Chapter 1: That One
Your sisters had warned you about him for a fortnight, which was generous of them, considering at least one had hoped to marry him herself.
"He'll be cruel," Maris said, brushing out your hair the night before you left Storm's End. "He has that look. Like he's counting how many ways a person could be broken."
"He killed a man in the yard at Oldtown for laughing," said Ellyn, who had not been to Oldtown and had heard this from a cook.
"He has a jewel where his eye should be," said Cassandra, very quietly, as if that were the worst of it. Cassandra had worn her best gown to the feast when the prince came on his dragon, and had smiled at him until her cheeks ached, and he had looked straight past her to the gallery, where you were standing with a goshawk on your fist and your sleeves pushed to the elbow and absolutely no intention of being chosen.
You remember it better than you'd like. The hall full of smoke and stormlords, your father red-faced and loud, the prince tall and still in black leather at the end of the table, silver hair tied back from a face that might have been carved for a temple if not for the patch. Your father had waved his hand at the line of daughters as if offering a choice of horses. Aemond Targaryen had not looked at any of them.
He'd looked up. At you.
"Your dragon," you had said, before you could think better of it, because the hawk on your arm was still bating from the noise of the great beast landing on the walls, "has frightened half my birds off their feed, my prince. I'd thank you to tell her to land on the other side of the keep next time."
The hall had gone silent. Your father had gone the color of raw beef. And the prince had studied you for a long moment with his one violet eye, and you had not looked away from the patch, or from the eye, or from him, and at last he'd said, in a voice like a blade drawn slow, "Vhagar lands where she likes. But I'll tell her you asked."
Then he'd turned to your father and said, "That one."
So now you stand in the Great Sept of Baelor under seven crystal faces and a thousand candles, and a septon who smells of incense and onions is droning the Seven-Pointed Star at you, and your father's hands are on your shoulders lifting away the gold cloak of House Baratheon with its black crowned stag.
The prince steps behind you. You feel him more than see him. He is tall enough that his shadow falls over you entirely. The new cloak settles across your shoulders, heavy black wool lined with red, the three-headed dragon of his house worked on the back in scarlet thread. His fingers brush the side of your neck as he fastens the clasp. They're cool, and quite steady, and he takes longer over it than he needs to.
"With this kiss I pledge my love," the septon prompts, and you turn.
Up close, he's younger than the stories. Twenty-four, your father told you, two years older than you, a second son with a reputation that walked into rooms ahead of him. His face is all clean edges. The patch over his left eye is black leather, plain and well-kept, and the right eye is a shade of violet you've only seen once before, in a storm off Shipbreaker Bay when the light went strange just before the lightning.
He doesn't lean down. He waits. It takes you a moment to understand that he's waiting for you.
So you rise onto your toes and press your mouth to his. It's brief and dry and entirely proper, the kind of kiss you'd give a cousin. When you pull back his hand has come up, not to hold you, just to rest lightly at the small of your back, and his eye is fixed on your face as if you've done something he needs to remember exactly.
"I take you for my husband," you say, and the bells begin.
The wedding feast is held in the throne room under the dragon skulls, and by the third course the King is drunk.
You'd heard about Aegon too. The stories about him were less frightening and more tiresome. He is handsome in a soft, sleepless way, crowned and slouched on a cushioned seat beside the Iron Throne with a wine cup that never empties. The Queen Dowager sits stiff and pale in green, watching her eldest with the face of a woman watching a fire she can't put out. Queen Helaena talks quietly to a beetle in her palm. Lord Otto Hightower, the Hand, smiles at you exactly once, and it's the kind of smile your father gives a horse he's just bought at a good price.
Your husband eats almost nothing. He sits at your right, straight-backed, and watches the hall the way your goshawk watches a field. When a knight from the Crownlands asks you to dance, Aemond allows it with a slight tilt of his head. When the same knight, Ser Harlon Rowe, a big laughing man with wine on his breath, takes your wrist on the turn and pulls you closer than the steps require and murmurs something into your hair about what a stormland wench must be like in bed, Aemond doesn't move at all.
But you see him watching. His face doesn't change. His hand, resting on the table, closes slowly around the stem of his cup.
You twist your wrist free in the way your master falconer taught you to break a hawk's grip and step back into the figure of the dance. Ser Harlon laughs, as if you've played a game. You decide that if he touches you again you'll put your heel through his instep, wedding or no.
He doesn't get the chance. The music ends, and from his seat the King lifts his cup and bellows, "The bedding! Come on, brother, we've waited long enough. Let's get the bride out of that gown!"
A roar goes up from the lower tables. You've known this was coming. Every bride does. The crowd of drunk men carrying you through the halls, tearing at laces, singing filth, the women doing the same to the groom. Your sisters joked about it for a week. You'd decided to grit your teeth and bear it the way you bore a hawk's talons through a thin glove. Hands are already reaching. Ser Harlon is grinning, wiping his mouth, coming up the steps toward you.
Aemond stands.
He doesn't raise his voice. He doesn't need to. He's simply there between you and the hall, black and silver, one hand resting on the hilt of the sword at his hip, and something about the stillness of him makes the nearest men stop as if they've walked into a wall.
"There will be no bedding," he says.
"Oh, don't be dull," Aegon complains. "It's tradition."
"Then the tradition can go without." Aemond's single eye travels down the length of the hall and back, unhurried, touching each face, and it rests last and longest on Ser Harlon Rowe. "Any man who lays a hand on my wife tonight will lose it. I trust I'm understood."
Nobody laughs. Ser Harlon's grin slides off his face. In the hush, you can hear the candles hissing.
Then your husband turns and holds out his hand to you, palm up. Not grabbing. Offering. It's the same thing he did in the sept, you realize. He keeps leaving you the last step.
You take it. And he walks you out of the throne room himself, past the silent tables and the gaping lords, with your fingers resting in his and the dragon cloak sweeping behind you, and you don't look back once.
His chambers in Maegor's Holdfast are not what you expected. You'd pictured weapons on the walls, maybe a skull or two. Instead there are books. Stacks of them, on every surface, in High Valyrian and the Common Tongue, maps of Essos weighted with river stones, a half-finished letter on the desk in a tight, slanting hand. The bed is enormous and hung in black. A fire burns low in the grate.
He closes the door. The latch clicks, and you hear your own heartbeat, and you think: here it is. Whatever he is, you're about to find out.
He crosses to a side table and pours two cups of Arbor gold. He brings you one. He doesn't drink his.
"What have they told you about me?" he asks.
You consider lying. You're tired, and your feet hurt, and you've had too much wine to do it well. "That you're cruel."
"I am."
The honesty of it startles a laugh out of you. "To me?"
He's quiet for a moment. The firelight catches the edge of the patch. "No," he says. "Never to you."
He reaches out and takes the end of the first lace at the back of your gown between two fingers. He draws it loose, slowly, one cross of ribbon. Your breath catches. The fabric slackens a finger's width at your spine, and his knuckles graze your bare skin through the gap, just once, and heat goes through you like a swallow of strong wine.
Then he stops. His hand stays where it is.
"Tell me what you want," he says, low.
You open your mouth and find there's no answer ready. Your body has one, it seems. Your body would very much like him to keep going. But your head is full of Ser Harlon's breath and the roar of the hall and your sisters' warnings, and a man you've spoken perhaps forty words to.
"I don't know you," you say finally.
He nods, as if that's a reasonable thing for a wife to say to her husband on their wedding night. He ties the lace again, loosely, and steps back.
"Then we'll wait," he says, "until you do."
He kneels. You go rigid, but all he does is lift your foot onto his knee and unbuckle your slipper, then the other, and set them side by side on the rug as neatly as a squire. His thumb presses once into the aching arch of your foot, firm and knowing, and you have to bite your lip not to make a sound. He glances up at you. His mouth curves, barely.
Then he draws a dagger from his boot.
You stop breathing. He turns it in his hand and holds it out to you hilt first. Valyrian steel, the blade rippled like smoke under glass.
"If I ever give you reason," he says, and touches two fingers to the side of his own throat, just below the jaw. "Here. It's quickest."
He sleeps on the window seat. You lie awake in the great black bed with a Valyrian steel dagger under your pillow, listening to him breathe, and you don't know what to make of any of it.
In the morning you break your fast in the solar with him. He's dressed already, peeling a blood orange with his long fingers, and he doesn't look up when the steward comes in white-faced and murmurs that Ser Harlon Rowe was found in the Serpentine Steps at dawn with every bone in his right hand broken.
"A fall, they're saying, my prince."
"How unfortunate," Aemond says, and sets a perfect segment of orange on your plate.
You should be horrified. You know you should. You look down at the orange, and at his hands, which are unmarked, and back up at his face.
"He reached for what was mine," your husband says calmly, and meets your eye. "Tonight, if you want me, you'll have to say so. I'll not take anything I can't be certain was given."