Chapter 2: A Dragon Is Not a Slave
You don't say so that night. Or the next.
It isn't that you don't want to. You want to in a way that keeps you awake, staring at the black bed-hangings while he reads by a single candle on the window seat, his profile sharp against the dark glass, turning pages with a soft dry sound that you start to hear in your sleep. You want to when he comes in from the yard with his hair damp and his shirt clinging, and when he speaks High Valyrian to the steward in a voice that makes your stomach drop, and once, mortifyingly, when he simply passes you the salt.
But wanting a thing and saying it aloud to a man who broke a knight's hand over breakfast are two different matters. So you watch him instead. You've spent your life learning the moods of creatures that could kill you. You decide to learn this one.
Here is what you learn in a week.
He trains with Ser Criston Cole in the yard every dawn and is better with a sword than anyone you've ever seen, with no flourish in it at all. He corrects the maester's Valyrian, politely, which is worse than rudely. He loathes his brother in the particular tired way of someone who has cleaned up after him for years. He loves his mother and doesn't know how to say it, so he brings her books. He is kind to Helaena, gentle in a way that surprises you.
He doesn't touch you. He walks beside you through the halls of the Red Keep with his hands clasped behind his back, and if a lord's eyes linger on you too long, Aemond simply turns his head and looks at the man until he finds something else to look at. Nobody at court calls you a stormland wench now. Nobody calls you anything at all except my lady, as though you might go off in their hands.
And on the eighth morning, there is a gyrfalcon on a perch at the foot of your bed.
You sit up and stare. She's white as new snow, flecked with gray at the edges of her wings, hooded in red leather tooled with tiny dragons. A northern bird, worth more than some holdfasts. Someone has known exactly what to buy.
Aemond is at the desk, writing. He doesn't turn around.
"The falconers of the Keep are fools," he says to his letter. "I asked. They wouldn't know a haggard from a hen. I thought you might like something to fly that you didn't have to share with them."
You get out of bed in your shift and go to the bird and hold out your arm without a glove, and she steps onto it, sharp and light. She's beautiful.
"Thank you," you say.
He sets down the quill and looks at you, the same look as in the sept. "There's someone else," he says, "I'd like you to meet."
The Dragonpit sits on the Hill of Rhaenys like a great domed skull, and inside it smells of sulphur and old smoke and something animal and enormous, and when Vhagar lifts her head from the sand, you forget how to breathe.
She carried Queen Visenya at the Conquest. She is older than the Red Keep and the Iron Throne and every king who has sat on it. Her scales are the green-bronze of a drowned bell, scarred and pitted, and her eyes are the size of shields, and when she looks at you, you feel it in your teeth.
Aemond walks straight to her, unhurried, and lays his palm flat against the side of her jaw, and says something low in High Valyrian. The great head lowers. A breath like a furnace door rolls over you and lifts your hair.
He holds out his hand.
Every instinct you have says run. The thing that kills you is never the thing that snarls. It's the thing that goes still, and Vhagar is very still.
You take his hand anyway. He draws you forward until you stand beside him, close enough to touch her. You don't reach out. You do what you'd do with a new hawk: you keep your eyes soft and to the side, you breathe slow, you let her look. It goes on for a long time. Her nostrils flare. Then, so slowly it might be the ground shifting, the enormous head turns an inch toward you, and a rumble starts deep in her chest, and Aemond's hand tightens on yours.
"She likes you," he says. He sounds almost startled.
"She's deciding whether I'm worth the trouble of eating."
"That's how she likes people." He watches you with an expression you can't read. "My brother won't come within fifty paces of her. You stood there like a falconer."
"I am a falconer." You glance at him. "A hawk isn't a pet, my prince. You don't own it. You come to an arrangement."
Something moves in his face, quick and fierce. "Zaldrīzes buzdari iksos daor," he says softly.
"What does it mean?"
"A dragon is not a slave." He looks at you a moment longer. Then he says, "Would you like to fly?"
You'll never be able to describe it properly. The way the ground fell away. The wind trying to tear you out of the saddle and his arm locked around your waist, holding you back against his chest so that you felt every breath he took. King's Landing shrinking to a scatter of roofs and smoke, the Blackwater Rush a silver vein, and Vhagar's vast wings beating like the heart of a god.
You screamed at first. Then you laughed until you couldn't stop, and behind you, against your ear, you felt Aemond Targaryen laugh too, a real one, low and startled, as if he'd forgotten he could.
When you land, your legs won't hold you. He lifts you down and doesn't set you on your feet right away. He just holds you there in the sand, and your hands are fisted in the leather of his coat, and your hair is a ruin, and your heart is going like a drum.
You look up at him. His face is very close. His eye is very bright.
"I want you," you say.
He goes still. Like Vhagar. Like a thing that could kill you and has decided not to.
"Say it again," he says, "where I can do something about it."
He doesn't hurry. He walks you back through the Red Keep at the same measured pace as ever, your hand on his arm, and the only sign that anything has changed is that his thumb, very slowly, draws circles on the inside of your wrist the whole way, until by the time the door of his chambers closes behind you, you're shaking with something that isn't fear.
He turns you to face him. He cups your jaw in one hand, tips your face up, and looks at you.
"Say it," he says.
"I want you. I've wanted you for a week. You passed me the salt and I nearly—"
He kisses you.
It's nothing like the sept. It's slow and deep and certain, his mouth opening yours, his hand sliding back into your wind-tangled hair to hold you where he wants you, and he kisses you like a man reading a book he's waited his whole life to open, one line at a time, missing nothing. Your knees go weak. He feels it and catches you against him with an arm at your waist, and you feel the hard length of him through his breeches, and he makes a sound into your mouth that you'll be thinking about for the rest of your life.
He undoes your laces this time without stopping. Every one. The gown pools at your feet, then your shift, and he steps back to look at you in the light from the window. Not hungrily, though there's hunger in it. Reverently, as if you are a thing he has prayed to.
"Seven hells," he says quietly. "Look at you."
You reach for the buckles of his coat. Your fingers fumble. He helps, impatient now, shrugging free of leather and linen, and he's lean and pale and scarred under it, a long seam across the ribs, a pucker at the shoulder. You put your mouth to the scar on his ribs without thinking, and his breath leaves him in a rush, and his hand comes up to cradle the back of your head.
He lays you down on the black bed. Then he kneels at the edge of it, takes your knees in his hands, and draws them apart.
"Aemond," you say, uncertain, and it's the first time you've said his name.
He looks up at you over the length of your body, and his eye is dark. "You told me a week ago you didn't know me," he says. "Let me make certain you do."
He starts at your ankle. The same ankle he unbuckled the slipper from. He kisses it, and then the inside of your calf, and the back of your knee, which makes you jolt, which makes him do it again, slower. He works his way up the inside of your thigh as if he has all the time in the world and intends to use every bit of it, his mouth hot and open against your skin, his fingers stroking idle patterns on your hip, until you're twisting on the sheets and he still hasn't gone where you need him.
"Please," you hear yourself say.
"Please what?"
"You know what."
"I want to hear you say it." His breath stirs the curls between your thighs and you nearly come off the bed. "You're my wife. You'll never have to wonder what I want. I'll not have you leave me guessing at what you want, either."
So you tell him. In plain words, with your face burning, and he groans like you've struck him and puts his mouth on you.
The rest of the world goes away. There's only the slow, devastating stroke of his tongue, the broad flat heat of it and then the point, his lips closing around the swollen bud of you and drawing gently, his hands firm on your thighs holding you open when you try to close them on his head. He learns you. That's the only word for it. He tries a thing and listens to the sound you make and does it again, patient and merciless, and when you grab a fistful of his silver hair he only hums against you, which is worse, which is so much better. He slides one long finger into you, then two, crooking them, and the pleasure that's been building low in your belly draws tight as a bowstring.
"Aemond. Aemond, I'm going to..."
"Yes," he says against you, and doesn't stop.
You break apart. It goes through you in long waves, your back arching off the bed, your thighs shaking around his head, a cry tearing out of you that the whole of Maegor's Holdfast can probably hear, and he holds you through it and keeps going, gentler, until the last tremor fades and you have to push weakly at his forehead because you can't take any more.
He rises over you. His mouth is wet. He looks, for once, entirely undone.
"Tell me," he says, and his voice is rough. "Tell me you want this."
"Yes." You pull him down. "Yes. I want you. Now."
He fits himself to you and pushes in slowly, so slowly, watching your face the whole time. There's a sting and a stretch, and he stops the instant you wince, his arms trembling with the effort of holding still, his forehead dropped to yours.
"Breathe," he murmurs. "I've got you. Breathe."
You breathe. The sting fades into fullness, into heat, and you roll your hips up into him experimentally, and he says a word in High Valyrian that you're fairly sure isn't fit for a septon, and then he starts to move.
He's thorough about this too. Of course he is. He takes you slow and deep, learning the angle that makes you gasp, and then holding it, relentless, his hand sliding down between your bodies to circle where you're still tender until you're clutching at his back and saying his name like a prayer. When you come again it's slower and deeper and seems to go on forever, and you feel him lose his rhythm, feel him break, his face buried in your neck and your name in his mouth, over and over, as if it's the only word he knows.
Afterward he lies with his head on your breast, and you comb your fingers through his hair, and neither of you says anything for a long time.
"No one's ever chosen me," he says finally, into your skin. So quietly you almost don't catch it. "Not first. Not for myself."
You don't know what to say to that. So you just keep stroking his hair until he sleeps.
You wake in the dark some hours later to find the bed cold beside you. He's at the desk in only his breeches, a letter in his hand, and as you watch, he holds the corner of it to the flame.
It catches. In the brief flare of light before it curls to ash, you see the seal on the parchment. Black wax. A crowned stag.
Your father's.
"Aemond," you say. "What is that?"
He doesn't turn around. He drops the last burning scrap into the grate and watches it go.
"Nothing," he says. "Go back to sleep."