Chapter 3: The Last One's Love
You don't go back to sleep.
You lie still and listen to him come back to bed, feel the mattress dip, feel him settle on his side facing you. He doesn't reach for you. After a long time his breathing slows. You wait until you're sure, and then you wait longer, and then you slip out from under the covers and cross the cold floor to the hearth.
Most of it is ash. But the fire had burned low by then, and a corner of the parchment has fallen through the grate onto the stone, browned at the edges and curled like a dead leaf. You smooth it flat in the gray light coming through the window. Your father's hand, thick and impatient. You'd know it anywhere.
...the Queen at Dragonstone offers a better match in the Vale and gold besides. The High Septon will set aside any marriage made by force or never rightly given, if you will write that you were unwilling. This is the third time I have sent. Answer me.
The third time.
You sit on your heels on the hearthstone with the scrap in your hand and feel something go cold and hard in your chest, like water freezing in a bucket.
You find him in the yard at midmorning, because of course you do. He's sparring with Ser Criston, both of them stripped to their shirts, blunted steel ringing, a small crowd of squires watching from the colonnade with their mouths open. Aemond moves like water and strikes like a hammer. He's beautiful to watch. You want to throw something at him.
He sees you at the edge of the yard and his guard drops for half a heartbeat. Ser Criston's blade raps him smartly across the ribs.
"Leave us," Aemond says, without taking his eye off you.
Ser Criston looks from his prince to you and back, and something like amusement crosses his weathered face before he hides it. He sheathes the practice sword, bows, and clears the colonnade of squires with a single jerk of his head. Then it's only the two of you, and the sun on the packed earth, and the scrap of parchment you hold up between two fingers.
"Three," you say.
His jaw tightens. He sets his sword on the rack with great care, as if it's made of glass.
"Three letters," you go on. "From my own father. Addressed to me. And you burned them."
"Yes."
"Without a word."
"Yes."
"Why?" Your voice cracks on it, which makes you angrier. "You stood in that hall and told a hundred men you'd take their hands for touching me. You gave me a dagger and showed me where to put it. You made me say every single thing I wanted before you'd lay a finger on me, and then you went and decided this for me in the dark?"
He's silent for a long moment. When he speaks, his voice is very low and very even, the voice he uses on Vhagar.
"A dagger," he says, "I could survive."
You stare at him.
"You'd have read them," he says. "And you'd have thought about it. The Vale. A lord with two eyes and no dragon and no war coming to his door. You'd have been right to think about it. Any sane woman would." He looks away from you, toward the walls, toward the bay beyond them. "I've been second my whole life. Second son. Second choice. They gave my brother the crown and me the dragon nobody else could hold. I chose you because you looked at me in your father's hall and didn't see any of it. And I could not bear to put the letter in your hand and watch you decide I was second again."
The anger doesn't go out of you. But something underneath it turns over, slow and painful.
"That's not your choice to make," you tell him. "Do you understand me? You don't get to keep me by keeping me ignorant. That isn't devotion. That's a cage with a nice lock."
He flinches. Actually flinches, a man who just took a sword across the ribs without blinking. Then he nods, once, and when he looks back at you his face has gone very still and very pale.
"There's a ship at the Kingsgate docks," he says. "A Baratheon galley, waiting for the tide. It's been there three days." He takes a breath. "Write your father whatever you like. If you want the Vale, I'll tell the High Septon myself that I took you unwilling, and let them say what they want about me. They say it anyway." His voice doesn't waver, but his hands, at his sides, are clenched so hard the knuckles have gone white. "If you want to go, I'll walk you to the ship. I'll not stop you. I swear it."
You believe him. That's the worst part. You can see what it costs, and you believe him completely.
"Find me a quill," you say.
He brings you to the solar, and parchment, and ink, and stands at the window with his back to you while you write, because he's a Targaryen prince and he would rather die than let you see his face while you do it.
You write for a while. Then you sand it, and fold it, and say, "Come here."
He turns. He comes. You hold out the letter, unsealed, and after a moment he takes it and reads it, and you watch him do it. You watch the exact moment his breath stops.
Father. I am a Targaryen wife, and well content, and you may tell the Queen at Dragonstone that I was never more willing in my life. Send no more envoys. If you send a fourth letter, I'll answer it from Vhagar's back, and you won't enjoy it.
He reads it twice. His hand isn't steady by the end.
"Seal it," you say, and hold out your hand for his ring. "With yours. Not my father's stag. Your dragon."
He drops to his knees in front of your chair.
He doesn't say anything. He just presses his face into your lap, his arms around your waist, his silver hair spilling over your skirts, and holds on. You feel him shaking. You put your hand on his head and stroke his hair, and for a long time neither of you speaks.
"I'm still angry with you," you tell him eventually.
"I know." It's muffled against your knees.
"No more burning things."
"No more burning things." He lifts his head. "Except my enemies."
"Except your enemies," you agree, and he laughs, a cracked, astonished sound, and you kiss him.
That night, in the black bed, you put your hand on the edge of the patch.
He catches your wrist. Not hard. Just holding.
"No one sees it," he says.
"I'm not no one."
He's quiet for a long time. The candle gutters. Then, slowly, he lets go of your wrist, and reaches up himself, and unties the leather cord.
The scar runs from his brow down across the lid and onto his cheek, a pale old line, cleanly healed. In the socket, where his eye should be, a sapphire catches the candlelight and throws it back at you, deep and strange. He watches you with the other eye as if waiting for you to recoil. As if he's spent his life waiting for people to recoil.
You lean in and kiss the scar. Once at the brow. Once at the cheek. Very gently, once, on the closed lid beneath which the stone sits cool against your lips.
He makes a sound you've never heard from him, a broken thing, and then his mouth is on yours.
It's different from the first time. Slower, if that's possible. He undresses you as if you're something he might break and then makes you undress him, every lace, every buckle, his hands guiding yours. When you're both bare, he lies back against the pillows and pulls you over him, so that you're straddling his hips, looking down at him in the candlelight with his silver hair spread on the black linen and the sapphire glinting and his hands spanning your waist.
"Like this," he says. "You choose. All of it."
So you choose. You take him in your hand, hot and hard and twitching against your palm, and he swears softly, and you guide him into you and sink down by slow degrees, watching his face as he watched yours that first night. His head tips back. His fingers dig into your hips. When you're seated fully you stop and just breathe, full of him, his chest heaving under your palms.
"Gods," he whispers. "You'll be the death of me."
"Not tonight." You roll your hips, experimentally, and his eye goes almost black.
You find a rhythm. Slow at first, then less so, learning what makes him groan, what makes his hands tighten, what makes him say your name in that ragged voice. He lets you. He holds your hips and lets you take what you want, and when you lean down to kiss him he surges up to meet you, one arm around your back, the other hand sliding between your bodies to touch you where you're slick and aching, rubbing slow tight circles until you're gasping into his mouth.
"Look at me," he says. "Please. I want to see you."
You look at him. His real eye and his sapphire one, both fixed on you, and there's nothing in his face but you. You come apart like that, with his name on your lips and his gaze holding yours, and you feel him follow a moment later, thrusting up into you, his arms locked around you as if he means to hold you there forever.
Afterward you lie tangled together, your head on his shoulder, his fingers drawing idle patterns on your back. The patch is still on the nightstand. He hasn't reached for it.
"Nyke ao jorrāelan," he murmurs into your hair.
You lift your head. "What does that mean?"
He looks at you for a long moment. "Learn to say it back," he says, "and I'll tell you."
"That's not how teaching works."
"It's how I work." His mouth curves. "Nyke. I. Ao. You."
"And the last one?"
He kisses your forehead, slow. "Love," he says against your skin. "The last one's love."
You say it back to him, badly, stumbling on the vowels, and he corrects you, and you say it again, and then he stops correcting you and just kisses you instead.
Far below, somewhere in the city, a bell begins to ring. Then another. Then the great bells of the Sept of Baelor, all of them at once, on and on in the dark, and you feel his whole body change beneath you, go taut and alert like Vhagar lifting her head from the sand.
Someone pounds on the door. "My prince. The King summons you. A raven from Harrenhal."
He closes his eye for a moment. When he opens it, he looks at you, and you know.
"Tomorrow," he says quietly, "I'll have to fly."
You pull the blanket up over the both of you, shutting out the bells and the door and the war, and put your hand flat over his heart.
"Then tonight," you tell your husband, "you're mine."