Chapter 7: The Soldier's Reward
The air in the tent was thick with the smell of wet wool, cold iron, and the pine boughs laid over the mud floor. A map of the Riverlands was spread across a campaign table, its corners held down by daggers stabbed into the wood. Red wax droplets, like congealed blood, marked the holdfasts that had yielded. There were not enough.
Criston Cole poured wine into two cups. The silence between them was not comfortable, but familiar. It was the silence of men who had shared too many battlefields and too many secrets. He handed a cup to Aemond, who stood staring at the map, his silhouette cutting the light from the single brazier.
“The Blackwoods still resist,” Criston said, his voice a low rumble. “They’ve pulled back into Raventree Hall. The castle is a stone knot. It will cost men to untie it. Many men.”
Aemond did not touch the wine. “We have dragons. Vhagar does not untie knots. She burns them.”
“And the land with it. You cannot rule a charnel house, my prince.” Criston took a long drink. “A show of force at their gates may yet—”
“I am done with shows.” Aemond finally turned. The torchlight carved deep hollows under his cheekbones, his single eye a shard of polished ice. The hollow from the Red Keep had traveled with him, a cold companion no amount of wine or planning could warm. “They saw Vhagar at Harrenhal. They heard what she did to the Bracken levies. Their continued defiance is an insult. It requires a correction.”
He took the cup then, draining it in one go. The wine was sour on his tongue. He had left his mother in her grief, in her green dress, playing the compassionate queen to a boy he’d ruined. Here, there was only the simplicity of opposition. The clarity of fire.
His gaze settled on Criston. The Lord Commander was still a handsome man, the white cloak at odds with the hard, weathered face. Aemond remembered the man’s hands on him as a squire, correcting his stance, his grip. A different kind of correction. The memory brought a thread of warmth, a path away from the cold.
“Leave the map,” Aemond said, his voice dropping.
Criston looked at him. He knew that tone. A muscle flexed in his jaw. He gave a single, slow nod.
When the tent flap was secured, Aemond walked to the pile of furs that served as his bed. He sat, then lay back, his movements deliberate. He unlaced his own breeches, pushing the roughspun fabric down to his thighs. The cool air touched his skin. He was already half-hard, the idle thought becoming urgent demand.
“Come here.”
Criston knelt. There was no pretense, no seduction. This was an understood transaction, a service rendered from one killer to another. He bent his head, his white hair falling forward, and took Aemond into his mouth.
The heat was sudden, engulfing. Aemond’s head fell back against the furs, a sharp hiss escaping his teeth. His hand rose, tangling in Criston’s hair, not guiding, but claiming. Criston’s mouth was a skilled, relentless instrument. His tongue swirled around the head of Aemond’s cock, pressing into the slit, before swallowing him down deeper.
“Don’t stop,” Aemond breathed, his hips lifting off the furs. His eye was closed, the world narrowing to that slick, tight pressure. “Fuck, just like that.”
Criston obeyed. He took him deeper, his throat working, relaxing. Aemond could feel the vibration of a suppressed groan against his sensitive flesh. It shot a lightning bolt of pleasure straight to his core. His balls tightened, drawing up. The rhythm became punishing, a savage suction that pulled at the very root of him. This was nothing like the complicated, hateful tangles with his mother. This was pure, animal relief.
“I’m going to come,” Aemond warned, his voice strangled.
Criston didn’t pull away. He pushed further, his nose buried in the coarse silver-blonde hair at Aemond’s base. The head of Aemond’s cock bumped against the constricting ring of his throat, and that was it.
Aemond came with a shattered, guttural roar. His back arched violently off the furs, every muscle seizing. His release pumped hot and bitter down Criston’s throat in relentless, pulsing jets. Criston held him there, swallowing steadily, until Aemond’s spasms subsided and his body went boneless, collapsing back into the furs.
For a long moment, there was only the sound of Aemond’s ragged breathing and the distant murmur of the camp. Criston pulled off, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Aemond’s cock lay spent against his belly, glistening in the low light.
“Fuck,” Aemond breathed, a pale ghost of satisfaction fleeting across his face. The hollow was gone, filled with a leaden warmth.
The hollow was gone, filled with a leaden warmth. “Stay,” Aemond muttered into the furs, his voice thick with exhaustion. The command was slurred, but absolute. “It’s colder than a whore’s heart out there.” Criston, after a silent moment, unbuckled his sword belt. He lay on the far edge of the pile, his back to Aemond, the white cloak draped over them both. Sleep, when it came, was a black pit.
Aemond woke to pressure and movement. The brazier was embers, the tent a cave of deep blue shadows. He was on his back. A heavy weight lay across his chest and hips—Criston, turned in his sleep, half-pinning him. The man’s face was buried against Aemond’s neck, his breath hot and regular. But his hips were moving, a slow, insistent rhythm grinding his hardened cock against Aemond’s thigh through their clothing.
A sharp, bright fury flashed through Aemond’s haze. This knight uses his prince as a fucking bolster. His hand twitched, ready to shove, to backhand the sleeping man into awareness. Then he stilled.
The rutting was becoming more urgent. Criston let out a muffled groan against his skin, a sound of pure, unconscious need. The coarse fabric of their breeches rubbed between them. Aemond could feel the thick, rigid length of him, the desperate pulse of it. A morbid, clawing curiosity rooted him to the furs. Let him. Let him use you. See what he does. The anger curdled into a perverse hunger. He wanted to witness the finish, to have this secret, this vulnerability, to hold over the man who had just had him in his mouth.
He lay utterly still, a statue in the dark. Criston’s humping lost all rhythm, becoming a frantic, jerking pursuit of friction. His breaths came in ragged, sleep-damp huffs. One of his hands fisted in Aemond’s shirt. Aemond watched the tormented concentration on the man’s face, even in sleep. It was raw. It was base. It was real.
“Fuck,” Criston gasped into the hollow of Aemond’s throat, the word a wet, dreaming expulsion. His whole body stiffened, hips jamming forward in a series of sharp, brutal spasms. Aemond felt the hot, wet seepage through the layers of wool, a sudden dampness spreading against his own thigh. The sheer animal honesty of it, the complete loss of control, was a trigger pressed deep in Aemond’s gut.
His own climax ripped through him without a hand ever touching him. It was a shock of pure response, a brutal echo. He came in his own breeches, a silent, racking convulsion that milked his cock dry, his teeth clamped so hard his jaw ached. The pleasure was sharp and shameful, a stolen thing.
Criston’s body relaxed, going boneless and heavy. Within moments, the deep, even breaths of sleep resumed. He did not stir, did not wake. He slept on, spent and unaware, pinning the Prince Regent beneath the proof of his own need.
Aemond lay there in the damp and the dark, the cold seeping back into his bones. The leaden warmth was ashes. He stared at the tent’s ceiling, seeing not canvas but the satisfied curl of his mother’s lip. You are not the only one who takes, the darkness seemed to whisper. You are just another thing to be used. The thought did not bring rage. It brought a glacial, clarifying certainty.
It brought a glacial, clarifying certainty. He did not sleep again. He watched the dark fabric above him lighten from black to grey, feeling the cooling stain on his thigh and the heavier, damp weight of his own release in his breeches. Criston’s breath remained deep and even, a steady rhythm of ignorance Aemond both despised and envied.
The first true birdcall pierced the camp’s silence. Criston stirred. Aemond felt the man’s awareness return in stages: the stiffness of limbs, the unfamiliar warmth of another body, the crusted fabric stuck to his skin. Criston went utterly still.
He pushed himself up on one elbow, looking down at the mess on his own breeches, then at the corresponding damp patch on Aemond’s. His weathered face, usually so composed, slackened with a dawning, sick horror. He scrambled back as if burned, his back thudding against a tent pole.
“What…” His voice was gravel. “What happened?”
Aemond didn’t move. He kept his head on the furs, his single eye fixed on Criston’s disgust. A slow, cruel smile spread across his face. “You were rutting. In your sleep. Pushing your fucking cock against me like a dog on a leg. Like a cat in heat.” He let the obscenity hang in the cold air. “You made a proper mess of us both.”
Criston looked down at himself again, the proof undeniable. Shame flooded his features, twisting them. He began to stand, to flee the evidence. “My prince, I… I have no memory. I apologize.”
“Sit down.”
The command was a whip-crack. Criston froze, half-crouched.
“I didn’t tell you to leave.” Aemond sat up now, the furs pooling around his waist. The cold certainty hardened into a directive. The hollow needed filling, and here was a tool, warm and ashamed and already used. “You woke something up. Now finish it.”
Criston stared at him, his eyes wide. “My prince?”
“I am your Regent.” Aemond’s voice dropped, low and dangerous. “Do you think your vows only cover killing for me? They cover this. Everything you are is mine to use. Even this.” He gestured vaguely at the dampness between them. “So use it. I want to feel you lose control again. On purpose this time.”
For a long moment, Criston only breathed, the conflict warring in him visible in the taut cords of his neck. His honor, a tattered thing, flapped uselessly against the raw, humiliating need Aemond was commanding him to acknowledge. The need won. It always did.
With a stifled sound that was half-growl, half-sob, Criston moved. He didn’t kneel with service. He pounced. He shoved Aemond back down into the furs with a force that drove the air from his lungs, pinning his wrists above his head with one strong, mail-calloused hand.
“Is this what you want?” Criston hissed, his face inches away, his eyes wild. “This filth?”
“Yes,” Aemond spat back, bucking against the hold, his own renewed hardness pressing against the rough wool of Criston’s breeches. “Give me your fucking filth.”
Criston’s free hand fumbled between them, yanking at laces, freeing his own cock and then Aemond’s. He didn’t stroke. He didn’t kiss. He positioned himself and began to rut.
It was a raw, clumsy, desperate grinding. His clothed hips slammed down, his hardened cock sliding alongside Aemond’s, trapped together in a hot, furious friction. The wetness from their sleep aided the slide, creating a slick, obscene sound. Criston’s breath came in ragged, open-mouthed pants against Aemond’s cheek. He was not making love; he was breaking something, and that something was the last pretense between them.
Aemond thrashed beneath him, not to escape but to deepen the contact. He hooked a leg around Criston’s thigh, pulling him closer, harder. “You’re a fucking animal,” Aemond groaned, the words vibrating against Criston’s sweat-damp neck.
“You made me one!” Criston snarled, the rhythm becoming punishing, a brutal, piston-like drive of his hips. Every thought, every strategy, every map of the Riverlands burned away in that frantic, shared heat. There was only this savage conjunction, this race toward utter oblivion.
Criston’s body locked. A broken, choked cry was torn from his throat, a sound of absolute surrender. He came between their pressing bodies, his release hot and copious, pulsing over Aemond’s cock and stomach in thick, wet streaks.
The feeling of that loss of control, the visual of the mighty Lord Commander shattering, was the final trigger. Aemond’s own orgasm followed instantly, a violent, silent convulsion that arched his spine off the furs. His seed mixed with Criston’s, a useless, spendthrift heat painting his skin.
Criston collapsed. His forehead fell heavily onto Aemond’s shoulder, his entire body weight going limp. They lay there, a tangled, breathless heap in the grim light of dawn. The only sounds were their ragged, struggling gasps for air and the distant, mundane clatter of the waking camp outside.
Aemond’s arms, now freed, did not push him away. They remained at his sides, fingers slowly uncurling in the damp fur. The hollow was gone, filled with a leaden, exhausted completeness. He stared at the tent wall, past Criston’s heaving shoulder. Somewhere to the north, the Blackwoods waited in their stone knot. Vhagar was hungry. The correction would come.
But here, now, there was only the weight of a spent man and the slow, seeping cold of the morning.