Chapter 5: Midnight Oaths
The Baratheon manse in King’s Landing was a tomb of tapestries and echoes. It smelled of lemon oil, dust, and the faint, ghostly trace of stag antler polish. Visenya stood in the solar, staring at the empty hearth. Her few belongings looked alien in the spacious, dark-paneled room. The king’s decree had moved with brutal efficiency; she was installed within a day, a gilded prisoner in a house of memories that were not her own.
A royal guard stood at the street door, another at the postern gate. Their presence was not for her protection, but her containment. A different, subtler leash.
The first week was a lesson in stillness. She received no visitors. The only messages were formal scrolls from the Hand’s office detailing the planning for the “proper” wedding ceremony, a monstrous farce scheduled for a moon’s turn hence. She took walks in the walled garden, her senses straining for the distant, familiar roar of a dragon that never came. The silence was the worst part. In the Red Keep, silence had been a living thing, full of whispered plots and hidden steps. Here, it was hollow. Final.
On the eighth evening, as she picked at a solitary supper, a different sound filtered through the high windows. Not a roar, but a deep, resonant thrum, felt in the bones more than heard. It vibrated the glass in the casement. It was the sound of immense wings displacing air, close, too close for the Dragonpit.
Vhagar.
Her heart leapt, a painful, hopeful wrench in her chest. She pushed her plate away and went to the window, but the narrow view showed only a slice of indigo sky. The thrumming faded. Had she imagined it? A desperate fancy?
A soft, deliberate scrape came from the bedchamber.
She froze, her breath catching. It was the sound of stone grinding on stone. She moved silently, pushing open the door to her room. A tapestry depicting some long-ago Baratheon victory hung crooked on the far wall. As she watched, it swung inward, revealing a black maw in the stone.
From the darkness, a figure emerged, cloaked and dusty. He pushed back the hood.
Aemond.
He looked like a creature of the underworld, pale hair grey with stone dust, his black leathers coated in a fine powder. The single sapphire eye found her instantly, gleaming with an urgent light.
“You,” she breathed, the word a mixture of shock and overwhelming relief.
“The manse was built by a Baratheon with a pirate’s paranoia,” he said, his voice low and rough. “Secret passages. Forgotten. It took me a week to find the entrance in the river gate sewer.” He shrugged off the cloak. “The guard at your postern gate is currently enjoying a wineskin gifted by a ‘concerned citizen’. He’ll wake with a headache and no memory.”
He crossed the room in three strides. He didn’t embrace her. He stopped a hand’s breadth away, his gaze sweeping over her as if inspecting for damage. “You’re unharmed?”
“I’m bored. And watched.”
“Fuck them.” His hand came up, not to caress, but to tilt her chin, his thumb brushing over her lower lip. The touch was possessive, assessing. “This separation is an idiot’s game. A performance for cretins.”
“It’s the king’s command.”
“The king is a dying man propped up by Hightowers.” His thumb pressed harder. “Do you regret it?”
She didn’t hesitate. “No.”
Something fierce and satisfied flashed in his eye. Then his mouth was on hers, a kiss that was all conquest and relief. It tasted of grit and cold stone and him. It was not gentle. It was a reclamation. Her hands flew to his jerkin, clutching at the cool leather, pulling him closer until not even dust could fit between them.
They broke apart, gasping.
“We have maybe an hour before the guard is found,” he said, his breath hot against her neck. His hands were already at the laces of her gown, his movements hurried, practical. “I need you. Now.”
The raw need in his voice unmade her. She helped him, fingers tangling with his, until the fabric gave way and pooled at her feet. The evening air was cool on her skin, raising gooseflesh. He backed her toward the large canopied bed, its Baratheon black banners feeling like a taunt.
He stripped off his own clothes, a series of quick, efficient motions. Dust motes danced in the dim light around his pale, scarred form. The evidence of his desire for her was already stark, rigid. He looked at her naked body with a focus that was almost violent in its intensity.
“On your hands and knees,” he commanded, the words a graveled whisper.
A thrill, dark and sharp, shot through her. She obeyed, climbing onto the thick blankets, presenting herself to him. The position felt primal, exposing. She heard him move behind her, felt the dip of the mattress, then the warm, rough drag of his hands from her hips down to the backs of her thighs. He parted her, and the cool air on her most intimate flesh made her shiver.
“You’re wet for me already,” he observed, his voice thick. A finger slid into her, deep, a blunt invasion that made her cry out and push back against his hand. “After all this silence. You’re fucking soaked.”
He added a second finger, stretching her, scissoring them. The sensation was overwhelming, a crude, delicious friction. She dropped her head between her shoulders, a low moan tearing from her throat.
“Please, Aemond…”
“Please what?” He crooked his fingers, finding a spot inside that made her jolt. “Use your words, wife.”
“Fuck me,” she gasped, the obscenity feeling necessary, true. “I need you to fuck me. Now.”
He withdrew his fingers with a slick sound. She felt the broad, hot press of him at her entrance. He didn’t enter her slowly. He guided himself and shoved in, one relentless, deep stroke that buried him to the hilt.
The force of it stole her breath. She cried out, the sound muffled by the bedding. He was huge inside her, stretching her exquisitely, filling the awful emptiness of the past week. He held himself there, fully seated, his body trembling with the effort of his control.
“Gods,” he choked out, his hands gripping her hips hard enough to bruise. “You feel… you feel like you were made for this. For me.”
Then he began to move.
It was a hard, driving rhythm, devoid of finesse, pure frantic need. Each thrust rocked her forward, the bedframe protesting with a rhythmic creak. The sound of their joining was obscenely loud in the quiet room—skin slapping against skin, their ragged breaths, her choked sobs of pleasure.
“Is this what you dreamed of in your stone prison?” he growled, leaning over her, his chest pressed to her sweat-slicked back. One hand fisted in her silver hair, pulling her head up. “Dreamed of my cock splitting you open like this?”
“Yes,” she wept, the pleasure coiling tight, unbearable. “Only you.”
His pace became punishing, a furious piston driving into her. The sapphire in his eye socket felt like a cold star watching her. He shifted his angle, and on the next thrust, he hit something so deep and perfect that white light exploded behind her eyelids.
“There! Right there, don’t stop, please don’t stop!”
He didn’t. He hammered into that spot with a focused, brutal precision. The coil inside her snapped. Her climax tore through her with a violence that rivaled his thrusts, a silent, shattering convulsion that clamped around him like a vise. She shook, helpless, reduced to a pulsing, raw nerve.
The fierce tightening of her around him was his undoing. With a guttural, shattered sound that was half her name, half a roar, he came. His hips stuttered, his thrusts turning shallow and erratic as he poured himself into her, his release hot and endless. He collapsed over her, his weight pressing her into the mattress, his face buried in the crook of her neck, his breath coming in ragged, hot gusts.
For long minutes, there was only the sound of their slowing heartbeats and the distant, ever-present murmur of the city. The smell of sex and dust filled the air.
Slowly, he softened and slipped from her. He rolled to the side, pulling her with him, tucking her back against his chest. His arms wrapped around her, holding her as if she might be stolen away. They were both slick with sweat, sticky with the evidence of their joining.
“The passage,” he said after a time, his voice scratchy with use. “It leads to a cellar by the river. I can come this way. Twice, maybe three times a week. If I’m careful.”
It was a plan. A thread of hope. She twined her fingers with his. “They’ll expect us to try something. Otto… he’s not a fool.”
“Otto Hightower thinks in scrolls and sigils and whispered alliances. He doesn’t think in tunnels and dragonfire.” Aemond’s voice was cold iron. “This is just another form of war. And we have the better weapons.”
He nuzzled the top of her head. “The official wedding. We’ll have to play our parts. Smile for the septon. Let them dress you up like a doll for the crowd.”
“I know.”
“After that,” he continued, his hand splaying possessively over her lower belly. “Things change. A married princess cannot be kept from her husband indefinitely. We’ll push. We’ll demand our own household. Away from this fucking city.”
The idea was a beacon. A future.
A distant shout from the street below broke the spell. The muddled voice of a guard, questioning.
Aemond tensed, then with clear reluctance, released her. He sat up and began dressing with the same grim efficiency. She watched him, memorizing the lines of his body in the gloom.
He leaned over the bed, cupping her face for a last, searing kiss. “Remember this,” he whispered against her lips. “Remember what we are, no matter what fucking pageantry they force on us. You are mine.”
“And you are mine.”
He gave a sharp nod, his sapphire eye gleaming. He moved to the tapestry, became a silhouette in the black opening. With a final glance, he was gone. The tapestry swung shut. The stone ground back into place, leaving only a faint, straight line in the plaster to show it had ever been there.
Visenya lay in the rumpled, scented sheets, the deep ache between her legs a precious, secret proof. The manse was still a tomb. But now, she knew it had a hidden vein, a pulse leading back to the heart of the dragon. She smiled in the dark, a secret, fierce thing.
The game had changed. They were no longer just hiding a life.
They were building one, stone by stolen stone, in the dark.
They were building one, stone by stolen stone, in the dark.
The secret passages became their lifeline, a grimy, subterranean world that smelled of wet rock and rats. Aemond appeared like a phantom twice more, their couplings frantic and silent against the cold stone of the cellar or the borrowed sheets of the manse bed. Each visit was shorter, riskier. The guard posted at the manse was replaced by two, then three, their faces grim and unfamiliar. Otto Hightower’s suspicion was a net drawing tight.
On the eve of the public wedding farce, Visenya knew it was over. The ceremonial gown, a monstrous confection of ivory silk and spun silver, lay across a chair like a waiting ghost. A different scroll had come from the Hand, not with schedules, but with a neatly penned list. It named the household staff being assigned to her ‘permanent residence’ at the manse, all Hightower loyalists. It listed the approved visitors, a column of empty cells. It was a life sentence written in pristine ink.
She waited in the cellar, a single candle guttering. He was late. The damp cold seeped through her cloak. When the stone finally grated open, he was not alone. The smell of dragon came with him, pungent and sulfurous, cutting through the cellar’s mildew. He held a large, rough sack.
“We leave tonight,” Aemond said, his voice leaving no room for argument. He dropped the sack. It clinked with the sound of glass vials. “Dragonstone. Vhagar is waiting in the river reeds downstream. Where is your she-dragon?”
“Silverwing is in the Dragonpit. They’ll have extra guards—”
“They’ll have extra corpses if they try to stop her answering your call.” He stepped close, his hands rough on her shoulders. In the candlelight, his face was all stark planes and resolve. “They mean to bury you here. To make this stone house your world until you’re nothing but a portrait on the wall. Is that what you want?”
She saw the future in his single eye: years of stolen hours in this dirt, their child—if one came—raised a hostage in all but name, their union a whispered joke. “No.”
“Then scream for her.”
They blew out the candle and slipped into the night-shrouded garden. The air was thick with the scent of night-blooming flowers and dread. Visenya stood in the center of the lawn, closed her eyes, and reached. It was not a shout, but a piercing, silent need, a pull of blood and fire. For a moment, nothing. Then, a distant, answering shriek tore the sky above the city, a sound of rending metal and furious joy.
Chaosis erupted. Alarms rang from the Dragonpit district. The manse guards shouted, booted feet pounding within the house. “To the river,” Aemond snarled, grabbing her hand. They ran through the postern gate, past the snoring guard Aemond had dosed again, and into the labyrinth of stinking alleyways that led to the Blackwater.
Behind them, Silverwing’s shadow blotted out the moon, her bellows shaking tiles from roofs. They reached the marshy bank, their boots sinking in the muck. There, like a half-sunken island of scales and malice, Vhagar waited. The ancient dragon lowered her head, her hot breath steaming the cold river water.
“Up, now!” Aemond boosted her onto a bent foreleg, scrambling up behind her. From the city walls, a horn blew—the alarm for fleeing prisoners. Torches moved like angry fireflies along the battlements.
“Dohaerās, Vhagar!” Aemond commanded.
The dragon surged upward with a deafening roar, the downdraft flattening the reeds. Visenya clung to the saddle, the city plummeting away below, becoming a map of pinprick lights. A moment later, a silver streak shot upward to meet them, banking to fly at Vhagar’s flank. Visenya felt Silverwing’s eager fury through their bond, a clean, sharp rage.
They flew through the darkness, the only sounds the thunder of wings and the rush of wind. Dawn was bleeding grey at the edge of the world when the jagged silhouette of Dragonstone materialized from the sea mist, a stone dragon frozen in eternal rage. They circled once, the dragons trumpeting their arrival. Below, figures emerged from the seaward gates.
Aemond brought Vhagar down on the wind-scoured practice yard with a ground-shaking impact. Silverwing alighted beside her, folding her wings with a metallic rustle. Disarmed guards approached cautiously, but they were not the first faces Visenya saw.
Rhaenyra stood there, wrapped in a cloak against the damp chill, Daemon a step behind her like a shadow given form. Her sister’s expression was unreadable, but her eyes held neither surprise nor condemnation. Daemon’s lips were curved in something that wasn’t quite a smile.
“Brother. Sister.” Rhaenyra’s voice carried over the yard, calm. “You’ve picked a wretched hour for a visit.”
Aemond dismounted, then helped Visenya down. Her legs trembbled from the flight and the adrenaline. “We seek no audience with the heir,” Aemond said, his tone carefully neutral, a prince to a princess. “Only a place to rest our dragons. We will not trespass.”
Daemon barked a laugh. “Trespass? You land the largest dragon in the world in my yard and speak of trespass?” He stepped forward, his eyes glinting. “You stole a princess from under the Hightower’s nose and flew here. That’s not trespass. That’s a declaration.”
“We have declared nothing,” Visenya said, finding her voice. It sounded raw. “We left.”
“You fled,” Rhaenyra corrected softly, but not unkindly. She looked from Visenya’s travel-stained clothes to Aemond’s defiant stance. “The ravens will be flying by noon. ‘Princess Abducted.’ ‘Prince Turned Traitor.’ My father’s court will demand heads.” She sighed, a cloud of steam in the cold air. “You can’t rest your dragons and fly on. Where would you go? The Free Cities? To be beggars with nuclear weapons?”
“We manage,” Aemond snapped.
“You’ll die,” Daemon said flatly. “Or you’ll start a war you can’t finish alone.” He shrugged. “Or you can stop posturing. Come inside. Eat. Let the fucking ‘things cool down,’ as the maesters love to say.”
The offer hung in the salt air. It was not warmth, but it was pragmatism. It was shelter.
Rhaenyra nodded. “The Sea Dragon Tower is empty. It’s damp and the stairs will crack your shins, but it has a view of the sea, not the yard. You can stay there. For a time.”
It was not a blessing. It was a calculation. Two more dragons on Dragonstone was a staggering increase in power, a direct challenge to the Greens. It was also a tinderbox.
Visenya looked at Aemond. His jaw was tight, the muscle flickering. He was a prince who accepted nothing, especially not charity from rivals. But he was also the boy who had learned to measure the cost of pride in scar tissue. He gave a single, sharp nod.
“Lead the way,” he said.
The tower was as described: damp, spare, and echoing with the crash of waves far below. A fire was lit in the hearth. Simple food—bread, cheese, stew—was brought. The door closed, leaving them in a fragile, provisional silence.
The adrenaline bled away, leaving a hollow shaking in its wake. They were exiles. They were pawns in a new game. They were utterly, terrifyingly free.
Aemond paced the length of the room once, twice, a caged predator. Then he stopped before her. He didn’t speak. He simply began undoing the clasps of her cloak, her dress, his own garments, letting the travel-stained clothes fall to the stone floor. The firelight played over their pale skin.
He backed her toward the worn tapestry that covered the wall, his hands rough on her hips. His mouth found hers, but this kiss was different. It wasn’t fury or desperation. It was a bleak, consuming hunger, the kind that follows a narrow escape from the abyss.
“They think they own you,” he murmured against her lips, his hand sliding between her legs. His fingers were calloused and demanding. “They think their laws and their ceremonies are chains.” He pushed a finger inside her, and she was already slick, her body responding to the sheer survival of the night. “You feel this? This is what’s real. This wet, hot truth. This is the only oath that matters.”
He added another finger, stretching her, his thumb finding her clit and circling with a brutal, precise pressure. She cried out, her head thudding back against the stone wall. The orgasm ripped through her, sudden and shocking, making her legs buckle. He held her up, his arm like an iron bar across her back.
Before the last tremor faded, he turned her around to face the tapestry, the rough wool scratching her cheek. He kicked her feet wider apart. She heard the slick sound of him stroking himself, once, twice.
Then he was entering her, not with a shove, but with a slow, inexorable press that burned and filled her utterly. He sank in to the root with a deep, guttural groan that seemed pulled from his core. He stilled, buried inside her, his chest heaving against her back.
“This cunt is mine,” he whispered, the words raw and obscene in the quiet room. “This heart. This life. They can have their fucking kingdoms. They can’t have this.”
He began to move then, a deep, rolling rhythm that was less about speed and more about possession. Each withdrawal was an agony, each thrust a reclaiming. The slap of his skin against hers, the wet sounds of their joining, were the only truths in the world. He gripped her hip with one hand, the other tangling in her hair, using it to pull her back onto him, controlling the depth, the angle.
“Tell me,” he demanded, his breath hot on her neck.
“I am yours,” she gasped, each word punched out of her by his thrusts. “Only yours. Always.”
“Fuck.” The word was a prayer and a curse. His rhythm fractured, turning harder, faster. “I’m going to fill you up. I’m going to put a child in you right here, in this tower they gave us. A dragon. Our dragon.”
The promise, crude and magnificent, undid her. Another climax mounted, deeper this time, a tectonic wave building from where he was joined to her. She clenched around him, a silent scream tearing at her throat.
It triggered his own end. He drove in once more, brutally deep, and held. A broken sound escaped him as he pulsed within her, his release hot and seemingly endless, mingling with her own. He collapsed forward, pinning her to the wall, his weight a solid, anchoring comfort.
They stayed like that, joined, breathing as one creature. The fire cracked. Somewhere in the castle, a distant door slammed.
He finally softened and slid from her. They didn’t move to the bed. They slid down the wall to the floor, limbs tangled on the borrowed cloak, facing the dying fire. The reality of their situation settled around them, cold and sharp.
They were guests of their rivals. They were a crisis waiting to happen. They were together.
Aemond pulled her close, his lips against her temple. “Dragonstone,” he muttered, the word tasting of salt and smoke and uncertain sanctuary.