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Chapter Text

Chapter 1

Oldtown, Aegon has come to find, smells remarkably less like sewage than King’s Landing does. This should be a cause for peace, almost celebration. The sun is shining. The birds are chirping. The morning has so far been glorious. Sunfyre feasted on a fox he found in the forest outside the city, and the taste of something other than sheep seemed to please him. In all, it should be a good day. Until-

“You take that back you miserable, blind cunt!” Aegon hisses, launching himself at Aemond.

Vhagar, from where she sits a few yards away from them, previously napping (as she always does, the grumpy old cunt), lifts her head and grunts at them. Sunfyre, his ever-faithful companion, squawks right back, affronted by the grievous insult.

They land in the dirt, Aegon smacking his open hands on Aemond’s cheeks, chest, wherever he can reach. He’s not so unkind as to curl them into fists, though it is tempting. He sometimes thinks Aemond needs a good bashing to get that silver, superior spoon out of his ass. Annoyingly, even though his brother is three years his junior, Aemond manages to easily roll them over, though not before Aegon spits in his face.

“Aegon!” Daeron chastises, aghast. “Aemond!”

At that, the older two of the trio pause to stare at their younger brother. Daeron is but twelve, a practical stranger, sent away to Oldtown when he was but three years of age at their grandsire’s suggestion. He is not familiar with their antics and general antipathy. No doubt Ormund Hightower would never allow his son and heir Lyonel to grapple with his siblings in such a way.

Not that Aegon’s own father seems to notice.

There are somethings that Daeron cannot learn through letters. Their mother had been even stricter than she usually was when it came to their letters to Daeron. “You are his elder brothers,” she had said more than once. “You must guide him.”

When Aegon had pointed out at fourteen that it would be remarkably easier to do so if Daeron was actually there at King’s Landing, he received nothing more than a glare. Aegon had written once every fortnight as his mother bade of him, asking him questions she had already pre-approved after she’d caught him once speaking of his “inappropriate exploits”.

So yes, while Aegon might know Daeron’s favourite colour (blue, ironically enough), what he received for his nameday, and Daeron might know the same of him, the intricacies of their daily habits and exploits are rather lost.

A shame his younger brother is in for a rude awakening. They’d arrived at the Hightower not two days past and had somehow managed not to scuffle with each other. Until now, anyway. Their silent agreement broken.

Jaw working, Aemond carefully removes himself from on top of Aegon, but not before accidentally landing his knee on Aegon’s groin.

“Apologies,” Aemond says, flashing his teeth. “I slipped.”

Aegon, grumbling through the pain, lets himself fall back against the grass. The sun warms him, and he allows his eyes to drift shut. All he needs now is a cup of sweet wine, a pretty woman, and he would be content to remain like this for the rest of his days. Left alone from his mother’s worries and his grandfather’s prodding and-

A shadow falls over him, blocking the sun, and he opens his eyes just in time to see Sunfyre swoop down and lick his face in one large swipe. Aegon blanches, disgusted by the wet sensation, but still can’t help but laugh.

“How you ever said Tessarion is prettier is beyond me,” Aegon says to Aemond. He leans up and scratches Sunfyre like a peasant would their faithful dog. Sunfyre preens under the attention. “Isn’t that right, precious?”

“Precious?” Aemond asks, unimpressed.

“Like you don’t sing Vhagar to sleep sometimes.”

That shuts Aemond up, thankfully. Aegon can’t help a grin. It’s very rare when something does.

“Tessarion is beautiful,” Daeron mumbles, mildly affronted. His blue queen squawks in acknowledgement. Aegon surveys the mount. She is pretty enough, he supposes. But she’s not Sunfyre. Aemond only lost one eye, he isn’t blind.

Aegon is wise enough not to say that out loud though. His brother might just stick the sword Ser Criston gave him as a nameday present into his gut, his promise to Mother be damned. Aegon’s own nameday is in a moon’s time. He is to become eight and ten, a man by the customs of Westeros. When his mother had asked what he’d care to have for such an occasion, after he’d complained against the weeks of tourneys her and Otto had planned, he’d requested permission to travel beyond the Keep. Permission to see the country so many people are anxious for him to rule.

Aegon hadn’t mentioned that part, but he’d made a point of mentioning visiting Oldtown and Daeron, and his mother had eventually complied. He hadn’t asked for Aemond to join him, hadn’t wanted him to, but that was the only way in which their mother would agree for him to leave.

“As a protector,” she had claimed over his objections.

My jailor, you mean, he had muttered. Their mother had pretended not to hear him.

Aemond may be younger, but he’s getting taller than him already. His dragon is larger. He’s better with a sword. Forever his brother’s keeper.

Aemond’s presence had been a slight disappointment to Aegon’s plans. Namely, to drink himself to ruin and fuck as many girls as he could before his inevitable marriage to Helaena shortly after his nameday. Otto had finally deemed them old enough and made the preparations.

Helaena, thankfully, had not joined them. Aegon, objectively speaking, loves his sister. But the thought of marrying her, of marrying anybody, makes his heart plummet to his stomach. He’d never asked Helaena what she thought of marrying him. When the betrothal had been announced, Helaena had merely looked at everyone at the dinner table with the same blank look she always had, and promptly said, “We will have three children, but he will have more.”

Their mother never really gets angry with Helaena, but she had gotten cross then, more with him than anything else. Angry over things he had yet to do, infidelities in a marriage he is not even bound to at present. Aegon does not dwell on the possibility that he currently has little children somewhere in the world, born to a woman whose name and face he does not remember or care to. Yet, whenever his mother chastises him for his exploits and forces him to think on it, Aegon is overcome by a revulsion so strong he drinks himself into a stupor.

Hence, he has gotten rather marvellously good at pulling out.

When Sunfyre eventually leaves him in chase of some prey he spotted in the grass, Aemond nudges him with his foot.

“Up,” his little brother grunts. “We have a wedding to attend, remember?”

Aegon leans back with a groan. “This is supposed to be fun travels. Why the fuck do we have to go to a wedding?”

Aemond nudges him again, with a little extra effort. Aegon is certain he’ll bruise under the abuse. When he complains as such, he looks up in time to catch Aemond rolling his eye.

“Don’t be a baby,” he says. “And don’t be crass. Mother would not approve.”

“Mother is across the country and you’re still somehow tugging at her skirts,” Aegon sneers. “You know, it won’t help you be her favourite if she’s not actually here to see it.”

“I’m already Mother’s favourite,” Aemond shoots right back.

Aegon pauses because, well, fair enough.

It certainly isn’t Aegon.

Daeron looks mildly put off, and Aegon—

He wouldn’t say it’s guilt that motivates him, but he props himself up on his elbows, and asks exactly whosewedding they’re meant to be attending. Their great uncle, Ormund Hightower, is betrothed to a new woman after the death of his wife, but the marriage is not to take place until the mourning period had officially ended. It would be improper otherwise, of course. Insulting to the dead to marry so soon.

As if being betrothed to someone twenty years younger than your dead wife so you can fuck her is somehow better.

“The daughter of Lord Florent’s,” Daeron replies, shielding his eyes from the sun with a hand placed by his brow. In some ways to Aegon, he looks a great deal like their mother. His hair is certainly curlier than the rest of them, cropped short like Ormund’s. Flops on his forehead, hiding the freckles Aegon spotted the first night he arrived in the city and got Daeron deep in his cups for the first time.

“Who?” Aegon demands. To him, the Reach consists of the Tyrells, the Hightowers, and the old Bees-something cunt’s descendants from the small council. The rest are insignificant.

Aemond rolls his eye. Again.

He sneers at him.

“House Florent boasts of a greater claim to Highgarden than the Tyrells,” Aemond patronizes. You’re an idiot,goes unsaid, but is heavily implied. “Through their relation to the instinct House Gardener.”

“Ha! Aegon the Conqueror slaughtered them in the Field of Fire!” Aegon interjects.

Aemond raises an unimpressed brow.

“I’m sure our Maester would be overjoyed that you remembered.”

Sensing further conflict, Daeron steps in. “It’s the marriage of Lord Florent’s only child.”

“Ah! Our age, I hope? Mayhaps he can show us how to have fun without dragging us into a sept like our dear cousin Lyonel—”

“It’s for his daughter,” Daeron corrects.

Aegon instantly deflates, groaning. “Is she pretty at the least?”

Daeron laughs, startled, and Aemond glares at him before jutting a finger in his face, almost brushing against his nose.

“It’s her wedding, you imbecile,” Aemond warns, “no funny business.”

Aegon glares at him. He dislikes being given orders or told how to behave by anyone, but especially by him. A strew of insults brew on his tongue, but Aegon settles for the very mature response of biting his brother’s finger. It’s a light bite, to be fair, but it’s hard enough to make Aemond exclaim in surprise.

“Are you an animal?” he hisses once he’s finally managed to wriggle his finger out of Aegon’s mouth.

“You seem to think so,” Aegon replies sunnily. He imagines his mother receiving a raven from Ormund complaining about how Aegon bedded a bride on her wedding day, and almost desires to do as such just to see the expression on her face.

Daeron looks between them, frowning. Aegon’s mirth dies. Gods be good, at this rate their brother will turn grey by the end of their trip.

“I have not met her,” Daeron says. “Though Florent’s are known for having pointy ears. Like a fox.” Daeron giggles a little. “You know, because that’s their sigil?”

“Oh,” Aegon says, forcing himself to laugh. “That is rather funny, Daeron.” He lies back again, looking at the sunny sky. “Lovely. We have to go to a wedding because Ormund accepted the invitation long before we arrived, and the bride and groom are probably ugly. Wonderful.”

They all fall quiet. Soon, they will have to return to the Hightower to get ready for the occasion. Apparently Brightwater Keep is only half a day’s ride on horseback, which means even faster on a dragon. Fuck it if they even think Aegon will consider cramming himself into a carriage for hours on end. He thinks the fuck not.

Aegon is close to drifting to sleep when there’s a loud, sudden thump right by his head. He turns towards the sound, grumbling to Sunfyre, and opens his eyes to see—

“What in the seven hells!” he yelps, with a great amount of dignity, thank you.

Sunfyre perches close to him, tongue wagging like a dog, pleased with his offering. Their maestor had once told him, Aemond, Jace and Luke (when they lived in King’s Landing) that cats and dogs often liked to bring animals they had killed as a way to show their appreciation. Sunfyre, it would seem, has adopted that habit also.

And now, he has brought Aegon a bright red fox as a gift.

Shit.

Aegon scrambles to his feet, looking at the bloody, mangled thing with poorly concealed horror. He tries to hide his disgust purely to spare Sunfyre’s feelings and shares a look with his brothers. Aemond’s brow is furrowed. Daeron looks like he’s about to be sick.

“Well,” Aegon drawls, hands on his hips, “that isn’t ominous at all.”

Ariadna finds Larissa by the window, frowning at the blinding sun and ocean-blue sky.

“I told you it would not rain,” she jests, tugging at her shawl. She’s not cold, really, but the familiar fabric is soothing against her skin. Calms the tightening knot in the pit of her stomach.

It’s her wedding day.

Larissa turns to her, frowning, and reaches out to flick her forehead.

“Ow,” Ariadna complains. “What was that for?”

“It is not good to gloat,” Larissa chides, smoothing the red mark on Ariadna’s brow with her thumb. “It is unbecoming of a lady.”

Ariadna looks at her handmaiden closely for a moment, expression inscrutable, before dissolving into laughter. Larissa sighs, but her smile is fond, even as she tugs her young charge away from the window and towards the bath the other servants are still filling with water.

“That’s enough,” Larissa tells them. “I shall fill the rest.”

The servants nod, accustomed to this, and move to leave, but not before offering Ariadna their best wishes for the day.

“Rain on a wedding day symbolizes good luck and a fruitful union,” Larissa says, as she pours a milky white substance into the steaming water. She sprinkles some other petals and oils into the tub.

“In Westeros it is the opposite, or so I’ve heard,” Ariadna counters, leaning against the bathtub. “Is that a Volantene custom?”

“I suppose. It rains so rarely there. Westeros is so wet.”

“Better than the Riverlands.”

Larissa chuckles, and quickly turns to her once she’s done stirring the water and other substances together. A flowery aroma fills the air, tinted with something sugary sweet. Ariadna bends down, brown curls tumbling over her shoulder, and takes a whiff.

“Rose, honey, olive oil, milk, lavender and—is that fig?”

“Indeed it is,” Larissa says. “To soothe the muscles, keep tension from the body.”

She tugs at the sash of Ariadna’s robe, making it fall to the ground. Ariadna shivers, hugs her arms close to her chest, and huddles into the bath, sighing with relief at the warmth.

“I’m only fifteen,” Ariadna protests. “My muscles don’t need soothing.”

Larissa seems to pause for a moment, as if to say something, before she forces a smile to her face. “Your mind needs soothing since you work it so so much, little one.”

“You’re only six years older than me.”

“And yet I’ve seen far more.”

That, Ariadna knows, is true. The scar on Larissa’s light-brown cheeks confirm it. Ariadna hadn’t been there when it happened, but she’d heard the screaming. A suggestion from Ariadna’s father, of course, to rid Larissa of the tattoo that adorned her face. It left behind a rather large mark, and had come close to blinding Larissa, leaving her right eye with a slight milky white colour, severely impacting her vision.

Larissa does not like to talk of it, so Ariadna grumbles, and pulls her legs up to her chest, leaning her cheek on her knee as her handmaiden starts to pour handfuls of the substance on Ariadna’s hair, lathering and massaging it into her sculp.

“Smart and smug,” Ariadna murmurs. “My father must be disappointed.”

“Your father loves you, Ari,” Larissa replies. “He dotes on you.”

“But my husband might not.”

That knot in her stomach tightens, bile burning in her throat. Ariadna wonders, as she turns to look at her friend, whether she looks as nervous as she feels.

“Do you think my father would marry me to someone like that?” she asks. “Even if he’s a Tyrell?”

Larissa looks at the water for a moment, considers, and then meets her gaze head-on. There’s a dark look there, haunted, but firm.

“No one will hurt you,” she tells her fiercely. “I won’t let them.”

Ariadna smiles, nods her thanks, but it does not escape her how her friend did not answer her question.

“Your father is a good master,” Larissa continues. “He does not like cruelty.”

“He’s not your master,” Ariadna says, almost as if reminding her. “If you wished to marry, Larissa, I would understand, you know. I want you to be happy.”

“And leave you? Never. Besides, I have no desire to spend the rest of my days in service to my husband.”

Unlike me. It’s a thought that’s plagued Ariadna more than she cares to admit. Her position among the women of Westeros is largely unique, she’s aware. Her father had been married three times before he wedded her mother, and she was the only child of his to survive infancy. All his other wives, her mother included, had died in pursuit of giving him a long-awaited son or of illness.

“The Gods have deemed it so to not give me a son,” he often told her. “And so, Brightwater Keep passes to you.”

She is an heir, her father’s sole one, besides her uncle, even if he’s a bastard. And yet she is also a wife. Or a wife to be. The expectations to provide children are still there. She bites her lip. Larissa had drawn her pictures and explained what happened between a man and wife far more than her Septa ever had.

“It is normal for his manhood to be hairy, and red,” Larissa told her. “Do not be frightened. The harder it is, the more it means he wants you. And after he’s done, it may flop like a fish. That is also common.”

When Ariadna had asked if the act would hurt, Larissa had hesitated. “The wetter you are less, the less it will hurt, and the more pleasurable it will be. Or so I’ve heard. But after the first few times, regardless, it will feel only tight.”

Larissa respects her far too much to ever lie to her, of which Ariadna is grateful, but she can’t help but be a little frightened. Her father loves her, yes. He let her read any books she wished and indulged her every whim as a child. But all he’s wanted, all his father has wanted, and his father before him, is to be wedded into House Tyrell.

House Tyrell’s occupation of Highgarden had been more or less politely challenged or undermined ever since Aegon the Conqueror had given it to them for their obeisance in his conquest. Of all the outraged and audacious houses, House Florent had been the most bold in their boasts of their rights to Highgarden through their past connections to House Gardener, the extinct Kings of the Reach. Ariadna’s ancestor had alienated the Tyrells with such boasts, and her grandsire and father have spent their lifetimes trying to rectify this breach.

And Ariadna represents the perfect opportunity. Even though her husband is the first son of a second son, her father is ecstatic that the match has finally been approved, even though the likelihood of her husband or any of their potential children inheriting Highgarden was near non-existence, only possible if all of the other Tyrell heirs – of which there are a near dozen – were to magically be wiped out in a fire, or some other horrific accident.

Ariadna tries not to think about how happy that might make her father and settles for closing her eyes instead.

If she focuses enough, she can discern the scent of apples over the flowery bath tinxture she’s currently soaking in. The apples in their orchard were finally ripe and ready for picking. Ariadna loves many foods – figs, fish, lamb, tarts, but to her there is nothing better than their apples.

Her father always allowed to her to pluck the first one of the season.

But now, that was not possible. She is to be married.

Her nose wrinkles at the thought of some stranger making their way through her orchards. Her husband chopping down all the trees on a whim. Ariadna almost asks Larissa if it were possible for him to do so, but decides against it. How would Larissa know? Her father had been generous in giving Larissa shelter after he’d seen her begging in the Oldtown harbour. Slavery was something he would not abide by, and Larissa, in his words, had more than proven her worth with her knowledge in healing and the general comfort she brought Ariadna. But that was all she was.

And the Westerosi customs were still lost to Larissa on occasion. She knew how rare it was for a girl like Ariadna to be heir to anything, but Larissa had not seemed to comprehend the way this would undo the normal Westerosi relationship between husband and wife.

Unless it wouldn’t.

Ariadna, it is true, often has to many thoughts inside her head, and she can’t quite stop for wondering about what her life will look like. What good will it do her to be named her father’s heir, the future lady of Brightwater Keep, if all she will end up being is a wife, more likely than not to die in childbed?

Ariadna had never known her mother, who died giving birth to her. Only that she looks like her, given her complete lack of similarity to her father. What if that is all she is to her children? Some nameless, faceless woman, whose only legacy is the physical features they inherit?

Her father would not need her if she were to give birth to a son, of that Ariadna is keenly aware, though he has not said yet. Sometimes she feels mad for even thinking such things, for even believing that people say it behind her back. She is not meant to worry about such things.

And yet she does.

Sometimes Ariadna believes she was born worried, and forever will be. This disease inside her, slowly devouring her soul inch by inch.

Larissa startles her by placing a hand on her shoulder.

“This is a happy day,” Larissa tells her. “And you will be happy here, with your husband. In your home. Do not forget that.”

Ariadna is almost tempted to ask if Larissa is lying, but in truth, foolish as it may be, she does not want the answer. No, she does not want the truth. There is comfort in lies, on occasion, and now Ariadna allows it to wash over her, to steady the beat of her heart.

She thinks of those pictures Larissa drew her, and latches onto her hand, clutching it like a lifeline.

Larissa, as always, does not let go.

It takes several hours to bathe her, shave her, and pamper her. Larissa has always been dedicated to herbal remedies for the skin and hair, but this day she is almost obsessed, scrubbing Ariadna with a near startling intensity before lathering her with soft creams and patting her down with blankets.

Larissa brushes her hair until it falls to her waist in soft, glittering waves. There have always been hints of blonde to her locks, but it seems especially pronounced now, giving her a honey-coloured glow. Her skin is especially tan, almost flawless, her lips painted with rouge, her cheeks lightly dusted with pink powders, her eyes lightly smudged with coal for dramatic effect. It is scarcely visible, but under Larissa’s talented fingers, it makes her look more appealing.

It might be the first time in her life that she’s felt beautiful.

Ariadna knows she is not ugly. But she’s never felt any pride in it. Some relief, maybe, that she grew into her slightly puggish nose unlike other noble girls she knew that were secretly called pig-like by stablehands and others.

But now, on her wedding day, she finally feels it. Arrogant it may be, but she feels worthy. Her husband might be displeased with her in other ways, but he could not be in this.

Ariadna tugs at her wedding dress, eager to do something with her hands.

“Stop that,” Larissa says, gently tugging her hands away from the reddish-orange fabric. “You’ll create wrinkles instead of ridding yourself of ones that are not even there.”

Ariadna, per her father’s wishes, had sat through numerous tailoring sessions for her wedding dress and cloak. Her dress is styled in the reddish fox fur of her house, exposing her collarbones. The neckline is deep, highlighting the long column of her throat and the gold chain around her neck. The bodice of her silk, flowing gown is stitched with vines, leaves and small foxes. The skirts flow, as per custom in the Reach, and seem to shimmer as she moves.

In the crown of her hair, Larissa has woven in blue roses, also in honour of her house sigil, forming them in a manner that reminds Ariadna of a tiara. Except mine is made of flowers, not gold.

She reaches out and touches the delicate petals. Larissa’s expression softens, and Ariadna can plainly see the worry in her friend’s brow. The lock of her jaw. No one will hurt you, Larissa said earlier. I won’t let them.

A sudden rush of fierce gratitude overwhelms her, makes her eyes grow wet. She tries her best to blink it away.

I’m scared, she wishes to say. I’m so frightened I can scarcely breathe.

Larissa gently grasps her chin.

“You look beautiful,” she tells Ariadna. “Truly. The most splendid thing I have ever seen.”

“Because of you.”

Larissa bops her nose, making Ariadna squeal. “Because of you.”

There’s a knock on the door, and Ariadna’s mirth dies. From the open window, she can hear the roll of carriages below. The faint echo of chatter as the guests from all the prominent houses in the Reach begin to arrive. Her father, as she well knows, has spared no expense.

Before Ariadna can respond, the door swings open, revealing no other than her father himself. Lord Arthur Florent is generally well-known as a likeable, if slightly boastful, man. Ariadna has no doubt that if he were younger when she was born, he would have married again. Alas, at near fifty with four dead wives to his name, Arthur Florent’s ambitions were confined to his sole child and heir; her.

When she turns to face him, her father stops mid-step, beaming.

“You look exquisite, my little dove,” he declares, moving to embrace her. He smells familiar to her; pine with faint hints of his favourite arbour red wine. “The very image of your mother.”

She smiles faintly, almost embarrassed. Whenever her father dolls compliments to her like this, she grows quiet, almost shy. Overwhelmed by the sheer swell of emotions blooming within her.

He moves back, grabs her hands tightly in his own, peers into her eyes.

“My good girl,” he murmurs. “My pride and joy. I know you will do your duty well, I have no doubt.”

Ariadna smiles, nods. Though she is fifteen, mere hours away from being a wife, the urge to please her father has not faded. She wonders if it ever does for daughters and promises herself to ask Larissa later.

“As you wish, Father,” she replies.

He lightly pinches her cheek. “My good girl.”

Another voice chimes in from the open door. “You look beautiful, niece.”

Ariadna tries her best not to stiffen. “Uncle Gerald,” she replies. “My thanks.”

Her uncle is considerably younger than her father by near two decades. Though Arthur Florent was not under any obligation to acknowledge or welcome his bastard brother into his home following his father’s death, Ariadna’s father had. As a young man whose only sibling had died from the sweating sickness, he was in need of companionship, and grew close to his father’s son by his late and longtime mistress.

Uncle Gerald looks like her father; pale blue eyes, dusty blonde hair, though his, unlike her father’s, was not greying. Ariadna had always been struck by the sense that he deeply resented her existence. He had never given her reason to think so. Had never been cruel, and always gotten her nameday presents. But sometimes, whenever her father clapped his shoulder and said that she would ensure Uncle Gerald would continue to have a room in the Keep when he was long dead, her uncle would look at her with narrow, darkened eyes that seemed to scream at her.

“In a few hours you will be a Tyrell,” her uncle comments. “A high honour.”

“A Florent still, dear brother,” Arthur corrects. “I confirmed the details with Lyonel Strong a few years passed. Any child of hers shall retain the name Florent. I will not have it die out, after all, seeing as there is no one else to continue it.”

Uncle Gerald, from behind her father’s back, smiles tightly. “Of course.”

“I thought Lyonel Strong had died a few years back, Father,” Ariadna points out, unable to help herself. Otto Hightower had resumed his position as Hand. Why would he help her?

“It’s not your position to question him,” Uncle Gerald reprimands.

Her father waves a hand in his brother’s direction, chuckling. “No matter, no matter. It’s my fault, I dare say. I’m the one who allowed her to be taught to think.”

The two men laugh then, as if it is some great joke.

Her father cups her cheeks then. “Do not worry, little dove. I have all the details sealed in my will, with the seal of the Hand of the King. That still stands, regardless of who wears the pin.”

Ariadna is not certain that’s true, but she bites her tongue, unwilling to rupture her father’s jovial mood.

“Of course, Father,” she says.

“Your husband is older than you,” he says. “But he has spent his time sowing his wild oats – he was a strapping young lad, last I saw him. Now, he is calmed, and ready to be a husband as duty commands. I am sure of it.”

He kisses her knuckles. “Regardless, I trust you more than anyone to make our family name, our ancestors, proud. A father could not ask for a better daughter.”

And then, Ariadna feels silly for ever doubting him. Her father loves her. Values her. Treasures her. He cares. This marriage will bring honour to the family, will help give her power when she comes to be the Lady of the Keep and rule in her own right. This is good for her. For all of them.

She can do this.

He pats her hands, pleased by her smile, and turns to Larissa. Her father opens his mouth, but he’s interrupted by a large, growling sound echoing from the outdoors. It’s followed by a roar so loud it sounds like thunder amplified, as if there is a storm raging in her ears.

“Father?” Ariadna questions, aghast. Caught between fleeing beneath her bed and flying to the window. “What is that?”

At that, her father beams again. “Why, your wedding surprise, of course.” He leans in mischievously. “Dragons.”

“Gods be good,” Aegon swears beneath his breath, tugging at the collar of his doublet. “Mother knows how I hate this fabric.”

“Mayhaps if you’d actually sat with the tailor, you could have chosen the fabrics yourself,” Aemond hisses right back. He elbows Aegon in the side. “Now behave. The ceremony is set to start.”

Aegon glares at him, tempted to smack Aemond right over his head for the cheek. He settles for stomping on his brother’s toe instead, smirking slightly at Aemond’s muffled grunt of pain. Daeron turns to look at them, perplexed, and Aegon smiles innocently. Him, Daeron and Aemond are in one of the first pews of the Sept. It’s nowhere near as large as the one in King’s Landing, or even the Starry Sept in Oldtown, but the painted glass representing the seven pointed star is rather remarkable, though it loses its charm quickly.

Aegon sniffs.

“Does anyone else smell apples?” he ponders.

Aemond scowls. “You’re just hungry, as per usual.”

Aegon really does wonder if his brother intends on always provoking him in a room full of people. And there are, to be honest, dozens of people crammed into the Sept. He recognizes a few from those who frequented Oldtown during his stay, and others simply from their Sigils. House Tarly, Ashford, Crane, Redwyne and others have made their appearance, including his mother’s house. And then there is, of course, the family of the groom.

Golden rose banners on a field of green are hung up throughout the Sept along with the banner of the bride. Flower petals adorn the floor. Candles are lit, casting the room in a warm glow. The sun is already close to setting.

The day has lasted forever. As annoyed as it makes him, Aemond was right; he is hungry. And tired. Sunfyre had shared his discontent to be there. Why was Aegon needed here? It had been pure chance his stay at Oldtown coincided with this wedding, nothing more. That his granduncle seemed to disagree with.

Aegon spots Ormund Hightower in the opposite pew, chatting animatedly with his young near-betrothed, Samantha Tarly. She can’t be older than his age. She is remarkably pretty – yellow hair, black eyes, a good smile. Comely figure. She catches his gaze for a moment, and Aegon wonders what her tits would look like bare, pressed against her dress as they are.

When Aemond pointedly glares at him, Aegon whistles and turns his direction towards the groom. He on the other hand, must be thirty at the least, if not older. Reddish hair, green eyes. Faint wrinkles on his brow. He was not plump, but not thin either. The man did not give the illusion of being a warrior.

“Gods,” he says. “How old did you say this girl was?”

“Fifteen, I think Lord Ormund said,” Daeron replies. “Why?”

Aegon points to the younger man standing beside the groom. They’re no doubt brothers, or at the least cousins, given their physical similarities.

“He seems a bit more appropriate, no?”

Older than Aegon still, but not thirty or older.

Daeron shrugs. “That’s Lord Alester’s younger brother, Rickard. And Alester is the first son, not Rickard.”

“First son of a second son.”

“It matters still,” Aemond cuts in. At least he also looks bored. It’s been hours since they arrived, or so it feels.

Aegon does not see why it matters. The son of a second son does not stand to inherit anything, especially if there are others from the first son to inherit. By the time the first son had children, and then grandchildren, his nephews would be nothing more than mere specks of dust.

Aegon’s mouth twists. He is almost in a similar position, is he not? A first son, but not due to inherit a dime either. The first of my kind. He almost takes a peculiar sense of pride in it, on a good day. On a bad day…

A hush falls over the room. The whispers cease. The groom seems to straighten.

“Fucking finally,” Aegon mutters.

Aemond nudges him, but his lips twitch in agreement. Aemond has never liked weddings, either.

Aegon sighs, restless and eager to return to Sunfyre, to eat and drink and maybe fuck if he so wishes, mayhaps if he finds that eager and lovely serving girl from the first night, the one with the hazel eyes, then he can be left in peace.

And then he looks up, midway through thinking about which position he can fuck said serving girl in, and finally catches a look of the bride.

Oh, fuck, he thinks distantly, and he feels stupid. There’s this odd sensation of a string snapping inside him, and a new one forming, something invisible and otherworldly and fucking strong, pulling him to her.

Aegon doesn’t think he could look away, even if he wanted to.

The girl has long, flowing brown curls, with faint hints of blonde throughout. He spots a faint dimple indentation on her left cheek, the one facing him. Rosy cheeks lightly dusted. Brown eyes with flecks of gray. In terms of colouring, she is nothing spectacular. No rare beauty with violet eyes or flaming red hair or exotic piercings. And yet, and yet—

She’s so pretty it makes him feel stupid, makes him forget to think with his cock, and that—

That Aegon does not know what to do with. He thinks, for a foolish second, that he’s glad his visit to Oldtown coincided with this visit, and the thought shocks him enough his senses return to him, at least partially.

The old man beside her, no doubt her father, has incredibly pointy ears that she does not seem to have inherited, unless they’re hidden beneath those curls of hers. He kisses her cheeks before handing her over to her husband, who looks immensely pleased, like a cat who caught a particularly tasty rat.

Aegon, in another remarkable turn of events, is struck by the urge to grab her from the older man and keep her by his side. Maybe even take her on Sunfyre. Why wed a lovely creature like her to a man like that? He doesn’t want it to happen. For a moment, he’s convinced if he sees it happen, he might cry.

He takes a single step forward, and the sound echoes in his ears, joins the pounding of his heart. Boom boom. Boom.

The bride glances over her shoulder, seems to catch his eye, and Aegon loses his courage. She has remarkably clever eyes, he thinks. And there’s something familiar about her, as if he’s seen her face before.

“What are you doing?” Aemond hisses, latching onto his elbow.

The moment shatters, and Aegon wrenches his head away, flabbergasted at himself, and feeling oddly tired, like he’s just had a terrible dream.

“Nothing,” he hisses right back, shrugging Aemond off his hand. “Fuck off.”

After taking a few seconds to collect himself, Aegon looks up. She’s no longer looking at him, her attention directed solely at her husband and the Septon.

“We are gathered here today to witness the union of Ser Alester Tyrell and Lady Ariadna Florent, in the sight of our Gods—”

Ariadna, he thinks. Now, a name to a face. Daeron had no doubt said it before, but Aegon hadn’t cared to hear it. The longer he looks at her, the more familiar she seems.

“Fuck,” he says, as it occurs to him. “She looks like Jace.”

Daeron looks at him like he’s mad, but Aemond—

“I didn’t know she was half-Strong,” he grumbles. A few heads turn towards them, and Aegon nearly elbows his brother to be quiet.

“Her mother was, I think,” Daeron whispers. “Why does that matter?”

Oh, freaking fuck, Aegon thinks. Wonderful. My sister and I have more common than I realize. But Aegon doesn’t say that. If Daeron doesn’t seem to recognize the relevance of his statement, he’s not about to inform him.

Aemond merely grunts, and Aegon—

He looks forward. Ariadna is glancing at him again, ever so slightly. He stares right back. Her wedding cloak is long enough to trail on the floor behind her. Golden roses are stitched on the back, along with blue to match the ones in her hair. There’s a fox in the centre and it seems—

It seems like there’s a golden rose hanging out of its mouth.

If Ariadna seems to feel any horror at marrying a man at least twice her elder, she does not show it as they commence their wedding dance. In truth, it is a slightly miserable affair to witness. She is so young and fresh, like a rose in a field of weeds, and her husband—

Well, he is so visibly inadequate. Stumbling over every few steps. Staring at her face hungrily.

Aegon wants to punch him in the face. Or maybe feed him to Sunfyre. They can’t hang him for murder, can they? His mother would be angry, though. Aegon watches every second of the sordid affair, unable to look away. He feels his mood worsening with every step they take, and swallows back gulpfuls of wine to no avail.

He feels ridiculously angry at it all. At the whole entire world. He glances at the head table, which they are sitting near to as the guests of the honour, and finds that her father is beaming at the scene before him.

“Does he not care,” he wonders aloud, “that he’s married off his daughter to a man old enough to be her father?”

Daeron flinches slightly, no doubt reminded of Ormund’s impending marriage to Samantha Tarly. Gods forbid the precious Hightowers be slighted in any way. Aegon’s lips curl.

“Apparently House Florent has boasted of a superior claim to Highgarden for generations,” Daeron tells him. “This must be his way in.”

“Lovely,” Aegon scoffs.

There is no one else seated at their table besides them three. Their table sticks out for its emptiness. As the guests of honour, most eyes are on them instead of the bride and groom. King Viserys’ sons. The disinherited princes. The unfavoured children. The list goes on, of course.

“Why do you care?” Aemond snaps. “She’s a Strong.”

He spits the word out like it’s a dirty accusation. Aegon is not overly surprised. Anything that reminds Aemond of Luke puts him in a sour mood.

“I never said I cared.”

Aegon betrays himself, however, by his eyes darting back to the woman in question. She’s dancing around her husband, arms up, movements lithe and smooth. He wonders how her roses don’t fall out. Wonders if she’d tell him, if he asked.

Aemond snaps a finger in front of his face like he’s dog that needs to calm down. Aegon’s brother juts a finger in his face.

“No,” Aemond reprimands. “Absolutely not, Aegon.”

“I didn’t do anything!” he protests, finishing his wine. He waves a servant forward for another cup.

Aemond sends him a dirty look. “Yes you are. Salivating over her like a dog. Have some decency, for Mother’s sake.”

“Mother isn’t here.”

“No.”

Aegon just barely manages not to stick his tongue out at him. Barely.

He looks forward again. The music comes to a still, and the audience politely claps as the couple bow and curtsy at one another. Lord Alester takes his wife’s hand, and Aegon nearly gags at the thought of witnessing another kiss between the two. When their vows had been cemented with such an action, he’d felt so revolted Sunfyre roared so loudly it seemed to shake the painted glass itself.

Lady Ariadna shoots her husband a small smile, standing tall, and watches with a faltering smile as he takes his leave to sit beside her father without another word. Aegon watches her. She seems small, standing there, near vulnerable under all of their gazes. He wonders if she senses their pity, their envy. His attention.

She’s beautiful, still. And alone. Standing there.

It’s not right.

Nothing that beautiful should be looked at in isolation.

Without quite thinking, Aegon stands.

“What are you doing?” Aemond hisses, reaching for him.

Aegon ignores his brother, walks to her instead. It is customary for the bride to dance at weddings, once her first dance with her husband is over. No one else seemed willing to relieve her loneliness and Aegon-

Well, he wants her to himself. He’s selfish enough to want that, though he does not know her. She does look like Jace, he notes, the closer he gets to her. But not as much as Aemond seems to think.

He reaches her, and all else seems to slow.

“A dance, my lady?” he asks, offering her his hand.

Lady Ariadna pauses. She looks at him with a hint of relief, almost curiousity. Aegon can’t help but take pride in it. She does not know him. The rot inside him. The clogging, walking disappointment that he is. Does not know his many failures – the ones he has done, and the ones he has yet to do.

Aegon is merely a handsome prince, come to dance with her when no one else would. And Aegon—

He would like to pretend, if only for a few moments, if only with her, that he is this better, imagined man.

“I would be honoured, my prince,” she replies, curtsying.

She slides her hand in his, and a warm tingle shivers its way up his spine. Aegon smiles broadly, and it feels more genuine than it’s been in years.

The music starts, and Aegon—

He holds her close, vaguely remembering the steps, and leads her. No, leads her is not quite the right word. More like they move in unison. One step forward. One step back. Easy, natural steps, as normal and easy as the wind blowing through leaves. As the molten flow of the earth.

He’s never felt good at something before. Nothing besides Sunfyre, which came naturally, and fucking, which didn’t. But he feels good with this. With her. He’s not his mother’s son, the greatest test of her patience. He’s not the first born son his father craved and ultimately ignored. He’s not even Aegon.

He’s just a boy with a beautiful girl, unmarked by politics or tragedies or his own failures, and he loses himself in the fantasy enough he almost believes this is his wedding, and she is his bride. He thinks he could be happy. He doesn’t know why. Doesn’t know her. But feels it in his bones. A certainty that matches the strength of his spine.

They prey their palms together, turning as the dance requires, and he soaks in the warmth of her hands, the smell of her perfume, the roses in her hair. The darkness of her brown eyes. She’s staring intently at him right back, and he—

He wants to see her smile. To hear her laugh.

He’s struck by the urge so strongly he spins her under his arm again and again until her skirts flap loosely around her and she’s giggling slightly, spinning with the dizziness, and he smiles so hard his lips seem to split in two. Finally he’s accomplished something, he’s done something, he’s made someone smile, and not to get her into bed but because he—

The musicians stop, and they stare at each other, panting.

Please, he almost says. Call me Aegon.

He’s still holding onto her hand, he realizes. He doesn’t quite want to let it go.

And then Daeron is behind her, smiling shyly, asking in a polite voice if she would like to dance, and Aegon—

A hand grips his arm tightly, practically dragging him away from her. Other couples join Lady Ariadna and Daeron, swarming around them as a lively country song begins to play.

“What,” Aemond utters, face washed over with fury, “was that?”

“A dance,” he replies simply, joy quickly fading. “I know you are unfamiliar with the concept—”

“You looked two seconds away from bedding her right there in front of everyone!” Aemond snaps at him. “Or do you truly think her husband and father did not notice? If you thought with your cock for more than two seconds, Aegon, you would realize that that they’re no doubt calling her a whore this second because of you—”

“That’s enough,” Aegon interrupts harshly, practically thunderous. “Fuck off, Aemond. I mean it.” And then, because he’s feeling especially cruel, he adds, “and good luck trying to find a girl willing to dance with you.”

At that, Aemond falters, and Aegon knows he’s hit his brother where it hurts. He may hide behind his anger and his sword and Vhagar, but Aemond is more sensitive about to his appearance than he cares to admit, even now.

Once, when they were younger, before Aemond had gotten his patch, a Lord’s daughter at court had seen him with his empty eye socket, and screamed so loud she nearly threw up. Aemond had shut himself inside his room for days. Their mother had sent the girl and her family home, banished from court and forever out of her good graces, but the damage had been done.

By the time Aemond emerged from his chambers, it was with his patch and an even more pronounced bitter twist to his mouth.

They stare at each other, brother to brother. Aegon to Aemond. A failure and their mother’s saviour, her favourite.

“Fuck you,” Aemond spits slowly, before storming out of the room, no doubt in search of Vhagar. Aegon almost apologizes, but why should he? Aemond always always assumes the worst of him. Always.

By the time Daeron is done dancing, Aegon has finished his third cup of wine since sitting. Lady Ariadna is still dancing, he thinks, but he can’t bring himself to look.

“Where is Aemond?” Daeron asks.

Aegon shrugs, bitter and still angry, and takes another swing of his wine. He knows there’s no escape, not really. No matter what he does, he is still destined to fuck it all up in some way or other.

Over his youngest brother’s shoulder, he spots Samantha Tarly looking at him with interest, and resigns himself to his cups.

Ariadna’s feet hurt. They haven’t felt this sore before – not since she first learnt how to ride a horse. And yet, she is surprisingly content, almost dizzy. She’s gone for dance after dance. Sharing one with her husband, her father, her uncle, her husband’s brother, other Lords and ladies and—

Prince Aegon.

She’s never seen a man with violet eyes before. Never seen a Targaryen before. His are unlike anything she has ever seen. Not the pale violet of Prince Daeron’s, but a deep amethyst shade.

And his hand had been warm and soft.

Her husband had callouses, a hand that reminded her more of her father and less of a lover. A husband.

She looks over her shoulder throughout the night, curious, but he does not return. She spots her father cornering the two princes at some points throughout the night, no doubt thanking them for their presence. For the honour. Not one, not two, but three Targaryen princes? It was unbelievable.

As was the weight of his gaze.

She had felt it on her throughout the ceremony. Had caught him staring unapologetically, shamelessly, as if he had the right to do it. As if that did not belong to her husband, and she was meant for him instead.

Ariadna has not heard much of his character. Whispers and rumours, here and there, but nothing certain.

She can’t help but be curious.

She can’t help but be especially curious when she spots him and Samantha Tarly disappearing from the room when everyone else seems busy. Ariadna excuses herself from the dancing, and ushers herself to the far corner of the room, behind the dancers, far out of sight of the head table.

Her stomach grumbles. Gods, but does she want to eat something.

And yet…

She moves to leave. She knows Larissa would tell her she’s being foolish, but she can’t help but follow, and feel mildly affronted. Ariadna has no claim to him, but she knows he was staring. If he wanted her, why bed another? Especially a woman rumoured to be his great uncle’s new bride.

Foolish.

Ariadna, unsure of where they went, wanders upstairs to her bedchambers, eager for a moment alone.

And then, right as she’s about to open the door, she hears it.

Moans.

She stops, mouth open, and then anger surges inside her at the sheer audacity. This is to be her marriage bed in a few short hours. How dare they?

Ariadna is cross, but not so bold as to storm in. She settles for opening the door wide enough for it to slam loudly as she shuts it. There’s a muffled yelp, a flash of silver in the corner of her eye before the door closes, and then she steps backwards and waits for the culprits to emerge.

The first, of course, is Samantha Tarly herself, who looks flushed and slightly dishevelled, but not suspiciously so. She pinkens at the sight of her, head bowed, glaring, and Ariadna offers her no sympathy. She won’t tell her father, but she certainly won’t forget this either.

“Go,’ she says, and the lady listens.

And then, once Samantha Tarly has rounded the corner, Prince Aegon saunters through her bedchamber door. He stops at the sight of her.

He’s drunk.

Ariadna is oddly disappointed by this fact. It makes his eyes less violet, overcome by red. Less beautiful, but still attracting.

For a moment, it seems like he’s about to leave her without a word, and—

“She is to be your great uncle’s wife,” Ariadna states, unable to help it. “Does that not bother you?”

Prince Aegon pauses. There’s a wine cup in hand. Ariadna does not think this is an uncommon occurrence.

“Not particularly,” he replies honestly. “If he loved her, mayhaps. But he does not.”

“How do you know?” she asks, brows knitting together.

He glances at her with surprise, then shrugs. “She’s pretty, and he’s old. He’s marrying her for her beauty, and for her womb. Those are the only reasons why people get married.”

Prince Aegon steps towards her. “I imagine that’s why your husband seems so pleased – he has been satisfied on all accounts.”

Ariadna’s lips curl. “Perhaps not when he finds out his marriage bed – his wife’s bed, has already been soiled.”

“Apologies,” Prince Aegon chuckles. “It was the nearest private place. I did not realize it was to be your marriage bed.”

“The rose petals did not give it away?”

Ariadna flushes at her arched tone. What is she doing? He’s a Prince. She has no business chastising him.

He laughs softly. “I suppose you are right, my lady.” He looks at her then, tilts his head. Silver curls fall close to his eyes. He has shorter hair than his brothers, despite Prince Daeron’s comparative youth.

“Does it always smell like apples?” he asks her abruptly.

“It’s the first day of the season,” she replies. “We have an orchard outside.”

“Ah. I imagine you haven’t seen anything of the world outside of your orchard, have you?”

“I imagine exploring the world is far easier when you have a dragon, my prince.”

He laughs again, so loud the sound booms in her ears. It’s a harsh sound, but still lovely even then.

“Right again, my lady,” he drawls, taking a sip of his wine. “You’re quite smart.” Prince Aegon eyes her again, and some of his drunkenness seems to ebb. “Tell me, what is it like to be an heir?” he questions. “I would not know.”

“My prince?”

He takes a step towards her. “You’re your father’s heir, I am not. I’m curious what it’s like to be deemed worthy.”

Ariadna stills and then admits, “My father has no other children, my prince.”

“And so you were his only option.”

It stings to hear.

“He has a bastard brother,” she tells him. “But yes, I suppose you are right.”

He chuckles. “I suppose we are more alike than I thought.”

“I suppose.”

They stare at each other for a moment too long. Ariadna’s heart skips. Her skin seems to flutter. Is this what it’s like to want to be kissed?

“The apples,” he says, taking another step towards her. “The ones you mentioned earlier. Have you had one yet?”

“Not yet,” she says, nervous. “But they’re my favourite things in the world.”

He pauses, so close she can feel his breath on her lips. She can hear her own heart beat, or is it his? She can’t tell.

“A pity,” he murmurs, gaze fluttering to her lips. “Oh, fuck it—”

And he kisses her.

Ariadna has seen sex before, even before Larissa showed her those drawings. She’d caught a cook and the blacksmith’s daughter having sex against a tree in the orchard a year past. Their kisses had seemed sloppy and wet, used to muffle moans and sink their tongues into each other’s mouths.

Her kiss with her husband had been dry. Short. Perfunctory.

This—

It’s sweet. Like a lover’s kiss in a song, like a hero saying farewell to his damsel in a great tale. He is not a drunk prince who bedded another woman on her marriage bed, but someone who loves her, cherishes her. Respects her.

And she—

 A warm pull spreads from the tips of her toes to her neck. A delightful flush that makes her heart sing. Their lips remain pressed together until she can no longer breathe and pulls away, panting.

Is it always like that? She almost asks, before she remembers that it’s not. Her own kiss with her husband cemented that.

There’s a dragon roar outside. She hasn’t seen his dragons yet. They’d been kept outside the Keep, hidden behind the walls. She’d seen the shadow of Vhagar, but had been too frightened to look out for more.

“Sunfyre,” Aegon explains, noticing her wariness. “Would you like to meet him?”

Yes, she almost blurts out, and then—

The sounds of the party, her wedding celebration, hit her from below. She’s already been gone long enough. Soon, they will get suspicious. Her father. Her husband. Her uncle. All of them. Fleeing off into the night and sharing kisses with a Prince is not fulfilling her duty.

“I must head back,” she says apologetically, taking a step back.

Something in his face saddens, before it’s gone in a flash.

“Of course,” he says. “Perhaps next time.”

Next time.

For a moment, it seems like he’ll kiss her again, and she’s tempted to let him, and then—

He shakes his head, glances away. She almost calls after him, convinced she’ll never see him again. That there will be no next time.

And so there won’t be, her mind whispers. You belong here.

She says nothing, and he goes.

Her husband grunts like a pig when he enters her later that night. She is the mortar, and he is the pestle. It stings. It hurts. She considers calling out for her father, and then remembers he’s the one who put her here, and quietens. This is her duty, she reminds herself, as she feels herself split in two and the blood from her maidenhead trickle down her thighs.

Within a moon, the maester announces that she’s with child.

She’s still two months away from her sixteenth nameday.

The morning after her wedding, two dozen apples are discovered missing from the orchard.

Chapter Text

Chapter 2

Six years later

“Ow, Helaena!” Aegon complains, grunting as her foot presses into his ear. “Watch it!”

If anyone were to stumble upon them, they would either find the scene comical, or think them mad. Or maybe both. Regardless, Aegon struggles under the strain of her weight, hands latched around her ankles to hold her upright.

“Stop moving,” she singsongs back. “I’m almost done!”

“You said that ages ago!”

“You’re acting like a child, Aegon.”

“You’re standing on my shoulders!”

His head is half-covered by the skirts of her dress. Under the summer heat, sweat already drips from his brow. He can feel his shoulders tremble.

“Yes,” Helaena replies slowly, “and why is that?”

At that, some of Aegon’s righteous anger dies. He bites his tongue instead and hears Helaena hum from up above. They remain in this ridiculous position for another few minutes or so. Just when Aegon feels as though he’s about to collapse and take Helaena with him, she pats his head.

“There!” she exclaims. “I got him!”

The him, in question, is of course a particularly rare kind of spider that had been eluding captivity for weeks. Helaens is usually a remarkably calm, quiet sort of person, but there is nothing that puts fire in her soul like a bug or insect she cannot catch and study or add to her collection.

With some grunting and exclamations of alarm, they finally manage to get Helaena safely on the ground, jar in hand. Aegon’s sister-wife beams with pride as she practically stitches her eyes to the glass jar, giving the illusion that the red spider is walking on her pupil.

Aegon may be bent over, hands on his knees, panting, but he still cringes.

He’s never liked spiders.

“Gods be damned I need some wine,” he grumbles, massaging his neck. He’ll need a warm bath soon, he thinks, to try and get better. Mere moons away from his four and twentieth nameday, and he already feels sixty.

Helaena narrows her eyes, looks slightly smug. “If you don’t want this kind of punishment, stop sleeping with my ladies in waiting. I liked Lyarra, as did the children. She always walked right.”

Walked right? This is another sensitivity of Helaena’s. Sometimes even the sound of heels clicking on the stone tiles puts her on edge. It’s what made selecting her ladies all the more difficult, according to their mother, anyway.

“Yes, I know,” he says, returning to his full height when his breathing calms. “I am sorry, Helaena.”

And he is. There is some genuine guilt there. Aegon has never been faithful in their marriage, but he always tries to at least fuck women that aren’t involved in his sister’s household. He’d been deep in his cups when that particular liaison with Lyarra occurred, and had genuinely forgotten her importance, seen only a pretty face that liked his.

Of course, his mother would not listen to that when she stumbled upon them in bed together, after he had not shown up to break his fast. Lyarra had been dismissed on the spot, but quietly, and sent back to her family’s meager keep with moon tea in her belly and disgrace.

Sometimes it scares him, how the wines blur his memory and strip his reason. He used to think he had it under control. But the urge has outgrown him, and he can no longer handle it as smoothly as he once did.

Or mayhaps he never had. That possibility bothers him more than he cares to admit.

“Next time,” she says, “I’ll have you do this for days – and go into the sea! There are some sea snails I wish to collect, though Mother will not let me dive into the bay myself.”

Next time.

It’s that which grates Aegon the most. The certainty that he will fuck it up again, regardless of how sorry he might feel or what he might do in atonement. Sentenced guilty before there’s even been a trial or even a crime committed.

It shouldn’t bother him – after all, once Aegon’s lack of ambition became known as a boy, their mother had begun to believe the same. His father had sometime around when Aegon turned five. Aemond disliked him from birth.

And now Helaena.

It shouldn’t bother him, this lack of faith, but it does.

Mainly because he knows, deep down, that she is right. She always is about these kinds of things.

Aegon narrows his eyes at her, juts his chin.

“Do that, and I’ll spit the seawater on you and turn into a fish out of spite.”

“I’ve heard certain women like the taste of sea water. They might find it appealing.” She flicks her silver curls over her shoulder. “Besides, you might be better suited as a fish.”

Aegon scoffs. “Bitch.”

Helaena smiles in that serene way of hers, reaches forward, and pinches his nose. “Whore.”

“Hel!” he complains, wriggling out of her grip. When she’s in the mood, Helaena can be unbearably strong. When his nose is red enough for her liking, she releases him, but not before Aegon reaches out and flicks her eyelid. It’s a trick he learned as a kid – Helaena always used to leave spiders on his bed, or dead worms with their insides upturned. At first he thought it was a sole effort, and then he discovered a secret alliance between Aemond and Helaena, and decided to fight back.

“You cheat!” she exclaims, cradling her eye.

“Aegon!” their mother gasps sharply.

Fucking fuck shit shit—

“Mother,” he proclaims, whirling around. She stalks past him in an outraged flurry, cradling Helaena. “Uh- that was not what it seemed.”

“It seemed like you were bickering with your wife like silly little children fighting with their family,” she hisses.

“Well,” he points out, rather unhelpfully, “we are brother and sister.”

His mother, the illustrious Alicent Hightower, looks at him with poorly concealed frustration, like she’s seconds away from beating her hands on the walls. She had once, when he’d disappeared from the Red Keep for two days, loitering in the Streets of Silk, going from one whorehouse to the next.

He’d only been caught because he eventually fell asleep by Sunfyre, curled around his golden tail. That had been the night the maesters announced Helaena was pregnant. When he’d been eventually dragged back to his chambers to sober up, his mother had woken him up with a blood curling scream, half-mad, crazed like she’d been that night on Driftmark.

Why do you cause me such pain? Alicent had yelled.

That question lingers between them, an undeniable truth between a mother and her first born son. The first sacrifice in her life-sentence of isolation, queendom and bitterness.

Aegon feels like a little child again, screaming in a room with no one who even looks up. He’d tried it once, at a state dinner. Right after Aemond was born. He’d been sent away without a word of comfort, his mother bouncing Helaena on her knee with Aemond balanced against her chest.

Helaena, now that their mother is here, has retreated into her shell. She’s never liked conflict. Playful spats sometimes are alright, when she has a good day. But Aegon and his mother’s arguments are never playful. Sometimes he thinks the Maester’s should rip open his chest and marvel at the lashings on his heart.

Alicent closes her eyes, inhales deeply through her nose. “You’ve done enough,” she says, and the need for a drink takes root.

She guides Helaena away, and Aegon turns to find Aemond standing at the entryway to the gardens, no doubt in the middle of a walk with their mother. Private time with her favourite child.

Resentment builds in Aegon, cold and biting. He watches them leave, their own special trio, a group to which he never receives an invitation to join. Even though he’s also a husband, a brother, a son.

He doesn’t want to join them, but he also hates that they haven’t asked.

A drink, he decides, will be for the best.

“King’s Landing smells like shit,” Larissa proclaims, before closing the shutter of the wheelhouse.

Ariadna grunts in response to her friend’s attempt at levity, and soon all falls silent. The same heavy, stilted silence that has overwhelmed them ever since they began this wretched journey. A wave of nausea hits her as the carriage hits a particularly large bump, and she grabs the waterskin, heaves into the opening. Larissa tries to hold her hair back, but Ariadna shies away.

She can feel Larissa’s hurt, but she is in no mood to placate her.

When the retching stops, Ariadna closes the waterskin and slumps back against the seat. There’d been no time to grab pillows or blankets or anything during their mad dash from Brightwater Keep. Ariadna had half a mind to keep her treasures and some coin in her chambers during those few days before her uncle struck and claimed the castle, driving her out of her home.

The sheer humiliation of it makes her cheeks warm recounting the event. She cradles her swelling stomach as the carriage hits another bump.

Larissa thumps the hood of the wheelhouse with her fist. “Careful!” she yells, and the carriage rider says something back.

They’d been moving like the wind ever since their escape. The travel from Brightwater Keep to the capital usually took a fortnight. Now, it had taken them a week. Ariadna had not been willing to leave anything to chance. If her uncle’s men caught her, they would simply drag her back, kicking and screaming. Hoping she would die in childbirth.

After all, she almost died the first time.

“Are you feeling alright?” Larissa asks, dark eyes latched on Ariadna’s hands.

Though Ariadna is only three moons along in this pregnancy, she can almost feel the baby kick in protest. Or maybe that’s just her stomach grumbling. Criminals on the run, they have been. The wheelhouse is their home. Their safety. Not Brightwater Keep, even though her father had left it to her, even though it’d been nigh on three years since he passed—

It’s not Larissa’s fault. It’s not Larissa’s fault that her husband, Lord Alester died. It’s not Larissa’s fault that Alester’s brother, Rickard, betrayed Ariadna and opened the gates for her uncle. It’s not Larissa’s fault that Ariadna’s uncle is an ambitious, duplicitous cunt.

And it’s not Larissa’s fault they left Robb behind.

A great, terrible pang of grief pierces her heart. Robb. A bitter yet sour taste fills her mouth. Robb Robb Robb—

Thinking of Robb splinters whatever remains of Ariadna’s soul in two.

She takes a deep breath. Larissa was right. It does smell like shit now that they’ve reached the city. Sweat beads on Ariadna’s brow. The city feels hot, makes the air in the wheelhouse taste rusty, almost heavy. Another deep breath.

The wear and tear of the last week must be banished. Robb and all memories of him are locked away inside her. There, he will be kept safe, at least in her memory. Please let him be safe.

She opens her eyes, smooths out the skirt of her black dress. Long silks, open sleeves. Mourning garbs in the style of the Reach.

“Do you have some mint leaves?” she asks Larissa, ignoring her question.

Her friend nods, reaches into her ever-faithful satchel, and hands some over to her. Ariadna chews on the leaves carefully, until she’s certain that all hints of her vomiting are gone.

Her stomach stabilizes. She forces life back into her frame. Ariadna may be homeless, penniless, and near-defeated, but she must be strong. She must be. Even if all she wants to do is lie down and sleep for a hundred years.

Or stab her uncle through the eye.

Either works.

“My hair,” she says to Larissa, running a quick hand through a lock. It’s certainly seen better days. It has grown longer these past few years, reaching down to her waist.

Robb never liked it when she cut it.

No, she chides. No. Her son and all mentions of him are locked away. She pinches her wrist, welcomes the pain. It gives her something concrete to hold onto. Something real.

“If you can fix it,” she says to Larissa. “I must be presentable when I arrive at court.”

A peace offering.

Ariadna tugs the sleeves of her dress down to cover her wrists. Larissa had to drag her, kicking and screaming to the carriage. And the carriage driver too. It had taken them both to overpower Ariadna and force her inside as she screamed her son’s name raw.

She swallows.

“Of course,” Larissa murmurs, and Ariadna knows her past few days of sullenness have been forgiven. Larissa fishes out a hairbrush from the bag, and quickly begins to unknot Ariadna’s hair.

Ariadna sits on the perch, her back to Larissa, and thinks.

“Ari?” Larissa questions quietly. “What are we to do now?”

A valid question. King’s Landing is better than home. Only royal intervention can rescue her from the mess she’s in now. Rickard’s betrayal ensured that she could not look for Tyrell aid. After all, this was a petty squabble among their descendants. Her uncle had not been dumb enough to strike while her husband was alive, but now that Alester had been dead for a few moons…

Indignation burns inside her. If she could, she’d spit fire like a dragon burn the entire world. She has enough bitterness and regret to do it.

She shakes her head. “Survive, I suppose,” she says. “There are no other Florents to petition for aid, and my mother’s family have no power or influence in the Reach. So we must submit our petition to the King or the Hand and…”

“You have family here, do you not?”

After a moment, Ariadna nods. “I do. My cousin – Larys Strong, I believe. It is said he’s close to the Queen, or so my father said years past.”

Ariadna had no chance to send a raven. She’d never spoken to any of her Strong kin before. Her father made numerous references to her uncle, Lyonel Strong, and the discussions he had with him to secure her succession. What good that did, she thinks grimly. As the years went on, her father mentioned Lyonel Strong less and less the more rumours they heard following the wedding.

The Targaryen Princes’ attendance at the wedding of a half-Strong was not something people did not gossip about. She’d heard her father and uncle speaking of the rumours. Of a man called Harwin Strong.

Gods be good. As if her life wasn’t already difficult.

“And will he help?” Larissa asks.

Ariadna respects her friend enough not to lie.

“I don’t know,” she admits. “I don’t know.”

Aegon’s father’s chambers stink of incense and something rotten. The incense is strong enough he nearly coughs – it’s solely there to mask the smell of sickness, which it fails at doing quite remarkably.

On the bed, Aegon’s father sleeps. It’s what he does all the time, really, nowadays. Sleep, shit and groan in pain. For whatever reason, Alicent makes him visit his father at least once a week, nevermind what condition he’s in. After the little scene earlier, Ser Arryk had come to guide him there, per the Queen’s orders. No doubt trying to prevent him from becoming drunk too early in the day. He’d only managed one cup.

Aegon peers down. He can see the outline of his father’s rotten flesh through the bandages. In a rare twist of irony, whatever disease afflicted Viserys had taken his eye. Aegon had thought to ask how Aemond felt about it when it happened, but he’d thought better of it, even if he couldn’t help feeling slightly satisfied.

It occurs to him then that if he sat beside his father at dinner, he would be able to see him chew his food down to bits considering all the flesh on the right side of his mouth is gone. Aegon has the strange urge to drop one of Helaena’s spiders inside his mouth and watch it crawl around. He imagines it traveling through his father’s insides, his father’s empty eye socket the end of the tunnel.

Mayhaps he’d feel as small as he makes them feel.

The door creaks open, but Aegon does not turn.

“I don’t see the point in this,” he states. “He’s sleeping – he does not care. Not that he would if he were awake, anyway.”

There’d been one time, though Aegon had never told his mother, where his father had woken during such a visit. Rhaenyra, he’d murmured, lost in the throes of medicine and pain, somehow mistaking Aegon for his eldest daughter. My only child.

“Do not say that,” his mother chides, though it is in a gentler tone than usual. “He is your father, and he is ill.”

And before that?

The times that Aegon can remember his father not wasting away are very slim. Always mourning. Always tiring. Always weak. He’d lost his arm a week after Aegon turned nine. He remembers having nightmares about the empty sleeve where the King’s arm once was. Imagined the stump hot red with bulging veins.

He turns to Alicent.

“You do not bring the children here, do you?” he asks. The thought is unimaginable.

“Of course not,” she tuts. “When he is lucid and feels well enough, his Grace on occasion reads them a story, though it saps his strength.” She shoots him a sharp look – one that makes him wish he’d had more wine.

He always manages his mother’s tirades against him better when he’s in his cups. It always bruises, though. However faint the marks are. Even if he doesn’t remember the arguments clearly.

The words linger.

“You would know this,” she continues, “if you spent more time with them.”

“I spend time with them.,” he snaps. More than he ever did with me.

Aegon works his mouth angrily, defensively. Fiddles with his thumbs. His mother reaches for them, firmly pries them apart. Instantly lets them go afterward. Alicent never likes to touch him for longer than is necessary. Seeing his father makes Aegon feel like a dog without a leg, dragging itself across the floor to get anywhere. An object of pity to everyone.

And yet they are surprisingly fierce. Aegon had seen such a dog in the Streets of Silk, and he’d tossed the pack of dogs a piece of bread impulsively. The strays had swarmed, but the one-legged dog had bitten and snarled his way to a decent chunk of the prize.

“They’re in my chambers with Helaena,” his mother comments, a clear challenge in her tone. “You can go and see them then, since you spend so much time with them.”

Aegon nearly sneers at her but acquiesces. He casts his father a final glance before his mother pulls him from the room. He does not know how or why she spends so much time in there, nursing the King, kneeling on the bed as she fluffs his pillows and wipes his dribble.

He hears his children from the solar, and a queer sort of panic forms in his chest. Like a bird flapping its wings, trapped inside his ribcage. It always feels like that when he’s around them.

Jaehaera is sitting by Aemond’s feet, playing with a few blocks. Jaehaerys is by Helaena, watching as she studies one of her bugs with a magnifying glass. He had, much to Aegon’s dismay, inherited his mother’s affinity for worms.

“Father!” Jaehaera exclaims, running towards him on her little toddler legs. Maelor, from where he sleeps in the serving girl’s arms, stirs a little, but does not wake. Aegon bends down, scoops her up in his arms. It’s instinct, really, to do so.

“Hello, little dragon,” he greets, smacking a kiss on her cheek. Helaena watches them, her magnifying glass still by her eye, making her look enlarged. He snorts, and Jaehaera follows his gaze with her eyes before giggling.

And somehow, for just a moment, that panicked feeling inside him ebbs.

Jaehaera has always been a solemn little creature. As a baby, she rarely cried or laughed. When he’d held her for the first time, it looked like she had a perpetual frown, like her skin was grey. But now, she laughs sometimes. Especially with him. In that way children always have unconditional love for their parents.

But one day, like with all children, that love dies.

The thought of this never happening again bothers him enough to put Jaehaera down. Pats her head when she complains. Jaehaerys doesn’t get up, but he does smile. Already it is happening. The slow disillusionment with their parents starts young.

“Aegon,” Aemond utters, lips pursed.

He ignores him.

“What were we doing here?” he asks Jaehaera. As she eagerly explains to him the very vivid and difficult process of building her blocks, Aegon watches her little face. She looks like him more than Helaena. The same round eyes. Thin lips. Better she look like Helaena.

Thinks he’s disappointed his daughter already.

His mother often says he doesn’t care about anything, but sometimes Aegon feels he cares so much he will die from it. His bones will rot and his ashes will be collected, but still his body will remember this weight. This crushing, inescapable vulnerability, like his insides have been picked raw.

“I have a lunch with Lord Larys,” Alicent announces, looking at him sharply. Don’t leave. “I shall return shortly.”

He can hear the frown in Aemond’s voice. “You are going to his chambers, Mother?”

“Lord Larys sent word that his foot is rather compromised today,” she replies. Aegon spots her pinching the inside of her wrist where she thinks Aemond can’t see. “It hurts more when it rains, or so I gather.”

Aemond grunts.

“No matter,” she assures him. “Lord Larys is a valuable friend to us.”

Valuable how?

Aegon does not understand why that man has grown so close to his mother. Harwin had evidently been one of Rhaenyra’s greatest supporters and confidants. If Larys wanted power and influence, surely it would be best for him to align with Rhaenyra, no? Blood bound them together, regardless of what his half-sister said about Jace, Luke and Joff’s parentage.

But Larys had aligned himself with Aegon’s mother against all odds.

It bothers Aegon, but he does not have the words to explain why that is. Usually he assumes every annoyance in his life is due to a lack of drink in his hand. Years of being told he doesn’t do enough has made him second-guess his own instincts. What a pearl am I, he thinks dryly.

“Father?” Jaehaera blinks at him.

“Yes?”

“Are you alright?”

He forces himself to nod. “I am, little dragon. I am. Come, show me some more.”

Helaena’s has grown more into parenthood than he has. When the twins were born, he and his sister almost seemed to share the same boat. Clueless, they were, when the babies screamed and shat themselves. Jaehaerys was even more of a wonder to them, with his sixth finger.

Does it hurt him? Aegon had asked the Maester the first time he held his son in his arms.

It shouldn’t, my prince.

But still, the worry had lingered. And Aegon knew not what to do. By the time Maelor had come, Helaena seemed less tired, in tune to their wants and needs. And Aegon had been left behind in his cluelessness. He knows his children are his, in a bone-deep way he feels with scarcely anything else. But they seem unbearably breakable, like he’ll simply breathe upon them and they’ll scatter in the wind like dust. Or infect them with the same restless, numbing disease that plagues him.

Aegon imagines whispering to Jaehaerys, my only child, as Jaehaera and Maelor watch, and his children seem more breakable than ever.

What she notices most about the Red Keep is how horribly busy it is. Ariadna has never been in a place with so many people before. Even at her wedding. There are groups in the halls, servants bustling behind them. Ariadna can’t help but keep her eyes peeled open. It’s the largest castle she’s ever been in.

There are some dressed in black, but none she sees dressed in mourning garbs like she is. A guard leads them up the stairs, a servant or two carrying the belongings they managed to stash in the carriage.

It had taken some convincing to get the guard to lead her to Lord Larys, right until a servant with a dragonfly broach had come, somehow sensing the truth, and given a nod of assent. Unnerved, Ariadna had choice but to follow them.

On the pillars, vines are twined around the walls. In some of the corners, almost tucked away from view, she spots dragon tapestries and other foreign looking statutes. Up on the bannisters, however, are symbols of the seven-pointed star. The Gods.

She rubs at her wrist. The Targaryen influence seems to be ebbing. Is this the King’s doing? No. Last she heard, the King was ill. Alester mentioned it after a visit to Highgarden. The ruling family of each kingdom is always somehow in the know of the goings in the capital. Even if Alester was the progeny of a second son, he was still a Tyrell. That held weight in the Reach.

No, if the King was ill, this was no doubt the work of his Hightower Queen.

Ariadna curses herself for not bringing beads with her.

She follows behind the guard, resisting the urge not to turn back to Larissa. The walls of the Red Keep seem to be closing in on her. It’s too large, too unfamiliar. Too much. They wind through the halls, turns and turns, so many she’s breathless. They reach a quieter part of the castle, near a corner.

Ariadna braces herself. This is all so foreign to her. From the colour of the stones to the height of the walls. For as many people as there are in the Keep, it all feels so echoingly empty. Almost unnatural.

The man with the dragonfly broach enters the room first, before either of them enter. And Ariadna—

She wonders, not for the first time, how she ended up here. And then her heart hardens. No no no.

The grey door swings open, and the man with the dragonfly broach steps aside, gestures for her to enter. Ariadna swallows.

“Thank you, Ser,” she says.

He nods, doesn’t reply, looks down. Larissa makes a small sound from behind her. Their gazes meet, but Ariadna forces herself forward. Now is not the time for doubt. When Larissa moves to join her, the silent man puts a hand on her shoulder, shakes his head.

Just Ariadna then.

Wonderful.

Ignoring Larissa’s look of alarm, Ariadna pushes forward. The door slams behind her with a resounding bang. She steps forward, clasps her fingers together on top of her stomach. Is glad she had Ariadna re-do her hair.

At the table, warmed by candlelight, a man at least ten years older than her sits. A wooden cane rests by his chair. Beneath the tablecloth, she can see the outline of the iron outline encasing his foot.

Larys Strong.

Her father had not taken her to the capital when he’d undergone his negotiations with her uncle to secure her as his heir, but he had told her of the man’s disabled son. A clubfoot dragging behind, she recalls.

She sucks in a deep breath. Men always want something from women, she’s come to find. Comfort. Purity. Sex. Appeasement. Validation.

What would Larys Strong find interesting in her? A man whose name she knows, but nothing else.

His gaze flits towards her. His eyes, unlike hers, are a grey-green colour. Though they’re smaller, beadier, with a curious, knowing glint in them. His gaze narrows on her face, then her stomach, then drifts down and up again.

“Your husband has been dead two months and you still wear mourning garbs,” he observes, lacking any greeting. “You must mourn him dearly.”

“Alester was kind,” she replies quickly. When he wanted to be. “And a good father.”

Larys plops a piece of cheese in his mouth. Chews. “Ah yes. Your son. He is not with you.”

How does he know all this?

Ariadna takes another breath, resists the urge to flex her fingers.

“No,” she agrees. “He is not.”

“What was his name again? Ryder?”

“Robb,” she corrects.

“Short for Robert?

“No. Just Robb.”

His lips curl. “Delightful.”  Her cousin shifts in his chair, rests his hands on the hilt of his cane. As he does, she spots the several plates laid out on the table. The cutlery and candles. Her mouth nearly waters as the smell of sweet lamb and fresh bread wafts to her nose. She’d sold pieces of her jewellery on the road to get food, which had been lackluster at best.

She’d given one of the few remaining rings on her finger – one her father had given her for her sixteenth nameday – to the driver in order to pay him for his services. The indignation of it all still burns. She is a lady, an heir, and she has been driven to this. Stripped of her birthright, her home, and forced to flee in the middle of the night.

All she has left is her dignity, and even that is battered and bruised.

“I wonder that you had time to put rings on your finger and mourning garbs in your chest before you fled Brightwater Keep, but not enough time to grab your son and keep him in your custody.”

Again, how he knows all this is beyond her. It must be spies, but who in her household would have been planted there by Larys? And why would he care enough to do so?

Ariadna stares at him plainly. That knowing glint in his eyes, like he takes a perverse sort of pleasure in goading her. A man like him – disabled, heir to an accursed place like Harrenhal, must have something of use in order to be kept at court. To be close to the Queen. It could not be his skills as a warrior given his condition, and he did not seem handsome enough to her to inspire a secret emotional devotion.

Information.

Who was the master of whisperers at court? She does not know. If Larys is this well informed of the going on’s at her home, she does not desire to know what else he is informed of.

And she finds it does not matter.

He knows what he knows. That does not change the past.

“My son’s chambers were too far,” she says. “There was no time.”

“Hmm.” He tilts his head as he inspects her. “I always found that parents are blinded by love from doing the smartest decision. Love stays the hand.” He drums his fingers on the table. “Is a downfall, if you will.”

What would you know of it?

“It is certainly fickle,” she agrees, and her heart hardens. Love. What a jaded, useless thing to her now. She’d relied on it too much, and she had guessed wrong time and time again. It had cost her everything. Men love things so long as they do what they wish. It is always littered with conditions.

More than that—

A man will not love anything more than he loves himself.

“Ariadna, is it not?” Larys questions. “Forgive me, I seem to have forgotten my manners.”

“Not at all, cousin,” she replies.

His eyes narrow a bit at that, before his gaze fixates on her face yet again. He hobbles as he gets up, his bad foot dragging a second behind him as his cane scrapes against the floor.

“You are your father’s heir,” he surmises. “Chased out of your home by a bastard. I assume you came to me for aid.”

She can smell his breath, stale and near acidic. His eyes bore into her skull, like he’s picking apart every thought she’s ever had. Like he wants to own her.

“The King’s justice can help restore what is rightfully mine,” she tells him. “By all laws, my father’s bastard brother should not inherit.”

He smiles. Leans a little closer.

Ariadna forces herself to remain still, even as her heart hammers away. She knows that look. All pretty girls know that look after a while, cousin or not.

“And you wish for me to intervene.”

“If you could spare a moment of your time to perhaps speak with the Queen, I would be forever in your debt, my lord.”

“I was wrong before,” Larys says. “No – I misspoke. Love and family is a downfall.”

“I would ask that you reconsider,” she says – near pleads. She hasn’t come all this way to be turned away now. Where would she go? What would she do? And Robb. Gods be good, Robb.

“Why should I?” he asks. “What are you willing to give me in return?”

She gulps, tries to hide it. But he catches it. She can tell. All Ariadna has left is meager pouches of coin and a few spare necklaces and rings and her dignity. Her pride. But what is pride compared to a roof over one’s head? What is her honour compared to regaining what is rightfully hers?

What is dignity to seeing Robb again?

 Nothing.

She’s already lost bits and pieces of those things over the years. Her pride when she whimpered, cried and begged for the pain to stop as she gave birth to Robb. As she threw up all over herself from the pain. Her dignity as her husband grunted above her, balding and greying. Those are intangible things.

Her body is real. Her heart is real. Money, power and station are real.

(her son is real).

Ariadna lifts her chin. “Anything,” she answers. “Everything.”

That answers seem to momentarily perplex him, before a slow, hideous grin twists on his mouth.

“Very well,” he says. “Prove your worth, and I shall do what I can for you.” 

A flimsy deal at best. Inconstant. Easily set aside. What else does she have?

“How would you like me to do that, my lord?”

He purses his lips, seems disappointed with her lack of insight. “What do you think is the most valuable thing in this castle, Lady Ariadna?”

She pauses, considers. “Information.”

“Ah, perhaps there is some—”

The door swings open. At once, Larys’ hideous grin disappears, and he assumes that nervous, twitchy look he held initially. A tanned man dressed in heavy silver armour walks into the room, followed by a woman with auburn hair, lovely eyes, clad in a splendid forest green dress. Atop her head lies a small, gold tiara lined with gemstones.

“Your grace,” she murmurs, curtsying deeply. Her knees strain under the weight. By Gods, she’s so tired and sore and hungry. Hunger is new to her. A lifetime of privilege has rendered her unused to lacking simple necessities.

Queen Alicent’s gaze flits between them. Larys bows his head.

“Forgive me, your grace,” he says, grunting as he moves back to his chair. “My leg is quite sore today.”

“Of course,” the elder woman murmurs.

Her gaze lingers on Ariadna.

“And you are, my lady?”

“My cousin,” Larys cuts in, beating her to it. “My father mentioned her situation in a small council meeting, if you recall, your grace.”

The Queen’s mouth tightens. “Ah yes, I do. Your father was Lord Arthur Florent, was he not?”

“Indeed, your grace,” Ariadna replies.

“And why have you come to King’s Landing?” Queen Alicent finally seems to notice her black dress. “Forgive me, I am sorry for the loss of your…”

“Husband, your grace,” Ariadna supplies. “My husband died not two months past.”

“Ah yes, I believe my sons attended your wedding to a Tyrell son, if I am not mistaken.”

Ariadna’s heart plummets to her stomach. Gods no.

“Or so my son Aemond told me,” the Queen adds.

Some of the tightness in Ariadna’s spine loosens. “Prince Aemon, Prince Aegon, and Prince Daeron were present, your grace. One of the great honours of my life.”

Queen Alicent smiles politely. “That was six years ago, was it not?”

“It was,” Ariadna says, resting her hands on her stomach again. The Queen’s eyes follow the motion, and there’s a split second where she seems close to tears.

“I am sorry for the loss of your husband,” the Queen adds gently. “I hope it was peaceful.”

Ariadna’s stomach clenches. “After he passed forty, his health took a turn for the worst,” she replies. “But the end was as quick and merciful as the Gods can manage for us.”

At the word forty, the Queen’s brow creases, then smooths instantly after. To Ariadna’s surprise, Queen Alicent reaches for her hands, clasps them tightly.

“You are most welcome here for the duration of your stay,” Queen Alicent promises Ariadna with a fervency she was not expecting. Ariadna has never known a mother’s touch, or been close to a woman who is greatly her elder. For a moment she forgets what to do with herself.

“I—thank you, your grace,” she murmurs, mildly stunned.

“It would seem Lady Ariadna has been ousted from her home in a violent coup by her uncle,” Larys chimes in, watching the scene with those beady eyes of his. “What was his name again?”

“Gerald Flowers,” she responds.

The Queen’s features slack with outrage. “A—”

“—bastard,” Larys confirms, sighing solemnly. A man of many faces, he is. Ariadna almost finds comfort in it. Better to know he’s untrustworthy from the start so she’s on her guard. Better that than to find out his true failings later. “A bastard usurping the position of a true-born child. What has the world come to?”

Ariadna watches intently as some of the colour leaves Queen Alicent’s fine face.

“Indeed,” the Queen murmurs. “A most troubling development. Rest assured, my lady, that your petition will be heard when the Hand assumes the Iron Throne.”

Head spinning, Ariadna can scarcely too anything but nod before the Queen ushers her into a chair.

“Please,” the elder woman urges. “I insist. In your condition and after what you have endured, you must rest. Eat, please.” She pats her hand comfortingly and sits in the spot between Ariadna and Larys.

Unnerved by this compassionate display, Ariadna’s appetite seems to vanish. She takes small, careful bites of her food. The Queen seems to be engulfed with motherly instinct, constantly checking that Ariadna is well, that the food is to her liking.

“We shall find chambers for you,” Queen Alicent tells her. “What do you think, Lord Larys?”

“With her condition, I rather think she should be closer to the Maester’s, should she not?”

“A splendid idea,” the Queen says. “Ah – I remember. My daughter, Princess Helaena, has just had one of her ladies return home after suffering a bout of ill health. You both are similar in age. You may join her service.”

Lord Larys’ stare grow harder.

“Of course,” Ariadna pipes up, unable to stomach any more of her food. “I would be most honoured, your grace.”

“Wonderful. The Princess and her children should still be within my chambers. We should go and visit them now, introduce you to them.”

The Queen stands, and Ariadna forces her limbs to follow, barely hiding the grimace from her face. Larys tilts his head again, lips pressed together.

“We shall lunch again together, Lord Larys,” the Queen says. “A pleasure it must be to have a member of your family at the Keep again.”

“It is, your grace.”

Queen Alicent pauses, a hint of wariness worrying her mouth, before turning away.

“Come,” she says. “We have much to introduce you to.”

Ariadna trails behind her as fast as she can. When they leave the room, Larissa is still there, though this time she is accompanied by the guard who escorted the Queen initially. The man with the dragonfly broach is gone.

“Is this your maid?” Queen Alicent questions, staring keenly at Larissa’s scar.

“She is,” Ariadna interjects, stomach tightening. “Larissa has been nothing but loyal to me, your grace, and accompanied me as I fled from Brightwater Keep.”

“A valuable thing it is,” Queen Alicent murmurs, “to have a loyal friend.”

She turns to the guard. “Ser Criston, if you would escort Lady Ariadna’s lady to Lady Lyarra’s recently vacated chambers.”

He nods, face solemn and statuesque, and obediently waves Larissa forward. As he passes, however, she does not miss how Ser Criston glances at her. The dark, perplexed look in his eye.

“Come along,” the Queen calls. “The children should be down for their nap, soon enough.”

Of everything Ariadna was expecting when she arrived at King’s Landing, being a lady in waiting was not one of them. She’d never been a lady in waiting before. She’s always been the lady waited on. Her house may not be the wardens of the Reach, but the Florents have always been valuable and wealthy allies to have.

Beyond that, her position as her father’s heir made her unique to most ladies her age. All of them had brothers or trueborn male cousins to succeed their father’s – or at least only the noble families of note. Ariadna had been taught more than just how to sow, write and recite poetry. She was taught that, of course, but her teachings had also included more manly pursuits. How to be the head of not only her household, but of the few vassals sworn to her father.

It always alienated her from the ladies she met that were of her age and station. Like they did not know what to do with her.

Ariadna did not know what to do with them either. She was an heir, and so, in her young mind, she was special. Not just a womb.

As she walks a few paces behind the Queen, she cannot help but swallow back the bitter taste in her mouth.

Be grateful, she thinks. They could have tossed you in a whorehouse.

She thinks of Lord Larys’ expression again, and her stomach tightens. All men are the same. But she—

She has survived worst.

“You should not drink in front of your children,” Aemond hisses at him.

Cheeses and meats had been brought to their mother’s chamber now that it was apparently time for the children to have what Helaena called their afternoon snack. Maelor is more than old enough to be eating solids, but he seems to resist any attempt to feed him something that looks yellow.

He wails at the top of his little toddler lungs as the twins fight over a piece of cheese that apparently looks like a seashell. In the wake of this, Aegon has poured himself a cup of wine. He’d tried to help, for the record, but that only made Maelor cry harder.

Helaena’s mouth is pinched, her eyes remarkably glassy as Maelor’s shrieks of protest grow sharper. Even to Aegon’s ears they are grating – he cannot imagine what they’re like for hers.

“I’m thirsty,” he snaps back, stubbornly taking a sip.

At a particularly large and note-worthy cry, he huffs and offers Maelor a grape.

“You see?” he asks, beyond impatient.  “This is green. Not yellow. Green.”

Maelor hiccups from where he sits on Helaena’s lap. Blinks at him with those sorrowful violet eyes.

“Eat,” Aegon commands, and his youngest son finally does.

He pinches the bridge of his nose and leans back, feels a headache come on. His family has their strengths, but patience is not one of them.

At that, his mother can most certainly agree, though she would be loath to admit it of herself.

Helaena does not thank him, but she does look remarkably less like she’s about to burst into tears, so he’ll accept it as a thanks anyway. Even though Maelor is sucking on his grape quietly, Aegon can’t help but feel a pang of sickness. What if I was too harsh? What if I should have made him eat that stupid piece of cheese? What if—

An endless litany of questions. Aegon takes another sip of his wine and blanches. His mother’s tastes have always been too bitter for him.

He’s always preferred sweet things.

He reaches for an apple on the plate of fruits, and leans back, about to take a bite when the door pushes open. Relieved, Aegon is about to spring to his feet so he can finally drink himself into oblivion, when he spots the woman trailing behind his mother, and he seems to lose the feeling in his legs.

“Helaena,” his mother beams. “I have found you a new lady in waiting – Lady Ariadna Tyrell.”

Helaena peers up, confused, and Aegon—

For a moment he is a boy of ten and seven again, having just kissed a beautiful girl at a wedding. It would be a lie to say that he missed or thought often of the girl. Years of drinking, whoring and drowning in misery had dulled the misery of that night. But Aegon remembers enough to feel a pleasant tug in his stomach as his gaze lands on her.

Lady Ariadna looks older, no longer the blushing bride he made giggle as they danced. Her cheeks are thinner, her eyes more worn out, like she’s lived a thousand lifetimes in these six years. There’s a downward tug to her lips, like she’s perpetually thinking about something. Even her hair has seemingly darkened, or maybe that’s just his mind playing tricks on him. Her hair is still braided elaborately, the top half pulled into a braided crown with cross-knitted patterns.

She looks especially pale now that she’s dressed in black, despite the swelling of her stomach.

Aegon’s gut clenches. They have grown up, the both of them. He can’t help but be slightly mournful of it. It’s ridiculous, and yet he cannot help it. At her wedding, for a few moments, anyway, he had been able to pretend to be someone different. Someone better. And now, he has turned into exactly what he feared. Any potential he may have had or shown that night has died, and he is molded in this shape forever.

Aegon is keenly aware of his own changes. The perpetual redness in his eyes that is harder and harder to go away. The way his stomach is slowly but surely softening from drink, the firmness of his muscles – earned from his years training (though not as intensely as Aemond) and dragon riding – fading away.

Mayhaps he will also lose an arm like his father. There’s a sense of poetry to it.

“Florent,” he says.

His mother turns him. It occurs to Aegon that the conversation has continued, and he must be interrupting. He can’t quite bring himself to care. He feels Aemond glare meaningfully at him, but Aegon doesn’t spare him a glance. He’d never told him about the kiss, but his brother had eventually noticed his absence. Or maybe Daeron had told him - impossible to say.

“It’s Lady Ariadna Florent, is it not?” Aegon questions. “I remember I attended your wedding.”

“Indeed,” Ariadna replies when his mother does not speak. “You did, my prince. It was a great honour.”

Aegon fiddles with the apple in his hand.

“She married a Tyrell, Aegon,” his mother cuts in. “You know the norms of the Realm.”

When have you ever been called Alicent Targaryen? There are more examples of this, Aegon realizes. Princess Rhaenys. Even his sister. And from what he recalls, Ariadna was her father’s heir. So why is she here?

She says nothing to dispute his mother, merely stares at him, as if slightly curious.

“We can introduce you to the court the day after next,” his mother says. “And you may begin your duties then. Give you some time to adjust and rest, after your ordeal.”

Aegon’s brows furrow. Ordeal?

He throws the apple, then catches it in his palms. Remembers sneaking into her orchard, drunk and sinking his teeth into the sweetest apples he’s ever tasted. Remembers thinking they tasted like her lips.

He takes a bite of the one in his hands. Not even close.

After the perfunctory introductions are made, Lady Ariadna is escorted out of his mother’s chambers, and the children are taken away from their nap.

When his mother isn’t looking, Aemond glares at him. Don’t sleep with her.

Aegon ignores him. Feels oddly bereft, not lustful. Recalls the current rigidness to her shoulders. The tiredness on her face, like she had not smiled in years.

Wonders what it would take to make her smile like she did on her wedding day. Finishes his apple, and thinks it tastes of nothing at all.

“So the day has gone well, then,” Larissa says, later.

They’re in Ariadna’s new chambers. The Queen had arranged for Larissa to join Princess Helaena’s household as a maidservant. It would mean more manual labour, but at least she would be close.

Given Ariadna’s pregnant condition, it had been determined it was appropriate to have Larissa share her chamber at night in case she needed anything. A welcome relief. Larissa smells remarkably nicer than Alester ever did on the occasions he fell asleep in her bed instead of returning to his own, or when she was called to his bed and expected to stay.

“Better than I hoped,” she whispers back. “We have an in.”

She does not know when the petition will occur, or when the Hand, Otto Hightower, will begin hearing new ones. And she tries not to think about Larys Strong, either. But still – today was better than nothing.

Love and family are a downfall.

She thinks on that over and over. She may have left her heart back in Brightwater Keep, but she still has her wits. Her mind remains, and that must prevail. She doesn’t have dragons or armies to force her way. Nor does Robb.

All they have is her.

She bites her lip, strokes her stomach, turns onto her back. And for the first time in years, she prays.

Prays that she will be enough.

Chapter Text

Chapter 3

“Ow,” Larissa complains.

“Sorry,” Ariadna mutters, trying not to tug too hard as she brushes her friend’s hair. Larissa’s hair was a different texture to hers and required a special kind of brush to smooth it enough for her to braid it easily. After a few minutes, they manage to get Larissa’s hair to settle, and Ariadna begins the long task of braiding it. She’s nowhere near as good at it as Larissa is, but braiding one’s own hair – especially considering how much of it Larissa has – is remarkably difficult.

It's been a fortnight since their arrival in King’s Landing, and they both are growing used to the castle. It’s always restless, never fully silent. Larissa, given her station as a lady’s maid, has to wear the uniform the others have. Red and beige dress, beige cap, hiding her hair.

A fortnight has confirmed their suspicions that using such a cap on Larissa’s natural hair was near impossible, and that braids were required. Hence why they’re both still awake at this hour, working in the candlelight.

“You should be resting in your condition,” Larissa frets. “I can manage this.”

“You spend your days scrubbing floors and polishing cutlery because of mistakes I made,” Ariadna replies. “Allow me to do this little service for you at least. Besides, I will not drop dead from being on my feet, no matter how much it might please my uncle.”

She glances down at her stomach. If anything, childbirth would do a better job killing her than anything else. Robb’s birth had been difficult, and she’d lain in bed for days afterward, weak and feverish. Gerald could simply wait behind Brightwater Keep’s high walls and let this pregnancy do the work for him.

Not that he could reach her now.

Ariadna doubts Larys Strong possesses any sentimental feelings towards her given their first meeting, but he had spared the expense to post a guard at her door. She suspects he’s done this mostly because of the Queen’s reaction to her situation, lest he look bad in her eyes. She appreciates it nonetheless, though she by no means feels safe in King’s Landing.

In truth, Ariadna does not believe she could feel safe again. Even if she managed to get home, she’d always remember her mad flight from her home. Knowing that danger was lurking. Waiting for the shoe to drop.

“That’s not funny,” Larissa says, frowning.

“I wasn’t trying to be amusing.”

Ariadna tugs at a particularly tight knot. “Sorry.”

The tightness near her heart squeezes it like a vice. Through the passing days, Ariadna has felt more and more wary, like her bones are disintegrating beneath her skin.

Sensing her worry, Larissa reaches for her hand, squeezes it. Ariadna can’t help but clutch it like a lifeline.

“Your petition will be heard,” Larissa assures her. “Time is all you need.”

“Time is my enemy, it would seem.” It grated her, really, to think of it. Knowing that she can’t do anything about it. That she’s at the mercy of others entirely. Larys’ charity. The Queen’s generosity. But they could only do so much. Her time in King’s Landing has affirmed one thing to Ariadna; she is a small fish in a very, very large pond. Everyone at court, even Princess Helaena’s other ladies in waiting, were circling around the crown. Wanting. Circling like crows, ready to swoop in for a feast when weakness is detected.

Ariadna’s troubles, the injustices she has survived – it is not the first thing on everyone’s mind. Everyone at the Red Keep has their own tale of woe, their own struggle for power. Larissa had told her little of what she learnt from other servants, though many were tight lipped around her. Women who looked like Larissa, with her light-brown skin and scar, were noticeably outsiders. If she came from Driftmark, mayhaps it would have been different. But Larissa’s accent is still noticeable.

Regardless, the information she had obtained was useful. Helps Ariadna find her footing in this wretched city. The council will only deign to hear her petition if they care enough. But why would they? The Queen had been surprisingly kind and quick to find her a situation, but she’s spoken no more to Ariadna than wishing her a good day since she entered Princess Helaena’s service.

“What cannot be cured must be endured,” Larissa muses. “An old proverb from Volantis.”

Ariadna’s eyes latch on her friend’s scar. The tattoo that was once there. A lone, single tear. Holds her hand tighter. What cannot be cured must be endured. Remembers Alester grunting above her. Staring at the canopy. Feeling herself drift from her body as he thrust again and again, her head smacking against the headboard.

What cannot be cured must be endured. There’s a stinging sensation inside her, a need to scream – there should be nothing to cure in the first place. Takes a deep breath instead. This is no fault of Larissa’s. Losing her temper with the Queen or Princess Helaena will only get her thrown out of the Keep to beg and whore her way to survival.

If it came to it, Ariadna would sell her body to restore what is hers – but she will not let herself be that desperate yet. The situation is not so dire.

“You Volantene people are wiser than us in many ways,” Ariadna mutters, getting back to braiding.

They remain in silence for a long while. Ariadna rather enjoys braiding. It keeps her mind busy. Lets her do something with her hands.

“Is the Princess still kind to you?” Larissa asks.

“Kind is one way to describe it.” Ariadna nearly snorts, then frowns. This bitterness seeps into her bones, clogs her veins. “She’s odd. Delicate, almost.” She pauses after tying a small braid. Gulps. “Like Robb.”

Larissa meets her gaze in the mirror. Robb. The glaring hole between them. The emptiness. The absence. Robb Robb Robb. To say that Princess Helaena and Robb are the same would be inaccurate. Princess Helaena seems trapped in worlds other than their own.

Robb—

Well. Getting through to him was never easy.

Ariadna closes her eyes, reaches for another lock of hair.

“That is good, no?” Larissa questions. “For your standing.”

“It could be. But based on the little I have seen, Princess Helaena does not seem overtly involved in politics – or that she cares about the going ons of the court.” In truth, Ariadna would be surprised if the princess remembered her name. The silver-haired woman was not cruel or mean-hearted, but she scarcely talked to her ladies – if she did, they were random bursts of words that had no rhyme or meaning to them.

The other day, Helaena had been practicing her needlework as her ladies mended one of her dresses when she’d abruptly lifted her head and declared, “What one craves is not what one ultimately thinks of when at death’s door. Blood shed for ultimate regrets.”

And then she’d looked back down as if she’d said nothing at all.

“But mayhaps gaining her favour would be beneficial,” she says. “It would maybe garner the queen’s attentions.” Ariadna has not met any other queen, but she does not think majority of them were so involved in council meetings. That, based on what she’s heard, is where the Queen spends most of her time.

The King has not made any appearances since Ariadna arrived. Rumours of his illness, it would seem, were not unfounded.

Ariadna just wants them to care. She’s seen Otto Hightower in passing, and has to resist the urge to run to him and gnaw at his leg like a dog. Look at me, look at me, look at me. Ariadna is so very very tired.

Her free hand gently glides over her stomach. How long will she able to remain in Princess Helaena’s service? Two moons? Mayhaps three, and then she would be deemed too thick with child to do so and shut away somewhere, provided she was still alive. She could lose the babe, and the bleeding last time she’d lost one had been so horrible.

But no good to dwell on that.

“I could also try and find a new husband,” Ariadna says heavily. The bitterness in her voice is undeniable, as is the crushing pressure in her chest. Grating and immeasurably hefty, pressing down on her heart, flattening it. She’s in this wretched mess because she didn’t want a new husband. Because—

But no matter what she wanted. No matter what she planned for. This babe will be born sooner than late, and if it is alive, she will need to provide for it, and herself. And Robb. She blinks back the moisture in her eyes. She has nothing – no dowry, no land. Has a babe on the way and another child to care for. No money. No prospects. All robbed from her.

She is, however, beautiful. Prince Aegon had not been mistaken in that all a husband wanted, especially an older one, was a pretty face and a fertile womb to pop out a few spare heirs just in case. Ariadna is lucky in that she is young enough for her beauty not to have faded – if this had happened ten years from now, and she had grown stout and wrinkly, she would have one less card to play. Or mayhaps it would take longer – the Queen is nearing forty, and she is still beautiful, no flecks of grey in her auburn curls.

Prince Aegon.

It would be a lie to say that Ariadna had thought of that one stolen kiss often. Not after she had Robb. During her pregnancy, and those first few moons… Ariadna could not help but muse how different her life could have been if she’d taken him up on his offer to meet his dragon. As Alester worked himself inside her, she would imagine herself on a dragon far above the skies, far away from the bed she was lying in. Or mayhaps Prince Aegon would have escorted her back inside. Perhaps he was nefarious and cruel and would have ensured her dishonour and besmirch her reputation. But, before Robb, she’d play that night over and over again, until it was a worn but familiar thing tinged in bitterness and innocence, a relic of an extinct time.

And then Robb was born, and she forgot all about dreams of dragons and running away, of the silver-haired prince who stole a kiss from her lips—

Thinking of it now, she can’t help but feel foolish. His reputation among the ladies and servants of the castle knows no bounds. Some actively seek his eye, wishing to warm his bed. He is still a beautiful man from the little Ariadna has seen, and many in the castle wish to seek favours or gain approval from the Queen and the Hand. Others avoid him lest they be sent away for any passionate indiscretions. But ladies, servants and whores alike, they all grace his bed.

A persuasive tongue, they say he has, Larissa had warned her, who, of course, knew about that fleeting kiss from years ago. Ariadna had told her shortly after it happened. After all, it was her faithful friend who had found her there, standing outside her bedchamber, fingers pressed to her mouth.

Larissa knew almost everything about her. Ariadna had not been counting on Aegon’s favour for anything. If anything, what Larissa overheard from the servants confirmed what she’d seen years ago between him and Samantha Tarly. A prince who overindulged in sex, lust and excess simply because he could.

Apparently, his mother had once found him bedding a Septa in the Royal Sept. Whether that was true or not is of no consequence, but the fact that the servants did not deem it implausible spoke to his true character.

“It is too early to think of that,” Larissa says. “Wait for more news before you try and wed another.”

Waiting. Ariadna has never been good at it. Besides, Alester died fairly recently. Some may think her a whore or untoward for speaking to any other men, widowed or otherwise. The Queen is fervently religious also – and Ariadna needs no reason to be sent from court or expelled from Princess Helaena’s service. An in is an in.

“She doesn’t like having her hair brushed,” she says. “Helaena. Like Robb.”

Larissa watches her closely, understands her meaning. “Oil,” she says. “Lavender oil. Makes it easier.”

It did for Robb.

Ariadna nods grudgingly, swallows back the bile in her mouth. Thankfully, her morning sickness has ebbed since she arrived in King’s Landing.

“There,” she says, eager to change topic. “Half-done.”

“You know,” Aemond drawls, as they watch his children toddle about in the gardens, “you’re not being particularly subtle.”

Aegon glances at him frown the corner of his eye, scowling. “How so, pray tell? That sapphire of yours must have given you prophetic abilities to see into someone’s soul, for I have done nothing.”

Aemond bares his teeth. Were it not for the presence of Helaena and the children, Aegon is certain his younger brother would launch himself at him. The most infuriating part is that he’d more than likely win in such a scuffle. Aegon’s lack of physical fitness is slowly growing more apparent the older he gets. He’d long stopped visiting the training yard, though he’d never been as dedicated a student as Aemond to begin with. He grows winded more easily after a night of drinking, muscles straining from climbing up and down the stairs leading to the Red Keep. The greatest physical activity he gets is riding Sunfyre and fucking—

Aemond tilts his head slightly in direction of the small circle of ladies sitting nearby Helaena. They work on their embroidery as Helaena—

Well. She’s currently nearly burying her nose in the grass as she inspects some kind of particularly rare ant. She’s occupied.

It had been their mother’s suggestion, of course, to go into the gardens on this splendid day. Helaena usually did anyway, often taking the children with her, but their mother is eager for other courtiers to see the happy scene of marital and family bliss. Nevermind that he and Helaena are rarely seen sitting nearby each other or acting romantically.

Usually, whenever his mother got into these frantic moods, Aegon would flee to a favourite whorehouse of his and indulge in wine and fucking. Now, he had acquiesced to spending the afternoon in the gardens. It’s relatively pleasant. A light breeze, the sun nicely warm. Even the flowers are blooming. With a cup of dornish wine, it’s almost a perfect afternoon.

Except, of course, for the whining in his ear.

“You know what I speak of,” Aemond says, voice hard but measuredly quiet. “Don’t act the fool, Aegon. It’s never suited you.”

He sneers. Behind Aemond, his gaze flits to Helaena’s ladies. They’re not too many of them, but they’re all at least relatively pretty. Some dressed in gold, others blue, some green or red. No doubt wishing to seek favour at court.

Ariadna is the only one in black. Even under the sun, it makes her particularly pale and thin, despite the slight swell of her stomach. Her head is bowed as she works at her stitching, her dark curls stirring with the wind. On her sleeves he spots stitching of flowers, laced in black, a small adornment to her mourning garbs. She’s picked up on the styles of King’s Landing rather quickly – the upper half of her hair braided into a coil on the back of her head.

Aegon has, if he does say so himself, gathered as much information about her situation as covertly as possible. Or at least he thought he had, save for Aemond’s suspicions.

His brother snaps his fingers by his nose, indignant and somehow smug.

“You were saying?”

“I’ve done nothing,” Aegon snaps. “You can’t tell me you aren’t curious about her circumstances.”

“I think you’re curious about seeing her in your bed,” Aemond states flatly, careful to keep his voice low.

Aegon rolls his eyes. “Like I said – I have done nothing.”

“But you haven’t said you don’t plan to.”

“She’s with child.”

“And that would stop you?”

It did with Helaena. Aegon doesn’t say that though. It took great amounts of urging from his mother to visit Helaena’s bed. Any excuse he had not to go was one he embraced fully.

“I haven’t even talked to Lady Florent,” he mutters. “Not since she arrived.”

Aemond humphs. “And that’s why you’ve started spending more time Helaena and your children.”

“I spend time with my children.” The hardness in his voice surprises even Aegon. A defensiveness. “Until you have children with whoever Mother forces to become your wife, don’t speak to me about them.”

Aemond’s lips press into a thin, disapproving line. “You never listen.”

“And you always accuse.”

Aemond seems to realize he’s hit a nerve, for he momentarily shuts up, thank the Gods. Wounded, Aegon looks away. He wonders what it says about him, that his brother is partially right. That part of why he’s been more present is this relentless, hungry curiosity. Sometimes he dreams.

Not of her, per say. But as himself as a pure, handsome knight, shining in glittering armour. Spinning a young girl at a dance, her laughter ringing in his ears. And then he wakes in the cold darkness of his room, and his miserableness washes over him.

It might be her laughter, but he can’t be certain. It’s been six years since he’s seen her smile – it might just be wishful thinking. Watching Ariadna now, he thinks it has been that long since she’s smiled. Her face even now is tense, solemn, her gaze flitting towards the sky every so often, before she glances at him.

Aegon quickly looks away, clearing his throat as Jaehaerys comes to showcase one of his findings – a particularly silver coloured rock.

“How lovely,” Aegon declares, with as much sincerity he can muster. For a split second, he stares at his eldest son, unsure of what to do. Five years old already, and that hefty nervousness has yet to fade.

He reaches out and awkwardly pats his silver hair. “Anything else you can find?”

“You’ll keep it?”

Aegon gulps, squeezes his fingers. ‘Of course I will.” And he partially means it. He hasn’t kept everything his children give him – who keeps dead spiders for Gods sake – but he keeps somethings. Remembers his own crushing disappointment when he saw his father lose or forget his own gifts – drawings and shells and whatever else Aegon thought his father would like as a child.

Jaehaerys runs along, but Aegon catches Ariadna still watching them as he closes the rock around his first. Aemond is quiet.

“Did it ever occur to you,” Aemond wonders, “that I’m merely offering advice?”

Aegon snorts. “And right after you run along to Mother and tell her of my doings.”

“I haven’t told her about this,” Aemond points out. “Or the wedding.”

“Nothing happened at the wedding.”

“You disappeared for hours, as did she.”

Aegon remembers his dalliance with Samantha Tarly with a chortle, and waves a servant over for a cup of wine.

“I did not bed her,” he insists. “I did not.”

Aemond huffs, but leans back against his chair, surrendering. “No, you merely watch her now.”

“I’m curious,” Aegon repeats. “Aren’t you?”

Aemond shrugs. “Her bastard uncle usurped her place and she fled in the night. Her former brother in law was the one who opened the castle gates apparently, or helped aid the uncle seize Brightwater Keep.”

“What a bastard,” Aegon murmurs. “No pun intended.” A thought occurs to him. “How did you find out about this?”

Aemond shrugs. “Mother told me. I can ask her about these things, you see, without her getting suspicious.”

Smug little bastard. Aegon grits his teeth instead.

“She has a son too, doesn’t she?” he asks quietly, as Jaehaera’s laughter floats to his ears. “I heard that.”

Aemond nods.

“Do you know his name?”

“No.”

Well, that was helpful.

Aegon rolls his eye. That damned curiosity stirs inside him again. He wants to know how a girl once dressed in splendid reds, oranges and purples went to mourning garbs. Wants to know what has blemished her soul so. It’s a silly curiosity, but the intensity of it transfixes him.

Sometimes, Aegon thinks the last thing he did right was asking her for a dance on her wedding night. The last kind, noble thing he did.

Ariadna – Lady Florent, Lady Tyrell – is staring at Helaena and Maelor now. Aegon’s youngest son is curled in his wife’s lap, giggling as he tugs at her silver locks. Maelor has a habit at tugging at hair – his, Helaena’s, Alicent’s. Even Aemond’s, which Aegon had given his son a kiss of approval for, much to his mother’s dismay.

It’s fleeting, but he sees the sorrow that darkens her features, like a grey, mutinous cloud threatening to overwhelm a summer day. And then, just as quickly, it’s gone. Her features smooth. But that ache – an ache Aegon can understand, must be lurking beneath.

One can hide wounds, but they bleed just the same.

“Helaena,” he calls out, without quite thinking.

His sister pauses, pale violet eyes blinking at him owlishly.

“Would you like to go for a ride with Sunfyre and Dreamfyre tomorrow?” He pauses as Jaehaera’s expression brightens. “And we can take the children to see theirs.”

Helaena claps her hands together, Maelor mimicking the expression. It almost makes Aegon smile.

“A race,” she declares happily.

Aegon scowls. “Sunfyre won that last one and you know it.”

“Because he whips his tail out to cheat because he’s grumpy when he loses.”

“Ah yes, because Dreamfyre nearly burning the keepers to bits makes her so hospitable—”

“Tomorrow,” Aemond cuts in, sick of their bickering. “Vhagar and I will join you.”

“How wonderful,” Aegon mutters, ignoring his brother’s glare.

Though he is mildly hungover, Aegon is true to his word. They cram into the wheelhouse, him, Helaena, the twins, and her ladies. Aegon visits Sunfyre, his true friend, but it’s rare that his visits coincide with Helaena’s to the dragonpit.

Often times, Aegon will force his guards to take him to Sunfyre straight after a pleasurehouse, and he’ll fall asleep there after his dragon hisses at the guards to leave them alone, wrapped in Sunfyre’s wings.

A few of the ladies look excited, others look sick to their stomach. From the brief glances Aegon shoots Ariadna’s way, she looks tired, flexing her fingers again. Still clad in black.

When they arrive, Aegon is nearly tempted to remain with his wife as the ladies are ushered to a safe spot, lest a dragon try to eat them. Helaena rushes off to see Dreamfyre with excited little skips, but Aegon has to descend lower into the pit to reach Sunfyre.

Majority of the caverns are empty now since Rhaenyra returned to Dragonstone with her children. Sunfyre and Vermax used to share a cavern – fast friends, they were.

Now, Sunfyre is alone. He perks with interest as Aegon steps aside, and then promptly turns his back.

“Sunny,” Aegon sing-songs, bending down to pat his dragon’s tail. “Come now. Forgive me. I saw you two days ago!”

Sunfyre grunts, displeased. Aegon sighs in false-disappointment, and then pounces on his mount, circling his arms around Sunfyre’s middle, so he’s almost covered by a wing. Aegon’s arms don’t link around, of course, but he nuzzles close anyway.

“Don’t be mad,” he coos, running a hand up and down Sunfyre’s stomach. “You know I love you best.”

Sunfyre seems to soften, before he swoops down and licks Aegon’s hair in one swift lick.

“Bitch!” Aegon gasps, as Sunfyre snorts derisively. “Come now – behave. Please.” He pouts. “I want to show you to someone.”

Sunfyre eyes him curiously, before finally grunting his assent. Aegon smacks a kiss on his wing. “The best boy.”

After the chains have been removed, Aegon guides Sunfyre out of the caverns. Usually he’d already climb onto his back, but he holds the riding chains like a dog on a leash. Sunfyre practically hops as he follows, panting loudly, tongue stuck out of his mouth.

The ground thunders as they walk, but Aegon is used to it.

When they emerge to the top of the pit, the ladies are bustled off to the side, the keepers standing nearby with their spears.

Dreamfyre is already there, Helaena soothing her mount’s scales. Dreamfyre is pretty enough, but Sunfyre isbrilliant.

“Showoff,” Helaena grumbles in Valyrian, loud enough for him to hear. Aegon cackles.

Look at me, he wishes to say. Look.

Sunfyre is the only thing of his own, really, that he can be proud of. That is entirely loyal to him. Hells, Sunfyre is the only being in this world that likes him. If something so beautiful likes him, there must be something worthy inside him, mustn’t there?

His gaze flits to Ariadna, whose eyes are darting between Helaena and Aegon, watching the dragons with—

Is that hatred?

Floored, Aegon looks away. It can’t be hatred, can it? Why would anyone hate Sunfyre? Oddly off-put, Aegon guides Sunfyre out of the pit, and then climbs up to his saddle. Within minutes, Sunfyre and Dreamfyre are in the air, flying amongst the clouds. Dreamfyre may be older, but Sunfyre is faster. He trills as they spin in the air, brushing through the clouds.

And yet Aegon can only think of her hard, almost bristling look.

Sunfyre must sense his distress, for he’s friendlier to Dreamfyre than usual. Typically they wack at each other with their tails, but now their wings glitter under the sun as they take a turn around the city.

It’s all peaceful, for a moment, until a dark shadow falls over them.

Vhagar.

Sunfyre hisses. His dislike for the old bat has always been constant, nurtured by Vhagar often knocking him about in the sky when Sunfyre gets too close for comfort. Rather like him and Aemond, in a way.

It sours Aegon’s mood. The old bitch is too large to be kept in the Dragonpit, so when they finish their second turn about the city over the sky, he returns to the dragonpit, ignoring Helaena calling after him.

When he lands, a few of the ladies have gone with the twins to their cavern. Their dragons are small, merely babies – and well, dragons are a lot cuter to people who aren’t Targaryen’s when they’re so little.

But Ariadna is still there by the entrance, pressed against the side of the wall. Hand on her stomach. Brow furrowed. The sleeves of her dress have slid up to her elbows, exposing dull purple-greenish bruises.

Fingerprints.

Frowning, Aegon allows the keepers to take Sunfyre’s reigns, and says farewell to his dear friend with a small scratch to his chin.

“My lady,” he says, eyes latched on the bruises. “You’re hurt.”

She startles at the sound of his voice, like she wasn’t even aware that he’d approached her.

“My prince,” she greets, curtsying. She glances at her wrists, and quickly tugs the sleeves back down. “It is nothing.”

“It looks like something,” he says, hands flexing at his sides. For a moment she’s not the woman before him, but the girl she was six years ago. “Someone grabbed you.”

He remembers what Aemond told him.

“I was held back,” Ariadna corrects. “I had to be.”

“Why?” He’s prying, he knows, but the response is instant.

She stares at him. Hard. “My son wasn’t with us when we left Brightwater Keep, my prince. I had to be carried to the carriage.”

Well fuck. “That must have been difficult,” he says stupidly. Of course it was difficult you fool.

“What was his name?” he asks.

Her lips curl. “Robb,’ she admits grudgingly. “His name is Robb.”

And then her eyes dart forward, and she takes a step away from him.

Helaena.

Later, when they’re back at the castle, Helaena doesn’t let him escape quickly. She skips to his side, links their arms together, digging her nails into his skin. Aemond joins them, appearing from the shadows – as he somehow always manages to do.

He can tell just by looking at her that Aemond has told her something.

“I haven’t done anything,” he says tiredly. “I haven’t.”

She narrows her eyes. “Believe it or not,” she replies airily, “your little dragon isn’t so talented as to make the sorrow in her go away.”

Aemond shudders in disgust.

“I spoke with her once,” Aegon says. “That is not a crime.”

He’s angry at them – both of them. And at himself. His own inadequacy. His clumsiness. His casual cruelty in asking her about her son. He didn’t mean to be, but he saw it on her face. How she did not wish to speak about Robb – not with him, anyway.

“And I’ll have you know,” he states to Helaena, “my cock is rather marvelous, thank you.”

Aemond gags, and Aegon stalks away when has the chance, head pounding. He needs a drink and a bath and a good fuck to make him forget his own name.

Ariadna watches as Princess Helaena is put in her robe following her bath, and her wet hair is gathered at the name of her neck. She flinches as one of the other ladies touches her skin, and moves out of their grasp, biting at her lip.

Maelor is brought to her, and Ariadna—

The smell of dragon lingers in the air.

It had been otherworldly to see them in person. Grand, majestic beasts. Sunfyre was the prettiest thing she had ever seen – far prettier than anything she’d imagined after her wedding. She’d watched as Helaena cooed at her dragon, and Aegon scratched at Sunfyre’s scales. Like they’re pets. Harmless, frivolous little things kept in the dark and brought out on their whims.

Ariadna hates them for it. She can’t help it – this burning, incandescent envy that throbs insides her. Poisons her veins. They have this power and treat it so casually. Like their dragons are dogs. If she had a dragon, she would go to Brightwater Keep and burn it to the ground. If she had a dragon, she’d make them give her back her inheritance.

No one could ignore her then. Brush her to the side. Make her a servant. She’d be home. Safe. Powerful. And so would Robb. She could burn the whole world with just a word and no one could stop her.

And they have that, and they do nothing with it. They don’t help her, they don’t help others. Prince Aemond seems to spend his time brooding, Princess Helaena is lost in her dreams, and Prince Aegon seems drunk.

At the thought of him, her bitterness grows. She feels more fragile, if possible. Speaking of Robb makes her feel like a fresh, tender bruise. If she doesn’t speak of him, she doesn’t breathe life into his absence. And he’s safe. Safe.

Helaena is asked by one of the ladies if she wishes to brush her hair, and she shakes her head and—

“Lavender oil makes it easier to brush, Princess,” she suggests. “Makes the hair softer.”

Princess Helaena meets her gaze in the mirror, and her violet orbs seem full of clouds. Maelor in her lap, the perfect family scene. Ariadna wants to scream.

Gods be good, she thinks. Was I always so hateful?

No, it can’t be. Ariadna can only remember a vague taste of it, but she’d been an innocent girl once, hadn’t she? She’d been made of something more than bitterness, tiredness and hatred. She swallows.

“Let us try it,” Helaena says. Someone fetches some lavender oil and, much to her surprise, Helaena waves her over to do it.

Ariadna goes to her at once, movements stiff. Oil rubbed into her palms before gently massaging it into the silver locks. The movements are vaguely familiar. Think of her as Larissa, she tells herself. This is Larissa.

It isn’t Robb. This hair is silver, not red. Long, not short. One brush. Two brushes. Three.

The door pushes open, revealing the Queen.

“Lady Ariadna,” she says, glancing between her and Helaena. She sniffs. “Is that lavender?”

“It is,” Ariadna replies after an aborted moment. “I heard it helps brushing hair. Makes it easier.”

“I see.”

The Queen smooths the lines of her green dress, glances at Helaena, who has started to mutter. Ariadna looks down to find the silver haired princess staring at her stomach.

“There are ghosts grown in the womb,” she says. “There are ghosts grown in the womb!”

Ariadna steps back, drops the brush, nausea brewing in her throat. Flustered, she tries to bend down to pick it up, but the Queen urges her not to.

“Wait for me in the solar,” she tells Ariadna. “We will go for a walk.”

Heart pounding, she nods.

She doesn’t know how much time has passed by the time the Queen comes out, but when she does there’s a crease in her brow as she worries at her fingers.

“Please,” she says. “Let us go for a walk.”

When they’re out of the room and walking through the halls, Ser Criston close behind them, the Queen apologizes.

“I am sorry for her comment,” Alicent tells her. “My daughter – well, she can say things sometimes.” Her expression softens as she glances at Ariadna. “I will send the Maester to assess you, if you wish.”

Ariadna resists the urge to touch her stomach again. “I would appreciate that greatly, your grace. Thank you.”

“Carrying children is never easy,” Alicent muses. “But we bear it.”

“Indeed,” Ariadna says, trying to ignore her unease. Ghosts in the womb. If she is going to lose this babe, it would be better to lose it now, would it not? Last time, it had been six months she’d lost it. Near seven. If this baby is doing to die, she’d rather it be now, then have to go through the effort of growing it and birthing it for nothing.

Gods, maybe she is just full of coldness now.

“What cannot be cured must be endured,” she murmurs.

Alicent looks at her. “That is an adept saying.”

“Credit must go to my handmaiden Larissa,” Ariadna replies.

“Ah yes, childhood friends are dear to the soul, aren’t they?”

Ariadna nods. Queen Alicent looks sad for a moment, before shaking her head.

“I know you must worry for your son,” the Queen says. “Rest assured, my father will hear your case shortly—”

And then a door bursts open on the side, and Aegon stumbles into the hall, a ginger-haired woman on his arm, kissing and biting at her lip, hand palming her breast, already stinking of drink.

It’s a quiet hallway, to be sure, but it’s still public.

For a moment, Ariadna can’t help but watch the way in which he devours the woman’s lips, and then her ears are ringing with the Queen’s screeching.

“Go, Lady Ariadna,” the Queen commands, and Aegon seems to sober up for a split second. “Go.”

She does.

The shouting Aegon gets from his mother lasts hours. He’s forbidden from leaving his chambers for two days, and when he finally does—

He goes to Helaena’s chambers when he’s certain she’ll be out. Usually Helaena, his mother and the children go for walks at this time.

And, for once, he is lucky. Still hungover, bruised, wounded, and sick with shame, but lucky.

Ariadna is in Helaena’s chambers alone, tidying a few things here and there, fluffing a pile of sheets.

“My lady,” he says.

She jumps, presses a hand to her heart.

“Prince Aegon,” she gasps. “Forgive me, I did not see you.”

“No need to apologize,” he says. “Please. I—” He coughs. ‘I have been in my chambers these past few days, after what happened.”

Her face grows blank.

Aegon doesn’t like feeling nervous. Desperate for relief, he digs his nails into his palms.

“I wanted to see you,” he says. ‘Quite urgently.”

“I see.”

He glances away from her, searching for the words. And then--

“Would you prefer me on my back or on my knees, my prince?”

Aegon’s neck hurts from how fast it snaps in her direction. He finds Ariadna fiddling with the straps of her dress, features expressionless, the pile of sheets set down on the edge of the bed. She starts pulling the strap of her black dress down her shoulders, exposing an expanse of smooth, tan skin.

He gulps.

“On my stomach would be too difficult, I think, with my belly, but if that’s what you prefer, I can make do, I’m sure—”

“What? Oh no, Gods—”

He moves without thinking, places his hand on hers, tugs up at her sleeve. Swallows at the warmth radiating from. Her skin. Ariadna pauses, stares up at him with bewilderment.

“My prince?”

He gulps, feels a little sick, or like he wants to cry.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” he says. “I don’t wish to bed you.” And then he instantly cringes because fuck— “I didn’t mean -- you are beautiful, my lady, but I would never demand that of you.”

He pauses, considers. “Or anyone else.”

Her confusion melts away. She stares at him instead, and fuck, he can’t tell what she’s thinking. Can’t help but think of her six years ago, with that light still in her eyes, instead of this hardness. This rigid cage her body conforms to.

Aegon grasps her hand gently, strokes her knuckles with his thumb without really thinking. She doesn’t look at the motion, but he can tell by the stiffness in her spine that she’s noticed.

“My apologies,” she says. ‘I assumed—’

“Not without basis.” He chuckles half-heartedly, still embarrassed. Aegon loves sex, to be sure. It’s the only thing he feels he’s actually good at. Far better than Aemond has ever or will ever be. But that doesn’t mean he wants his mother to see it.

Her lips seemingly curl, but there’s no warmth to it.

“I simply wished to apologize,” he says. “To you. For before. It was unseemly.”

Her brows knit together.

Aegon giggles again, as he always does whenever he’s nervous. His heart hammers away.

“Is there something wrong?”

“Not wrong, my prince. I—thank you for the apology.” A pause. “To me.”

“You sound uncertain.”

“I—”

“You can tell me,” he insists. “I want you to tell me.”

She looks at him, a million thoughts in those dark eyes of hers.

“I admit I am perplexed, my prince, as to why you feel the need to apologize to me.”

“Who else would I apologize to?”

Her brows seemingly reach her hairline.

“Your wife,” she replies. “Or mayhaps your lady mother, the Queen.”

And Aegon—

He tilts his head back and cackles. Still holding her hand, he leans back and laughs harder than he has in moons.

“Forgive me,” he says, wiping at his eyes with his free hand, unwilling to let go of hers. “Forgive me -- I suppose you are right.”

“You suppose, my prince?”

“In a regular family, that would be true.” His laughter dies. “But not this one.”

“Your family seems like any other. You have a mother, a father—”

“And my wife is also my sister.” He smiles tightly. ‘We Targaryen’s like to complicate matters even more so.”

For a moment it looks like she might laugh, but no sound escapes her mouth. She blinks rapidly, like she’s forgotten she’s awake, and pulls her hand away.

“Forgive me,” Ariadna murmurs. “I forgot myself. I thank you for the apology—”

“I meant it,” he cuts in. “I want you to tell me.”

“Why?” she questions.

Ah. The dreaded why. And what can he say, really? That that one night with you I felt like a man I could be proud of. Better. Braver. A silly dream, really. Aegon has fucked too many times and drank too much wine to ever be called good. But there’s a part of him that’s achingly resistant to the idea of being seen as nothing in her eyes. A disappointment.

Aegon already had that with everyone else in his life. Is it too much to want for someone to see him as more than he is?

“I want to be your friend,” he says. His skin itches with the urge to touch her hand.

“My friend?”

“Would you not like that?”

Ariadna stares at him. “I’m not exactly in the position to be a good friend to anyone, my prince.”

Call me Aegon. He bites the words back. “And why do you think that?”

She rests a hand on her stomach. “I am pregnant and a widow. Also penniless, homeless, and stripped of my birthright.”

“Well,” he says, marveling at this state of affairs. “At least my mother cannot worry that I can get you with child.”

Ariadna blinks, caught off guard. Once. Twice. And then—

Ah. There it is. Her lips twitch, shoulders shaking with silent laughter, and he beams. The lightness in his chest is blinding. Like he can float among the clouds.

“Such a suggestion would certainly be improper,” she allows, once she’s gotten a hold of herself. “But mayhaps an apology to her would not hurt. We both did witness your—” she pauses. “Indiscretion.”

“Apologies don’t work on my mother anymore, I’m afraid.” He flashes a smile that does not fit his face. Old, used and tired. A joke that falls flat. “She’s heard too many of mine for it to matter as much as Aemond’s.”

Too much information, probably, but it pours out of him. Leaks from his heart like a faulty waterskin.

Her face grows slightly pinched as she observes him. “I would not presume to claim I know anything about the Queen’s feelings.”

“I know. I’m telling you. My mother’s love is a rusty thing.”

“You think your mother prefers him?”

“I know so.” His lips twist. It should be a joke, but the bitterness has not escaped him. Aegon used to fight for his mother’s attention. For short bursts of time, he would try to emulate Aemond, especially after his nephews had gone to Dragonstone. But it would never last. He’d always crack, and his real self would shine through –

And that is an ugly thing to her. His own mother. “Do not all mothers have a preference for their second son?”

Ariadna tilts her head in consideration. “All first sons typically belong to their father’s.”

He guffaws. Her expression does not soften. Words brew on the tip of his tongue, acidic and venomous. I belong to neither.

“You don’t agree with my assessment,” he says, noting how she fiddles with her fingers.

She hesitates again. Thinking. He can see the thoughts flash in her dark orbs, but can’t decipher their meaning.

“Ariadna,” he gently cajoles, her name rolling naturally off his tongue. Tell me.

“You never love anything in the world the way you love your first child,” she says, cupping her stomach yet again. “Even if you do not mean to – they’re the first to rearrange your world, to change the core of your being, of your marrow. It doesn’t matter what they do – that love stays, I think.”

There’s a very strange sensation he feels; like there are strings holding his ribcage together and pulling, tugging them apart inch by inch.

“You gather that from your second child already?” he muses, feeling oddly small, even though he towers above her.

“I lost my second in the womb,” she states flatly. “This is my third.”

“Gods.” He blinks. Once. Twice. “We’ve both lived a life of tragedy, haven’t we?” Destined for more as well, though he does not say it. To compare the two of them makes him feel pathetic and insignificant. Aegon is usually blinded by his own self-pity. When he’s drunk enough, and his whores have either left or fallen asleep, he usually cries until he throws up or drifts into oblivion, choking on his loneliness and lack of ability to do anything right.

Cursing against Aemond, for being their mother’s favourite the instant he left her womb. Cursing his mother, for always expecting him to be something he’s not. Even cursing Helaena, who never wanted him as a husband in the first place. But this—it feels different. Hearing her story and seeing how Ariadna has conducted herself makes his own inadequacy more frustratingly apparent in a way he never expected.

“We make do with what the Gods deal us,” she parrots back before glancing down. “I am luckier than most.”

“How so?” he asks.

“Many women die to begin with in childbirth. I survived.”

Aegon swallows the bile in his throat – but barely.

Words escape him. He doesn’t know what to do, really, to make himself look better in her eyes. And he doesn’t understand the inescapable want to do so.

“Forgive me,” she says. “I find I am a creature of sorrow and grief lately. Hardly what anyone desires in a friend.”

His lungs seem to constrict. “I’m not most people,” he says, and he offers her his hand, just like he did all those years ago when they danced. “Sorrow and grief are my dearest companions.”

She looks at him then, like there’s something in particular she’s searching for. Then she gingerly places her hand in his, lets him squeeze it lightly, unwilling to hurt her.

“I think friendship is a rather valuable thing for someone to have,” he says measuredly.

Ariadna watches him, those dark eyes flashing with unknown knowledge. She squeezes his hand back, then slowly removes it from his grasp.

“Yes,” she agrees. “I rather think friendship can be beneficial to both of us.”

Chapter Text

Chapter 4

“Helaena,” Aegon singsongs, plopping down on the seat beside her. She’s sorting her cockroach collection, having preserved them long ago for her own inspection. It’s late. The children are well asleep, and the sun has set, supper in their bellies.

Aegon is certain his mother will learn of this and be pleased – him finally visiting Helaena’s chambers at night without her having to wrangle him into it.

Helaena looks up, scrunches her nose. “Tonight is a baby night?”

“No, Gods. We need a break from children, don’t we?”

She eyes him, working her mouth. “I do need a break from growing.”

Helaena had given birth nine months after they wed – almost to the day. The twins had come early, and the birth had been not without complications. Maelor came easier, but his mother told him to stay away from Helaena’s bed for at least a year after the twins were born. Maelor is two now, but—

Well, they have an heir and a spare now, to put it crudely. Helaena has never enjoyed her pregnancies- her dreams are horrible then.

She looks down at her collection.

“What do you want then?”

“Hmm.” He drums his fingers on the table, tilts his head. “How would you like me to help you in the gardens again?”

Helaena pauses, sets down her magnifying glass. Considers. “In exchange for what?”

“I have a friend,” he begins. “Or well – a friend I want to know better. But I can’t do that without Mother getting suspicious and sending her away.”

“Her?” Helaena’s eyes seem to bore into his skin, sneaking into every thought, categorizing them. “Lady Ariadna.”

“I never said that.”

“And yet you don’t deny it.”

He huffs. “Yes, it’s her.”

“And what do I have to do with that?” Helaena pauses. “You don’t want me to join do you—”

“Helaena!” He blanches, shuddering with disgust.

Helaena arches a brow. She can be particularly probing when she wants to be. “Then what?” She hums a little beneath her breath, scrunching her brow, like there’s a complex problem she wishes to solve.

“I can’t be with her alone,” Aegon tries again. “Not in my chambers nor anywhere else. Too many people, and if someone were to find us—”

“Mother would send her away,” Helaena finishes. “So you wish to use my chambers?”

“Yes,” he says. “You can be here, closeby. In the solar. You can send your other handmaidens away and I can—”

“Bed her in my bed?”

“Gods, do you take me for a heathen?”

She smiles primly. “Mother caught you bedding one of her ladies in the Sept. Sacrilegious, she called it.”

Aegon remembers that day. He’d seen her with Aemond in the gardens. Touching his face, a prideful smile on her lips. Gentle. Gentle in a way she’d never been with him, even as a child. Always distant. Always colder. Always lost, like she’s never known what to with him. How to love him.

And Aegon—

Well, he’s never claimed not to be jealous.

“This is different,” he says. This isn’t to get a reaction, to get attention – this is just for him.

“Different,” she mutters, frowning. “Ghosts in the womb, death in a kiss.”

Her mutterings go on for a few more minutes. Unsure, he places a hand on her shoulder. Squeezes it. The whispers stop. He doesn’t know what to make of Helaena’s murmurs – they make no sense to him. Not really. He just waits for them to pass.

“You have to look for the seasnails,” she says. “I want those.”

“Gods, really?”

“If you want me to agree, then yes.”

“Fine. How many dives?”

“Until you find me ten?”

Gods.

“Very well. Ten sea snails.”

“And four afternoons in the gardens.”

Aegon grits his teeth. “And four afternoons in the gardens.”

Helaena claps her hands delightedly. “We can figure the rest of the details later, I presume?”

Aegon nods, relieved, and then—

“Promise not to tell Mother?” he rushes out. “And Aemond? He tells her everything.”

“I promise.”

He chuckles, delighted, and bends forward to smack a long, wet kiss to her cheek. “You’re brilliant, Helaena, do you know that?”

He reaches back in his pocket and unveils a ruby ladybug necklace laced with black gemstones. Helaena loves making her own jewellery, but their mother doesn’t allow her to wear the handmade insect necklaces before the court. Within their own chambers and in Maegor’s Holdfast is allowed, but if they have to be in the Great Hall or more public areas she forbids them.

But this – an insect necklace made of actual jewels – she can’t forbid, can she?

“It’s gorgeous, Aegon,” she coos, flushed with awe. “Where did you find it?”

He waggles his brows. “My trips to the city are good for something.”

He’d seen it in a stall near one of his favourite pleasure houses, and had used his coin on that instead.

“Why didn’t you give this to me before?”

“Wanted it to be a thank you,” he says. For a moment, it almost seems like they like each other. He can’t help but warm at her approval. It happens so rarely, him doing something right, that he can’t help but cling to it.

And yet, inevitably, he knows it will be ruined.

He clears his throat, pulls away before he can say or do the wrong thing for it is only a matter of time.

“Tomorrow then,” he says, but Helaena is already muttering, whispering of her dreams.

She doesn’t notice him leave.

Nigh on a week after Ariadna’s conversation with Prince Aegon, she’s convinced that she either imagined the whole thing or that he was drunk or otherwise mentally indisposed. She half expects for the Queen to storm into her chambers and banish her from the court.

But it doesn’t happen.

Her anxiety worsens the longer she hears nothing. Stuck with nothing to do but serve and be and smile and try not to scream. Trapped in a dreadful routine, day after day. She almost asks to see Larys Strong, but he seems to be intentionally avoiding her. No accidental interactions or brushing past each other. No whispers.

The Queen seems to have an infinite amount more patience than she does.

Nothing happens, at least until today.

When she enters Princess Helaena’s chambers with the other ladies, she’s sitting by herself, working on her stitching.

“I’d like to be alone today,” Helaena says. “You all can come back later. Too many of you in here. Lady Ariadna, you can stay for now. There are some tasks in my bedchamber.”

Ariadna resists the urge to sigh. The further along in her pregnancy she grows, the thicker her ankles seem to get. Over four moons already. Gods, it seems like only yesterday that they buried Alester. She can still remember how the sun shined.

It had seemed like a new beginning – almost hopeful.

She idly rubs the swell of her belly. In truth, she has no desire to be around Princess Helaena after the incident. The ghost in her belly. She presses slightly harder against her stomach, but still there’s no sign. No kicking or fluttering. Some women feel it this early, but Ariadna had been five months in before she felt Robb, or so Larissa claims.

The other ladies shuffle out the door, sending her cold looks. Princess Helaena does not seem to notice. Around her neck, a ruby necklace gleams, a ladybug at its centre. New, Ariadna believes. And more than likely expensive.

Helaena has returned to her needlework, and so Ariadna makes her way to the bedchamber without a word, tugging at her black sleeve. Ariadna is not a commoner or typical servant, so thankfully she does not have to worry about emptying chamberpots or scrubbing floors. Mostly they’re meant to serve as Helaena’s companions or help sort through fabrics for a new dress or aid in works of charity. Sometimes they reorganize things to her liking, seeing as Helaena adores having her items sorted in a specific way. Or they aid her in dressing.

But she’s already done that this morning, it would seem.

Ariadna expects some other menial task in the bedchamber, but when she enters there is only Prince Aegon lounging on a chair by the fireplace, seemingly inspecting the ring on his finger. Placed on the small round table next to him lies a plate of food. Some fruits, cheeses, meats.

Apples.

“Forgive me, my prince,” she says, evidently startling him, given by how he jumps in his seat. “I did not expect you here. I shall leave—”

“No,” he says. “No. This is for you. Well – for us.”

She blinks. “For us, my prince?”

Aegon brightens, tugging at his deep green doublet. He doesn’t seem so hungover this morning, instead overcome by a poorly restrained kind of nervousness that makes his eyes seem wider. His cheeks twitch like he’s trying not to smile.

“To be friends,” he explains. “Well – to deepen our friendship.”

Ariadna, for what feels like the first time in her life, is speechless. As if stuck in water, she slowly, painfully, glances over her shoulder. Princess Helaena is lost in her own world, entirely ignoring her, focusing her violet, beady eyes on her needlework. She jerks the door closed slightly more so the Princess is only partially in her line of sight, and then turns back to Prince Aegon.

She is—

Incredulous. Surprised. Taken aback.

Friends.

“Sit,” Aegon says. “If you want to, that is.”

Gingerly, trying to grasp her bearings and trying to hide how bewildered she feels, Ariadna does. The chair creaks beneath her wait, and she almost sighs at the relief given to her ankles now that she’s off her feet. Stop this, her mind hisses. Don’t get too comfortable.

That never seems like a good idea for women alone with Prince Aegon. She straightens her back, rests her hands placidly on her knee. Hates that her back is to the door, as if someone were to sneak up behind her and stab her in the back.

Aegon doesn’t seem to know what to do now that she’s sat down. Ariadna is not certain what to say either. His wife is outside. Ariadna had thought of many consequences or scenarios regarding her friendship with Prince Aegon, but she’d never thought his wife, her mistress, would know.

“Apologies for the formalities,” he decides on. “There is no other means by which we can be alone without calling into question your honour, lest someone walk in.”

“That is very considerate of you, my prince.”

He smiles. It seems cracked with nervousness, a hint of uncertainty lurking in those purple eyes.

“Should you not call me Aegon?” he asks. “If we are to be friends, we need familiarity.”

“I’m not sure that would be appropriate.”

“Why not?” He leans back in his chair, slowly regaining his confidence. “What would you recommend then, to deepen friendship?”

“Talking, as we are doing this very moment.” Ariadna is careful to keep her voice quiet. The thought of the princess overhearing every instance of this conversation makes her profoundly uncomfortable.

Aegon grins. “You have me there, but I will convince you eventually.”

She forces her lips upwards, tries for it to be genuine.

“Here,” Aegon says, handing her an apple. “They’re not as good as the ones from your orchard, but they are decent.”

Ariadna accepts the offering, takes a small, delicate bite.

“Not sweet enough,” she comments. “Not like the ones back home.” She tries to think of what time it is in the season. Are the apples out? Are they dead? Would Robb be running amongst the trees as he liked to do when the flowers came out? She can’t remember. She can’t remember. One of her hands curl around the arm of her chair.

“Ariadna?”

She shakes her head. Returns to herself. Tries not to feel breathless. “Forgive me – I was lost in thought for a moment.”

“I should be asking for your forgiveness,” he says.

She looks up at him.

“I’m the one who stole a dozen from you the night of your wedding. I could not resist.”

Surprising even herself, Ariadna smiles fleetingly. “My father didn’t know who the culprit was.”

“But you did.” Their gazes meet.

“Yes,” she agrees, gaze flitting back to the empty fireplace. “I did. And I believe it was two dozen apples, my prince.”

“Accept my even greater apology then.”

Her hand slowly uncurls around the wood, returns to her stomach.

“How do you feel?” he asks, once the silence drags on too long.

“Well enough. Despite the theatrics the past few months, it has remained, so…” Her voice trails off.

“I am sorry,” he says. “For your husband. I forgot if I said so before.”

Alester. Even now, she could still feel him. Kissing her. Holding her. His touch a chain around her wrist. After her father died, her husband’s presence seemed to overwhelm Brightwater Keep. Thankfully he kept mostly to his own chambers at night, but Ariadna would have incense burning for hours since his smell lingered beneath her nose.

And then—

“He wasn’t cruel, was he?” Concern is tight in his voice. Despite the impropriety of it all, it sounds genuine. Forceful. “He seemed like a fool. No offence.”

Ariadna almost laughs. Fiddles with her sleeve instead. Soon enough, she would transition out of her mourning garbs. Alester. How could she describe him? He wasn’t a monster. Did not delight in death or rape. Did not murder his servants or beat her with his belt. But he wanted. Wanted to be the Lord in his own home. Wanted to force the world to give him what did not come naturally. Wanted—

“No,” she replies curtly. “He wasn’t cruel.” A pause. To be too curt would discourage this friendship, and Ariadna—

Well, she can’t say she won’t need it in the future. “He was just a man.” And what other men define as cruel does not align with a woman’s definition.

“A friend, at the least?”

“Gods, no.”

Aegon smiles ruefully. “A sad thing it must have been then, to have no friends.”

“I had Larissa,” she says. ‘I’ve always had her. I wasn’t alone.”

He peers at her, and she returns the gesture.

“What of your friends, my prince?” she asks.

He grins, laughs maniacally. She can hear the tinge of sadness beneath.

“I have none,” Aegon declares. “Can you believe it?”

Ariadna can’t help her frown. He’s a prince. He may be isolated because of his power, but certainly he has friends. He’s grown up at court his whole life. He has siblings.

“You must have some,” she says, somehow feeling the need to argue.

Aegon pauses, strokes his chin. “I had Jace once. And Luke.” A shadow crosses over his face.

“My prince?”

“My nephews,” he clarifies. “Jacaerys and Lucerys.”

Ah. Ariadna’s mouth flattens into a line. The rumoured bastard offspring of Princess Rhaenyra and Ser Harwin Strong. If those whispers are true, that would make them her cousins. Ariadna does not see the value in recognizing such a connection. If they were Harwin Strong’s children, their sheer existence would be treason, and Ariadna has no desire to be caught up in more trouble.

Besides, they would not want to ally themselves too closely with another Strong, would they? Nevermind the fact that it had never been her name.

“You were friends with them?” she asks carefully.

He nods. “Once. My mother was not too pleased with that.”  He crosses his legs together, ever the picture of casualness. “What do you make of her?”

“Of who?”

“My mother.”

Ariadna can’t help but glance sharply over her shoulder, but Princess Helaena has made no sound. She doesn’t even know if the princess can hear them fully.

“Her Grace has been nothing but kind to me.”

“Yes, I’m sure she has.” Aegon bites his lip. “I think you remind her of herself.”

Ariadna says nothing.

“You know – young brides forced to marry men decades older than them to produce heirs. Became mothers young. Neglectful husbands.” Aegon reaches for his cup, sips at his wine. “Sorry, I forget that not everyone is used to my scandalized behaviour.”

“I would not call it scandalous, my prince.”

“Then what would you call it?”

“Honest. Perhaps too much.”

Aegon tilts his head back and chuckles.

“Is truth not the bedrock of any true friendship?” he asks. “Is that not what everyone wants?”

“I suppose.”

“You don’t agree.”

“I have no opinion—”

“You’re lying,” he says. “I can tell.”

“Honesty in all things?”

He laughs again. “I usually like honesty about myself when it’s things I want to hear, and that happens too rarely.”

A pause.

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“Which, my prince?”

“What do you want?”

There’s an edge to her smile now. “I don’t believe you asked me that before.”

“I’m asking you now.”

Of course. A demand veiled as a request. No matter this… occasion, he is still a prince, and she is still a lady. A rather powerless one at that. The most infuriating thing of it all is that it doesn’t even seem like he’s aware of this privilege, this underlying fact that even if she wanted to say no to these interactions, she couldn’t. Not without fear of reprisal.

It makes her bite down on her tongue. What does she want? Too many answers. Her uncle’s head on a spike. To see Robb. To claim her inheritance. To go home. To deliver this babe safely and not die. To never be powerless again.

But more than that, deep deep down, all she wants is for someone to hold her and say everything will be alright. More than that – she wants to believe them. She’s so tired.

“To go home,” she replies eventually.

Aegon’s face sombers. It makes looking at his beauty a little easier.

“Yes,” he says. “I imagine you would.”

“And you?” she asks, trying for levity. It feels so foreign to her. “What do you want, my prince?”

He shrugs, eyes the door.  “To have that trust in someone that everyone else seems to.”

Any attempt of levity dies, tastes like ashes in her mouth. She doesn’t think he’s being entirely honest when she notices him scratching his cuticles, but she is in no position to demand for the truth either.

“Have you ever had that?” he wonders. “That trust? And had it broken?”

Ariadna’s muscles spasm. It takes every inch of her strength to keep her fingers still. Try as she might, even as she tries to will it away, Rickard’s face flashes before her eyes. She swallows, ignoring the sting to her pride. The hurt that still lingers.

“No,” she replies. “I can’t say that I have.”

Three weeks unfold with those stolen meetings. It doesn’t happen every day, of course, lest he arouses his mother’s suspicion, but it happens often enough for Aegon to feel like he’s starting to know her. He brings new snacks for her everyday – apples, some peaches, oranges. Figs. Honey. He notes what she likes, what she doesn’t.

Can tell by if she has more than one bite of the snack. “Sensitive stomach,” she’d explained. “My cravings have always been funny.”

He gathers any piece of her he can, like a mouse searching for crumbs. Tries to paint himself a full picture. Perhaps what remains so enticing about it all is how much she gives him without giving him everything about herself. For every answer she provides, a dozen more mysteries pop up. She’s honest enough with her answers that he’s pleased with her lack of lies, but Aegon has this innate gut feeling that she isn’t being entirely truthful. That every time he looks into those dark eyes of her she’s holding back.

Even if it’s just a scream, he wants to hear it.

“Aegon!” Helaena chastises from where she stands on the beach. “Focus!”

He coughs up an impressive amount of seawater, rubbing at the burning in his eyes.

“Mother,” Jaehaerys says solemnly at her side, “why is Father rolling around like a dolphin?”

Aegon had not wanted the children to witness this particular brand of humiliation, but the day had been particularly lovely, and so Helaena had insisted.

Helaena pats their son’s head. “He’s doing a favour for me, my darling.”

Jaehaerys shrugs, as if to say that’s normal, before turning around and going to play with his sister. Jaehaera is already in the process of making a particularly large sandcastle, molding the structure with her hands. Her twin, without them needing to say a word, starts to build a moat.

Little Maelor is snoozing in the shade with the only other blanket curled beneath him. Well, besides the one Ser Erryk is holding as he stands anxiously by the water, eyeing the sea as if an assassin were to spring from its murky depths or Aegon would be caught in a fishing net.

Helaena flips open her book and turns it to him. From this distance, he can barely see the page, especially with the glare of the sun.

“This!” she calls. “This is how it looks like.”

“Gee, how helpful.”

“Try again!”

He takes a deep breath and dives back down. He’s not very far deep – Aegon learnt how to swim when he was young along with his siblings and nephews. An important life skill, his father had called it. Aegon hardly thinks he meant this, but when has he disliked shoving it to his father?

It burns, keeping his eyes open, but he does so long enough to spot what he thinks might be the creature she’s looking for, and bends down to scoop it up. It feels wet and slimy in his hold and he holds it up for her inspection as he rubs furiously at his eyes with his free hand.

“That’s a piece of seaweed.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake—”

“Try harder,” she says, stomping her foot on the ground. “You promised.”

He looks up at her. His tunic clings to his chest, weighs him down like a rock. Helaena had wisely told him notto strip down in the nude, lest their mother happen to come across their doings or some other lady. But Gods, does he feel so heavy now.

He opens his mouth to respond, but then he catches sight of Aemond striding along the beach, steps quick and furious, mouth pressed into a white line. How did he even spot them? They specifically went to the beach behind the castle, where few would be able to even look down and spot them on the shore.

“Fucking fuck,” he mutters, and Helaena whirls around just in time to catch sight of Aemond.

“What in the seven hells are you doing?” Their brother stands beside Helaena with their hands on his hips, scowling. He looks so much like their mother Aegon nearly – foolishly – laughs. He turns his wrath upon Aegon’s sworn shield. “When my mother hears of this—”

“She won’t,” Helaena interrupts, for once looking upset with Aemond. Aegon thinks the world might be ending. “You won’t tell her, Aemond. I’ve been wanting these snails for moons now. Moons.”

Aemond takes a deep breath through his nose, then moves until he’s standing closer, the waves licking at his ankles, wetting his boots.

“What did you do to agree to this?” he demands suspiciously. “Did you fuck a woman in our mother’s bed now?”

“No, but now that you mention it—”

“He hasn’t done anything bad,” Helaena chimes in, linking her fingers together.

Aegon brightens. He thinks Helaena means to be kind, but he can’t resist the urge to taunt Aemond, especially when he’s so achingly self-righteous. “We were having a family moment, you know. Husband and wife. Very romantic.”

Helaena rolls her eyes, mutters something under her breath. For once, Aemond is the odd one out. The one not invited. The one alone. The feeling of being welcome is intoxicating.

“Well,” Aemond says, for once looking unsure. “Do you need help?”

Helaena opens her mouth, but Aegon—

He beats her to it.

“No,” he declares with newfound muster. “I shall do it.”

And he dives back down.

Seven fucking hells, he thinks later, gritting his teeth.

“Does it hurt much, Father?” Jaehaera asks, watching as he holds out his hand and resists the urge to close his fist. She stays close to him, oddly fascinated by the display. Aegon had managed to fetch four of those wretched seasnails, which Helaena had promptly put in a jar full of seawater for safekeeping. She’s currently peering at them now, Jaehaerys tucked into their side as they walk.

Unfortunately, during Aegon’s wonderful display of his diving skills, he accidentally touched an urchin, and now black pincers are stuck in his skin. Aemond’s face is dark as thunder as he carries Maelor on his back, muttering about what an idiot he is. Ser Erryk’s face is also particularly white as they claim their way back up the stairs close to the gardens.

“Not much, sweet one,” he replies, trying not to think that there are black needles in the flesh of his palm. He half thinks he’ll try to rip them out with his own nails, which doesn’t seem wise. Now, of course, they will have to go to the Maester, because while Aegon does not want to face his mother’s wrath, he wants to lose his hand far less.

Walking in soaked clothing is not a particularly pleasant experience, but at the least the sun is hot enough for it to feel moderately dryer. He needs to go back and change before anyone else spots him. Aemond stalks ahead, clearly infuriated, and Aegon—

He pauses. Spots Ariadna sitting beneath an oak tree, book in hand, studying intently. He doesn’t recognize its cover. He pauses, considers his options. “Run along to your mother,” he urges Jaehaera, loud enough that Ariadna looks up and spots him. Her brows furrow, clearly confused, and he walks over to her, wet clothes and all.

“Splendid day isn’t it?” he greets, flicking his hair off his brow. He doesn’t not show off how sheer his white tunic is now. Near indecently so.

Ariadna shuts her book, but not before Aegon spots drawings of various plants and what appears to be a child’s writing beside it.

“Indeed,” she says. “I believe you have gone for a swim.”

“What gave it away?” He grins. “I promise it wasn’t me fishing a barrel of ale.”

Ariadna chuckles slightly – a low, raspy sound, like she’s disused to the notion.

“Aegon.”

Helaena appears close to him, the twins in tow, watching Ariadna closely. At once his friend is on her feet, curtsying, clutching the book to her side as if to hide it from view.

“Princess,” she bows. She must have had the day off, given Helaena’s business. Ariadna’s hair is braided back in loops and ties at the back of her head, some of the braids tumbling down her back.

“Lady Ariadna,” Helaena murmurs. Her gaze fixates on Ariadna’s swelling belly, and Aegon frowns as Ariadna’s hands cover it, as if trying to shield it from his sister’s gaze.

“Your hand,” Ariadna says, once she spots the swelling.

“Father touched an urchin,” Jaehaerys informs her, scratching his chin and showcasing his sixth finger. Ariadna does not seem repulsed by it, though maybe she has grown used to it. Jaehaera hides behind him, ever the shier of the two. Maelor and Aemond are long gone. “He was catching seasnails for Mother.” He grabs the glass jar from Helaena and thrusts it front of him, so close it nearly grazes her stomach.

“I see.” Ariadna lifts a hand to shield her face from the sun. “How lovely, Prince Jaehaerys.”

Aegon moves to clasp his son’s shoulder, but momentarily forgets his current predicament long enough for pain to shoot up his spine.

“You should be attended to, my prince,” Ariadna says.

“Yes, and the Grand Maester is in a small council meeting, and that does not bode well for me.”

Helaena remains oddly quiet, even as Ariadna’s friend – Larissa, he believes – emerges from the shadows clad in her serving garments, her white eye especially noticeable in the summer heat.

“Larissa,” Ariadna calls. He watches how her face softens, almost relaxes, in her friend’s presence. Almost unnoticeable to others, but not to him. He thinks that Larissa might be the sole person in the world she actually trusts. He doesn’t know her well enough to be envious he does not have that status, but he can’t help the stab of envy.

Larissa bows deeply, steps closer to Ariadna.

“Prince Aegon came into contact with a sea urchin,” Ariadna says.

Larissa’s head snaps up. “I know Volantis there were some.”

“Yes,” the serving girl murmurs after a moment. “There were.” Hesitantly, she glances at Aegon. “If I may, my prince?”

“You may.”

Helaena watches them without a word.

“You must soak it in vinegar,” Larissa advises. “For a while. And then you take them out with pliers.”

“Knowing our Maester, he’d advise me to chop my hand off entirely or have a hot sword pressed against my palm. I prefer this method.” Larissa still looks nervous, as if expecting him to lash out and strike her.

Ariadna shoots her a small smile.

For propriety’s sake, he leads them to Helaena’s chambers rather than his own, mindful of the fact he had a woman in his chambers the previous night, and it might still smell of musk, mead and sex.

After Larissa fetches some vinegar and a bowl is procured, Aegon soaks his hand in the liquid, wincing at the sting.

“Does it hurt, Father?” Jaehaera asks, practically sitting on his lap. Ariadna lingers near the doorway, hand on her belly, book still pressed against her side. Helaena brings over a pair of pliers watching as Aegon bounces his knee.

“Not too much, little one,” he saves. The slight sting helps calm his nervousness. Despite this mishap, it has been a rather good day. Can feel it in his bones. It makes loving his children easier. Less anxious. Less scared.

Helaena clenches her eyes shut. “Death in a kiss,” she repeats. “Death in a kiss.” She’s almost frantic now. Larissa stares at her, unsure and mildly frozen, and then Ariadna—

Her expression is shuttered, but he can see the tightness in her jaw for a moment.

“Ghosts in the womb,” Helaena says again, staring down at Ariadna’s pregnant belly.

“Helaena.” His voice seems to bring her back. “Helaena, calm.”

Slowly, she seems to. She blinks rapidly, dazed, and abruptly grabs a hold of the children.

“You must change,” she says, ushering them out of the room, practically ignoring Ariadna, who has to step into the room to avoid them.

The silence is harsh and ugly. Aegon hates it.

Ghosts in the womb. He looks at Ariadna stroking her stomach.

“Sit,” he requests. “Please.”

Wordlessly, Larissa makes for the door. When she meets Ariadna there, they exchange a look, but nothing else, before Ariadna hands the book over. Then she obeys Aegon’s request, sitting a far bit away from him, picking up an abandoned piece of stitching Helaena or more likely another lady had begun, lest someone walk in.

“Forgive Helaena,” he says after a moment. “Her words can be cutting, sometimes.”

We will have three children, he will have more.

“There is nothing to forgive,” she says. “How is your hand?”

“Fine. How do you feel?”

She pauses her needle, glances at him sharply.

“I can tell when you lie,” he says, not even sure it’s true, but knows he can tell now, if she did. It breaks his heart to think that she would.

“I am fine,” she says. “I was at a tea earlier that one of the other ladies held since Princess Helaena dismissed us for the rest of the day.”

“Oh, how social of you.”

She smiles permissively. “One can never have too many friends, my prince.”

“I would disagree. I much rather being alone.”

“Do you?”

“Perhaps. Sometimes.” He shrugs. “I don’t always have a choice in the matter.”

Part of the reason why Aegon thinks he clung on so desperately to his friendships with Luke and Jace was because he was alone before that. Helaena never understood him, and Aemond was so overwhelmingly their mother’s favourite from the moment he left her womb that Aegon resented him from the first.

He’s never said it out loud, but part of him thinks Aemond instinctively knew, and that’s why  they’ve always loathed each other to varying degrees.

She says nothing, merely looks back down at her needlework, frowning at the odd patterns left behind.

“What was in that book?”

Ariadna muffles a deep breath, but barely. Aegon is a rather peculiar creature to her, in truth. He lies about his behaviour to the Queen – saying he had two drinks when she’d seen him have three, for instance -- , forsakes his marriage vows and continues to partake in whoring, and participates in what must be the greatest occasion of self-pity ever known to man.

And yet – he is alarmingly honest about what he wants. His insecurities. His truths. His need for love. His perceptiveness. He’ll make a crude joke and then confess something awful about his childhood, like never having any friends.

Ariadna does not have it in her to pity him, not truly, but he surprises her. Disarms her. Every time she thinks he can’t possibly surprise her again, he somehow wriggles out a way to do it.

Especially now.

“It is Larissa’s book,” she says. “She’s always been good with herbs and medicines.”

“I’ve noticed.” Aegon flexes his hand in the bowl of vinegar. “Where was she before she came here? Volantis?”

She nods.

“How in Gods name did she wind up in the Reach?”

Ariadna herself does not know the full details. She knows enough to piece it together, but also knows it is not her story to tell.

“A long tale,” she replies. “Volantis was a harsh place to live if you weren’t freeborn.”

Recognition dawns in Aegon’s eyes. The scar on Larissa’s face was made here, but he can probably guess at what caused its need in the first place.

“She learned a lot there,” she clumsily adds. Larissa had been born in a pleasurehouse, and men from all sorts came to be tended to, loved, and fucked. But whores in Volantis, especially well-established ones in wealthy and popular brothels, were treated almost like a lady, save for their occupation. They were invaluable currency, bringing in clients who grew attached to particular workers. That meant physicians on every floor, tending to every fever, pox, cold, pregnancy or other ailment that threatened to put anyone out of business.

“She must have.” A pause. “Did your son also share her interest in flowers?”

Ariadna locks her jaw for a moment before forcefully unclenching her teeth. Aegon doesn’t seem to understand the concept of boundaries, sometimes. Usually he is sensitive to her desire not to talk about Robb, but his curiousity gets the best of him.

Talking about him with anyone other than Larissa, who loved Robb almost as much as she did, feels like a betrayal she cannot describe. Like she’s breathing life into a notion that he’s gone.

But when she looks at Aegon, there is no malice, merely his own unique brand of kindness.

“He did,” she replies. Does. “He’s never liked swords very much. Just books.”

“He must be excited to meet his own brother or sister.”

She hums in acknowledgement. Ghosts in the womb.

“I’m certain your babe will be healthy – a beautiful girl just like you.”

Ariadna strokes her belly. Her cheeks must spasm for Aegon frowns.

“Mayhaps,” she acknowledges.

“You almost sound displeased.” And then, jokinkingly, “I thought every mother dreamed of having a girl.”

 Ariadna pauses.

“What?” Aegon asks. “What is it?”

“I’m not certain it would be best if this babe were a girl,” she says, as diplomatically as she can.

“Why not?”

Sometimes she thinks he is deliberately obtuse. “Because I have no means to pay her dowry, and if I am to wed again my husband might be discouraged because she would be a drain to his resources.”

“You mean to wed again?”

“If it comes to it, yes.”

Aegon’s frown deepens. “Not all men view daughters like that.”

“I know,’ she says, as placatingly as possible. “But the truth is, my prince, that men view sons as more valuable than daughters. Better heirs.”

“Your father seemed proud of you - loved you,” Aegon says, in what is no doubt meant to be a comfort.  

Ariadna nearly laughs, even as her eyes grow increasingly wet. She blinks it away, furious with herself. She’s more tired than she realized. “Did he?” she wonders aloud. It’s something that’s been gnawing at her for years – ever since that first night with Alester. Her father didn’t have to marry her off to Alester. He could have wed her to Rickard, who was mildly more appropriate age wise, and whom she was better suited – at least on paper.

He could have wed her to anyone else. Let her choose. But he didn’t. Regaining the Tyrells’ confidence was more important to him. Ariadna wasn’t his choice of heir, she was his last resort. Dutiful, modest. Taught to think that his wants for her were what defined her worth. If she disobeyed, she would be unworthy. If she complained, she would be ungrateful.

How many women become their father’s heirs, after all?

But what bothers her most, deep down, is that her father didn’t arrange that deal with Lyonel Strong to protecther. He did it to protect the name. To ensure his line would live on.

“It’s the fate of every daughter to be betrayed by their fathers,” she muses ruefully. She cups her stomach. She hadn’t meant to be say it out loud, but it’s the truth – or it is for her. She remembers after she gave birth to Robb, once her fever had finally abated, she’d woken to her father sitting by her bed, holding Robb in his arms.

“My blessed child,” he had said, smiling ear to ear. “I knew you wouldn’t waste my time with a girl.”

It was meant to be a joke, judging by his laugh and the kiss of gratitude he gave her, but it stuck with her. And then there was the moment when her father met Alester by the door and clapped his shoulder as she breastfed Robb. “You are a lucky man,” he’d said, “to get a son so easily.”

But there was more to it than that. Robb’s birth had been near deadly and difficult, hence why Alester stayed away from her bed for longer than was custom following a typical birth. But her father had grown ill shortly after Robb turned one. His coughing grew more pronounced, his frame grew thinner, his health frailer.

“Another boy, you need,” he’d rasped to her on the many nights she spent nursing him. “Before I die, I wish to meet another child of yours.”

He’d asked it of her – begged it of her. And of course, wasn’t Ariadna always dutiful? Wasn’t she always compliant? And so she did. Alester had affairs of course, but he’d always been somewhat discreet about them. Still, it did not take any convincing to get him to return to her bed. He wouldn’t pin her down and rape her, but since her father had requested another child, and she was willing to try again, he had no other hesitations.

Within a moon, she was with child again. It was strenuous to her body – horrible morning sickness, aided by the stress of her father’s impending demise and rearing Robb. And yet her father persevered as she stumbled along in her pregnancy.

Yet, by her sixth moon, he was bedridden.

Yet, even though she had felt the babe move, she lost it. Ariadna had cried bitterly over the loss, but she’d quickly realized she was more devastated by the fact she was disappointing her father than anything else. More than that – Ariadna did not feel as though she were mourning a real person. She was mourning the tiredness she felt – all the pain and agony she’d underwent, and for what?

For nothing.

All those days and months, just for the baby to die? For that effort and time to be wasted?

She was madder at that than anything else. But still, even after it was over, she’d forbidden anyone from telling her what sex the child was. She’d made Larissa swear not to mention it, and her friend had furiously seen to it that her wishes were respected. Even on his deathbed, Ariadna was not certain Alester knew either. He’d never said, and she’d never asked him.

But her father was too ill to realize what had happened, even when she was well enough to visit him.

“A son,” he had gasped. “So many lost. We need… you need another. This will be a boy, I’m certain of it.”

He’d died a few days later, and she had her father and babe buried together.

Of course, she doesn’t tell Aegon this. She forces a smile to her lips instead when she spots his troubled expression.

“I’m certain you will be the first not to,” she assures him. “You love your daughter dearly.” Of his children, he seems to interact with Jaehaera the easiest.

Aegon looks doubtful. Not because of the claim of his love, she’s certain. But because of her assertion.

“I’d like to be,” he says. “But I have a rather spectacular talent of messing things up.”  

It’s odd – for all that Aegon mourns over his deficiencies, he seems to do nothing to correct them.

She, of course, does not point this out.

“Have faith,” she says. “I’m certain you will succeed… Aegon.”

He looks at her and beams, and the smile is so bright Ariadna momentarily forgets her own discomfort. He is too handsome for his own good, she thinks. Desperate to be liked. The door pushes open, revealing Helaena, who still remains partially troubled.

Ariadna stands to leave, curtsying, but they are joined shortly by the Queen, the Grand Maester, and Prince Aemond. Ariadna tries her best to stay out of that prince’s way. Aemond’s face is too cold for her. Too full of steel.

“What are you doing?” the Queen cries, seemingly not taking notice of her. But Prince Aemond does. His glare is cutting like a knife as he practically pins her to the wall with the force of it.

“Prince Aegon, you must remove your hand at once—”

“Of course,” Aegon says. “And I’m sure your suggestion would be to set my hand on fire or some other type of fire-like torture?”

The Maester pauses.

Aegon removes his hand from the bowl of vinegar, picks up the pair of tweezers, and pulls out one of the black needles without even flinching, a sunny smile on his lips. Ariadna nearly gapes.

“See, Mother?” he poses, leaning back casually. “No harm done. And this way, I can still use my hand relatively easily with no hot pokers.”

The Queen seemingly falters, brushing past the princess, and Ariadna takes the opportunity to go to the door, head bowed all the while.

“No pain at all,” Aegon says. At the door, she glances at him long enough to catch his eye. As his mother and the Maester fret over his hand and the remaining black spikes stuck there, he shoots her a wink, before a flash of real pain washes over him as the Maester prods at his hand. Gods.

It disappears just as quickly as it came though. Despite the people surrounding him, Ariadna thinks he’s the loneliest person in the entire castle.

A few days later, rather abruptly, Ariadna is called to the small council chambers. She’d like to say there was a warning beforehand – some note sent to prepare her for the meeting. A message from Lord Larys or the Queen – or hells, even Aegon.

But there is nothing.

One moment she is in Helaena’s chambers, helping to braid her hair, and the next Ser Criston is at the door, requesting her presence in the small council chambers. The abruptness of it all unnerves her. How casually they treat the greatest occasion of her life.

Ariadna walks past the group of serving girls Larissa is usually partnered with as Ser Criston leads her to council, but she can’t spot her friend amongst them. Willing those thoughts away, she rests her hands on her stomach, tries to squeeze feeling back into her body to no avail.

The small council chamber is smaller than she would have thought. Among the many faces – a dozen or so, mayhaps less – she spots the Queen and Larys Strong. Neither of them look particularly happy to see her. In fact, Queen Alicent seems almost nervous, fiddling with the marble rock before her, tracing the black stone with her thumb over and over.

Though the Queen sits at the head of the table, it is Ser Otto who most of the men look at. Ariadna has caught glimpses of him in the castle or at various family dinners she escorted Helaena to, but they had never been formally introduced. Until now, anyway.

His hazel eyes glitter with unveiled knowledge as they survey her top to bottom.

Ariadna curtsies deeply, careful to keep her movements slow as to emphasize the swell of her belly.

“Your grace. My lords.”

“Lady Ariadna?”

She looks to Otto. She can find traces of the Queen in his face, but not much. She must inherit after her mother, like Ariadna herself.

“My lord,” she replies.

Otto sets down a sheet of parchment, drums his fingers against the table. “You fled to King’s Landing to escape your Uncle, did you not?”

“I did,” she replies.

“In your own words, my lady, please explain to us your view of these… unfortunate sequence of events.”

Ariadna’s spine stiffens.

“As my husband grew ill,” she says, “shortly after I became with child, I heard rumours that my uncle was displeased by my ruling Brightwater Keep without any other male guardian to aid me. Given the severity of my husband’s condition, I was too stressed and overcome to truly appreciate the severity of my uncle’s displeasure.”

“And yet, before your husband died, your uncle had not interfered with your inheritance.”

Ariadna stills. “No,” she allows. “He did not.”

When Otto does not interject again, she continues. “My uncle allowed me to bury my husband in peace, but shortly thereafter there were issues with the estate. Harvests from the farms were being set upon and burnt. Grains stores were being looted. Shortly after his last visit to visit my son, his great-nephew, a few of my mother’s jewels went missing. Jewels that had been given to every lady in the history of House Florent went missing. I later discovered my uncle had given them to his new wife. When I demanded their return, he accused me of driving House Florent to ruin, and our relationship soured.”

“And then?”

“I declared that the gates of Brightwater Keep were to be kept closed, and that my uncle was to be arrested for theft. As he is not a knight, nor a lord, it was appropriate for me to do so.”

Otto appraises her. “And yet your Uncle managed to breach the walls with the aid of your former brother-in-law, Rickard Tyrell.”

“That is true, my lord,” she acknowledges evenly, ignoring the clench of her heart.

“Why do you think that is?”

“My lord?’

“Why do you think Ser Rickard aided Gerald Florent’s in driving you out of your home?”

And Ariadna—

Of all her many bitter regrets, Rickard was at the top of her list. What is she meant to say? He asked me to wed him and I said no. But it’s more complicated than that, isn’t it? A means to absolve herself of any wrongdoing or blame.

More – I knew he loved me and still I laid with him as my husband grew ill because I was lonely and wanted to. I knew he loved me, and did not love him back as he wished. I cared for him, but I cared for my independence more, and that was not enough. She’d thought he cared for her enough to stay even without vows exchanged, that he would vouch for her, but she’d underestimated how deeply she’d hurt him.

But she can’t exactly say that, can she?

Her mind whirls with what to say, heart pounding frantically, and then—

She understand what he just said.

“Gerald Flowers,” she says, feeling something inside her crack. “My uncle’s name is Flowers. He was never a Florent, my lord.”

The Queen looks down at her marble.

Otto wields an unsealed letter in the air. “Here, my lady, your uncle confesses to having found a Septon who legitimized a union between your grandfather and his mother. Given his ill health and the lack of equity in their standing, they kept their marriage secret.”

“His mother was the daughter of a kennelmaster.”

“Mayhaps, but that would still make him legitimate. After all, House Tyrell were once merely stewards before House Targaryen raised them to be rulers of the Reach.”

And Ariadna—

She can feel it all slipping away. Her home. Her birthright. Robb. Gods, Robb.

“This is outrageous, my lords,” Ariadna breathes. Larys tilts his head at her, eyes shining with that wretched amusement. “If this were true, why did this Septon not come forward after my grandfather died? Why was my father not informed? This Septon must be at least a hundred by now—”

“Ninety-five, to be exact,” Otto says.

Her vision blurs.

“There must be a trial,” she says. “Even if this is true, my father, the Lord of Brightwater Keep, recognized me as his heir.”  That matters, she wishes to scream. Damn you all, it matters. The urge to weep is overwhelming, but this—

This isn’t the room for tears.

“There will be a trial,” Queen Alicent assures her. “Nothing has yet been decided, even with this new evidence.”

Is that meant to make me feel better?

The Queen shoots her what Ariadna is certain she thinks is a comforting smile. It makes her want to bash her own head against a wall.

“And other matters,” Otto adds.

Queen Alicent’s expression narrows, almost grows frustrated as she gazes at her father. “I do not think it best, given her condition, to bring this matter up now—”

“I think Lady Ariadna would disagree,” Otto says.

She swallows, clasps her hands together. Tries not to tremble. “I do not follow, your grace. My lord.”

Otto looks at her. “Your uncle has accused you of your husband’s murder.”

Chapter Text

Chapter 5

“Get up, Aegon!”

Something hard slaps against his cheek, and he stirs with a moan. The woman he fucked last night gasps, clutches the sheets to her chest.

“Prince Aemond,” she stammers, and that makes Aegon rear up. His head pounds ever so slightly. The sun shines hot and bright through the window – must be midday already. Not an unusual occurrence for him.

Aegon racks his mind – he just saw Ariadna a few days ago, he didn’t sleep through it, did he? He always made sure he wasn’t drunk or miserable those days. Tried not to drink too much the night before. But why would Aemond know, or care?

His brother’s lips curl with disgust.

“Get dressed,” Aemond sneers. “Quickly. You don’t want to miss this.”

“Miss what?” Aegon demands, rubbing his brow with his palm. “I’m currently quite fucked out, thank you—”

“Mother has summoned Lady Ariadna to the small council chambers,” Aemond says. “I thought that might interest you.” He moves for the door. “I must be mistaken—”

“Shut up, shut up,” Aegon grumbles, jumping out of the bed. Aemond rolls his eye at his nakedness, and the girl flushes a hot pink. He forgets her name. “You win.”

He dresses as quick as he dares, and then—

“Hold on,” he says, midway through sliding on his boot. “We can’t exactly barge into a small council meeting. Not even Mother would let you do that. Not that, anyway.”

Aemond rolls his eye. Again.

“Of course we’re not going to do that, idiot,” Aemond snaps. “Just follow me and stop delaying. The meeting has no doubt already started.”

Scowling violently, Aegon does. He keeps up with his brother’s quick, sure steps despite the ache in his brow and the sweat still coating his upper lip. His breath is still sour from sleep, but at least he doesn’t look totally deranged.

Aemond cuts a few corners to avoid certain guards, and Aegon’s brows lift with surprise as his brother guides him to a back door.

“I’ve never noticed this before,” Aegon says.

“You don’t notice much.”

“Cunt.”

Aemond glares at him so sharply Aegon lifts his hand in surrender. They enter through the back door quietly, careful to be quiet as possible. Aemond presses a finger to his lips, and Aegon sticks his tongue out but follows. There is a screen in front of them, shielding them from view.

Aemond was right – the meeting has already started. Aegon’s heart hammers away in his chest – boom boom boom. He feels like an imposter, a fraud, and he’s certain his mother will be able to see right through the screen and chastise them to the ends of his days. When he glances at Aemond, however, his brother shares none of his uncertainty.

He must have done this many times before. Spying on meetings, listening in on council sessions. It fills Aegon with more than moderate unease. He shakes his head, lifts his eye to a hole in the screen and watches.

Ariadna is there. Despite the fact she’s the only one standing, she looks small, even with her chin held high. The blackness of her garbs makes her look even more frail in this light, despite the swell of her stomach.

Aegon’s heart gives a treacherous little leap – he remembers her saying his name – Aegon, Aegon Aegon. He wants to hear it again. Wants to see the reluctant curve of her lips. Wants to see it grow wider, more genuine. Wants to do something right.

He’s so transfixed on his musings that it takes him a moment to understand what they’re saying.

“First my uncle usurps my inheritance,” Ariadna says lowly, “and now he accuses me of murdering my husband?”

Aegon feels his gut give a horrible jolt.

He nearly laughs on instinct, has to clamp a hand over his mouth to stop him from doing so.

“I assume you deny the charge?” Otto asks.

“Deny?” Ariadna takes a deep, shuddering breath. “How does he suppose I did it then, if I may ask, Ser?”

“That would give away details of his case at trial—”

“He said you poisoned him,” Aegon’s mother interrupts, her brow creased. “Put it in his food and wine.” Aegon spots her picking at her cuticles. She doesn’t look pleased at this state of affairs. Good, he can’t help but think. Murder?

It’s impossible. He imagines her at her wedding – laughing, smiling, dancing, merely a girl. Thinks of her a few days before, sitting beside him as those wretched urchin needles were stuck in his palm.

It can’t be.

A thousand expressions flicker over Ariadna’s face. He can’t pick them all out – anger, shock, sadness, frustration, irritation and then—

Relief?

He blinks, and her face is smooth as stone.

“I did not put poison in anyone’s food, let alone my husband’s,” Ariadna states. “Nor his wine. I am innocent of these crimes he accuses me of. He merely says so to besmirch may name and claim my lands and make this ludicrous claim to legitimacy all the easier to swallow.”

Legitimacy?

Her uncle is a bastard. A Flowers through and through. Why on earth would his mother or Otto tolerate this? Was that not the whole basis of loathing Rhaenyra? Jace was, by his mother’s definition, illegitimate, and thus not in line to inherit. His blood dictated it so.

So why the change of heart?

Aegon’s stomach gives a horrible, terrible jerk. Aemond looks at him sharply, but Aegon pays his brother no heed. No, he thinks. No. Aegon stays the fuck out of politics, but even he isn’t that stupid. Otto wants the male claim to prevail.

The issue of bastardry is a small hurdle that Gerald Flowers has found a way to overcome. It didn’t matter. If he could prove his legitimacy, on however shaky a pretext, that is the claim the council would prefer, save for a few exceptions. And pinning her husband’s death on Ariadna, framing it as murder, gave them the perfect justification.

His nails pierce his flesh as Aegon stands there rigidly, barely fighting off his dizziness.

“Be that as it may,” Otto says. “You will both have to prove your innocence at trial, as is your right.”

Ariadna frowns just as Aegon rears his head. “Both, Ser?”

The main doors swing open at Otto’s whistle, and Aegon’s mouth drops as he spots two Kingsguard dragging in Ariadna’s serving maid – Larissa. Her servant’s cap is in disarray, and her cheek is swollen.

“Your uncle claims your dear servant aided you in the murder,” Otto continues. “As she is well known to have an affinity for herbs and poisons.”

For a moment, Aegon is convinced Ariadna will launch herself at his grandsire and scratch his eyes out. She ignores him in favour of going to Larissa, shaking her head as she gently cups swollen cheek. She grabs Larissa’s hand, ignoring the Kingsguard who glance at her.

“She hasn’t done anything,” Ariadna says. “Nothing. She’s innocent in all of this – merely been a loyal and faithful friend these many years—”

“She is not highborn, my lady, so she must be kept in the cells until the trial is underway. Ser Criston, if you please—”

But Ariadna does not move. She doesn’t move.

She locks her arms around Larissa’s, stands in front of her.

“You’ll have to cut me down first, Ser,” she threatens. Her voice is soft, but the meaning is there, evident in her stance. She won’t go quietly.

All the air is sucked out of Aegon’s lungs. He’s never seen someone outside of Daemon or Rhaenyra refuse Otto in such a way. Never. He wants to reach for his sword and go to her, but his belt is empty. He is no hero, no knight in a song or a story.

More than that—

He’s never seen someone show that much loyalty to another. Not without sharing any blood.

Surprisingly, the first to move is Larys. He stands hastily, cane scraping against the stone floor.

“My lords, my dear cousin with child,” he breathes, in that soft, skittish voice of his. “We cannot blame her for her emotions – it has been, I think we can agree, a rather sudden turn of events.”

“Indeed it has,” Alicent murmurs. “I don’t think it necessary to keep the serving girl in the cells. They won’t try and escape, will they?”

Ariadna’s jaw is clenched so hard Aegon is certain it will break.

“We won’t,” she says, collecting herself. “I swear it by the Old Gods and the New. We will remain here.”

Larys lips twist upwards, especially eery given the coldness in his eyes. He glances at Ariadna, and Aegon despairs at not being able to see his face. He wants to hide her from it forever, wants to—

Well. Mostly, he wants to run.

“Then we have it,” Alicent says. “We will, of course, offer you the opportunity to find witnesses to attest to your case, and we will afford you a full, fair and proper trial before the Gods and the law, Lady Ariadna. Until that happens, you will be allowed to continue as Princess Helaena’s lady-in-waiting until you are too far along to do so.”

A beat. “I thank you for your generosity, your grace.”

“I will take my niece more formally into my custody,” Larys adds. “She is my blood, after all.”

Ariadna does not let Larissa go.

“That will be all,” Otto says. “You both may go, as the Queen so decreed.”

Ariadna stiffly nods and curtsies, one hand still in Larissa’s, and moves for the door.

“Cousin,” Larys calls. “I will see you in my chambers shortly. Be there.”

She stops, face stony and ice-cold, and nods, taking Larissa with her as she goes. And Aegon—

He stumbles backwards, towards the door he and Aemond entered in, ignores his brother’s hiss as he clumsily spills out of the room, gasping heavily. He kneels, head bowed, hands pressed against the wall. He can’t breathe, he can’t breathe, he can’t fucking breathe.

I don’t want it, he wants to scream. I don’t fucking want it.

And, in that moment, he truly, sincerely wishes that he would die. It would be easier if he did. Jaehaerys is only a boy – who wants a boy king in favour of a fully grown Queen? Everyone hates regencies, even Aegon knows that. If he dies, the world would be better.

Or would it?

I don’t fucking want it, he thinks.

Eventually, the panic subsides, and though he feels as though he’s about to be sick, nothing spills from his mouth. Nothing at all.

“Why would you show me that?” Aegon asks.

Aemond had followed him at some point, and now he leans against the wall, watching Aegon with a mixture of disgust and pity, though the latter seems more prevalent, nearly giving into shock.

“It’s obvious you’re interested in her in some capacity,” Aemond says. “I’m not blind. You drool like a dog when she’s around.”

“Fuck off.”

“I thought you’d want to know.”

Aegon manages to stand on wobbly legs. “I don’t want any of this,” he says, shaking his head. “I don’t want it.”

Aemond reaches for him, but he shoves his brother off and stalks away. He needs to go, needs to flee, needs to breathe—

And he can’t do that here. He can’t.

Ariadna manages to make it around the corner before she lets go of Larissa’s hand and slams her own against the wall. A loud, solid thud echoes through the hall, her muscles in her shoulder rigid as she stands there and tries to breathe, to think. To let go of the urge to fucking scream.

“Ari,” Larissa says, huddling close. “Ari, we can’t stay here.”

She nods, and a wounded, muffled sound escapes from her throat. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. It’s so stupid. She’s so stupid. What will crying do? And yet that’s all she wants. She wants to crawl into a ditch and die, but not before taking her Uncle and Otto Hightower with her, and Rickard. She wants for someone to hold her and say everything will be alright.

She wipes at her eyes, turns to her friend. Her tears dry almost in an instant, give way to an unbridled, furious rage.

“I’ll kill him,” Ariadna whispers. “I’ll rip his throat out with my teeth if I must.”

“Ari…”

“You haven’t done anything wrong,” she spits, angered beyond repair. “You haven’t done anything except be my friend.”

Larissa’s lips wobble, and Ariadna—

She presses her brow against hers.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m so sorry—”

“It’s not your fault,” Larissa says. “It’s not.”

But it is. Larissa doesn’t know the truth of it, or refuses to see it. Ariadna’s choices landed them here. She thought she was smart, but she played all the wrong hands, gave into temptation and trusted the heart of a man. She should have known. She should have known.

She exhales loudly, pinches the bridge of her nose.

“Go to our chambers,” Ariadna tells her. “Go and bar the door – don’t open it for anyone who isn’t me.”

“Ariadna—”

“Go,” she cuts in forcefully. “I don’t trust Otto not to change his mind. I need to go to Larys’ chambers, but for now you seek refuge there.”

Larissa traces the bruise on her cheek with the pad of her thumb. Her heart wrings itself dry with guilt.

“What does he want with you?” Larissa asks.

And Ariadna—

“I don’t know,” she admits. “But I suppose I’ll have to find out, won’t I?”

She doesn’t know how long she waits in Larys’ chambers. The guard assigned there, clad in the familiar dragonfly broach she saw on the first day, lets her in without question, as if expecting her in advance.

She wonders how long they’d planned it. Wonders how long Larys and the Queen knew before they dragged her in there. Ariadna bites her lip so hard blood fills her mouth, has to suck to keep it from drippling down her chin.

“Anxious?”

The door closes behind Larys as he hobbles his way inside. She hadn’t even heard it open. Still trapped inside her memories – Alester, Rickard, Gerald, Robb. The same horrible sequence over and over and over—

“It has been a trying few hours, my lord,” she replies, smoothing out her skirts. Larys traces the motion with his eyes, lips twitching with amusement, as if her mourning garbs are somehow a hidden joke.

“Yes, I imagine it has for you.”

Ariadna grits her teeth as he leisurely sits by the lunch table, pours himself a cup of wine. She’d sat herself by the window, the cushion hard beneath her body.

“Please,” Larys says, beckoning her over. “Come closer. We have much to discuss, you and I. And secrets are best shared in close proximity.”

Silently, Ariadna does, taking the chair directly opposite his. Larys pours her a cup as well.

“These sweet wines won’t harm the babe,” her cousin tells her. “Or at least, so I’ve heard.”

“Thank you,” she murmurs, taking a small but polite sip.

His smile grows wider. It stretches his face unnaturally, like his cheeks are uncertain what to do. It should frighten her, but Ariadna is too exhausted to truly care.

“So polite even now,” he says. “Holding onto your graces, despite your small hiccup earlier.” He rests his chin on his hand, props his elbow on the table. “Your affinity for that foreigner is a weakness.”

She lifts her chin. “It’s not a weakness to reward those loyal to you.”

“Ah. There you have a valid point. No one does anything for free or without expectation. When it comes time to deliver, you best have something to show for those who do unspeakable acts in your name.”

The taste in her mouth sours.

“I haven’t asked anyone to commit any unspeakable acts in my name,” she says. “Anything I’ve done has been mine and mine alone.”

“But you did not slip poison into your husband’s food?”

“I did not,” she replies instantly.

Larys observes her closely, like she’s under a magnifying glass. Those beady little eyes seem to sneak under her skin like a disease.

“Very well,” he says. Silence falls. “You’re no fool,” he states plainly. “You know it doesn’t matter to them whether you’re innocent or guilty of the crime, or if the Septon your Uncle found is even sound of mind.”

He pauses. “Well, I suppose it may matter to her grace the Queen, as she suffers from her conscience.”

“Sounds like you know her intimately.”

“As you know Prince Aegon.”

Ariadna sits her cup down abruptly, wine spilling onto the table. Neither of them move to clean it up. Does he see through walls? She wonders. How can he know?

“I can’t listen into every conversation,” Larys hums, “But I can know if or when they take place. A lady in waiting and a prince alone together in the princess’ chambers? Must be a rather close relationship.”

Ariadna says nothing, merely bites down on her tongue.

“Don’t worry,” he says. “I’m not here to shame you – after all, who can say no to a prince? A Targaryen? They are closer to Gods than to men.”

“I have not shared his bed.”

Larys arches a brow. “That does not surprise me – he has, of course, continued to indulge in his whores. Mayhaps if you allowed him to, he would have a single mistress for one. A more focused process to his ardour.”

She stills.

“Is that what you wish from me?” she asks. “To take the prince into my bed?”

The door pushes open, revealing a serving girl with plates of food and utensils. She sets out enough dishes for two – another sign of how he planned this. When they’re alone again, Larys picks up a fork, stabs at a slice of pie.

“Have you seen the King?” he returns. “You’ve serviced the Princess Helaena for over a moon now.”

“I have not,” she replies. “She tends to take those visits alone.”

He sighs. “A pity. Then perhaps you would grasp the gravity of the situation.” He chews his food casually, slowly, as if he enjoys putting her on edge. “The King will soon die. A matter of months, not years. What do you think will happen then?”

“Princess Rhaenyra is heir to the throne,” she replies carefully. The hairs on the back of her neck stand out. Dangerous whispers, these are.

Larys stares at her impatiently. “Yes,” he allows, “and what do you think will happen with her on Dragonstone and the King’s firstborn son in King’s Landing? So far away, she is, with few allies remaining at court. Or the ones she has are not in the highest positions of power. What do you think will happen then?”

Beneath the table, Ariadna pinches her thigh.

“I believe there might be a change to the succession.”

Larys tilts his head back and laughs. “There is no need to fear here, cousin. These whispers will not leave this room, I swear it.” Another laugh. “On my honour.”

She nods, takes a reluctant bite of some food before her. It doesn’t taste like anything at all.

“But yes, you are right,” he adds. “There would be a change to a succession.”

Ariadna wipes at her mouth. “Forgive me, cousin, but I do not know what that has to do with me.”

“You have surely noticed Prince Aegon’s lack of… ambition, I’m certain. His lack of propriety, if you will.”

“And you believe I can fix that?”

“I believe,” he says slowly, “that you have the ability to exert great influence over him, if you so wished. If a King has many mistresses, they lack influence. But if he has one – well, that changes things.”

“The Hand and the council could… change the succession successfully without my interference.”

He nods. “That is true enough… but I find that desire, lust, even love, can be a powerful influence on others. Once it infects you, it seeps into your bones, clouds your judgement. Makes you foolish.”

“Sounds like quite the experience.”

His gaze turns cold. “I’ve seen it, more like. Firsthand.”

Larys leans in closer.

“You no doubt accepted Prince Aegon’s overtures of friendships because you figured he had influence. You have never been in the capital before – you didn’t know better. He’s not been offered a seat on the council, nor would he attend if he was so offered. It is the Queen and the Hand who rule, and they can undo your inheritance with the snap of their fingers.”

“But a King could restore it,” Ariadna finishes. “You want – you want me to aid in this plot on the chance he cares for me enough to restore what is rightfully mine?”

“It’s not simply his affection you would gain,” Larys says. “Think on it – you’re not a simpleton. Aegon is currently rather... lacking, if you will. He’s fallen prey to a disease many men waste away of.”

“And that is?”

“A desire – a need, to be loved. It’s written all over him, pollutes the air he breathes. He wants someone to smother him with affection, to love and see him, and all that frivolous gossip. It’s why he frequents his whores so much.”

“You sound as if you know him dearly.”

“I have ears and eyes everywhere, even in whorehouses, Lady Ariadna.”

She swallows. In truth, his assessment of Aegon seems rather accurate in her eyes, even if Larys makes light of the charm he possesses.

“If you were the prince’s mistress, they could hardly sentence you for murder. If you were to exact a positive influence on him, they may even thank you. You may not be restored to your lands and titles, but you would be provided with a dowry and wed off if the need arose.” He pauses. “The prince is not cruel to his whores.”

His whores.

“Men’s attentions are flimsy and inconstant,” she says. “Hardly reliable, especially with one as such voracious appetite has he. I could be set aside and forced from the castle before my trial even begins.”

Her lips curl over the word trial. Fuck. Fuck.

She hadn’t lied to Larissa earlier. If she could, she would kill Gerald with her bare hands, rip him limb from limb. Even Otto Hightower, she’d kill.

“Mayhaps,” he says. “It depends on you – what you’re willing to lose and hoping to gain. Whatever gets you closest to seeing your son again, I presume. And besides, the prince seems to have some genuine affection for you. He did attend your wedding, after all.”

Ariadna ignores the last sentence, her mind seizing on the one thing in the world that matters most to her. Robb.

Gods, it all comes down to him, doesn’t it? Ariadna has fallen victim to the same trap all other women undergo. From daughter to wife to mother. It is the children who come first above all.

She nods, lets out a shaky breath. Tries to remember to breathe, to think, to be.

“Think on it,” Larys says. “After all, it’s not as though you could lose anything else.” He pauses. “Besides your life, I suppose.”

She does not see Aegon for the next few days, almost as if he is intentionally avoiding her. In truth, Ariadna welcomes the freedom. She needs to think, to orient herself. To plan. Larys is right, to some degree. Ariadna has been stripped of her reputation, her dignity, her standing.

And now she is accused of murder.

But there’s more she could lose – this babe. Robb. Robb.

She troubles over it, picks at her fingers, loses herself to her thoughts. Would she whore herself for Robb’s life? Without question. But Ariadna did not come here with the intention of partaking in treason. If they weren’t successful, if Princess Rhaenyra returned and discovered she was involved in any plots—

Ariadna would not doubt be burned alive, or worse. Gods, she can scarcely believe this is her life now. The council must have agreed not to speak of her uncle’s accusations, for Ariadna is not further ostracized in the halls or ignored. As if the Queen is doing her a kindness.

She catches sight of the Iron Throne every so often, now vacant due to the King’s absence, and the Hightowers never dare linger on it long, no doubt not wishing to seem too ambitious. Ariadna doesn’t care who sits upon that wretched throne. Doesn’t care who rules over the seven kingdoms.

She just wants to go home.

More than that – she wants to go home and stay there. Wants no one to ever dare question her authority again. Wants to crush her uncle beneath her shoe and fucking keep him there. Dead and crushed beyond oblivion.

But how to get there? There is nothing empowering about the thought of whoring herself, even if it’s for a man as handsome as Prince Aegon is. But she can do it, would do it. To what end? If Aegon were King, he could restore her to her lands and titles, if he were so inclined.

But what if he keeps her here? What if he refuses to let her go?

That is, presuming he even cares for her by that point. Desires her. Provided she doesn’t fucking die in childbed. Too many what if’s. She loathes the uncertainty more than anything else. The knowledge that she can’t exactly do anything by it.

And Larys.

He knows so much. Too much.

If she were to write to Rhaenyra, what then? There’s no chance she could or would take her word for any of it, and Ariadna has no personal affection for her.

Larissa is at a loss. That hope she maintained the past few weeks has been bruised, just like her cheek. Ariadna looks at her face and resists the urge to flinch. It’s her fault. All her fault. She rubs her stomach and thinks and thinks, but she can settle on no clear mouth. The delicate in between she was balancing before no longer seems appropriate.

Perhaps she could go to Otto now and renounce her claim to her lands and title and cling to Prince Aegon for scraps and hope for his mercy when the time came. If. Ariadna hates that plan most of all. She will beg and scrape and whore herself if she needs to, but she is the heir. Her father designated her so.

She will retain that sliver of pride for now at least.

Ariadna is at a loss as to where Aegon is. He does not frequent Helaena’s chambers the week after the council meeting, and so she does not see him. She wonders if he somehow knows. If perhaps he fears her now as a murderer and a whore. But why would he believe it? She’s given him no reason to assume so.

It’s Prince Aemond she’s more concerned about. Prince Aemond, who eyes her with that cold, calculating stare whenever she so much as brushes past him. She’s glad he is not the firstborn son, in truth. He may be a warrior, may be more proper, but his presence makes her restless and skittish.

She does not think Aegon would ever harm a woman. She’s not certain Aemond shares the same qualms if she were to get in his way.

But she does end up seeing Aegon, in the end. She sits with Helaena in her chambers, the silence stiff and awkward as Maelor plays by the princess’ feet. And then—

The door swings open. Aegon stumbles in, clearly drunk, stinking and wretched, probably uncertain of where he is. There are maids in the bedchamber, changing the sheets, scrubbing the floors. But he doesn’t care.

And suddenly Ariadna is furious with him. Completely and totally furious, even as he hiccups and grows teary eyed at the sight of her.

“All of you, out!” Helaena commands, and the maids usher out the door, taking Maelor with them, even as they shoot them curious glances. Aegon stumbles to his knees.

“I’m sorry,” he tells Ariadna, practically falling right at her feet. “I’m sorry.”

Helaena turns away, disturbed, hands pressed over her ears.

And Ariadna—

This fool. Suddenly all her rage and anger is directed at him. He drinks and whores his days away because what? His father didn’t hug him? He has so much. Has a dragon. And he does nothing with it. His blood, his standing.

Ariadna stares at him, heart pounding, and Helaena moves to her bedchamber, shuts the door behind her. Leaves them alone. Aegon knows. How does he know? She finds she doesn’t care to know.

“For what, my lord?” she replies curtly.

His eyes are round and wet and red. Even his beauty will fade in a few years. Ariadna had seen Alester deteriorate from lack of training, lack of exercise and discipline. Aegon would be the same. Such a waste. And what infuriates her more is that he knows of it – knows how he is failing, his weaknesses, his lack of friendships, and he does nothing to rectify the situation.

He’s not like how Alester had been – blissful and ignorant, overestimating his own importance and capabilities.

Somehow, this bothers her more.

“For me,” he says. “It would be better if I were dead. If I were never born. It would be—” he hiccups, crying like a child. “It would be best. I can’t do anything.”

“You can help,” she says. “Your family. Your children.” She pauses. “Me. You can.”

He shakes his head. “I can’t. I can’t. Don’t you see? I can’t. I don’t want to.”

Ariadna pulls away, disgusted both with herself and with him, and tries to step past him. She cannot bear this. Not today. Not now. She has lost everything, and he has lost nothing, and he is the one sobbing?

“Wait,” he calls out, and he grabs her hand, tugs her back like she’s nothing more than a feather.

Ariadna lets him. She stares down at him.

“I thought you were my friend,” she says. “I thought you cared.”

“I do,” he says. “I do care. I do I do I do—”

He hiccups again, eyes red. His hand is still soft, somehow, despite his drunken state. And Ariadna—

She leans down, almost as if outside her own body, and cups his cheeks. Watches as his lashes flutter in appreciation, almost relief, as if this is the first time someone has ever touched him.

“Then act like it,” she whispers, trying with every fibre of her strength to be gentle. To be loving. As if he were her own child, or her lover. Had she been kind to Rickard? She must have been, for him to think she loved him. Or mayhaps simply sleeping with him had been enough.

She doesn’t think that will be enough for Aegon. He has sex every night, almost, with various women – highborn and lowborn alike. Just because he’s good at it doesn’t mean it’s sustainable. And yet, for a moment, she hates him. Hates him so badly. Loathes all of them. Fuck the throne and the kingdom. Fuck it all.

He shakes his head. “I can’t,” he says. “I don’t want it.”

Her brows furrow. Ariadna is tired and aching – the babe has finally started to move in her womb, and she sleeps even less than normal these days. And though she knows she needs to keep him close, she can’t bring herself to contain her temper.

“I don’t understand you,” she says. “I don’t. I don’t think we’re alike at all.”

She takes a step back, withdraws her hand. He sways with the loss, blinks at her wearily. Within moments, she’s certain he will fall to the ground. It’ll be a miracle if he even remembers this conversation.

“I would be respected if I couldn’t be loved,” she says, and Aegon flinches. He cries a bit harder this time, and Ariadna—

Though she regrets it later, she leaves him.

It’s not often Aegon is truly embarrassed. He’s done too much shit to feel truly self-conscious all the time. However, when he wakes the next morning cheek-flat on Helaena’s floor, he flushes red all over.

“Ah,” his wife says, clearly unimpressed. “You’re awake.”

“Father,” Jaehaera says, suddenly obscuring his vision. “Why were you sleeping on the floor?”

It’s a rather disturbing sequence of affairs, though he’s at least comforted by the fact he wasn’t allowed to sleep in a pool of his own vomit. The twins are thankfully ushered away by their nurses, but Helaena remains, staring down at him with her hands on her hips.

“I should kick you,” she informs him primly.

“I would probably deserve it.”

I would be respected if I couldn’t be loved. The rest is blurry, but he remembers that quite clearly, as if it were branded on his skin.

“Have you been foolish?” she asks. “You still owe more seasnails.”

He grunts, rubs at his head. Recalls a hand tracing his skin, warm and heavy. A touch he didn’t even know he needed until he had it. I would be respected if I couldn’t be loved.

“Helaena,” he says randomly, ignoring her previous words. “Do you respect me?”

Her brows raise. “That’s random,” she states plainly.

“You didn’t answer the question.”

“I like you sometimes.”

“Sometimes?”

“You’re only nice to me sometimes,” Helaena says. She softens somewhat. “And you remember the children’s names – that’s more than I can say for Father.”

Wonderful. Aegon’s crowning achievements. Occasionally being nice and remembering his children’s names. Helaena is kind enough not to directly say she doesn’t respect him, but the implication is there.

He already knows what Aemond’s answer would be.

Aegon manages to find his way back to his chambers, spends nigh on an hour soaking in the tub. I would be respected if I couldn’t be loved. But he’d tried, hadn’t he? When he was younger, he had. He’d been better liked then, at least by Jace and Luke.

It’s ironic that his nephews, particularly Jace, liked him far more than Aemond ever had. Daeron had never been given the chance, not really. But Aegon has tried for bits and bouts of time, but it’s never been good enough. He doesn’t know what would be good enough. No one understands it.

Aegon is a failure, he can freely admit it, even if it hurts. But is there not wisdom in understanding that he does not wish to rule? That he has no taste for duty? Better to give the power away to someone who actually wants it, or prepares for it their entire life than claim it for himself.

Aegon wouldn’t make a good King, even if he might want to. He is lazy by nature – has always preferred relaxing in the sun to sequestering himself in a library. In truth, that’s the life his father should have led as well. If he’d been smart or honest enough with himself, Viserys would have recognized that.

No matter. Aegon isn’t his father. He’s not.

When Aegon eventually emerges from his chambers, he bumps into his mother in the halls. In truth, he’s been avoiding her as well. His mother. His protector. His torturer. I don’t want it, he wants to scream at her. He wants to fall to his knees and hug her. I have your face but you don’t know my heart.

If she can sense his anger, she doesn’t show it.

“Helaena is visiting your father,” she says. “You should go with her. Now.”

She reaches for him, as if to push back his hair, but he pulls away. Ignores the slight hurt on her face, the surprise. Usually he accepts her scraps of affection, but now he can’t force himself to stomach it. He can’t.

He also can’t imagine himself doing for his children what she does for him. What she tells him. Or told him, anyway, as he grew. If Rhaenyra comes into power, your very life could be forfeit. Can’t imagine looking at his children’s faces and telling them someone wants them to die.

He wonders what that says about him as a father.

Her mother waves her hand, and Ser Erryk escorts him to his father’s chambers, a clear command if there ever was one. Helaena is there. And, much to his dismay and surprise, Ariadna is as well. It’s not often that their mother allows others to enter the king’s chambers, but Helaena must have kept her close today to apologize for his behaviour.

She can be rather forthright when she wants to be, his sister. When she’s not caught in daydreams or obsessing over bugs.

Ariadna is staring the King, face pale, hands clenching and unclenching at her sides. He is in a rather sorry state, to be fair. Another maid roams around, cleaning certain cobwebs, dusting the chairs. Helaena notices him, but says nothing, merely takes a few steps back, seats herself by the King’s model of Old Valyria.

Ariadna stays there. Sways like a ghost.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, so low he’s certain not even Helaena can hear. “For yesterday.”

Ariadna jumps at the sound of his voice, presses a hand to her chest. Glances back at the King, who is wasting away in this bed. So frail. So fragile. She seems oddly stricken.

“My father married my mother for the sole purpose of having a son,” he says. “And yet he never loved me. He never loved any of us.” That’s why. That’s why. He poisoned us all and pretended his hands were clean throughout.

At that, Ariadna returns to herself.

“I’m sorry,” she says, and she reaches for his hand. Clutches his loosely. “I put my anger on you. I’m sorry. I’ve never been in your shoes. I’m sorry.”

He looks at her. Clutches her hand.

“Are we friends again?” he asks.

She nods, glances back at the King.

“Of course,” she says. “Of course.”

Chapter Text

Chapter 6

Once her decision is made, Larys grants her a small allowance, allowing Ariadna to order new dresses to accommodate her growing form. All she’d managed to bring from her home were mourning garbs and a few of her looser dresses. But now that she’s five moons into her pregnancy, all her gowns are growing tighter, especially around her stomach and breasts.

Larys was generous enough with his coin. She wonders if he ever plans to marry. She knows there are some Strong cousins that remain, some aunts and uncles she never got to meet. But most men she knows desire their own blood to succeed them; aren’t satisfied by cousins or nephews or nieces.

But Larys Strong doesn’t seem to be like most men. The more Ariadna puzzles over him, the less she knows. He wants to help put Aegon on the throne exchange for what? More power? The Strongs would not be given Riverrun, would they? They weren’t as prestigious as House Tully, or even as wealthy as some of the other Riverland houses.

Or so she thinks. Who knew with Larys Strong at the helm?

But regardless, he granted her money and a carriage, and so she finds herself in the streets of King’s Landing, surrounded by some of his guards as her and Larissa weave their way through the stands and rows of shops. Sellers yell at the top of their lungs, listing fabrics, jewels, foods, some of which she’s never even heard of before.

It’s crowded and chaotic, bursting with life and colour and smell.

“It still stinks of shit,” she grumbles to Larissa, who barks out a laugh. Her friend is more of an expert in these situations than she is, navigating through the streets with relative ease, always careful to keep their guards close.

“Is that how it was like in Volantis?” Ariadna asks her, linking her arm through hers.

“Even worse, if possible,” Larissa says, though for once her recollections sound almost fond. “A lot hotter, and there was also the smell of elephant dung to contend with.”

They laugh together, and for a moment it almost feels like an adventure. Like how it was before Ariadna married, and they explored the nearby towns together when her father let her go to the markets.

They find a stand with suitable material, Larissa inspecting the ends with her finger as Ariadna stands there with the pouch of money, trying her hardest not to feel too sore. Larissa picks out a few rolls of fabric – some black, soft orange and pinks, blue. Ariadna is eager to be rid of her mourning garbs, but it’s a careful balance.

If she stops wearing her mourning garbs now, it might be interpreted as an admission of guilt. If she keeps wearing them, they might accuse her of trying for false sympathy. No matter what she does, Ariadna can’t win.

Once the fabrics have been selected, Ariadna has some remaining coin left, and so they wander for a bit longer before the guards call Ariadna’s attention.

“We are nearing the Streets of Silk, my lady,” the older utters.

“Ah. I see.”

Ariadna peers ahead. She can smell faint whisps of perfume, sweat and fucking. Can even hear distant moaning if she listens hard enough. The art of seduction. Stomach turning, she moves away, back towards another food stand.

“Are you alright?” Larissa asks, close to her.

“Just fine.” She looks at her friend. “Are you?”

Larissa glances over her shoulder, then shudders from her own memories. “Fine as well, I guess.”

They continue on, heads bowed as they explore.

“I’ve never seduced someone before,” Ariadna mutters. “Perhaps I should ask them for pointers.”

“Ari…” Larissa shakes her head. “Most whores, in my experience, drink wine to dull their senses. Make their limbs looser.”

“Is wine not bad for the babe?”

“I never said you should do that,” Larissa says. “Most women who work in pleasurehouses are miserable. If they don’t end up pregnant and die in childbirth or aren’t chased out, they die in a pool of their own vomit. Or they grow old and end up begging in the streets.”

Ariadna squeezes her hand. “But not you.”

And then her heart pinches. Larissa’s bruise has healed, left only a faint shadow on her cheek. The cells had been cold, overcrowded and dark according to Larissa, and Ariadna will do what she must to keep it from happening again, even if it means whoring herself.

“No,” Larissa allows. “Not me.”

For now.

Ariadna flinches. She won’t let it come to Larissa being convicted of Alester’s murder. She won’t.

“Prince Aegon seems fond of you,” Larissa whispers, changing the subject. “And you are beautiful.”

“And pregnant.”

“Some men prefer to that.”

“Compared to thin, curvy women? I doubt it.”

“His appetites have been large and various,” Larissa reminds her. “Older, younger, blondes, brunettes…”

“Gods, do the servants talk about it so often?”

Larissa nods. “Apparently he is rather accomplished with his lovemaking. Successful, even.”

“It might be one of the few things he works at,” Ariadna mutters scathingly. She feels a pang of guilt afterwards. Remembers how he looked when he stared at the King. Ariadna had never once set eyes on King Viserys, but even she was taken aback at how terrible the man looked. She knew why they were all so adamant on keeping the man hidden, and she couldn’t help but think it was intentional that Helaena of all people had been the one to bring her there.

As if to make her understand. As if to tug on her heartstrings. Perhaps it had, for a moment. Ariadna didn’t have a mother, but her father did love her. It must be something, to know that one of your parents doesn’t love you.

“You won’t have to do much to get him to bed you if that’s what you want,” Larissa says.

“Perhaps, but I need him to care. Fleeting passion isn’t going to help me at all.”

“But he has fondness for you,” Larissa repeats. “He—” she lowers her voice even more,”—kissed you at your wedding. I still struggle to comprehend the audacity of it.”

Ariadna nearly laughs again, even as her mood darkens.

“I haven’t been very successful in keeping a man’s affection for long,” she mutters.

At that, Larissa’s features twist with understanding. Rickard. Rickard hadn’t been something Ariadna had planned, or even wanted. He hadn’t even lived at Brightwater Keep for the first year of her marriage. Had visited only a few times during the second. It was only after her father died that her husband invited him to live at the Keep. It had annoyed Ariadna, that Alester had done so without even asking her opinion. Like he was the lord of the manor, not her.

She’d expected Rickard to be a drain on their resources. To waste her coin on gambling, hunting and trinkets for his whores. While neither him or Alester were in any position to inherit something from Highgarden, they’d been given considerable allowances given their close blood relation to the Lord Paramount of the Reach.

Rickard seemed to spend his wisely, but Alester hadn’t saved much at all. Once he married her, a wealthy heiress, the allowances had stopped, and so he was dependent entirely upon her. Alester adopted a rather telling attitude of assuming everything she had was his and doing whatever he so desired, per his rights as her husband, but Rickard had more modesty. Used his own money for his spending habits, which Ariadna mildly appreciated. It wasn’t as though the presence of one more inhabitant would ruin her family.

She’s never been fantastic at accounting, but her father had tutors who taught her well, and she listened to their advice soundly enough to bring in decent harvests and maintain their income. It was the thought that mattered. Rickard showed an appreciation for her hospitality that Alester never had; acknowledged that it was her home before settling into it himself, and only ever asking if she was comfortable with him changing anything within his own chambers.

Not like Alester, who tried to have statutes erected or tapestries made on a whim. Who clapped his hands and expected anything he desired to appear. Despite being twenty years her elder, her husband had been remarkably naïve in that regard. But Rickard hadn’t.

And while she does not proclaim to have ever been madly in love with him, she appreciated him for his good sense. For not dismissing Robb entirely, despite his own peculiarities.

Rickard finds her in the gardens, a loose shawl wrapped tightly around her shoulders. The sun is nearly set, and Ariadna is trimming thorns off roses with a pair of clippers, a few candles nearby to help her see clearly.

Alester is in his chambers, ailing, and Larissa with Robb, tucking him into bed. The maester has just confirmed her second pregnancy.

“You’ve picked up a fondness for gardening in the past year,” Rickard says, startling her out of her reverie.

“Robb loves flowers,” she replies. “It’s one of the few things he talks about.”

Rickard approaches slowly, almost sheepish. “He’s a young lad. He’ll soon grow to love swords and horses, as I and his father once did.”

Ariadna hums. It irritates when most try and act like they know her son’s nature better than she does. At least Rickard sounds mildly concerned, not just arrogant and dismissive.

“Perhaps.”

He sits beside her, brings a candle closer. They’re alone in the gardens. Judging by the redness in his cheeks, she’s certain he’s aware of it.

Ariadna isn’t blind. She knows he looks at her, his brother’s young, pretty and wealthy wife when he thinks no one notices. Rickard is closer to her age, near thirty. Still thin and handsome as opposed to Alester.

“I thought cutting off the thorns was bad for roses.”

“Mayhaps, but Robb keeps pricking his fingers and cheeks on them despite my warnings, and our current gardener didn’t trim the thorns properly, so here I am.”

“His cheeks?”

“I don’t know how he managed it,” Ariadna says. “Mayhaps he used them as a pillow when I wasn’t looking.”

Rickard laughs, deep and somehow sweet. “The boy is smarter than that.”

“Yes,” she says, and this time she’s slightly proud. “He is.”

The maesters had feared Robb was simple after he barely spoke as a babe. Most babes of two years were stringing small sentences together, but Robb was eerily quiet, only crying at random times after he’d just been fed or burped. He showed little interest in the toy swords or rocking horses Alester brought for him, but would gasp and scribble onto a piece of parchment whenever he saw a particularly pretty flower. It was gibberish of course, given his youth, but it’s slowly taken shape into a hobby of his.

Her son may not like horses or fighting or have dreams of being a knight, but he certainly isn’t simple.

“You’re a good mother,” Rickard adds.

At that, Ariadna stills. When she looks at him, she can see that he means it. She feels fragile, a little bruised. Motherhood is not as effortless as many make it out to be.

“Alester doesn’t think so.”

“My brother… he can be quite proud. When Robb grows older, he’ll shape himself into more of a… tradition man. He must, as head of the household, no?”

Ariadna fights to keep the smile on her face. “Yes, indeed.”

She snips the final thorn of the bush, exhales loudly, and leans back, abandoning the clippers on the grass. She feels so tired already. This babe is already wearing on her.

“Do you think Alester will get better?” Rickard asks.

Ariadna keeps her gaze fixed on the heavens.

“The Maester is uncertain,” she replies. “His health has been deteriorating for a while, you know that.”

“He’s always had terrible allergies when the fresh flowers bloom,” Rickard allows. “But nothing like this.”

She glances at him. His head is down, eyes wet with tears.

“Is it horrible,” he whispers, “that a part of me is glad he is ill?”

Ariadna raises her brows.

“For your sake,” he continues. “So you – you can be with a man worthy of you.”

Ah. For a moment, sitting under the evening stars with a not unhandsome man basically declaring his love for her, Ariadna is nearly touched.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I shouldn’t have said that—”

She reaches for his hand, holds him in place. He looks at her, eyes wide and shining and full of hope.

“Thank you,” she says. “For what you’ve done for Robb.”

“I would do anything for you,” he says. “Anything. You deserve someone to love you, Ariadna.”

“And you love me?”

She decides then, quite suddenly, that she doesn’t want an answer. She already knows. But she’s almost on the cusp of freedom. Six years she’s been tied to Alester, an empty husk in her marriage bed. She wants, for once, to be with someone who desires her. Someone not twenty years her elder. Someone handsome and patient with her son.

She cannot claim to love him, but she cannot claim that her vanity isn’t appeased by his declaration. She’d known from the beginning that she would never be able to fall in love with Alester. It would have been easier if Alester fell in love with her, but the novelty of having a fifteen-year-old bride wore off quickly for him. Especially since they had nothing in common, and Ariadna couldn’t bring herself to act the besotted fool with Alester. They were cordial and tolerable at best.

To stop Rickard from replying, she kisses him lightly instead, comforted by the fact they’re shielded by bushes and trees, cocooned in their own corner of nature.

It takes a long time for them to leave the garden.

Remembering that now, Ariadna can’t help but feel bitter. Rickard had loved her once, but when she’d refused his offer of marriage, he’d turned against her.

Larissa’s face is mutinous.

“Rickard is a fragile little shit,” she informs Ariadna primly.

“And Prince Aegon isn’t?”

Larissa leans in closer. “He can’t demand marriage of you, can he?”

Ariadna chuckles. “That is true.” She thinks of Aegon as she knows him. He’s different from Rickard from the start. Rickard had seemed proper, honourable, decent, devoted. Aegon is scattered in comparison, unsteady, near broken, but desperate for affection.

She’s certain he would forsake honour if it meant he’d feel loved. She remembers him sobbing in her lap, apologizing, so caught up in his own misery. Rickard had been his own person, but Aegon? Aegon needs guidance. Needs someone to hold him together.

And now it seems that task will be hers.

Larissa’s face brightens as she spots a food stand.

“That’s Volantene food,” she informs Ariadna, beaming.

“Come on then.”

“But that’s the last of your coin—”

“Larys said he’d give me more to pay the tailors. Let me do this for you.” It’s the least I can do.

Larissa can see she has her mind set on it, so they go to the vendor, pay him the remaining coin in exchange for the snacks Larissa decides are best. She settles on some curry items and a few triangular shaped pastries.

“These are filled with spiced potatoes and onions and other filling,” Larissa says excitedly, inhaling deeply. Larissa occasionally cooked food from Volantene culture when they came into the right ingredients, which was rare in the Reach, or at least because they further inland than Oldtown, for example.

But this is the first time they’ve seen Volantene food sold. Even for Ariadna. Larissa hums excitedly as she breaks of pieces of the pastry for Ariadna, trying a small bite herself to determine that it’s not overwhelmingly spicy.

“Delicious,” Ariadna allows, munching happily.

The guards soon clear their throats, reminding Ariadna of the time, and they begin the long trek back to the wheelhouse. The streets are even more full of people, the traffic overwhelming. It seems that there’s been an accident up ahead – a few stands knocked over, their goods spilling into the streets, causing upheaval as they fight away beggars, dogs and other competition while they fight over who is to blame.

They don’t have enough guards with them to make it back to their wheelhouse safely through the growing mob.

“Lady Ariadna!”

She turns, perplexed, and nearly gapes at the sight of Princess Helaena hanging her head out of her own wheelhouse, beckoning them over. Larissa and Ariadna exchange a look. Princess Helaena has many guards surrounding the wheelhouse, of course, and the Kingsguard make quick work of approaching the mob.

“Get in with me,” Helaena says. “Bring your things.”

Unwilling to refuse a royal command, Ariadna and Larissa obey, with Larys’ guard promising to bring the wheelhouse back to the castle safely.

Princess Helaena stinks awfully of dragon. Though Ariadna hasn’t seen a dragon up close since the first time, she’s grown rather familiar with the smell after all the times she’s helped Princess Helaena change from her riding clothes. It clogs the air. Thankfully, Helaena seems to have made the trip to the dragonpit alone, without any of her ladies to accompany her.

Ariadna thinks if it weren’t for the Queen, Helaena would shun all their company.

“That smells wonderful,” Helaena breathes, sniffing loudly. She blinks at them like an owl. “Can I try some?”

“Of course,” Ariadna says, handing one of her triangular pastries over before Larissa can do so.

Helaena takes a bite from it, and then scrunches her nose, pale cheeks blooming red.

“It’s spicy,” Helaena says, waving at her mouth. “I’ve never tasted anything like it before.”

“It’s a Volantene dish,” Larissa says. “I forget that Westerosi people don’t usually use such spices. Forgive me.”

“Not at all.” Helaena giggles like a child. “It’s nice once you get used to it.” She hums, sucking at her fingers as she polishes off the pastry with a surprising lack of grace, given that she’s a princess.

Helaena peers at Larissa, frowns. “Your cheek is bruised.”

Ariadna stiffens. How much did the princess know? Given that Ariadna is still allowed in her service, the rest of the court doesn’t seem to know much.

Helaena frowns, whispers beneath her breath, ‘death in a kiss. Death in a kiss.”

“A rather unfortunate affair,” Ariadna says smoothly. “How is Dreamfyre, Princess?”

“She is well,” Helaena says. “I think she might birth a fresh clutch soon.”

“How wonderful. Perhaps it can be given to Prince Maelor or another little prince or princess.”

Helaena shrugs, tugs at the her sleeves.

“I’m done bearing children,” she says casually. “I will have three, but Aegon will have more.”

As if it’s nothing at all.

“I see,” Ariadna replies, as evenly as she can. What in Gods earth is she meant to say to that? Is it supposed to be some kind of trick? Some hint? Does Helaena know what is to come?

Ariadna pales at the thought of her having Prince Aegon’s children. She doesn’t need to have bastards of her own. Besides, she needs to focus on surviving this birth first before anything else.

Helaena giggles again, fiddles with her ladybug necklace.

“That is a beautiful necklace, Princess,” Larissa says.

“Thank you! Aegon got it for me so I’d help him meet with Ariadna.”

If it were possible for her to choke to death on her spit, Ariadna is certain she would.

Helaena hums. “After Aegon cries in front of you, I figure we have a level of familiarity.” She hums again. “Even if you’ve been accused of murder.”

Ariadna is too stunned to say anything.

“Aemond told me,” Helaena says.

How wonderful.

“It’s a false accusation,” Larissa says, ever loyal. “A ploy—”

“Larissa,” she stresses, keenly aware of Helaena’s gaze boring into the side of her face. “Such a matter is not up to the princess.”

“No,” Helaena says. “It’s not. But I’m certain it’ll be sorted. Flames in the west lead to ravens to the isle.”

As if that’s supposed to make any sense at all.

“Of course,” she says.

Larissa frowns a little, rubs a smudge of dirt off her cheek.

“You have innocent eyes,” Helaena says to her.

“I—thank you,” Larissa says, blinking rapidly. “Thank you, my lady.”

Helaena smiles. Without lifting her eyes from Larissa’s face, she says to Ariadna, “My mother wished to speak with you on the morrow.”

Ah. How wonderful.

Ariadna tries her best to smile and does not try and trouble herself regarding what the Queen might wish from her.

Aemond finds Aegon in his chambers, sitting near the window. The breeze washes over his face as he nurses a cup of wine.

His brother arches a brow, clearly unimpressed by his choice of activity.

“You know if you keep scowling so much, your face will be set that way forever.”

“That’s not true.”

“Says who?”

“Science.”

“You mean to say in all those books of philosophy, law and history you read, the author speaks of the effects of scowling?”

Aemond’s scowl only deepens, making Aegon laugh.

“Mother used to say if we tried to keep our eyes open when we sneezed, they’d pop out, remember?” Aegon reminisces.

“You still tried.”

“Yes, and they were bloodshot for a week.”

Aemond shrugs. “Serves you right.”

“Yes, I suppose it does.”

Aegon hasn’t been inside his brother’s rooms in years. Certainly, it’s no doubt more put together than Aegon’s. Aegon, who has empty cups and flagons everywhere. Whose sheets are unmade – bed low, room dark, black curtains surrounding the windows. His mother once said his bedchamber resembled a dungeon, but Aegon refused to budge. His sole successful rebellion.

Hells, he doesn’t even think his children have ever come in here. It would frighten them, no doubt. Aemond looks out of place beside him, in the room Aegon reserves for sleeping, crying and his whores.

“Why have you come?” Aegon says. He can faintly smell the sea, even from so high up.

“Have you decided to do anything about we learned the other day?”

“I asked you first.”

“I found something.”

“You found something? Gee, how mysterious of you.”

Aemond unveils a rolled-up scroll from the inside of his sleeve.

He offers it to him, and Aegon reluctantly unrolls it. He scrunches his brows together.

“Is this a map of the Keep?”

“So you aren’t an idiot.”

“Fuck you—”

“Look at it closer,” Aemond says.

Aegon does. It occurs to him that there is faint sketches of the Keep, with tunnels beneath the walls. It makes his head spin.

“Do you remember that story Mother told us of?” Aemond asks. “Of Rhaenyra sneaking out to a brothel and returning in the dead of the night?”

“I do that all the time.”

Aemond rolls his eye. “I, and everyone else in the castle is well aware of that. However, she used a tunnel. The ones Maegor had built and then—”

“He killed all the workers to keep it a secret.” He snorts. “Unsuccessfully, it would seem.”

“There are only a few, I’m sure,” Aemond says. “Not all of them are listed here. Only four. But better than nothing.”

“Wait a moment,” Aegon says. “There’s one right by my room.”

“Yes, and it leads where?”

“Another part of the castle?”

Aemond looks severely unimpressed. “No, it leads to Volantis. Yes, it leads to another part of the castle, and your friend lives there. Or near there, I think. Though why you want to keep on being intimate with a woman accused of murdering her husband is beyond me.”

“You know that’s a lie.”

“People surprise you.”

“Because you think the worst of everyone.”

“Well, when an eight-year-old cuts out your eye, you learn to.”

Aegon nods, as if to say, fair enough. And then—

“Why are you showing me this?”

“It was a shame not to show someone.”

“Yes, I suppose Mother would confiscate it, lest you get lost.”

Aemond doesn’t look at him.

“How about Helaena?” Aegon shakes his head, discounting his own thought. “Nevermind, she doesn’t like the dark very much.”

Aemond makes a noise in agreement.

“So why me?”

“I thought you might need it,” Aemond says. “Or take interest.” A moment. “Just because you’ve never thought to share things with me, doesn’t mean I return the favour.”

Something sour blooms in his mouth along with faint stirrings of guilt. Recalls Aemond trailing behind them at the dragonpit, always desperate to come closer to the dragons, face always so eager. It had been so easy to be cruel to him. It had been funny sometimes, but Aegon reveled in the fact that for once he was better at something than his brother. His bond with Sunfyre came naturally – as easy as breathing. A reflection of his soul.

But Jace always seemed to like him. Aemond didn’t. Even when he hovered close, his brother was always scowling just like their mother. Would tattle on him for every single thing. Aegon used to think it was intentional, so he could gain their mother’s favour and worsen Aegon’s standing.

Like it’s all a competition. And it is. Despite their shared blood, they scraped over what remains of their mother’s affection, and Aemond has always, always won.

“Well,” Aegon sniffs, as graciously as he can, “thank you.”

Aemond leans back in his chair, crosses his legs. “Now you answer. What are you planning to do?”

Aegon says nothing, looks out the window. Remembers Ariadna’s hand in his own, clings to that assurance. I’m sorry. Did she mean it? She seemed to, but Aegon can’t help but shake the feeling he’s failed already. That though she apologized to him, he is the one in the wrong.

Because he is.

He’s many things – a drunk, a whore, lazy. But he’s not entirely blind to his faults. He’s aware, on some innate level, how pathetic he is.

“You can’t mean to do nothing, can you?”

“Aren’t I supposed to be overyjoyed at this new precedent being established?” Aegon demands. “I have no power when it comes to politics.”

“And you enjoy being used as a pawn?”

“I’m sorry, what great political developments have you been a part of?” Aegon questions. “Seriously, what am I to do? Stroll into the council chamber and tell them to fuck off? Otto and Mother would have me locked in my chambers until—”

His throat goes dry. The dreaded until. The day their father breathes his last.

Aegon doesn’t give a shit about whether Viserys lives. He does care about what comes after. Dreads it like nothing else in the world.

“Until they decide otherwise,” he eventually finishes.

“And you don’t plan to do anything about her?”

“What exactly are you suggesting? I silence her?”

“No,” Aemond says. “We don’t avenge ourselves upon women.”

“Except Rhaenyra, according to your own words.”

“You understand what this means, don’t you?” Aemond leans in. “I don’t know how much you’ve told her, and I don’t care to know if you’ve fucked her or not. But she has much reason to hate our family.”

Aegon scoffs. “And you think Ariadna is a spy?”

“I think you should think with your head and not your cock,” Aemond shoots back. “A difficulty for you, I’m certain.”

“And so why give me this map?”

“Because I know you,” Aemond says. “You’re going to do what you like. And if you manage to get her on our side, that’ll help Rhaenyra not interfere with this precedent.”

Aegon is not convinced that Ariadna would so easily join his cause and forsake her own inheritance, but he doesn’t say that. He doesn’t even want her to. He doesn’t want this. Aegon looks down at the map again and sees that one leads outside the castle. He can escape, undetected, in the dead of night…

And he knows the true reason why Aemond gave it to him, even if he’ll never say it directly. His brother and his dreams of the throne, despite how many stand in the way. Aegon looks at him then, nearly laughs. Almost asks if he’s prepared to kill him and his children so the day Viserys dies he can oh-so conveniently claim the throne.

He doesn’t say anything at all.

“Whatever you say, brother,” Aegon says, gulping down his wine. “Whatever you say.”

Ariadna is summoned to the Queen’s solar the following day, and she goes after her visit with the tailor has completed. She walks in to find the Queen working at some correspondence, or what appears to be as such.

“Lady Ariadna,” she greets, brownish red curls piled on top of her head, a small tiara to accompany it.

“Your grace,” she curtsies as deeply as she’s able, and by the time she looks up, she’s almost surprised by the faint sense of hurt she feels. She’d thought, foolishly mayhaps, that the Queen had some fondness of her. Some level of understanding, given how quickly she had given her a position as one of Helaena’s ladies.

And all the while, she’d been conspiring to strip Ariadna of her birthright. She can understand why the Queen desires this. Why she feels the need to make an example of her.

But it still grates at Ariadna.

The Queen could have been her own mother. The same age, roughly. Similar colouring. Ariadna nearly loses herself in it.

“Please sit,” the Queen says, gesturing to a nearby chair. “I do not wish to stress you in your condition.”

“That is very kind of you, your grace.”

She sits appropriately, cupping her stomach. The Queen looks down, almost as if in shame. Looking for the right words. Alicent Hightower is still remarkably beautiful, and Ariadna can see Aegon has her face. The full eyes, the pouty lips.

“I wanted to apologize,” Queen Alicent says. “For how we delivered the news to you. It was unseemly, and given your condition… we could have been kinder.”

“There is no need to apologize, your grace—”

“Kind of you to say so, but we both know it’s a lie.” Queen Alicent sets down her quill, links her fingers together. “We cannot interfere in the matters of men, of course. Merely guide them on their course. But we women can support each other when the time comes.”

Alicent clears her throat.

“You will have two children to support soon, Gods willing,” Alicent continues.

“My son will return to me?”

“That I cannot say,” Alicent says. “Your uncle currently has no heirs of his own. Your son might… might remain in his custody.”

Ariadna is not certain what she hates more – the acknowledgement that the case has almost certain been decided against her, or that Gerald could potentially raise her son until he sires one of his own.

She says nothing, but she’s certain her face speaks for itself.

“The Crown is not cruel,” Alicent continues, “I will work to have your son returned to you when the trial is over.”

“Unless I am found guilty.”

Alicent looks down. Her fingers tap the edge of the table.

“If—” the Queen begins, taking a deep breath. “If perhaps you were to marry another, revoke your claim to inheritance, you could live quietly away from court.”

“Your grace?” Ariadna sits up straighter. “You would – you would find clemency for a murderer?” She shakes her head. “An accused murderer?”

Alicent eyes her. “You and I share some similarities,” she comments lightly. “Wed young to men many years our elder. I find we are often blamed if their health fails, though of course I cannot comment on the evidence your uncle will present.”

The Queen takes another deep breath. “In time, mayhaps a few years, you could wed another, leave court quietly.”

“A few years.”

“When the time is right,” the Queen amends. “There are a few options I can arrange for you. Minor houses, but honourable. You will be provided for.” A pause. “Justice will be provided for you, Lady Ariadna.”

It occurs to her that Alicent thinks she’s being kind. And in a way, she is. Offering her another husband. Some stability. A balm to soothe the wound. But Ariadna—

She said no to Rickard because she wanted her freedom. She wanted to not have a husband. For all men would seek to override her, and she’d owe him obeisance as her husband. She was sick and tired of trying to balance it all. Being a wife and being the head of her household. Westeros doesn’t allow for it.

“Do you have any houses in mind, my lady?” she asks.

The Queen sends her an approving look.

“Here are some.”

She slides over a list of names, many of which she’d never heard of before. Some in the Crownlands, in the North, far away in the Vale. None in the Reach or Riverlands, lest she try and ask for aid from any familiar houses.

“Some of them are older,” the Queen continues. “In need of companionship, which they will value.”

Ariadna almost laughs. Everything she fought so hard not to happen, after everything she did, and now if she accepts, she’ll be sold off. But this isn’t until after the trial. Gods. Are her Tyrell inlaws involved?

She hasn’t considered that at all.

It’s funny – her value moves from daughter, to wife, to mother. Women can’t be anything beyond that.

By the time she leaves the Queen’s chambers, she is relatively exhausted, and heads straight to her chambers, grateful to be able to lie back and ponder. Wonders if she should tell Larys about the Queen.

When she pushes the door open, her jaw slacks.

Lying on her bed, leaning against a pillow, is Aegon.

“How did you get here?” Ariadna says, unable to contain her surprise.

Aegon laughs. “Some secrets are too important, don’t you think?”

Her gaze darts to the window. “You didn’t use Sunfyre, did you?”

He wheezes then, tears piercing his eyes with how hard he chuckles. “Now that would be a glaring lack in subtlety, would it not?”

She smiles slightly, but it turns out more like a grimace.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” she says, watching as he swings his legs off and sits by the edge of the bed. After a moment, she joins him, sitting a comfortable distance away.

“Aemond found a map with some shortcuts.”

“A map?” She arches a brow. “Where?”

“He didn’t say.”

She puzzles over this a moment. “And he gave it to you?”

“I proved him right, I guess, with what I did with it. Coming to see you.” Aegon tries to smile. “It’s been a few days.”

“It has,” she allows.

“My mother… the Queen would not be happy with this, as you must know.”

“I do.” She twists her mouth ruefully. “She’s trying to marry me off.”

Aegon nearly falls off the bed. “She is.”

“Indeed. A generous offer, given my criminal status.”

Aegon—his lips part, and he sits there gaping at her like a fish. He tries to think of attending another one of her weddings, and the thought makes him feel violently ill.

“To who?”

“There was a House Cave on that list.”

“Who the fuck is that?”

“I must admit – I do not know.”

She looks at him again then, gently peers into his eyes. “But if the husband would accept me… it could be good for me. Better than facing the axe.”

“It won’t come to that.”

“How do you know?”

His lips go dry. “I just do. I won’t let it.”

“A kind offer,” Ariadna states gently, “but this is out of your hands.”

“What was my mother thinking, anyway? You just got rid of one husband, I thought she’d want to give you a break. Would understand.” And, Aegon realizes, he doesn’t want her to marry someone else. He wants to keep her for himself. To know every inch and crawl between her ribs to make a home. There’s still so much he feels like he doesn’t know, like he’s scratching at the surface.

He just wants to see her smile again.

“It’s a generous offer.”

“You’re not considering it, are you?”

“Why wouldn’t I? I may have to renounce my inheritance, but I could try and get Robb back. And I would be alive.”

“I don’t think that’s enough for you,” Aegon says. “I saw you at your wedding – that’s your home. Your birthright. It belongs to you.”

He’s insulted on her behalf, frustrated.

Ariadna seems to appreciate this. “We’ll see what happens, but I am grateful to your mother. Besides, if it would help my son, I’d do it.”

“You must want to kill us all.”

“We women can’t afford to lose our tempers. It’s held against us forever. I’m certain her grace would agree.”

Aegon barks out a laugh then. It scratches the back of his throat. “She charged at Rhaenyra with a knife after Aemond lost his eye – stabbed her. Father wasn’t going to do anything about it, or reprimand Luke and… Well. She didn’t react well. Anyone has their breaking point, and I would blame you for being near yours.”

Ariadna is evidently surprised.

“I don’t blame her,” she murmurs, rubbing her belly. “If someone did that to Robb, I… I don’t know what I’d do.”

“Would you kill someone for your son?” Aegon asks.

Ariadna glances at him with surprise. “Of course, I would. If I thought someone was there to harm him or take him away… I’d do anything to keep him safe. To keep him near. I would kill them without question.”

Aegon swallows against the tightness in his throat. There’s an inkling at the back of his mind, a slight tug. He knows in his bones that she’s telling the truth, can see it plain on her face, that steadfast certainty.

“Would you kill someone for your children?” she returns.

A laugh escapes him, awkward and bubbly. It strips him raw. Aegon has always doubted his parental instincts. That instantaneous love and devotion everyone else seems to have when they look at their babies. He doesn’t know what to do with his children most of the time. What to say, how to rear them, love them.

But he imagines their small little faces stricken with terror, crying for him or Helaena, and the rage that comes is quiet but deadly, all encompassing.

“I would,” he says, almost with a touch of surprise. He shakes his head, mildly rattled, rubs a hand over his collarbone to try and calm the frantic beat of his heart.

Ariadna is watching him closely, and she surprises him by reaching for his hand, gently squeezing his fingers in her own. His heart jumps to his throat.

“You almost seem surprised,” she says.

He can’t bear to meet her gaze. Aegon looks at the ground.

“I’ve never been much of a father,” he admits. “I’d like to think I’m better than mine, but that isn’t saying much.”

“The fact that you care, and worry is proof that you’re better than you think.” Gingerly, she places her hand on top of his, and his head snaps so fast in her direction he’s certain she can hear it crack. “Give yourself some credit, Aegon.”

Her voice is soft, almost caring.

“Is that enough?” he wonders aloud. “Is simply caring enough? I don’t know. I can’t believe that it is, no matter how much I might like to.”

Ariadna’s brow furrows. She pinches her lip with her thumb.

“I wonder the same,” she admits, not without a hint of reluctance. “With Robb. I didn’t know what to do with him. Sometimes I’d listen to him cry and cry, and I all wanted was for him to be quiet. To sleep. Larissa has always been more patient with him than me. Always.”

“I’m sure you’re a good mother.”

“We’re children having children,” she says. “We do the best we can, I suppose.”

She wipes at her eyes, and Aegon—

“Don’t cry,” he hushes, and he scoots close to her, presses his lips to her cheek. No tears fall, but her eyes are still scrunched shut, like she’s willing herself to be present. To not be caught in the past. “Don’t cry. That’s my job.”

Her shoulders shake with silent laughter.

She pulls away, and she seems a bit lighter. Aegon realizes how close they are, but he doesn’t want to move. Wants to keep smelling her. He plays with the ends of her hair, and though he thinks he might be mad, he’s certain they smell like apples.

“What can a husband offer you?”

Ariadna shoots him an unimpressed look. “Security, a roof over my head, money, a life—”

“But he’ll not doubt be old and insignificant.”

“A sacrifice I’m willing to make, if it comes down to it.”

“A life without orgasms?”

An incredulous laugh escapes her lips, loud and biting. He feels it all the way to his stomach.

“You never know, my prince.”

“Did your husband ever give you one?”

“That’s inappropriate to ask, wouldn’t you say?”

“I’m curious.”

“I’ve had one before,” she replies bitingly. She removes her hand from his, places it on her lap. One is all he hears. A travesty.

“I can provide for you,” Aegon says.

“You have a wife, my prince—”

“An orgasm.”

For once, Ariadna seems truly, genuinely shocked.

“I’m with child.”

“So?” He shrugs. “That’s never mattered to me.”

“How many pregnant prostitutes have you bedded?”

He pauses. “None,” he admits. “But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t.”

A spring of excitement lurks in his stomach, makes his smile easier, like he’s had a few cups of wine to loosen his muscles. He reaches out and pushes a lock of hair behind her ear.

“I can do this for you,” he says. “I want to.”

“You do?”

“Has that not been obvious?”

“And here I thought all you wanted was the pleasure of my friendship.”

“That too,” he stresses. “I need not bed you. We can do – other things, if you like.”

“Other things?”

Aegon gestures towards her navel with his chin.

“Ah,” she says. “Cunnilingus.”

“Gods, you make it sound like a disease. Eating you out is much better.”

“I wasn’t aware I was a desert.”

He smiles. “I’m certain you taste like one.”

For once, Ariadna seems mildly taken aback by him, almost surprised, like she’s lost her footing somewhere in the conversation. He moves to kiss her, but she turns her cheek just in time.

“You’ll have to earn my kisses,” she says, and though her voice is strained, there’s a hint of levity in her voice.

He chuckles lightly, and presses a quick kiss to the back of her ear instead. “As you wish.”

Aegon pulls away, sinks to his knees before her. His hands reach for the skirts of her black dress, and he stops.

“I don’t want you to feel as though you have to,” he tells her shyly. “I want you to want to.”

Ariadna’s brown eyes are nearly black. She leans forward, presses a small, delicate kiss to his brow. Aegon, even though he’s on his knees, feels cherished. Appreciated.

“I do,” she assures him. “I do.”

He doesn’t rip her skirts up like he often does. Sex to him is a need as well as an art. When he was young, he wasn’t very good at it. He’s always been a good kisser – thank the Gods for his plump, thick lips – but he was always concerned with blowing his load. It took a few women for him to learn, to calm down in his urge for connection and to focus.

Once, when he turned sixteen, he spent an entire night pumping his fingers in and out of a red-headed whore, matching his efforts with his tongue, until she soaked the mattress seven times, gushing over his chin and wrist. He’d walked around the castle in a pleasant mood for near a fortnight before the whore was sent away, apparently having been caught stealing from her mistress.

He's had sex – rough, fast, desperate, but he takes his time now. Presses slow, lingering kisses to her calves, her knees, as he gently pushes the fabric higher and higher, exposing her small clothes. And Aegon—

Aegon is greedy. He lavishes her hipbone with small little nips, kisses her abdomen through her clothing, then the inner parts of her thigh, smiling to himself when he leaves blooms of blue and purple.

And then his fingers gently tug her small clothes out of the way, down to her ankles. She slips them off, understanding his silent missive. He looks at her then – propped up on her elbows, stomach round, almost blocking his view of her. She looks comfortable enough, mildly curious, as she bites on her lip.

Every inch a Queen, he thinks.

Now he wants her to feel like one.

Without prompt, he slings her legs over his shoulders, causing her to fall flat on her back with a yelp.

“Aegon,” she says, startled, but he distracts her by plunging his cunt in her mouth. She’s only slightly wet, not as drenched as most are, but no matter-

He’ll rectify it sooner than late.

Her moan is cut off, no doubt by her slamming a palm to her mouth, and that—

It just won’t do. He holds her hips in place, and plunges his tongue in and out of her cunt like one would a cock. Her hips tilt up, and though a hand is no doubt slammed over her mouth, he can hear her heavy breathing. He grins against her, and uses a finger to rub at her clit as he licks her clean like a particularly tasty dish.

And Aegon—

He’s good at this. Sex.

Even now, he feels strong, purposeful. He knows what the quiver of her thighs means. That she’s close when her cunt begins to flutter around his tongue as his nose brushes against her most intimate place.

“Aegon,” she says, desperate, a touch frantic. “Aegon—”

Surrender, he thinks, as he plunges two fingers inside her, massaging her walls with practiced care, searching for that one spot all women have. Aemond may have Vhagar and a sword and a library full of books he’s no doubt memorized, but he’s never pleased a woman like this. Never tasted her, pleasured her.

It’s like being a god – the only shining star in the entire sky.

And Ariadna—

Her wetness drips down her thighs, and when he looks up, he sees her press her cheek into the mattress, whispering something like a prayer. Almost as if reluctant to come. To let go in front of him. So Aegon—

He buries his head back between her thighs, and she comes with a muffled moan, hips canting upwards. He smiles, pleased beyond measure, and breathes heavily, wiping at his chin.

“Do you bathe with apples?” he wonders. “Or have you just eaten enough of them?”

Lazily, Ariadna gently kicks his shoulder. Aegon laughs.

“You should be thanking me, not hitting me.”

“Thanking you, shall I?”

“As your new God, you know,” he informs her. “Aren’t you in love with me yet following that spectacular orgasm?”

“Ah yes, after one orgasm, I’m ready to lay down my life for you.”

Aegon laughs, bubbly and bright, and rests his head against her stomach, panting slightly. He feels cocooned, almost warm.

“I should have taken you away,” he says. “That night on your wedding. I should have just taken you with me on Sunfyre. I think we’d both be happier if I’d done that.”

“That’s a beautiful dream,” Ariadna murmurs. He can feel her staring at him, but he doesn’t lift his head.

“It is,” he hums. He thinks if he’d pursued that one night of goodness, he could have pretended long enough for it to have become real. Slowly, she lifts a hand to his hair, and he purrs lightly like a cat.

And then—

He feels it.

A soft, feeble kick to her stomach.

He jerks back, eyes wide like a saucer.

“Was that your babe?” he asks.

Ariadna looks surprised herself. “It was,” she says. She pats her stomach, and he can’t help but touch it as well. The babe kicks again, almost as if in response.

“No ghost in the womb,” he says. “See?”

“No ghosts,” she repeats. “No ghost.”

And for a moment, she almost sounds like she believes it.

Chapter Text

Chapter 7

Aegon doesn’t want to move. He’s being rather stubborn about this, despite how Ariadna chides him.

“You are sitting on my bladder,” she emphasizes. She has to bend over her stomach so he can see her – it’s grown larger, these past few weeks.

Aegon grunts, closes his eyes, shifts further down so his head rests on her thighs instead.

“Better?” he asks lazily, reaching for her hand, lacing together their fingers.

She hums. “Well enough, I suppose.”

He laughs, low and hazy. His cock is still out, soft and useless now. His lips curl as he recalls exactly what led to that arrangement. He brings her fingers to his lips, presses a lip to each beloved knuckle.

“These,” he declares grandly, “are talented hands. Hands I deeply appreciate.”

“Because they just jerked you off?”

He gasps, mock offended. “Because they are delicate, and gentle, and—”

“Good at touching cock?”

“That too,” he allows, chuckling against her palm. He hears her partially muffled chuckle from up ahead. The room smells of incense, candles, and sweetened sweat from her perfume. The shudders are open, sunlight pouring in from the window. A familiar scene, nowadays. Aegon has put the map Aemond gave him to good use, much to his brother’s consternation.

Aemond is seething he can’t do anything about it, because Alicent will be incensed he didn’t bring the map to her attention.

Ariadna has reached her sixth moon of pregnancy, and so she has slowly been released from Helaena’s service.

He props himself up on his elbow, turning over so he’s no longer laying on her and is scooted closer. Her dress is still dishevelled – a soft orange-pink gown that does not confine her stomach, loose and silky. Her left breast is still on display, pinkened and swollen from all his attention.

She gazes up at him lazily, blinking slowly.

“Aegon?” She stirs, but he shushes her, encourages her to lie down. “You’re staring.”

“Am I not allowed to stare?”

“You’re a prince, you can do anything.”

Aegon smiles, but there’s a sharp pang on his inside. “You’re beautiful,” he tells her.

“I thought I said compliments will get you nowhere?”

His hand sneaks up her thigh. “It got me somewhere,” he says meaningfully.

“Hilarious, my prince.”

He leans closer, brushes his nose against her cheek. “Don’t call me that,” he requests, stilling his hand. He can feel the stickiness of her come there still. “Please – just Aegon.”

She nods, pats his chest.

“You know if—if you didn’t want me here, I’d leave,” he says. There’s this constant, inexplicable need for him to remind her of this. That he wants this to be her choice. That—

Well, he wants her to want him. Desperately. He knows he can make her come with his tongue, his fingers, even with his cock, if she’d let him. She hasn’t yet. Says it is improper, but she won’t let him kiss her either. He wants to ask why, but something always stops him. It’s odd—he wants her entirely. Wants to crawl inside her womb and stay there forever, let her grow and nurture him. He thinks he’d be happy like that, trapped beneath her skin, surrounded by her blood, marrow and tissue.

He doesn’t tell her that either.

He wants her, but it’s equally important that she want him as well. That he’s not merely something for her to suffer.

“If I didn’t want you here, you would know,” she replies.

He bends down to kiss her, and she watches him. He stills, kisses her nose instead. Part of her softens, relaxes into the bed. He moves onto his hip, peers down at her. Sharp cheekbones, pink cheeks, brown curls. A lovely face.

“Why won’t you let me kiss you?” Aegon asks, finally giving in now that the ugly monster in his chest is appeased. “I assure you, I’m rather good at it.”

“I’m sure you are. You’ve certainly had lots of practice.”

“As have you,” he retorts. “You were also married. Hmm? I don’t have much competition, I suppose. You’ve kissed myself and your husband, the old bastard.”

She hums.

“Come,” he urges. “Tell me.” He nuzzles his nose against her cheek. He wants to know every thought behind those pretty eyes of her. Wishes he had the power to do so.

She opens her eyes.

“Don’t tell me I have to earn it,” he says. “How many orgasms have I given you today?”

“Three,” she replies. “And that wasn’t how I meant earning it.”

“Then how?” he asks, half-teasing. “I can’t marry you.”

“Certainly not.”

“Then?”

She shuffles so she can sit upwards, wincing at the effort. He helps her lean against the pillows.

“The worst of it was the kissing,” she says.

“Pardon?”

“With Alester,” she says. “I could suffer his cock – I fell asleep during it once. But my mouth – I couldn’t ignore that. His tongue invading past my lips. I couldn’t fall asleep during that. It would choke me. Earning my kisses – that will take a special something not even orgasms can wash away.”

And Aegon—

“If he weren’t already dead,” he says lowly, “I would feed him to Sunfyre.”

“I’d let you.”

He cackles, delighted. “You’re more bloodthirsty than most give you credit for.”

“And you’re a better man than you give yourself credit for.” She leans forward to kiss him on the cheek, and he does not – does not! – preen. “Have more faith in yourself, Aegon.”

“I think the orgasms are clouding your brain.”

“A bad man wouldn’t ask if I wanted you here.”

He nearly laughs again. She isn’t right. Even if she did tell him to leave, Aegon isn’t certain he’d go. There’s a certain need in him, to see her. Only being with her can satiate it. He wouldn’t force her, but he wouldn’t let her be with someone else either.

He wonders if she can see the truth in his face, the selfishness, the rot. He wonders what she’d do. Aegon settles for humming instead, leans into her. Rests his hand on top of hers. Feels her babe kick.

“Gods,” he says. “You have a fighter in your belly.”

“I do,” she says. “He keeps kicking.”

“He?”

She shrugs. “A motherly guess.”

Aegon frowns, looking down. She’s six moons into her pregnancy already – what will happen after the trial? The petition? The matter of her succession? With a new babe, another mouth to feed—

“You’re frowning.”

“I’m worried.”

“About?”

“Your trial. Aren’t you?”

She exhales. “Of course I worry. But there’s only so much I can do about it. The Queen has given me permission to send ravens to call for witnesses, but who will attest in my favour? My husband was a Tyrell, no noble house in the Reach will stand against them.”

“I’ll attest to your character.”

She laughs. “To my ability to jerk cock?”

He scowls. “I know more about you than that.”

Ariadna’s expression softens, somewhat. “I know,” she allows. “I know that. But that can never happen.”

“So who will fight for you?” he asks. “And when? After your babe is born? Before?”

“They’ll probably hoping I’ll die,” Ariadna states bluntly. “I have a bad record with childbirth, Aegon. Chances are I’ll die of infection or disease, or I’ll bleed out—”

“No, you won’t—”

“Most women do,” she says. “Larissa can only help me so much. In truth, it’s not the worst decision my dearuncle can make. It saves him from potentially having to kill me himself, and they’ll be no one left to fight for Robb. Though he could, I suppose, name him his successor.”

“I’d fight for him.”

“You haven’t even met him—”

“I would.”

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep Aegon.”

“I’m not.”

He sighs. “Isn’t there anyone else to help you, since you refuse my assistance? Your mother’s family – the Strongs.”

“I’ve never met any of them, save Larys,” she replies.

“None of them?”

“My mother died giving birth to me,” she says. “I barely even know her name.”

“What was it?”

“Sara,” she says. “Her name was Sara.”

“Pretty.”

“Common,” she corrects. “A woman I never knew.”

Aegon’s mind traitorously jumps to Jace, an isle away. Jace was good – is good. He only ever became a shit to Aemond when he pushed Jace too far. And Luke, save the whole eye-cutting out fiasco, is generally good natured. They would help their kin. Jace used to look at Harwin like he hung the moon and the stars. He would help Ariadna, wouldn’t he?

Jace has always thought with his heart first, or he used to. Aegon doesn’t know him anymore. He almost asks if she would consider writing to them, but he dismisses it. His mother would murder him, and Jace—

Why would he come? To align with Ariadna would be to almost admit his Strong relation, which everyone in the castle knows of. The whole country, even.

“Do you wish you had known her?” he asks.

“It wouldn’t have hurt,” Ariadna says. “And if she lived and gave my father the son he so craved… my life would be simpler in many ways.”

He wonders if Rhaenyra thinks similarly of him, Helaena, Aemond and Daeron. How simpler her life would be if they didn’t exist.

He can’t blame her for it, even if part of him wants to.

“All she gave me is her face,” Ariadna says. “Which I am grateful for – I wouldn’t want the classic Florent pointy ears, thanks.”

Aegon chuckles, presses a kiss to her earlobe.

“Yes,” he agrees, “pointy ears would be very off-putting.”

“Touching. But—sometimes I wish I had known her, if only to know what it’s like.”

“What?”

“To have a mother.”

“It’s not always a pleasant experience.”

“I’m certain Robb would and will say the same about me, if the time came.”

He shakes his head. He can’t imagine Ariadna like his own mother. It doesn’t correlate in his mind, doesn’t fit. Can’t imagine Ariadna gripping her son’s jaw and forcing him to listen, to look at his sister as enemy. Can’t imagine Ariadna screaming in a room, charging at someone else with a knife.

Or maybe he can.

He hasn’t seen Ariadna love someone that much. Maybe she hides it from him. Maybe—

He wants her to feel that way for him.

Selfish, definitely, but also true.

He curls against her, strokes the nape of her neck. There’s a knock on the door – a series of three raps, followed by two longer ones, and she peers up.

“A moment, Larissa,” she calls.

“You know based off that?”

“I would know her anywhere,” Ariadna replies, fixing her dress.

Again, another pang of jealousy overwhelms him. He wants her for himself – wants to be the one who knows her better than any other on this earth. Wants to know her as well as he knows his own body.

He tucks his cock back inside his pants, and Larissa comes in, head bowed as she avoids his stare. Aegon had asked Helaena to keep an eye on the serving girl so he can have Ariadna to himself without any interruptions, but it seems she must have been released.

He closes his eyes again, reluctant to leave.

“You can’t sleep here, Aegon,” Ariadna says.

“I know.” But he doesn’t want to leave. “A few minutes, please.”

Helaena sniffs loudly.

“You smell of perfume and pussy,” she informs him primly. Aegon nearly chokes on his spit, before he promptly sticks out his tongue.

“I sure taste like one as well,” he says, and she grimaces, swatting his arm.

They’re in her chambers again, her hair wet from the bath as she organizes her magnifying glasses and other bug books.

“You’re disgusting.”

“Lies,” he says. “I’m the most handsome man you’ve ever seen.”

“Yes, because that’s what preoccupies my time and attention. Not our three children.”

Aegon saw them earlier. Jaehaerys really is her son, Gods be good. Privately, he thinks Jaehaerys would be far happier in the Citadel then he’d be with a wife.

“Obviously,” he says, grinning.

Helaena rolls her eyes and hums. He watches her for a moment – his sister, his wife. He should feel guilty about his betrayal, shouldn’t he? He has actively sought another woman’s bed, as he always has. But he doesn’t. Not really. He doesn’t think she cares much about where he sticks his cock.

He asks her if she does, and she blinks at him.

“No,” she replies slowly, “so long as you don’t stick it in me without warning.”

“I wouldn’t do that.”

She looks at him. “I don’t even think you remember how we conceived Maelor you were so drunk.”

“I remember!” he protests. “I think.”

She clucks her tongue, as if saying he’s proven her point.

“Hel,” he begins, taking a deep breath. “Have I—have I harmed you?”

She squawks at him. Aegon doesn’t blame her. This conversation is painfully awkward for them both – speaking of their feelings. But he can’t shake what Ariadna said earlier. About Alester. His kisses.

Aegon has never thought of his kisses as poisonous before. His cock has caused him more trouble than it’s probably worth, but his kisses? He thinks of the few he and Helaena have shared, wonders if she lies awake at night and is haunted by them.

“Harmed me?” she repeats, as if the words are some inexplicable mystery to her.

He nods. “Mentally.”

She gapes at him.

“Hel.”

“In this family we don’t speak of feelings,” she points out, “if we try, we might expire on the spot.”

“Well I’m here. Trying.” He swallows. “I don’t want – I don’t want to have hurt you. Or haunt you, negatively speaking.”

“Can anyone haunt someone positively?”

“Not the point.”

She hums, nibbles at her lip. “The first time hurt, if that’s what you mean,” she says.

“Yes, but—”

“You mean the others?” Her violet eyes narrow. “You’ve never broken my heart, Aegon. Not in that way, anyway.”

“But I have in others?”

Helaena sighs. “We’ve all disappointed each other at some point.”

He looks down, lump in his throat.

“Why do you ask?” she questions suspiciously.

“I—well,” he swallows again, throat unbearably dry. “I was wondering what it would take for someone not to be so… haunted by bad kisses.”

“Are you – are you asking me for advice so you can bed your mistress better?”

Helaena picks up the pillow beside her and wacks it on his face. When she moves to hit him again, he lifts his arms to fight off the blows.

“Hel – stop hitting me!”

“Stop being ridiculous.”

“Alright, sorry, sorry.”

She huffs, sufficiently vexed.

“She’s not my mistress, anyway.”

Helaena arches an elegant brow. “Have you bedded anyone else recently?”

“…Not for a few weeks. And I haven’t bedded her either. Just tongue and fingers and—”

“I really don’t wish to know.”

“I wouldn’t mind, you know,” he says clumsily. “If you – if you were to take a lover. We have our children. I’d pretend any babe you had was mine, no problem.”

“How generous.”

“I’m just saying, I would.”

Helaena looks away. “Men haven’t interested me in the way pretty girls seem to interest your cock instantly.”

“Well, there could be someone—”

“Aegon.”

“Sorry.” He winces, rubs at his chin. “I just… I don’t have anyone to speak to, about this.”

“And so your best bet was your wife?”

“Better than Aemond. Or Mother.”

They stare at each other for a beat before Helaena erupts into a fit of giggles, clapping her hands together.

“That’s true,” she allows, still giggling.

Aegon laughs too, soft and low.

“I want to kiss her,” he says. “But she won’t let me.”

“Mayhaps you should respect that—”

“I do,” he says. “I will. But I want—I want to help her want that from me, does that make sense?”

“Oddly enough for you, it does.”

He’s the one to smack her on the arm this time around.

“Help me, Hel?” he says. “Please? I already found all those wretched sea slugs for you.”

“That was payment for one favour. This is another.”

“Fine. Then name your price.”

“Spend more time with them,” Helaena says after a moment. “The children. They ask for you, and I’m running out of excuses.”

Shame uncurls inside him. He knows what she means – spend more time with them now before they realize there is no reason for your absence besides your lack of desire to see them. They’d experienced the same with their father. Helaena remembers less than he does, but Aegon recalls the time when Viserys used to pay them at least some attention, before his visits grew more and more sporadic the less enchanted, he became with the second family he had built.

Once, he’d caught his father playing with his stupid fucking Valyrian model instead of joining them for Helaena’s nameday. Aegon had destroyed a tower he’d built, but he’d been caught by a guard, and his father never bothered to speak with him after that. Not really.

“I will,” he says. “I will.”

She nods.

“What have you done for her?” she asks. “Besides her give her orgasms.”

“I… I listen when she talks.”

“How good of you.”

“Well what am I supposed to do?” he questions defensively. “I can hardly offer her marriage, can I?”

“Evidently not.”

“And it’s not like I can offer her money or rescue her son or take her home,” he rambles on, “not without mother or Otto noticing, and they’ll find a way to keep me chained or undo it. They always do.”

“Give her a necklace,” Helaena says. “Most women like jewellery.”

“You like spiders and centipedes.”

“Indeed, and yet you made do,” Helaena says, pointing to the necklace he had made for her weeks ago.

“Huh. I do have good ideas, don’t I?”

“Every so often,” Helaena replies airily.

He scowls again. “Thanks, my dear wife.”

“You came to my chambers with another woman’s cunt taste on your tongue—’

“Alright, alright,” he says. “I understand. Gods.”

Helaena rolls her eyes. Again.

“Just be patient with her,” she says. “Kind. Loving.”

“Ah. All the things Father never was with Mother, then.”

Helaena brightens. “Exactly.”

Wonderful.

Aegon does take note of Helaena’s suggestion, and he finds a goldsmith near the streets of silk. It’s not the first time Aegon has made a request for some jewels to be made for a partner of his. It was more often when he was younger, and his bits of infatuation had slightly more to do with his heart than his cock, but no matter.

He has a gold chain made with charms shaped and coloured with blue roses and red foxes, and he pays the man an obscene amount of money to keep his mouth tight shut lest someone start asking questions.

He invites himself into Ariadna’s chambers the day after he collects the necklace, and she smiles slightly at the sight of him.

“What’s this?” she asks, as he tugs back her hair and does the clasp.

“For you,” he tells her. “A token of my affection.”

Ariadna hums, fingering the chain, staring at it in the mirror. They make a nice balance, he thinks. A good contrast. His silver hair, her dark curls. Violet eyes next to greyish brown.

“Do you like it?” he asks, and he feels nervous like a child. “It reminds me of your wedding dress, do you remember?”

“I’m surprised you do.”

“I remember more than you think,” he says idly, taking her free hand. He wonders when this will stop – the need he has to touch her, to gain her approval. If it will stop.

“I like it a lot,” she says, and she looks away, back to their reflection in the mirror. “Thank you, Aegon.”

“That’s a lovely necklace,” Larys tells her, eyes fixated on her neck. “A gift, I presume? I do not recall you visiting a jeweller with the money I lent you.”

“It was a gift,” Ariadna tells him, as politely as she can. She nearly kicks herself for forgetting to take it off or tuck it beneath her gown, but Aegon had pouted for days when he caught her not wearing it when she walked through the halls.

“From the Prince?”

Bile fills her mouth.

“Indeed,” she allows. The babe kicks again, and she grunts near-silently with discomfort. Gods, she hates being pregnant. Hates it. Aegon’s attentions have been good at relaxing her body, her muscles.

Larissa said orgasms had the habit of doing that for the body. Ariadna wouldn’t know from past experience – not really. She wasn’t nearly pregnant enough when she bedded Rickard. And Aegon—

Well. She can’t say he’s not talented in the bedchamber. She’s hardly about to discuss that with Larys.

He smiles – or well, his lips curl. There’s no warmth to call it a smile. Like his lips weren’t made for such an act.

“You’re successful, then,” he says. It’s not a question, merely a statement.

“He’s proven fond of me,” she says.

“He’s certainly been visiting less brothels,” Larys says. “And fewer ladies have been seen visiting his chambers, that is for certain.”

Ariadna doesn’t think much of what Aegon does outside her chambers. Mainly, about who he fucks. The thought of him visiting a whore and then coming to her is revolting, mainly for sanitary purposes. She doesn’t want to be riddled with diseases, thank you.

She takes a small bite of her stew. Larys has insisted on them having dinner every week. She knows why but there’s simply not been much to report. Aegon has no knowledge of what his mother plans, or if he does, he doesn’t confide in her about it.

He rattles on about other things. Dreams he had as a child to fly beyond the wall with Sunfyre. Getting stung by a bee on his lip when he was twelve. The first time he lay with a woman.

I made her come even then, he had said, wiggling his brows. I was born talented – what can I say?

She’d laughed then at his sheer audacity, if nothing else. And while she’s had his tongue in her cunt and her hand around his cock, she doesn’t—

She doesn’t feel like she’s made progress. Like something has changed meaningfully about her position. Aegon is still Aegon. She doesn’t have more power than she had before; he hasn’t magically changed into a better, more dutiful son simply by the magic of her spreading her legs.

Ariadna fiddles with the necklace. It had been thoughtful of him, that is certain. But what do jewels mean? Nothing more than pretty words. Actions matter. Those are tangible, real. Harder to take back than a declaration of love. That’s all she feels like right now – a momentary distraction, a fun little tryst that he spills his feelings to.

Ariadna has a feeling Aegon has done so with other women, even if he doesn’t want to admit it. He’d probably done so deep in his cups, but he’d done it nonetheless. He wears his heart on his sleeve, Aegon, though he is loath to admit it.

“Keep up the good work,” Larys says. “Start planting the idea in his head.”

“Of what?”

“Being king,” Larys says, as if the answer is obvious.

Ariadna recalls her own gentle pushes, her encouragement that he’s a better man than he believes himself to be. If she starts telling him about being King, he’ll run faster than the hills. She knows that.

She nods anyway, troubled, but trying to hide it.

“There’s something else,” Larys says. “That you must know.”

“Yes?”

“Two representatives from the Tyrell house are arriving soon,” he says. “Regarding the accusations against you.”

Ariadna wants to fling her cup in his face. “I see,” she says, wiping at her mouth. “And who are they?”

She hasn’t actually met that many of her Tyrell-in laws. She’d been to visit Highgarden a few times, but she’d made no substantial relationships. Alester was hardly a substantial Tyrell to begin with – a tool they used to marry into the Reach noble houses that doubted their claim.

“I believe one of them is Rickard Tyrell, your husband’s younger brother.”

“How wonderful.”

“A rather tense reunion, I’d assume.”

“Certainly.”

Later, Ariadna rages in her chambers as Larissa listens.

“Rickard! How dare he! How dare he? The nerve of the man.”

“And Larys is for certain he’s coming here?”

“He is,” Ariadna says. She paces back and forth, one hand on her stomach, the other on the small of her back. “Gods be good, can’t he drop dead first?”

The door swings open, revealing Aegon. Of course.

“I hope you aren’t talking about me,” he states mildly.

Larissa swings her legs off the bed, stands, and promptly curtsies.

“Sorry to interrupt,” Aegon adds clumsily. She can smell his drink from here.

“You’re drunk.”

“I missed you,” he pouts, and comes to wrap his arms around her, burying his face in her neck. An overgrown child, he is. She bites back a sight, rests her hand behind his head, gently stroking his curls.

There’s a small outer room that Larissa quickly escapes to, and Ariadna shoots her friend an apologetic look over Aegon’s shoulder. This is, of course, Larissa’s bedchamber too. Not his. That which Aegon seems to have forgotten.

“You were here earlier,” she reminds him, just as plumps himself on a chair, carrying her with him so she falls onto his lap. His skin is pleasantly warm, despite his breath reeks of plum wine.

“Was I? It felt like days.”

“Aegon.”

He meets her gaze head on. “I couldn’t sleep. Nothing helped.”

“And what exactly was it you were doing to help with that? Besides drinking, of course.”

He smiles wolfishly. “I wasn’t fucking another woman, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“That would be none of my business.”

“You wouldn’t care at all?”

“Would you care if I fucked another man?”

“Yes, yes I would,” he replies promptly. “I’d be like one of those old, rogue Kings from before my family came and fucked everyone. The one from the mountains in the Vale that plucked people’s eyes out with his thumbs and ate them. What was his name again?”

“I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about,” she informs him. “What a just king you would make.”

Aegon’s mirth dies a little, his lips twisting. “I wouldn’t actually do that,” he insists quietly. “You know that, don’t you?”

“I do,” she says.

He hums a little, sways back and forth, still holding her close.

“Who were you speaking of?” he asks, right when she’s about to question if she’s too heavy for him now. “Earlier?”

She doesn’t see the point in lying. “Rickard,” she admits, sighing. “He’s coming here with another Tyrell envoy.”

“The bastard.”

“My sentiments exactly.”

“Why him?” Aegon wonders.

‘The personal edge, I suspect. To rattle me. To gloat.”

“He didn’t seem so vindictive at your wedding.”

“No, he didn’t, did he?” The bitterness in her voice is unmistakeable.

Aegon peers at her, eyes red.

“Why does he hate you so much?” He frowns. “Did he—did he love you is that it? Love is one of the few reasons why hatred turns so sour. Believe me, I would know.”

Ariadna is taken aback by his astuteness. Aegon can be emotionally intelligent when he wants, he just so often chooses not to be. But still – why tell him? It’s too significant, too risky.

“I’ll tell you a secret,” he whispers conspiratorially. “I wish my father were dead. I wish he’d died before he wed and trapped my mother. Everyone’s lives would be so much easier if I didn’t exist.”

She presses her thumb against the crease in his brow. “Not mine.”

He smiles at her, soft and slow, and she knows it was the right thing to say.

“So?” he says. “Did he love you?”

“He did,” she admits. “He wanted—he wanted me to marry him. After Alester died… I said no.”

“Sounds like you might regret it.”

“Well, it certainly came back to haunt me.”

“Why did you say no? Did you not love him?” Aegon’s frown deepens. “Did you bed him?”

“That’s many questions you just asked.”

“Ariadna.”

“Aegon.”

He gently bites her chin, releases the tender skin after a few minutes.

“I did,” she admits quietly, lowering her gaze. “Once.” A lie, but he doesn’t need to know that. “It was a mistake. And I didn’t – I didn’t realize how deeply it mattered to him.”

“You?”

“His honour,” she replies. “I don’t think he really cared for me as he thought he did. No one who does would ever betray me like he did.”

“So you didn’t love him.”

“No, I didn’t,” she agrees. “And I wanted my freedom. Wanted to rule my own household without worrying about my husband undermining my authority or using my funds to pay for his whores, gambling or drinking.”

Oddly enough, Aegon laughs. “You should tell that to my dear sister.”

“Your wife?”

“Rhaenyra. She wed Daemon. I wonder if she thinks he’ll simply stand by and do as she wishes while he nurses their children and reads some books.”

“I can’t possibly say,” she says carefully. “I’ve never met him.”

“Good for you – he’s a cunt.” A dark shadow falls over Aegon’s face. He clears his throat, snuggles closer to her, as if being so near someone soothes something inside him. Slowly, she strokes his cheek, presses a light kiss against his brow like she used to do with Robb when he had a nightterror.

“You wouldn’t bed him again, would you?” Aegon asks. “Rickard?”

“Of course not.”

“Good. I don’t want you to.” His violet eyes lazily meet her gaze. “Now you won’t have to wait longer, will you?”

“I suppose I won’t,” she says. “The reckoning is coming.”

“Reckoning?” Aegon peers at her. “You haven’t done anything wrong.”

“That’s kind of you to say.”

“It’s the truth,” he enunciates. “If I had the power, I’d tell him to fuck right off. Keep you here, safe with me.”

You could have that power, Ariadna nearly screams at him.

“I’m sure you would, if you could,” she assures him.

He smiles slightly. “You haven’t done anything wrong,” he repeats, almost like she hadn’t said anything.

She smiles. She can almost believe it.

Almost.

As it turns out, Ariadna doesn’t have to wait long, or so Aegon discovers. However much he might want to, he can’t spend all his time with her with his tongue in her cunt. And besides, he made a promise to Helaena, so he finds himself in the gardens with the children, nodding mildly as Jaehaerys brings a spider to his lap.

And by nodding mildly, he really means trying not to fucking squeal. Helaena sits in the flower beds with Maelor, Jaehaera busy making them flower crowns that she hastily plops on his head, which Aegon accepts far more readily than the spider, though he tries to act equally as enthusiastic.

It’s almost easier to pretend in the sunshine like he knows what the fuck he’s doing with them.

And then Aemond comes, stern and furious, stalking towards them, and—

“I thought you’d want to know that your dear friend is being brought before the throne this instant at the insistence of the Tyrell representatives,” Aemond informs him primly. “A rather abrupt development, but they seemed rather desperate.”

“What?” Aegon squawks, standing abruptly. Jaehaerys frowns as the spider makes it frantic escape, chasing after it. Helaena glances up at them, bewildered, and Aegon waves her off, offering a vague apology as he follows Aemond back to the great hall, heart pounding and thoroughly confused.

It’s only been a few days since he spent those nightly hours with Ariadna. He’s seen her nearly everyday since. It feels abrupt, unreal, for it to be happening now, like their little cocoon has been shattered. For it has.

They push their way through the crowd in the Great Hall. It’s not a large amount of courtiers, but enough curious onlookers to send gossip spreading through the halls as Aegon weaves his way to the corner of the room, a little out of his mother’s watchful gaze.

He can see Ariadna clearly. Larissa is with her, standing right behind her. Ari, he heard her friend all her once. He wants to call her that. Ari.

A plump elder lady shoots Aegon a curious look, and he realizes Jaehaera’s flower crown must still be on his head. Aegon doesn’t care enough to throw it off. He fixates on Ariadna, who is watching the two petitioners, Rickard and another man roughly his age, clearly related to him, make their case to Otto, who sits on top of the throne.

Aegon hadn’t expected it to be so public. His mother, upon further investigation, looks displeased as well, picking at her nails. But they’re Tyrells. Otto would want to appease them more than—

Well. More than Ariadna. More than Aegon’s mother, even. They have the Hightowers support, but the Reach is the most populous kingdom in Westeros, or so the Maesters say. More wheat. More sheep. More soldiers.

“Lord Gerald has made it plain to us the truth of my kinsman’s death,” the other Tyrell proclaims, jutting a finger in Ariadna’s direction. She’s wearing one of her pale orange gowns, her stomach large and protruding, a black shawl draped across her shoulders.

She’s still wearing his necklace. Absurdly, he nearly beams, which is certainly not the appropriate reaction in such a situation.

“My dear cousin Rickard became aware of the truth, and so acted appropriately,” the man continues, jeering at Ariadna. “We demand justice in light of the evidence.”

“And what evidence, Ser, do you so have?” Ariadna demands. “What has my uncle found? If he has such evidence to convict me of what you allege, why is he not here to show it?”

Her gaze darts to Rickard, who has so far been studiously avoiding her gaze. He finally glances at her after the weight of her glare, and Aegon—

The bitterness and resignation is palpable. Even he can see it. Jealousy boils beneath his skin. He hadn’t been angry at Ariadna’s revelation. After all, it would be massively unfair considering his own history. But he didn’t like the thought of anyone else knowing her, wanting her, claiming her.

“Lord Gerald is indisposed.”

“And my son? You seem to forget, Ser, that my son is your blood.”

“If he is even your husband’s.”

“I beg your pardon?” she protests hotly. “I have never bedded anyone outside of my husband’s blood, Ser. That which everyone knows. Robb even looks like him.”

“That is an accusation we cannot substantiate,” Rickard cuts in, looking haggard and apparently unwilling to stoop that low. “We are here to focus on the matter of succession, nothing more.”

“And what evidence do they have?” Ariadna demands again. She takes a step towards the throne. “My uncle has not appeared before you, my lord. He has not shown to present his evidence, and is slandering my name all the while as he seizes my birthright—’

“I will have you know, my lady, that your uncle and several members of Brightwater Keep have been indisposed by a small but severe illness that has killed members in the family and made others dangerously ill.”

And Ariadna’s face grows white.

“What mean you by that Ser?” she questions, voice nearly shrill. Aegon takes a small, unconscious step towards her. Aemond’s hand inches towards him, as if to hold him in place. Aegon ignores him. “How is Robb?”

The man ignores her.

“We maintain that Lady Ariadna has acted outside the realm of decency and has taken advantage of the privileges given to her by her father—”

“Is my son dead Ser?” Ariadna interrupts, loud and furious, cheeks blotchy and red.

Rickard turns to her, says something quiet, something Aegon can barely read – Ari.

“As if you care for your son!” the man scoffs. “You, who murdered his father. You, who abandoned him to flee to the city and took lovers into your bed like a whore—”

And Aegon—

Aegon sees red. He remembers Ariadna at her wedding, freshly fifteen with roses in her hair. Recalls Alester, past thirty and wrinkled already, lavishing her with his eyes like she was a juicy piece of meat. Recalls her words in bed, how she lost her second babe, how she was sold off for her father’s desires like his own mother was, and Aegon—

Aemond may be quicker, smarter, faster than him on almost all days, but not this one.

Aegon marches forward, hand at his sword, and decapitates the Tyrell envoy with a single slash of his sword. Blood spurts in the air, coating his lips, and the head rolls to the floor. The body quickly follows.

Huh, he thinks, mildly stunned at his precision. Criston will be proud. Aegon flicks his flower crown out of his eyes as startled, horrified cries fill the room, his own mother among them. Rickard turns to him, hand reaching for his own weapon out of instinct, and Aegon sneers.

“I’m the King’s firstborn fucking son,” he spits. “I fucking dare you.”

And Rickard, as predicted doesn’t dare. The Kingsguard in the room swarm between them as Otto yells vague orders in the air, beyond furious. Aegon is mildly dizzy himself. He sheathes his sword as he continues to look at Rickard. He should kill him too, he thinks.

But the opportunity is gone.

He turns to look at Ariadna, who has a hand pressed over her mouth, eyes wide.

“My lady,” he says, taking a step towards her. Larissa is helping her to remain standing. Aegon, guided by sheer, natural instinct, offers her his arm. He glances sharply at Rickard. “I believe she asked you a question, Ser.”

Rickard blinks, cold and hard, and the hint of bitterness turns to hatred as he glances between Ariadna and Aegon and sees.

“No,” he replies, voice full of loathing. “Robb isn’t dead.”

“You see,” Aegon drawls. “How hard was that? Good boy.”

He can be mocking without consequence, drunk on his own power. For once, Aegon actually feels like being the King’s firstborn son means something. More than just his mother’s fears or worries. It’s a tangible, living, breathing thing. Something he can use to protect and enact vengeance, as leverage.

He shakes that realization away.

“We’re getting the fuck out of here,” he spits, and Aemond is already running interference with their mother and Otto.

Ariadna takes his arm, bewildered, just as the shouts grow louder.

There is no escape in her bedchambers. In the entire keep, there is no escape. Not from the Queen, or the Hand, or even the King.

Not even from Aegon.

Ariadna, numb from the day’s events, follows where Aegon leads her, Larissa trailing behind her. Her heart continues to pound solely for Robb. Illness, illness, illness-

The blinding fear, the seeping relief. The taunt on Rickard’s cousin’s face. He was even more distant to the heir to Highgarden than Alester had been – Lance, Ariadna believes his name is. Was. Before Aegon took his head off.

When the door shuts behind them, Ariadna sinks to her knees, cracking. Larissa follows. And really, she’s all Ariadna wants, because Larissa—

Larissa is the only one who loves Robb like she does.

“He’s alive,” Larissa assures her. “He’s alive.”

And Ariadna wants to believe it. So, so desperately. But—

“I would feel it, wouldn’t I?” she whispers. “If my son were dead, I would feel it.” She repeats it, as if to convince herself, but the fear does not go away. Remains within her like a disease. And then Aegon sits behind her, palm pressed against her spine, and the full weight of what he’s done hits her like a tonne of bricks.

She pulls away from both of them, scrambles as fast as she dares given her current bodily state to her feet.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” she tells Aegon.

He gawks at her. “You wanted me to stand by and let him call you a. whore?”

“It’s certainly not the worst thing someone’s ever done to me,” she protests hotly. “And yes, that is what I expected, because now—”

“Because now what—”

“You’ve made things worse!” she cries. He stands as well, and she wants to hit his beautifully carved face, as if gifted from the Gods themselves. Wants to ruin it. Wants to shake some sense into his beautiful, empty head.

“Made things worse,” he states flatly. “Apologies, for defending your honour—”

“I don’t need you to do that,” she says. “Gods, Aegon, don’t you see what you’ve done? They all know now that you care for me. It wouldn’t be a lie then, for them to call me a whore. Would substantiate their claims. And—”

“And what?”

She scoffs, low and cold. Larissa backs away from them both, wary.

“How can you not see?” Aegon blinks at her, petulant and stubborn and so fucking impulsive. She grabs his cheeks in her hands, fingers trembling, and takes a deep breath, trying to calm herself. “When the King dies, Aegon, what do you think will happen?”

He tries to look away, but she doesn’t let him.

“I think you have some idea,” she continues lowly. “But you don’t want to see it. That’s fair and fine. But your grandsire will need help to succeed in what he wants. Help from the Great Houses, those of which include House Tyrell. And now, since you killed one of their own for my sake, they’ll want blood. And the outcome for me will be far less sweet than your mother’s suggestion of wedding me off to some insignificant old lord in the North or the Vale. Your grandsire will offer them my head or my lands to appease them, say I bewitched you. Don’t you see?”

Aegon is pale and staring at her. In his eyes, she has the very keen sense that something is breaking.

“Otto might even offer them your youngest son in marriage,” Ariadna continues, shaking her head.

He remains painfully, embarrassingly, silent.

“I didn’t—I didn’t think of that.”

She smiles bitterly. “Of course you didn’t.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

And Ariadna—a laugh grows trapped in her chest, cold and cruel and aching. She is nothing more than a little bird beating at her cage.

“Oh Aegon,” she sighs. “When have you ever loved someone more than yourself?” She wipes a hand over her mouth. “If you ever had, you would think more about how your actions effect other people, or you would do something about it and help, instead of going off drinking somewhere and crying into my lap.”

He winces like she slapped him. She thinks in some ways, she did.

“You should go,” she says, defeated. Her anger has been snuffed out like a candle. Fuck. Fuck. “You won’t do me any favours by staying here.”

And, as if in a daze, he does.

His mother is furious with him, that goes without saying. He’s barred inside his chambers indefinitely, he’s certain. Alicent even cries, which isn’t untypical when she’s particularly frustrated with him, but it hasn’t happened in a while.

Aegon feels picked raw, beaten like a dog, and the urge to drink has never been stronger. He wants to. This is what happens when he cares. He fucks up irrevocably. Aegon is locked inside his room for two nights when Aemond comes in to visit.

“Out of the two of us,” his brother starts, “I thought I’d be the one to decapitate someone first.”

“You and me both.”

“Why did you?”

“He was a twat and I wanted to.”

“Aegon.”

“Aemond.”

He swallows hard. “Is she—is she alright?”

“The court is alive with gossip,” Aemond admits, plopping himself down in a chair. “They’re calling her your mistress.”

“And?”

A pause. “And some other unfavourable terms. It’s not often a woman bewitches a prince while pregnant.”

“She hasn’t bewitched me.”

“You killed a man before the Iron Throne for calling her a whore.”

“That was my impulsivity—”

“Yes, and she bears the brunt of your idiocy,” Aemond drawls, merciless. “Unless, of course, you intend to help her?”

“How?” Aegon demands. “Mother won’t let me out of here, Otto is more likely to shove me out a window, and Father couldn’t care less about me. What else am I to do? Pout and beg before the small council?”

Aemond shrugs. “I never said I had any suggestions to fix the fuck up you’ve created.”

Aegon groans. “And the children? Hel? How are they?”

Aemond eyes him closely. “Confused as to your absence,” he replies.

A pang of guilt hits Aegon. He promised Helaena he’d spend more time with them, and now—

I would feel it, wouldn’t I? Ariadna had wondered to Larissa, broken and fearful, if my son had died?

And suddenly Aegon is standing, rushing to his drawers.

“What in the seven hells are you doing?”

“Something stupid,” Aegon replies. “But I think, for once, this might actually help.”

Aemond watches him, amused. “There are guards outside your door.”

“Please. As if you didn’t tell them to fuck off the minute you came here. You terrify them.”

Aegon’s brother grunts. “I terrify most people.”

“Lovely of you.”

Aegon searches around until he finds it – a grey, wrinkled cloak. A half-full waterskin. Riding gloves he tucks into his back pocket before Aemond can see.

“Are you being proactive?” Aemond mocks. “This is a first.”

Aegon tries not to flinch, but the words land regardless. “It is,” he allows. But it needs to be. There’s no going back now. He can either try and save it, or

Well. He can stay like this forever, proving everyone right. Drinking and whoring until the end of his days. And he wants that, on some level. Wants to not care. But part of him still does. The same boy who asked Ariadna to dance and wanted to be a knight in a song for her. He still exists inside Aegon, bleeding and dying as he is.

“Stay by her door,” Aegon requests. “I’ll never ask anything of you again in my life. I swear it. Just – don’t let mother send her away. Keep her alive. Please.”

Aemond frowns at him, dark and imperious, lips curled with disdain. “What will you do?”

“Try and fix this mess I started,” Aegon says. “Or maybe fuck it all up even more. Hard to say.”

“Aegon—”

“For once, I just—” He inhales deeply, flexes his fingers. “Let me do this one thing.”

“You do a lot of things.”

“Aemond, you fucker—” Aemond looks away, and for a moment he’s not Aemond. Mother’s favourite, rider of Vhagar, cold and distant and always telling him how shit he is. He’s not that to him in this instant. He’s Aegon little brother, expression falling as he spots the pink dread, constantly following him, looking at him, urging him to—

“Please,” he says finally, and he cups his brother’s cheek for the first time in years. Aemond looks at him, startled. “This last thing. For me.”

Aemond glares at him, low and furious. “Fuck you,” he spits, and then—“Fine. It will be a miracle from the Gods when I no longer have to clean up after you or hide your messes.”

Aegon grins. “I think that’ll happen once I’m dead.”

Aemond laughs, almost as if surprised he still can. Aegon drops his hand. “And don’t tell Mother. Not yet.”

“When?”

He reaches the door, finishes tying his cloak. “You’ll know,” he murmurs. “You’ll know.”

He pulls up the hood. “And don’t come after me.”

Sunfyre isn’t pleased to be woken in the night, but his sour mood is gone by the time they take to the sky, disappearing behind the clouds.

There’s a faint roar from Vhagar – a farewell, a warning.

It soon falls on deaf ears the farther Aegon flies from the capital.

Chapter Text

Chapter 8

Ariadna wakes in the night to movement in the antechamber. She springs up, hair tousled and loose, propped up on her elbow. She’s fast, but Larissa is faster. Larissa swipes up a knife, and stands. Ariadna hadn’t even realized Larissa had moved to sleep on the floor in front of the bed, so no one could reach it without stepping on her.

But Larissa stands, bold and furious, and shields Ariadna with her body, knife at the ready.

“You stay behind me,” Larissa says, and Ariadna can detect the hint of fear in her voice. Her beautiful, loyal friend. Gods, what has Ariadna done to her? All the lies, the guilt, the sins—

“If they’re going to kill me,” Ariadna says. “They don’t need to kill you as well. Best to step aside.”

Larissa shoots her an incredulous look. “Would you simply step aside if it were me?”

Ariadna presses her lips together. The babe kicks her stomach fiercely, almost in time with the savage beating of her heart. The noise grows slightly louder. She’s thought a bit about how she would die. After all, she nearly died in childbed. Twice. She never thought she would be beheaded or murdered by a palace guard.

What a turn of events.

She huffs, sits upright, and presses a hand to her belly. Almost as if comforting the babe and herself at the same. Abruptly, she reaches for Larissa’s free hand. Her friends knots their fingers together, squeezes so tightly her knuckles rattle.

There’s a bump against the door.

“She’s pregnant,” Larissa calls out. “I thought you Westerosi folk did not harm women with child and believed in fair trials.”

The door pushes open.

“You’ll have to kill me first you coward—”

Larissa falls silent. The knife nearly clatters to the ground. A small, wounded sound escapes Ariadna’s throat unwittingly. Prince Aemond raises a cool, stoic brow. He’s holding a candle, and his cheekbones seem all the sharper in the fading light.

It also helps Ariadna notice the gleam of his sword.

“It’s not every person who calls a prince of the realm a coward,” Prince Aemond drawls. “I could have you thrown in the stocks for that. Or sent to the dungeons.”

“My prince, I—” Larissa stammers.

Ariadna takes a deep breath, and stands on shaky legs, grunting at the strain it puts on her lower back.

The silver-haired prince stares at her sharply, thin red lips pursed with vague distaste.

“Not to worry,” he says smoothly. Dangerously. “I think you are in enough trouble.”

Ariadna nods. Once. Twice. Rubs her palms against her nightgown. She wonders if she looks as young as she feels.

“Has the Queen sent you?” she asks, as evenly as she can. Ariadna has not been allowed to leave her chambers, not that she’s tried particularly hard. Last she checked, there were guards outside her door. She wonders what Aemond did to them.

He considers her a moment.

“No,” he replies curtly. “My brother.”

When have you ever loved someone more than yourself? The question lingers inside her, cold and biting. The look on his face. It’s the truth, but it’s a truth she regrets saying. Mostly, she’s been in a daze. Her plan, if the Queen sought to confront her, was to be the penitent, humble servant of the realm. A mother desperate to protect her son. It’s not far from the truth, anyway.

It’s not like Ariadna could reject a prince comfortably. She thinks the Queen is aware of that. But this isn’t a casual dalliance now. Aegon killed a Tyrell. For her. There is now blood owed because of her, or so they’ll say. Because Aegon couldn’t control himself. 

“Your brother,” she repeats, as if convincing herself of it. So he has not abandoned her after all. “Is he—is he here?”

“No,” Aemond says. “I’m afraid I don’t know where he is. He left the castle.”

“He—” 

The word is sucked out of her throat. She sinks down onto the mattress, hand on her collarbone. Tries to remember to breathe. If Aegon isn’t here, who will advocate for her not to die? He may not sit on the small council or be the heir, but—

He has a dragon. He has some measure of authority within the castle.

Without him—

“Not to worry,” Aemond states mildly, almost like he’s enjoying her distress. “He made me vow to remain with you, and so I shall. Be grateful he has more care for you than his usual mistresses.”

Grateful.

Ariadna is not certain what she feels for Aegon, but it certainly isn’t gratitude. His impulsiveness has ruined her chances drastically. She can’t forget that. But where has he gone? Has he fucked off to Essos?

She swallows.

“Thank you, my prince,” she tells him, as politely as she can muster.

Aemond nods, turns away without a word. Larissa does not drop the knife when the door clicks shut. Merely sits beside her, hand still in hers. The other clutching loosely at the blade’s handle.

“Well,” Larissa sighs. “We’re not totally fucked yet.”

Ariadna laughs. She can’t help it. Gods, if only she’d known this would happen as Alester lay there dying…

But by then it was too late, wasn’t it?

Larissa pulls her close, and Ariadna rests her cheek on the curve of her shoulder, the only sliver of home that remains to her.

“Sunfyre!”

His dragon grunts beneath him, clearly displeased. Sunfyre is usually a bundle full of energy, tail constantly wagging like a dog. He’d been glad to see Aegon, even in the dead of the night, despite the way the dragon keeper trembled and cried as Aegon pointed his sword at him. However, Sunfyre, rather like Aegon, enjoys his sleep.

He does not, quite clearly, appreciate this disruption and is making his displeasure known by unnecessarily tilting one way or the other, Aegon nearly toppling over.

Aegon huffs. “Fine, you big baby. Let us rest.” He tugs down at the riding chains, and Sunfyre gratefully moves for land, chirping like a bird. This ridiculous creature—

When they reach the ground, Aegon looks up at the sky. It’s been a few hours at the least since they left, but there’s no hint of sunrise yet. A flock of birds flee their nests at Sunfyre’s arrival, and when Aegon glances at him his dragon seems to be pouting. Fucking ridiculous.

He pats Sunfyre comfortingly on the nose. He wishes he’d paid more attention when Criston attempted to teach him how to hunt, because he has no idea what to do or where to start. He’s merely glad he had the foresight to bring a few waterskins with him.

“Well,” he mutters, “this may have been a bit impulsive.”

Something he’s excelled at these days. Aegon sighs, pinches the bridge of his nose, and turns to look at Sunfyre. “Come on,” he says, gesturing around them wildly. “Go hunt or something.”

He knows if Sunfyre were human, he’d be arching his brow at him rather like his mother does. “Come on, get.”

Sunfyre trills, flicks his tail at Aegon, knocking him over, and hops into the thick cluster of trees nearby the clearing, grumbling in his wake. Aegon groans from where he lies flat on his side on the earth, and eventually rolls himself up. Sunfyre had been smart enough to stop nearby a stream.

He refills his half-empty waterskin and waits, sword at the ready, trying to fight off the cold. He gathers a few twigs and leaves, already yearning for the comfort of his bed. But he can’t return. Not yet.

By tomorrow, he should arrive in the Reach.

Provided his mother doesn’t change Aemond’s mind and send him and Vhagar after him. Gods. He can only imagine his luck if somehow Daemon is taking a frolick across the country at this very moment. He’d be Caraxes fodder in no time.

Thump.

Aegon startles, practically jumping out of his skin. Beside him is a half-ripped apart rabbit carcass, measly and pathetic from Sunfyre’s great jaws. The stench of blood wafts past his nose as he sits there and almost vomits.

Sunfyre stares at him expectantly, as if daring him to complain. Aegon offers him a half-hearted round of applause, and gestures for Sunfyre to light the kindling he gathered. Within moments, a fire crackles a few feet away, Sunfyre grumbling once more. Aegon ignores him.

If he were any other man, he would be wary of lighting a fire in the dark, so far from others. He’d be an easy target – the smoke a beacon for the raiders, rapers and thieves. But Aegon is no ordinary man. He tucks himself close to the fire, Sunfyre’s tail coiled around him tightly, keeping him from harm.

After a time, he manages to remove some lame pieces of meat, puts it on the end of a stick. Criston would be proud, he thinks wryly. Sunfyre huffs behind him, already deep in sleep, sensing his restlessness.

Gods, what is Aegon doing? He’d been so certain when they took flight, but now—

Now, he almost trembles. He can’t go back. Aemond would have gone to Ariadna by now, wouldn’t he? She would know. But Alicent. Helaena. The children—

Aegon will return. But not yet.

He presses his lips together and tries to convince himself of that. He’s always known he’s been inadequate in many ways. His body is softer than Aemond’s, not that of a hardened warrior. But now, even with Sunfyre at his back, Aegon is keenly aware of his lack of survival instincts outside of the comfort and lavishness of the Red Keep.

Watch me end up in Dorne, he thinks, taking a large, vicious bite from the rabbit. He almost spits it out – stops himself just in time. Gods, he thinks, not for the first time. He pinches the bridge of his nose, tosses his stick and food into the fire. At least the skies are clear. He wonders if Ariadna cares that he’s gone. If she knows what he hopes to accomplish.

A log snaps a few feet ahead. The crunch of leaves. Aegon sits up, sword at the ready, and Sunfyre is awake at once, growling in the back of his throat. Any man would run away in fear at the sight of Sunfyre.

But there is no crying, no whimpering. Nothing of that sort.

A few feet ahead, almost frozen in place, is a small fox. He can see its orange fur faintly from the glow of the fire. Its yellow eyes peer at him, curious and unafraid. Not even Sunfyre seems to scare it. Remembers that day of her wedding – the dead fox Sunfyre brought him.

Oh, Aegon thinks, and his heart gives this queer little lurch. Oh.

And it feels as good an omen as the world is capable of giving.

-

Ariadna wakes the next morning, yet again, to shouting in the ante chamber. Larissa is slumped on the floor, back against the bed, and she rightens as Ariadna bolts awake, almost tripping in the bed sheets as she reaches for her dressing robe to conceal her modesty.

“Ari—”

“I’ll be fine,” she says, trying to believe it. “I’ll be fine.”

“He’s one man.”

“He is,” Ariadna allows. “But he’s a prince.”

Larissa grumbles. “I’d feel better if we could fit Vhagar in between you and those who wish to harm you.”

“That might be the entire Reach by now.”

Ariadna runs a hand through her hair and pries open the door. Aemond is standing a few feet in front of it, back poker-straight, hands clasped at the base of his spine. His sword is not drawn, and Ariadna—

“Where is Aegon?” the Queen shrieks. “Aemond, where is your brother.”

“I don’t know,” the silver haired prince replies. “Try the Streets of Silk?”

“Is he in there?” the Queen persists. “Is he there? I will have Ser Criston and the rest of the Kinsguard pry you from the door if I must. Where is Aegon?”

Ariadna catches a quick glimpse of Alicent Hightower through the gap in Aemond’s arms. She looks particularly aggrieved, as dishevelled as Ariadna has ever seen her. Ser Criston, from where he stands behind her, looks unimpressed. Grave.

“Prince Aegon is not here, your grace,” Ariadna says quietly.

Aemond stills, steps to the side. Alicent Hightower’s jaw locks, her eyes grow inflamed.

“You will forgive me, my lady, if I do not take you at your word.”

Ariadna nods. “Of course, your grace. You are welcome to check—”

“I will check if I so please, Lady Ariadna. I do not require your permission.”

“Mother,” Aemond cuts in softly. “I do not lie – Aegon is not here. You know that. Sunfyre is gone.”

And there, Ariadna sees it – the raw, naked fear on the elder woman’s face.

“Where Aegon goes, Sunfyre follows,” Aemond finishes. “He isn’t here.”

“But she knows where he went,” Alicent insists. “She, who has made him act so... dishonourably. She knows and convinced him, and I shall have the truth of it.”

And gone is the kindness that was once there for her. The gentle understanding Queen Alicent had for her situation. In her eyes, Ariadna is a villain who endangered her son. Two-faced and duplicitous and—

Gods, she thinks. How am I meant to dig my way out of this?

“I understand that,” Aemond says evenly.

Ariadna’s heart drops. The Queen nods to Ser Criston, who takes a step forward, ready to bring her wherever his sworn lady so desires. She braces herself for it, this humiliation – after all, she has born worse, but then Aemond steps in front of her.

“Be that as it may,” he says, “I swore to my brother I would not let harm come to Lady Ariadna, that I would protect her, and I do not forsake my word.”

“Aemond—”

“I do not wish to come to blows with the man who taught me how to wield a sword,” Aemond says. “But if I must, I shall. My word to my brother comes before personal feelings.”

They stand there, staring at each other. The tension in the room is stifling.

Fuck.

“I will answer any question her grace has for me,” Ariadna says. “I am a loyal servant of the realm, and do not wish to cause any further disturbance than I currently have.”

Aemond glances at her sharply.

“If her grace will allow me to dress—”

“I will speak with you now,” Alicent cuts in. “Alone.”

Ariadna’s lungs feel clogged with smoke. Why can’t she breathe?

“As you wish, your grace.”

When Criston moves to follow the Queen, Aemond stops him.

“Just them.”

Heart in her throat, Ariadna watches as the Queen nods her acquiescence. Larissa scrambles of the floor at the sight of the Queen, nervousness etched onto her every feature. The Queen glares at her, but Larissa, even mid-curtsy, does not let go of the knife. She keeps looking at Ariadna.

“We require privacy, Larissa,” Ariadna requests, tightening the sash of her robe. “If you will wait in the antechamber.”

Larissa sets down the knife, nods grimly, and offers the Queen another curtsy before leaving the room.

“Where is my son?” Queen Alicent asks. “He is missing, and he must be found.”

“I do not know, your grace,” Ariadna says. Her ankles throb with discomfort. The babe kicks her again, and she can’t help her grimace. The Queen notices, sighing loudly with annoyance.

“Sit,” she commands, waving her hand impatiently. Ariadna does, watching as she paces. “My son, in the course of the past few days, has murdered a member of one of the Great Houses and fled the castle in the dead of night without a word. At least one of those actions is related directly to you.”

“I understand how it seems, your grace,” Ariadna says. “I do. But I do not know where Prince Aegon is. I did not—I did not ask him to do any of it—”

“You mean to blame him?” Alicent demands. “You would have me believe that you have done nothing to encourage his affections? To get him to forsake his vows? To act in your best interests? I am no fool, Lady Ariadna, of that I can assure you.”

“Your grace, I did not ask Prince Aegon to kill Ser Thomnas Tyrell, nor to leave the castle on my behalf. I swear it on my life.” A pause. “I swear it on my son’s life, your grace. I did not ask that of him. I did not.”

“You would swear such a thing on your son’s life?”

“I would swear on the truth, your grace,” Ariadna says. “As perplexing as they are, Prince Aegon’s actions were his own. I did not bewitch him, or force him, or—or do anything of the sort.”

“So you deny his fondness for you. That improper relations have taken place—”

“I care about your son,” Ariadna says, and it’s only in that moment that she acknowledges it for the truth it is. It’s a profound love, but there is a fondness there. “I do, your grace. He has—he has tried to be my friend, and I must admit that I have let him.”

Alicent sneers. “Let him, have you? As though you did not work to advance such a situation yourself.”

Ariadna swallows. “I know what my husband’s family must be saying, your grace,” she murmurs. “I know what it seems like. But I’m not to blame for him dying. I’m not to blame for what Prince Aegon did. I care for your son, but I am not the one who first sought out his company. I am not the one who—who encouraged a closer friendship. I am not to blame.”

She takes a deep breath. “I have done as my father asked of me. I wed when he told me to, and I gave him a grandson. I was fifteen, and I did my duty. I am not to blame for the actions and ill health of the men around me, your grace.”

And when she looks up—

Alicent seems to soften, somewhat. To understand. There truly is a chord of communion between all women. This understanding. And who better to understand than Alicent Hightower? Fifteen when she wed a king and bore him a son. Could she have said no?

Of course not. Women can never say no. Not even when it matters. If they do they are ungrateful, rebellious, problems.

“I may not be as wise as old King Jaehaerys,” Ariadna adds, “but I was not so callous or irresponsible with my lands or title that I deserved to be usurped. I am as capable as my uncle, if not more so.”

“And yet my son is still missing,” Alicent says. “I don’t care about you very much, Lady Ariadna. I care for my son, and he is currently missing. Vanished entirely. And I need to know where he is.”

“I don’t know,” Ariadna repeats.

“What did you say to him last?” Alicent demands. “What did you say to my son?”

“We argued,” Ariadna admits. “I was not – I was not the kindest to him, your grace.”

Alicent’s hand curls at her side. Ariadna is certain the older woman is seconds away from striking her across the face. She clenches her eyes shut instead.

“Oh Aegon,” Alicent hisses. “You idiot.”

Ariadna stares at her warily.

“If my son dies or comes to harm,” the Queen says coldly, eyes wet even as they stare in hate, however unfair, “I will hold you responsible.”

But Ariadna finds she can’t quite blame her for it.

“As would I, your grace,” is all she says. “As would I.”

Brightwater Keep is not how Aegon remembers it. If anything, it seems smaller somehow. Or maybe he’s just older. Maybe now that he knows what happened behind its walls, in its beds, he can’t find it beautiful any longer. Like the grass is less green, the walls less red, the sun less hot.

Now, he looks at the castle and feels a hot fist of anger overtake his chest, burning his insides. Sunfyre lands with a loud, tremendous roar. Aegon’s hair flutters in the wind with the force of it. The gate seems to tremble. Aegon knows he is not imagining the chaos on the battlements, the movement of the guards.

But they—

They wouldn’t dare fire on a prince. Aegon, glad he stopped briefly on the way to tidy himself, smooths back his hair as he jumps off the saddle and paces in front of sapphire casually, humming to himself.

The sun beats down on him, and he huffs. What did they think they could do? Out wait a dragon? Not bloody likely.

He whistles, and Sunfyre blows a big, gust of fire towards the gate. There’s a faint shriek behind the walls. Burning down the keep and everyone inside it would be rather counter-intuitive to his plans, but the urge is still there. Mayhaps once he has custody of Ariadna’s son, then he can indulge.

It would also give her a reason not to leave him.

But he’s in deep enough shit with her already. Best to wait before he burns down her childhood home. Her birthright.

He whistles idly, snaps his fingers. Sunfyre breathes fire again. He wonders if he should yell – he’s never laid siege to a castle before. He’s a bit lost on the decorum. Soon enough, however, the great doors swing open, and a rather terrified looking Maester is practically shoved outside, followed closely by two guards.

“Who are you?” Aegon demands, almost insulted. The Maester looks seconds away from pissing himself. “You’re not the lord of the house. Forgive me – the usurper of this castle.”

“I am not, my prince,” the Maester stammers. “I am Maester—”

“I don’t give a flying fuck,” Aegon interrupts. He glances up at the battlements, finds a few archers there at the ready. Sunfyre hisses at them, and they jump back. He rolls his eyes.

“Forgive me, Prince Aegon, but we do not—we do not have much money or gold—”

“You think I came here to rob you?” His incredulity is undeniable. “For fucks sake – despite your proximity to the Citadel and all those books you really are an idiot. If I wanted to rob someone, would I not target the hundreds of lords and ladies residing at the keep?”

“Then why are you here?”

Aegon sighs, loud and hard. “Where the fuck is Gerald?”

“My prince?”

“Gerald? The fat old treacherous fuck calling himself a lord.”

The Maester blinks rapidly. “He has taken ill, my prince.”

“Oh has he? So he did not send agents on his behalf to lie to the crown?”

“I- I-“

Sunfyre growls, and the Maester yelps, taking a step back. “He is ill, Prince Aegon, I swear it on the Gods.”

“Not ill enough to miss witnessing a dragon, I’m certain?”

“Of course not, my prince, I—”

“Don’t keep me waiting, otherwise I will set Sunfyre upon you all.” Aegon smiles brightly. “Many thanks for such a dutiful servant of the realm.”

The Maester practically flees back behind the walls, and then, within moments, he returns with—

Gerald. Aegon remembers the man from Ariadna’s wedding. Sculking around in the shadows. He’s older now, more weathered, red in the face. But not so sickly as his father. There’s a cane in hand, but Aegon is more than tempted to see if he truly needs it or if it’s more for artistic effect.

“My prince,” Gerald greets, bowing.

“Shut up. Your face is more tolerable when your mouth is shut.”

Aegon kicks at the cane, and clatters to the ground. Gerald does not fall over.

“Ah – so you lie about ailments and physical injuries? How wonderful. And not to forget your lineage.”

“My prince—”

“I’m not interested in your excuses.” He takes a small, idle step forward. “You’ve been laying behind these walls and waiting for her to go into childbirth, haven’t you? Hoping she’ll die. Well – let me tell you, I will not let that happen. And if it does, I will come here and burn you alive. Understood?”

“Prince Aegon—”

Sunfyre hisses at him.

“Understood?” he repeats, smiling.

“I will come to King’s Landing at once,” Gerald says, clearly displeased. “Though I must warn you, my prince – my niece is not what she seems.”

“I have no idea what you speak of,” Aegon says vaguely. “I’m interested in justice for the realm – my father would not like a man usurping a woman’s birthright, after all. Nor would the heir to the throne, my dear sister Rhaenyra.”

Rhaenyra, who has no idea any of this is happening. Fuck. Fuck. Aegon doesn’t trust Rhaenyra, and he certainly doesn’t trust Daemon, but—

They’re the only people who have a vested interest in stopping this precedent. And Aegon—

Fucking fuck.

“Is there anything else you would like, my prince?”

Aegon leans back and cackles. “You think I came all this way to chat with you? You truly are preposterous. I came here for something much more precious.”

He stares intently at Gerald and recognition fills the older man’s eyes.

“Robb is in my custody—”

“And he belongs with his mother.”

“She left him—”

“Yes, and I’m certain she’s infinitely glad you decided not to become a kinslayer.”

“Prince Aegon—”

“Do you truly think you have bargaining power over me?” Aegon’s voice drips with incredulity. “I have a dragon, lest you forget.”

Sunfyre howls and breathes a gust of fire on the line of trees. Smoke fills the air. Gerald takes a step back.

“Bring Ariadna’s son to me. Now. And if you try and lie, I’ll know, and I’ll come back and kill you regardless of how enraged it makes the Hand or my mother.”

“Why not just kill me now?” Gerald questions.

Aegon merely glares, but he knows the reason. They both do. Because they’ll take it out on her. The fire along the treeline seems to die down. Fires in the east lead to ravens in the west. He stirs as Helaena’s words linger in his mind.

Ravens in the west.

He bites his lip as he stares at the castle. Those large doors Gerald has disappeared behind. Rhaenyra. Ariadna. Because Otto and his mother can dangle her in front of him like a carrot to get him to do what they want. They’ll push and push and—

Aegon does not wish to be King.

And he doesn’t trust Rhaenyra, or Daemon, but—

There was once a time where he trusted Jace. Or was friends with him at the least. Mayhaps that will—

His thoughts run dry as Gerald brings a child behind him, trailing a few steps back. He’s a small child, brownish-red curls sticking in all directions. His eyes are round, Ariadna’s eyes. His ears are pointy.

And his face is—

It’s entirely blank. Even as he takes in Sunfyre, he barely reacts, merely presses his hands to his ears when Sunfyre roars.

“Shush,” Aegon chastises. Sunfyre obeys.

Gerald nearly drags Robb over, but the boy follows well enough.

Aegon can’t help but crouch down a little.

“This is Ariadna’s son, my prince.”

Aegon ignores him.

“Hello,” he greets, staring at Robb, who eyes him warily. He’s thin, Aegon realizes. Dark circles around his eyes. How could it have been like for this child to wake up one night to find his mother gone. “My name is Aegon. You must be Robb.”

Ariadna’s son nods slightly, glances down. He’s holding a book in his hands, Aegon realizes. By the Gods…

“I’m a friend of your mother’s,” Aegon says. “Would you like to see her again?”

Robb flinches, as if answering or admitting to it will bring him harm.

“She’s missed you very much,” Aegon tells him. “Hmm? This is Sunfyre.”

Robb nods, hugs his book close, and—

“Is that all, Prince Aegon?”

“No,” Aegon says, standing. He flashes Robb a quick smile. “I’ll need some parchment and a use of one of your ravens.”

“I—”

Sunfyre growls.

“Of course,” Gerald agrees stiffly.

Aegon laughs. He looks at Robb, who has parts of Ariadna’s husband, but more of her, at least in this light.

“One more thing,” he calls. “Do you have any apples in season?”

Chapter Text

Hi all! my apologies for my very very long absence. I just wanted to inform followers of this story that I will no longer be continuing this story over here! I will be posting a new updated version of it on my profile. this version will remain up, as I am proud of the comments and passages I wrote, but plot wise I kept getting stuck over mistakes I had made. this new version will have a lot of overlap, but also a lot of improvements. I hope so, anyway. You'll find the new version under the same title on my profile! thank you all for understanding, and I hope you're all enjoying the new season :)