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Vaerra is wet and cold and trembling when Silverfyre lands at the gates of Winterfell. It is only autumn, but already the ground is thick with fallen snow. She has long since realized that she did not dress warmly enough. It is a portent, perhaps, of the future that awaits her. She faces a life stranded in this cold, dark, freezing wasteland. Away from her family, away from the only home she has ever known, away from him. And she is not prepared to meet it.

She was sure of her course when she left Dragonstone. And now doubt blooms in her heart, dark and endless as the winds of winter, and something like regret is clinging like a film in her throat. It must be the wind whipping at her braids and her eyes that makes her feel like she will start crying at any moment.

There are men riding out to greet her on horseback. They are dark shadows in the distance growing ever larger against the glistening white snow. Silverfyre is as hot as she ever was beneath her, but there is something muted in it now. Something not quite right. As if the cold has sapped some of her fire.

The sounds of thundering hooves and ringing swords fill the air. Silverfyre tenses beneath her, lowering her head with a fierce growl of warning. Fear makes her grip fast to the saddle. She is surrounded in mere moments by swords and sneers and distrust. No dragon has seen the north since the days of King Jaehaerys and Good Queen Alysanne. Now she knows why.

Things of flesh and flame were not meant to dwell up here, she thinks.

“I had not thought to see you here today, Princess Vaerra,” the man before her says. His horse is stamping the ground as his master stares her down. As he stares her dragon down. He is broad of shoulder with a lean face and eyes the color of a winter storm. She meets his eyes and knows that she is staring at a wolf in men’s clothing.

“You know me, sir?”

“Cregan Stark is a lord, girl. You will address him as such!” a wiry youth lingering at Silverfyre’s shoulder says. His face is set in determined defiance. His hair is as black as pitch, his eyes a blue so bright that for a moment, they are almost clear as glass. Silverfyre only has to look at him before he folds, crumpling in his saddle like a piece of wet parchment.

“My apologies, Lord Stark,” Vaerra says, turning back to the man before her. “I may be a girl, but this is hardly a welcome fit for a princess of the realm.”

Cregan Stark laughs as if she has made a joke. The smooth baritone of his voice is low and husky with daring as he stares at her astride her dragon. He does not seem afraid in the slightest.

“Perhaps if we had known of your coming, Princess, we might have been better prepared for you.”

“There was no time. My mother, Queen Rhaenyra, sent me here urgently-,” Vaerra begins to say. She is cut off by Lord Stark’s bark of laughter.

“Queen, you say? And yet, a raven from the Dowager Queen Alicent has already come and gone with a missive of her own. She spoke of many things-a king’s dying wish and a boy with the Conqueror’s name and a request for me to ride to King’s Landing to bend the knee to our new king just as my ancestor bent his knee to Aegon the Dragon.”

Vaerra stares and stares and gulps down her fear and her trepidation. She had not thought that the words of her late grandfather’s wife would arrive before her. He knows already, why she is here, or at least part of why. He is smirking at her. There is a knowing glint in his eye that wakes a swarm of bees in her gut. Bile rises, thick and heavy and hot, in her throat. It is all she can do not to retch.

“Perhaps if we could speak inside, my lord,” Vaerra suggests, at a loss for what else to do. She did not think it would be easy, swaying a man such as Lord Cregan Stark, but this is perhaps more than she was prepared to handle alone. It is a child’s wish that makes her think of her mother’s kisses, of her brothers at her back, of her stepfather’s mad grin. She has a lifetime to miss them, a lifetime for them to become strangers to her, a lifetime to forget their faces. And the prospect of that is nearly enough to fold her in two.

Lord Stark stares at her with a wolf’s smile on his lips, teeth bared and flashing. He is toying with her, playing with his food before he swallows her whole.

“Tell me why you have come,” he says for all and sundry to hear. The men surrounding her shift in their saddles with hunger in their eyes. A pack of hounds scenting blood in the air. “Give me one good reason that I should extend guest rights to you. Give me one good reason why I should let a dragon inside the walls of Winterfell. Give me one good reason why I should care whose royal, pampered ass sits the Iron Throne.”

She imagines the Wolf of the North’s shining teeth closing around her neck. She imagines the blood that would bloom and drip and stain the snow beneath their feet. She imagines another man in a darkened room who had the chance to do just that.

Unbidden, the memory of a boy with one eye and silver hair fills her mind and her heart. She remembers his teeth on her flesh. She remembers how she shook in his hands, a leaf ripped from its home and lost in the wild wind of a storm. She remembers and she imagines yanking the memory out of her, root and stem. She imagines shoving it down, down, down as far as it will go. It hurts, it burns. An ember clinging to life. But if she allows herself to think of him now, she will be lost. She breathes and the air that shudders out of her seems made of glass, sharp and jagged. Scraping at her insides and trailing blood in its wake.

“Your father swore fealty to my grandfather, King Viserys, and his chosen heir, my mother, Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen. The boy sitting the Iron Throne is a usurper and a traitor. I have come to see the worth of a Stark’s word for myself. I have come to secure your continued fealty to my mother’s cause. And if I cannot, then I will burn you all for traitors.”

That is her uncle she is talking about. He is a drunken fool half the time. He is a wretch. And yet, he is also family. She remembers him as a boy, with his stupid jokes and his cups full of Arbor red and his wandering eyes. She remembers him as a man. Sullen and truculent and impossible to please because he had always been told that he should have everything he ever wanted, but had always been denied what he needed.

If Lord Cregan Stark feels anything at all about her threat to turn her dragon’s fire on him and his men, he does not show it. Just cocks his head, that same wolfish grin gracing his mouth.

“How?” he asks.

Vaerra does not flinch, but it is a near thing. This is the moment, she thinks. The moment she has been dreading since a boy with one eye stole into her heart. He will never forgive her for this. If they lived a hundred years, it would not be enough time for him to forgive her for this.

Once I claim something, it is mine forever.

In another life perhaps, she would have been his. In another life, they would have been married in the Valyrian tradition, bound in blood and magic as their forebears were, as Daemon and her mother were. In another life the halls of the Red Keep would have been filled with the delighted laughter of their children. Children with his eyes and her hair, children with his mother’s nose and her father’s ears. In that other life, there would have been light and love enough to quiet the ghosts roaming the halls, enough to silence the hint of war drums pounding in the air when the night is at its darkest.

But that other life is a child’s dream. The stuff of her girlhood fantasies. She imagines throttling it. She imagines carving it out of her and setting it aflame. She imagines crushing it in her hand until it crumbles to dust and ash. Until it is swept away on a high wind. Until it disappears forever.

“Let us join our houses, Lord Stark. The Queen’s proposal is a simple one. Support her claim and pledge your banners to her cause. In exchange, you shall have my hand in marriage.”

He huffs a laugh, as if he cannot quite believe her daring, as if he is surprised and delighted by it in equal turns, as if he is pleased.

“It is a bold thing indeed, for the Queen to offer your hand to me. You Targaryens are a queer lot with queer traditions. Why not marry one of your brothers to strengthen your dragon’s blood? Or your uncle? He is as yet unmarried, or so I am told. Would that not settle this matter of usurpers and traitors more surely than wedding you to me?” Lord Stark says.

For a moment, she feels like she has been struck with a lance. Her veins are singing, calling for blood and fire and ash. Silverfyre shifts beneath her. Her claws dig through snow and ice to the packed earth below. Streaks of black on a field of white. It would make for a pretty banner, she thinks.

“It is not for me to question my Queen, Lord Stark. If she thought that marrying me to my uncle would stop this war, she would have done so instead of sending me here. My mother is not so desperate to beg you to accept my hand in marriage, but if that is what it will take to secure your word, then a beggar I shall be.”

Silverfyre crouches until her belly is nearly dragging the ground. Vaerra slips from the saddle. The impact of her numbed feet hitting the frozen ground is enough to make her grit her teeth in pain. Enough to wake the nausea churning in her belly anew. Lord Stark is watching her, only watching. His expression is impassive, unforgiving as the snow glittering like diamonds in his midnight curls, more stone than man. She approaches and kneels just beyond the range of the feet of his horse. She raises her head to meet his steely gaze.

Lord Cregan Stark lets her kneel in the snow and the cold for a long minute before he slips from his horse with practiced ease. His boots meet the ground with a spray of snow and packed earth. He says nothing as he offers her his hand. She slips her fingers into his and when he pulls her to her feet, he clings to her hand for a moment too long to be considered proper.

He is tall, nearly as tall as Aemond, but that is where the similarities end. They are like day and night, like the sun and the moon. Her uncle is slender, lithe and fair as quicksilver in the Targaryen way, but Cregan Stark is a bear of a man with shoulders so broad she feels he would fill a doorway. He is as dark and cold as the winter winds, with a stern brow and sterner lips. But his eyes…his eyes are a different story altogether. This close, they are as mutable as flame, flickering between the gray of a winter’s storm and the gray-green of the waters that lap the shores at Dragonstone. There is a warmth there that she had not expected to see from a man more accustomed to the cold and the dark than she will ever be. And a hunger that whips her fear to poison in her belly.

“You are a dragon, my lady, and my future wife besides. You will never have to beg for anything again so long as you are mine.”

It is a pledge and a promise and a victory, but she feels empty. She feels as hollow as a shell abandoned on the shore. A thing to be scooped up and admired and cast aside again when it loses the shine of its novelty.

She stares at her would-be husband and wonders how long it will be before she loses her shine?

“You are shivering, my lady. Are you so frightened of your future lord husband?”

“No, my lord,” she says in a voice that is not her own, with a smile that is not her own. “I am only cold from my journey.”

“Well then,” he says, tucking a lock of her hair behind her ear. “Let us get you inside. The fires of Winterfell may not burn as hot as a dragon’s, but they burn hot enough.”

She has nothing to say to that, so she nods her assent and follows her future lord husband to her new home.

It is not until much later when her response comes.

After she has filled her belly full of meat and wine that tasted like ash on her tongue and sits like a prison inside of her. After she has peeled the layers of her riding leathers and gloves and boots from her body and been draped in a long-sleeved shift that does not belong to her and smells like a memory. After she has been poked and prodded, brushed and scrubbed until her skin is raw and the water in the tub is almost black. After Lord Stark has allowed Silverfyre to alight in the godswood, the only place inside Winterfell’s walls big enough to house her.

Only then does Vaerra’s response come: even draped in a mountain of furs, even with the fire roaring in the hearth and the wine roaring in her blood, she does not believe for a second that she will ever be warm again, let alone as hot as dragon’s fire.

***

Rhaenyra returns, drenched and grinning ear to ear, to her waiting council. They watch her like she has gone mad. Maybe she has. Maybe she is as mad as her little sister, Helaena. Maybe that is not entirely a bad thing.

“Where is Prince Daemon? Where is Prince Aemond, Your Grace?”

This from Lord Bartimos who flinches beneath her attention when her lilac eyes meet his across the painted table. The storm is still raging outside. The rain is a thick curtain of gray surrounding the castle, thick enough to hide two dragons stealing away from the beach and making their way north. The wind is howling, loud enough that her ears are ringing with it, loud enough to mask the flap of wings flying overhead.

“Otto Hightower, the snake that he is, failed to mention one of his king’s terms. Prince Aemond came here to make me aware of it and treat with me himself.”

“And what was this term, Your Grace?”

“Aegon wished to propose a betrothal between his brother and my daughter, Princess Vaerra. ‘To mend the broken bridges between our families,’ I believe is what Aemond said.”

Lord Bartimos’s anger is sudden and great and blustering.

“Your Grace! That is…a betrothal between Prince Aemond and Princess Vaerra would surely be seen as an approval, however indirect, of your brother’s usurpation. This cannot stand while he still sits the Iron Throne!”

Rhaenyra turns to her maester as if she has not heard her advisor. Lord Corlys, standing at the maester’s side, does not even attempt to hide his grin.

“Maester Gerardys, please draft a letter to King’s Landing. Tell my brother that I will agree to nothing unless we meet face to face. I will not go to King’s Landing and I know that he will not come to Dragonstone. As such, the meeting should be held at a neutral site, away from both our courts.”

“The lords of Maidenpool have ever been loyal friends to House Targaryen, Your Grace. Let me send a raven to Maester Norren for Lord Mooton’s consideration,” Maester Gerardys says after a quiet moment.

Rhaenyra thinks on his suggestion. Looks at the painted table spread before her, looks at the breadth of her father’s kingdom, and cannot help but bask in its orange glow, in the warmth suffusing through her fingers, in the Conqueror’s blood singing in her veins.

“That is a fine suggestion, Maester. I have every hope that Lord Mooton would be happy to host such a gathering. Fetch me when the letters are done and when we are sure of them, our ravens will fly.”

Maester Gerardys bows. Corlys’s smile is infectious, it seems. “At once, Your Grace!”

He hastens from the room to the sound of the rustle of his robes and the clinking of his maester’s chain. She turns to follow him when Lord Bartimos Celtigar’s voice cuts through her with all the fury of their shared blood, however distant, however diluted.

“And what are we to do, Your Grace? The men whose loyal banners you called to your war table? Are we to slink back to our castles, tails tucked between our legs? Are we to cower in fear amongst our wives and children as we wait for the headsman's axe to fall? You say your usurper brother will treat with us, that he will pardon the traitors who conspired against him, but what is to stop him from mounting his dragon when the fighting is done? What is to stop him and his brother from burning all of us to ash and dust and history?”

Rhaenyra fixes her lilac eyes on her cousin’s cousin’s cousin three times removed or however else they are related, and the power and hunger of the dragon swells in her veins. She imagines how easy it would be to let the maelstrom break on the shores of restraint and mercy. She imagines how good it would feel to mount Syrax and burn the whole of her father’s kingdom to ash, Lord Bartimos and his wife and their children included. She looks at all the men gathered at the painted table and wonders what cowardice dwells in their hearts, what thinly disguised contempt for her and her bastard children, what malice they would fling at her if they did not believe her husband would burn them alive for it.

She is as much a dragon as her uncle. The same blood flows through her veins, the same strength, the same fire. And the men attending her war councils would do well to remember that the only reason they have not been burned to ash and dust and history already is her.

“My Queen,” Corlys says, cutting through the thick ribbon of her fury. His fingers are whisper-soft at her wrist, his voice light as snow in her ear. She tears her eyes away from the men who swore to back her claim and meets the gaze of the man who believed her responsible for his only son’s death for six long years. Perhaps he still believes it. A man such as the venerable Sea Snake is almost as unknowable as the Rogue Prince. And yet, here he is, standing by her side, and once more calling for mercy in a world that had gone too often without.

He snatches her back from the brink as his son had done so often before him. She had not thought to feel the loss of her first husband so keenly, especially not here, not surrounded by these strangers wearing familiar faces, but there it is. Her second heartbreak, laid bare before her. She imagines him sometimes, his gentle smile and his warrior’s soul, and she feels grateful that he has not had to endure as she has.

Rhaenyra breathes in the silence and brushes her fingers against Corlys’s forearm as if to say I am well. She is well, or as well as she can be. She is not about to call Syrax to burn the cowards before her for traitors. She is restrained once more, a dog on a leash. A dragon held by its tail can still breathe fire, after all.

“My Lord Bartimos, you seem to have stumbled onto some misunderstanding. I am going to Maidenpool to negotiate my brother’s surrender, not mine,” Rhaenyra says, smoothing her hands across the front of her dress. “Aegon sent first his grandfather and then his own brother to Dragonstone. Riding on the back of the largest and most fearsome dragon in the Seven Kingdoms. He is losing allies left and right and for what? To beg my surrender? I think not.”

Understanding rushes like a sudden wind around the room. Their eyes are wide and their mouths are open and Rhaenyra thinks they look like fish floundering on the banks. It is no matter. She has said all she needs to say. She has done all that needs be done.

Now all she can do is wait.

***

Vaerra remembers the heart tree in King’s Landing. She remembers the groan of its boughs swaying in the wind, the whisper of its blood-red leaves and the din of activity just beyond its sheltered courtyard. It was a place to escape the prying eyes of the court, nothing more. A place to go when she did not want to be alone with her thoughts.

The heart tree in Winterfell is a place of quiet, of peace, of solemnity. It is the only place where she can go to feel any semblance of home. There is a weight to the silence. Like something or someone is watching her. But here, the idea does not seem so bad. It is almost a comfort to be looked at by the gods in this wood, to be judged and found wanting not for the false family’s name she bears nor the blood that runs in her veins, but for herself. For her own actions, her own thoughts, her own sins. It is almost a relief.

She takes a step, snapping a twig beneath her boot. Birds, as silent as the Stranger, alight from the trees to soar to safety above the canopy.

“Who goes there?”

The words are sharp and she hears the whine of a weapon sliding from its sheath. Vaerra steps out from behind a tree and into the clearing with her hands raised in surrender. Her future lord husband is sitting beneath the weeping heart tree, his Valyrian steel sword brandished in his hand, and his gray eyes as dark as the storm clouds brewing above their heads. Maester Willem assures her that the storm will not break until the morrow, but she has her doubts.

“It is only me, Lord Stark. I came to see Silverfyre,” she says, watching Cregan as he is watching her. “I can leave if you wish. I did not mean to disturb you.”

He sheathes his sword once more and leans it against the heart tree at his back. He laughs, but there is no humor in it.

“This is your home now, my lady. And the godswood is big enough for the two of us and your dragon without ever having to see each other.”

His tone is resigned, his eyes as closed off as she has seen them yet. He is staring at the pool before him like it contains the secrets of life. She wonders what he is seeing. She wonders what he wishes to see.

“Is that what you want? To be married to a woman you never have to see or talk to?”

His smile, when it comes, is almost sad.

“No. I will do my duty by you. We will make little lords and ladies to fill the halls, I’m sure. But it is not my wish to force my company on a woman who does not want it.”

She is wrapped in three layers of furs and petticoats and stockings and she is still so cold.

“I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean, Lord Stark. We have barely spoken since I arrived, but I am sure in time that we will learn to love each other, of a fashion.”

“You cannot love me if you already love someone else,” Lord Stark says. She knows then that whatever the people of King’s Landing think of the northmen, they are not half as dull as she had been led to believe.

There is a knowing cast to Cregan’s gaze, a sad tilt to his smile. She will share a life with this man and he is right. Consigning herself to her fate was almost easy, but consigning her heart is not so simple. She has kept that at arm’s length, behind a wall of propriety and indifference and distance. Distance of her mind, distance of her body, distance of her heart.

It was her father-her real father-who taught her that she must protect the things that she could not bear to lose, the things that she could not live without.

Well, now that she is here, now that her would-be husband is a man of flesh and bone and blood, she finds that she cannot bear the thought of losing her heart to him when it already belongs to someone else. Now that she is here, she does not know if she is strong enough to live without Aemond. She does not know if she wants to be strong enough.

She cannot bear it, but she knows she must try. For her sake and the sake of her future child.

“Would you like to meet Silverfyre, my lord?”

“We’ve already met, if I recall,” he says, shooting her a dubious look.

“Not really. Not properly.”

“I thank you, Princess. I appreciate the gesture, but that is not necessary.” He will not meet her eyes for long, his lips twitching in a not-quite-smile that delights her.

She does not mean to laugh, but it comes anyway, clear and bright and fresh as summer rain.

“My lord, you are to wed a dragon. Gods be good, our children will share their cradles with dragons. It will not do for my husband to be afraid of them.”

He laughs and she is surprised to hear the genuine amusement in it, and the heat in his gray eyes.

“And if I am afraid of dragons? Would you brand me a coward, Princess?”

“No,” she says. Thinking of a boy who lost an eye to claim a dragon. Thinking of a man who struck fear in her heart and want in her belly. Thinking of how terrified she had been of her own desires, trembling in his hands, breath tripping out of her as she keened. “A healthy fear of the things that could kill us is not a bad thing, my lord. Fear reminds us of all we have to lose. True courage is looking fear in the face and doing what you must in spite of it.”

He hums and stands from his post by the pool. He approaches on steps much too light for such a man. He stands before her and she is struck again by how tall he is, how much space he takes up, even here.

“I have faced fear many times before. I suspect I will have to face fear many times again before this war is over, Princess. At least in this one thing, I will have you there to protect me.”

Her laugh tumbles out of her like an accident. Like a gift.

Heat alights in her heart. A warmth sparking to life that she had not thought to find when she left her family behind and flew north. It is not the blazing inferno that she remembers from that night in the library. It is not suffocating. It is not killing her with fury and the promise of fire and blood. But it is not nothing.

It feels as light and delicate as a baby bird. As fragile as gossamer strands of spider’s silk caught in a gust of wind. She shudders. They turn. And in the heart tree behind them, a crow lands in the boughs. Watching. Silent and still and black as death.

***

She goes to bed, content and warm, for the first night since she arrived in Winterfell. And in her sleep, she dreams of a boy with violet eyes and hair as black as midnight and a bastard’s blood in his veins.

She sleeps and the Stranger comes to watch her, dark and silent and wistful as a shadow in the corner.

When she awakes the next morning, the sheets are soaked in sweat and tears and something else. Something worse. The air is thick with the tang of salt and iron and death. That is where her lady’s maid finds her when her husband-to-be, worried by the late hour, had bidden her to find her mistress. She is sitting in the pool of blood between her legs, fingers and thighs slick with red so dark it is almost black.

“M-my lady?!” Sara Snow asks. She is a waif of a girl, barely ten years old, with gray eyes and midnight hair, and a bastard’s name. They could almost be sisters. Sara loves her older brother, but she has always wanted to know what it is like to have a sister.

“It’s alright, sweetling,” Vaerra says, but Sara does not think it is she her mistress is speaking to. Her lady slides from her bed, bare feet stark and pale against the stone floor. She gathers the ruined sheets and lays them in the fire with a care that is almost reverent. Black smoke and the acrid stench of burning cotton fills the room. Sara can only watch as her mistress stares, her dark eyes as shuttered as the crypts of Winterfell, tears clinging to her lashes, lips trembling as she stares at the smoke as dark as pitch and the flames swallowing the babe that almost was.

“Sara, please tell Lord Stark that I am not feeling well. I shall remain abed today.”

“Yes, my lady,” Sara says. She stands, spine as stiff as a rod, her vision blurry with unshed tears.

Sara owes this girl nothing. She is to be her brother’s lady wife. She is to be the mistress of his castle. She is to bear his children someday. Sara owes her nothing, and yet, even as young as she is, even as wild, she has heard the stories of her brother’s bride-to-be. She has heard the whispers and the rumors that despite her noble name and noble bearing, Vaerra Velaryon is as much a bastard as she herself is.

We bastards must stick together, she thinks, and shoves the secret down, down, down. She buries it like the Starks bury their dead and hopes that it will not rise with the winter winds.

***

Helaena’s maids find her muttering nonsense and rocking, inconsolable, in her bed. She is not crying but it is a near thing. Her grief is the shroud of her unkempt silver hair and the trembling of her lips and the whispers of words that tumble from her mouth like flies. Dead, shorn of their wings, abandoned and forgotten between her sheets.

One of them goes to fetch her lady mother, the Dowager Queen. Another goes to fetch her husband, King Aegon. And the third stands close, careful not to touch.

You must never touch Heleana unless she initiates. If I hear that you have touched her, you will be sent to the kitchens or to the washerwomen or worse. Do you understand?

That was what Queen Alicent told her when she first became Heleana’s handmaiden. The urge to touch her now, to provide some measure of relief, is so strong that the maid has to twist her hands in the scratchy skirts of her dress to stop herself.

“Helaena!” the king roars as he enters his wife’s bed chambers. He has not been in this room since they were married, and nothing at all has changed about it. The blue curtains, as effervescent as spider’s silk, are the same. Her collection of creeping, crawling things along the far wall is the same. If everyone is quiet and still, he can almost hear them: the scuttling of their legs, their chitters and clicks, their ceaseless buzzing and chirping. He approaches her bed, the one place as her husband he has never allowed himself to go. She catches his sleeve and pulls him to her, looking up at him with eyes that are as wide, as wild, as mad as he has ever seen them.

“He’s gone, Aegon. He’s gone. Committed to the flames. Buried in ash and embers and the north.”

Her words spin faster and faster until she buckles beneath the weight of her vision, beneath the weight of loss. She collapses and Aegon is the only thing remaining to hold her up. He sweeps her into his arms, lays his head on top of hers. She cleaves to him like a port in a storm, she clings and cries and finally lets her tears fall.

The son her brother would never know. The nephew she will never see outside of her dreams.

A boy with violet eyes and hair as black as midnight and the dragon-girl’s bastard blood in his veins.

The gods are cruel. The gods take. And the dragons die for it.

“Dragons of blood and bone on a field of white ash,” she says. “Dragon of blood and bone on a field of white ash.”

“It’s alright, Hel. I’m here. I’m here,” her husband says. His fingers are gentle in her hair, his lips a balm and a curse and a madness as they press against her skin. It is the softest he has ever been with her. Softer than the night he held the twins for the first time. Softer than the night he came inside her and whispered her name.

This is the beginning of the end for them.

And he is wrong.

It will not be alright. She thinks that nothing will ever be alright again.

Unacknowledged, unseen, her lady mother is standing in the doorway. She is holding a letter with hands that are tipped with ripped and ragged and bleeding flesh. She watches her children for a moment, then looks at the scroll with a broken seal, then slips into shadow and is gone before they know she is there.

***

It has been three days and two nights and the stench of char and ash and death is still so thick in her room that Vaerra wonders if it could choke her in her sleep. It has been three days without food, without the sight of her husband-to-be. Three days of feeling like her soul and her heart and her mind had been consecrated with her son in those blooded sheets. Three days of nothing but maddening numbness.

She feels nothing, even now, as Sara helps her don a dress. Even now as Sara combs her hair and braids it into a plait that brushes the small of her back. Even now as Sara stares at her with a trembling smile and her eyes full of…is it pity?

She does not know. And she cannot find it within herself to care.

She moves through Winterfell like a ghost, like a wraith of herself, like a shadow cast upon the wall. She cannot feel the stone beneath her kidskin boots. She cannot feel the air moving through her lungs, shredding and scraping and hollowing her out. She cannot feel anything and she wonders if she will ever feel anything again.

She makes her way to the heart tree, to the godswood that was almost a sanctuary to her. It does not feel like a sanctuary now. The gaze of the old gods feels like a weight pressing down on her. At least it is something, even if her breath comes harder in this place, even if the wind bites and claws and scrapes at her like it wants to tear her apart, even if her hands tremble and her legs, weak from disuse, wobble and threaten to give beneath her.

In the distance, she can hear Silverfyre. She can hear her cries and her muted rumblings, and she should go to her, but she is torn by her own indecision, paralyzed by her own doubt. If she goes, then she will be able to feel again. She knows it, senses the truth of it in her bones. And she is not ready, not yet. She does not know when or if she will be ready ever again.

So she stays, planted like a tree, and imagines sprouting roots of pain and misery and poison into the snow and ice and black earth beneath.

The thought, when it comes, is vicious, brutal in its suddenness, and terrible as the pain of burning the only reminder she had hoped to have of him. She wishes he had marked her in some way: carved his name in her flesh or taken her eye as payment for his. She wishes for proof that he had ever laid hands on her, proof that he had kissed her lips, proof that he had loved her and ruined her and abandoned her all in the course of a single night. But the proof cannot be found on her skin. It is a brand inside of her. It dwells in her marrow and beats in her veins. It is inscribed on her heart and buried like a dagger in the dark, empty spaces between her ribs.

All she has instead is a band of leather wrapped around her wrist and her memories, imperfect and painful and blinding. And she fears for the day her memories and her pain ebb to a throb and then a dull ache and then nothing at all. What will she be without them? Who will she be without them?

There is nothing and no one to answer her but the lows of some animal, lonely and sad and desperate as the song in her heart and a shadow on the horizon, as big as a small mountain, approaching from the south.

***

Aegon, Second of his Name, King of the Andals and the Rhoynar and the First Men, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms and Protector of the Realm, cannot remember a time when his eldest sister asked him for anything. He remembers her from that day at court, standing tall in their father’s throne room, chin up, shoulders back. He remembers the fire in her eyes, the defiance written like poetry on her pretty lips, the claws shifting hidden in silky, smooth skin aching for the chance to come out. He thinks about that day sometimes, not Vaemond’s head being sliced off. He could have done without that. No, Aegon thinks of what might have been had Father not been announced. He thinks of what might have happened if his sister had been forced to fight his mother and his grandfather in open court.

Would she have bared her teeth and snapped her jaw and dug her fingers like claws through their eyes? Would she have remained standing, strong and impetuous and imperious as stone in the face of the truth laid bare about her children, about herself? Would she have gotten to her knees and begged for the rights of her bastard son?

He will never know. They will all of them never know: his wife, his brother, his grandfather, his mother, him. And he thinks what a tragedy that they will never know the price she was willing to pay for her love, for her pride, for her life and the lives of her children.

He reads the scroll written in Rhaenyra’s voice, drafted by the hand of a stranger. He tosses it, abandoned, onto his bedside table, and prays to gods that he does not believe in for a second chance to find out.

He worships in the only way he knows how: at the altar of his wife’s body. He presses kisses of penance in the soft skin of her thighs. He mutters queries of absolution against her lips. He laughs as she smiles and wipes at his tears. He does not know if they are tears of joy or tears of sorrow. He does not know if it matters. He spirals on wings of fire and blood and hope to drive away their pain and prays that she will forgive him his trespasses, his sins, his weakness.

He does not deserve her, but he hopes she will forgive him anyway.

***

“Brother.”

“Sister.”

Gone is the Realm’s Delight. Buried or burned or pounded to dust and ash and history beneath the weight of her grief. She is not the girl he knew as a child: bent on hating him, and when that did not work, when hatred thawed in the light of his chubby cheeks and his gurgling laugh and his lilac eyes, bent on ignoring him. He was the brother she had wanted since she was a little girl and he was not enough.

In her place is a woman of cold fury. A woman with their father’s eyes and their father’s crown and their father’s promise clinging to her like a second skin. She is the Queen of the Seven Kingdoms and she is beautiful and terrible in her rage.

“I worried that you would not come.”

“That you worry for me at all is a fresh change of pace,” he says. He wants to needle her. He wants to get under her skin. He wants to flay her open to see what her insides look like. If they are as cold and hard and unyielding as the rest of her.

His sister smiles and his blood runs cold.

“Do you know why I have called you here?”

He doesn’t. He really, really doesn’t. She could have burned King’s Landing to ash a dozen times by now. The fact that she hasn’t yet is concerning at the least, terrifying at the most. It keeps him awake most nights, the waiting and the dread and the feeling of inevitability pressing down on his chest.

“You’re in want of a king between your legs?” he says, because he can. He smirks, because he can.

“Aegon!” His mother, little better than a statue standing beside him, exclaims. Even admonishing him, she only has eyes for Rhaenyra Targaryen.

His sister, for her part, only smiles that cold smile. She shifts on her feet, stares unseeing into his eyes, and continues.

“I have your terms for my surrender. I wanted to offer my own in person,” Rhaenyra says. Her eyes slip from his to his mother standing at his shoulder. Rhaenyra’s eyes, cold and unfeeling as stone, melt and spark with fire and fury. There you are, he thinks. “I will speak with you alone, brother, or not at all.”

“Done,” he says. He turns to his mother and the remnants of his father’s Kingsguard. “Leave us.”

Across the room, his sister dismisses her Queensguard.

They file out, silent and sullen and looking at each other with dread in their eyes. His mother is the last to leave, her red hair shimmering like a waterfall of blood down her spine, her dress the green of envy and the green of poison and the green of summer grass. She looks at Rhaenyra and there is something about the way her expression twists, like a secret waiting to be spilled, like a dagger wielded in fury, like the tears his wife had smiled to see and kissed away. She does not look at him, or can’t, or won’t, as she grips the doors and pulls them closed behind her.

Aegon feels empty. He feels cold. He feels hollow, like his guts have been scraped out with a spoon.

“Well,” he says, pouring himself a glass of Arbor red and lazing back in his chair. “You’ve gotten what you wanted. As you always do. Present your terms, sister, and let us be done with this mummer’s farce.”

“Mummer’s farce,” she repeats. He can hear the laugh in her voice, the disbelief, as if she cannot quite comprehend what she is hearing. “You started this war, Aegon! You crowned yourself king, against the wishes of our father, against my rights as his named heir.”

“I started nothing,” he says. His voice begins to rise, spiraling as he works himself into a frenzy. All of that hurt, all of that doubt, all of that pain he thought he had buried and burned to ash. “My grandfather started it. My mother started it. I wanted no part in it. I wanted to get on a ship and never look back, but they made my brother drag me back to the Keep. She told me my father named me with his dying breath. She told me he wanted me to be king.”

“And you believed her?!” Rhaenyra says. Her nails are digging into the wood of the table between them. Her eyes are shimmering, her lip trembling as she bares her teeth at him. He wonders what it would feel like if she leapt across the table, sank her teeth into his flesh, and savaged his throat. He wonders what it would feel like to have her rip him apart with teeth and nails as she has already ripped him apart with her words.

“I wanted to believe her.” He feels small when he says it, when he bares the truth and the horror of the deepest rung of his despair, when he peels back the layers to reveal the roiling waves of pitch that are always half a second away from washing over his head and dragging him down to the depths.

I wanted to believe that he thought me capable.

I wanted to believe that at the last, he thought me worthy.

I wanted to believe that I am enough.

He doesn’t say it. He doesn’t have to. He feels it in every writhing, shameful nerve buried like shards of glass in his skin. He hears it in the sound of his mad, empty laughter. He sees it when he lifts his cup to his mouth and meets his own eyes in the mirror of red.

“It doesn’t matter what I want,” he says instead with a smile that does not reach his eyes. There is a kind of power in admitting the truth that he has always held at arm’s length. “Give me your terms, dear sister, and let us pretend that I have any other choice but to accept them.”

She is looking at him the way his mother looked at their father all those years ago. In a stranger’s keep, surrounded by strangers wearing familiar faces, their brother’s face a mangled and bleeding ruin. Like with a word he has betrayed her. Like he has plunged his hand into her chest and ripped out her heart, still beating, still bleeding. Like he has shattered her.

“Aegon,” she whispers. It is soft, gentle, pleading.

“Your terms, Rhaenyra,” he says.

He thought that everything soft in him had been burned away years ago. When he was still a little boy and had first come to realize how little his father cared. When he was still a young man and his mother told him that he would be king, no matter that he did not want it.

But that is not quite right. Any softness left within him belongs to his children and his wife. It belongs to the brother he failed to protect and the brother who is little more than a stranger to him now. And if he feels any softness when he looks at his eldest sister, well, who would ever know but him?

Rhaenyra Targaryen stands, unbowed, unbent, and unbroken before him. The Queen That Was Promised, their father’s chosen heir, and the Gods chosen servant. She stands, staring at him with fire in her eyes and something else that he cannot name, and hands him the key to his own undoing. Perhaps he is mad. Perhaps he is losing his mind.

Losing. Lost. Loose.

“My terms are thus: surrender the throne, give up the Conqueror’s crown. Open the gates and the skies of King’s Landing to me and I swear, on my honor and the lives of my children, I will not harm a hair on your pretty head. I will be crowned by the faith in sight of gods and men in the Dragonpit, just as you were. The lords and ladies of the realm will kneel before me and pledge their fealty to me and my trueborn son and heir, Jacaerys. And if they will not, they shall have their choice of punishment: the wall, the black cells, or death by dragon fire.

“Your son, Jaehaerys, shall be my husband’s squire. Your younger son, Maelor, shall be my cupbearer. Your daughter will marry my son, Aegon, when they are of an age. And if the Mother should bless you with another daughter, then she should be married to my youngest son, Viserys.”

“What of their mother, my wife?”

“Heleana is free to do as she pleases. I bear her no ill will and as such, she may go with your mother to Oldtown or remain at court as one of my ladies.”

“And our brothers? What of them?”

“The proposal of my daughter, Vaerra, to our brother, Aemond, shall stand if she accepts him. They will be the Lady and Lord of Dragonstone and rule the ancient seat of House Targaryen in my name. As for Daeron, I hear he is quite comfortable in Oldtown. He may remain there if he so wishes.”

Everything is as it should be: his family safe, their father’s kingdom in capable hands, his wife free to choose a life of her own instead of the one chosen for her. So why does he still feel that ache inside of him? Why can he still feel the void inside him swirling and twisting and swallowing everything in its path?

“What about me? I who was crowned king? What will you do to the man who stole your birthright and your throne, sister?”

Rhaenyra is quiet for a moment. And when she smiles, it feels like he is looking at the sun. She is blinding like this, the picture of the Mother Herself.

“You allowed yourself to be steered, brother. As much as I let my own pride and hate and grief steer me. Our father divided the realm by naming me the heir. He divided it again when he married your mother and had the son he always wanted, then another, and another. The creation of this division in our family started with him and I have done nothing but encouraged the gap to widen and deepen. As your older sister, I was meant to protect you, to love you unconditionally, and I have done a poor job of it thus far,” Rhaenyra says.

Something lurches in his chest. Something made of brimstone and fire dislodges and he feels suddenly lesser for its loss. It burns in his belly, hot and bright as a star, before sinking below the waves. Smothered in cold and ice.

“Aegon, your life, as mine was before you, has been dictated to you from the first. But I promise you now, if you wish to go and be with your youngest brother in Oldtown, then you shall be given leave to do so. If you wish to cross the Narrow Sea and disappear with a new name and a new life, then I shall pack you onto a ship myself and wish you a good journey. If you wish to stay on Dragonstone with Aemond and Vaerra…well, you would have to bring that up with them. But if you wish to stay in King’s Landing with your wife and your children, then you need only say so. Bend the knee, in sight of gods and men, and you shall be free to do what you like. But if I sense a shift of the winds, if I hear even a whisper of rebellion, or a rallying call of banners in your name, I will find and I will crush the remnants of your family with all the might of the Targaryen army and the Velaryon fleet at my back. And once I have finished with them, I will come for you last of all. Do you understand me?”

If he ever doubted that the same blood that runs through his veins also runs in Rhaenyra Targaryen’s, her little speech would be enough to convince him. She is the blood of the dragon, as he is. He sees Aemond in the curve of her aquiline nose and sharp-as-glass jaw. He sees Daeron in the shade of her eyes. He sees Helaena (soft, sweet, good Helaena) in her smile. And he sees himself too, though he had not thought to see it. Just as he had never thought to look for it in the first place. He sees himself in the crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes and in the single errant wisp of silver hair that has escaped the thick braid draped over her shoulder, and in the way she clasps her twitching fingers together to keep them still.

I am King of Nothing and Noone, he thinks.

It is not sorrow or dread or anger that burns in his belly now. As he reaches for the Conqueror’s crown and has to force his fingers to gentleness. As he surrenders his crown and the birthright that should have been his, all he feels is a bone-deep relief.

“I will not betray you again, sister. And if my wife should have me, then I will never leave her side again. I leave my fate to her.”

Rhaenyra smiles and the sun rises with it. Glaring and blinding and radiant.

“Good.”

***

It is her fourth day of mourning and the words she feared would come are filling her room, buzzing like bees in her ears, stinging her skin. Sara is telling her that she must rise from her bed. She must bathe. She must dress. She must play pretend for a few hours. Her husband-to-be has received guests, men of noble esteem, apparently, though Sara did not listen well enough to be able to tell her their names.

Lord Stark has never demanded anything from her before, not once in the weeks that she has been his guest, his betrothed, his future wife. But he is demanding now and is it not the duty of a wife to do her husband’s bidding, no matter what she might think or feel?

Vaerra rises, feeling like a corpse in her mottled gray shift, and submits to the same poking and prodding that she had when she first arrived in Winterfell. She takes a bath of tepid water and crushed violets and tries not to stare too long at the petals. They are broken little things that make her think of boys with one eye and the child she almost had and lost. She stares and stares and wonders what it would take for the Stranger to come and strike her down.

Sara braids her hair into a crown threaded with violets and baby’s breath. She ties the laces of her dress (the blue so dark it is almost black) until it is difficult to breathe. This is her shroud. This is her armor: pretty clothes and pretty hair and a lie for a smile. It is almost enough to make her feel at home in her own skin again. It is almost enough to make her feel strong, to make her feel like a dragon.

Through the window, Vaerra watches Silverfyre alight from the godswood. A pale shadow against the impossible pitch of nights in the north. She wishes it were so easy for her to escape, to fly away. She would spread her wings and lunge for the sky and pick a direction. And once she started flying, she would never look back.

She enters Winterfell’s great hall. They have had no cause yet to hold a feast, no cause yet for the kinds of celebrations that were as plentiful at her grandfather’s court as whores on the Street of Silk. They were saving the splendor for their wedding feast, or so her future husband had said.

Now, streamers of white and gray have been strung from the ceiling, the iron chandeliers shining with what looks like a thousand winking, flickering candles, tables strewn with the petals of winter roses. It is beautiful. It is breathtaking.

But nothing takes her breath like the man standing in the center of all of it. His back is to her, his hair a shimmering sheen of spun silver amongst the unending black (black hair, black tunics, black trousers) of her future husband’s countrymen. His hands are folded carefully behind him. He is as tall and lean and striking as a storm. He is everything she remembers and it is killing her.

He must be a ghost, a phantom. Death come to claim her at last. The Stranger wearing the face of the man she loves. It will be a mercy, she thinks, to welcome death in the safety of his arms. Even if it is a lie, even if it is false kindness in the form of a dagger wrapped in the silk of his skin and the meat of his palm, she thinks it will be the most beautiful lie she has ever been told.

The phantom turns. Lord Stark turns with him, a grin as wide as the Narrow Sea on his lips and his hand clapped soundly on her uncle’s shoulder.

“Princess Vaerra!” her future husband calls. The music screeches to a halt, a symphony of discordant notes fading to a whisper and then to nothing at all. Her ears are ringing with the silence. Every man, woman, and child turns to look at her, but she only has eyes for him.

His mouth, the cut of his jaw, his shoulders betray nothing, but the violet of his eye is as bright as the north star in the dead of night. A comet streaking stardust across the sky. A beacon to light her way through the darkness.

Hope springs, white-hot and eternal behind her ribs, a dagger lodged in her chest, a star alight and burning and guiding her home.

Vaerra is helpless to its call. She approaches and she feels like she is flying. She is weightless, unmoored, and swears her feet do not touch the ground.

“Niece,” Aemond says. It feels like he is scraping at her insides, a monster beating at the walls of her prison, fire and blood and ash enough to slip through the gaps to poison her.

Aemond, she wants to say. She wants to grab him by the lapels of his jacket. She wants to throw him against the table and ravish him until he is as broken and twisted with need as she is. She wants to crawl into and under and through his skin. She wants to bury herself inside him and thinks she would be glad to never see the sky again.

The violence of her desire should terrify her. It should shame her. She reaches for him, trembling and wet and wanting.

“Daughter! You’re just like your mother, making the men-folk wait for your grand entrance!”

Daemon staggers forward on legs that are as steady as a newborn foal’s. He crashes between Aemond and Lord Stark and throws his arms unceremoniously about her shoulders. He buries his face in her hair. He is warm and smells of smoke and ash. He smells like home. And he is whispering words into her hair.

“Steady, girl,” he says, soft enough that only she can hear. Aemond is watching her. He hasn’t stopped watching her since Lord Stark called her name.

Her stepfather presses down on her shoulders and presses a sound kiss to her cheek.

“Father,” she says, fond and exasperated and furious with him. He steps away, his lavender eyes shining with mirth. She hates him so much it feels like she is swallowing down fire as she turns to Aemond at last. She hates Daemon, but she concedes that perhaps, he had a point. Her fingers do not tremble this time as she reaches for him.

“Uncle. I had not hoped to see you here tonight. You should have sent word that you were coming.”

“There was no time. A raven would have arrived too late.”

Lord Stark huddles her close. Drink has made him unsteady. Drink has soured his breath. Drink has brightened his gray eyes and stuck a grin on his face that will not leave. “It seems your mother is going to treat with your uncle. Not this one, though. The other one, the king.”

“Is she?” Vaerra asks. She stands in the arms of another man and she cannot stop watching Aemond either. She hasn’t blinked since she first saw him. She is sure she hasn’t taken so much as a slip of a breath. She is starting to feel lightheaded.

“She is,” Lord Stark assures her. He flings his hand in the air, jovial as she has never seen him, and the gaggle of bards in the corner strikes up a merry tune once more. The center of the floor is a flurry of dancing partners, all shifting silks and wandering hands and eyes full of mischief.

Cregan squeezes her and takes her arm to lead her up the steps to the high table. The table runner is the same gray as his eyes and is covered with all manner of dishes that Vaerra has no desire to eat. There is spitted pork and black bread with butter. There are charred mushrooms and pots of steaming fish stew. Lord Stark flops down into the seat in the center of the table. Vaerra, as his betrothed, sinks down next to him, and expects her stepfather to sit next to her. But it is Aemond sliding the chair back from the table, Aemond slipping into the seat, Aemond’s arm brushing her shoulder.

“There’s no need to look so scared, my lady. It is only food,” Cregan says. He squeezes her fingers with a smile that twists at something in her heart. She is sharply reminded of the moment between them in the godswood. Before everything had gone so terribly, horribly wrong.

“I find it hard to eat these days,” she says. She does not know which of the men beside her she is talking to. She supposes it doesn’t matter in the end. Cregan Stark says nothing as he pours himself another cup of ale. Aemond stares out at the crowd before them and finds her hand beneath the table. He drags his fingertips over the back of her hand, then trails them across her palm. It is a chaste thing, as innocent as children’s kisses, but she is burning for it. Burning for him. He touches the sliver of skin at her wrist where the sleeve of her dress has ridden up. He hums, quiet and curious and smug when he touches the leather band of his old eyepatch.

“I’m sure we could find something here for you to sink your teeth into,” Aemond says. Loud enough that Cregan and Daemon look at him. Loud enough that the people at the closest table are looking at him.

She doesn’t think. Just pushes to her feet, wrenching her hand away from his beneath the table with a nervous laugh. She stands so abruptly that her chair tips backward, arching for a fall. Aemond’s hand catches it, straightens it, and looks at nothing and no one but her. She thinks she hears someone laughing. She looks away first.

“I apologize, Lord Stark, but I am still not feeling well. Please, may I retire to my room?” she asks, pleads. Like she is nothing more than a child with a stomach ache. Not a woman grown soaking through her smallclothes, being touched by a man who is not and will never be her husband. She blinks, startled by the pain blooming in her heart. Surely she is dying. Surely it is killing her, this want, this ache, this longing. No one could feel this pain and survive it.

“You’ve barely eaten!” Cregan exclaims, drawing more eyes to the drama unfolding at the high table. She has not eaten so much as a crumb, but she is not going to be the one to tell him so. He must see something on her face, something in her eyes. He smiles, sad and indulgent and sorry. He gathers her close and it is a rare moment of tenderness when he kisses her cheek. An apology for a wrong that he had no part in. “Of course. Rest well, my lady, for tomorrow we must find something to entertain two princes of the realm.”

“I will. I promise,” she says.

And then she is turning. She is fleeing. She is shoring up her defenses one stone at a time, shoving the mad betrayal of her own heart down, down, down. At least she is brave enough to wait until the door to the great hall closes behind her before she starts running.

She has walked the halls of Winterfell enough to find her own way back to her room during the day, but the castle of her soon-to-be-husband is something else entirely at night. She runs through abandoned hallways, past darkened rooms, and feels like a thing of wind and rain and earth darting through trees. A sprite, as insubstantial as a ghost, a thing of memory and legend and smoke.

She hears the scrape of a boot against stone, a phantom memory surely, but it makes her heart leap with fear. It fills her limbs with tremulous terror. She runs faster. Her dress is so tight, she cannot hope to breathe. Her head is spinning. She is drunk on the laughter sizzling on her tongue, on the fright burning in her blood, on the hope wheeling like stars in her lungs.

She slides into the hallway where her room is and nearly collides with the wall. It startles a gasp out of her, makes her hands tremble. She is so close, close enough that she is starting to lose her strength. Her legs threaten to give beneath her, her hands clutch at cold stone, and she prays for strength that will not come. She stumbles into her door, nails shredding wood.

Someone catches her by the waist. A lily-white hand darts forward to grab the handle of the door and pushes. They tumble through in a fury of winding limbs. She does not know where he starts and she begins. He crowds her against the door, their weight closing it behind them with a snap that is as loud as canon fire.

He is staring down at her, violet eye aflame, jaw ticking with a vein, mouth curling in a smile. There is something different about him, though she cannot tell what it is. She feels nothing as she stands in the cage of his arms, feels nothing as the heat of him squeezes what little breath remains to her from her lungs.

It is not a lie, but is as far from the truth as it can be.

“Aemond,” she says. It is a whisper. It is a wish and a plea. It is a dream answered as he leans over her, bearing down on her with heat and hands and lips that are as scorching as flame. He presses kisses to her cheeks, to the bridge of her nose, to the soft hollow of her neck. “Aemond!”

He has the gall to laugh in her face.

“Vaerra!” he whispers. He is mocking her. He is teasing her. This was nothing more than a game to him once. It seems hardly more than a game to him still. Her smallclothes are drenched, her thighs slick with her longing. Her expression twists, she pulls back her hand, and gathers all her courage to slap him. He stumbles away from her, hand grasping at his jaw, his mouth dropping open in shock.

“I won’t let you do this to me again. Get out!”

“You’re as helpless against this as I am,” he says, advancing on her again. He has the look of a predator closing in on its prey. She can’t help thinking that death has never looked so good or so sweet. He is flushed with want, pink painted in an imprint of her hand on his cheek, across the bridge of his nose, down the column of his neck. Her eyes dip to his lips and that thread inside of her goes taut. He sweeps her into his arms, presses flush against her until she can feel the heat of his cock straining against her belly. He pushes his thigh between her legs and she is hopeless as she opens her legs for him, as she writhes wet and wanting against him, desperate for friction, driven mad by her desire.

“There you are,” he says. He is tugging her hair, arching her back until she is sure she will snap in half, pressing open-mouthed kisses to her neck, to the underside of her jaw, to the swells of her breasts. “Do it, Vaerra. Ride me. Use me for your pleasure.”

“Come for me. Scream for me,” he says. It is neither request nor command. It is a plea. He is begging for it. Begging for her as she once begged him. “They’re all at the feast. No one will hear you but me.”

She comes, but she does not scream. She stares at the ceiling, trying to see the stars through the blur of her tears. Her lips are hinged shut, worried between her teeth hard enough that she tastes iron and salt in her mouth. She is trembling but not from pleasure. She is falling apart at her seams. The only things holding her together are his hands and his lips and his body hard and unyielding against her.

She thinks of the babe she lost. She thinks of him cold and alone and abandoned in the hearth when she joins her lord husband in their marriage bed. She thinks of a ghost with Aemond’s eyes and her hair and her Uncle Aegon’s mischievous smile. She thinks of him wandering the halls of Winterfell, lost and only wanting his mother.

Aemond is frozen beneath her. Whether it is shock or horror or worry, she does not know. She shakes in his arms. He does not pull away, but he does not move closer either.

“Forgive me,” she mumbles. “Please forgive me.”

He is staring at her like she has lost her mind. Maybe she has. Maybe she is mad and lost and untethered. Maybe he is nothing more than mist and shadow, an illusion she conjured up to fill the silence. Maybe she was right after all and he is the Stranger finally come to collect his due.

“Vaerra,” he whispers. He threads his fingers through her hair and the plait that Sara worked so hard on tumbles free. Violets and baby’s breath shower down around them. He pulls his thigh from between her legs. He turns her with a gentle hand on her waist. He undoes her stays with a patience she had not known he was capable of. Her tears are still falling, her breath stuttering in ragged gasps from her mouth. He sweeps her hair aside, presses kisses to her neck and her shoulder and the knobs of her spine. There is nothing hurried about it, nothing demanding or forceful.

And as he goes, he whispers words into her skin.

It will be alright.

The pain will pass.

Breathe, Vaerra.

She breathes, tries to breathe, but the pain in her lungs will not fade. Her mind is heavy with shame, her heart weighted down with betrayal. She turns in his arms and grips his hands so tightly that her knuckles turn white. She does not look at him, cannot look at him, so she stares at the hearth over his shoulder. The fire is low again. She will have to toss more wood onto it soon.

“I lost him. I woke up and he was already gone, snatched by the Stranger in the dead of night, laying in a bed of blood.”

“Who did you lose, Vaerra?” he asks. But there is something cold and fractured as ice in his voice and on his face. He knows. He knows.

“Your son. Our little boy,” she says. There are tears in her eyes again, but she refuses to let them fall. She stares at the hearth, stares at the ashes beneath the dying embers, and admits her greatest betrayal. “I didn’t name him. Before I burned him. I didn’t name him and now he will wander the world, lost and alone with not even the comfort of his own name for company.”

He pulls one of his hands from hers. He trails a line of fire up her throat, along the curve of her jaw, and into her hair. He tangles his hand in the dark strands and pulls her forward until their foreheads meet. His eyes are closed. She closes her eyes too, soaking in the warmth of his skin and the touch of his hand.

“Aenor,” he whispers. Like a secret. Like a promise.

She pulls away.

“What?”

“His name. Shouldn’t the father be consulted on names too? I don’t remember you asking my opinion on the matter.”

There is a smile, sad and small but there, curling at the corners of his lips. She balks.

“I-I suppose,” she says, stumbling over her words as she has not stumbled over them since she was a child.

“His name is Aenor, then, if you agree. A strong name for a prince.”

There was a time when he could not say the word “strong” without it sounding like a vile word, like an accusation and a curse. But there is nothing malicious in the way he is smiling at her, nothing vicious in the way he leans forward to kiss her. It is chaste and careful. Like he is scared of breaking her. Like she might fall apart at the wrong word or the too-hard press of his lips.

“I cannot forgive you,” Aemond says when he pulls away again. His hand is heavy on her waist, the other playing with the ends of her hair. She has never seen this look on his face before. “Because there is nothing to forgive. I ruined you and abandoned you. I let fear into my heart. It is I who should beg for forgiveness. I who should fall at your feet and plead for mercy.”

He does so, dropping to his knee and whipping off his eyepatch in one fluid motion. The leather band falls to the floor. She thinks she will never tire of seeing him like this: kneeling before her, face upturned and shrouded half in darkness, his sapphire eye warm and winking in the firelight. His hand moves, fluttering and twisting as he reaches inside his tunic. It comes away bearing a ring of silver inset with a half-band of sapphires.

“I would not blame you for turning me away now. But if your heart is still as it was, if you still feel any affection for me, then marry me. Marry me and I will give you a castle full of princes and princesses. Marry me and I will give you the world.”

She has seen Aemond Targaryen’s rage. She has seen his desire. And now she sees through to the very heart of him, to the sorrow and fear and love buried deep behind the shield of his soul. It strikes a match in her, inferno blazing, her heart swept in a tide of fondness for the man before her. He could drown her in kisses, smother her with his hands and the weight of his body, and it would never, ever be enough.

“As much as I like you on your knees,” she says with a wry smile. She offers her hand. He slips his fingers into hers, callouses sliding in her palm, and lets himself be pulled to his feet. “I am sure my mother told you why I came here. I am to be married to Lord Cregan Stark. He’s already accepted the proposal. What will you do if he pushes his claim?”

“There are three dragons outside his gates, waiting for a signal. Do you really think he would fight so hard to keep you?” Aemond says. His eyes are distant. He is thinking about this. He has already thought about this. “We could offer him something else. The marriage of our first girl to his son.”

She is nodding, smile blinding and as wide as the Narrow Sea. In truth, she does not care what his answer is. Only knowing that he has thought about it before lifts her heart. Gone is the reckless little boy who claimed a dragon and lost his eye as recompense. Gone is the boy who cornered her in the library and took her maidenhood without thought for the consequences.

She reaches for his face and he must know what she wants. He tilts forward, body curling around hers. All she can see is his silver hair like molten quicksilver in the firelight and his eye of sapphire, warm and watching and waiting to see what she will do. She touches the corner of his eye, touches the cold silver inset and the dark blue gem nestled inside. She looks down at the ring still gripped between his thumb and fore finger: a silver band crowned with sapphires. The piece of him, the proof of his love, that she has always wanted.

“I love you, Aemond,” she says in a rush. Wanting him to know it, needing him to know it before anything else. “I think I’ve loved you since I was a girl. Maybe I’ve always loved you.”

She smiles, pressing her fingers into the ragged flesh of his eye socket, where sapphire met flesh. He hisses in pain, expression twisting, mouth dropping open in an oh of pain that does something truly fascinating to her insides.

“Leave me again, betray me again and even Vhagar will not be able to save you,” she says. It is a threat and a promise and with the way he is looking at her now, it’s like she’s offered him the secrets of life. Like she's laid the world at his feet and dared him to reach for it.

“I promise. I swear it,” he says. He surges forward and she surges up and the clash of their mouths together is like the meeting of steel or the dance of the dragons. It rings through her, sharp and bright and clear as a bell. He is kissing her like he wants to devour her. Like he wants to crawl through her skin and make a bed of her insides. Between them, he pushes the ring on her finger. And then he is pushing at her skirts, frantic with the need to get her undressed. She is just as desperate, breath hot and heavy in his mouth, fingers tearing at the laces of his breeches and the clasps of his jerkin. Their clothing falls with rustles and thumps and when they are bared to each other as they have never been before, that is when it hits her.

This is happening. This is real. He is real.

“Fuck,” he says, moans. “You’re so beautiful and you’re all mine.”

He backs her up until her knees hit the bed and she folds, hands gripping him so tightly that he has no choice but to follow. His body covers hers and for a moment, the movement slots the tip of him perfectly against her clit. For a moment she sees stars again, wheeling bright and hot and burning above their heads.

“Aemond,” she whines. It is almost embarrassing how she whines for him, how she begs with lips and hands and teeth. He laughs, swept up in the madness as much as she is.

He grabs her knee, hooks it over his hip, and enters her in a smooth, fluid motion. He buries himself to the hilt with a groan that catches a fire in her belly. He is covering her, crowding her, his hair falling like a curtain around their faces. She can see nothing but him, can feel nothing but him. There is not even an inch of space between their bodies and it is still not close enough.

“I’ve got you,” he whispers. He rolls his hips and the long, slow drag of him inside of her makes her flutter. She arches her neck, arches her spine, presses herself so fully against him that for a moment, they feel like one body. One heart, one mind, one soul.

They do not last long. It is too hot, their bodies slick and sliding together with sweat. But every time he pulls away, every time he tries to give her space to catch her breath, to cool off, she yanks him back. She doesn’t want space. She doesn’t need to breathe. She wants him, smothering and suffocating and all-consuming as he is.

And when he comes, when his seed explodes warm and wet inside of her, she falls like a star from the heavens, like a dragon plummeting towards the ground, like a comet trailing dust and ice in its wake, like a fire banking to embers.

Later, when the sweat has cooled to tracks of salt on their skin, when his fingers are gentle and soft in her hair and on her shoulder, when his kisses are little more than the whisper of a butterfly’s wings, he says it.

“I love you, too, you know,” he whispers. Hands and lips trailing gooseflesh in their wake. He presses it to her lips like a secret, like an admission, like a prayer. “It scares me sometimes, how much I love you.”

“Fear reminds us of all we have to lose,” she says, drowsy with warmth in the circle of his arms.

He says something more, but she is lost to the world. Dragged down in darkness and sated sleep. It does not matter. He has planted something inside of her. A daisy poking through the late winter snows. The first sign of spring, of new beginnings, and fresh starts.

***

His words, spoken in the dark and the empty spaces between dusk and dawn, are a prelude to the life they will live. It was a tragedy that she did not hear them that night, her own words spoken to her from the lips of the man that would love her and protect her and spend a life with her.

But he shows her, with his words and his actions and kisses pressed to her skin, that he understands them. Courage is not the absence of fear.

True courage is looking fear in the face and doing what you must in spite of it.

Their life together is a long and happy and sometimes sad one. They fuck and fight and love and die as only Targaryens can: with fire and blood. Some of their kin die of old age, tucked in their beds with their family surrounding them as Prince Aegon, The King Who Once Was. Others die in ways as terrible as their house words, long before their time, like Princess Daena Targaryen, the eldest daughter and heir to the Iron Throne of King Jacaerys Targaryen and his wife and queen, Baela Targaryen. And there are the very lucky few who die together as Vaerra Velaryon and Aemond Targaryen do. One soul living in two bodies, entwined and ensnared and bound by blood and love and magic that knows no limits, not even death.

They fuck and fight and love and die as only Targaryens can. But first, they live.