Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Pinpricks of warmth avail themselves in Alerah's touch—freckled, sun-bathed fingers wet inside the attar of roses.

Helaena's chambers are no less filled with exuberance than hints of hidden danger. Curtains hanging in loose folds sift moonlight like flour across their faces.

It's with diligence that the girl combs through Helaena's milk-white curls, twines them together like a tapestry, and runs a thin bead of oil across each newly fastened plait.

"Would you like to hold one?" Helaena's voice splashes.

"They're truly harmless, Alerah."

A lizard—but not quite—takes the appearance of a snake inside Helaena's palm, curled into itself, legless. Alerah's reminded again of the tittering of beetle wings, the warble of bush crickets and scarabs clustered in the man-made contraptions the queen's commissioned.

She's made worse judgements. Setting aside a meager sum for her daughter's leisures won't bring the house to ruin.

The creatures are both smooth and squamous, delicate and durable, a collection of contradictions Alerah bears no impulse to understand. The bulbous, rutting head of the hazelworm in between Helaena's fingers writhes, as grease-skimmed as an eel, before it escapes under the aegis of her deliberately loose fingers.

"Careful," the princess hums, turning back to look at Alerah's horrified face.

Under the labyrinth of skirts between them, brilliant shades of vermillion and blue-green for Alerah, the lizard burrows.

Helaena lifts a row of her gown as silk-velvet cascades onto the floor, and Alerah moves to steady herself on the headboard. A moan escapes from the foot of the bed, weight shifted too eagerly, and Alerah digs the oily pads of her fingers into the wood with as much might as she's able to muster. Enough to keep herself immobile as the creature squirms with agitation.

Helaena offers the worst outcome to consider when she asks, "what if he avails us?"

"We shall sleep in the godswood, then," Alerah says.

She can't decipher the cleverness in Helaena's voice through its honeyed veneer.

"Or I shall find myself in the servants' quarters for another night."

Helaena rummages through their skirts before looking up at Alerah's face, amusement casting rogue onto Helaena's cheeks.

"Assure me that I'll come to no harm. I'll swear featly, anything," Alerah whispers.

Helaena laughs, plucking the hazelworm from the nest of linens it's explored during all the commotion.

Alerah's contestation never approaches the far outskirts of her mind, coiling as inward as the cottonmouths in Helaena's menagerie of self-claimed wonders. And for once, Alerah must agree, the creatures do posses a certain whimsically enjoyable element within the stronghold of her mind. Salamanders, she learns—with much protest—are born from a camping flame. Perhaps they're just as pyrokinetic as their winged counterparts.

Dragons.

"He bears a strange resemblance, do you not agree?" Helaena asks.

"To whom?"

"The Blood Wyrm."

Caraxes, of course. Although, Alerah's not inclined to see the creature, nor its rider. She's yet to meet Prince Daemon for all her misfortune.

"Ah," she says.

Descending from the higher post of the bedframe, Alerah embraces a more self-effacing calm.

"I wouldn't profess to know."

It's not within the gods' nature to grant credence to mortal wishes, but Alerah refrains from posture—from all the self-induced suffering the lords of Westeros implore from their fitful gods, their heedless gods, and thinks of her most incorruptible desires.

She thinks of Tyrosh and its teeming harbors, the stink of sea snails, bone-thick fish, and mussels soaked in the vinegar she loves. And she wonders if she recalls these memories with as much precision as before, or if her time spent in King's Landing has caused her to distort her only childhood happiness.

Alerah's a foundling, not unlike the many slave-children of Essos.

Before him—before Aegon the Conqueror journeyed to Westeros, before Targaryens were no less fabled to have carried the title of a lower house in Valyria, before all of it, Alerah's ancestors were dragontamers. Through sheep, not blood magic. That's what she chooses to believe, regardless of what she's been told.

It was the Archon of Tyrosh who claimed her, who conferred his name, honors, and wealth, abundant in all, onto her. She wasn't trueborn, she wasn't even his, but she was enough to admire for a man whose ambitions had long outgrown him. She was to be sold to the highest bidder, but—as always—men's hearts are fickle. She's stayed with the Archon ever since.

Alerah inherited a hundred siblings from him.

They would pronounce her blood-tainted, with her parentage uncertain—with a muddle of masters avowing to have bred the last silver-haired Valyrian in the city, Inerora. Her beautiful mother.

Someone must have accomplished the unfeasible. For some reason, Inerora was kept from slaughtering her infant daughter just as she managed with all her other bastards. It was said that she went mad with grief much before Alerah's time.

Alerah's foot knocks against a metal tin as it snaps her back to cruel realities.

Her time spent with the Targaryens—the Greens—more accurately, is nothing more than a stepstone in her life. Greater things, he ventured, she always heard him call her to greater things, but what would the Archon know of the politics in Westeros until he was actually burdened with them? What would he know if he's beseeched his daughter to become a servant? A thrall?

She's never relished her true purpose—a concubine for a king, a wife for a lord's son, a broodmare for a master. That's why she was sent here. Training. Wait on the future king of Westeros, and who knows what power Tyrosh will gain in the near future?

"Will you mount a dragon?" Helaena's voice falls to a murmur, ringing in her ear. "Possess one?"

Alerah turns to the mirrors that encompass them like a siege, a dozen perfectly round, and a dozen more the shape of ellipses. Reflections pool around them, casting back their faces through the cut of the moon—just barely fading by dint of the oculus.

"I'll never have a dragon," she says, feathering away her discomfort, eyes fixed upon a wayward, red-hot curl pressed tightly against her mouth.

"I boast no talent for it—nor the fortitude."

"You shall," Helaena sighs, eyes half-seen through a pale partition of lashes.

"You shall clamber up, and up, and up, until you are no longer tethered to anyone—not even yourself," her voice reaches a crescendo, and then bliss—overtaking her features. "And when the dragon finds respite in your coals, your fervor, you shall ride. At last."

Difficult to discern truth, or meaning, Helaena's words remain as little more than dream, fragmented, a far-sighted daze that beats down upon her with the Summer's heat. Yes, Alerah reasons the climate has taken its way with the princess, created senseless mirages one would see above the endless dunes in Dorne.

"Shall we call upon Aegon, then?" Helaena asks, a sadness drowned in her voice, a lull that seeks Alerah's protest, craves for it. She picks at her nails. "The hour is late."

"If that is what the princess wishes for tonight, then so it shall come to be."

"Yes," she says, defeated as soon as the words are coaxed from her lips. Alerah likes to think that neither cares for this pretense. "Yes, I believe that is the sensible thing to do. What mother would want. The twins—they shall be glad for another sibling. I know it."

"Of course, just as you are for Aemond."

"Has he received you well?"

Altogether, Alerah feels a wave of treacherous white waters rushing to extinguish the fire fanning beneath her cheeks.

"N—No, I apologize," Alerah says, annoyance beginning to overcome her fingers, her work heedless and hurriedly woven together. "I didn't intend to refer to the prince with such familiarity. We've not had the pleasure to exchange words, lest we consider the formal occurrences. 'Tis only, I understand, the manner in which he looks upon you as sister. He's always appeared kind."

"No more than you."

Helaena's laughter, her warm, effervescent laughter alleviates Alerah of any misspoken word. If it were Queen Alicent, or worse still, the Hand of the King, every slip would be a weapon leveled against her throat. Jabbering on would entail her misery rather than work to rectify her mistakes.

Thus, Helaena has become her most beloved confidant in the vipers' nest of King's Landing. Above the handmaidens, and even, herself. For Alerah is the singular—the crag above a storm's unceasing blows, the one person in who she can depend on with earnest. Even Helaena surpasses her love for herself.

"You honor me, princess."

And she means it, a wealth of affection spiraling her stomach into a knot.

"Let me collect your husband, hm?"

Rather than change, Alerah merely gathers up the apron she's swaddled in the corner of the room and the servant's cowl to accompany it. She places both over her fine cerulean-blue, eventually binding the threads of the veil atop her drumming skull when she's done.

Fitting, she thinks, neither servant nor lady.

She leaves the princess to her own devices, slipping beyond the threshold of the giant's door and the kingsguard who stands over its path. Before she continues, she hears a familiar voice sweep alongside her temples. She twists back to receive the call.

"Pleasant dreams, Lady Alerah."

"Greetings onto you, Ser Harrold. Have you delighted in your post this evening? Perhaps, unwilling in all your efforts, chanced upon a rumor?"

He laughs mightily, all heart and lung.

"You and the princess guard your secrets well enough. You hardly need my talents, nor my wellspring of knowledge."

"Oh, nonsense," she says. Drawing closer, and now within earshot, her voice drags to a whisper.

"We're in need of a wellspring more than ever in this dreadful summer, a drought of knowledge, or a drought of sense? It's become quite the demand for me to tolerate your fellow members as of late. The twins—"

"Both?" he quirks a brow, as if to ask a touching question. When should he knock their helms together, and to what degree.

He's honorable, and honor's not a trait that can suborn one's way through the city—as much as Alerah longs for the contrary, of course.

She places a well-meaning hand on Harrold's plate, just beneath the shoulder.

"Well, one or the other does not show the consideration to come to me in advance. He merely sets off to inform me of my summons moments before I am due to arrive. Helaena must always contend with this, place her own dresses, pour her own cups—it's unheard of, it's abominable!"

She laughs. "I refuse to take fault in the matter any longer."

Like a raconteuse spinning her yarns, Alerah finds another culprit to lay her addresses.

"Then, there is Ser Rickard Thorne," she says.

"Do be merciful. We'll have no knights left to serve at your discretion."

"I just need one," a dullness tugs at her throat, a Tyroshi humor that rarely hits its mark in the belly of Westeros, "and barring the fact, there is not much in the way of adulation. Ser Rickard is brave. He is strong. He is not, however ... "

"Bright."

"Hm, yes, that is the word, isn't it? Bright," looming above where his chest piece converges, Alerah finds her fingers mapping their own tangled designs in the steel. Sudden is the sound when Alerah curls her fingers into a claw, scratching, and the metal whirs under her pulse. "Lord Commander, I must not have misgivings when I tell you of this, but Ser Criston—"

"Child," he says, eyes overlooking her shoulder. There's reprimand, voice shingly, as though a mass of pebbles has washed ashore.

Then, there, comes the Dornishman.

"Cole, how goes it? Prince Aegon, is he well?"

"Well enough."

The dark-haired knight shuffles into her view, cloak dragged against his heels—dirtied.

He's fidgeting with his gauntlet, forehead wrinkled, brows screwed up, inexplicably handsome by account of almost every flowering woman in the castle. Alerah wilts from their blathering. The younger are keen for his attention. The older are worse, their petals curling around his hair, his hands, stroking, brushing—as though they'll simply parch up otherwise.

"And are you the same, Lady Alerah? Have you been charging the princess with your stories? Your people have an aptitude for it, I've heard."

My people, is it, she wants for her voice to become a mountain.

"Where are you venturing to then, my lady? The kitchens?"

"Gods, no. Helaena—"

"Princess Helaena," Criston interrupts, always keen to correct.

Alerah has the mind to reserve the crack of her tongue for another evening. Eyes bowling like baked apples into the back of her skull, the Tyroshi plucks at a few lingering, stray hairs sticking across her nape.

The cowl itches at times.

"She's requested her husband at her side. Merely another curtain of darkness I must endure alone."

"Hm," he says. The younger of the Kingsguard nods, crabbed, ill-humored, and Alerah looks for nothing else save for an intervention. How much more she can demonstrate her obedience to the Crown, or skim through court politics without a moment of imbedding her personhood into the affair, holds no consequence for the queen and her followers despite how much she tries.

Harrold bows, soon departing, and Alerah is left to Criston's wordless dissent. She's mulled over forming a kindred relation to him—if such a feat were possible.

She turns to face him.

"Flatterer," she says with finality.

Criston beams at the candied accusation, eyes like beads of black treacle.

"Dornish customs are not so unalike, Ser Criston. We're cut from the same cloth, the blood of the Rhoynar flowing—right beneath our skin," she draws her wrist against the light, churning, until a bangle catches with the shine. "I dread you have offered up your sword just for this blood to waste, however."

"I do not mourn the children I have never sired. I fear not celibacy, nor my oaths as a sworn knight."

"No, you don't," she says, affirming. "My ser, that wasn't what I've implied, and I doubt you're misguided on the matter."

She knows, somewhere, she knows he doesn't partake in her tricks—finds no use for them. Criston's mirage, like mires of garden work and trees on a dune's curve, all but dissipates. True suspicions always reveal themselves. He'll reveal himself in time.

His breastplate, fauld, and tassets, gods, everything chinks when the knight moves closer.

"I know you do not find ours a respectable creed, Alerah. You've made mention, a considerable amount for a handmaiden from a sea's away, but know this," he says. Laced with turmeric and salt and bitter frustration that pinches her throat, Criston's tongue wreathes rebellion. "The kingsguard is respectable—as long as I serve."

"And just who do you serve?"

"Everyone."

No one. If they'd shared a close relationship, for the proximity between them offers no substitution, Alerah swears Criston to have taken up her cheeks in the palm of his plated hands. He leans forward, a ghost of a caress trailing across her chin, and she's wrested into his eyes.

"Even you."

As he withdraws, Criston slips the bangle from her wrist. He takes a moment to pause.

"Becoming careless? Rather, would it be more apt to suggest you're a somewhat careful girl, quick-minded in your stratagems?"

"I've forgotten it was there—but I needn't offer up vindication to you, ser."

"None that I require. You aren't the first, and you won't be the last who's asked the stars for more from their station."

"Not stars, not the Seven, not even Mother Rhoyne. I pray only to fire, and for nothing as trivial as the favor of an adulterous leech. I shall return one day, soon enough, and without a babe in arms to collect my due," Alerah snorts, letting her shoulders buckle. "From a foreign ruler's son, no less. What insult."

"If that is what Queen Alicent entitles you," he says, returning the bangle, "little fork-tongue."

"Now, leave, collect your prince," he shrugs. "I'm not to be distracted."

The journey to his chambers shouldn't be so ill-contrived, so fucking far, but it remains as such no matter how much she complains. Alerah's effortlessly reminded of every missing and meek-minded drudge who'd chanced upon the misery that is Aegon's favor. She hates going to him. She's done it a handful of times before.

In and out. That's all there is to it.

He must see it as a pleasure sport—something like jousting—in his vacant shell of a mind. Either way, not a single well-informed servant volunteers to attend to him at this hour. She only does it because she's been told to have Helaena meet with him on every full moon.

She reaches the other end of the corridor, fingers confident in their weaving. Every fine, running stray of hair tucks under the veil she's made to adorn. For the uniform, she's always been grateful. It doesn't distinguish her. She might even feel prepared to greet R'hllor himself with such disguise.

And just as she's reached and opened the door, his door, a surge of discomfort nips the back of her skull.

"What are you doing?" Aegon's voice clatters throughout the expanse of his quarters, echoing with accusation.

He barks right above her shoulder.

She spins around, and he offers no surrogate for comfort, the thinning of his eyes telltale of his pitch-black mood so early into the night's welcome.

He appears—well, tired—with no lack of censure at Alerah's disposal. What comfort could she possibly offer besides that of which he would demand?

Sunken like graves and bloodied, his eyes bear a ring of resemblance to the fires of Asshai—Red Priests offering their faith outside Alerah's rooms, smiling and flittering with incantations cast from their tangled tongues. How she longs to be enchanted again in the way only religion can do so, but Aegon lacks the years of study to convert even a child to his cause.

"Your Lady Helaena has requested I fetch you for tea in her room."

"Fetch me? And just why do you presume I would follow what she dictates like a blind mongrel?"

As Alerah splits her mouth open, lips rubbing on a word—a word she's forgotten in the twinkling of his eye—Aegon reaches for her head.

His hand rips the veil off, uncovering a tumble of half-pinned curls, now plunged against her waist.

Aegon toys with it, indifferent, and ostensively eager to begin an onslaught against her person. Now that she's made a person. Individualized. Her only sense of protection pilfered from her with such ease. His new smile creases into fat lumps of dough.

She can almost attest to the feeling of her tongue, rested heavy like a log inside her mouth, the gravity of the moment having been lost on the prince and reduced, instead, to the alcove of her mind that would sooner have her scream if anyone cared to attend to it.

Aegon brushes past her shoulder, circling the center of a table with half-emptied bottles spread atop its weathered surface.

"Perhaps I am mistaken, but you haven't seen your sister-wife in a fortnight. Don't you grow weary when she's absent?"

"On the contrary, I'm invigorated," he says.

He moves an obsidian-colored jug, fat-bottomed with a handle, then a traditional green.

"And you're a fresh discovery, yes? Someone to keep me company as well? I may grow weary without your presence if you're just as vibrant as your colors. Gorgeous, gorgeous girl."

"Unfortunately, I doubt you'll find much fire in me."

"That really is for the best, isn't it?"

Furling a finger to his bottom lip, Aegon's nail scrapes his teeth. They shine like pearls.

"Have we—have I—"

It takes but one glance to throw her into the image. Pale upon pale, skin upon skin, satin moored around his ample girth.

"No."

She'd brought him a flagon once in the hours of the lark as one roosted upon a bough outside, trilling. She remembers how the sun dipped its balmy fingers through the window, and when she moved the flagon aside, Aegon stirred, white gut stained with blood.

Not his, of course.

He smiles. "Let's make amends to that, shall we?"

Aegon pours his fill into a cup.

"Prince Aegon?"

"Mhm, yes," he breathes in the oil, fingers wound across his neck like a vise-grip, the scent galling.

"I fear you forget yourself, and your duties."

"Fuck those," he blows out a rush of uninhibited laughter. Taking a sip, mouth pursed into a flower, Aegon paces back and forth inside the room.

It's a half-hearted attempt for peace, and Aegon knows only triumph. He needn't ever make compromises—those would only encumber him as the clipped wings of a bird forestalls escape.

Finally, he finds a suitable position, splaying himself on the bed and all its adornments, a grand emerald on the fat of his finger beckoning her to come forth.

"Now," he hums, tone deceptively kind.

"Come to bed," he says, slumping over the furs—wolves and cave bears that Alerah knows he's had no hand in hunting—and makes an idle gesture towards his lap. The ring effuses a viridescent light in the shadows of the silk-strung canopy. "Right here, love. It'll bring me great comfort. A bit of fun for you."

"My lord, I don't wish to disgrace myself," Alerah's disgust is palpable, but Aegon, overindulged by his cups and thick-headed with arrogance, mistakes it for caution. "Although, it would be an honor to lay at the head of a dragon."

Poor consolation for one that can take its fill. Like bartering with an outlander that has come to maraud you of all, anyway.

"Oh, I'll be sure to honor you all night," he drawls. Warm, languorous wine bubbles in his throat, heady on the tongue. "You're tall, hm, taller than ours—where are you from again?"

"Tyrosh."

"Tyrosh," he says mockingly.

It should be easy for him to conjure Tyrosh in mind, but Alerah discerns the unfamiliarity shrouded by his false bravado.

"I've yet to witness the Free Cities for myself; however, Sunfyre has yet to stretch his wings that great a distance. Are all the women there as enticing as you? You've a wet, girlish tongue. How I long to feel it around my cock," another lazy, tippling sound erupts from the bowels of his chest like a cat's thrum.

"Settle yourself between my legs."

He smacks and rubs his thighs, preening the strands from his face with an unoccupied hand.

Alerah's throat constricts, and not even the sweetness of flesh-filled pears could expand it once again.

"No, my prince."

"No? But I am your prince."

Alerah's eyes dart about the expanse of the room, conspicuous in their attempt to contrive an evasion—to somehow delude the beast into relinquishing some hold. Perhaps, a naïve perspective, she understands. Although, she's with few choices on the matter when another means that she must comply with whatever Aegon posits.

"There's another prince, isn't there? Two, rather. It's with—"

Alerah's tongue darts out of her mouth, wetting her burning lips. "Trepidation—that I ask whether my loyalties be divided, and weak, if a clash in command were to ever arise."

Aegon's almost caught off-guard. He reclines further onto the bed.

"My brothers take no interest in low-bred women, I'm afraid, but I—I find it irreverent to discriminate. You are just as worthy if that is what troubles you. The one that," he sighs, "would rather bury his head in a tome instead of a woman's tender cunt, he enjoys sovereignty over your mind?"

"No, I've suggested that—"

"Yes, and you have to obey us both. Just as you do Helaena. I'm certain you would enjoy that from your looks—obeying. It might be in your nature, or it might illicit something far more carnal inside of you. As I've said, come here."

"Therein rests the difficulty, I adore Helaena. Once you are joined as husband and wife, the gods look favorably towards the union. They cast their outrage onto those who do not. It's no less true for a prince's marriage. Perhaps the honor accounts for more severity."

"Bugger the gods and their rules!"

An eruption of laughter bursts from him and lingers in the air before it spoils, curdling Aegon's mouth like sour milk. He plinks his chalice onto the dresser abutting the bed. "Seven Hells, you sound like my mother."

"I don't follow your gods, but I have my own convictions. You're beginning to incense me, my lord."

"And I'm beginning to become impatient. Must I lead you?"

He lumbers to his feet, the slob, and approaches Alerah with a confidence that suggests he's succeeded with his aggression before. Although, the Tyroshi needn't presume, because she's listened—concentrated on the whispers that frequent brothels where she visits the silk dancers, kitchen mouths of the Red Keep, and the rest.

She's made well to avoid the prince altogether, or to only incite him when he's drowned in his cups. Unable to pluck her face from a crowded room.

Until now. When he's ripped her veil from her, a spill of copper-red to distinguish the girl.

As straight as a bolt, Aegon lunges towards the Tyroshi with his last half-step.

He clasps his mouth around hers, all sopping, artless, slovenly with spit. Fruit pours onto Alerah's tongue, pomegranate, or plum, and she can feel herself choke from the wine and whatever lingers in its place. She reaches for his twisted curls, for the mop of silver-blond atop his warm skull.

Aegon closes the gap at a breakneck, then revels in the tongue-full he takes from her, mouth drawn back just to press into her again. It could be delicious, so violently delicious if it wasn't him. Stolen in the hidden pockets of the prince's chambers as though he were her lover, she could come to remember the memory fondly.

But Aegon's no lover.

She writhes, twisting sharply, just to cover her own squalls.

His hand juts out above hers, firm and forced against her jaw.

"G—Go," she whimpers, half-breathless with Aegon mauling her neck. "Le—Let me g—o."

Her fingernails twist like thorns around his tangled, grease-coated hair. He's akin to the lizard she's touched in Helaena's sheets. She loathes how delicate she can be.

Even now, she can't bring herself to cause injury to the deserving cretin. He pushes, prods, and means to fuck her until she's red and sobbing for none of it. He's a nightmare, a fiend come to drag her to the Seven Hells.

He's not just a common whore. He's Helaena's brother, her husband, the rightful heir. It would be treason if she could so much as utter a word against him, the transports of delight for him when he chances to inform the castle of another notch above the royal bed.

Skewing her mouth from his, Alerah sucks in what seems like a breath that takes the cosmos. Aegon swoons, clumsy in all his efforts, the wine and the kiss and her sinful, squirming tongue playing upon his—until he's left off balance.

She drives him to his knees, and for one dauntless moment, he's hers to do with what no one has done to an adequate degree.

She raises her palm, then strikes him, hard, his cheek crimsoning like a rose underneath. A sanguine hue blends color into his features.

"You dare strike a dragon?"

He snaps, blood and bile and gods know what else flooding against the roof of his mouth. She can smell iron.

"I'll have your hand crushed and cleaved from your wrist!"

She can't seem to sheathe her wrath. All of it, months of torture that has nestled inside her, waxed and waned their bulbous bodies, too colossal for her to properly contain. She's become as indignant as a child in this moment. Endlessly, she's enveloped herself in high dudgeon that has no place in the walls that press against her.

Ever the reticent lady. Tight-lipped, cloistered, a foreign offering.

Piggish as the creature he is, avid to tear and sup on the sum and substance of those in his attendance, he still feels entitled to more. He wants for everything. Let him have it.

She lurches away from his sniveling face. Crushed and cleaved.

"Is that so? Then allow me to make my peace with it now."

Suddenly, her arm is caught with a hand so forceful that it nearly propels her back without, seeming, much effort from its part. Muscles ricking from the whiplash, fingers forced slack until she unfurls them altogether, Alerah whines in pain. It's her only recourse to swing her body around, skirts following, and she raises the other hand against her captor's face.

The silver-tongued prince. Marred by his own impetuous youth, and gifted a godhead in the shape of a dragon.

Aemond.

"Brother—brother, I am ever so grateful."

"Shut your whimpering, fool," he snaps, his eye scoring daggers into Aegon's wretched face. "I considered leaving you to amend your own errors. At the very least, I assumed more discretion—in spite of the door standing ajar. An oversight on my behalf. How I've come to accredit you with far more tact than you clearly posses."

Alerah snarls at Aemond. "Perhaps you've overlooked many an error in your late years, my—"

"The bitch! Send her to the Black Cells, I don't ever want to see her."

"The Black Cells?" Aemond howls.

Taking swift note of her jibe, the focus is quickly overtaken by his brother's outrageous appeal.

"Are you as pig-ignorant as the ladies claim you, brother? On what account has this girl incited treason? Because she did not wish to become another one of your countless conquests? Or because she did not allow herself to become conquered?" he asks.

The younger prince swipes at his lips, frustrated. "If anything, we should reward that kind of conduct, should we not? Why punish the victors of war, and those who cannot so easily be broken?"

"Just take her out of here, Aemond," Aegon moans angrily. "Report her to mother for all I care. Let her make her judgements."

"Yes, you'd revel in that, wouldn't you? Knowing she is well-occupied with the kingdoms you refuse to oversee. She will only grant you pardon."

"Come, bitch," he snorts, wriggling his long, slender fingers in between each of hers. As a matter of getting her to move, Aemond tugs Alerah towards him—on the further side of his brother's reach.

"We'll dab your eyes dry and be done with this farce," he whispers.

Tempered by her body heat, a single hand interlocked and rubbing across the stretch of her palm with enough scandal to satisfy the whole keep, Aemond makes a low, guttural sound that reverberates in her ears.

Alerah stiffens altogether when she feels him, and wrenches away her hand just for him to retort with a short, cavalier shove. He moves her outside the door before she's vulnerable to Aegon again.

Aemond's staring at her with such contempt, it could choke someone. Perhaps, she dreadfully anticipates, he'll discipline her how he desires to himself.

There, Aemond stands, critical in his judgments. His lone, deep-seated eye makes heat flourish from the soles of her fingers. She finds herself wringing them together, as though they've been bruised along a thread of rope while laboring to draw a mast in the middle of sea. She feels like her life's been cut in half with that last encounter.

"What is it, girl?"

"Will I be sent to the gallows?" she blurts.

Aemond chuckles, amused, from what—she hasn't a clue. She's just assaulted his brother, the next king. The shadow of a smile, an almost smile, looms across his grave features.

"What ridiculous customs do you hail from, I wonder. No, you won't. He was in need of some correction even."

"I was informed of that before my arrival."

"Were you," he says, more affirmation than question. "You're from Essos. Bra—no, Tyrosh."

"Can you hear my accent?"

"No," he says. "Ao sepār yknagon hae lo ao've issare jentan hen iā lōgor |You just reek as though you've been led off a boat|."

Curling a single finger into the dip of her collarbone, Aemond careens into her skin.

"Pār, konīr iksis gerpa |Then, there is fruit|."

"Se ao, hen ānogar |And you, of blood|."

This elicits a laugh. Thank the gods.

"Your High Valyrian needs considerable work, Tyroshi. And your tongue cannot curl the way it was intended. That is something that cannot be taught, I'm afraid."

"Perhaps I can instruct you on how to tame a dragon then," she says, a dangerous lull in her voice. Still, he threads svelte-like fingers into the bush of her hair, attentive, her words an inducement of concern whether mild-minded or damning. "We are not as fortunate to have them brought to us in chains."

Denoting to the wild, untamed dragons of the Eastern coastlines, and more strewn along Essos's Western ends, treacherous crags and caverns hollowed out by scorching fires, Alerah boasts a bluff. Were she ever to encounter such a beast herself, she'd murmur a garbled prayer before ascending to the Hall of Light, welcoming whatever lays ahead of her.

She couldn't tame a dragon if her life depended on it.

"Be thankful it is I who found you and not one of my father's men. They would not be so gracious," Aemond sneers. The cut of his teeth is keen.

His breath clatters down her neck as he moves, examining her with an inquisitiveness unknown to her, like how an astronomer studies a fresh, whorled ring upon a planet.

"Although, I suspect our prince would prefer not to spy your face in court. Not without," he pauses, the implication laced between his tormenting eye far too evident for her to ignore. Tapping a finger on his cheek, he grins. "A few arrangements. As such, perhaps, I shall do you another kindness."

He means to put her against the torturer's knife—sharp questioning, a fingernail here, a lashing there. It may be that he seeks to find a companion in his plight, one singular to him, a gouged eye lolling from Alerah's socket and skull. He'd like that, wouldn't he? It's no more impossible than it is conceivable for someone of his rumored nature.

She hesitates, then reframes his words into those of her convenience. She'd rather play the fool than be discovered, feign a common birth, shed herself of his attention once and for all. She can bore him. That much she can do without a great deal of effort.

"Do you mistake me for someone I'm not, my lord? Have you spied me in court, or is that an ability you no longer seem to retain?"

Aemond's eye churns to the other end of the hall, and he laughs hideously, curbing what she would call frenzy spreading like a root in the pit of his gnarled stomach.

Then, like an arrow from a well-oiled bow, he's dragging her at her hair's ends, the Tyroshi's head rammed against a column parched with candles that quiver aloft.

"What are you called?"

"Alerah, my lord."

"Good. Go on."

"I've no other name," she says. "None that would interest you in any sense of the word."

Frustration swells in his chest, she sees, and the prince can't be sated with that alone. There's too much said, and yet nothing at all. Nothing for him to take any self-congratulatory victories.

"You lack even a modicum of insight then, servant girl," he says.

What comes next, comes as a word of promise.

"Shall I take you back to my chambers and finish what my brother has begun? As errant a fool he may be, he does have an inclination to reach for the sweetest thing in front of him. Do you fare it is my turn?"

"For all my lacking," she begins. "I imagined the fledgling prince to have an aversion for his brother's voracious appetite. It's quite beneath your station to invite a lowly attendant—such as myself—into your bed, much less the leavings of your brother. You are a dragon, not a whelp. Do you bear no shame assenting to scraps?"

"An attendant, yes, but lowly you are not. You've made sure to secure your position on that—what with your impertinence, your vile tongue—"

"Alerah, darling," a voice as smooth as the thread of rain cuts through the corridor, gripping at Alerah's throat in a fit of unmistakable horror. Worse than Aegon, worse than Aemond. Lady Hightower, or Lady Targaryen, she corrects herself, wends her way across the darkness that surrounds them. Both shadow and specter alike.

"Is something the matter, Aemond?"

He pushes himself off the stone.

"She appeared to be lost, the lamb," Aemond beats his tongue against the roof of his mouth, tilting his jaw to the side. He takes one glance at Alerah and smothers a curl behind her cheek. "Stumbled into the beast's burrow."

At this declaration, Alicent squeezes her eyes shut, wishing, wanting for nothing more than the words to be spoken and for whatever this may constitute to just disappear. She wraps her arms together self-soothingly, and hides them under forest-colored sleeves. Her shield, her comfort, Alerah thinks.

Cursing the gods for the effect of Aegon's misconduct on their mother has accomplished nothing, it appears.

"Has he—"

"No. You may wish to send a maester to his aid, however," sipping in a breath like mulled wine, the prince allows the moments to consume what remains of Alerah's far-removed sanity. Methodical in his devices.

She dreads the worst, quickly imagining her skull skewered on a stake, rotting outside the castle walls in the blistering heat of Summer.

Then Aemond does the unthinkable.

"I couldn't stay my hand."

He lies to the Queen Consort.

Alerah can't fathom why he's intervened, nor what benefit taking arms against his brother's own words presents.

She supposes she should be grateful. She isn't.

Alicent fretfully clutches her necklace, a river of radiant-cut topaz, splashing together, splintering off against the Seven-Pointed Star that adorns the middle.

"See to Helaena, and bolt the door."

Chapter Text

It startles him—how Aemond's mind has already begun to conjure her features, as abominable as they are soft and rigid and utterly embossed into the reaches of his mind when they're called to break fast on the morning's arrival. Aegon being nowhere in attendance.

He pushes another stray hair aside, silver decorating the outskirts of his ear like an altar of laden offerings.

He draws the first cup, begrudgingly thinking about his whoremonger of a brother. Good riddance to him.

Off to lick his wounds, Aemond surmises; although, he's not one to castigate the change when it's come so opportune in its unraveling. Better it be Aegon, always truant in his learning, and now, missing for the spread of cheese, delicate fat-clung meats, and trencher bread to serve as the platters.

He's never been grateful for anything in his pitiful existence, has he? How could he be? Everything's served to him as if scribed in the stars.

"Ae—mond! Ae—gon!"

The twins plump themselves on their mother's lap, and Jaehaerys, the mischief maker, articulates himself well enough through a mouthful of ground-pressed legumes.

Not like the Tyroshi, that's for certain. The way she battled to wrap her tongue around something as simple as blood—ānogar—well, one couldn't be faulted if they misunderstood her blathering nonsense. She could sooner be compared to a goat with that performance.

How does Cole style her, again? He's heard him on the battlements one evening, calling down to a girl with a fat face, all round-cheeked and red like an apple.

No. Red like a demon.

She-devil? Fork-tongue? Yes, he thinks, that's fitting.

Gods, he's jaded surely to ruminate on that impudent little maid when the hour demands he pay more attention to possibly anything else. He pours the ale himself.

Bafflement, frustration, one or the other erodes his patience for the cupbearers that stand idle outside the table's periphery. They're twisted—no, wrong in the semblance they pose—quiet as though it's an ordinary morrow, yet they're more restless than he's ever seen them before. Half-lurching forward, then shuffling back into their positions as though they're about to fall over otherwise.

It's curious as they lack Aegon's passions to sift through, dread haunting their eyes when the prince touts a lockstep with the women. Why the dread now?

The most unusual thing surrounding this circumstance remains to be the water in place of the wine. Only a preference hosted by one person in the keep.

Queen Alicent sits beside him, bridled like a birch tree, hands affixed in prayer that none can hear amidst clang of silverware and more dishes presented in a string of impenetrable chorus as the rounds are made. He should have known. There's something aberrant about her to be causing such discontent—the red-mane called Alerah.

If the Seven parade any semblance of justice, they'd see to Aegon's absence well into the darkness. Sunrise coming victorious against Sunfyre's majestic shadow. Then dawning, and new beginnings once again. Hells, he wouldn't dispute another moon's ripening of his brother's departure.

Perhaps they all need the lesson.

How he can continue this ceaseless provocation against everything the Crown has boasted for decades is beyond even Aemond's breadth.

"Hm," he hears the queen's hum, as sing-song as a nightingale.

Alicent unfurls her fingers, thumbing a corner of the crack of her lips. She's ill at ease when her veneration for the Faith would corrode the hours, and his brother's remaining sanity, into dust. She does that without effort. She makes things palpable to the senses—as real as mountains.

Whether it's something as trite as the decor or something as grievous as negotiating for his hand in marriage.

He reaches for a walnut buried between a collection of wrinkled dates and prunes.

"You've not joined us for a fortnight, mother," Aemond says. His fingers lick and linger about his jaw. "Is there need for concern?"

"None."

"Really?" he asks, one finger curving askant his good eye.

"Have you seen Aegon?"

Helaena eagerly, and unknowingly, cuts into the tension.

Jaehaerys and Jaehaera bounce with as much vigor as a sprite on, over, and under her legs, until a servant finally comes to guide the children from their mother's arms. He can see how she prostrates herself. Helaena's always ill-featured. Helaena, his most beloved creature in existence.

Another sobering thought bubbles in his sister's throat.

"I thought we might confer about—about—the twins," she laughs. That, too, is succeeded by a sourness on the tongue that Aemond has come to expect. She doesn't persist, not in the way Aegon always manages with a lecherous, thinning display of a smile. Like a little eel, his brother.

Helaena's of a more honest mind. That's her weakness, her shield, and a reward for womanhood.

He's not granted such freedoms to express himself, nor does he particularly want for them.

"Of course, whatever you wish to discuss, I am here," Alicent folds her fingers under Helaena's chin, propping it up with a whickering hum. "We mustn't allow the scourge of old canards to lay waste to the present. Aegon has amended himself—"

Aemond can't help himself at that. "Mother, need I remind you that bearing false witness—"

"Is as grave a sin as committing the act, my gratitude, Aemond," she says.

Laboring to suppress another sigh, the urge swarming Alicent like the seeds of a dried dandelion, she swallows her temper again.

"But I must remind you, also, of absolution. That is something we all must strive towards, hm? After all, we are imperfect," she says, seizing Helaena's clammy fingers inside her own. "Only the Father shall issue judgement, and who are we to repudiate that? Be kind to your brother. He is a forlorn child."

Helaena's eyes flutter, the deepest of the yellow-bellied violets in the garden, and she twitches out from underneath Alicent's touch.

"Please excuse us," his sister says.

She departs from the table, twins in tow.

Aemond would laugh if Helaena's candidness didn't make him so irritable. She's perfect only for the way she traipses off, leaving him to sort through their family troubles, leaving him to be the anchor—as always.

Now, he can't abide the madness of his mother's lies when dearest Helaena illuminates them so—he can't change them into honeyed truths. He can't ignore the frustration welling in his chest. His mother's here in his brother's absence. It's a double affront.

Waspish tongue sitting light in the cavern of his mouth, ready to flagellate anyone who would be so bold as to test his patience, the prince broods.

Silent, silenced, he doesn't know of which his mother embodies when he locks his eye onto hers.

"Who is she?"

Alicent stirs from her seat. "Who is who, Aemond?"

She feigns courage in the face of threat, he accredits her that.

"Hah," he breathes. It's all so humorless, really. "That girl your precious jewel of a son almost fucked. Although, I suspect that doesn't do well to narrow the choices."

Alicent picks up her chalice, lashes her leaves, leaves her shelter against his threatening violet hue. But gods, how he tires of this posturing.

"She is your sister's bedmaid."

His fingers drum on the table, one, then the other, and on and on like the pitter-patter of rain on cobbles. Like the rain after a weeping day of mass. Like the rain that bounces off Vhagar's sea-scorned scales during a descent.

His words come out like a dagger. "Is she not grown?"

"Dreams—terrors afflict her and she is need of a companion. What of it, Aemond?" she snaps.

"Then you and the blasted rest of the keep may reflect on why Aegon does not accompany her at night," he says, venom tickling the back of his throat. "As her true-hearted, noble husband."

Alicent's voice turns into a whisper with a keen edge. "You know why he does not. He slinks into the dark hours and hounds the servants in stairwells, in passages, in the courtyard! At least he may reserve what grain of honor he has with a lack of interruption—"

"In opposition to what, exactly? Allowing him to do as he pleases?"

A snort rushes past his raw lips—reddened from the grating, the scrape of his teeth.

"He does not have your inhibition," she says. Dornish red stains her tongue as she draws the muscle out, now fully partaking from a pitcher of wine the servants have scuttled to bring in the midst of whatever this may be.

It boasts a dry note that Aemond's beginning to take offense to in the course of this scathing rebuke. She begins to placate herself, not one to regard her voice until it's nearly squalling with feminine dramatics. "Notwithstanding the fact that you have lost your composure on more than several occasions."

"As have you, mother," he says.

Aemond's swift to issue his own judgement, recalling the sight of castle-forged steel dug into Rhaenyra's sleeve all those years ago on his behalf. "But is that not what we do when we love?"

"Passion is the folly of men. Bloodlust is a transgression against divine law. You would do well to remember that in order to avoid future consequence—"

"Is she from a noble house?"

Alicent takes another long, humorless drink from the chalice.

"There is speculation that I will not have repeated, do you understand?" she asks.

Aemond solemnly issues a nod. Whether out of expectation or as an instinct, he doesn't purport knowing.

"It may seem that your uncle sired a daughter with a Tyroshi when he was exiled from court. Someone from the Stepstones, someone who's ventured far into that wasteland of a continent. A questionable bloodline."

He finds that difficult to believe, but he entertains it all the same. "How so?"

"Perhaps one that predates the Doom."

Intrigue lifts Aemond's thick brow. "Her ancestors are Valyrian? From her mother's side as well?"

"It's always a possibility, but it's nothing to concern yourself over, Aemond. She has no legitimacy, nor claim. She's a bastard at most. A foreign bastard."

"I can see that in her coloring," he says. "The mutt."

Centuries of outbreeding have washed away her more beguiling features, he presumes.

"And a common girl with a clever, circumstantial fostering at the least. Nevertheless, she is a useful prospect. She has some pieces in her possession she would otherwise not if these declarations were unfounded," with a half-labored sigh, she says the rest as though it's an afterthought. "And she remains a maiden."

That catches his regard.

"Narrowly," he adds, and Alicent's white-hot gaze scintillates, a subtle twitch betraying her composure.

"For now," he offers instead. Yet, that does little more to dissuade her concerns, her eyes like twin flames flickering behind a veneer of regality.

Aemond shifts one leg over the other. "What do you intend to do with her?"

"I suppose we'll have her wed to a lord who boasts imagination for Valyrian blood. If she is your uncle's daughter, then all the better."

"Would he care?" he scoffs.

"That's wholly dependent on how we choose to utilize her."

"Wed to a lord," he thinks aloud, more to himself than to his mother. The words are beginning to taste strangely cathartic on his bone-dry tongue.

"And Aegon? What role does he play in this grand design? Absent from the table, absent from his duties."

"Aegon is a complicated matter, as you well know. His predilections are not easily channeled into conventional pursuits. We have our ways of managing him."

He chuckles. "Managing, you say? Is that what you call it?"

"Your brother may dance on the fringes of propriety, but he is still a dragon," she says. And with this as her final act of authority, Alicent gracefully slips a spoonful of molasses into her mouth before leaving Aemond to the silence—save for the rearrangement of silver reverberating in his ears.

Aegon appears, damned be his name, in the crestfallen slumber of night.

He first spies a tangle of silver-blond hair beneath a cowl that's too large for the figure's stature—just before the figure slouches against the hallway that connects Aemond to Helaena. He'd meant to rouse the handmaiden for answers when the girl would be most unprepared to flex her fiendish tongue. It seems he won't have the chance, however.

Aemond rolls his eye at who is undoubtedly Aegon, now retching the remainder of a meat pie garnished with cloves, and what looks to be chopped fans of parsley, onto the floor.

He sharply pulls Aegon's cowl back with a fwip when he comes up on him, suddenly aware of the stickiness glazing his fingertips. "Where have you fallen into this time? Another whorehouse's latrine?"

"No," Aegon answers simply, unaffected, snuffing another candle out before unclasping the cloak from his narrow-gauged shoulders. It plunges onto the floor with all the grace of a rider tumbling off his horse. "I've just made some arrangements. For our Ty—Tyroshi."

Glancing swiftly between their position and a recess in the walls, Aemond chooses to lead Aegon down a narrow path further North of Helaena's chambers. Eventually, Aemond decides on one of the unoccupied servant's rooms, and pushes Aegon into it. His drunkard of a brother collapses onto a chair.

"You remember where she's from," Aemond says.

"And I know her name," his brother guffaws, a slithering, near-reptilian sound leaking into his voice. "Alerah. She's always with Helaena. I've just never taken notice—"

"Because you hardly take notice to see your wife."

Aegon's eyes beat across his brother's frame, like the strong, muscle-bound wings of a dragon, before he coasts an arm underneath his head. His voice is distant, disinclined. "I tire of the same spread every evening, don't you, brother? What did you have this morn'? Bread and goat cheese?"

He waves his wrist flippantly. "Sylvi sends her affections."

At that provocation, Aemond's voice volleys impatience—tetchy-tongued. He can't abide to hear the whore's name. It sprouts her into existence when he'd much sooner forget everything she'd done to him. Under the title of experience. "What have you arranged?"

"Hm? Ah, yes," Aegon feigns a lightness at his tongue, "well, there's no use really in attempting to have the filthy creature hanged."

"Why not?" Aemond asks dully.

"Because that would not serve us, would it?" he shrugs. "Although we could offer a substitute bedwarmer to Helaena, I doubt the Archon would be as inclined to accept."

Torturously, Aegon begins to slur, half-pissed with Arbor gold and his brains half-fucked out of his skull.

"I've heard of her little pedigree, of course. As shit-stained as our dear cousins' mop of curls," he says. He cants his head from side-to-side. "So, I can't have her killed," he says, matter-of-fact, almost resigned.

"And you can't rob her of her maidenhead, either."

"Hm," Aegon purrs. As though that doesn't irk him in the slightest.

"Your remedy?"

"I want her starved. We'll use her foreign god as pretense—as means of," Aegon's fingers patter across the oakwood before he spews, "fasting, something of the sort!"

"All of this serves what purpose exactly? We should be focused on the assembly between Rhaenyra and—"

"Ugh, what of it?" Aegon sputters, choking with laughter. "We have time before that occurs. Don't spoil my entertainment until then, little brother. With some contrivance, we'll be able to set the stage for a rather memorable reception, and I, as always, will champion my family in whatever battles that are spurred."

He snorts.

"You do what you wish, Aegon. It has ne'er concerned me."

Chapter Text

The smell of black-burnt bacon wakes the castle alongside the more unenthusiastic tang of cumin.

Slipping from her bedside, Alerah buttons her robe and carefully patters across the floor, down the stairs, and towards the kitchen before stealing a platter of bacon and returning towards the lofty staircase. She assumes one of the midnight servants was feeling peckish, and she doesn't grouse at the prospect of a few strings of meat left out for an hour or two.

The malady from the previous night's terror has dissipated, and all that's left is to continue as before with her beloved—

Aemond's revelatory footsteps approach behind her. Pat-pat-pat.

She recognizes the gait, because he's so peculiar about his mannerisms. His steps never rushed, always measured.

Alerah twists around to see Aemond following in pursuit, a half-smile tugging his lips into what she would describe as a weasley little grin.

"M—morrow, Prince Aemond," she says, clumsily curtseying with the platter in hand.

"Good morrow, little mouse," he says, tilting his head with wry interest. "Hm, a curtsy for me?"

He certainly sounds amused, but there's something in his tone that doesn't quite reach his eye.

"You're off to see my sister, I presume?"

"Yes, Helaena's chambers," she says, before immediately rectifying her blunder, "the Princess Helaena."

Well, Criston Cole, it seems you're not entirely ineffective.

She tries to step past Aemond, but he's already circumventing her path.

"Hm. Is that all you're to be receiving?"

He gestures towards the lack of bacon on her plate. Alerah wonders if he's counting the pieces. His empty gaze reluctantly flicks to her lips for the briefest of moments, and then back to her eyes.

"It'll be enough for Helaena's appetites, I'm certain. She's had far, far more when she was with child. But if you recommend I fetch more—"

"You're very slender. You should partake in more viands. The keep has an overabundance as it stands."

"I appreciate your concern, my prince, but I'm quite content."

"Content?" he asks, his voice dropping low, almost conspiratorial. "You've been here long enough to know that contentment isn't the same thing as satisfaction. The castle's full of distractions, little mice like you flitting about, keeping busy. But when was the last time you allowed yourself something more than mere duty?"

His tone lingers on the word, duty, as if savoring it, as if inviting her to admit that she's become just another cog in the castle's endless drudgery. That she's no better than him or Aegon or even Alicent herself. A family she used to admire.

She breathes in, steadying herself, holding his lilac-colored eye with great forlorn.

"I find satisfaction in my duty, my prince," she replies. "And that's enough for me."

And then, just when she's sure he'll close the gap between them entirely, just when she feels as though she might shatter if he doesn't touch her—he pulls back.

"Hm."

Aemond's hands move with slow, deliberate intent as they slide down Alerah's waist, his fingertips grazing the velvety fabric of her gown, but never venturing farther.

"You're so responsive," he murmurs. "So easy to make you shiver. Tell me, little mouse, do you want me to keep going?"

"I should go," she whispers, but makes no move to leave.

"You haven't answered my question," he says, his voice like velvet wrapped around steel.

"Well," Alerah feels her heart hammering against her ribs, the bacon platter suddenly impossibly heavy in her hands. "Pl—please, this is improper."

His single eye gleams with something that reminds her of the dragon he commands. Vhagar's shadow seems to fall across his face even here, in this narrow castle corridor.

"Improper?" he echoes, his fingers still resting at her waist.

"What do you suppose my sister would say if she knew how you tremble at my touch? Does she make you tremble, too, little mouse?"

He says this softly, as if the question's simple and not a knife made for opening her from breast to groin.

"She—she has a way about her," Alerah says, the words tumbling untethered from her lips. "But not the way you intend."

"So, you do intend to be tamed, just not by me," Aemond says, and though the statement should burn, it's delivered almost as a caress. The weight of it settles across Alerah's shoulders, unexpected in its gentleness.

"I'm not to be tamed."

She fights for her composure in the thicket of his gaze.

"I serve, I obey, I love what I'm called to love, but I'm not a horse or a dog to be broken and bridled."

"You make a good case for a baseless girl. It's almost convincing."

"I'll make myself more convincing and follow my duties at the moment, prince."

Aemond laughs, watching as she returns to his sister's chambers.

Later that afternoon, Aemond finds Helaena in her solar, surrounded by her curious collection of insects pinned beneath glass. His sister's delicate fingers work methodically, arranging a particularly vibrant butterfly.

"I require a seamstress," he says abruptly, interrupting Helaena's careful work. "The Tyroshi girl in your service—Alerah, is it? She'll need to attend to my garments."

"Alerah's skilled with a needle," Helaena admits, returning to her butterfly. "Although, I had planned for her to help me catalog my newest specimens."

"Let me steal her away from you, dear sister. I promise I'll return her in better conditions. I need a handmaiden who's entirely adroit with a needle."

"Your attire seemed in good order at breakfast," Helaena remarks, a subtle frown casting shadows over her eyes. "Do you intend for her to fashion something specific?"

Aemond pauses, weighing his words like a merchant with precious metals.

"Perhaps a new leather scabbard, something to match Vhagar's saddle."

She hums at him, as though she knows a secret he's even kept from himself.

"This time, his blow must have been especially severe. Tell me, what did you strike it against?"

"One might think I lead a tumultuous and violent life," he replies, adjusting his belt with a solitary, slender hand. "I've not done anything of my usual consequence. Not for the past day, at the very least."

"Yes," Helaena says, dream-like. "Yes, you will have Alerah tend to it, if that is what you wish."

Aemond inclines his head, a small act of acknowledgment, before spinning on his heel and making his way towards the antechamber.

He taps the frame of the door with his knuckles, a warlike ta-tu-tat-tat, and Alerah pops her head out from behind an ornate couch.

Alerah sees him, and there's a curtness to the set of her mouth, an irritation she barely disguises.

"Yes?" Her voice is apprehensive, yet defiant.

"Alerah, my prince," he says, with a soft mockery that bounces lightly between them before coming to rest at her feet.

"You're to accompany me and see to my needs."

"For the day, or the hour?"

"For as long as I desire."

She doesn't bother to cinch her apron. The sunsilk of her shift clings at her sides—worn thin, intangible, the color of unripe apricots. She glowers a moment longer at Helaena, who is feeding a sardine to one of her more carnivorous mantises, and then departs, following the prince's calculated stride.

Aemond leads her to the stone gallery overlooking the yard where trainees in the House guard make mock war with staves and battered shields. His walk is silent, unerring, and she must lengthen her own legs to match. She fancies he notices. He notices everything.

The air's fermented with the sweat of men, the mulchy tang of the moat, and wind-powered scatterings of gillyflower and bugloss from the beds below. He rests his hand atop the wall and gazes, unspeaking, into the tangle of chaos below.

She wishes, not for the first time, that she could strike this prince across his serene and callow face.

Instead, she says, "you wear the scent of the library this morning. Is the Maester teaching you more history?"

She means to needle him. His smile's a slim blade.

"Today it was music," he says, not looking at her. "The windharp. I find the tuning more instructive than the instrument."

"And is that why you've summoned me? To listen to your windharp?"

"No, you're to mend something of mine."

"Clever artifice," Alerah says.

Aemond snorts.

"Hm, no artifice. You're to mend this within the hour," he says, his hands spreading over a delicate piece of chainmail, and she can see it's been splintered off—a patch of chains broken.

He gives her an ornery glance.

"Cole struck me in the courtyard, don't look so pleased."

"I'm not a blacksmith."

"The stitching underneath the 'mail, girl," he says tersely, "and you're to accompany me in the library. Do you know how to read, Essosi?"

"Yes, I know how to read."

"Good. The setting alone should serve you in any case."

The library of the Red Keep's cavernous, shelves stacked with leather-bound tomes reaching towards the vaulted ceiling. Sunlight streams through tall windows, dust motes dancing in the golden beams. At this hour, they're alone, save for the aged Grand Maester who dozes in a corner chair, forgotten scrolls unceremoniously spilling from his lap.

Alerah sits cross-legged atop the library's flagged stone floor, notes and her kit arrayed beside her. She focuses on the layers of fabric she's separating; it's the padding Aemond wears beneath his armor. The prince has his only eye fixed on his book—The Lineage and Histories. His long, autumn-leaf fingers riffle through the pages, leisurely.

"Find anything to amuse you?" she asks, keeping her head bent over her work.

"A bastard is a bastard is a bastard," Aemond says, his words like stones skipping across a pond. "Even those who declare themselves legitimate find their way back to the core. The oldest truths, clothed in new languages."

"Some of those truths are forgotten," she replies, a quiet defiance in her voice.

"I find that very little is forgotten in time."

"It appears the Conquest of Dorne entirely slipped notice."

"Does Tyrosh have such an urgent yearning for past certainties?"

She looks up, meeting his gaze. There's something raw in it, something edged. She isn't quite sure if it's a weapon or a wound.

"No," she answers.

"I thought not."

He watches her pinch the sides of fabric between her index and thumb, a little overcareful as she stitches the silk—teasing the smallest thread—but her hands never shake. The needle runs smooth as water over glass.

He wonders when the last time someone truly frightened her.

"Did you enjoy it?" he says, voice offhand, as though he were asking about the weather. He lets the question linger.

She doesn't look up, but her lips quirk.

"Enjoy what, my prince?"

"When you slapped my brother. Did you expect that you would be allowed to keep your hand?" Aemond's mouth tilts, an echo of the violence.

He can't name the endgame here, whether it's to watch her unravel or yield, but he's intrigued to see which she would choose.

Her answer comes like the slip of a knife.

"He's still alive. I consider it a failure on my part."

"And it is Alerah the Stranger, is it not?" he asks with a smirk, his fingers folded steeple-like beneath his chin.

"I'm nearly done, my lord," she says, not deigning to answer his provocation.

"Then my father will be pleased to know that your attentions are not entirely wasted in this castle after all."

"Will you inform him yourself?" Alerah rises, dusting off her apricot gown. "Or shall I?"

His eyes bore into her, like the twist of a dagger tightened after a timorous first bloodletting.

"I shall," he says. "With that very beautiful, very imprudent mouth of yours to aid me, if need be."

"And if need be," she replies, "I will be the one to offer a correction."

He finds this—her nerve, or perhaps the stubbornness that masquerades so ably as wit—to be irritating and unreasonably necessary. Not a cure, exactly, but an antidote to the boredom that plagued his childhood, endured even now. Even the library's monks and mice seem to hush at her impudence. And so Aemond, hand still splayed across The Lineage and Histories, opens his mouth. Decides against speaking. Shuts it. And then feels the tightening of his lips, a thin, rare smile.

"Tell me, how much High Valyrian do you know?"

Alerah's fingers falter ever so slightly on the thread.

"I know some phrases," she admits, her voice carefully measured. "Household commands, pleasantries."

"Read this passage," he says, his finger landing on a paragraph midway down the page.

She stands and makes her way to the table, her uncertainty disguised by elegance, and she reads the words in halting, liquid tones.

The script before her's nothing like the flowing Braavosi characters she knows intimately. High Valyrian glyphs stare back at her, elegant and impenetrable as castle walls. She recognizes a few—common words that appear in trade agreements and shipping manifests—but the dense paragraphs might as well be insect trails for all she comprehends.

"I'm waiting," Aemond says, his voice like honey drizzled over broken glass.

"I—this particular passage is quite archaic. The dialect—"

"Is standard High Valyrian," Aemond cuts in, amusement threading through his words. "The same taught to every noble child in the Seven Kingdoms."

He leans closer, his chest nearly touching her back, and traces a line of text with one long finger.

"This speaks of dragon fire and its properties. Something you should find fascinating, considering your proximity to those who command such power."

"It's a wonder, then," Alerah says, turning to meet his eye, "that your family is not more generous in sharing this knowledge with the rest of us."

She knows it's playing with fire to speak so boldly, but she sees a flicker of something in him—a want to provoke, perhaps, that matches her own.

"Do you know what happens to liars in the Red Keep, little mouse?"

"I imagine they thrive quite well," she counters. "The court seems full of them."

"Sharp, aren't you?" Aemond says, pulling a chair beside her. He sits with the casual authority of one born to command, legs spread wide, claiming space as dragons claim the sky. "Clever little mouse with clever little claws."

For a moment, there's only the susurrant hush of old paper and the soft purr of distant torch-fire in the stone cavern. The Maester's breath notes time; the world outside the library's thick walls a memory, nothing but rumor and shadow.

The low hum of Alerah's voice forms a dulcet, dissonant strain beneath the quiescent noises of their secret isolation.

"Are you going to teach me the passage, or shall I decipher it with the same labor your forebears conquered the kingdoms?"

"Stop," Aemond commands suddenly. His hand closes over hers, warm and dry, calloused from sword practice and dragon reins. "Come here."

He draws her closer to the table, tugs her just enough to tip her balance forward. In the silence there's a negotiation; she offers nothing but a straightening of the shoulders, an unwillingness to flinch or shrink.

"Your sister waits for her entertainment," she says, her voice as steady as still water hiding currents beneath.

"My sister," Aemond replies, his smile paper-thin, "can wait a little longer. I find myself in need of a translator."

Alerah regards his gesture, the audacity of it striking her like the first cold breath of winter. The space he offers—his own lap—feels both like a trap and an invitation. The needle in her hand becomes a talisman of normalcy she's reluctant to abandon.

"I prefer to finish my work properly, my prince," she says, her voice as steady as a Braavosi canal at dawn. "The stitching requires careful attention."

"And I prefer obedience when I give commands. The choice is simple, little mouse—come here of your own accord, or I'll place you where I want you."

With a deliberate slowness that belies her racing heart, Alerah sets the needle down. The choice before her isn't really a choice at all—it's merely the illusion of one.

"Three," he begins counting, voice low and melodic.

The needle pricks her finger, a tiny spot of crimson blooming on her skin. Aemond's gaze fixes on it, his pupil dilating slightly.

"Two," he continues, a predatory smile playing at the corners of his mouth.

"I'm not one of your subjects to command," she whispers, but her protest sounds hollow even to her own ears.

"One."

His hand snakes out, encircling her wrist with unexpected gentleness. He pulls her towards him, and she finds herself perched awkwardly on his knee, her body rigid, her hands folded primly in her lap as if she might maintain some semblance of propriety in the most improper of positions.

"There," he says, his breath warm against her ear, "was that so difficult?"

The book remains open in front of them, the ancient High Valyrian text swimming before Alerah's eyes as she tries to focus on anything but the heat of Aemond's body beneath her. His thigh is firm muscle, unyielding as Valyrian steel.

And then Aemond's hand comes to rest on the small of her back, pressing her still. Not hard. But enough to hold her precisely where he wants her.

"Start here," he says, tapping the page again, and his eye shines with a keen desire—academic, prurient, insatiable, all at once.

"Read," he commands, his voice vibrating through her back.

"I cannot read what I don't understand, my prince," she says.

His arm continues to coil around her waist, pulling her more firmly against him until the space between them vanishes like morning mist.

"Then I shall teach you," he murmurs, his lips brushing the shell of her ear.

"This symbol here—" his finger traces a graceful curve on the parchment, "—means fire. And this one," his touch slides to another glyph, "—means desire," he says.

His finger continues tracing the symbols, each touch deliberate and purposeful. Alerah feels herself caught between the ancient text and the prince's body, a butterfly pinned between pages of history and present danger.

"This one," he continues, reaching around her to indicate another symbol, his chest now pressed fully against her back, "means to consume. And these together—" his hand slides over hers, guiding her fingers across the parchment, "—speak of a hunger that cannot be sated."

"This passage," he continues, "describes how a Valyrian bride would sometimes cut her palm on her wedding night, to prove the fire in her lineage."

His free hand captures her wrist, turning her palm upward.

"Your skin's so pale. What would we find if we opened it?"

Alerah's breath catches.

"Only common blood, my prince. No fire, no magic that would interest a Targaryen."

"And what would interest a Targaryen?" he asks, his thumb now tracing lazy circles on her captured wrist. The sensation sends unwelcome shivers up her arm.

"Dragons. Power. Fire and blood," she replies, struggling to keep her voice steady.

Aemond laughs, a sound both musical and dangerous.

"You've learned our house words well enough. But you've forgotten one thing we Targaryens desire above all else."

His fingers move from her wrist to brush a stray lock of hair behind her ear, the touch featherlight yet burning.

"Conquest."

Heat blooms across her skin, not entirely from embarrassment. The prince's proximity's intoxicating, his scent a mixture of leather, cloves, and something distinctly draconic—smoke and embers trapped in his clothing.

Alerah swallows hard, aware of how his eye follows the movement of her throat.

"The Conquest was centuries ago, my prince."

"Not that conquest, little mouse."

His hand slides to her waist, fingers splaying across her abdomen, tracing the curve where fabric meets flesh.

"Every Targaryen finds something new to conquer."

His words hang between them, heavy with implication. The library seems to shrink around them, the towering shelves closing in like the walls of a cage. Even the Grand Maester's snores have faded to silence, as if the very air holds its breath.

"I'm no conquest," Alerah manages, though her voice betrays her with a slight tremor.

"No?"

Aemond shifts beneath her, adjusting her weight on his lap so that she faces him more directly. His single eye captures hers, violet depths that seem bottomless.

"Then why do you tremble like a newly claimed territory?"

"I serve your sister," she whispers, the words barely disturbing the air between them.

"And yet here you sit," he counters, his voice a silken cord drawing tighter. "In my lap, not hers."

His thumb continues its torturous exploration of her lower lip, testing its softness, its yield.

"Tell me, little mouse, do you think of me when you're alone? When the castle sleeps and darkness gives permission to forbidden thoughts?"

Heat floods Alerah's cheeks, betraying her before words can form a defense. Aemond's smile widens, predatory satisfaction gleaming in his eye.

"Jurnegon issa |Look at me|."

"Fetch a maester to assist you if you mean to exchange words."

Aemond ignores her quip, continuing to entertain himself with a lavish stretch as he holds onto the book in hand.

"Skoro syt |Why|?" he asks with feigned innocence.

She could stab her needle into his other eye.

"Because I'm not practiced and I have other obligations in which I must attend to—"

"You've other obligations aside from serving the Crown?"

She can't see him, yes, but she knows he's wearing a shit-eating sneer just about now.

"Yes, my lord. As I've told your brother before."

"Issa lēkia iksos nykeā mittys |My brother's a fool|," he says, tilting his head. "Don't you agree?"

"I shan't voice my approval so eagerly," she says, resistant. "Where the matter rests, I'm your sister's attendant. Not his."

"How does it feel to address all of the Targaryen children's needs? It must come to you as drudgery."

"I didn't recognize you as a child."

"I'm not a child?"

"No," she says, now nervous.

"I've never been," he says, voice unbending. "Did they tell you otherwise in Tyrosh? Do the sons of the Archon suck milk until they're weaned on wine, or do they learn to walk with blades in their hands and fire at their call?"

"Prince Aemond, may I ask a heretical question?"

"You're never at a lack for confidence. Ask."

"Is it better to be your true self, here, and suffer your family's wrath, their inanity, or to have no self at all and claim the power of inheritance? They've given you complete autonomy. You've more freedom than anyone in Westeros. Has it been difficult for you to choose?"

"That's more than a single question."

"Yes."

He watches the shadows play across her alabaster skin, the way they eclipse her bones like whorls and swirls of mist before the sun's had a chance to burn through. She doesn't look Tyroshi now. She looks like pure Valyrian, a myth made flesh, and it quickens something hidden and deep inside him.

He watches her for several seconds, silent, appraising; then finally speaks, a murmur low and close in the tomblike hush of the library.

"That is the question at the heart of the world, is it not? Whether a dragon should starve itself for the comfort of others, or burn the world around it for its own sake."

He looks down at her hands and, with something near reverence, trails his finger over the faint scar on her palm, new and nearly vanished.

"Most in this castle—myself included—have not the spine to commit to either. We're always in debt to both. Power and privation, inheritance and self-annihilation."

He smiles—not kindly, but with the profound loneliness of a man who has considered every possible answer and found only himself at the center, gnawing his own tail in circles.

"I envy you, Tyroshi. You belong to yourself, even in servitude. You're not divided."

She considers the words, watches one dust mote somersault down the shaft of dying sun, and lets it settle on her knuckle. How groundless that praise—or pity—lands when they're both at the mercy of their names, his written in the blood of ancestors, hers in the spindrift of other men's fancies.

"You speak of envy, my prince, but I suspect you would never trade stations with me."

"Perhaps not. But it should be plain your life is less constrained than ours."

He lets his hand drop, fingertips skimming the ancient wood of the library table. The gesture's both dismissal and benediction.

"Your silence speaks volumes," he murmurs, his face now close enough that she can feel the warmth of his breath against her lips. "Such eloquent confession in what remains unsaid."

Alerah attempts to regain her composure, to rebuild the walls his presence has so effortlessly dismantled.

"You misread silence for meaning, my prince. Perhaps that's a habit of those accustomed to having their every whim indulged."

His laugh is unexpected—a genuine sound that transforms his face. For a moment, the dangerous predator recedes, revealing something almost boyish in his features.

"Oh, you are delightful," he says, his hand moving to cradle the back of her neck. "Most would simper and acquiesce. But you—you bare your little teeth even while sitting in the dragon's jaws."

His fingers thread through the hair at her nape, and though his grip is firm, it carries with it the promise of release. She knows he's testing her resolve, waiting to see just how far she'll hold out.

No matter how close she trembles to the edge of abandon, she'll not give him that satisfaction.

Not yet.

But the thought of it—of what she could do if she had nothing to lose—skitters through her mind, bright as summer lightning.

"Try this word," he says, turning back to the open page and pointing to the first character in the passage. "Skoros."

"Skor—skoros?" she repeats tentatively, the intonation rising as though it were a question.

"Try it again," he says, his mouth an inch from her ear. "Skoros. Say it until you can feel it at the back of your throat."

"Skoros," she says, her voice threading between their tangled breaths like a pale blue ribbon.

"You need to curl your tongue like this."

Alerah feels his hand slide from her neck to her jaw, tilting her chin up.

He kisses her. The weight of his mouth against hers is insolent, demanding, and she tastes the charring of his tongue, the embers lurking beneath. It's a kiss with heat and hunger but something else, too—desperation, perhaps, the kind of greed only lonely creatures possess.

His tongue flicks across the seam of her lips, urging them apart, and Alerah opens to him, startled at the depth of her own craving. Aemond's kiss is an invasion, a claiming, as if laying siege to a fortress he intends to hold until the end of time. He presses her mouth wider, devouring, while his fingers tangle in her hair with a possessiveness that promises both splendor and ruin.

His tongue maps her, ash and sweat and devouring; it pulls her from herself, against herself, until her very breathing is conspiracy.

She's never kissed a Targaryen, but she understands what the bards mean by consuming fire.

A subtle shift beneath her tells her everything she needs to know about his state of mind—as well as his body. It startles her, his sudden readiness, the extent of his want. She stiffens before she can stop herself, but Aemond only holds her tighter, an emboldened, insatiable coil.

"You do this to me," he whispers, and his grip tightens, pulling her closer. "Do you have any idea?"

She breaks the kiss, her breath ragged, her resolve fraying.

"You are your family's true heir, Prince Aemond," she says, her voice unsteady but provocative, a lure and a challenge in equal measure.

Alerah goes rigid, preparing for the next assault of his words.

But instead, Aemond simply releases her, the loss of warmth more jarring than any touch. She rises from his lap, her pulse like a tempest beneath her skin, and retreats to the far side of the table, her face a medley of defiance and uncertainty.

"Tell my sister I enjoyed her handmaiden's services," he says, leaning back in his chair, the picture of languid ease.

Alerah forces her heart to slow, pins her hair with still-bloodied fingers, and leaves the prince in a cloud of vellum and vanquished sunlight. 

Chapter Text

She finds Helaena by the pool of glass-walled light that crowns the princess's solar, where the pale woman sits in the midst of her menagerie.

Blue bottle flies, beetles bright as sapphires, and the spined shimmer of fire ants all parade upon glass towers and antiqued wood. Helaena herself hums a lullaby that sounds less like a song and more like the faint echo a stone makes when thrown into a well.

"Pardon my lateness, princess," Alerah says. The words tremble, only slightly.

"My brother detained you," Helaena replies, though she could be speaking of any of her three brothers.

Alerah places the tray on the low-slung table, pours two cups, and allows the steam to rise between herself and her mistress.

Helaena's fingers move with unerring precision as she gently prods a dragonfly nymph through the surface of water in a shallow bowl. When she looks up, there's a strange clarity in her pale eyes.

"Did he frighten you?" she asks.

Alerah considers.

"No. But I am ... less myself now than before."

"Sometimes, after a dragon grazes the sky, all else seems smaller."

Helaena's voice dips, and she turns her attention to the tea.

"He was born hungry, you know. Mother says he cried at the wet nurse, her skin slick with blood. Some are made that way."

Alerah studies the taut surface of Helaena's composure, unbroken and beautiful. It's a mirrored pool, tempting the observer to lean just a little too far.

"I think he's lonelier than anyone cares to realize," Alerah says, which is a risk—dangerous in its candor.

Helaena blinks, a pulse of surprise.

Then, "did he kiss you?"

Alerah laughs, but her breath fogs the rim of her cup and the silence that follows goes down her throat with the tea.

"Yes," she says at last. The truth's not a gift, but Helaena makes it one, smiling in a way that's both sad and indulgent.

"He always wants what he cannot claim," Helaena murmurs.

Alerah says nothing. A mature dragonfly, disturbed by a ripple in its bowl, climbs a false shoreline. Helaena dips a finger to steady it.

"Have you ever wanted something so much you knew it would end you?" Helaena asks.

"No," Alerah says, though in speaking it she tastes the bitterness of the lie before it's wholly born.

She thinks of the dye-women, the dockside prophets all the way back home, and how each of them claimed the truest lies were always the ones you told first to yourself. In that sense, maybe she's a Targaryen after all; maybe self-delusion is their house specialty.

After tea, she fetches a pail of water from the well, then draws it up through the servants' stairwell. Even her own reflection, fleeting in the iron-rimmed bucket, seems fragile, possible to shatter with a fingertip. Her mind races a half-lap ahead of her body, unable to decide if she wants to return to Tyrosh or bury herself under the Red Keep's flagstones and be done with longing.

By midday, the castle's mood had curdled: a storm bolts restlessly outside the stained-glass, thunder kneading the air rather than bursting it. While inside, servants scuttle with eyes fixed low and voices in tight, knotted bundles. Alerah comes to know, without being told, that Aegon has quarreled again with his mother, and the palace will vibrate with fresh venom for days.

The kitchen's heat presses in like punishment; she slices onions until the smell makes her weep, then takes the knife and a bowl of chopped root vegetables up to the nursery, where the twins are already waiting.

Jaehaerys, the bolder, perches on a stool and studies her as she sets out carrots and beans into a tidy rainbow. His sister, Jaehaera, swings her foot in rhythm while she recites a counting-song in nearly perfect Tyroshi.

"Ha-yar," she intones, "du-dia, sa-sidi, si-der."

She pauses, baffled.

"What's next?"

Alerah jabs the knife into the cutting board with a laugh.

"Don't ask me," she replies. "I'm still learning Valyrian, remember?"

The girl wrinkles her nose as if there must be something diseased about this confession.

"But you're old," Jaehaera says, then adds hastily, "not as old as mum, but old."

Alerah laughs, and the corners of her mouth twitch with something like mischief.

"Not so old as Grand Maester Mellos, at any rate."

Jaehaerys, whose ear for adult conversation far exceeds his years, pipes up.

"Aemond says the only reason girls go to lessons is to sharpen their tongues like knives."

"Perhaps your uncle knows more about women than he lets on," Alerah says, stacking carrot slices with deliberate precision.

"Or maybe he only fears what he doesn't understand."

"Uncle doesn't fear anything," the boy retorts, but his tone wavers at the edges.

Alerah smiles to herself. She wonders if, right now, Aemond could sense the subtle mutiny in his name being spoken by a servant's mouth with such reckless, familial ease. It would likely please him, and that should bother her, but it doesn't.

"He's a dragon," Jaehaera insists, chin held high. Her sloe-eyed earnestness makes it hard for Alerah to keep from laughing outright, and she tousles the girl's silver-blonde hair before standing to her feet.

"Nothing to fear, then," Alerah agrees, though even the twins' nursery banter stirs a longing that leaves her gut-sick with want.

She returns to the servants' quarters, the dim stone hallway as much home as any other place she's ever known. If home could be said to mean a ceiling, a floor, and four walls—one for each lie a child wants desperately to believe, a lie so large it needs a room of its own.

Her wrist's still sore from Aemond's unlatching grasp. She unfastens the cowl from her head, lets it drop to the ground, and rubs the corners between her thumb and forefinger.

Maybe she'll return after all. Maybe there'll be something left of her to return.

Alerah has no answer for those thoughts, not yet, and so she gathers the thin blanket from her cot and snakes through the keep, one hallway after the next, until she finds herself at Helaena's door. Dragons are far-sighted, she's learned, but they always come back. They always have a use for the places they've abandoned.

The guard outside the princess's chambers has a different face than his morning's watch, but the same uncomprehending expression. He grunts a low acknowledgment, barely looking up from the cross-stitch he's slipped from under his breastplate. Even the knights need sedatives, some days. Alerah doesn't need to announce herself: the door to Helaena's chambers is never shut all the way; it hangs, as always, by a wish and a memory of hinges.

Inside, the lamps are all shrouded in thin blue scarves, and the air smells of cloves and wet beeswax. Princess Helaena lies curled on her settee, hair a frayed frost across the cushions, gown askew about her ankles. She's awake, though her eyes roam like a moth trapped behind glass.

Alerah closes the door with an almost soundless click. She isn't sure Helaena even knows she's there, until the princess murmurs, "he asked you to read?"

She doesn't specify which brother.

"He wanted me to read High Valyrian," Alerah answers truthfully, "and made a game of how poorly I could manage it."

Helaena's lips arched into something between pity and pleasure.

"Did you like it?"

Alerah sits on the edge of the settee.

"I don't know. I think I wanted to bite him and kiss him both."

This, more than anything, seems to amuse the princess.

"That's how they win," Helaena says, "with teeth, or with kisses. Sometimes both at once."

Alerah's not sure how to phrase her next, so she begins to plait Helaena's hair, each section dividing neatly, the act as familiar as breathing.

She wants to ask if Helaena ever hated her own brothers.

Instead, she asks, "did you ever want to run away?"

The princess's eyes sharpen.

"I was always told I would have a dragon someday instead. Something else to run with, not from."

This isn't the answer Alerah hopes for, but she savors its odd, twisted sweetness.

Outside, the storm finally breaks, hammering slate and stained-glass with rain so heavy that the world beyond the window goes entirely white.

Helaena turns her face into the onslaught.

"I dreamed last night that we were all drowned," she confides, absently.

"Every member of the family, sinking at the same depth. But you were above the water, sitting atop the foam like a gull."

Alerah ties off the braid with a twist of silk.

"I'm not sure gulls are safe from the water, either," she says.

"Nothing is ever safe," Helaena replies, and there's a glasslike clarity to it that cuts more than any sword. "Not even the ones who serve."

The words settle between them. Alerah looks at her hands, at the old, ink-blued scar that ropes the left from the first week she'd been bought off the Tyroshi docks. Purchased as a housemaid—storm prize, her sellers called it—and now, here she was, combing the hair of a future queen.

She wonders what her mother would have thought. Wonders if her mother would have cared, or simply sold her again to buy sweeter fish guts, to keep the blood-orange dye pressed into every pillowcase.

She sits with Helaena through the blue hour, watching the beads of water knurl on the window. The princess hums, her mind adrift in a curled horizon of dreams, and Alerah studies the slow draw of her own breath. For all the sharpness she can muster, the world always returns to this: two girls in a borrowed kingdom, nursing each other's wounds with the only currency they have—small kindnesses, and the ability to survive until morning.

"Tell me a story," Helaena breathes.

Alerah fumbles for something gentle.

"In Tyrosh," she begins, "sometimes when the rain came down so hard it whipped stones from the alleyways, the children would swim the canals. We'd hold hands and form a chain, and whoever let go first had to fetch cakes for the rest come market day. I nearly drowned once, in a gutter, but someone yanked me out from my hair."

She laughs softly.

"I hated that boy for a year. Then I missed him after he was sold away."

"It's a good story," Helaena's voice is distant, but attentive. "You were rescued and did not want to be. That is always how it is, isn't it?"

The words coil around them like a snug, wretched embrace. Alerah falls asleep in the princess's chambers, red head against the lavender of Helaena's knees, and dreams more fitfully than she would have liked. The pelting of rain blurs the world to ash, and then to nothing, and then to blue again as the night gives way.

"I want another story," Helaena insists. She sounds both far and small, like a child calling in the dark. "One I've never heard. One not from the inside of this place."

Alerah lifts her head.

"In Tyrosh," she says again, "there was an Archon who let us—his children, his slaves—run wild as goats. We slept outside and took our meals at sea; when the moons were high and red, we thought the water might strike and ignite, so bright it was with our lanterns."

She sounds like she's marveling at someone else's secret.

"His beard was the color of corals."

She waits, but Helaena doesn't stir.

Her own breathing slows, and for once, even the pounding in her chest sounds like a lie she might be able to live with.

The dream that comes is vivid and barbed, as unsettling as waking: a great, rearing shape beneath her, a falling, a dragon with wings the length of a darkened sky. It consumes what it loves, and what it is.

Alerah wakes to the shuffling sound of candles being snuffed, the early gray light of morning a soft invasion. Her mouth feels cottony with the taste of half-forgotten dreams. Helaena's already out of bed, the nightgown like a discarded memory at the foot of the settee.

"You're up late," Alerah says, rubbing one hand against the small of her back, where the floorboards have left a grid of tender marks.

"Or you're up early," the princess replies. She seems imperturbably refreshed, like a lily grown through stone.

Alerah straightens, smoothing her clothes with the quick neatness of someone long accustomed to wearing yesterday's garments.

"Shall I find us breakfast, my lady?"

Helaena's wrapping her hair into a loose bun, weaving strands with the easy grace of a girl who's practiced on herself more than once.

"I have a hunger," she says.

The castle crackles to life as Alerah makes her way to the kitchen. She catches sight of Jaehaerys, already tugging at the sleeve of a sentry-tall scullion, and stops to ruffle his curls before he slips from her reach. The boy's on a mission, a small cyclone determined to whip up chaos in the staid quarters of adults.

"Better watch yourself, or you'll end up in a pie," Alerah calls after him, though her voice is swallowed by the clamor of servants.

Ser Criston Cole passes with two young knights in tow, and although he doesn't address her directly, she notes the glint of his eye as he appraises her and then turns away. The gesture's a little too deliberate, too practiced.

She heads further down to the servants' hall, where tables are piled high with trenchers of bread, fresh-drawn milk, and strings of desiccated sausages. The same place she raided the night before. The same place she's helped prepare meals since her arrival.

Nothing's quite as she remembers.

Alerah pauses, not believing what she sees—an absence rather than a presence. There's no more food left. No one looks up, no one notices her, but she feels their eyes regardless. The other girls steal glances only when they think she's not watching, and a wide berth surrounds her as if she were a leper or a ghost.

Her steps slow as she approaches the table, and when she reaches for even the smallest loaf, it's with the full knowledge that no one will stop her.

It is also with the full knowledge that no one needs to.

"Where did everything go?"

"We've orders to clean the kitchen before you arrive. I'm sure you know that much."

"On whose authority?"

"Prince Aegon."

Alerah pauses. Let them starve her, she thinks. She's survived worse.

Her head throbs to the battle-drum of want, but she holds the way a pearl holds the grit before it can dull its sheen. She holds, and she leaves the bread untouched.

She'd drown before she'd let them see her claw for crumbs.

"Fine," she says. "Have it your way."

Aemond finds her, bow-deep in the kitchens, peeling marrow from the long white bones left over from the last feast. Her sleeves are rolled above the elbow, fingers pruned from the brine, tongue pressed between her teeth in a childish show of focus. The maid-children watch her work with something like awe, or fear, or both. Only the ancient cook, the one whose knuckles curl like roots and whose face bears more warts than the average garden toad, seems indifferent.

He says nothing when he enters, only stand in the door's shadow and watches how her hands work the knife, the elegant economy of violence. Not a drop wasted. The northern sun limns her hair copper and fire-red, and for a second she's not a servant at all, but a goddess of the hearth whose altar's scorched and hungered.

He waits until she finishes, until the last tendon's levered free, the skull cracked and drained for its jelly. Then he says her name, the Essosi lilt precise and unkind on his tongue.

"Alerah."

Every eye in the room finds its gravity in him. Even the cook shrinks, somehow, although she doesn't seem inclined to bow.

"My prince," says Alerah, not looking up, never breaking pace. The knife flicks, a sliver of bone dancing from the blade's tip.

"I would like to speak with you," he says, "alone."

Alerah sighs in a way she dares make audible, then wipes her hands and leaves with him, trailing a faint scent of juniper and rendered fat.

He leads her to the rookery, where the ravens reel and kite in the wind that always finds its way there, no matter the lay of the towers. It's an odd, seldom-used place for a Targaryen, yet somehow fitting. Aloof, isolated, haunted by messages that rarely bring anything but ill omen.

She waits, her bare arms made marble by the morning cold.

"Have you eaten? They say you've not touched a thing except for marrow."

"If the staff has orders not to poison me, I've yet to notice it," she says, but there's no mirth in it, just weary bravado.

Aemond gazes at her for a moment, expression unreadable.

"The order's not poison," he says at length. "Though if you believe my brother capable of such subtlety, you've too much faith in his wit."

"It's not faith in your brother so much as lack of faith in the world. Most men do nothing out of malice, and everything out of appetite."

The wind yanks a coil of hair loose and slaps it across her cheek; she presses it flat with the back of her hand, then waits for him to speak. The air between them holds the skein-wet promise of another storm. Alerah hears the crows quarreling overhead, a familiar sound to anyone raised in the gutters of any city worth its salt.

"I could bribe the kitchen, if you'd say the word," Aemond offers. It has all the sincerity of mockery, but none of the lazy delight that colors Aegon's voice; when Aemond speaks, the words are stones and his tongue the sling.

"No."

"Or you could eat something now, and spare us both the drama of watching you wither for the sake of principle. You don't impress my mother—she thinks you're starving yourself for her benefit."

"No. The queen doesn't care, you see. It's only a test."

She glances past him, at the black and white flurry of ravens above the parapet.

"If I starve, I starve. King's Landing will find another girl to stand by her daughter's side. There's nothing to prove."

He leans in, the shadow of him cast longer by the thin sun.

"So this is foolish pride, not defiance?"

Alerah turns her back to the wind.

"What is there to defy? In Tyrosh, if you cross the wrong person, they slit your throat and dye your skin to match your shame. Here, you starve out in public, and everyone pretends it's your own idea. It's—"

She struggles for the word, and his expression tells her nothing.

"—politics," he finishes for her. "The game that consumes us all."

He walks to the edge of the rookery, fingers grazing the lichen-cloaked stone, and says, "that's not wrong, Alerah. But you err if you think starving yourself is a move that cannot be turned against you."

He looks over his shoulder at her, the wind plucking hair from his face so it whips into the silver behind his profile.

"If you are bled hollow by hunger, you are of less use. If you eat, you are compliant. There's no version of this where you win by refusing to play."

"It's not a game I chose."

She stares at her hands, the memory of marrow slick between her fingers. "But I can't be blamed for playing by its rules."

"Most people can't even identify the rules," Aemond says, a kernel of reluctant respect in the lines between his brows.

He steps closer, misreading her defiance for frailty.

"You will eat," he decides for her, the finality in his tone the same as when sentencing a would-be usurper. "If I must summon you to my table, I will. If I must carry the bread to your lips ... "

At this, Alerah laughs. It's a sharp, salt-bitten sound, a flash of storm light against a granite sky.

"Would you spoon it into my mouth, my prince? Like a child? Or a prisoner?"

"That depends," he murmurs, "on whether you struggle."

For the first time, she sees it—the line his jaw draws when he's truly uncertain.

"Struggling is the only thing I've ever done well," she quips, but with less venom than she'd hoped for.

He regards her, each slow blink a calculus of appetite and a flicker of something very nearly like mercy. Then, as if by some compelled revelation, he closes the distance and takes her hands in his own.

"If you wish to wound my brother, eat. If you wish to vex my mother, eat. If you wish to live—"

He leaves it unfinished, the taut thread of meaning suspended between their faces.

For a long moment, the only sounds are the tugging of wind, the distant cries of crows, and the hot-handed thrum that seems to lurch beneath her ribcage. She thinks of the stories Helaena always begged her for, how they rarely ended with rescue—no, always with the heroine gnawing out her own freedom with bloodied teeth. Perhaps that is how it is, always.

"Will you bring me food, then?" she asks.

His eye flares with challenge; the curve of his mouth's almost a sneer.

"If you require it."

"Then that is my price. I surrender. Bring me a meal worthy of a traitor and I'll eat it."

He nods, lets go her hands, and turns on his heel without a word. She's left in the rookery, shivered by the cold, the tympanic beating of her pulse louder than the caws of all the ravens in King's Landing.

She expects him to forget, or to delegate the task to some trembling page.

But when the knock comes at her door—her own, not Helaena's—it's Aemond himself, bearing a tray that steams and spills scents of lamb, apricots, and the resin of clove. The moment's so frankly absurd, so out of her own experience, that for an instant she wonders if this is a trick, a rehearsal for courtly humiliation.

Instead, he sets the tray on her cot, drawing up a battered stool and seating himself opposite, hands folded like a monk awaiting confession.

"I thought perhaps you'd relish a reminder of Tyroshi feasts. I'm led to believe pomegranate is especially prized there; the Maester's texts cite your fondness."

She won't betray hunger before a dragon, especially not this one.

"Did you prepare it yourself?" she asks, only half-jeering.

The gall of it seems to amuse Aemond, who shrugs with an elegance that only the highborn can muster.

"I instructed the kitchen. I have butcher's hands, not a cook's."

A beat.

Aemond says, "you may eat, if you wish. The gods don't see as clearly in these rooms."

Alerah lifts the bowl and sips the broth, letting the oil and herbs scald the roof of her mouth before she swallows. It's exquisite, heavy with the warmth she hasn't felt since her last true home, if you could call the Tyrosh orphanage such a thing. Lamb, apricot, the acid of pomegranate, the faint anise that burns at the finish. A soup, but also a summoning of everything she'd lost.

She doesn't look at him, not at first, until she feels the pull of his eye and the constraint it exerts on the room. Aemond watches her like a scholar watches the slow unfurl of a rare flower, or maybe like a butcher casing the best way to split a joint. There's a wildness to it, an honesty, that both alarms and compels her.

When she finishes, Alerah sets the bowl down and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.

"And now I'm to thank you, is that it?"

Aemond inclines his head, but doesn't demand it.

She thinks for a moment, then says, "fuck your brother. I won't starve for his amusement."

He smiles.

"That is all the thanks I require."

Alerah lifts her chin, searching for what remains of her self-possession.

"Why did you do it, then? Why are you here?"

The question's a dare, and it lingers between them like the taste of bone in a stew.

Aemond cocks his head, thoughtful.

"Do you think every act a political machination? Maybe it is."

He stands, pushes the empty bowl aside, and studies the way her hands drift, loosely, to her lap.

"But perhaps I am not always my brother's heir in cruelty. Sometimes I am simply hungry for something other than what I am given."

The words cut through her, unexpected. There's no defense in them, and for one moment, Alerah feels the room turn. She remembers the story of the child in Tyrosh, the one she hated for a year and mourned for longer, and something in her softens, just enough to let the heat of the soup settle inside her.

Aemond's hand—his left, the one less scarred—rests on her shoulder, and she doesn't flinch. The touch seems tentative, as if he'd decided on a calculated cruelty, but changed his mind at the last second.

It takes effort—measurable, wrenching effort—not to lean into it. The prince holds her only so, suspended; a span too long for mere etiquette, too brief for any comfort.

"I will not intervene again," he says, a vow heavy as a helmet. "If you are starved, it is only because you will it so."

The rest of the day ages her by seasons.

Helaena needs her, nervous and thin-skinned, unable to eat; her hands flutter helplessly over the black bread that sits, unbuttered, on a tin plate.

At intervals, Alerah's summoned to Jaehaerys and Jaehaera, and then to the corner of the stone yard to mend a tear in the septon's purple stole. She's a ghost in a sunless corridor, where the light escapes between stones but never settles on her. This suits her, in a way; she always hated the way bright colors looked on her.

By dusk, she's called for again. The castle's a whorled snail shell of narrow stairs and useless turnings, but word reaches her nonetheless: the prince, the younger one this time, requires attendance in his rooms. The message's formal, but it comes from the mouth of a small, snot-nosed stablehand, hardly tall enough to meet her eye.

She doesn't answer, just follows the long flagstone shadow up the servants' stairwell, every footstep echoing her own emptiness.

Aemond's rooms are dry and surprisingly without any tomes.

There are chessmen on the table, not arranged for play but lined up in soldierly ranks, the Valyrian army facing the plain, painted tiles of Westeros with a bloodless resolve. She waits until he acknowledges her, and when he finally does with a, "sit, please", she stands anyway, not out of defiance but because she fears what might happen if she settles.

He pours wine, not much, and offers her a cup first. She suspects this, and studies the vessel before tasting. Sweet, citrus-tinged, nothing like the stinging, medicinal stuff Aegon swills. If intended as a trap, it's a courteous one.

"They say in Tyrosh you can tell a woman's fortune by the shape and color of her tongue."

He says it with a sociable air, but his eye pins her for a curiosity.

"Mine's been blackened by too much mulberry," she replies, touching her lips, "and by the habit of running before my thoughts catch up."

"If you're hoping for leniency with me, speak plainly."

Alerah feels the faint pulse of rebellion, sour and pleasing as green plums.

"Back in the library. I've never had a prince try to seduce me with grammar before. I must admit, it's more interesting than the usual means."

He laughs—sharp, no warmth but plenty of clarity.

"What's the usual means in Tyrosh?"

She thinks of painted whores and auction blocks, of boys who knife each other for half a loaf of bread, and of the Archon's daughters who set their brothers against one another for less.

"Usually," she says, "they just buy you. Sometimes there's a chase. But it never ends well for the runner."

His smile turns inward.

"You see everything as a contest. A test for which only you know the rules."

"Not everything."

She sips the wine, and only when her tongue bristles with the aftertaste does she add, "your rules are far more complicated. Sometimes I can't tell when it's a game at all."

Aemond considers that. Picks up a pawn and holds it between two fingers.

"And if you could, what would you do with the advantage?"

"Probably waste it," she says, smiling. "I never did learn how to play chess."

He laughs.

"I don't like the game much, either, if I'm honest. The pieces are all expendable, but every move matters. There's little room for forgiveness. Or reinvention. No matter how many times you play, the boards are always the same."

Alerah studies the arrangement, the painted figures in ordered rows, each knowing exactly where it belongs. Silent in the spaces around them, she sees the flaw: nothing in King's Landing, or in herself, had ever been so neat.

"Do you want to know what I envy about your people, Alerah?" Aemond asks, voice low, so the words seem to flatten the candle's flame.

"I suspect nothing."

"More than anything, I envy the way you keep your own counsel. Nothing's said unless it's meant, and even then, it's offered up like a provocation. My mother says it's the only thing she admires about the Free Cities. Their concubines can lie better than anyone, even with the truth."

She shrugs, a quick flutter.

"Truth and lies are the same thing, sometimes. Depends who's paying attention."

He leans in, elbows on the desk, and Alerah feels the old tremor dance through the length of her back.

"Will you be honest with me, then? Just once?"

She braces herself, not knowing what he'll ask.

"When I kissed you," he says, slow as honey, "did it make you want to bite me?"

Her laugh's a rupture, sharp as cracked glass. She meets his gaze, then looks away, ashamed at how long she must pause before the answer.

"Yes," she admits. 

"And if I asked you to kiss me now?"

She reaches, because the air demands to be filled, because a world left empty is one where she can't breathe.

He doesn't lunge, or demand, or even beckon. He waits. And that, more than any force, is what folds her to him. She kisses him, a slow, measured thing at first, as if they had all the time in the world, as if not everything depended on this one small, ordinary violation.

But then her hands betray her, pulling him into her. Their teeth click together. Her tongue's a dare, and his is the dare taken—back, over, again. Their breath fuses in a single, molten, salt-wet rush.

He tastes like clove, and the pomegranate, and something sharp and sad and utterly himself.

She pulls away first. She has to.

"Is this what you wanted?" she asks, though the edge in her voice is already fraying.

He's breathing just as hard as she is, but when he answers, it's with a composure that says, we can do this again, as many times as you wish.

"No, not nearly," he says.

Chapter Text

She feels it, the potential for worse, rattling down the vertebrae of her spine. It should terrify her; instead, she finds herself warmed by the anticipation.

"More than this, then?" she whispers, her throat dry as the Dornish sands. "Or just more of it?"

His smile pinches.

"You do enjoy putting a prince to question."

"Well," Alerah says, cheeks flushed, "someone must. If not us, then who?"

He answers this with a kiss—no warning, not even the shadow of one. His hand on her jaw, thumb slicked at the edge of her mouth, the other snaking to her waist, and then lower, so the world tilts until she's half in his lap and half in the braziers' glow. The taste of wine, the little pop of air as she draws breath, something electric that arcs between her teeth and his.

He pulls away, but not far, and his single eye's molten in the half-light.

"Do you want me to stop?" he asks.

"No," she says.

He untangles a strand of her hair, red in the fire's tide. His hand cups her thigh, possessive and steady. She wonders if he'll bruise her—wonders if she wants him to.

"It's a forbidden thing," he says, almost to himself. "My mother despises anything that cannot be documented, or explained, or catalogued. My brother would take you and discard the bones for the dogs."

He traces a circle, slow, just above the rim of her knee.

"But me," Aemond says, "I keep what I conquer."

The words send a violence down her nerves.

"What a thing to say," she whispers.

"What else should I call it? To hunger for what you cannot, in good sense, have."

He doesn't ask another question. He moves her, slow but inexorable, until she's straddling him, her linen shift scraping the silk of his tunic. Alerah thinks, for the space of a heartbeat, that she should protest, but her hands are already buried at the base of his neck. Her mouth's wanton and needy against his.

She loses herself in it. The taste and texture of him—yes, but also the way he shudders when she bites his lip, the clench of his hand at her hip, the subtle demand to press harder.

Impossibly, Criston Cole's voice booms like a blast of light in the dark.

"Prince Aemond, the Hand requires you in council."

She jerks, panic slicing the length of her spine, but Aemond holds her fast. His finger to his lips, a swift unspoken command for silence. He cocks his head towards the door.

"Can it not wait?"

"Lord Otto says, now. There's talk of a delegation from Dragonstone."

Criston's a blur on the other side, the door still shut, but Alerah imagines she hears the tap of his boot.

Aemond exhales, the rush of air a slow reclamation.

"I'm occupied. Isn't one brother enough to keep track of?"

There's a scuffle, a diplomatic scraping of metal, as if Criston means to say something more but opts instead for a formal retreat. The shadow of his boots echoes away, and for an instant, only the hush of their breathing and the ragged tangle of their limbs remain.

"I should go," she simply says, before anything else should unreasonably occur.

Alerah slips from the room without anyone the wiser, although the servant's cowl is far too loose when she ducks under the arched stone of the hallway. She redoes it with fumbling hands, the echo of Aemond's mouth still heavy on hers, and makes her way to the dockside markets. It's the furthest she can go, the furthest that still falls within the bounds of King's Landing, and as close to freedom as her cowardice will permit.

The stalls crowd thick with the smell of persimmons and pickled eels, the calls of traders making bids for coin and bartered salt.

"Girl," one of them says, voice anointing her with a rough intimacy. "Do they not feed you in that golden cage? You look as hungry as a Lyseni monk."

She pretends not to hear, but he steps in front of her, a sea-wind curl lapping the bone work of his jaw.

"You're of the pale lot," he says.

"Tyrosh," she answers.

"Sloshed the lilt off your tongue from birth, though, didn't you?"

He has the look of someone who'd been half-salted as a boy, then left in the sun until the sea and land alike forgot what to call him.

He squints, his hands callused and clean from endless hours gutting cod for the lord-masters of Driftmark and the Crownlands. But his teeth, when he shows them, are straight and pearled, better kept than any she'd known in Tyrosh or the court above. He clears his throat hastily.

"I have a cousin in Tyrosh. Or did have. She made sloe gin for the noblemen. Ended up in a bottle herself, I think. You know how it is."

"Why do you say that?"

He shrugs.

"They say the Free Cities are like a sieve. What trickles down is only what's left after the lords finish their feasts."

Alerah thinks he'd fit in among her half-sibling brood—if he survived it.

The man tilts his head. "What do you want?"

He takes her measure, gaze slipping from her eyes to the meager basket she holds between her two hands. It bears nothing but a coil of rough gray string and a very old, half-dried orange. She sees the calculation.

"You've a hunger," he says, not unkindly. "I've a stall here. I throw out more cuttings than you could eat in a fortnight. If you want, I could slip some to you, under the table."

Alerah narrows her eyes, fighting the shudder that claws up her legs.

"What's the catch?"

He smiles, feline.

"Only that you return the favor when it's due."

She doesn't know what favor a prince's whore could offer a streetside fishmonger, but she learns fast: never ask, never promise, just let him give and see what price he attaches when the time comes.

"Fine. I'll be back next tide," she says.

He tucks a sliver of cold-smoked eel into her palm, closing it with a thumb.

"Good girl," he says. She almost laughs; it's the same condescension as in the Red Keep, only better salted.

"If the ones up there ever tire of you, try your fortune in Silk Street. The gold cloaks love a palace girl."

"That's a shame. We have the same employer. Doubt the Targaryens would be pleased."

"Oh! The prince, he knows you're down here?"

"He doesn't own me," she replies, and walks away before the man can answer.

She lingers at the edge of the throng, watching a thin-lipped woman haggle over honeycombs, boys hawking balled rice with raisins, a Myrish dyer dazzling housewives with indigo cloak-linings, impossible in hue. She feels the ache of the city like a bruise, a place that'll never quite accept her, not even when she's dead and leaching into the earth.

She walks until calves and thighs burn, up the steep rise behind the big sept on Rhaenys' Hill. There, king's men in green and gold march in sleepy, unimportant rotation atop the walls. Alerah lets herself be seen. There are no patrols at this hour, only occasional gaggles of merchant girls and a boy selling sweet loaves slathered in fat and almond meal. She sniffs them, thinks of the dry heel of bread waiting on her cot, and turns away.

She sits beside an old stone well, the lip mottled with odd shells and bird shit and wax trimmings from a dozen quick, secret vigils. There's no one else near. Below, the city, spun and shingled, glitters with light even at dusk: all the torches, hundreds, maybe thousands, burning their little frustrations against the coming dark.

Alerah looks out and imagines calling the world hers, the way the Targaryens dream of it, but she can't summon the taste for conquest. Someone must lose; that has to be the rule. She wonders if this is why they have always, inevitably, gone mad.

She's lost in the hour, the day, the city, until the bells at the Queen's Sept peal for curfew.

Sometimes, at the house of her childhood, the city's towers would cut the sun into slices and for a brief, bleeding moment every wall would glow the color of a robin's egg yolk. She missed that, missed how the heat could be caught between brick and bone, how it could be almost hidden from the world, just for her. Here, the city squatted under a permanent thumb, the sky pressed down to the color of old cheese, and everything—light, rumor, breath itself—was rationed through a thousand unseen gates.

She digs her nails into the rim of the well, turning them slowly along the roughened grit, then picks one free from her thumb and flicks it down the shaft just to hear the echo on the stone. Her hand looks whiter than she remembers. Paler maybe, or trash-scoured by weeks in the keep. They say you could learn a country by the scars on its children. If that's true, King's Landing is cruel, but not nearly as inventive as Tyrosh. The well shudders with her tremor, but no one minds. No one's looking.

She doesn't hear the approach, only smells the clove and salt of him—Aemond, in a dark cloak, no banners, hood down so only the silver of his hair marks him out as more than a common man. He sits beside her. Like he belongs there.

"You run well," he says.

"You called for me?"

He looks sidelong, the one eye an entire landscape of chill.

"I never call. I only expect to be obeyed," he says, and there's humor there, sly and self-immolating.

She expects a lecture on her foray down cobbled alleys, or on the folly of risking herself so nakedly in the lower city. But the prince says instead:

"If you wish to eat at the market, why return at all?"

Alerah stares at her open hands. The eel-ends, the dried orange, spiced with street-dust, not fit for a King's lapdog let alone a Targaryen's. She almost says it aloud. But you're not a Targaryen, are you? Not in the way you imagine.

"Even the gulls in Blackwater can't live on market scraps," she says. "The real bread is up on the hill, and it doesn't last long away from the ovens. I never learned the trick for keeping it from going stale."

Aemond studies her with a twitch of jaw.

"You're not like the others. Not even like the whores of Tyrosh. You don't smile when you beg, or lie when you barter."

Alerah means to thank him, or insult him, but the words tangle, unsure which direction to tumble.

"Maybe it's that I don't enjoy lying. Maybe I've never had a coin worth it."

Aemond lets the moment hang, the two of them in the drift of cooling air, neither speaking for so long that the city sounds begin again: a pulse of drums from the port, the howl of some animal far beyond the walls.

"Do you know what happens to girls like you?" he asks abruptly. "Who survive the driftwood stalls and the whorehouses and then climb into princely arms?"

She recognizes the claim for what it is—a warning, or maybe a prophecy.

"They usually die," Alerah says.

He shakes his head.

"They don't die. They become part of the palace, and the palace never lets go. It wears you down until nothing's left except a rumor, or a name in some ledger that nobody reads. The strong ones, the clever ones, they try to break it. And the palace breaks them. That's what happened with my uncle's daughters. That's why my mother despises concubines and handmaidens and all things that can't be tamed."

Alerah draws the orange's rind through her teeth, tongue pricked with the ghost of sweetness.

"It's no different where I'm from. The men who think they're oarsmen—who think they're rowing the city, that the rest of us are water or wind. I'm not the first to try for more than what's given, my prince. Not the first to fail, either."

She offers him a section of orange. He declines.

"You know my brother would ruin you. You know my mother would use you up for barter, or blood," he looks at her, really looks, and asks, "so why stay?"

She thinks, the city stretched out at their feet as if awaiting a decision made here would reach, by dark magic and rumor, every gutter and garret below.

"When I was small," she says at last, "my mother hid a coin in the flour tin. Each day she'd empty it in hopes the gods would double it by next night."

Alerah shakes her head, smiling at the stupidity of it.

"For years, I waited for the gods to visit, and for years nothing appeared—until the day a rat chewed through and scattered flour all across the table. The coin was still there, dulled and pecked. Most people don't leave, my prince. The trick is finding new gods."

She tosses a curl of orange into her mouth and wipes her hand on her shift.

"And perhaps I'm just as daft as my mother."

"You realize that no one in the world is able to hold King's Landing for long, unless the city itself chooses not to kill them."

He stands beside her now, closer than before, close enough that she can smell him again—cinders, smoked wool, a trace of pomegranate still lingering on his lips.

They both look out, side by side, into the valley of the city.

"If you destroyed it, what would remain?" she muses.

"Ash, and swimming things that live off dead flesh. Maybe the palace, if the wind is in its favor. Nothing else."

Aemond thinks about that for a long while, so long a passing bat stutters through the half-light between them.

"Sometimes the world needs to be razed."

It could be a line from a story, but in him, it sounds only like a promise.

"Where did you hear that?"

"My mother, once. In a dream. She said the only way to grow stronger is to burn down the rot and start over."

He glances at her. "The Seven despised her for it."

Alerah wipes a knuckle over her lip, half-amused, half-incredulous.

"Is that what you believe? That you must always start over?"

"No," he says, "but I do know there are no new stories. Only new burnings."

They watch the lanterns pop on, one by one, a nervous exhalation from every little house in the sprawl below. Alerah wonders, not for the first time, what her part would be in the fire: a spark, a log, or merely what gets swept away by the cinders after.

She doesn't look at him.

"You shouldn't be here," she says.

"No," he agrees, but doesn't move.

He lets the seed of his answer settle. Looking at him now, there's something of the old men who watch flames in winter with a glassy distance. The wind rises, snaps the pennants along the walls. Aemond's voice is softer than she expects.

"You'll come, then," he says. "Tonight. To the high table."

It's not a question; it's a summons, and they both know it. Alerah nods, and the city tilts a fraction, as if the hill itself has given up its quarrel with gravity.

"What's today again? Remind me."

"The king's nameday, of course."

He rolls the word on his tongue, almost wryly, as if to test her knowledge or her mettle.

"Then it's a feast," Alerah says, with more defiance than what safety might advise, "and the castle will busy itself with more than plotting against the likes of me."

She stands and brushes the orange rind from her lap.

"I'll change into something less like myself, and I suppose I'll see your mother there."

Aemond's look is not quite tender, but not unsympathetic, either.

"Lamb," he says with finality. "Tonight, after the feast. Show me your kingdom."

She watches him go, the low light polishing his cloak to a gloss of oil and late-winter plum.

Chapter Text

"Lady Alerah, you're to be seated near the prince this evening. Princess Helaena has retired to her chambers for rest, and Prince Aemond has asked for your stories."

It's not without reproach that Alerah accepts the invitation from venerable Ser Harrold Westerling after she breaks fast—stowing away dried apples, herring, and figs she's managed to collect from the forgotten stores. Everything the castle's inhabitants forgo, she devours with haste.

Although, she's still starving.

Helaena's not at fault. She tells herself that. She has to. Gilded as the cage may be, it's still a cage that entraps the princess, and Alerah, for all her vengeful machinations, doesn't intend to be the one to crook the bars.

She feigns common courtesy, and lightness, and gives a wide berth to the subject of Helaena's husband—as though he were a storm out in sea, and she the sailor avoiding its due consequence.

It's no less through rumors that she discovers another entrapment laid by the Greens.

The question of Princess Rhaenyra's children, although never dared to be broached in conversation by either her or the other servants, has brewed its own tempest in these halls. They'd just had an evening to themselves a fortnight ago. The Realm's Delight seated beside her Green Queen. It stirred the tongues of all who attended.

Tyrosh's not without its imperfections—an undeniable truth, but Alerah can't boast remembrance of bastards relegated to such discontent among the court's gossips.

After all, as one of the Free Cities that claims Valyrian blood to still linger among its populace, Tyrosh wouldn't dare impose a self-induced barrier, not when those bloodlines are in the interest of the Archon. The trade of people is no strange innovation to Tyrosh.

She's proof of that enough.

Regardless, Alerah concedes to Aegon's game. She's famished, and of her own volition—to a degree.

One fortnight and she'd gone without swallowing a crumb or uttering a word of discontent.

A few days later and she's been made a cadaver of her former self—her skin paling to chalk-white, cheeks void of rosehip-red, and venom, venom tipping from her tongue with as much sincerity as she's permitted. If she was a more ignorant woman, she'd lay address onto Aegon, implore him to attend to his merciful nature, his charitable nature—if such notions weren't imagined.

Instead, she makes it arduous for herself, knowing the truth of his temperament, knowing her pleas would sooner find the ears of a deaf-mute.

That's why she receives the bidding, and that's why she must go to Aemond without equal theatrics. She's just borne witness to some—Criston Cole behind Westerling, laboring to suppress judgement between his dark, Dornish eyes.

He simpers, half-turned but in her sights, when her voice resounds with grudging, tired agreement.

Gooseflesh as sharp as a knife's jag envelops her skin.

Aemond may just as very well be her executioner at dusk. She shouldn't torture herself like this, but she can't bring an end to the clamoring of her mind. How reason cannot be heard above the din of chaos and what possibilities may come of it.

"Stop," she says, and the kingsguard halt in their steps.

"Let them wait upon my arrival. I've no such fine gown to fall into, if anything."

"It would appear you've made a mess of it—since you seem to find it necessary to make paltry amends," Aegon says, twirling a prong into his plate idly.

He's unable to withstand the obvious temptation of staring.

The Tyroshi makes her way towards the front of the banquet. Her face is obscure, but he sees fire-touched curls bound together and hidden under a clattering hairpiece.

Among the court jesters, bards, and bastards, Aegon can't summon a shred of delight—even under the pretense they must entertain. A momentous occasion, their father's nameday.

Yet, here, beneath the seven-pointed star, beneath all of their gods, new and old, he finds for a lack of trying when he recalls Aemond's conduct.

He looks at Aemond and sighs.

"What could have possibly inclined you to summon that sheep-skinned peasant? I wonder. A mock bride—for some dullard, no doubt."

The older prince gestures for the cupbearer, a girl who is no more than four-and-ten, slipping his fingers across her forearm with as much delicacy as a spider surveying its next captive. She lurches forward, gauche, before the younger balances her and shoos her from the table. Like two beasts poring over prey for their leisure, Aemond's one to allow a clutch of eggs to grow into something of more sustenance, while Aegon's reckless and short-sighted. He'll take whatever lays before him.

"She's high-born, fool," Aemond chews on a piece of fish before throwing his fork back onto the plate.

He takes comfort in the drink, not for any plain reason other than to conceal his face, lower his eye into the ring-shaped depth of the chalice. He wonders, if only for a moment, whether he can divine the future, read the flow of water or the entrails of a beast.

Aemond shuts his eye. Nothing.

"But I am generous in my praise, of course," he says.

A well-versed affirmation, one that's intent on keeping more unseemly passions from unfurling themselves. Aegon knows this all too well, knows of the barrier surrounding Aemond's careful words, how attentive he is, even with his impairment. He's trying to make a fool of him. Trying to pretend at indifference for the girl.

"Yes, you've quite a belly full of commendation, brother," Aegon says.

He chinks the cup with his ring, somewhat bored.

"You've drawled about her wickedness all evening. Pray tell, are her feminine wiles leading you astray? Noble, dutiful Aemond?"

Knocking against their table, a young, tittering woman apologizes, prostrating herself with the neck of a swan. She smiles, reticent, then returns to her lord-husband just as immediately. Aemond takes the opportunity to whisper another command to Ser Harrold. This time, to let it be known that the princes aren't to be disturbed or grave consequences will follow suit. Aegon frowns, tearing another leg off the quail set before his eyes.

Aemond's not one to yield, not of his own accord, anyway. They were children, once, as far as Aegon's memory can reach. And in that short-lived season of innocence—as much as they were able to retain under the burdens of nobility, or their mother's own—Aemond resolved to never showcase his cracks. All the more to pluck at. Fodder for him and their nephews to conjure their schemes.

Aegon taps a nail on the table, and with atrocious abandonment of any restraint, decorum, or delicacy, laughs.

"Aego—"

"No appetite for jests? Come, now, age has turned you into such a recluse with no patience for story. 'Tis merely a story—that girl."

Pointedly, he gestures for Aemond to look at Alerah.

Halted by the usual intrigues, Alerah greets lords and ladies with errant laughter. Like pigeons around a girl with scraps for bread, they pester the Tyroshi until her hands are emptied of what little she already has.

"I could always reward her with my everlasting thanks. Fill her cunt with dragon brood. A brilliant recompense, you needn't extend the branch, brother," Aegon says.

Something sour seems to have reached Aemond's lips—for he whisks his tongue across them, and sets down his cup.

"Should you not be attending to your lady wife? Your children?"

"That's right. The whelps," Aegon snorts. "Forgive me, are they at the age where they don't whimper and squall over every trouble? You would be most familiar with them, wouldn't you? Not even the servants can manage them."

He takes another drink, his brow as flat as a stone.

"Petulant little creatures."

"You speak of them as though you have been slighted. Our sister deserves all the adulation in the world for lying with you once, much less on two wonderful occasions made evident to all. I'm sure."

"Our sister," Aegon smiles, his words drawn like a dagger in the night.

"I'd like a wife who wasn't as forlorn, resigned to her illusions and fantasies, plaguing me with solemnity—no lightness—just as everybody does in this fucking castle."

"And it is your belief that this handmaiden's different in that regard?"

Aemond allows himself to scathe, to clamp down on his brother's juvenile concepts of both the smallfolk and noblemen alike, a trait he must shed before he's named king. Or gods help them all.

"Why ever not?" Aegon laughs, wine lathering his tongue in foam.

He shrugs.

"She's a foreign whore. She's no wager that would entice more than a fishmonger! Let her be what she was born into, brother. Why brandish our fine Valyrian for the honor of a—what did you name her? A slaver's slut?"

Aemond flexes a finger around the stem of the chalice.

"Do your eyes deceive you, brother, or your filth-ridden cock?"

At that, Aegon laughs from the abdomen up, slapping the table, punctuating the air with an intolerable tension.

Aemond conjures a half-smile.

"Do you find the truth amusing?" Aemond asks.

"What an intriguing notion—you're fond of the creature."

"I care only for my family, Aegon."

"Good," Aegon nods, eyes venturing out and plucking her from the revelries. He finds it pitiable, truly, how she hoped a mask would conceal her from him. Make her more indiscernible. Less individual at this red-letter occasion. An affront to his intelligence.

"Then you won't anguish over what I intend to do to her, the crude bitch."

Fingers wiggling in the air, Aegon catches the attention of Ser Criston Cole and has the knight follow the girl.

Like a rabbit upon its warren, Alerah weaves through the crowd in deft, familiar patterns. Men in the king's favor shout at her bawdily, voices as ripe with irony as the pheasants they gnash with wet jaws. 

Three of them chase her from the servants' end of the dais to the spot where Aemond sits, patient as carved marble. 

She halts beside his chair, spine squared, showing off neither wit nor submission. Only a poise that suggests survival's sometimes the only wit one can wield.

Aegon gestures, and a flagon's poured.

“Wine for my lady,” he says, and the word—lady—breaks the table’s humor for a moment. A small stir of whispers unspools behind their backs. It's not lost on anyone. Least of all Aemond.

At first, Aemond does nothing. He doesn't invite her to sit, nor does he address the other men hounding at her heels. Instead, he tips his head just so, as if listening for the last echo of a song being plucked by one of the bards.

Then, to the three gorging lords now leering over Alerah's shoulder, he says, "you've business with her?"

One, a Lannister or Strong or some other mongrel, smirks and opens his mouth, but Aemond's eye sharpens, and the words curdle back down. Alerah knows the look; it's the look of a man who's seen a dragon fly, and knows there's nothing left in the world to astonish him except its shadow.

"Di—did you ask for me?"

"Yes, sit," Aemond says, a hint of concern irritatingly adhered to his tongue.

"Imports from your beloved home. I considered you might know the cuisine better than any of our tasters claim, and so," he says, humming, "you'll entertain us, I'm afraid."

"May I interject?" Aegon asks disingenuously. "I fear my cupbearer is long overdue for a substitution."

"Apologies, brother. She's mine alone this evening. Indubitably," Aemond shrugs, a stream of silver cascading across his leather-clad shoulder.

"You must find one that is more suited for the task. Her shoes are not intended to scamper to and fro' the kitchen. Not in proportion to your needs—not at all. What with the way you're going through your cups. You'll wear her to skin and bones. As if she needs the encouragement."

Aegon doesn't overlook the insinuation and, instead, shrinks back into his seat.

"I'm not partial to those," Aemond says, pushing the shells of mussel closer to Alerah when she makes no motion to secure the plate. Look too eager, and she fears it may all be ripped away in a chorus of sadistic laughter.

"In exchange," he hums, dribbling fingers on the lacquered wood.

"A story, if you please," and his voice rings in the hush with all the clarity of command. "From before you entered service, if it won't offend the lords and ladies present."

There's a ripple of laughter—a polite one—from the high seats, the kind that says, we're not in the habit of listening to our guests, but let her amuse us if she can.

Alerah fixes her gaze on the silver goblet Aemond turns between his hands.

"My mother worked the canals of Tyrosh, dyeing silk for the noblemen and their pets. We lived in a kiln at the edge of the dye market, and every summer the walls would leech pink and blue from all the years of dripping cloth. Once, during the war between the Sea Lords of Braavos and our own, the city burned for a week straight, but the kiln—my home—did not catch. For a month after, the whole district smelled of boiled cherries and scorched salt, but not a stone changed in our house. My mother claimed it was proof the old gods loved those who endured fire, not those who made it."

She pauses. The room's utterly rapt.

"But the next year, our home was taken by a councilman, and we were sold to a passing Myrish merchant for the value of two bolts of silk. I learned, then, that the gods do not love anyone, old or new; they only test you until you break, and then they laugh."

She expects them to laugh in return, to dismiss her with the same brackish indifference that’s greeted every other tale she’d ever told at table. Instead, the hush lingers, rippling along the benches. Even Aegon holds back his retort, his eyes pinched, thumb scuffing circles on the gilded rim of his goblet.

"What a queer lesson to draw,” Aegon finally breaks, pitching his voice so that the nearest two tables catch the comment and pass it among their number.

But even he seems winded by the underlying violence, the way Alerah’s story refracts his own—hellish fires that plague their house, family scattered, gods who don’t know mercy from spite.

He leans forward, catches Alerah’s eye.

“Suppose you were the god, then. What would you have done?”

Alerah sips her wine, considering. Her new dress, borrowed off a seamstress’ rack, catches sharply against her ribs with every breath.

“I would have burned the councilman first,” she says, “then left the kiln as it was, for the next fool who wanted a taste of permanence.”

She shrugs, the words smoldering in the air.

“But I am not a god.”

Aemond’s face twitches at this, although only a flicker. Still, Alerah files it away: a reaction, in a man who seldom offers them. She eats two mussels, then a third, and finds the shells too pretty to discard, so she lines them in a neat curve along the edge of her trencher. The rest of the table resumes its pulse; the lords and ladies lean in, dropping wagers over the next course or who would be quickest to take her to bed.

Aemond waits until the musicians strike up again—some mournful thing, meant to cast a gild over the striplings whose faces bloom in the candlelight, whose hands stray under trestle tables and tangle in stolen bites of marzipan.

Then he says, almost considerably, “the kiln is not your prison, girl. Nor is this place.”

Gently, he lifts the veil of what looks like clattering stars above her face—two sea-colored jewels of eyes to rival his sapphire.

He waits in suspension before he allows the veil to slip between his fingers. The stars fall, curtaining her eyes again.

"Hm," he hums, shoving the plate before her. "Eat, girl."

She does as she's told. Merrily. She looks at the spread before them with a great, white lust, and she means to sate herself on all of it—before any greedy hands would think to retrieve them.

Alerah doesn’t remember the taste of the first bite, only the velocity at which it disappears. Mussels, briny and cold, then slabs of honeyed pork and limp shavings of pickled fennel, tart enough to twitch her jaw. She finishes two more courses—rose-pickled onions, then a stew of game birds and barley with figs—before the heaviness of it bruises against her stomach.

"You feed as though you've been starved! Poor thing," clear delight washing over his face, Aegon clicks his tongue.

Alerah makes an inexplicably unfamiliar expression, chewing on her portion of meat with such a measured pace that Aegon wouldn't have believed her to be deprived for so long—if he himself had not issued the order. It's made flagrantly apparent—when the yellow in her eyes dances like twin flames on a spire—that she's bridling her anger to use on a more appropriate occasion.

Aegon's crooked smile splits into teeth. He's grinning, the bastard.

She abandons the fork altogether. Instead, picking at the succulent marrow with her fingers.

"My fast, yes. It is dedication to the Lord of Light. Nothing a man cannot do, regardless of status. Or creed. If you are thus inclined, perhaps you should subjugate yourself to the same circumstances. It is no easy feat, but entirely within your capabilities, my prince."

Aegon bluntly interjects.

"Why the fuck would I do that?"

Grease glazes her fingertips a golden-brown. She flattens her tongue against her skin, drawing a long, vulgar stroke across one finger.

"I recommend partaking in the east's culture in order to forge better connections with its people. Mayhap, you'll unearth an understanding of Old Valyria that's been lost over the years. Aegon the Conqueror would surely recognize this, and I would insist that his legacy's upheld through this keen perspective. An empire cannot survive if it is fractured by religious contention. Imposing the Light of the Seven on Essos would sever all possibilities of a centuries-old alliance before they've begun to form."

"Your barbarism never ceases to fascinate me, Tyroshi. Do not presume I am in need of a lecture—political or otherwise."

"You should listen, Aegon. Perhaps you will be in need of such advice if you ever aspire to your namesake."

Aegon chortles an ugly thing.

"Those heretics will bend the knee if I instruct them to, have confidence in that," he snorts, curling his lips into a weasley smile.

"It's the one true religion. Mother has always maintained that in our education. Any savage would thank us for enlightening them, for saving them against their own dull-wittedness and lack of refinement."

"I must say, my prince, bluntness is of the utmost salience for when you are named king," Alerah says. "Certainly, you possess an unsharpened intellect—for it to come so naturally to you in words. As if you were still a child. Hm, I admire that so."

"As you've said, brother, she needs the fare," Aemond interrupts, canting his neck towards Alerah with a disapproving scowl.

"She is not in the correct state of mind."

"Yes, I fear I've forgotten myself. Forgive me if you've taken offense," she says.

Aemond slips a careful hand across her lap and squeezes her thigh underneath the table before just as hastily withdrawing.

Fortunately, Aegon's entirely too distracted by the wine and her barbs to notice.

"Of course," the older concedes temporarily, annoyance clouding his eyes with a lavender haze.

"But I am not in direct standing to be king—that privilege is awarded to my half-sister, and gods endow her with the lust for it," he says.

"Is that really true?" she asks.

"Quite so. You're not well-versed in the blood laws of Westeros. I hear that Tyrosh brandishes a different order, one that awards bastardy and other manners of ill conduct."

Political intrigue, a subject in which their own father doesn't care to suffer through.

Alerah seems to unbend, her shoulders grow slack, and she becomes remarkably thoughtful for how much the moment permits. If she is a dragon—descended from Old Valyria—she wouldn't reduce her claim with a cursory answer. As much as it may appease Aegon.

"We cannot afford to discount children born out of wedlock, my lord. Even a slave's child may be of an exalted, ancient bloodline."

Clever, but a foreseeable answer nonetheless.

"Yes, quite a predicament, isn't it? In truth, it appears as though this very issue has washed onto the shores of Westeros. Bled into court. Into the people's hearts. It is rather difficult, I suppose, to put a mutt to the knife when it is bred from a prized bitch. So few of its kind already," he says. "Still, a mercy to kill the offspring. No?"

Despite his voice giving credence to Rhaenyra's misdeeds, her bastards always relegated to a small corner in Aegon's mind, Alerah doesn't recognize his words as one having been supped in King's Landing would. She's entirely too foreign to comprehend the magnitude.

Sudden, and without warning, Alerah issues a hum, a downcast smile forced upon her features.

"It must be lonely, I imagine. I'm saddened that you must guard yourself—that duty has tempered your spirit," she means it not for himself, of course, but for his brother. As inconspicuous as he ventures to be, Aemond rolls his eye across her lips, and watches.

"Don't waste your platitudes—"

"I grieve for you, Prince Aegon. You've been issued a heavy burden that few would receive with grace."

Aegon's nearly set on the offense. He seizes the rim of the table, unnoticed, pressing so hotly that he would think the wood to melt like skin off bones if he didn't know better.

He should fuck her bloody for her impudence alone. The lamb doesn't offer compassion to the beast that'll devour it.

Not unless it thinks itself its equal.

His brother turns, dragging his knuckles across his neck in a gesture of discomfort.

"He is grateful. He doesn't know it," Aemond says. He waves for a pitcher to be fetched from the far end of the table.

"Are you parched as well, girl?"

Alerah's handed a chalice, filled with an exotic brew—something just as sweet-smelling as honeyed wine. Aegon doesn't recall having seen the color, either. Pale, but a golden tint can be extracted given a thoughtful look.

Generous in the serving, Alerah tipples the drink towards the back of her throat with eager abandonment, and flushes, cheeks and lips blossoming with a rich scarlet-red.

She laughs into her hand.

"Pears! It's made from pears."

Aegon doesn't see the unmarred eye of Aemond when he orders another cup to be brought.

"Yes, and you can have as much as you crave, in due time," Aemond says.

Rare occasions are met with Aemond's laughter. Aegon knows this too well.

"Slower, slower ," another chuckle from Aemond and she's tripping the chalice back anew. "Gods, you drink like a Northman."

Aegon sighs.

"Have you enjoyed yourself, Lady Alerah? In the company of the princess?"

"Oh, of course," she nods earnestly. "She and the younglings are so terribly sweet. You both could not be more blessed with such a sister. And you, a wife, Prince Aegon."

"Yes, well, I don't know which of the Seven to extend my gratitude towards. Aemond wants for naught—ever since we were young. Not in the traditional sense. And yet," Aegon scrapes the hilt of his dining knife across his jaw, relishing in what he's about to profess. "It would seem as though fate has delivered their favorites to him. Golden as he is, I believe I'm beginning to find some tarnish."

"Come off your nonsense, Aegon."

"Never one for acclaim, really," Aegon chortles, more crow than dragon. His eyes flicker towards Alerah.

"Do you ever allow the commonfolk the pleasure of spying your face, my lady? How auspiciously round, plump," he says it with a pop of his lips, dabbing his finger against his cheek.

It's doubtlessly an insult to emphasize the gaunt, new structure of Alerah's face. One that ardently suits her, he should say.

"Have you traversed the Street of Silk yet?" he asks.

Aemond's scowl thickens.

"Must I?" Alerah sets down her brew.

"Oh, yes! It's the only true source of entertainment in King's Landing, I can assure you. Pillow houses, mummers' plays, those sorts. Similar to your home in Tyrosh, yes? Or am I mistaken?"

"You're not."

"Wonderful," he says, a lilt in his throat. "I have one more inquiry, then I'll stop my dunning. You must be inclined for bed—with our treasure of a sister, or perhaps, us?"

"Aegon, enough degeneracy. Leave her to the roast. She's starved."

It disturbs Aegon—how this delicately offensive creature has been permitted to not only dine with them, but remains elevated by his very own blood. It would almost seem as though Aemond's deliberate in his intentions to oppose him lately.

To side with the equivalent of a glorified whore, one that would no less be in the company of inferior men across the Narrow Sea if not for the generosity of the Crown, is categorically hideous.

"What was it like, then, in Tyrosh?" Aegon asks, abruptly. "The dye market's not the only thing the city's famous for."

He leans in, lolling on his wrists.

"Tell the lords and ladies what amusements await a girl from the gutters there."

Alerah glances at the array of faces around her—some expectant, some averted—and picks up a half-moon of cheese.

She chews thoughtfully, then says, "I once watched a penniless painter slit his throat in defiance of a magistrate who tried to purchase his daughter. He bled blue, from the indigo under his skin. His body hung in the square for a day and a night, and in the morning, all the children dipped their fingers in the pooled dye to stain their lips with his defiance."

Someone at the table—one of the Baratheon bastards, maybe—snorts in disbelief at the extravagance of the tale. But Aemond smiles, thin and white and sharp as a new blade.

The evening wears down in layers. With every plate, every toast, the company thins—first the minor lords, then the queen's lesser cousins, and eventually even the bards. By the third hour, it's only the immediate family and a scattering of the more determined bottom-feeders still at the table. Alerah, dauntless, keeps pace with Aemond as he drains his cup and refills it without remark.

By the fourth hour, only the brothers and Alerah remain. Both boys are loose with drink, and with the temporary truce their cups have forged. Aegon is slumped in his seat, the shape of someone who once thought the world owed him more than this and who still hasn't recovered from the disappointment. His fingers coil around Aemond's sleeve like a shackle.

"Where will you go," he mutters, "when Rhaenyra makes good on her threats, and we're all little more than names in a song?"

He asks not just Aemond, but anyone even half-available for listening.

Nobody answers.

He looks at Alerah, at the empty table, at the candled chandeliers that seem to hang lower, more judgmental, with every draught of evening. 

"Tyroshi, tell me another story. Something twisted."

She wipes the honey from her mouth with the back of her hand, as if his command could conjure a childhood she never cared to recall. For a moment, she wonders whether Aegon wants a lie or the closest thing to it—a lie told with such conviction that calling it a story is its own kind of mercy.

"There was a dog," Alerah says, and it's clear she's trying to amuse herself more than anyone.

"A great, ugly mastiff kept by the winter-keeper at the Silk Bridge toll. The boys threw stones at it, the girls ripped its whiskers when it wandered too close. But the dog wouldn't die. Even when they hung it, it chewed through the rope and limped after us for days, bleeding and half-wit from the lack of air."

She flashes a smile, this one for Aegon alone.

"Years later, a cousin of mine was murdered behind a dice house. No one cared, but the dog howled at the corpse for three days, scaring off the rats. It wasn't loyalty—it was just a dog, doing as it was made to do. The city guard finally beat it to death with clubs, but in the end the rats finished the body anyway."

Alerah shrugs, wipes another streak of juice from her chin.

"I suppose the princess will want something sweeter for the children. But that is the kind of story they tell us as babes in Tyrosh."

Aegon, whose jaw has slackened half an inch at the rawness of it, jolts to life at last.

"Brilliant," he says, tapping his palms together without enthusiasm.

"It's been ages since I've heard a proper fable, one with nothing to recommend it except the steady, eating hunger of the world."

He leans into Aemond, breath soured by spiced wine.

"See, brother? Even the harlots have more imagination than half the court."

Aemond finishes his glass and stands.

"It's finished," he says, softly. "Go to bed, Aegon, before the table falls on you."

"No," Aegon whines. "I want one more. The Tyroshi's such a pleasant conversationalist, no?"

"You—" 

"As I've said, one more. I'm certain you'd be inclined to know as well, brother," says Aegon.

Suddenly, his attention snaps to Alerah.

"So, how much were you auctioned for, and to whom?"

"I beg your pardon, my prince," she says.

She flounders to stand, but Aegon merely latches onto her wrist, tugging her towards him without a token of exertion.

"You've been granted no such thing."

"Let me go."

"Slave girl," he croons, setting down his chalice with a sharpness that she wrests away into the corners of her mind.

"When you are summoned, you will respond as expected. I should hold my tongue before a slave? As though she's pristine?"

She tries to wrench away. The veins on her hand stand out blue and wild, the bones delicate but refusing to buckle.

"I serve your wife's house," Alerah says, her accent doubled and knotted by humiliation, "not yours."

Aegon barks his laughter, teeth bared and breath laced with pear wine.

"See how she pretends at pride! The wheel turns slow here, little mouse; even the highborn bow their heads eventually."

Aegon leans back, arms spread and gaze glassy, as though he's conquered every inch of the conversation. His hand flails for another bottle, and when he finds none, he flicks his tongue in a frustrated, nearly reptilian snarl.

"You're in the midst of two dragons. Valyrian dragons. You think we didn't keep slaves for our beds? Westerosi, Essosi, we would have devoured you alive in Valyria—and thrown out your stinking corpse for our pets come supper. That is—if you underperformed."

"Is that what you think they are? Pets?"

"At the best of times. They do as we bid, don't they? Apart from the occasional mishap, Sunfyre has performed marvelously in all regards," he says.

Aegon casts a wide grin, made thinner by his teeth.

"Although, I suspect you'd make a much more fulfilling creature to tame."

"Aegon, stop this," Aemond says. "You'll summon unwanted eyes to yourself."

"Then pull her from me, brother," he says, simple in its provocation. "If you feel affection for the broodmare that is intended for another lordling's cock."

Aemond bares the circumference of his drink with alarming austerity as Alerah nearly topples onto his brother's lap.

And just as promptly, Alerah's wrenched from his grasp.

"Only out of respect for your good name ," Aemond whispers, a haughty expression caught between the glimmer in his eye. "You can have her in private quarters, but not here."

With a slurred fondness, Aegon's voice dims, "I like you, Tyroshi, even if you talk too much. Reminds me of my sister before she went soft in the head."

He lolls deeper into the seat, arms flung wide in a parody of benediction, and closes his eyes. Within moments, his head nods once, twice—then he's snoring into his cup, the string of drool pooling against the waxed rim.

Criston Cole emerges from the shadows of the hall, like a man who's heard too little or too much. He approaches with a soldier's precision, his posture as rigid as the sword at his hip.

"Prince Aemond. Allow me to escort Lady—"

"No need, Cole. Her chambers are shared with the princess. I wish to retire to mine," Aemond says.

Criston seems to ignore the subtlety, reaching for Alerah's arm when Aemond pushes back.

"They're adjacent to my sister's, lest I need to make it all the more comprehensible for a steward's son. Mind your station."

Criston doesn't argue—he never does, not openly. Instead, he drops his hand, bows a stiff inch, and melts into the galleries.

The feast continues unabated, a cacophony of clinking goblets, laughter, and the ceaseless chatter of the court.

But in the wake of their departure, as Alerah and Aemond ascend the spiral staircase that winds into night's higher quiet, the noise grows weightless behind them. Even the burning cressets and embroidered banners seem less real than the pressure of Aemond's hand on her elbow, steering her not into darkness but a corridor thick with peacock blue dusk, where the windows leak memory and the forgotten warmth of a long-evaporated day.

"You held your own," Aemond says, voice so flat it might be approval or censure or both.

Alerah tucks her thumbs into her waist sash, keeping her eyes on the uneven stone.

"Your brother’s easily amused. I imagine he’s bored of all the usual amusements."

"He is," says Aemond, with the cold certainty of someone who has seen those amusements and wishes to spare her the enumeration. "But he’ll remember tonight. The stories. How you didn’t cower."

He glances sidelong; the moon runs a seam of white along his scar and down the marble of his throat.

"You don't have to let him treat you like that. Not my brother. Not anyone." 

She wants to laugh—the idea that the tyrant-in-waiting would police the cruelty of another strikes her as a riddle that can't be solved.

If Aemond notices her near-mirth, he doesn't remark on it. Instead, he guides her along the narrow corridor, past the flammable shadows the night's wrapped them in.

"You allowed it," she says, a vein of accusation deeper than she intends.

"I allowed you to play at the brave outsider," Aemond counters. "Whether you believe it or not, you'll need that reputation, should you expect to stay."

Before they even reach the end of the long corridor cutting through the main entrance, Aemond picks up Alerah, throws her over his shoulder ass-forward, and marches up the stairs towards his chambers. Her heart's pounding in her throat when she sees the telltale signs of his entryway, and she can feel him loom over his massive bed.

"Aemond, don't you dare—"

She flops onto the feather mattress, and Aemond falls over her, his face so close they could cradle a needle between their noses.

"I've grown familiar with my mother's cues. Her little, unwavering attempts at—mn, crumpling up her skirts," he nips at Alerah's chin, then, just as suddenly, props himself on an elbow and surveys her as if discovering an unexpected secret buried in his sheets. Alerah, still winded from the abrupt absconding, blinks up at the ceiling, tracing the plaster cracks with her gaze.

"Scuttling towards the screen of protection her chambers offer when she cannot move the mountain of incompetence that surrounds her. When she is only a feather against the stone. Light. Fallible. Still unwavering."

She follows the spindly lines until they tangle and multiply towards the corner, a thousand fine veins splitting off into nothing. There's a pause, a gathered breath that feels like the hush before rainfall, a blood-pulse in the throat of the sky. Then he gathers her to him, voice draped in something unfamiliar, something heavy and bare and nearly fatherless. 

"I've seen it," he says. "My father shirking from the blood, while my mother approaches it, blade in hand."

"She runs from duty," Alerah says. "You've all been administered some sort of—poison to be so blind."

"Open your mouth, girl. I'll give you some poison."

Alerah releases a laugh—the shift from venom to laughter comes too easily—and parts her lips, letting the words and the space between them hang.

Aemond fits his mouth over hers, not gentle, not slow, but with the same terrifying efficiency he'd shown in the rookery or the library. His tongue tastes of wine and secret sweetness, and for one second, she feels herself become the hunger he exhibits. He presses his palm to the base of her neck, thumb at the hinge of her jaw, and with a deft twist, he tips her head back to bare the line of her throat. His mouth follows, trailing heat and the press of barely restrained teeth along the tendon pulsing in her neck.

"That's right. All for me. Listen to my voice, my command. I rule you."

"I belong to the Archon. To Tyrosh. To R'hllor."

"You'll belong to whichever lord or stablehand or god our house deems fit. You fall under the Crown, remember? Subject to its laws—and the Targaryens—oh. We have never followed the laws of men. We aren't men. Doesn't that sound exquisite, little lamb?"

He nudges her hands above her head, pinning them with a single iron-fingered clamp. The mattress sighs under his weight, the strong axis of his thigh wedged between her legs. His breath, thick and hot and honeyed, brands her ear with words she doesn't dare repeat.

"You've the right shape for it, you know," he says, searching her face as if to find some foregone answer already buried there.

"To be the first dragon bred in the city's spanning red-walled gutters. Would you like to be part of that history? Shall I fuck a son into you? A daughter, even. Either would serve their purpose. I don't have a preference for the first."

Alerah struggles into a half-sit, her arms still held by the implacable press of his hand.

"You assume a lot from a girl with no name."

She squirms, but not as hard as she might.

Aemond, smiling, bends to kiss her again. Breath for breath, and then none at all.

"Most of the world has no name," he says, voice hushed into the shell of her ear. "Names are for those who would like to be remembered. You wish only to survive."

"I don't care to be a name in your ledger," she manages, not quite breathless, but the tingle at her scalp is nearly intolerable.

"But I want to live to see you crawl, as all worms do, when the world eats you from the inside out."

His grip tightens.

"Then the world must get in line. Many have tried."

Alerah closes her eyes.

"If you knew how easily I might slip through your hands, you'd not make the mistake of thinking me so skilled. What good is a whore without a single patron?"

Aemond pulls back, just enough to see her face. 

The realization strikes him with an almost physical force, a blow as sharp and incomprehensible as if a dragon had turned on its very own rider.

She's a maiden.

He stares at her, speechless for the first time since they began their sparring dance. 

"Well," Alerah says, her voice a thread of silk pulled tightly through the eye of a needle. There's blood in her cheeks, a warmth that shouldn't be there. Not if she were as seasoned and profane as he'd imagined.

"Do you intend to finish, even if no one has come before you?"

Aemond blinks. The cogs of the world shift unfamiliarly, and for a moment, it's as though he sees the pattern in her weaving and understands nothing.  

"I see," he says at last. "I see, and you are—"

The words die on his lips. You're mine, he means to say. The first. The only. He releases her wrists, the taut circle of his grip dissolving to something almost reverent. 

"Dare I call you a coward?" she asks, watching him with defiant eyes that flare and burn. 

"Dare you," he says. 

She feels his breath against her neck, his body poised above hers, waiting. Alerah shifts, and it's the smallest, simplest movement, but it carries the weight of her answer. She's not frightened. Or rather, she is, but she doesn't flinch, and this, more than anything, is what strains him against her. 

"Well?" Her pulse hammers in the hollow of her throat. 

Aemond swallows. His voice, when it comes, is furred with something she can't quite place.

"I'll not come second to the gods. Or to another."

He rolls, sliding her to the edge of the bed, one arm still wound around her waist. 

"Then you're no coward," she says, words drifting like a ship whose sails have been slashed. 

"You'll have it my way, Alerah." 

"Your way," she repeats.

The challenge in it stirs him, makes him want to prove the shape of the world to both of them.

"Yes. My way, and yours. If you come to me," he says, settling with alarming calm into the waiting dark, "it will be because you meant to." 

Chapter Text

She lies awake for most of the night, refusing herself the luxury—or the penance—of sleep. The room's a shroud pulled too tight. She can feel his nearness even through the wall that separates his chambers from Helaena's: a hot, waiting star eating its own light. The old women in Tyrosh, the ones who saw omens in every puddle of piss and each broken egg, would have called it fate—would have bid her spit three times to ward it off, then told her to enjoy the sight of a prince brought low by desire.

She dreams of burning. Sometimes it’s the city; sometimes it’s herself. The fire always starts with a room, a candle or an overturned lamp, a single rash spark. She can never find the source in the dream, only the aftermath: the walls buckling in, the dead left bright and clean as torches. She wakes to the wind gnawing at the shutters, and for a moment is certain she can smell smoke on her skin.

The morning comes all at once, the sun splitting the stained-glass above, so it patterns the bedchamber in gold and desolate coral. She rises with it, fevered and restless, not sure whether she's sweating out a sickness. Helaena's gone from her side.

She splashes water against her face, rubs her wrists raw, and tries, not for the first time, to see herself as more than the sum of men and masters who'd held her down.

Helaena's praying in the solar, her hands steepled, her eyes rapturous and rimmed in sleeplessness. She doesn't look at Alerah as the Tyroshi enters, but Alerah knows she's been expected. She feels the princess's gaze in the weight of the air, in the slowed drag of her own breathing.

"Did you love anyone in Tyrosh?" Helaena asks, before even a greeting can slip through.

"No," she admits, her voice just above the soft click of her boot heel on the tiles.

"Not a one?" Helaena's smile is crooked. "I was certain you'd say yes. The way you talk, it's as though you carry the memory of someone everywhere you go. Like a splinter under the nail."

Alerah sits, smoothing her borrowed wool skirt over her knees. She tries again.

"I cared for a boy, once. He had hair the color of copper filings, and he could steal anything not nailed down. He taught me how to run, and how to hide a knife in my hair. But love ... "

She shrugs, and the gesture breaks something in her shoulders, some stiffness she's carried since the night prior.

"He was sold to the war when I was still ten. Most are, in Tyrosh. The city eats its own." 

She expects Helaena to answer with some kind of gentleness, a platitude about the Seven's mercy, or that the gods will mend all wounds.

Instead, Helaena says, very quietly, "my mother sold me to my husband before I bled. That is the way of it, everywhere." 

Each turn their confessions over like coins whose faces might change with the angle of light.

Finally, Helaena says, “I dreamed last night that our children built a raft of bones and sailed away from Dragonstone. The wind followed them, even to the edge of the world. I wonder if you ever feel the wind on your back, instead of in your eyes.”

Alerah considers the question. She wants to answer honestly, to explain that every city—every person—waits for the wind to turn, and that sometimes you only recognize the force of it when you see how much it’s worn you down. She could say this, but she suspects Helaena already knows.

So instead, she says, “I’ve always been running into it. But I suppose that’s one way to know you’re still alive. If you can feel how hard it wants to knock you down.”

Helaena’s hands, white and trembling, cover her own cup.

“Do you think he would let you go, if you asked?”

Reflexively, Alerah’s lips twitch upward. She's been a house gift so many times she supposes she’s forgotten what it feels like to be a thing that can be given up entirely.

“Perhaps,” she answers, “if he thought it was his own idea.”

A shadow passes the glass terrace—the unmistakable silhouette of a man with half a face and a presence that always fills the space twice over. Aemond, already at his post, waiting.

“He’s terrible,” Helaena says.

“That’s the rumor.”

“And you? Are you terrible, too?”

Alerah shrugs, but her heart’s not in it.

“I’ll tell you when the wind changes,” she says, and Helaena smiles.

“Go,” the princess urges. “He has no patience for anyone, especially himself.”

Alerah finds him in the garden cloister, the lime trees in bloom, their citrus kneeling the heavy air into focus. He's alone, which is rare, but not reading, which is rarer still.

He gestures for her to sit, ever the autocrat, but he doesn’t look at her right away. Instead, he studies the clouds above him, the way their bellies shift and roil.

“I was told you require me,” Alerah says, schooling her tone to perfect neutrality.

“I require a great many things. But I suppose you could do, in a pinch.”

She waits, hoping he’ll rattle off another errand—mending, fetching, translating some obscure codex. It’s easier to be useful than anything else.

Instead, he asks, “did my brother wound you?”

She blinks. It’s not the question she was expecting, and she doesn’t trust it.

“I’m well enough.”

He frowns, as if dissatisfied with the answer, but says nothing for a time.

“My mother thinks you’re a conspiracy,” Aemond says at last. “She wonders if you’ve been planted by the other side. Except she says, the other side, as if the world itself is split in two, and not in as many pieces as there are rats in the city.”

Alerah folds her hands, fingers interlacing. She can feel the scab at the base of her thumb, the old Tyroshi scar.

“And you? What do you think?”

He glances at her, the wind tugging a strand of silver hair against his cheek. It’s almost petulant, the way it sticks there.

“I think you’re as much a creature of this place as I am.”

“That’s a strange comfort.”

“Most comforts are strange, if you outlive the first hour of them,” Aemond replies. He studies her profile as if mapping it for later recollection, for some stratagem that’s yet to be revealed. “You know, I hated you when you first arrived.”

Alerah laughs. “Then you felt as the rest of the keep does.”

He cocks his head, as if considering her from a new angle.

“Not exactly. They hate you out of habit. Servants are bred for it, like the pariah dogs at the fish market—if they don’t hate at first sniff, the next one will be their last.”

“And you?”

“It wasn’t hate. More like the feeling of watching a knife dance on its edge and wondering which way it will fall.”

He leans forward, elbows on his knees, voice molten and slow.

“That’s how you are, Alerah. You keep your balance where others would rather lie flat or break.”

“My mother always said if you can’t find purchase in the world, make it bleed until you do.”

“Wise woman.”

“She’s dead.”

Aemond smiles, but it’s not really a smile, more a bared edge of empathy.

“Most wise women are, or soon will be.”

There’s a silence, but it’s a filigreed one; Alerah can feel the unspooling of his next thought before he even shapes it.

“She also wonders,” Aemond says, “whether you’ve lain with my brother yet. Which of us would corrupt you first, and with what tool.”

Alerah feels the flat shock of it, but only for a moment. She shakes her head, hair spilling its borrowed blue beads across her collar.

“I haven’t laid with anyone, my prince. I doubt I ever will in the way you mean.”

“Because you’re chaste? Or because the Crown owns your cunt as well as your hours?”

She meets his gaze. “Because no one’s ever offered anything I wanted.”

There. Aemond’s eye mirrors something—a swipe of fellow feeling, or maybe just pleasure at her honesty.

“And if someone did?”

“I would expect them to want too much in return.”

“I’m not sure I like being compared to a Tyroshi slaver.”

“Nor am I. But here we are.”

He stands, the motion abrupt, shadow looming taller in the dappled light. For a moment Alerah thinks he’ll storm away, but instead he circles the bench and arrives behind her, his hands clasped behind his back, gaze grazing the curve of her jaw. Alerah half-turns to meet him, bracing herself with a sardonic lift of one brow.

“You scare them, you know,” he says, voice gone almost intimate. It’s unsettling, the distance melting from his tone like butter in a hot pan.

“And does it amuse you to keep their fears alive?”

“No. But I respect it.”

He leans in, so close she can smell the citrus bloom and the faint scorch of oil from his fingerless gloves.

“There are so few honest terrors left in court. Most are theatrical, or inherited. Fears of ghosts, of curses, of losing a privilege you never earned. But you ... you genuinely threaten the order. Like a worm in fruit, working from the core outward.”

Alerah keeps her breath steady. This isn't the first time a prince has sought to threaten or seduce her—it is rare, however, for the difference to be so ambiguous.

“I haven’t done anything worth fearing, aside from speaking out of turn. And not even that so much, now. It costs too much, and I tire easily.”

Aemond’s voice, already low, drops to a hush so nearly inaudible she can barely parse the words.

“You don’t understand the court at all, do you?”

She wants to say, of course I do, but the lie dries up before it forms.

“I think I understand the parts that matter.”

“An economy of words,” Aemond agrees, moving the discussion with that telltale flick of the wrist—a gesture that’s at home on a dueling ground, and only barely domesticated here in the gardens. “But it’s not your tongue that frightens them. It’s your refusal to go mad.”

The words are tossed as a jest, but not wholly.

Alerah gives him a careful look, unsure whether to scoff at the suggestion or accept it as the rare coinage of praise it is.

“I thought madness was the local custom.”

“It is,” Aemond says. “Ours is a house stamped from the same die, so often and so inexpertly that the casting lines show through the gold.”

He’s not watching her now; his gaze is thrown upward, towards the towers that circle the inner court.

“In every generation, one of us tries to salvage what’s left of the original. The rest are content to melt and pour, burn and cast again.”

Alerah watches him press his hand against the balustrade; the tension in his wrists, the flex of knuckles. There’s anger in it, but more so yearning so pure it nearly embarrasses her.

“I heard once,” she says slowly, “that in Old Valyria, the dragon lords would break their own bloodlines, just to see what combinations might survive. That the city was one great crucible, and its people the raw ore.”

He nods.

“We’re the slag that survived. The dross left over from all that burning and remaking.”

“You don’t look like dross.”

“Nor do you look like the product of a dye-market kiln. But I suppose we’re all a little forged, in the end.”

They're standing very close now, too close for the etiquette of court or even the looser customs of the Free Cities. The skin at the base of her neck prickles.

“You aren’t expected to outlast us. Not really,” he says, almost matter-of-fact, like a scribe noting the hourglass turn in a ledger.

“No one is. My family, my court, myself included—we’re bred for a kind of rapid dying. We eat and fuck and kill quickly and then are replaced, over and over. Burned through like candle wicks in the Red Temple.”

“I’d not peg you a cynic, my prince.”

“I’m not,” he said, almost cheerful. “It’s the closest thing I have to humor.”

She studies him then, as if for the first time. The scar, the hair, the glassy depth of the one eye, its cold regard and the palette of unvoiced colors it might muster if given leave. She recognizes a kind of humor in him, but it's gallows humor, the joke of the man watching his own execution and wagering when the axe will fall. No future but the present, and the present only as long as it can be sustained by the next clever word or desperate act.

It dawns on her, suddenly, that Aemond isn't afraid of his fate, only that it won’t matter. That all his cleverness, all his violence, will spin out and scatter, a thin gray spiral vanishing in the wind. There are men who live in terror of the end, and men who would welcome it as a friend returned from exile; Aemond belongs to the breed that worries only about the echo left behind.

They stand in silence a few minutes longer, and then, as if shaken from reverie by some invisible hand, he smooths the lapels of his jacket.

“You’re dismissed, if you wish to be. Or you can linger.”

“I think I’ll walk the garden,” she says, offering the faintest tug of a smile.

“I recommend the east wall. The jasmines keep their color all day there.” 

The week cuts short in a confusion of banners, rumors, and the fevered messengers that shuttle between the citadel, the city gates, and the queen's own hand. Some minor lord—a Blackwood or a Beesbury, or one of those little houses that never learn not to play at war—has done something catastrophic out on the King's Road, and for three days, Alicent locks herself in the high tower, fasting in a show of piety for the scepters and weeping openly for the faith of the realm. 

Alerah's summoned more than once to the queen’s antechamber, where she finds herself little more than a shade among the red-robed septas and the plangent gloom. Alicent’s gaze falls on her not as a person, but as a misbehaved implement, a hairbrush wrapped in someone else’s hair. There's no room for herbs or remedying words in the queen’s world, only the bone-gritted terror of imminent disaster, and the appetite for penance that undergirds it.

At last, when the seventh bell rings for council, Alerah's ushered into a hall fevered with the hunger for solutions.

Larys Strong perches at the margins, his smile tucked away behind steepled fingers, while Ser Criston Cole stalks the length of the table with the patience of a lizard, waiting for the direction of the light before he snaps. The room reeks of men who’ve gone too long without sleep and who, in the interval, have come to suspect every handmaiden, every gossiping child, every animal larger than a rat of being an agent of their enemies.

Even Helaena's called in, her chin marked by a shadowy bruise, purple as a fading iris, but she stands among them with a composure that seems almost luminous, as if her sadness itself were a kind of veiling tiara.

Alicent addresses the chamber in a voice made raw by fasting and pride.

“Jaehaerys and his sister are not to be left unguarded,” she decrees.

“If the Blackwoods would threaten their own kin at arms’ length, imagine their cunning in a nursery.”

“There is no current threat to the children, my queen,” Criston intones. “We have tripled the guard.”

Alicent glances, cool and imperious, to where Alerah stands at the side of Helaena’s seat.

“It is not soldiers we must fear. It is the unseen. The hungry, the desperate, the smallfolk who go uncounted in every tally. The coins that slip through our fingers buy knives, not bread.”

“Then stop the coins,” Aemond says, his eye as fixed as a drawn cord, “and starve the city until it learns gratitude.”

“Are you king, then?”

Alicent’s tone would have withered a field of wheat.

“No, mother. Merely advising as a son should.”

There is, for a moment, the silken hush of very old, very dangerous silence, the kind that can only exist among a group tied to one another by the inextricable bonds of blood. Then Aegon, who’s made a show of arriving late and still reeking of the feast’s dregs, breaks the spell with a yawn.

“Let the bastards eat each other,” he says, and slumps into his chair, eyes darting out the side like a man trying to avoid a cockroach on the wall.

“Your concern for the realm is as boundless as always, my son,” Alicent replies.

Here, finally, Larys Strong unspools himself from his coil and paddles forward, his limp more pronounced in the chill.

“Your Grace, it is not only the coins or the knives. It is the story. The city's full of it—a story that will not die, that the queen’s children are not rightful, that the trueborn are on Dragonstone. And now, a story that one girl from Tyrosh can undo the whole of House Targaryen if she is allowed to whisper in the wrong ears.”

All eyes turn to Alerah. 

She's not startled, not outwardly. In Tyrosh, stories have cut more throats than steel, and she's worn that lesson down to gristle. The meeting's an augury, and she knows to keep still as sacrificial meat. The queen’s green eyes take her in—hungry, wary, but not without sympathy. Aemond’s gaze is dried ice. Helaena’s is lost in some inner tide.

"Me? I'm unremarkably inconsequential."

"We've lost the Stepstones to the Blacks."

"And they've lost them in return. It's been years since those isles have been reclaimed by piracy and crabs alike. Where is this accusation born from? Just the mere—proximity of the Steps to Tyrosh? I'm not an agent for the prin—"

Alicent levels a look that could shoot daggers.

"—Rhaenyra."

"I have little patience for melodrama," Alicent declares, and the room stiffens accordingly.

"She is not a sorceress or messenger from the Free Cities. She's an ornament. Unpolished, but instructive to my children and their keepers. Lord Larys, if you have an accusation, bring it to me with evidence, not conjecture."

But Alerah sees the micro-flares of calculation around the table—how even when the queen diminishes her, the men glance from her face to Aemond's, then back, like gamblers watching a coin for the trick. They saw last night, or heard of it. Stories move up and down the social vertical in this city as if bred for flight. Larys tilts his head thoughtfully.

"It is a waste to treat a Tyroshi as mere ornament. We have a weapon that if we will not yield, will be yielded on us. The Free Cities train their orphans better than our own tutors train noble blood. If the object is instruction, let her tend to more than embroidery needles."

Criston Cole breaks in with, "the last thing needed is another vagrant taking confessions at every fire grate and servants' bench."

"Then confine her," Aegon suggests, half as a joke but half-hopeful for sport. "Lock her in the old sept with the oxcarts. Let her see if her beloved gods come to answer."

Aemond's voice is as clean and sharp as an obsidian blade.

"If only so simple. If you cage her, she will burrow out or breed dissent in the mortar. She's not an ornament. She's a lever. Decide if you wish to pull it or break it."

Alicent’s brow draws down. A strange pride flickers there, almost maternal, as if she’d have liked to produce a child so dangerously resilient. But she won't let herself admire it; vanity is their house's curse, and she was weaned to hate her own reflection more than any rival’s.

“We pull no levers,” she says. “Not until we know what wall is load-bearing. If you’ve made her an extension of your hand, Aemond, then you will answer for her. If she goes astray, it’s you the court will gnaw first.”

Aemond’s mouth flickers with something between disgust and pleasure.

“As ever, mother. My leash is secure.”

"See that it is. I'm not so certain."

He absorbs the rebuke with a stillness so complete that, for a moment, it looks like his skin might crack under the strain.

"If it were my choice, I would position her more closely to the children. Not further. Jaehaerys and Jaehaera respond to her. They take their meals without complaint. Helaena has not attempted to escape into the yard or jump from the battlements since the Tyroshi arrived."

Alerah doesn't flush at this, doesn't even blink. She wonders if that's what it means to accrete power: to absorb the full gaze of a council's paranoia with the invulnerable composure of a nothing, a nullity. Even the lords and knights, bred for bluster, learn to fear the weather inside a woman's face. There's no terror for them greater than a girl who cannot be shamed.

Alicent resumes matters with a clipped nod, as if the wrangle over Alerah’s fate is already done, a foregone footnote in a ledger of more urgent debts.

“If the garrison fails again,” she says, “the Watch will be purged by a new hand. If the kitchens are found leaking rumor or poison, I’ll ask Ser Criston to salt the lot. If one more Black banner flies in this city, it will be seen by crows alone.”

Alerah gets the sense the council expects her to speak, to show her teeth and tell them the bite will not draw blood. Instead, she keeps her voice level as the water in the well.

"There are easier ways to be rid of me than a public spectacle. I have no loyalty to the opposing claimant in this war. My only wish is to outlast it."

Her words are plain, even artless, and they're left to fall where they will. After a long pause, Criston Cole shrugs as if to say, she may live.

For now.

The meeting adjourns on that note; the sickly king never appears, not even as a rumor, and when the bell clangs the hour, the lords and soldiers file out in knots of low, whispering urgency. Helaena lingers, then detaches herself with a silent grace from the queue of noblewomen trailing the queen. She touches Alerah's wrist—cool, soft, the touch of a moth.

"My mother will not harm you unless she must. She fears you as she fears everything, but she is tired of making new ghosts."

Alerah nods. She's tired of making them, too.

She follows the seam of shadow down the corridor, counting her steps all the way. The session leaves a taste, bright and bilious, at the back of her tongue. The Tyroshi always said, if you wish to keep your head above water, sink lower than the storm.

She almost trips on a mop bucket outside the nursery, where Jaehaerys and Jaehaera lie in opposite cradles, crying together. The nursemaid, mollified by neither bribe nor threat, cowers in the far corner with hands jammed to her ears. Alerah stares at the children, their platinum hair sticky with sweat and tears, and for a moment, sees not dragons at all but infants the city would eat as surely as any wolf would a lamb.

She hushes them with a croon, one she learned from her mother—though, in truth, she can barely recall the woman’s face, only her rough hands and the hunger in her voice.

The twins fall silent, Jaehaera’s eyes open and watchful, Jaehaerys burrowing to find a thumb to suck. They're so small. Even the legacy of empire comes mean and miniature, at first.

She draws the shade to keep the sun from their faces and stands for a while in the scented hush, watching the motes spin above their breathing. A strange calm. The city will burn, or it won't.

All she can do now, is wait.

Chapter Text

The summons arrives before she’s dressed. One of the queen’s men—a stripling with a face like a boot, apologetic in the way only the truly powerless can manage—stands in the threshold, reluctant to cross.

“Her Majesty seeks you for the breakfast hour.”

She’s ushered up through the maze of servant corridors, past the black-clad septas and the muttering kitchen hands, towards the queen’s own study.

Alicent is there, seated at a small table with a single cup before her, looking not so much at the spread of records and letters arrayed before her as through them, to some farther horizon only she can see.

She acknowledges Alerah with a flick of her wrist.

“Sit.”

The silence stretches. Alerah counts the raised welts along her own knuckles; mustering the nerve to speak. She waits for the queen to do it first.

“You’re not as clever as you think,” Alicent says, not unkindly. “But you are a quick study. Quicker, perhaps, than my sons.”

Alerah makes a noise—affirmation, or maybe protest, but it’s too thin to hold up either way.

“You know, I had the measure of your kind before you even entered the city. You’re all the same, the Free City orphans: so tender, so easily turned to hate, but with a longing for comfort so deep it could drown a mountain. You want to be seen, not just used; you want your suffering to mean something, not just fill the days between when someone else gives you orders.”

Alerah nods. There’s nothing more to say. It's the truth, and the truth is rarely ever complicated for long.

“I like you. As much as I am able to like anyone. But I have given birth to two children who know only cruelty, and I am not so old as to think I can save you from it.”

Alicent doesn't speak for a while, and Alerah senses the faint tremor at the edge of poured wine. The queen’s hands, knotted on the stem of her cup, are older than her face lets on, and for a moment Alerah sees the lineage of worry and resolve that carves them both from the same pale stone. When at last the queen looks up, it’s with the expression of someone remembering a duty that was once affection.

“I’m told you sing Tyroshi lullabies to the children. Even the nursemaids cannot calm them so. I’ve heard it from the little birds. And from Helaena, who will not take comfort from me. Did your mother sing to you?”

The question's a surprise, and stranger for its softness. 

“Only before a beating,” Alerah answers, but when the queen’s mouth pinches in pain, she adds, “sometimes, yes. She had a voice pitched higher than a bell, and the sails in the port would become ghost-white with the sound of it.”

Alicent nods, as if this is what she expected.

“I used to visit the laundry stones in Oldtown when I was small."

“The women there would chant as they worked—old Volantene work songs, braided with prayer, and always sung in secret. My father forbade it. He called it low, dangerous, but I loved it.” 

She stares at her own hands, their moonscapes of callus and lacquer. 

“I can’t remember the words now, but I remember the hush after. That is what left me: the silence when their voices stopped.”

“Sometimes, I think, the moment a voice is gone, it lives everywhere,” Alerah agrees, almost inaudibly. “In the water, the cloth, the little cracks between stones. Harder to wear it away than to keep it silent.”

“Yes. Exactly that.” 

Alicent sighs, and the confession seems to leach some of the stiffness from her. For a moment, her posture slips from sovereign to someone else—a memory or a child, Alerah can’t tell which.

“How strange that we carry our mothers into every room, no matter how hard we try to shut the door behind them.”

“I miss my mother, even so,” Alerah says, surprised to find the weight of it rising in her. “She was cruel at times, but she gave me what she could.”

“My sons are cruel. They are their father’s, but mine, too. And all I can do is pray every hour that the world leaves them a little less damaged than it found me.” 

Her jaw works, as if words strain to be voiced. 

“The other girls—the noble ones—always go mad with fear when the time turns against them. But I don’t think you will.”

Alerah's voice, when it comes, is a dry reed.

"I've had the better part of my life to practice," she says.

"Good," says Alicent. "You'll need it. The Blackwoods' coup is only the beginning. Soon everyone will have to choose, and the ones who pretend to be neutral will die first."

"I've never been very good at pretending," Alerah says.

Alicent almost smiles.

"Then you share my flaw, girl."

“My queen, if I may … do you really believe that I have Valyrian blood in me?”

“You wish it so. But it’s meaningless, all this pedigree. It’s only true if you can make others believe it. House Strong was broken on rumors alone. Targaryens have burned cities with less.” 

“But am I?”

Alicent lifts a hand, brushing invisible dust from her sleeve. "Perhaps. You have the look."

Her expression sharpens, dissecting Alerah's face as if it might reveal some molten vein of pure ancestry beneath.

"But more likely your ancestors learned to survive in a place where lies were currency, and bloodlines meant nothing unless they could be parlayed into power. It suits you, as it does us. The difference," she adds, "is that the old Targaryens were wise enough never to trust their own reflection."

“Who do you plan on marrying to me?”

“Well, that’s entirely up to your father, the Archon. Isn’t it?”

Alerah flexes her sore fingers under the table, each joint a memory of labor or mischief. 

"The Archon’s a ruse," she says. "If I were ever worth a marriage, it would be to a lesser merchant or a crippled knight. None of the lords here will have me, nor the nobles where I was born."

"You underestimate yourself," says Alicent, stroking the rim of her cup as if coaxing the flavor from the clay. 

"Beauty is currency, and even a hungry orphan with the right shade of eye will fetch a king’s price in the right season."

"Perhaps if I'm lucky, Your Grace, I’ll wind up on the arm of an old Fossoway or a Tully with more lands than teeth."

“Your people endure well,” Alicent says.

She pushes a carafe across the table, as if peace might be brewed in a half-glass of red.

Alerah drinks, and the wine’s nothing like she’s ever tasted—not sweet, not bitter, but spiced and dry, the flavor of someone else’s blood left too long in the sun.

“Do you want children someday?” Alicent asks abruptly.

Alerah almost spits the drink.

But the queen’s entirely serious.

Alerah places the glass slowly upon the table. 

“Where I come from, we’re told to never dream past the next meal.”

"You're in Westeros now. Here, the women who don't dream for more are killed off by their own children, or by the men who dream for them."

Alerah can’t argue. She sets down the glass with a gentle clack, then folds in on herself, bracing for the moment the queen will dismiss her. But instead, Alicent pours herself a half-measure and lets it linger between them.

"You'd make a fine lady at court, you know. But you prefer the company of wolves."

"I prefer to know when I’m in danger." 

Alerah hears her voice, tight and sharp, as if in another room.

"Here, the wolves do not hide their teeth."

Alicent laughs, a sudden, brittle crack in the air. 

"The ones to beware are the sheep who have learned to shear themselves. You’ll see.” 

Alicent stands abruptly, and the room tightens with the precise gravity of womanhood in power. 

"You’re dismissed. Make yourself useful to my daughter, and—Alerah?" 

Her voice halts Alerah at the threshold.

"Yes, my queen?"

“If he ever tries to hurt you—my son—come to me first. That’s the last kindness I can offer.”

In the kitchens, she finds the ovens already lit, exhaling their sweet, yeasty warmth. She waits for the baker to turn his back, then nicks two rolls and flees to the laundry court, where the air still smells of frost and lye. It’s not hunger that drives her, but the urge to fill the cavity left behind by sleep.

She eats quickly, barely tasting, then tiptoes to the aviary. This early, most of the messengers sleep fluffed against their cages, but a few birds are already wide-eyed, yellow stare uncannily human. Alerah opens the door, letting in the cold; a hawk snaps its beak, iridescent tail arched against the morning, fiercely unafraid of her.

Alerah bobs a mock-curtsy to the bird, whose eyes are the color of weak tea, then slips to the window, pressing her cheek to glass. The city’s rooftops bristle against the new sun, each gable and chimney as sharp as a tooth. The market’s already alive, figures swarming like ants over honey, carts and donkeys jostling for place as tongues of smoke unfurl from the low, hungry stews.

"I hope you're not thinking of flying," Aemond says. 

She doesn’t turn.

“Already tried it once. Didn’t work.”

“Looks cold, down there.”

He studies her in the dusty glass, both of their faces shredded by the lead lattice and the old, flawed panes.

“It’s colder up here, sometimes,” she says, which is mostly true.

They stand like that for a time, both watching the city. Dragonstone’s banners haven't surfaced yet, but the air pulses with the expectation. From the height of the rookery, the city seems to breathe beneath them, a massive, sleeping thing whose dreams might turn on itself at any second.

Alerah finally turns. 

“What did the council decide?”

Aemond’s mouth quirks.

“That you're either too clever or too worthless to be a traitor. They’re not sure which.”

She lets it dig into her. 

“So, I’m to be watched, but not believed.”

Aemond reaches past her to open the window. The wind slams in, sharper than any blade, and for a second she thinks he’ll vault free and ride the air to its violent end. Instead, he lets the violence pass through both of them, then closes it with a slam.

“I want your company tonight.”

“If it’s amusement you need, there are brothels in every ward. All of them hungrier for princes than I could pretend to be.”

He surveys her in the fractured sun, a smirk ghosting over half his face. 

“They do not understand me, and I have no patience to teach them. But you’re just as resistant, only to learn from your betters.”

She grins, baring a canine. 

“And that is an aphrodisiac for the Targaryen line, or so the stories go.”

He leans back against the glass. 

“In our blood, it’s more a provocation than anything sensual. My father loved my mother, I suspect, not just for her beauty but for her refusal to look away when he was at his worst. She would tell him, I see you , and not flinch.” 

He runs a finger down the scar bisecting his cheek, the gesture practiced, maybe even comforting. 

“Most women here, they look but do not see.”

“I see you,” Alerah says.

Aemond’s eye narrows, and the full attention of him is like a lantern struck in a forgotten tomb. 

“Yes,” he says, “I believe you do.” 

He steps into the small, cold space between them, and the clouded glass limns them both in stark, blue twilight. 

“You learn quickly, and you have the patience to wait for a win. I’m almost impressed.”

Alerah shrugs off the compliment. 

“Almost?”

She can feel the heat from his body now, the wild scent of him—oil, hay, pepper, something singed at the edge. He tucks a finger under her chin, feather-light, the gesture more invasive for its restraint than any real threat.

“Why are you still a maiden?”

She could lie, and for a half-second instinct nearly takes the lead—spin a tale of forced piety, a Tyroshi custom, a nightmare, a curse. But here, with the bite of winter behind her and Aemond searching her for traps, it seems not only unnecessary, but small. Lying would make her like the rest of court: clever, but cowardly. She shrugs.

"Nobody ever asked sweetly. Or with intent beyond their own means. Why does a dog keep its teeth? Because it hasn't found anything worth surrendering them for."

"I could take it, you know," he says, with only the faintest flicker of humor, "but I think it would bore you. I think you’d survive it and forget it by tomorrow. I want to see what you look like when you want it."

She pictures herself from the outside, cloaked in borrowed blues and city grime, a child’s bones rattling in an adult’s body. The futureless little scab from Tyrosh, hoarded up in the stones of a dead house. 

And this man, who by law and birthright could take anything he liked, saw her not for her prettiness or her defiance, but for the void that gnawed at her just as viciously as it did him.

"Do you intend to wait until I ask nicely?" she asks.

Aemond’s mouth twitches.

"No. That would be cowardice. Or foreplay. I’m not sure which offends more."

He kisses her then, hard enough to resound in her teeth.

She bites his lower lip. Not too hard, but enough to taste the line between violence and invitation. He holds her jaw, but not to break or discipline—instead his thumb strokes under her cheekbone as if memorizing the shape for a later, more patient dissection. She thinks of the word foreplay and wonders if, for his breed of men, that spans a lifetime.

His tongue traces her cut lip, and she tastes him, bitter and bright with the residue of citrus from the garden. He doesn't let her pull away, not at first; the hand on her jaw urges her closer, until Alerah senses nothing in the world exists outside the sphere of his attention.

They part just long enough for the wind to draw a line of cold between their mouths, then crash back together, harder. His hands slide to the hollow behind her knees, lifting her in one impossible motion so she's perched, trembling, on the narrow granite ledge that sills the window. She expects him to tear her, to devour. Instead, he kneels, lowering his head in a ritual of patience that is almost courtly. His mouth finds her throat—the secret hymnal places—and she realizes he’s mapping every pulse, every reaction, the way some men would plot the course of an enemy fleet.

"You want to be ruined," Aemond sighs against her skin, "but not all at once. Is that it?"

She struggles to find a retort, then realizes she’d rather feel than speak. She shoves her hands into his hair, not to pull but to memorize the way it slides between her fingers—heavy, soft, nearly without texture, as if woven from the fabric of air itself. The window latch clatters under her heel, a staccato drumroll for the undoing that follows.

His lips skate her jaw; his teeth catch the lobe of her ear, and below that, the slope of her neck. Alerah feels like her entire life has been arranged to deliver her, at this moment, to the mercy of a man bred for fire and violence. He peels away her shift, exposing the skin beneath to the bite of the rookery chill, and she shivers—pleasure and cold warping together so it’s impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins.

She lets her head fall back against the window mullion, arches into his mouth wherever it lights, hungry not just for the pain but for how precisely he tracks her—like a soldier calibrating an arrow, or a smith testing a blade on the edge of his own thumb. Her body’s a map not even she knows, but he reads it as if it’s all he’s ever studied.

Her heart stutters in her chest, and she almost laughs at the absurdity of it—Tyroshi street rat and the dragon prince, gnawing at each other in the shadows of the rookery.

There’s nothing courtly in him now, unless you count the way some swords are said to sing when drawn for the first time. She’s not sure if she loves or hates him for it—maybe both, probably both—but it doesn’t matter because her whole sense of self is being smelt and poured into some new, indelible alloy.

He stops as abruptly as he began, and for a moment she thinks she’s offended him. Instead he leans his forehead to hers, a single, deliberate press, like a family crest pressed into wax. His hand, cold from the wind, laces through her hair and cups the base of her skull; his thumb finds the pulse thudding there and rests.

"You'll want it, someday," he says, "and it will be at the worst possible moment."

She doesn't say, I already want it . She doesn't say, I've never wanted anything so much , and that's why I have to resist . Instead, she memorizes the look of his mouth, the taste of almonds, the soft hiss of his breath as it ghosts along her skin. 

She's conditioned by a lifetime of waiting for the other shoe to fall; she expects him to demand more, to break the spell with a jape or a cruelty. But Aemond just holds her there, frozen in the moment between escalation and surrender.

He sets her back on her feet, wipes the smear of his own blood from her lip, and kisses her once more, so softly she barely feels it. Then, with the same finality that closes a book, he draws shut the window and gestures for her to go.

There are footsteps in the corridor before she even makes it to the door. They don't belong to Helaena, nor a septa, nor even the damp-footed Jaehaera in her clutch of nursery terror.

It's Ser Criston, perhaps, or another sworn sword, but Alerah doesn't break stride. She passes into the hall with her head high, color flaming her cheeks and the taste of him burning the roof of her mouth.

The guardsman—Ser Arryk, or Erryk, she never bothers to note the difference—casts her a look that is half-suspicion, half unwitting admiration. He expects gossip, a story, something he can pass along to the next link in the chain. 

She gives him nothing.

The day passes in blurs: tight-laced lessons in the solar with Helaena, who’s more wraith than girl this morning, her hair still sleep-knotted and her eyelids lacquered in the bruised shadow of unslept hours; then a furious stint in the kitchens, where Alerah volunteers for onion-chopping—anything to rid her hands of the memory, the trembling.

By midday, she’s numb, and the only evidence of that morning’s trespass is the small blood-crust at the corner of her lips and the burst of heat that flares whenever she thinks of his hands, his mouth, his total and unrepentant hunger.

The city outside convulses. There’s a rumor of a riot near Cobbler’s Square, some outrage over grain rations or the swelling list of names nailed to the Iron Gate.

More bodies in the river, gossips say. The two boys who bring firewood to the rooms arrive with split lips and one blackened eye, and when asked, can only say that’s what happens to bastards when there’s no war to send them off to die in. Someone’s been painting Blackwood birds on the public fountains, and even the pious masks on the sept’s statues have drawn their lips with fresh soot, as though mocking the silence of the gods with a leering impudence.

Alerah does what she has always done: she survives the small day. She nurses Jaehaera through a new fever, brings a flask of clear liquor to Helaena’s room when the princess refuses food, and—when the hour is late enough that even the palace rats have driven home—slips into the garden with nothing but the last heel of bread from her supper, chewing the crust to nothing as she watches the sky flame with the passage of some far-off dragon. 

There’s a terrible beauty in it—the way dread and awe collapse into the same hollow, the way the world’s endings can be so ordinary, so edible.

In the cool marrow of night, she climbs the roof. The slates are slick with rain and soot, and her borrowed slippers slide with every step, but she perseveres—always, always towards the thing that might kill her. The city groans, old and restless beneath her.

Out past the embattled sprawl, she can just see the rim of the Blackwater, the drag of moonlight on its bruise-colored skin, and the distant gleam of torches ringing the camps on the far bank. Watch-fires for the enemy, some say; signals for spies or deserters, others say; but to Alerah, they’re just white scars, blighting the dark like the memory of wounds.

She likes to think she’d survive no matter who won. Even if the city was razed, she’d find a place in the ruins, dig for marrow in the bones of the vanquished, laugh herself hoarse at the sight of new lords thinking their walls could hold out any longer than the last. Maybe she’d end up as a nursemaid in the next palace, or a brothel madam whose girls all wore dyed veils and spoke with the hiss of gutter Tyroshi.

Or she’d go back to the Steps, sell herself for what she was worth: a single meal, a new name, the promise of one warm night before the world finally caught up and dragged her under.

A great shadow falls across the roof where she sits, a piece of bread clamped between her teeth and her hair streaming in the wind like an unstrung banner. She assumes, at first, it’s just the storm recoiling, the sky’s low belly clouding in for another round of rain. But then a roar comes, not the thin shriek of gulls or the mumbling complaint of crows, but a liquid, living sound—golden and horrible, the way thunder would be if it craved meat.

Sunfyre the Golden, beast and prince in one, alights on the stretch of roof below her, claws splitting limestone and tail lashing sparks from the slate.

For a moment Alerah cannot move, because all her life she’s measured dragons by absence: the ones who left, the ones who were killed, the ones whose wings were only black banners in the distant sky. 

The air’s sharp with burnt feathers. The next dawn, Sunfyre shatters the blue-gold of the sky again, spiral-shadowed with a vaporous corona. Alerah hears the dragon before she sees it, the keen of its wings lifting from every roof and echoing in every alley of the city below. When at last it lands—outside the Red Keep, far enough that the city's rabble can gawk but not touch—Aegon dismounts in a burst of gaudy Valyrian posturing, arms flung wide, hair streaming like a banner.

She keeps to her errand: the twins, a new litter of kittens to entertain them, a cup of honeyed milk balanced in one hand. But even before she hears the courtiers' tremors and the exclamations of the guards in the hall, she knows. He's come for something. Maybe her.

He finds her in the upper gardens, where the dawn soaks the rose trellises and paints the stone walks with an obscene blush. The twins are climbing each other, as children do, inventing dragons out of shrubbery and biting at each other's necks.

"Lady Alerah," Aegon calls, in a tone so jocular it can only be an insult.

"I knew I'd catch you in the nursery. Or do you prefer the garden?"

She gathers the twins to her, shielding them with nothing but her limbs and a withering stare. 

"Good morning, my prince."

He grins, all teeth and princely malice. 

"No need for formality. We are, after all, of the same ilk. Aren't we?"

He drops, uninvited, to sit cross-legged at her feet, lean and loose as a tomcat on the prowl. The children are wary. Jaehaerys backs into her knee, clutching her skirt; Jaehaera, ever the braver, simply studies Aegon with her wide, uncanny eyes.

"I've heard," Aegon says, plucking a rose and stripping it of its thorns with his thumbnail, "that you tell stories. If I asked, would you tell one to me?"

Alerah matches his gaze, pulse steady. She doesn’t understand why he has to feign pleasantries.

"What sort of story would you have, my prince?"

He thinks, twirling the rose. 

"A true one. Not the lies they read in the sept. Something bitter and unkind. Something that ends poorly for everyone, especially the heroine."

She lets him see her consider it.

"There's a Tyroshi fable," she says, "about a fisherman who saves a drowning eel. He hides it in his nets, feeds it scraps, and dreams about how he'll one day eat the eel and grow strong enough to challenge the river gods. But one day the eel grows too big for the net, and when the fisherman tries to gut it, the eel bites him to the bone and drags him under. The moral is: never feed what you cannot kill. Or, perhaps, never mistake gratitude for love."

Aegon's mouth twitches, and he suddenly snorts.

"I like that," he says. "Although, I think the eel's a fool, too—should have eaten the fisherman at the first chance, not waited until the knife was out."

He ruffles Jaehaera's hair, ignoring her flinch.

"I wonder, sometimes, if that's what we've bred in this castle: a thousand things that should kill us, but instead wait. And when the knife's raised, we're surprised. When we shouldn't be."

He tilts his face back to her, a boyish squint that almost charms.

"Do you think they'll eat us, in the end?" 

She sips the honeyed milk for the twins, licking the rim before answering.

"If you starve something long enough, it always eats back. Even if it's just your bones left in the river mud."

Aegon barks a genuine laugh.

"You're almost amusing, Tyroshi. Has anyone told you that?"

"I'm told it all the time," she says, drawing the children tighter against her side. Already the mood of the garden has shifted—servants hover under the trellises, guards pace their circuits with eyes hot and searching. Even the air seems to clench around Aegon's presence, waiting for some inevitable cruelty.

He gestures to Jaehaerys, who cowers, but Aegon's voice is unexpectedly gentle.

"Go on, little monster. Go play with your sister. I won't bite."

The children scamper off immediately. When they're gone, Aegon leans forward, all courtesy scrubbed away. 

"My mother says you matter. Not in her words, but in the way she can't ignore you. And my brother seems to find you interesting. Do you love him?"

The question is so bald, so artless, that its bluntness hurts.

She weighs the answer, knowing that whatever she gives will be played against her, or perhaps, more accurately, against Aemond. Still, she tells the truth.

"No. I don't love him. But I see him. That's more than most get."

Aegon's eyes slant, foxlike. 

"You should fuck him, you know. If you haven't already. It’ll soften him. Make him more human." 

He grins, suddenly eager for her discomfort. 

"I won’t touch you, if that's what you fear. I have my own amusements for that."

"I didn't think you’ll restrain yourself for long. You like to destroy things only after they've been made precious by someone else."

He cocks his head, uncertain whether to be offended or impressed. 

"You really are a delight," he says, standing, dusting his knees, and flicking the rose into the air. 

"I hope you last, Tyroshi. The city will be poorer for it when my brother finally breaks you."

He bows with a parody of courtly flourish and leaves her in the garden, the twins tumbling up and down the stairs in pursuit of some imagined quarry, and the dawn pressing hard against the seam of the morning.

There’s a hush in the garden after he goes, as though the air itself’s unsure what has just transpired. Alerah lets out a long, thin breath, then pushes her hands through her hair, combing it back to stiffness. She watches the twins spiral through the flowerbeds, chasing each other in long, wild arcs. For a moment, she remembers the gutter-children of Tyrosh, how they’d run through the dye markets painted in every color but joy, always looking over their shoulders for the boot or the chain or the street warden’s lash.

A sudden scream jerks her back to the present—a sharp, animal cry, too loud, too sudden. Alerah is on her feet before she knows what she’s doing. The twins are at the edge of the reflecting pond, Jaehaerys squatting, Jaehaera teetering at the lip. 

She sees in an instant: a snake, thin and sand-colored, coiled under the shadow of a broken statue. It strikes, missing by a scant inch, but Jaehaera stumbles, an arm flailing.

Alerah sweeps the girl up, tucks her under an arm, then pivots on a heel to drag Jaehaerys back with a grip that will leave red crescent moons blooming on his wrist for hours.

The snake, startled at its own ambition, slides into the pond and is gone. The girl wails, clutching at Alerah’s neck, the boy a stolid stone, refusing to cry but trembling so hard the teeth click in his mouth.

She holds them both—awkward, ungainly, their bodies big compared to her stick-thin arms. She sits with them until the shaking stops, until quiet returns. 

Jaehaerys is the first to speak. 

“You saved her,” he says.

Alerah shrugs. “It’s my duty.”

Jaehaera pulls back, her face streaked with salt, eyes wide. 

“You broke the rule,” she says.

“What rule?”

“We’re not supposed to touch the servants.”

Alerah laughs. Aegon must have told them that.

“Well,” she says, still holding tight, “you are not a very good princess, and I am a worse servant.”

This seems to comfort them. Jaehaera, not quite trusting her own legs again, curls up in Alerah’s lap and rests her head on Alerah’s knee. The boy perches in a way that says, I’m a man, but please don’t let go.

She lets them stay as long as they need. The murmur of the pond and the fugitive hush of wind through the myrtle boughs mellow the panic, until Jaehaerys’s squirming, restless, and Jaehaera’s half-asleep with her hand wound tight into Alerah’s smock.

A lull. Jaehaera’s sleep-mussed head twitches with each tremor of Alerah’s knee. Jaehaerys draws patterns in the dirt with a stick. The pond, immaculate just moments before, is now clouded by the memory of a vanished snake.

"Would you like a story?" Alerah asks.

She expects no answer; children in palaces are schooled to politeness but rarely to personal wants, and both twins merely await instruction, hollow-eyed and grave.

Jaehaera’s pupils, huge even in the morning, tilt up to meet Alerah’s. She nods once, solemn as a priestess.

“Alright, then,” Alerah murmurs. 

“There’s a tale,” she begins, her voice low as the dark under the table, “of a queen who kept a sparrow in a golden cage. It was the last bird of its kind, for the queen’s armies had hunted every other to make quills for her scribes. The sparrow sang only when she was alone, and the queen loved that, because the song belonged to her and her alone.”

Jaehaerys smiles at this, but only a little. Jaehaera’s breath goes thin, as if wary of how the story might turn.

“One day, a prince came from far away, riding a horse with no mane and eyes like bottle glass. The prince offered the queen a gift: a knife, so sharp and so light it could split a hair on the wind. With this, said the prince, you could cut the cage and let your little bird go. Or you could keep it forever, and cut the tongues of any who claimed it should be free.”

Jaehaera’s eyes stay fixed, unblinking.

“What did the queen do?”

“She asked the sparrow, would you stay with me, if I let you be free? And the bird replied, if you free me, I will return to sing at your window, for you alone. But if you keep me caged, one day your enemies will come—with knives sharper than his—and take my song, and you will never hear it again.”

Jaehaera's silent for a long time, her hand curled in the fabric of Alerah’s skirt.

“Did the queen let the sparrow go?”

Alerah runs her palm over the girl’s hair, as if the motion could call an answer from the air.

“She did. But only after she had broken the knife, so no one else could use it.”

The twins are quiet; the wind moves in tiny skeins over the pond. Finally, Jaehaerys says, “I like that story. The queen was smart.”

“She was lonely,” says Alerah, and kisses the crown of Jaehaera’s head before letting the girl unlatch from her lap and race her brother down the garden path.

They disappear in a flash of white and silver, leaving her alone by the water.

Chapter Text

In the weeks that follow, the palace drifts into the eye of the season's storm. There's a lull in the hostilities, or so it seems—no fresh sieges on the walls, no new heads spiked on the city gates, not even the yellow-hued fever that so often crests with the heat. Instead, the days collapse into repetition: the thud of booted feet on slate, the waft of spiced wine at every council, and Helaena’s hands, always trembling, twisting a knotted string as if to unknot her own fate.

Alerah learns the moods of each hour: when to slip past the guards, when the kitchens are least watched. She studies the servants’ routes as a map of new conquest, and at night, in her bed beside the princess, she sketches their stories in her head, each one a fragment of the larger, gnawing loneliness that makes the palace what it is.

Aemond avoids her for three days after the rookery, and then not at all. He stalks her in the corridors, sometimes materializing without a sound, sometimes with a deliberate heel-snap to echo off the stone and announce his coming. When he finds her—and he always does—he corners her into alcoves, stairwells, the cleft of the library’s inner sanctum, and stares, wordless.

She learns to stare back. Sometimes, she even wins.

Once, he calls her to the sparring yard, right after the supping hour, where Criston Cole and the twins are chiding each other over who can hit the melon hardest with an old tourney sword. He presses a blade to her hand—blunt, but heavy—and tells her, “you’re smarter than most girls here. But are you braver?”

She takes his measure, then Aegon’s, who’s drunk at the edge of the yard, betting with the kitchen boys and laughing whenever a melon splits open with a sound like a splitting skull.

“I’m not afraid of wounds,” says Alerah, “just of maesters who stitch poorly.”

Aemond laughs, and it’s real—a rasping sound, not cultivated, not princely. He wipes his nose with the back of his wrist and gestures to the target.

“Then show me bravery.”

She does, and the melon splits, seeds sluicing out like yellow pearls. Aemond’s eye narrows with something like admiration, and later, after the crowd scatters, he presses his mouth to the cut on her palm and holds it there a moment too long.

Alerah’s not immune to the thrill of it, the way the world tilts around a single gesture.

It glimmers in her all day—all the next day, too. She keeps expecting to be snuffed out, devoured, exposed, but the gaze of the court’s fixed on other hungers for now, and in the silence she discovers an appetite of her own.

She finds him again on the terrace at dusk, arms folded on the stone, watching the mist crawl up from the river. The wind’s sharp, and his hair blows loose in the spray.

“You missed noon prayers,” he says without looking over.

“I prayed elsewhere,” she says, matching his stance on the ledge.

He risks a sidelong glance, taking in the state of her hands, the milk bruise at the inside of her arm. 

“The children exhaust you.”

“They’re the only thing in the palace that doesn’t want something.”

“That isn’t true. They want everything, but lack the words to ask for it. It’s why they break things. Or scream when someone leaves.”

He speaks as if the logic’s unassailable. In a way, it is. She almost laughs, but his face is too bare for mockery.

Aemond’s voice is unlike Aegon’s, she notices; where Aegon’s is built to shatter or charm, Aemond’s voice is a subtle thing, meant for weathering any wind, even if it’s only to be heard by himself.

“You feed them stories, like birds at a window,” he says, “but you never tell your own.” 

He doesn’t pose it as a question.

“You’d be bored by mine.”

“I doubt it.”

The silence blooms: an implicit wager, another duel, and she knows to let him wait. Tyroshi are famous for patience. The dye gets deeper the longer it soaks.

She tells him nothing. Instead, she watches the city below, the braziers winking along the dockside and the smoke pulsing up between red-tiled roofs. When the bells ring, it’s a thick, clotted sound, more omen than music.

“When does it happen?” she asks.

Aemond knows what she means. 

“Rhaenyra and the others will come to contest the throne to Driftmark, no doubt. I’d say it’ll all occur within a fortnight.”

He scrapes a fleck of mortar from the parapet and flicks it to the river below. 

"My father won't last the month; Hightower's wringing the sept for a miracle, but even the Mother Above would let him rot, I think. The city will eat itself. My mother is clever, but not so clever as to see the end when it's bearing down on her in daylight."

Alerah says nothing for a moment, spots the thin slug of a corpse—just a dog, this time, or the remains of one—floating past the Copper Gate. 

"Will you kill her? Rhaenyra?"

"If I must."

"You want to?"

"Does it matter?"

She shrugs, plucking at a loose thread on her sleeve.

"I've met a hundred men who would spill their blood for a crown, and not one of them knew what to do with the world afterward. Is it different for you, my prince?"

“I’m the second son. The world wasn’t made for me to rule. I just cut a path through it.”

“I’m not to attend the dinner, yes?”

"You may do as you wish," he says, the words half-mocking, half-mournful. 

"My brother will be pickled by the first course, and the old men will be too busy sniffing out the nearest betrayer to notice you missing.”

She imagines the scene—Aegon, lurid and ruddy, eyes glazed; the maesters gathering like flies on a carcass; half the nobles with knives under their frock-coats and the other half with their poison already measured into sugar. She shakes her head.

“I’d prefer not to be in attendance, but these things are oft’ not in my control.”

Aemond, always impatient with artifice, cuts through the brittle air. 

"Come," he says, "you're more use to me tonight than to the queen's kitchen, and I’ve no wish to share you with the children.” 

It's always like this with him—leaping the conversational cutwater, ropes slack and billowing, expecting her to keep pace. She’s still retrieving yesterday’s barbs from under her nails while he’s already halfway down tomorrow’s throat.

“To the Street of Silk.” 

He says the last as if it’s merely the next hall over; as if the city’s oldest, roughest vein were nothing to a prince and less than nothing to a girl like her. 

"I've business in the lower wards. Consider it a holiday, if you wish."

She isn't given a chance to decline. The walk down is swift—the back stairs, a shuffle through the stone-walled sub-cellar where barrels of olives and reeking dried fish serve as insulation against the river damp. Then a side door, cut straight from the stone of the wall, and out into the city’s vein-work, alive now with the peculiar phlegmatic clamor of an early autumn evening.

Alerah doesn't ask what business means. She follows, keeping her stride two steps behind, and finds herself enjoying the rare chill of freedom, the honest mess of King's Landing when not viewed from the eyries and battlements of the castle. The city has a logic, if not a kindness: the wider streets make room for horses and palanquins, the narrower ones for the desperate and the invisible. Down here, distance is measured not in feet but in the number of hands you could lose between one lantern post and the next.

Aemond walks as if born to the street, eye darting everywhere and nowhere, hand always at the hilt of his sword. With him, it's much easier to become invisible yourself. The crowds part for a dragon prince, if only to save their teeth; the street urchins and cutpurses can be glimpsed only as flickers, always keeping their hands in plain view.

They reach the Street of Silk just as the city’s color swells gold, like an infection. The banners of the pillow houses ripple with the same violence as the river after a night’s rain.

The smell of yeast, sweat, and perfumed offal hangs thick. The storefronts advertise their stocks not by sign or signal, but by flinging open their doors and loosing a tide of laughter, shrieks, and somewhere, the crisp flick of a switch against bare flesh. Some scents linger longer than others—incense and lamp oil, the lacquered brine of pickled eel, the condensed savory edge of roasting nuts smothered in honey. Every pleasure in King’s Landing has a courier and a price.

Aemond leads her through it briskly, never pausing to leer or prod; instead he points out the business of the street like a tutor rehearsing a lesson he’s long since mastered.

“There, the Red Dagger—oldest brothel in the city. It’s said they own half the goldcloaks, and the rest are bought by the Crown. The mistress inside fancies herself a queen, said she nursed a bastard son of Maegor.”

“Is it true?” Alerah asks, skeptically.

“Probably. He’s blind in one eye, and hasn’t left the beds since conscription failed to take him. Most nights, he sits at the bar and curses his ancestors by name.”

“I take it you’ve met.”

“My mother tried to have him murdered when I was one-and-ten. Of course we met."

They pass the threshold of a tavern cut into the bones of an old granary, where the ceilings stoop and the music warps through planks gone soft with years of spilled ale. Aemond doesn’t stop, but at the far end, a man with hair the color of raw oats raises a bandaged arm in salute. There is recognition, maybe even kinship, between them—a shared language of scars. Alerah files it away.

Aemond doesn't slow for introductions. He slips through the curtain of the next den, where an entire troop of mummers—faces painted with the crying blue and ochre of Lysene exiles—rip through their routine with the desperate precision of those who know they'll be stabbed come morning if the crowd isn't satisfied. He gestures for Alerah to keep close, less a warning than a courtesy. Even in the city’s tightest braids, no one touches a Targaryen unless they want to end the night in the Black Cells. 

He sleeves her through a tapestry-hung vestibule and up a winding flight of stairs into the private room of the most expensive pleasure house in the Street. He tells her nothing of what awaits until the heavy blue door swings open.

Inside, it's neither the velvet-damp lair of some Westerosi debauch nor the painted carnival of the Tyroshi courts she’d known as a girl.

The walls are tiled in green and white, the sort of chevron pattern that betrays foreign tastes—Volantene, maybe, or Old Pentos—and the smells are a confection of saffron, spiced wine, a honey so pure it might as well have been distilled from sunlight itself. The ceiling’s low and arched, hung with gold-threaded lamps and festoons of dried fruits.

On a divan, three women lounge with the boneless confidence of those who've never once been denied a thing.

One wears nothing but a fog of perfume, beaded into the roots of her hair; another, russet-skinned and covered with a latticework of tattoos, glances up and flashes a wolfish smile. The third, cool and impassive, looks like a boy. Or at least, the finishes of boyhood lingers about her—angular in the jaw, red-lipped, hands delicate as a girl’s and stroking a chessboard set with obsidian and mother-of-pearl pieces. 

Alerah’s initial thought is that they're here for a transaction: some information to be bartered, some favor to be wrenched from the dregs of the city’s underbelly. Instead, Aemond gestures for her to sit at the mosaic-topped table, the chessboard between her and the others.

“Teach her,” he says, but not to Alerah. To the room.

The russet girl cocks her head; her tattooed hands move across the chessboard with an aggressive cleverness.

“She’s not a child, my prince,” she says, in a voice roughened by years of smoke and—Alerah guesses—other things.

“She has the look. Even the rough ones from the salt market know what to do.”

Aemond shakes his head.

“Not what you think. She’s never done it."

He glances at Alerah, studying the color draining from her cheeks. “She needs to learn how to want it."

The tattooed girl’s eyes light up with a sensation somewhere between hunger and pity.

“Why not teach her yourself?”

Aemond’s mouth twists, as if the answer is obvious.

“Because she’ll survive it, and survive me, and then it will be as nothing. I want her to want it. I want her to be ruined properly, not just—crushed.”

He waves his hand dismissively. “Do you understand?”

The inked woman nods, comprehension blooming in her face. To her, it's a game already long played, and she’s delighted to test her hand against a new opponent.

“You want her to ask.”

“Yes. Show her how to ask.”

Alerah’s first impulse is to refuse, to flee, to hurl the plum wine at the wall and scramble for the stairwell. But she doesn't. She watches, cautiously, as the russet girl—her name is Yana, Alerah notes—takes a rook between tattooed fingers, balancing it atop a pawn.

“Sometimes you have to lose the piece you love, in order to win the game,” Yana says.

Her eyes rake Alerah up and down, an appraisal so briskly professional it lacks even the threat of insult. 

She offers the pawn forward, black-swirled and slick as a river stone. 

“Your move, Tyroshi.”

“I—I’m not so—”

“You don’t have to like it, at first,” Yana says, scraping a chessman back and forth between her thumb and forefinger. 

“But when you find you do—when you like wanting it, the rest comes easy.”

The other two in the room function less as participants than as observers, a silent pair of witnesses to whatever game now unfolded. The boy-girl in blue powder simply watches, her mouth composed in a gentle, private smile. The perfumed girl, near-naked and unconcerned, pours the wine and refills the glasses with the unhurried grace of a priestess conducting ritual.

Yana sets her rook down and, across the marble squares, takes Alerah's wrist in both hands.

"Let us teach you what even the best houses leave out of their lessons."

Yana's thumb traces the lines of Alerah’s palm, pressing delicately over the raised junction of muscle beneath her thumb. Alerah doesn’t flinch, not even when Yana leans over the chessboard and lets her tongue loll out, spiced and glossy, to lap the rim of wine off Alerah’s wrist. The tenderness is more alarming than any violence could ever be.

“You think it has to hurt,” Yana says, a little raise of an eyebrow, “because that’s what the men taught you. That you pay in pain for every drop of pleasure. But it doesn’t. Not if you learn how to give a little first.”

Alerah risks a look at Aemond, uncertain whether she expects his approval or his order to stop. The prince’s lips are pressed flat; he picks at the corner of the chessboard with one finger, tracing a delicate line from pawn to edge. She can't read him.

Yana takes Alerah’s hand and places it there, above her clavicle, on the bare skin.

“You can touch me,” she says, smiling with a knife’s honesty. “You can touch me, because you want to, not because you have to. Try it.”

Alerah does. First with a palm, then the pads of her fingers, mapping the sharp angles and inked whorls of Yana's collarbone, her skin slicked by the sweat of the night and the clinging sweetness of wine. Yana watches with narrowed eyes, the tip of her tongue worrying the split in her lower lip, as if every hesitation in Alerah’s touch were a move to be tallied and countered.

Yana’s hands, sticky with the warmth of the room and the residual wine, hike the hem of Alerah's shift up at the hips. There's no applause, no shouts, only the frictionless quiet of anticipation, like the moment before dice hit a table and the world tilts into inevitability.

Alerah’s knees part, first with reluctance and then—when Yana’s tongue flicks against the inside of her thigh, painting a stripe of heat so vivid it seems to crowd out the rest of the room—almost mechanically. She braces her hands on the edge of the board, the sharp corners pressing deep into the fragile pads of her fingers, and watches the chessmen vibrate as her leg quakes with the first, exploratory pass of her mouth.

Yana winks up at her, tongue glistening, then dips forward and draws a slow, siren’s moan along the seam of Alerah’s cunt.

She looks for Aemond, who's standing now, hands behind his back, the ruined side of his face half-lit by a sconce so that he looks like two princes merged at the jaw. He doesn't speak, but his gaze traces every twitch of Alerah’s body, every shudder and arch, the pale lilac of his eye all but gleaming in the dim.

The moment slides, inescapable, into the next: Yana's hands on Alerah’s knees, opening her wider than any midwife had ever dared, pulling her forward so that her thighs bracket the chessboard entire, pawns and bishops rocking in their squares at the violence of it.

The perfumed girl giggles soundlessly and pours another shot of gold-tinted honey liquor into a thumb-sized cup, then tips it into Yana’s waiting mouth, making her hum before she returns to her work.

“You’re allowed to close your eyes,” Yana breathes, “but it’s better if you don’t.”

Yana laps, then sucks, slow and disciplined, as if every muscle of her jaw was governed by a logic beyond pleasure. She times the rhythm to Alerah’s breathing, and when the breathing skips, she switches her grip: one hand splaying Alerah’s hip to anchor it, the other snaking under to cup and lift, guiding her into the mouth’s orbit.

Yana tongues her again, harder, and the sensation knots at the base of Alerah’s spine. The bones there remember nothing of pleasure, nothing but cold and hatred and the bruising of labor, and yet here—splayed, naked, and watched with a prince’s attention—she discovers a new function for her own nerves.

Yana angles into Alerah, fingers splitting, and draws back so all can see the wet, ragged aperture blooming open; the perfumed girl claps, delighted, and the blue-powdered girl clears her throat.

Aemond moves before he’s conscious of it, driven by a pulse that’s neither lust nor hunger but the primal need to witness what he’s wrought. 

He kneels, absurdly, beside the table. From here, he can see Alerah’s cunt—slick, visibly trembling, the glisten of it like something alive. He makes no pretense of indifference. His jaw tightens, his eye glass-blue and bottomless in the light, and for one suspended second, even the laughter of the street outside seems to hush.

Yana leans back on her heels—Alerah’s thighs trembling, skirt hitched to the waist, her cunt slick and exposed between the table’s wobbled edge and Yana's tattooed hands. 

The room’s heat drills into her skin, and she sees the slug-trail gleam Yana's tongue has left, the lips parted, the whole of her open and on display. 

Yana winks, then nudges Alerah’s legs further apart and flicks a knuckle.

Aemond stands over them now, the blue fire of his gaze unmoved. He’s not watching the women, not exactly, but something about the set of Alerah’s mouth, the strain at her throat, the ache between her trembling knees. 

His own hands glide up to his belt—hesitate there, just a second, then work the buckle until the heavy leather falls open. He strokes, slow as a priest weighing a sinner and twice as cold, his cock arching in his palm, already half-rigid from the spectacle before him.

"Look at him," Yana murmurs, her chin glossy, a faint note of mischief lacing her voice. 

"He wants to see what you do next. You want it, don’t you?"

Alerah can feel every pulse in her body beating at once, the shame of her own lust outmatched only by the certainty that she does want it. 

She holds Aemond’s gaze as Yana slides two fingers over the spill of her cunt, circling, then pushing inside, shallow at first, then more. Alerah’s hips roll up to meet, and the sound she makes—neither whimper nor plea, but a raw call—seems to echo off the tiled dome of the ceiling.

Aemond’s grip tightens, thumb running the length of his cock, back and forth, rhythmic and certain. He watches the angle of Alerah’s spine, the sharpness of her breath, the way her body learns the rhythm and begins to crave it. 

Yana’s mouth hovers right above Alerah’s swollen clit, tongue flicking out to taste at the precise second that Yana's fingers scissor and curl; the heat floods Alerah’s core, her face, even her tongue, so that when she speaks the words come out slurred, thick, and desperate.

"Please—"

His hand’s under the waistband now, knuckles white, pumping a slow, excruciating rhythm that matches the cadence of Yana’s tongue. The room grows tight with the scent of sex—perfume, sweat, the glissade of honey wine and salt.

Aemond’s eyes flick up to Yana. 

"More," he says, and the command is as much for himself as for the women.

Yana slides the flat of her tongue along the seam, every muscle of her jaw straining to draw the last ounce of want from Alerah’s wracked body. Yana's fingers work with practiced persistence, and when they land on the spot inside her—a scrape against flesh so sensitive it feels like a bell's toll—Alerah’s whole body seizes; her hands tear at the chessboard, scattering pawns and bishops, and she gasps with a shout almost too loud for the tiled room.

Aemond’s mouth opens; he exhales a long ragged moan, finishing the arc of his stroke as the heat floods his palm. He lets the pleasure ride up and crash over him, not ashamed to watch her as he does. On the table, Alerah’s knees buckle, her body folding in on itself, the signal of surrender written in every pulse of her skin.

Yana lets Alerah ride the last tremor, tongue lapping at the slick until there’s nothing left but the echo of pleasure—and, behind it, a fragile new charge in the air, as sharp and heady as the blue-fire of Aemond’s gaze. 

“Is that so hard?” Yana breathes, her voice a velvet rasp. “Say you want it, Tyroshi. Tell us.” 

Alerah wants to look away, but Yana's hand pins her chin. 

“Speak,” the tattooed girl purrs, sliding her free fingers along the inside of Alerah’s thigh. 

“Show the prince how you beg.” 

Alerah’s lips burn, every nerve alive, every inch of her stung by the force of wanting. 

“Please,” she says again, weak at first, but a moment later, “please, fuck me.”

Yana’s mouth cracks into a delighted, savage smile. 

“Oh, she can ask, after all.” 

She gives Alerah no quarter. She plunges the fingers in deep, crooking them expertly, and in the next heartbeat, sucks hard at Alerah’s clit, tongue battering with a hunger verging on violence. 

“Fuck, you’re dripping for it,” Yana groans, voice thick. “I can taste how bad you need to be filled.”

Alerah moans through clenched teeth, her whole body arching into the curse of pleasure, and Yana only grins harder, flattening her tongue to the swollen bud and rolling her jaw in fast, merciless flicks. 

“Fuck, I love how a quiet girl screams,” Yana says, lapping and sucking until Alerah’s hips jerk up, desperate for more.

“Look at the prince. He’s about to lose his fucking mind for you. Watch him stroke himself while you’re coming on my tongue.”

Alerah’s eyes flutter open. Aemond’s right there, hand pumping his cock, silver hair fallen wild over his face. 

“Is that how you come in Tyrosh?” 

Aemond’s voice, brittle and high, splits through the room. 

“Or is this the first time you’ve howled for anyone?”

“Never,” Yana laughs, all lips and tattooed knuckles. “But she’ll learn to howl in every tongue from now on. Say his name, darling. Say it for him.”

“Gods—Aemond,” Alerah grinds out, the syllables foreign and raw. The prince devours her with his eyes, fist red-knuckled around his cock, so hard it glistens in the lamplight. 

“Please, I can’t—”

Yana circles her tongue slower, then faster, then slow again, driving Alerah mad until she’s sobbing into her own arm. 

“Fuck, you’re greedy,” Yana croons. “You’re going to crush my face, Tyroshi. You want him inside you, don’t you?” 

The other women laugh—a low, throaty sound, echoing off tile. 

“Tell him.”

Alerah’s voice is hoarse and thin. 

“I want you to fuck me, Aemond. Please.”

"Look at her—never been fucked, but she’s greedy for it. Dripping all down my wrist."

“Please, please, please—” 

Alerah gasps, not even sure what she’s asking for, only that she can’t bear another instant and yet would die if it ended.

Alerah tries to close her thighs, but the tattooed hands won’t allow it. 

“Let me see,” Yana demands, spreading her wider, peering into the shine of spent desire and laughing low when Alerah flushes full-to-the-hairline. 

“Oh, you’re perfect,” Yana breathes, glossing her upper lip with the slick she’s gathered—bright as a jewel. 

She brings a few fingers coated in Alerah’s juices to Aemond’s mouth, and he devours it greedily, the tip of his tongue tracing every seam of her pleasure, lips painted with her taste and his own gasp.

“Gods, you’re sweet,” Aemond hisses, his voice shredded with lust. “Did you learn that in a whorehouse or were you born to bruise men like me?”

“Fuck, she was born for it,” Yana says, cocking her head at Alerah. “She’s tighter than a miser’s fist. You’re going to have to pry her open, prince—she won’t break unless you make her.”

Aemond comes closer, one hand braced on the chess table, cock grazing its edge. 

“You look beautiful when you come,” he rasps. “All the girls in the city could scream, but you—” 

He thrusts his hips, once, slow and deliberate, just close enough that the head of his cock glistens against Yana’s cheek. 

Alerah stares, captive, at the sight—at the obscene, forbidden spectacle of her own wetness painting the mouth and cheek of the girl kneeling between her thighs, at Aemond’s cock levered thick and aching above them. 

Aemond’s lips peel into a snarl.

“You’re going to beg me to fuck you, aren’t you, little Tyroshi? Beg, and I’ll grant you anything. You want it now, say so.”

"Please," she gasps again, and it comes out warped, a note in a scale she'd never dared to imagine, "please, please, please—"

Yana doesn't let up; she wants the noise, wants the sob, wants the animal out of the cage. Her tongue splits Alerah's cunt, deft and sure, and at the same time, Yana pumps Alerah open in a rhythm that builds and swirls, perfectly tuned to the agony at the top of her breath.

"She's so fucking tight, Aemond," Yana purrs, half-cackling, "princes don't get cunts like this in the palace, do they? Not unless they buy them by the mouthful."

There’s a beat, a new tension, the whole room realigning itself in anticipation. Aemond shucks the rest of his clothes, cock bobbing nearly purple with want, and stalks around the table, not bothering with artifice.

Aemond closes the gap in three long strides. He grabs Alerah by the wrist and drags her off the bench, chessmen skittering to the floor. He bends her arms behind her, not cruel but insistent, and presses her face-first to the table edge, chess pieces digging into her hip. She feels the blunt head of him, thick and hot against the slick seam of Yana's mouth.

Yana steadies her, still working her fingers inside, as Aemond rakes the head of his cock through Alerah’s soaking cunt.

“You want it filthy, don’t you?” he says, not even a question, voice diamond-sharpened with need. “Take every inch, Yana’s loosened you for it, but I’ll be the first.”

"Don’t go drooping, darling," Yana whispers, lips slick with Alerah's wet, "he likes you awake when he splits you like that. You hear me? He wants you watching him."

“Aemond, please—”

Aemond doesn’t need a third plea. He sheathes himself in one relentless slide, and the force of it nearly knocks the wind from her. She’s so slick from Yana, so swollen with need, that every vein and ridge of his cock rubs the ache higher, flaring it out until her toes curl and her head tips back, lips parted in what might as well be a scream.

“Take it,” he snarls, and Yana’s laughter encourages him, fast and merciless. 

“Didn’t think a prince would fuck you like a whore, did you? Say it—say you’re my whore.” 

He jerks her back by the hair, forcing her arch into his next thrust, and the brutal collision of hips and bone shakes the mosaic table.

Aemond grunts, fucking into her hard enough to rattle the chessboard. 

"You feel that, slut? That’s what you get for talking back. This is what you’re for, Tyroshi. Gagged on my cock or stuffed with it. That’s the only way I want you."

He keeps a hand on her shoulder and the other in her hair, wrenching her upright so her back arches to the room—chest and throat bared, face flushed and mouth open.

"Feel how deep I am?" he whispers, fucking her slow and murderous. 

"You didn’t know you could take this much, did you?" 

He slides out, letting the head of his cock catch at her opening, then sinks in again, even deeper. She gags on the sensation, legs trembling, the stretch both agony and transcendence, and there’s a sick pride in the knowledge that no other man could ever fill her like this. Not after this.

Yana, still kneeling, rolls her eyes up at Alerah and moans, “gods, he’s splitting you, isn’t he? Fuck, I can see it—he’s thicker than a wineskin. You’re going to feel that for days.”

Aemond’s cock slams home, and Alerah can taste it in her throat even though it’s buried to the hilt in her cunt. There’s a stretch—more than stretch, a ruin, a sacrament of too much—and her body tenses up so hard she can feel every vertebra shiver. 

Yana cackles, but there's awe in it. 

"Gods, you're going to take every inch, Tyroshi? Never seen a girl so small swallow a cock that size and live to tell of it—" 

She leans in, tongue flicking the tender skin where Aemond disappears into her, tasting the slick that oozes out at every thrust, eyes rolled up to bear witness.

"He's fucking you open, darling. Ruining you for every soft-lipped lord in King's Landing."

Alerah claws at the table, wrist bones scraping mosaic, hips bucking with each brutal drive. The sound of it—flesh on flesh, the slick, obscene squelch—fills the tile dome, the air made gold and red by the lamplight and the pressure of Aemond's want. She doesn't dare speak, barely dares to think; every word in her skull's bent to the shape of him, the way he destroys her so completely.

"You're going to drip all over my cock, aren't you. Going to milk it out of me, like a proper whore. Say it. Say you want to feel me spill inside you."

"Yes," she manages, and then, louder, "yes—gods—yes, yes, fuck, yes—"

Aemond’s hips snap forward hard, and he chokes off a curse as he buries himself to the hilt. The world shrinks to a single, violent point; he spasms deep inside her, cock twitching as he pumps her full. It burns—Alerah can feel it, the white-hot wash of him, scalding in its absolute certainty, the way a dragon’s fire would cauterize the wound as it made it.

She’s sure that’s the end, but Aemond’s hands only tighten. 

He keeps her impaled, refusing to retreat, holding her bent over the chessboard as if trying to drive his seed into the very marrow of her bones. Another pulse, and another, and then he grinds against her, groaning, a sound so raw it could be mistaken for pain.

For a while, no one moves, and the air purls with the thick, honeyed silence of aftermath. The tattooed hands frame Alerah’s hips, stroking away the tremors, while Yana’s tongue flicks up one final time, savoring the aftertaste of salt and the ruined, blushing cunt spread still around Aemond’s cock.

Yana wipes her mouth, then leans in to kiss the red bloom on Alerah’s thigh, as if sealing the experience under wax.

“Look, you didn’t even bleed,” Yana whispers, pride disguised as mockery. “Barely even a stain for the prince’s sheets.”

Aemond grunts, insular and hoarse, his eye dark with hunger. He finally slides out—a slow, merciless drag—and the spill of him follows, a tide running over Alerah’s battered thighs and pooling between the mosaic squares. She sags, spent, onto the table, her face mashed into the lacquered wood.

Yana, with the brisk authority of a woman who's seen every aftermath and knows each one by its breath, hums a lullaby as she wipes Alerah clean, kissing her trembled hips with a strange, unpracticed gentleness. The perfumed one drapes a shawl over the Tyroshi, as if tucking in a fevered child, then trails her own blue-lacquered nails down Aemond's spine. 

He’s limp with relief, face pillowed in the crook of Alerah’s arm, and twitches only slightly when the woman dabs the mess from his thighs with a warmed rag. 

The boy in blue powder—now clearly, unmistakably, a boy, face reconstructed by the aftermath and the soft light—slides a cup of spiced wine between her trembling hands. He covers her with a blanket, as if to hide her shame, and then with a quick motion lifts a plump velvet pillow from the divan and tucks it under her head.

For a long time, the only sound is the click of chessmen being swept into their velvet pouch, the soft snoring of one of the women, and the infrequent, liquidy swallow of a cup passed from hand to hand.

Chapter Text

Alerah spends the next morning hiding in plain sight. She sweeps the corridors, pokes her head into the kitchen and the counting house, lingers in the laundry with an armload of unwashed silks, and avoids every window or arch where she might see the glint of silver hair, or the long shadow that always moves with a prince's certainty.

Helaena keeps to her own chambers, curled up with her children and the kittens, and doesn't speak of the night before. The nursemaids accept Alerah's help without question, grateful for any pair of hands that can keep the twins from eating the cats or each other.

She lingers in the west wing: first in the scullery, hands deep in carrot tops and onion skins, then up on the roof walk, where the wind scours every last trace of body heat from her. She sits in the crook between a gargoyle's shoulder and the broken finial of the watchtower, relishing the cold sting on her legs and the atavistic longing for flight it stirs in her. She'd rather flinch from the next bout of wind than from the next thing a prince might want of her.

Down in the garden, the staff rakes last night's hailstones from the myrtle beds. It's the sort of day when even birds huddle in the eaves, silent except for the menagerie's racket echoing up from the yard.

Alerah watches the yard for evidence of Aemond—his stride, his hair—but there's nothing, not even a flicker of his shadow on the flagstones.

Helaena's in the first terrace now, teaching the twins to crack walnuts with a mallet; Jaehaera's more interested in smashing than eating, and Jaehaerys has figured out that if he waits, his sister will do all the work and he can just pick at the spoils.

By the time the watch changes at the main gate and the thinning sunlight shifts to the color of old parchment, Alerah has looped the castle twice over. For all her efforts, she runs straight into Aemond at the one place she never meant to be: the high library, where scholars and maesters labor in shirtsleeves and forget, for a moment, their place in the knots of court.

The prince sits at the end table, two books open, rubbing a twist of wax between his fingers, eye intent on the page.

Alerah freezes at the threshold. The maester on duty greets her—she's made herself indispensable for the princess, fetching Helaena's reading wherever the day demands it. She's welcome wherever duty permits.

Aemond suddenly looks up, eye catching hers across the room, and there's nothing in his face to give away the heat of the night before. If anything, he appears colder, his features so blank they'd read as arrogance if not for the faint tremor at his mouth, the tension leashed back into the line of his jaw.

He jerks his chin once: come here.

She pretends not to see. Threads straight past the reading tables, past the muttering scribe with his quills, to the alcove where the bibles of the Seven gather dust. She tucks herself between two enormous folios and thumbs through a treatise on breadmaking.

A page turns behind her. Aemond's voice is nearer than makes sense.

"Are you frightened, or only pretending?"

Alerah doesn't lift her eyes from the book.

"Neither. I'm busy."

He circles her, putting a shelf between them, as if the mere gesture could lend privacy or boundary to a library built for eavesdropping.

"Did you enjoy the Street of Silk?"

She doesn't answer, and the silence stretches, uneasy. Aemond leans in, fingers braced on the shelf, shadow falling across the open pages. He watches her, the one eye bloodless, pupil so pale it seems to fracture the light itself.

There's nothing he expects from her, no apology, no gratitude—not even the edge of regret. If anything, he looks bored by his own cruelty, as if hunger had outwitted itself and now lingered only to see what appetite would grow in its place.

"Did you like it?" he repeats, but the question's different, quieter. Not goading, not even cruel—demanding something she can't name.

Alerah slides the bread treatise back in its gap.

"I liked the honey wine," she says.

Aemond absorbs the answer, then leans to shelf level; his fingers drum, uneven, the measure of a song she doesn't know.

"Just the honey wine?"

Alerah shrugs. She watches him from the corner of her eye, waiting for the next move.

"I liked Yana," she says, pronouncing the name with a haughty slant.

"And I liked the company, for a time. They made it all seem like a children's game. Less consequence, more—"

She hesitates, searching for the word in both languages.

"—spectacle," she finally decides. "Nobody suffered if they lost."

"I thought you might enjoy it."

Aemond shifts closer, swiping the dust from the wood with the back of his hand.

There's no violence ready in him, not even the thrum of promise. She's caught off-kilter by the calm, by the steady shining of his eye.

Her hands want to curl, but instead she braces them on the book's bleached calfskin.

"I have a confession," he says.

"Isn't that the province of the Seven?"

He snorts.

"The gods can have the big terrors. This one's small. Last night, I thought I would ruin you—crack you open and watch what spilled."

He shrugs. "But you were not ruined."

"Then you failed."

He shakes his head, the faintest hitch of a smile.

"No. I believe you ruined me instead."

He says it lightly. She almost wants to laugh. Instead, she flips his book shut and lets it fall with a padded thump.

"I don't see you ruined. Your hair's still neat. The world loves you just the same."

"The world doesn't love me."

Alerah studies the veins on the backs of her hands.

"You could have had any whore in the city."

"True. But I wanted you."

"Why?"

He considers. Then, very quietly says, "because you never pretended to love me."

Alerah doesn't have a reply. It's as if he's pressed his thumb to the bruise she didn't know she wore. Not with malice, either—just curiosity, the same as a child plucks the wing from a dying moth to see what lies beneath.

She wonders if all the prince's predecessors had been blind to their own needs, or if only the new, raw-blooded Targaryens could admit them aloud.

"You're so careful with your hurt," she says, after a while. "It's like you polish it before you put it on, so everyone can see how precisely it fits."

He laughs, not angry.

"Every suit of armor must fit. If you don't tend to the seams, it splits at the first blow."

Alerah glances up, curious if he's being literal, metaphorical, or both.

"And what would you do if it split?"

He must sense the direction of her thoughts.

"You think I'm just like the rest. But I am what the world made, not what the bards sing of. If you hate me, at least you're not disappointed."

"Aemond, what occurred last night will be the only time it shall occur."

"No."

"No?" She almost spits the laugh, bitter and raw. "You'll drag me back there, lick me raw while I whimper for a cup of honey wine and the tongue of another woman—force me to perform for you, for your own pleasure, until you've bled every fear from my body—"

He seizes her jaw. Not gently, but not cruelly, either; there's a trembling in him she's never seen, a violence pointed not at her, but back at himself. He tips her face towards his—the only true violence isin the glare of his eye, the ferocity of need so white-hot it threatens to melt her bones where she stands.

"If you believe that is why I brought you, then you still don't know me," he whispers, voice drawn thin as wire.

"I ruined you because I wanted an equal. Something that could survive anything I did. I wanted to burn the world off you, and see if you were steel at the core."

Alerah stands, neither jerking away nor softening, letting the confession lengthen past its natural end. Every instinct rages at her: hit him, kiss him, leave. Instead she marks his hunger and recognizes it as her own—ugly, secretive, a gnaw that will never be sated by ordinary means.

"You could have asked," she says.

"I don't know how."

He doesn't let go of her face. His thumb strokes under her chin, an afterthought.

"Do you want me?"

There's a feeling like stepping off the edge of a tower and floating, suspended between the desire to live and the urge to fall.

He lowers his head, breath pooling against her cheek. The muscles in his jaw work, the words catching and then breaking through.

"Let me have you, Alerah."

"Not here," she tells him, but her voice is a pale echo of command. "Not when you want everyone to see."

He doesn't hesitate, just pulls her with him—out through the winding stacks, into the black-marbled side vestibule, the door closing thunderous and final behind them. The air smells of old wax and rain leaking through the stones. There's almost no light. Alerah's back hits the wall.

In the hush of the alcove, every sound's magnified: the slip of his palm against her thigh, the pop of two buttons as he works the suture of her shift, the wet whimper she can't keep tamped down in the knot of her throat.

He kneels. She's baffled, not because it shocks her but because the gesture's so bare—an impossible inversion of power. He parts her thighs and kisses the inside of her knee, trailing upward, slow, the scrape of his breath bright and eager. She can't see his eye, only the press of his hands, the pressure of his tongue unraveling her.

"Isn't it proper," he says, but her sex is on his tongue, "for a prince to kneel at the altar of his own undoing?"

She wants to be clever, but all that comes is the instinctive clutch of her fingers in his hair, holding him steady as he consumes her.

He fucks her softly, methodically, as if he could outwit the trauma in her muscles by confusing it with pleasure, replacing every old memory with a better one. She wants to resist, but her body's been trained by years of deprivation, and the gift of this new sensation, this slow, flooding ache, tears her in a way nothing else could have.

Her knees buckle. He laughs into her cunt, then—implacable, gentle, inexorable—pushes her legs wider and keeps going.

She chokes on the force of it, the old violence composted into something unrecognizable—more hunger than hurt. The angle of his chin, the careful way he places his palms under her thighs, splitting her so wide it feels like an opening of the chest, not the hips. He's speaking all along—she only now notices it, a lost child's confessional under the breath, spilling words along with the slick heat of his tongue.

"You know what I want, don't you?"

He suckles, voice gone damp with lust.

"I want to see you shake. I want it burned in your memory, so every time you close your eyes, you taste me. I want you filled with me until you leak."

He eats her until the tension breaks and she moans into his hair, hips grinding at his mouth, her legs shaking as she fucks his face, which would mortify her if it weren't for the way Aemond's tongue grows more merciless the more desperate she gets. He wants it—wants all of her, every twitch and curse and last scrap of pride wrung out like salt from a fish on the quay.

"Look at you," he pants, lips glossed wet, "less than a week in the palace and you're already ruined. Spilled on my tongue, dripping like a whore. Gods, I want to fuck you until your voice is hoarse with it. Want to hear you beg for more, and then again, and then again, until you stop knowing the word for no."

Every time his tongue flicks or his fingers probe, he makes a note of the way she shudders. Repeats it until she can't distinguish between her own rhythm and the tempo of his mouth. It's mortifying to lose control like this, after a life spent tuning every reaction to stay alive.

The pleasure's so complete it gnaws at her spine, scrapes the backs of her knees, and fills the dark with the sound of her own messy need. By the time he pulls his mouth away, she's slick and stretched and desperate to clutch anything that will anchor her to the world.

He works her with his tongue, his voice almost worshipful as he speaks between the wet, flicking laps.

"When you walk tomorrow, you'll remember this. It'll ache, and you'll clench your thighs together, thinking they can still keep me out."

His breath burns her, speaking straight into her pussy as he spreads it with two blunt fingers and slides the thick, violating length of his tongue inside.

"You're not a maiden anymore, Alerah. You belong to me now. I'll devour you in every room in the keep if I have to remind you, every hour of every day, until your pretty head goes empty from it."

"I could breed you here," Aemond says, and if the words sickened her before, now the threat of them is a pleasure so sharp she wants to bite it.

"I'd fuck you until you screamed my name to the rafters. Until the whole fucking castle knew which house owned your cunt."

"N—no feat. Your mother already pays me to—ah!"

His tongue swipes against something knobby.

"You're going to come on my tongue. You're going to soak me, then you're going to ride my cock until you can't walk. That's what you want, isn't it? That's what you begged for, last night."

She can only gasp, breath shallow, as he devours her with a hunger so honed it leaves nothing untouched. Every pass of his tongue—deliberate, knifelike—draws her tighter, sharper, until her body's nothing but wire strung over want. He licks her through her trembling, lifts her hips with both hands, and sucks her clit until her vision cracks around the edges.

"Do you hear yourself?" he asks, voice muffled, words bruising her like a fist under the skin.

"Listen to how you moan. You're loud now, aren't you? How many will hear you?"

He flicks his tongue, then bites, and the roughness of it makes her whimper so loud she's glad for the sanctuary of thick stone.

"You want the whole palace to know, don't you. That you're bent over my face, fucked and helpless."

Alerah shudders, then claws at his head, grinding herself into him—unashamed, no longer hiding the need. He pulls her down harder, nose buried in her, and at the height of it—when her thighs tremble and spasm and her spine bends like bow wood—he slips his tongue inside and fucks her with it, slow and merciless, until she's sobbing and clutching at his hair.

Aemond's breath slicks her.

"That's it. Squeeze it out. So good for me, aren't you? You want to be bred right here. On the cold floor. My bastard, your first and only, a dragonling made from ruin."

He pushes two fingers in with the next lick, curling them expertly until she's gasping and rutting against his knuckles.

"You're so tight, gods, I can barely move inside you."

His voice is pure, ragged triumph.

"I'll stretch you for days. I'll split you, and next time, you'll beg even louder. You're going to be the noisiest girl in the keep."

"Aemond, please—"

"Look at you," he groans, fingers working between her cunt and clit, "all this slick just from my mouth."

He slaps her ass, making her jolt, then spreads her wider, so the chill of the air hits everywhere at once.

"You're going to soak me, aren't you, little lamb? Ruin my face, just like I ruined your cunt. That's what you're for."

"Aemond, I'm going to come."

"I thought you'd fight me, Tyroshi," he pants, lips and jaw sticky with her, "but you're nothing but a hungry whore, begging for my cock—"

The wet sound of her hips against his face is all that masks the scuffle at the nearest door. Someone's coming, and the torrent of Alerah's pulse drowns out even the thud of approaching boots. Aemond feels her tense, the whole of her tightening around his tongue—but he clamps her in place, shoving her further onto the bench so that the spiked heels of her slippers die against the stone with no echo at all.

Alerah has seconds—two, maybe three—before the ancient wood hinges open and blots out the hall beyond with the silhouette of Ser Criston Cole. He enters, as always, without knocking.

Aemond doesn't stop. He palms her hips, holds her down flat to the cold stone, and licks her, slower now, more deliberate, as though to test whether the possibility of discovery will break or harden her. Her teeth bite down on her own sleeve, and she feels the flood of heat rising, treacherously, as the bootsteps echo right to where she is spread-eagled behind the reading benches.

"Prince Aemond?" Criston's voice is a knife, bored and careful.

Aemond's face is invisible, buried between her thighs, but Alerah can feel the laugh ripple through his tongue as he answers.

"Here, ser. Fetching a treatise the maester neglected to bring."

Criston comes no further than the first row. His stance's rigid, almost comically so—the man refuses to look left or right, keeping his face towards the center aisle while his voice projects through the stacks.

"The queen requests your presence at dinner. She says to remind you not to be late, as the lords attend tonight."

Criston's words are lacquered with the careful neutrality of a man who has seen more than he's supposed to and intends to live longer for it.

Alerah's entire body's a tremor above Aemond's mouth. Her thighs clamp, her back arches, and her vision spots with the force of holding back the sound that wants to break her in half. She tunnels her face into her folded arms, fingers clawing at the crack between two ancient stones. Aemond, never to be outdone, flicks his tongue with the lazy cruelty of a man who has all the time in the world, savoring her ruin with each lazy pass. Alerah can feel how close she is—closer than she's ever been—and can't decide if she wants the shame of being caught or if she'll die from it.

"Tell the queen I will attend," Aemond calls, voice muffled but steady, a chime of false propriety.

Criston makes a noise like an affirmative, then stalks off, the sound of his boots fading into the candle-bright dusk at the end of the hall.

Aemond doesn't surface. He rides the slow wave of panic in her, then sinks his tongue deeper, curling it until he finds the place that makes her legs buck so violently she nearly kicks over the heavy bench. She moans, finally, the sound low and hopeless, muffled only by her own arm.

She comes on his tongue, the bolt of it burning from her toes up to the roof of her mouth, her bones liquefying before she's even had the chance to weep. He pulls back, then, and for a second she thinks she's imagined everything—that the world, sensible and gray as ever, will resume its slow ruin without these explosions of color. But he doesn't let her drift; he hauls her up, slams her against the wall, and kisses her with a mouth that tastes of her and nothing else. His cock's hard, alive, pressed against her thigh through the thin barrier of his breeches.

When he finally draws away, her body goes limp. He stands over her, hair mussed, eye flushed wild, fingers gleaming with the proof of her. He presses two knuckles to his pale lips, as if to keep in a secret. Then, with the offhand precision of a man well-accustomed to the aftermath of violence, he tucks her shift down, straightens the knotted belt, and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand before offering it to her.

"You're going to walk to that dinner with my seed inside you one day. You'll feel it every time you stand. My mark, no matter what else you wear on your skin."

She glares at him.

"It will stain the floor before it stains me."

"You're stubborn."

He laughs, voice suddenly boyish, a flash of something almost happy. "But you'll remember."

She spends an hour rectifying her appearance. Not vanity; survival. The high table's full of eyes, all sharpened for dissection, and if she walks in with so much as a limp or a flush, the rumor will propagate before the soup's cooled.

Tonight's dinner is supposed to be a feast, a declaration that the Crown stands unshaken by small mutinies or market riots. They roast two calves and spit-bake chickens, set out candied orange rinds and silver bowls of compote gleaming as dark as rubies. Alerah takes a seat at the low end, near the nursemaids and the off-duty guardsmen. She eats and watches the proceedings.

She looks at Helaena, whose hair's bound up in fresh braids, and her wrists are tangled in a rosary of knotted threads. For a moment, the only conversation's the scrape of spoons and the fussy complaints of children made to sit still.

Aegon arrives late, eyes blown wider than ever, smelling like a mixture of cider and some unguent that should never have touched skin. He takes in Alerah with a glance, then smirks—a flex of the lip that says, what a good little whore you are, without needing to voice it aloud. The queen's as composed as icing, her face polished and gleaming with the effort of dignity.

Even the king—old, flaked, papery—makes an appearance, propped up in cushions at the head of the board. His eyes track nothing; his mouth sags open, spilling a wet line of wine down his chin. The maesters hover, as if to catch a miracle should it pass from the room too quickly.

Aemond enters last, and though his hair's still mussed from her grip and there's a rawness in the way his eyes move, the face he shows to the room is a mask forged new for the occasion. He takes his seat without so much as a nod to her. Only the faint, almost undetectable angle of his jaw betrays anything of what passed between them.

No one speaks above a whisper. The lords discuss tides, tariffs, the rumor of a black fleet massing out at Driftmark. Alicent keeps one hand firm on Helaena's, and the other drummed in a measured rap-tap on the table.

When the server brings the main course, a haunch of boar lacquered with honey, the queen stops it midair and insists on the food-taster's bite before any platter can pass.

The hush is total, broken only when Aegon shouts for another jug, which he pours directly into Jaehaerys' cup, earning a sharp rebuke. The twins, for their part, play quiet games under the table, etching letters into each other's palms with greasy fingers.

Alerah feels the heat between her legs, a reminder of time's velocity—how one hour ago Aemond's tongue was inside her and now, in the same city and under the same roof, her world's been composited and painted over. She barely tastes her food.

When Helaena passes her the bowl of figs, her hand brushes Alerah's wrist, and there's an instant flare of color behind her eyes, a memory transposed: the lacquered wall, the smell of old rain, the splay of fingers that can't forget.

Aemond's voice slices the calm.

"I'll have the eastern gates locked at night," he says, "and doubled patrols on the river-walk. I want every word that passes the Point logged and countered. If Rhaenyra's fleet is coming, we'll see them long before their banners hit the wind."

"Shall I take dictation, my prince?" Alerah asks, drawing languid amusement from the table.

She expects the rebuke, but Aemond only nods, as if the suggestion had been a genuine offer of assistance.

"Yes," he replies. "And if you hear a single sentence to the contrary, bring it straight to me."

Aegon, now three cups deep and swirling the dregs at the bottom of his goblet, says, "they'll talk in circles, you fool. All the lies in the world and not one of them straight. You want truth from the streets, dig up the brothels."

Aemond tilts his head, as if he already knows the irony and is only waiting for his brother to catch up.

"You're an expert, of course."

"Only in expert company," Aegon winks, eyes sliding to Alerah and then back to his own reflection in the polished surface of the wine.

A moment later, Alicent's fingernail clicks against her goblet, and the room returns to the muted drone of lordly conversation.

The rest of dinner plays out as a pantomime: Aemond issuing directives between vocal silences, Aegon mumbling inarticulate filth to anyone who'll withstand it, Helaena humming to herself as she whisks mashed yam into coiling patterns.

It isn't until the pudding's served, and the candles gutter through their final inch, that the world cracks again. A howl, not wolf nor man, splits the dusk. The guards in the gallery twitch; a ready hand flits to hilt, then falls away, embarrassed. But the howl doesn't abate. It keens, then multiplies, until the outer wards are alive with it—a river of raw, confluent sound rising from the slum rows below the castle.

Aegon lets out a low whistle.

"That's the sound of a city about to shit itself," he says, to no one in particular.

Alicent stands. The room, so recently balmy with residual heat, chills like a drowned hearth.

Outside, the din swells—brooding, agglutinate—as if the city itself's clawing at the base of the Red Keep. The corridors fill with shuffled boots, half-armored, ill-prepared.

The first orderly message comes not by page or steward but by a kitchen boy, his apron sullied with something that might be pig's blood, might be his own. He bows, stammers, delivers: the Old Gate's been breached by rioters. Not enemy soldiers. Not Blackwood or their kin. Just the common rabble, furious and froth-mad, trampling the Watch and flaying banners from every wall.

Aemond finds her before the rest of the table has even risen. His hand snags her elbow, firm but hidden by the screen of his mother's dress, and steers her with such directness that she can't think to resist.

The riot's shriek is loud enough to render all else mute—a corridor of sound, licking at the palace's soft underbelly—and as they slip from the dining hall, Alerah can smell the panic already seeping into the timbers.

He hauls her up a flight of stairs so narrow and old it seems to have no origin in the castle's map; the walls reek of dust and the bones of private terrors. Aemond speaks only when they've ducked two landings and crossed the gallery with its banners rippling in the torch-wind. Even then, he drags her to the end of the southern wing, a corridor locked to all but the princes and the men sworn to them.

"My mother will have the guards ring the inner court," he says, not breathing hard. "But that's just to keep the stink of panic off the lords. The real risk is here—"

He gestures at the old timber, the thin glass of the arrow slits.

"If you were to breach a fortress, would you strike the gates? Or would you come up through the sewer, dressed as a rat?"

"You want me to hide," she says, voice dry.

"I want you alive."

He slips a key into her palm, traces its teeth with his thumb.

"The old passage behind the stables. It runs to the lower dock, all the way past the first ring of walls. Helaena and the twins will be sent after, if it turns worse."

"You're not coming?"

But he's already spun away, thundering down the corridor in search of more swords to call.

Chapter Text

She waits a full minute, watching the filigree of torchlight splinter across the polished floor, listening for the click of his boots to fade. Only then does she turn the key in her hand, first with skepticism, then with purpose.

She's never seen the passage he describes, but the Red Keep's full of old stories—of tunnels, trapdoors, hidden stairways cleaved out by bastard masons and sealed by the far cleverer dead—so she can believe it exists, and more: that it could deliver her out of the palace if, or when, the world turns.

The air down the narrow stairwell thickens: kitchen smoke, turned meat, human sweat. On the lowest landing, crammed between refuse bins and racks of corked casks, she finds the hatch, cleverly paneled into the wall behind a defunct anchor winch. The key fits with a mechanical smoothness.

When the latch yields, a breath of ancient air—dust and salt, reminiscent of dried kelp and rat nest—sighs across her face. She steps in, closes the hatch, and gropes for the wall. The dark's so complete she can't tell up from down, but she walks anyway, following the slope and the groove of chilled stone.

The tunnel spirals once, twice; she counts the turns, because Helaena always says the mind needs pattern to survive a night without stars. Three turns, then the floor levels, and the passage widens, the ceiling abruptly higher, the echoes less claustrophobic.

The silence is oppressive, yet comfortably absolute. Even the city's riot is muted by the weight of old secrets. In Tyrosh, she once spent a fortnight hiding in a brine cellar after a creditor's throat was slit open right beside her. She learned then to listen—most especially when it seemed nothing was to be heard.

Alerah feels her way forward, hands stretched wide, the left brushing the rough, moisture-pocked mortar, the right trailing along at thigh height in case the floor drops.

Moments pass, measured in heartbeats and the shuffle of her soles. She wants to believe there's no one else in the dark, but the air's thick with a kind of anticipation that's too quiet for pure emptiness.

She wonders, suddenly, if Aemond lied. Not to trick her, but to test her, to see if she'd run blind and mad into the dark just because he willed it.

She stops, listens hard, and then keeps going. There's no incentive for panic: if anything, the cold is a relief after the fever of the day. She moves for what feels like a quarter-hour, a curving, descending path with shallow stairs at intervals. Below, the air deepens—moisture swelling from the stones, a mineral pulse, like the belly of a cave. The further Alerah presses, the more certain she becomes of being followed: not by steps, but by the resonance of her own motion, a double-echo that must be her, and yet by the third switchback, she's certain it isn't.

She slows, then halts, using the hush as a shield. The blackness is absolute. Her eyes water, then adjust to a faintly lighter gray at the far end, where the tunnel may open into an atrium or cellar. She moves again, wary, counting her breaths.

A scraping behind her. Three slow, deliberate steps. No attempt at stealth. Not Aemond; his footfall is a piano wire, quick and high. This gait's heavier, a plodding certainty—like the sound she'd always imagined for a butcher's apprentice, one who lugs the carcasses and never blinks at blood.

She bolts down the slope, skirt in one hand, and reaches the wider antechamber before daring to look back. A flicker of motion: not a guard, not a prince, but a cloaked figure, close enough to shadow the tunnel wall in even this absence of light. No sword drawn, no threat—just presence.

Alerah weighs her odds: call out, or run. She runs. The passage takes an unexpected corner, and suddenly she's in a room so old the cobbles are worn concave by centuries of feet. If the Red Keep has a heart, this is the thudding, sightless thing. Two doors. The left: a splintered wood, lock crusted in rust. The right: iron grid, ajar.

She slips through iron, into a space like a plinth or viewing hall. A window—black and set with mouth-wide bars—looks out over another stairwell dropping into even deeper dark. Up here, at least, there's a little moon: a pale wedge, filtered down from somewhere higher in the Keep. It puts a sickle of silver along the wall, enough to see by.

The follower appears, then, framed in the arch. Hood down. In the dim, the face is mostly nose and shadow, but the carriage is pure certainty; someone not at all surprised to find her cornered here, someone who'd prefer to talk in the dark.

They stand for a minute, each assessing the other with a detachment so pure it feels like a parody of fear. The woman's eyes, blue or green or neither, slide over Alerah's body, marking the slight limp, the tremor in her left hand, the faint pulse that won't let go of her neck. At last, the woman sits, knees up, back against the cold iron, perfectly at ease.

"You're the Tyroshi."

She says it without inflection.

"You're famous."

Alerah grins.

"That's not so hard in a city where everyone dies young enough to be remembered."

The woman's mouth twitches.

"True. But you're not supposed to be here."

"Neither are you," Alerah points out.

The woman shrugs.

"I'm paid to find secrets. You're paid to keep them."

She leans in, voice dropping, though there's no need for secrecy in all this stone.

"Who's winning? Your Greens or the Blacks?"

Alerah lets the question hang. She takes in the other woman's hands, the careful flex of her fingers—no rings, no scars, but the subtle overlay of knuckle and tendon marking her as someone who's done violence, and often. Probably sells water and information down by the fish market; probably has a string of debts and a string of dead, and cares about neither. In Tyrosh, they called these girls eelers, for the way they could slip a knife in or out without ever changing the color of their face.

"I think," Alerah says, "the only one winning is the river. It'll have all our bodies soon enough."

The woman laughs, husky and low. "There it is. The famous Tyroshi fatalism. Tell me, princess—"

"Not a princess," Alerah interrupts, automatic and cold.

"Whatever you are. What would it take to buy you over?"

Alerah blinks. The audacity's clarifying; it clears the dregs of the last hour's panic.

"I don't think you could afford me."

"Oh, but I could."

The woman leans forward, elbows on knees.

"Not money. That's for city rats. But you—"

Her gaze sharpens.

"You're a climber. You want to stay alive. You want to be seen alive at the end."

Alerah finds herself nodding despite every warning in her head.

"I'm just here to watch," the woman says. "The war's not yours, not really. All you have to do is tilt—just a little—when the time comes. Give a message. Delay a runner. Nothing loud. Quiet is safest."

She smiles, and the smile's beautiful, the way rot sometimes gleams under rain.

"What do you want?"

"Not much. Just to know where the twins will be, if it goes to flames tonight."

The directness of it leaves Alerah breathless. Not your life, not your loyalty. The children, as coin. She doesn't answer right away. The eeler waits, blinking as slowly as a lizard on a rock.

"Your footwork's not bad for a kitchen girl," says the woman, her voice lacquered in the argot of the ward but sanded smooth by education.

It's an accent designed to slip beneath a door, not batter one down.

The muscles at the core of Alerah's body clench. She knows, of course, that the twins are the only game worth betting on in this city—what's a king if not a way to mint the next king?

"You could storm the nursery yourself. You're closer than anyone. Is this leverage, or just rumor-spinning?"

The woman cocks her head.

"A test, maybe. To see what you'll do. Take them to the dock. Tonight. Do nothing more."

Alerah fixes her with a look, practiced to break hearts and fealties both.

"And if I don't?"

"Then you're just another body in the river, Tyroshi. Maybe two more, if you take the children with you. I admire stubbornness, but the river admires nothing."

Alerah wants to believe there's a joke in this, some offhand bluffing, but she hears the certainty in the woman's voice—the city's certainty, the kind that always wins in the end.

"If I do as you say?"

"Then you'll live, at least for another hour. The world's built of small wagers, Alerah. Choose who to feed, and who to save."

"Fine."

"Fine?"

"I don't know exactly where they'll hide," Alerah lies, "but it's always in the hollow east of the stables. There's a priest's niche, with a blue tile deviled into the floor. Jaehaera won't go anywhere without the cats. They haven't left yet."

The woman's head nods, just enough to register the information and file it away.

"So, it's true," she says. "You really don't care who wins, do you?"

She's gone, leaving only a swirl of air and the residue of sugar.

Alerah counts to one hundred.

She stands at the edge of the stairwell and waits for her own heart to quiet, then presses on, ankle-deep in the dust of secrets. The way out's simple; Aemond knew it, and so did his enemies. The under-levels of the castle pulse with their own kind of order.

She emerges at the dockside, blinking in the wet, salt-hung dark. The fog's almost solid on the river, swallowing torches before their light can veer out to the moorings, and even the fishers' lanterns look like fugitives dragged down by their own weight. Laughter spills from wharf-side taverns, tinny and mean. Above it, nearer the castle, the riot still boils: she can see pulsing orange where fire has caught the thatch and the rope lines, can see shadows on the wall that move in tides, always up, never back.

Alerah finds the meeting place with no effort. The blue tile gleams—unnaturally, as if licked clean by a woman's careful tongue—amid the debris of old refuse.

There's no sign of the twins, no white-blonde head bobbing in the murk.

She ducks into the lean-to by the first stall, which is dark and too quiet: no horses left but one gelding pissing nervously in the back. She expects the twins to be here, as Helaena sometimes brings them to sweep stray kittens out of the cold—but it's empty, save for the faint reek of straw, shit, and oil. In the corner, an old, rust-caked scythe is wedged against the feed bin. She thinks of the eeler's casual threat of, "the river admires nothing", and for the first time wishes she hadn't dismissed her own violence so gently.

The scythe's handle is cracked but solid, the edge chipped along the belly; still, it looks like it would cut a throat as cleanly as it'd topple a head of wheat. She turns it once in her palms, surprised at the heft, then tucks the blade into the crook of her elbow and creeps along the horse-aisle, out towards the warren of side passages behind the stable.

He passes within arm's reach, blind to her, or maybe trusting that she's too ordinary to risk a backwards glance. He's dressed as a stablehand, but the way he moves says otherwise: something about the set of his shoulders, the tilt of his head, betrays years of watching for the quickest escape.

Alerah lets him pull ahead, gives herself half a dozen paces, then steps out behind and brings the scythe down, not on his neck but the backs of his knees—just as the Tyroshi gutter girls do to the men who beat them.

He collapses with a wet, surprised grunt. A knife flashes; she kicks it loose, then buries her own foot on the man's wrist as he fumbles for another. He swings up at her with his free hand, catching her hip, but she pivots, braces the scythe's handle under his chin and wrenches back with all the leverage her small body can muster.

It doesn't kill him, but it's close. He convulses, heels drumming, then goes slack. The knife is at her feet—a short, crescent blade, sharp enough to shave. She kicks it further away, then crouches over the man, locking eyes through the mask of his hood.

He stares up at her, one side of his face bent by the strange slackness of a drunken stroke, or maybe a poorly-mended break. He's young, younger than she expected, beard just a rash along his jaw, teeth flashing white and neat even as a ruby of spit slicks his lips.

He doesn't whine, doesn't plead, just bares them in a cold grin. When he finds the breath to speak, it's through a ragged whistle.

"Good form," he rasps, and Alerah recognizes, instantly, the accent—Braavos, tempered with something softer, maybe Lys.

"Never seen a Tyroshi with hands cleaner than her blade," he manages. "Does the prince fuck you, or just have you do his killing?"

For a moment, she's tempted to drive the scythe into his throat, just for that. Not because it's true, but because it's true in a way that will always be used against her. Instead, she settles on the balls of her feet and leans in, close enough to smell the night in his breath, the faintest tang of cloves.

"Which prince?" she whispers. "They all look the same with their heads off."

His chest rises, tentative, as if he expects her to slit it open along the seam with the next breath.

Instead, she gives him a calculated moment, then steps back, flexes the scythe with a wrist flick.

"You have a message?"

There's a cough—he laughs, hacking up something dark.

"I'm supposed to bring the little ones downriver. Easier if it's not their blood on the deck, but it hardly matters, does it? They'll take what's left of them east, cut their hair, and make banners out of their blood."

She weighs the words, the scythe's crescent shadow trembling on the dirt.

"And what if I refuse?"

He shrugs through the pain.

"Then you die before you hear the rest of it. We'll have our terms either way in the end."

Alerah glances over her shoulder—no more shadows in the hay, just the echo of boots and the stifling dark. The world above pulses with distant violence, a thudding river of torches and screams. She squats next to the assassin, planting the blade's heel just above his collarbone.

"Tell me the rest, and I'll let you bleed out nice."

He snickers, tongue sliding across cracked teeth.

"You're wasted in this city. Have you ever thought of coming east? You'd last a year, maybe two, and if you learned to keep quiet—"

She digs the blade in, not deep, but enough to peel away pretense.

"Talk."

His face goes slack. There's resignation, and then something like relief. He spits once, clears his throat, and begins.

"House Blackwood wants the bastard twins, alive but not entire. If you get them to the river, there's a boat waiting. Gold's good, and the captain owes his next three sons to the cause."

Alerah processes this with the efficiency of a butcher at market. She could drag it out—ask who wins, who loses, what her role's to be—but the stone's already written, and it's ugly.

"Do you have a name?" she asks, and the assassin blinks, surprised.

"No. But you do."

He pushes himself up on his elbow, wheezing, and leans close.

"Alerah of No One, begotten of no one. You never wanted children, but you'd die for these ones now, wouldn't you?"

Alerah stares him down. There's no profit to be had in denying it, nor in pretending the twins are anything other than the loadstone dragging her through these corridors, through these choices.

"That's the truth," she tells the shadow, and drives the scythe home, just under the curve of the chin—through the meat and up into the base of the tongue.

The sound's wet and brief, the life lost in a single arterial spout that stains her shift, sopping the straw beneath.

She's not sentimental enough to close his eyes.

She wipes the haft of the blade clean against the assassin's tunic, rolling the body under the bench with her foot. Her hands shake—not from the killing, but from the clarity of it, the instant crystallization of intent. All those years watching violence from the salt-crusted gutters of Tyrosh, and it had never once occurred to her that the only difference between victim and victor was the bite of a tool in the right moment.

She leaves the scythe. Carries the knife instead, tucking it into her sleeve with the practiced ease of someone who'd believed, for a decade or more, she might never need to use it. Now it felt as natural an accessory as a ring or a rosary.

Her feet move without instruction, logic writ into muscle. Past the empty stalls, up through the warren of side corridors, towards the servant's barracks. The children—her children, though she will never think the words aloud—would be here, if Helaena followed habit; it was the most obscure, least attractive hide in the palace, and no one with ambition or malice ever lingered long among the sweepers and the maids.

Alerah rounds the final corner and nearly plows into Helaena, who stands not as a mother but as a soldier: hair unbraided, face unadorned, and the twins bracketed behind her in a corridor thick with the scent of candle wax and coil-rotten rope.

Helaena's eyes are larval with fear, bulging and unfixed, but her hands are as steady as boards.

"Is it finished?"

Helaena has an oil lamp in one hand, Jaehaera's wrist in the other, and a kitchen cleaver leathered to her own belt with twine. Jaehaerys clings to her skirt, pale and wild-eyed, his mouth crusted with biscuit and fear.

Alerah slows, palms raised, barely breathing. Helaena blinks at her, uncertain—the way a falcon might, if handed a mouse it hadn't caught itself.

Alerah says nothing of the blood in her hair, or the dark skeins smudging her sleeve. Helaena will see it soon enough. Instead, she moves forward, stooping to the twins' level. Jaehaerys flinches, withdrawing back behind his mother, but Jaehaera stares, transfixed by the black wetness congealing on Alerah's jaw. No revulsion, no tears—just the pale intensity with which she watched everything.

Alerah wipes the edge of her mouth with her thumb, pretending at nonchalance, then holds out her clean hand to Jaehaera.

"We're going for a walk, little flower. Nothing to be afraid of."

She expects some resistance, a shrill whine or a clutch back to Helaena's skirts, but instead Jaehaera lets the bloodied hand close around her own and only says, "it's cold."

"She's not scared," Alerah says softly, more for Helaena than the child.

"No," Helaena says. "She's seen worse."

Alerah nods. "It's a long walk." She keeps her voice low, gentle. "But you can help me keep your mother and brother safe."

They move in a tight wedge, Helaena leading, Alerah's hand on both twins' napes, like a shepherd with no sheepdog but her own will. Through the barracks, past stuttering ranks of sleeping cots, ignoring the few kitchen girls who sit hunched at the boards, hands clamped around their own whispered terrors.

One sees the blood on Alerah and looks away; the rest are too bowed by misery to notice.

They exit into a side courtyard, a rectangle of churned brown grass and frost-scabbed flagstone. The towers above are darker than the river. For the first time, Alerah can see the fires—proper fires now, not just torches or the illusion of disorder, but houses on the slope below the Red Keep kindled orange and wild, gutters boiling with the mob.

Helaena hesitates, scanning the parapet.

"The passage?"

They reach the lower stair, a spiral so tight Helaena has to take it sideways, the lamp swinging close to the children's hair at every turn. At the base, another door: rotted from within, but sturdy still. Alerah picks at the hinge with her borrowed knife, scraping away the furred green until the pin at last gives. The door squeals open, and beyond is only the night air, the brined stink of the river, and the muffled roar of the mob.

Jaehaerys whimpers once, a thin, involuntary noise, and Alerah feels it transmit up through her own palm. She draws both twins in tight to her sides, guiding Helaena forward with a press of her shoulder.

"Follow the wall. Don't look up."

Her own voice is a stranger's, flattened to a steady thrum.

They edge along the frost-slick stones, the lamp's trembling light drawing odd sigils along the crumbling mortar.

Twice, Helaena stutters, slips, and Alerah's hand shoots out, steadying her. Each time, she half-expects the queen's daughter to melt, to weep, to revert to some infantile, safer version of herself—but Helaena only blinks harder, lips pressed into a rigid seam.

When the first missile arcs overhead—an oyster shell packed with slop, mostly, but the shriek of it is dreadful enough—Alerah tucks the twins under her elbows and hunches instinctively. The city's riot has found even this last bastion. Torches, slings, stones.

Alerah looks up and sees, not a hundred feet away, a ribbon of men armed with gut-stuffed cudgels and the odd, out-of-place saber. They surge and waver as one, like a flock pressed by a hawk's shadow. On the highest part of the wall, she recognizes, of all things, a banner—one of the palace's own, torn end, now painted over with a crude, black-winged shape she understands at once: Blackwood. The Black Queen's sparrows have learned to fly.

Their eyes meet hers—some hollow as bird bones, others bright and sharp with the thrill of what's coming—and then, miraculously, they let the three of them pass, Helaena and her children shielded by nothing but the whiff of royal blood and a single, blood-streaked foreigner.

Alerah realizes, then, that no one in this city actually wants to kill a child. They want the logic of power to prove itself. They want the great ones to be brought low, the old justice to be unsettled. They want the story of the city to belong to them, just for a night.

The moment sharpens, and everyone looks up—a shared presentiment, nervous and electrical, as if the world's weather had changed with no warning. At first, it's only a disturbance in the clouds: a ripple, a shifting shadow cast over the riot. Then comes the sound.

Not thunder, but the groaning, alive sound of a dragon's descent, neither here nor there, but everywhere at once. The entire avenue of the docks—hundreds of bodies pressed together, shouting, hungry for breakage—goes abruptly soft, eyes saucered, jaws loose. Even Helaena, frozen mid-step, blinks up at the sky as though expecting to see the city's own soul flayed open.

Against the clouds, a shadow moves.

Alerah knows the dragon by silhouette. Vhagar. The old terror, whose wingspan had blotted out half the square the last time she'd seen it, years ago as a child, terrified and pressed up against the steps of the Tyroshi dye market. Now, each ripple of the dragon's limbs is visible in the lantern glare, and at its nape, a rider in black: Aemond.

Vhagar's talons land first, sinking into the rutted bone of the quay, and her tail sweeps out, shattering a line of makeshift palings in a single, bored gesture. The dragon's head swings low, mouth open, teeth like a string of cathedral windows.

"Back," he shouts, and it isn't even that loud, but everyone hears it. "Back, or you'll burn."

He doesn't need to say it twice. The first line of men—city guards, defectors, and whoever was brave with drink and not much else—drops whatever weapons they had, and the rest pull back, brambles shivering in a wind that isn't there. Vhagar's maw opens, a flash of molten pink, and a gout of smoke thick as syrup leafs through the crowd.

Aemond doesn't land right above them, but circles once, making it clear to everyone who he's come for. He slides from the saddle with a grace that would look ridiculous if not for the fact that every single person on the wharf believes he's about to kill them all. He moves towards Alerah, and for a second, she imagines he'll gesture, or call her name, or something.

Instead, he just walks, a line of open space forming in front of him, as if he brings his own emptiness with him.

She's momentarily aware of the blood still drying on the side of her face. Of the twins' trembling hands, their too-thin clothing, the sticky patch on her sleeve where she'd pressed a stranger's life out in the dark. But when Aemond stops in front of her, none of it matters. His eye softens—a trick of the light or of his nature, she doesn't know—and he studies Jaehaera first, then Helaena, then Alerah herself, as if taking census of all the ways the night has changed them.

"It's over," he says, not to the women but to the twins, who will believe him because they know nothing else.

Alerah wants to make a joke, some mordant crack about how nothing is ever truly over in King's Landing, but her tongue is dry to the root. She notices, from the corner of her eye, the eeler from the tunnel—now a black shape on the dock, standing at attention. For a sharp, shivering second, Alerah can see the whole chessboard: the twins as king and queen, herself as the pawn that kept moving, and Aemond, the knight, forever circling, forever one slant away from the kill.

It's over when the city says it's over: when the fires die down, and the children are asleep, and the old men in the towers begin to whisper that the new order smells much like the old, only with more burn marks and fewer laws. It's over when the eeler's shadow peels off the dock, vanishing into the braid of wharf alleys without so much as a parting glance, and the assassins in the alleys recalculate their debts, and the dead in the river roll belly-up, white with the city's easy acceptance of loss.

Alerah stands in the bitter damp behind the Red Keep and scrapes blood off her hands with a chipped tile.

Jaehaera sleeps on her lap, face slack with the perfect innocence of those born to survive; Helaena curls next to her, lips parted in a fox's half-smile, as if even in sleep she's culling the next hour's puzzles before they can break her.

Aemond sits a little apart from them, his silhouette inked black against the river, hair loose, tunic still stained with the aftermath of the city's riot.

His eye finds her even when he pretends to look away.

He waits until the moon's at its zenith and the city's noise has died into a low, exhausted hum. Then he comes over, crouching beside her, arms looped loosely over his knees. She expects a demand, or an accounting, but Aemond just sits, head bowed, jaw clenched and working as if chewing through his own inventory of violence.

"You killed someone for us," Aemond says, at last. Not a question. Not even a condemnation.

"Saw no point in leaving it to chance," Alerah replies.

She expects a lecture, a disquisition on honor or necessity, but all he does is nod.

"You should have left him alive. Information's worth more than the fear it took to kill him."

"Not for men like that," Alerah says. "They think fear is a kind of inheritance. I'd rather they learn disappointment."

Aemond lets out a breath. If it's laughter, it dies in the curl of his mouth.

"You did the right thing, but you didn't do it for me."

"No," Alerah says, twisting her finger through Jaehaera's white-blonde hair, careful not to wake her. "I did it because I wanted to live. And I wanted them to live."

She expects him to sneer at her logic or to fold it into a lesson about how the world only rewards loyal hands. Instead, Aemond watches. He looks at her, really looks, and then reaches down to gently wipe a clot of blood from her knuckle, his finger warm and human.

"It wasn't like the songs, my prince. He gurgled for a while. I think he wanted to go east, in the end."

Aemond makes a thoughtful shape with his lips.

"There's still time for that. I could send the parts."

"I thought you'd be disappointed."

She means it. She expects him to sneer, to recite a prince's catechism about order or patience or the cruelty of improvisation. Instead, he looks at her with an admiration so unvarnished it makes her skin heat from neck to cuff.

"Well," he says, "if everyone in the city were as practical as you, I wouldn't need a dragon at all."

He glances at Vhagar, whose wings now blanket the better part of the dock.

"She eats three pigs a day," Alerah says, absently.

"Three is for peace. Five is for war," Aemond murmurs, as if reciting the logic of some ancient siege.

He waves his hand at the black, quiet sweep of the city.

"What will you do—when it's over?"

Alerah starts to say that she doesn't know, but the truth jumps out, unbidden.

"Abduct the children. Run a stew house in Tyrosh. Maybe drown before I get to the second shore."

"Hm. You'll get past it. People like you always do."

He pulls the callused edge of her palm to his mouth, kisses it, and lays it in his lap, as if to keep it from running away before he's finished with it.

Above, Vhagar's massive eye cracks open and surveys the pair with a slow, drowsy calculation, smoke leaking from her nostrils in lazy, blue-lit puffs.

"Do you want to meet her?" Aemond asks, tilting his head.

Alerah laughs, soft but unvarnished, as if only now remembering what bravery sounds like.

"No. She eats people."

"Only once," Aemond says, "and he was a squire who tried to bribe her with a sheep's heart."

"But you aren't afraid of her?"

He looks up at Vhagar, then back at Alerah, weighing the gravity of both.

"I'm more afraid of the world without her in it. The first time I rode her, I was certain I'd fall, and she would shake me off like a tick. Instead, she kept me. Even when I lost control, she just waited. Like a mother, or a god."

"She can love? Or only obey?"

Aemond shakes his head.

"She's far older than me. Older than my father, or his father. Sometimes, I think she just endures us until something better comes along."

He laughs, a wet sound.

"Maybe that's all love is—waiting until something better comes along, and then not hating what you have while you wait."

All at once, Alerah sees the boy he was, the one shadowed out of himself by a rack of ancestors and obligations, and, for an instant, she pities him so fiercely it threatens to crack her ribs.

"There's a priest on the Moss Gate side," she says, "who tells fortunes out of crab shells. He says every dragon's real name is just the sound they make when they die. Do you believe it?"

His eye goes wide at the thought, as if each word were a new barb to be plucked out or savored.

"If so, Vhagar's name will flatten the city when she dies."

He looks back at the dragon, now low and half-bedded in the mud of the dock.

"She's waiting for me to die, too, I think. We have an understanding."

Beyond them, the dragon blinks, tongue ghosting the air as if savoring the memory of flame. Jaehaera stirs, twitching as if the furnace of Vhagar's side has seeped into her dream; even asleep, the child reaches for the creature's presence, one small hand raised, fingers uncurling as though in second-sight salutation.

Aemond nudges Alerah's foot under the rough of the bench.

"Come. She's gentle enough if I'm near. You ought to meet her properly after tonight."

Alerah's legs tremble so badly she nearly dislodges Jaehaera from her lap.

Aemond waits at the base of the dock, one boot wedged against a sunken post, as if the entire world is only this wooden length between them.

At the slope, Vhagar cants her massive jaw to one side, the slow-smoldering coal of her eye roving over them. The ground is chewed to mud and ignited hoofprints; part of the quay is still greasy with the melt from her last fire, which has made the air blister and dance. Still, she's quiet. In some ways, more deliberate and less monstrous than any man Alerah's ever met.

Alerah remembers, suddenly, the way he ate her in the library—the same patience, the same meticulous power. She wonders if that comes from his mother or the dragon, or if in the end the difference could ever be found.

Aemond says a word—something in Valyrian—and Vhagar shifts her head, so that for a moment Alerah's reflected in the damp gilt mirror of the beast's gaze, doubled and distorted, infinite in her own trembling.

"She likes you," Aemond says.

"I'm covered in blood."

"She likes that, too."

Aemond lays a hand to the rough curve of Vhagar's foreleg, fingers dwarfed by the corded muscle under the scales. The touch is gentle, not a command but a greeting. When the dragon lowers her snout, Aemond beckons Alerah forward with a flex of his wrist.

"Don't move too fast," Aemond calls, not so much a warning as a reassurance. "She respects patience."

He lays his palm flat to the beast's cheek, thumb tracing where the hide is worn smooth from decades of bridles and battles. The dragon's jaw flexes, a sound like tree roots snapping.

Alerah dares extend a hand. It trembles in the yellow glow, palm up and open, not at the snout but at the narrow shadow under the jaw, where a pouch of skin hangs slack from old age. She expects to be ignored, or devoured, or perhaps both. But the great head tips, just a little, and the leathery warmth of it settles like a blanket around her hand and wrist.

There's a hesitation—half a second, maybe less—where Alerah feels, truly, that she could lose the whole limb, and not even the dragon would remember it an hour from now.

"This is what rules the world?" she whispers, not to Aemond, not to the dragon, but to the senseless dark above.

"A bit of lizard bone and a mountain of hunger."

Vhagar snorts and rolls her tongue, a lazy rectangle of muscle the size of a skiff. The dragon emits a low, trampling chuff, and the thick night air shudders in concert.

Above the Reach, a fresh riot of stars shivers into view, and Alerah looks up—at the sky's new clarity, all those scattered, cold bodies crammed together like fish roe, a whole universe watching the world's last monsters lick their wounds on a dock in King's Landing.

"Think I could mount her?"

"Don't," he says, but it's not a command. More a confession of his own limits.

"If she doesn't want it, she'll let you know before you even try. Best to meet her on foot, first. That's how the old dragonriders did it—offer a stone or a strip of meat, bow, wait for the consent."

Alerah glances at her own empty palms.

"I've nothing worth offering."

Aemond snorts.

"That's the point. Stand there, just as you are. It's your own life you're bartering."

Alerah closes the last few steps, boots squelching in the cinders and muck.

The eye, when it fixes on her, is huge and wet and not at all like a person's: it blinks sideways, slits contracting, a yellow moon returning the world's light through a thousand years of memory.

Alerah bows—not a deep, obsequious bend, but a short, honest dip of the neck, the way she'd seen dockmasters do for the old salt witches of Tyrosh. It's all she knows for respect. The dragon's head jerks in reply, then with a child's suddenness, Vhagar's tongue flicks out, rough as sackcloth, and smears a patch of river mud from Alerah's knuckles.

Aemond lifts his hand as if to steady her, but Alerah barely rocks on her heels.

"She accepts you. She's lost a half dozen handlers over the years. But you—she likes."

His voice cracks, as if he hadn't expected this turn of luck for himself, either.

"Tell us a story, Alerah," he says suddenly.

Alerah steps back, tucks her hands under her armpits to hide the trembling, and tries to laugh—not the brittle, bruising sound of the palace, but the low, rolling sort the river trades in. She thinks for a moment, searching the sediment of old tales. The twins are still asleep, faces soft against Helaena's skirt, but some part of her knows stories are best told to the unconscious, the remembering-bone, not only to the waking mind.

She pitches her voice low, the way a Tyroshi wet nurse might, if surrounded by newborns and the hush of salt and hung meat.

"There was a fisherman's wife once," she begins, "who wanted a daughter so badly she scoured the whole coast for a pearl big enough to wish on. Found nothing but shells, splinters, and the ghosts of old sailors. So she took her sorrow to the docks, and every night she'd cast her wish out with a shucked oyster, asking the moon to fill her belly or break her heart."

Aemond smirks.

"Not much of a choice," he says.

"No," Alerah agrees. "Not at first. But the moon's patient—it prefers its stories in long tides. What she gets, one morning, is a girl born with a shell for a spine, hair like seaweed, and a smile so wide it could drain the bay. They name her Iridyn, and she grows to be stronger than any dock boy, mean as a pilchard and twice as fast in the water."

Aemond rocks on his ankles, listening. Helaena, sensing a turn in the wind, strokes the twins' hair, eyes fixed now on the snout of the dragon curled at the dock's edge.

"They say Iridyn could hold her breath from first bell to last, swim the length of a storm with nothing but a shrimp for company. She grows, and the town's afraid—because she's bigger than they hoped, birthing rage where they prayed for sweetness. Some say she drowned her own father after he tried to cut the fins from her feet; others say he just walked out to sea, wanting to be less than an afterthought beside her."

"Such is the world," Alerah says, "that the girl with the shell for a back is blamed for every fish that goes missing, every swallow drowned in high tide. Even when she saves the shipping fleet from a giant squid, even when she teaches the salt-pickers to mend their nets, it's never enough. One day, the town elders catch her slipping the moon a bribe—her own baby tooth, polished and spat on to glisten in the dark. They drag her to the quay and tell her to make a last wish."

She draws a finger across the air, as if cleaving fact from fiction.

"The moon's full that night," she says, voice rough but certain, "and so bright it peels the paint from the bait barrels. Iridyn asks nothing for herself—nothing for her crooked back, or her mother, or the hounds that sleep on her doorstep. All she asks is that the world remembers her name. In return, she pries her own shell open, shows what's inside, and dives beneath the water just as the sun breaks the teeth of the horizon. She's never seen again, except in the tide lines of every wharf, where the barnacles clutch a little tighter, and the bones of the drowned always float up white as pearls, never rotting."

Aemond sucks his teeth.

"She must have been a clever little monster, if they're not sure to this day what happened to her father."

She looks down at the boys, molded against the weathered wood, and her voice drops to dust.

"Some things can't help the shape of their bones."

The salt breath of the Blackwater stirs the dragon's mane, and for a moment, all the world's silvered. Ships clicking against their moors, the slow churn of the tide, the hiss of scales on flagstone.

"What's the moral here?"

"That monsters rarely choose what they become in others' eyes."

"Is that pity or pride, Tyroshi?"

"Neither," she says, and her teeth clench on the word the way a wolf closes its jaw on a bone.

"It's just what the current does if you don't know how to swim."

Chapter Text

The next day, a barge ferries the princess of Dragonstone and her retinue up the Blackwater, set with banners so new the paint glistens above the ash of last night's fires.

The Lords of Driftmark greet the party at the quay in their velvets, stiff and silent as pillars, and the city's gossips scream to see their queen returned, whole and well, not poisoned or coffined as the commoners had willed.

Rhaenyra's dragon, pale as birch bark and twice as battered, kneels on a shattered pylon while the queen dismounts with less grace than rumor would ascribe to her.

She's older than Alerah expects, skin crosshatched in a fisherman's geometry, hair limned silver but matted to her brow. Behind her, the young princes dazzle: one a wraith, sallow-eyed and reedy, the other a brute with arms bare to the cold and a mouth that never closes.

Alerah watches from the riverbank, half-shielded by a cadre of drunk fishwives and the city's most unrepentant urchins, who'd converged out of nowhere with the whiff of free bread and spectacle.

She can see Aegon from across the square. He's already drunk, hoisted up on a makeshift throne of crab crates beside the betting stalls, where the city's lowliest gather to swap curses and shivs. He's surrounded by the detritus of loyalty—a one-eyed priest, a mute in a red jerkin, and a pair of identical girls.

He has a cup, but it's empty, and his hands are already weaving the air for the spill of his next story.

She slips through the crowd, not bothering to disguise herself. She stands before him.

The effect's instantaneous, as if she's thrown a pebble into a stagnant pond. The priest straightens, the twins cut their cackling, and Aegon's tongue stops dead, curling mid-lament before he recognizes her.

"My favorite Tyroshi!" he yelps, arms open for a hug that would cleave her sternum or, just as likely, cut her throat with the signet he wears.

"You look better with blood on your chin. More honest."

Alerah gives him a refill from the first available bottle, no matter the provenance.

He slops wine across his sleeve, then gestures at the crowd with a wet wag of his entire arm.

"All these faces," he says, voice doubled by the amphitheater of muck and echo, "and not a mind among them."

He cocks his head at her.

"You know what they used to call my father? Not in the records, I mean—in the kitchens, in the alleyways. What the gutter called him."

He waits for her to answer, and when she doesn't, roars it himself.

"The Sleepwalker! Not because he ruled asleep, oh, no, but because he had to be half-dead to even notice the world burning."

He leans in, cupping her neck with a grease-slick hand.

"What do they say of me, I wonder? That I drink? That I fuck? That I can't hold a table or a city worth a damn?"

Alerah thinks of a hundred answers, none of which would matter to him, or to the city, or to the future.

He lets her go, settling into the throne of crabs as if it were his destined seat.

"You see her?" Aegon asks, gesturing past Alerah's shoulder.

Rhaenyra, arranged in black and gold, laughing with her sons and the old lords, the whole retinue gathered at the foot of her dragon as they wait for the formalities of peace or murder to begin.

"She ate my share of the porridge when I was five. I never got over it. The city won't, either, if I've anything to say about it."

He's smiling, but only in the way a knife edge smiles: a promise of harm, a tautness that must go somewhere.

He drains the cup, wipes his mouth with a plank of bread, and starts again on the litany.

Aegon talks for an hour, but it feels like three. About the flaws of women, of dragons, of the city—every subject braided into a single cord of self-pity and naked resentment. For every jape he lands, there's a moment of startling, uncut honesty. It's in these flashes that Alerah sees the absolute clarity of his rage.

He knows, to the marrow, that everything he touches will slip away or rot in his hands, and so he mangles it first, to be certain of the outcome.

She listens. Not as a servant—those would have walked away, or feigned deafness, or collapsed drunk beside the prince and let his invective wash over them like bathwater—but as someone whose whole life had been trained to divine the real story hidden under the slag of complaint.

"You think I'm mad, don't you? All the clever little scribes, the lordlings who learn their letters before their swords—they think I'm a jester with a crown too big for my skull."

"What are you, then?"

He barks a laugh, so fierce it cuts the air.

"I'm the only sane one! I see it all—what a city's for, what it hungers for. Not the stories. Not the peace. It's a butchery: the strong take, the weak pray for a plague, and everyone else just rots in place."

He rocks back on the crates, nearly falling off, then rights himself with the instinct of a practiced inebriate.

"They crown me, then curse my every breath, but give them a choice between me and those cold-eyed bastards on the Black side, and I'll have the Street of Silk in tears for a year. Because I know what to do with ruin. I make it laugh."

Elyra doesn't trust herself to say anything clever.

"You know why I hate her?" he asks, nodding at Rhaenyra.

"Because she's not even trying to be royalty. She wants to be a mother, a martyr, anything but what she is—and yet, she can't help it. Every time she frowns, the city thinks it should starve itself for a week. If I frown, they throw lepers at my window."

He rambles about his mother, how he was her favorite son—until he wasn't. About Criston Cole, who has a spine so rigid it must have been cut from the hull of a drowned ship.

"Cole's the only reason any of us still have heads. You know, last spring, my own uncle tried to drown me in a privy?"

Aegon barks, gaze swinging from Alerah to the priest, then to the twins, who ignore him with seasoned mastery.

"Reached right over the edge and held me down. Strong bastard—could have been a hero, if he'd managed the deed. But here I am, pissing in every pot just to offend the fates. Cole said to play dead, so I did. Best advice I ever got."

She stands, arms folded against the morning chill, letting Aegon's vices flare and gutter out as they must. Every few minutes, a serving girl topples a wedge of bread or a fresh cup into the reach of his hand, and he rolls it between his palms, never quite finishing one before demanding another.

"Tell me a fucking story, Tyroshi."

It takes everything within her to not roll her eyes.

"There's not a single story worth the price of a full bottle, but I'll trade you two for one."

Aegon gestures extravagantly, sloshing wine down his chin.

"I am a prince. Name your terms."

She narrows her eyes, measuring the crowd for any hint of spies, then leans closer.

"You ever hear of the unluckiest man in Volantis?"

"Sounds like every man in Volantis."

"Maybe."

She laughs, full-throated, not caring if it makes her seem crass or dumb; it's the only register Aegon seems to respect.

"But this one was special. He was a baker's bastard—they called him Doughboy, on account of the flour stuck in his hair from the day he could crawl. He had a face like a crumpled ledger, and the small habit of sleeping with every fishmonger's wife in the bridge quarter."

Aegon puts a finger to his nose.

"A man after my own liver."

"This man, he never lost a wager. Clever with cards, clever with blood. Too clever for a city like Volantis, where the Tigers and Elephants sucked the marrow from each other's bones by sunset. So every week, he bets on which side will lose a dockworker, or which whore will next embrace the mercy of the river. One day, he bets on himself. By midnight, he boasts, I'll be in bed with the Archon's youngest daughter, and home before cockcrow."

She pauses for effect. The priest and the twins hang on her words, Aegon's cup trembling in his hand.

"In truth, the daughter did have a taste for this boy. But the Archon's wife, she had a taste for knives. So, she waits under the bed, silent as a rolled-up snake. The moment he's in, she slides out and slits his heel—snip, just the one, so he can't run until she's had her answer."

Aegon leans forward, lips parted in expectation.

"She doesn't kill him. She asks him a question: why risk your life for a pleasure that lasts one minute? And the unluckiest man in Volantis, he says, if I could find a pleasure that takes two minutes, I'd risk both feet."

Aegon laughs, the windows of his mouth flaring wide, and slaps the table so hard a crab shell sails off into the street.

"I'd have liked to know that man. The world's made for drunks and fools, and him doubly so."

He wipes away leaking tears—real ones, not the mock kind—and looks at her as if seeing something new.

"You ever lie, Tyroshi?"

"Whenever the truth's not fashionable," she replies.

He tilts the wine bottle, admiring it as if it were the city's last treasure, and offers her the stopper.

She balances the bottle, then lifts it high and tips it in salute to the motley jury assembled: crab pickers and mudlarks, the squat priest, Aegon giddy and half-fallen on his own throne.

"To happy men," she says, "and the women who outlive them."

She drinks, and the twins clatter their cups together in echo.

Tonight's a crisis of succession.

The lords assemble in a storm, boots thumping and squires tripping over their own newly-oiled armor. The white cloaks of the Kingsguard seem more gray than ever, more patch than fabric.

In the vestibule, three banners fight for precedence: the Crown's triple-headed dragon, the thin, splintered stag of the Baratheon, and the surge of sea-blue encircled by the curling silver bones of Driftmark.

They enter the throne room together—Alicent at the head, Aemond and Aegon flanking their mother with the measured pace of wolves at a funeral.

Alerah isn't allowed past the back gallery, but she's spent enough hours in the palace's oubliettes to know every echo and shadow by heart. She scales the last few steps to the musicians' platform, knees tight and steadying, and peeks out through a web of candelabra.

Rhaenyra's children have not been here since the last great winnowing, two years prior, when every line of succession was rearranged in an hour's worth of blood and accusations. Now, they proceed as if through fog.

Jace, taller, eyes mirror-bright; Luke, thinner and hollow-cheeked; the youngest—Joffrey—hidden beneath a salt-damp hood, as though the air itself might flay his skin if he dared look up.

Alerah feels the tension before the lords do—the way the room crowds and tilts towards a singularity where only two outcomes are permitted: abdication, or annihilation.

Alicent speaks first.

"It is the Crown's right to seat its heir. Driftmark's claim passed to Lord Vaemond, and the Council has judged it—"

"Your pardon, Your Grace," interrupts Rhaenyra, "but the Council's writ means nothing unless the king signs it."

The air shifts, and for a moment even the dragons painted on the throne room's walls seem to lean in.

Alicent's mouth works, rehearsed words suddenly brittle. The king's not present. There's only the echo of his intent, filtered through the veils of his wife's will and the ambitions of his sons.

"His hand no longer holds a pen," says Alicent, her voice a sluice of water. "We are forced to do more with less every day."

Rhaenyra holds her ground.

"Then I propose the king's will be carried by the heir's hand. My son is his true blood, as was always pledged."

Alerah finds herself adrift between observation and irrelevance. She glances to where Aegon stands before the throne, scratching at his neck. The motion's compulsive, like a dog scratching at a bare patch, and with each dig of his nail, Alerah can see the blood rise redder under the skin.

Every now and then, he glances up—at his mother's pinched mouth, or at his brother, or at some shadow Alerah can't see—and resumes the scratching, as if he could hollow himself out with nothing but the dull persistence of self-hatred.

Helaena, beside him, is present and entirely absent; her dress is glazed in a sheen of sweat and her knuckles are blue from the way she's twisted her hands together, so perfectly imbricated she looks like someone preparing to snap her own fingers off, one at a time.

"My son is of king's blood," Rhaenyra repeats, the vowels heavy with certainty. "And the king's word was given. Must we discuss it, or will you concede the hour?"

Alicent's answering smile is so thin it could decapitate anyone foolish enough to believe in its warmth.

"Of course. But as you say, the king's blood prevails. What is your offer, princess? That we seat your son and breed him to a grandchild of my own? That we entrust the future of the realm, and the key to the Driftwood Throne—to a child now without a father's guidance, and a questionable claim?"

"My claim is what the king said it was," says Luke, stepping forward, surprising everyone—including himself.

His voice falters for only a moment.

"And my mother never broke a promise in her life, which is more than your side can say."

Aegon grins like a wolf at the end of a famine. The court forks its attention, all eyes flicking from the boy-prince bristling with borrowed confidence to the sallow, brittle woman who could, with a look, bring the whole room to heel.

Alerah watches the faces as they change.

The old lords of houses minor, who've survived every succession by knowing when to blink; the knights from the Crownlands, too new to court to hide their awe at the Targaryen siblings; and the dozen or so women, matrons with hands gripping their own wrists so as not to betray with a flutter of fan or folding of silk what they wager in this moment.

Every possible outcome exists in the space between the echo of Lucerys' words and the next move from Alicent.

Aemond's silent beside his siblings, his profile sharp, lips pressed tight as if he's already bored with the proceedings and just waiting for a blade to be drawn. But Alerah knows that look—he's running the possibilities, left to right, from bloodless settlement to riot, and every permutation in between. He wants a fight, but he's not fool enough to start it himself, not when there's somebody better placed to get the ball rolling.

Aegon, drunk but not dull, glances again at Alerah, his eyes communicating the old, eternal question: what will they do next?

When she returns the look—a subtle shake of her head, because any true violence, today, will come from the other side—he seems almost disappointed.

"My lords," says Alicent, rising with newfound dignity.

No one can look at her and see the girl she was. Even the sweat on her upper lip is composed, purposeful, part of the role she's dressed to play.

"Let us not disgrace the king's name with a spectacle. The Driftmark question is not driftwood that floats or sinks at the pleasure of the tide. It is a pillar of the Realm, and must bear the weight of our unity, or splinter it."

The doors yawn open behind the lords with a ceremonial heave, and the thud of staff against flagstone announces Otto Hightower, Hand of the King. His beard's trimmed to the colorless precision of tallow; his eyes scan the chamber with the bored malice of a man who's already prepared his side of the history books. The procession at his back's all white and green, like a palanquin for the idea of certainty itself.

"Attend to the twins, girl," he murmurs—never slows, never glances, just shaves the words off as he passes.

The command's absurdly quiet, but somehow it drowns even the overlapping voices of court.

She bows a fragment—hides the smile that wants to crack her face—and then ghosts back from the gallery, slipping behind the columns, down the stairs, and into the low-lit corridor that bisects the old nursery and the new.

Inside the green-brocaded chamber, Jaehaera balances on the edge of her cot, hair limp in a single plait, eyes fixed on the window where light bruises the stones. She holds a kitten in her lap—a true cat now, grown sly and sword-thin—and strokes it with a slow, deliberate care. Alerah expects the child to ignore her, but instead she's met with a gaze so direct it startles.

"Did they choose yet?" Jaehaera asks, not even offering a greeting.

The cat flicks annoyance with its tail and nestles deeper, indifferent to dynastic peril.

"It's not that simple," Alerah says, stooping to catch a dropped hairpin and tucking it back into the child's braid.

"They're building the outcome in layers, so everyone forgets who first started the thread."

She isn't sure Jaehaera understands this concept.

Jaehaera pins her with a hard stare, the kind that grown men can't stand for long.

"They could just say. If anyone but the king can say, then the king doesn't matter."

"That's a dangerous idea, little dove. I'd keep that one close."

Before Alerah can finish the last stroke of Jaehaera's braid, the latch slips and Aemond's silhouette occludes the doorway.

He crosses the threshold without hesitation. He has something in his hand—a velvet pouch, a scrap of gold, it doesn't matter, because it dangles forgotten at his thigh as he beelines for Alerah and, with a single, predatory motion, seizes her by the chin and kisses her.

Not chaste, not practiced, not even especially skillful—just a press of mouth to mouth, teeth bruising her lower lip, the taste of copper and salt, tearing at her until her skull rattles. The cat bolts. Jaehaera yelps in surprise. Alerah should pull away, but the pressure's an anchor.

He kisses her again, deeper this time, dragging the air from her lungs so that for a second the whole world is his mouth, the pressure of his thumb along her jaw and the tremor of his pulse pressed to her temple.

"That's for luck," he says, his voice frayed at the edges. "We'll need it, come tomorrow."

Jaehaera's jaw is set, small and stubborn, watching them with a flat regard.

"Mum says kissing makes babies," the child observes.

Aemond's lips twitch into a smile.

"That's a lie for the frightened, not the clever," Aemond says.

He kneels to Jaehaera's height, the pouch still forgotten in his fist, and extends it to her.

"A present," he says, the words weighted. "From the Driftmark vaults."

She takes it with both hands—greedy, skeptical, as small girls are when gifts come unbidden. She pinches the drawstring, upends the pouch, and lets a tangle of white chain slither out into her palm. At the end of it, a locket, heavy as a tooth.

Inside, sealed in a resin drop, is a fleck of scale, no bigger than a grape seed, not black or green or any true dragon color but a stormy, wet silver, like the sky bottled inside a raindrop. Jaehara turns it over and over, unaware her thumb has cut a print of red where the clasp pinched flesh.

Aemond looks at Alerah. She wonders if he means for her to translate the gesture. The locket, the scale, the way he squats on the balls of his feet instead of lowering himself to the floor, always ready to rise or retreat. She doesn't. She waits for his words.

"You remember when father would take us to see the cages beneath the hill?" Aemond says, so softly the lilt barely catches Jaehara's ear.

She nods. Of course I remember, you idiot, her face says.

"They kept a dragon in fetters once, so old and spent it barely had breath to flame. The keepers starved it to keep the spine from curling around the iron."

He looks at the locket, still spinning in the child's palm.

"The last day, it shed this. The handlers said it was a sign, that the world would soon be rid of its monsters."

He rubs a thumb across Jaehaera's scalp. "But I kept it. Because sometimes it's better to know the monsters are there, even if you can't see them."

"Jaehaera, go play with the guards in the antechamber. Take your locket. Show it off. But don't let them touch it, and don't let it out of your sight."

The girl sniffs—offended by the command, or maybe by the idea that any guard could be trusted with such a prize. She slides off the cot, stalking past Alerah with a white-hot look, the cat swaying in the kittenish wake of her skirt.

The door closes behind her with a child's exaggerated care, and Alerah's left alone with Aemond, the hush of the palace vibrating just under the limit of what can be heard.

Aemond's first words are so unceremonious, so utterly at odds with the tension in his face, that Alerah almost laughs.

"Do you know how long it takes for a head to recognize it's been cut off? A human one, I mean."

She blinks at him, not sure if he's making a threat or a confession.

"Do you want to know?" he presses, gaze gone shark-bright. "It takes nearly thirty seconds for a man's mouth to finish what he was saying. It gapes, it gasps. The tongue tries to keep talking even as the body remembers it's already dead."

Alerah waits, wary of the point or the pain behind it.

"Daemon cut Vaemond's head off. Right in the throne room."

Aemond glances at her to see if she flinches, or if she'll sneer at the melodrama.

"He faced my uncle and still died like a carp speared in the market, mouth wide for air until the end."

"You almost sound impressed."

"Wouldn't you be?" Aemond paces to the window. There's a dangerous joy in him, a lean satisfaction, like a child with a thumb pressed to the bruise he's proudest of.

"He was the only one in this palace who looked at me and saw a rival, not a child. Sometimes I miss him. Someone has to witness you, or you don't exist."

Alerah snorts, more out of habit than real scorn.

"You think that's all we'll be—just the sum of who bore witness?"

"What else?" Aemond leans against the oiled frame, fingers splayed as if to brace his whole body.

"You want a witness? All right. I'm watching."

She expects a challenge.

Instead, he says, almost gently, "you're the first person in this palace who isn't waiting to see if I'll slip and bash myself open on the stairs."

He looks down at his hands, as if bewildered by the miracle of their own survival.

"Even my own mother expects me to break. She tells herself I won't, but it's like a prayer, nothing real. She wants to see a difference from one morning to the next, and when there isn't, it's as though she has to start believing again from nothing."

"You disappoint her in your own way, is that the trouble?"

"Not just her."

He faces her square.

"I grew up in the shadow of every perfect thing my brother ruined. Tell me," he says, "and don't lie: if I vanish tomorrow—swallowed by the river, or gutted in the street—what will they say of me? What will you say?"

"The city's memory is short, even for its monsters. They'll say you ruled with a sword instead of a heart. They'll say you could never love, so you loved the killing. They'll praise your mother for outlasting you, and praise your brother for not living as long as you did."

She shrugs.

"But the ones who wash the floors, or serve the soup, or gossip with the sailors at the wharf—they'll say you let the dragons fly again, even though it cost the world."

"Would you miss me, Alerah?"

She rolls the question around on her tongue, detects no trace of jest.

"I'd forget your voice within a week," she says, a lie.

"But the kittens and the children would mourn longer. You have a knack for growing on the softest parts of people, like a burr in a pie."

He laughs, the real kind that starts with the ribs and stings in the eye sockets. She thinks he'll press the point, but instead he just looks past her, out at the drift of dusk where the rain blurs the city's lines.

"Good," he says, almost to himself. "I'd rather be remembered like that, by accident."

He stands very close, then, "would you let me fuck you again?"

"Are you asking or ordering?"

His mouth quirks.

"Would you want it if I ordered you?"

Alerah studies him, weighing the living man against every fantasy of him she'd ever heard scraped off a dock or through a linen sheet.

"A prince's order is as dull as a chamber pot," she says, fiercely quiet.

"Surprise me, and you might have my attention."

With a wrist-flick, he pushes her back to the window, but there's no violence in it. He wants her upright, looking out at the city, so that when he knots his fist in her hair and pulls her head to the side, it's him reflected in the glass, all pale and angular and quivering with want.

The first time, he'd taken her like a secret. This time, it's a debt.

There's no more talk. Their hands find skin, the old way, the way of sailors and orphans and every pair of lonely creatures joined by accident in the world's great brine. She climbs him—literally, arms wound around his pale neck—and he lifts her, sets her against the stone ledge, and tears the laces of her underdress so hard the cord splits her back like a spine of pearls. He slips in fast, so fast the breath exits her lungs in a yelp, and fucks her with a prince's disregard for pain; but she clings to him, rides the pace, bites his jaw until blood beads at the edge of his chin.

The glass fogs. Two floors away, his mother's plotting an outcome, and five doors over, someone's almost certainly about to die. None of it matters. Aemond's whole world's the knot of Alerah's legs around his waist, the clutch of her hands learning the seams of his back, the way her voice—raw and salt-slicked—breathes his own name into the shell of his ear, over and over, as though that alone could guarantee his survival.

When he comes, she cups the back of his neck, forces his head down, and holds him there, refusing the finish until she's certain of it. Maybe forever. For an instant, his bones shudder. She feels it through her ribs. Maybe they're both vibrating with the same story.

She lets him go, then, and he slumps forward, breathing her in as if she might leak away if his mouth left her collarbone for even a second.

He stays there for a while, pressed to her like a child, and then—suddenly, almost violently tender—he cups the back of her head and kisses her again, slower and more whole. This time, when he peels away, his smile's lop-sided.

Across the lintel, Jaehaera's cat pads back into the room, arches its tail, and hisses at Aemond as if to remind him that while it might be his home, it would always be hers first.

Alerah nips at his jaw.

"Once more and you're my thrall forever, prince. That's what they say, in Tyrosh. You keep fucking the same woman and she'll own you by the new moon."

He laughs against her neck, but it's a softer, wondering sound.

"Then marry me and say it in every language you know."

She flinches.

"You," she says. "Marry a girl from the gutters, who can barely hold a spoon in the right hand, who the palace wouldn't even let serve the appetizers. You'll get a dagger in the eye for even thinking it."

She runs her hands through her tangle of river-hay hair and gives him a skeptical look.

"You'd like that, wouldn't you? Another unworthy bride to mix in the royal line. Your mother would eat her own hand."

"It'd be a favor to the city. Give them something to gnaw on between wars."

She snorts. "You couldn't afford my dowry."

He pushes her into the glass, cock working back in, and this time the pace is slow, savoring, like eating the last thing you love before dying of hunger. She lets her head loll back against the window, eyes open, watching the city shudder with a thousand secret lives. He fucks her until her toes curl and the sweat laps his ribs, until she's gasping and slapping the rhythm into his spine just to punish his mercy.

"Don't make promises in the afterglow. It's like planting crops in a drought. Nothing takes root."

He laughs.

"Fine. Then we’ll fuck until the ground’s so salted, nothing grows for a generation."

Chapter Text

The hour's late by her reckoning of the moon. The bells ring for dusk but the room blazes with a midday ferocity. Every candlestick in the Red Keep seems to have been called to action; the heat of their tapers softens wax, dulls air, makes the silvered plates swim as if submerged.

The feast begins with the senseless clang of knives on platters, edge meeting edge, an ugly harmony of hunger and posturing. Alerah stands behind the queen's left elbow, where the shadows stretch thickest from the columns.

Daemon drums the table with his ringed fingers, pausing only to yank a shank of venison from its greasy bed. Rhaenyra, composed to the last hair, sits upright, letting no sign of her fatigue leak through. To her right, Joffrey methodically builds towers of sweetmeats. Luke and Jace—eyed by every Hightower lickspittle in the room—sit stiffer, each a study in the art of not fidgeting.

For their part, the Greens gather on the table's high curve, the queen to the right of the king, and Helaena resolutely glassy. Viserys sits at the very apex, frail and cocooned in lambswool, mouth ajar, eyes rolling with the inertia of memory.

The first toast goes to the Crown, but no one drinks. Luke stares at the rim of his cup with a child's obstinacy. Joffrey knocks over two goblets, and while everyone pretends not to notice, Alerah sees the ripple of irritation in Alicent's jaw, sees the way Helaena flicks her gaze, sideways and lost, as if trying to imagine herself in a future where none of this will matter.

Alerah moves among the servers, her hands steady as they pour, refill, fetch and vanish the bones and rinds.

Aegon's voice rises as he harangues the musicians, demanding a song with teeth to it, not the limp ballads of peace, and when the minstrels fumble the first chord he snaps his fingers until silver strings bite into the tune he wants.

He slams the table for emphasis, showering Helaena with droplets of honey mead. She squeaks, dabs at her sleeve. Aemond twitches, as if debating whether to intercede.

"That's not a love song," mutters Jace, words so nearly swallowed it's clear he never intended to be heard.

Aegon grins, torquing his chair to face the boy directly.

"Love songs are for weddings. This, nephew, is a funeral feast."

Alicent cuts a glance so sharp it stings the air, but Aegon neither flinches nor shuts up.

"All the best stories end in a little blood," he continues. "May ours overflow the cup, eh?"

Joffrey slaps his tower of confections flat, sending a sugar-dusted hail across the table. Alerah leans in fast, wipes the spatter from the gold-fringed cloth, and feels the sharp heat of Luke's stare as she does so. The boy's eyes are wolf-yellow tonight, hungry and wary.

"Would you like something sweeter?" she asks him, careful to curtsy just enough for the lords at the lower table to notice.

"We have plums preserved in brandy. Or melon from the palace garden, candied just this evening."

Luke recovers a half-smile.

"Just wine. I'm supposed to act grown, tonight."

"I won't make it obvious," she teases.

She pours the wine, a thumb locked over the seal to keep the flow modest, and watches as Luke stares at the cup, then at her neck, then away so abruptly that the tips of his ears ignite scarlet.

Luke looks as if he might thank her, or apologize for the heat in his cheeks, but Aemond's voice slices down the table.

"Alerah. Here."

She lifts her chin impersonally and glides up the right side of the table, skirts brushing against the backs of men she once feared.

"You're a busy girl," he murmurs, the chill in his voice so veiled it could be mistaken for a joke.

He plucks a thumb-sized cherry off the plate, dangles it, then pops it into his mouth with a flex of jaw.

"Say something kind to your nephew," she whispers.

He waits until the pit has sharpened sweet against his tongue and then bites it with a sharp crack, letting the kernel's bitter flesh bleed out.

"Why? You've nothing to offer him yourself?" he scoffs.

"He'd prefer it come from you."

Aemond leans back, his eye flat with irony.

"We're family in name only. Blood doesn't clean the slate. But if a moment of peace is the tax, I suppose I'll pay it."

He turns to his nephew, the ruined cherry pit still dark between his teeth.

"Luke," Aemond intones, lips curling, "may your first voyage as Lord of the Tides be less disastrous than most of your evenings here."

Luke stares. It isn't malice he sees—Aemond's voice is almost gentle, the humor real and scuffed with the polish of resentment. The boy raises his cup, and the hush at the table goes flat and strange, as if the walls themselves are bracing for the crash.

"Thank you, uncle," Luke says, voice ironed with resolve. He drinks. The wine etches a line of purple down his lip. For a heartbeat, the whole hall's at balance—nothing falls or soars, nothing breaks.

Aegon whoops, then, and palms the back of Jace's neck, pulling the older prince's face to the silvered plate.

"Why all the grim?" Aegon demands. "We're family, aren't we?"

He jabbers up a cluster of dates, mashes them together, and holds it out as if to anoint his nephew. Jace accepts the bundle of fruit, and if his face's damp with dignity, he doesn't show it. He chews, stares into the center of the table, swallows his pride as if it were the rind.

Aegon slurs, voice both mocking and admiring.

"Next we'll be feeding the dragons in the yard, see who comes back with all their fingers."

Daemon laughs harder than anyone, and Rhaenyra's mouth crooks, a sideways smile she can't suppress.

Alerah waits for the next volley of insults, but the mood at the table shifts. The city, for one perfumed evening, wishes itself into a peace it can't sustain.

She makes her way around the back of the hall, refilling goblets, fetching more warm bread, glancing up only when a voice she didn't expect knifes through the room like a gust from the open sea.

"Alerah, girl," Daemon calls, waving a half-eaten apple. "Fetch us a knife. One worthy of a prince, if there is such a thing in this nest."

She curtsies with a flourish and sidles down the length of table to where the real power gathers in pockets and glances, not titles. He grins up at her, teeth like wet stone, and though the air of violence round Daemon Targaryen is almost a perfume, Alerah finds herself charmed, not cowed.

He studies her a moment while she lays out the knives, one after another, as if lining up soldiers for the last doomed charge.

"You know, in Braavos, they don't eat with steel," he says, tooth-picking the words with a low, conspiratorial lilt. "Too easy for the table to become an abattoir."

"Yet here we are. No one trusts their kin quite enough to go without a blade."

Daemon lets out a short, delighted bark.

"I'd as soon lose a hand as a tongue, in this room. What about you? You seem to have more wit than half the court, and less patience than the rest. Given your druthers, what would you cut first, in this den of slander and silk?"

He asks it like a jest, but even the child-boys at his side are listening, waiting to see which law she breaks with her answer.

Alerah sets the last knife, the meanest one, right before Daemon, then bends to pour the wine. She lowers her voice, just enough for him and his wife's boys to hear.

"I'd cut the silence. It's always sharper than the tools on the table."

Daemon's stare grows more intent. The dragon lord in him wants to laugh; the man sees the thread under the words and tugs at it.

"You don't like stillness, do you?" he asks.

"I grew up on market streets where you can hear time moving. If it drops quiet, you're already dead."

Rhaenyra, occupied with her own thoughts and her sons' darting hands, gives no sign of listening, but Alerah feels Alicent's attention as a pulse under the conversation.

Daemon pushes the knife towards her.

"Careful, Tyroshi," he says. "Keep talking like that, and someone will ask you to run the city by morrow."

"I only ask for running water and a warm cot," she says, playing the fool as deftly as he'd hoped.

Daemon's fingers flick to her wrist.

"You get both, and the first cup poured at my table, if you ever tire of the palace."

At the end of the table, Aemond watches Alerah carve her route through the feast. His lips sharpen into a seam when she serves Joffrey, who—despite all warnings to the contrary—hurls a spoonful of honeyed carrots at the back of Aegon's head.

Through the raucousness, the king stirs.

Viserys, abandoned by the world even as he sits at its center, lifts one shaking hand. The tremor's visible, a ripple from shoulder to wrist, and Alerah notes the hush that drops from ceiling to tile in its wake, the way the lords suck at their teeth and the women clamp their fans tighter, bracing for whatever he's to utter.

"My family. My children. I see you all, and I remember when you were small."

Daemon glances away, eyes suddenly wet.

"Please let there be peace between us."

For a moment, the silence is unadulterated. Even Aegon doesn't sneer. Helaena's hum goes unbroken, but softer, fading into the bone of her chest.

Alerah glances along the ridgeline of candles, sees Aemond's single pale eye, glittering, tracking her through the crowded air. The only time he'd ever looked away from a threat was if something more interesting had arrived.

She feels it—his gaze, moon-cold and bright as blade steel—on the hollow of her throat, marking her in a way no public fuck ever could. She wonders what he wants her to do, in this moment where the whole court holds its breath, teetering between history and disaster.

If she were clever, she'd drop a plate or spill a flagon, cut the tension with grease or laughter. But a part of her yearns for this silence to last. She wants the lords and ladies to know the weight of stillness, the same weight the gutter-born learned with every stunted morrow, every hour before the market stall opened.

"My own face is no longer a handsome one, if indeed it ever was. But tonight, I wish you to see me as I am. Not just a king, but your father, your brother, your husband, and your grandsire who may not, it seems, walk for much longer among you. Let us no longer hold ill feelings in our hearts. The Crown cannot stand strong if the House of the Dragon remains divided. Set aside your grievances. If not for the sake of the crown, then for the sake of this old man who loves you all so dearly."

As she moves to clear plates, Daemon catches Alerah's eye. He leans in, voice so low she feels it as a vibration in the marrow.

"Good speech, that," he nods at the king, "though it won't last as long as the cheese on the table."

"Have faith, my prince."

"Faith tastes like ash, in my mouth," Daemon says, but his eyes remain softer than his words, fixed and unblinking on the king's trembling frame.

Viserys stands, or rather sits, tilted and tilting as if the throne itself has become angled. His head sags, and the queen rises with less grace than she means to, catching his shoulder before he pitches forward into the stew.

“My love,” she murmurs, and though every eye is on her, she makes it sound like a secret. Alerah notes the calculation in Alicent’s hand as she signals for the servants—the king’s guard, the maester, the servants alike—and how each springs to motion not with panic but a choreography rehearsed for years.

The king’s daughters and sons don't rise. Rhaenyra keeps her boys still with only a rustle of her sleeve. Helaena blinks, owl-wide and impenetrable. Aegon huffs a laugh at the king’s slumber, but when Aemond breaks from his silence—tensing to rise, to help, to intervene—it is cut short by Daemon’s boot, subtly leveraged against the table leg, pinning Aemond’s path.

For all his edge, Aemond folds. He watches, inscrutable, as the king is half-carried, half-rolled from the table, the folds of his robe billowing wildly around his shrunken frame.

The wet scrape of cutlery resumes, subdued. The wine flows thicker, conversation spooling out in low, private tatters that the room’s acoustics can’t quite swallow. One by one, the high lords and bickering squires retreat to supper’s shadows or out the side doors, seeking the comfort of company or the safety of distance.

A silver platter wobbles down the hall, borne aloft by two sweating girls in crisp aprons. It weaves towards the head of the table in a stately disorder, followed by a brace of lesser servants bearing trays of garnishes, compotes, and the lemon tarts for which the palace's infamous.

The platter lands with a clatter in front of Aemond.

The centerpiece's a roasted pig, brown and lacquered, its snout encrusted with cloves and its mouth grinning.

Luke's face goes briefly as pale as ash, but then a strange delight needles at his lips, and a low snort—derisive, half-swallowed—curves out into the quiet.

The boy raises a hand to his nose as if to stifle it, but the sound lingers, unspooling a thread of memory Alerah doesn't know but feels in the prickling of her own skin.

Then, all of a sudden, Aemond drives his fist into the wood. The goblets rattle, knives clatter, and every conversation in the hall dies in an instant so total that Alerah feels her own pulse as if beneath a wet thumb pressed to her throat.

"Final tribute. To the health of my nephews: Jace ... Luke ... and Joffrey. Each of them handsome, wise ... Strong," he says.

Alerah watches the tracking of the word, the way it lines through the air and lances into its targets: Jace, braced and trembling; Luke, lips pressed so tightly together a drop of blood beads beneath his canine; Joffrey, child enough not to understand, but smart enough to know the laughter now brimming in Aegon is meant to be a weapon.

Alicent gives a sharp inhale.

"Aemond—"

"Come, let us drain our cups to these three ... Strong boys."

"I dare you to say that again," spits Jace.

"Why? 'Twas only a compliment. Do you not think yourself Strong?"

Jace, standing beside Helaena, moves with the startled rage of a starved animal. He closes the distance between them in a single stride and, without ceremony, drives his knuckles into Aemond's cheek with a crack loud enough to startle the servants.

Aemond doesn't even stagger. He absorbs the shock, eye watering, then pivots with a feline fluidity and easily shoves Jace backward.

"Jace!" shouts Luke.

The motion draws every eye, but the only sound is the wet, cartilaginous thump of Luke's nose when Aegon—now fully awake, fully in his element—grabs his nephew by the back of the head and slams his face hard into the festive spread. The boy's cheek splits open on the ridges of a clementine; blood spatters the goblets, mixing with syrup and citrus.

Jace surges up off the floor. He doesn't shout this time, just swings again—a clean, knuckle-forward punch aimed straight for the white star of Aemond's cheekbone.

"That's enough!" shouts Rhaenyra.

Rhaenyra rises with the grace of a drowning woman—and it is terrible, the way she collects herself, shakes off her husband's anchor-hand, and strides around the splintered edge of the table to seize her son by the shoulder.

Alicent's hand is on Aemond's arm—sharp, jeweled, fingers like a barbed whip. She doesn't yank him down so much as lever his shoulder, a forceful pivot, redirecting all of the rage and glee and sick delight still coiling through his smile.

"Why would you say such a thing before all these people?"

"I was merely expressing how proud I am of my family, mother. Mn, though it seems my nephews aren't quite as proud of theirs."

Someone's goblet rolls the length of the grand table and comes to rest at Alerah's feet. She picks it up, restores it to its rightful perch, and all around her, the air vibrates with the held breath of a hundred courtiers, none of whom recall what it's like to see a family grudge played out this close and unvarnished.

Alerah's already moving towards Aemond, but she's outpaced by a black blur from the other wing. Daemon, risen from his seat with a rictus grin, sternly places a hand out to Aemond.

"Wait, wait!"

He looks at Jace first, then Aemond, weighing disappointment and pride in equal tension.

"Are you lords, or longshoremen squabbling for the last pickled herring?"

Aemond, nursing his jaw, glares at the older prince, but there's a flicker of genuine contrition in his eye—perhaps even shame, if such a thing exists in Targaryens at all.

Jace, chest heaving, squints through tears and blood; his knuckles are already swelling.

Alerah can sense it moving, the sharp disintegration of appetite, the boiling off of every pretense of politesse. Rhaenyra bears her sons towards the door, their dignity tattered but heads held upright. Daemon lingers, as if to police the retreat, his hand resting lightly on the hilt at his waist, daring anyone—Alicent, Aegon, even the prince's own kin—to spark another round.

Alicent remains at her place for a long minute, hands folded with the rigidity of marble. Beside her, Aemond dabs at his cheek with the hem of a napkin, then, when he catches Alerah watching, wads it into a ball and flicks it at her feet under the table. He doesn't smile, but the eye he gives her is clear: he'll bleed for less than this, and enjoy it more.

When at last the servants have swept the last of the fruit and bones, and the echo of the family's rage is only a rumor fading in the damp stone, Alerah lingers at the threshold. She folds a napkin around the clementine that bled Luke's cheek, wipes a stripe of red from its flesh, and turns it over in her palm as the lords begin to disperse.

Alerah finds herself following the rhythmless sweep of dust mops and steel-toed boots through the back corridors.

She walks past the storeroom—where the turnspit boys are already wagering who wins the next round, all agog on new gossip—and up to the small, concave alcove where tomorrow's breakfast always gathers dust overnight.

On any other night, she'd curl in the straw here, let the world fume and cool, but tonight's different. She sits, but her hands keep moving, peeling the clementine, splitting each wedge and scraping the last beads of blood off in the candlelight.

Eventually, after enough time has passed to sour the entire palace, the soft tread of boots slows in the hallway. Aemond appears in the doorway without warning, a blue cast to his skin from the moonlight outside.

She tries to slip past him, nimble and sly, but he cuts her off, left hand splayed on the jamb, right hovering just enough to force her back into the alcove. In the dead pause, the clementine at her hip glows like a soldier's blazon, and she wonders if it's the only light left between them.

He's wiped his face clean, but the strike's engraved a new pigment to his cheek, a sickle-bright plum. He eyes the fruit in her palm, then the stain on her sleeve, and sneers—unimpressed, or maybe envious.

"You're not clever when you do that," she says.

She means the blocking, but also the baiting of his own kin, the way he snapped her name across the table, the way he'd watched the evening curdle and let it.

"You think I started it?"

She laughs.

"You poured the oil and flicked the match. That's not starting? How many words of peace did the king waste before you made a game of cutting your own family's throat in front of half the city?"

"It's not a game. It's the only way to keep the piece of Driftmark they haven't stolen."

"You think anyone at that table cares about Driftmark? The only thing with weight, tonight, was your spite. You couldn't let them swallow their own pride in peace. You had to salt the wound, because what would you be without it?"

"You sound like my mother."

"Why did you do that?" she hisses, voice the keen of a knife skimming bone. "You wanted the fight—wound the boy sharper than any blade. You split him on purpose. You could have let it lie. You could have left them alone."

He tilts his head in the dark, the light above charting every bruised hollow under his jaw.

"I said what I meant."

"Strong," she spits, "as if it were a curse."

She shoves at his shoulder, hard, and he absorbs it without sway.

"They're heirs to the throne, whether I agree with that misnomer or not," he says, more helpless than she's ever heard him. "One day they'll need to scar. Might as well be now. I learned younger than them."

He leans down, nose to hers, hunger draining everything else out of his face.

"You want me to be better than my father, or my uncle, or the thousand years of monsters behind me. But that's not what keeps you close."

She doesn't answer, but she feels the memory of Vhagar's breath at her back, the way it had judged her not by her hope or her sorrow but by the simple engineering of her will to live. She doesn't want Aemond to be better than his ancestors. She wants him to be strong enough to admit they were all mad, all hungry, all warming themselves over the same ancient coal of cruelty.

He kisses her, but it's not the alchemy of before; it's clumsy, and the push of it hurts, the way lemon juice stings a cut. His fingers grip her face, angling her head so they're eye to eye.

"I need you to stay with me tonight. Don't haunt the halls, don't let the shadows find you. Stay. Here."

"You and I both know we can't do that."

He sits. No words at first. Just the scuff of his sleeve as he wipes the sweat from his brow and the bright line of his jaw as it tenses and releases in time with the clatter of kitchen knives beyond the wall.

"I liked watching you serve. You make it look like something besides a humiliation."

She snorts, loud enough that it echoes.

"It's all sleight of hand. The trick isn't in the pouring, it's in never letting anyone see what you hate."

She peels another wedge, hands it to him.

"You can eat, can't you?"

He accepts it, frowning at the dark spot where her thumb gouged the skin. He sucks it between his teeth, chews, and swallows without ever quite looking at her.

"Did you mean it?" he asks, and when she cocks her head, he clarifies.

"You'd forget my voice in a week?"

She shrugs, angling the answer away from his need.

"I met a man in Tyrosh who forgot his own name the instant another was forced upon him. Slavery does that. So does palace work, in its way."

She flicks a rind into the bucket at her side, more deft than angry.

"Voice goes first, then face, then everything else. Took me a year to remember my mother's laugh after I left. Still can't summon her words when I try."

"But you wouldn't forget me," he insists, not quite a question but not certain enough to be a boast.

"No," she says, slow, as if the word drips in a spiral to the ear. "Not if I wanted to. Not now."

He grabs the next wedge, bites it with a violence that blanches the fruit, then finally looks at her. The old mask has slipped—his mouth's flecked with juice, eyes rimmed pink from the laughter and the blow. He holds the blooded clementine aloft, as if considering whether to eat the bruise or spit it out.

"Did you enjoy the spectacle?" he asks.

"It's strange, isn't it? How a brawl at the king's own table feels safer than eating in silence."

He laughs, whole, body shaking with the force of it.

"I thought you'd be a better fighter," she says, just to needle him.

He gives her a sly look, then wipes the blood from his lip and sets the clementine on the ledge.

"I could have gutted him. Would have, if mother hadn't looked up."

Aemond rubs his hands together, smearing the tacky juice until his fingers gleam with it.

"You never asked what I want from you," he says.

"It's not a secret," she answers, looking levelly at him.

He leans back, bracing both hands behind him.

"Maybe not. But everyone else wants something so simple I don't believe in it. My mother, peace. My brother, escape. Rhaenyra, the memory of being right. Daemon, the throne. You—"

He pauses, appraising her.

"You want something that lasts. Something that won't burn or change with the wind."

Alerah tilts her head, tries to summon the correct lie. But all she can manage is the smallest of shrugs.

"I want to see the next day. See it with my own eyes. I've never had the luxury of wanting more than that."

He chews this over.

"You want to see the next day, but you risk your neck for kittens and children who could be dashed to stone at any hour. Why?"

"Because the world is cruel," she says, "and every soft thing in it is a kind of rebellion. I didn't start out wanting their survival. It just happened, and then I couldn't let go."

"I'll give you a story, Tyroshi. One you can't buy in any whorehouse, or silver on any street. Listen."

She's quiet, only because the room's so dark and the pitch of his voice is the only thing rooting her in the present.

"When I was ten, there was a rat in the walls of my room. The kind that gnawed wires, silk, anything. My nurse tried poison, then ash, then summoning a broom-wielding master-at-arms to hack at the stones. Nothing worked. The rat lived for months. It left droppings on my pillow some nights. Once I woke with it perched on my hair, biting a strand to line its nest. I could have screamed, called the world to arms, but instead I shut my eyes, held still, and let it finish."

"Hm."

"Come morrow, the nurse found three baby rats in my shoe. Blind, writhing, ugly as gods, but alive."

"I'm certain you must have loathed that," she says, nodding to herself. "What did you do then? Dump them in the river? Feed them to Vhagar?"

"No. I didn't kill them. I snuck them bits of bread, watched them grow. I hated the mother at first, but I admired her more. She wanted something to outlive her, just as the rest of us do. My mother was furious—said it was filthy, aberrant, treasonous to harbor vermin in the palace. I think she understood, though."

Alerah picks a sliver of fruit from her nail.

"Are you saying I'm the rat, or the nest?"

He considers it.

"I'm saying you know how to breed survival in a place designed for killing it," he says, voice a bare stitch above a whisper. "And you don't have to like the mother, or the children, or even yourself to do it."

"I don't see you as a child of the queen. I see you as a foreigner, like me, the last of your kind, and you rule a people who have no gratitude for rule. Crude, artless, wholly without understanding. You enjoy reading under the garden trees. Riding the world's largest beast. You study the histories, the art of the sword. I admire you as a prince who's so unlike me or the rest of the common folk. I do like you, Aemond."

He seems to fold inward at this, as if the truth's an impact he hadn't braced for.

"I hate most things, but not you. You don't know how rare that is."

"As rare as an honest man in the Red Keep. I understand the impulse."

His jaw cranes, eyes slitting against a memory.

"Wanting to see the next sunrise, not because it's a victory, but because it denies the world another small cruelty."

She smells the pith and wine on his mouth before his hand lands at her throat. Not hard, not enough to bruise or even threaten—just a quiet, certain pinning, as if to remind her that in all the ways that mattered, she was alive, here, and what stood between them was nothing worth preserving.

He cups the back of her head, cradling the skull with a carefulness that shames the violence of everything that came before, and then lets his other hand find the dip of her hip, thumb steadying her as if she might try to run. She doesn't.

He licks the pit of her throat, and her body—traitor to every warning bell in her, every maxim learned from streets and stews—leans into the pull, hungry for the sugar and salt and the blind certainty of another body. His hand slips along her collarbone, fingers walking like spiders to the fastening under her chin.

She moans, low and unlovely, but he kisses the sound away before it can rise. With his thumb, he wipes the damp from her lip, then presses the flesh between tongue and tooth as if seeking the root of her own voice.

"You don't care about the war, do you?" he asks, finally drawing away.

She stares at him, bare inches between them, the dark barely leavened by the cinders of kitchen fire that reach this far.

"I care about who wins, but not because of banners. I just want to pick the side that keeps me from the ditch."

He nods, gently, as if this was the only answer worth hearing. She expects him to press for more—names, traitors, the yield of her ear to the world—but instead, Aemond slides his hand under the rough edge of her jaw with a precision that's almost clinical in its tenderness, lifting her face to the light.

"Don't lie to me," he murmurs, but she feels the words less as command than as invocation, as if he needs to summon honesty from the bone and sinew of her.

He nudges her chin, traces her pulse with a thumb.

"Betray me to my enemies, if you must. But let me believe you when you look at me."

"You're the one who lies," she says. "You say you want peace, but you live for the rupture. You say you love your mother, but you want to burn every memory of her. You say you hate your brother and then you toast him in public, like you're twins in the womb and he's the better half."

"You know what I want, Tyroshi?"

She leans in, grinning up from under her lashes.

He yanks her onto his lap, arms wrapped so tight around her ribs she feels her own heart falter and resume in the cage he's built.

"For once, I would like not to be divided inside my own skull," he confides, pressing his nose into her hair. "I want to live in the next hour without plotting how it might end."

She says nothing, just listens to the hiccup of his breath, the desperate way his hands tremble at her hips as if waiting for them to dissolve.

"You're good to me," he mutters, and she almost laughs, because if there's a word less suited to the world they live in, it's good.

She turns in his embrace and straddles him, grinding slowly—just enough to remind him he's got a body, and it works. He grunts, low, and kisses her neck, then her collarbone, tongue tracing the lattice of old scars and new bruises.

He slips the hem of her shift and rubs the inside of her thighs, and she's so wet with want and anger that he can slide two fingers in at once. She sucks air between her teeth and rides his hand, burying her own nails in his shoulder.

"You're shaking," he observes, and she bites his earlobe so hard it bloodies his jaw.

"So are you, prince," she says.

They rock like that, the slow, nasty rhythm of the wounded. She brings him off with her fist, presses his cock between her stomach and his lap so all the mess stays where the world can't see, and when he bites her shoulder through the cotton, she can't help but moan, loud enough to echo.

"You're going to get me killed," he sighs.

"And you'd let me, if it meant getting off first," she breathes, and he laughs so raw it rattles the air between their teeth.

He palms her head and puts her to her knees. The stone's cold, the alcove tight, but when she looks up at him she finds his face bright with the fever of wanting—not love, never that, but want so sharp it seems to peel away the years and the wars and the old cartilage of self-hate. Aemond rubs the crown of his cock along her jaw then slaps it, deliberate, tracing the cut of her mouth like it's the only line in the city he hasn't conquered.

"You want it, don't you," he says. Not a question.

"Say you want it," Aemond tells her, his thumb catching her lower lip, pulling it down.

"Want you," Alerah manages around his fingers, the laugh half-snarl, half-confession. "Want your cock in my mouth, want you to—"

He shoves in, not unkind but absolute, and she chokes, a wet string of spit binding his grip to her tongue.

The back of her head hits the arch, and he sets a pace that's not for show but for the realer, uglier need of two people who'd rather break themselves than surrender to anything so pretty as comfort.

"Look at you," he croons, and his voice is the beautiful, venomous thing that had first drawn her to him—not gentleness, but the art of knowing exactly how far to push before the pain gets even better.

"No one's ever fucked your throat proper, have they? They never taught you how to take it and beg for more."

She hums a protest around him, the vibrations making him shudder, and he thrusts deeper, hand locked in her scalp, his words better than the violence itself.

"You were built for this," Aemond tells her, "for me to ruin and show off, perfect strange thing that you are. Girl from the gutter, whore of princes—they all talk about you and not a one will ever know what you taste like on their tongue."

She gags—once, twice—but doesn't pull back. Instead, she opens her mouth wider, lets her jaw slack, and proceeds as if she could swallow his whole sick heart and spit it back, shiny as a pearl and twice as pretty.

He starts to break with it—she sees it in the way his ribs flutter, the way his free hand slaps the wall behind her for purchase. Still, he keeps talking.

"Going to come down your throat, Tyroshi. Fill you up until you choke or drown, whichever you prefer."

"Please," she mumbles, and the sound's filthy; she hears herself and wants more.

She wants it so badly that when his cock jerks in her mouth and his hand seizes, she moans—deliberate, deep—so the first, hot pulse paints the back of her throat and the rest dribbles out to run down her chin.

Aemond holds her in place for a beat, then lets her go, watching with fever-bright eyes as she gasps for air, cum stringing in silvery knots down her chin and onto her collar. He wipes it away with his thumb, smearing it across her cheek, anointing her as his own. She doesn't mind the mark. In this city, there are worse things to be painted with.

"You swallow like a prince's mistress," he says, a smirk twitching at the healed edge of his lip.

She wipes her mouth with the back of a wrist, makes a show of it, letting the glare of the hallway lamps pick out every wet streak on her lip and chin.

Her eyes meet his, and she grins.

"You come like a boy who's never missed a meal," she says, and relishes the flare of his laugh.

He slides to the stone, legs splayed, arms propped on his knees.

"I could fuck you until dawn and still want you in the morrow," he pants, reaching to tangle his fingers in her hair, as if seeking the proof of her, the evidence that she was not a dream.

"Try it," she breathes, collapsing across his lap, letting her cheek rest against the sharp, shuddering rise of his thigh.

"See if you make it until morrow with anything left."

They sit in the alcove for what might be an hour or a heartbeat, the spoils of violence gone to silence but for the pulse and scrape of distant boots, the thud of the palace breathing as a living thing. Alerah cleans the last pulp from the clementine, picks out a seed, and flicks it at Aemond's chest. He grins, doesn't flinch, and catches her wrist, then sucks the juice from her thumb, slow and almost reverent.

"You're restless," he says.

"Always am, after a fight."

Aemond leans in, mouth pressed against her crown. She expects him to take it further, to tease or to tangle her in more quarrel, but instead he just sits, hand warm and careless along her back, as if her ribs were the only puzzle he'd ever need to solve.

"You know, there's talk tomorrow of purging everyone who saw the scene at supper."

"Not the children," she says, sharp as a black pin.

"Nor the cats," he agrees, a smile murdering the edge of his voice. "But maybe a servant or two. To signal it's a new morrow."

She laughs again.

"So comes the future."

Chapter Text

She wakes tangled in the rotunda alcove, a bloom of clementine still wet on her tongue and a spasm pulsing through her thighs.

Alerah stretches, combs the night's tangles from her hair with her fingers, and heads straight for the scullery, not bothering to fix her shift or feign composure. She finds three of the usual kitchen girls huddled in a corner, eyes rimmed with red, heads close together as if sharing warmth.

One of them—Ness—looks up, mouth working soundlessly, and then flicks her gaze back down to her own raw-knuckled hands.

Alerah plucks a heel of bread from the commons, surveys the empty table, then steps through to the yard. Every other morning there would be deliveries stacked—salted fish, turnips, crates of sour wine from the Blackwater denizens—but today there's nothing. Alerah makes a slow circuit of the perimeter, fingers idly knocking the cold stone of arches and sills as she goes, searching for a sign of patrol or, at the least, a living soul with a taste for gossip.

On the third pass, she spies Ser Criston Cole posted by the main gate, helmet off, hair slicked back with an oil that glitters in the frost. He's not in his usual place, not even close; the Kingsguard are never seen this far down at daybreak unless there's a threat, or a pronouncement to be carried on a pike.

He doesn't wear his armor—just the scuffed, boiled-leather jerkin and the faint blue-gray shadow of a sleepless night.

"Early for the market, isn't it?" he says, and it's not a question, not really, just a challenge thrown to see if she'll bother to parry.

She shrugs, tearing off a chunk of bread and tucking it into her cheek like a sparrow.

"Rumor says the fishmonger's got a new breed of river eel. Blue, slick as a lord's cock. Thought I'd see if it bites."

Criston doesn't smile.

"No one leaves the palace until the bell rings thrice. Maester's orders."

She squints at his hands. She walks a slow circle, comes to stand a half-pike's length from him. The yard's empty but for them, but it feels as if every stone is watching.

"You expecting trouble?"

Ser Criston's eyes flicker over her, then away.

"Trouble's already come. It didn't leave when the sun set."

She chews, then spits the heel to the ground and wipes her mouth.

"Then why the bells? Just say no one goes out, let the city fume."

"The bells warn of plague, or fire, or death of a king. Only those three."

His voice bears a chill she's only heard once before, in a cellar in Old Volantis, when the master of the house told her who would live and who would drown.

"And you, girl, should not sniff the air so bold today."

"Did a king die?"

He doesn't blink.

"No more questions. Go back."

She tries to slip past, but his hand, gloved and quick, finds her upper arm and pulls her in close, until she smells the peppery wax on his collar.

"We will not have a repeat of last night, do you hear me? Not with you, and especially not with the children."

She shakes loose.

"Children are in their rooms, bellies full, all fingers and toes accounted for."

Criston pulls her towards a stunted olive tree by the kitchen wall. His voice is low.

"When the time comes—and yes, it will come—you are to get them to the passage through the old pump house. If you wait for anyone else, you'll have their blood on your hands."

Alerah's tongue lies dead in her mouth. She wants to snap back, but can't think of a single word big enough for what she feels.

Criston pats her on the shoulder, once, like a father.

"Don't pretend you don't know. It's what makes you useful."

"I don't care about being useful to you."

A muscle pulses at his temple.

"Return to your place," he says. "Or I will return you myself."

"Let me through, or I'll piss myself right here," she threatens lightly, testing the smallest boundaries.

He grunts.

"Use the privy off the east hall. But stay in sight. They're counting heads, and the queen wants you accounted for."

She wonders if this exhausts him, or if some part of him finds peace in the rigor of it.

Either way, she doesn't prod further. Criston Cole is one of the few in this place for whom the truth's indistinguishable from the threat.

She retraces her steps, slipping down a narrow servants' stair and into the hollow belly of the Red Keep.

The kitchens are feverish already—two dozen women and a scattering of men working dough and chickens and the great, brawling cauldron at the room's far end.

Mira, the oldest of the scullion crew, pulls her into a web of arms and spices.

"Did they send for you already? The queen asked—"

"The queen asks a lot," Alerah mutters, glancing at the door to see if Criston's shadow had followed her.

"She wants breakfast on the hour, but only if it suits the stomach of the princess," Mira clucks. "And gods help you if it doesn't."

Alerah pulls on her apron, more for show than allegiance.

"Anything else?"

"Just this. You hear about the rye boy in the yard? Got his mouth split for lying to a guard. Said the king was dead."

Alerah pretends to be impressed, but her hands are already sorting mugs, stacking platters, keeping vigilant with the other parts of herself.

The head cook—Old Chops, bent and goitrous, voice thick as syrup—barks at the girls in a tongue so sodden with Crownlands gutter that Alerah has to guess at the threats by the way the cleaver moves in her hand.

Alerah slips to her post by the breadboard, using the excuse of trimming crusts to eavesdrop. Old Chops' right-hand, a girl named Milly who never once met a rumor she didn't like, is whispering urgent and ugly to a knot of wrappers.

"They said maester found the king, dead as cold mutton. Blue up to the lips. They been hiding it since the first bell."

"Who's they?" hisses Ness. "Mother of mercy, you can't know that—"

"Do too! Missy Threefingers heard it off the ratcatcher. They sent for the silent sisters in the middle of the night, and word is the queen shut herself in with nothing but a prayer book and a piss-pot. Ain't rung the death knell yet 'cause they're afraid of who'll come running first, the Blacks or the new king."

Milly's voice drops, her face shining with anticipation of more.

"Shut it before Old Chops hears you," says Ness, licking her fingers fastidiously, "or you'll be strung with the sausages."

But the rumor, like so much rot in the palace, is already sprouting everywhere.

By the time Alerah's loaded the morning's first tray and balanced it against her hip, she's heard three versions: that the king was killed by poison, that he choked on his tongue, that he slept so deeply the skin of his scalp fused to the pillow and they had to peel it off with a fish knife.

On a cue invisible to anyone without her training, Alerah slips out through the scullery vent and bolts up the nearest servants' stair, knowing, instinctively, that her usefulness is about to become her curse.

She follows the corridors, hair damp with oven sweat, and listens for the telltale signs of a breaking world: the strained bass of men moving in armor; the shrill, wordless keening of women when betrayal confirms itself; most of all, the sudden, unsupportable silence that always precedes the worst news in a city like this.

It's that silence that greets her when she rounds the final turn to the king's chambers, a hush so deep it erases the memory of all sounds that came before.

Aemond's already there, cloak unfastened and dark against the whitewash of the corridor. His sword's belted, his jaw set, and his hands bare, knuckles spotted with bruises from the night prior. He doesn't greet her, not with a word or even a look, just gestures with a flick to the gap in the door.

"Go in," he says.

So she does.

Alicent's kneeling beside the bed, one hand bunched in the coverlet and the other pressed to her own mouth, as if holding in a scream.

Her face is mottled with sleeplessness and something older, weightier—a grief that doesn't flatter but simply erodes. The bier smells of resin and spiced wine, and the king is more wax than man, both shrunk and magnified by death.

No one speaks.

Otto Hightower's next to the window, hands folded, gaze fixed on the river. Even with his back turned, Alerah can feel the hunger leaching off his skin. If the city took even a breath to mourn, it would be Otto who decided when to exhale.

Alerah isn't sure what purpose she serves here—whether she's witness, or servant, or simply the safest pair of hands for the new day's work.

She waits until Alicent lifts her head, eyes dry and furious.

The queen opens her mouth, and for the briefest moment, Alerah thinks she might issue a primal scream, a curse against the palace or the world entire. But what comes is softer than anything Alerah's heard from her.

"Tea," Alicent says, the word nearly inaudible. "He's cold."

She looks down at the body and smooths the king's limp hair with a trembling hand, as if comforting a small, difficult child.

Alerah bows and glides from the room, but not before catching Aemond's eyes on her.

She returns minutes later with a cup balanced on a saucer. She kneels next to the queen, sets down the cup, and waits. Alicent stares into it with a look of repulsion and want.

Aemond shifts in the background, posture unchanged, but the atmosphere's thickened.

It's true. The king's dead.

The news has yet to exit the room, but it's already as old and heavy as a pewter bell, tolling in the bones of everyone present.

The maester arrives at a clip, tucking his robe closed, lips already pursed into the wheedling shape of admonition. But when he sees the body, and how firmly the queen has herself in hand, even he falls quiet.

"Let it be known," Alicent says, eyes never shifting from the face of her dead husband, "that the king died unopposed and unplagued. Not by any woman's or man's hand. Have the body prepared," Alicent orders the maester.

Only when Otto speaks does Alerah risk craning her ear.

"Time is our enemy," he says, standing with hands locked behind his back as if holding the palace itself by its spine.

"We cannot let our enemies seize the city before the crowning. You understand this, Aemond?"

"Yes," the prince says. "But Rhaenyra will know in an hour. The harbor's rotten with her spies."

Otto's mouth tightens as if he's tasted the next hour and found it bitter. He waves Aemond towards the doors, and Alerah, though not ordered, falls into step behind him—her place now as natural in the backwash of their violence as in the fore.

The plan, voiced in the corridor and already leaking into the air, is simple.

Find Aegon. Secure him. Heir him up, set his backside on the throne, and let history ratify the moment before the city can even think of objecting. Rumor, after all, travels faster than a crow, and the city was a cauldron already, the surface skin only just beginning to break.

Aemond's stride is coldly efficient, ducking past detours and keeps, crosscutting the palace in two with the unconscious precision of a man traversing his own vertebrae. They check the prince's rooms first—empty. The bedding's crisp, undisturbed, the window's open and the air's thick with the pitch of river fog.

The next place is the library, where sometimes he'll laze whole mornings conjuring limericks from obscene drawings folded between the ledgers. Not here, either.

"He's not hiding," Aemond says, but his voice has the reedy hint of hope that he might be wrong. "He wants to be found. He's just making it dramatic."

They scour the floor, circle the perimeter. Every closet's checked, every alcove. Aegon's not in the girls' dormitory, not in the wine cellars, not even collapsed in the laundry heap, where sometimes he'd slept to avoid the press of expectation. The guards at the east passage haven't seen him in hours. The guards at the west have lost track of time altogether. There's a growing sense that, despite every prevention, Rhaenyra's partisans might be waiting to pounce before the king's even cold.

"Aegon doesn't want the throne," Aemond says. "He wants out. Or he wants to die before Rhaenyra can finish the job."

Alerah glances at him. They're alone, or as alone as you can get in the Red Keep at this hour.

"You're not worried," she notes.

He shrugs, seemingly unconcerned.

"He'll surface. He's not clever enough to vanish for real."

They pause by a window slit. Below, the Square of Silk is already boiling over into market day—half a hundred voices hawking, baying, a ferment of rumor and rotten hope. The morning sun hacks shadows off rooftops.

Alerah lets her weight settle against the cold sill.

"You could take it yourself, you know. If you really wanted. The council would fold in a second."

Aemond rolls his one good eye.

"If I wanted it," he says, "I wouldn't have let him live this long."

She watches the colorless pulse of his jaw, fascinated by the minimalism of his honesty. The world was always less complicated in Aemond's head—grace and cruelty, neither in excess, each a tool deployed in order.

"He hates you for that," she says. "You know?"

"He hates himself more."

He drops the words without affect, as if they're an old whetstone, worn by use.

"I don't envy him. I don't loathe him either. He's just ... "

"An accident," she suggests.

"Exactly."

He tugs at his tunic, straightens, lets out a sigh.

"Do you think it matters, who sits the throne? Or is it just an excuse for the city to choose sides in—"

The words break off. The sound of metal rasping on wool; a shadow that grows into a man.

Ser Criston Cole. He fills the hall, brown-and-white cloak trailing, his face set in something less than patience.

"Prince Aemond. Lady."

"I don't think she's a lady, not officially," Aemond says.

Criston eyes Alerah with a stiffness that connotes both suspicion and a kind of tactical respect.

"You heard, then?" Criston asks, low.

"We're searching for my brother."

Criston's lips flick into a smile.

"I have men at every gate. He won't leave unless he's carried. I recommend you focus on the queen's task."

"Which is?"

Criston gives a little shake of the head, like he's disgusted by their slowness.

"Today, when the bells ring, the heir must be not just present but ready. In every sense. And he prefers to greet history with a hangover."

Aemond gives a single nod.

"We'll try the Dragonpit next."

Alerah and Aemond pivot and cut across the audience yard, past a phalanx of servants armed with nothing but mops and rumors. The pit hums with the nervous energy of an unlocked winehouse in a port town three days into a siege.

Aegon's not there. His dragon, though, is; and Sunfyre shivers with the restive boredom of a caged wolf, long tail lashing the mud. The creature snorts at their approach, then indifferently closes its eyes and returns to the labor of existing.

Aemond climbs the side rail, scanning the the perimeter. When he drops down, he turns to Alerah.

"Where would you go, if you had only hours to vanish?"

Alerah considers this. She'd been planning escape routes since the age of five—first for herself, then for others. She tries to picture Aegon, not as a prince but as a cornered animal.

"The brothel," she answers, but Aemond's already shaking his head.

"He hasn't been there in months. Not since they bled him dry over the madam's last bet. Even he's not that predictable."

"There's a second, run by a woman named Sylvi. Not the one with the painted sign. The one by the olive mill. Myrrish girls, half the men in the palace come by for specials."

Aemond's face twitches, ever so slightly. It's not the business of whoring—it's the mention of the name. Weak spot. Someone, or something, there he'd rather not surface.

He doesn't argue.

"We'll check it."

Criston's already in motion, boots slamming the hard-packed gravel as if punishing any memory that got in his way. Aemond follows, but not before he pauses at the stable's exit, cocking his head at Alerah.

"You go to the queen. She'll need someone who knows what these walls are really for."

"Don't let him get killed," Alerah says, voice flat.

"He'll be crowned by tomorrow, unless the city eats him first," Ser Criston answers, back already to her, but she can hear the smirk.

Alerah turns for the palace proper, trailing the long, hidden ochre corridor that once ferried garbage from the kitchens and now ferried only her.

She passes no one but shadows, and even they seem to shrink at her approach.

The door to the royal nursery stands slightly ajar.

Inside, Jaehaera sits cross-legged under a great, weeping window, carefully combing her cat's fur with a piece of fishbone. The child looks up, registers Alerah, then tugs her dress primly down to the ankle.

"Where's your mother?" Alerah asks.

Jaehaera shrugs.

"In with grandmother. She's making her drink the green water."

Alerah swears, under her breath, and slips through the padded door, past the painted screens of dragons and saints. She finds them in the center of the queen's chambers, Helaena hunched over a pewter dish, Queen Alicent pouring from a small, stoppered bottle she'd relieved from the maester's stores.

Tansy, willow bark, and something sharper. For stability, for courage, or for the way agony likes to be shared.

Alerah waits while the queen's hand steadies her daughter's, then takes a second glass herself. Only when the green liquor's swallowed do they acknowledge her.

Alerah studies the glass as Helaena passes it to her. It smells of pine tar and burned honey, and she knows from the medicine women of her childhood that this mix will keep you calm even as the world salts itself to bone.

She drinks it, the burn lessening none of the clarity in her head, though it sloughs the ache behind her eyes into a dull, bearable hum.

"Sit," orders the queen, and Helaena obeys, crumpling into one of the window seats with her knees bunched under the fabric of her nightgown.

Jaehaera and her kitten post themselves nearby in mirroring silence. Alerah stands, awkward yet absolute, as if summoned in the precise role for which she was engineered: not a confidante, not a guard, not even a reliable shadow—just the last draught of air before the doors seal for good.

"I thought there would be noise," Helaena whispers. "That they would storm in, or set all the beds on fire."

Alicent glances down at her hands, then up at her daughter.

"Not yet. Today will be quiet, if they know what's good for them. By sundown, the city will ring with the news. Until then, you are to remain here, all of you. Do you understand?"

Helaena meets her mother's gaze, and something passes between them. A flicker. Then the old, shell-bright queen gathers herself, fixes the proper mask, and turns her attention to Alerah.

"You were present last night. You saw the fight."

Alerah nods once—there's no value in denying it.

"Good. Then you know my sons. And you know their faults."

She smooths her palms over the green silk of her dress, eyes hooded.

"You will do what is needed. I have no one else I trust not to lose their head—or their hand—when the house is tested."

Alerah catches the drift.

"Am I the blade, or the poison?" Alerah asks, letting the sharp go down smooth.

Alicent's eyes don't waver.

"You're neither. You're a servant. Act like it."

And there it is, pure as pitch. She's to carry the children to safety, or to murder, or to wherever the future wants them most.

Alerah nods, committing nothing, but her body is already preparing: mapping the exits, estimating the moment when she grabs both children under her arms and hauls them down the secret ladder to the river-well, or into the bricked-up sally port where the palace rats go to die.

"I don't want to be queen," says Helaena.

Alicent kneels—actually kneels—before her daughter, smoothing the child's hair behind her ear.

"You must be brave, for the sake of your children," the queen murmurs.

Her hand, mottled and dry as a pressed flower, lingers on Helaena's cheek.

"It is not a kindness to want less for them. If you do not stand the day, they will only remember you for the hour."

Helaena flinches at her mother's touch, but accepts it, the way a knife accepts the whetstone. Passively, destined for pain.

The queen stands, regaining her height.

"Men in this house have always mistaken cruelty for strength. You are the last of us who can prove them wrong."

But the moment splinters—an urgent cadence of feet on stone, a toddler's shout muffled by linen, and the dry snap of a reed fan as a messenger, thin as a chaff of wheat and twice as brittle, slides into the chamber and bows with clockwork awe.

The queen doesn't turn. The messenger, never raising his head, lets the note tumble from his sleeve onto the nearest table.

"From the Lord Hand," is all he says.

Alicent steps forward, slow and precise, as if the world would shatter if she mismeasured even a breath.

She breaks the seal, reads, then sets it down.

"It begins," she says.

The bells are not rung, not yet. The city simmers without knowledge, each household larded with rumor but starved of the truth. Alerah feels it on her skin—the pressure of a coming storm, the way the light in the window thickens and the air hangs, gravid. If the palace were a body, it had just bitten down on its tongue.

She wonders, not for the first time, why she stays. Why she doesn't flee, now, while the alleys still belong to rumor, while the trackers are fixated on one another and not on the gutters they once swore to keep clean. The answer's as easy as it is terrible.

There are children here. Not just the kittens and the twins, but Helaena, who seemed so detached and unbreakable until Alerah saw her in the half-light, knees bunched up to chin, shivering for the world she was about to inherit.

It's easier to see the children.

Alerah slips from the room at the next lull, catching the queen's glance as she leaves. She expects a sharp word, a summoning, but Alicent only dips her chin in what might be gratitude, or surrender, or a silent prayer that Alerah will not fail the house, even when it's failed itself.

She finds Jaehaerys in the nursery, curled under the window seat with three kittens and a book he can't yet read. He clutches the kittens with a desperation that makes her laugh inside, but she only knuckles his scalp and sets him gently upright.

"You have to dress, little lord. There's to be a parade."

He blinks, then shrugs, tugging at the hem of his nightshirt until it comes loose entirely.

"Will there be banners?" he asks.

She nods.

"And trumpets, and the good pastries, if you behave."

He makes a face, because he knows the good pastries are not for him, but for the men who'll guard every step of his next hour. Still, he stands, and lets her button him into the day's green-and-black.

Out the window, a single crow spirals down the spine of the city, loops once, then vanishes towards the river. Alerah counts the flaps: three, pause, three. She knows the code, has heard it everywhere from Tyrosh to the slums of Lys. It means change. Or, depending on the day, death.

She leaves Jaehaerys in the custody of the day nurse and threads her way down the spiral, slow at first, then faster as her feet recall the logic of the Keep. Past the crimson vestibule, through the candle-lit crypts where the dust's so thick you sneeze for an hour after, out to the stone balcony that overlooks the city from the Fat Tower's lowest tier.

King's Landing looks changed. A strange hum vibrates off the water, not the old music of haggling and hassle but a keen, metallic edge.

Alerah squints, hunting for movement on the avenues, and finds it quickly, a ribbon of guards winding through the sleeping city and towards the sept. There are no crowds—yet—but she can feel them forming in the backstreets, clustered behind the awnings of smoke shops and meat vendors, each face already loaded with the question that would set the city on fire.

Which Targaryen now?

She looks down at her hands, thin and strong with the callus of a too-hard life. She flexes her fingers and permits herself a single, guilty luxury: the fantasy of walking away and letting the dragons eat themselves, this once.

But she doesn't. Because, as her mother once said, the job of those born with nothing is to make sure something remains when the world changes hands.

She turns, and the noise catches her—shouts, fast footfalls, the gleam of gold cloaks in the corridor behind. She ducks into a dwarf stairwell, slams herself flat against the cool stone, and listens.

The first pack runs past, six men in livery.

"—cornered in the whore's lane, near the lime kilns," spits the tallest, his boots scuffing in angry unison with the rest.

Aegon.

They were close now, or close to a corpse, if the mood of the men was any augury.

The urge to hide is powerful, but the voice of every woman who ever taught her about power and proximity pipes up in her skull: "You have to see the blood if you want to know who will wash it up."

So she slips after them, a shadow half a flight back. She cuts through the servant's gallery, down again, to the damp arcade where old statuary sleeps through the chill. She edges closer, follows the echo, hears the commotion before she sees it: the snarl of a man's pain, the high, thready wheeze of a guard already losing his nerve.

She peeks. Aegon's wedged into a corner.

He's shirtless, smeared with grime, bare feet streaked dark with the runoff of the yard. Surrounding him are five palace men, one already on the ground with his nose pulverized, the others less certain of their intentions now that their quarry's hands have found a broken bottle.

"Stand off!"

Aegon's voice rings raw, the whine of a kicked cur, and instantly Alerah knows he's already lost—no man calls for parlay with glass in hand unless the fight's gone from bluff to bleeding.

One of the guards, nervous and young, rushes first. He gets a raking down his forearm and screams, more in surprise than in pain. Another circles left, arms wide for the tackle, but Aegon feints and claps his heel into the man's groin, bottle swinging overhead. The arc's wild, and it misses, but the intent lands. The rest hang back, uncertain, not wanting to be the one who costs the day's victory.

Alerah sees the moment it turns: a third man, this one older, moves in so fast it's nearly invisible. There's a crack, wet and final, and Aegon's knees buckle like water. He spits blood, whips the bottle at their shins, then falls, clutching his head where the cut tangles hair and bone.

The guards converge, all hands now, pinning the prince hand and foot, one gripping the bloodied scalp and the other twisting Aegon's wrist until he howls anew. Alerah counts the seconds until the fight's fully out of the prince, and then she edges closer, keeping to the shadow of the king's crumbling ass.

"Careful—he might still bite," says the first guard, wiping the sweat off his brow with a shudder.

The old one glares.

"Let him. Queen wants him breathing. Go get Cole. Tell him we bagged the idiot."

The guard sprints off, boots smearing blood and dust down the stone.

For all the city's talk, Alerah had never understood how Aegon could be so hard to kill. Now she saw: it was in the hips, the ugly torque of desperation. He moved with the momentum of a child about to be thrown off a balcony, limbs pinwheeling, face a slick of terror and calculation.

Alerah closes in, slow and unthreatening, hands out so the rest don't spook or skewer her for proximity.

She kneels. Aegon's cheek is split, his teeth red, but he cracks an eye and sees her.

"Queen of the Stews," he mumbles, voice syrupy with defeat. "Didn't think you'd come to watch."

"Drink," she says, and uncoils a flask from her skirt.

She holds it to his mouth, and Aegon sucks deep, then sputters.

"More?" she asks.

He grins, and the mess of it makes her want to laugh and retch both.

Alerah stands, hands off her knees, and sizes up the guards. The old one meets her gaze, nods, and together they haul the prince upright. He's surprisingly heavy, limbs limp and awkward as a sack of liver, but they manage, shuffling him out from the arcade and into the main corridor where Criston's already waiting.

Ser Criston gives one look—just one—and then takes Aegon under his own arm, whispering into the boy's ear so low the words are barely more than a rumor of breath.

Alerah sidles along, half a step back, watching the ripple of the escorting party as it moves through the quickening palace. Behind them, the guards reassemble with practiced, boring discipline, and you wouldn't know from their posture or step that two seconds ago they'd snapped a prince's skull nearly open. Here was the poetry of King's Landing: violence, then nothing, then the slow rearrangement of pieces.

Alerah and the men ferry Aegon through a dozen cut-throughs and dank, oiled halls, past the whetstone stench of the old training yard, and out to the back cloister where the royal washroom doubled as the city's best quick triage.

Criston shoves open the iron-bound door, deposits Aegon onto the cracked marble slab that served as both examining table and occasional birthing altar, and gestures to Alerah as if to say, do something.

She does. She takes one look at the prince's head, peels back the crusted hair, and pours the remaining liquor over the wound.

Aegon screams, curses her by all Seven and by a few she'd never heard of.

He spits at her. She spits back. Ser Criston clamps the prince's legs with a knee, and Alerah threads a needle, yanking the silk tight.

"You know, if you lose a tooth every time you brawl your own kin, you'll be sucking nothing but soup by the time you're one-and-twenty," she says, and for her trouble, Aegon tries to bite her thumb clean through.

Criston snorts.

"Should I do the rest?" he offers, sarcastically.

Alerah ignores him and sets about knotting the second stitch.

"He needs the rest of his face, I think," she says.

When Aegon rises, head swaddled in a rag that immediately bleeds through, he's a ruin but a mobile one.

He blinks, breathes in the first real air he's had all morning, and burps up a stream of words that are half-insult, half-hymn.

"Is it time?" he asks the room, but no one answers.

They march Aegon through the maze of corridors, past the painted shields of ancestors and the pillars scored where rings and knives had worried the stone for generations.

Every so often, a face peeks out from a doorway, but no one dares speak. The silence is almost archival; every moment destined to be measured, picked apart, dissected for meaning in some future that won't remember how it felt to be this afraid, this alive.

The queen is waiting at the high table, her hair pulled so tight it lenses her features until she looks nothing like the mother Alerah had glimpsed just hours before, cradling her daughter.

They plant Aegon in the chair at her left. His head sags, but he keeps his eyes level, tracking every motion in the room. Ser Criston stands just behind, broad hands folded, a statue of intent.

A moment later, Aemond arrives, the drag of his boot still echoing with the memory of violence. He surveys his brother, quirks a smile, and settles in without a word.

"Call the council," Alicent says.

The lords filter in, half-dressed, still perfumed with sleep and suspicion.

Otto Hightower is first, daggers his way to the queen's side and bows—not the perfunctory sort, but the full draining-of-air, knees-knocking apology that only a lifetime of breeding can produce. The rest, and there are many, file in.

Larys strong and waxy as ever, a handful of cousins and strays, two representatives from the Iron Bank—always.

The death of the king is spoken quietly, as if by naming it too loud it might be reversed or, worse, disputed.

"The city must be secured," says Otto, in the way of men who still hope a list will save everyone. "The harbor locked. The gates held by trusted hands. We notify the sept first, then the merchant towers, then ... "

"And the princess?" interrupts one of the cousins, a nervous, rat-eyed man who, Alerah suspects, wouldn't last a day in the softest stew of the Riverlands.

Otto doesn't flinch.

"She will be informed, and her rights observed—at the proper time. First, we must confirm the new king before dissent seeds itself in the gutters."

Aegon, lolling heavily against the chair, gives a brief, wheezing laugh. It's not joy so much as the release of air from a punctured skin.

"Never wanted it," he mutters, very nearly to himself. "Never even wanted the bloody kingdoms."

Aemond, for the first time, allows himself a smile.

"The kingdoms want you, brother. Every pig and pigeon and old whore with a tongue in this city alone will have your name in their mouth by noon."

Aegon tips his head back, swallows dry, and glances sidelong at Alerah.

"They'll spit it out faster than I can piss it away, but sure. King for a dawn, then let the vultures at it."

Aemond leans across the table, hands tented, the candlelight branding daggers into the lines of his fingers.

"You might as well give them a show, brother. The city's hungry for a god. If you can't be one, fake it with fire."

"They'd prefer a martyr," Aegon says. "Maybe I'll go out and let the mob pull me apart. Easier than listening to your sermons."

A flicker runs through the lords. Otto's head inclines just enough to slice the edge off Aegon's self-pity, and Aemond, eyes catching the movement, seats his next words with the precision of a pebble in the mouth of a slingshot.

"There are worse fates than kingship. You could be remembered as nothing. A cautionary tale for stewards. Or an afterthought to Rhaenyra."

"Better a cautionary tale than the footnote in yours," Aegon grunts, tongue working the hole left by a snapped molar. He rifles a yawn and daubs blood from his lip, then sprawls back in his chair, reckless as a boy still daring the world to save him from drowning.

"Is it cowardice or laziness that rules you, Aegon?"

"Cowardice is the honest answer. The rest is just flavor on the bone."

He sniffs.

"You always were the better liar, Aemond. Even when truth would serve you easier."

Across the span of table, the council stirs—some with averted eyes, others with the morbid, pinched delight of brawlers watching a good match upset. Otto's face is studiedly inert, but his knuckles blanch on the curve of the chair; even the old men at the margins of power scent a threat heavier than the king's corpse.

Aemond slides one hand to the table, palm down. The motion's casual, or would be, if not for the veined tension in his wrist.

"You could abdicate," he says. "Not a soul here would object. I'll carve your name into the stones, just as the stories like it—tragic, luminous, spent."

"You all want me up there," Aegon gestures to the air, to the very idea of the throne, "but let's not lie to each other. I'm the last man here who deserves it. I drove away my first tutor before I could spell my own name. I whored my way through half the city's daughters, and as for the rest—" he gestures at Aemond, "he's the one who should wear the crown. He can at least say he wants it."

Aemond pours wine wordlessly, sets the jug before Aegon with the care one gives a child with a fever. The council seems to forget itself in the machinery of protocol, each member fixing on Alicent as the axis of sense, but never, ever looking directly at the two boys who are about to become the sun and moon of every city wall for a thousand years.

Alerah almost pities them.

"You'll have to start acting like you want it, at least," Aemond says.

Aegon drains the cup. It spatters his shirt, stains it, and he doesn't wipe his mouth.

"Why? It's a crown, not a woman. I don't see the point in pretending to love it if it's always going to fuck me over."

Aemond gives a long, humorless hum.

"They'll crown you at dawn. They'll stuff the bread in your mouth, let you clench the scepter, and parade you before the mob as if the world was always waiting for your face to be stamped on it. But you must not fail. Because if you do, if you so much as blink at the wrong street or the wrong color of tunic, Rhaenyra will have your head by midday."

Aegon leans back, squints at the ceiling, and lets his thumb trace the rim of the wine cup. The silence gets close and ugly; the rest of the council pretends to find fascination on the tabletop, or the grit beneath their own nails.

"Well then. You've got your wish, brother. Anything you want to say to your king before the mob gets its turn?"

"Only that I hope you choke less on the crown than you do on your own spit at the bottom of a bottle."

The lords at the table debate the finer points of usurpation, but no one is fooled—least of all Alerah, who sees the shape of things more plainly than the men paid to predict it.

There will be no smooth transition. The old lords who sit furthest from the table, eating their own nails, know the same. This city, built on secrets and boiling pitch, will split before it bends.

When the debate falters, Alerah leans to refill Aegon's cup, fingers brushing his. He tenses, then relaxes, and she sees a flash of that child's fear that even devils carry into adulthood.

"Drink," she murmurs, "and show them you're still awake."

He downs the cup, slams it to the table, and stares straight at her. The others sense the shift and peel away in layers, as if this next matter is both embarrassing and beneath their dignity.

"Thought they'd send someone prettier for the cups," he says, and the line should be cutting, but his tongue's so thick with dread that it lands as a plea.

Alerah doesn't flinch.

"You'd rather it was your mother?"

His eyes flick up, violet and clawing for a joke.

"Gods no," he says. "She'd have me drawn and quartered before breakfast. You, at least, just want me out of the way."

"You look like a dead eel," she says, savoring the insult.

He laughs, which makes the clotted gash on his temple weep a little, but he doesn't stop.

"You know, I always thought I'd die in a whorehouse or a gutter, but here I am, another corpse-in-waiting at my mother's table."

"You could still die in a whorehouse," Alerah offers, voice velvet-rough. "You've never lacked for optimism."

He makes a sound—almost a purr—and sets the cup down.

"Even now," he says, "you don't look at me the same as the rest. I've made a contest of it, with myself—see how far I can push you before you turn away in disgust."

"Not disgust," Alerah says, sliding the jug towards him so he can have his pick of how deeply to lose the morning.

He sighs, cards his fingers through his hair, and lets the silence fill up the space between them.

"Alerah," Aegon says, suddenly and without slur.

It's the clearest he's sounded in days—a lucidity so stark it makes her wary. She crosses her arms, feeling the grit of spilled salt on her sleeve.

"You don't belong here. Not in this room. Probably not in this whole misbegotten city. You talk to me like I'm still a person."

She waits for the rest, but he's already dropped his gaze. Not in shame—Aegon never carried that symptom—but in the sullen, wavering guilt that comes of being pitied by someone he couldn't manage to hate.

The council drones on—logistics for the parade, the arrangements for the king's burial, the contingency for riot or rebellion when the bells finally sing—and Alerah, forgotten by all but the wind and the weight of the moment, glides to her customary place by the window.

She catches Aemond's eye. He lifts two fingers in an absent half-salute, like their night together was a port stop too brief to remember, too pivotal to forget.

"Alerah," Aemond says softly, mimicking his brother.

"Hm?"

"Don't let our cups empty. Today is a monumentous occasion, after all."

She pours the wine wordlessly for a moment, and the color of it—a resin-bright red, almost florid in the light—makes her think of the marrow that binds bones together, or the way a wound flashes before it clots.

"Yes. It would seem so, my prince."

Chapter Text

She piles the cups in a stack that rattles like a warning. For a second, there's nothing—just the clack of ceramic and the thin whine of wind leaking through the cracks in the windows.

Then Aemond's hand comes down, palm over hers, pinning her wrist with less force than intent.

"We're done here," he murmurs for her alone, words a shape in the air nobody else would notice.

She follows him as the council disbands, as the lords and lickspittles peel away in their green and black finery, their faces chalked with ambition or fear, and the queen's spine remains a rod of glass, upright and ready to shatter.

Out in the corridor, the hush is even deeper. Somewhere, a page cries for a dropped tray. Somewhere else, a woman's laughter cuts off mid-peal, like a neck snapped suddenly.

He leads her up and up, past the nursery—where the twins squabble over a battered chessboard and Jaehaera growls at her brother when he cheats—past the guard landing littered with joss sticks and drying herbs meant to fumigate the palace.

Down a disused corridor, two dragons painted on the faded walls lunge at each other, teeth bared in endless stalemate.

At the end, a door with no lock, just a flicker of greasy candlelight beyond.

Aemond closes it behind them—no ceremony, just a once-over of the lintel to make sure it stays shut.

He turns to her, and for a moment, the muscles in his face arrange themselves into something almost sheepish.

"It'll be rough tomorrow. Not just for us. The city will want a spectacle. Otto expects it. Mother expects it. But I thought—"

He hesitates, thumb grazing the edge of her jaw, "—you'd stay, for tonight."

"I'm not the one with the city's fate in my lap, my prince."

His mouth curves, but it doesn't reach his eyes.

"Sit. Please."

He gestures at a low cot, blanket thrown back and rumpled from some former inhabitant. The room is bare; a single window, a table crowded with books and a sword, but otherwise the sort of cell you'd exile a problem to, not a person you loved.

He pours two fingers of wine into a chipped cup, then settles across from her, keeping a careful distance, as if the air between them were a yard of hot wire.

She takes the cup. Doesn't sip. Waits.

He looks at her, and for the first time she notices the tiny scar at his hairline, the way the purple of his eye warps when the light strikes it from an angle.

He notices her noticing.

"Wasn't from a sword," he says, a slyness in it.

"Oh?"

"A chair. I was five. My brother tossed me clean across a table, cracked my skull. Mother bought him a pie for the feat. Claimed I deserved it. Whatever 'twas I did."

Alerah laughs.

"A pie? Seems a small prize for nearly culling the bloodline."

"She had three of us at the time. Margin for error."

He seems to find his courage in the play of her stare. He leans forward, propping his chin on his hand, and studies her in a silence so intense it has its own pulse.

"Were you afraid, the first time you stood before a monster?" he asks finally.

She knows he means Vhagar, but could as well mean any of the men whose skins she stitched and whose appetites she tended, and so she weighs the answer on the scale of both.

"No," she says. "It isn't the monsters you should fear. It's the moment after, when you realize the world made them necessary."

"I like that you see it. Mother says I'm cruel, but all I do is give the world what it expects. You see cruelty. I see honesty. Is that so different?"

She shakes her head, watching the wine roll waves against the inside of her cup.

"I've seen worse truths," she says, "but fewer people brave enough to say them aloud."

Aemond absorbs that with evident pleasure. The candle's flame trims itself in the draft, their shadows lengthening toward the wall, as if seeking purchase in the stone. He tips his head and runs a thumb across his lower lip, smudging the wine stain that lingers there.

"They'll come for you, too," he says, voice dropped low as a co-conspirator's.

"If not for what you've done, then for what you know. You've outlived your usefulness to this house by at least a day."

She shrugs.

"I've never been useful to anyone for more than a day."

He sets down the cup and, without preamble, presses his lips to hers.

The first kiss is cool and rough, but the second is warmer, and the third is edged with the hunger he never wastes on ceremony.

He kisses hard, one palm cupping her cheek, pulling her close until she feels her own breath ricochet back into her lungs.

When he breaks from her mouth, his hands frame her jaw, holding her still in the small violence of the moment. His eye shines.

"I could have you chained in the dungeon for mutiny. Or kept in silks on the high tower. Either way, I'd always know where you are."

"You want to keep me?"

"No. I want you loyal," he says, "and I want you here tomorrow, however the city receives my brother."

She pushes him back, just enough to see the color rise to his neck, the pulse beneath his jaw where the blood answers first for every lie he tells.

"You always assume there's a tomorrow," she says. "You sure that's not hubris?"

He kisses her again, deeper, and this time his hands slide to her hips, pulling her onto his lap. The cot bends under their weight, and she feels herself fall into the rhythm of his breath, the not-quite-hidden desperation in how his hands roam her shift, as if searching for a catch or a seam to tear open.

He finds it—he always does.

The hem tears, and she helps, yanking it up until her thighs are bare and the cold stone of the wall bites into her back. His fingers are quick and clever and bruised, working her open like he wants to memorize the shape of her. She gasps when he hits the place she needs most, and he grins into the crook of her neck, licking sweat and salt.

"You're shaking," he says, voice little more than a growl.

"You're the one who makes the ground move," she pants.

Aemond pulls back, far enough for her to see herself through his eye, the reflection rippling in the sliver of blue embedded in the violet. The candle makes a crown of his hair, so pale it seems to glow, sliding silver down the cut of his cheekbone and pooling in the hollow beneath his jaw.

Up close, his lashes are black and fine as soot, the lid scarred where the flesh knits itself to the bone after trauma—a seam that should have marred his beauty and instead inches it closer to something worthy of legend.

"You're so beautiful," she whispers.

He laughs.

"No one's ever said that."

"They should. I think it's why you fight so hard to be ugly."

He seems to consider this, then fucks her with two fingers—hard, so she yelps and jerks into his palm, knocking the cup and sending a trickle of wine over his wrist.

"Pain suits you," he mutters, lips scraping a line from her jaw to her collar. "Every time you look at me like you want to bite, I want to see how much you can take before you break."

"You're the prince of measured cruelty," she gasps, riding his hand with a smile so wild she feels her own blood go hot.

"There's no virtue in mercy. Only weakness, and the world's proved what it thinks of that."

"If you're a monster, what does that make me?" she teases, and sucks his earlobe until he yanks her hair in answer.

He bends her arm behind her back, twists until she arches, and uses his free hand to hook her bare thigh over his knee.

There's a table behind—he shuffles her onto it, half-dragging, half-lifting, until her ass meets cold wood and the cup falls to the floor, shattering. Her mound's already wet, the dark hair there slicked flat, and he kneels to her without shame or warning.

"Gods, you taste like honey," he hisses, licking between her folds, teeth grazing so sharp she buckles again.

He slides his tongue in and out, slow enough to punish, fast enough to keep her desperate.

Every time she gasps, he pinches her clit between his lips and whispers, "take it. Take it for me. I want you to come on my face, Tyroshi."

He fucks her with his mouth, with his words, with the need to prove he owns this moment and her body, too.

"You were meant for kings and men who eat the world alive," he says, lips kissing the petals of her cunt.

"But you belong to me now. You breathe when I let you, you come when I say."

She wants to slap him, but there's nothing to catch hold of, just the wet swipe of his tongue and the insistent battering of his nose against her. It's vulgar, and joyful in its vulgarity. He works her with a greed that seems completely outside himself.

He spits and laves her again—each time she tries to look down and catch his gaze, his mouth works harder, trapping her until her vision twitches.

"Is that all you've got, prince?" she growls, humming blissfully. "I expected you to do more than lap at a cunt. Thought you liked to conquer."

Suddenly, his gaze slits up, eye rimmed and wild, and he speaks not with his mouth but with the drive of his tongue, the way he spears her, relentless, then circles back to suck and bite until she's clutching the edge of the table and nearly screaming.

Aemond doesn't give her time to prepare for the finish, only shoves two fingers in alongside his tongue, crooks them, finds the place in her that makes her clutch the edge of the table so hard she hears the wood splinter.

She feels the shiver reach his jaw, the snap of his eye squeezing shut, the moan he buries in her thigh as if it were the only sound he could risk making.

Alerah comes with a brief, wet judder, thighs squeezing his jaw, and Aemond looks up at her, chin painted with slick, lips split in a cruel, pleased smile.

He wipes her slick from his chin with the back of his hand, then rises, cock stiff in his palm and leaking, pushing between her thighs so she feels the bright, raw press of his skin. He doesn't wait for her to adjust, just pushes in, impaling her so deep she claps a hand over her own mouth to muffle the sound. He bruises her hips, ratchets her legs around his waist, and fucks her with the dirty, artless urgency of a man who knows the next hour might be his last.

"Beg for it," he commands, but she's already so ruined she can barely draw breath for speech.

"Want your cum," she gasps, "want you to fill me up, make me yours, make me forget the world for even a fucking instant—"

He laughs, but it's a sob, or something twisted close to it, and he pounds into her so hard the table feet stutter and scrape on the stone.

She takes all of it, relishing the stretch, the ache, the way her body opens for this strange and beautiful prince as if his cock is the only key that ever fit her. He fucks her through, drives her over again, and when she clamps down—so hard the world whites at the edges—he moans her name into her mouth.

"Gorgeous," he says, voice shredded, "you're so comely when you break."

They rut against each other, the table skittering against the flagstone with every fevered thrust. She matches him, rocking hard and clinging to his neck, nails raking long red lines up his back. If he's pained, it only spurs him on—he fucks her with a violence that borders on joy, every slap of flesh a pleasure so breakneck it risks dissolving into grief.

"Look at me," he rasps.

He fucks her harder, one hand wrapped tight around her throat, the other pinning her knee to the crook of his elbow.

"You'd let me fuck you in the Great Hall if it got you noticed."

"You've got it wrong," she pants, fingers digging half-moons into his wrist.

He laughs and fucks her harder, slamming the edge of the table against the wall, hands tight on her ribs.

"You want to be filled up, don't you? Want to be remembered, even if it's only as the whore who seduced a king."

He buries himself to the hilt, jaw set, and the tone in his voice goes ragged, almost pleading.

"Let me fill you up, Tyroshi. Let them call you whore, let them call it treason—I only care that you take every last drop and know it was mine."

She doesn't answer except to arch her body around him, clutch at him, drag his mouth down so their teeth clash and the kiss opens her lip.

He doesn't let her down, even as she trembles and buckles around him; instead, he finishes standing, hoisting her thighs tight to his hips, keeping her aloft while he shoves into her, over and over, cock thick and slick and so deep she nearly sobs.

The prince keeps his grip on her throat—not choking, just holding her steady in the present—while he drives up, pelvis snapping with each slap of flesh. She glances down and sees his cock sliding in and out of her, glistening and white-hot, and the sight of it almost undoes her a second time.

Every time he bottoms out, he grunts, like he's fighting with the world and not just her body, and she matches him, hips rising to meet the piston stroke of his cock. She bites his tongue; he answers with a bruising shove, their hips knocking so wild the table nearly topples. His hands are everywhere, not gentle but insistent—at her hair, her ribs, the arch of her ass as he lifts her off the table for just a moment and spears in so deep she sees black stars.

He whispers things to her in High Valyrian, words that sound like a curse and a benediction at once, and she parses none of them except the taste of her name in his mouth as his pace goes ragged. She clings to the table and digs her nails into his back, the welts running red in the candlelight, and when he finally breaks, it's with a single, suffering moan that echoes off every cracked plate and chipped goblet in the room.

Aemond comes deep, groaning into her mouth, hips trembling as he shudders through it and then collapses halfway onto her, half off, only the rope-bind of his arm around her waist keeping them both from slumping to stone.

He softens inside her, but keeps himself sheathed, unwilling to move or break the lock of her legs around his waist.

When the world returns—too bright, too loud—he gathers her onto the cot, folds his arms around her shoulders, and lets her braid his pale hair with lazy, sybaritic expertise. They lay there and listened to the city wake up to trauma—shouting, a bell shivering in the frost, the far-off bang of a door slamming through the quarter.

It's sometime before they speak again, and when they do, it's more like the shift of a current than a new beginning.

"You'll go to the coronation?" she asks, fingering out the knots in his hair.

He closes his eye, lashes fanned against his cheek.

"It's not a choice for me. Nor for you. They'll want every inch of the hall packed. Need to display unanimity. The last time the city rallied around a king this hard, it was because the next morning they meant to hang him."

She laughs, kisses his neck.

"I'll stand at the back. Near the exits."

He lifts her wrist to his lips and kisses the back of her hand.

"If you tried," he says, "you'd be past the walls before anyone could name you. But I'm not letting you out of sight until the dust settles."

She wiggles her fingers in the cocoon of his grasp, matching his dour mood with a drier wit of her own.

"Then squeeze tighter, prince, I'm slippery as a trout."

"I'll stake you to the cot if I must," he says, and though he means it for a laugh, she can hear the grain of truth that makes the joke sturdy enough to bear a pause.

The window above them drinks in the growing noise, and she rolls over to peer through the dust-caked glass at the avenue below. The gathering has already begun. Guards shepherd the crowds into chutes marked by banners; fruit vendors double their prices in a flicker of opportunity; no one wants to miss the moment, not even the little fishmongers who'd spent the morning picking squid ink from beneath their nails.

She twists to face him.

"You ever wish it was just you? No brothers, no council, no feasts, no banners?"

He doesn't answer at first. There's a candidness about him in the half-dark, as if the corset of dynasty fits looser here, in a storeroom with a whore for company and a city afraid to say his name. He rolls onto an elbow.

"You'd be bored of me. Even a prince needs to be worth something to someone."

She snorts, pushes her hair out of her eyes, and picks a flake of candle-wax from the sheet.

"I don't know. I could find a use for you. Wash your own clothes for once. Learn to cook an egg. That would be a start."

He grins.

"Chop wood, carry water," he says, nodding as if the idea has an appeal all its own. "I'm not proud. I could get good at menial labor, with the right incentive."

"Just as long as you don't want for an audience," she says, flipping her leg across his hip and pinioning him flat.

"I'd like to see you try and teach me, Tyroshi."

"I'm stubborn. You'll have to kill me to get rid of me," she says.

Aemond lies next to her, staring at the wooden beams above. The long muscles in his arm go slack; he seems, for this last hour, like any boy who'd lived a gentler life and wound up here by accident.

She hums under her breath, a cord from an old dockside chant, and before long his breath evens and slows, and she realizes he's fallen entirely asleep.

Up at the top of the Great Sept of Baelor, she can see the pall of incense pluming in great wound-colored fans.

The day has come, and the city gleams with a fever's worth of expectation. She dresses in silence. Aemond watches her with a child's envy, and lets her tie the sash at his waist. She does it with a craftsman's pride, knuckling the fold straight and brushing the dust from his narrow hip.

"Never pegged you for the sentimental sort," she says.

"I'm not. But I want to remember this."

He leans down, composes her hair, vertebra by vertebra, as if winding her to a key only he can hear. He brushes her lips once, then again.

They go together into the corridor, down the fire-scarred stairs, past the anchoring scent of rosin and lye and bleach that coats every meeting in the palace with a membrane of reality. The city's already boiled to the marrow; there will be no peace today, nor for a thousand days after.

By the time they reach the divine corridor, the guards are assembled in halberds and breastplates, green surcoats as luminous as pond water in the low light. The Queen's Men, they call themselves, but the only woman in sight is Helaena, posed at the foot of the grand stair, her dress heavy with mourning and the black netting veiling her eyes.

Her children are beside her—Jaehaerys too small for his doublet but bearing the weight as if it could be shed by effort alone; Jaehaera pale and unreadable, her kitten cradled to her breast like a poppet.

The crowd thrums. Alerah has to slip and shoulder to keep up with Aemond, the tide of people pressing so tight at the steps that the guards wield their polearms as prods, not weapons. Someone latches onto her sleeve and is gone; a bare ankle flashes between banners and snaps away; a perfume at once lovely and sickening rides above the ruckus and clings, unforgettable.

At daybreak, the Red Keep's own kitchen hands are packed along the balustrade, faces smudged with flour and disbelief. From her vantage on the minor stair, Alerah watches the shift of hundreds—the green splay of the Hightower banners, the black surge of Targaryen livery, the commoners' acidic drab. The entire castle seems to condense to the single point of the throne room, where only the queen and a clutch of papery old lords play at control.

"Bugger me twice," breathes a kitchen runner beside her, voice burnt at the edges. "Is that the same whoreson from the wine bust last winter?"

Alerah looks, and sure enough, the muscle-wasted man limping at the head of the procession's that same drunk, now, apparently, a royal crier. This is what the world does, she reminds herself: it pays for service in humiliation, for humiliation in promotion.

This time, the Dragonpit's the stage. Not the Sept, nor the throne room—too dangerous, too hallowed for the sudden, whiplash violence of a new crown—but the blackened ruin atop Rhaenys' Hill, the air inside still stinking faintly of straw and old, scorched scales. It's spacious enough for a crowd, echoing enough to carry the roar of a mob.

They funnel the entire city through the ragged arch of the pit, peasants pressed cheek to jowl with the lowest lords, beggars and sellswords packed under the banners of faith and ambition. From her riser, Alerah watches the congregation seethe and split, the whole of King's Landing in a single beastly lung.

Aegon's at the center. Hair combed, wounds disguised beneath a circlet of gold so fine it seems to toy with the idea of weight rather than bear it. He doesn't look at anyone, not even his mother, not even the assembly of Valyrian faces, row on row, gathered in an impromptu riot of kinship and dread.

He looks like a man stripped and then sewn back into something like royalty by the hands of people who'd rather see him dead. In the morning light, he's the picture of frailty. What raw muscle remains is lean and torqued from weeks of being hunted, the side of his head a livid bruise under a thin gold wreath, his violet eyes dark-rimmed, distant, and distracted.

Alerah's skin prickles.

Even in the monstrous din, she can sense him before she sees him: Aemond, cutting through the cordoned-off flank of the crowd with his signature cold intent, followed by a page and a priest. He reaches her on the steps with neither preamble nor pretense, just presses two fingers into her upper arm, an anchor in the undertow.

"You weren't at the assembly," he says, voice pitched low so the mob's noise shears right over it. "I thought you'd try to run."

Alerah snorts, not bothering to correct the prince's estimation or her own motives.

"Did you come to see me off, or to warn me not to stir shit in the crowd?"

"They'll want you in the front with the rest of the household."

"To show how even the low-borns approve?"

"You're not low-born."

"In Westeros, I am."

"You remember your first day in this palace?" he murmurs.

"Which one?" She pauses, then, "the day I was sold as a servant, or the day you noticed I could speak three languages?"

"The day you spat on Grand Maester Orwyle's shoes and called him a lemon-faced crook, in the hearing of a full court."

"You noticed that? I thought you were too occupied preening yourself, or stiff out of your mind from boredom. Didn't think you'd pay that much attention to a serving girl."

"I noticed you the moment you stopped pretending to be invisible."

Alerah shrugs.

"It was a good line. Not as good as calling the Lady Ormund's daughter a goat-brained sack of millet, though."

Aemond almost smiles.

"We all start somewhere."

Below them, the crowd seethes like a tide at cross-current, the air honeycombed with the echoes of rumor.

"Do you think he'll make it through the day?" she asks, keeping her gaze fixed on Aegon's sunken face.

"He'll make it," Aemond replies, certain. "But that's the easy part, isn't it."

His tone's bright, almost amused, as if the whole of the last decade had led to this single, exquisite farce.

Alerah breaks from him—Aemond's hand a ghost on her wrist—and wades into the press, letting herself be buoyed by the fever of the crowd. The new sun flares the Dragonpit's ruined vault; the ring of people below is so tight she has to wedge her shoulder to get within a few yards of the central platform where the altar's been set for the crowning.

At the altar, a quartet of droning septons prepares the crown. It sits on a bed of dusted silver, the points taller and crueler than Alerah imagined. She remembers the prop crowns blacksmiths sold to children on feast days—tin and pewter, bent by every second blow, the points prickling your skin when you set it on and arched to make you look tall and thin and, for that half-day, almost holy.

Alicent stands at the forward edge, cloaked in a deep viridian silk that slicks her form into a single line of intent. Her hands are bare, no rings, no sigil of office. Up close, her face is thinner than ever, drawn out to the cheekbones and lined with a grief so disciplined it might as well be bred in her, not worn on the surface.

Her eyes dart across the pit—not to the king or the council, but to the crowd, as if measuring the volume of all that could, and probably would, go wrong.

Helena perches half a step behind, her dress a rippling dusk-lilac overlaid by a spider's web of widow's lace.

The gown hangs oddly on her, as if she'd grown or shrunk sizes overnight; her hands, resting on the shoulders of her twins, are covered with the same fine mesh, the only bit of armor she's ever learned to wield. Her gaze floats just above the heads of the crowd, never focusing, never quite there.

Alerah can feel it—the bracing of the crowd, the way entire families cluster, the eyes that burn from under hoods and the hands that clench every time a shadow moves overhead. Sunfyre's chained at the eastern post, kept in check by no more than a dozen men and a tension in the air that signals, wordless, no one is here for joy.

Otto Hightower, freshly laundered, stalks the stage with a scroll, as if all it would take to end the day's chaos is the right phrasing, the perfect cadence of lie to truth.

"Citizens of King's Landing," he begins—voice sharp as honeyed vinegar, "it is with humble obedience that we announce the passing of our king, Viserys. May his legend mark the turning of an age, and his vision guide the Realm's next dawn."

He pauses, lets the dust of the words settle.

"His rightful heir, Aegon of House Targaryen—by his blood, his lawful son and successor—will bear the crown as the gods and the law intended. Any rumor to the contrary is the venom of treason and will be dealt with as such."

Aemond stands just behind him, limned in the syrupy light, his face as perfectly controlled as a snake's just before it strikes. He doesn't look at Alerah, but she feels him look.

She pivots on her heel, scanning the grain of faces in the massed crowd, marking all the men and women who looked like they'd slit a throat for a day's pay. The palace guard's presence on the periphery is more pretense than protection—if chaos starts, it'll be over.

Aegon takes the scepter, fumbles, then grips it with all the fury he can muster and, in that second, it looks less an accessory than a cudgel.

"By the will of the Seven and the writ of blood," intones the septon, "I crown thee King—"

A pause, as if the city itself joins together, "—Aegon of House Targaryen. The Second of His Name. King of the Andals, the Rhoynar, and the First Men."

Aegon raises the sword of Visenya, Dark Sister.

It trembles, faintly, and the sun breathes through the Dragonpit's ruins to daub the blade in ochre and pearl. He doesn't make a speech. Doesn't even smile. Just holds the weapon aloft.

The applause comes next: ragged, uncoordinated, but gaining force by the moments.

Aegon stands taller, and all the fine rhetoric and pearl-clutching of the court dissolves in the brute cries of the crowd.

The world, for a second, bends around him; for a second, she thinks he could make this kingdom last a hundred years just by the force of his will to survive it.

It's then—precisely then, when every back arches in anticipation—that the earth itself rebels.

The ground splits six yards from where Alerah stands. Dust and splinters and the hot, sour stink of crypt air spiral up in a geyser. A slab of stone the length of a barge lifts, buckles, and is immediately blown skyward by the force of something older, darker, and infinitely more awake than the thing they've just made king.

Alerah's knocked backward, the crowd pancaking against itself as limbs and feet tangle in the wreckage. She scrambles upright in time to see the head of a dragon force its way through the pit floor—not white, not gold, but a deep, cinder-crusted red, horns spoked wide, eyes burning the specific yellow of ruined wheat.

"Mother of Mercy," someone gasps. Alerah half expects the voice to be hers.

Meleys.

Chapter Text

She knows the name before she knows what she's seeing, because every child in the city learns the litany of dragons before they learn the faces of their own kin. The beast explodes from the flagstone, wings slitting air, jaws distending in a shriek that scalps the first row of onlookers clean of hearing.

Its handler, or its rider—Alerah can't see for the haze—clings to the back of the dragon's neck.

She braces herself, as does every body in the pit—and for a second, so pure and paralyzing it feels like a choice made by the whole species at once, there is silence. Then, chaos. A scramble in the first ten rows, a surge toward the exits, the palace guards losing their line at the very first taste of fear.

On the platform, the septons scatter; the crown wobbles, listing on Aegon's skull as he stands, transfixed, sword still in hand but paring no more air than a kitchen knife.

The dragon lands—no, more than that. She erupts from the splintered earth.

Meleys, the Red Queen, jewel-scaled and old as myth, arching her armored neck with a contempt reserved only for heirs and their handlers. For a frozen instant, she's the spine of the world, scarlet shadow blotted against the sky, her rider a speck that could be mistaken for a spider if not for the silver of her hair.

An old woman rides her.

Alerah recognizes the white braid before she understands the face: Rhaenys Targaryen, called the Queen Who Never Was, sitting a dragon as though it were the only chair ever built for her frame. Her eyes survey the crowd, the lords, the wives, the screaming children. She draws no sword, raises no hand.

She's not breathing fire—not yet—but the scent is there, copper and salt and the clean, ozone tang of something about to be ruined. The beast's tail cleaves a trench through the stone, scattering men like beggars before a sodden cart, and Meleys lowers her ochre-fanged mouth to just above the platform.

Alicent, not even pausing, grabs Aegon by the scruff of his newly-crowned neck and hauls him down, shoving his head below the shield of her body as a gout of fire splits the air just above the dais.

A wall of sound detonates—roar is too small a word for it, the dragon's voice a cathedral turned inside out, a million tons of bell clamor and wind and the world's old, childless rage. It bowls over the banners, rips the wigs from noble brows, and peels the first layer of skin from the hands of those closest. Women faint. Men weep. The children try to run but find there's no direction left to escape.

Alerah sees it through the prism of her own cowering: the way Helaena, backed against a column, shudders with both terror and recognition; the way Aemond, even in panic, never lets his one eye leave the beast's gullet, as if peering past death's teeth to trace the contour of the future. The air is so hot she can taste her own hair crisp on her tongue.

But Rhaenys doesn't torch them.

Aegon, for all the city's prophecy, doesn't shit himself. He doesn't flinch, or cry, or faint. He stands, purpled and battered and absurd in his gold, and meets Rhaenys' gaze with a strange, battered dignity. For the first time since birth, he looks his age.

Rhaenys waits. For three breaths she lets the pit settle. Then, with the deliberateness of a judge at the headman's block, she lifts her hand. Meleys rears, the world warping under her wingspan.

Alerah loses sight of Aemond. She's swept with the others into the crush, the heat of dragonfire still ringing the inside of her skull. Hands grab at her cloak, her hair; she ducks a blind elbow, sidesteps a child in the mud, shoves a collapsed fishmonger out of the choke point near the side gate. Servants tumble in a cadence of shrieks and laughter, as if no one could process the fact of survival until it was already luck.

Rhaenys lets the beast shriek, lets her eyes lap the gallery of power twice, and then, with measured malice, guides Meleys up and out, the force of her take-off sucking hats and cloaks aloft, knocking a dozen self-important bodies flat to the domed stone.

The Red Queen's shadow shimmers across the crowd, and then they're gone—just the echo of the scream, the brine of burnt air, and a city forever changed.

Alerah makes her way, shell-shocked, through the thinning crowd. Spilled wine, burst fruit, and little rivers of piss or blood streak the aisles; above, banners flap like they're trying to fly from their own standards.

Everywhere, people cling to strangers or sob openly, some even laughing as if the proximity to death has knocked all the caution from their heads. The old men who moments ago muttered of treason now press themselves into the shadows, correcting their posture in real time to suit the new wind.

Alerah's halfway through the cinder-streaked vestibule when a hand closes on her wrist, yanking her sideways into the lee of a collapsed arch.

She's ready to claw at eyes or worse, but it's Aemond.

His hands shake, his breath short. There's dust in his hair and a raw patch above his collar where someone—something—had tried to tear away the velvet. His eye rakes her up and down.

"Are you burned?" he demands.

She shakes her head, coughs once, can't force breath past the ringing in her ears.

"You could have been killed," he says.

"I've been closer to a dragon than that," she says, referring to Vhagar. 

"You were too close," he says, voice low and sharp, as if he's angry at her and the world and maybe himself for letting her slip through the net.

"You're never to be in the first ranks again."

She wants to snap back—something about how he can't order the sky to stop falling, how she's more likely to survive a riot than half the men in his house—but it dies in the press of his hand.

He pulls her full against him, thumb digging just above the bruise on her clavicle, and for a moment she thinks he's going to throttle her for the audacity of being alive. Instead, his body, tight as a violin string, slacks forward; their foreheads knock, hard enough for her to taste blood behind her eyes.

"Say something," he insists, as if silence were the true danger, the wound he'd be helpless to suture.

"Still here," she manages. Her voice is hoarse, but steady.

"Good," he bites the word off, glancing once over her for signs of cracks or burns. Then softer, so only she can hear it.

"I thought I'd lost you in the crush."

He lets his hand drift to her scalp, knuckling at the root of her hair as if to test the realness of her. Like a new mother, she thinks—to count the bones, the parts, the breath.

Footsteps clatter above and, at the edge of the belfry, servants are already scraping up spent banners and cinders. The city's spell is broken; the spell of survival closes tighter, world rushing back in all the old, ugly colors.

"They'll be looking for you. The queen. Ser Criston. Half the court."

"They'll find me," he says.

He nudges her chin, as if that's the whole accounting.

"But I wanted you first."

He tastes ash and wants her, wants the press of her body and the stupid, reckless certainty that if he could just keep her here, the rest would settle into its new order. Instead he turns, marching her back down the narrow passage, shoes slapping blisters in the grit, until they emerge in the mouth of the king's yard—momentarily deserted, heat still shimmering off the blackened stone.

This time when he kisses her, there's nothing borrowed from play or posture: it's hard, ugly, brief. He breathes her exhale. Then he pulls away, and the prince in him vanishes behind the wall of duty.

"Return to the kitchens," he says, "and wait for me there."

She doesn't argue. Alerah sidesteps the fresh trail of melted tallow and strides the battered concourse to the rear towers, doubling her pace as the castle regains its vigilance, the pulse of search and muster and furious covering-of-tracks reigniting in every hall. By the time she slips into the pantry, the air inside is thick with fear and bruised fruit, and the huddle of kitchen girls in the corner watch her as if she's the first touch of plague come up the river.

Ness gestures at the caked blood on Alerah's knuckles, then at the froth outside the window.

"You didn't," she whispers.

"Not me," Alerah says. "The Princess Rhaenys' own beast did it. Rode right up through the floor of the world and nearly burnt the new king on his own bone-white arse."

"Did it eat anyone?" Milly asks.

"No, but people were killed."

Mira, giddy, pelts her with questions, but Ness keeps glancing at Alerah's stained hands, then at her eyes, as if to see whether she'll blink away what just happened. She won't. Neither will the city, not for generations.

Milly, less awed, more practical, leans in over a bowl of rising dough.

"So, who's the king now? Or is it just going to be dragons 'til the next flood?"

Alerah, picking crusted wine from her nails, only shrugs.

"Whichever one lives longest, I'd surmise."

A new bruise blooms above Alerah's knee, deep and mean, where someone's boot had found her in the crowd. She stands and stretches until the bones in her back crackle.

"There's likely to be a purge by morning. Stay close, Mira, and keep the little ones out of the main halls. Ness, you get word someone's looking to sweep the rooms, you lag behind, hear?"

Ness nods, eyes wide as soup spoons. She pulls a paring knife from her apron and palms it, not to fight, but as if the grip itself could anchor her to the floor.

Alerah can smell in the girl the same thing she remembers from her own worst years. The urge to hide, to disappear through the grain of a door, to never be tall enough or sharp enough to catch a blade by accident. She almost says something kind, but the truth feels safer in this house than comfort.

Aemond doesn't come for her until the hall is fully awake.

He wears a new coat, black and stitched with silver, the House's three-headed sigil embroidered at the nape. There are fresh cuts on his knuckles and a sheen to his hair as if washed of soot, but his face is unchanged. He says nothing of the night, nor of the morning, only nods to her as if they'd always been at this—two stones in the same current.

They move together up the narrow servant's stairs, shadows chasing at their feet, the day outside already soured by screams and the dull, constant clangor of bells.

At the base of the tower, a brace of guards loiters, uncertain whether to salute or to draw arms. The story of the morning's violence had already curdled its way through the Keep; even at fifty paces Alerah could read the resignation in their posture.

Within, the air's thick with the musk of tallow and the sweet smoke of funerary incense.

Another king, another crown; and still, bones had to be washed, wounds mended, secrets buried before the next sun.

Aemond leads her by the sleeve—never the hand, not here—and up a dizzying spiral where the windows shrink to razor slots, the stairwell's chill biting at her ankles.

They pass two old maids whispering in clipped Valyrian; the crone's eyes fix upon Alerah, and her mouth sketches a prayer or a curse, maybe both.

At the tower's apex, a crooked anteroom; a table, a basin, an oil lamp as pale as the moon.

Aemond closes the door, bolts it, and only then, in the hush he makes, does he let himself unclench.

He slumps onto a chair and tugs her down next to him. Says nothing.

She sits beside him and pulls out a crust of bread, peels it, and passes over the warmest piece.

Aemond finishes the bread, licks his thumb, and wipes it on the chair.

"It mattered to you, that show of mercy?"

Alerah chews on this.

"Mercy is a slippery brand for dragons. But yes, I saw it."

He's silent, turning that single word over as if searching for the sharp hidden edge.

"I think, in her place, I might have burned him," he says at last. "If not for spite, then to cinder the memory of the brat."

She glances at him sidelong.

"That's why you never had her chance for the throne. You're just a little too honest with yourself."

He laughs, one dry, unfinished breath.

"I'd rather be hated for candor than lauded for the lie."

"And yet," she watches him trace a circle on the rim of the basin, "you'll spend the rest of your life in a costume made for some other man."

That gets his attention. He turns to her, lip curling, not in menace but in the delicate art of self-mockery.

"You think I don't know?"

"I think you do," she says, "and I think you hate knowing it more than any of them do."

"Would it be better, if I lied about wanting the throne?"

"It might be easier, at least."

"For whom?"

"Yourself," she says.

She can tell he's about to say something bitter, something that would hollow the room, but his jaw closes over it.

"Too late for comfort, Tyroshi. I learned to love the mask before I had a choice."

"She could have burnt every last soul, if she wanted."

He nods, tracing the grain of the table with his nail.

"It humiliates us, you realize. The city saw our belly. Our best. And still she let us live. Had she not been so old—"

Alerah scoffs.

"Age never yet stopped a Targaryen. It was a choice."

He drags a finger down her forearm, as if drawing a line from now to the failures of every dynasty before.

"She wanted more witnesses," he says, as if clarifying a point of scripture. "Let us nurse the wound in public, so when her kin arrives, the city remembers this. That their king could have died a thousand times over before dawn, but lived because one dragon rider thought spectacle more valuable than victory."

Alerah shakes her head.

"No, she left because she saw Alicent shielding her useless son. Rhaenys is a mother first, still. She couldn't stomach wasting a child, not even the child of her enemy."

He snorts.

"Motherhood is not a virtue in war."

"But it is the only difference, sometimes," Alerah says, tucking her foot beneath her.

"Mercy and hesitation are cousins, and both are called flaw, unless they save a life you love."

She touches his wrist, studies the vein.

"She saw someone else's child, and remembered her own."

"You ought to have been a maester if you were born a man," he says, adding, "if you could withstand the boredom."

His hands—always cold—splay at her neck, and he tips her chin to better test her mouth. The kiss is rough with need, but it holds a strange and almost frightened grace beneath the violence. She feels his jaw shudder against hers, as if some muscle of resolve's finally gone liquid.

When his lips part from her cheek, he says, "you know your own blood, don't you?"

The question's so raw she almost laughs, then remembers who she's talking to.

"I was a whore's whelp, if that's what you mean."

"No. People like to forget how many Targaryens seeded bastards across the Stepstones. The whores' sons and daughters. The maids. The Tyroshi. You've the look—oh, don't snarl, you do. Even the way you stand—like if I put a dagger to your heart, you'd spit in my face before you begged. I've only seen it in my own kin, or the half-mad women they marry."

She leans back, half-mocking.

"You want to claim me a cousin, is that it?"

He shakes his head.

"I want to claim you as mine. The rest is just the truth no one has grace to notice."

She laughs, really laughs, and he kisses the sound while she's still making it, biting it in half and swallowing it down.

"Romance in the midst of a disaster. You're a true prince, Aemond."

He stares at her so long she expects him to puncture it with a knife's edge.

Instead, he asks, "do you want it?"

She chuffs a laugh.

"The city? The crown? No, thank you. Too likely to end poorly."

"No," he says, so plainly it hurts. "This. Us. Even if it's not built to last. Would you?"

Alerah studies him, expecting the ploy, the sleight of hand.

In the hour since the coronation the palace has shifted, all the old stories run backward and forward in her head, but nothing prepares her for the sense that he means it. Not a marriage proposal—Aemond couldn't be that base, surely.

"You want to marry me?" she asks, finally, the word so obscene in her mouth it tastes foreign.

He shrugs, but his eye doesn't move from hers.

"Why not? The dragons fuck who they please, and the rest learn to live with it."

"You know they'll never permit it," she says, reading the want so clear in him she might as well be reading her own scars.

"You can keep me in your rooms, fuck me in every half-lit corner of the palace, but to marry—"

"Who said I want their permission?" he says, teeth bright, tongue swift behind it. "What are they going to do—wage another war to unseat me? They already lost the last one before it started. And which lord, which greasy-fingered merchant prince, is going to call me bastard-lover when his own line is a snake ball of whores and drunkards?"

He doesn't shout. He just waits, letting the silence unspool, and when it turns brittle between them, he picks up her hand and presses the knuckles to his mouth.

"If you decline me, I'll forget the ask. You can keep your post and your peace—such as it is—and in a year, you won't remember I tried."

Alerah, Tyroshi, foundling, bastard, nothing—thinks about what it is to belong. To be anyone's except her own. The idea's unthinkable.

Aemond moves in, crossing the final inch—so intrusive she thinks he means to squeeze the very memory of her from the world. His hands bracket her jaw, and she feels the cool, violent intent in his fingers before his mouth covers hers, open and searching, like prayer at the end of a famine. She means to resist—she knows she should—but what comes instead is a low, embarrassing sound from her throat, a helplessness that makes her clamp his sleeve and pull him closer.

When he breaks, it's to press his brow to hers, his breath threading her lashes.

"You don't have to decide. Not now."

"Why?" she whispers.

"I don't know. It pleases me to think of you as mine."

"If you were a smallfolk boy, I'd say you want a warm bed and a cunt that bites back," she says, voice deadpan, almost cruel. "But you're a prince, so it must be more—maybe you like the idea that something in this world needs permission to be yours."

He leans in, his breath like the smoke of a dragon when he breathes wetly on her skin.

"No. I like that you'd choose it. Even when you shouldn't."

Morning, and there's blood on the wet stones. Not just a slick, accidental cut, but a puddle lapsed from someone's nose, or mouth, or some more private wound. Mira's already sopped at it with sawdust and salt, the kitchen girls circling it as if it were a new religion.

The kitchen is alive in its old agony: heat, bodies, breath, the smell of leavening and slow-rotted onions, and the sharp chorus of girls already two hours into their tasks. Mira's voice cracks against the stone, a hammer on the rhythm of work, but the girls snap to it with relief. There are worse places to be, Alerah thinks, than at the mercy of a woman who shouts when she worries.

She washes up at the scullery pump, scrubbing under her nails with the cheap lye. Watching the water run its pink and gray, she tries to piece together the lines of what Aemond had said.

There were rumors, already, that the queen would lock the gates and put the city to sword for any further dissent. That the old lords would sue for peace, or that the armies on the Black side of the river would swim it before the end of the week.

A commotion in the yard: Ser Criston, voice like a crossbow, barking out a list of names for the new king's order of merit.

He's clean-shaven, eyes alight, no sign of the violence from dawn except the way his boot kicks open the mud-choked pantry door.

"Girl," he says—always girl, never Alerah, as if a name would beg too many questions from the walls.

"You're needed in the king's chambers."

He wipes a fleck of cinder from his lip and studies her for any mark of treason or pride.

"For what?"

Criston shrugs.

"For his breakfast. What else from you?"

Alerah loads a tray with sweet rolls and the gritty, over-fermented cheese that comes only at the end of a season. The others watch her, pretending otherwise, their hands busy but their eyes always finding her again. Wordless, she sets the tray on her shoulder, slips out the pantry's back mouth, and vanishes up the stair. There's nothing less interesting than a girl doing her job, and so, as always, the palace fails to see her.

The corridor shivers with activity. Pages in emerald livery dart like mayflies, some crying, some just running because everyone else is. The air, tinged with dragon smoke and something less definable—grief, maybe, or expectation spiked with fear—coils through the halls like a physical presence.

She climbs the stairs, two at a time, balancing the platter at a cant to keep the syrup from sloshing off the cakes.

At the threshold of the king's chambers, a pair of Lord Ormund's men block her way, but she gives the tray a little waggle and they let her through.

She passes knots of guards drinking it all in, uneasy, some who had watched a dragon burst through stone not twelve hours ago and now palmed their swords as if that might mean a damn in the next round. No one stops her.

Inside, the mood is less triumphant than stunned. Aegon, propped on a velvet couch with a black cloth pressed to his scalp, glowers at nothing. One foot, bare, dangles off the upholstery and taps an erratic rhythm.

He eyes her, gives a vulpine grin, and gestures at the window.

"Come to poison my breakfast, or just to see if I can make it down my own throat without choking?"

Alerah sets the tray on the nearest table.

"Just here to help. The trick is to chew," she says.

He laughs.

"The city's already got its new favorite. By dusk, the rumor will be I'm so haunted by my cousin's dragon I can only eat food chewed soft by women who hate me."

"Is it true, you nearly pissed yourself?"

He claps, delighted.

"I did. And so did half the men in that pit. Would've pissed on you, too, if it meant living another moment."

He studies his knuckles, wiping a trace of blood from the thumb.

"It's all a wager, isn't it, Tyroshi? How many days I last before they string me up or the city federates around Bright Rhaenyra and burns us all down?"

She uncovers the sweet roll, places it in his hand, and leans closer.

"They're saying the dragon could have burnt you all, but chose not to. Does that frighten you, or does it—"

"Shame me?" he interrupts. "Would you prefer I died pretending at courage?

"I think," Alerah says, watching him wolf the roll, "there are worse shames than being spared."

Aegon flashes a smirk, then chews more deliberately.

"You always did have a soft view of the world."

She fingers the edge of the sweet loaf, lets her gaze wander over the bruises purpling his jaw.

"I saw what happened, after. The crowd swarmed so quick I thought for a moment you were already dead."

He grins, licks sugar from his nail.

"But I wasn't. Lucky me."

She doesn't say anything to that.

"I know the difference between mercy and contempt. Rhaenys wanted the city to remember we lived by her gift, not our right."

Alerah folds her arms.

"Kings have started wars for less than a woman's spite."

He barks a laugh.

"You think me the sort to die for spite? You haven't watched a Targaryen die in bed. It's never glory. Just rot and regret and a bloody slow whimper. I'll outlast my enemies with cowardice alone."

She looks him full in the face and, for the barest moment, pities him. The color of his eyes is not like his brother's—a little more clouded, less the cut of agate, more the slurry of rain after a deep and sullen winter.

"No one's truly safe here," she says.

He sniffs, shrugs.

"Especially not you."

Alerah sets to cleaning up the dribble of wine and honey from the table's edge.

He watches her wipe the smear with a rag, and when she's done, he grabs her wrist, not hard but final.

"Stay," he says, eyes fixed on hers. "Just for a bit."

She thinks to ask why, but sees that he's not in a mood to field questions, or even to distinguish between kindness and manipulation.

So she does. She sits on the couch, drops her head to the side, and lets the silence gather. He eats a bit of cake, watching the yard below, and finally shakes his head.

"I'm told the first of the lot to attempt my life will be a cousin, not an enemy," he says.

Alerah studies his profile, the battered mouth, and thinks, yes, that's true.

"Probably your mother's cousin," she suggests, and he grins, baring the half-missing tooth.

"They say the path to the throne is paved with your kin's bones. I say it's more the shit people talk about you while you're still alive."

He shifts, and the black cloth slips down his scalp.

"You're bleeding," she says.

He shrugs.

She reaches to set the cloth back. For a second, her hand hovers, then gently pats the wound until it doesn't leak. She thinks of her own scalp—shaved bald at fourteen when a louse infestation swept her quarter, the horror and hilarity of it, how the girls would peel ribbons of hair off themselves and compare the look in reflective tiles scavenged from the canal.

Aegon's hand drifts from the cloth to her wrist, then up her forearm, so slow and floating it barely seems delivered by muscle. She expects him to be crude, to pitch her onto his lap, but instead he simply brings her hand to his mouth and kisses it—one soft press, tongue almost invisible behind the smile.

She tries to pull gently, but doesn't force it.

"If we were the same sort," he goes on, "I'd keep you. Like a pet. Or worse, like a wife."

He squints, then grins to himself.

"But that's a horror reserved for my betters."

"You do have a wife, you know," Alerah says, as though it costs her less than it does.

He shrugs, and though it seems careless, she can see the way the muscle beneath his jaw ripples at the word.

"That's not a marriage," he says. "That's a badge."

"Not by her reckoning," she replies.

He makes a fist. Studies the way his thumb tucks naturally over the wound.

"She doesn't want me. Never did."

"She wants a father for her children."

He spits, aiming out the window but missing his mark onto the clean-swept floor.

"Then she'll have to look elsewhere. I can't make myself love a songbird that shits itself every time a shadow passes."

"You could let her go," Alerah ventures. "They say you have the king's will now. You could send her away—let her live out her days with books and children and things that fascinate her, in a place that doesn't reek of death and old men plotting over soup."

He rolls this over, tongue creasing the inside of his cheek.

"And who gets to keep the heir, then? Or the spare? Or the next one after? No, Tyroshi. Even if I did, there's nothing in this city that would let her be forgotten. Not in this life."

He reaches for the last chunk of roll, pinches it, then offers it to her.

"Eat. Or the gossips will say I starved my own help."

She almost rolls her eyes.

"Yes, we wouldn't want that."

She takes the roll, lets the sugar tack against her molars, and swallows.

"What's it like, living with a seer?" she asks, wiping her hand on her skirt.

Aegon squints, as if the idea puzzles him.

"She doesn't see anything worth the telling, not anymore. When we were young she sometimes screamed in the night, or drew the faces of men who'd never been born. Now she sleeps quiet. Not blank, just—old. Like her soul's ten years ahead and waiting for the rest to catch up."

"Maybe she keeps her visions for herself," Alerah ventures, not sure if that's a kindness or a wound.

"Maybe," Aegon agrees, but drains his cup so fast she knows the topic only hurts.

"Anyway," he says, "the world's not for prophecy. It's for the ones who get to tell the story afterward. Men write the books. Women get written into footnotes—unless they mount a dragon, at least."

He cackles so sudden and loud that the words ring off the bronzed mirrors and painted panels.

"You should steal a dragon, Tyroshi. You'd do it for the story alone."

Alerah licks the sugar from her thumb, savoring the sweet and the faint aftertaste of vinegar.

She says, "they're just overgrown lizards. I'll stick with knives."

"If you had a dragon," Aegon muses, "would you use it to burn the city, or save it?"

She considers. The answer's not as simple as he'd want.

"I'd use it to get out. There's no point in burning a place that's already halfway to ash. And saving," she shrugs, "only makes sense if there's something worth saving."

He picks at the sticky plate, fingers already moving, never quite idle.

"Once Helaena told me I'd crown in shadows, and die a candle's death. Not sure if that means with a tiny flame, or in a room full of them. Engulfed in flame. Burned alive. Either way, not a happy end."

Alerah thinks of Helaena with her too-wide eyes, her garden of insects, the way she sometimes clutched the children with such hunger for softness she left bruises on their ribs.

"Maybe it means you'll burn bright just before you're gone."

"That's a prettier lie than most," Aegon says, nodding at her with the lazy gratitude of a man who counted any sentiment, even a cruel one, as a momentary surcease.

"You're a good listener," Aegon tells her, as if the compliment is news to them both.

She rises, straightens her apron, and sets the cup to soak.

"The kitchens will want me back before noon," she says, not quite as an excuse.

"Send up another bottle," he mutters, voice thick with fatigue, "and yourself, if you've no easier way to spend the morning." 

Aegon's hand hovers at her wrist, just until she stands. Then, with a resigned, mocking flourish, he lets it drop.

"I'll be here. Waiting for my poison."

Chapter Text

The kitchens are a slow simmer now, the girls less a hive than a clutch of birds after a hard storm, each one pecking at her own repairs but always keeping one eye on the cracks beneath the sill.

Fewer delivery boys, fewer guards filling their cups, and every plate that leaves the scullery comes back half-touched, as if the city had suddenly lost its appetite for anything except rumor.

Alerah's halfway through draining the grease trap when Jaehaera appears in the doorway, eyes clear as river glass.

She's dirtied her dress at the hem; one kitten rides in the crook of her elbow, drooling.

The child's voice is flat as she says, "grandmother requests you, and you're to come now."

"She can't wait for you to finish your shit-work, can she," Mira mutters, and shoos Alerah through the bright, panicked light of forenoon.

Beneath the hush of day, the Red Keep has grown a second set of nerves. Off-hour messengers, men of no house, clerks in mourning black drifting from corridor to corridor as if they were the only ones awake for what was to come. The low rumble of a thousand secrets spoken into stone.

Alicent's not in her regular parlor. The dowager queen receives Alerah in the solar overlooking the outer bailey, where the windows filter the cry of the city into a soft, ceaseless ache. Her gown's fresh, but under her jaw a string of bruises climbs into the collar like a new necklace. She sits sideways, her body canted to the light, and for the first time Alerah thinks she looks tired of the world's accounting. Like a banker counting out her last few coins and already regretting every one spent.

"Sit," says the queen, as though she's been holding the word for hours and is only now free to spend it.

Alerah perches at the edge of a bench opposite, knees together, hands sanded with flour and sticky with the last hour's labor.

"You were with my son," Alicent says, not a question.

"Yes, Your Grace."

"And before that, the kitchens," the queen continues in a voice that might be mild, if it weren't so perfectly dilated.

"And before that, in the yard, with Ser Criston. It seems everywhere I turn, you are present for the worst moments of this house."

Alerah holds herself perfectly still, because it strikes her that standing out in this way is a crime that's only ever prosecuted once.

"I serve the house as I'm bid," she says.

Alicent lifts a hand, the gesture an old habit—maybe from praying, maybe from her own mother, but it signals neither blessing nor warning. Just a weighing.

"You serve something," the queen says, "but I have always wondered what. It is not fear. Not hunger. Not coin. You've never once asked for a raise. Even your curiosity is," she waves lightly, as if clearing fruit flies from the air, "constrained."

"You knew, didn't you, that Aemond would have asked for your loyalty even before he had reason to call it tested."

Alerah shrugs, wondering if this is the moment to choose between honesty and survival. When in doubt, play the middle.

"I know the difference between an order and a need, Your Grace. He never hid either from me."

"What has my son needed you for?"

"He once asked me to repair a bit of chainmail."

She can see Alicent deciding whether to laugh or to bristle. In the end, the queen does both.

"My son wears armor as if the world itself might shatter at a word. He never could abide the idea of a soft spot in anyone, least of all himself."

This time, the queen's mask doesn't hold. Her mouth jerks, not quite a smile, not quite a sneer.

"Did he bed you to make you loyal? Or has he made you his confessor, like some misbegotten priest?"

"Neither," Alerah says. "He likes to talk, and I remember what he says."

Alicent's fingers curl on her sleeve, picking at a seam.

"Do you love him?"

"I think he likes that I don't."

"I was a good mother," Alicent says, more to the city than to Alerah, "until I understood what it cost. After that, it was just—negotiation. The sums and subtractions of affection."

Alerah sits. Waits. She knows not to interrupt a grief like this.

"He came to me with a proposal. I assume you know of it?"

"He wants to marry me. I said he should hold out for a better offer."

"Did you tell him you'd accept it otherwise?"

There's no censure in her voice, only a graveled curiosity.

"No," Alerah says.

Alicent dry-washes her hands, once, then twice, then lets them rest in her lap, fingers spliced together.

"Here is my suggestion. You're the daughter of an alleged Valyrian, which makes you half. There may be orphans amongst us, sired by gods know whom back in King Jaehaerys' time or further. But you were delivered to us by the Archon of Tyrosh, and you've more propriety than the rest of these urchins combined. I think it would make a fair betrothal."

Alicent's mouth curls into a frown.

"But we've already secured a match with Lord Ormund's daughter. Any one of them will do. Aemond's to decide on which in the coming days."

"Then why tell me this?" Alerah asks. She doesn't mean to, but the words tumble out, hot, almost childish.

"Because I'd like you to stay away from my son. You may continue your visitations with Helaena and the children, and by extension the king. But I would not wish for Aemond's vision to be compromised—even by such beauty as yourself. This will not leave this room, of course. I imagine that the two of you have remained discreet."

Alerah bites her tongue. Her first instinct is to make a jest, to say that nothing in this palace has remained discreet since the invention of windows, but she senses the queen wants neither humor nor humility, only an answer that's assured.

"We have been discreet," she says, voice clipped. "We could be more so, if it pleased you."

Even now, the notion lands wrong. The very idea of distantness between her and the prince makes her pulse quicken, but she can't say if it's dread or desire or some flammable compound of both.

Alicent reads this. That's the curse of queenship, Alerah supposes: you see every tremor, even those you'd rather not.

"He's to have the Baratheon girl," the queen tacks, dry as chalk. "It's not a matter for appeal. Even if you were noble by Westerosi standards, it would suit neither precedent nor optics for a bastard to wed the prince."

She stands, gaze fixed above Alerah's shoulder, and delivers the next sentence without emotion.

"If my son surprises you with a token, or an invitation, decline it. Don't return his attentions, not even in passing. You understand."

Alerah finds herself half-swallowed by the thickness of the room, her tongue stuck behind her teeth.

"I understand," she manages, and waits to be dismissed.

"You may leave, girl."

Alerah stands. The urge to bow or curtsy is so warring with the urge to spit she manages only a half-nod, then pivots with the calculated disinterest of a cat. The corridor outside's ashen with the light of late morning, the city visible only in slivers beyond the leaded glass. The new king's banners are already slung across the yard at crooked angles, as if the wind itself wasn't sure of the verdict and had tried to tear them down in a test run.

She makes for the kitchens, picks up pace as the thickness in her throat spreads outward, filling her arms and fingers with a kind of tonic cold.

Downstairs, the wet rags are still out on the stone. The girls have moved from the smear of blood and now cluster two by two along the bench, shelling beans and passing whispers more furtively than ever.

"You look like the queen herself just tried to lard you," Mira says, motioning at Alerah's face.

Alerah denies her the story, shrugs, and goes to fetch the brooms. She occupies herself with sweeping until her head goes blank. Every few passes, she thinks she feels Aemond's hand, but it's just the echo of the queen's warning.

By sundown, the city's begun to recompose itself. Masons are filling the cracks in the yard where dragon fire split the tile; along the river front, teams of scavengers claw up the day's dead. There's a smell to it, some blend of fresh lime and rotted sinew that never quite leaves a city given over to war.

"You hear they're to have a wedding within the fortnight?"

Ness' voice is pitched so low as to be inaudible to anyone but the two of them.

"The queen means to marry her son to the Lady Baratheon."

Alerah's mouth drops.

"Which Lady Baratheon? They've got more daughters than the rest of the Crownlands has cows."

"The one with the bad teeth, rumor says. The queen picked her for the dowry, not for the face. She wants a wedge in Storm's End, says Ormund's girl is the best lever in the barrel."

"Don't believe everything you hear."

Word comes by way of Milly—too breathless, nearly skipping—that the prince wants to see her. Alerah's instant reaction's to laugh, a snort that cracks out of her chest before she can will it smaller.

She expects to find Aemond in his study. Instead, a page tells her to look for him in the lower stables—some business with a saddle, or maybe just needing a cover for a conversation no one else is meant to hear. She navigates the tangle of passageways and lamp-lit yards, boots skidding just once in a patch of congealed blood, before she slips into the cool, ammoniac air of the stable's east annex.

Aemond stands inside, between bays, hands braced on the damp wood of a stall divider. His hair's completely unbound, wet along the temples, and his shirt's open to the sternum, the tiny shell buttons straining from the torque under his arms.

Alerah registers surprise—not at the invitation, but at the lack of an audience, no guards, no page hovering. Even the stablehands seem to have been run off for the hour. She closes the door behind her, waits for him to look.

"You heard," he says, not turning.

"You always said you'd marry for strategy. Is this strategy, or maternal blackmail?"

He rolls his neck, then leans back, fixing her with the sharp violet of his eye.

"Why not both? The queen thinks it stabilizes the city. I think it only buys us an hour before someone tries to kill us again."

The air's thick with horse sweat and the salt of new straw. She slips closer, stops just short of the circle he carves with his body.

"Why send for me?"

He cocks a smile, then lets it fall.

"Because you're the only one I know who can tell me the truth, and not regret it."

Alerah shrugs off the compliment.

"If I told you the truth, you'd have to confront what you want."

His hands flex on the wood—white-knuckled, then loose. He regards her profile, the chip of brow, the insouciant slouch of her hip against the post.

"Don't you start. My mother already rehearsed the whole waltz: royal duty, the weight of legacy, the bad optics of keeping a bastard paramour."

His voice pitches, mocking, perfectly aping the clipped righteousness of a woman who'd crawled over kingdoms to get here.

"She forgets that no one—least of all me—has the stomach for a pure reign anymore."

He pauses, waits for her to prod him. She doesn't—just picks a splinter from the stall and folds it between her teeth, as a horse might a bit.

He's watching. The heat between them clicks on, a current only two people in the world can feel and not draw back from.

"Say I rescind the alliance," he continues, "say I drag you in front of the whole council and spoil the marriage myself. What then?"

"Then you've traded one kind of power for another," she says, deadpan. "And you'll have to keep hold of me for a long time to prove the gesture wasn't just a child's tantrum."

He closes the gap in three strides, hand at her jaw, tilting up her chin.

"You don't think I'd do it?"

"I think you'd do anything not to be your brother."

She's half-smiling now, a bare show of teeth.

"But this isn't about me, and you know it."

He huffs, lets her go, then turns for a fresh bridle, threading the leather through his hands as if twisting sense from nonsense.

"The city's in shock," he mutters, threading the girth loose, "but the shock will wear off by tomorrow. After that, it's just patience and opportunists."

She watches him work, the subtle pleasure in his hands as the leather yields, buckles. He doesn't meet her eyes, doesn't need to.

"If you want me on your arm for the wedding, say so," she says. "If not, I'll watch the carnage from the kitchens."

He stops, turns, strips a sliver of stray horsehair from his cuff.

"I didn't bring you here for a decision."

She tips her head, intrigued.

"What for, then?"

Aemond shifts the bridle onto the hook, dusts the pads of his fingers, then draws her close with a motion almost too brief to catch. He kisses her, nothing like the hunger of last night—this is a transaction, clear-eyed, and her brain registers the feeling even as her blood argues for more.

He breaks the kiss first, his mouth still hovering an inch above hers.

"Whichever way it falls," he says, "there are two truths. I want you. And I want the crown."

"Would you have both?" she asks.

"I'd have you on the throne beside me if it were possible."

"But it isn't."

He almost laughs.

"No, but that never stopped my family before."

She leans into him, lets herself enjoy the incandescence of being desired by a man made for legend or for mockery, but rarely for the in-between.

He tucks a wisp of hair behind her ear, the gesture so practiced it feels accidental.

"I'm marrying the Baratheon girl. But I'll keep you. It's not a kindness. Just a fact."

"Are you asking, or telling?"

"I don't traffic in hints," he says, mouth brushing her ear.

For a moment—an actual, measurable beat of time—Alerah can feel herself ignite.

It's a small, sharp burn, starting in the place that used to take pride in her self-sufficiency and radiating, outward and upward, until her jaw locks and her pulse hammers in her fingertips. It's the oldest anger in the world: the fury of being spoken for, written into the margins of someone else's story.

She steps back, not coy or coquettish or even dramatic, but with a deliberate thin-lipped violence, as if reclaiming that single inch of air might be the fulcrum on which the rest of her life will balance.

"You know, I thought the Targaryens were supposed to be better at this," she says, words spitting out between her teeth.

"All the history, all the wars, all the swords and dragons—still can't work up the gall to ask whether I'd stay before you decide I'll just be kept like a dog on a leash."

Aemond's face doesn't change; it's the same impassive, planed-off calm she's seen when he guts a rumor or a man. But there's a pale flicker in his eye, a twitch in the tiny muscles at the corners of his mouth.

"If it's a leash, it's one I wear, too," he says, tone a shade colder. "But I don't need to explain myself to—"

"You don't need to explain yourself to anyone, do you?" she snaps. "Not to your mother, not to your brother, not to me. But you still make the effort, don't you? You mark your territory, you say mine, mine, and the world rearranges itself to suit."

He looks at her—really looks, as if the heat of her voice has turned her foreign. She feels the pressure of his silence, the calculation, the slow, coil-tightening drag of it. But she doesn't back down. She doesn't even blink.

"You want me, fine. But I'll not have you keep me like a trinket in your pocket. I had a better life in the alleys of Lys than I would as the afterthought to your political marriage."

"If that's what you think," he starts, but she cuts him off, stepping closer, toe to toe in the stink and churn of the stable.

"What I think," she bites, "is that you see the city as a chessboard and every piece as either trophy or tool. You told me once we shared a face for the truth, and now you try to fit me in the palm of your hand."

He doesn't flinch. This is what he wants—what all of them want.

She scoffs, shoves her palm flat against his collarbone, watches the white fabric dent and ripple.

"I will not be the next bastard swept under your rug. Do you hear me? If you need me, say it. If you want me, say it. But if you ever presume again to dictate my life—"

"You're such a mouthy bitch," he hisses against her lips, breaking off the kiss only to drag her hard up against the wood. "I could have any girl in this miserable city. You think you're special? You're just the only one mean enough to stand up and bark when I bait you."

She tries to slap him, because she's drunk on the outrage and the heat of the moment, but he catches her wrist before it lands. He grins—a mean, white slash of a grin—and crushes her hand in his own, driving her knuckles into the rough grain of the stall wall. Then he crowds her, mouth at her temple, voice so low it blisters.

"You want honesty?"

He fists both hands in the front of her tunic, twisting until the seams crack.

"Fine. I want you naked in my bed and on your knees in my council, and I want you dressed in every silk and whore-red dye this city ever forbade. I want you bruised on my cock so you limp when you walk. I want your mouth, your cunt, your cunt's spite, and every word the rest of the city's too damned scared to say. There. Truth. You happy with that, or do I need to scrawl it in blood on your fucking forehead?"

He punctuates the last word by slamming her so hard against the stall that the wind leaves her lungs. He keeps her there, forearm like a bar across her breastbone, waiting for her to spit teeth or retort or even collapse. When she does nothing—when she just meets his eye and doesn't fucking blink—he snaps and kisses her.

"You want my cock, or my name?" he hisses, the rush of his breath hot on her cheek. "You want me on my knees, or do you want to see how fast I can put you on yours?"

Aemond's hand snakes up the side of her throat, fingers splayed in the language of violence or prayer, and he drags her in so their foreheads clang. His breath's venom-sweet.

"You can spit in my face all you want, Tyroshi. But from this moment," and here he bites her earlobe so hard she yelps, "no man or woman in this city will ever touch you unless they go through me, and god save the bastard who tries."

He doesn't let her go. She smells the smoke of his soul, the crack of horse hide.

She should flinch. She should laugh. But what happens is her knees go watery, and she wants, more than anything, to match him curse for curse, move for move. So she grabs two fistfuls of his pale hair, yanks down until his neck bows, and kisses him with the bite of a storm tide.

They break apart for a half-breath, both sucking air, then slam together again like stones flinting sparks. She can't tell which of them is the aggressor anymore; it's a brawl disguised as a kiss, a war where the only surrender is in the drop of Aemond's hand to her ass, squeezing so hard he'll leave a mark for days. He hikes her against the stall, perch of a feed bin gouging her back in the best possible way, and the other hand claws the front of her tunic. He rips it—not dramatic, not theatrical, just a feral, focused savagery he's probably used to killing things.

Her breasts spill free, nipples peaked for him, and he laughs, eye gone black around the violet, and drops his mouth to her left breast.

He licks around the areola, slow at first, then nips the tip, bites down just shy of pain.

When she moans into his hair, he lets the sound fill him, suckles hard enough to bruise, then pulls away to drag his teeth across her sternum. His breath's like a furnace; hers a knife. Through the torn shreds of her shirt, she finds his belt, wrenches it open, and palm his cock—already thick, pulsing, so hot it shocks even her.

She strokes him, slow at first, reveling in the way all his heat floods towards the point of contact.

"You want to be ruined, don't you," he whispers, voice so low it vibrates through the plank at her back. "You want everyone in the Red Keep to hear you come for a prince like a common wet-legged whore."

She jerks a laugh, shoves her thumb over the leaking head, then smears her palm down the shaft until he shudders.

"I want to ride you until you can't stand up for your own wedding," she says.

"Then you better start, Tyroshi. You've got one night left before I start being faithful to the sow they saddle me with."

He fucks her with a violence that has no place in daylight, cock driving up in piston strokes that crash every other thought out of her head. She tries to speak, but he talks over her, grunting.

"That's right, you take me, you greedy bitch. You fit so tight, so sweet—there's not a noble whore in this kingdom who could clench me like you do."

She rides his cock hard, the bridle of his hair wrapped in her fist.

The stall's wall thunders with every collision of flesh, every exhale a snarl. He doesn't let her pace set the limit; as soon as she gets purchase he flips her, palms under her thighs, yanking her up so her calves clamp around his ribs and he's fucking up into her, benching her almost clear off the wood.

He fucks her standing, right there in the reek of straw and animal, both of them so angry and alive it's a miracle the Keep itself doesn't catch. She claws his chest, sucks at his tongue until she's sure he'll taste blood, and he tears at her shift, mussing it up to her waist before grinding against her with the greed of totaled restraint.

"You like it hard, don't you?" he snarls in her ear, rutting into the seam of her thighs through his breeches.

She takes the next stroke with greedy precision, slamming her hips down to meet his, the clap of their bodies loud enough to spook the nearest horse. Her toes curl in the straw, nails digging twin gouges into the meat of his ass as he fucks up, intent to hammer her into pieces against the ragged planking of the stall. Each thrust carves the air from her lungs; each rebound makes her teeth snap together.

"You like it dirty in the stables with the straw sticking to your knees and the whole of the royals ready to hang you if you make a sound."

She answers by raking her nails down his spine, wrapping her thigh around his hip, and grinding herself along his cock until the friction nearly lifts her off the ground.

He pistons her up and down, balls heavy and tight as they slap her ass, cock plunging deeply.

She meets his pace, grinding forward, until her cunt's sticky with it, until she can feel her own slick running down her thigh in a tacky web. He grabs her hair and hauls her head back so her neck's bare, so he can see every shudder that ripples the tendons.

"So pretty when you fight me," he breathes, then sucks a bruise high on her throat till she yelps and shoves her hips down to devour his cock.

"You said you'd make me walk crooked," she growls, and he fucks her even harder, the rhythm brutal, relentless, and her vision whites at the edges with the shock of it.

He slams her hips down, slapping her cunt onto his cock until the veins throb against her inner walls, then grunts into her mouth.

"Whore. Mine," he gasps. "Mine. You think I'd let anyone else—"

"You'd kill me first," she pants.

"Not before I breed you raw in every room of the castle."

He hammers into her, knowing she's close; he can tell by the way her cunt clamps and pulses, by the ragged hitch of her breath. He grins and grinds his thumb on her clit, not neat or gentle, just a cruel, insistent pressure, until she sobs and arches her spine, slamming her skull into the wood hard enough to bruise.

"That's it. Come for me," he demands. "You want to, I can feel it. Come so the whole palace hears you."

He reaches down, thumb circling her clit, and her vision folds in on itself. She screams. He doesn't let up. He pulls almost all the way out, then spears in, again, again, until she sobs his name into the hollow of his shoulder and sags limp in his arms.

Aemond fucks her through it, chasing his own end, and he doesn't even slow when her pussy starts fluttering so hard it milks his cock, draws the orgasm right out of him. He grabs her jaw with his hand, forces her to look at him as he comes, cock pulsing, stuffing her full until there's no room for anything in the world except his will and the ruin of her own body.

She laughs, wild and ugly, and he crowns the moment by shoving in so deep she feels him crowd up against her cervix, cock throbbing.

He pins her there, both wrists locked in one hand above her head, and rides out the last tremor as if he means to anchor her ghost to this world, even after her body's spent.

Then he slows—rotates his hips, grinding the last bit in, savoring the heat and clutch of her, until he can't hold it any longer. She feels the pulse, the slick gush of warmth as he empties.

He collapses against her, chin hooked over her collarbone, breath hitching with stray, animal growls. The straw creaks under their combined weight; somewhere a horse wickers, scandalized.

She milks the last pulse from him, then lets her head tip back and laughs. It's not mirthful; it's the laugh of exhaustion, of one more storm survived at sea.

He stays inside her, not ready to crawl out of the membraned, fragile world they've made inside this battered wooden box.

When they finally recompose themselves, she levers off his grip, plucks the shredded front of her shirt together, and fixes his hair with two sharp tugs. He lets her, prideful and sated, the dragon in him not quite banked, more like curled up by the fire, waiting for the next chance to scorch the world.

Aemond lets himself slide down the stable wall, eyes gone glassy, hair fanned out on the soiled straw like the aftermath of a lightning strike. He doesn't speak—doesn't need to. It's a truce, a flag planted in the churned ground, neither of them needing to say who won.

Alerah stands, sets her chin, and only then does she brush his hair back from his face.

"You're going to be the death of me."

"And you the death of every girl who thinks she can tame you."

He snags her wrist as she moves past, but she slips it clean and walks out, fixing her stride for anyone watching. Only when she's sure no eyes follow does she slow, lean against the splintered rail, and allow her hands the shake they'd reserved for after.

By evening, the palace was drunk on its own peril. Men doused old wounds in sour ale and called it proof the gods had not yet lost their appetite for drama. In the kitchens, Mira shouted like a priest at market, snapping wooden spoons and threats until everyone, even the most insensible scullions, worked at three times the pace.

It was as if the whole of the castle had lost its mind for one last, glorious hour before the hammer fell.

Alerah made the rounds. She instructed Ness in the art of hiding small knives in unlikely places; she told Milly which vent would carry a message fastest; she gathered the other orphans and warned them to keep to the stairs, never the main corridors, until the third bell after midnight. She stitched her own bodice, patched her skirt, and made her peace with every scar she still carried from the house that spat her into this mess.

She was winding bandages by candle when the summons came.

This time, it wasn't a page or a runner, but Ser Criston himself, boots mud-caked, eyes red, face tight as an old man's fist. He doesn't speak; just jerks his head, and she followed.

He leads her through the back maze of the keep, into the old council chamber where, under the fractured dome of cinder and glass, the new king, his mother, and a ring of lords waited.

Aegon looked less a king than ever—wounds still livid. But there's a gravity to him, a sense that, for better or worse , the day had shifted, and he was now sovereign not out of birthright, but sheer, unimpeachable survival.

She realizes, in this hissing, whisper-rife chamber, that every eye in the city that counted was wary of her, and that anything she did could—would—be remembered. Maybe even set to song, in the manner of cautionary tales.

Otto Hightower's voice slices the murmur.

"The king will have confessions of loyalty from his council and household tonight, before the ink dries on those charters. No exceptions, and no omissions for the sake of courtesy or nostalgia."

The dowager queen watches from the gloom, hands locked together, not moving a muscle except to scan each face for fractures.

Ser Criston intones.

"Alerah of Tyrosh, orphaned in service to the house, indebted by the Archon of—"

"Get on with it."

"—you are summoned to swear fealty to King Aegon, Second by his name, rightful heir of House Targaryen, Defender of the Faith, King of the Andals and the Rhoynar and the First Men, and to foreswear allegiance to any false claim or pretender, under pain of death by fire or sword as the law decrees."

He shoves a parchment towards her.

Alerah eyes the quill, still wet with the blood-ink of the last man to sign. Her signature, such as it was, would be binding—at least until someone stronger made it redundant.

What surprised her most, as she dipped the pen, was how little she could bring herself to tremble.

She signs, a loopy scrawl that more resembled a curse than a name.

"And with your oath," says Aegon, in a voice that could have magicked a drought on the room, "we begin the world's longest tomorrow."

Beneath the rim of the council table, Alerah could feel the tremor of her own pulse—steady now, as if the act of signing had cauterized her nerves. The silence that follows is that of a room all but waiting for permission to exhale. Aegon's gaze lifts from the blot of her name to the faces of the gathered lords, daring any to question the rightness of what had passed. None speaks. Across the stained marble, Ser Criston's hand closes over the charter as if staking claim to the future by sheer grip alone.

Otto Hightower, never quite content to let silence rule, offers the next line.

"You are dismissed, girl. You'll do for today," Otto says, "but I've eyes on the kitchens. No more rumors. No more loose tongues."

The rest's muffled as the door scythes shut behind her.

Out in the corridor, the air hangs heavy with the oil of lamps and the unopened threat of another night. She walks slowly, as if returning from an execution, and is nearly to the kitchen landing before she realizes her hands are shaking—not from fear, but from a venom of importance she had never once allowed herself to crave.

The girls were waiting. Mira, Milly, even Ness, all shifting like anchored boats in the tide, faces upturned and slick with sweat or candle-grease.

Ness breaks ranks first, crossing to her and clutching her wrist.

"What did they want?" she whispers, as if the walls had already grown new ears in the hour since their last betrayal.

Alerah shrugs it off, more bluff than truth.

"Just a signature. A show for the old lords. They want to see who blinks first."

"Did you?" Milly asks, voice small.

"No."

She smiles, and to her own astonishment, it feels easy.

"There'll be more," Mira says, glancing from her to the shadowed corners of the pantry. "They won't trust anyone not born to it."

"Let them," Alerah says, suddenly, fiercely. "The king trusts no one. The old queen trusts only her own children. If we last the week, we'll last the year."

And for one unguarded moment, the kitchen feels lighter, the air less full of knives. Even Mira smiles, and in her gap-toothed way, it was almost pretty.

They work late that night. Alerah lades soup for the old men in black, wraps salted fish for the messengers, even brings a tray—by special request—to the Queen Helaena, who opens her door only a crack and takes the roll in her left hand, closing the door before Alerah can even speak.

In the moment of exchange, however, Helaena catches her gaze, and there's a flash of something there—fear, yes, but also a kind of solidarity Alerah can't place. The next morning, Ness reports that Helaena had locked herself in the garden for hours, burning sage and reciting numbers in a sequence nobody else could follow.

Twice, Alerah passes Aemond in the halls, flanked by guards, his posture unbreakable even when the silver of his hair's slicked flat to his head with summer sweat. He makes no sign of recognition. Maybe he's sparing her, she thinks. Maybe she's already written herself out of the story.

She doesn't see him again for four nights, and it isn't until she's peeling potatoes in the kitchen does he arrive behind her back.

"Did you follow the queen's instructions?" he asks, voice so cool it might have been speaking to a ghost.

She sets down the knife.

"Which set?"

He smirks, hair falling forward to hide the silvered scar at his temple.

"Mother must have told you to avoid me."

He waits, all patience, as though this were a chess match and he's already placed her king in check.

"She did."

"Will you listen?"

Alerah turns, palms flat on the battling block. Her eyes feel hot.

"Are you truly asking me, or just collecting obedience like every other man who's ever had the luck to live in a house of power?"

His eye lights, in that way all men's eyes do when suddenly called to account for the theater of their own arrogance.

"I want to know if you care," he says. "If I matter. If any of this—" he gestures, encompassing the knife, the potato, the world, "is more than a game for you."

"Does it matter, my prince? So long as you believe yourself the winner?"

He stares, unmoving, and she realizes then that he's at actual risk—of heartbreak, of humiliation, of some new and terminal wound that can't be stitched with a needle.

She sets the potato aside. Wipes her hands dry on her apron. Looks him in the face, the full, predatory beauty of it—a mouth made for cruel wit, a jaw meant for the axe.

"If you must know, then yes. I care. More than is sensible. But I'd rather die clever than live soft. I care. I also don't trust you, or your mother, or your sodding dynasty. Call it a vestige, from a life where trust killed before hunger did."

Aemond studies her, then he lifts a hand, as if to touch her cheek, but thinks better of it and lets it fall.

He stands there a moment, jaw working side to side, then sweeps his hair behind his shoulder and nods with a tight, almost desperate finality.

"Mother wants me to forget you," he says. "But then, she wanted a great deal from this world that was not built for wanting."

He turns, not in a fury but in a bleak surrender, and for a heartbeat she's sure that's the end of it—that the long and wounding thread between them has finally snapped. He walks to the door, hand poised on the lintel as if weighing whether to say anything else.

"I'll be gone for three days," he says, and finally walks away.

Chapter Text

Helaena keeps to her rooms, and the children grow wilder, less contained.

Jaehaerys once brings a snake into the pantry, dropping it in a flour bin only to cry when Mira threatens to snap it in half with a cleaver.

"You want a pet," Mira says, "get a dog."

Alerah plucks the snake from the bin—it's nothing, just a grass runner, but it twists in her hand with more sweetness than malice.

"Best not to threaten the snake," she tells Mira, wrangling the snake into a clay pot. "He needs to know some things survive in this place by cleverness."

Mira just grunts, then lines up the day's bread for cutting.

Suddenly, Criston comes through, eyes knife-bright, cradling an arm that's been swaddled twice in rags and then again in arrogance.

"You there," he says, not even glancing at the paring knife in her hand.

"Aye, ser," she answers.

He waits until she's close, then says, "Queen Helaena's unwell. She will not eat. You'll stay with her until she does. I've already cleared it with the dowager."

Which means, Alerah notes, Alicent would rather not have to see her own daughter just now, or she's too swamped in grief, or maybe she's simply run out of parent in her.

The nursery's a blue, airless warren. Helaena sits at the window, hands folded, a skein of black lace puddled in her lap like a dead bird. Her skin's wrong—stretched, translucent, the veins showing blue at her throat—and her breathing runs in strange, syncopated little hums.

Alerah sets down the tray, peels back the linen from a honeyed cake. The children, for once, are not here.

"They sent you," Helaena says, without turning.

"Would you rather it were the queen herself?"

"No," says Helaena.

Alerah slides onto the stone bench by the window, leaving the cake untouched between them. She follows Helaena's gaze to the avenue outside. Lines of men in livery arrange themselves below like chess pieces, the city's pulse visible in the shuttling lanterns, the tidal inrush of rumor cresting with each new footfall.

"They took my children's nurse," Helaena says, voice flattened to a hush. "Said she was a spy, but she was not. She just liked to rock them after their naps. Spent too much time with them."

Alerah listens gently.

"They think I don't notice," Helaena says, "but the beds are colder. The silence changes. Years ago, I could tell every soul in this palace by the sound of its walking. Now it is all strangers, and the song is different."

Alerah thumbs a flake from the cake, places it on her tongue.

"Jaehaerys says he will have a sword," Helaena continues, "and that it must be sharp enough not to notice where the cut begins. I told him there's no such sword. That you always know. He did not believe me. He said every king gets a sharper sword than the father before."

"At least he has a sharper sword than his mother," Alerah says, in the way a jape is offered at a stranger's wake.

Helaena's lips twitch, barely.

"Mother told them you'd be the next to leave."

"Leave where?"

Helaena traces a vein through the mesh at her wrist.

"She wants you sent to Dragonstone. As a peace offering, but also as eyes. She'll tell you it's to negotiate, but really it's so you can return with secrets, or not return at all. She claims you have the face for it. The blood, too. Enough ambiguity to be neutral—to convince Rhaenyra and Daemon that the crown is not solely a matter for men at swords."

Alerah waits, breath held at the hinge between possibility and doom.

"You want me to parlay with the woman who raised half this city on fire and covert—blackmail?"

"My mother wishes to offer truce, but only if the word comes from a mouth the Blacks do not anticipate."

"She wants me to be the goat crossing the bridge ahead of the pack," Alerah says. "If I'm eaten, it's no real loss."

"It would be a great loss to me," Helaena says, and for the briefest moment her voice is all child again, all the bruised sweetness the city's hunger has not yet hollowed out. "You are the only one who never lied to me. Not once. I would rather trust you than any knight or lord."

"Me?" Alerah scoffs incredulously, voice crumpling at the edge. "No one's going to listen to—"

"But they will."

Helaena's gaze is as fixed as a needle in the skin.

"You're not of this house. Even the princess could not set you aflame without thinking of the cruelty of it. They mean to use you, but not as bait. As promise."

"I don't know a damn thing about parley. Or peace," Alerah says.

"I think you do. You know what not to say. And you know how to survive."

Alerah's eerily silent, the honey melting on her tongue, pooling in the pit of her stomach. The idea of crossing the bay to Dragonstone, to the court of the Black Queen, doesn't frighten her. The city emptying behind her like lungs at blackout—that's what roots her to the cold seat.

"Do you want me to go?" she finally asks.

Helaena looks away from the window, eyes unfocused but deep as the dusk pooling through the glass.

"I want you to come back, so please do your best in maneuvering there. I doubt they will touch you."

Alerah sits with that, then slices the cake in two, pushing the better half to the queen. She expects Helaena to ignore it, but the woman takes a bite, chewing until the tension drains from her shoulders. It's the first time Alerah's seen her eat in days.

"I don't want to leave you with the twins," Alerah says, "not while the queen is half a ghost and the rest of the household is surrounded by gossips and cowards."

Helaena blots crumbs from her lips, the motion almost regal.

"I'd rather the twins be haunted by me than by strangers," she says, and for a moment her face, luminous in profile, is almost the model for the reliquaries the old maesters keep.

"They will miss you," Helaena says, and for a heartbeat Alerah wonders if that includes her, too.

She doesn't say as much, only nods, and watches the twin currents of grief and duty run their tide within the queen's small frame.

When dusk bleeds through the nursery's panes, Helaena wipes the window with her sleeve.

"If you don't come back," Helaena says, quiet as frost, "I will know it was not your fault. But if you do, bring something alive. A bee, or a moth, or—"

"—a snake?" Alerah offers, grinning so forcible it nearly cracks her face.

Helaena's lips twitch, unsure; on another girl, it might be called a smile, but here it's just a spasm, a muscle memory of happiness from a time before this one.

"Even a snake," she says, reaching, and her hand circles Alerah's as if it were a secret only the two of them were meant to share. The touch is so formal, so considered, that it takes Alerah a moment to recognize its power.

She squeezes back; it seems the only answer that could possibly matter.

"I'll come back," Alerah says.

"Then do," Helaena says, and lets the hand fall away.

Helaena rises, shoulders tight, and walks to the hearth where the remainder of the black lace pools, gathering it into an infant's bundle. For a moment, Alerah thinks she'll set it to the flames, but instead, Helaena holds it against her chest, rocking it lightly, the silence in the room not empty but full of the clattering, secret noise of the world outside.

"How do you survive," Alerah asks, "when everyone expects you to die for their story?"

Helaena's head tilts.

"You write your own story, then you set it on fire so no one else can read the ending."

Alerah gives a grudging nod. It's the only answer that's ever made sense in this house.

There's a wail and then the slap-slap of boots on soiled flagstone, and a boy not yet out of his own scabs appears in the kitchen's arch, breathless.

"The Lady Tyroshi is called to Queen Alicent's solar," a pageboy recites, voice shaking like water in a tin cup.

Alerah shoots a look at Mira, who just wipes her nose on her sleeve and mouths, good luck, over the cauldron.

She wipes her hands on her apron, and pauses just long enough to flick the last of the batter at the knot of nerves under her chin. Then she follows.

The solar is even colder than usual, light filtered through thick, old glass until it drowns the world in a gray-blue haze. The Queen, eyes raw, stands at the window with Ser Criston at her side.

On the table before her: a letter, triple-sealed, the wax still warm.

Alicent doesn't look back.

"You are to depart this hour," she says, "across the bay by ship. The captain is discreet, and will not speak your name, nor allow you to speak to the crew. You will arrive at Dragonstone by dusk tomorrow."

She turns, at last, and something in her is cracked.

"You will deliver this to the Princess Rhaenyra," the queen says, "and then you will wait for reply, and return. You are not to linger, nor to play at diplomacy. You are not to act as spy nor messenger except for what you see with your eyes and hear with your ears. If you are captured, you are not of this house. If you are honored, you will say nothing but the words in this letter."

She holds the letter out, and Alerah notes the tremble in her fingers, the way her nails dig half-moons into the wax.

"If you fail, if you die, if you are delayed—"

Here, her voice wavers.

"—then the house will go on. Nothing will change. You understand this, yes?"

"I understand," says Alerah, not out of defeat but as if that knowledge is itself some crooked kind of weapon.

Alicent draws a ragged breath, then flicks her eyes to Ser Criston, who steps forward, a belt pouch bulging at his hip. He presses a coin purse into Alerah's hand—not the thin weight of copper usual for smallfolk, but the heavy clink of silver, maybe gold among it.

Alerah wordlessly slips the purse into her shift. Tucks the letter into the folds with a quiet efficiency. She curtsies, low and unflinching, and the queen, for the first time, almost smiles at her. Something between distaste and admiration.

In the hall, the air hangs thick with the dust of evening and the distant rumble of unrest. The city hadn't gone quiet, only muffled its agony until the guards changed shift and the bells stopped ringing. She finds herself threading instinctively through the undercorridors, where shadows climbed the walls like old friends, and the only eyes that followed her were those of the castle's true keepers—the rats, the cats, the night maids in their linen shifts.

When she gets to the base of the mountain that is the Red Keep, the city seems to yawn open beneath her—piers fogged in, the iron nets on the windows of the wharf, the old bell tower still leaning eastward like it resents the new king.

In the first hour after curfew, the streets are gorged with rumor and fear.

Every drunken lampmaker and alley-blooded fishwife who saw the dragon had made their own version of the story. That Aegon had died in the pit, that his ghost already stalked the court; that the dragon had eaten the queen or turned Hightower into smoke; that Aemond, not the king, was the one who'd tamed the monster and rode it out to the edge of the world.

Alerah knows better. She'd lived too long on the periphery, seen how the memory of a thing overwrote the thing itself, sometimes within the same day.

But nothing in the city, for all its talent for rumor, had any story of what the queen's bastard was doing, sloping off the postern gate with a velvet purse and a letter meant to upend three dynasties.

The wharf's shrouded with the sticky foam of the river's last tide. Alerah keeps to the edge, where the rot of fish guts blunted any scent that might follow her from the palace. The man at the end of the pier says nothing, just jams an oar at her chest to ferry her out to the waiting skiff.

He rows in silence, muscles bunching under a threadbare shirt, only once meeting her gaze to pass a chunk of bread and a skin of rusted wine.

They reach the middling galley at anchor before the bell rang out half-past midnight.

No one hails her, or even seems to mark her boarding. The hold's already half-filled with cargo: casks of lamp oil, burlap-wrapped bundles that reek of spice and cheese. She's shown to a berth—no light, only the sway and the slow rot of tar caulking. The one sailor who speaks to her makes a joke about keeping the rats for company. She finds a blanket, curled around the coin purse, and lets the roll of the hull erase the last of King's Landing from her mind.

When she wakes, the world's gray.

Somewhere above deck, sailors argue in sibilant Low Valyrian. They make landfall at Blackwater's mouth by the pulse of the tide, then drift out along Dragonstone's lee, the castle itself a gnarled, ash-black crown against the pink humiliation of morning.

The landing's near deserted save for two Black cloaks, each bearing the sigil of an upstart lordling pledged to Rhaenyra's cause. Alerah hands over the letter, and the guards hold it as if it burns. They don't take her name, only motioned for her to follow, and up the path she went, boots grinding cinders into the soil.

Dragonstone's nothing like the Red Keep. For one, the air doesn't smell of piss, or of old men's fear; here, the sulfur and salt are honest.

The main hall, though dull and black, is warm with banked fires. Two pages usher her in, neither older than a decade, eyes bright with the thrill of possibly getting to see something worthy of a story later.

They leave her to wait on a bench sculpted in the form of a dragon's back, the scales slick with centuries of use, the eyes inset with glassy shards that reflect every movement across the hall.

Alerah sits, and for the first time in weeks, she has nothing to do. No dough to punch, no knife to clean, no bruise to fuss over. Just the cold certainty of her own limbs.

Nothing happens for a long time, long enough that the day outside must have changed flavor, but no sunlight ever touches the glass in this place.

At last, a footstep. Then more. The echo of bootheels so decisive it knifes through the gloom like a new blade.

Two entered.

Daemon Targaryen led the pack, face grave and unsurprised, as if he'd known Alerah since she was pickled in the womb. He wore his mourning black with an elegance bordering on provocation; his hair unbound, lips set, hands as idle as a hangman waiting for the bell.

Beside him—half a head taller, a vision in scaled jet and hammered gold—was a woman.

Rhaenyra, the Black Queen.

Her eyes are nothing like the pale crystals of her kin: amethyst, almost muddy, but they carry the same heat.

"You're the Tyroshi," Daemon says. His smile's a bare, bored line.

Alerah inclines her head. Not a bow; more a nod of two wolves meeting on a distant moor.

"Did they search you?" Daemon asks. "Strip you for the secret knife or the pious suicide pill?"

"No," she says. "I suppose I seem unthreatening."

He notes the dress, the calluses, the shortage of jewelry, the way her posture denies both apology and invitation.

"They should have," he remarks.

He turns to Rhaenyra, placing a hand on his chin in mock contemplation.

"See the hands? She could throttle a man before he could even shout for mercy."

Rhaenyra makes a noise almost like laughter, but the lines of worry in her brow don't break.

"You have a letter," Rhaenyra says, and her voice is ruined honey, thick and low with recent damage.

"Give it here."

Alerah does as she's ordered. Rhaenyra snaps the seals herself, flicks open the parchment. Daemon watches Alerah, not his wife, but his gaze just glides over her, already memorizing the shape of her. It isn't lust, or even threat—it's the way the truly dangerous only ever inventory the world in terms of what can be used or broken.

Rhaenyra reads the letter, start to finish, lips moving on every line as though she mistrusted even her own eyes. When she finishes, she exhales once—so clipped it could have been a cough, or a warning.

"Mother to mother," Rhaenyra says, showing the script to Daemon as if he might dispute it.

He doesn't, just leans in until the ink glistens off his nose. As he reads, his lips curve, but not in joy; more the satisfaction of a long-overdue spear finally finding a tender flank.

Alerah studies the rhythms between them—how Rhaenyra's hands never stop worrying the letter's edge, how Daemon never lets go his wife's shoulder, even as his other hand toys with the pommel of his sword.

He takes the letter, reads it entirely in three blinks, and hands it back.

"Diplomacy by the back door. Alicent would sooner lick a leper's palm than bare her neck. But here it is. The whiff of surrender. Or maybe just a bluff so naked even the blind could see it."

Rhaenyra gives him a look, neither chiding nor intimate. It is the look of a battle companion who knows every vector of your weakness, and likes you more for it.

"Stay," Rhaenyra says to Alerah, not bothering to disguise the order. "We are not done."

Rhaenyra and Daemon confer, voices subdued, the Valyrian too warped by dialect to mean anything to her but the cadence of squabble: first his, brittle and rapid; then hers, the drag of gravel over sand. They move to a hearth at the far end of the hall, doom spilling from their silhouettes like black ink.

She doesn't fidget.

On Dragonstone, even the silence feels like a method of surveillance. She catalogues the hearth, the benches warped with centuries, the rank of chairs at the table, each one scored by years of weapons left hooked over the spines.

She waits at the window, watching the wind flatten the pennons back against the stone, and lets the chill soak into her arms. In a way, this is calmer than the Red Keep: here, the politics are sharper and faster, but also less disguised.

When they return, the shift in the mood's palpable. Daemon's movements are less performative, almost warning. Rhaenyra stands over Alerah, the letter rolled in her hand, now battered by her thumb.

"Queen Alicent says if I bend the knee, she will let my children live. Veiled as a polite threat, of course," Rhaenyra says, with a flourish meant to strip the words of any pretense.

"Do you know what the letter says, or did she keep it from you?"

"I know only that it was sealed with her hand," Alerah answers.

Across from her, Daemon leans his hip on the edge of a basalt table, fixing Alerah with a half-lidded stare.

"Then you don't know the half of it," Rhaenyra says.

Rhaenyra tears the letter in quarters and lets it fall to the floor, pieces scattering like unlucky dice.

"Tell me what you see when you look at me," she says.

Alerah blinks, her instinct to answer honestly warred with the honeyed venom of palace etiquette.

"I see a woman unafraid to send dragons to do what men will not."

"Do you?" Rhaenyra presses, stepping in, close.

"Or do you see a mother so whittled by her own ambition that she would let her children starve, just to keep a finger on a claim destined to be denied her?"

She waits, the air bright with tension, and Alerah glances past Rhaenyra to where Daemon has produced a single stick of licorice, chewing it slowly, as if this is the only treat left in the world.

"I see a woman," Alerah says, "who has never been given the chance to rule what is truly hers."

Daemon cackles, a sound so dry it threatens to snap the old air of the hall.

"Tell me," Rhaenyra says, "what did Alicent promise you in return for the delivery?"

"Nothing," Alerah replies, and this time, it is the truth.

"She gave me a purse so I wouldn't die on the docks, and a warning not to come back if I failed."

Rhaenyra's frown deepens.

"Then you're not a messenger. You're a failed orphan carrying a letter written to be refused."

Daemon cuts in.

"You do know, don't you, that by crossing the bay you have bound your life to this outcome?"

Alerah meets his gaze, refusing to flinch.

"I assumed as much."

He spits the licorice onto the flagstone, teeth blacked by the tarry root.

"Then what would you do, if you were me?" asks Rhaenyra.

"Me?" Alerah looks at her, but the she only gestures—go on.

"If it were me," Alerah says, pulse a drum in her neck, "I would write back. Another letter. An answer in the same hand. I would find a mouth that would survive the retort. And I would bind the deliverer to my house, by blood or coin, before the old one has a chance to retrieve her."

Rhaenyra's mouth twists.

"And if I wanted to keep you? Not just as a messenger, but as proof the queen's not the only one who can collect a memorable servant?"

Alerah doesn't answer, not at first. The honest reply—what lived like a weed inside her—was a kind of love for the people who'd raised her not to love them. She knows the taste of their mornings, the timbre of their lies, the stooped suffering of their ambitions. Even their cruelties feel, to her, more real than the truths she might have invented for the other side.

She aches, a little, for the kitchens with their loneliness and stink; for the new queen whose madness was more lucid than most men's reason; for Aemond with his hollowed-out pride and the way he bit every piece of bread as though it would fight him back. She thinks, with a shamed tenderness, that these were her people, and she would sooner die than betray them—but she can't say as much, not here, not to Rhaenyra who wore loyalty on the blade of her tongue and expected everyone else's to be so clean.

"I would serve, if asked," Alerah says, voice more measured than she feels. "But I'd rather know first what happens to those who keep both feet in two boats."

Daemon's smile cuts sideways.

"You get wet, girl. And sometimes you drown."

Rhaenyra tilts her head, sizing her up as if the bones beneath her skin are already on the auction block.

"There's nothing for you back in King's Landing," Rhaenyra observes.

"The children will miss her," Daemon says mildly, eyes flicking from Alerah to Rhaenyra and back, as if daring either to contradict him.

"Children miss servants the way a wound misses a splinter," Rhaenyra says, rolling the thought in her mouth. "But I see your point."

Rhaenyra lets the silence build, then says, "you'll stay here tonight. My steward will see to your comfort. Tomorrow, you and I will talk again."

The command's so absolute there's no imagining a refusal. Not that Alerah had one to give; her legs are trembling so badly she doubts she could make it back to the wharf under her own power.

Daemon steps in, closer, and for a moment, the legend of him—the man who survived two wars, killed more men than most priests have ever forgiven—crowds the air around her.

"Take this advice, girl."

His smile doesn't reach his eyes.

"Here, the walls have tongues, but all the knives are honest. Be careful what you repeat, and even more careful of what you keep to yourself."

He turns to Rhaenyra, bows—mocking, but not without a twist of courtesy—and leaves.

Rhaenyra doesn't look up, but the set of her mouth betrays something like relief. For a time, neither of them speak, and Alerah is left to marvel at how utterly unadorned the Black Queen is—her hair pulled tight, not a ring or torque on her fingers, a plain black gown that reads as both mourning and threat. She looks strongest when she's still.

A steward—older, and scarred over the whole left of his face—brings bread, cheese, and a decanter of bronze-colored wine.

Alerah expects to be served last, but the old man pours for her first, then for the queen, keeping his eyes respectfully down. She drinks, at Rhaenyra's nod, and discovers it's better than any liquor ever poured in the Red Keep: full, smoky, the kind of comfort no king ever earned by merit alone.

Rhaenyra's cup vanishes in two long pulls. The queen doesn't even acknowledge the taste, as if all pleasure in this house is rationed out, shared grimly, never indulged when alone. Only when the cup's empty does she settle herself back, hands loose in her lap, and look to Alerah with a focus that is almost fatherly in its gravity.

"This city keeps expecting me to make some grand move," Rhaenyra says, her finger tracing the dragon-head's curve on the rim of the goblet. "Every day a runner brings news of another house folding, or plotting, or waiting for the right moment to shift its weight. Every day, I am told to be patient, to let the pressure cook until the city cannot help but open to me. I have been patient. I have also been a fool."

She looks hard at Alerah then, as if deciding something final.

"Do you know what it is to be a mother in a house built to eat its own? Every day I wake, it's to the nightmare of my youngest—" her voice catches in her mouth, sharp, "—gone. Because men would rather burn boys to cinders than let a woman stand at the bridge ahead of them."

She's looking for pity, maybe. Or rage, to match her own. Alerah answers the only way she knows.

"We taught ourselves not to need what the world won't give," Alerah says. "But it's a harder trick, teaching others not to need you."

Rhaenyra laughs, the sound so volcanic it rings the glass in its stem.

"You're wasted as a messenger, Tyroshi. They should have sent you with a knife."

Her fingers carefully circle the rim of her goblet.

"Luke is here, you know."

"Oh?"

"Would you like to meet with him? He remembers you from the feast, I think. Talked endlessly about the girl with the red hair."

Alerah clears her throat.

"Isn't he betrothed to Lady Rhaena?"

"He is, but here he is safe, and will not mind a moment in your company. Boys of three-and-ten are as faithless as the wind, and sometimes just as quick to change direction. Would you care to see him?"

Alerah twitches a brow. She hadn't expected kindness, nor even a trace of familiarity in this place. She searches Rhaenyra's face, but the queen is impossible to read—maybe she's testing her, maybe she's baiting her, maybe this is just how mothers fill the air between threats and tears.

"If he wants company," Alerah says, "I'll sit with him."

"He's a good boy," Rhaenyra replies, her voice gone soft and for a moment utterly unlike a queen. "But all boys are. Until they're not."

Again, the old steward arrives. He summons Alerah with a tilt of the head—out, away, into the lamp-lit corridor, past the ceaseless shuffle of men and boys posted in every arch.

They wind up a spiral and through a corridor so narrow that Alerah's shoulders brush stone on both flanks. At the end, a set of warped doors thunk open, and she's pitched into a low-ceilinged library, the air thick with the hush of unspoken spells.

At a writing desk is Luke. Or Lucerys Velaryon, Rhaenyra's second-born, hair tangled and face as eager as any city boy, though even Alerah can see he's grown since last they met. He stands as she enters, blinking at her as if expecting an assassin's shadow to trail behind.

He recovers first, gestures to a second chair.

"My lady," he says, with a showman's bow.

"Your Grace," she answers, as much for him as for the steward in the hallway.

They settle, uncertain, like children seated at the adults' table for the first time. Luke picks at the edge of the desk, clearing invisible dust. Alerah notes the books he's been reading: diagrams of dragons, a bestiary, and three volumes of Riverlands trade law. She says nothing, but it interests her. For a long while, he simply stares.

"H—have you lived in the Red Keep long?" he asks, finally.

"Since I was eight-and-ten, I'm nine-and-ten today," Alerah replies. "But it feels much longer. The stones have a way of aging you."

She expects the boy to smirk at that, but instead he nods, eyes going serious.

"Dragonstone isn't so different. I never liked it when I was younger, but now I can't imagine another roof. The rain never ends, but at least it's honest. No one in the castle pretends not to hate it."

He swings his bare heels against the desk.

"Except the dragons. They love the wind. Sometimes if you watch them take flight right before a storm, you forget to be afraid for the whole minute. Rhaena says every dragon's a mirror for its rider. If you have fear in you, it just makes them mean. If you're bold, they get braver. But if you're stupid—well, there's always a bigger dragon."

"Is that why they say your uncle's is the biggest?" Alerah deadpans.

"Vhagar isn't his, though. Not really. He just rides her. She belonged to my grandsire's mother, then Lady Laena, and even now I think Vhagar's waiting for her to come back. That's what makes her so cruel. She remembers the pain of every hand that touched her first."

He flicks a page in the bestiary, then looks up with a sober caution far older than his years.

"I saw you fly," Alerah says. "The night of the feast. You nearly took my head off getting past the tiles."

He brightens, remembering.

"My brother said you ducked lower than any of the other girls in the yard. He said it's because you lived with snakes in Tyrosh, and they're always best at seeing what comes from above."

Alerah smirks.

"Your brother's smarter than he looks."

Luke sets his chin on the back of his hand and studies her with clear, wet-lashed eyes.

"I miss him," he says, and the quiver in his voice catches her off guard.

"Jace. I thought I'd worry for him less up in the north. But I just think about him more."

Alerah says, "you could write him."

He shrugs.

"I do. Every day. I think by now the maesters just throw out the ones that seem wrong or dangerous. They say it keeps the peace. But all my peace is in the letters, and none of them ever come back."

Alerah leans in, elbows on the desk.

"That's the trick, though. You send the letter, not because you think they'll open it, but so you know you did your piece. Sometimes you just have to say it out loud, even if it's only to yourself."

He looks at her, a glimmer of curiosity.

"Do you write letters?"

"Not much use. I never knew anyone who'd write me back."

She taps the table with a fingernail; it makes the tiniest sound, like a warning or a promise.

"If I did, what should I say? The bread is gray, the city a little more so, but the people are nothing if not inventive in their cruelty."

Luke laughs, a brief, clean sound, genuine enough to make her wish the world were simple for once.

"If you wrote me," he says, "I would keep the letter. And read it again when I was scared."

"I've seen Sunfyre in flight, once," Alerah says, unsure why she's confessing it, except the memory is living in her skin.

"From the Queen's Tower. The sound makes you forget how ugly life is on the ground."

His smile comes easier now, and she feels a strange weight lift. She wants, absurdly, to protect him. But that's not the job. The job's to keep her own head down and make herself necessary to the next person who can use her.

"You can visit the dragons if you'd like. No one really says no, so long as you take a guard. I could show you, if you like. Or you could wait for mother to summon you."

She lifts a brow, almost smiling.

"Are you trying to keep me from running?"

He shakes his head, solemn.

"I know you're not afraid of dragons, not really. What they did in the pit—that was for show. If a dragon wanted to burn you, you wouldn't have time to be scared."

His fingers tap a quick, anxious rhythm against the desk, as if conjuring a little courage by muscle memory.

"They have the eggs, down in the caves, you know," he says, so quietly she nearly misses it. "Some are said to be dead, but I heard a servant boy say he saw one where the shell was warm and trembling."

His eyes flick away from her.

"Would you come see, if I asked?"

Alerah stands, bones still stiff from the ship and the long wait.

"Show me, then. But you have to promise to tell me the truth when you're scared."

He grins, pure and guileless, then leads her from the library, bare feet slapping stone with a confidence she'd never muster in this place.

They wind down the spiral, past corridors limned with deep blue glass, until the air grows heavier, more sodden with old smoke.

A pair of guards loiter at the entrance to the dragon caves, but Luke only gives a nod and they move aside, unease written in the stiffness of their shoulders.

Inside, the tunnel's mouth's choked with the bones of old offerings: sheep heads, split hooves, a whole piglet once, its corpse shriveled in the heat that leaked from the caverns. Smoke breathes from the cracks in the black basalt; the ceiling's veined with white salt, glittering where stray lantern light falls.

"Just there," Luke says, pointing at a threshold of stone columns. "It's safe. They're chained, anyway."

"It's not the chains I worry for," Alerah says, but she follows anyway, letting the kid's confidence be her permission.

The main cavern opens like the gut of a god: wet, echoing, pulsing with a slow, irregular exhale. And there, at the far end, a dragon.

Not one of Vhagar's size or Meleys' fury. This one is smaller—childlike for its kind, muzzle narrowed to a twist, wings slicked with an iridescence that reminded her of the ink they used in the scribes' hall, slippery and black until the light snared blue and emerald from the gloss.

"That's Moondancer," Luke whispers, reverent.

The beast doesn't move, doesn't even lift its head, but the membranes of the wings shudder, a ripple running from claw to claw. Under its left foreleg, Alerah sees the mottled shape of an egg, ghost-pale.

"She's been brooding for weeks," Luke says. "People say an egg won't hatch unless it's wanted by the world."

He crouches, careful but not afraid, and sits cross-legged four yards short of the dragon's feet, like a worshipper at the feet of a god grown used to disobedience.

Alerah hangs back, keeping her weight on the balls of her feet, heart slamming against the cartilage of her ribcage.

The cavern's heat is unreal, wet like the under-tongue of a fever, sweet with the stink of guano and burned marrow. Moondancer's opal eyes flick to her, then away, as if bored by the threat. Even the dragon understands her insignificance.

Luke fidgets, then reaches for a pebble at his feet, rolling it between his palms.

"She's never eaten anyone," he says, "except for once, when one of Daemon's men tried to bribe her with raw ham. She took the hand first, and the ham after."

Alerah watches the dragon's breathing—slow, thunderous, the movement a rhythm she could lose herself in if she wanted. She thinks about the city, about her jobs and grudges and the kitchen girls who'd be counting the hours until the next batch of bread is due.

"I still find it odd," she says, "that anyone who has one of these would ever need to fight with a sword. Or a pen, for that matter."

Luke shrugs, then tosses the pebble into the dust. It lands, rolls, and comes to a rest, as if it, too, had given up on escape.

Alerah steps closer, feeling the echo of each timid shuffle up through her thighs. She watches the dragon's chest rise, fall; the egg, cradled between armored legs, pulses with a life Alerah can't decide to covet or pity.

Luke's shoulders square in the far edge of her sight.

"You never wanted to have one?" he asks, meaning a dragon, meaning a legacy.

Alerah almost laughs.

"I don't think a dragon would have me," she says. "I wasn't born for fire. Most likely, I'd be eaten before the first ride was done."

"I don't think it works that way," Luke says, sounding shy but not incredulous. "I think some dragons like strays even more than princes."

She doesn't know why she does it, except that the silence has a blade to her throat and the egg is so near, so excruciatingly close in the hollow between the dragon's claws. She pads forward, slow and flat-footed, pulse heavy in her ears. Moondancer lolls her head, exhaling a gout of air so thick with ammonia that tears slick Alerah's cheeks raw.

She means to keep her hand steady, but the tremor sabotages her. The egg's warm, faintly damp, its shell stippled with a waxy bloom like a dying peach. She trails two fingers along its seam and, for a heartbeat, the cave goes utterly still.

Moondancer's jaws snap with a violence less of hate than of reflex, the sound a tomb lid slamming shut.

Alerah's arm—hand, wrist, elbow—is flung backwards, skin scored by the graze of ivory fangs, not pierced but marked. She staggers, nearly falls, but catches herself, the pain whelming her guts with a hot, nauseous throb. Luke yelps, scrambling up and away.

The dragon doesn't pursue. Moondancer cranes her long neck down over the egg, nostrils flaring, a warning as plain as any language.

Alerah kneels in the dust, arm hugged to her chest, fingers numbed and already swelling. She sucks a lungful of air, ragged, then laughs. It rings off the cell walls, a peal of manic giddiness, and as she meets Luke's horror-wide eyes, she realizes she's grinning.

"Always mind the mother," she hisses through her teeth.

She stands, wobbly, and lets the pain clarify her senses. Luke helps her, small hand tentative on her shoulder, his own face flushed with awe rather than pity.

"You could have lost your hand," he says.

"I've had worse."

She takes a moment, shoulders canted against the lattice of the cavern's mouth, savoring the pulse in her fingers and the way the flesh reddens and ridges. Blood pools, thin and bright, along three parallel slices, but the bone is deep and shuddering with its own relief.

Alerah wipes the ooze of blood on her sleeve, then bows to the dragon, eyes never leaving the slit-pupil gaze until she's sure the mood's settled again.

Luke follows her out, keeping close.

They leave the cavern, Alerah pressing her sleeve to her wrist, a spreading bloom of red staining the linen. By the time they reach the daylight, the blood's stopped, a black crust drying over the worst of it. Luke fumbles for a scarf, presses it into her hand.

She wraps the scarf, winding it tight to slow the throb. Luke is even more subdued than before, glancing at her wound as if he's a little afraid he'll start bleeding in sympathy.

"I'll walk you to your room," he says, voice very small.

"You don't need to do that."

He frowns.

"I want to."

He keeps his pace dainty and slow to match hers, or maybe to force her not to outrun the ache; she can't tell which childish intent drives him. The corridor hums with the echoes of their steps, her own smeared shadow dragging along the pitted flagstone.

She tries for gentle.

"I'll write, if I live through the night."

Luke laughs—softer, but genuine enough for her to miss him before the door even closes.

"Then I'll keep the letters," he says, and scurries off, feet vanishing in a flick of blue wool.

Up in the halls, news travels on legs faster than she can walk. A girl nearly eaten in the dragon's den. By the time a pageboy leads her to her guest chambers, the skin of her hand has already gone gray-yellow with the first flush of bruise, and her arm throbs like a second, loud heartbeat.

Her quarters—a cell, really—are bare to comfort, just a cot, a washbasin, and a narrow slit of window aimed at nothing but the tumbled roofline and the ever-present smoke of the island. The cot's bedding is fresh, and beside it, someone has left a wedge of cheese and half a pomegranate, seeds scattered on the stone like glossy, living rubies. She cleans the wound as Rhaenyra's steward showed her, strips the ruined linen from her arm and shivers at the contact of cold water on the raw scrape.

There's a knock. Alerah expects the queen, or a nurse, but it's Daemon, alone, his scent as sharp as the sea on a storm day.

He arches a brow, taking in the bandaged arm and the dried blood darkening her sleeve.

"You tried to touch the dragon," he says, not quite a question. He's amused, but there's a flick of something else—respect, maybe.

"She's got fine teeth," Alerah replies, flexing her hand and wincing. "But a lighter touch than most courtiers at court."

Daemon tips his head, the curtain of silver hair falling forward.

"I imagine the lesson sticks deeper from a dragon than a maid."

"I suppose that's how one knows she's real," Alerah says.

She lifts the arm to eye-level, studies the purpling stripes.

"I'll not forget her, or the egg. Or the eyes."

"Moondancer's always been gentle, at least next to the rest. Either you're braver than you look, or you've a death wish you'd rather not discuss."

"Most girls keep their wishes to themselves," Alerah says, "but you know, I've always preferred my bad choices out loud."

"Oh, I like you," he says, and means it. "If you'd been born a man, you might have surpassed me at making bastards and trouble."

"If I'd been born a man, I'd be dead by now. There's always someone wanting to cut one down."

Daemon bares his teeth at that—a raw, foxish grin that sucks the breath from the narrow room.

"I brought a salve. Milk of poppy—if you want to sleep, or I can bring you something else."

"Sleep is fine," she says. "If it's not poisoned."

"Oh, it is," Daemon says, pouring it into a chipped cup and pushing it across. "But not in a way that matters."

She downs it, unblinking, savoring the bright, cold sting behind her teeth—half expecting the next breath to be her last, but instead it quiets the nerve in her arm and sluices her veins with a hot, almost electric calm.

Daemon waits, watching her face.

"You'll stay here. Rhaenyra wants you healed before the next talk. She says you're no use to her if you can't write or wield a knife."

Alerah grins, teeth pink with pomegranate.

"Kind of her."

Daemon's gaze drops to her wound, studiously clinical, then returns to her eyes.

"If you want honest advice—next time, don't put your hand so near the mouth."

"Next time?"

Daemon’s laugh is low and unhurried, flaring through the ribs of the little stone room.

“It’s always the ones who try once that try again. Don’t believe the bluffers and poets—bravery isn’t born, it’s a creeping disease.”

“I’m not in the habit of repeating my mistakes,” she says. “I prefer the novelty of new ones.”

“Good,” Daemon says. “Because you’re to be given audience tomorrow with the queen’s inner council. She thinks you might have something useful to say about the old regime. Or you could just listen. Both traits are rare, but you seem gifted at the latter."

Turning, Daemon places a hand on the wood of the door, head slightly crooked with the next thing he says.

"This war will get inside all of us before it's over. You might as well grow the scar early. Consider it your mark of favor from my household."

He leaves, the click of the latch oddly gentle for a man rumored to choke a man as quickly as a goblet of wine.