has floated closer to his small raft of living death. Her eyes watch unblinkingly; a chin tips until only the soft peaks of shoulder and bottom lip peak out from the murky sea. Her visage has gone dark with some horrible hunger.
“We do.”
There comes no hesitation in her reply, nor turn of trick, and the honesty of it brings him no refuge in disbelief. His stomach seems to fall away beneath him; for it rings with it the realization that he is alive, indeed. He is alive, yes, only stranded – a castaway clinging to a forgotten shard of war in the middle of an endless sea; alive only because a creature of the deep has chosen, for reasons he cannot yet fathom, to keep him so.
It leaves him strangely breathless. “Why?” he asks, roughened by salt and disuse. “I was – I was dying. Y-you could have taken me.” He is unsure what compels him to remind her of her own nature, though fear laces itself tight around his abdomen.
For several heartbeats she only regards him, and in that silence there is something so old and fathomless that it makes the skin along his arms prickle. Then, at last, she speaks.
“I’ve known of your war for some time,” her voice comes low. “One drowned sun past, I watched your great beast’s fire swallow the men who have hunted me and my sisters for eons. I watched you kill those men and leave them for my sisters below.” Silence comes between them, save for the gentle dripping cascade of water from her countenance to return to the sea. “And I saw you as you fell.”
Jacaerys’ eyelashes flutter in a sudden sting of salt and memory, though he dares not speak.
Her tongue sweeps once more over glossed lips. “The cries of the men upon the hippocampi ships said that you are a prince,” she murmurs, leaning closer as though a thought too reverent to speak aloud, “a son of both salt, and fire.”
How wrong she might be, he thinks – for he is not son of salt; Velaryon blood runs not through his strong veins, though still the words are cold water poured over a fevered brow, spoken with a strange and almost reverent note.
“My sisters have told stories of your kind,” she says, and her eyes drift briefly toward the horizon as though somewhere beneath it lay the endless kingdom from which she had come. “Those humans whose blood carries flame, who ride the sky upon winged beasts. We have watched them for longer than your kingdoms have stood.”
A faint smile ghosts across her lips, and it is haunting as it is ethereal, glinting in the sharp edge of teeth. “I had never seen one close enough to taste.”
Her eyes glint, and he feels the familiar churn of unease. “I wondered” A tilt of her head, studying his bared chest and visage with a curiosity so untouched by human shame. “If the sea claimed a son of fire,” Her gaze drops briefly to where the arrow once buried in his shoulder, “...would he burn beneath the water?”
Despite himself, despite the bewilderment and discomfort threatening to steal him away once more, a breath quite near a laugh escapes him. “I’ve disappointed you, then.”
She, it seems, is quite unfamiliar with the mortal crutch of humor. “You’ve done no such thing,” she assures dazedly, though her gaze has unsettlingly drifted toward the bare expanse of his chest once more. Jacaerys stiffens in nature, his own hand rising without thought to his throat; The touch of something wet and careful in memory, the blood which had gathered at his neck and collarbone, laved away, cleaned with a voracity which only bordered on tender.
He nearly recoils at the thought. It had been her, indeed, who tasted him again. With it comes another bout of nausea; though quieter, and more treacherous still, is the hungry and awed way in which he cannot cease his staring.
She is beautiful – in the line of flesh so cool beneath the water, such swirling, glinting eyes and gentle turn of cheek; that glint far below, silvered as mother-of-pearl and strange iridescence as she moves with the tide.
It is perhaps this trance, this pull of fate or of fools, in which he extends his fingers – weak still despite their healed wounds – towards the very water which clings to her shoulder. There are glinting marks there, some half-scaled beauty, and he moves slow enough for her to vanish into the depths if she wishes.
She does not move – only watches him nearer with a stillness so harrowingly unnatural.
His fingertips brush her shoulder, so very cool to the touch; enough so, such a respite from the beating oppression of the midday sun, that Jace lets some strangled breath loose from his throat, a half-relief at the sensation of cooled, glinting flesh so sweet against his burning palm.
She, in turn, leases a short inhale, chilling enough to send ridges of thrill across his bare spine. The noise which leaves her is none he has known of man nor beast; a sound of glistening shores and soaring seas, of sunkissed reaches and tidepools swirling in slow wakes.
A jolt from his touch, swallowed of regret and instead burgeoned by a sharp motion, her fingers perhaps tightening somewhere below the greened depths of the mirrored sky. Glossed lips then tremble, eyes flicking to his and down to the slip of wood which separates his warm shoulder from her sea.
“I’ve brought you something,” she says gently, and when her elbows beach themselves as they had yesterday upon the edge of his raft, he finds her palms abound with bounty.
In one hand comes a small, dripping bundle of greenery – dark fronds and pale, tender shoots which look as though they sprouted from some moonlit cavern far beneath the waves; in the other she bears a cluster of oysters and other mollusks, their shells slick with salt and glinting beautifully in the sun’s breath.
Jacaerys watches in startled awe as she lays them before him upon the raft, visage painted with some odd, nearly unnatural shyness about her. His lips part, though the tearing, churning hunger persists violently within his stomach; she offers food to him now, as she keeps him alive and afloat. “You must eat.”
Her voice is a sound which bubbles gently against the lapping of water over her elbows, bare skin warmed only by the sun.
Jacaerys does not waste a moment more.
It is an effort, indeed, to rise himself to his elbows; hauling himself upon rippling, quivering muscles into a position where he might grasp the kelp and seaweed by the handfuls and tear at their stringy flesh with his teeth. He eats them handful by starving handful.
A savage, he must be; for he does not so much as turn his mind over as he swallows the pale stalks tasting of pepper and brine, nor do his lashes flutter in the slightest when she bends her head and, with the sharp glint of nails he hardly glances, pries open the shells one by one.
The meat of them lie glistening and large, singing with a gentle grace of saviour to his ears as he finishes the greenery in mere minutes.
Her nails, nearly claws, rip through shell seams as though they’re merely sheaths of parchment; the sound of it sends shivers through him and goosepimples along his flesh, lets his voice splinter in a half-moan of hunger as she pierces into them as though shell and flesh alike are no obstacle to her will.
In her clutch comes the first scallop, offered to his lips.
He eats from her grasp as though he has not tasted food in weeks, perhaps longer; he tears at the meat with a hunger never felt before, brine running down his chin and slpping onto his chest. Still he scarcely pauses, too ravenous to care for such things as propriety, and all the while two glinting eyes watch him with such concentration it nearly feels like a touch.
For a long while they remain suspended between sea and sky as the prince gathers strength one careful mouthful at a time; the siren only lingers beside the raft, elbows anchored lightly upon the weathered timber. The tide whispers in patient breaths as sunlight wanders across the waves, reaching her face and fracturing into shifting gold upon her damp skin.
“Gods,” his voice nearly cracks only once the remains of broken shells and the trails of oysterjuice track down the sun-browed skin of his chest. His finger graces over the oystershell nearest his knee as he half-sits, energized from the sustenance. “Thank you.”
She smiles at this; a bizarre yet gentle thing, just a breath away, with her own elbows perched upon the raft. His fingers brush the shell again, tracing the smooth curve worn soft by the endless overchurn of the sea.
“It is a shame,” he finds himself murmuring absently, “that there was no pearl within.” With his words come a strange bashfulness, an emotion so foreign upon him that he’s struck to hear it at all. There is little left of the prince in his voice now; Only a boy adrift upon broken wood, speaking to a creature who should belong only to nightmares. “I would have had something to give you in return.”
A dip of brows upon her ethereal visage; an expression enough to rouse a dusting of heat to his cheeks.
“We give pearls as gifts,” he explains quietly, watching the blank confusion linger across her countenance. “To those who are…special.” The words catch faintly, tumbling in sheer awkwardness as he wonders faintly if the fever ever truly left his mind. “I suppose it is not the same for your kind.”
The sea dips them; her coiled hair, shining with the remnants of the deep, curls over the broken timber where the ship’s remains have since become the expanse of this strange world. His hand rests near it, close enough that the strands occasionally brush against his fingers when the sea moves.
She stares at him, always so watchful; Even as saltwater slips over her lashes and gathers upon her gleaming eyes, she does not blink.
“Have you gifted pearls before, my Prince?”
Heat touches his face, caught entirely unprepared. He looks away with a faint, embarrassed breath that might have once belonged to some other boy – some boy who’d not fallen from the sky, nor stared at the starry sea of death and found a woman waiting beneath the waves.
“No,” his voice is far softer than he’d endeavored. “I’ve not.”
This, it seems, affects her. A strange flicker warms her expression, fleeting as first light of dawn; not human, but recognizable in itself as Jace watches her lashes dip over her pearled eyes. Shyness, he thinks wondrously. A creature who could drag ships beneath the waves and rip men open whole; and she is shy.
I’ve gone mad, he thinks, and the vision of her is so impossible under the midday sun that he nearly smiles. The sea rocks them gently upon the raft, the movement drawing her hair away from her shoulders which gather sunlight in soft, golden sighs; Jacaerys realizes he’s been staring for farr too long and casts his gaze upward, half-closing his eyes to feel the sun true and warm upon his countenance once more.
For some time, they remain like this: the prince regaining his strength, the siren floating beside the raft, the smell of the seabreeze between; The water whispers around them in secret sounds, and when Jacaerys tips his gaze to levy her once more, he finds the sunlight trembling over her features, rendering her unreal in the golden shimmer of warmth. At last, very quietly, he speaks.
“You are quite kind, I think.”
The words seemed to startle her even more than his touch had; her eyes dart, skittish things, from his propped elbow and down towards some unseeing depths which linger far beneath them. Still, he continues. “You saved me. You healed me, fed me.”
Marked by the silence of the sea, Jacaerys lets his head fall back to hang upon a stretched neck, exposing his throat to the open air, to the sun, to the salt; there is a prickling awareness there, of her gaze upon the pulse beneath his flesh, though he does not, for once, return her stare.
“If you mean to drag me beneath the waves one day,” he continues – and he is mad, surely, for there is now a faint, unsteady amusement in the curve of his mouth, “then perhaps I am a fool.”
He glances back toward her to find surprise glinting so slight and fleeting over her visage; a small trace of humor lingering in her own curve of cheek.
He shrugs, a half-boyish thing belonging to another lifetime. “But you are kind nonetheless.”
The silence which follows swallows; it is full of her watching, and of the sea breathing around them. Kind, that word conjured once more – she acts as though perhaps she’s unfamiliar; As though no one has ever looked upon her and chosen any name but monster.
Then, for the first time since he had seen her rise from the depths of the murkiness the night past, she truly looks away – and before he can ask what he has done, she slips beneath the surface entirely.
The water closes over her, merely a shadow of shoulder and hair lingering like shadow before it is all swallowed by the blue – a final glimmer of silver follows, that glint of treasured coin; and then she is gone. She leaves behind only the trembling of ripples and the bright, indifferently gilded sunlight scattered across the vast expanse of sea, a blinding thing now that there is no beauty to obstruct its harshness.
The tide shifts beneath his raft, and for the first time since he fell into the water, Jacaerys is well and truly alone.
HIS SIREN, SHY AS SHE MIGHT BE, RETURNS WITH THE SUN THE NEXT DAY.
And, indeed, the same time the day following. Habit grows within this drifting life so quietly that Jacaerys notices it not until it has rooted itself far within him; for three days pass in the very same rhythm, churning with the slow grace of heat and then chill, shivering and sweltering, some warmth in his skin which bleeds not and sheds not but always persists in hunger, if not for sustenance than company, or its more wretched and unknown twin.
The sea becomes his tell of time; tides mark the hours better than bells ever had, and somewhere in those long hours between sunset and moonrise, she always appears.
Sometimes he finds her instantly; that coy shape glittering in sharp glints beneath dark water, silvered scales catching and vanishing amongst the waves. Sometimes she watches him first, a sensation which comes to him as a strange awareness upon the nape of his neck and deep below his stomach, lingering as though some odd thing awaits for him across the water.
Always, though, she brings him food. Bounties of shellfish, mollusks, fish gleaming like polished coin, strange seafruits and vegetation which taste of figs and peppers and salt and brine; once she returns with an odd brown-haired hard shell, which contains within it not only a sweetly hardened white fruit but also water – a sugary kind, which drips itself across his thirsted flesh and dries tacky until the next morning he wakes to his skin laved fresh and clean once more.
There are many things he learns during this time. Most of all, he learns that questions mean very little to her; and answers, perhaps, mean even less.
When he asks how far they are from land, one morning as the sun rises soft and pale over the endless blue, she only tilts her head. “The sea touches many lands,” she provides in response, a notion which is incredibly uneasy as it is exacerbating. Jacaerys discovers then that the creatures of the sea do not measure distance as men do; They do not count leagues or days or the fading hope of a distant horizon finally appearing, for the ocean is no obstacle to them, but a home.
There are other times in which her companionship is close as he can remember to any other; She learns of him through the little movements of his human visage – captured things, the pull of amusement at his lips and the lowering of sadness at his eyelids. He catches her watching him often, studying these small betrayals of emotion; One afternoon, as the sun dances upon her bared back, she attempts to replicate his amusement upon her own ethereal reflection.
A near imitation of a smile grows too intentional and solemn, reflecting a study of joy yet not yet a true wielder of it in the flesh. The sight pulls a laugh from him, boyishly bright, doubling him from the waist in amusement.
She, at his outburst, reflects a ture smile – not forced or painted but merely grown of inordinate pride that she might create something so bright within him. It is the first instance, perhaps of many, in which he finds himself watching her lips with a very specific intention of curiosity.
Days pass, or weeks; Time behaves strangely upon the sea, and he watches suns rise and fall, tides come and go, no stretch of land or ship or life in any distance.
THough each day and evening she returns, and eventually he learns the sound of what passes for a name amongst her kind. It is a sequence of beautiful notes which his human throat cannot wholly reproduce; and each time he attempts it, she only laughs, a sound somehow more beautiful than what she is called, and it rises and falls like water spilling through caverns. Eventually, with some fond exasperation, she allows him a shortened thing, a simpler name which his tongue can manage. In return, she learns his; and she calls him Jacaerys in that watery lilt of hers, so low and fresh and pulling.
One night, as she brings him a supper of squid and weeded sea, she requests something of him in return.
“Tell me of your kind.”
He looks up from the small task of fastening reeds and torn netting together, a distraction made for himself to tear his eyes away, for at least a moment, from her cloyingly alluring countenance. His nose scrunches against sun-kissed freckles, tipping his head. “Men, you mean?”
Her tresses are floating tendrils in the near-dead sun, so different from their glimmer of day, and he watches in entrancement as she shakes her head; Another human instinct she’d learned from him in days past. “Your kind,” she repeats, coming closer to the raft. He no longer recoils at her proximity; now, when she approaches, his first instinct is dizzying anticipation instead of fear. “The ones whose blood tastes of fire.”
His stomach finds a chill at her words, though he only leans back upon calloused palms and glances up and the nail-sliver of moon peeking through bruise-crushed curtains of sky.
He tells her, then, of Old Valyria; of dragons filling the sky and empires of families, the dredges left of them who crossed both Doomed ash-shores and poisoned seas, carrying the last embers of a dying civilization. When he thinks he’s finished, or that she might tire of his voice, she only asks more – starry eyed and curious, leaning her head against the wood and asking how it feels to fly upon the sky.
It’s only after the sheer blackness of night has found the sea that he speaks of Dragonstone. He murmurs of his own family, too; he tells her of soaring towers black as dragonglass and fields of lurching green which become swallowed up by jagged volcanic breath, of his mother and the war in her name. He whispers of his Usurper uncle; of Luke and Arrax – and that is when words truly start to tremble. He does not realize he weeps until he tastes the salt of them, until she lifts a cool finger to wipe them away and taste them instead upon her own tongue.
He whispers the rest – of Meleys and her rider; then of Vermax and of the end in the Gullet. And when he finishes, she remains silent for a long while.
Her voice comes in the watery traces of a whisper. “You have been lonely.”
He does not respond to her.
He couldn’t have, even if he’d wished to; there are truths too large for the mouth to carry, and this is one of them.
So he turns his face away, letting his gaze drift over the restless dark of the sea, over the silvered shiver of moonlight trembling upon the water’s skin. But she has watched him long enough to understand despite this, and the glint of her is dimmed under the blackness of the sky, that mirrored world broken only by her sweet form half in the glassy depths.
“I have sisters,” she says then. “I know I’ve spoke of them to you before.”
And though she’d indeed mentioned it days past, still it is odd to think a woman like her – if she is to be labeled such a thing, so swathed in tide and shadow – might have a family at all; His eyes find her and try to conjure the thought of a life down below. Within him he finds something curious and tender. “Do you have many?” he asks, because it is the easiest of his questions.
She nods, a spill of hair along her shoulders. “Yes.”
“How many?” he asks then, shifting upon the raft to lie closer along the edge, his bared shoulders freckled even beneath moonlight, their faces so very close.
And so with a dip of her chin, she tells him in turn of the hundreds of sisters which live down in the depths, of the Mother-sister which birthed them and watches them, and of the ribbed-world of bleached bone and darkness which she came from. He asks her of her childhood, and of her people; and when she gives him all in kind, he finds himself pondering – with a distant recall of dragonseeds and countless nameless silver-haired visitors to the island – how abundance itself can be another kind of exile.
ON THE EVENING FOLLOWING, SHE COMES TO HIM WOUNDED.
He had waited for her through the expanse of the day. It was a strange thing, he thinks now, how he had once every morning begun with thoughts of war and strategy, of what ravens might arrive and what battles might be waiting beyond the horizon. Now, he wakes with the sun and listens for the sound of water changing.
He’d fashioned something resembling a task for himself; a crude thing, a boy’s invention against the endless boredom alone at sea; With reeds and pieces of his torn trousers and the remnants of salvaged seanet, he has rigged a small tether, a foolish little snare which occasionally lures fish close enough for him to catch if his hands are quick and his luck is kinder. Still; after exhausting himself upon the empty bounty of fish his game provided him, he’d waited for her for far too long.
When she comes, it is in the glint of moonlight which catches red upon the curve of skin, and his heart thuds once within the cave of his chest when he finds the long, horrid lacerations crossing one shoulder like clawmarks across her flesh.
“What did that?” he asks her sharper than intended. She only watches him; She has brought him a handful of shells, gathered carefully in her torn and bloodied fingers, a sight which churns painfully in his chest. She has come to him injured, and still carrying gifts. “Are you all right?” he attempts again, kinder this time.
It is silent for far too long as she dips her head, working open the few shells for him with jagged nails, which he takes hungrily, though not distracted enough to forgive the strained stiffness of her normally voracious movements. At length her voice comes in a quiet tense, low as a groan.
“My sisters are displeased.”
It is enough for Jacaerys to study her, those lacerations and such sweet skin ripped apart, and understand enough that the wounds have something to do with him and, indeed, with the food she brings to the surface each turn of sun. Perhaps, too, with the sheer notion that he still breathes at all.
“Because of me,” he whispers, and she says naught but a small trembling sigh; though when his knuckles raise to tenderly trace along the marred flesh of her shoulder, she does not turn away. A churn of water, she keens to his touch, coming nearer until and she is close enough to drop a weary, shivering cheek upon the cloth of his thigh. Heat burns there, roving from the seeping chill of her bare cheek upon his pant. She gazes up at him once more from his lap, a reflective but morose thing, as though she doesn’t quite understand why he sees her suffering as so horrible; as though perhaps it is merely the price of wanting something and keeping it.
He whispers to her then, when she asks – tales of Princely youth and sailing upon the sea with his father; and she whispers quietly of her own life, of the schools of fish which keep her company and guide her to the most treasurous depths of the sea.
And that night, after she leaves, he lies awake and watches the stars.
They are cruel things, stars – so beautiful and yet unreachable. And the songs, as they always do, begin sometime past the hour of Ghosts, reaching him across the water from the odd-hazed distance; the song of her sisters, he’s come to understand. He lies upon his raft and wonders if she will return tomorrow – and then, if she might one day decide he is no longer worth the trouble, worth her pain.
He thinks then of his mother, and of Dragonstone, and all those who must believe him dead; who have likely carried on in the war that he has so reluctantly left behind.
And beneath it all, in that endless sky of stars, there remains one true wish upon his tongue: that his siren might come back unharmed.
TWO DAYS PAST, AT THE EDGE OF THE BAT’S HOUR, SHE FINALLY RETURNS TO HIM.
She reveals to him in a depth of shimmer, dancing upon a surface of purple and orange which streaks his tanned skin and curls his hair with salt and warmth, still in the early eve of the day. Water warms him; the sunset bleeds crimson across the horizon and Jacaerys sits at the edge of the wreckage with both legs dangled within the sea.
She surfaces soundlessly between his knees, an appearance so sudden he nearly startles back; with a glint of amusement she stares, brows ticking upwards in an impossibly human expression. Jacaerys, warmed through his unease shock, lets his lips curl in a fond relief.
In an urge so boyish; a thing laced with sheer hope and solace, he forgets himself and, indeed, the weakened state in which she’d appeared to him two long nights past.
“Hoping to drown yourself?” he jests before he remembers himself.
She – having since learned the human habit of jesting and recently found herself one for the same sharp wit he often bears – only tips her glinting, glimmering eyes skyward in a roll of vexation, a thing she’s also long learned from him to do.
“I cannot drown,” she chides, voice like seafoam, amusement leaked so warmly through her mouth that he nearly forgets the glint of teeth which live just beyond those sweet lips.
“No,” he, solace at last to have his siren returned unharmed, only smiles. “I suppose you cannot.”
Her hands settle upon the timber, mere breaths from the outer line of his thighs as he leans back upon palms to regard her fully. “Are you well?” He wonders – and then, with a faint heat upon his cheeks that grows not only due to the dying sun, “I worried for you.”
It casts something bright upon her eyes and twitches the coltish smile which belies her lips; and the shimmering is there once more, so evergreen in her beauty as she pushes only closer to him, her cheek ghosting that giving fabric which clothes his inner knee.
For a moment he merely gazes down upon her visage, raining with beauty and dripping still with that unsettling stillness. Her eyes glint only faintly in the dying day, so beautifully lit between his thighs.
“You should come in,” she says in response.
To this, Jacaerys laughs. It is not the first offer; indeed it is a thing she’s supplied in more than a handfuls – when the sun reached its blistering peak and he winced at the searing upon his flesh, when the moon made whatever hides below her hips in the depths glow, even when the breath of conversation dwindled in the easy laze of the heat, the water so inviting as it kissed over her skin.
And Jacaerys might, these days, be a mindsick – or lovesick – fool; but still, he knows better.
“You hide it well,” he murmurs, only partial in his jest though some lace in the back of his mind truly yearns to yank himself from the pull of those depths, to coil away in fear of the creature between his legs. “But you cannot trick me, siren.”
She does not particularly enjoy the name; though still she only tilts her head, a coy thing he resents only so far as it makes the urge to slip into the water even stronger, to feel her skin between the warmth of the water and his own salted skin, cooled by the depths below.
“I only wish for you to join me,” the words rise from her with the hush of tidewater slipping through black stone, soft and inexorable, the sea itself speaking so longingly through her mouth.
There is little mirth in the laugh he gives once more. He mirrors the tilt of her head boyishly, curls tangling with lashes. “And be dragged into the depths?”
The levied gaze upturned against the glint of dying day does not waver from his visage; in the dimming light her eyes hold such strange, fathomless brightness, submerged stars peering at him through leagues of darkened water. “ I would not drag you.”
It is so sweet, the lie; and perhaps it is not inherently such a thing, but instead borne from those odd, coiling natures which juxtapose her very being – to tear flesh and to soothe it, to lave upon fear and to charm it away. She is kind, and she is, despite it all, sweet – though yet, Jacaerys remains uneager to discover yet whether her self restraint survives immersion into the sea.
Nonetheless, he cannot help his faint tick of a grin, amused perhaps only at the absurdity of it all.
“I am not eager to test your limits,” he confesses.
A ribboned smile, lurking against the water as her hands grasp the wood beside his knees. Something in the depths brushes his ankle; boot against something stronger, faint and fluttering though still startling enough to ridge his bare spine. She hums. “Do you think so little of me, Jacaerys?”
It is a song, to hear his name from such lips. The sea rocks impatiently, and he feels the leverage of his hips tilt just so against the tides. She rocks with them, a gentle flow that splays tendrils of hair across bare shoulders, glimpses of sweet skin lower than his eyes dare dip. “I think,” he says with a wettened lip, “you have already admitted to dragging men beneath the waves.”
She finds amusement in this, it seems, and she gives a small tilt of head. “Men.” Such emphasis comes with a tightened flutter across his chest, and his brow lifts, emboldened so as to lean forward until their breaths meet the same stretch of salted air.
“Am I no man to you?” he wonders.
Her eyes, those unblinking lives of dying stars through the last breath of day, flare with some kind of heat from the expiring sun. “You’re far more than that.”
In her wake washes aboard his wooden raft a fresh kiss of sea, straining her bare chest against the expanse of plank between his thighs; the movement is a gentle rocking, though it brings them keenly close, so close indeed that Jacaerys is rendered dizzied by the sweet smell of her once more, of the cloying honesty in those deepened, reflective eyes.
Jacaerys has lived a life told of titles and beings; prince, son, rider, piece upon the board of kings and queens, bastard and heir, all of the muddled things which lie between old bloodlines indistinguishable from myth.
He watches that myth now, splayed before him, and silently marvels at her tangibility. So he says her name, her common-tongued name, and tips his head boyishly. “You say such strange things,” he murmurs.
Her head tilts in a mirror, one which makes his heart skip over itself faintly, the lick of warm sea against his knees lapping over the salted air. Her skin glows under the red-streaked sun, a thing of marvel and unconfounded beauty. “As do you, prince.”
A laugh escapes him, bubbled from the space between them as it rocks, the sea yearning for the two hearts which beat not together nor on the same natural track but instead in some odd counterbeat of each other; and Jacaerys lets the water dip him forward just so, enough to see the iridescent lines shimmering upon her cheeks. Her face is so very pure in the setting death of sun.
He tips his head sidelong, somewhat intrigued by her words. “And what strange things have I said to you?”
She, who never blinks, is overcome with some minute breath of shyness, a mirror memory of nights before, and her gaze drops to the fire-streaked water before looking to him once more. “You call me kind.”
Of all things, the prince thinks; Of all the impossible, absurd madman things she has witnessed him do: speak of dragons, bleed upon the sea, command her to rise from the depths as though he still possessed a court and the shadow of a crown to succeed – this is what remains with her.
“You find that so strange?” he shakes his head faintly, letting his lip lift slightly. “You have spent every day proving it.”
She says nothing; The silence between them is no longer the terrible silence of their first meeting, for it is now laced through with those more sweet things, a vulnerability shared through salt-laced glances and small smiles.
“You healed me,” he continues quietly when her voice still shies away from sound. “When there was no reason to. And you fed me when your own kind would sooner have fed upon me. You listen when I speak, though I imagine my life must sound terribly unexciting beside yours.”
This, at last, coaxes a small curve of glossed lip to her visage.
His smile is slight, too, though still he continues. “And when I grieve...” He lowers his eyes toward the darkening glass slipping between the broken planks, thinking of ancient wings and smoldering waters. “...you still care, even if my troubles seem so minute to you.”
The sea breathes around them in spilling sighs of waves; She studies him with that unnerving patience once more, until she asks, in a voice so soft he almost mistakes it for the tide, “is that truly kindness?”
His brow knits, struck at once by both her honest bewilderment and, too, her capacity for tenderness. The breath which slips his lips is one of wonder. “What else would it be?”
Her gaze drifts beyond him, toward the place where the sun has nearly drowned itself beneath the world’s edge, and her head tilts in that learned habit, a small mirror of his own.
“My sisters sing until men forget they are afraid. And then they feed.” she says after a long while. Her fingers trail idly through the water, and the sea bends around them as though eager for the touch. “When I first saw you upon your beast,” Her eyes lift to meet his once more, startlingly bright. “I thought I might do the same.”
His heartbeat stumbles; a thought which should bring terror but, in its absence, only reminds him how very alive he still is. She speaks before he can dare.
“I do not know why I did not.” A draw comes upon her brow, a tremble of her lips. “I only know that when you sleep...” she murmurs, almost wonderingly, “...I do not wish to leave you.” Her fingers curl and he watches them catch upon the pearl of sea. “When you laugh, I wish to hear it again, and when you hurt...” Her voice catches upon something. “...There is… pain in me, also.” A shake of tresses, bewildered. “I have never known that before.”
A burgeoning warmth spreads across the very fibers of his being. The last breath of day lingers across the water between them, red as banked embers beneath ash, and Jacaerys stares at the woman who saved his life, wondering how she has gone a whole life without ever hearing a gentle name spoken of herself.
“I should think,” he says softly, scarcely above the whisper of the tide, “that whatever name your sisters would give such a feeling…” His heart skips its own beat within his chest, watching how her eyes dance with the light of late eve, “…among my people, we would simply call it affection.”
The evening deepens around them; she does not respond but instead leans closer to him, just slightly so, her bared beauty brought higher momentarily. The sun has nearly swallowed itself unto the horizon, leaving only the last remnants of gold bleeding beneath the line between sky and sea; the water beneath his knees is dark and glassy, reflecting the first early stars as they begin to appear one by one.
“Affection,” she repeats, a sweet thing from lips so parted, wondering. Warmth spreads boyishly across Jacaerys’ visage, and he only nods gently.
It is this very moment that she chooses to spill her grace onto the palms steadying her between his legs; he watches her rise higher from the sea, arching until the water gives way to the scaled glow beginning below her hips.
Early moonlight pours over her as though it has waited all evening for this very purpose; and his gaze follows the hush of young moon over the sky of deepening violet, tracing how beauty glows through the curve of her breasts as she breathes shakily in the salted air. Lower still, with heated cheeks, his eyes fall – down where human shape surrenders into luminous impossibility.
He must have stared too long, for her mouth parts in a chilling breath. “You stare at me often, Jacaerys.”
“You are difficult not to.” It comes from his lips with no such reservation of courtly politeness nor intent to charm; it is a simply known truth, one he’d likely repeat with each breath, if she so wished to hear. “Surely, you know such things.”
Seabreeze breathes the wet strands of her hair in damp kisses across her cheek; the sea rocks gently beneath them as though to lull him closer – though he needs no more encouragement than the sight of her alone.
“I truly wish you would come in,” she chides, and her voice – a thing nearly lost beneath the hush of the water and the gentle streaks of dead sun; a confession of sorts, some private form of longing which spills from glossed lips into the air of hunger between them.
Her breath ghosts upon his cheek as she leans impossibly closer between his thighs. “Though, I suppose I must come to you instead, prince of the sky.”
A quiet smile ghosts across his mouth, a jilted thing borne from nerves and, perhaps, fate; If such there is a thing. And there, beneath the youngest stars of the sea’s early night – after days of floating in the wide expanse of nothing – he kisses her.
Her lips are cool as water beneath shade; rainfall upon fevered skin, and from sugary lips comes the faintest breath of her surprise. She presses against him with an eagerness bolstered by uneven weight, a lamb unstable upon fresh legs, some sweet hunger that calls to him louder than the songs of her sisters which have already begun to leak over the surface of the horizon.
Lips shift, sliding salty and sweetened with hunger. The raft shifts beneath them at her eager lurch; Jacaerys’ hand comes to steady himself upon the wood as his hips cant, slipping further towards the edge of that abyssal water, and still he does not resist, he merely lets his other palm, the one so hungrily pressed to the flesh of her collarbone, slide upon wet skin. Her own ripple upwards like waves upon shores, threading like rivulets through his curls and the other casting her chilled palm over the warmth of his pounding bare chest. Webbed, he thinks faintly, as her fingers splay over his skin; The stars above seem to tremble upon the water in her rippling wake as she presses closer still.
Tongues prod and slide, a slow dance neither is particularly familiar with though the beat alone brings them closer, breaths melting into soft sighs and gentle hiccups of need. Her lips are of brine and sweet seafruit, and he finds himself insatiable to the taste.
His hand, hungry and of its own mind, slides past supple flesh; he squeezes only where her sighs come out with faint sounds of enticement – exploring where the deepest keening of her throat meet his own, whilst her own exploration tugs at his scalp and grasps sharply at his warm skin. Hunger and that deeper urge mix deliciously within the basest instincts of his manhood; though his hand pauses at the place where her skin changes, where the familiar ends and the sea wholly begins. Perhaps, days ago, he’d have recoiled at such a sensation – though the man he is now only feels wonder.
And so he pulls her closer, close enough to taste the brightness of her tongue, so cool and familiar in his memories of his bloodied flesh, so hungered and placant still. And when she pulls back, hardly enough to breathe, her forehead presses cool against his.
“You taste of fire,” she whispers, a trembling and insatiable thing.
A smile touches his mouth, and he imagines she can feel it all upon her own lips. “And you of salt.”
For the first time, she laughs against his mouth; and the sea, ancient and endless, carries the sound away.
JACAERYS IS NOT LOOKING WHEN THE WORLD RETURNS.
Indeed – as has become the quiet habit of these strange and borrowed days – his gaze has long since abandoned the horizon in favour of the creature beside him. The world has narrowed these days to a single pair of luminous eyes and a curve of shoulder which rises with the tide; to the silvered wake she leaves whenever she slips, laughing, beneath the glassy panes of water and vanishes into whatever hidden depths lie beneath the waves. He watches her instead, the compass by which all mornings begin and all nights fall.
Seamist sighs over the Narrow Sea in wandering veils, drifting along the horizon and stitching the heavens to the waters with threads of pearl; The sun has drowsily set itself an ascent, still seeping pale across the panes of water, when she grows suddenly still.
“What is it?” He inquires, voice still syrupy with the dredges of sleep. He lies upon the swollen and salt-rotted board, one arm draped lazily over the edge of the raft, fingers absently threaded through the cool silk of her hair so unable to ever fully dry from the cloying breath of sea.
She does not look at him, nor answer; a glossed gaze remains fixed upon the immeasurably distant horizon. Perhaps, if he were not drunk with the drowsiness of morning laze and early heat – if he’d not given up the hope of such sights days ago – he’d have turned and looked with her.
Only after so long a silence that he almost repeats himself do her lips part.
“Land.”
This, indeed, sobers the prince entirely. He rises at once, the raft pitching beneath him as he lurches quickly upon one knee. Fingers, still caught amongst her hair, loosen hurriedly lest he pull her with him; He shades his eyes against the low morning light.
Afar stretches the same rolling sea, thick with mist and silent as a phantom, that horrible blue which has swallowed days and weeks from his life. His eyes strain, a sharp sting of salt and sun, though still he soon makes it out.
It’s a far distant thing – far beyond the rolling waves, hardly more than a shadow painted against the morning; despite such meager an observation, Jacaerys lets out a breath through laced teeth. A miracle, a blessing answered by the gods who had watched him drown and then live in the same eve.
How many nights had he whispered it into darkness? When his fever burned, and the sea seemed endless, when the empty sky swallowed the empty sea and rocked him, lonely and stranded, in a cold nothingness.
Land.
For the first time in what could be weeks, or months – or perhaps merely some strange lifetime lived entirely between one sunrise and the next – Jacaerys feels the world opening again, yawning back into a wide berth of cliffs and coves and spine-ridges mountains, of valleys and lakes and beaches and forests.
And an odd thing passes him, then. Jacaerys has now lived so long suspended in this place, so far between water and sky, between continents, between worlds; how odd to remember a life, as though peeking into a jarred, seaside old bottle-scroll of another man’s dream.
When he lowers himself again, it is not the distant shore that once more first claims his attention.
She has drifted nearer without his noticing, borne gently upon the breathing swell until her face nears the side of the raft, a glint of silvery tendrils curling just beneath the sun-shattered surface. His boots, which lie at the end of the disintegrating raft, dry in the early morn; she leans a cheek drowsily upon the sun-warmed wood near his knees, and he has a mind to trace the soft curve of her there, that sweet expanse of skin. Though her words come before he might even think to lift his palm.
“I will bring you there.”
The words are gentle, and only after he takes time to study her face does he discern it: Shine glistens there, upon her cheeks – no seawater nor salted spray, but some pooling glisten of silvery glum. It pools there, clinging to her lashes for a final moment before it slips soundlessly along the delicate slope of her cheek, falling unto the weathered timber between them where it shines for one heartbeat before the thirsty wood drinks it away. Another follows, then another. She is crying.
The sight unmakes him.
Though not one to ever endure the tears of any woman so disheartened, this proves impossibly more grievous: This creature of the deep, born of sea and darkness, who he once believed belonged only in stories meant to frighten babes – weeps now with all the helplessness of any mortal girl. The tears which fall from her eyes catch the light of morning; pieces of the moon itself, dissolving upon her skin.
A man at his very core, his words come foolish, perhaps. “Why do you weep?” His hand rises to instinctively brush away the shining path glittering beneath her eye.
“It is foolish,” she murmurs, a thing so nearly human that Jace forgets himself; wrought, momentarily, with visions of some garden back on his Island, of curling tresses and sweet fruits and quiet whispers and gentle laughter.
“You’re no fool,” he insists with a whisper of her name, quiet as the waves coaxing them closer to that distant promise on the horizon. Jacaerys soothes beneath her eye as one rescues dew from the petal of a flower; his signet glinting upon his thumb though he possesses neither dragon nor kingdom here. Touch has grown familiar now, a thing he’s been gifted to explore for the better of four passed days together, natural as the sunrise.
“There are those who still wait for me,” he says quietly, a sprout of hope tugging at his chest at his own words; and though her visage remains sweet as the sunlight, lashes tangle and loosen a small wave of silvered sorrow onto the wood. He leans upon elbow now, so close he might feel her chilled breath upon his own lips. “My mother, m-my family, my people, my… my home.”
At this, her eyes flutter open, kind as she is understanding. “You belong to the land, Jacaerys.” her lips wilt with the beautiful breath of shared sorrow. “I have long known this.”
He, unable to help himself, searches her face; a twinge of desperation, that old thing, tugs within his chest. His eyes sting. “And you?”
A curious sadness enters her expression then, a flicker of some emotion Jacaerys thinks is, perhaps, not fully known to man. She says nothing again, and in this silence, his gaze flickers toward the scars that still cross her shoulder – though the wounds have begun to close beneath whatever strange grace lives within her blood, they remain angry against her skin.
The sea moves around them and it churns restless, unhappy; dangerous as the land in the distance, roving and hungry as those ancient creatures who lie in wait, far beneath. His lips part in a horrible fear. “Your sisters.”
At the flinch of her visage, he only cradles her further in his palm, tipping his face to find her gaze watery, silvered even in the breath of morning. His own gaze swims with tears. “Will they hurt you, for what you’ve done?”
Her gaze remains on his, and the reflection of them brings a small mirror of his own sorrow. “There will be no place beneath the water for me as there was before,” she breathes, as though exile is merely another current she must learn to swim against. “Though I knew this the moment I chose to take you.”
The words ache all through his marrow, coiling tenderly in the notches where once arrows had struck through him. She speaks of it as though kindness is a betrayal; some selfish thing instead of the most selfless thing a creature might ever do.
It is a horrible moment in which Jacaerys looks toward the distant shore, voice imbued once more with the memory of smoke and fire, of burning ships and dragons swooping from clouds. A lifetime, it seems, has passed.
He takes her hand, that webbed softness which boasts tender flesh and frilled wonders of silver, and when she takes him in kind, the feeling is still just as strange and wonderful as the first time he felt her under his palm.
“I cannot remain upon the sea forever,” he says. “There is a war waiting for me. A life.” The taste of salt upon his lip; in the distance, a swooping shadow dives toward the pane of sea, and Jacaerys sees the first gull he’s seen in days. “But..” he murmurs, and a faint smile touches his lips. “There could be a life waiting for you, too.”
There is some gleam in her eye, a terribly sad thing. Her cheek lifts from the wood to near his own visage, sweet and chilled by the breath though none the less warm in her unending kindness.
Her lips curve into a watery smile. “You promise impossible lives, Prince Jacaerys.”
“I promise the only one I possess.” He only pulls her closer, lifting her hand between both of his. "Dragonstone rises from the sea; Every stone of it knows the tide. If there is a place in this world where sea and fire have ever learned to live beside one another…” His smile, though weary and water-laced, has found him at last. “...Surely it is there.”
Hope is perhaps too dangerous a thing for a creature such as her to possess. He wonders, fleetingly, whether she has ever known it at all. She looks at him then, and he finds not hope within her gaze but something gentler, infinitely sadder: the aching desire to believe him, shining there with its silvery terrible nakedness. Very quietly, she asks, “And if the sea wishes for me back?”
Jacaerys rests his forehead against hers, and her skin carries with it the scent of salt and deep places untouched by sun. His own lashes flutter shut.
“Then it may ask.” A faint shake of his head, voice scarcely stirring the morning seabreeze. “It has taken enough from me.”
He feels the tremble of something across her lips; and then, before the shore can steal another heartbeat from them, she rises just enough for her lips to find his.
He turns instinctively to meet her, his mouth yielding beneath the cool sweetness of hers, tasting of salt and seafruits and sweet residual of those peculiar sweetwater shells. Her hand comes to rest against his chest, splayed lightly over the place where once an arrow had sought his heart; his own disappears into the silken weight of her hair, drawing her nearer. A sighing thing, the sea, as it lifts their joint mouths and sways Jacaerys closer still to the depths she hales. Wood sighs beneath their joint weight, small waves claiming its splintered sides; the morning is still, water softly hushing around them. There are no birds in the sky.
Jacaerys thinks, for a moment, that if the world were to end now, it would do so quite gently.
WHEN LAND FINALLY CLOSES AROUND THE RAFT, IT SWALLOWS THEM WITH A FUNEREAL QUIET.
In the very last stretch of current, spurred by both tide and whatever ethereal tail lies below her hips, the sea narrows gradually; great walls of black stone rise from either side as they float nearer to the shore, until the open world is swallowed behind them into a small opening, a breath of sunlight through the keyhole of some grand door. Jace sits upon the wreckage, watching the horizon as that endless breathing vastness that had carried them for so many days retreats into a distant strip of silver; When the land swallows the last of the abyssal sky, he is finally welcomed by the first breath of shaded light he has felt in what might be ages.
It is a balm to his being.
An old-born tyrant, weeks beneath the sun’s gaze has tanned and chapped him; Salt lives in every crease of him, wind has carved into his bones. A sigh of seeping shade crossing overhead, the looming shadows of the cliffs are cool, rich with the scent of stone and moss, and Jace draws a breath so deep it begins to ache in those places where the arrows once lived.
Passing into the mouth of a cave the size of a small ship, the rock shoots high overhead, blacker than any rock he’s yet to see in his three-and-twenty years; The slate slices sharp from the water, scarred and riddled with smaller caves whose mouths yawn open toward an emptier abyss further within the dark. Some are no larger than doorways, though others crack open high to the heavens, large enough to swallow entire fleets.
Jacaerys finds himself staring at their scars; the sea has gnawed these caves for a thousand years, and its teeth marks rake through sharp stone everywhere.
Soon, the cove opens around them, and the water becomes clear; and there, so close he could perhaps dive and swim to it, the water yields to a rocked edge of beach.
Breath catches within his throat; a stretch of black beach, soft as velvet to the eye for a slope which turns flat with slabbed black rocks, warmed by the breath of sun but cooled by the deep cavernous chill. Pools gather within them in fragments of captured sky; He looks into them and feels a tremendous relief.
It is only then, that his gaze falls upon the bones.
Lying strewn among the rocks is a whale’s skeleton, half-entombed, the great spine twisted through the stones; ribs arch upward in weather-worn curves, bleached white as old moonbone. The wind moves through them with a hollow music, a sound so mournful it brings shivers cascading down Jacaerys’ bare spine.
As they near the cove’s shore, there reveals more bones beyond the whale’s shattered being – and these are not the bones of beasts. With the creeping dread of a fever dream, the cave peels back its own skin: A skull half-buried in stone, empty sockets filled with shadow and crystallized salt; A yellowed hand thrust up through the earth, still crawling itself towards the spot of dripping sunlight from high above; Fragments of a spine tangled in driftwood and root. Jacaerys feels that cold thing so long past creep over his chest once more. Death has not passed through here and moved on; indeed, it has become one and the same with the cove – one with the rocks and caves and tide pools.
His breath only ceases entirely when he finds the skeleton laid beneath the nearest cavemouth. Ribs have been forced apart; shattered not by storm nor time but instead pried wide apart with care, a doorway of the corpse, a nest.
A gaze lies upon its mangled shape in horror as those same old stories of youth now rise in him like bile; His stomach tightens, mouth stuffed of cotton and pulse pounding within his chest.
Nearby – scattered among the rocks as though left by pilgrims or fools, lie offerings of silvered halfgroats and Tyroshi copper, greened with age; strings of fine stones dulled by salt, salt-rotted silk, fragments of pottery, even a rusted gilded dagger.
Jacaerys feels, once more, impossibly small upon the broken raft. How many men have stood where he stands now, trembling before the dark; How many had crossed black waters with pockets heavy from gold and bellies full of fear, believing that beauty might yet bargain with death?
With a flick of fear, his eyes shift to the glistening clear waters. Beside him still, she watches from the shallows, and he finds that she remains beautiful as the sea when it means to kill a man; floating in the clear waters, visage kissed from pearled ripples, entirely at home among the bones as though she has spent all her life here with the dead to keep her company. Perhaps she has.
Old as it is, still the fear returns to him, surging to his throat at the sight of the pried ribs, to the trail of finger-bones littering the nearest tidepool, to her. And, after all, Jacaerys is only a man.
“Are you going to eat me?” His voice calls out quiet, but in the wake of silence, it rebounds through the cave – a sonorous thing, not trembling though surely frightened the same: eat me, eat me, eat me. It falls dead after its repetition, laying to his expanse of bare back a cool whistle of breeze which sets the hair upon his nape on end.
Her eyes still in the water, as still as the day he first caught glimpse of her. What comes next is a minute shift; a fall of gaze, some learned softness drawing away as a crab takes to its shell, and the cove falls still. Even the water ceases, for a breath, its incessant lapping at the black-beached shore.
“The death of so many suns,” comes her voice at last; a thing scarcely louder than water finding a path along the sand. “And birth of so many moons.” Her eyes lift, and within those wisps of lashes, so sweet and salt-clinging, he finds only that very moon she speaks of, reflected so deep, so sharp and luminescent. “And still, you fear my mouth.”
Jacaerys opens his own to answer; though worse still is the breathless thievery of his chest – the lack of words which crawl to his throat yet remain perched upon his tongue. Words gather there, frightened birds against the bars of his ribs, yet refuse to fly – because he knows not what he might say.
For he has spent weeks dying in the water with her hands upon his skin, her voice in his ears, her lips upon his own; with her keeping breath inside his ruined body. And perhaps he could tell her that still, beneath all such tenderness, a frightened boy remains – that the songs of his childhood are carved too deeply into him; that men are weak creatures who inherit fear long before they inherit wisdom. Silence answers for him instead.
His gaze returns to her, then.
And he finds that here, in the lucid water of the cove, nothing is so softened by darkness; the sea renders her wholly to him now, silver scales glinting as hammered mail and stitched from both woman and abyss alike. Fins, a near translucent thing, taper along the delicacy of hips and fold in the current of a dreadful languor of tail; a strong shing, a terribly powerful thing which scatters ribbons of light across the cave walls as she shifts.
Her gaze rests upon him, so eternally unblinking, and a faint smile touches her mouth then – a smile made of frost and moonlight, beautiful and dangerous and far too sad to any longer be called kind. “I could have eaten you when your blood first touched the tide.”
The sea stirs around her hips as she shifts. Her gaze does not leave his own. “I could have eaten you when your fever took your senses and you hardly knew your own name, when all you could do was cry out in the dark.” Tresses curl, tendrils cloying towards the edge of the wood. “I could have eaten you when I drew the wounds from your flesh and cleaned your blood.”
Eyelashes burn as Jacaerys watches her, helplessly foolish to hois own nature; he traces how her visage shifts under the reflections of the shimmering waters.
“I could have eaten you when you first laid your mouth on mine.”
His breath catches in a shamed flush to his cheeks, for memory betrays him all at once: her laughter beneath the stars, the cool sweetness of her lips, the shy turn of a smile after a handful of shells were deposited upon his lap. That she should speak of it all now, with such resentful sorrow – a horrible emptiness within him gapes further.
“But you ask now,” eyes lift to him once more, moonlit and wounded even in the light of day. “even after I have done each kind thing you once praised of me?”
Regret coils ugly within him. He lurches toward the water without thinking, knees upstable upon the disintegrating salt-logged wood. “Wait,” he calls, hand outstretching in some boyish fit of desperation, as though command might counter the hurt he’d levied.
She only slinks away, velveted water swallowing more and more of her.
Sorrow, that horrible thing, falls deep within him at the sight. “Please.” The word breaks from him then, raw with a desperation he cannot hide; The cliffs catch it and throw it back at him once more in a hundred dying echoes – please, please, please – the cove lamenting his grief.
Her eyes shimmer with unspilled silver. “I know you do not wish to fear me.”
It is then that she lets herself fall back into the sea. Scarcely a small sigh of water; Jacaerys is helpless to himself as the dark swallows her, absorbing the shape of her glinting scales as completely as though she had never existed at all.
He is left quite alone.
Silence occupies not just the ear but his bones themselves; Jacaerys remains kneeling where she vanished for some time, a hand suspended foolishly above the water in hopes the tide might, struck by some late compassion, yet choose to return what it has taken from him. Water kisses the edges of his boots and the splintered ruin he floats upon, and only when the last warmth of day has wholly bled from the cliffs lining the mouth of the cove does he at last force himself to move.
His limbs, it seems, have long forgotten the labor of belonging to him; For weeks they had been sustained by the cool touch of her palms against burning skin in the dead of night – that curious miracle by which each waking day found him a little less dead than the evening before.
Rising upon his feet calls forth a strength he’s not attempted in what feels like true moons.
Boots sink into the black sand; Solid earth has haunted his prayers through endless nights upon the water, yet now it feels strangely faithless and wholly dead with its lack of sway and ease. He walks because standing still becomes unbearable in both his limbs and mind.
Slowly the prince wanders the little cove she had chosen for him. He threads first between the vast white arches of whale skeletons; then, fingertips drift across stone polished smooth by centuries of tides. Here and there the sea has driven whole ships into the stone, timber petrified into the bones of the earth; Human skulls peer from beds of mussels, seagrass growing through the hollows of their eyes; And yet nowhere among these countless things might he find the single thing he seeks.
In time, night paints the caves into a black mouth, moonlight catching to glow horribly upon saltbleached bones. Jacaerys could leave; There is land beneath his feet, a miracle for which he once would have traded kingdoms, and somewhere beyond these cliffs there must surely be roads or villages with harbors and living men.
He does not go.
Instead he returns to the water’s edge and lowers himself among the abyssal sand, and tells himself that he will wait only until morning, when either his siren returns or daylight might reveal some path for him inland. He makes no fire, for the darkness feels less lonely when it remains unbroken; hips upon land and back against sharp rock, Jacaerys stares at the shifting current with broken regret.
And when dawn finally begins to silver the eastern rim of the cave, washing the black water pale as beaten steel once more, bleeding with that softened lilac, Jacaerys is still there, watching with sunscorched eyes for any hint of silver within the waves.
JACAERYS WAKES TO COLD.
No chill which lives in the memory of his bones – not that of blood seeping from a dying body; he wakes to the roll of the frigid tide reaching calves, just where he’d collapsed upon the sand. Water laps over his boots and retreats again, a chilled thing as eyelashes unlace themselves from their salted hold upon his consciousness.
For several breaths he reposes where he is, suspended in that memory of sleep and waking. A turn of head, pressing cheek to softened volcanic sand; and then his eyes open in memory, a lurch of disorientation at the sensation of land beneath him.
What he finds, instead, are eyes.
They are waiting for him from beyond the dark shelf of rock where the cove deepens suddenly into black water, faintly luminous now beneath the gentling dawn. He is struck with such immense relief that he laughs before he knows he has done so.
He croaks out her name, carrying with it all the lonely hours of the night between them as he rises swiftly, stiffness of limb protesting with the neglection of weeks upon the raft. His balance falters upon the uneven stones, though he crosses the cove as swiftly as the gods allow, ducking through whale ribs to where she waits where the black stone falls sheer into fathomless water, only her shoulders and head above the tide, hair spreading behind her.
Jacaerys lowers himself carefully onto the warm volcanic rock, stretching close so he might lie upon his stomach along its edge, one arm hanging over the precipice towards her watchful countenance. The tide slips lazily between her tresses, coiling shyly.
“I was cruel.” He murmurs, gentler than the lick of tide which coaxed him awake though the words scrape against his throat. “I have no excuse.”
She studies him without expression, unsettling enough that he cannot tell whether she means to forgive him or leave him once more.
“I am so sorry,” he whispers, one last offering cast into the cove alongside the coins and daggers and futile silks of drowned things long past. Nothing answers him but the crashing wave, coaxing the glint of purpled crabs alongside the underbelly of his rock.
Only then does her arm emerge from the water; with an upward reach, she glances up at him – and there he finds a bewildered heartbeat of hope that she might touch him again. Instead, her fingers unfold; in the glint of morning glare, Jacaerys blinks upon her palm, leaning further once more to find there, resting in the center, something shining.
A pearl, fresh and small enough to disappear beneath his thumb. Morning gathers itself there upon its surface, a stolen captured piece of dawn pale as milk and luminous as mist-laced moon.
Lashes flicker momentarily as the breath catches within his chest, a small laugh of absurd affection rising sweet and sharp in his throat as his eyes burn with emotion.
Hesitation sits so strangely upon so beautiful a creature; her eyes glisten with those silvery tears, too, as her lip trembles. Her voice comes between pressed lips, a rather bashful countenance among the waves. “I wished to bring you one before you left me.”
Her palm, he registers, trembles with the small thing, a glinting haze of the cave; affection burns bright through him as Jacaerys takes her palm with his own, closing her fingers gently around the pearl.
“I don’t wish to leave you,” he says instead, and the confession comes before pride can catch it, before the careful walls built by a lifetime of crowns and expectations can remind him that princes are not meant to plead with the sea. His fingers remain around hers, warm against the strange coolness of her skin, the pearl hidden between their palms as though they have together captured some tiny fragment of the moon itself. “I wish to stay with you,” he whispers wetly.
Her eyes swim just as the ancient, beautiful tail of shimmering silver does beneath the waves; currents curl and fold, and she remains utterly quiet for one moment, hand trembling within his own. Her gaze lowers briefly to the pearl still enclosed between them, then lifts again.
“The place you spoke of,” her voice ripples along the whisper of the tide. “The stoned castle that watches the sea, the home you say waits for you beside the water.” A lip trembles before it is speared with sharpened, pearled teeth. “You would truly bring me there?”
Dragonstone. He thinks of black towers rising from volcanic earth and halls warmed by fire, his mother’s chambers and dragons circling above cliffs where the wind wails.
“Yes,” he says, lacking any such hesitation of a prince with the duty of war still looming upon his back. “I meant it. Truly.”
Something changes in her face then, though still he leans closer, lowering himself further over the stone until the water nearly reaches his bared visage, nearly kisses his chest. But before he might let his body follow that burning instinct of his heart to slip into the water after her, her hand slips from his own to disappear into the water.
The pearl lies in his own palm; He watches her once more leave him.
“Wait,” his voice tapers, though his disconcertion grows so completely that he remains frozen upon the rock, watching as the sea carries her not away this time, but instead towards the shore.
It is only once she reaches the sand, long taloned things grasping in wounds through the dark, that the prince snaps upwards, heartbeat thundering upon his throat. A grieving veil, the dark water shifts and folds along her body, so unwilling to surrender what it has kept for longer than most men have had names for their gods; glassy folds climb her skin and slip over the silvering scales which remain among her sun-breathed skin.
The unnatural grace begins in a wail of tide; a large crash of seafoam submerges Jace, his lungs filled once more with burning salt and unforgiving sting; when he surges to, upon his knees against sharp rock, he hears it: a wailing horror, splintered as shards of bone snap against echoing cave walls. His siren screams.
Salt slides in drips from his vision, though still he finds the horror, a darkened sea of shimmering deep – no color of mortal blood, but perhaps an open vein in the ocean itself which spills a piece of its darkness upon the sand.
The stories return once more of the she-creatures coming to land to nest; and, for the first time, the sound that leaver her is not some haunting sweetness meant to lure men closer.
It is sheer agony, and it jolts him to action quicker than any war bell.
Screams echo through the cavern, horrible and dragging; and hands catch the sharp of rock as Jacaerys descends, a scrambling desperation of fear as his knees strike the cold sand and stumble twice. The strength that has carried this far was never his own; it has always belonged to her and the breath she gave him, the kindness of a creature he once feared. Now, he spends what remains of it reaching her.
He rears the largest rock just as the last of the blooded dark water retreats; waking itself only in foam and silver upon the shore.
And just there: His siren lies still upon the sand.
Upon reaching her, he falls to his knees. He finds, in trembling breaths, the sea’s remains upon her: laces of that old magic, shimmering scales along her skin; a strange elegance to her form, a brightness reflecting in her gaze, so akin to mother-of-pearl.
She is no ordinary woman, but his woman.
A trembling palm rises to brush away the remnants of foam and weeded sea, clinging to her as a dying man might his lover; and she only meets his own watery gaze, a small puff of air passing her lips. “I told you, I wished for you to come in.”
The words undo him, loosing a laugh helpless in its wonder and grief, watery in bewilderment. Glossed lips curl, that same old glimmer in her eyes as she whispers next: “I suppose I once again had to come to you instead.”
A hitch of his breath, swallowed in a rush of thrill as a palm comes to cup his own jaw, soothing as fingers spread along the curve of his cheek. “My prince of the sky,” she chides, her eyes carrying pools of the very same, that broke-open expanse of light high above the cavernous dark. Fingers brush away his salt-laced curls.
He gathers her to him wholly, and she comes so very willingly, no longer divided by anything so distant and unknowable as the sea.
A simple miracle; for she is warming, a living thing against him, breath trembling and falling in ripples of warmth along the bare of his shouldered back. Here she is, in his arms.
Jacaerys presses his face against damp tresses and closes his eyes, overcome by the strangeness of the world having allowed such a thing to happen; and she in turn tightens her grasp round him in a gesture so truly human that it nearly brings the sting of tears to eye. The cove roars louder now, perhaps distraught with its loss; the water thunders along their bared legs, and at length, Jacaerys slowly pulls back.
Slow, his gaze drops to her legs – the unfamiliar grace of twitching tissue and flesh and muscle and bone beneath the morning light; concern touches his heart and perhaps, too, his visage.
“Do they hurt?” he asks softly, tipping his head to catch her eyes. “Your legs.”
She looks down as though considering a question yet to be occurred within her mind; and then at length, she lifts one supple foot and nudges his side with a shy, almost playful firmness. A gesture moves through him, lips curling in a gentle affection at her nudge.
“I have had them before,” she reminds him then, in hint of faint pride and amusement. He only smiles, no longer afraid of what she has been before him, what she is. For she is his, too – and he, hers.
“Does it feel the same?” he wonders, gaze lingering over each sweet part of her, so real upon the shore.
For the first time since she came ashore, she falters nearly unconfident; a startling transformation which renders Jacaerys marveled at such bashfulness. Her gaze slips away from his, and when she answers, her voice is barely above the whisper of the tide.
“No,” she hums, a small thing; and her fingers tighten faintly against his bared shoulder, nails blunt but sharp still. He can see how warmth touches her cheeks, how her lip catches upon sharp teeth. “This… feels far better.”
Jacaerys smiles then, a hand falling tenderly upon her face. A thumb brushes the dampness at her cheekbone, the silver traces still glimmering there like moonlight caught so stark against the real nature of her skin.
And then he kisses her, slow as fate; a warmed mouth lingers against hers, patient and gentle, her hands rise to his back solidly to grasp at his warm flesh; the sea groans behind them, and the wind howls through the bones along the shore.
Her breath catches when his hand slides to the sides of her – and he feels the shiver that passes through her then, not of fear but of sensation, an old recognition of something newly awakened. It answers in him at once, too, so low and bright and aching.
She leans closer once more, and he meets her there.
The kiss deepens unhurried and tender; fingers curl in the muscle of his back, his own palm reaching the strange, living warmth of her skin, the quickening pulse there, the breath of her body now made real in his world. When she makes a small sound against his mouth, soft and startled by her own response, he draws back only enough to look at her. Her eyes are wide in a dawning tide of astonishment, swimming with the same heated thing that kisses across that sweet skin which once never knew the true touch of warmth.
Jacaerys rests his forehead against hers and smiles, his own breath uneven now, his heart no calmer than her own within their beating cages. “Are you alright?” he murmurs.
Her answer is to kiss him first. Jacaerys makes a low sound against her mouth and gathers her closer once more, one hand at the nape of her neck, the other spreading along her waist, feeling the tremor there as though her body is remembering itself once more upon land. It is a sweet thing, a tangle of tongues languid, enough to perhaps remind her that tenderness can be just as fierce as hunger.
She moves against him with a wonder that undoes him; She has known desire, he can see that in the way she breathes, in the way her fingers tighten at his shoulders, in the bright, startled heat of her gaze, the memory of muscles when he shifts to press himself hard along the line of her own wanting body. Indeed, she is not one who hesitates; She knows the language of wanting better than he does, and he is not ashamed to learn from her now.
When he draws away only enough to look at her, her lips are parted, her eyes dark with a confusion that is almost pain.
“Tell me if you want me to stop,” he says softly, the words trembling with nerves that guide her closer to him still. “T-tell me if you do not want this, please.”
Her hand rises to his face, and the touch warms across him, spreading down trembling throat and quivering chest, far lower, igniting some spark within him.
Her thumb brushes his mouth, and there is a smile which graces across her own. “I want,” she says, and the ocean crashes itself against their shore, folding over their hips as though it, too, wants.
He swallows, his body already hard with his own wanting; his voice comes lower, hungry for the sweet softness beneath his palms. “What do you want?”
Her gaze holds his. “You,” she says, helpless to the unnatural flow of tresses which still seem to float gently round her beauty even left of the tide. “Only you, Jacaerys.”
Eyes shut for a heartbeat, if only in effort to steady himself; and when they open she still watches him in that patient, unsettling way.
“Please, let me be careful with you,” he whispers, nearly desperate. She only nods, so ethereal under the breath of faraway sunlight, and her words come in the same tremble of needed breath. “Let us learn of each other.”
And so he leads her from the waterline of the softer black sand and up where the dawn has begun to warm the flatter, kinder stones. And there, beneath the pale opening sky, he eases the salt and cold from them both.
Fabric, fear, distance - one by one they fall away from their entwined forms until there is nothing left between them but breath and the bright, trembling ache of wanting. He lays her down with care, and when he follows her onto the sand, his mouth finds her throat first, then the hollow beneath her ear, then the place where her pulse leaps beneath the skin. She arches into him at once, a soft gasp breaking from her when his hand slides over her waist, then lower, learning her with a cruel patience.
“Jacaerys,” she breathes, a plea, a praise which makes him shudder. He answers only by kissing her harder, one hand threading through her hair, the other braced beside her head as he lowers himself over her. Her fingers clutch at his shoulders, then rake along his back, unsure whether to pull him closer or hold herself steady; He gives her both – indeed, he gives her everything he can.
His mouth moves over hers, then down again, tasting salt and warmth and the faint sweetness of her breath, ghosting over the tantalizing flush of skin upon her breast, teeth scraping only softly. When she trembles, he stills at once, looking upon her with salt-kissed lashes. “Too much?” he inquires gently.
Her eyes are dark, her lips swollen from his kisses, and she looks nearly frenzied at the though of ceasing.
“No.” The answer is breathlessly hungry and he smiles against her skin, slower now only because he wants her to feel every stroke of his hands, every tendered bite of teeth, every careful press of his body against hers. Her hips lift to meet him; it sends a sharp pulse of heat through him which coaxes a soft groan, lost to the plush of her skin, and she startles – perhaps at the effect she has on him.
“Again,” he begs, guiding her with his hands though his lips leave their marks upon silver flakes along her skin.
She moves once more; the black sand clings to their skin and the morning wind cools the sweat at their backs.
And when he finally joins her, it is with a groan that feels torn from somewhere deep in his chest; she tightens around him in a surprised thing, melting into wanting, then wholly his in that moment. He pauses only long enough to look at her, to make sure she is with him; and when she nods, brow knit with a pleasured desperation, with her fingers digging into his shoulders and drawing half-moons of red, he presses into her warmth nearer to worship than any prayer that’s ever left his lips.
First, with the wash of waves, it is a slow thing of breaths and shaking laughter and trembling moans – though it grows deeper, growing a heat that builds and builds until the air between them seems to crackle with it, until his pleasure rolls over him in heavy immense pressure, until her own gasps sharpen and their fingers fall, entwined together, to find the spot upon her which coaxes her eyes back in ecstasy.
Her head falls back against the sand and lips part upon a sound that is half-gasp, half-plea. He drinks the song, kisses the line of her throat, the curve of her breast; finger turn, pressing gently in a caress along the trembling place where her body meets his, and each touch draws another shiver from her. She is beautiful like this, so flushed and undone by pleasure and trust alike; the sight of her makes him impossibly harder still, makes him want to give her everything, makes him want to keep her here in this moment forever or keep her upon a throne or wherever she might wish to be.
“Look at me,” he begs, a broken sound.
And the sight of her eyes on his, dark and dazed and full of him, is enough to make him lose the last of his restraint. He moves with a steadier rhythm then, one hand at her hip, the other braced beside her head, grasping along the smooth rock, his mouth returning to hers whenever he can bear to leave her skin. She meets him with such growing fervor, hands roaming, learning the planes of his muscled back, the line of his jaw, the taper of his hips, the damp hair at his temples.
Pleasure gathers tighter and tighter between them; The sea roars in the sonorous echo of two exiles making a home of one another. It is only then, as she pulls his chest upon hers and lets out a soft tremble of sigh, that they find the peak of their ecstasy in harmony.
It rolls within him as tide turns stones upon the shore – sun-drenches and ebbing, his pleasure tumbles, his groan falls into a taper of her name, or that which his tongue can form; and she, in turn, with trembling legs and wettened eyes, smiling at the bewilderment of such earthly delights. When he comes to lie beside her, when their sweat and sand-laced skin sticks gently to one another in a lazy, sweet whispering sigh of exhaustion, her eyes meet his once more.
A shared laugh, one of relief and bubbled affection, curls around their small cove. It is not untouched by grief, nor lacking in the gods’ cruelty – though it drifts out still across the water, and echoes only in sweetness as their foreheads press.
And when at last he draws her down with him, when the last of the morning light spills over them and the cove becomes all hush and salt and the soft ruin of restraint, it is not hunger that remains between them but love – deep, astonished, and newly named.
For some time, the waves come and go.
It is when the sun fully glints through the clear tidepools that his siren rises, and offers her palm. When they gather themselves from the rocks and sand, pearl stowed within the pocket of battered sunbleached riding leathers, Jacaerys finds pieces of old silks among the bones; he wraps her in them, a first garment for a woman who crossed from one world to another.
She laughs when he fusses over the tie of her new dressing, attempting in gentle adjustments to ensure it bothers not the scars which still stretch across her shoulder; the sound of her laughter follows them as they move away from the shore.
The path upward out of the cove is narrow and ancient, carved through stone by years of rain and wind and the endless pummel of waves. They walk slowly, dually unsteady beneath the unfamiliar weight of land, rendering both their bodies unsure; for once, neither belonging to this world but both traversing it, sharing in stumbles and laughs and small conversation.
At the top of the path sunlight finds their skin, and the world opens; horizon stretches wide before them so endless. In the breath of the world once more around him, grief and death melt; water dries upon warm skin and his siren lets out a breath of shock, of wonder. Jacaerys holds her palm as her other runs over the tall wildgrass swaying around them in a tide of seabreeze, holds her tightly as she throws her arms round him with bubbling laughter.
It is only then that the shadow passes in the distance. His breath catches, her own coming only a moment later; For far along the coast, beyond the cliffs and the rolling sea mist, something enormous moves through the sky, massed and raining shadow upon the earth. Even at a distance, even as only a shape against the morning for, he knows.
He remembers the curve of the wings and the weathered roar even before it meets their ears; knows the glint of faint gold and rubied heart along the breast of the great beast as he knows the back of his palm.
His mother’s dragon.
And so together, with splintered breaths and wettened eyes, hand in hand, Jacaerys and the siren run toward the shadows in the distance, unaware of the rising smoke and distant screams beneath it.
whew! that was long
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Series Summary: Having studied Valyrian history and sorcery, you perform a ritual to save Jace's life after the battle of Gullet, except he's not quite who he used to be after he comes back from death's doorstep. See part 1 here. Warnings: smut, came back wrong Jace, blood, Valyrian wedding, talks of death, killing.
The war council had convened in the Chamber with the Painted Table, that great slab of carved stone that mapped the whole of Westeros in intricate detail. You stood near the far end of the table, your hand loosely clasped in Jacaerys', watching as your stepmother traced her fingers over the carved representation of the capital.
"The Velaryon fleet is scattered," Corlys Velaryon said, voice heavy with the admission. The Sea Snake had aged a decade in the weeks since the Gullet, the loss of his ships and the near-loss of his heir apparent in the lines around his mouth. "We cannot launch a naval assault on the Blackwater. Not yet. The fleet must regroup, resupply, and repair. It will take moons."
"Moons we do not have," Daemon said. He stood at Rhaenyra's right hand, Dark Sister at his hip. "Every day Aegon sits the throne, our position weakens. The lords of the realm watch and wait. They will flock to whichever side seems strongest. We cannot afford to appear weak."
"A direct assault on the gates, then," suggested Ser Alfred. "The City Watch..."
"The City Watch will not be enough," Rhaenyra interrupted. "I have received word from a source within the Red Keep itself. The Dowager Queen Alicent has promised to open the gates to us. She has promised to order a surrender."
A murmur rippled through the gathered lords. You exchanged a glance with Baela, who stood across the table from you, her arms crossed over her chest. Baela's face was unreadable, but you knew her well enough to see the skepticism in the set of her jaw. Alicent Hightower, surrendering? After everything? It seemed too convenient by half.
"You trust this source?" Corlys asked.
"I trust that Alicent Hightower is a mother before she is a queen," Rhaenyra said. "Her sons have brought ruin upon our house and upon the realm. She knows the war is lost. She wishes to end it before more blood is spilled."
Daemon's expression flickered with what might have been contempt or might have been agreement, it was always difficult to tell with your father. "Then we fly," he said. "We take the dragons and we take the city before Aemond and Vhagar can return from the Riverlands. The dragonseeds are ready. Hugh Hammer and Ulf White have Vermithor and Silverwing. Addam of Hull has Seasmoke. With Syrax and Caraxes, we have five dragons. More than enough to seize the Red Keep and hold it."
"What of the smallfolk?" someone asked. "If we burn the city..."
"We are not burning the city," Rhaenyra said sharply. "We are taking it. There is a difference. The gates will be opened. The garrison will stand down. There will be no need for fire."
Daemon's silence spoke volumes. You knew your father well enough to know that he did not share Rhaenyra's optimism about a bloodless conquest. But he held his tongue, and the planning continued.
A murmur ran through the room. You felt Jace's hand tighten around yours, and when you glanced at him, you saw that his jaw was clenched, his dark eyes fixed on his stepfather. This was the first war council he had attended since his recovery, and he had been silent throughout, but his silence was not passive.
Rhaenyra raised her hand, and the murmuring ceased. Her gaze swept the room. "But we are not stripping Dragonstone of its defenders. Baela will remain here with Moondancer. And Jacaerys..."
Jace straightened, his hand releasing yours as he stepped forward. "Your Grace?"
Rhaenyra's expression softened, the hard mask of the Queen cracking to reveal the mother beneath. "You will remain here as well. You and your betrothed. Dragonstone must be held, and you are my heir. I will not risk you in battle again so soon after..." She trailed off, unable to finish the sentence.
The silence that followed was heavy with unspoken words. You watched Jace carefully, waiting for the argument. The Jace of before, the serious, earnest young man who had always been so desperate to prove himself, would have protested. He would have insisted on flying with his mother, on being at the vanguard, on showing the world that he was worthy of the crown he would one day wear. But this Jace, the one who had come back from the darkness with fire in his eyes, only nodded once.
"I understand, Your Grace," he said.
Rhaenyra blinked, clearly surprised. Even Daemon raised an eyebrow. Daemon saw everything, catalogued everything. He had noticed the changes in Jace just as you had.
"Good," Rhaenyra said, recovering quickly. "Then it is settled. We fly in three days. The usurper's reign ends at dawn."
The council began to disperse, lords and dragonseeds filing out of the chamber with murmured words and shuffling footsteps. You made to follow, but Jace's hand caught your wrist, holding you in place.
"Wait," he declared. "There is something I need to ask."
Rhaenyra turned back, her expression questioning. Daemon paused as well, his hand still resting on Dark Sister.
"What is it, my son?" Rhaenyra asked.
Jace took a breath. You could feel the tension in his grip, the way his fingers pressed into your skin just a little too hard before he consciously relaxed them. "I wish to be wed," he said. "As soon as possible. Before you leave for King's Landing."
The words hung in the air. You felt your heartbeat stutter in your chest. You had known, of course, that you would marry him eventually. You had been betrothed since childhood, promised to each other before you even understood what that promise meant. But you had assumed the wedding would come after the war, after Rhaenyra sat the Iron Throne, after the realm was secured and there was time for celebrations and pageantry.
Rhaenyra seemed to have been thinking along the same lines. "Jace," she said, her voice gentle but firm, "I had hoped to see you wed in the Great Sept. After I take the throne. The realm should celebrate the marriage of its future king. It should be a symbol of our victory, a declaration that our house endures and prospers."
"The realm is at war, Mother." Jace's voice was calm, measured, but there was an undercurrent of steel in it that had not been there before his brush with death. "And it will not stop being at war the moment you take King's Landing. Aegon will flee, or he will be captured, but his supporters will not simply lay down their arms. Aemond is still out there with Vhagar. Daeron is in Oldtown with Tessarion. The Hightowers will not surrender while they still have dragons and armies. This war could drag on for months. Years."
He stepped forward, still holding your wrist, pulling you gently with him. "I am your heir. My claim to the Iron Throne must be unassailable. There are already those who whisper about my...parentage." He said the word carefully, without flinching, but you saw the flicker of old pain in his eyes. "Marrying a trueborn Targaryen princess strengthens my position. It silences the whispers. It shows the realm that the blood of Old Valyria runs true in our line."
"He has a point," Daemon said, and there was a note of amusement in his voice. "A strong match, publicly acknowledged, secures the succession and quiets the rumors. The boy is thinking like a king."
Jace shot Daemon a look that was equal parts gratitude and wariness. He knew, as you did, that Daemon's support was never given without calculation. But he pressed on.
"We have been betrothed for years," he continued, turning back to his mother. "Everyone in the Seven Kingdoms knows we are promised. There is no political advantage to waiting. And if something were to happen to me..."
"Nothing is going to happen to you," Rhaenyra cut in, her voice sharp with maternal ferocity. "You will be safe on Dragonstone."
"Wars are unpredictable," Jace said, and his tone was gentle now, gentler than it had been. "You know that better than anyone. I am not asking for a grand ceremony. I am not asking for tourneys and feasts and a kingdom's worth of guests. I am asking to be wed here, on Dragonstone, in the tradition of our ancestors. A Valyrian ceremony."
Rhaenyra hesitated. You could see her wavering, the queen and the mother warring within her. She looked at you then, her violet eyes searching your face. "What do you say to this?"
You opened your mouth to answer, but Jace's hand tightened on your wrist again, and you felt the heat of his skin against yours, the faint tremor of urgency that ran through him. He wanted this. He wanted this desperately, and you understood, with a sudden, crystalline clarity, that this was not just about politics. This was about him. About the darkness he had been through. About the fire that now burned behind his eyes and the need that drove him to hold you closer, kiss you harder, keep you near him every possible moment. He had come back changed, and part of that change was a hunger that had not existed before. A hunger for you.
"I want to marry him," you said, and your voice was steady despite the pounding of your heart. "I do not need a sept or a crowd or the approval of the realm. I only need him."
Rhaenyra's expression softened. She looked at you for a long moment, and then at Jace, and something in her face shifted. Resignation, perhaps. Or acceptance. Or simply the recognition that her son, the boy she had raised and protected and nearly lost, was no longer a boy at all.
"Very well," she said. "We will hold the ceremony tomorrow evening. It will be small, but it will be done properly. You deserve that much."
Jace exhaled, a long, slow breath that seemed to release some of the tension from his shoulders. "Thank you, Mother."
Daemon, who had been watching the exchange with the detached interest of a man observing a particularly entertaining game of cyvasse, chose that moment to inquire mockingly:
"You're very eager to get this done quickly, Jacaerys. One might almost think you were in a hurry." He paused, letting the silence stretch just long enough to become uncomfortable. "Is there a reason for this urgency? Have you gotten my daughter with child?"
Leave it to Daemon Targaryen to pour oil onto a fire dwindling away. You felt heat flood your cheeks from embarrassment and indignation. "Father!"
Jace's composure cracked for just a moment, a flush rising to his own cheeks. "No," he said firmly. "We have not...I have not dishonored her. I would never..."
"Jace has been the soul of propriety," you interrupted, your voice rising. "Nothing more. We have not lain together. I am not with child."
Daemon held up his hands, a gesture of mock surrender, but his eyes were still calculating. "I meant no offense, daughter. A father is entitled to ask such questions, especially when his daughter's betrothed is so... insistent."
"I am insistent," Jace said, and his voice had steadied again, cooled to a hard and controlled tone, "because I have already lost too much time. I was dead, or near enough. I lay in that bed while the maesters whispered about how they could not save me. And all I could think about, all I could dream about in the darkness, was her. What I would never have. What I would never be able to give her." He looked at Daemon directly, meeting those violet eyes without flinching. "I am not going to wait any longer. Not for politics. Not for propriety. Not for anything. I am going to marry her, and I am going to do it now, while I still can. Is that a sufficient answer for the King Consort?"
Silence swallowed the hall. Daemon looked at Jace for a long moment, then the mockery faded, replaced by respect, or recognition, or simply the acknowledgment of a fellow predator.
"Very well," he said, and turned back to Rhaenyra. "Let them marry. The boy makes a fair point. And it will give the people on Dragonstone something to celebrate before we fly to war."
The ceremony took place three days later, on the cliffs of Dragonstone as the sun sank toward the sea.
It was a small affair by royal standards. There was no time for feasts or tournaments, no time to summon lords from across the realm. But somehow, the intimacy of it made it more powerful. The witnesses were few: Rhaenyra, Daemon, Baela, Corlys Velaryon, and a handful of household knights and servants who had served Dragonstone for generations. The dragons stirred restlessly in the distance, their cries echoing off the volcanic cliffs, as if even they knew something momentous was happening.
Your hair had been braided in the traditional Valyrian style, interwoven with ribbons of gold and black. Baela had helped you dress into the traditional Valyrian attire.
Jace was waiting for you there. He looked at you like you were the only thing in the world. Like the fire that burned behind his eyes had found its focus. He looked at you like you were his salvation.
Daemon performed the ceremony. It was an old Valyrian rite, the words spoken in the liquid syllables of a language that had been ancient when Aegon the Conqueror was born. The binding of blood. The joining of fire. The creation of a union that could not be broken by anything less than death.
When the time came, Daemon drew a small dragonglass blade and made a shallow cut on your palm, then on Jace's. You pressed your hands together, blood mingling, and the contact sent a jolt through you like lightning striking stone. Jace's eyes met yours, and you saw the recognition in them. He felt it too. Something more than ritual. Something more than words.
We ask the Lord to shine his light. you thought, remembering the words you had spoken over his dying body.
But you had not needed a lord. You had needed only your own will, and your own blood, and your own desperate love.
"With fire and blood, it is done," Daemon intoned in the Common Tongue. "You are one. Let no man tear asunder what the flames have joined."
Jace leaned forward and kissed you, and despite the witnesses, despite the solemnity of the moment, it was not a chaste kiss. His mouth was warm and insistent, his hand tightening on yours, and when he pulled back, his eyes were blazing.
"You are mine now," he said, so quietly that only you could hear. "No one can take you from me. Not the Greens. Not the gods. Not death itself."
There was no bedding ceremony. Rhaenyra had made that clear from the start: there would be no bawdy crowd, no drunken lords carrying you to the marriage bed, no crude jests and leering looks. This was not a political match made for the entertainment of the court. This was a union of dragon's blood, and it would be consummated with dignity.
Instead, there was a feast in the great hall, with roasted boar and fresh bread and wine from the cellars that had been laid down during the reign of the old King. Jace ate little but drank several cups of wine, his hand never leaving yours. He spoke to the others who had gathered to celebrate, answered Rhaenyra's toasts and Daemon's pointed observations with perfect courtesy, but his attention was always on you. His thumb traced circles on the back of your hand. His knee pressed against yours beneath the table. Whenever you caught his eye, he smiled, and that smile was full of promises that made your stomach tighten and your skin flush with heat.
When the feast was over and the toasts were finished and the last of the wine had been drunk, Jace rose from his seat and offered you his hand.
"Come," he said simply.
You took his hand and let him lead you from the hall, up the winding stairs, to the chambers that had been prepared for you.
The room was warm, a fire already burning in the hearth, candles flickering. The bed was large and draped in crimson silk, the pillows plump and inviting. Someone had scattered dried flower petals across the coverlet, rose and lavender, their scent sweet and heady in the warm air.
Jace closed the door behind you and slid the bolt into place. The sound of it was loud in the quiet room, final and irrevocable.
"I have wanted this," he said, his voice low and rough, "for longer than I can remember. I have dreamed of this. In the darkness, when I was...gone...I dreamed of you. Of this. Of finally having you in my arms with nothing between us."
You turned to face him, and the look in his eyes made your breath catch. There was hunger there, raw and undisguised, a fire that burned so hot it was almost frightening. But it was more than hunger. It was need. A desperate, consuming need that went beyond desire and closer to worship.
"I am yours," you said, your voice barely above a whisper. "I have always been yours."
He took your face in his hands. His palms were warm, his fingers threading through your hair, and when he kissed you it was not gentle. It was fierce, demanding, his mouth slanting over yours with an urgency. His tongue swept against your lower lip, seeking entrance, and you opened for him willingly, letting him taste you, letting him take what he needed.
His hands moved from your face to your shoulders, to the lacings of your gown. He was surprisingly deft, his fingers making quick work of the knots and ties that Baela had so carefully arranged. The fabric slid from your shoulders, pooling at your feet, leaving you in your shift. The firelight shone through the thin fabric, outlining your body in shades of gold and amber.
Jace stepped back, his eyes traveling over you with an intensity that made you shiver. "Beautiful," he murmured. "You are so beautiful. I do not deserve you."
"You do," you said. "You deserve everything."
He shook his head slowly. "I should have died. I should have drowned or bled out or been eaten by the creatures of the deep. But you would not let me go. You brought me back. You gave me this second chance." He stepped forward again, his hands settling on your hips, his thumbs tracing the curve of your hipbones through the thin fabric. "Everything I am now, everything I do from this moment forward, is because of you. Do you understand that? I am yours more than you are mine. You own me. Body and soul. Whatever is left of my soul."
"There is nothing wrong with your soul," you protested, but even as you said it, you remembered the old texts, the warnings, the whispers about those who came back changed. Fire wights, the red priests called them. Creatures of flame, animated by something older and darker than mere life.
Jace smiled, and in the firelight, his eyes seemed to flicker with an inner flame. "I hope you are right," he said. "But it does not matter. Wrong or right, I am yours. And tonight, I am going to show you how much that means to me."
He kissed you again, his hands slid the shift from your shoulders. It joined the gown on the floor, and then you were bare before him, your skin glowing in the candlelight.
"Lie down," he said, and his voice was thick with desire. "Lie down and let me worship you."
You obeyed, climbing onto the bed and settling against the pillows. The silk was cool against your heated skin, a pleasant contrast to the warmth of the fire and the heat of his gaze. He undressed with the same grace he had shown in unlacing your gown, his tunic and breeches falling away to reveal the body you had glimpsed during his recovery, when the maesters had changed his bandages and you had looked away out of modesty. Now you let yourself look.
He was leaner than he had been before, the weeks of bedrest having stripped away some of the muscle he had built in the training yard. But he was still beautiful, his shoulders broad, his waist narrow, his skin marked here and there with scars: the new ones from the arrows, still pink and healing at an unnatural speed, and older ones from years of swordsmanship and dragon-riding. The scar on his neck was the most prominent, a silver-pink line that traced the path the arrowhead had taken when the maesters finally cut it free.
He climbed onto the bed beside you. His hands found you again, stroking down your sides, over your hips, along your thighs. His touch was gentle at first, exploratory, learning the shape of you. But there was an undercurrent of urgency in it, a barely leashed desire that made his fingers tremble against your skin.
"I have received," he said wryly, "a great deal of unsolicited advice on how to proceed tonight."
You could not help the laugh that escaped you. "From whom?"
"Daemon, primarily." Jace's expression was somewhere between amused and pained. "He was very...thorough. I suspect he enjoyed it far more than I did. He kept saying that I should prepare you first, that I should take my time, that I should not simply impale you like a boar on a spit."
You covered your face with your hands, mortified and amused in equal measure. "I am going to kill him."
Jace laughed, a genuine, warm sound that reminded you of the boy he had been before the war. "Please do not. I think he meant well, in his own peculiar way." He leaned down and kissed your collarbone, his lips trailing a path of fire along your skin. "And he was not wrong. I do not want to hurt you. I want this to be good for you."
His mouth mapped every inch of your body, his lips and tongue and teeth finding all the places that made you gasp and arch and moan. He kissed the hollow of your throat, the curve of your breasts, the soft skin of your inner wrists. He spent long, torturous minutes learning the shape of you, the sounds you made when he found a particularly sensitive spot, the way your breath hitched when his hand slid between your thighs.
He was patient, far more patient than you had expected given the hunger in his eyes. His fingers explored you with careful precision, stroking and circling and pressing until you were trembling beneath him, your hands fisted in the silk sheets, your body arching toward his touch like a flower turning toward the sun.
"Please," you gasped, and you did not even know what you were asking for. "Please, Jace, I need..."
"I know what you need," he murmured against your skin. "I know. Let me take care of you."
His fingers continued their gentle assault, coaxing you higher and higher until you shattered beneath him, your cry swallowed by his mouth as he kissed you through your release. When you finally stilled, trembling and breathless, he pulled back to look at your face.
"There," he said, and his voice was rough with restrained desire. "Now you are ready."
He positioned himself above you, his body a warm weight pressing you into the mattress. You could feel him, hard and insistent against your thigh, felt the blunt pressure of him at your entrance.
"This may hurt," he said, and his voice was tight with the effort of holding himself back. "Only for a moment. I will try to be gentle."
You reached up and cupped his face in your hands. "I trust you."
He pushed forward, slowly, carefully, and you felt the pressure build and build until there was a sharp, bright flash of pain. You gasped, your fingers tightening on his jaw, and he froze immediately, his eyes searching your face.
"Are you all right?"
"Yes," you breathed. "Yes, I'm...it's fine. Don't stop."
He moved again, sinking deeper, and the pain began to fade, replaced by a strange, stretching fullness that was not unpleasant. He was trembling above you, his muscles rigid with the effort of holding back, and you realized how much he wanted this, how much he was restraining himself for your sake.
When he was fully seated inside you, he paused, his forehead dropping to rest against yours. His breath came in harsh, ragged gasps, and his eyes were closed, his expression one of almost religious intensity.
"I can feel your heartbeat," he whispered. "I can feel it. Here. Inside you. The blood you gave me. The life you gave me. It's like...it's like coming home."
He began to move, slow, shallow thrusts that gradually deepened as your body adjusted to him. The pain faded entirely, replaced by a growing pleasure that built and coiled in your belly like a spring being wound too tight. His name fell from your lips again and again, a litany, a prayer, and he answered each one with a kiss, a touch, a murmured endearment.
And then he pulled back, and he looked down at the place where your bodies were joined, and he stopped moving.
"Jace?" Your voice was hazy with pleasure, confused by the sudden stillness. "What is it?"
He did not answer immediately. His eyes were fixed on the small smear of blood on his length when he withdrew slightly, the evidence of your maidenhead, bright red against his skin. You felt your face flush with embarrassment, you had known there might be blood, the septas had warned you, but the expression on Jace's face was not one of concern or distaste.
It was fascination. Deep, reverent, hungry fascination.
"Your blood," he said, and his voice was strange, distant, as if he were speaking from very far away. "It was your blood that brought me back. Your blood that you spilled. Your blood that pulled me out of the darkness."
His hand moved down, his fingers brushing against your inner thigh, and when he lifted them, they were stained with a faint smear of red. He looked at it for a long moment, and then he lifted his fingers to his lips and tasted it.
You should have been disturbed. You should have been frightened. But all you felt was a strange, dark thrill, a shiver of something that was equal parts desire and recognition.
"My sorceress," Jace breathed. "My beautiful, brave, miraculous sorceress. You marked yourself for me. You bled for me. And now I will spend the rest of my life proving myself worthy of that sacrifice."
He bent his head and kissed your mound, right at the top of your slit, where the blood had dripped. His tongue darted out, tasting, and you gasped at the unexpected sensation. Then he was sliding back inside you, filling you again, and this time there was no restraint, no careful gentleness. This time there was only fire.
He moved with a ferocity that stole your breath, each thrust deeper and harder than the last, his body driving into yours obsessively. He found a spot inside you that made white-hot pleasure spark behind your eyes, and he angled his hips to hit it again and again, his cock bullying that same sweet spot until your moans broke into sobs and your fingers clawed at his back.
"Yes," he crooned against your ear. "Yes, let go. Let me hear you. Let me feel you. You are mine, my love, my wife, my sorceress. You brought me back from the darkness, and now I am going to fill you with life."
Tears were streaming down your face, not from pain but from the overwhelming intensity of it all: the pleasure, the love, the strange, dark magic that hummed between you like a living thing. You clung to him, your body meeting his thrust for thrust, your moans dissolving into wordless cries.
"Please," you sobbed, and you did not know if you were begging for mercy or for more. "Please, Jace, please..."
"Come for me," he commanded. "Come for me, and I will give you what you want. I will give you everything. Come for me now."
His hand slid between your bodies, his fingers finding that sensitive nub at the apex of your sex, and the combination of his touch and his thrusts and his voice was too much...You shattered. Your vision went dark, pleasure crashing through you in waves so intense they were almost painful. You cried out, his name or a prayer or both, and he followed you over the edge a moment later, his body going rigid above you as he spent himself inside you with a groan that sounded like a sob.
You lay tangled together, your bodies slick with sweat, your breath coming in harsh, ragged gasps. His face was buried in your neck, his lips pressed against the pulse point beneath your jaw, and you could feel his heartbeat thundering against your chest.
When he finally lifted his head, his eyes were soft again, the blazing fire banked to a warm glow. He brushed the tears from your cheeks with gentle fingers, his touch a stark contrast to the fierce passion of moments before.
"I love you," he said simply. "More than the crown. More than the throne. More than anything in this world or the next."
"I love you too," you whispered. "Always. Whatever happens."
He smiled that slightly odd smile of his, slightly off, but still so warm and loving. "Then we will have an heir," he said, his hand sliding down to rest on your belly. "If the gods are willing. A child of fire and blood, born of our union. A child who will carry our legacy into the future."
Part 3: pending... Sneak peak/Chapter 3 summary: There is a search for Rhaena and Sheepstealer. Even having experienced firsthand how deadly a wild dragon can be, having witnessed they can be claimed, Jace gets a mad idea to try to bond with other wild dragons residing near Dragonmont on Dragonstone. While Rhaenyra, Daemon and the dragonseeds fly to take King's Landing, the couple left behind on Dragonstone cut their honeymoon short, sneak off, and encounter Cannibal and Greyghost.
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