Chapter 3: Blood on Silk
The silence in the Baratheon apartments was worse than the shouting. Visenya stood in the center of the sitting room, the heavy oak door bolted behind her. The space smelled of her husband—leather, sweat, and the sour tang of the strongwine he’d been drowning in since the maester left. Her cheek still hummed where he’d gripped her arm, a phantom echo of the public yank, but the real pain was deeper, a cold stone of betrayal sitting in her gut.
She heard him before she saw him. A heavy, scraping tread in the bedchamber. The connecting door swung open and he filled the frame, a mountain of resentment with a face that was a ruined mess. The maester had set his nose, but it was a swollen, purple monstrosity taped with linen. Both eyes were blackening. Dried blood crusted his upper lip and stained the front of his fine tunic, now carelessly unlaced.
He held a fresh flagon. His gaze, blurry with drink and hatred, fixed on her.
“You’re here,” he slurred. “Thought you’d be warming your brother’s bed by now.”
She didn’t flinch. She kept her voice level, the voice she used to calm spooked horses. “I am your wife. This is where I am meant to be.”
“Meant to be.” He laughed, a wet, ragged sound. He took a long swig, wine dribbling down his chin to mix with the blood. “You were meant to be a link to the crown. A pretty dragon to hang on my arm. Not a scheming bitch who whispers with madmen in corridors.”
“We spoke on a terrace. In full view of half the court.” She took a slow breath. “Borros, listen. What you did with the letters… it was a mistake. A grave one. But we can address it. Through the King, through law. We can—”
“Law?” he boomed, stumbling a step into the room. The flagon slammed down on a table, cracking a ceramic dish. “You speak to me of law? He broke my face! In the King’s own hall! Where is the law for that? Where is the justice for me?”
“You provoked him. You confessed to a crime before everyone.”
“A crime? Keeping my wife from that vulture’s clutches?” He shook his head, a clumsy, bull-like motion. “No. The crime is the way he looks at you. The crime is the way you looked at him when he offered his hand. I saw it. You wanted to take it.”
Her composure cracked, just a hair. “For two years, I believed he hated me. I mourned him. And you were the cause. You let me mourn a living brother who thought I’d cast him aside. How could you?”
Her hurt, so plain and raw, seemed to infuriate him more than any accusation. It was a language he couldn’t speak, a country he couldn’t map. He preferred the simpler geography of rage.
“You are my wife,” he growled, advancing. “Your thoughts, your loyalties, your affections are mine to direct. He is a poisoned well. I was protecting what is mine.”
“I am not a castle to be held!” The words burst from her, hot and sharp. “I am not a trophy you won! I am a woman, and I was your ally, and you made me your fool!”
He was in front of her now, his breath a foul cloud of wine and blood. The rage in his eyes had a new, glassy quality. Drunk beyond reason, humiliated beyond bearing.
“You defended him,” he whispered, the words venomous. “Tonight. You stood there and used your pretty words to defend that one-eyed freak. My own wife.”
His hand came up, not to grab, but to strike.
The backhand caught her across the mouth. It wasn’t a slap; it was a brutal, full-armed swing from a man who could shatter timber. Her head snapped sideways. The world dissolved into a white burst of pain, a copper tide flooding her tongue. She stumbled back, crashing into a small side table, sending a candelabra clattering to the floor. She landed hard on one knee, gripping the edge of an overturned chair, gasping.
The pain was blinding, a ringing, dizzying nova. She touched her lips, her fingers coming away smeared red.
Borros stood over her, breathing heavily, his damaged face a mask of grim satisfaction. “There. Now you remember who your lord is.”
Before she could speak, before she could even draw a full breath, a shadow detached itself from the deep alcove near the balcony, a space meant for a statue.
Aemond moved with a silence that was more frightening than any roar. He must have been there the entire time, waiting, listening from the moment she entered. A ghost in their marital chambers.
Borros, senses dulled by drink and triumph, didn’t see him until it was too late.
Aemond didn’t waste breath on threats. He simply picked up the heavy, overturned oak chair Visenya had been clinging to. He swung it not like a man swinging a weapon, but like a woodsman splitting a log—a short, efficient, devastating arc.
It connected with the back of Borros’s knees.
The sound was a sickening crunch of wood on joint. Borros’s roar of surprise cut off into a guttural scream as his legs buckled, dropping him like a felled ox. He hit the floor hard, his face smashing against the stone.
Aemond dropped the chair. It thudded on the rug.
He stood over Borros, who was writhing, trying to push himself up, spitting out a tooth and a stream of curses. “You—I’ll have your head—I’ll see you drawn and quartered—”
Aemond knelt. He placed a knee in the center of Borros’s back, pinning him. He grabbed a fistful of the lord’s dark hair, yanked his head up, then slammed it back down onto the floor. Once. Twice. A wet, rhythmic thud.
Visenya watched, frozen, one hand pressed to her bleeding mouth. She couldn’t scream. The sound was trapped behind the pain and the shocking, speeding clarity of the violence. This wasn’t the controlled fracture of a nose in a crowded hall. This was something else. This was methodical.
Borros’s curses became garbled pleas. His hands scrabbled weakly at Aemond’s boot.
Aemond shifted his grip. He rolled the heavier man onto his back as if he were nothing. Borros’s eyes were wide, the whites showing all around, swimming in confusion and terror. He saw the sapphire eye first, gleaming with a cold, celestial light. Then he saw Aemond’s other eye, the violet one, and there was nothing human in it at all.
“You hit her,” Aemond said. His voice was calm. Conversational.
“She’s my—” Borros choked.
Aemond’s fist drove into his throat. Not a punch to the jaw, but a precise, brutal crush of the windpipe. Borros’s breath seized in a silent, agonized wheeze. His face began to darken.
“You stole her words,” Aemond continued, as if listing sins. He grabbed Borros’s right hand, the one that had struck her, and bent the fingers back until they snapped one after the other, like kindling. The sounds were small, crisp pops.
Borros could no longer scream. He could only jerk and shudder, a fish on a stone slab, his mouth working soundlessly.
Visenya found her voice. It was a whisper. “Aemond.”
He didn’t look at her. His attention was wholly on the man beneath him. “You called me a freak.” He leaned close, his lips almost touching Borros’s ear. “But you are the one who looks monstrous now.”
He picked up the lord’s head by the hair again. Borros’s remaining eye was bulging, pleading. Aemond looked into it for a long, cold second. Then he drove the heel of his other hand upwards, a sharp, vicious blow under the jaw, snapping the head back with unnatural force.
There was a final, wet crack.
Lord Borros Baratheon went still.
The sudden silence was absolute. It rushed in, thick and deafening. The only sounds were Aemond’s steady breathing and the distant, indifferent sigh of the wind on the balcony.
Aemond stayed there for a moment, kneeling on the corpse’s chest, his hands stained. He looked down at his work, his expression unreadable. Then he let go, letting the head loll to the side at an impossible angle. He stood up, wiping his palms slowly on his dark trousers.
He finally turned to Visenya.
She was still on her knees, clutching the overturned furniture. Her eyes were huge, fixed on Borros’s ruined face, on the empty stare. Her own blood was a dark trickle from her split lip down her chin.
Aemond walked to her. He didn’t touch her. He just looked, his gaze taking in the bruise already flowering on her cheek, the blood, the shock in her eyes.
“He wasn’t going to stop,” Aemond said. His voice was quiet now, stripped of all fury, just stating a fact. “He would have done worse. Tonight. Tomorrow. For the rest of your life.”
She knew he was right. The man on the floor had been erased, replaced by this broken thing. The violence had been horrifying, but it hadn’t been chaotic. It had been a brutal, final solution to a problem that had no political answer.
“They’ll know,” she whispered, her voice trembling. “The guards, the servants… his men. They heard us. They’ll know it was you.”
Aemond looked around the room. His eye, the living one, was already calculating, planning, moving past the kill to the next move. He walked to the balcony, glanced out, then back at the body. “He was drunk. Humiliated. He beat his wife. In his rage, he tripped. Flew headfirst into the stone floor.” He pointed to the corner of the heavy table, its edge sharp and unyielding. “Or there. The damage is consistent with a fall.”
He said it so calmly. He was already constructing the truth.
Visenya looked from the table to her husband’s grotesquely twisted neck. She felt a hysterical laugh bubble up in her throat and choked it down. It was monstrous. It was brilliant.
“They’ll question me.”
“You will tell them the truth,” Aemond said, coming to stand before her. He finally reached out, his fingers—the same ones that had just broken bone—gently brushing a strand of silver hair from her bloody cheek. His touch was astonishingly soft. “He struck you. You fell. You were dazed. You heard a crash. When you looked up, he was dead. That is all you know.”
His gaze held hers, willing her strength into her. “Can you do that?”
She looked at the body of the man she’d been bound to. She remembered the weight of his hand on her shoulder, the sound of his laughter at his own tables, the empty space on her desk where no letters ever came. She tasted her own blood.
She nodded.
“Good.” Aemond straightened. “I was never here. I am in the library, or the yard, or with my dragon. You came here alone. You faced him alone.”
He moved towards the secret passage entrance hidden behind a tapestry in the alcove—the way he had entered. At the edge of the fabric, he paused, looking back at her one last time.
“You are not alone now,” he said, and then he was gone, the tapestry swaying softly behind him.
Visenya was left in the ringing silence with the corpse of her husband. The candle guttered on the floor. She took a deep, shaking breath that hurt her ribs. She pushed herself to her feet.
She walked to the mirror on the wall. A stranger stared back—a woman with a bloody mouth, a livid cheek, and eyes that were suddenly, terribly old. She took another breath, letting the cold, pragmatic fury wash over the shock. This was the price. This was the only way out he had left them.
She picked up the overturned candelabra. She walked to the door, unbolted it, and threw it into the hallway with a clatter that echoed down the stone corridor.
Then she turned, looked at the room, at the body, and screamed. It was a raw, perfect sound of a terrified, abused wife. It tore from her throat, full of genuine pain and freshly minted horror, and by the time the guards’ pounding footsteps arrived, she had already crumpled to the floor, her body wracked with sobs that, to her own surprise, were absolutely real.
The door burst open before her scream had fully faded. Two Baratheon guards in stag-crested helms filled the doorway, swords drawn. Their eyes swept the room, taking in the overturned chair, the guttering candle on the floor, their lord’s twisted form, and the princess weeping beside him.
“Gods be good,” the older one breathed, his sword dipping.
The younger guard rushed to Borros, kneeling, his fingers pressing against the lord’s throat. He looked up, his face pale. “He’s gone.”
The older guard, Ser Gareth, sheathed his sword and moved to Visenya. He didn’t touch her. “My lady. Princess. What happened?”
She dragged in a shuddering breath, the sobs subsiding into ragged hiccups. She kept her eyes on Ser Gareth’s boots, black leather against the grey stone. “He was so angry,” she whispered, her voice shredded and small. “From the feast. The insult. The wine.”
She gestured weakly toward the empty flagon on the table. “He said I’d… defended Prince Aemond. That I’d shamed him.” Her hand floated to her bleeding mouth, her swelling cheek, presenting the evidence. She let her fingers tremble. “He struck me. I fell. I heard… I heard a crash.”
She looked over at Borros’s body then, and a fresh, genuine tremor went through her. The reality of it was a physical blow. “When I could see again… he was like that. He must have tripped. In his rage, he must have fallen.”
Ser Gareth followed her gaze to the sharp corner of the heavy oak table. He walked over, examined it, then looked back at the angle of his lord’s neck. He grunted, a sound of grim comprehension.
“Fell right on his damn head,” the younger guard said, still crouched by the body. “Drunk as a lord on his wedding day.”
“Mind your tongue, Jaxon,” Ser Gareth snapped, but his voice lacked heat. He’d seen Borros’s rages before. He looked back at Visenya, his expression a mix of pity and wariness. “You’re hurt, my lady.”
“It’s nothing,” she said, pushing herself up. She swayed, and it wasn’t entirely an act. The room tilted. “I just… I need to sit.”
Jaxon rushed to bring the upright chair. She sank into it, keeping her posture folded, defeated. A wounded bird.
“The King will have to be told,” Ser Gareth said, mostly to himself. “The Hand. Prince Aemond…”
At the name, Visenya flinched. A perfect, subtle jerk of the shoulders. “Please,” she said, her voice cracking. “Not him. Not yet. I cannot… I cannot see anyone.”
Ser Gareth nodded slowly. “Aye. Best the maesters see you first. Jaxon, fetch the Grand Maester. And find Ser Cole. The Lord Commander will need to secure these rooms.”
As Jaxon hurried out, Visenya let her head bow. She listened to Ser Gareth’s heavy boots pace the room. He righted the other chair. He picked up the fallen candelabra.
“A tragic accident,” he murmured, not to her, but to the room. “A drunken accident.”
That’s what they would call it. That’s what they would need it to be. The alternative was a scandal that could ignite a war—a Baratheon lord killed by a Targaryen prince over his own wife. No one wanted that truth.
She heard more footsteps in the corridor, swift and authoritative. Not just the maester.
Otto Hightower, the Hand of the King, entered the room first. His sharp green eyes missed nothing—the body, the blood, her face. He was followed closely by Ser Criston Cole, whose hand never left his sword pommel.
“Princess,” Otto said, his voice a controlled, dry rasp. “Ser Gareth has given a report. Are you able to speak?”
She nodded, keeping her eyes lowered. “He was angry. He hit me. He fell.”
Otto moved past her, kneeling by Borros with a faint grimace. He didn’t touch the body. He simply observed the awkward angle, the proximity to the table. He stood, brushing invisible dust from his sleeves. “A ugly end. But a clear one.” His gaze settled on her again, probing. “You were alone with him?”
“Yes, my lord.”
“And Prince Aemond? Where was he when this… accident occurred?”
Her heart hammered against her ribs. “I do not know. After the terrace, we parted. He went his way, I came here. To my husband.”
The lie felt smooth, practiced. It was just one more stone on the cairn they were building.
Ser Criston spoke, his voice cold. “The prince has a temper. A proven one, after tonight’s display.”
Otto held up a thin hand. “The prince’s temper was expended in the hall, Ser Criston. This…” He gestured at the scene. “This is the aftermath of wounded pride and too much strongwine. A Baratheon specialty.” He sounded almost bored. “We will inform the King. The Silent Sisters will be summoned. The princess will be moved to quieter apartments to recover from her… ordeal.”
It was being decided around her, neat and clean. The cover-up was not her burden or Aemond’s alone; it was the Crown’s necessity. Otto Hightower was already sewing the official story shut with threads of convenience.
As the Grand Maester arrived and fussed over her lip, dabbing it with stinging ointment, Visenya let her gaze drift to the balcony. The sky was lightening from black to deep indigo. Dawn was coming.
In the shadows of a distant tower arch, unseen by anyone in the room behind her, a lone figure stood silhouetted against the fading night. He was perfectly still, watching the commotion in her lighted window.
Aemond watched until he saw Otto Hightower leave, his pace efficient, unhurried. He watched the guards assume a respectful posture at the door. He saw the maester lead Visenya, wrapped in a borrowed cloak, from the room. Her head was high now.
Only then did he turn from the arch. The first sliver of sun caught the sapphire in his socket, igniting a cold blue fire. He had work to do. Vhagar needed to be fed.
The game had changed, but he was still playing. And now, so was she.
And now, so was she.
The official story held because it was convenient. Borros Baratheon, humiliated and deep in his cups, had taken a fatal stumble. A tragic accident. Visenya, the grieving widow with a bruised face, sold the tale with silent tears and a hollow stare. Otto Hightower had smoothed the rest, his efficient whispers ensuring Storm’s End received a chest of gold and favorable trade considerations alongside their lord’s body. Peace, however brittle, was maintained.
Two moons passed in a blur of subdued whispers and strategic isolation.
Visenya kept to her new apartments, a world away from the rooms where the air still felt thick with the scent of blood and broken wine. She saw Aemond only in public—across the throne room, at formal suppers. Their exchanges were polite, distant, a pantomime for the court. But sometimes, in the space between heartbeats, his eye would find hers. No warmth, just a silent, fierce check-in. Are you whole? her gaze would answer. I am surviving.
Then the summons came.
Her father’s solar smelled of dried lavender and slow decay. King Viserys sat propped in a chair by the fire, a shriveled hand resting on the head of the dragon cane. He looked at her, but she often wondered if he truly saw her, or just the ghost of the woman whose life hers had cost.
“Visenya,” he rasped. “You look well.”
“Thank you, Father.”
A long silence stretched, filled only by the crackling logs. He shifted, wincing at some deep-seated pain. “This Baratheon business… unfortunate. But concluded. You cannot linger in this… this intermediate state. A woman of your birth, widowed so young. It is a strategic vacancy.”
Her stomach tightened. “I am in no hurry, Your Grace.”
“The realm’s needs do not wait for your grief, child.” He said it not unkindly, but with the detached finality of a mason placing a stone. “Lord Tyrell has a second son. A fine lad, I’m told. Or perhaps a match in the Vale. Lord Royce’s line is strong. We will find a suitable man. A good man.”
The words good man felt like ash in her mouth. Borros had been deemed a ‘good man’—strong, loyal, a political asset. She remembered the sound his fingers made when they broke.
“Father,” she said, her voice barely above the fire’s whisper. “Must I? So soon?”
He looked at her then, and for a fleeting moment, something like regret flickered in his milky eyes. It was gone as quickly as it came, buried under the weight of duty and a grief two decades old. “It is not a question of want. It is what is required. I will have the Hand draw up the considerations.” He turned his face back to the flames, dismissal clear. “You may go.”
The cold that seeped into her had nothing to do with the stone corridors. It was the chill of a door sliding shut, of a future being measured and parceled out without a thought for the heart trapped inside. Another lord. Another castle. Another life of being managed, monitored, and ultimately, mortgaged.
She found Aemond in the dragon yard, a dark silhouette against Vhagar’s colossal, sleeping bulk. The smell of sulfur and warm scale was a violent contrast to the lavender-scented death of the solar.
“He’s selling me again,” she said, the words tumbling out raw. She didn’t bother with greeting. “Tyrell. Royce. Some ‘good man’ from a scroll.”
Aemond didn’t turn. He kept his hand on Vhagar’s leathery hide, feeling the slow, volcanic breath beneath. “I heard.”
“Is that all?” The frustration, the fear, boiled over. “You heard? He didn’t look at me, Aemond. He never looks at me. I am just a recurring reminder of the wife he lost. A problem to be solved.”
Now he turned. The afternoon light cut across the sharp planes of his face, glinting in the sapphire. “So be solved.”
“What?”
“Marry me.”
The world stopped. The dragon’s breath, the distant clang of the armory, the wind—all of it folded into a silent, roaring point.
“Don’t be absurd,” she breathed, taking a step back. “He would never allow it.”
“I am not asking for his allowance.” Aemond closed the distance between them, his intensity a physical force. “The Conqueror took both his sisters as wives. The doctrine of Exceptionalism is still law, however much the septons sneer. We are Valyria’s blood. Our ways are older than their seven-pointed stars.”
“It’s not about doctrine! It’s about defiance. He would see it as a betrayal. Otto would brand it an abomination to sway the lords. You would be disinherited. I would be shamed, or worse, locked away.”
“You think I care about an inheritance?” A low, mirthless sound escaped him. “What has this inheritance ever given me? Scorn. A milk name for a crown. A lifetime of being second, third, less. The only thing of value it ever gave me was you. And they took you away with a piece of parchment and a Baratheon seal.”
His voice, usually so controlled, frayed at the edges. He reached for her, but stopped, his hand hovering in the space between them as if afraid she’d vanish.
“They are already drawing up the documents, Visenya. In a moon’s turn, you’ll be riding south or east, to some stranger who will see a Targaryen princess on his arm and a treaty fulfilled. He will not know about the letters. He will not care about the silence. He will share your bed and drain your light until you are just another polished thing in his hall.”
The truth of it was a knife to her ribs. She saw it. The slow, glittering erosion.
“We could run,” he said, the idea taking wild, desperate shape. “Take Vhagar and Silverwing. Fly east. Find Pentos, Volantis… places where our names are just stories. We could be no one.”
“And live looking over our shoulders forever? Hunted by our own family?” She shook her head, tears of anger and helplessness welling. “That is a fantasy, Aemond. A child’s tale.”
“Then what is real?” The question was a plea. All the cold armor he showed the world was gone, stripped away, leaving something terrifyingly exposed. “Tell me what is real, if not this. If not me, here, asking you to choose me. Not our father, not the realm, not some lord you’ve never met. Me.”
He finally touched her, his fingers brushing her chin, tilting her face to his. His thumb traced the faint, long-faded mark on her cheek, the ghost of Borros’s ring.
“I love you.” The words were unfamiliar on his tongue, rough and unadorned. He had never spoken them before. Not in the covert letters, not in the dark conduit. They hung in the sulfurous air, a fragile, undeniable truth. “Not as a brother. Not as an ally. I am in love with you. It is the only thing in my life that has not been a poison or a weapon. It is the only thing that is mine.”
He sank to one knee in the black sand, looking up at her, his face raw with a need he could no longer conceal. “Marry me. Tonight. In the old way. Before a weirwood, or under Vhagar’s wing with only the stars as witness. Bind your life to mine. Let the consequences come. Let them try to take you. They will have to go through me, and I have nothing left to lose but you.”
The wind pulled at her hair. Vhagar released a sleeping rumble that vibrated up through the soles of her boots. She looked down at him—this fierce, damaged, relentless man who had killed for her, who had built his entire lonely life around the memory of her kindness. He was offering her chaos. He was offering her war.
He was offering her a choice.
All her life, she had been chosen for. A daughter, a sister, a wife, a widow. A political instrument to be placed on the board.
Her hand rose, trembling, and came to rest against his cheek. His skin was warm. He leaned into the touch, his eye closing for a brief second, the gesture so vulnerably human it shattered her last reservation.
The fear didn’t leave. It coiled in her gut, cold and alive. But beneath it, a different heat surged—a reckless, defiant current that felt more like freedom than safety ever had.
“Yes,” she said.
The word was soft, but it echoed in the space between them like a shout.
His eye flew open. The hope in it was almost devastating.
“Yes,” she repeated, stronger now, the decision settling into her bones, becoming fact. “I choose you.”