Chapter Text
Aerion Targaryen lay on his back and watched the canvas breathe.
The Roseroad ran south through the Reach like a pale, overtrodden scar through land too rich by half, its edges swallowed on either side by growth that seemed determined to reclaim it. When the wind worried at the cart’s cover it lifted just enough to offer him broken glimpses of the world beyond—barley nodding heavy-headed in the fields, hedges gone thick and glossy with summer, orchards crouched low beneath fruit not yet ripe and already buzzing with flies. Everything here pressed in on a man. Too green. Too fecund. Too alive. Even the light had weight to it, hanging low and swollen in the afternoon, golden where it struck the dust and brown where it settled, as if the whole of the Reach had been left too long in the sun and had begun to sweat.
His injuries made the wheeled house a necessity, instead of allowing him to ride on horseback as it was his proper place. The wretched thing lurched and pain answered at once. It had made residence in his leg now, deep and stubborn, a hard bright thread that pulled taut whenever the wheels found some rut or hidden stone. His ribs ached beneath their wrappings. His shoulder burned when he shifted even so much as a finger. Every motion reminded him of the meadow—of the ground rising hard to meet him, of mud beneath his back, of weight and breath and blows going on long after a fight should have been done.
That, he could have withstood. It was the rest that made it unbearable. The air lay warm and damp against his skin. Linen clung where it ought not have clung. The blanket rasped at his thigh when the carriage shook, and the seams of his clothes scratched in places they had no business touching. The smell of the road—horse, leather, dung turned sweet and soft in the heat—seemed to coat the back of his tongue no matter how often he swallowed. Even the wine had betrayed him that morning, thin and sour where it should have been rich. Nothing tasted right. Nothing sat right. The world itself seemed to have slipped half a finger’s breadth out of place and left him to endure the rubbing.
Nothing was right in a world a dragon could not endure heat.
He had not slept. Not the night before. Nor the one before that. Nor the one before that, though he had closed his eyes and lain still enough to fool any man watching. He had counted breaths, counted heartbeats, counted the slow drag of hours while the camp sank to silence and rose again with dawn. He had listened to men snore, horses stamp, canvas shift, coals settle. Sleep had circled him like something shy and half-wild and would not come near.
The whole world seemed bent on reminding him of his grievance.
Beside him, Valarr Targaryen shifted on the cushioned bench, the silk at his sleeve whispering as he moved. He had borne the journey with far more dignity than Aerion had, which was rather the point his father must have intended when he ordered his cousin to accompany him. If Aerion must be watched, the old man had at least had the decency to choose a guard dog with breeding. “You might try behaving like a prince,” Valarr said at last, after enough silence had passed to make the remark seem almost thoughtful. “It would spare the rest of us the spectacle.”
Aerion did not move from where he was sprawled. “I have behaved as a proper prince all my life,” he said. “Do not fault me because your notion of princeliness is meek. A prince who cannot compel respect is only a man in better cloth.”
Not so long ago, his family’s claim had been secured on dragonback, not on marriage pacts. He never understood why he alone seemed to grasp how brittle their family’s position was, how the realm had bled for it—rebellions, defiances, lords grown bold enough to weigh a king’s strength like merchants weighing wool. Valarr might play the perfect heir until singers wept to hear him, but someone had to remember that a claim not enforced was only a story men told themselves.
If Aerion had hoped the truth of it might shame his cousin into silence, he was disappointed. “You flogged a servant in front of half the realm.”
Valarr made reproach sound perilously like concern, which was one of his more exasperating gifts.
“She spoke out of turn.” If he did not open his eyes, if he did not move, it was possible, thought not very likely, Valarr might drop the issue, but Valarr had never been much deterred by being wrong.
“And yet, dear cousin, there might be a more reasonable response to insolence than savagery.” The reproach in his voice sat atop something softer, which made it harder to bear and easier to despise. “A prince need not answer every slight with blood.”
Valarr’s tone was mild, but there was something beneath it Aerion disliked more than censure. He had begun to hear it everywhere these past days—that carefulness men put on when they had decided beforehand that one must not be provoked. Aerion opened his eyes then, slow and unwilling. The light through the canvas struck at once, too bright by half. “Is that what this is?” he asked. “A lesson?”
Valarr did not rise to it. His disapproval came dressed in patience, as it always did when Aerion was hurt enough to be impossible. “It is advice. You have spent the last several days paying for your temper at Ashford. I should think pain might have taught you what counsel could not.”
He had certainly learned many things in the last five days. That linen could scratch like mail if it lay wrong. That a cartwheel striking a rut could set his whole body aflame. That a man might go three nights without sleep and yet still be denied peace. That every jolt of the road found his ribs, his shoulder, his leg, as if the gods themselves had taken to prodding bruises for sport. Aerion was no stranger to pain by now.
“Then take my gratitude and be done with it,” Aerion said. “I know very well what my rashness cost me.” His jaw tightened as the cart lurched again. “If you wish me wiser, Valarr, do not goad me whilst every bone I own is ringing.”
That, at least, gave his cousin pause, which suited Aerion well enough, for just then the canvas bellied inward with a passing gust, lifting enough to admit a wash of hotter air. Beneath the rank sweetness of horse and leather and summer dust, another scent found them—faint for any other man, perhaps, but not for him. Sweat, wool, sun-warmed skin, steel gone dull with use.
It was a small mercy the cause of Aerion’s suffering had been made to ride with his wrists bound, shamed and subdued as it suited the lowborn knight, back to a place fit for his station, where he should never have tried to rise above. But not even the walls of his cart or the distance the road imposed them saved him from all the indignities of his designation.
His body answered before pride could master it. Want knotted low and hard in his belly, hot enough to shame him. The bite at his neck throbbed with sudden fury beneath its wrapping, each beat of his pulse seeming to wake it anew. He could feel the place of it as if the knight’s mouth were on him still: the brutal pressure of teeth, the wet heat of breath, the humiliation of being marked like some bitch in a yard.
That ache ran deeper than every other grievance. It licked along his skin from throat to spine and settled heavy between his thighs, insistent as fever. Despite better reason, still his treacherous flesh turned toward the man riding somewhere beyond the canvas as a flower turns toward the sun.
Aerion shut his eyes more tightly and held his breath. The wound in his neck beat like a second heart. Bound, denied, and made ridiculous by a hedge knight who ought to have been left broken in the mud at Ashford.
He must have made some sound of displeasure, for when Valarr spoke again his voice had lost a little of its edge.
“Is it the wound?” he asked. “Or is it him?”
They had managed, until then, the courtesy of not naming it. That Valarr should do it now struck hard enough to make Aerion open his eyes.
“Spare me that much, cousin,” Aerion said, and hated the strain he heard in his own voice. “At least from you.”
Valarr held his gaze a moment longer, then looked away first, which in itself was answer enough. “I am trying to be soothing,” he said. “You make the business difficult.” His hand shifted on the bench between them, not quite reaching, not quite withdrawing. “If this is pain, I can send for more wine. If it is fever, we can stop. If it is…” He did not finish.
If it is the hedge knight, the words hung in the cart all the same. Aerion laughed once, though there was no mirth in it. “And what would you prescribe if it is?”
“Nothing I would care to name.” Valarr’s mouth tightened. “Nothing I had ever thought to see in our house.”
That stung worse than it should have. Not because it was cruel, but because it was fearful, and fear sat poorly on Valarr. He had always worn composure as other men wore mail. To hear even a crack in it was its own offense.
“Do not look at me as if I am already some cautionary tale for singers,” Aerion said.
“You are my blood,” Valarr answered, and now there was edge beneath the calm, faint but unmistakable. “What touches you touches all of us. If the bite takes—if even the whisper of it holds—can you imagine what our enemies would do? If this is seen for what it is—or guessed at closely enough—it will not be you alone they measure by it.”
“I know what my nature has cost us,” Aerion said. “You need not recite it.”
There was the old shame of it, dragged out once more and laid between them. After a moment, Valarr exhaled softly. “I do not say this to wound you.” The hesitation there was slight, but real. “Gods know you seem wounded enough.”
At last he reached across the narrow space between them and set his hand, careful as if approaching some half-tamed thing, against Aerion’s wrist, where his scent glands were. “Only do not force me to fear for you more than I do already.”
Aerion ought to have pulled away. Instead he lay still beneath the touch, rigid with pain and pride and something dangerously near to shame. It made him maddeningly aware of his own body —most of all, the bandage at his neck that would not be ignored no matter how often he commanded it. His hand rose without leave. A breathing creature throbbed beneath the linen, as if the skin itself had learned a new and detestable trick. He pressed it, faint and terrible and alive.
Too warm. He dropped it at once, as though he had touched coal. At least he said, “I have enough discomfort without tending to your fears, cousin.”
Valarr’s unmatched eyes traced his hand’s movement attentively. “You keep touching it,” he sounded almost resentful. “Does it burden you so?”
“I keep being reminded of it.”
“Then stop being reminded.” There it was—that shortening in Valarr’s voice, clipped enough to betray him.
A faint smile touched Aerion’s mouth. This was a familiar dance. It had amused him once to test the limits of that composure, to set his own restlessness against Valarr’s restraint and hear where the fabric tore.
“Sound counsel.” Aerion let his gaze linger on Valarr a moment too long, lazy despite the pain. “If my suffering troubles you so much, you might try distracting me from it.” He allowed his legs to spread open in the small space of the chariot and ignored the way his groin protested at the movement.
He needed never fear honorable, respectable Valarr might not heed his calls, not ever since they were boys, not even on Valarr’s wedding feast, when Valarr had bent him over his own nuptial bed mere hours before saying his vows.
He felt the familiar thrill then when Valarr’s eyes lingered on his body, hungry and wanting. His familiar alpha scent filled the chariot and its acrid taste stuck at Aerion’s tongue, unexpectedly stifling. Valarr’s hand moved to the inside of his wrist and rested there for a heartbeat, massaging his scent gland.
“I might worsen your injury.” he cautioned, all the while leaning forward to drag his nose down Aerion’s throat column. Aerion let out a strangled sound when Valarr’s lips found the base of his neck, suckling at the skin there. If he held his breath, he might not even notice Valarr’s ash and ochre heavy undernotes.
“I am injured, not insensible. Must you hover when you might be kissing me?”
Valarr found the exact point where his pulse beat on his throat and gave an open mouthed kiss. All he could do was moan, arching his neck to grant him better access. Valarr’s fingers unbuttoned his tunic’s front with practiced ease.
His hands rose to grab at his cousin’s hair as Valarr licked his collarbone, his hand caressing his torso until it found a raised nipple to pinch.
He moaned, fingers spreading on his back, wanting to mark him with his nails. He loved when he scratched hard enough to draw blood, wondering what account Valarr would have to render to his bride later.
Valarr panted against his chest, staring at him with half-lidded eyes. “Must you always look so pleased to be wanted?”
Blush rose in him, from chest to cheek. Valarr’s lips coaxed the color brighter, nibbling on his nipples, on his jaw, on his lips. “Cousin,” he whined encouragingly.
“Gods, Aerion, curse you calling me cousin as if your blood doesn’t quicken just for saying it.” Valarr breathed against his mouth, capturing his lips and forcing his tongue against Aerion’s.
Aerion broke for breath and found ash waiting in it. He could not remember an instance it had been half so unwelcome or irritating. He bit Valarr’s lip with enough force to fill his mouth with the taste of copper.
He allowed the man to draw back. “You wileful thing.” Valarr derided, exasperated. Aerion ignored it. “Your scent displeases me.” He complained.
Valarr raised his hand to his bloodied lip in incredulity. “You have a rare talent for making every kindness regrettable.”
“Indulge me some other way.” He pleaded unabashedly. “Forbid my body any craving but your tongue.”
Valarr leveled him a ravenous look, hands coming to grasp at Aerion’s strong thighs and travelling higher on his body. One of Aerion’s hands dug into his shoulder and the other buried into his hair. “As my prince commands,” said Valarr undoing the laces on Aerion’s breeches. He mouthed at the slick soiling his groin, purring as it flowed more freely the more he lapped at it.
As Valarr’s mouth closed around his cunt, Aerion buckled off the bench of the cart in oversensitive surprise. His hips pressed shamefully against Valarr’s face, then were forced to settle back down by Valarr’s forearm. He pushed against Aerion’s waist, firmly holding him immobile as he pleasured him. “Take it, little dragon.”
“Seven hells.” He cursed, hands flying around, pressing desperately into Valarr, drawing out a guttural groan from his throat. The sound reverberated into his core, made him quiver wetly. Valarr’s tongue invaded him, once, twice, before it flattened to roam from his entrance to his nub, circling it before replacing it with suction. He held the back of Valarr’s head firmly against him, unable to stop himself from grinding against him. One of Valarr’s fingers invaded him, curling inside just as his mouth suckled at him, drawing enough moisture he managed to insert a second finger inside almost without effort.
Valarr knew his body too well, and there was not a touch misplaced nor a pause mistimed, his fingers stretching him open just as his mouth worked him, and soon he felt a knot coiling at the base of his abdomen, just out of reach.
Aerion ought to have been able to lose himself in it, yet everything in him felt subtly wrong. His own skin sat too tight upon him, as if he had been sewn back into it poorly after Ashford. He could not come, his pleasure forever catching on some invisible barb beneath the surface, until frustration throbbed harder than want.
The thing went sour in him before it ever broke and he felt a desperate urge to strike something rise until it was uncontrollable. He wrung Valarr’s hair sharply and painfully to dislodge him.
He shoved Valarr away with more force than the space required, breath going sharp in his throat. The thwarted ache in him had soured at once into something meaner. His skin felt unbearable now, too close and fevered, sweat cooling on him in miserable detail, while the moisture caught in his tights made every shift of cloth feel obscene, the air in the chariot thick with their mixed scents.
He needed out of the stifling little box of silk and heat and failure before he did something truly ugly.
Valarr drew back, lips parted as if to speak, one hand still half-raised from where Aerion had torn free of him. Something stricken passed nakedly across his face before composure gathered itself again. “Aerion—”
“Do not.” The word came flat and vicious. Aerion dragged a hand down his face, already fumbling for composure and finding none. “If you mean to ask what is wrong, I shall hate you for it.”
Valarr’s mouth tightened; then, with visible effort, he let the sting of it pass. “Shall I pretend not to understand?” He jerked his chin toward the road beyond the canvas, where the horses and the hedge knight must still be keeping pace.
“Damn you to hell, Valarr,” said Aerion. He wrestled his clothes back into order with furious motions. The chariot seemed to have shrunk around him, every inch of it rank with trapped heat and breath and shame. He struck the roof of the cart loudly with the flat of his hand. “Stop the cart.”
There was a startled murmur from outside.
“Now,” Aerion snapped, rapping the roof again. “Unless the crown has grown too poor to let a prince piss by the roadside.” The cart lurched to a halt.
Yorkel and Wandel were there at once, both moving as Aerion swung himself over the side. Yorkel reached first, hand half-lifted as if to steady him by the elbow. Aerion looked at it until the man thought better of the gesture and stepped back.
Valarr neither moved to help nor spoke to stop him as he leapt out. Pain bit at once, from calf to hip, and for half a heartbeat the road threatened to tilt beneath him, but he would sooner have bitten through his own tongue than let either of them see him weakened by it.
Dust stirred around his boots. The heat lay thick against his face. Behind him, he could feel Valarr still in the carriage, still watching, though Aerion did not turn to confirm it.
“I am going to relieve myself,” he said.
“As you say, Your Grace,” said Yorkel.
Aerion took three steps toward the hedgerow before he heard them following and stopped at once. The pause dragged just long enough to make both men halt in turn. “Surely,” he said, without looking back, “I need not explain how pissing is done.”
Yorkel cleared his throat. “Orders, Your Grace.”
Aerion turned then, slow and dangerous. “I am not some blushing maid to be escorted into the bushes.”
Wandel’s mouth bent, and there was a small, nasty light in his eyes that set Aerion instantly on guard. “No, Your Grace,” he said. “Though by the smell of you, a man might be forgiven the mistake.”
Aerion moved.
Steel flashed.
Wandel’s scream was sharp and brief. His hand struck the tree behind him and stayed there, pinned through the flesh by the dagger, his spear falling from nerveless fingers into the dust.
For an instant he only stared, as if his own hand had become some strange thing nailed to the bark. Then the pain seemed to reach him in full, and the breath burst out of him in a wet, broken cry.
“You should be grateful,” Aerion said softly, leaning close enough that the man could feel his breath, “I am not asking for your tongue.” He wrenched the blade free. Blood flowed freely then. Wandel made another sound, smaller and uglier than the first, and folded half to his knees, clutching his ruined hand.
Yorkel had gone white beneath the road dust. “Your Grace—”
“Stay where you are,” Aerion said, not raising his voice. He flicked the blood from the blade into the grass. “Or I may be forced to think you equally witless.”
Aerion held where he was. The dagger remained in his hand, the red on it bright and fresh. Beyond Wandel’s cries came the creak of harness, the abrupt hush of voices cut short, the first quick beat of hooves turning out of line. He felt the whole road turn toward him.
And then, with the same miserable clarity by which he had lately become aware of every other indignity, he felt it: attention fixed upon him, heavy as a touch between the shoulder blades.
He sought him out before he could stop himself. The hedge knight sat ahorse a little way down the road, wrists bound before him, his great brown face turned wholly toward Aerion, staring at him as if he had never seen him before. There was something naked in the look—alarm, perhaps, or pity—and Aerion was once again filled with hatred.
He turned his face away at once. Let Duncan look if he wished. Let him think whatever a lowborn brute was capable of thinking. Aerion had no desire to see it written plain.
Hoofbeats pulled his attention behind him, quick over the packed road and near enough now to kick dust round his boots. Daeron came out of the line at a canter with Ser Roland Crakehall at his side, the white cloak bright beneath the road dust. They reined in hard at the edge of the disturbance.
Ser Roland was moving before his horse had fully settled, one hand on the reins and the other already at his sword. Steel whispered free as his gaze fixed not on Aerion, but on Wandel in the dust, bleeding and half doubled over, as if the greater danger lay in what a wounded fool might do next.
Daeron said nothing at first. His eyes went over it all in one sweep: Wandel clutching his hand, Yorkel rigid as a spearshaft, the ring of halted men pretending not to stare, Aerion with the dagger still red in his grasp—and beyond them, Ser Duncan on his horse, far too big to go unnoticed.
By then Valarr was coming through the small knot of men as well. Silk whispered at his shoulders; dust caught at the hem of his cloak. He did not look first at Aerion, nor at Wandel, but at the men who gathered around them.
Daeron’s eyes flicked once to Yorkel. “What happened?”
Aerion’s mouth hardened, unwilling to give word to his own humiliation. Around them the road had gone unnaturally still; even Wandel’s wet breathing seemed too loud. “He presumed to speak of matters above his station.”
Yorkel swallowed. “Your Grace,” he said to Daeron, “Wandel spoke out of turn. Of the prince’s… condition. He made coarse mention of the prince’s scent, Your Grace.”
Ser Roland’s blade did not lower. Valarr’s gaze moved over the watching men one by one, and heads began to dip before he had yet said a word.
Understanding touched Daeron’s face, though lightly, and was gone again at once. “I see,” he said. His voice lowered a notch. “Then I do not wonder you were angered.” His mouth twitched, though whether with sympathy or irony it was hard to tell. “But if you mean to carve up every man who has a nose, brother, we shall have no convoy left by sunset.”
“Enough,” Valarr’s voice carried. Ser Roland still had steel in hand, Daeron still sat his horse, and Valarr’s gaze had already found every face worth remembering. He turned to Yorkel. “Bind that hand before he bleeds out.”
At once the stillness broke. One man stooped for the dropped spear. Another tore cloth. Yorkel moved at last, as if released from some spell, and went to his fellow. Hands found work. Eyes found somewhere else to rest.
Valarr let them busy themselves a moment before he spoke again, quieter now. “No one speaks of this. You saw a prince correct a man. Nothing more.”
His gaze passed once more over the watchers, and paused just briefly on Ser Duncan’s bound hands before moving on. “That includes every man here.”
Men lowered their heads and obeyed. Even now, with Aerion’s blood still hot and Wandel’s on the grass, Valarr could do in three quiet words what Aerion must do with steel.
By then Daeron had dismounted as well. He crossed the last few paces to Aerion and fell into step beside him as though they had merely resumed some interrupted walk. He did not look too closely at Aerion’s face. Aerion marked the courtesy and hated himself a little for it.
Together they watched Yorkel get Wandel half to his feet. The man’s injured hand was wrapped now, though badly, blood already showing through the cloth.
“You do have a gift,” Daeron said, “for turning manageable scandals into memorable ones.”
“I have corrected a man who forgot himself,” Aerion said.
“Yes,” Daeron replied mildly. “And if you continue, your hand will tire before their folly does.”
His eyes moved, and Aerion’s followed. Across the road Valarr stood a little apart with the hedge knight, speaking low. The brute’s big head bent once in answer.
The hedge knight had no business being counted among princes or guards, yet there he was all the same.
“There rides the whole jest of it,” Aerion said bitterly. “A hedge knight with his teeth in a prince, too large to hide and too honest to lie well.”
Daeron’s mouth twitched. “I do not wonder you are out of temper,” Daeron said. “I might be short of it myself, had half the realm watched me bitten, bloodied, and packed into a cart like freight.”
Daeron walked a few paces more before he stopped. When he spoke again, the jest had gone out of him. “For what little comfort it is worth, when they begin their muttering, I will be there to make them ashamed of it.”
Aerion halted. For a moment he only stared. Of all the things he had expected from Daeron, pity was not among them, and loyalty least of all when spoken aloud.
“Why?” he said at last, the word sharper than he meant it to be.
Daeron looked at him sidelong. “Must there be a reason?”
“There is always a reason.”
“Very well.” Daeron’s mouth twitched, though his eyes did not. “Because you are my brother. Because half the fools in this family mistake cruelty for strength and silence for wisdom. Because if they are set on making a monster of you, I would rather not hand them the knife.”
Something in Aerion’s chest gave a queer, unpleasant turn. He looked away at once, as if the road itself might spare him the answer to that.
“You’re too sentimental when you’re sober.” He said.
“Who says I am sober?” said Daeron. “I am merely practical. You are difficult, but you are ours.”
They had walked farther than Aerion realized. Ahead, Ser Duncan sat mounted beneath guard, his bound hands resting awkwardly before him. The big knight’s face turned as they approached.
Daeron followed Aerion’s glance and gave a soft sound that might almost have been amusement. “There is the root of half your troubles,” he said. “And the other half, I suspect, is the way he looks at you.”
Aerion’s mouth hardened. Duncan was watching him still, and there was something in the look Aerion could not bear to name. Something worse for being gentler.
“He looks,” Aerion said coldly, “as though I am something cracked.”
Daeron’s gaze flicked between them once. “No,” he said. “That would be simpler.”
He went no farther than that. Mercy again. Daeron only clapped Aerion once, lightly, against the uninjured shoulder and moved ahead to speak with the guards, leaving Aerion to follow or not as he pleased.
Aerion stood a beat longer than he should have, feeling the road heat through the soles of his boots, feeling the dull throb in his leg, the sharper one in his neck, and beneath both of them that other miserable pull, steady as a hook set deep.
It drew him toward the hedge knight even now. He came up beneath the gelding’s head and stopped. Duncan looked down at him at once. He could hate Duncan well enough when he thought of Ashford . He could hate him more easily still for having heard a guardsman speak of him like some camp whore fit for coarse jests.
The man should never have seen that.
At Ashford Duncan had beaten him before the eyes of lords and princes, and here too he remained beyond Aerion’s reach: bound, guarded, set apart by command stronger than his own. Aerion could not strike him, could not silence him, could not even force his face to turn elsewhere. He was left only with the knowledge of that look upon him, and the intolerable sense that Duncan had seen too much.
Yet beneath the shame, something meaner stirred. Aerion could not deny that either. Let Duncan look. Let him see the bruise-dark mark his own mouth had left at Aerion’s neck, raw still beneath the wrappings, throbbing with every pulse as if to mock them both. If the knight meant to stare at him as though he were something damaged, let him stare at the proof that he himself had done the damaging. There was a bitter sort of pleasure in that, small and venomous and not nearly enough.
He wondered if Duncan could smell Valarr on him.
“If you have something to say, ser, say it,” Aerion said. “I am weary of your face doing the work for you.”
Duncan frowned. “I wasn’t saying nothing.”
“No,” Aerion said. “Only staring as if you have mislaid your wits somewhere in my direction.”
Duncan shifted awkwardly in the saddle, his bound hands moving against the reins. “You bloodied that man less than he deserved,” Duncan said.
For half a heartbeat Aerion only stared. He blinked. Just once. That the knight should understand the insult for what it was—and worse, agree it had merited answering—struck somewhere awkwardly near relief.
His smile came slow and without warmth. “How comforting,” he said. “To find you not wholly witless after all.”
Duncan’s gaze stayed on him. “I didn’t say I agreed with your method.”
“No?” Aerion tilted his head. “You seemed, for one shining instant, almost to have grasped the matter.”
Duncan’s mouth hardened. “I said he deserved correction. Not that you ought to be throwing steel in the state you’re in. You can hardly ride.”
Aerion’s smile thinned. “And whose work do you think that is? I did not beat myself into a cart.”
Duncan's jaw tightened. “I beat you at Ashford, aye. I’ll own that. But this trouble? You made that for yourself.”
Aerion’s eyes narrowed. “Do you mean to tell me I am at fault for all of this?”
Duncan met his gaze without flinching. “Aye. I do. You started, first with the puppet girl. Then the servant. With every time you put your pride before sense and call it a prince’s might.”
Aerion’s mouth curved, though there was nothing of mirth in it. “And what would you call it,” he asked softly, “when a hedge knight takes it upon himself to claim a prince as if he were some kennel cur to be mastered?”
The knight’s mouth snapped shut promptly. For once, no ready answer came to him. He sat there in the saddle, broad and awkward and bound, with shame plain enough in his silence.
When he did speak, his voice was rough. “I’m sorry for that.”
That was worse.
That made an insult of everything uglier in Aerion: the restless pull in his blood, the sleepless nights, the treachery of his own body turning toward the very man he ought to despise. Sorry, as if it had been only a wrong turn of temper and not something that had lodged itself beneath Aerion’s flesh and made a mockery of him ever since.
Fury rose hot in his throat. “Keep your sorrow.”
Duncan’s mouth hardened. “I’m not sorry I beat you. Someone had to stop you.”
Aerion’s mouth curved, though there was no mirth in it. “Had you not chosen to fight like a kennel brute and put your teeth where they had no business being, I might have beaten you.”
Duncan stared at him. For a moment he looked almost too astonished to answer. Then his gaze dropped, plain as daylight, to the way Aerion stood: too stiff through the spine, favoring one leg despite all the pride he spent trying to hide it, one hand still white-knuckled about the dagger.
“That’s a lie and you know it,” Duncan said.
Aerion’s face hardened. “I know I was cheated.”
Dunk shifted awkwardly in the saddle, his bound hands moving against the reins. “You can scarce stand easy. You’re being carried in a wheeled house.”
“I can ride.”
Dunk blinked at him. “No, you can’t.”
The flatness of it bit deeper than contradiction had any right to do. Aerion drew himself up. “Fetch my horse. I am tired of being carted about like some feverish widow.”
Dunk gave a short, disbelieving breath. “For what?”
“Must I explain horsemanship to you as well as breeding?”
“You’re near folded in half where you stand,” Dunk said. “And now you want to ride half-dead through the Reach to prove a point no one cares about.”
Behind him, there was a brief silence. Aerion did not need to turn to know that Valarr and Daeron had heard every word of it. He could feel their witness as keenly as he had felt Duncan’s. And worse besides—the witness of guards, grooms, servants, common men, all of them measuring him.
A groom in the retinue made the mistake of meeting his eye. Aerion fixed him with a look.
“You,” he said.
The man stopped as if a hand had closed round his throat.
“Bring me my horse.”
The man only stared.
“Do not make me repeat myself.”
He dismounted at once and hurried back toward the led horses.
“Aerion,” said Valarr sharply. That struck deeper than Dunk’s doubt had done. A servant’s insolence was filth. A hedge knight’s contradiction was vulgarity. But Valarr knew better. Valarr, who had never been his better in the saddle, now thought to forbid him the one field in which truth could still be made visible.
He did not turn.
“Do not be a fool.”
“A little late for such counsel,” said Daeron dryly.
Valarr ignored him. He came a step nearer instead, anger beginning to show through the polish of him. “You can scarcely stand. If you fall trying to mount, every man on this road will remember it longer than they will the knife.”
Aerion laughed once, low and ugly. “Then let every man here remember that I mounted anyway.”
“What they are being given,” said Valarr, “is proof that pain has finally devoured what little judgment you possessed.”
Aerion did not answer. Across the road the man was already hurrying back, leading Aerion’s destrier by the reins with the cautious, wide-eyed misery of one approaching a fire. The animal tossed its head once, impatient with the halt and the noise.
Valarr saw it too. “No.”
Aerion took the reins from the man without so much as a glance, and if the servant flinched from the blood still wet on his hand, that too went unanswered.
“Move,” Aerion said.
The man stumbled back at once.
“Aerion,” Valarr said again, quieter now, which was always more dangerous than anger. “Do not make me stop you.”
At that, Aerion finally looked at him. “You may try.”
When Aerion spoke, he did not pitch his voice for Valarr alone. He lifted his chin, the white bandage stark against the heat-flushed gold of his skin. “If any of you have mistaken me for something lesser, correct yourselves now. I am a Targaryen. I am of the blood of the dragon before I am anything else.”
Pain went through him white and vicious as he set his foot to the stirrup. For one ugly instant the world narrowed to leather under his palm, to the pull in his leg, to the bright sick throb in his ribs and shoulder. He could feel eyes on him from every side, waiting for the stumble, the slip, the proof that the cart had told the truth and he had not.
He gave them none.
He hauled himself into the saddle in one hard, graceless motion and sat it, breathless but upright, his face gone pale beneath the gold.
“There,” said Daeron softly, not without admiration.
Aerion gathered the reins in his blood-marked hand. “I will ride where I am meant to ride,” he said. “At the front. At my father’s right hand, behind my uncle the heir. My place is not in a wheeled box like freight, nor hidden behind servants and guards as though I were something to be managed.” His eyes flicked once to Dunk, then away. “Let any man who thinks otherwise say so now, and I will answer him as I answered the last.”
No one spoke.
Aerion turned the horse with more force than grace and rode toward the head of the convoy, straight-backed in the saddle though each step of the beast jarred through him like punishment. Let them watch. Let them whisper. He would ride in pain before he was carried in shame.