Chapter 4: Practice Makes Perfect
The stain on the sheets had been hidden, the linen bundled and given to a chambermaid with a mumbled excuse about spilled wine. But the mark on her neck remained. Visenya kept her hair arranged over the left side, the silvery strands a curtain against curious eyes. She could still feel the phantom pressure of his teeth, a brand that pulsed in time with her heartbeat when she was still.
Days bled together in a haze of strained meals and avoided glances. Dragonstone felt like a cage whose bars were her mother’s absent-minded smiles and her stepfather’s devastating, deliberate indifference. He looked through her now, his violet eyes gliding over her as if she were another tapestry on the wall. The rejection was colder than the sea wind, a brutal confirmation of his words. This changes nothing.
It was Margaery who finally broke the awful silence in her head. She was a pretty thing from a minor stormlands house, all soft brown curls and cheerful chatter, her presence a gift from Rhaenyra to keep her daughter company. She knew nothing of dragons or succession, only of embroidery patterns and court gossip.
“You’re brooding again,” Margaery declared one evening, closing the heavy door to Visenya’s chambers behind her. The fire was low, casting long, dancing shadows. “It’s not healthy. You’re nineteen, not ninety.”
Visenya offered a faint smile from her seat by the window, where she’d been staring at nothing. “And what would you have me do?”
“Something frivolous. Something fun.” Margaery flopped onto the large bed, kicking off her slippers. She patted the space beside her. “Come here. Talk to me. Or don’t talk. Just… be elsewhere for a while.”
The invitation was simple, warm. A lifeline. Visenya crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed, the soft down of the mattress yielding beneath her. The scent of lavender from Margaery’s soap was clean, uncomplicated.
“Do you ever think about it?” Margaery asked, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. “What it will be like? With your husband, I mean.”
Visenya’s stomach tightened. “Sometimes.”
“I think about it all the time,” Margaery confessed, rolling onto her side to face Visenya. “I’ve heard such stories. That it hurts. That it’s messy. But also that it can feel… incredible. Like flying, they say.” She chewed her lip. “I don’t want to be a clumsy fool. I want to know what I’m doing.”
“No one knows what they’re doing,” Visenya said, the ghost of Daemon’s skilled mouth on her skin making her voice sound distant.
“We could practice,” Margaery blurted out.
Visenya turned her head. “Practice?”
“Not that,” Margaery said, giggling nervously. “Gods, no. But… kissing. Everyone says a good kiss matters. It sets the tone.” She sat up, her expression earnest. “We could practice on each other. So it’s not so strange when it’s a man we barely know. So we’re not just… standing there like stunned fish.”
The logic was absurd. And yet, the idea of contact, of a touch that wasn’t fraught with terror and history and consequence, was violently appealing. A touch that wouldn’t look through her afterward. She found herself nodding, a slow, unsure movement. “Just kissing.”
“Just kissing,” Margaery agreed, her eyes bright.
She leaned in first. Her lips were softer than Visenya expected, and she tasted of mint and honeyed wine. The kiss was closed-mouthed, chaste, a dry press of flesh. They pulled back, looking at each other. Margaery’s breath hitched. Then she came in again.
This time, her mouth was open. The tip of her tongue touched Visenya’s lower lip, a shy question.
Something unraveled in Visenya’s chest. A dam broke. She opened for her, and Margaery’s tongue slid inside. It was different—softer, less demanding than his, exploring without conquering. Visenya’s hands came up, tangling in Margaery’s brown curls. She heard a muffled moan, and wasn’t sure which of them made it.
Margaery pushed. Gently, but insistently. Visenya yielded, letting herself be guided onto her back, the thick coverlet cushioning her fall. Margaery’s weight settled on top of her, a warm, solid pressure that pinned her in a way that felt safe, not threatening. Their shifts, thin summer linen, were barely a barrier.
The kissing grew deeper, wetter. Margaery’s hips shifted, settling into the cradle of Visenya’s thighs. A faint, tentative grind.
A spark shot through Visenya, bright and sharp. Her own hips lifted of their own accord, meeting that gentle friction.
“Oh,” Margaery breathed against her mouth. “You feel that?”
Visenya could only nod, her eyes closed. She was chasing it, that building heat, using the memory of a darker, more devastating pleasure as a map. This was a gentler country, but the destination was the same.
Margaery understood. Her grinding became more purposeful. Their centers, swollen and sensitive, rubbed together through the dampening fabric. The soft linen was a torment, creating friction but denying true contact. Visenya could feel the hot, slick evidence of her own arousal, could hear the soft, wet sound their bodies made as they moved.
“Fuck,” Visenya whispered, the curse a ragged prayer into Margaery’s shoulder. Her hands slid down Margaery’s back, clutching at her shift, pulling her closer, grinding her cunt up harder against her.
“Yes, like that,” Margaery panted. She buried her face in Visenya’s neck, her breaths coming in hot, quick gusts. Her movements lost their rhythm, becoming frantic, desperate. “Oh, gods, Visenya, don’t stop.”
They were a tangle of limbs and heated, rushed motions. The polite pretense of practice was gone, burned away by a simple, acute need. Visenya’s world narrowed to the slick, pounding rhythm where their bodies joined, to the feel of Margaery’s breast crushed against her own, to the overwhelming scent of female sweat and arousal.
The climax took her by surprise, cresting suddenly. It wasn’t the catastrophic unraveling Daemon had wrung from her; this was a softer shattering, a bright, pulsing wave that made her cry out, her back arching off the bed as she trembled through it, her cunt clenching around nothing, soaking her shift.
Margaery shuddered atop her, but didn’t stop. She was still chasing it, her hips stuttering, her breath sobbing. “Almost… almost…”
Visenya, spent and dazed, slid her hand between them, pressing her palm firmly against the heat of Margaery through the soaked linen. She rubbed in a hard, circular motion.
Margaery’s whole body went rigid. A high, thin whine escaped her throat as she came, her hips jerking erratically against Visenya’s hand until she collapsed, a dead weight.
For a long time, the only sounds were the crackle of the fire and their labored breathing. The air was thick, sweet with the unmistakable smell of sex.
Margaery finally rolled off, flopping onto her back beside Visenya. She let out a shaky, incredulous laugh. “Well. That was…”
“Educational,” Visenya finished, the word tasting like ash in her mouth.
They lay in silence. The physical release had left a hollow space inside Visenya, an emptiness more profound than before. She had used Margaery’s warm, willing body to try and scour a different touch from her memory. It hadn’t worked. All she could think of was the dark, the taste of salt, and the devastating emptiness of a closing door.
“Was that your first time?… like that?” Margaery asked softly, her hand finding Visenya’s on the coverlet.
Visenya stared at the canopy above her bed, at the embroidered dragons forever locked in stitched combat. “Yes,” she lied, quietly.
“Yes,” she lied, quietly.
The lie stretched between them in the firelit dark, thin and brittle as old glass. Margaery accepted it with a sigh, her fingers lacing through Visenya’s. “It was better than I dreamed,” she whispered, a confession of her own. They lay there until the embers died, their shifts stiffening against their skin.
The next few days were a study in normalcy so forced it made Visenya’s jaw ache. She took Stormveil out over the churning sea, the wind whipping tears from her eyes that could be blamed on the cold. She attended her mother in the solar, nodding at the right moments while Rhaenyra drafted letters bearing the royal seal. She avoided the training yard entirely, though the clash of steel and Daemon’s laughing taunts to the knights carried on the air, a torment she navigated like a physical maze.
Her body felt like a traitor. It hummed with a restless energy, the memory of Margaery’s gentle weight a stark, shaming contrast to the brutal hunger she truly craved. She scrubbed her skin raw in her bath, trying to erase the ghost of soft lips, only to feel the sharper ghost of teeth instead.
A few nights later, Margaery slid into her chamber as Visenya was braiding her hair for bed. The girl’s cheeks were flushed, her eyes avoiding Visenya’s directly. “I can’t stop thinking about it,” she admitted, her voice small. “Do you… would it be terrible to practice again?”
Visenya’s hands stilled in her silver-gold hair. She stared at her own reflection in the polished bronze mirror, at the sea-green eyes that looked older than they should. This was a path, quiet and shaded, away from the precipice where Daemon stood. A place to siphon the desperate heat he had ignited, to blunt its edge with something simpler. She nodded, once. “All right.”
They didn’t speak this time. The pretense had evaporated. Margaery crossed the room and took Visenya’s face in her hands, her kiss immediate and deep, all searching tongue and soft, hungry sounds. Visenya met it, pushing her own tongue into Margaery’s mouth, trying to lose herself in the taste of wine and the simple, pliant warmth of another person.
It was easier to fall back onto the bed now, a familiar surrender. The dragon-scale tapestries rippled in the draft from the hearth. Margaery climbed atop her, settling into the groove of her hips, their thin shifts already an irritating barrier. The kissing grew messy, frantic. Margaery broke away, breathing hard, her eyes dark.
“I need—” she started, then just rocked her hips down.
The friction was instant and sharper than before. Margaery wasn’t grinding now; she was fucking, desperate little thrusts of her pelvis that rubbed her swollen cunt directly against Visenya’s. The linen was damp within seconds, a hot, slick patch growing between them as their bodies slapped together with a soft, wet rhythm.
“Oh fuck, yes, just like that,” Margaery chanted, her voice tight and high. She braced her hands on either side of Visenya’s head, her curls falling around them like a curtain. Her movements became more urgent, less controlled. Each thrust was a seeking, clumsy pressure that somehow found the exact, aching spot.
Visenya wrapped her legs around Margaery’s waist, anchoring her, pulling her closer, harder. She abandoned thought. She let the raw, physical mechanics of it—the slap of skin, the ragged puff of Margaery’s breath, the building, coiling tension in her own gut—obliterate everything else. She thought of the dark, of a different rough hunger, and her hips pistoned upward to meet Margaery’s frantic rhythm.
“I’m gonna come,” Visenya gasped, the words ripped from her.
“Me too, me too, now, please now—”
It crashed over them almost together. Visenya’s climax was a hard, internal clench, a silent shout that locked her spine as pleasure, bright and sharp, detonated in her core. Margaery cried out, a raw, trembling sound, her body stiffening as she rode out her own pulsing release against Visenya’s thigh.
But Margaery didn’t stop. She was still trembling, her body wound tight again almost immediately. “Again, I need it again,” she sobbed, and resumed moving, her motions now jerky, uncontrolled. She rutted against Visenya’s spent, sensitive flesh, chasing a second peak with a single-minded desperation that was fascinating and faintly frightening.
Visenya lay beneath her, a vessel, watching the play of agony and ecstasy on Margaery’s face. She felt used, and she let herself be used, because the emptiness inside her welcomed it.
Margaery’s breath hitched, then shattered into sharp, gasping cries. Her entire body convulsed, a violent, shaking tremor that seemed to last for minutes before she finally collapsed, boneless and dripping with sweat.
In the heavy silence, Margaery turned her head and pressed her open mouth to Visenya’s throat. Her tongue licked a slow, salty stripe over the fading bruise Daemon had left. Then her teeth nipped at the tender skin there, not hard, but with a possessiveness that made Visenya go very still.
They lay there, slick and tangled, the only sound their slowing breaths. Margaery’s lips moved against her neck. “When they finally make me marry some old lord,” she whispered, “I’ll think of this. I’ll think of you.”
The words were a shackle. Visenya stared at the ceiling, at the carved stone dragons, and felt the walls of her world, once so vast with fire and sky, contract to the size of this bed, this girl, this desperate, sticky imitation of a connection that had seared her to the bone. The mark on her neck throbbed, a twin echo to the new, lighter teeth marks Margaery had just placed beside it.
The mark on her neck throbbed, a twin echo to the new, lighter teeth marks Margaery had just placed beside it. Visenya lay utterly still, the sweat cooling on her skin. Margaery’s breathing evened into sleep, her arm a heavy, possessive weight across Visenya’s ribs. The fire had died to a dull red glow, and in the near-dark, the room felt like a sarcophagus. She carefully extracted herself, slipping from the bed as if from a trap.
The stone floor was icy under her bare feet. She walked to the window, pushing the drape aside just enough to see a sliver of the night. The wind screamed off the Narrow Sea, a sound of pure, unfeeling fury. She pressed her forehead to the cold glass. Her cunt still pulsed, a dull, used ache, and the slickness between her thighs felt like a shame she couldn’t wash away. Margaery’ gentle, greedy affection was a balm that couldn’t reach the burn.
She was using the girl. The truth was cold and clear. She was a hollow vessel, letting Margaery fill her with a simpler heat because the real fire was forbidden, and had left her charred and empty.
A few nights later, the rituals of the castle exhausted, Margaery appeared again. She’d brought a skin of sweet, fortified wine. They shared it, passing it back and forth on the rug before the hearth until Visenya’s head swam with a soft, fuzzy warmth. The wine made the room feel softer, the edges blurred.
Margaery’s eyes were bright in the firelight. She set the skin down with a deliberate thud. “I want to practice something else,” she said, her voice low and a little slurred.
Visenya, leaning back on her elbows, felt a curl of apprehension low in her belly. “Practice what?”
Margaery didn’t answer with words. She just smiled, a slow, secretive thing, and crawled across the rug until she was kneeling between Visenya’s sprawled legs. Her hands went to the hem of Visenya’s sleeping shift. Visenya watched, her breath catching in her throat, as Margaery gathered the thin linen and pushed it up, past her knees, her thighs, folding it above her waist.
The firelight played over her bared skin, gilding the pale curve of her stomach, the dark triangle of hair below. The air was cool against her most intimate flesh.
“Margaery—” Visenya started, a jumble of protest and shock lodging in her throat.
But Margaery was already moving. She bent forward, placing a soft, open-mouthed kiss on the inside of Visenya’s knee. Then another, higher up her thigh. Her path was deliberate, slow, a burning trail kissed into her skin. Visenya’s muscles tensed, her fingers digging into the woven rug. She knew where this was going. The intellectual knowledge was a distant, cold fact, completely divorced from the visceral reality of Margaery’s warm breath ghosting over her inner thigh, so close now to the heart of her.
Before Visenya could form another syllable, before she could decide if she wanted to stop it, Margaery’s mouth was on her.
It wasn’t a tentative lick. It was a full, wet, engulfing press of lips and tongue against her exposed cunt. Visenya’s back arched off the floor, a sharp, guttural moan tearing from her lips without permission. The sensation was shocking in its directness, obliterating thought. Margaery’s tongue delved, not with skill, but with an intense, focused intimacy that was its own kind of devastating expertise. She licked into her folds, finding the swollen bud of her clit and circling it with a relentless, wet pressure.
“Oh, gods,” Visenya gasped, her hips lifting off the rug, seeking more. Her hands flew to Margaery’s hair, not to guide, but to hold on as the world dissolved into a white-hot pinpoint of feeling.
Margaery ate her like she was starving. She slurped at her wetness, her nose pressed into Visenya’s curls, her tongue fucking in and out of her entrance before returning to torture her clit. The sounds were filthy, obscenely loud in the quiet room—wet, sucking noises, Margaery’s ragged breaths, Visenya’s own broken cries.
“Yes, right there, don’t stop, please don’t fucking stop,” Visenya babbled, her head thrashing side to side. It was different from Daemon’s calculated, devastating conquest. This was worship, hungry and devoted, and it unspooled her just as completely. The coil in her belly pulled taut, a wire about to snap.
Her orgasm erupted without warning, a violent, blinding surge that clenched her entire body. She cried out, a raw, tearing sound, as the pleasure ripped through her, wave after convulsing wave, her cunt pulsing against Margaery’s relentless tongue.
Margaery didn’t stop. She gentled her licks, soothing the oversensitive flesh, but kept her mouth there, drinking the aftershocks. And then, as Visenya’s body was still trembling, she began again. The tongue became more insistent, the pressure renewed. The sensitivity was almost painful, a sharp, bright edge to the returning pleasure.
“I can’t, it’s too much,” Visenya whimpered, but her hips were lifting again, betraying her.
Margaery hummed against her, the vibration sending a new, electric shock straight to her core. She hooked her hands under Visenya’s thighs, holding her open, and doubled her efforts. The second peak built faster, a dizzying, desperate climb. Visenya felt split open, exposed to the marrow, every nerve ending screaming.
She came again with a choked, silent scream, her body seizing, a fresh flood of wetness spilling into Margaery’s waiting, eager mouth. This climax was deeper, a soul-wrenching shudder that left her limbs weak and her mind utterly blank.
Finally, Margaery lifted her head. Her lips and chin were glistening, slick with Visenya’s release. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, a slow, deliberate gesture, and crawled up to lie beside her on the rug. She was smiling, a soft, dazed, triumphant smile.
“Did you like that?” she asked, her voice husky.
Visenya could only stare at the shadowed ceiling, her chest heaving. She was wrecked, hollowed out, more thoroughly used than she’d ever been. She managed a single, jerky nod, her throat too tight for words.
Margaery’s smile widened. She curled into Visenya’s side, nuzzling against her shoulder, one hand resting possessively on her stomach. “Good,” she murmured, and within minutes, her breathing slowed into the easy rhythm of sleep.
Visenya lay awake for a long time, feeling the dampness on her thighs, the ghost of that worshipful tongue. The fire popped. The castle groaned around them. She felt the twin marks on her neck, one brutal and secret, one tender and claiming, and understood with a clarity that chilled her to the bone that she was now well and truly trapped.