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inthedayswhenlandswerefew · 2 months ago

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Cannibals [Chapter 5: Sapphires and Cinnamon]

Series summary: You are his sister, his lover, his betrothed despite everyone else’s protests; you have always belonged to Aemond and believe you always will. But on the night he returns from Storm’s End with horrifying news, the trajectories of your lives are irrevocably changed. Will the war of succession make your bond permanent, or destroy the twisted and fanatical love you share?

Chapter warnings: Language, sexual content (18+ readers only), references to war-related violence, Targ chaos terrorizes poor innocent House Corbray, Red and Jace have a lovers' quarrel, interesting news arrives from the Riverlands, bats!!!

Word count: 7.4k

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Like game pieces on a board, he moves the coins he’s using as tokens around the ink-and-parchment Westeros that is rolled open across the table. He’s been underwater for weeks, but now he can breathe again. Aegon is starting to heal, through the worst of the danger and unlikely to die, and he has been tucked away someplace no enemy will find him: an unassuming farm in the countryside surrounding Rook’s Rest, under the protection of the knights of his Kingsguard and tended to by requisitioned maesters. Criston’s infantrymen and cavalry have rested and healed and reorganized to fill the gaps in their ranks following the battles to subdue the turncoat houses of the Crownlands. Yesterday, Aemond rode Vhagar to the stone gates of Claw Isle and accepted a tremulous, tearful surrender from Bartimos Celtigar’s lady wife, in whose care the castle was left. Rhaenyra will receive no further gold from the region, and she will find the treasury of King’s Landing empty, the wealth once stored there split and hidden at Tyland Lannister’s suggestion in Braavos, Casterly Rock, and Oldtown. She will try to tax the smallfolk to fund her war effort, and they will rise up and murder her. That, at least, is Aemond’s hope.

Criston walks into the room. He’s just come from the rookery, where ravens arrive carrying news from Green spies and allies throughout the Seven Kingdoms: the Triarchy will send ships to combat the Sea Snake’s fleet; the Hightower army in the Reach has won battles at the Honeywine, Tumbleton, and Bitterbridge; the Lannister army in the Riverlands triumphed at the Red Fork and Acorn Hall; Cregan Stark is marching south from Winterfell with ten thousand men to fight for Rhaenyra, and they will need to be dealt with.

This will all be over soon, and I can go home. Home to my family, home to her.

“Daemon is restless,” Aemond says, repositioning his coins. “He will tire of enduring Rhaenyra’s orders in the capital, and he will fly elsewhere on Caraxes. He yearns for battle, I know him. A hero’s glory, perhaps even a hero’s death. When he leaves King’s Landing, I will go there on Vhagar and kill Syrax, Vermax, and this new dragon Sheepstealer. I will retake the capital and then leave Daeron as its protector in my stead while I hunt Daemon. Daeron has proven himself in the Reach. He’s growing up.”

Faintly, fondly, Aemond smiles. But Criston appears stricken.

“Bad news,” Aemond says for him. “From where?”

“The Red Keep.”

“Mother?” He fears that Rhaenyra will have her executed like Grandsire, though this would be a grievous mistake. The people love the queen dowager, who has lived among them nearly all her life and selflessly nursed King Viserys while Rhaenyra seduced her uncle, plotted Laenor Velaryon’s death, and secluded herself and her vile nest of bastards and villains on Dragonstone.

Criston is hesitant to begin. Perhaps he isn’t sure if Aemond should know this. “No, your mother and Helaena are still held in the dungeon, captive but in relative safety. Jaehaera and Maelor are wards of Rhaenyra. I would assume she’s trying to win their affection and then arrange politically advantageous betrothals.”

There has been a name left out. Aemond stares up from his map, waiting.

“She’s been taken out of the city,” Criston says.

An impossibility, an irrationality. “What?”

“I don’t know where to, or for what purpose. But she’s not in King’s Landing.”

Aemond says nothing for long, cold, grey minutes. The sky outside beckons in the coming winter like a nefarious houseguest, one who shares your dinner table and then slits your throat while you’re asleep. When he finally speaks, his voice is low but fierce. “She’s no threat to them.”

“She isn’t.”

“She can’t travel by dragon.”

“No,” Criston agrees. “So they must have transported her by land or sea.”

Aemond shakes his head. “Why would Rhaenyra do that?”

Criston’s dark eyes are afraid. “I don’t know.”

“Where might they have sent her? Where could she be?”

“Anywhere, Aemond,” Criston says helplessly. “Anywhere.”

And it rises in him like magma through the earth: a scorching venom that pools in the capillary beds of his lungs, a fatal heat that burns away flesh and bones and reason.

~~~~~~~~~~

Rain falls from the sky, sea spray erupts from the waves, stinging eyes and the abrasions on your skin from falling on the rocks over and over again. You are a child, and you are tracking Vermithor on Dragonstone. The mist is so thick that Criston and the guards have lost sight of you, and you can hear them shouting for you to wait for them, but you can’t, you can’t, you’ve wanted this for years and now it’s about to happen. You can feel the volcanic stones, black and serrated, quaking as the Bronze Fury stomps in his hovel. The cave is shrouded in fog, but you know he’s in there. He is growling, a sound like thunder. You can see the glinting gold of his eyes.

“Vermithor!”you command him in High Valyrian, holding out your hands, your maroon gown billowing around you in the vicious wind. Strands of long silver hair are torn from your braid. Blood runs in thin rivulets from your ravaged palms down your wrists and forearms. Saltwater burns like fire in the gashes on your feet; you’ve lost your shoes while scrambling over the rocks. “All my life I’ve dreamed of you, and now we will fly together at last. We will be bonded to one another until death. We will preserve the realm and burn our enemies. Serve me, Vermithor! Serve me!”

He emerges from his cave: a colossal skull covered in scales and spines, steam rising from his nostrils, jagged fangs bared, eyes that are at once reptilian and mindless and wrathful and sage. He is a century old and unfathomably mighty; he is an inheritor of the sacred magic of Old Valyria. He judges you with eyes like kindling flames.

“Red, step back!” Aemond yells from where he watches, his black cloak like a banner in the wind, closed at the neck with a silver chain and with a constellation of silver buttons in the shape of Vhagar’s wings across his shoulders. He is the only person who has kept pace with you. “Give him room! Let him approach you!”

But Vermithor is yours, there is no other possibility, in your heart he has always been yours, he has been the beast you claimed in your soul when you first heard his legends as Aemond read them aloud to you, Aegon, Helaena, Daeron under the heart tree in the Godswood of the Red Keep, and now you will climb onto his back and fly with him and meet Aemond and Vhagar in the mist-grey sky. From deep in his throat, the Bronze Fury snarls.

“Vermithor, be calm! Don’t you recognize me? We are meant for each other. We belong to each other. The dragon egg I was given in the cradle didn’t hatch so I could come here and find you instead. I am not afraid of you. I will not flee from you. Serve me! Serve me!”

“It’s not working,” Aemond tells you with dawning horror. “Get away from him! Red, get away!”

“Serve me, Vermithor!” you scream, and now you’re terrified, because his jaws are opening and dragonfire is boiling up into his mouth, crimson and glowing. “No, no!”

You try to run but the heat is already everywhere, and the air is suddenly too hot to breathe, and when you touch your face with your bloody hands you can feel your cheeks blistering. And then something collides with you like a lance striking a jousting knight, and you are thrown to the ground. It’s Aemond, and he is shoving you down into a crevice between two slabs of black basalt, and when instinctively you try to push him away—you’re always fighting him, something wild to be tamed—Aemond pins your wrists to your chest and shields your body with his, shrinking from the lethal heat of the world outside and burying his face in the velvet of your gown.

Then Criston and the guards and the Dragonkeepers are here, and with their ancient spells the Dragonkeepers convince Vermithor to retreat into his cave. When Aemond helps you out of the crevice, you see that the buttons on the back of his cloak have melted, and if the attack had lasted even a moment longer he’d be dead.

~~~~~~~~~~

When you wake in your bedchamber at the top of a tower of Heart’s Home, Jace is already gone. You peer through the window and see him strolling in the castle courtyard with Lord Leowyn Corbray, both of them bundled up in heavy furs; there is a layer of powdery snow on the ground, just as high as the ankles. The pine trees of the surrounding forest sway in the cold mountain wind. Servants lead horses in and out of the stable. And you wonder randomly: Do they have bats in the Vale?

Maids hear you walking around and file into the room to show you the clothes your closet has been stocked with through House Corbray’s generosity and help you dress. They try to distract you, but you notice anyway: one of them strips the bed and takes the sheets away, blotted with a watery, pale pink stain of blood. You’re sore, but not terribly so, just enough pain to remind you—when you move in certain ways—that you are wed to Jace, and that he took you last night as any husband would, and that now you could be carrying his dark-haired heir. The thought stuns you; you’ve never been more than ambivalent to the prospect of bearing children. Your dreams were of Vermithor, and marrying Aemond, and being possessed by him in every sense possible. Motherhood would come later, and you had always assumed you would one day begin to dream of that too.

Do I dream of it now?

No, you feel in your bones. Not now. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

The colors of the Vale are chilly and weak like the sky. The maids show you velvet gowns of dusky rose, icy blue, moss green, dove grey. After some consideration, you choose the blue. Then you wander the castle, your drafty stone prison, your new home. There are no tapestries of the Hightower or wrathful dragons or lovers ensnared like knotted threads, no familiar faces. Heart’s Home is austere, its primary embellishments being candlelit chandeliers and rugs made from dead animals, and the loudest sound you hear is the whistling of wind through cracks in the walls, frigid air that howls in from the Mountains of the Moon.

After much exploration you find the rookery, where ravens squawk in their cages and bed down in mounds of straw, and through the window is a view of snowcapped mountains that stretch on endlessly like a sea. There is no table to write on, and you see no parchment or ink or quills, and you don’t know which raven (if any of them) is trained to fly to Rook’s Rest. It doesn’t matter; you can’t write to Aemond without endangering your family held hostage in King’s Landing. And even if you could, what would you say to him?

Aemond, I’ve married Jace and I did it to save you. But don’t fear for my safety. I am protected here, I am content enough. I have no dragon, but I can help fight the war in my own way. Jace seems to like me. I might even be beginning to like him too.

“You’re not supposed to be in here,” someone says, and you whirl to see Lord Corbray’s wife filling up the doorway.

You do not bow or curtsey. As a princess, you outrank her. “Lady Caroline.” No. Not quite. “Lady Carolyn. Lady Carolina.” Then you remember. “I am so sorry, Lady Carolei. Forgive me.”

She laughs boisterously. “Carolei is a common name in the Vale, but not elsewhere, I’ve been told. My closest friends here call me Lady Caro, you can feel welcome to do the same.”

“Lady Caro. Please allow me to apologize again.”

“Oh no, that won’t be necessary. I’m sure you had a late night.” Her eyes—large and round, almost bulging, and a very pale blue—sweep from your feet to your face. “But you didn’t have too bad of a time with it, I think.”

“The maids took the sheets,” you say like an accusation.

She smiles, perhaps a little guiltily. “As High As Honor,” she replies. “They are the words of House Arryn, but all the great families of the Vale aspire to be above reproach.”

“And you are a great family.” It’s more of a question.

“We are not grand or wealthy, that’s true,” Lady Caro concedes. “And I can imagine our little castle cannot compare to King’s Landing or the Hightower of your Mother’s house. But we are dependable and honest. What Queen Rhaenyra has entrusted us with is a tremendous privilege. We will abide by her instructions, and endeavor to satisfy her every request.”

“So she wanted to know that I bled.”

Lady Caro shrugs—I can’t tell you that—and then signals for you to follow her. “Join me in the Great Hall. We’ll have some cinnamon tea.”

The Great Hall of Heart’s Home is about the same size as your bedchamber in the Red Keep, with two rows of wooden tables and a crackling fire in the hearth. When you look into the glowing embers, you are reminded of Vermithor’s flames. Cool overcast light falls like snow in through the windows. Lady Caro gestures for you to sit with her at the table closest to the fire, and maids bring you fried eggs and bacon, fresh bread, butter, blackberry jam, and cinnamon tea, milky and aromatic and very sweet.

“It must be difficult for you,” Lady Caro says thoughtfully as she slurps her tea, steam wafting into the air. “Being so very far from your family. Even if they are traitors.”

She seems to be testing you for a reaction. You gaze into your tea and try not to let tears well up in your eyes as you think of them: Mother and Helaena in a dungeon, Jaehaera and Maelor with strangers, Jaehaerys and Grandsire dead, Daeron at war, Aegon burned, Aemond hating me once he learns of my betrayal. None of us are in the same place. That’s not how it’s supposed to be. “But you must be far from home too. Women get married off and sent across the world, it’s nothing new.”

“This is true,” Lady Caro muses. “I am originally of House Coldwater, and if you think Heart’s Home is plain and remote, I hope you never see Coldwater Burn. You’ve probably never even heard of it.”

“It’s up near the Fingers,” you say softly, remembering Aemond showing you dots littering the Vale on one of his maps, warm firelight, teasing hands, his lips murmuring against the shell of your ear. “The colors of its banner are blue, red, and white.”

She gasps and presses a palm to her chest, delighted. Her already ruddy cheeks flush pinker. “Mother have mercy, they teach that in the capital?”

“I have an interest in geography.” No, you don’t; but Aemond does.

“Do you embroider or sing?”

“Neither. Not well, anyway. Helaena works miracles with a needle and thread.” Absently, you touch your gown where beneath the pale blue velvet a scar runs from your left collarbone down to the top of your breast. So does Aemond.

Lady Caro observes this curiously, peering at you over the rim of her mug. “How did you occupy yourself before you came here? I do want to make you feel as comfortable as possible.”

Because you are kind? Because Rhaenyra told you to? Or because I might be the queen myself someday? “I spent a lot of time with my brothers and sister,” you answer honestly, dolefully. And I kept bats. You decide to omit this. “We all had our crafts. I made mosaics out of seashells.”

Lady Caro titters. “Seashells? Well, they aren’t exactly abundant, but there are some out near where the river meets the Narrow Sea. I’ll see if I can have a bucketful brought to you.”

“I can collect them.”

“The water is very cold, and the current powerful.”

“I like to choose my own shells. You can send knights to watch over me, I’m not hoping to drown myself or anything.”

Now Lady Caro laughs loudly. “Drown yourself! The things you say, princess…”

You decide to try to make conversation to encourage her affection, as Mother would want you to. “Do you have children, Lady Caro?”

“Oh yes, five of them. Four died though. Awful luck, isn’t it?” She goes somber, staring blankly out the nearest window for a long while, leaving you unsure of what to do or say. Eventually, she returns to the Great Hall and is cheerful again. “My daughter Jessamyn was married into House Mallister of Seagard. I get to see her and the children once every few years. And she’s nothing like you.”

You smirk cautiously. “What does that mean?”

“It means she’s very sweet and agreeable and naïve.” And then Lady Caro winks at you, and you realize you might be becoming friends. “Not like a Targaryen.”

You drink your cinnamon tea and think of last night, feeling a strange brew of fondness and shame and relief and loss. “Sounds a bit like Jace though.”

“Yes, well,” Lady Caro says, then wisely leaves the rest unspoken. He’s more of a Strong, isn’t he?

One of the Great Hall’s heavy wooden doors creaks open and Jace strides inside, wearing black accented with red and a bear fur coat overtop, speckled with snowflakes. More flurries are melting in his hair. You stand to meet him and he takes both of your hands. You smile uneasily, not knowing what to expect; then Jace playfully kisses the knuckles of your right hand, and after that your left, and he beams at you.

Instead of a greeting, he says: “We have a few more days together, then I have to go away.”

It’s the second time a man has told you this. “Go where?”

Jace shrugs evasively. No one is allowed to tell you anything. “Do you like horses?”

“Sure.” Aemond used to take you to visit his war horses, all towering and temperamental: Rusty, Apple, Fox, Ladybug, Pomegranate. Then he would watch as you stroked their forelocks and their downy muzzles, his remaining eye fixed on you, imagining sins that never felt like damnation but rather searing, tumultuous waves like an ocean of blood.

“Good. I’ll show you the stable.” Jace kisses you, a quick peck for modesty’s sake since you aren’t alone. He grins and licks his lips. “Mm. You taste like cinnamon.” Something warm, something red. He turns to Lady Caro. “Thank you for making us feel so welcome. The queen will be pleased to hear of your devoted service to the crown. We know that this is an imposition, and we appreciate your generous sacrifice.”

“Nonsense,” Lady Caro replies, and she seems to mean it. “It’s no imposition. It’s an honor.” Then she rises to her feet. “Let me find some boots and a fur coat for the princess.”

Once you are properly guarded against the cold—wrapped in a thick coat of fox pelts—Jace links his arm through yours and leads you outside, and you tread together through the shallow snowfall toward the stable.

“You’ve probably never even seen snow before,” Jace says, and you agree even though this isn’t true. You saw snow here in the Vale when you were very young—you don’t even remember which castle Mother and Father had been visiting on their royal progress—and that was the trip when Aemond pushed you into a frozen river and you caught a chill that almost killed you.

“Jace?” you ask, cutting him off mid-sentence. You hadn’t meant to interrupt him; your mind had been wandering.

He looks at you with some trepidation, as if he’s worried you might have a complaint. “Yes?”

“Why are you being so nice to me?”

He blinks at you, then exhales in a relieved chuckle. “You’re asking why I’m nice?”

“You never liked me before. And you had no reason to.” In your eyes, I was a traitor. If you could tell what I’m feeling, you’d know I still am.

He ponders how to answer as you walk. Now his expression is serious. “I always knew that when I married—to whoever it was, although for most of my life I believed it would be someone else—that would be it for me, and I would never be estranged from her or take another lover. There are so many families with…” He pauses, and you watch him closely. “There are so many children who suffer from the indiscretions of their parents.” There is a bloom of ashamed, gory pink in his cheeks, and you know he is speaking of himself, and of all the bastards anywhere in the world who have ever been made to feel lied to, less than, disgraced, disavowed. “I swore to myself that I would be a good husband and father, and that my own household would be…wholly uncomplicated.”

“So you would act this way with anyone. With whoever you were wed to.”

“Well…” He smiles softly. “As it turns out, there are things I like about you.”

“Really?” you tease, grinning, and when you reach the stable you shove the door open and step inside onto a straw-strewn floor. There’s no biting mountain breeze here in the shadows, and the body heat radiating off the horses makes the air more hospitable. Jace seems surprised you didn’t wait for him to open the door for you. “What things?”

“Several things,” Jace says, then—now that you are alone aside from the horses nickering and chomping on hay in their stalls—wraps his arms around your waist and holds you from behind, kissing the side of your neck. You have to resist the reflex to fight him off so he can overpower you, pin you to the floor, fuck you as you hiss and claw at him and tell him to stop. Jace wouldn’t understand it. Jace would be horrified by it. “Here,” Jace whispers, skimming a hand over your gown where he made you bleed last night. Then his palms travel up to your breasts. “And here.” Then he nuzzles your silver hair as he gently unfastens your braid and inhales deeply. “And I like this too. Although I’d be interested to see you wear it in a style that is a little…softer.”

“Softer?” you echo doubtfully.

“You’re not a warrior,” Jace says as if he thinks you will want to hear this, as if it will comfort you. It doesn’t. “And that’s alright. You can be soft. You can be ladylike.”

You don’t feel very much like a lady. You feel like a kettle full of boiling water, like lava bursting up through the cracks in the earth, like dragonfire hemorrhaging from a beast’s gaping throat. Now you and Jace are on the wooden floor of the stable, displacing straw as you kiss hungrily and pull off each other’s coats. Jace climbs on top of you, and you think: I can’t do this again, not like last night. I want to be fed too.

Jace stops to marvel at your face, his thumb skating over the curve of your cheekbone. “I want to make it as good for you as it is for me,” he says solemnly. “Last night it was over so quickly, and…I didn’t…I feel like I could have done more, but I don’t know…I’m not sure if…”

You grab his right hand and lace your fingers through his. “Can I show you how I touch myself?”

Jace’s eyebrows go up. “You touch yourself?”

“Don’t you?”

“Well, yes,” he admits bashfully, blushing. He does this a lot, you are learning. “But I’m a man.”

You smile. “Women experience longing too, Jace.”

“Yes,” he says, and now he’s breathing quickly and it sounds less like he’s merely intrigued and more like he’s begging for it. “Show me. Please show me.”

You take his hand and guide it beneath your gown, up the length of your legs, stopping where you are slick and needful, an ache so deep it hurts like the cramps when your blood arrives each month. You place two of Jace’s fingers on the right spot—he keeps inadvertently moving his hand just off the mark, and each time you put it back where it belongs—and lead him into a rhythm, a tight swift circling and pressure that makes your thighs open wider for him and your spine arch.

Jace murmurs as you pant on the stable floor, shadows on your face and straw in your hair: “Is this okay, am I hurting you at all?”

“You can press down pretty hard,” you assure him. “You won’t break me. I’m not glass.”

He’s trying not to lose his focus. “Okay…okay…”

“Jace,” you gasp as you sling your arms around the back of his neck and cling to him, your hips rocking, and he moans and kisses you—deeply, passionately, gluttonously—and under your dress his hand suddenly strokes you so forcefully it’s almost painful and then it’s on you, that feeling better than anything else on earth, being opened, being dragged under, being ignited, being devoured until you go weak and limp and boneless, aftershocks throbbing and your lips smiling drowsily. “Jace, Jace, Jace,” you breathe dizzily, still holding him.

He is gazing down at you, awestruck. “When can I watch you do that again?”

“Soon,” you purr through Jace’s dark curls. “Now…your turn.”

You are barely aware of it as he pushes the hem of your gown up to your waist and frees himself from his trousers, and you only come back to Jace when he enters you—your flesh still tender from last night, but wet and wanting him—and he is careful as he slowly pushes himself all the way inside, trying not to hurt you again. Then he thrusts and you are stunned by how good it feels, like your climax made everything more sensitive, more ready, more flawlessly tailored to fit with him. Jace doesn’t last much longer than the first night, and yet just before it’s over there is the ghost of something, a vague desire that is building, and you think next time (or the time after that, or the time after that) you will be able to finish again, and you will be drained like a slaughtered animal with its throat cut and its body hung by the feet, every last blood drop purged and collected in a bucket to be used for fertilizer or pig feed.

Lying together exhausted on the stable floor, you twirl one of Jace’s curls around your finger and—purely by instinct, because it’s what you and Aemond used to do—whisper to him in High Valyrian: “I love how you touch me, thank you, I needed this, I needed you.” But you can tell by the way Jace turns to you, startled and a little self-conscious, that he doesn’t understand what you said.

“I know some High Valyrian, of course,” he explains quickly. “But I’m…I’m still learning.”

“Oh.” It doesn’t come easily to him. Because he’s a Strong, and the Strongs have nothing to do with Old Valyria. And then, to temper the blow: “I can help you practice.”

“Who taught it to you?” Jace asks. He is suspicious, then hopeful. “Helaena?”

You should lie to him, but you don’t. At some point you have to start letting raindrops of the truth seep in. You are going to share a household with Jace, your bodies, your futures, your children. You want him to understand who you really are. You can’t pretend forever; already, it is stifling, a constant and trudging effort, a vanishing until you are transluscent like clear water. You are reminded of all the times when you’ve tried to hide pieces of yourself to please Mother, whose Hightower blood was washed away by the grim, intoxicating magic of the Targaryens. “No, Helaena doesn’t speak High Valyrian except when giving commands to Dreamfyre. She can understand it fairly well, though.”

Jace nods, studying you, but he doesn’t say anything else. The phantom of Aemond stands in the far corner of the stable. You think: I am a traitor to both of them, I am a house of no banners. After a moment, you ask Jace for your very first favor.

“I want Helaena freed from the dungeon in the Red Keep,” you say. “I understand Rhaenyra’s distrust of Mother, but Helaena is innocent. She should be confined to her chambers and permitted to see her children. And allowed to walk in the garden sometimes too.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Jace says distractedly.

“You know Helaena. She is gentle, she is fragile. She deserves compassionate treatment.”

“So did Luke,” Jace replies; and though he takes your hands and helps you to your feet as horses snort and paw at the straw-covered floors of their stalls, he averts his dark gaze—an inheritance from his bloodline, the indomitable lineage of the First Men—and doesn’t meet your eyes.

Two days later he departs Heart’s Home for a destination that Lord and Lady Corbray know, surely, but you don’t. Jace bids you farewell at the edge of the field beyond the castle walls as Vermax waits impatiently for him across the clearing, not liking the mountain cold, not liking you. Jace wears black and red as he almost always does, the colors of his mother’s house. His curls are ruffled by the breeze, his red cloak flowing down from his shoulders like a trail of blood.

“I’ll be back as soon as I can.” Jace touches your cheek, then your chin. “I’ll miss you and all those things I’ve discovered I like so much.”

You smile back. You have the beginning of a headache—a throbbing above your left eye, a fuzziness in your thoughts—but you’re trying not to show it. “I’ll be here.” Where else could I go?

“I love you,” Jace says, and then looks at you expectantly. It takes you a minute to realize he’s waiting for you to say it too.

You open your mouth, but your pulsing skull is clamoring with prayers you cannot voice. Please protect the family I have left. Please don’t find a way to kill Aemond. At last you manage: “I love you,” but it sounds hollow and unnatural and cold, like stark snowcapped peaks and the gales that shriek through them.

Nonetheless, Jace is satisfied. He tilts up your face to bring his lips to yours and then treks across the field towards Vermax, leaving footprints in the fresh snow. His sword hangs from his belt. He practices with knights in the castle courtyard each day, and he’s not bad, you’ve observed anxiously. Not as good as Aemond, but not bad.

That night you see the shadow of something interrupting the moonlight that floods in through the window of your bedchamber, and when you push open the glass a bat lands clumsily on the sill and then scrabbles inside. You squeal with delight and scoop it into your arms. It’s a male and a different sort of bat than the ones in King’s Landing, larger in size, black and white in color and with long fanlike ears. He sniffs at you and gazes up with small but intelligent inky eyes. Then, as a mark of friendship, he begins to lick at your fingertips.

“And what do you eat, huh?” you coo as you pet him. “Probably not honey or fruit if you live way up here in the mountains. Probably just bugs. Should I try to catch you some spiders tomorrow? This decrepit old castle must be full of them.”

You have to name him. And this is an opportunity to break all your old patterns. You could call him Seahorse for Jace’s false house, or Dragon for his true one. You could call him the High Valyrian word for bat or wings. You could name him after something black, the color that Jace favors. And yet as you hold him, old memories come screaming back to you, Aemond helping you tend to your bats, Aemond protecting them, moments of kindness and understanding that you now fear were illusions.

He never said he loves me. Not once in eighteen years.

You keep waiting for a glimpse into Aemond’s mind, a stabbing pang of loss and longing when he realizes you’ve been taken away, but it never happens. You keep waiting for him to find you and descend upon House Corbray with fire and blood.

Aemond, where are you? Aemond, have you forgotten me?

“Sapphire,” you whisper to your new bat—your only bat—and he looks up at you as if he knows his name.

~~~~~~~~~~

Jace is gone for weeks, and in his absence you try to learn how to be his wife. You ask Lady Caro to teach you how to wear your hair like the ladies of the Vale: soft waves, sedate buns knotted at the nape of the neck, delicate wisps that frame the face and blow in the harsh mountain wind. You attempt to cultivate an affinity for pale impassionate colors. You distract yourself so you don’t think of Aemond. You catch spiders and moths in secret to feed to Sapphire when he visits you each night. You spend days practicing quiet, feminine embroidery—ruining yarn scenes, piercing your fingertips with needles—until you give it up and fling the cursed tangle of threads away and return to your strange fixations that once confounded Mother.

Lady Caro sends knights to accompany you to the mouth of the river, and you wade up to your knees in the icy water plucking rare shells out of the silt and the pebbles. You are not permitted to collect bones from the forest—there are bears and wolves and shadowcats—but you arrange for the hunters to give you what’s left of the carcasses once they’ve been skinned and butchered. The carpenters give you boards of wood and the blacksmiths forge you a small iron mallet. Sometimes Lady Caro stands in the castle kitchen watching you boil animal bones in a caldron or in your bedchamber as you shatter shells and paint the shards with glue, and she shakes her head, surely thinking: What is wrong with these Targaryens?

You don’t dare to make any mosaics of Aemond. It’s too dangerous, and too painful, and too revealing of what you’re truly feeling. So instead you piece together visions of the rest of them: Aegon smirking over a goblet of red wine, butterflies landing on Helaena’s outstretched palm, Daeron riding Tessarion, Mother smiling at Criston, Jaehaera and Maelor playing together in the garden of the Red Keep. You hang them on the walls of your bedchamber and at night you sleep better.

When Jace and Vermax return to Heart’s Home, you and Lady Caro are in the inaptly named Great Hall sipping cinnamon tea and nibbling blackberry oatcakes, and Lady Caro is telling you about her flock of grandchildren who reside at Seagard on the shore of the Sunset Sea. “Jasper is clever but terribly loud, and then Joy won’t talk to humans at all but loves her cats…” She trails off as your husband rushes into the room, his steps buoyant, his red cloak flying behind him.

“Welcome back, Prince Jacaerys,” Lady Caro says as she stands to greet him. “I hope your travels were comfortable and all your ventures went well.”

“Very well,” he says, grinning, alight with victories that are yet unspoken. Lady Caro dismisses herself to give the two of you privacy, promising to bring cinnamon tea for Jace. As soon as she is gone, Jace bolts to the table.

“What happened?” you ask he sits opposite of you. The hearth throws off rage-colored heat.

Please let this be peace and not violence. Please don’t have harmed anyone I love.

He is beaming as he takes a messy bite of a blackberry oatcake, crumbs falling down onto the table. And he must have decided that he can begin telling you his secrets now. Perhaps he trusts you; perhaps he knows there’s nothing you can do to sabotage him anyway, no ravens to send, nobody to inform. “I found someone to ride Vermithor.”

The realization sinks inside you, dark and heavy, an anchor, a sickness. You murmur, knowing it is pointless: “He was supposed to be mine.”

“Well…he didn’t agree.”

This hurts you; Jace doesn’t seem to notice. You think of the tiny wooden Vermithor that Aegon once carved for you, and you wonder if it’s still on your dresser in Maegor’s Holdfast or if Rhaenyra has burned or broken it, or mistaken it for something of no value.

“Corlys’ bastard Addam has claimed Seasmoke,” Jace continues, as if this could not possibly be anything to you but good news. “Vermithor and Seasmoke are now helping Mother to safeguard the capital. Daemon and Nettles…” Jace gestures awkwardly. There was a falling out with Rhaenyra. “They’ve taken Harrenhal as a base in the Riverlands. So we needed more help in King’s Landing, and we found it.”

We have two battleworthy dragons. Now they have six. No wonder Jace is so pleased.

“And there are still other unclaimed dragons,” you say dully, nauseous with dread.

“Yes,” Jace agrees. “But unfortunately, Aemond realized what we were doing. So he took possession of Dragonstone, and he and Vhagar are always back and forth from there, and no one can approach the island and risk him happening upon them.” Another bite of his blackberry oatcake, more crumbs, more casual chewing. “Which brings me to my question for you.”

“For me?”

Jace nods. “I need you to tell me what he’s going to do next.”

You stare at your husband inanely. “What?”

“Aemond is the problem,” Jace says, more agitated now. He devours the last of his blackberry oatcake. “Even with all the dragons we have, it’s going to be difficult to destroy Vhagar. Our new dragonriders are inexperienced, and Daemon, he’s…” Jace waves a hand. “Unreliable. Self-serving. But you were there at the Red Keep with Aemond when he and Criston were drawing up their plans, and therefore you can help us.”

You lie immediately. “I don’t know anything.”

“I don’t believe you.”

Another lie. “Really. He didn’t discuss it with me.”

“Then tell me about him,” Jace says impatiently. “I know he’s good with a sword, but he must have weaknesses. Does he have lasting pain from his maiming, does he have vices that distract him?”

I’m not convinced I knew Aemond at all. “I’m not going to help you kill him.”

Jace glares at you incredulously. “How do you think this ends?”

“Rhaenyra promised Mother that Aemond would be spared, and you were a part of that bargain—”

“We said we would let him live if he’s still alive when the war is over, but we can’t win the war if he and Vhagar are seizing castles and territory and burning our men and supplies and nobody can stop him!”

“Does he know that…” You swallow, your throat burning. “Did Rhaenyra send him a raven to tell him about our marriage?” About my treason, about my ruining?

“No. Why would we provoke him like that? Why would we put a target on my back? The realm will be told when the battles are past and the surviving Green loyalists must be convinced to bend the knee.”

You close your eyes and you can’t picture Aemond as a warrior; you can only see him as a child with stitches and agony, as a man who gave you forbidden, bewitching pleasure. “I don’t know anything. I can’t help you.”

“I did as you asked,” Jace snaps. “I persuaded Mother to give Helaena more freedom, I ensured that Alicent is healthy and that Jaehaera and Maelor are well cared for and never lonely. I can probably even save Daeron. But Aemond must be stopped.”

“He’s my family too—”

“I am your family now!” Jace roars, jolting to his feet and pounding on his own heart. “Me and my siblings, and my parents, and my children, not them!”

One of the doors of the Great Hall swings open and Lady Caro is there with a tray of cinnamon tea and fresh blackberry oatcakes. She gapes at you and Jace, too shocked to remember to be polite. It’s too late for her to pretend she hasn’t heard. She stalls, trying to think of something to say.

“I believe we’re having venison for dinner,” she announces with feigned cheerfulness.

Jace looks at you one last time—with disappointment, with fury—and storms out of the room.

~~~~~~~~~~

He doesn’t come to bed all night, and you leave the window wide open so Sapphire can glide in and visit you: hanging from your bedposts, scrambling over your blankets, and then vanishing shortly before daylight. You have a headache that worsens until you are half-blind and sick to your stomach, and the maids hear you retching and bring you toasted bread and ginger tea and a bucket and wet cloths to cool your face.

Lady Caro wanders in and sits down beside you, her weight shifting the feather mattress, and pats your shoulder sympathetically. “I think you should tell the prince that his efforts have been successful.” To produce an heir, she means, and you’re convinced she’s wrong.

“That’s not what it is,” you moan, burrowing under the blankets. “I’m sick all the time.”

“You haven’t had your monthly blood since you’ve been here,” Lady Caro says gently, and of course she knows this because of her maids, her spies. You stare up at her vacuously, unable to comprehend it.

Pregnant with Jace’s child?

And this feels like a final severing of any possibility that Aemond will ever want you back. No other man was allowed to lie with you. Now Jace has wed you, bedded you, bred with you, turned your coat.

You force yourself out of bed and let the maids dress you and comb your hair, nursing the ginger tea—unappetizing, but good for nausea—as you gather your courage. You aren’t sure how to tell Jace. You aren’t sure that you want to see him at all.

Your skull still throbbing and your bare feet unsteady, you stumble through the cold stony corridors of the castle until you hear men arguing spiritedly in the Great Hall, their voices rumbling like thunder. Inside you find Lord Corbray, a number of lords and knights, and the maester of the castle. Jace is bent over one of the tables and reading, then rereading, a letter that the maester must have brought from the rookery.

Lord Corbray is saying: “They write that he has already razed Darry, Blackbuckle, Claypool, Swynford, and Spiderwood. The noble houses are constructing scorpions, but even with them, how many bolts would be needed to kill Vhagar? She’s massive, she’s monstrous. The Northmen are marching south, but now they’re saying they won’t go beyond the Twins without Caraxes and Sheepstealer as escorts, and can we count on Daemon for anything…?”

Jace looks up and sees you standing in the threshold. His dark curls hang over his bloodless face; his eyes are staggered and fearful. And twistedly, horribly, there is a flash of light that burns radiantly through the murky gloom of your skull and your ribcage, a forbidden vindication, a rapture you can never reveal.

Aemond remembers me? Aemond longs for me?

Jace says: “He thinks you’re in the Riverlands.”

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