Now I’m Covered In You [Chapter 6: Dawn]
Series summary: Aemond is a prince of England. You are married to his brother. The Wars of the Roses are about to begin, and you have failed to fulfill your one crucial responsibility: to give the Greens a line of legitimate heirs. Will you survive the demands of your family back in Navarre, the schemes of the Duke of Hightower, the scandals of your dissolute husband, the growing animosity of Daemon Targaryen…and your own realization of a forbidden love?
Series title is a lyric from: Ivy by Taylor Swift.
Series warnings: Language, sexual content (18+), dubious consent, miscarriage, pregnancy, childbirth, violence, warfare, murder, alcoholism, sexism, infidelity, illness, death, only vaguely historically accurate, lots of horses!
Word count: 6.4k.
Link to chapter list (and all my writing): HERE.
Taglist: @borikenlove @myspotofcraziness @teenagecriminalmastermind @quartzs-posts @tclegane @poohxlove @narwhal-swimmingintheocean @chainsawsangel @itsabby15 @padfooteyes @arcielee @travelingmypassion @what-is-originality @burningcoffeetimetravel @randomdragonfires @anditsmywholeheart @aemcndtargaryen @jvpit3rs @sarcastic-halfling-princess @flowerpotmage @ladylannisterxo @thelittleswanao3 @elsolario @tinykryptonitewerewolf @girlwith-thepearlearring @minttea07 @trifoliumviridi @deltamoon666 @mariahossain @darkenchantress @doingfondue @atherverybest @namelesslosers @skythighs @moonlightfoxx @partypoison00
Let me know if you’d like to be added! 💜
She’s worse than you could have ever imagined.
She’s dignified and graceful and courteous, stunning like an opal or a pearl, a portrait in motion. She has hushed footsteps and large bright eyes that dart around taking in every detail. You can tell she’s intelligent, everyone can tell, and that’s worse than all the rest of it; as she and Aemond stroll together through the gardens, she asks him questions about history and hunting, and then has clever retorts to his answers. Their conversation has the seamless, pacific quality of language between people who have known each other for years. It’s just like the Duke of Hightower said it would be. She is precisely the sort of woman Aemond would have chosen for himself.
The Duke prattles on about various features of the palace and its grounds, inflating favorable attributes like a seller at a horse auction whose children are waiting hungry at home. It’s not difficult to imagine what fuels his freneticism. The king, unresponsive and reeking of decay, lies dying in his bedchamber. Rhaenyra is keeping a vigil there. She must genuinely love him, as there is nothing more to gain from cooling his forehead with damp cloths or clasping his feverish hands. The Greens have no such tender heartache brewing within them. They mourned King Viserys long ago, not his death but his dreadful, interminable absence.
Rhaenyra refuses to leave her father, and Daemon refuses to leave her here in London unprotected—though he should be riding north to command soldiers pledged to the Blacks—and so the two factions circle each other like snarling dogs. The second the king dies, the war will erupt, and everyone knows this. The court is a powder keg. Letters are scrawled, noblemen are dispatched to raise their banners, no one eats or drinks anything unless it is brought to them by a lifelong loyalist. In the past 48 hours, there have been twelve fistfights, seven sword duels, and no less than five deaths, six if you include the poisoning servant who (allegedly) threw himself from a window of the Tower of London before he could be racked. And for once, the Greens’ supporters know exactly what to say to you. They fawn over your health and mourn your losses, all four of them, as if they happened only yesterday. They never tire of expressing their horror. They vow that the treacherous, murderous Blacks must not be given any further opportunity to endanger you or the child you now carry. You are not just—at long last—a true Green. You are a beacon that draws ever more allies to their side. You are a talisman. You are an example of how mercilessly low Daemon will sink to devour his adversaries: a serpent, a wolf, a butcher who no man of honor could count among his friends.
You are walking behind Aemond, Kunigunde, and the Duke of Hightower with Nico and Daeron, trying to remember how to smile, how to speak about trivial things like fabrics and feasts. Nico is hoping that even considering the haste with which this wedding must take place, the kitchens will manage to whip up some famous Austrian dessert, cheese strudels or Linzer tortes or Marillenkuchen, a sort of apricot cake that is renowned throughout the Continent. You can’t follow her phrases; your hearing goes in and out like a tide. Late-April rain, cool and benign, falls in large sporadic droplets.
The Duke is rambling: “You’ll see that we have here in the gardens all manner of herbs, angelica, feverfew, St. John’s wort, betony, chamomile, rosemary…” He does not mention pennyroyal, a word that now brings tears to your eyes. “There are a plethora of roses, of course. Bluebells, daffodils, wisteria, tulips, lavender. And calla lilies, a symbol of matrimony, I believe. Perhaps you would like to use some in your wedding bouquet.”
“Do you grow any edelweiss?” Kunigunde asks in a voice like windchimes.
“Edelweiss…?”
“It is found in the Alps,” Aemond explains. “Small white blossom that thrive in rocky limestone soil. It cannot survive in England, regrettably.”
“A shame,” Kunigunde says with what you would guess is well-disguised homesickness. “It’s my favorite flower. That’s what’s used in my perfume, you know.”
“A splendid scent!” the Duke chirps, and he is not a man inclined towards chirping. He is a child on Christmas morning, a hound who’s found the trail of a fox. “We shall arrange to have edelweiss perfume shipped here directly from Austria for you.”
“Ah! But I see you have an infestation.” Kunigunde points at the grasping emerald vines that are spilling from the grey stone walls of the palace down into the gardens.
The Duke follows her eyeline. “Oh, ivy, yes. Well, there’s no stopping that. A stubborn weed. It would cover the whole world if it could.”
You and Aemond glance at each other, like a reflex, then immediately look away. His cheeks flush a deep hectic pink.
“But it kills,” Kunigunde says. “It smothers everything else. It must be tamed.”
“We’ll have it ripped down,” the Duke assures her, then leads you all into the royal stables to escape the rain.
Kunigunde drifts down the aisle, inspecting each stall. She moves swiftly past Caraxes; he kicks at the walls when she comes near, flattens his ears and glares with bulging black eyes. Kunigunde’s gown is not the sunlike gold of the Holy Roman Empire nor the green of the family she is marrying into. She wears a harmless unaffiliated color, a pale watery pink that makes you think of the organs of a gutter bear: a lung, a kidney, the deflated globe of a stomach. She’s not trying to prove that she’s anything. She doesn’t have to. Everyone knows exactly who she is: the only daughter of a kingdom far larger, wealthier, and more stable than England. As the wife of the second son instead of a third, she will outrank Nico. As a superior partner in every conceivable way, she will eclipse you.
Sir Criston Cole arrives, hauling Aegon along like an errant child. Your husband keeps running away and hiding in stairwells, in trees, behind curtains, under beds. He knows people are always searching for him now, wanting to meet the almost-king, trying to coax him into discussions of alliances and war plans. He sighs and bows to Kunigunde, his white-blond hair uncombed, his ocean-blue eyes groggy.
“Welcome to England, princess. And, uh, I presume you have a nickname of some sort…?”
Kunigunde blinks bewilderedly at him. “Why would I require a nickname?”
“Jesus Christ,” Aegon mutters, and wanders away to pet Sunfyre.
“We’ll purchase you a horse of your own,” the Duke of Hightower promises Kunigunde, papering over the mishap. Aemond has migrated to Vhagar, stroking the white blaze of her face, ticking her velvety muzzle with his expert fingers that you wish you could stop staring at. “A gift to commemorate your marriage. Any color and breed that you wish. Perhaps a golden Akhal-Teke like Sunfyre, or a mighty Percheron like Tessarion, or a breed from your native Austria if you’d prefer…”
Kunigunde stops at your horse’s stall. She marvels at her—gleaming black coat, vast muscles, defiant eyes—and gasps in delight. “Meine Güte! What is this one?”
“She’s an Andalucian,” you tell her. “From Navarre.”
“Your homeland,” Kunigunde notes gently, like someone who knows the pain of being exiled from the same earth that grew you.
“Yes, princess.”
“She’s beautiful,” Kunigunde declares. “Gorgeous. Formidable. What do you call her?”
“Midnight,” you reply, then steal a glimpse of Aemond to test his reaction. He pretends not to be listening, but again his cheeks color with a fleeting wash of scarlet. His betrothed—in a few short hours, his wife—observes this thoughtfully. It’s nothing as low as suspicion; it’s an intelligent, acute sort of awareness. One can look at her face and see gears and levers shifting, hear the ticking of a clock.
When the Duke continues the tour to show off the archery fields, Kunigunde insists that he begin without her; she will have you escort her there shortly. As soon as the rest of the group is out of earshot, she leans into you and takes your hand, painting the air with her fresh, lively edelweiss perfume.
“Is it awful?” she asks in a conspiratorial whisper.
You genuinely have no idea what she’s talking about. “What?”
“His eye,” she says. “Prince Aemond’s lost eye. A grisly thing, surely. The scar is bad enough, but the eye? I can’t imagine having to stare at it while…while…well, you know. While he’s lying with me. Fortunately, I have been assured that I won’t ever have to see it. But I’m sure you have. I’ve heard that you’re very good friends.”
“I’m afraid I can’t be of much help to you. I haven’t seen it myself.” You’ve wondered about it, though never with such scandalized revulsion. There’s nothing about Aemond that could disgust you. And then you say to comfort her: “But he’s well worth it.”
Kunigunde smiles hopefully. It’s the first time you’ve detected genuine vulnerability from her, but it’s there. “Is he?”
“Yes. He’s very clever and chivalrous. He has no vices, drinking, gambling, idleness. He loves history and sword fighting. He always smells of smoke and leather and hard work, like a blacksmith’s forge. He always has ink stains on his hands. And he writes poems.”
“Poems? Really?” Kunigunde says. She’s pleased, but she’s something else as well. There’s that watchfulness in her face again, too many layers for you to sift through. “Have you read many?”
You reply briskly as you lead her out into the scant rain: “Only one.”
An hour later—when the Duke of Hightower has concluded his ever-so-slightly-desperate flaunting of Westminster Palace and turned his attention to the hurried wedding arrangements—you return to the royal stables to see Midnight. You brush out her coat, feed her handfuls of oats from your palm, wrap your arms around her colossal black neck and rest your head against her, feeling the radiating heat of her body and the thudding of blood in her veins.
“I don’t think I can do this,” you tell Midnight. She nickers in reply, a low sympathetic rumble.
You hear footsteps in the aisle. Anxious—you really aren’t supposed to be going anywhere alone until the Blacks have left the court—you step out of Midnight’s stall to see who it is. Aemond is waiting there, his silvery hair wet from the light rain, wavy and dripping.
“What do you want?” you pitch at him.
He speaks with hesitant, quiet words. “I just wanted to express…I’m aware that…I’m sure this is difficult for you.”
“What an astute observation. I hope your tutors were well-compensated.”
“Ivy, I know how you feel—”
“Do you?” you snap. “Have you ever had to feign pleasure as some drunken stranger was invading you? Have you felt that your entire worth was whether or not you could produce a living son—an endeavor that might kill you, by the way—and then been vilified when you could not do it because you were being poisoned, all that sacrifice undone like someone pulling out a loose thread from a tapestry, all those nights of forced smiles and premeditated moans wasted? Have you stolen seconds of happiness, your first in a year, only to watch the person who gave them to you marry someone who is not a pitiful failure by any possible metric but a godsend who surpasses you in every way? Have you felt what it’s like to carry one man’s child when you desire another? No, you haven’t, and you never will. You have no fucking idea what this feels like.”
“We need to end this,” Aemond says. “The Holy Roman Empire must support the Greens’ claim to the throne. All our lives hang in the balance. Yours, mine, Aegon’s, my mother’s, Daeron’s, Nico’s. Everyone’s.”
“Right,” you hear yourself tell him.
“My wife…” And you flinch as he says it, like he’s hit you, a palm crashing against your face, a wave of flesh and bone. “She has to be happy here. She has to have a real marriage.”
“Unlike mine.”
He closes his eye. “Yes.”
“Then go,” you say, biting back sobs. “Go and get ready for your wedding.”
“You don’t think I’m being ripped apart by this?” he demands, striking a fist against his chest. “You don’t think I’d like to have some choice in the woman I’m bedding? For once in my life? You don’t think I’ve spent hundreds of hours wondering how our lives would look if the timing had been different, if you could have been wed to me and Aegon given the emperor’s daughter?”
“She’s perfect, she’s…” Your voice breaks off, bitter and fracturing.
“Yes. She must be, everybody agrees. Even the Blacks are in awe of her. They’re petrified by the advantage this match gives us. But I can’t see it. Because I’m not the man I was before and I can’t get him back. Because now I’m covered in you.”
You clean tears from your cheeks with quick, aggravated swipes. “I’m sorry our momentary indiscretion has become such a source of regret.”
“I don’t regret it.”
You look at each other from across a chasm of silence like a miles-wide torrent of dark cold water, a river, a channel, an ocean.
“I’ve made something for you,” Aemond says, kindly now.
“You’ve had it made, you mean.”
“No.” He shows you his hands. He made it himself.
“I don’t want it.” But you’ve made something for him too: a tunic to wear as he takes Kunigunde’s hand in marriage, deep forest green with bears and horses and roses stitched into it with gold thread. You’ve already given the tunic to Daeron so he can present it to his brother this evening. You won’t be there when he’s getting ready. You wouldn’t be able to bear it anyway. “I won’t accept it.”
“Then I’ll leave it in the box where you keep your sword.”
“Aemond, you don’t have to pretend,” you say. “I know you’ll spend the rest of your life avoiding me. You can start now.”
He comes to you and lays his hand on your belly; you’re not showing yet, but everyone knows you carry Aegon’s child. And now that the sinister cause of your previous losses has been revealed, there is no reason to believe that this one won’t live. “I will always protect you. And the child.”
You reply cynically: “Because if it’s a boy, he might be the king someday?”
Aemond shakes his head. “Because whether boy or girl, it’s a piece of you.”
He turns away and walks out into the rain, a grey spring afternoon hurtling towards night.
~~~~~~~~~~
You hide in the stables for as long as you can. When it grows so late that you know people will start looking for you—Nico wanting your opinion about her dress and her hair, the Duke of Hightower ensuring that the vessel carrying Aegon’s heir hasn’t gone missing—you take Midnight and trek down to the edge of the forest. She’s as good as any guard who might escort you; she’s been known to bite and kick at anyone besides Aemond and Vhagar who ventures too close. You use the spade you keep stabbed into the earth there to dig up the pink ivory wood box your sword is stowed away in. The soil is already soft, recently disturbed. There beside the blade, on velvet the same color as the flag of Navarre, is a thin gold chain with a charm attached to the center. The charm is a leaf with three distinct points like little mountains, like a crown.
“Ivy,” you tell Midnight, showing her the necklace. “He’s carved a leaf of ivy.”
Midnight only peers at you, onyx-black eyes attentive, ears pricked forward, chomping on the mouthful of lush wet clovers.
You put on the necklace—feeling traitorous, feeling heartsick, feeling comforted somehow—and then pick up your sword. You take it to the base of the tree to carve the dates you’ve left there ever-deeper, keeping them alive in a way that your first four children never will be. You locate the small imprints in the bark, and then you stare at them in puzzlement, the sword in your hand abruptly unnecessary. Someone else has already revived them recently. Someone else has traced over the dates so they won’t fade.
Aemond’s words come back to you like rain after a spell of drought: Because whether boy or girl, it’s a piece of you.
You press your knuckles to your trembling lips and sink to the dark damp earth, embers burning in your eyes and your throat.
“I’m in love with him,” you say aloud for the first time. “I don’t want to be. But I am. And I don’t know how to stop.”
And you stay there for what feels like a lifetime before you return to the palace to ready yourself for his wedding to the Holy Roman Emperor’s daughter.
~~~~~~~~~~
The ceremony is almost ludicrously simple in its haste, in the Duke of Hightower’s urgency to get the marriage finalized before King Viserys’ death. Aemond and Kunigunde recite their vows in the tiny private chapel, the same place you found him after you lost your last child, after you read his poem.
It’s like I’m reliving everything between us, you think as you look down at the wooden floorboards, unable to watch him linked by the hands with the woman he will share his life with. The stables where we first spoke, the chapel where he gave me the name that only he knows, where now he pledges himself to be someone else’s husband. The beginning and the end.
Aemond wears the tunic you made for him. Kunigunde wears a delicate and impassive pale blue. You wear the gold ivy leaf necklace and a gown green like envy. There is no sunlight streaming in through the stained glass windows today. Even if the sun had not already set, the sky is thick and churning with rainclouds. There is thunder somewhere, distant, ominous. Hundreds of candles illuminate the chapel like a pinpoint inferno in a world full of darkness.
In the Great Hall, the Greens sit at the high table together: the Duke of Hightower and Queen Alicent, you and Aegon, Nico and Daeron, Kunigunde and Aemond, Sir Criston Cole pacing restlessly, seeing threats in every shadow. No Blacks attend, nor would they be welcome to. Their great defender lies dying on the other side of the palace as the Greens stitch the final thread into their design. This is the Greens’ triumph to revel in. Everyone knows it will be their last glimmer of joy before the bloodshed begins. The English countryside is blooming with banners: green roses, black roses, but none in the proper color. You are the only one whose homeland is red. You have already written to Alonzo that the war is imminent, that the Blacks have slaughtered your children and risked your life. Soon ships, soldiers, archers, horses, and gold from Navarre will be arriving in London. You fold your hands together over your belly, wondering if the war will be over by the time you deliver your child, how many lives it will claim, what sort of king Aegon will be.
Beside you, your husband drains cup after cup of wine, but he cannot escape the inevitable. When the Greens wage war, it is his claim they are fighting for. And as long as he lives, it is he who must wear the crown. Aegon glances at you, smiles tiredly, dark patches around his eyes like a badger’s. He reaches over to touch you fondly, your hair and your cheeks. He drapes an arm across the back of your chair and rests his head on your shoulder, one hand on your belly. Aemond watches this, his eye sharp and glacial, then departs with his new wife to dance.
“How are we tonight?” Aegon asks. Meaning both of you, you and the baby.
You twirl messy locks of his white-blond hair around your fingers. “Well enough, all things taken into consideration.” And you wonder, as you do with increasing frequency, what sort of man he might have been if he hadn’t been beaten black and blue by the demands placed upon him since infancy. “Aegon, when are you happiest?”
“I don’t know,” he says, as if he hasn’t ever considered it. “Never.”
“Never? Really?”
“When I’m with Sunfyre,” he decides. “And when I think about the fact that I’ll always have you.”
He can’t mean that. He’s spent most of the past twenty-one months ignoring me.
“I miss you,” he murmurs. “I miss being with you.” He turns your face to his and kisses you sloppily. The Duke of Hightower rolls his eyes—this is far from decorous feast behavior—but is otherwise content to ignore it. Across the exuberant hall, the Montfords hang their heads in resigned disappointment. Aegon’s murky gaze skates over your body: green velvet, gold metal. “I was always uneasy about it because of the pressure to give the Greens an heir. But now…you are already with child. And neither of us were at fault for what happened before.”
He kisses you again, his tongue darting between your lips, wine and drowsy desire. And you think, through a fog of melancholy and self-loathing: Could I find some happiness with him? If Aemond will spend his life with Kunigunde, if Nico will know true passion with Daeron, if Rhaenyra will have Daemon’s single-minded devotion until it destroys them and their children too…could I have something for myself that makes the burden of existence lighter? Could I even learn to love him? If I tried for months, for years, for decades?
“I understand if we can’t lie together,” Aegon says. This is a stipulation you have been clinging to; it is more of a recommendation from physicians than a decree, a guideline that many couples break without consequence. It is a convenient excuse for an unenthusiastic wife to neglect her marital obligations. “But when you’re ready again…I want you. No one else. I want you so fucking badly it’s killing me. It’s all I can think about.”
It's just an escape, you think, you know. It’s a port in a storm for him. And yet…perhaps it could be the same for you. You push back his hair and touch your lips to his forehead. “You can have me, Aegon. If you’re gentle.”
He beams at you, dazed with wine and reckless optimism. “I always am.” And he’s right; he is. “Shall we dance, wife?”
“I don’t think I’m supposed to. And I’m certain that you are not capable of it at the moment.”
He takes your hand and staggers to his feet. “Let’s walk then.”
Aegon accompanies you around the perimeter of the hall, clumsy and stumbling, yes, but also proud, his palm on your belly, presenting you to various Green-affiliated noblemen and their wives, daughters, sons. They are warm and compassionate to you, appalled by your now-infamous suffering, mindful of the fact that if their faction wins you will soon be the queen; and with a husband like yours, the people closest to him will be more influential than the king himself. Among the dancing couples, Daeron spins and giggles with Nico. Aemond revolves with Kunigunde—she’s almost as good a dancer as you are, almost, though as far as anyone besides you and Aemond know she’s the best at court—but his eye follows you and Aegon around the crowded room, betrayed even though he has no right to be, incensed by the only honorable choice you can make. Aegon’s wine sloshes out of his cup each time he trips over his own feet, leaving a trail of maroon puddles on the floor. You sip mead now, weaker than wine and sweet with honey. You cannot stand the thought of apple cider; even the scent of it makes you nauseous and unbearably sad.
The Duke of Hightower, red-faced with frustration, appears as Aegon clutches the wall to keep his balance. “For the love of God, go eat something! Sir Criston?” The Duke waves the knight over. “I command you to take Prince Aegon back to the high table and do not permit him to leave it until he has consumed no less than one full plate of bread and meat. Is that understood?”
“Does the apricot cake count?” Aegon slurs.
“Fine,” the Duke agrees, and Aegon is ushered away. You and the Duke of Hightower stand together without speaking, watching Aemond and his wife dance together, two flawless figures with their hands resting lightly, sheepishly on each other, speaking in clandestine voices that no one else can hear. It knocks the air out of your lungs once, twice, again. This is going to kill me, you realize. I can’t drown out the memory of his voice with Aegon’s. I can’t stop wanting him.
You say with dark disdain: “My beloved grandsire-in-law. Did even you ever dare to dream of a future this bright?”
“He should be groveling in appreciation for this arrangement and so should you.”
You glare at the Duke and echo something you once heard Aemond say to him. “You care nothing for love.”
The Duke of Hightower turns to you; his voice cuts like jagged, rust-laced metal. “I loved my wife more than you could fathom, princess. More than the future or the past. More than my titles, more than my children, more than myself. And yet over the course of five days I watched her die of fever—insane, in agony—and there was nothing I could do about it. Nothing. There was no amount of money to pay or men to cut down with a blade. The wheels of the world turn again and again, and we’re all just running on top of them until it’s our turn to be dragged screaming below and crushed into oblivion. None of us own anybody. Not even the ones we’d kill for. All we own is our legacy. That’s all we can salvage from the maelstrom of this life. And this…this…this affinity between you and Aemond? It has no place in a future where we could win.”
You study Kunigunde—the daughter of one emperor, the sister of the next, the wife to the man you love, the future mother of his children—and marvel at what you would give to be her. Anything, everything.
“If you love him, you will not imperil him,” the Duke says. “You will not jeopardize our ascension.”
“I love him,” you confess in a splintering whisper.
The Duke of Hightower frowns at you in disappointment, in disgust. “Learn to hide it better.” Then he sweeps away to make his rounds among the noblemen, to ensure their banners are rising and their loyalties unfaltering.
Nico, in exuberant spirits as always, finds you and joins you in observing the newlyweds. She reads the words in the lines of your face, the wonder in your eyes. The princess from Austria is beautiful, brilliant, flawless. She is entirely worthy of him.
“Yes, she’s certainly the next best thing, isn’t she?” Nico says cheerfully.
You furrow your brow in confusion. “Second to who?”
Nico grins. “You, of course.” And then she sees your horrified expression. As usual, she’s hit just a bit too close to the mark, to the truth. Nico stammers an explanation. “I mean, you know, because you’re such good friends, and you understand him, he’s so odd to most people, so unnerving, but you like him as he is and he’s clearly smitten with you, and if you weren’t already married to Prince Aegon you’d be his choice for a wife, I’d imagine, but since it’s impossible…”
“Very impossible,” you say flatly.
“Right,” Nico capitulates, anxious. “I didn’t mean to offend you.”
“I’m not offended, Nico.” You lay a hand on her shoulder and then her flushed cheek, forcing a smile. “I’m sorry. I’m just tired. I’m very tired.”
“You have had a very eventful few days.”
“I’ve aged centuries.” Sometimes I think I’m already dead.
“Would you like me to come back to your rooms? We could read, or do needlework, or just sit and talk by the fire…”
“No, you stay. You’re having such a good time. I don’t want to ruin it for you.”
“It’ll be ruined if I fear you’re unhappy.”
“I’m happy,” you insist. “I’m happy, Nico.” I’ll never be happy again.
Courtiers are beginning to tease the newlyweds good-naturedly, shooing them off to bed. Kunigunde flashes her audience a timid, demure smile. Aemond is stoic; he wears no emotion that you can decipher. He raises his wife’s hand in the air, and there are whistles and applause. Then the couple retires to Kunigunde’s bedchamber, flanked by a flock of servants who will ready them for the essential next step: cleansed bodies, prayers recited, blood on white sheets. The room is spiraling around you; all the air in your lungs evaporates; your vision is speckled with dizzying splotches of darkness. In the midst of the cheers, you flee unnoticed from the hall. As you pass by the high table, you see that Aegon has laid his head down beside his plate and is practically unconscious. You fly through the corridors and take refuge in your bedchamber, a sanctuary, a prison.
You don’t even let your ladies undress you. You send them away and kneel down on the bearskin rug and stay there waiting for nothing, time crawling over you, prickling and slow and murderous like ivy. As the bells toll and the hours pass you imagine what they mean, you envision it, though you wish you couldn’t. Now he is taking off her nightgown. Now he is combing out her long lustrous hair with his agile fingers. Now he is admiring the glow of her bare skin in the firelight. Now he is tracing the slope of her jaw with the lightest touch—entranced, reverent—and tilting up her chin to kiss her. Now his hands are on her throat, her breasts, her waist, her thighs that have never been stained with the blood of another man’s child, parting them, reaching between them, angling himself to enter her. But he won’t rush; he won’t want to cause his lover pain. For all of their innumerable differences, he and Aegon have that in common.
You stare into the flames until they blur and bleed together, your eyes brimming with tears. And suddenly it feels like the fire is inside rather than out: your throat, your lungs, everything you’re made of, searing through vertebrae and veins. It feels like you could burn until there’s nothing left but echoes, threadbare ricochets of memory, a murmur of ash. Aegon does not appear. He’s probably not fucking some Green loyalist’s daughter, you concede that much, but he’s gone nonetheless: passed out under a table, or in a stairwell, or in the garden, or in Sunfyre’s stall in the royal stables. Aemond is bedding his wife and Nico will dance with Daeron until the sun rises but you are here alone, alone, alone, and you always will be. When Aegon drinks himself to death you will be widowed. When your child is born it will be given away to wetnurses and governesses. Nothing here is truly yours. Even if the Greens win, there’s no scenario in which you do.
I should have gone back home to Navarre when I had the chance. I should have fled from here like a sheep from wolves. And now I’m trapped. I’m so fucking trapped.
You cover your mouth with both hands. You don’t want anyone to hear you sobbing and decide to investigate, to piece together what has caused you such distress. Tears pour down your cheeks like spring rain. And you know now that if you are ivy to Aemond, then surely he is the same to you: a merciless trespasser, vines that have grown through your palms and into your bloodstream, scraping along the path of ruby arteries until they strangle the heart. There’s no point in trying to rip him out of you. There’s no way to return to the person you were before.
The bedchamber door flies open and slams shut, so quickly it’s over before you register what’s happening; hurried footsteps travel across the wooden floor. You whirl to find Aemond standing in the stone-heavy silence, in the firelight. You’ve never seen him like this before. He’s still wearing his eyepatch, but his long silver hair hangs free and wild, strands obstructing his face. He is dressed in only loose trousers and a white sleeping shirt that has been unbuttoned down to his navel. He’s backed himself against the wall. He’s trembling all over.
You rise and go to him. “Aemond…?”
He pushes your hands away when they settle on his forearm. “Don’t,” he pleads in a whisper.
“Alright,” you agree immediately. He won’t look at you, his blue eye darting everywhere except your face. He runs his fingers through his hair, shaking his head, breathing rapidly. Perspiration gleams on his bare chest, etchings and basins and steppes you’d only ever imagined. You ask him softly: “What happened?”
“I couldn’t do it,” Aemond says. At last, his gaze catches on yours, as if he’s surrendering, as if a gap in a page has been filled. “Not with her.”
Oh God, what is going to happen to us? What the hell is going to happen?
Before you can ask him, Aemond’s palms are on your tear-streaked face, and he’s kissing you with an intensity that cuts through all the strings that were knotted around you just minutes ago: hopelessness and solitude and bone-rattling terror. Your hands debate stopping him; instead, they come to rest on his salt-damp chest, exploring hungrily, a feast after famine. He’s begging for you in every way but words. There’s no question as to what your answer will be. There should be, but there isn’t; you need him in a way that is inescapable, like the seasons, like time.
You take blind steps backwards until your bare feet meet the bearskin rug, downy black fur of a beast that was killed for you. You stumble down onto the rug together, Aemond on top of you and tugging impatiently at the laces of your gown, you pulling up the hem, unable to wait, unwilling to lose the mindless rush of this moment. The necklace he made for you is a stripe of frost against your sweltering skin. You nip teasingly, ravenously at his neck, tasting smoke and paper and ink and leather, leaving flairs of red that vanish within seconds like dissipating smoke. Your fingers snag in his long white-blond hair; you lift his shirt from his back, inhaling a split-second hint of his wife’s edelweiss perfume as you toss it away. Aemond yanks off his trousers. He’s big, you knew he would be; bigger than his brother, bigger than you are confident you can endure.
Please let this be everything I hope it can be, you think fearfully. Please don’t let it be the way it was with Aegon. Please don’t let it be nauseating, tiresome, lonely, painful. The trepidation must show on your face.
“I won’t hurt you,” Aemond swears. “I’ll never hurt you.”
He retreats, hooks his arms beneath your thighs, and drags you towards him, burying his face between your legs; you bite down on your wrist to keep from crying out in pleasure. Beneath the gathered layers of your gown, his lips and tongue—greedy, dominating, starving for you—find the place where you are most sensitive, most aching. He licks, circles, licks again, sucks gently until you can feel that powerful wave of heat, bliss, finality building in your muscles and your nerves.
Not like this, you think. I want him closer to me when it happens. I want him inside of me, one with me.
“Aemond, come back,” you moan. “Please, please, come back. I need you. All of you. I need you right now.”
He rises obediently, his lips and chin dripping with your wetness, and kisses you deeply, intoxicatingly; you can taste yourself on him, minerals and desire, love and earth. He’s positioning himself between your thighs, two fingers of his right hand slipping effortlessly inside of you, working to ensure that you are prepared for his thickness, his length. You’re nodding as your hips move with his rhythm, gasping in air like you’re drowning, lost in a lust-red haze of helpless desperation. “Are you ready?” he asks in a ragged whisper.
“Yes, yes, Aemond, yes.”
His lips traverse your throat, the arc of your jaw, your cheek. “Stop me if you need to, okay?”
“Okay.”
“We’ll go very slowly.”
Kissing the side of your face, his left hand smoothing back your hair, Aemond begins to ease himself into you. There is pressure—tremendous, delicious pressure—but no pain yet. He stops to give you time to adjust; and perhaps it’s for him as well, shaking with euphoria and anticipation, trying to last long enough to please you. The first tentative rays of dawn are bleeding in from the slits between the curtains. And then there’s a sound that at first you don’t recognize: a creaking, a draft of new air. It’s the bedchamber door opening.
It happens too quickly for you to push Aemond away, to make any attempt to disguise your treason, your lethal weakness. There is only time to turn your face towards the open door to see who has discovered you. Perhaps it is the newlywed Kunigunde searching for her absconder husband, or the Duke of Hightower ready to drag Aemond back to consummate the marriage, or Daemon coming to murder you, or a servant or a guard or Queen Alicent or Sir Criston Cole. Each would be horrific in its own way, legacy-shattering, life-threatening.
But the intruder is none of these people. It is the one silhouette you didn’t even consider. You had assumed he wouldn’t be here. He’s almost never here.
The person in the doorway is Aegon.
293 notes
·
View notes