Chapter 2: Aemond's goblet cracked in his grip when Borros backhanded Visenya for 'forgetting her place' - before the stunned court, his sword was at the Baratheon's throat, sapphire eye burning with dragonfire as Visenya's whispered plea of 'not like this' warred with two years of stolen letters and stolen dignity.
The great hall swam in a sea of torchlight and discordant music. The air hung thick with the smells of roasted boar, spiced wine, and the cloying perfume of courtiers. King Viserys, a shrunken figure propped on cushions at the high table, smiled vaguely at the revelry, seeing only the ghost of a unified family.
Aemond sat apart, a column of stillness amidst the swirl. He nursed a cup of strongwine, his single eye tracking movements like a hawk. It landed on Visenya, seated beside her husband at a table of Baratheon bannermen. She wore Targaryen red and black, a subtle defiance that pleased him. But her posture was rigid, a painted smile fixed on her face as Lord Borros held forth, his voice a booming drumbeat over the softer conversations around them.
Borros Baratheon was a man built like the stormlands he ruled—broad, loud, and impossible to ignore. His laughter shook the table. He gripped his wife’s shoulder, not with affection, but with proprietorship, his thick fingers pressing into the silk of her gown.
“Another?” a voice slurred beside Aemond. His brother Aegon slumped into the empty chair, already deep into his cups. “You’re staring. It’s unnerving. Drink. Stare less.”
Aemond ignored him. He watched as a serving girl, nervous under Borros’s gaze, poured wine. A drop splashed onto the lord’s sleeve.
“Clumsy wench!” Borros’s hand shot out, not to strike, but to clamp around the girl’s wrist. She froze, pitcher tipping, a crimson stream arcing onto the rushes. “This is Myrish silk! Worth more than your village.”
Visenya’s hand went to his arm. “My lord, it was an accident. A little wine—”
“A little wine ruins the finish, woman,” he snapped, shaking off her touch without even looking at her. His attention was on the terrified girl, on the audience he now commanded. “Perhaps you should pay for its cleaning. A moon’s wages should cover it.”
The girl paled. Aemond’s knuckles were white around his cup. He saw Visenya’s jaw tighten, the smile finally gone. She reached for her own purse.
“Here.” Aemond’s voice cut across the space, cold and clear. He hadn’t meant to speak. He flicked a gold dragon across the gap between the tables. It spun, clattering to a stop before the serving girl. “For the silk. And your trouble. Leave us.”
The hall had quieted in their corner. The girl snatched the coin, bobbed a curtsey, and fled. Borros’s face darkened, his brows knitting as he turned his stormy gaze on Aemond.
“My prince is generous with my wife’s honor,” Borros said, the joviality gone, replaced by a gravelly threat.
“I was sparing the hall your tedious accounting,” Aemond replied, taking a slow sip. “A service to the crown.”
Aegon snorted into his wine. “He’s got you there, Baratheon.”
Borros’s face flushed a deeper shade of purple. He stood, the movement shoving the heavy table a few inches. Visenya rose with him, a hand on his arm again, a silent plea. He ignored her.
“You have a mouth on you, boy. For a man with one eye, you don’t seem to know your place.”
A deadly chill settled in Aemond’s veins. He set his cup down with precise quiet. “My place is where my blood placed me. Which is above yours.” He stood, slower, a predator uncoiling. The music in the hall faltered, musicians sensing the shift. “And I would have both eyes, if not for the leniency my family showed yours at Storm’s End.”
It was a low, vicious blow, referencing an ancient slight. Borros’s nostrils flared. He took a step forward. “You little—”
“Lord Borros.” Visenya’s voice, sharp with a command Aemond had never heard, sliced between them. She positioned herself, not fully in front of her husband, but as a barrier. “The prince speaks of old history. This is a feast. Your dispute is with a serving girl, now settled. Sit. Please.”
She was using her Lady-of-Storm’s-End voice, firm and diplomatic. But Aemond saw the tremor in the hand still resting on Borros’s forearm. He saw the furious embarrassment in her husband’s eyes at being managed in public.
“Your wife has more sense than you,” Aemond murmured, the words meant to carry. “Heed her.”
It was the wrong thing to say. Borros’s control, always tenuous, snapped. He looked down at Visenya, his gaze stripping her of rank and dignity, seeing only an object that had dared to correct him.
“You defend him?” he growled, his voice low and brutal for her ears alone, yet the silence now was such that it carried. “After he shames me? After the years of his mewling letters, his pathetic bleating for your attention? I saved you from that. I put a stop to it. And this is my thanks?”
The words hung in the air.
I put a stop to it.
Aemond felt the world narrow to a tunnel. The noise of the hall faded. The scent of the food turned rancid. He saw Visenya’s face go ashen, her eyes widening in dawning, horrified comprehension. All her theories, all their whispered suspicions in the dark conduit, crystallized in a single, brutish confession.
“You,” Aemond breathed. The word was the crack before the avalanche.
Borros, realizing his mistake too late, tried to bluster through. “Aye, me. Someone had to. That… closeness was unnatural. Unseemly. A distraction. I did my duty as her lord husband. I protected my household from unhealthy… attachments.”
Aemond moved.
He did not run. He did not roar. He simply walked around the table, each step measured, deadly calm. The crowd parted before him. Ser Criston Cole took a step forward, hand on his sword, but a sharp look from Aemond—a look of pure, ancient fury—froze him in place. This was not a boy to be managed. This was something older, and far more dangerous.
He stopped a foot from Borros. Visenya was between them, her back to Aemond, facing her husband. She was rigid, a statue of shock.
“You stole my words,” Aemond said, his voice so quiet it was almost tender. “You stole hers. You engineered a war in the silence between us. For two years.”
Borros puffed out his chest, relying on bulk where sense had fled. “I preserved the dignity of my marriage. She is a Baratheon now. Her loyalties are to Storm’s End, not to some lonely, half-blind prince with a head full of fantasies.”
Aemond’s laugh was a short, dry sound, utterly without humor. “Fantasies.” He finally looked at Visenya, over her shoulder. Her head was bowed. “Did you read them, Borros? My ‘mewling letters’? Did they entertain you? Did you laugh at the secrets I trusted to her? At the sadness?”
He leaned in, his lips near Visenya’s ear, but his icy violet eye locked on Borros’s. “He knows about the sapphire, doesn’t he? The colour of Vhagar’s eyes. He read that. My grief was his evening’s diversion.”
A tear traced a path through the powder on Visenya’s cheek.
Borros saw it, and his own shame curdled into rage. “Enough! She is my wife! You will not speak to her! You will not look at her!” He grabbed Visenya’s arm, yanking her back and away from Aemond, a rough, dismissive pull that made her stumble.
Something in Aemond shattered.
The careful control, the icy intellect, vaporized under a wave of incandescent, Targaryen fury. It was the same fire that had burned Harrenhal, that had forged the Conqueror’s crown.
His hand shot out, not for a weapon, but to seize Borros’s wrist, the one holding Visenya. His grip was iron, tempered in a thousand hours of training. Bones ground together.
“Unhand. Her.”
Borros roared in pain and surprise, releasing Visenya. He swung his other fist, a wild, haymaker punch meant to crush a castle gate. Aemond flowed inside the blow, his own body a weapon. He drove his forehead into the bridge of Borros’s nose.
The crack was sickening, a wet crunch of cartilage. Borros staggered back, bellowing, blood streaming down his face, staining his fine Myrish silk a deeper, truer crimson.
Chaos erupted. Shouts. The scrape of benches. Steel being drawn. Ser Criston and other guards surged forward.
But Aemond was already past Borros, who was clutching his face, sputtering curses and blood. He stood before Visenya, who stared at him with wide, terrified eyes. The hall was a cacophony, but between them was a pocket of silence.
“Come with me,” he said, his voice raw. “Now. Leave him.”
It was a plea, a demand, an offering of salvation. He extended a hand, not the one speckled with Borros’s blood, but the other.
She looked at his outstretched hand. She looked at her husband, a hulking, bleeding, furious monument to the life built on a lie. She looked at the ring on her finger, the crowned stag of Baratheon.
“Visenya,” Aemond urged, the name a fragment of their old world.
Borros stumbled to his feet, aided by a knight. “You bitch!” he spat, the word meant for her, thick with blood and venom. “You see? You see his madness! He’ll burn us all for looking at you!”
King Viserys was trying to stand, his voice a papery whisper lost in the din. Rhaenyra was on her feet, her face alarmed. Daemon watched from the shadows, a smirk playing on his lips.
Visenya took a shuddering breath. She did not take Aemond’s hand.
Instead, she turned to face the hall, to face her husband. She stood straight, wiping the tear from her cheek with the back of her hand. When she spoke, her voice did not carry the might of storms, but the finality of falling ice.
“You intercepted the letters of a prince of the blood,” she stated, clear and cold. “You confessed to it before this assembly. You lied to your wife, and you lied to your prince. You sowed discord in the King’s own family.” She took a step toward him, and the fury in her eyes made the bleeding lord take a half-step back. “This is the protection of your household? This is dignity?”
She turned her back on him, a calculated, magnificent insult. She looked at Aemond, her gaze clear now, resolved.
“My prince,” she said, loud enough for all to hear. “My lord husband requires a maester. His injuries appear to have loosened his tongue and his wits. I fear the feast is ended for us.”
She was not taking his hand. She was not fleeing with him. She was choosing the battleground—the field of law and custom, not shadowy tunnels. She was staying, not as Borros’s victim, but as a Targaryen witness to his crime.
Aemond understood. The fire in him banked, cooled into something even harder. He gave a single, sharp nod.
Ser Criston finally reached them, soldiers at his back. “Prince Aemond, you must come—”
“I must see my sister to her chambers,” Aemond interrupted, his tone leaving no room for argument. “Her lord husband is indisposed. The King’s peace is restored. Is it not?” He swept his gaze over the stunned, bloody Borros, who could only glare and drip.
Without waiting for permission, he offered his arm, a formal, courtly gesture. After a heartbeat’s pause, Visenya took it, her fingers resting lightly on the black leather of his vambrace. They walked together from the hall, through a gauntlet of stunned silence, the weight of a shattered secret and a very public wound hanging in the air behind them.
He did not take her to the Baratheon apartments. He led her to a secluded terrace overlooking the city, where the noise of the hall was a distant murmur. The night air was cool, a relief after the stifling heat of rage.
She let go of his arm and gripped the stone balustrade, her shoulders shaking. Not with sobs, but with the aftershocks of fury and adrenaline.
“He read them all,” she whispered, her voice breaking. “Every word. My fears. Your pain. He had them. He burned them, probably, laughing.”
Aemond stood beside her, watching the lantern lights of King’s Landing flicker like fallen stars. The cold weight in his gut was gone, replaced by a hollow, ready clarity. “He will pay for that.”
“It’s not enough.” She turned to him, her violet eyes blazing in the moonlight. “Aemond, he revealed it because he thought it would hurt me. To put me in my place. He doesn’t even understand what he’s done. He sees it as a husband’s right.”
“Then we will teach him what it truly is,” Aemond said. “Treason. Not against a husband, but against the Crown. We have his confession. In front of half the court.”
A slow, grim realization settled between them. The private investigation was over. It was public now. And in making it public, Visenya had just declared a different kind of war, from inside her own marriage.
“He will be furious when his head clears,” she said.
“Let him be.”
“He is still my husband. I must return to those rooms.”
“Do you want to?”
She was silent for a long time. “No,” she finally admitted, the word a tiny, defiant spark in the dark. “But I have to. For now. To see what he does next. What they all do next.”
Aemond looked at her, truly looked at her. Not as the ghost from his letters, not as the lost sister, but as the ally she had become in a single, brutal evening. Forged in humiliation, tempered in fury.
“Then we watch,” he said. “But from now on, he knows we watch. That changes everything.”
From the depths of the Keep, a dragon’s roar echoed over the city—deep, resonant, and angry. It was Vhagar. She felt his fury, his renewed purpose, and answered it.
Visenya did not flinch at the sound. She lifted her chin, a Targaryen princess once more.
“Let it change,” she said.