Chapter 2: The Raven Book
Wind. That's all there is, at first. Wind like a wall, like a hand over your mouth, like the whole sky is trying to tear you off the back of a dragon and fling you into Blackwater Bay.
Then your eyes stop streaming, and you see it.
The bay spread out beneath you in the last light, gold and rose and deepening violet. Ships like toys. The Red Keep shrinking behind you on its hill, a red-brown smear above a city of smoke and roofs. The long green line of the north shore curving away east toward home. And under you, all around you, the great red length of Caraxes, his wings snapping and booming on the wind, his long serpent neck stretched toward the horizon, his scales hot as a hearthstone through your skirts.
You are flying. You are actually flying.
You laugh out loud. The wind steals it before it's out of your mouth.
Behind you on the saddle, his chest a solid wall against your back, his arm locked around your waist like an iron bar, Daemon leans down until his mouth is beside your ear.
"Breathe," he says.
"I am breathing."
"You were screaming."
"That was joy."
"Hm." You feel rather than hear the low rumble of amusement in his chest. "Lykirī," he says to the dragon, and Caraxes levels out, the wild pitching easing into a long smooth glide, and the wind drops enough that you can hear yourself think.
"Your uncle," Daemon says, "will have gone straight to Otto. Otto will go to my brother. By morning there'll be a summons with my name on it and a contract with yours, and the whole court will be waiting to watch me hand you over to a man older than the Kingswood."
"I know."
"So this," he says, "had better be worth it."
"It will be."
"You're very sure."
"My father never signed that contract," you say. "He called Lord Celtigar 'that wet old crab' in front of half the Narrow Sea. He wouldn't have given him a dog. And every letter he ever sent or received went through Maester Benifer at Hartmere, and Benifer copies everything. If that contract is real, there'll be a record. If there isn't…"
"Then your uncle's a forger."
"Then my uncle's a forger. And a fool. And I'll have him in the black cells by the end of the week."
Daemon is quiet for a moment. Then his arm tightens around your waist, just slightly, and he says, "I'm beginning to see why your father was worried about you."
"Worried?"
"For the court," he says. "Not for you."
Hartmere at night is exactly as you left it, and nothing like it.
The keep sits on its rock above the harbor with its torches lit and its gate shut and its banners hanging limp in the windless dark, black for mourning. When Caraxes comes down in the outer yard, screaming, the whole garrison pours out of the barracks with spears and then stops dead, gaping, and old Benifer comes hobbling across the cobbles in his nightshirt with his chain clanking and his candle guttering and his mouth hanging open.
"My lady," he says. "My lady. That's a dragon."
"I know, Benifer."
"That's the Blood Wyrm."
"I know, Benifer. I need the raven book. All of it, for the last year. And Father's letters. And bread. Whatever's in the kitchens."
It takes four hours.
Benifer brings ledgers. You and Daemon spread them across the long table in your father's solar, under the window where he used to sit with his pipe, and you read until your eyes burn. Daemon reads too, which surprises you. He reads fast and silently, his elbows on the table and his chin on his fist, turning pages with a callused thumb, and every so often he makes a soft, unimpressed sound at your father's handwriting.
"He wrote like a man fighting a snake," he says.
"He was very proud of it."
"He shouldn't have been."
It's past the third hour of the morning when you find it.
Not the contract. There is no contract. There's no letter to Celtigar, no letter from Celtigar, no copy, no draft, no record of any raven to Claw Isle in the whole of the past year. But there is something else. A short, furious letter, in your father's snake-fighting hand, written to his brother six months ago, and copied neatly by Benifer into the ledger:
You will not touch the harbor accounts. You will not speak for my daughter. If I fall, Hartmere is hers, and if you so much as look at it, I will come back from whatever hell they send me to and drown you in the bay myself.
You read it three times. Then you put your hand over your mouth, because your throat has closed and your eyes have gone hot, and you can't seem to breathe.
Daemon reads it over your shoulder. He doesn't say anything for a long time.
"Well," he says finally, very quietly. "I liked him."
You laugh. It comes out wet and wretched, and then it isn't a laugh anymore. You're crying, in your father's solar, in front of the most dangerous man in the Seven Kingdoms, at the third hour of the morning, with ink on your fingers.
He doesn't tell you to stop. He doesn't make a joke. He just reaches over and takes the ledger out of your hands and sets it aside, and then he pulls you out of your chair and into him, one hand at the back of your head, and holds you while you shake.
He smells like smoke and leather and dragon. His heart beats slow and steady under your ear. You think, absurdly, that nobody has held you since the raven came.
When you finally pull back, his doublet is wet and your face is a ruin. He thumbs the tears off your cheekbone, roughly, like he's not used to doing it.
"You have your proof," he says.
"I have my proof."
"Then we fly at dawn."
"We fly at dawn," you say. And then, before you can think better of it, "You said in King's Landing that you'd have to make me unmarriageable."
His thumb stops on your cheek.
"I was being dramatic," he says. "It's a family trait."
"Were you?"
He looks at you. In the candlelight his eyes are dark, more purple than violet, and very, very still.
"Be careful," he says.
"You keep saying that."
"I keep meaning it." His voice has dropped. "You're grieving. You're tired. You haven't slept in two days, and tomorrow you'll walk into the throne room and win, and the day after that you'll be free of me. You don't want to make choices tonight you'll have to live with once you are."
"Don't tell me what I want," you say. "Every man in my life has spent the last three weeks telling me what I want. My uncle. The Hand. The King. You." You step closer. Your hands find the front of his doublet. "I'm twenty-five years old, my prince. I've run this keep for two years. I know exactly what I want, and I've wanted it since you walked into that throne room and stood next to me like you'd been there all along."
His hands come up and close around your wrists. Not to stop you. Just to hold.
"Say it," he says.
"I want you."
"Not because you owe me."
"I don't owe you anything. You owe my father. I'm not your debt. I'm choosing you." You hold his eyes. "Is that clear enough, or would you like it in writing? Benifer will copy it."
Something breaks open in his face.
He kisses you like a man coming home from a war, hard and deep and hungry. You make a sound against his mouth and grab his shoulders, and he walks you backward, one step, two, until your hips hit the edge of your father's table and the ledgers go sliding off onto the floor with a sound like a flock of birds.
"Not here," you gasp. "Gods. Not in Father's solar."
He laughs, rough, into your neck. "Where?"
"Up. My rooms."
He scoops you up like you weigh nothing and carries you up the tower stairs while you give him directions, and the guards on the landing turn very carefully to face the wall.
Your rooms are dark and cold. You'd forgotten. Nobody's lit a fire here in weeks. He sets you on your feet beside the bed and lights a candle from the one he's carried up, and then he turns back to you, and the look on his face in that small gold light makes your knees go weak.
He undresses you slowly. Mourning black, laced up the back, a dozen hooks. He takes his time with every one. His mouth follows his fingers down your spine, and by the time the gown pools at your feet you're trembling, and not from the cold.
"Look at you," he murmurs against your shoulder. His hands slide around your waist and up over your ribs to cup your breasts, rough thumbs dragging slow circles over your nipples until you arch back against him with a gasp. "They'll write songs about the woman who brought the Rogue Prince to heel."
"I haven't brought you to anything."
"Not yet," he says, and turns you around, and lays you down on the bed.
You pull at his doublet. He lets you. You get it open, and the shirt underneath, and you push it off his shoulders, and he's lean and hard and scarred in a dozen places, old silver lines across his ribs and one ugly knot of puckered skin low on his side that you trace with your fingertips. He shudders.
"Crabfeeder," he says.
"Did it hurt?"
"Less than this," he says, and kisses you again.
He takes his time. You hadn't expected that from him either. You'd thought he'd be all fire and impatience, the way he is in the stories, but he touches you like he's learning a new language, like he wants to know every word. His mouth moves down your throat, across your collarbone, over your breasts, lingering, until you're twisting under him and pulling at his hair. His hand slides between your thighs and finds you wet and aching, and he groans against your skin, a low, raw sound, and strokes you slowly, deliberately, until you're shaking.
"Daemon," you gasp. "Please."
"Please what?"
"You know what."
"I want to hear you say it." His voice is pure smoke. "You said you know exactly what you want. Tell me."
So you tell him. Plainly, breathlessly, without a scrap of courtly modesty, and you have the deep satisfaction of watching his composure crack straight down the middle.
He rises over you. He settles between your thighs, and you feel him, hard and hot, and he holds there for a long moment, his forehead against yours, his breath ragged.
"Last chance," he says. "After this, every whisper in King's Landing is true."
You wrap your legs around his hips and pull him in.
He sinks into you slowly, a long, deep, inexorable slide that wrings a cry out of you, and you feel the shudder go all the way through him. For a moment neither of you moves. Then he starts, slow and deep, and you meet him, and the old bed creaks under you, and the candle gutters, and the cold room fills with the sound of your breathing.
He watches your face the whole time. That's what undoes you. The Rogue Prince, the terror of the Stepstones, the man the whole court whispers about, braced above you in the candlelight, watching every flicker of your expression like it's the only thing in the world worth knowing. When you come, it's with his name in your mouth and your nails in his back, and he follows a moment later with a low, broken groan, buried deep, his face pressed into your neck.
Afterward he doesn't leave. You'd half thought he might. He lies on his back in your narrow bed with you sprawled across his chest, his fingers moving slowly through your hair, and stares at the ceiling.
"Unmarriageable," you murmur.
"Thoroughly." His chest rumbles with something that might be a laugh. "Otto's going to have a seizure."
Caraxes brings you down into the Dragonpit at noon the next day, the ledger wrapped in oilcloth and strapped to your back.
The great doors are already open. And standing on the sand, ranked in a neat line of gold and steel between you and the city, are forty gold cloaks with drawn swords. At their head is a knight of the Kingsguard in white. Beside him stands your uncle, smiling.
"By order of the Hand of the King," the Kingsguard calls, "the Lady of Hartmere is to be delivered to her betrothed. Prince Daemon is to surrender his sword and come with us."
Behind you, you hear the long, slow, singing hiss of Valyrian steel leaving its sheath.