Chapter 9: The Queen's Request
Criston Cole stood at the window of his chambers, looking down at the training yard. Below, Aemond moved through his drills with a two-handed longsword, each stroke a whisper of death, each pivot precise and brutally efficient. He had not spoken of that night against the campaign table. He had, in fact, spoken very little at all since the ravens had flown. He was a coiled spring, and the world was waiting for his release.
The door opened silently. He did not need to turn. The scent of rosewater and faint anxiety announced her.
“Leave us,” Alicent Hightower said to the guard outside. The door closed.
Criston did not turn. He watched Aemond deliver a blow that would have cleaved a man from shoulder to hip. The memory of bending that same formidable body over a table, of the choked, animal sounds he’d wrung from it, flashed behind his eyes. It left a taste like cold iron in his mouth.
“He is a tempest,” Alicent said, coming to stand beside him, her hands folded neatly. She wore a severe gown of dark green, her hair bound tightly. The Queen Mother. The architect. “And I must leave the capital. Lord Redwyne is dying, and my presence is required to ensure his grandson, who is… fond of me, upholds his fleet’s allegiance. I will be gone five days.”
Criston finally looked at her. Her face was pale, the fine lines around her eyes deepened by the grey light from the window. She was afraid. Not of the journey. Of what she was leaving behind.
“My place is at your side, Your Grace. Or at the King’s. Or,” he nodded towards the yard, “at his.”
“Your place is where I require it to be.” Her voice was firm, but her knuckles were white where they gripped each other. “I need him… contained. Occupied. He cannot be allowed to stew in his own thoughts. He cannot be given free rein. The things he writes in those scrolls… the corrections he speaks of. I have seen the burn marks on the map he keeps. I need you to be his tether. A heavy one.”
Criston gave a short, humorless laugh. He leaned back against the cold stone, crossing his arms. “And how, precisely, do you propose I occupy the Prince Regent? Shall I challenge him to a sparring match every hour? Read him bedtime stories? You know what he is. You know what he needs. It is not a game of cyvasse.”
Alicent’s gaze faltered. She looked at the floor, at the woven rug from Myr that was worth more than most men earned in a lifetime. “You have found a way before.” Her words were barely a whisper.
“A way,” Criston echoed, the word foul. “And what is my reward for this service? More sleepless nights? More of his… attention?” He pushed off from the wall, standing to his full height. He saw her flinch, just a tiny contraction of her shoulders. It pleased him. “Why should I take this risk? For duty? My duty is a shredded thing. It died in a white cloak stained with mud and worse.”
She stepped closer. The rosewater scent grew stronger, cloying. Her eyes, that vivid Hightower green, sought his. They were not kind now. They were calculating, desperate. A trader assessing her last valuable commodity.
“Because I will reward you.”
Her hand came up. Not to his face. It slid down the front of his leather jerkin, over the doublet beneath, down past his belt. Her fingers, cool and deliberate, found the shape of him through his breeches. He was already half-hard, the memory of the yard below and the tent before it a constant, low thrum in his blood. Her touch sparked it into flame.
He didn’t move. He let her feel him swell under her palm. “Your Grace,” he said, his voice a graveled warning.
“Quiet,” she breathed, and her other hand went to the laces of his breeches. Her movements were not clumsy. They were practiced, efficient. She had done this before, for a king who was now a rotting husk in a bed upstairs. The thought should have sickened him. It only hardened him further.
She freed him, his cock springing into the cool air, already thick and eager. She did not pause for ceremony. She sank to her knees on the Myrish rug, the green silk of her gown pooling around her like moss.
She took him into her mouth.
There was no gentle persuasion. Her lips closed around the head, her tongue swirling over the slit, tasting the salt already beading there. Then she took him deeper, her head bobbing with a rhythm that was neither loving nor tender. It was functional. It was a transaction. Her cheeks hollowed as she sucked, her hands coming to grip his thighs for balance. A low, choked sound came from her throat, and the vibration travelled straight up his spine.
“Fuck,” Criston grunted, his head falling back against the stone wall. He tangled one hand in her intricately braided auburn hair, not guiding, just holding on. He looked down. The Queen Mother, on her knees, her mouth stretched around his cock. The sight was more blasphemous than any oath he’d ever broken. He thrust shallowly into the wet, tight heat.
She took it, taking him deeper until he felt the head nudge the back of her throat. She relaxed, swallowed around him, and he saw stars. His hips jerked. He was close, so close, driven over the edge by the sheer, degrading audacity of it.
With a guttural cry that was Aemond’s name and a curse and a prayer all at once, he came. His release spurted hot and bitter down her throat. She swallowed convulsively, her body shuddering, but she didn’t pull away. She licked him clean, a slow, thorough pass of her tongue that made him twitch.
When she tried to rise, his hand in her hair tightened. He held her down.
“That’s not enough,” he growled. His cock, still wet from her mouth, was still hard. A restless, unspent energy crackled through him. The debt was not paid.
He pulled her up by her hair, a pained gasp escaping her. He turned her, shoved her towards the heavy oak bed. With rough tugs, he stripped the green gown from her, then the thin shift beneath, until she stood naked and shivering. Her skin was pale, marked by the faint silver scars of childbearing. She did not try to cover herself. She simply stared at the canopy of the bed, her face a blank page.
He pushed her onto her back. The feathers swallowed her slight frame. He climbed over her, his weight pressing her down, his breeches still tangled around his thighs. He took a nipple into his mouth, sucking harshly, biting the peaked flesh. She made no sound. Her eyes stayed fixed on the embroidered dragons above.
He moved down her body, his mouth leaving a trail that was not love. He tasted the salt of her skin, the hollow of her ribs, the soft plane of her belly. She was utterly still, a sacrifice on an altar. Her passivity fueled a hot, stupid rage in him. He wanted a reaction. A scream. A slap. Anything.
He positioned himself between her legs. She was dry. He spat into his hand, slicked himself roughly, and guided his cock to her entrance.
“Look at me,” he commanded.
Her green eyes slid to his. They were empty. Hollow. Just like her son’s.
He drove into her in one brutal, unforgiving thrust. She was tight, unyielding. A pained gasp finally escaped her, her body arching off the bed for a second before going limp again. He fucked her with the same punishing rhythm he’d used in the tent, a rhythm of anger and utility. His balls slapped against her, the sound obscene in the quiet room. He gripped her hips, fingernails biting into pale flesh, holding her in place for his use.
He wanted to stain her. To leave a mark her careful piety could never scrub away. He wanted her to feel the filth he felt every time he looked at her son, every time he remembered the taste of ash and seed.
“You use him,” Criston panted, driving into her, “like a weapon. You use me like a leash. What does that make you?”
She didn’t answer. Her breath hitched with each thrust, but her eyes were dry. She was somewhere else. In a sept. With her prayers. He was just a brute grunting on top of her, a means to an end.
The thought pushed him over. With a final, shattered groan, he spilled inside her, his seed pumping deep, a claiming that felt like defeat. He collapsed onto her, his sweat-slick chest against her cold breasts, his face buried in the pillow beside her head.
He felt her hand come up. It rested on his hair, not pushing him away, not pulling him close. A faint, mechanical stroking. Her gaze had returned to the ceiling. The dragons stared back, woven in silent gold thread.
After a long moment, he rolled off her. He stood, pulling up his breeches, lacing them with fingers that felt numb. He did not look at the bed.
“I will occupy him,” Criston said, his voice flat, dead.
“Thank you, Ser Criston,” Alicent replied, her voice equally toneless. She sat up, gathered her shift, began to dress with methodical precision. The queen reassembling herself.
As she fastened her gown, her eyes fell on the map pinned to his wall. On the smear that still discolored the Reach. She paused for only a heartbeat. Then she turned, glided to the door, and was gone, leaving behind only the scent of rosewater and sex.
Criston walked to the washbasin. He poured cold water over his head, scrubbed his face until the skin was raw. He looked at his reflection in the dented metal. The Lord Commander of the Kingsguard. The whore of a queen. The lover of a monster.
Below, in the yard, the training had stopped. Aemond stood alone, the point of his sword dug into the earth, looking up at the window. Even from this distance, Criston could feel the weight of that single, piercing blue eye. Waiting. Hungry.
The tether was in place. It was chafing them both raw.
It was chafing them both raw.
Alicent walked the serpentine corridors of the Red Keep as if wading through deep water. Each step required immense focus. The smell of him—leather, sweat, the sharp tang of spent seed—seemed woven into the fibers of her gown. She could feel the slick trickle of him between her thighs, a viscous reminder of the transaction. Her skin crawled where his mouth had been, a phantom wetness on her breast.
She reached her chambers. The familiar space, with its tapestries of the Seven and its neat shelves of devotional texts, offered no comfort. It felt like a stage set. She was an actress who had forgotten her lines. Her hands trembled as she poured water from a pitcher, scrubbing them over and over at the basin until the skin shone pink.
She could not wash the feeling away. It was inside. A cold, slithering thing coiling in her belly. She had done it for the realm. For Aegon’s legacy. For Aemond’s containment. The justifications were polished stones, smooth from constant handling. They felt meaningless in her mouth now, like swallowing ash.
She sat on the edge of her bed, still fully dressed. The silence was a physical pressure. She stared at her own hands, resting limp in her lap. They were the hands that had laced a king’s boot, that had penned careful letters, that had just unbound a knight’s breeches. A short, dry sob escaped her. It was not grief. It was the sound of something hollow breaking.
The door opened softly. “Your Grace?” It was Lyra, her maid. A girl of twenty with quiet eyes and deft hands. “I heard you return. I brought the lavender oil for your temples.”
Alicent did not look up. She could not bear to see recognition in another human face. “Leave it.”
Lyra did not leave. She set the small vial on the bedside table. Her footsteps were nearly silent on the rug. “You are unwell.” It was a statement, spoken with a gentleness that felt like a blade.
“I am tired,” Alicent whispered, the lie brittle. “You may go.”
Instead, Lyra knelt before her. The maid’s gaze was level, seeing too much. She saw the mussed hair, the smudged kohl under eyes that refused to cry, the rigid way Alicent held herself as if her spine might shatter. She saw the queen, and she saw the woman.
“What did he do to you?” Lyra asked, her voice low.
Alicent flinched. “Nothing. I did what was required. Now go.”
Lyra’s hands came up, not in service, but in something else. They rested on Alicent’s knees. A profound silence stretched, broken only by the pop of a log in the hearth. Then, without a word, Lyra leaned forward. She pushed the heavy layers of green silk up Alicent’s legs, the fabric whispering its ascent.
“Lyra, no—” Alicent’s protest died in her throat.
The maid didn’t place a comforting hand on her arm. She didn’t offer words. She lowered her head between Alicent’s thighs and placed her mouth directly on Alicent’s cunt, through the damp linen of her smallclothes.
Alicent jolted. A spark of pure, undiluted sensation shot through the numbness. It was not the calculated suction of a dutiful wife or the brutal taking of a resentful knight. It was a hot, wet pressure exactly where the shame throbbed. A low, shocked moan tore from Alicent’s lips.
Lyra hooked her fingers in the linen, pulling it aside. The cool air kissed Alicent’s exposed flesh for a second before Lyra’s mouth covered her again, skin to skin. Her tongue was soft, seeking. It traced Alicent’s outer lips, then found the tight, aching bud of her clit.
“Oh, gods,” Alicent gasped. Her head fell back.
This was different. Lyra’s mouth was an answer to a question Alicent had never dared ask. The maid licked her with an intimate, devoted precision, her tongue swirling and pressing, her nose nudging against coarse auburn curls. She explored Alicent’s folds, tasting the residual bitterness of Criston’s visit, then lapped it away, replacing it with a growing, desperate heat.
Alicent’s hands flew to Lyra’s head. Not to push her away. Her fingers tangled in the maid’s plain brown braids, clutching, pulling her closer. She ground herself against that mouth, her hips lifting off the bed. The coiled, frozen thing inside her was melting, turning to liquid fire.
“There,” Alicent pleaded, her voice ragged, foreign to her own ears. “Right there. Don’t stop.”
Lyra moaned against her, the vibration singing through Alicent’s entire body. The maid’s tongue worked faster, a relentless, worshipful rhythm. One of Lyra’s hands slipped beneath Alicent’s thigh, gripping her ass, holding her open and immobile for the feast. The other hand found Alicent’s breast, kneading through the silk, pinching a nipple until the pain blurred into the pleasure.
It built like a storm, this feeling. It had no name, no justification. It was not for the realm. It was not a transaction. It was a fracture in the ice, a flood from a deep, sealed well. Alicent’s back arched, her body bowing off the bed. A raw, fractured cry ripped from her throat, echoing in the vaulted chamber.
She came. Her whole body shook, convulsing around the tongue that gentled her through the waves. Pleasure, sharp and clean and terrifying, washed through every vein, scouring her hollow places. It felt like being unmade and remade in a single, shuddering instant.
The tremors subsided. Lyra rested her head on Alicent’s thigh, her breath warm on sensitized skin. Alicent’s grip on her hair loosened, her hands falling limply to the rumpled blankets. A profound, heavy exhaustion claimed her, a physical weight pressing her into the mattress. The phantom smells, the crawling skin, the slithering cold in her belly—all were gone, replaced by a humming, spent warmth.
She did not speak. She could not. Her eyelids were stones. As sleep pulled her under, her last conscious sensation was Lyra quietly pulling her smallclothes back into place, smoothing down her gown, and drawing a fur over her with touch softer than any she had known in decades.
A deep, dreamless sleep took the Queen Mother. On the floor beside the bed, Lyra sat with her back against the post, guarding the silence, her own lips still tasting of salt and queen and grief.