Chapter 1: The Ward
They have been talking about you for an hour as if you are a parcel of land.
You stand at the foot of the Iron Throne in a mourning gown three weeks old, your hands folded, your chin up, and you listen to your uncle explain to the King of the Seven Kingdoms why you can't be trusted with your own name.
"A grieving woman, Your Grace," Ser Cassor says, his voice rich with false sorrow. "Unwed. Untried in the running of a holdfast. Hartmere's harbor pays a tenth of the crown's tariffs on the north shore of the bay. It must not be left in hands that…" He glances at you with a sad little smile that you'd like to remove with a fire iron. "…that are perhaps not yet steady."
You are twenty-five. You have kept Hartmere's books since you were old enough to hold a quill. For the two years your father was at war on the Stepstones, you ran the harbor, the levies, the grain stores and the garrison, and in that time the tariffs went up by a third. Your uncle spent those two years in King's Landing losing at dice.
But you are a woman, and he is a knight, and he has the Hand of the King standing at the King's right shoulder nodding along like a septon at a sermon.
"Lord Hightower," the King says wearily. Viserys looks tired. He looks like a man who would rather be anywhere else, building his little stone Valyria in some quiet room, and you can't entirely blame him. "Your counsel?"
Otto Hightower clasps his hands. "The precedent is clear, Your Grace. A guardian should be appointed until the lady weds. Her uncle is the nearest male kin. And Lord Celtigar has already expressed an interest in a match."
Lord Celtigar is seventy-one and has buried four wives. The whispers say the fifth would be lucky to last through a winter. The court murmurs, and somebody near the back laughs.
You open your mouth. You have a speech. You've been rehearsing it for three weeks in a room at an inn on the Street of Seeds.
You never get to give it.
The great doors at the end of the throne room bang open so hard that both gold cloaks on either side flinch, and every head in the hall turns.
He comes in like weather.
You've seen him before, at a distance, at a feast years ago when your father brought you to court: a tall silver-haired figure at the edge of the dancing, watching the room like it was a game he'd already won. You've heard about him for longer. Everyone has. The Rogue Prince. The Lord of Flea Bottom. The man who held the Stepstones against the Crabfeeder and came home with a crown on his head that nobody gave him. Some of the stories make him a hero. Most make him a monster. You've never been sure which version you believed.
He is older now. Forty, if the stories are right. His hair is the pale silver-gold of the old blood, cropped short, and there are lines at the corners of his violet eyes that weren't there at that feast. He's dressed in black leather, travel-stained, still dusty from somewhere, and Dark Sister rides at his hip in her scabbard like a promise.
He doesn't look at the King. He doesn't look at the Hand. He walks straight down the length of the hall, past the courtiers and the knights and the gaping petitioners, and stops beside you.
Close. Close enough that you can smell smoke and leather on him, and something hot and metallic underneath, like the air after a forge.
He looks at you, finally. Just for a moment. A long, cool, measuring look that goes all the way through you.
Then he turns to the throne.
"Brother," he says.
Viserys sighs like a man watching a jug tip off a shelf. "Daemon."
"I'm told you're giving away Lord Harte's daughter."
"We're discussing her guardianship."
"Ah." Daemon reaches into his jerkin and pulls out a folded square of parchment, stained brown at one corner with something that you realize, with a lurch, is old blood. "Then you'll want this. Edric Harte wrote it the night before the battle at Bloodstone. He gave it to me with his own hand." His mouth tilts. "He asked that, if he fell, his daughter be placed under my protection. I'm here to collect."
The court erupts.
It takes another hour, and by the end of it Otto Hightower looks like a man who has swallowed a wasp, and your uncle has gone the color of curdled milk, and you are a ward of the Prince Daemon Targaryen.
You don't say a word through any of it. You can't. You're too busy staring at the letter in the King's hands, at your father's crabbed, square handwriting that you'd know anywhere, and trying to understand how the last thing he ever wrote was about you, and nobody told you.
Afterward, in a passage behind the throne room, you catch up to Daemon and grab his arm.
He stops. He looks down at your hand on his sleeve, then up at your face, with an expression of polite interest, as if a cat has jumped onto his table.
"I'd like to see the letter," you say.
"The King has it."
"Then I'd like to know what it said."
"It said you were to be protected."
"From what?"
"Your uncle. Lord Celtigar. The Hand. Old men with ledgers." His voice is low and dry and faintly amused. "Your father knew the court. He knew what they'd do to Hartmere the moment he was in the ground. He knew I'd be the only man in King's Landing who'd enjoy telling Otto Hightower no."
"So I'm a weapon."
"You're a ward."
"Is there a difference?"
He considers that. "With me? Not much."
You let go of his arm. You're shaking, and you don't want him to see it. "Do you know what they're saying already? Out there?"
"I can guess."
"They're saying you took me as your ward because you want me in your bed."
"Yes," Daemon says, perfectly calm. "They'd say that if I'd taken in a goat."
You stare at him. He stares back. Then, absurdly, you laugh, a short, startled, broken sound, and something in his eyes changes. Just slightly. Like a man noticing a blade he hadn't seen.
"Come," he says, and turns, and walks away down the passage, and after a moment, because you have nowhere else to go, you follow.
His apartments in the Red Keep are not what you expected.
You'd imagined something lurid, from the stories. Silks and gold and a courtesan from the Street of Silk on every couch. Instead there are maps. Dozens of them, pinned to the walls, spread across tables, weighted at the corners with daggers and wine cups and a dragon's tooth as long as your forearm. The Stepstones, inked and re-inked with troop movements. The Narrow Sea. Essos. A small, battered charcoal sketch of Dragonstone that looks like he drew it himself. There's a window that looks out over the bay, and a fire, and a long table with two chairs, and that's all.
"You'll have rooms across the hall," he says, pouring two cups of wine. "My steward will see to your things. You'll dine with me when I'm in the city. You'll appear at court on my arm. You'll be seen. Constantly. Everywhere." He holds a cup out to you. "Let them look. The more they talk about what you are to me, the less they'll talk about what Hartmere is worth."
You take the cup. You don't drink. "And what am I to you?"
He sits on the edge of the table, his long legs stretched out, and looks at you over the rim of his cup for a long time.
"A debt," he says finally. "Your father held the left flank at Bloodstone with forty men against three hundred. He held it long enough for me to get Caraxes into the air. He died doing it." Something moves in his face, there and gone. "I don't pay many debts. I'm told it's a character flaw. But I'll pay that one."
The fire cracks. Out over the bay, a ship's bell rings.
You set the cup down very carefully on the table, next to a map of a war that took your father, and look at the Rogue Prince.
"I don't want to be a debt," you say.
"No?"
"I want Hartmere. In my own name. Not my uncle's, not a husband's, not yours." Your voice is steady now. You're almost surprised. "I want to be named its lady in my own right by the King, in the throne room, in front of Otto Hightower. And when that happens, I want to walk out of this wardship and never be anyone's anything again."
He looks at you with something that might be respect, or might be hunger, or might be both. It's hard to tell, with him.
"That's a great deal to want," he says.
"You asked what I was to you. That's what I am. A woman who wants her own house."
He sets down his cup. He stands, and crosses the space between you in two long strides, unhurried, until he's close enough that you have to tip your head back to meet his eyes. He doesn't touch you. He doesn't need to. The heat of him reaches you anyway.
"And until then," he says quietly, "you're mine."
It should sound like a threat. It doesn't. It sounds like a vow.
"Until then," you say, and your voice comes out lower than you meant it to, "they'll say I'm your whore."
"They will."
"Doesn't that bother you?"
"It costs me nothing." His eyes drop, slowly, to your mouth. Stay there. "Does it bother you?"
You think about it. You think about it honestly, which is a mistake, because the honest answer is not the one you came here to give.
"No," you say.
Something flares in those violet eyes, bright and dangerous, a fire banked under ash. He lifts one hand and, very slowly, slides two fingers beneath your chin. His skin is rough with old calluses. He tips your face up toward his, and you let him, and for one long breath neither of you moves.
"Then I'd be careful, my lady," Daemon Targaryen murmurs, "about what you let them say. In this city, gossip has a way of coming true."
He lets you go. He steps back. He picks up his cup again as if nothing has happened, as if your heart isn't trying to break out through your ribs, and turns to the window.
You're halfway to the door, legs unsteady, when someone knocks.
His steward slips in, white-faced, and bows. "My prince. Ser Cassor Harte is in the yard. He's brought the Hand's septon." A pause, a swallow. "And a betrothal contract, my prince. Signed and sealed by the late Lord Harte. It promises the lady to Lord Celtigar."
You go cold all the way through.
Behind you, very softly, Daemon begins to laugh.
"Well," he says. "Then I suppose we'll have to make her unmarriageable."