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Chapter Text

Aemond Targaryen walked through the gardens of the Red Keep as if each step were an unwanted concession.

He hated that place when she was there. The flowers, the stone paths, the clear light of dusk. Everything seemed to conspire to make her more visible than she ought to be. A wife should know how to make herself scarce. How to lower her eyes. How to remain silent.

Valia Velaryon did not.

Aemond had learned early that certain things were imposed upon men—duty, blood, sacrifice. Women, too, were imposed. Especially those who came burdened with error and inconvenience.

Valia was both.

His wife.

She possessed none of the delicacy expected of a noblewoman. She had not been shaped to please men like him—or perhaps she had been shaped too much by the wrong example.

Aemond saw Rhaenyra in every gesture: in the way Valia lifted her chin when she laughed, in her almost instinctive refusal to submit, in the insolent way she occupied spaces that did not belong to her.
And yet…

Her skin was far too pale for someone who spent so much time outdoors. An almost sickly pallor, he thought—until he remembered how a single laugh, a sharp remark, was enough to set that pale tone aflame, red blooming across her cheeks as if her blood ran hotter than most.

He hated noticing that.

He hated even more how much he noticed.

Her eyes… those eyes. Violet, yes—but not like his, nor like those of his siblings. True Targaryens bore an intense, pure lilac, sharp and almost cruel. Hers were different: a diluted violet, stained by bastardy, as though Valyrian blood had been mixed with shame.

And yet, when the light struck them at the right angle, Aemond found himself thinking they were softer.

More dangerous for it.

She carried features she should never have inherited. A face shaped like an echo of ancient Valyria, imperfect but undeniable. A remnant of something that had never belonged to her by right. A woman made of errors—and yet far too whole.

She had always been insolent in a way that bordered on offense. She laughed too loudly, spoke without restraint, took up space as though the world had not been designed to contain her. There was something in her that resembled his half-sister far too closely, and Aemond hated how true that was.

In certain lights—when the sun struck her from the side, or when the castle torches cast imprecise shadows—Valia looked like Rhaenyra. Not a perfect Valyrian mirror, never that, but an unsettling echo. The same shape of face when her chin lifted in challenge. The same gaze, as though she did not ask permission to exist.

It enraged him.

But all it took was a shift of light, a single step, a brief laugh, for another inheritance to surface—raw and impossible to ignore. Her mouth, with lips too full for Targaryen refinement, betrayed Harwin Strong without shame. Her slightly upturned nose—proud, almost provocative—held nothing of Valyria. It was earthly. Solid. Far too human.

A feature that refused to bow to the illusion of blood purity.

And her hair… her hair sealed the crime.

Long, thick, dark. Not the disciplined silver of legitimate Targaryens, but a heavy, untamed mass she made no effort to control. She never braided it as a lady should. Never properly pinned it away. She left it loose, rebellious, at the mercy of the wind—as if rules were mere suggestions meant for others. As if her very existence were a quiet affront.

That was before.

After the marriage… something broke.

The consummation had been enough—a duty fulfilled without affection, without gentleness—for everything to change. A single night had sufficed for her to conceive, as though even in that she were too inconvenient, too efficient, too quick to mark her presence.

Aemond had felt relief when he realized she had not sought him since. No attempts at closeness. No conjugal pleas. No wandering hands. He was grateful for it. He felt revulsion toward her—for her insolence, her origin, her incorrect existence—and he had no desire to touch her again.

Let her remain distant. Let her be silent.

But when her family returned to Dragonstone, leaving her alone at court, something in her dimmed.

Valia became withdrawn.

She wandered the Red Keep like a ghost, appearing in empty corridors, in courtyards at dawn, upon the battlements at dusk. She did not obey Maester Orwyle’s orders. She ignored the queen’s recommendations that she remain in her chambers. She walked alone—always alone—dragging those irritating slippers across the stone floors, as if she did not care to announce her presence—or her lack of purpose.

Pregnancy had made her more disciplined… but only with herself. Not with others.

Now, he saw her from the battlements.

Aemond stood leaning against the upper parapet, above the walled gardens, while Valia rested against one of the lower walls, facing Blackwater Bay, the open sea before her and the entire castle at her back.

She wore a dress of soft orange, almost provocative in its restraint. The fabric clung improperly to her breasts, shaping them in a way Aemond found indecorous. The neckline ran open from shoulder to shoulder, exposing too much skin for a married woman—for his wife. The sleeves, torn in a way that seemed almost negligent, fluttered in the wind.

And the wind made a point of playing with her loose hair.

The curve of her belly had begun to show—subtle, but undeniable. A clear sign of the life he had put inside her. His legacy. His mistake. His duty.

She had no dragon. She never had.

To Aemond, that was the final proof of her inadequacy. A Targaryen woman without a dragon was like a blade without an edge—decorative, useless. Dependent.

And yet there she stood, upon the battlements as if the castle belonged to her.

Aemond watched her from afar when he realized something was wrong—though he could not have said exactly what.

Valia Velaryon leaned against the stone with less steadiness than usual. The wind toyed with her dark, thick, unruly hair, and the soft orange dress clung too closely to her body. Her belly pressed faintly against the fabric, discreet but impossible to ignore—the sign of the life he had placed within her.

She looked… fragile.

The thought irritated him.

And Aegon was with her.

Drunk. Laughing loudly. Far too close.

Aemond felt his jaw tighten.

Her posture was relaxed—arms braced against the stone, face turned toward the sea. The wind tangled itself in her hair as if it had grown too familiar with her. And Aegon… Aemond knew that look. Knew that loose, undisciplined hunger, typical of a man who had never learned restraint.

And in Aemond’s mind, the blame fell where it was easiest to place.

She likes attention.
Women like her always do.
Even pregnant, she has learned no decorum.

It did not occur to him—or he refused to allow it—that perhaps she was simply too tired to notice.

Aegon Targaryen was already on his third cup when he decided that his brother’s marriage was the greatest irony the court had ever produced.

Valia Velaryon rested her forearms on the battlement, staring out at the sea as though searching for something that was not there. The late-afternoon light made her skin look even paler, almost lifeless, and that caught Aegon’s attention in a strange way. Women usually looked more… vivid. She did not. She looked drained.

He moved closer, the wine sloshing lazily in his cup, his steps slightly unsteady, claiming territory.

Married to Aemond, he thought, a crooked half-smile tugging at his mouth.
Her of all people.

Aegon had never understood that union. An arrangement born of guilt and politics, stitched together on the same day Aemond lost his eye. A bastard—dressed in Velaryon colors—handed to Alicent’s most severe son as if she were compensation.

Cruel, even by their family’s standards.

“The court’s been far too quiet lately,” he remarked, taking another sip, his gaze tracing the line of her neck down to the open curve of her neckline. “Or maybe you’re the one who’s forgotten how to make noise.”

Valia blinked slowly, as though the words took time to reach her.

“I… don’t know,” she replied. “I think it’s always been like this.”

Aegon tilted his head, watching her with the unfocused attention of a cat studying a weakened bird. The soft orange dress clung to a body that was changing, softening in unfamiliar places, and the wine in his veins turned the sight into something dirty and enticing.

“It must be strange,” he continued, his voice loose, “to be tossed around like that… Dragonstone, the Red Keep… my brother.”

He laughed under his breath.

“Especially my brother. I doubt he knows what to do with a woman beyond the obvious. And even that…” He shrugged, letting the implication linger like a bad smell.

Valia turned her face toward him, but her gaze seemed to pass straight through.

“It wasn’t a choice,” she said, as if that explained everything.

Aegon lifted his cup in a mock toast, using the motion to lean a little closer, intruding into her space.

“Marriages rarely are. But some are worse than others.”

He leaned in further, lowering his voice as though sharing a secret.

“Aemond isn’t exactly… warm.”

She took longer to respond. When she did, her words came out strangely spaced.

“He… does what is promised to him.”

Aegon found that deliciously pathetic. He took another swallow, letting the wine kindle a low, contemptible heat in his stomach.

“And you?” he asked. “Do you get what was promised to you?”

Valia seemed to lose focus for a moment. Her violet eyes narrowed, as though the world had shifted slightly out of place. She took a deep breath, and Aegon realized—too late—that something was wrong. But his perception was dulled, clouded by a lascivious curiosity.

Her discomfort, her pallor, her vulnerability… it all arranged itself into a different picture inside his drunken mind.

She leaned forward suddenly.

Toward him.

The movement was subtle, but enough for her breasts to press forward beneath the taut fabric of the dress. The wine made the gesture seem deliberate. Provocation. A poorly disguised invitation.

Aegon felt his body react before his thoughts, a quick, vulgar heat racing up his spine.

Of course, he thought, blood pounding in his ears. The neglected wife. Hungry for attention. For touch. Aemond doesn’t touch what’s his. Must be frustrating. Someone had to notice. Someone had to harvest what he refused to plant.

He smiled, confident—but then she pulled back slightly, lifting a hand to her forehead. Her fingers trembled. Her skin looked even paler now, almost gray.

From Aegon’s blurred perspective, it was confusing. The wind felt stronger. The world slower. As if everything were out of rhythm—except her form standing before him.

“Are you all right?” he asked, his voice slipping into a false sweetness that only made it sound more obscene.

Valia opened her mouth to answer.

She couldn’t.

Her body gave out all at once.

Aegon caught her on instinct, holding her upright for a moment. He felt the excessive softness of her hip beneath his hand, the press of her breasts against his chest. Her scent—sweat and something sweet—flooded his senses. His gaze dropped easily, sliding over her body the way his hands wanted to, lingering where it shouldn’t. The wine heightened everything—the smell, the warmth, the vulnerability. It was almost better this way, her limp and silent, without that sideways look that had challenged him.

For one dangerous second, he thought Aemond was a complete fool. And that his brother’s foolishness could be his amusement.

When he lifted her into his arms, a strange sensation crept in—not quite guilt, but something close to the awareness that he was touching something he should not. It was a weak awareness, drowned in alcohol and in the fleeting power of holding what belonged to the perfect brother.

That was when the shadow fell over them.

“What happened?” Aemond’s voice was dry, sharp.

Aegon turned, still holding Valia, only now registering how improper—how exposed—the gesture looked, and found his brother standing just a few steps away. The single eye swept over the scene too quickly not to have seen everything. Everything.

“She fainted…” Aegon replied, quick and defensive, an idiotic smile still tugging at his lips—the smile of someone caught but amused by it.

Aemond took a step forward.

“Put her on the bench. Now.”

The order allowed no argument.

Aegon obeyed, stepping back once Valia was laid down. In the careless movement, the skirts of her dress rode up, revealing the milky pallor of her legs, indecently exposed. His gaze lingered for a fraction of a second longer than decent before he forced himself to look away.

For the first time since approaching her, the wine was not enough to drown out the uncomfortable sense that he had crossed an invisible line.

And as he watched Aemond bend over his unconscious wife, Aegon noticed something rare.

His brother did not look merely irritated. He looked… furious, in a way that went beyond duty.

And that—despite the fear—was deeply interesting.

Aemond noticed it before he was willing to admit it.

It was not only the way Aegon lingered before letting Valia go. Nor the way his gaze had dropped too quickly—too slowly. It was something subtler, and therefore more offensive.

Desire.

Raw, poorly restrained, the kind belonging to a man who had never learned to respect boundaries. Aemond recognized it with a clarity that made his fist tighten.

Aegon had wanted her.

The realization burned like acid.

“Step away,” Aemond repeated, his voice lower now, more dangerous.

Aegon, the cup still dangling loosely from his hand, blinked as though trying to arrange the world in front of him.

“I just… she fell,” he said with a light laugh, the wrong laugh for the wrong moment. “Dramatic, isn’t she?”

Aemond did not respond. He knelt in front of the bench where Valia had been laid, ignoring his brother as though he were irrelevant.

She was far too cold for someone who had been walking under the sun. Her pale skin contrasted with the faint flush that still lingered on her face. Her dark hair spread messily across the wood, undisciplined even in unconsciousness. Aemond swallowed hard.

He placed two fingers against her pulse.

Strong. Irregular, but there.

Relief came too fast. Too violently.

Aemond knelt beside the bench and, in doing so, realized too late that when she had fallen, the skirts of her dress had ridden up.

Valia’s legs were partially exposed, pale, far too bare for the required decorum. He held his breath for a brief, irritated moment—not out of surprise, but immediate disapproval.

Aemond tugged the fabric of her dress down with more force than necessary.

The sight sparked irritation in him at once—not shock, but judgment came first.

Stupid.
No stockings. Wanders the castle like a careless servant and expects not to be looked at.

The censure came easily. Comfortably. That was how he kept his distance.

But his fingers brushed her cold skin—and the touch made him pause.

Too cold.

Aemond frowned. He leaned in a little closer, defying his own instinct to pull away. He adjusted the dress over her lap, covering what Aegon should never have seen, as though that could undo what had already happened.

She exposes herself.
She allows it.
She does not know how to behave.

Harsh thoughts clouded his judgment, yet now they sounded… insufficient.

His hand hovered over her slightly rounded belly. He should not touch it. He did not want to touch it. Still, he did. Lightly. An almost unconscious gesture.

The life he had put inside her.

“Idiot,” he whispered, unsure whether he was speaking to her or to himself. “Walks until she collapses. Disobeys orders. Doesn’t eat. As if the body didn’t matter.”

As if she didn’t matter.

Aemond pulled his hand away from her belly as though burned, irritated by the thought itself.

Concern was a luxury he could not afford.

“Is she alive?” Aegon asked suddenly, leaning in a little, far too curious. “Because if she isn’t… I think you’ve finally rid yourself of your burden, brother.”

He laughed at his own joke. The sound echoed badly.

Aemond turned his face slowly.

“Shut up,” he said, his tone so controlled it was more threatening than a shout.

Aegon raised his hands, still smiling, but there was something cautious there now.

“I’m joking,” he muttered. “By the Seven.”

Aemond turned back to Valia.

He touched her forehead. Cold. Or merely exhausted.

“Valia,” he called softly, almost against his will. “Wake up.”

Nothing.

He clenched his jaw until it hurt. He leaned closer, his voice slipping into a register he barely recognized himself.

“Valia Velaryon.”

Her lashes fluttered.

The moment was small. Infinitesimal. But Aemond felt as though something cracked inside him.

She opened her eyes slowly, confused, her violet gaze blurred as it searched for something to anchor to. When it found him, it took a second for recognition to settle.

“…Aemond?” she murmured, her voice weak, almost childlike.

His name on her lips sounded wrong. Too intimate.

“You fainted,” he replied curtly. “Stay lying down.”

Valia drew a deep breath, as though the air resisted her. She lifted a hand to her forehead, confused.

“I… felt strange.”

Aegon cleared his throat behind them.

“See? She’s alive. Pity,” he commented, laughing to himself. “I almost had hopes.”

Aemond stood.

“Go away, Aegon.”

“Now?” he asked, feigning offense. “I was just starting to enjoy the afternoon.”

Aemond took a step toward him.

“Now.”

Something in his brother’s gaze made Aegon understand that wine would not protect him this time. He raised his cup in a careless farewell.

“Take good care of her,” he said with a crooked smile. “Someone has to.”

When he finally walked away, silence fell heavily.

Aemond turned back to Valia.

She was watching him with far too much awareness for someone who had just woken. There was something in her eyes—fatigue, perhaps. Or resignation.

“You… stayed,” she said.

Aemond hesitated.

“I am your husband,” he replied, as though that explained everything.

She tried to sit up. He caught her by the shoulder—too firm to be gentle, too careful to be rough.

“No,” he said. “Not yet.”

Valia drew a deep breath, as though the air weighed too much.

“I just… feel strange.”

“Because you don’t eat,” he snapped automatically. “Because you walk as if you’re invincible. Because you ignore the Maester, ignore the queen—”

“I’m not a child,” she interrupted, weak but stubborn.

Aemond clenched his jaw. Still insolent, he thought. And, strangely, that relieved him.

“You’re pregnant,” he said more quietly. “And you just fainted. In front of my brother. In front of everyone.”

She looked away.

“I didn’t mean to cause trouble.”

Aemond let out a short, humorless laugh. “You’ve been trouble since the day you were born.”

The words came out sharper than he intended.

He saw the immediate effect on her face—the slight stiffening, the quiet closing-off. Something inside him tightened.

Irritated with himself, he took a slow breath.

“I’m taking you to Maester Orwyle,” he said at last. “Now.”

“There’s no need—”

“There is.”

But as he helped her sit up carefully, as he felt her real weight—fragile and warm beneath his hands—Aemond realized something he could no longer deny:

Hatred was no longer enough to explain why his heart was beating so fast.

He bent, sliding one arm behind her back, the other beneath her knees. When he lifted her, he felt the real weight—fragile, far too warm.

Valia stiffened for a moment.

“Aemond—”

“Don’t argue,” he cut in, but his voice did not sound as harsh as he meant it to. “Not today.”

As he walked with her in his arms, feeling her uneven breathing against his chest, Aemond realized with absolute discomfort that he no longer knew where contempt ended and protection began.

And that was the second crack.

Aemond crossed the Red Keep without slowing his stride, a silhouette of fury and urgency cutting through the corridors like a blade. The world around him blurred into stone and tapestry, but he felt the stares. Stares that clung to him like flies—ladies with fans frozen mid-motion, lords cutting off hushed conversations, servants halting in their tasks. They saw Prince Aemond, walking steel, carrying in his arms a wife pale as a banner of calamity.

A young lady of House Tyrell, near the stairs, let out a soft gasp and made a hurried curtsy. Aemond passed her as though she were furniture. An older lord, a veteran of the Stepstones War, inclined his head in respectful recognition. His eyes were ignored, the gesture unseen. A curious smile from a courtier, a quick whisper between two sisters of House Redwyne—everything was static, insignificant noise against the deafening hum inside his own head.

A “My Prince…,” offered by a knight of the Kingsguard, died in the air, unanswered. The only thing that was real—the only thing that existed—was the unbearably light weight of Valia in his arms. It enraged him. Pregnant women were not meant to seem so fragile—an automatic, harsh thought, trying to raise a wall of logic against panic—and yet he adjusted his grip instinctively every time her faint, uneven breathing faltered against his chest.

When they reached the chambers of Maester Orwyle, Aemond did not announce himself; he imposed his presence. The door flew open under the impact of his shoulder, the wood groaning in protest.

“Enter,” the old man said, lifting his eyes from the scrolls, startled at the sight of them. “Princess Valia?”

“She fainted,” Aemond replied, the words a short, charged bolt of lightning. “In the gardens.”

Orwyle moved at once, sweeping his robe aside to examine her face, her wrists, her eyelids with an efficiency born of decades of crises.

“Lay her there,” he instructed, pointing to the narrow bed.

Aemond obeyed with a care that physically irritated him, as though every measured movement were a concession his nature refused to acknowledge. He remained standing, watching, his single eye fixed on her like a lighthouse on a rock—too intense, too direct to be mistaken for indifference.

“How long has she been like this?” the maester asked.

“Wandering,” Aemond answered before he could stop himself. “Refusing rest. Ignoring orders.”

Orwyle shot him a quick, penetrating look.

“I gave clear instructions,” he said. “Rest, proper nourishment, less exertion. Her body is overburdened.”

“She does not obey,” Aemond retorted, curtly. “She never has.”

The maester pressed two fingers to Valia’s pulse, where life seemed to flutter with the lightness of a butterfly’s wing.

“This is not rebellion,” he said calmly. “It is exhaustion. And loneliness exacts its toll as well, Prince.”

The word—loneliness—struck Aemond like a low blow. It unsettled him. Deeply.

“She is stubborn,” he insisted, his voice sounding, even to his own ears, thin and obstinate. “She always has been.”

“And yet she is carrying an heir,” Orwyle replied, lifting his gaze to pin him in place. “One who will not survive if this continues.”

Silence fell heavy, filling the small chamber like a thick gas.

Aemond felt something shift inside him—not a shock, but a cold, concrete pressure, like ice forming around his sternum.

“Will she lose the child?” he asked, the words escaping before pride could censor them, before he could decide whether he wanted the answer.

Orwyle raised his eyes, and in the maester’s gaze there was no alarm—only the somber weight of probability.

“If she continues walking alone through the castle, ignoring food and rest?”—he paused deliberately, each second a nail in the coffin of a possibility—“It is a possibility.”

Aemond clenched his jaw, the muscles jumping beneath his skin. The air in his lungs felt as though it had turned to steel.

“That will not happen.”

It did not sound like a promise. It sounded like an order given to the very threads of fate, a challenge hurled at any god bold enough to hear it.
The maester nodded—not in agreement, but in acknowledgment of an unyielding will.

“Then someone must ensure that,” he said. “Someone she cannot ignore.”

Aemond did not answer. There was no need. The sentence was already seared into his mind in fire.

When Valia finally woke, consciousness returning like a slow tide, she found herself seated, propped against cushions that smelled of bitter herbs. Her face still bore the pallor of ancient parchment. And Aemond was there. Very close. Arms crossed, a commander’s stance, but his gaze… his gaze was that of a man facing an enigma that threatened to dismantle his entire fortress.

“The Meistre says you require rest,” he declared, stripping away any ground for negotiation from the very first syllable. “And someone to watch over you.”

“I am not an invalid,” she replied, weary, though the firmness beneath her voice was steel cable. “I only felt dizzy.”

“You fainted.”

“Once.”

“In public.” His pause was loaded. “Before eyes that are not ours. Before my brother.”

She looked away, a tiny retreat that cost her more than he could ever know.

“I do not like being locked away.”

Aemond inclined his head slightly, an almost imperceptible movement laden with absolute meaning.

“This is not a matter of liking.”

She met his gaze now, and in her exhausted violet eyes he saw a glint of stubborn defiance that, against all reason, sparked something dangerously close to admiration.

“Are you going to imprison me in my chambers?”

Aemond held her stare, allowing the question to linger, letting the ghost of imprisonment haunt her for a moment.

“No.”

The relief that washed over her face was brief. Sweet. And cruelly fleeting.

“But you will no longer wander alone,” he continued, each word a stone laid in the foundation of a new world. “Not through the gardens. Not along the battlements. Not down any corridor of this keep.”

“I—”

“Always accompanied,” he cut in, his voice a iron gate slamming shut. “By a maid. Or by me.”

The words did not merely hang in the air; they altered its chemistry.
Valia frowned, confusion warring with disbelief.

“By you?”

“I am your husband,” he said, and for the first time the statement seemed to carry the weight of an action, not merely a title. “And I am responsible for this.”

Her hand moved instinctively to her belly, shielding the small rise growing there.

“This?” she asked, bitterness in her voice like sour wine. “Or me?”

Aemond hesitated.
It was a fraction of a second. An infinitesimal crack in his armor of certainties. But it existed. And she saw it.

“You are not… careful with yourself,” he replied, choosing his words with the difficulty of one handling an unfamiliar and dangerous material. “And I will not allow you to be harmed through negligence.”

“Or through freedom,” she shot back, the thread of defiance still alive, still stubborn.

He closed the distance between them with a single step. Personal space became contested ground, a silent battlefield.

“Freedom is of no use to you if it destroys you,” he said, his tone hard, authoritarian, the voice of a man accustomed to being the law. But beneath it ran a new timbre, a taut string vibrating with something that was not merely control, but a deeply unsettling possession.

“From this day forward,” he concluded, the sentence being pronounced, “you will do as the maester orders. You will eat. You will rest. And you will not walk alone.”

Valia watched him in silence. Seconds dragged on, measuring the distance between capitulation and revolt across her face.

“And if I do not obey?” The question was a whisper, but heavy with challenge.

Aemond leaned in. He did not bow; it was a controlled advance. Until his face was level with hers, and she could see the lilac of his single eye burning with near-physical intensity.

“Then I will accompany you personally,” he murmured, his voice low, intimate, inescapable as a shackle. “At every step. Every breath. Every moment of solitude you believe you have claimed.”

The threat did not sound like punishment. It sounded like suffocating possession. It sounded, strangely and terribly, like protection.

Valia took a deep breath, her chest rising and falling beneath the plain fabric.

“You cannot watch me all the time.”

Aemond held her gaze, and in that lilac depth she saw no doubt—only an

absolute, terrifying resolve.

“We shall see.”

And as he stepped back, breaking a closeness that was both accusation and connection, Aemond was struck by a truth that tore the breath from his lungs:

Taking control had not been an act of mere authoritarianism. It had been an act of pure, simple panic.

Fear.

Fear of that fragile body wasting away in his arms. Fear of the silence that might replace her insolent voice. Fear of the flat emptiness where now there was the promising rise of her womb.

Fear of losing her.

And that truth, bitter and inevitable as the taste of blood, was the hardest of all to swallow.

Chapter Text

Hatred, Aemond had discovered, was an exercise in meticulous attention. To truly hate something, one had to know it in its most insignificant and absurd details. And he knew hers with a precision that enraged him.

It was impossible not to notice, for instance, the utterly careless way she treated her own head. Her hair—so dark a brown it appeared almost black by candlelight—was invariably worn loose or tied back without thought. Never, never braided with the complexity befitting a Targaryen princess. It fell rebelliously over her shoulders or slipped free from fragile arrangements, as though she despised discipline even in her own appearance.

He had seen those strands scattered across the pillow on the morning after her collapse, and felt a sharp impulse—not to smooth them, but to wind them around his fist and pull, forcing her to face order, hierarchy, him. That disarray of hair was an affront. A silent provocation.

And the freckles. Twelve. He had counted them one afternoon of mortal boredom, watching her sleep, subdued by the Maester’s potion. Twelve tiny sun-kissed marks scattered across the bridge of her nose and the apples of her cheeks, as if the light itself insisted on claiming her, even within the gloom of the Red Keep. They looked ridiculous. Childish. Entirely indifferent to the weight of the name she now bore.

Aemond despised the way, when she flushed with anger or fever, those twelve points seemed to blur together, forming a faint golden shadow across her skin. He despised even more the fact that his single eye had registered them, catalogued them, preserved them.

But the eyes—the eyes were the worst part. A violet so deep and saturated it seemed to hold the night itself within its depths, a shade not inherited, but earned through the darkness she carried inside her. They were not translucent; they were opaque, impenetrable, and yet they reflected everything—especially his own coldness, returned to him magnified and distorted by a spark of defiance that never dimmed. When she met his gaze, it was as though that dark violet absorbed all the light around them, only to release it again as a wordless challenge.

He found himself, at times, during the few forced family dinners, watching those eyes involuntarily, trying to decipher what lay behind that impenetrable color. A tactical analysis, he insisted to himself. Studying the enemy. Learning the weaknesses.

But the truth was that that dark violet unsettled him in a way no defiant stare from a lord or knight ever had. It was a silent force, a severe beauty that asked no permission, but simply existed—irritating and persistent at the edges of his awareness, until it consumed it entirely.

Aemond Targaryen realized his routine had changed the moment he began to measure it no longer by the duties of a prince, but by her.

He now woke before the sun. Not because he slept poorly—though he did—but because the silence of the early hours allowed him to organize his irritation before the world stirred. He dressed with almost ritualistic precision and left the shared chambers without so much as glancing at the door to Valia’s room. He did not need to see her to know she was there. Her presence had seeped into the stone, the air, the discipline he had once believed unbreakable.

He went straight to the training yard.

Ser Criston Cole was already waiting, sword in hand, expression neutral. Steel met steel with enough force to make his arms burn, his muscles protest. Aemond demanded more. Always more. As though he could exhaust, along with his body, the restlessness that refused to obey orders.

“You’re distracted,” Criston observed after a poorly parried blow.

Aemond answered with another attack, too fast to allow a reply.

When the training ended, he did not linger to talk. He did not watch the other men. He refused water and praise alike. He returned immediately to the chambers.

And it was always there, upon crossing the threshold, that the question imposed itself—automatic, irritating, inevitable.

“Did she eat?”

The maid startled every time, as if the question were a test she never knew how to answer with certainty.

“Yes, my prince,” she would say sometimes.

On those days, Aemond merely nodded, his jaw still tight, but the world marginally less abrasive.

Other times, however—

“Not much, my prince. Only some fruit.” Or… “She refused the broth.”

On those days, his mood deteriorated visibly. The silence turned sharp. Orders came clipped. Patience vanished.

This is about the court, he repeated to himself.

About reputation.

The scandal of her collapse still lingered like a poorly dispersed shadow. The battlements. Her body giving way. Aegon holding her before too many eyes. Eyes that judged. That whispered.

The prince who does not care for his wife.

The husband who lets her waste away.

The man who fails even at what was imposed upon him.

Aemond clenched his fists at the mere thought.

It was not concern. It could not be. It was calculation. Politics. Damage control.

If Valia fell ill, the blame would be his.

If she lost the child, the court would never absolve him.

If he appeared negligent, weak, indifferent—the mistake would be exploited, repeated, magnified.

That was all. Only that.

And yet, when the maid said she had not eaten, something cold settled in his chest, too heavy to be explained by public convenience alone.

He passed her door more often than he would admit. Stopped there. Listened. Watched. Did not enter.

I am watching her.

As I promised.

But beneath it all, an uncomfortable truth began to take shape, slow and unwanted:

The vigilance was no longer merely a response to the scandal.

It was a poorly disguised attempt to ensure that something—or someone—never slipped beyond his control again.

And Aemond Targaryen hated, above all else, not knowing whether he was still in command… or merely reacting to the fear of appearing too cruel a husband for the court—and too human for himself.

She was completing her fourth moon of pregnancy when the routine suffered a small, yet irritating, deviation.

Aemond learned of it the same way as always: through the maid, eyes lowered and hands fidgeting.

“The princess refused the meal, my prince.”

Aemond set his jaw.

Again.

He did not answer at once. He simply turned and crossed into her chambers, his stride firm, irritation hammering beneath his skin.

This was not concern. It could not be. It was discipline. Decorum. It was what would be said if it were discovered that his pregnant wife was wasting away beneath the same roof as him.

She was seated at the table when Aemond entered, the untouched plate before her like a deliberate provocation.

Her dark hair fell loose to her hips, as undisciplined as ever—a living mass that refused pins or convention. Valia regarded the food with her nose slightly lifted, faintly wrinkled, the expression of someone personally offended by what had been served to her.

The maid withdrew the moment Aemond crossed the threshold.

“Why didn’t you eat?” he asked, without preamble.

She did not look at him at once.

“Because it’s inedible.”

Aemond clenched his jaw.

“Inedible.”

She finally raised her violet eyes—cool, defiant.

“Too heavy. Too greasy. It isn’t what I eat.”

“You are not in Dragonstone,” he shot back. “And you are not in a position to demand anything.”

Valia pushed the plate away with the tips of her fingers, as though brushing aside something offensive.

“There, I ate steamed fish. Simple. Light. Here, it seems they try to drown any trace of vitality in lard and overbearing spices. Perhaps to disguise the taste of rot.”

Aemond let out a short, humorless laugh.

“Then starve.”

She blinked—surprised for half a second, too quick to pass for weakness.

“Perhaps that’s for the best,” she replied coolly. “That way you’ll finally be rid of me.”

The words were venom. Direct. Calculated.

And Aemond felt the impact as if struck square in the sternum.

“Do not test my patience,” he said, voice low and sharp. “You are not as important as you think.”

“Neither are you,” she returned.

The silence that followed was dense, electric.

Aemond stared at the plate. Then at the still-discreet swell of her belly beneath the fabric of her dress. Then, irritated with himself, he turned away abruptly.

“Do as you wish.”

He left before he could say something worse, or something different.

The kitchens of the Red Keep quieted when he entered.

“Prepare steamed fish for Princess Valia,” he ordered. “No sauces.”

The cook hesitated.

“But, my prince—”

“It’s the Meistre’s order,” Aemond cut in.

He offered no further explanation. He did not need to.

When the new tray was brought to Valia’s chambers, Aemond did not enter. He remained outside, arms crossed, his expression set in pure irritation.

Or so it seemed.

Inside the room, Valia stared at the steaming fish for a long moment. Then a small, almost imperceptible smile curved her lips.

She ate.

And only then did Aemond move away.

Spoiled.

Insolent bastard.

Valia slipped out unnoticed on a morning when the castle was still waking slowly.

Aemond realized it through absence—always through absence. Through the empty room, the overly nervous maid, the silence that did not fit the newly imposed routine. Irritation came hot and immediate, a reflex as old as pride itself.

Stubborn. Insolent. Ungrateful.

He found her in a side corridor, near the tall windows overlooking the inner courtyard.

Valia walked without haste, as if she were breaking no rule at all. She wore a simple blue dress—too closed to provoke, too discreet for scandal. A soft blue, nearly muted, like the sky at dusk. Even so, Aemond noticed—he always noticed—that it was far more decent than the dress she had worn the day she collapsed into Aegon’s arms, too exposed, too vulnerable, watched by far too many eyes.

It did nothing to calm him.

Her dark hair fell long and unruly down her back, as if it refused to obey any rule—just like her. Her violet eyes, when they turned to him, did not apologize. There was a quiet defiance there that irritated him more than any open affront ever could.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he asked, his voice low, dangerous.

She turned slowly, unstartled.

“Walking.”

“Without informing anyone.”

“There was nothing to inform.” A brief pause. Then the truth slipped out, simple and tired. “There is nothing for me to do. I am alone all day.”

The word slipped in where it should not have.

Alone.

Aemond frowned, unsettled—by her, by the answer, by himself.

“Ladies-in-waiting can be arranged,” he said dryly, erasing any trace of empathy. “A dozen of them, if necessary. To talk, to embroider, to be bored together. That way you won’t wander, and you won’t force me to divert my attention from matters that actually matter.”

Valia hesitated, and the hesitation was more revealing than a refusal.

“I… don’t know anyone here. It would only be more people watching me.”

The relief Aemond felt was instant, visceral, and deeply irritating. Exactly, he thought. Fewer eyes. Less interference. Fewer people standing between them—this thing of two he neither understood nor wished to name.

“Then we will walk together,” he said, as if it were a purely practical, administrative decision. “Every day.”

She looked at him, openly surprised.

“You would do that?”

“Do not mistake it for kindness,” he replied. “It is supervision.”

And yet, from that day on, it became habit.

Valia broke her fast—sometimes by insistence, sometimes simply because he waited—and then they walked.

The gardens, where she seemed to breathe more easily, as if the green anchored her.

The library, where she touched the books with near-reverence.

Helaena’s chambers, where the children welcomed her without reserve, clinging to her skirts, laughing—oblivious to titles, blood, or bastardy.

The hall.

The king’s chambers, where he wished to see his granddaughter, his heavy hand resting for a moment on the still-discreet swell of Valia’s belly, assessing what was growing there.

On one of those walks, Vhagar crossed the sky.

The colossal shadow covered them for an instant, and Valia stopped, face lifted, violet eyes wide, reflecting immensity.

“She’s enormous.”

Aemond felt pride swell in his chest—followed immediately by the automatic, almost comfortable disdain.

No dragon. No bond. Not the right blood to understand what that meant.

“Vhagar is not meant for unprepared eyes,” he said. “She does not tolerate weakness.”

Before Valia could respond, Aegon appeared as he always did—unannounced, wearing a smile that came far too easily.

“She is frightening,” he remarked. “But if you want something more beautiful than terrifying, you should see Sunfyre. He enjoys an audience.”

As he spoke, Aegon placed his hand on Valia’s back, just below her shoulder blades—a gesture too casual to be innocent. Too familiar. Too close.

Aemond’s body reacted before thought could intervene.

Disrespect.

Always assuming he can touch.

Always treating women as available ornament.

Valia stepped half a pace away—almost imperceptibly—and turned to Aemond.

“I would like to go to the beach,” she said. “I miss the sea. Dragonstone.”

“No,” he answered without hesitation.

Aegon laughed, leaning toward her.

“I can take you.”

“No,” Aemond repeated, now fixing his gaze on his brother. “I will take her.”

The silence that followed was dense, charged.

Valia stared at him, clear surprise on her face.

“You?”

“Yes,” he said. “When I decide.”

It was not a concession.

It was not kindness.

But Aemond knew, with a clarity that irritated him deeply, that no one else would be permitted to lead her anywhere at all.

Three days later, at dusk, he took her to the beach.

Aemond chose the hour with strategic precision: twilight, when the castle turned inward toward suppers and naps.

The damp sand, exposed by the low tide, clung to the soles of his fine boots with an insistence he despised. Everything there was disorder—the salty, primitive scent, the incessant and chaotic murmur of the waves, the open vastness that defied control.

Valia walked beside him in silence, wearing a simple wine-colored dress, modest and closed. She breathed deeply, as if trying to store the salt air within herself. Her face, lit by the last light of day, looked different—less a wall, more an open landscape.

When the line of white foam licked the firmer sand, she stopped.

“May I go in?” she asked, her voice nearly swallowed by the roar of the waves.

“No,” he cut in, the answer a reflex of his iron will. “It’s dangerous. The water is cold. You are not in any condition.”

“Just for a moment,” she insisted, turning to him. There was no provocation in her gaze, only a deep, bare need. “Only to my ankles. Just to feel it.”

“No.”

“Please.” The word, whispered, had the rough texture of genuine supplication. It was a breach in her defenses, a moment of weakness she rarely allowed herself.

Aemond stared at her, his mouth a hard line. Logic railed against it. Yet denying her something so simple, so visceral, in that stolen moment felt like a petty tyranny.

“To your knees,” he conceded, the words falling like stones. “Not a centimeter more.”

She did not argue the terms. With quick, decisive movements, she untied the laces of her bodice and slipped out of the dress, folding it carefully over a smooth rock before he could protest. She remained only in her raw linen shift, a simple rectangle of fabric that covered her from shoulders to ankles. Without the structure of the dress, the truth of her body beneath the thin cloth became unavoidable: the gentle curve of her belly, the waist still trying to hold its shape, the line of her hips.

“That is indecent,” he growled, discomfort flaring hot beneath his own clothes.

“It’s just a shift,” she replied, without looking at him. “And there’s no one to see.” Before his objection could turn into an order, she turned and stepped into the water.

Aemond stood rigid, arms crossed tightly, watching every movement. She advanced cautiously, lifting the shift to above her knees. The cold water made her shiver, a visible tremor running down her back. She stopped where the waves broke just below her kneecaps. For a moment, she obeyed.

Then, as if pulled by a force greater than her promise, she took another step. The water rose, wrapping around her thighs. The linen began to cling to her wet skin.

“Valia.” His voice was a warning, distant thunder.

She did not seem to hear. Another step. The water now struck her waist, soaking the lower half of the shift completely. The low, golden light of sunset shone through the drenched fabric.

“Come back. Now.” The order was not a request.

She glanced back, the water foaming around her. “Just a little deeper,” she whispered, almost to herself, and took another step.

That was when the water reached her chest.

Aemond moved forward, boots sinking into the wet sand at the water’s edge. “I said enough!”

From that closer distance, the sight became a brutal revelation. The white linen, now fully saturated, had turned translucent like frosted glass.

The amber light of dusk, filtered through saltwater, illuminated what lay beneath with obscene clarity.

He saw not only the curves of her hips and thighs, but the rounded, heavy shape of her breasts, molded by the clinging fabric. Her nipples visible as shadows through the wet veil, the full, softened contours that pregnancy had already begun to alter—making them more generous, more vulnerable. It was the most complete intimacy, offered not by desire, but by accident and disobedience.

A violent, immediate wave of heat surged through Aemond, pooling low in his belly, pressing shamefully against the leather of his trousers.

Blind fury followed—at her, for this involuntary exposure that was more erotic than any calculated nakedness; at his own body, which reacted with the same animal instinct he despised so deeply in others.

It was pure desire, tangled with hatred, sharpened by an acidic thought: She knows. She must know. What kind of woman exposes herself like this? What perverse instinct drives her to display this fecundity, this flesh that is now also my property?

“You will come out of that water now,” his voice came out rough, laden with a rage that threatened to spill over, “or I swear by the Gods I will drag you out myself.”

This time, the threat in his voice cut through her maritime rapture. She hesitated, the water beating against her torso, her face torn between stolen freedom and the fear she saw in his eyes. Slowly, she began to return.

Each step was torture for him. The transparent shift revealed everything: the sway of her breasts with each movement, the contraction of her thigh muscles as she braced against the current, the rounded belly. She emerged from the water trembling, the linen clinging to every inch of her skin from the waist up, sculpting her torso, the curve of her belly, the fullness of her breasts. Salty droplets ran through the valley between her breasts, down the center line of her abdomen.

Aemond did not offer her shelter. He tossed the dress into her arms.

“Get dressed,” he ordered, his voice a blade of ice. “You have no sense, no respect for yourself, nor for what you carry. This will never happen again.”

She took the dress with trembling hands, lips blue from the cold, but her gaze did not lower. There was wounded dignity in her posture, even soaked and exposed.

“Thank you,” she murmured, and the word sounded strange, like an unasked-for absolution. “For letting me remember.”

He turned away, unable to bear the sight for another second. The image, however, was etched into him—the transparent linen, the heavy breasts beneath the fabric, pale skin lit by amber dusk.

The walk back to the castle passed in silence, heavy with desire he mistook for contempt, and with possession he felt more as a sentence than a privilege.

Chapter Text

Aemond woke before the sun, as always.
In the courtyard still cold with dawn, his sword cut through the air with almost cruel precision. Each strike was meant to silence the mind. It almost worked.

Because the sea insisted.

The image came unbidden.

Her body among the waves. The shift clinging to her belly, revealing curves that should never have been seen. Her black hair soaked through, heavy, streaming from her neck down to her hips. Her full lips tinged blue from the cold. Her dark eyes swallowed by the twilight.

His jaw tightened and he struck with too much force.

By the time the sun rose, he was composed once more.

After training, as part of the routine they had created without ever naming it, he went to fetch her.

Valia left her chambers with only a slight delay, but enough to irritate him. They walked through the gardens of the Red Keep in silence. The sound of her slippers dragging across the stone floor followed him like a constant insult.

“Walk properly,” he said, without looking at her.

“I am walking,” she replied, simple, almost distracted.

He scoffed. Always dragging her feet. Always touching things. As if the world belonged to her.

The letter arrived that morning.

The messenger bore the seal of Dragonstone. Aemond did not open it. He handed the parchment to Valia.

“It’s for you.”

She broke the seal with restrained haste. Read. And smiled.

A smile far too open.

“My brother was born,” she said, her voice rising despite herself. “Viserys. He… he was born healthy.”

Aemond inclined his head slightly.

“As expected.”

Then the smile faded.

Chapter Text

Silence came like the ebbing tide.

After the necklace and the cat, something in Valia gave way. It was not surrender, Aemond realized, but a quiet calculation. She had finally understood that her theater of pain would not take her back to Dragonstone. That the walls of the Red Keep were as real as the coastal rocks over which she had wept.

The calm that followed was almost more unsettling than the storm. She allowed the maids to bathe her, not protesting when they rubbed rose oil into her pale skin. She let them comb her hair — though she refused to tie it up, letting it dry loose as always, a final concession to her own nature. She began to eat, little by little, although Aemond noticed, through discreet reports, that she set aside part of the chicken broth for the black-and-white cat. The animal, in turn, began sleeping curled up on her bed, and Aemond had once heard her whisper a name to him: “Jonquil.”

A ridiculous name for a beast.

One morning, she left the room without warning. Aemond learned of it from a guard, and a chill ran down his spine before reason prevailed: she had nowhere to run. He found her in the inner garden, sitting on a stone bench beneath a trellis. Jonquil was in her lap, purring as she stroked the black fur.

He stopped a few paces away, expecting rebellion, a look of defiance.

Valia merely lifted her eyes. Their violet was dull, like the sky before rain. "He has never seen the real sun," she said, her voice low. "Only cold stones. I thought I could bring him here."

It was a childish request. Absurd. And yet, what came from Aemond's mouth was not a reprimand. It was a simple, almost imperceptible, nod. "Do not let him dig up the herbs."

She did not smile. But her fingers sank a little deeper into the cat's fur. And he turned his back and left her there, with her beast and her stolen ray of sunlight. The relief he felt was bitter, but it was real.

From then on, a fragile truce settled. Aemond still fetched her for their walks, but the silence between them was now less cutting, more laden with things unsaid. He observed her from a distance, and his eye – always his one, damned eye – betrayed him. It traced the simple neckline of her day dresses, remembering with obscene clarity that afternoon by the sea, the clinging shift, the shape of her breasts, now fuller. The sight gave him an uncomfortable heat low in his belly, which he immediately transformed into rage. Rage at her, for being so… visible. Rage at himself, for noticing.

And then, there was the belly.

Whenever she passed a hand over her womb, an unconscious, protective gesture, an acid remorse burned Aemond's throat. Bastard. He had called her a bastard, had said the child would be just another bastard for the world. A lie. A cruel lie told to wound, to mark territory in the silent war between them.
The child was his. Pure Targaryen. His heir. The guilt was a dull weight in his chest, a weight he would never confess. Sometimes, at night, in the silence of his own chambers, he caught himself wondering if the babe would be a girl with silver hair or a boy who looked like Lucerys.

The tournament in honor of Prince Maelor's second name day approached, and with it, the firm hand of Queen Alicent.

"She will not appear like a shepherd girl in rags," Alicent said to Aemond, her voice brooking no discussion. "She is your wife. The mother of your son. She will represent House Targaryen with decorum."

On the day of the tournament, when Aemond went to fetch her, he stood in the doorway for a long moment.

The Queen had done her work. Valia was dressed in a gown of the finest forest-green satin, the deep green that was Alicent's mark. The dress was skillfully cut, with a tightly fitted bodice that flared into wide sleeves and a full skirt. It was tight in a specific way – snug over the breasts, which were lifted and molded by the fabric, then flowing smoothly downward, masterfully disguising any swell of the womb. Her hair, for the first time since he had known her, was completely bound up. Intricately braided and pulled back, away from her face, revealing the bare line of her jaw, her long neck, her pale, high cheekbones.

She looked like a stranger. A perfect, cold Targaryen princess.

Aemond felt a wave of distaste. Not because she was ugly – far from it. The green, however, was the wrong color. It fought with her violet eyes, making them strangely pale. He remembered, against his own will, the greyish-blue dress she had worn at the first feast, the color of a new moon that suited her melancholy. He remembered the purple silk that enhanced the warm tone of her skin. Even that obscene, almost vulgar orange dress she had worn the day she fainted into Aegon's arms – it had life. It had her.

This green was armor. And the braids… the braids irritated him profoundly. Not because she looked more beautiful with her hair loose and wild – he refused to admit she was beautiful in any way – but because that braided perfection was an ornament for noble blood. For her to wear it seemed an affront, a bastard pretending to be something her blood did not deserve. It was a disguise, and a poorly fitting one.

But what disturbed him most was the tight bodice. The way the fabric stretched over her breasts, accentuating the curve he tried not to see. It wasn't desire he felt. It was discomfort. Inappropriateness. Everyone would look. They would think his wife was showy, vulgar. That he had no control over her presentation. And as his eye traced the line of the dress, seeking, almost obsessively, the curve of the belly he knew was there, he could not find it. No matter how much he narrowed his eye, the dress's clever cut denied the existence of his child. That erasure, that green lie, enraged him in a deep and confusing way.

"The Queen commanded it," Valia said, without emotion, when his gaze settled on her. She did not look comfortable. She looked like a dressed statue.

"I see," Aemond replied, his voice rougher than he intended. "Let us go. The King awaits."

The royal gallery was a sea of colors, laughter, and the metallic sound of armor. Valia sat beside him, rigid, her hands resting in her lap, her fingers tightly interlaced. Jonquil, of course, had been left behind.

Aemond tried to focus on the jousts. On the brutal impacts, the strategy, the strength. But his attention was an unguided blade, always returning to her. To the immobile profile, the controlled breathing, the way she blinked with each particularly violent clash.

The tournament followed its violent course. Blood already stained the sand in a few places. Valia grew a little paler each time, but held firm.

Until it happened.

It was during a particularly fierce joust between two knights of minor houses. One man's lance shattered not on the shield, but on the join of his opponent's armor, near the neck. A sharp splinter or a twisted piece of metal found a weak point. The stricken knight staggered and fell from his courser, and when the squires ran to him and turned him over, a scarlet jet gushed forth, soaking the pale sand. It was a shocking amount, a living river of red that seemed to have no end.

A murmur of horror swept through the crowd.

Aemond felt the body beside him shudder. He turned.

Valia was white as chalk. Her violet eyes, so dull before, were now desperately fixed on the spreading pool of blood in the arena. Her parted mouth tried to suck in air that would not come. Her fingers gripped the arms of her chair, her knuckles white.

"Valia," he said, softly, an order.

She did not hear. Her gaze was glazed, lost in the red. Her chest, constricted by the green dress, rose and fell in short, irregular hitches. Aemond saw her eyes roll back, consciousness escaping like water through fingers.

He acted before he thought. His hand – the hand that wielded the sword, the hand that gripped her firmly during their walks – closed over her wrist, beneath the table where no one could see. The pressure was strong, almost painful, an anchor of flesh and bone in the middle of her sea of horror.

"Look at me," he hissed, his voice a thread of command in her ear.

Her eyes, full of panic, dragged up to his. They found the single eye, cold, hard, unyielding. A rock against the wave of nausea.

"Breathe," he ordered, each word a dry blow. "Now."

She gasped, a ragged sound. She clutched his wrist like a drowning person. The pressure of her fingers was frantic.

"The knight will be seen to," Aemond continued, lying with absolute conviction. The man was likely already dead. "It is just blood. Breathe."

He did not let go. He remained there, his wrist trapped in hers, a furtive and brutal connection under the table, while the shouts of the maesters echoed in the arena and Queen Alicent made a gesture for the tournament to proceed. While the world around them rearranged itself around the spectacle of death, he held her to life with the force of his own contempt and something more, something he refused to name.

Valia did not faint. Color began to return slowly to her lips, but the tremor in her hands remained. She did not remove her fingers from his wrist. And he, Prince Aemond Targaryen, did not remove his hand.

They remained there, bound by horror and necessity, while the sun shone on the blood in the sand and on the green satin that hid their child. The tournament continued, but for Aemond, the only battle that mattered had already been fought and, in some strange and twisted way, won.

The hall was already thinning when Aegon decided to choose his audience more carefully.

The women had left some time ago, followed by the older lords. Only a handful of men remained — among them, two Hightower knights, direct cousins of the queen, seated nearby, far too attentive and sober to miss a single word spoken there.

Aegon leaned against the table, his cup always full, wearing the crooked smile of someone who knew exactly what he was doing.

“Tell me, brother,” Aegon said, loud enough for both Hightowers to hear, “how is your marriage bed?”

One of the queen’s cousins exchanged a quick, visibly uncomfortable glance with the other.

Aemond remained still.

“Cold, I imagine,” Aegon continued, swirling his wine. “Or is she still performing that little injured-damsel act?”

Silence.

“Because, you see,” he added, now clearly addressing the two knights, “villainy tends to come with certain… excesses. One moment they pretend to be fragile, the next their bodies speak for themselves.”

Neither of them laughed.

“Those breasts,” Aegon went on, with not a hint of decorum, “are anything but discreet. They grew too fast for someone who should know how to hide. Pregnancy does that, I suppose.”

One of the Hightowers cleared his throat, stiff.

“And the legs…” Aegon smiled, leaning forward. “White as milk. I saw them very clearly when she fainted the other day. Hard not to notice. Hard not to comment.”

The air grew heavy.

The blow landed before anyone could react.

Aegon laughed, spitting a bit of wine, more surprised than hurt.

“Well, well,” he murmured. “The loyal brother.”

Aemond was already stepping back.

He said nothing more.

The walk to his chambers felt far too short to contain the fury burning in his chest.

When he pushed open the door to his chambers, the warmth of the hearth hit him. And she was there. His wife. In his space. Sitting before the fire like a tamed intruder.

The green tourney dress lay in deliberate disarray. The bodice loosened. Her pale, bare shoulders catching the dancing light. The ceremonial braids undone. Her black hair fell like a cloak of rebellion over her skin. She was a living desecration of everything he should have loathed, here, in the sanctuary of his austerity.

He crossed the solar. She turned, sensing his presence. Her violet eyes, large and inheriting the Usurper’s legacy, widened. Her full lips parted.

“Ae—”

He did not let her finish saying his name.

Grabbing her was an act of war. One hand on the back of her neck, sinking into the soft, loose hair that defied order. The other on the curve of her waist, above the gentle swell of her belly — his child. He lifted her from the bench and pulled her against him in one fluid, brutal movement.

The kiss that followed was not a kiss. It was an attack. A claim made with mouth, teeth, and tongue. He invaded, and she — confused, shocked — accepted the invasion. Her lips, after a moment of petrified stillness, moved under his. Not with tenderness, but with a restrained fury that echoed his own. Her hands rose, grabbing the shoulders of his tunic, pulling him closer with a force that surprised him. It was surrender and combat at once.

He pushed her against the cold stone wall, his body a solid block of heat and dominance against hers. His hand — the same one that had wielded a sword hours before — slid beneath the loose dress. He found the thin nightgown, the fabric damp with sweat trapped between their bodies. It passed over the curve of her belly, feeling the firm roundness beneath his palm — their daughter. Then it went lower.

The legs. The cursed, condemned legs. He felt them bare, stockingless, soft and cold under his fingers. Milky legs, Aegon’s voice hissed in his mind. Fury mingled with a desire so overwhelming it felt like poison. His hand squeezed her thigh, and a muffled moan escaped her against his mouth.

He broke the kiss, panting. His eyes met hers, wide, glazed with confusion and something else — a dark, wet gleam. Her lips were red, swollen, marked by him. He looked down. The green dress had slipped further. Beneath it, the linen nightgown was tied with a simple knot at the front, centered between her breasts.

With a sharp motion, he pulled the tie. The knot came undone. The fabric parted, revealing her breasts. Full, heavy, dark nipples, tense against pale skin. Breasts that grew with each passing day. Aegon again. Desire and hatred intertwined in his chest, inseparable.

She did not move to cover herself. She just stared, breathless, eyes fixed on his, her body offering a silent and devastating surrender.

He looked, and then his mouth descended.

Not to her lips — to her chin. He kissed the bony tip, then gently nibbled along her jawline, feeling the small tremor that ran through her body. His mouth traveled down her neck, kissing, sucking, leaving little pink marks on her pale skin. Valia tilted her head back, offering more access, a stifled moan vibrating in her throat.

“Please…” she whispered, not knowing what she was asking for.

His mouth continued downward, passing over her collarbone, until it met the upper curve of her breast. He hesitated for a moment — a moment of lucidity — and then his mouth closed around a nipple.

Valia let out a low moan, sinking her hands into his silver hair, not to push him away, but to keep him there. He sucked, first gently, then with more pressure, feeling the nipple harden even more against his tongue. His other hand found the opposite breast, his thumb tracing slow circles around the areola, feeling the skin shiver under his touch.

It was then that he felt — with a painful clarity — the ties of his own pants. They were tight, restraining the unsustainable, aching growth pressing against the fabric. Every movement of his mouth, every muffled moan from Valia, every arching of her body against his, tightened that restriction further, turning it into sharp torture.

He moved to the other breast, his mouth now more urgent, more hungry. He gently nibbled the nipple before sucking it, and Valia let out a hoarse cry, her legs giving way for a moment. He held her against the wall, his own body trembling with the effort to restrain himself.

It was poison. The taste of her skin, the scent of lavender and sweat, and something inherently hers intoxicated his senses. Lust, pure and animalistic, masked the hatred, dissolving it into something more primal. She had bewitched him. That bastard, that daughter of the wrong woman, with her treacherous body and her belly carrying his future.

This is madness, he thought, as his mouth moved. This is perdition.

But he did not stop. He could not. His hands left her breasts and moved downward. One grabbed the hem of the dress, found the hem of the open nightgown, and then — skin. The bare skin of her thigh. It was softer than any silk.

His other hand slid down the side of her body, over the curve of her belly, until it met the other thigh. He squeezed, feeling her legs tremble.

And all of it — the taste of her in his mouth, the feel of her skin under his hands, the sounds she made — made the ties of his pants an unbearable prison. A sharp, concentrated pain that competed for attention with everything else.

He stopped suddenly.

His mouth left her breast. His hands left her thighs. He stood there, panting, his face inches from hers, her breasts exposed and wet with his saliva between them.

Valia opened her eyes, blurred and disoriented.

He looked at her — completely undone, completely hers — and felt not triumph, but terror. Terror at what he had almost done. Terror at what he still wanted to do.

The pants’ ties were cutting into his flesh, a physical reminder of the loss of control that was a hair’s breadth away.

Without a word, he stepped back. Two steps back, his face a mask of conflict.

She reached out a trembling hand.

“Aemond, wait—”

He punched the stone wall. The impact made his arm vibrate up to his shoulder, and the pain was a brutal, welcome relief.

He turned and left, the door opening and closing behind him with a final thud.

Inside the room, Valia slid down the wall to the floor, her breasts still exposed, her skin still marked, her body still trembling from his touch. Outside, in the hallway, Aemond’s footsteps echoed — fast, furious, as he fought against the ties that bound him and against other ties, far more dangerous, that he felt closing around something he dared not name.

Chapter Text

He had come to call it an incident.

The word was a shield. A dry description for a moment of combustion. Incident did not carry her taste still lingering in his mouth—sweet and bitter like spoiled wine. It did not explain the shiver that ran through his body when she arched against him, as if it were possible to fuse hatred and possession into a single gesture. Incident was a lapse in strategy. A moment of blindness.

His right hand ached. A deep, insistent throb that accompanied every strike in the training yard. The maester had spoken of swelling, of strained tendons. A courteous lie.The pain did not come from the wall.

It came from the clenched fist that had met Aegon’s face. The clean, bone-on-bone impact—satisfying. The muffled sound of flesh giving under his force. He felt it again, the reverberation of the punch climbing his arm, an echo of the fury that had exploded when his brother’s words crossed a line he hadn’t even known he was guarding. Aegon had kept his right eye purple and swollen for a week—a misuse of his House’s colors, as his mother, pale with rage, had told him. Lord Otto, with a merchant’s chill, had spoken of “consequences” and “appearances.” To defend a bastard’s honor with violence, he had said, was to trade gold for copper.

His hand hurt because he had used it to defend what was his. A stupid reflex. An exposed weakness. To defend her. The bastard. The inconvenience. And now he bore the weight of his mother’s silent reprimand and his grandfather’s calculated disappointment, along with the physical pain.

Steel sang through the air, a cold sound seeking to cut the heat of memory. He rolled his wrist in a Bravos maneuver, and the pain sharpened, becoming a fitting punishment. How could he? How could he allow himself to be so ensnared by a… stubborn bastard? Even his hatred of her was now tainted. It was no longer pure. It had layers; it tasted of the salt on her skin; it held the memory of the force with which she had pulled him closer, surrendering to the struggle.

Witchcraft.

The most logical explanation. How could something so visceral, so uncontrolled, spring from such an… unworthy source? She did not pray. She looked away from the stained glass, as if the Seven were a tedious story. She had twelve freckles on her nose—he had counted them, one sleepless night, tracing the constellation of her vulgarity. She did not have the breeding to be a temptation. It had to be magic. A rustic, effective spell.

Because it could not be desire.

It could not be that specific memory: her hair, black as a starless night, undone and enveloping, falling across his face as she looked at him, breathless, after the punch thrown in her defense. A look that was not gratitude, but something more complex—something that dared him to understand. It could not be the way her hands, surprisingly firm, had gripped his doublet that night, not to push him away, but to anchor him in the maelstrom he himself had begun. The curve of her belly, already visible, pressing against him—his heir, his guilt, his diluted future.

Her scent—lavender and something tart-sweet—the tea for nausea, always the tea. Always fragile. Always complaining.

And yet, in that moment, she had not seemed fragile. She had seemed a contained storm.

He closed his single eye, letting the sword sag. His hand throbbed, a pulsing reminder of his double failure: first, for touching her. Then, for defending her. The latter was perhaps the worse. It revealed a bond—an instinct of possession that transcended contempt—and it had cost him the approval of the only allies who truly mattered.

She was a presumptuous bastard. A political error that smelled of lavender. A stain on his lineage that would produce dark-eyed children, the eternal target of courtly whispers. Whispers that began with her and, by osmosis, reached him. They weakened him.

The incident—the punch, the wall, all of it—had been pure weakness. A crack in his armor. And the price had been a blackened eye on a king, the disapproval of his mentors, and this constant pain, hammering the memory of his loss of control.

The blame, he decided as the pain in his hand surged to a new peak, was hers. For existing. For making a fist trained to wield steel and command dragons close in defense of her tarnished honor, at such cost. For bewitching him with a magic made of tousled hair, eyes too large, and a stubbornness that looked far too much like courage.

The blame was entirely hers. He repeated it like a mantra, striking the air with his sword, trying to turn physical pain into a wall against a far more dangerous confusion.

After the spectacle a few weeks earlier—locked in her chambers, refusing food, baths, orders—he had assumed it was because she had finally accepted that she would not be returned to Dragonstone.
She had nowhere to flee. She had no dragon.

He had given her space.

He had instructed only that the maid inform him if she stopped eating. Not out of concern—but because a sick wife was inconvenient. A weakened pregnant woman might produce a frail heir, and that would indeed be his problem.

When he sought her out again, expecting the usual resentment, that ember of insolence that always warmed them with its unpleasant heat, he found… cold air.

She answered questions with surgical precision. Never asked any in return. Never provoked. Never cast a glance beyond what was strictly necessary. She was present, but untouchable. Completely… self-sufficient.

He convinced himself it was a relief. Silence was preferable to unruly chatter. The absence of complaints, a luxury. He would no longer need to correct her in public, nor drag her into fulfilling obligations. Now, she fulfilled them. Impeccably.

She began to attend events with irreproachable punctuality, a well-dressed, silent shadow. In the halls, she spoke with lords of the Stormlands about harvests with a bored serenity, praised tapestries from Lannisport with empty adjectives, listened to the stories of older ladies with a patience so perfect it was almost insulting. When the queen requested her presence in the sept, she went—head inclined, hands clasped, lips moving in prayers he doubted ever reached her heart.

She behaved like a princess. A perfect phantom of one.

Now, Valia had begun to pin her hair—not in the elaborate braids of noblewomen in King’s Landing, but with a simple brooch at the back of her head, just enough to keep the strands from falling into her face.
Aemond did not like it.

Not because she looked like some folk divinity when her dark hair framed her features, loose and untamed, but for the opposite reason: the more covered she was, the less he had to face that face—and the weaker the almost involuntary temptation to reach out and brush aside the locks that insisted on provoking him.

She dressed like one. The simple, practical gowns gave way to more refined silhouettes—not excessively puffed like those of ladies born in the Red Keep, but flowing, with delicate cuts at the sleeves, fabrics that moved as she walked as if she glided upon her own dignity.

Red, often. A deep red that hurt the eyes like a living reminder of Rhaenyra. A silent affront he chose to ignore, as a matter of strategy.

Summer teal, light as a sea breeze.

Pale silk pink, almost ethereal.

Green velvet for cold days—not Hightower green, but a lighter, softer shade that belonged to no house but her own.

A declaration of independence in the form of color.

And orange. He hated orange. More than once, he had thought of ordering it burned so he would never again see the reminder of her, unbalanced and vulnerable, in the arms of his drunken brother.

But the purple…

Purple was his favorite. Not that he would admit such a thing. He merely noted it, with the clinical eye of a strategist. Thin straps, bare arms, fabric molding to the growing curve of her belly—his heir. The color made her eyes seem brighter, deeper. Her dark hair stood out like ink on pale parchment, a deliberate contrast.

It was only a pragmatic thought, suddenly: he wondered whether Jason Lannister might notice a few coins disappearing from the treasury to commission more of that shade. And, in an even more absurd reverie, whether there existed fabric in the exact color of her hair.

Ridiculous.

She had learned to navigate the corridors with a studied grace, a silent ballet that transformed her once-hurried walk into something worthy of a tapestry. She stopped when ladies intercepted her, a civilized smile hovering on her lips as she allowed foreign hands to rest upon her rounded belly—already completing the fifth moon. She inclined her head to the murmured blessings, to the wishes of health and beauty for the baby, and even laughed, a light, controlled sound, perfectly suited to the hall.

But with him?

Cold as a wall.

Always ready. Now already dressed when he returned from training. Her beast, Jonquil, brushed against her heels like a living shadow, as if it too had chosen a side.

She answered. If he asked about her day, about her health, about some courtly triviality, the words came—precise, polished, and completely empty. She never initiated a conversation.

Never asked him a question beyond what was necessary. Never pressed a subject, never intruded, never troubled him.

It was better this way. It was the peace he had desired. Silence was a reward, not a punishment. The absence of her noisy slippers on the flagstones, the end of her impulsive remarks—it was freedom. It was what a man like him deserved: order instead of chaos.

King’s Landing exhaled its damp soul: salt, rotting fish, tar, and the promise of distant places. It was in the shadow of a warehouse, where the stench was strongest, that Aemond saw her.

Valia, surrounded not by courtiers, but by Jaehaerys and Jaehaera. She was keeping the promise made to the twins, her hands passing pieces of stale bread to their eager little hands. Crumbs fell like dirty snow onto the gray water, and the fish thrashed in a silvery frenzy. The twins laughed—a rare, fragile sound that dissolved into the salty air.

Jonquil was not there. He is ill, Valia had told the children.

Aemond knew it was a lie.

The feline beast lay in her chambers, atop the softest blankets, stuffed with the fish that was meant to nourish only her and the heir she carried.

Days earlier, in a rare moment of carelessness, she had let the fear slip: that her nephews’ dragons, Morghul and Shrykos, might devour her beast.

But there, in the harbor, there was no fear. He watched, unmoving, as she crouched with surprising grace despite her rounded belly. She guided the twins’ pale little hands to her own abdomen, where their small palms spread against the fabric of her dress. Then her laughter escaped—not the courteous smile of the halls, but a clear, unguarded sound that cut through the harbor’s murmur and floated over the water like something alive.

Five moons.

The baby already responded to touch, he imagined.

Something tightened inside him.

Irritating.

The light of dusk stained the chambers a somber amber when Aemond pushed the door open. He had come to fetch her for the banquet, a conjugal duty as empty as the corridors he had crossed.

She stood by the window, already ready. Her hair fell loose, a dark cascade that made her look like a sorceress stepped out of an old tale. Between her breasts, Vhagar’s tooth rested like an intimate trophy.
The purple dress he favored covered her like living twilight, the color so deep it nearly swallowed the torchlight.

The absence of movement, of any final preparation, was itself a provocation. It was as if she had been standing there for hours, waiting.
Not for him, but for the precise moment he would appear, to demonstrate that nothing in her depended on his arrival.

“You’re ready,” he said, more a statement than a question.

She finally turned. Her face was serene, the soft light erasing the freckles, deepening her violet eyes.

“Yes.”

The word was simple, complete. There was no “almost,” no “just one thing left.” Just a fact.

“Don’t you think you should wear something more… appropriate?” His voice sounded harsher than he intended. “The night has turned cold.”

“I’m fine,” she replied, as softly as fabric sliding.

They walked the corridors in silence. The sound of her steps, muffled by soft slippers, was almost imperceptible beside the rhythmic impact of his boots on stone. She did not look at him, nor to either side. Her gaze stayed forward, posture straight, a figure of absolute composure.

So this was it. The new strategy. No more storms of tears, no more the mute fire of resentment. This was it: a perfect, impenetrable presence that fulfilled every formality and, in doing so, excluded him entirely.

During dinner, however, the penetrating cold of the high hall proved her lie. He saw, out of the corner of his eye, a faint tremor pass through her bare arms. She crossed them, in an almost childish gesture of seeking warmth. That was when Ser Erryk, the youngest of the Kingsguard, rose. Without ceremony, he removed the white cloak of his rank and wrapped it around her shoulders with a natural gesture.

She lifted her face to him and smiled.

Not the polished smile she gave the ladies, but an open, complete smile that reached her eyes and showed her teeth. A genuine thanks, stripped of calculation.

Something shuddered inside Aemond, a hot, acidic sensation rising from his stomach to his throat. Irritating, he labeled it, with the fury of one who rejects a dangerous diagnosis. Ridiculous.

Back in their chambers, the silence between them was a third body, solid and oppressive. She turned, presenting her back to him.

“Could you loosen the ties?”

The simple question hung in the air. He stepped closer. His fingers found the silk laces, and as he untied them, the dress gave way. There was no shift or chemise beneath. Only the bare skin of her back, a landscape of delicate bones and tense muscles that caught the candlelight like living parchment. She held the bodice of the dress closed against her chest with one hand, keeping the front shut.

He finished the task, his fingers strangely deft.

“The baby…” he heard himself ask, his voice rough with an unnamed emotion.

She turned slightly, but only just. With the hand not holding the dress—the left—she took his hand and guided it beneath the loosened fabric, against the rounded curve of her belly. The skin there was warm, firm.

And then he felt it.

A movement. Light, distinct, like the flutter of a trapped bird’s wings. A small kick or elbow from within, pressing outward against the palm of his hand. The life she carried announcing itself, sudden and undeniable.

Their faces were a breath apart. Her breath, faintly bitter with herbs, mingled with his. In the reflection of his single eye, he saw her lips part, saw her lean in, a slow and inevitable movement.

For a fraction of a second, an instinct deeper than reason spoke louder. His own body inclined forward, an almost imperceptible response, a magnetic pull that drew his muscles before the mind ordered him to stop. The desire to meet that mouth, to taste her again, to yield to the heat emanating from her belly beneath his hand, was overwhelming and clear.

Then the thought struck him, cold and sharp as a blade. Witch.

The word exploded in his mind, dissipating the instinct in a flash of horror. That was it. That was her ploy. The pregnant body, the pleading look, the herbal tang on her breath—everything part of the spell. She was trying to ensnare him again, to use that primitive force he so despised in himself to master him.

The revulsion was immediate and violent. He did not merely turn his face away—he wrenched it aside, as if the nearness of her lips were pure poison. The kiss, if that was what she offered, met the cold air near his temple, and the abrupt motion made him tear his hand from that warm, treacherous belly.

He stepped back. Two precise steps that opened an abyss. Without a word, he crossed the solar and vanished behind the door to his private chambers, closing it with a final sound.

And the next day, he realized. Everything had changed. The silent war between them had acquired new rules, and he, for a moment of near-surrender, for having felt that kick and nearly fallen to her spell, had given her ammunition. The anger he had seen in her eyes was not only that of a rejected girl. It was the fury of a sorceress whose enchantment had failed. And she would not give up.

The “symptoms” began subtly, but opportunely. A sudden wave of nausea, a defeated sigh, moments before a tedious dinner with lords from the campaign. The first time, Aemond felt a chill run down his spine. A sick pregnant woman was a complex problem, a risk to the heir. He summoned the maester at once.

“No!” Valia protested, shrinking back on the bed, her pale hands over her belly. “It’s just my head spinning. The maester will only give me more of those bitter potions that make me sleep all day. Let it pass.”

Her reluctance seemed genuine, a mixture of weakness and stubbornness. He yielded, but kept watch from a corner of the room, observing her fall asleep, her brow furrowed even in rest. Concern sat like a dry weight in his throat.

The worst were the moments of sudden “weakness” when she was on her feet. In a corridor, on the way to the sept, she would stop abruptly, a tremor passing through her body. “Aemond…” was all she said, a broken whisper.

Then she would tilt to the side, like a flower whose stem had given way. The first time, he caught her by instinct, his hands finding her waist and back, feeling the unexpected, slack weight of her body against his. She stayed there, for an instant that felt like an eternity, leaning on him, her breath hot and ragged against his neck, loose hair sliding over the arm that held her. It was a disarming intimacy, a total physical surrender that stole his breath and set off a sharp alarm of concern—and of something else, deeper and unwanted, which he refused to name. Then she would compose herself, murmuring an evasive “thank you,” and the weight would vanish, leaving only the ghost of her warmth in his hands.

A splitting headache was the pretext for missing an audience with Lord Tyrell. Again he suggested the maester; again she refused in a thread of a voice. “I only need silence and half-light,” she murmured, turning to the wall.

Suspicion began to bud when the ailments always seemed to arise on the eve of duties she loathed. But it was during a private dinner with King Viserys that the farce unraveled.

The king, despite pain and frailty, was surprisingly lucid and affectionate. Valia, seated at his right, listened attentively to his stories of Dragonstone, responding with a sweetness that seemed to soothe the old king’s aches. But when the conversation, guided by Queen Alicent, turned to baptism plans and the urgent need for a Hightower wet nurse, Valia’s mood seemed to fade.

She grew pale and quiet, barely touching dessert. When Viserys, in a trembling voice, began to discuss traditional family names, she raised a shaking hand to her brow and whispered to Aemond, softly enough that only he could hear:

“Please… I feel like I’m going to faint. The air is so heavy.”

And then came the weight. She leaned toward him, and her whole body seemed to lose its skeletal structure. Aemond, seated beside her, had to extend his arm quickly to support her, feeling that same soft, warm weight press against his shoulder and arm. Her head settled near his neck, and the scent of lavender and cinnamon from her hair flooded his senses. King Viserys stopped speaking, his face marked by instant concern.

“Valia, dear?” the king’s voice was weak but full of distress.

Aemond acted before the scene could become a greater commotion. Genuine concern for the king’s discomfort—and yes, for the woman weighing against him like a warm sack of sand—spoke louder.

“Excuse us, my king. She needs a little air,” he said, his voice controlled.

With a firm movement, he rose, pulling her with him. She stood, but unsteady, all her weight still entrusted to him, weak fingers clutching the sleeve of his tunic. He wrapped an arm around her waist, feeling the curve of her belly against his side, and guided her out of the hall, bearing each of her faltering steps.

They had barely crossed the threshold into the outer corridor when he felt the body he was supporting change. The apparent weakness vanished; muscles reclaimed control. She slipped free of his support, as suddenly and completely as if a thread holding her had been cut, and walked to the balcony, filling her lungs with a long, deep gulp of night air.

“Better?” he asked, his voice sounding hollow and dangerously controlled in the darkness.

She turned, moonlight illuminating her face. The pallor had given way to a healthy flush; her eyes were no longer clouded but clear and alive. A small, indefinable smile touched her lips.

“Yes,” she said, her voice now steady and bright, without a trace of the fatigue from moments before. “The fresh air worked wonders. How strange, isn’t it?”

Aemond stood still, the arms that had held her moments earlier now empty and cold. Blood thudded dully in his ears. It was not strange. It was a masterful performance.

She had used not only the illness, but the physical necessity of his support—of his touch—to escape.

She had made him bear her full weight, trust in her weakness, only to rise, rejuvenated, before his eyes. His initial concern hardened into cutting ice and a silent fury. The sickness was a tool, and he was the fool carrying the instrument. And worst of all was the persistent memory of the warmth of her body yielding against his—an оружие she now knew how to wield with deadly precision.

Chapter Text

Valia’s sweetness did not soothe him.
It irritated him.

She no longer avoided him. She did not feign fainting spells. She did not whisper provocations at the edge of his ear at the exact moment he lowered his guard. Now she walked at his side with a serenity that felt less rehearsed and more… resigned. Like someone who no longer needed to flee because she had already been caught.

Sweet.
Always sweet.

She listened when he spoke — and he spoke little. She agreed when it was convenient — and he rarely asked for opinions. She smiled rarely, but when she did, it was as if the thin air of the Red Keep grew heavier.

And sometimes, when the wind crossed the battlements and her long black hair loosened over her shoulders like a living curtain, he had to look away.

He hated that.

He hated the way the afternoon light caught in those strands. Hated how his fingers remembered their softness — thick and smooth, slipping between his fingers like living silk — even though he had touched them only once.

One night.
One cursed night.

The tourney. Aegon, drunk, making jests about her body at the lords’ table.

The blow. The blood. The sudden silence.

And then her.

His hand descending. Her bare thigh, soft, cool beneath his fingers. The dress sliding down. The linen shift, the simple knot between her breasts.

And now, every night, while she slept in the chamber next to his — separated by a door and a corridor and a marriage decree neither of them had asked for — he lay awake.

And his damned body betrayed him.

All it took was a thought. A flicker. The sound of a dress dragging across stone floors. The scent of lavender in the corridor. And the ties of his trousers would tighten again, the ache would return, the weakness would shame him.

Witch.

There was no other explanation.

How could he hate her so much — hate her blood, her name, the power she held over the king, the child she carried like a chain — and still be like this? Hard? Needing? Weak?

She had not chosen this.

Rhaenyra had fled to Dragonstone to escape. To raise her children far from the sharp tongues of King’s Landing. Valia had grown up far from her duties. She had not been taught to be a proper princess.

After Lucerys took his eye, Viserys demanded reparation.

Reward, some thought. Restitution, said others.

No one asked what she wanted.

No one asked what he wanted.

They simply joined them as one might press together the two edges of a wound, hoping it would scar over.

It did not.

He rolled in bed, his back to the wall that separated them.

Clenched his fists.

Drove his nails into his palm.

Forced the memories back into the dark.

Her breasts. Her nipples against his lips. The moan. The taste.

Weakness.

His body did not obey. It remained rigid, pulsing, hungry.

Sorcery.

He hated remembering.

Hated her tongue. The taste. The texture of her hair slipping between his fingers. The sound she made when he bit her lightly, when he sucked, when his tongue found the hard, pulsing center of her pleasure.

He hated wanting to repeat it.

Hated that he could not.

Hated not knowing whether that night had meant anything to her — or whether it had been only one body offering itself to another, because that was what wives did, even those who had never wished to be wives.

She always manages.
Always.

No. She did not manage. She had never wanted it. She had been brought as an object of compensation, as one pays a blood debt with a dowry of flesh.

And yet.

And yet he wanted her.

That night, as on all the others, he lay awake.

Listening to the silence of the corridor.

Imagining black hair spread across the pillow in the chamber next door.

Feeling the dull ache between his legs, the unsatisfied need, the memory of her taste still lingering on his tongue.

Clenching his fists until his nails marked his palms.

Hating.

Hating.

Hating.

Valia’s next move had come to light. The king was seated upon the Iron Throne when Aemond entered.

Illness had devoured the flesh of his face, leaving only skin stretched thin over bone. The hand resting on the arm of the throne trembled — not from nerves, but from the slow decay consuming him. Half his face was deformed, the golden mask barely managing to conceal what the flesh no longer could.

Viserys was a man in ruins.

But when he lifted his eyes to Aemond, there was something different.

“My granddaughter came to me this morning.”

The voice was weak, dragging — but the eyes.

The eyes were alive.

Aemond felt his jaw tighten. The muscle jumped beneath his skin, aching.

“She asked permission to visit Dragonstone. She wishes to see her newborn brother.”

Viserys’s tone was almost affectionate. Not the weary affection he reserved for his own children — but something closer to tenderness. To admiration.

Revitalized, Aemond thought. Today he seems revitalized.

Otto intervened with calculated caution. “A curious request—”

“It is only family, Otto.” Viserys did not even look at the Hand. His eyes remained fixed on some distant point, as if he could see through the stone walls. “Let us not turn everything into suspicion.”

Family.

The word slipped from the king’s mouth like honey. As if speaking of her — of the granddaughter, the daughter, the place where they both lived — restored a fragment of the color the illness had stolen.

“I have authorized the journey,” Viserys continued, “and decreed that Aemond accompany her. A man’s place is with his wife and his child.”

Aemond watched the king. Watched how his trembling fingers stroked the arm of the throne. Watched how his glassy, pained eyes gleamed at the mention of Dragonstone.

He is thinking of her, Aemond realized. Of his half-sister and his uncle.

And of the granddaughter he himself sent away and now calls back.

He smiled.

A fragile smile, almost boyish.

Aegon, at his side, rolled his eyes. Otto kept his expression impenetrable. Alicent pressed her lips together until they became a thin white line.

Aemond said nothing.

There was no room for objections in the court of a king who had already decided — and who, in that moment, seemed more alive than he had in the past three years.

Otto held his gaze for a moment. Then he looked away.

Alicent, in her private chambers, did not spare her words.

“You allow her to act as she pleases.” The queen’s voice was low, but it cut like glass.

“She went to the king,” Aemond replied, his voice sheathed in ice.

“And you should have gone first.” Alicent faced him squarely. “Before she learned she does not need you for anything.”

Aegon, his eye still bruised, let out a wet laugh. “The beloved little granddaughter always gets what she wants, doesn’t she? Ever since she was born. Why would that change now?”

Aemond ignored him.

But the words echoed inside him like a crow that insists on returning, beating its wings against the walls of his skull until it bleeds.

Always gets what she wants.

Always.

The door flew open violently.

Valia lifted her eyes from the dress she was folding on the bed. She did not startle. Did not flinch. She simply looked at him, her fingers still resting on the blue linen.

“You went to the king,” he said.

His voice was low. Cutting.

She held his gaze. “He authorized it.”

She did not feign surprise. Did not ask how he knew. Did not offer excuses.

At her side, on the reading table by the balcony, Jonquil slept curled like a small ornament of black fur. He had grown, filled out, and now occupied the space with the lazy authority of one who already knew he belonged there.

Aemond did not look at the cat.

He looked only at her.

“I want to meet my brother,” Valia said. Her voice calm. “He was born two months ago. I have not yet seen his face.”

“And for that you needed to go to the king.”

“To whom else should I have gone?”

He stepped forward. She did not retreat.

“You could have come to me.”

She tilted her head. “And would you have allowed it?”

Silence.

“No,” she answered for him. “You would not have.”

His fingers curled at his sides.

“You manipulated him.”

“I didn’t need to.”

The sentence was so serene it felt like a blow.

“I did not need to manipulate my grandfather,” she repeated. “He loves me. All I have to do is ask.”

All I have to do is ask.

Fury climbed hot along his neck.

“Of course.” His voice was venom now. “Of course that’s all it takes. For you, it always is. You ask, he grants. You want, he orders. You sigh, he sighs with you.”

He stepped closer.

“And me? I exist only at the margins of what you decide. I was forced to marry you. Forced to endure the whispers about your bastardy in the corridors. Forced to tolerate your silence, your rehearsed sweetness, your constant presence like a wound that does not heal.”

His voice rose.

“And now, on top of everything, I am dragged along with you. Because you cannot bear your own misery and wish to entangle me in it.”

Her eyes changed.

No longer serenity.

Something sharp.

“My misery,” she repeated.

“Yes. This life you live here. This marriage you did not ask for. This court that whispers.” He laughed, dry. “You flee. You always flee. First your mother fled to Dragonstone to escape the comments about her children. Now you.”

He inclined his face, the scar tightening beneath the patch.

“But I cannot flee. I never could.”

The thought came before he could contain it.

Lucerys.

“Do you think I want to go there?” he snarled. “Do you think I want to cross the sea, enter your mother’s fortress, and remain in the same castle as—”

He stopped.

The name caught in his throat.

But she understood.

Her violet eyes widened.

“I did not ask you to go,” she said.

Her voice was different now. Less serene.

“You did not ask?” he advanced. “Then why did he command it?”

“Because he is my grandfather. Because he wants me safe. Because he does not trust that—”

“He does not trust that I can care for you?”

She did not answer.

Her silence was worse than any accusation.

“I did not ask you to go.”

“YOU DON’T NEED TO ASK!”

He stepped forward.

His hand found her chin.

Lifted it.

He bent down, lowering his face until his eyes were level with hers.

Eye to eye.

His breath warm against her lips.

“Do you think I chose this?” he hissed. “That I chose you? That I looked at your name and said, ‘Yes, I want her to repay the eye your brother stole from me’?”

She did not respond.

She simply stared at him.

On her toes.

Her chin held captive.

Violet eyes fixed on his single eye.

“I lost an eye,” he continued, his voice trembling. “I lost it. And the price they demanded of you was nothing compared to what I lost. But I was forced to accept. Forced to marry. Forced to sire an heir with you.”

He tightened his grip on her chin.

“And you never thought that, to me, you are the living reminder of what it cost me. Of what they took from me. Of what they imposed upon me.”

She stared at him.

Her face motionless beneath his fingers.

But her eyes — her eyes were glassy.

“Do you want me to go to the king and say you need not accompany me? That you would rather remain?”

Her voice was low.

Unsteady.

But firm.

She lifted her chin against his hand, still standing on her toes.

“I will ask, if that is what you desire. He will accept.”

Challenge.

Pure challenge.

He tightened his hold on her face.

“You think it is that simple?”

His voice was a whisper now. Sharp as glass.

“You think you can ask and dismiss. Include and exclude. As if I were a servant you summon or release.”

He leaned closer.

“What do you think the king will believe of me? That I am a husband who abandons his pregnant wife? Who refuses to accompany her? Who prefers to remain in King’s Landing while you cross the sea alone?”

Her eyes did not waver.

Silence.

“You think the king cares what I want or do not want? He has already decided. And I will go. Not because you wish it. But because he has ordered it, and because I will not give the court the excuse to call me a coward who flees his duties.”

He released her chin.

Her heels touched the ground again.

He stepped back.

He looked at her.

She looked back at him.

The black cat on the table awoke, stretched, and leapt silently to the floor.

“Three days,” she said.

Her voice calm once more.

But her eyes — her eyes were different.

“We leave in three days.”

He did not answer.

He turned.

He left.

After that, he avoided her.

Three days without seeking her out. Three days without asking whether she was eating, whether she was sleeping, whether the child moved.

It would be better if she died.

No.

Yes.

He no longer knew.

He only knew that he could still taste her on his tongue.

The king ordered that they travel by ship.

The information arrived at dusk on the second day, delivered by a messenger who scarcely dared to raise his eyes.

Vhagar would follow by air.

Aemond remained still for a long time after the man withdrew.

The flight would take an hour. By ship, three days.

Three days at sea. Three days confined with her. Three days looking at the face he could not forget, even when he hated her.

Another humiliation.

He thought of her.

Wondered if she knew. If she had suggested it. If, when the king asked, “How do you prefer to travel, my dear?” she had tilted her head and said, “By ship, grandfather. It is calmer.”

He wondered if she enjoyed it.

Seeing him reduced. Dragged along. Humiliated.

How could she not?

The departure from King’s Landing was a cold ceremony. The king, frail but determined, watched from his balcony. Queen Alicent did not attend. The royal ship, Sea Dragon, was a swift vessel, but to Aemond, every hour aboard felt like an eternity of deliberate torture.

He gave the command. With a roar that made the deck tremble, Vhagar took flight, her enormous wings casting a fleeting shadow that swallowed the sun. The dragon would fly alone, patrolling the coast, reaching Dragonstone long before they did. Valia watched the departure with an unreadable expression, Jonquil at her heels.

At the very beginning of the voyage, with the scent of salt and damp wood still clinging to the deck, Aemond made a silent decision: he would have more peace if he did not admonish her. The recent exchanges, the last provocations—real or imagined—had taught him something he was reluctant to admit. Every confrontation with Valia ended not in victory, but in erosion. He emerged more exposed, more inflamed, while she remained serene, almost untouchable. Perhaps silence was a sharper weapon than accusation. Perhaps ignoring her was the only way not to fall, once again, into a game he was beginning to suspect he did not know how to control.

The movement came quickly. As soon as the ship entered the more open waters of Blackwater Bay, the rocking began. Valia, who until then had maintained an irritatingly serene composure, started to grow pale.

"I don't think I feel well," she announced, her hands gripping the railing tightly.

It was seasickness. Common, mundane. But Valia transformed it into an opera of suffering. Low moans, tragic sighs, an exaggerated tremor in her hands. She refused to go to her cabin, insisting on staying on deck "for the fresh air," which meant Aemond was forced to stand there, motionless, watching her feign—or perhaps not entirely—an agony.

"You should lie down," he said for the tenth time, his patience wearing thin.

"I can't move," she groaned, letting her head fall back theatrically. "The world is spinning. Just… stay here. In case I fall."

And he stayed. Like a sentinel post, hovering over her as she curled against the wood. Her perfume—lavender and something sweet, perhaps pomegranate—mixed with the smell of the sea and brine. With each sway of the ship, their bodies almost touched. Aemond felt the heat radiating from her, saw her exposed neck, the rapid pulse at her throat. Anger mingled with a stupid, involuntary concern.

The hours dragged on. Valia alternated between petulant silences and sudden demands.

"Water, but not from this jug, it tastes like leather."

"A blanket, but not this one, it smells of mildew."

"Tell me something, to distract my mind."

He told her, through gritted teeth, about the tides, about the constellations that guided ships, about the history of the Sea Dragon. She listened, her eyes half-closed, and sometimes asked an intelligent question that caught him off guard, showing that beneath the farce, there was a sharp mind.

Night fell. She finally relented and went to her cabin, but only after making Aemond inspect it personally to "ensure there were no rats." The captain and crew exchanged glances. Aemond felt the insubordination as a heat at the back of his neck.

The second day was worse. The sea grew rougher. Valia became genuinely pale and quiet, but now her suffering was real, and therefore, more effective. She asked for nothing. She just lay on a bench on the deck, wrapped in a blanket, her dark hair spread out like seaweed, her eyes closed. Aemond couldn't pull away. Each moan of her pain was a thread pulling him back.

"Go below," he ordered, for the hundredth time, his voice nearly lost in the wind howling through the rigging.

"I'll die if I'm locked in that box," she groaned, clinging to the railing with white fingers. The wind tore her black hair from its undone bun, whipping it like dark tentacles across her pale face. Her fine wool tunic clung to her body, molding to the curves of her breasts, the soft swell of her belly.

The storm, which until then had been gathering on the horizon, arrived with sudden fury. A thunderclap roared, so close it seemed to split the sky in two. Valia screamed, a brief, sharp sound of genuine panic, and lost her balance. Aemond moved before thinking. In two strides, he was at her side, his arm wrapping around her waist, pulling her away from the slippery edge.

"Stupid," he snarled against her ear, but his hands held her firmly, dragging her towards the hatch.

Inside the cabin, the world narrowed to the deafening sound of the storm battering the hull and the nauseating roll. The only light came from an oil lantern fixed to the ceiling, casting wild, dancing shadows across the wooden walls. Valia collapsed in a corner, curling up, trembling uncontrollably.

Aemond slammed the hatch shut, isolating them from the outer chaos. The roar became muffled, but the movement was worse inside, amplified, intimate. He turned to her. She looked at him with eyes wide like a cornered animal's, silent tears streaming down her face, splattered with seawater.

Desire and rage fused into a single electric current within him. It was all her fault. This fragility, this fear, this need she radiated that made him responsible, that bound him.

"Satisfied?" his voice came out hoarse in the confined space. "Is this what you wanted?"

She didn't answer. She only shuddered as the ship plunged into a deep trough, making the furniture slide. Aemond staggered, falling to his knees before her. The proximity was sudden, crushing. He could feel her damp heat, smell the salt and fear on her skin.

Without thinking, his hand grabbed her chin, forcing her to look at him.

"Speak," he commanded, but his voice no longer held the force of command, only a hoarse urgency.

She inhaled, a trembling sob.

"I just… want it to end."

It's your fault, he thought. We're here because of you.

It wasn't he who moved first. It was her. She lifted her face, her enormous dark eyes reflecting the lantern's weak light. There were tears in them. She said nothing. She just pulled him into a kiss.

It wasn't like the furious kiss against the wall. It was desperate, deep, a search for an anchor. Her lips tasted of salt and fear. Aemond responded before his mind could protest. His arms tightened around her, his mouth opening to hers. The outside world—the roar of the wind, the creaking of wood, the sailors' shouts—vanished.

The ship lurched violently to starboard, throwing him against her. A voice screamed in his mind that he had crushed the baby. The impact was hard, their bones colliding, but the pain was lost in the avalanche of sensations. His hands, fighting for purchase, tore at the wet fabric of her tunic more out of necessity than violence—he needed to hold onto something, and her flesh was the only fixed point in a crumbling world.

Valia cried out against his mouth, not in protest, but in something akin to relief. Her fingers dug into his shoulders, her nails finding the waterlogged leather of his doublet. The kiss was chaotic, their teeth clashing as the deck dropped beneath them, their tongues meeting at strange, urgent angles. There was no grace, only raw need.

When he descended, tearing away what remained of her fine linen, the ship lurched upward. Aemond, already off balance, was thrown forward, his face burying itself between her breasts. The shock was followed by a wave of heat and the sharp, sweet smell of her skin. He grabbed one breast with his hand, feeling its full weight, the nipple hard against his palm, as the ship rolled to the other side. He had to brace himself with his other arm to avoid crushing her, his body transformed into a human anchor over hers.

Kissing her breasts was a battle against physics. The lantern swung, light coming and going, sometimes plunging them into total darkness, sometimes illuminating every detail with cruel clarity. His mouth sought a nipple, but the ship's movement made her body slide beneath his. When he finally managed to capture it between his lips, sucking hard, the Sea Dragon tilted dangerously. Valia slid a few inches across the deck, dragging him with her. He held her tighter, his teeth closing gently around the sensitive peak, and she moaned, a sound lost in the crack of a mast outside.

Crawling down, between her legs, was an expedition. The wooden floor was slick with seawater and moisture. He had to grab her thigh, then her hip, each grip leaving a pale mark on her skin that quickly flushed again. When he finally positioned his head between her thighs, the ship gave a jolt. He slipped, his chin bumping her inner thigh. Valia let out a small cry. He growled in frustration, grabbing her buttocks with both hands, pinning her in place against the hull, before burying his face in her again.

Sometimes, he licked her with deep slowness, taking advantage of a moment of relative calm. Other times, the deck dropped so abruptly that his tongue slid against her with involuntary force, tearing from her loud, broken moans that she tried to stifle with her own fist. He held her firmly, his fingers sinking into the soft flesh of her buttocks, feeling her muscles contract as he brought her to the edge. Her climax came in a series of uncontrolled spasms, her body arching and convulsing beneath him as the ship itself seemed to reach a peak of agitation. He drank every tremor, every contraction, until she fell back, breathless and melted.

Rising to position himself between her legs was a logistical challenge. The floor was a moving, treacherous surface. He had to kneel, pull her closer, and when he finally managed to align their bodies, a particularly violent wave nearly threw them against the opposite wall. He grabbed her hips, his nails leaving white crescents in her skin, and pulled her back.

"Is this safe?" he asked.

"Please," was the only thing she answered.

When he entered her, it was with a single deep, decisive movement, taking advantage of a brief instant when the ship seemed suspended in air. The fit was perfect, devastating. Valia cried out, her eyes widening, and her legs locked like a lasso around his back.

What followed was not a dance, but a shared shipwreck. There was no rhythm they could control. The sea imposed it. Sometimes, they were thrust against each other with brutal force, each impact a deep stroke that stole the breath from both. Other times, the ship rolled slowly, creating a long, agonizing friction that made Valia moan and bury her face in his neck. He tried to brace himself on his hands beside her head, but a violent yaw made him slip, and his body fell completely onto hers, crushing her against the planks.

"The baby—", Aemond tried to warn.

She didn't complain. Her arms wrapped around him, her fingers tracing scratches down his back, as if trying to tie herself to him.

"More… like this…", she whispered in his ear, as a series of short, quick sways created an almost frenetic rhythm.

He obeyed, moving with the ship, not against it, using the force of the sea to drive himself deeper. It was an absurd and perfect union—two bodies using the fury of the elements to fuse together. Their moans mingled with the creaking of wood, their bodies sweating and rubbing, creating heat amidst the damp cold of the cabin.

Aemond's climax was ripped from him by the combination of movement and sensation. The ship rose on a crest of a wave and then plummeted, and as it descended, he descended with it, burying himself in her to the hilt, his own cry drowned in the roar from outside. For an instant, everything stopped—time, fear, the storm. There was only the deep spasm of union and the shared sound of their gasping breaths.

Then, the world returned. The ship continued to sway, now with less violence. The storm was passing.

Aemond collapsed onto her, his full weight inert for a moment, before the instinct not to crush her made him roll to the side. They lay side by side on the hard floor, gasping, staring at the ceiling that still swayed. The lantern, now steady, cast a constant light upon the chaos they had created—torn clothes, undone blankets, their bodies glistening with sweat and other things.

Valia turned her head to look at him. Her face was marked, her lips swollen, her eyes enormous. She reached out her hand, hesitant, and touched his chin where she had scratched him.

Aemond caught his breath. The touch was light, but it burned.

Aemond stood up, separating himself from her with a movement that seemed to require physical effort. He did not look at her. He dressed quickly, his back turned to her, his movements rigid.

Valia remained lying on the floor, amidst undone blankets and torn clothes, her body exposed and marked. She pulled herself into a sitting position, wrapping her arms around herself.

"Aemond," she called, her voice a hoarse whisper.

He stopped, but did not turn.

"This… does this change anything?", her question hung in the charged air.

He was silent for what seemed an eternity. The ship swayed gently. Outside, a weak ray of sun pierced the clouds.

"Everything," he finally answered, his voice as rough as the hull's wood. "And nothing."

And then, he left, closing the hatch behind him, leaving her alone in the cabin that now smelled of sex, salt, and a terrible, undeniable truth.

The storm had passed. The path to Dragonstone lay open. But inside that ship, and inside them, a much greater storm was only just beginning.

Chapter Text

The smell of salt preceded the sight of the island—not like an omen, but like the briny memory of everything the sea had ever taken. The marine air entered his nostrils with the persistence of a poorly buried secret, and Aemond Targaryen, standing at the ship's prow, felt it adhere to his skin like a second layer of existence.

He sensed Vhagar before he even glimpsed her—not with his eyes, but with that part of himself that no longer knew where he ended and the dragon began. An underground tremor ran through the air, a vibration that made his teeth grind and the seabirds scatter in silence. The wind, that ancient accomplice of the Targaryens, bent in recognition before the colossal silhouette that emerged from the gray clouds like a forgotten god returning to claim tribute.

Vhagar circled above the turbulent sea, her wings opening and closing against the sky like a primordial breath. Dragonstone was still just a dark promise on the horizon—a black stain where the sea met legend—but Vhagar was already claiming it with the patience of one who had waited centuries.

Aemond pressed his fingers into the ship's damp wood, feeling the splinters dig into his palms like small warnings.

Dark abrasions marked his neck and hands—purple maps of the storm that had swallowed them the night before. But not just from the storm. There were marks that weren't from the violent lurches that had thrown bodies against the walls. There were marks that were hers—nails that had dug into his back when the ship rocked and he thrust deeper into her, teeth that found his shoulder when a wave crashed them against each other, repeatedly, until they no longer knew where one ended and the other began.

His head throbbed with a weight that seemed laden with meaning, a pain that had settled behind his remaining eye like an unwanted tenant. But it wasn't just the pain of a hangover or bruises. It was the memory—stubborn, intrusive, relentless—of her taste.

The taste.

It resurfaced at the most inopportune moments, at the back of his throat, as if it were still there. Salty like the sea surrounding them, but with something more—a deep, dark flavor he had known the night before, when he lay down on her and she arched her back against the cabin floor, her whole body trembling as the ship rocked and he held her by the thighs so as not to be thrown off, to stay where he belonged—inside her, inside her, inside her.

He wondered, against his will, if Valia was also marked. If the lurching had been as cruel to her as it had been to him. If his marks bloomed purple under her clothes, just as hers bloomed on his back.

If the baby—

The thought shattered before it could complete itself, like glass thrown against a rock.

He couldn't even look at her without the memory of the previous night hitting him like a low blow—the kind of blow learned in dockside brawls, treacherous, aimed at parts that shouldn't be hit. The sound of her breathing in the cabin, when the whole world was reduced to the ship swaying from side to side and the two of them, clinging to each other as if the storm were the only possible witness.

He remembered.

He remembered how the clothes had disappeared—he didn't know how, he didn't know who had taken off what, he only knew that, suddenly, she was naked beneath him and her skin was hotter than any fire he had ever known. He remembered how the ship threw them to the side and he held her tightly, desperately, with something that looked like hunger, and she intertwined her legs around his waist as if she too were afraid of being carried away by the current.

He remembered the first time he penetrated her—the ship tilting, him slipping, her moaning and pulling him closer with an urgency he hadn't known. He remembered how tight she was, as if her body had been sculpted for that moment, for that man, for that conjunction of bodies on a drifting ship. He remembered thinking, in a flash of lucidity amidst the chaos, that perhaps they had been born joined and separated at birth—two halves of a whole that the gods had dismembered and now, finally, were reunited.

He remembered her voice.

It wasn't just the moans. He remembered the sound of her body against his, skin on skin, in the rhythm of the ship.

He remembered how tight she was.

My God, how tight she was.

As if there were a place inside her that existed only for him, an empty space he filled like a key finding a lock.

Perhaps there was something sacred in it. Perhaps the old gods, those who existed before the Seven, had created certain pairs to be one, and then separated them at birth, so they would spend their lives searching for each other.

Doubt settled in like a slow-acting poison. He knew the art of acting. He had grown up surrounded by it. The court was a perpetual stage, and he had learned to read between the lines of smiles, the hidden meanings behind bows. But that night, with the sea howling outside and her scent filling every empty space—

He turned his face away sharply, annoyed with himself for not allowing himself this feeling for so long.

When the ship finally docked, the pier at Dragonstone seemed carved directly by the storm that had tormented them. Black, damp, austere—the very stone seemed to sweat centuries of stories no one remembered anymore. The waves licked the foundations with an insatiable hunger, and the smell of sulfur mixed with the salt, a constant reminder of what lay beneath the island.

Valia descended first.

Without even looking at him, she handed him the basket where Jonquil, the cat, meowed indignantly at the smell of the sea—a sharp, almost human sound that seemed to cut through the damp air.

"Hold this for me."

Just like that, without further ado.

And then she was already walking away, her skirts lifting slightly as she ran—ran—towards the three who waited ahead, on the black platform where the wind seemed to blow with less force, as if it too respected that moment.

Joffrey. Jacaerys. Lucerys.

The world seemed to shrink until only that name remained.

Lucerys.

Just the name already left a metallic taste in his mouth—blood, iron, memory. The memory of the blade cutting through the air. Of blood gushing out before the taste could even be processed. Of the void where there had once been an eye, a world, a part of himself he would never recover.

Aemond stood still, holding the basket like any common servant—and there was a humiliation in that which he noted coldly, storing it away for later, for when he had time to process what it meant to be there, on his half-sister's island, holding a cat while his wife ran into the arms of her bastard brothers.

He watched.

Valia hugged them as if she had been torn from them by force. She cried openly, without the mask she wore before him. Joffrey wrapped his arms around her; Jacaerys held her tightly, forehead to forehead, in a gesture too intimate; and then Lucerys—

Lucerys dared to touch her belly.

His hand rested on the evident curve of her pregnancy, in a gesture that could be innocent, that could be fraternal, that could be anything Aemond wanted to interpret—but he knew, with the certainty of one who had learned to read threats before learning to read letters, exactly what that touch meant.

The world tilted.

How dare he?

Wasn't it enough that they had taken his eye? Wasn't it enough that they had robbed him of part of his sight, part of his identity, part of his humanity that night? Did they also have to take what belonged to him?

Hatred grew like fire fed by dragon oil—but mixed with something darker, deeper, more primitive. Something that wasn't mere possessiveness, but a hunger he couldn't name. Uglier than hate, because hate was pure, direct, understandable. This was something else.

She was his wife.

Of all of them, only he possessed her.

Only he knew the sound she made in the darkness. Only he knew how her body reacted to touch. Only he had the right to see her belly grow with his child.

There was a silent triumph in that. A bitter, satisfying taste that mixed with hatred like poisons that, combined, create something more lethal.

He heard, even from a distance, Valia's cry:

"Why did you never come to see me? Moon after moon... I waited..."

The words cut through the air like something too intimate for him to hear.

No one had ever waited for him like that. No one had ever cried over his absence.

Vhagar roared in the distance, restless. He felt the dragon's agitation as if it were his own. Perhaps it was.

Finally, the three looked in his direction.

Jacaerys was the first to approach, posture erect, controlled—every step calculated to show he wasn't afraid, that he was in his territory, that the rules were different there.

"Uncle."

The word was correct. Polite. Respectful. But there was something in it that always sounded like provocation.

"Vhagar is on a nearby hill," he added casually.

Aemond merely inclined his head.

Then Valia turned to him.

"Come, husband."

As if nothing were wrong.

As if he weren't holding her cat's basket like any page while she distributed tears and hugs to other men. As if the previous night hadn't existed. As if they were only what they appeared to be.

They climbed the steep stairways of Dragonstone. Two servants followed behind, carrying trunks, the effort visible on their faces.

Valia's chatter filled the air—questions about the last few months, laughter punctuated by tears, memories he didn't share.

Aemond barely listened.

The humidity of the sea seemed to penetrate his bones. His head ached more than it should.

He observed the fortress as they advanced. Black. Sharp. Sculpted by dragons and shadows, each tower resembling a beast about to awaken. The gargoyles watched with empty eyes, and he felt watched too.

Valia now held little Joffrey's hand, the boy chattering about something involving a dragon, an egg, and a fall—a childish animation filling the silences she left.

And he found himself thinking, with an unexpected discomfort that resembled nausea:

If his child were born with dark hair...

The thought came as an automatic rejection, like a muscle spasm, uncontrollable.

He pushed it away violently.

As they crossed the inner corridors, the coldness of the castle was almost palpable. Even at midday, light didn't penetrate fully; candles burned on the walls at precise intervals, casting shadows that moved like living creatures, dancing in choreographies that seemed to mean something he couldn't decipher.

In a side hall, they found a wet nurse holding a small child.

Egg.

Aemond calculated he was the same age as Maelor. Silver hair like his, like all of them—except hers and her bastard brothers'.

Valia approached him without hesitation, as if moved by something stronger than will.

She took her brother in her arms, kissing his face with an almost maternal devotion—and there was something there that Aemond couldn't name.

"Do you still remember me?"

The child just smiled—and stuffed into Valia's mouth a piece of cake soaked in saliva, his little hands dirty with sugar and crumbs.

Valia laughed.

Smiled.

And accepted. Swallowed the cake as if it were the most natural thing in the world, as if there were nothing degrading about receiving food chewed by someone else, as if that were love.

Then, hurried footsteps echoed down the corridor, coming from somewhere deeper inside the castle.

Rhaenyra appeared.

Tears in her eyes. Her voice calling, almost a shout:

"Valia!"

She hugged her tightly, even with Egg still in her arms, grumbling between kisses and tears:

"You sent very few letters. Very few indeed. How are you? You look terrible! You're pale, thin, what did they do to you?"

Valia smiled wearily, a smile that didn't reach her eyes.

"The ship rocked too much. The storm was cruel."

Rhaenyra kissed her face repeatedly—forehead, cheeks, nose—with an affection so natural it seemed like breathing. She caressed her belly with ease, as if she had every right to touch what grew there.

Aemond felt his jaw clench until it hurt.

His half-sister.

Then Rhaenyra looked at him.

"Prince Aemond."

Formal. Controlled. The affection evaporated like water on hot stone.

"Welcome to Dragonstone."

There was something there. Something that wasn't hospitality. Something that might have been its opposite.

"Come, Valia," she continued, her animation returning as if a key had been turned. "You need to see Viserys."

The excuse.

The reason for the visit.

The two were already walking away when Valia looked over her shoulder.

"Come."

It wasn't an invitation. He followed them.

He stopped on the threshold of the nursery door.

Stood there.

Watching.

Valia leaned over the crib, watching the baby sleep peacefully. Her face softened with a tenderness he rarely saw when she was with him, an expression that seemed reserved for others, for moments that didn't include him.

Candlelight touched her hair, creating golden halos that seemed sacred. The silence there was different from the rest of the castle—more intimate, denser, as if the very air protected the child's sleep.

Aemond crossed his arms.

And, inevitably, wondered:

Where is Daemon?

Valia’s childhood chambers were located in a higher wing of the fortress, far from the main hall, where the wind struck the windows with less violence, though the sound of the sea still echoed through the stones.

When the door was opened, a different scent greeted them.

It was not the salty smell of the docks nor the ceremonial coldness of the corridors. It was something older. Preserved.

Aemond entered first.

The room was smaller than the ones they occupied in the Red Keep. The bed, though neatly made and adorned with embroidered coverlets, seemed far too narrow for two adults. The walls were not bare stone — they were painted.

Dragons.

But not the black, aggressive dragons carved into the fortress. These were lighter strokes, almost dreamlike. A pale blue serpentined near the ceiling. A muted gold shimmered by the window. There were clouds, small stars.

Childlike.

And yet… intimate.

Valia stepped in just behind him, removing her gloves with slow movements.

“These are my old chambers,” she said, almost as an explanation, though without any visible emotion.

The servants set down the trunks and withdrew.

Silence.

Aemond’s gaze swept across the room with nearly clinical attention. The small table by the window. A shelf with a few books. A worn bench. The view was not of the sea — he noticed that immediately — but of the hill where Vhagar rested.

He could see her from there.

The colossal silhouette against the overcast sky.

It gave him a strange sense of possession within a space that clearly did not belong to him.

Valia walked to the bed and ran her hand over the quilt, as if testing the reality of the place.

Then she spoke, without looking at him:

“Would you prefer they prepare another room?”

He turned his head slowly.

“What?”

She finally met his eyes.

“Separate quarters.” Her voice was too calm. “So you may continue avoiding me.”

The sentence lingered between them.

He did not answer.

He simply stood there, watching her as though she were something that needed to be deciphered.

She did not seem fragile now. Nor ill. Nor wavering.

There, in that room, she seemed… rooted.

His eyes returned to the walls.

“Did you paint this?”

She shrugged.

“It doesn’t look like a child’s work.”

Another faint half-smile.

“I was bored.”

He stepped closer to the wall, passing his fingers near — but not touching — the outline of a blue dragon.

“Why don’t you paint in King’s Landing?”

She was silent for a moment.

“I had no inspiration.”

Something tightened inside him.

He looked again at the bed. Too small. Too intimate. The space demanded closeness.

His head throbbed more intensely.

The room was too small to ignore her.

Too small to feign indifference.

Too small for him not to feel her every movement.

“Sleep wherever you wish,” she said, still gazing out the window. “My childhood chambers are small. Perhaps that will trouble you more than it does me.”

It was almost a challenge.

He took two steps forward until he stood behind her. He did not touch her, but he remained close enough to feel her warmth.

“You have never troubled me for lack of space.”

The words came out low.

Dense.

Ambiguous.

She stilled for a second.

Then she turned her head just enough for him to see her profile lit by the window’s light.

“No?” she murmured.

Aemond held her gaze.

Outside, the wind shifted direction. Vhagar moved upon the hill, a nearly imperceptible shift, but he felt it.

The room seemed even smaller.

The first days at Dragonstone took on an almost mechanical rhythm.

Aemond broke his fast with her family out of obligation, seated at the stone table beneath the pale morning light. Rhaenyra spoke. The children laughed. Valia participated in everything with unsettling ease.

Daemon arrived on the second morning.

There was no warm greeting. No open provocation. Only looks. Long. Measured. Aemond held his with calculated coldness. Not a word was exchanged — and yet an entire conversation unfolded in that silence.

After breakfast, he would leave.

Vhagar awaited him on the hills. The wind there was harsher, more unforgiving. Flying was simple. Hunting was simple. Deer, wild sheep, anything that crossed the rocky terrain. The weight of the spear, the impact of the fall, the scent of blood — all of it was more comprehensible than what he found within the castle walls.

In the afternoons, he withdrew to the library.

Smaller than the one in the Red Keep. Simpler, darker, with less gold and more dust. Yet there were Valyrian texts he did not know — ancient treatises smelling of centuries, fragments of unfinished histories someone had once decided were not worth completing, genealogies so obscure they seemed invented. He immersed himself in them with near-obsessive intensity, as though words might impose order upon the turmoil in his mind, as though understanding the past might somehow explain the present.

Meanwhile, Valia’s illness vanished.

No dizziness. No fainting spells.

She ate everything that was served to her. She did not refuse diluted wine. She made no demands. She laughed with her brothers. She walked the corridors as though the weight of pregnancy were merely a detail.

Happy.

That was the word that unsettled him.

At night, he waited.

He waited until she fell asleep first.

Only then did he lie beside her in that bed too narrow for two. The room was silent, lit only by the distant glow of moonlight against stone. He remained still for a moment, listening to her breathing deepen.

The scent.

Always the scent.

Lavender and something warmer, something that was wholly her. Intoxicating. Too familiar.

The dinner began like all the others since their arrival: with Rhaenyra at the head, Daemon distracted but present, and the children competing for attention as though affection were a scarce resource.

Aemond sat beside Valia by protocol, not by choice. The stone table reflected the warmth of the candles without absorbing it, and he occupied his seat as he occupied every space in Dragonstone — with the rigidity of a man expecting an ambush.

Valia, however, seemed different.

She laughed with Joffrey, who had invented an absurd tale about a crab attempting to steal his shoe. She leaned in to listen to Lucerys, who spoke softly about the flights he had taken with Arrax. She exchanged glances with Jacaerys — glances that seemed to hold entire conversations.

Aemond cut his meat into small pieces and did not eat it.

“More wine, Princess?”

The servant tilted the flagon before Valia could answer, and she did not refuse.

Aemond watched the cup being filled. Watched her fingers curve around the crystal. Watched the first sip, then the second.

“Thirsty?” he remarked, neutral.

She looked at him over the rim of her cup.

“I am home.”

The answer came quickly, sharply, and he felt the blow even though she had not raised her voice. Home. As if the months in King’s Landing had been exile.

The second cup arrived with dessert — a fruit tart the children devoured with their hands, ignoring the existence of utensils. Valia accepted more wine naturally, and Aemond noticed the different gleam in her eyes, the way her movements loosened, her laughter came easier.

She was drunk.

Not enough to stumble, but enough for her defenses to lower. Enough that when he watched her, she watched him back without the usual veil.

So much so that when they took their leave and headed toward their chambers, she walked ahead with steps far too determined.

He followed her through the corridors of black stone, the sound of his boots echoing in unstable unison with the sweep of her gown against the floor. The torches flickered, casting shadows that danced like witnesses.

It was in a darker stretch, far from the children’s ears, from the servants, from Rhaenyra’s constant vigilance, that she stopped.

She turned so abruptly he nearly collided with her.

“Why do you ignore me?”

The question cut through the corridor like a spear.

Aemond stopped. His expression did not change — it never did — but something in his single eye sharpened.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

She laughed. A sound without humor, without lightness, nothing like the laughter he had heard at the table.

“Of course you don’t. You never do. You wake before I do, spend the day away, return after dark, lie down when you think I’m asleep.” She stepped closer. The wine lingered in her breath, in her slightly slurred courage. “What is it, Aemond? Disgust? Boredom? Have you already done your part?”

His jaw tightened.

“You are drunk.”

“I am home,” she repeated, and this time the word tasted different. “I am home and you still treat me as though I am an obligation. As though you are serving a sentence.”

“Perhaps I am.”

The silence that followed was as heavy as Vhagar.

Valia stared at him. Her eyes shone not only from wine but from something more dangerous.

“Then leave.”

Her voice came out low, controlled — which made it all the more terrible.

“Go back to King’s Landing. To your Red Keep. To your cold war with your nephews and your cherished hatred. Leave me here, since you cannot stand me.”

Aemond watched her for a moment that felt too long.

“I cannot.”

“Why?”

“It was you,” he continued, stepping forward and invading the space she had tried to hold, “who begged my father to come here. You should have known I would be required to follow as your husband. And now? Now that you are home, now that you have your brothers, your laughter, your comfort, you wish to dismiss me like a disposable servant?”

Valia opened her mouth, closed it. Opened it again.

The shock on her face lasted only a second before something more wounded replaced it.

“And the night on the ship?” she asked, her voice trembling.

Aemond did not answer.

“You came to me as though you owned my body, and the next day—” She gestured to the corridor, to the distance he maintained. “This. This nothing. This ice. As though I imagined it. As though it meant nothing—”

“What did you expect?”

The interruption was brutal.

She stared at him, and he saw tears that did not fall, held back perhaps only by pride.

“It was your duty as a wife,” he finished, the coldness in his voice so perfect that even he no longer knew whether it was real or a mask. “It is what wives do. Do not turn it into something it was not.”

The blow landed cleanly.

Valia recoiled as if struck. The flush from the wine drained from her face.

Then she turned and walked away.

Her skirts gathered in her hands, her steps echoing urgently through the stone corridors, fleeing him as though he were plague, as though he were the storm she feared.

Aemond followed.

Not by choice. By instinct. By something he could not name.

She entered their chambers and left the door open. He heard her voice before crossing the threshold.

“How dare you!” The cry echoed against stone, and he knew, with absolute certainty, that the servants heard, that the guards heard, that perhaps even Rhaenyra heard. “How dare you say that after everything! You touch me as though I am yours and then—”

He entered and shut the door hard enough to silence her.

For a second, they only stared at one another.

Her chest rose and fell rapidly. Her hands were clenched into fists. Her eyes were red, wet, furious.

“Your duty as a wife,” she repeated, spitting the words. “Your duty as a wife. And what is your duty, Aemond? What are you besides this wall of ice and hatred?”

He crossed the room in three strides.

His hand closed around her arm — not brutally, but firmly enough that she felt she would not slip free. The contact was electric, wrong, too right.

“We will return together,” he said, his voice so low it was nearly a whisper.

“Let go—”

But he did not.

She tried to pull away, and he drew her back, and suddenly they were too close. Her scent — lavender, wine, anger — filled the space between them.

“Do you hate me?” she asked, her voice breaking.

“Yes.”

“You hate me and yet—”

She did not finish.

She did not need to.

The kiss came as the others had: inevitable, fierce, necessary.

She bit his lip first, or he bit hers — neither would know later. Her hands tangled in his hair, pulling with the same fury with which she had shouted minutes before. His mouth claimed hers, his hands gripping her waist, pulling her against him as though to erase every inch of space, every distance, every word spoken, feeling the curve of her rounded belly between them.

When they finally broke apart — breathless, disheveled, her eyes still wet but now for other reasons — Aemond rested his forehead against hers.

“Do not leave,” she whispered.

Neither of them was certain of anything anymore.

What followed was different from anything they had shared before.

It was not the desperate urgency of the ship, when the storm howled outside and the world seemed ready to collapse. It was not the possessive brutality of the first time, when he had taken her as though claiming territory on a battlefield.

It was slow.

So slow that Aemond felt every second as an eternity — and did not want it to end.

His hands found her face first, his thumbs tracing her cheekbones as though she were made of something fragile, something precious, something he did not deserve to touch but could not resist. Her violet eyes in the dim light burned with something he did not dare name.

“Valia,” he whispered, and her name sounded different in his mouth. Like a prayer.

She did not answer with words. She only drew him closer, and he followed her to the bed of her childhood.

Inside her, the world made sense for the first time.

“Mine,” he murmured against her lips as he moved with her, the word rough, as though it were both discovery and surrender.

She arched into him, a sound escaping her that was almost a sob, almost a laugh, almost everything neither of them said aloud.

“Mine,” he repeated, slower now, deeper, his fingers tangled in her hair, his single eye fixed on her violet gaze that did not waver. “You are mine.”

Her body beneath his, warm, alive, his. As though he belonged to her as much as she belonged to him. As though this were less conquest and more surrender.

He kissed her as though he had all the time in the world — because that night, he did. He kissed her eyelids when her eyes closed, kissed the tears that slipped free without warning, kissed the corner of her mouth when she smiled — smiled — against his lips.

“Aemond…”

Her voice was so soft he almost missed it. But he heard. He heard everything. Every small sound, every breath, every time his name escaped her like a secret.

He rested his forehead against hers, his movements slow and deep, as though they were dancing something only the two of them knew. Her violet eyes remained open, fixed on him, and he could not look away. Did not want to.

“Mine,” he said once more, and the word was everything he had, everything he was, everything he wanted to be for her.

There was so much there. So much he had never seen before. Or perhaps it had always been there, and he had been blind — blind in one eye, blind in many other ways.

She lifted her hand and touched the left side of his face.

Where the eyepatch hid what remained.

Her touch was light, almost questioning. Her fingers traced the edge of the leather with a gentleness that tightened something in his chest. He did not move. Did not speak. Only watched her, his heart pounding against his ribs.

“May I?” she asked, so softly he barely heard.

He should have refused. Should have protected that part of himself no one saw, that he himself avoided seeing, hidden behind leather, pride, and decades of poorly disguised shame.

But it was her eyes.

Violet. Gentle. Without pity. Without revulsion. Without anything he had always expected.

He closed his eye and inclined his head.

She loosened the straps patiently. Her fingers brushed his skin, his neck, the place where the leather always pressed and he never complained. The eyepatch gave way, sliding free, and he felt the cool night air against what he always kept covered.

The sapphire.

Set within the empty socket. Cold. Blue. Strange.

He did not open his eye. He remained still, waiting for what would come next — the quick look away, the disguised grimace, the strained silence everyone offered upon seeing him.

But she did not look away.

Her fingers touched his face with the same gentleness as before, tracing the skin around the gem, the scar that ran from brow to cheek. Her touch was warm, careful, as though she were touching something sacred rather than something mutilated.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured.

He opened his eye.

She looked at him without fear. Without pity. Without anything he had learned to expect. Only… him. Only Aemond. As though the sapphire were as much a part of him as the eye he had lost, as much as the hands now trembling faintly against her body.

“Valia,” he tried to say, but his voice failed.

She leaned forward and kissed the scar.

Slowly. Her soft lips tracing the path Lucerys’s blade had carved years before. She kissed his brow, the edge of the socket where the sapphire rested. She kissed his cheek, the corner of his mouth, his jaw.

And Aemond felt something break inside him.

Something he had not even known was whole.

Later, when her body finally relaxed beneath him, when her breathing grew deep and steady, the rhythm of someone who had found peace, Aemond drew her back against his chest.

He buried his face in her hair.

Lavender. Always lavender, now mixed with her own warm scent — the one he had learned to recognize in darkness and that now felt inseparable from him. He breathed deeply, feeling the softness of her hair against his face, the warmth of her body against his, his hand resting over the curve of her belly where their child grew.

His heart beat fast, and not from exertion.

It was her. It was this. It was being there, in that bed too narrow, holding a woman who should have been only a means to an end but had become far more without his noticing.

Aemond Targaryen did not know how to recognize feelings. He had never been taught. He had been raised to distrust, to hate, to survive. Love was uncharted territory, a map no one had ever given him.

But there, with the scent of lavender filling his lungs and her hand resting over her belly, he felt something he could not name.

Something that might have been this.

He pressed his fingers against the curve of her pregnancy, not with possession — or not only with possession. With something closer to fear. Fear of loss. Fear that it was temporary. Fear of waking to find it had all been a dream.

“Mine,” he whispered into her hair, so low only he could hear.

But she heard. Her fingers tightened around his.

And Aemond closed his eye — the only one he had — and allowed himself, for the first time in a very long while, simply to feel.

As on every morning since their arrival, he left the bed before she woke.

He woke before dawn.

His head throbbed more than it should — perhaps from the damp, perhaps from the constant weight of the eyepatch he rarely removed, not even to sleep. An old habit. A vigilance that never ceased.

He left the bed before she woke.

As though fleeing a few minutes before the day began were the only way to retain control of something.

But every morning, upon seeing her at the table — smiling, healthy, serene — he began to suspect something that irritated him deeply:

Perhaps Dragonstone had been the inspiration she claimed she lacked in King’s Landing.

And perhaps he did not like that at all.

Chapter Text

The routine changed after that night.  
Not in any declared way, not with words or promises — but in the small spaces between what they were and what they had become, in the interstices that once belonged to emptiness and now housed something he still couldn't name.

Aemond still woke before dawn. Still flew with Vhagar in the early hours, when the wind was sharpest and the sky still held traces of night like open wounds. Still hunted deer on the stony hills, feeling the impact of the spear travel up his arm like a familiar prayer, hot blood spattering on cold stones in a contrast that had always felt natural to him.

But afterwards, when the sun was high and the scent of the kill still clung to his skin, he no longer went to the library.

He returned to the castle. Returned to her.

Valia waited for him in different places each day — sometimes in the inner courtyard; sometimes in the forgotten gardens; sometimes simply in the corridors, leaning against the black stone as if she knew, with the certainty of someone who had learned to read his movements, that he would come.

And then they walked.

They wandered through Dragonstone with no fixed destination, as if the fortress belonged to them, as if every dark corridor and every abandoned hall was theirs by right of discovery.

He noticed things he hadn't noticed before: how, as the days passed, her belly grew more evident, heavier, more real. Seven moons now. Her steps grew slower. She often pressed a hand to her lower back. When they climbed staircases, she became more breathless, her chest rising and falling rapidly while he waited — patient as he had never been with anyone.

"I need to rest," she would say sometimes, leaning against the black stone wall, her free hand pressing against her womb as if needing to remind their child that it was still too early.

And he waited.

He said nothing. He just stood there.

Her brothers watched.

He saw it in the looks they exchanged when he and Valia entered a hall together. Joffrey watched with innocent curiosity, still too young to understand what had changed. Jacaerys with calculated distrust, his brown eyes following his uncle's every move like someone expecting betrayal. Lucerys...

Lucerys looked away.

And there was something in that — in the way the boy who had cost him an eye now avoided meeting his gaze — that fed a dark satisfaction in Aemond. Because Lucerys saw. Saw how Valia drew closer to him, saw how he touched her in small gestures that hadn't existed before.

Neither of them showed affection in front of her family. Not him, not her. At the table, they were still the same: distant, formal, strangers who shared the same plate by accident or imposition. Indifference was armor they put on every night, a ritual as necessary as breathing. But everyone knew. Everyone felt that something had shifted in the air between them, in the gravity that pulled them together even when they were on opposite sides of the hall.

What no one saw was what happened in the empty corridors.

The first time was in a narrow passage behind the great hall, where no one had passed for centuries. The dust gathered in the corners held only the tracks of rats — until them.

She pulled him by the sleeve of his tunic with an urgency he had learned to recognize, her violet eyes gleaming in the dimness with something that transcended desire and approached need. He pressed her against the cold wall before any word was exchanged, his hands finding their way beneath her skirts with the precision of one who studies a territory until knowing it better than his own.

After that, it was in an abandoned turret, with the wind howling through the cracks and the sound of the sea below as an indifferent witness.

The stones were covered in moss and saltpeter, and the uneven floor made every movement a negotiation with balance.

She came to him this time — it was she who pushed him against the circular wall, who undid the ties of his tunic with fingers that no longer trembled, who kissed him with a hunger he recognized because it was the same he felt. Her belly brushed against him, a constant reminder of what they carried together, and when she knelt — despite the weight, despite the obvious discomfort — he tried to stop her.

"Valia—"

"Quiet."

The order was whispered against his skin, and he obeyed.

When her mouth found him, Aemond lost the ability to think of anything but that moment. His fingers buried themselves in her hair, not to guide, but to cling to something as the world unraveled around him. The wind howled, the sea crashed against the rocks below, and he bit his own fist to keep from shouting her name for the whole island to hear.

Afterward, she looked up at him — lips red, chin wet, a slow smile that was both provocation and offering — and he pulled her up, kissing her with an urgency bordering on desperation.

"You're going to kill me," he murmured against her mouth.

It was in the wine cellar, among barrels of wine that no one had drunk for decades. The smell of fermented grape and mold created a strange, almost sacred atmosphere. She was sitting on a barrel, legs open to accommodate her belly, her dress hiked up to her hips. He was kneeling between her thighs — he, the prince, the queen's son, the rider of the largest living dragon — kneeling like a supplicant.

His tongue found her center with devotion. Her moans echoed among the barrels, ricocheting off the stone walls like prayers in an empty temple. Her hands gripped his hair, pulling him closer, always closer, as if she wanted to fuse him into herself.

"Aemond," she moaned, his name broken into syllables he collected like treasures. "Aemond, please..."

He didn't stop.

He only stopped when she came against his mouth with a cry he muffled with her thighs, pressing her legs together to contain the sound. Her body trembled in waves, and he felt each spasm as if it were his own.

Afterward, he laid his head on her thigh, exhausted, satisfied, empty of everything but her presence. Her fingers smoothed through his hair, and he closed his eye — the only one he had — and allowed himself to rest.

It was in the library, on top of a pile of ancient scrolls, that she laughed at having witnessed things the Valyrians never imagined. The most expensive scroll of all, a treatise on dragon breeding, ended up crumpled beneath her back as he took her with a deliberate, cruel slowness that made her beg.

"Please," she pleaded, her violet eyes glistening. "Please, Aemond..."

"What do you want?" He maintained control with the discipline of one who had trained his whole life not to yield. "Tell me."

"You. Only you. Faster, deeper, I need—"

He granted it.

And when she came — body arched, cry caught in her throat, nails raking down his back — he followed her, burying his face in her shoulder, murmuring things in Valyrian that even he no longer understood.

Even on the hill where Vhagar had made her nest.

The dragon had watched them with an ancient eye, as wise as only creatures who had seen centuries pass could be. She had allowed her to approach, to touch her snout, to murmur words in Valyrian that the beast seemed to understand.

It was there, on the rough grass beside the slumbering beast, that he took her once more.

The smell of Vhagar around them — sulfur, ashes, ancient power — mixed with her scent, creating a fragrance he knew he would never forget. The warmth of her body beneath him contrasted with the cold wind blowing from the sea. The gray sky above seemed the only roof worthy of what they shared.

He entered her from behind slowly, so slowly that she moaned in frustration before feeling him, burying her face in the grass.

"Mine," he whispered as the wind carried the words to the sea. "Mine. Mine. Mine."

Each repetition was a step deeper, a stronger bond, a more complete surrender.

He had read, in some of those ancient treatises he devoured in the library, that pregnant women became more insatiable. He had attributed the information to superstition or exaggeration by scholars who had never touched a woman, who confused desire with illness and pleasure with sin.

He had discovered they were right.

She sought him with a hunger he didn't know existed, with an urgency that disarmed him. It wasn't merely physical desire — it was need, a craving for skin, for presence, for feeling alive in a body that was transforming so quickly. And he responded — always responded — because denying her anything was denying himself, and he no longer knew where one ended and the other began.

There were moments, however, when he watched her sleep and felt fear.

Fear that this was temporary. Fear that, when the baby was born, she would no longer need him.

The problem — if one could call it that — was on the beach.

They were walking along the dark sand of Dragonstone, so different from the beaches of King's Landing, where the sand was golden and the sea seemed calmer. The low tide had revealed formations that remained submerged most of the time — among them, a fissure in the dragon glass cliff, dark as pitch, that opened into the interior of the cliff like an ancient wound.

"Come," she said, pulling him by the hand with childlike excitement. "I want to see what's inside."

He went.

Inside the fissure, light barely penetrated. The walls of black glass reflected what little entered, creating strange, almost magical glimmers — tiny points of light that danced like fireflies trapped in time. The sound of the sea grew distant, muffled, as if they were in another world, in a place where the rules of outside didn't apply.

He simply pulled her to him and kissed her.

She responded as she always responded — as if there was hunger in her too, as if the days of forced distance at the table were too many days without his taste. Her hands found his hair, pulling him closer; his found the ties of her dress, undoing them with the practice of one who had learned, in the past moons, to have patience for ribbons and knots.

The dress fell from her shoulders, revealing breasts heavier from pregnancy, nipples darker, skin more sensitive. He kissed every inch that offered itself — her shoulders, her collarbone, her chest, her breasts — feeling her moan softly, her fingers tangled in his hair.

"Aemond," she murmured, her voice echoing faintly against the glass walls. "Here... now..."

He obeyed.

His hands slid beneath her skirt, finding the warm skin of her thighs, the path he already knew by heart. She was wet — she was always wet for him, and this filled him with a primitive pride he no longer tried to suppress. His fingers found her center, teasing, exploring, while his mouth traveled along her neck in kisses that would leave marks.

She arched her back, pressing against his hand, her accelerated breath echoing in the enclosed space.

That's when they heard it.

Footsteps in the sand. Someone approaching the entrance of the fissure.

Valia froze. He did too.

"Valia?" Jacaerys's voice echoed from outside, confused, alert.

Then Jacaerys appeared at the entrance of the fissure.

The light behind him created a silhouette, but it was possible to see the exact moment when his eyes adjusted to the dimness and understood the scene. Valia with her dress fallen to her waist, breasts exposed, her body still pressed against the wall. Aemond with his hands inside her skirt. His lips red. Their ragged breathing. Everything.

"Seven hells," Jacaerys gasped, recoiling as if struck.

Valia made a strangled sound. Buried her face in Aemond's shoulder.

Aemond, in turn, felt something dangerously close to satisfaction.

Let them see. Let everyone see. Let Jacaerys, Lucerys, Rhaenyra, Daemon know she was his. His wife. She was his, and he possessed her in every way that mattered.

Valia waited for him to move before lifting her head. Her face was red, her eyes glistening, the expression of someone wishing the ground would open and swallow her.

"I'm going to die," she murmured. "I'm going to die of shame. Jace saw. Jace saw everything. Everyone will know we were here."

After that, Valia didn't appear at dinner.

Nor the next one. Nor the one after that.

Two entire days in which she invented illnesses — nausea, fatigue, back pain, fever, anything that would keep her in the chambers while the shame passed, while her face stopped burning every time she thought of Jacaerys's eyes at the entrance of the fissure.

Her brothers sent worried messages. Rhaenyra appeared at the door twice, her soft voice asking if she needed anything, if she wanted her to summon a maester — but Valia refused to enter, refused to leave, refused to face the world outside.

Aemond, for his part, sat at the table every night — after all, he was still a prince of the realm.

Alone. Silent. Facing everyone's stares with the same coldness as always, as if nothing had happened, as if there wasn't an elephant in the room that everyone saw but no one mentioned.

Jacaerys avoided meeting his gaze.

Rhaenyra observed everything with calculated attention, her eyes moving from Aemond to Jacaerys, from Jacaerys to Aemond, like someone trying to assemble a puzzle with missing pieces.

Daemon smiled.

Once. Just once. On the second day, when passing Aemond in a corridor, the look they exchanged lasted only an instant — but the smile at the corner of Daemon's mouth said everything. He knew.

Now everyone knew. Now there was no more doubt. She was his — the sister, the daughter, the protected one — she belonged to him in every way that mattered.

On the third day, he found her in the east hall.

Not by accident — he had looked for her. He needed to see her, needed to know if she was still hiding, if shame still consumed her.

But when he entered, he froze.

She had her back to him, sitting on a bench by the narrow window that looked out to the sea. The pale afternoon light entered in beams, illuminating her hair, her shoulders, her arms.

In her arms, the baby Viserys.

Her brother.

Valia was singing.

In Valyrian.

Her voice was low, soft, cradling each syllable as if they were made of velvet. The song was ancient — he recognized some words, some phrases about the sea, about dragons, about mothers waiting for their children to return.

The baby had one tiny hand resting on her chin.

She tilted her head slightly, pressing her skin against that minuscule touch, and smiled — a smile so soft, so full of something he couldn't name, that Aemond felt the air leave his lungs.

For one stupid second — a second in which his heart raced before reason could intervene — he thought she had already had the baby. Thought that while he flew with Vhagar, while he hunted deer on the hills, something had happened and he hadn't been there.

But no. It was too early. Only seven moons. And that baby wasn't newborn — he was months old, his eyes moving, following her voice with attention.

Still.

Still the scene struck him like a spear.

She looked so natural there. So right. As if holding a child were the simplest thing in the world, as if love were something that flowed from her without effort, as if this were the destiny for which she had always been designed.

He watched her for too long.

That night, and many after, they met in her childhood chambers for the night.

The castle slept, but they did not.

The narrow bed creaked protests under the weight of two bodies that no longer fit in it — not comfortably, at least. But comfort was not what they sought.

She was more distended each day, her belly grown like a full moon beneath her skin, and this made everything more awkward. More urgent. More desperate.

He took her from behind — one of the few positions her weight allowed, the only one where her belly didn't come between them like an intruder. She would lie on her side, or on her knees, and he would adjust himself behind her like someone fitting pieces that no longer fit perfectly, but needed, needed, needed.

There was something deeply wrong in this — and something deeply right as well.

Her moans were different now. More muffled. Deeper. Higher. As if the sound had to travel through more body before escaping. And he collected them, each one, storing them somewhere in his chest that he had once thought empty.

The bed creaked that night — that specific night, the night he learned a new geometry of bodies.

She was on her knees, her heavy breasts swaying with each thrust, and he held her by the hips with a force that would leave marks. Her belly brushed against the sheets with every movement, and she moaned into the pillow — a wet, warm sound that he felt more than heard.

"Harder," she whispered. Or perhaps he imagined it. Or perhaps she thought it so loudly that he heard it anyway.

He obeyed.

He always obeyed, on those nights.

His body found hers in a rhythm the ship had taught them — that sway of waves, that movement of those who had learned to fuck against gravity, against fate, against everything that tried to separate them.

When she came, he felt it, felt every spasm as if it were his own, pleading his name like a prayer, as if it were sacred.

He held her hips even tighter.

And he continued.

Because there was the fact that she was here, with him, carrying his child, fucking him, in the middle of the night, on the island of his enemy, in her childhood room.

He fucked her until he forgot.

Until the only name in the room was silence.

The copper tub was too small for two, but they squeezed into it as if it had been made for this. Her back against his chest, the hot water covering as far as it could reach, the steam misting the cold air of the room.

He massaged her shoulders with slow, circular movements, feeling the knots dissolve under his fingers. She moaned softly — sounds of relief, of simple pleasure, of surrender.

"Right there," she murmured when his thumbs found an especially tense spot. "There. Exactly there."

He obeyed. Without thinking. As if obeying the beating of his own heart.

The silence between them was comfortable now. Not the heavy silence of the first days, full of edges and distrust, but another — softer, more habitable. A silence that fit between two bodies the way water fit between them in that tub.

He was the one who broke it.

"I received letters from my mother," he said.

Her body tensed under his hands. He felt every muscle prepare, like an animal scenting danger.

She didn't respond. She just waited.

"We're leaving."

She turned in the tub, water shifting in waves that spilled over, wetting the stone floor. Her violet eyes were wide, alarmed. Dilated pupils. He knew that look. It was the same one she wore when someone came too close to the truth.

"What? Now?"

"In a few days."

"No."

The word was sharp.

"Valia—"

"No." She sat up straight, water streaming down her shoulders, her breasts, her enormous belly. "I'm not going. I can't. I'm nearly at the end of the seventh moon, Aemond. A few more and the baby will be born. You want me to travel now? To face the sea again? To risk—"

"It's an order."

"I don't care. I'm having the baby here."

Rage began to boil in him.

She was already crying.

Always crying.

The tears fell silently, magnifying those violet eyes he couldn't face when they were like this. Those enormous, wet eyes, making him feel like a monster.

A part of him hardened.

She always cries. Whenever she's contradicted. Spoiled. Raised to have whatever she wants.

Another part, smaller but insistent, whispered: She's pregnant. She's afraid.

He ignored it.

"You are my wife. You go where I go."

"Then go." She stood up, naked, water streaming down her body, her immense belly in front of her like a shield. "Go back to your mother. To your king. I'm staying."

"Valia—"

But she was already climbing out of the tub, grabbing a robe, leaving the room without looking back.

He stayed there.

In the water that was cooling.

Alone.

The dock was quieter that morning.

The sea, strangely calm, seemed to mock the storm that had brought them days before.

Jonquil was already on board — much to the captain's displeasure.

Valia remained on the pier.

Holding her mother first. A hug too long. Shoulders trembling. Face hidden against the lap that had cradled her as a child.

Then her brothers.

Joffrey held her tightly, as if he could still prevent her departure through sheer force of will. Jacaerys kept his posture straight, but his eyes glistened dangerously. Lucerys touched her face gently, his fingers hesitating before descending into a tight embrace.

Their tears didn't fall.

But they were there.

Daemon watched from afar.

Arms crossed. Expression unreadable. He didn't interfere. Didn't approach. Just watched — as if memorizing every detail.

Aemond stood a few steps behind.

Motionless.

His presence there was a constant, inevitable shadow.

Valia wept without shame now. Face red, eyes swollen. Each goodbye seemed to tear something physical from her.

Rhaenyra approached last.

She carried something in her hands, wrapped in dark fabric.

Valia turned, still sobbing.

Rhaenyra placed the bundle in Aemond's hands.

He hesitated before accepting.

The fabric was opened.

A dragon egg.

Golden with red veins, like fire beneath polished metal. The surface pulsed discreetly in the morning light.

For a second, the air left his lungs.

"Syrax laid eggs this season," Rhaenyra said. "I kept one for your baby."

Silence.

The entire dock seemed to wait.

Aemond held the egg with absolute care, as if it were something sacred — or explosive.

He hadn't expected that.

Not there.

"I..." the word failed briefly.

He swallowed.

"I thank you."

Formal. Controlled. But the shock still echoed beneath the surface.

Valia watched him with tear-filled eyes, surprise mingling with the raw emotion of farewell.

Vhagar roared from the hills.

Aemond felt the call vibrate in his bones.

He lifted his chin.

On the hill, the enormous dragon opened her wings.

The wind shifted.

The ship's sails snapped as Vhagar took flight, her shadow crossing the dock and covering everyone for an instant.

It was time.

Valia hugged her mother once more. Then her brothers. Rhaenyra held her last, whispering something Aemond couldn't hear.

Then she stepped away.

Hesitant steps.

Servants helped her up the gangplank.

Aemond came right behind, the egg still in his arms.

When they were aboard, he looked back.

Valia stood at the railing, tears streaming uncontrollably. Her face completely red. Her hands gripping the wood as if that could keep her there.

The ship began to pull away.

Her brothers remained on the dock, motionless, until distance made them only silhouettes.

Daemon still stood there, wind stirring his silver hair, his gaze fixed on the ship — fixed on them.

Aemond's heart clenched uncomfortably seeing Valia like this.

Shattered.

Not for him.

But for the land she was leaving.

He looked away first.

Adjusted the dragon egg against his chest.

And remained beside her as Dragonstone grew smaller on the horizon — without touching her, but close enough that if she lost her balance, he would be the one to catch her.

As always.

Chapter Text

The voyage back was not as harsh as the journey out. The sea was calmer, the wind less aggressive, the waves striking the hull with an almost drowsy regularity. For two days, Aemond allowed himself to believe the crossing would be simple.

Valia fell ill on the second day.

He knew before he even saw her. He descended the hatch and the smell struck him first—acidic, unmistakable. His body reacted before his mind did: heart quickening, jaw tightening.

She was sitting on the edge of the narrow bed, pale, her hair tied back carelessly. She held a basin in her lap with trembling fingers. Jonquil, the wretched cat, had curled up in a corner, equally nauseated, having vomited near the trunk.

Aemond stopped in the doorway. He said nothing. He remained there, watching her, measuring her pallor, her slow and careful breathing. He wanted to reach out. He did not.

“The crew says the sea will calm soon,” he lied.

She lifted her glassy eyes but did not answer. She merely rested her head against the edge of the bunk and closed her eyelids.

Aemond went up to the deck for the seventh time that morning.

Not because he needed to. Not because there was any reason. The wind blew steadily, the sails were full, the helmsman held the course. No threat on the horizon. And still, he climbed. He climbed to feel the air on his face, to shake from his shoulders the weight of that stifling cabin. He climbed so he would not rush back down and remain there, seated at her side, useless, too large for any comfort he might offer.

On deck, he braced his hands against the rail and stared at the sea. Below, Valia slept—or tried to sleep. Jonquil likely hated her for dragging him into that ordeal.

Aemond hated the sea. He hated the helplessness, hated the waiting.

But above all, he hated the truth pounding in his chest since he had descended that ladder: she was ill, and there was nothing he could do.

Nothing—except climb to the deck and count the minutes until he could go down again.

Their arrival at King’s Landing was far too abrupt.

Aemond felt Vhagar reverberate in his bones.

The smell of the harbor—fish, tar, salt—invaded his nostrils before he even stepped onto the gangplank. The sound of ropes being thrown against wooden pilings, the shouts of sailors, the organized chaos of the capital. After days at sea, the continent felt too aggressive, too solid.

And then—his mother.

Alicent was waiting for them on the quay, dressed in green, her hands clasped before her. The wind stirred her garments and loosened strands of hair from her coiffure. She greeted them before they had even finished disembarking.

To his surprise, she embraced Valia first.

She held her tightly, as if to measure the weight of the time they had been apart, as if she might, through contact alone, discover everything the sparse letters had not told her.

“You took long enough,” she complained, pulling back just enough to examine her good-daughter’s face. Her eyes traveled over every feature, every shadow. “Was the sea rough? You look pale. And the baby? How is it? Oh—how you’ve grown…”

Alicent placed a hand over Valia’s distended belly, smiling with a tenderness she rarely displayed in public. Her palm lingered there, as though waiting to feel the child move beneath the fabric.

Aemond watched.

Valia answered politely. With rehearsed sweetness. She inclined her head at the proper angle, spoke the proper words about the voyage, about her health, about the egg they had brought.

But he noticed.

The short patience. The faint tension in her shoulders beneath the cloak. The smile that did not quite reach her eyes—mere muscle effort, nothing more.

She did not want to be examined like a relic.

Aemond looked away before his mother could notice anything.

“Come,” he said.

Their old chambers were exactly as they had left them.

The same gray stone walls, cold even in the heat of day. The same faded tapestries embroidered with red dragons that seemed to move in the trembling candlelight—an illusion of the eye, or perhaps merely the suggestion of fire. The same bed too large for one man alone, its dark wooden posts bearing witness to nights of insomnia and nightmares. A bed that, in recent moons, he had learned to share—to yield space, to feel the warmth of another body beside his own, to breathe in the rhythm of someone who was not himself.

The dragon egg was already there.

Someone had brought it from the ship ahead of them, and now it rested upon glowing embers in a corner of the adjoining chamber. The room they had turned into a nursery during their absence. The walls had been layered with soft fabrics to soften the chill of the stone. A new cradle, carved from dark wood with dragons etched into its feet, stood near the hearth. A gift from the queen, they had said upon disembarking. Alicent had commissioned it before even knowing the child’s sex.

Aemond paused in the doorway of the nursery for a long moment.

The cradle. The egg. The orange glow of embers warming the marble floor.

The certainty that soon there would be a baby there.

His baby.

Her baby.

He felt the weight of it like a stone in his stomach—not just any stone, but a boulder, the kind that sinks ships, that drags men to the bottom of the sea before they can scream. His hand found the doorframe, fingers tightening around the wood.

Life was sword, duty, vengeance, the constant hum of Vhagar in his ears.

But now there was a cradle.

There was an egg that might or might not hatch.

There was a girl in the next room, carrying within her something that was his and hers and no one else’s.

Aemond did not pray. Not since childhood, not since he had learned that the gods do not listen—or if they do, they do not care. But that night, standing at the doorway of the empty nursery, with the egg slowly warming in the embers, he did something he had not done in years.

He wished.

He wished hard enough for it to hurt.

That the egg would hatch. That the child would be born alive. That the baby would have the silver hair of the Targaryens, so that no one would ever forget whose child it was.

He wished—and hated himself for wishing, because wishing was weakness, was baring one’s chest to the blow, was placing the knife in fate’s hand so it might stab him.

But he could not stop.

That night, he did not know what to do.

Over the past moons, on Dragonstone, they had shared a bed every night. Not always for sex—sometimes merely to sleep, to feel each other’s warmth, to know they were not alone in the dark.

But here… here it was different.

This was his territory. His mother’s and his grandsire’s stronghold. The place where she was the foreigner, the intruder, the daughter of the woman his family hated.

Would she want him to sleep beside her? Or would she prefer to be alone?

He did not ask.

He lingered too long in the doorway, watching her lie down in the great bed, pull the covers to her chin, settle Jonquil beside her body. The cat—traitor—curled against her belly, purring as though he had not spent the entire voyage trying to claw everyone’s eyes out.

“You are not coming?”

Her voice broke the silence suddenly. Violet eyes fixed on him, piercing, waiting.

Aemond did not answer at once.

He remained there, motionless, the weight of the question pressing on him. He felt heat rise along his neck—not shame, but something close to it. She drew him. She always had. And that attraction was, in some way, a weakness. A breach in the armor he had spent his life building.

If he stayed, everyone would know. The servants would see. His mother would know. The court would whisper about the prince who could not leave his wife’s bed.

But she was his wife.

And a man is not diminished for sleeping beside his own wife. The rumors would not touch him. He was the king’s son, rider of the greatest dragon in the world. No one would dare call him weak for warming the bed of a beautiful girl, whatever the circumstances of her birth.

Aemond moved.

He removed his boots, one at a time, letting them fall to the floor with a dull thud. Then his doublet, his fingers finding the ties with the same efficiency he used to fasten his sword. The garment slipped from his shoulders, and he dropped it carelessly over a chair.

He crossed the chamber in slow steps and lay down beside her.

Valia said nothing. But he felt the tension in her shoulders, the silent ill humor radiating from her like heat. She was irritated. With him. With the delay. With the hesitation.

Jonquil growled low, a guttural sound of protest. Then he leapt from the bed with the offended dignity of one expelled from his own territory, disappearing toward the darkest corner of the room.

Aemond almost smiled.

“Good night,” he said at last.

“Good night,” she replied.

Her voice was still cool. Distant.

He closed his eye.

Outside, Vhagar roared her own irritation, a deep sound that made the stones tremble.

Aemond ignored it.

He lay listening to Valia’s breathing beside him, feeling the warmth of her body beneath the sheets, waiting for the silence between them to cease being a wall.

Returning to routine was far too easy.

Almost automatic.

He discovered, however, that the few moons on Dragonstone had taken their toll. In the yard, he had to push himself harder against Criston Cole than he would have liked.

His arm took half a second longer to react. His breath failed him once.

Irritating.

Aegon was still drinking before midday, laughing too loudly, sometimes dragging musicians into his chambers at improper hours.

Helaena remained distant, gentle, almost ethereal. Her children orbited around her.

The library was still his refuge.

The same scrolls. The same candles. The same obedient silence.

His flights with Vhagar were predictable, controlled, almost therapeutic. Blackwater Bay stretched beneath him like a polished blade.

Everything seemed the same.

Except for her.

After a few days of tense silences, dinners began to take place in their own chambers.

It was Aemond who decided it.

Fewer eyes. Fewer comments. Fewer interventions from the queen. Less of that constant scrutiny that turned every meal into a silent battlefield. Here, in her private rooms, they could exist without an audience.

Valia did not protest.

But she did not show enthusiasm either.

During the day, if she was not summoned, she remained in bed. Lying on her side, surrounded by cushions he himself had begun adjusting before leaving—a habit he had acquired without noticing. Jonquil was always nearby, the cat no longer seasick but possessive, as though the pregnancy were his, as though Aemond were merely a tolerated intruder in his territory.

“The maester said you need to move,” Aemond said one morning, watching her struggle to readjust against the cushions.

“I move.”

“From the bed to the window does not count.”

She gave him a tired look. The kind that said everything without words—that he did not understand, that he did not carry that weight, that he had no right to demand.

Even so, she rose.

He began insisting she accompany him on short walks through the Red Keep. Through the wide corridors where footsteps echoed beneath vaulted ceilings. Through galleries hung with ancient tapestries depicting battles she did not know. Through the inner gardens when the sun was not too high, when the light was soft and the trees cast patterned shadows on the ground.

Jonquil followed behind, indignant, stopping every few steps to lick his paws as though the effort were excessive.

For the first few minutes, she walked well. Spine straight, chin lifted, the mask of the foreign princess perfectly in place.

Then the fatigue came.

Her swollen feet made each step slower. Sometimes she stopped discreetly, leaning against the cold stone wall, pretending interest in some detail of the architecture.

Her hands went automatically to the base of her back.

“It hurts,” she murmured once, not looking at him.

“How much?”

“As if someone were pushing my spine from the inside.”

She breathed differently now. Shorter. Shallower.

Her belly was low—he noticed that, even without fully understanding what it meant. Heavier. Her posture had changed, her center of balance shifted forward, forcing her to arch her back in a way that looked painful.

At night, she took a long time to find a position. She turned from side to side with difficulty, the furs tangling around her legs, her sighs filling the silence.

Sometimes she held her breath and went still for a few seconds.

“Is it happening?” he would ask immediately, sitting upright in bed, heart racing.

“No.” A sigh. “Just… pressure.”

She complained of her feet burning. Of numb hands. Of the difficulty breathing when she lay on her back. Of the constant weight in her pelvis, as though the baby were pushing to come out at any moment.

He listened to everything.

Memorized everything.

And pretended he was not afraid.

One morning, he appeared in her chambers with a box.

It was not large. Dark wood, simple carvings of sea waves along its surface. A polished metal hinge. He held the box for too long before entering.

She was in bed, as always. Jonquil lifted his head at the sound of the door, golden eyes tracking every movement.

But he did not see the beast.

He saw her.

Her dark hair spread across the pillow, thick and long like wild silk—hair he would breathe in deeply when he woke beside her, burying his face in it before even opening his eye, her scent filling his lungs like a vice as he was introducing his fingers inside her, feeling her shiver—always wet for him.

Her enormous violet eyes, which at times pierced his soul with coldness, at others melted beneath his touch. Her full lips—the same lips he kissed every night when they met in bed, first slowly, almost asking permission, then with hunger, with urgency, as if he might lose her at any moment.

His breath faltered.

It happened sometimes. It still happened. After so many moons, she was still capable of stealing the air from his lungs.

“I brought something,” he said, his voice rougher than he intended.

He stepped closer. Held out the box.

She looked at the box. Then at him. Then back at the box. The silence stretched.

“What is it?”

“Open it.”

She did.

Inside—paints. Small glass jars filled with color—deep blue, emerald green, leaden gray, white like foam. Brushes of various sizes, soft bristles. A wooden palette for mixing.

Her eyes changed.

“I thought… perhaps you would like to paint.”

She did not answer. She simply ran her fingers over the glass jars, over the brushes, as if she did not quite believe it.

Then she smiled. A small, genuine smile.

“Thank you.”

The walk to the rocks was slower than he had anticipated.

Uneven ground, a gentle but treacherous descent for someone whose balance was compromised. He offered his arm without asking. She accepted without thanking him.

Jonquil remained behind, seated at the top of the hill, watching them with disdain.

When they reached the flat stones near the water, Valia stopped. The wind stirred her dark hair, and she brushed it away from her face with her free hand—that gesture he liked, had always liked, that made the strands dance before settling behind her ears.

He watched her against the gray light of the sky. Her silhouette, her rounded belly, her hair in the wind, her eyes fixed on the horizon. And he felt his breath slip away again.

She was beautiful. Not despite the child—because of it as well. There was something in the way life grew within her, in the new softness of her curves, in the unconscious way her hand rested on her belly. Something that completely disarmed him.

The sea lay gray beneath the clouded sky. The waves struck the rocks with a rhythmic, deep sound that filled the silence between them.

“It’s different from here,” she said. “On Dragonstone, the sea felt more… alive. Closer.”

He did not answer. He simply helped her sit on a flatter rock, where she could settle carefully.

She opened the box. Mixed paints on the palette with slow fingers, as though rediscovering an old habit. Then she began to paint.

He watched.

The sea. The rocks. The sky. All of it taking shape on her canvas beneath quick, precise strokes that revealed practice and talent.

“Where did you learn?”

“My mother insisted that ladies must have refined talents.” She did not look away from the painting. “I found it dull for years. Then I discovered I liked mixing the colors. Making gray turn blue, blue turn green. Capturing the light.”

“You capture it.”

She paused. Looked at him.

“What?”

“You capture the light,” he repeated, pointing at the canvas. “There. In the foam. It looks as if it shines.”

She followed his gaze. Then looked back at him, something new in her violet eyes.

And he felt it again—that tightness in his chest, the loss of breath, the absurd urge to kiss those full lips right there, before the sea, before everything.

He did not kiss her.

But he moved closer.

They remained there for hours.

Him beside her. Her painting. The sea roaring below.

When fatigue finally won and they had to return, he breathed deeply. The scent of her hair filled his lungs. Lavender, something citrus, and a warmth that was entirely her own.

That night, when they lay down, she settled against him without hesitation. He buried his fingers in her hair, as he did every morning, and felt the silky texture slip between them.

She murmured something sleepily; he did not understand. Yet her voice, even so, was the sweetest thing he had heard in days.

The pain began at the hour of the owl.

Aemond woke to a sound—a sharp sigh, cutting as glass. His hand still rested on Valia’s belly, where he was used to feeling the baby move during the night. But now he felt something else: her body tense, rigid, as if someone had pulled a string tight inside her.

“What is it?” His voice was thick with sleep, but his heart was already racing.

She did not answer at once. Her breathing was quick, shallow. In the dimness of the chamber, he saw her violet eyes open, fixed on the ceiling, her pupils wide.

“Valia.”

“A pain,” she murmured. “It passed. It was only a pain.”

Jonquil, at the foot of the bed, lifted his head.

Aemond sat up. He lit a candle. The room filled with edges of orange light.

“I will call the maester.”

“Wait—”

“I will call the meistre.”

The meistre arrived. Tired, but lucid enough to understand what he had heard.

He examined Valia’s belly with cold hands. Asked questions. She answered in a trembling voice.

“It will be soon, my prince,” the man told Aemond in the corridor. “The baby appears to be in the correct position. It is early yet. Wait until the waters break. Then call for me again.”

And he left.

Aemond returned to the chamber.

Valia was in the same position, staring at the ceiling. Her hand rested over her belly, her fingers faintly trembling.

“He said everything is well,” Aemond sat on the edge of the bed. “That it is still early, but the baby is in the proper position.”

“Everything is well,” she repeated, as if she needed to hear her own voice say it.

He lay down beside her. He knew he would not sleep, but he would remain there.

The pains came and went throughout the night.

Spaced apart. Brief. A rhythm that was not yet a rhythm, only warnings.

He felt each one—felt when her body stiffened beside his, when her breath faltered, when her fingers gripped the sheets. She tried not to make noise. Sometimes she failed. A low moan escaped, and she bit her lip.

“Breathe,” he said during the third or fourth pain. “You must breathe.”

She breathed.

He remained awake the entire night, staring at the ceiling, feeling her body beside his.

When the sun rose, Valia stood.

Aemond watched her rise from the bed, slow, heavy. She walked the solar—back and forth, back and forth—the hand pressed to her lower back, breath short every few steps.

“I will train,” he said, rising as well.

She did not answer. She simply kept walking.

He pulled on his tunic. Put on his boots. Paused at the door.

“I can stay,” he said.

She stopped. Looked at him. Her violet eyes were tired, but there was something there.

Relief, perhaps.

They broke their fast together.

Bread, cheese, dried fruits. She ate slowly, chewing with effort. The fork slipped from her hand. She picked it up. It fell again.

“Valia.”

“I am fine.”

“I will call the meistre.”

“No.” Her hand gripped his wrist. “Not yet. He said to wait for the waters.”

He stayed.

The queen appeared before midday.

She wore green, as always, her hair arranged in perfect braids.

“I hear the pains have begun,” she said, approaching. “How fare you, my dear?”

Valia looked at her. Her face was pale, faintly damp with sweat. Another pain was passing—he could see it in her eyes, in the way her fingers tightened around the arm of the chair.

“I am well,” she answered, but her voice was short. Impatient. “I thank you for the visit, Your Grace, but I must rest.”

Alicent hesitated. Looked at Aemond. He said nothing.

“Of course,” the queen stepped back. “I shall return for the birth.”

And she left.

Valia closed her eyes. Another discomfort. She moaned—a low, sorrowful sound that tightened something in his chest.

The midwife came late in the afternoon.

She was a large woman, with thick hands and a firm voice. She examined Valia on the bed while Aemond waited in the corridor, fists clenched.

“She is progressing,” the woman said upon exiting. “But it will still take time. Have them bring a copper tub filled with steaming water. It will help with the pain.”

He gave the order.

The tub arrived. Servants filled it with hot water, bucket by bucket, until steam fogged the chamber.

Aemond helped Valia undress.

She was naked before him—her immense belly, her heavy breasts, her skin shining with sweat. He did not think of desire. He thought of fragility. He thought of how small she seemed despite her size.

He held her arm as she stepped into the tub. The water covered her body, and she moaned—perhaps in relief.

He sat on the floor beside her.

The sleeves of his doublet became soaked. It did not matter.

She remained kneeling in the tub.

Leaning forward, elbows on the rim, head bowed. Steam rose around her, and with each pain—now stronger, closer—she rocked, a slow back-and-forth motion, as if trying to rock the pain out of herself.

The sounds she made were different now.

Sad. Loud. Growing louder each time.

He ordered more water. The water cooled; they refilled it. It cooled; they filled it again.

Night fell. Then the small hours.

She was still there, on her knees, rocking as though the motion could cradle the pain away. The moans did not cease—a continuous, guttural thread that seemed to rise from deeper than the throat. The midwife came, looked, said it was not yet time, and left. Her skirts left traces of herbs across the stone floor.

Then Valia began to tremble.

It was not the pain. It was something else. Something Aemond recognized before naming it: the sharp scent of fear, the rigidity of one bracing for a blow unseen but inevitable.

Her breathing grew too short—rapid, shallow, as if air would not enter, as if an invisible hand pressed upon her throat. Her violet eyes were wide, glassy, searching for something they could not find. She sobbed. Gasped. Pressed her hands to her chest as if trying to keep her soul inside her body.

“Aemond”—her voice thin, fractured, like glass about to shatter. “Aemond, please.”

The voice broke. Not from pain. From something else. There was something in her eyes when she turned toward him—something he could not name, but recognized instantly as danger. The same look soldiers wore on the battlefield when they knew they would not return home.

He leaned over the tub.

“What is it?”

She tried to speak, but air failed her. Her lips moved, and he saw fear bloom across her face when breath would not come—the primal horror of drowning on dry land. She pressed her hand to her chest, as though she could force her lungs to work.

“You must write,” she swallowed hard, her chest rising and falling too quickly. “You must write to my family.”

He frowned.

“Valia—”

“Please.”

She seized his hand tightly, nails digging into his skin, leaving red marks. “My family. You must write to them. Send a raven, I beg you. Now. Before it is too late.”

The tears came.

Always generous with her tears.

“Valia—”

“Please, Aemond.” She was sobbing now, shoulders shaking in spasms that looked like convulsions. “Send a raven. I beg you.”

He thought of his mother. Of his grandsire.

What would they think if she summoned her family for the birth? What would they say if her bastard brothers and half-sister walked these halls, if the blood of his enemies crossed the corridors while his wife labored?

And he thought—a quick, ugly thought, coiling in the darkest corners of his mind:

She wants her family. I am here. I am here with her. Am I not enough? What am I, if not the father of her child, the man who brought her to this castle, the husband who swore to protect her? Why is that not enough?

“Shhh,” he murmured, running his hand through her sweat-damp hair. “Breathe. Just breathe.”

“I do not want to do this alone,” she pleaded, panic rising like a wave that would not recede. “I have a bad feeling. I dreamed everything would go wrong. I dreamed I died. Please, Aemond, write to my mother. Call someone. I do not want to be alone when the time comes.”

He cupped her face in his hands. Felt the fine bones beneath the skin, the fragility of her skull fitting in his palms. Brushed wet hair from her brow. Kissed her temple—tasted salt and sweat, felt the tremor running through her like an underground river.

“You will not die.”

“My back hurts so much,” she cried, words torn from her. “It feels as though my spine will break. My feet hurt. My womb hurts. Everything hurts, Aemond, everything hurts. It hurts so much I cannot think. It hurts so much I forget my own name.”

“It will pass. The meistre said the baby is in the right position. By tomorrow the child will be here, and you will forget this night.”

She looked into his eyes. And in that look he saw something he had never seen before: a silent question of whether he believed his own lie.

“Will you stay with me?”

He hesitated. Men did not remain for births. It was rule. Custom. Tradition. Men waited outside and entered only when it was done.

But—

“I will ask my mother.”

She shook her head, eyes wide, pupils blown like a frightened horse before battle.

“She will not allow it. The queen will not allow it, and I will be alone. I know no one here, Aemond. Please, send a raven. My mother. Baela. Rhaena. Someone. I will die. I dreamed it.”

His chest tightened—not pain, but something worse: the awareness that she was right, that she was alone, that he was all she had and might not be enough.

She is so young.

“Shall I call Helaena?”

“Helaena does not know me,” she sobbed, desperation thick in her voice. “It must be my mother. Someone who knows me.”

“Valia—”

“You do not understand!” she cried, voice breaking. “You do not understand!”

Then her body folded over the rim of the tub.

A different sound tore from her throat—not a scream, not a sob, but a deep, wet retch from her core. She vomited into the warm water, body shaking in violent spasms, hands gripping the marble edge until her knuckles whitened.

Aemond held her shoulders, keeping her steady so she would not fall. He felt every contraction of her stomach as if it were his own, the muscles of her back taut beneath his hands.

“It is all right,” he murmured, voice low. He rubbed her back in slow circles, feeling the vertebrae beneath her skin. “It is all right.”

She wept between heaves, tears and saliva mingling, face contorted by shame and fear.

Another pain came.

She pressed her forehead to the rim of the tub. Rocked back and forth, a human pendulum, crying, gasping, dragging in air that would not come.

“You must calm yourself,” he said, voice steadier than he felt. “You must breathe.”

“If I die,” she sobbed, words uneven and drowned in tears, “you must care for the baby. Promise.”

“You will not die.”

“Promise, Aemond.”

He closed his eye.

“I promise.”

“And Jonquil.” She lifted her head, eyes red and swollen yet still beautiful in a tragic way. “No one will care for him. He will be abandoned in the castle kitchens.”

“Valia—”

“Promise!”

“I promise.” He gripped her hand tightly. “I will care for the wretched cat as well. Now breathe.”

She breathed. Ragged, uneven—but she breathed.

He noticed then: the tears did not cease. She seemed smaller somehow, as if the crying were hollowing her out.

He rose, crossed the chamber quickly, and returned with a goblet of water. He knelt beside the tub—a prince on his knees upon cold stone—and pressed the rim to her lips.

“Drink,” he ordered, though his voice softened.

She tried to turn away.

“Drink, Valia. You cannot go on like this.”

She obeyed. Small sips, swallowed with effort. He held the cup steady, tilting it when she paused, forcing her to drink more, to wet the throat dried by hours of sobbing and moaning.

When the goblet was empty, she rested her forehead against his shoulder.

The water cooled for the third time.

He helped her rise.

He dried her with soft cloths. Dressed her in a clean shift. Helped her back to bed.

The pain came closer now. No longer calmly counted. No longer able to pretend it was still a quiet night.

Valia lay on her side, hair clinging to her damp face, fingers gripping the sheet as though holding her own skin.

“It is different,” she murmured.

He sensed it before asking what.

Her body had changed.

It was not only the contraction. It was something deeper—a tense silence within the movement. Like the air before thunder.

She lifted herself slightly, breathing fast.

“Aemond…”

And then it happened.

A sudden sound. Wet. A muffled snap beneath the covers.

He saw the fabric darken first.

Then the warmth spreading across the mattress.

Valia froze.

Her eyes lowered slowly, as if unwilling to confirm.

The water kept flowing.

It was not violent. Not dramatic. It was inevitable.

The world had broken open.

Aemond rose at once, ordering a guard in the corridor to summon Orwyle.

The door opened before he finished speaking. The midwife was already outside, as if awaiting that exact moment. The meistre followed. And, a few steps behind, the rigid silhouette of his mother.

The chamber filled with movement.

Sheets pulled away. Towels. Quick commands. The scent of herbs thickening.

Valia began to tremble.

“It is happening,” she said, but there was no joy in it. Only astonishment.

He returned to the head of the bed.

The midwife examined her with practiced hands. The meistre confirmed in a tone far too calm:

“The labor has advanced. We must prepare everything.”

Alicent approached the bed, eyes assessing.

“Put her in the proper position,” she ordered the midwife.

Valia seized Aemond’s hand.

“Do not go.”

It was almost a child’s plea.

He looked at his mother.

“I will stay.”

Alicent did not raise her voice.

“No.”

He felt heat flood his blood.

“She wants me here.”

The midwife exchanged a quick look with the meistre. The tension in the room shifted.

Alicent looked directly at him.

“Aemond.” Firm. “Your presence agitates her further. Let the women do their work.”

Valia began to moan again, louder now, hands reaching for him.

“Aemond,” she called, her voice breaking.

He stepped forward.

Alicent gripped his arm.

It was unquestionable.

“Trust.”

He did not trust.

He trusted nothing that excluded him.

But another contraction tore through Valia, and the sound that left her was no longer contained. It was raw. Instinctive. Animal.

His chest tightened.

She was searching for him.

But the chamber was no longer theirs.

It belonged to the midwives. To the blood that would come. To decisions that must be made without hesitation.

She shook her head, as if that were not enough.

But they were already drawing him back.

The midwives lifted her skirts. Laid clean linens. The meistre murmured instructions.

And he was led outside.

The door closed.

The sound of the latch sliding into place was worse than any scream.

In the corridor, the air felt too cold.

He stood still for a moment.

Then came the first full scream.

Not a moan.

Not a lament.

A true scream.

He closed his good eye.

There, he could only wait.

And for the first time since he had learned to ride Vhagar, Aemond Targaryen felt utterly useless.

The room smelled thick of crushed herbs, warm copper, and something rawer beginning to surface.

Alicent remained beside the bed.

Valia writhed between the already stained sheets, her hair plastered to her face, her nightgown too damp for any dignity. Each contraction tore a louder sound from her than the last.

It was not only pain.

It was abandonment.

“My mother…” Valia cried, her voice scraping. “I want my mother…”

Alicent felt her jaw tighten.

The midwife murmured instructions, but Valia did not listen. Her body arched, her hands grasping at the air as if something invisible were there to hold her.

Then came the nausea.

Valia turned her head too late.

The vomit rose violently—bitter, bilious—staining the pale fabric of her nightgown and spilling down her own chest. The sour smell mingled with the steam in the room.

The midwife hurried forward with cloths.

Valia wept as she tried to breathe, her stomach contracting even though it was empty.

Alicent did not move at once.

She watched.

She watched the loss of control.

“Princesses do not scream that way,” she said at last, her voice low.

Valia lifted her eyes to her—red, lost, far too wet.

There was no composure there.

No training.

No discipline.

“I can’t,” Valia whispered.

Only then did Alicent step closer.

“Pray.”

The word was almost an order.

“When the pain comes, pray to the Mother. Offer it to the Seven. Control your breathing.”

Another contraction tore through the young woman, folding her in half. The scream escaped before any prayer could form.

Alicent closed her eyes for a moment.

She thought of Helaena. Younger than Valia had been when she gave first gave birth, and yet she had given birth twice without scandal—the first time, twins. A true princess. A true queen, perhaps, like her mother.

She thought of how she herself had given birth.

Without spectacle.

Without begging for other names.

Without calling for any mother at all.

Valia, however, kept repeating:

“My mother… please… bring my mother…”

The plea was childish. Insistent. Humiliating.

And there was something even more troubling.

Aemond.

The way he looked at that girl. As if she were too fragile for this world. As if she had bewitched him.

Alicent had seen the look in her son’s eyes before he was sent away. That fracture. That near-disobedience.

All because of her.

If Valia were to die…

Another wave of pain struck, more violent.

Valia clutched the sheets, screaming, her voice breaking mid-sound. Her entire body trembled. The midwife positioned herself between her legs.

“She is progressing,”the meistre  murmured.

Valia began shaking her head, desperate.

“I’m going to die,” she kept repeating.

Alicent leaned down, taking her chin in hand to force her to face something solid.

“You are not going to die.” The tone was gentle.

The words lingered in the air.

Valia began to cry again—but now there was something different. It was not only fear.

It was loneliness.

Alicent noticed.

And for an instant she felt a distant memory of herself—too young, too alone.

She pushed the thought away.

“When the pain comes,” she said again, “breathe. And push when they tell you.”

Valia murmured her mother’s name between sobs. Sometimes she mixed it with Aemond’s. Sometimes she only cried.

Alicent remained firm at the bedside.

Not as a mother.

Not as a woman.

But as a queen.

The corridor was too cold for that hour.

Aegon leaned against the stone wall, a goblet still half full in his hand, the wine sloshing each time another scream echoed from the chamber.

Valia was screaming loudly.

Not the way women scream at feasts.

Not the way courtesans pretend to.

It was a raw sound. Torn open.

Aegon grimaced.

“Seven hells…” he muttered.

Beside him, Aemond did not answer.

He stood motionless.

Straight as a statue carved from green marble.

But Aegon knew his brother.

He had known him since they were boys too young to hold wooden swords properly. He knew his silences. He knew the tension that came before violence.

His knuckles were too white. His hands clasped too tightly behind his back. His jaw locked.

And his eyes.

His eyes never left the door.

Another scream.

Longer.

Aegon swirled the goblet lazily.

“You know this is normal, don’t you?”

Silence.

Aemond did not blink.

Aegon tilted his head, studying him.

It was curious.

After Aemond had returned from Dragonstone with his niece — his small dark-haired wife — something had changed.

Not in public.

Not before the court.

Aemond never touched her more than necessary. Never smiled. Never leaned too close.

But Aegon saw.

He saw the way his brother’s gaze lingered when he thought no one noticed.

He saw how Aemond always stood half a step ahead of her, like a shield.

He saw how, at meals, that single eye softened when it found her.

And he knew.

He knew Aemond now slept in her bed.

He knew because servants talk. Because torches burn at different hours.

There was something almost… human in him.

And that troubled Aegon more than it should have.

“Perhaps if she screamed less and breathed more—”

Aemond turned his head slowly.

The look was enough.

Cold. Cutting. Clear warning.

Aegon raised his hands theatrically.

“I’m only saying—”

“Mind your own wife,” Aemond cut in, his voice too low to be comfortable. “And your own children.”

The tone was not loud.

It was dangerous.

Aegon let out a brief laugh.

“They’re already born.”

But the word echoed strangely in his own mouth.

Children.

He did not remember the birth of any of them.

He did not remember screams.

Nor cold corridors.

Nor blood.

Helaena had been pregnant.

And then, suddenly, she was not.

And there were cradles.

And there were cries.

And there were small silver-haired creatures staring up at him as though expecting something.

They had simply… been there.

As if they had risen from the mist.

Another scream tore through the door.

This one was different.

There was something breaking in it.

Aegon felt a chill that had nothing to do with the wine.

The door opened suddenly.

A maid hurried out, head lowered, carrying sheets bundled in her arms.

The fabric was stained.

Yellowed with bile.

And streaked with red.

Not much.

But enough.

Aemond went pale.

Aegon saw it.

His brother did not move. Did not speak.

But the color drained from his face as though someone had pulled the blood from it.

The maid passed quickly, nearly stumbling. The smell came after — light iron, acid, crushed herbs.

Aegon swallowed.

He had never been there.

Never waited outside.

Never heard the sound of someone being torn from the inside out.

Perhaps that was why his children sometimes felt unreal to him.

Because he had not witnessed the cost.

“That…” he began, but did not finish.

Inside the chamber, Valia screamed again.

Louder.

More desperate.

A sound ripped from somewhere primitive.

Aemond took an involuntary step toward the door.

Stopped.

The latch did not move.

Another scream.

Then another.

Each one farther apart.

Each one more exhausted.

Aegon realized he was gripping the goblet too tightly. Wine had already splashed onto the floor.

“She’ll be fine,” he said, though he wasn’t sure whether he was speaking to his brother or to himself.

Aemond did not answer.

But his eyes were different now.

Not cold.

Not hard.

Too wide.

The screams continued.

One.

Another.

A weaker one.

And then—

Silence.

Not the silence between contractions.

Not the silence of breath being reclaimed.

A whole silence.

Thick.

Heavy.

The kind of silence that makes the world tilt.

The goblet slipped from Aegon’s fingers and struck the stone, rolling.

He did not try to catch it.

Aemond did not move.

But his knuckles turned even whiter.

And for the first time that night, Aegon was completely sober.

Aemond stood motionless outside the door, but inside something was beginning to crack — a thin fissure, like the one that runs through ice before it gives way.

He thought. For the first time with cruel, surgical clarity, the truth cut through him like a blade:

He had been a tyrant.

Petty.

The letter.

How could he have been so cruel?

He could have sent it. A raven. A simple raven. It would have cost him nothing. Taken nothing from him. And yet he had refused. Out of pride. Out of insecurity disguised as duty. Because he wanted to be enough — and knew, deep down, that he was not.

He could have left her at Dragonstone. Could have allowed her to have the baby within her own walls, with the scent of the sea she loved, with her mother nearby — who had loved her since before she existed.

But no.

He wanted it to be here. In King’s Landing. Under his roof. Beneath the gaze of his mother, his grandsire, his rules. He wanted to be enough. He wanted her to look at him and see everything she needed.

Now she was alone in that room. Curled in on herself. Screaming. Begging for her mother in a dialect he barely understood.

If she died—

She will not die.

The thought came violently, almost superstitious — as though naming the possibility might make it real, as though the gods were listening and might take suggestions.

He closed his good eye for a moment, and the memories came unbidden, invasive, relentless.

The first time he took her to the sea.

The water rising up her shift, soaking the thin fabric around her already rounded belly.

Dragonstone.

The constant wind.

Her effortless smile there, as though the black stones did not intimidate her.

Those full lips that fit against his with infuriating precision, as if they had been made for one another — a dangerous idea he would never admit aloud.

Her dark hair spread across the pillow.

If she died—

No.

She will not die.

He thought of her enormous violet eyes, always too large for her small face.

He thought of her holding her younger siblings at Dragonstone — so natural with babies, so patient, so certain. As though she understood something about those tiny creatures that he never would.

He thought of her voice singing in Low Valyrian, distracted, while she painted by the shore — lullabies her mother had taught her, lyrics she barely remembered but sang anyway, like prayer.

Her delicate hands stained with paint.

And now they were inside that room, clutching sheets, thrashing, searching for something they could not find.

Aegon said something beside him.

Aemond barely heard it. The words reached his ears like distant noise, irrelevant, the buzz of an insect.

Irritation rose quickly, acidic.

What was he still doing there?

Talking?

Breathing too loudly?

If he said one more thing, Aemond might strike him again. Might break his teeth. Might silence him forever. Violence pulsed beneath his skin, waiting only for an excuse.

The door opened.

The maid came out with the sheets.

Stains.

Yellow.

Red.

Not much red. Just enough to mark. Just enough to mean something.

But enough.

Enough for the world to tilt slightly beneath his feet.

The air seemed to thin. As though someone had closed every window in the corridor, every lung in the castle.

He drew a breath.

It did not come full.

Another.

His chest tightened in a strange way. Almost painful. An invisible hand compressing his ribs, testing their resistance.

He had never struggled to breathe.

Never.

Not when he lost his eye. Not when he mounted Vhagar for the first time. Not when he saw his brother’s face bleeding beneath his fist.

His fingers tingled faintly before he realized they were clenched too tightly — fists closed, nails biting into his own palms.

No.

She will not die.

Inside the room, one last scream.

Weaker.

Thinner.

Like someone surrendering.

Then—

Silence.

Complete.

Agonizing.

The kind of silence that is not the absence of sound but the presence of absence. The kind that freezes blood in the veins, that makes the heart forget how to beat for a moment that lasts an eternity.

Aemond did not blink.

Did not move.

But his heart was pounding too hard now. Too hard. As though it were trying to escape his chest, as though it knew something terrible had happened and needed to flee before witnessing it.

If she died…

The last thing he would have done was deny her her family. The last thing she would have seen was his face refusing what she needed most.

Out of pride.

Out of pettiness.

Because I was not enough and could not bear to know it.

The silence stretched.

One second.

Two.

Three.

An eternity fit inside three seconds.

And then—

The cry came, sharp.

Thin.

Alive.

It cut through the corridor like a blade.

The sound tore through Aemond’s chest all at once, brutal, wrenching the air that had been trapped there. He nearly stepped forward.

Nearly.

Aegon released a shaky breath beside him.

“It’s alive,” he murmured, as if stating the obvious, as if he needed to hear his own voice to believe it.

But Aemond did not answer.

The baby cried.

Small. Indignant at the world. Demanding. Furious. Perfect.

But there was no other voice.

No midwife announcing.

No word.

The crying continued.

And continued.

Too loud.

Too alone.

Aemond waited to hear the sound that mattered.

Her voice.

A groan. A sigh. A weak insult. Anything that said she was still there, that she still belonged to this world, that she had not left him alone with the weight of what he had done — and what he had failed to do.

Nothing came.

The baby’s cry began to sway, as though it were being rocked from side to side.

But not her voice.

Not that voice he knew in all its shades — rough in the morning, drawn out when bored, sharp when irritated, soft when she spoke his name.

He felt his heart beating in the wrong places. In his throat. In his ears. In his tingling fingers.

Her silence was growing.

The corridor seemed narrower. The walls closer. The floor tilting.

Aegon stopped moving.

Aemond took a step toward the door.

Stopped.

Waited.

The baby cried louder for a moment — then the sound was muffled, as though wrapped in cloth, as though gathered against a chest.

But her chest?

Still—

No voice from Valia.

He tried to remember how she sounded when she was tired. The rough tone after laughing too much. The impatient sigh when he contradicted her. The way she said his name — “Aemond” — always soft.

He tried to hear it now.

Nothing.

Only clinical murmurs.

The drag of fabric.

Water being poured.

Too organized.

Too calm.

Far too calm.

“They would have said if…” Aegon began, but the sentence died in the air, swallowed by the weight of what he dared not finish.

Aemond did not realize he was gripping the handle until he felt the cold metal beneath his fingers. When had he reached it? He did not remember moving.

She cannot die.

He thought of her sea-soaked shift. The thin fabric clinging to her skin, revealing the curve of a belly that had then been only promise. The water running down her arms, her shoulders, over hands later stained with paint.

Her freckles.

The way she wrinkled her nose when irritated — a small, almost childish gesture that made him want to provoke her just to see it again.

I promise.

The baby made a smaller sound now. Not a full cry.

Still no voice from her.

Her silence began to scream louder than anything that night. Louder than the baby’s cry. Louder than his own fear.

And then—

A different murmur.

More urgent.

Faster.

Aemond felt his stomach drop like a stone into dark water.

A midwife crossed the room quickly — her shadow visible beneath the crack of the door, a blur moving with too much haste.

Another murmur.

The baby cried again.

Alone.

Aemond did not wait any longer.

His knuckles turned white as he turned the handle