Chapter 5: The Princess' Education
The feast was a slow poison. Every sweetmeat tasted of ash, every laugh rang false against the cavernous vault of the hall. Naerys sat beside King Aegon, a gilded ornament trapped in the spotlight of his attention. His questions were bloated flies buzzing around the carcass of her mother’s memory.
“Daena was always… spirited,” Aegon mused, his fingers tracing the stem of his goblet. “Like a pretty little bird, singing songs no one asked to hear. Tell me, did she sing to you? Before the end?”
Across the high table, Alicent’s smile was a thin, satisfied cut. Daemon, seated several places down, was a statue of cold violence. His eyes, fixed on the King, held the dead stillness of a deep, frozen lake.
“She was quiet at the end, Your Grace,” Naerys replied, her voice soft. She focused on the perfect, harmless curve of her own spoon. “The fever took her voice.”
“A pity.” Aegon leaned closer, the cloying scent of his perfume mingling with the smell of roast meat and wine. “I would have liked to have heard her final song.” His hand, damp and heavy, came to rest atop hers on the table. She felt her skin crawl. “But you have her look. The hair. The eyes. A sweeter song, perhaps.”
From the corner of her eye, she saw Daemon’s knuckles whiten around his knife. He carved a slice of venison with meticulous, silent precision.
The ordeal lasted for hours. When the Queen finally rose, signaling the women could retire, Naerys felt a surge of relief so potent it weakened her knees. She curtsied to the King, who waved a dismissive, wine-stained hand. As she turned, her gaze met Rhaenyra’s. The Princess stood apart, a vision in black and red near a pillar. She wasn’t looking at Naerys. Her eyes, molten with a furious, wounded heat, were locked on Daemon.
Naerys moved through the thinning crowd, the weight of the stares like cobwebs on her skin. She sought a doorway, a sliver of silence. A servant gestured to a curtained arch leading to the gardens, but the night air was thick with the city’s stink. Instead, she turned down a narrower corridor, one lined with cracked murals of Aegon’s Conquest, the paint flaking like dead skin.
She walked, needing to outpace the ghost of the King’s touch. The corridor twisted, the torches sputtering farther apart. The sounds of the feast faded, replaced by the groan of ancient stone and the whisper of her own slippers on dust. She was lost, and the realization brought not fear, but a numb kind of peace.
A hand clamped over her mouth from behind. An arm like an iron band locked around her waist, yanking her backward into deeper shadow. A scream died in her throat, muffled by a palm that smelled of leather and sword oil and him.
“Not a sound,” Daemon’s voice hissed in her ear, a vibration against her skull. He pulled her through a seamless section of wall that pivoted on silent, oiled hinges, into a darkness so complete it felt solid. The wall clicked shut behind them, snuffing the last of the corridor’s torchlight.
They were in a void. The air was cold, old, thick with the smell of damp stone and forgotten things. His hand left her mouth, slid down to grip her hip.
“What—”
“Quiet.” His command was absolute. He was still holding her against him, her back to his chest. She could feel the rapid, hard thump of his heart against her spine. Not from exertion. From rage.
Then, a sliver of light. A crack in the far wall. It was a loose stone, or a peephole. He guided her forward, his body steering hers. As they neared, murmuring voices filtered through the gap.
“…linger here like a ghost, princess. The feast is that way.”
It was Daemon’s own voice, but flatter, colder. Coming from the other side of the wall.
Naerys stiffened. He was here, pressed against her in the dark, but his voice was out there. She tried to turn her head, but his hand came up, fingers splaying across her jaw, holding her still, forcing her to look through the narrow aperture.
They were in a hidden passage, running parallel to a smaller antechamber off the throne room. Through the gap, she could see a sliver of the room: a tapestry of a dragon in flight, a stand of unlit candles. And two figures.
Daemon—a different Daemon, the one from the feast—stood with his back to the wall, his arms crossed. Before him, sleek and furious as a serpent, was Rhaenyra. She had cornered him.
“You avoid me,” Rhaenyra said, her voice low and heated. “You ship your pregnant whore to my father’s side for hours and hide in shadows.”
“Watch your tongue.”
“Or what? You’ll scold me? You, who fucked her on a ship like a common sailor? I heard the tales. The whole court whispers it. ‘The Rogue Prince is tamed by a Lannister cunt.’ It’s pathetic.”
Naerys felt the Daemon behind her—the real Daemon—tense. His breath was a hot, slow stream against her temple.
In the chamber, the other Daemon pushed off the wall. He took a single step toward Rhaenyra, crowding her. “My business is not your concern.”
“Everything about you is my concern!” Rhaenyra’s composure cracked. She grabbed the front of his tunic, her fingers twisting in the fabric. “We are the same! Fire and blood! Not… not this milky broodmare from the West. She carries a Lannister pup, Daemon. A lion. Not a dragon.”
Naerys felt a strange, cold detachment. She was watching a play. A tragedy about her life.
“What she carries is mine,” Daemon-in-the-chamber said, his voice dropping to a menacing whisper. “Its name is Targaryen. Its destiny is the throne. That is all that matters.”
Rhaenyra laughed, a brittle, broken sound. “Liar. You look at her and you don’t see a throne. You see her.” She leaned closer, her voice dropping to a venomous whisper Naerys could still hear. “You look at her like you used to look at me.”
There was a long, dangerous silence. Daemon-in-the-chamber stared down at her, his expression unreadable.
Then, Rhaenyra moved. She rose on her toes, her mouth seeking his. It was a desperate, claiming gesture, full of old memory and fresh jealousy.
He turned his head. Her lips brushed his cheek.
He didn’t shove her. He didn’t need to. The rejection was in the stillness, in the deliberate turn of his face. It was an execution.
Rhaenyra froze. The air left her in a small, shattered gasp. She stumbled back as if struck, her face bleached of color, her eyes wide pools of horrified humiliation.
“Go back to your husband, princess,” Daemon-in-the-chamber said, his voice devoid of all warmth. “And your children. Guard your own claim. Mine is elsewhere.”
He walked away, leaving her standing alone in the slice of visible room. Rhaenyra did not move. A single, glistening track of silver slid down her cheek. Then her face hardened, crumpling into something ancient and feral. Hatred, pure and undiluted, etched itself into her features.
Behind the wall, the real Daemon moved. He spun Naerys around, his hands rough on her shoulders, pushing her back against the cold, rough stone of the secret passage. She could barely see his face in the absolute dark, but she could feel him—a barely contained inferno of possession and triumph.
“You saw,” he breathed, his voice thick with a terrible joy. “You saw her.”
Before she could answer, his mouth was on hers. This wasn’t the desperate, clothed claiming on the ship. This was a victory kiss, brutal and deep, tasting of wine and wrath and power. She could taste Rhaenyra’s humiliation on him, bitter and dark.
He ripped at the fastenings of her gown, the expensive silk shredding under his furious hands. The cold air of the passage hit her skin, raising gooseflesh. His own clothes were a hindrance he dispensed with just as violently, leather and linen cast aside into the consuming dark.
His hands were everywhere, mapping her body with a frantic, proprietary urgency. He squeezed her breasts, thumbed her nipples to hard peaks, gripped the soft curve of her belly where his child grew. “Mine,” he growled against her throat, the word a punctuation to every touch. “This. Mine.”
He dropped to his knees before her. His hands hooked behind her knees, pulling her forward, yanking her legs apart. His mouth found her cunt in the blackness, a hot, wet brand of absolute ownership. He licked and sucked with a furious intensity, not to pleasure, but to consume. To overwrite. She cried out, the sound swallowed by the ancient stone, her hands flying to his hair, not to push him away, but to hold on as the world tilted.
She came sharply, violently, her back arching against the unyielding wall, a silent scream locked in her throat. He drank her release, a low, approving rumble vibrating through her core.
He rose, a taller shadow in the dark. His cock, hard and thick, nudged against her stomach. He gripped himself, guiding the head to her soaked entrance. He paused, his breath ragged.
“She’s listening,” he whispered, his lips grazing her ear. His voice was no longer a whisper, but a deliberate, carrying growl. “The princess. In the chamber. She’s hiding in the shadows now. Watching this hole. Wondering where I went. Where you went.”
Naerys’s blood went cold. She tried to turn her head toward the sliver of light, but he caught her chin, held her gaze in the dark.
“Let her hear,” he commanded, loud enough for his voice to potentially carry through the stone. “Let her hear what I do to what’s mine.”
He drove into her. The fullness was a shock, a breathtaking invasion in the pitch black. Her cry was sharp, real. He set a relentless, deep rhythm, each thrust a statement hammered home. The wet, rhythmic slap of their flesh meeting echoed obscenely in the narrow space.
“This cunt,” he groaned, his voice deliberately un-muffled, raw and vulgar. “This sweet, tight cunt that’s carrying my son. You feel how it grips me? How it weeps for me? That’s your throne, princess.” The last word was a sneer, thrown at the wall, at the listener beyond.
He fucked her with a focused, theatrical brutality. One hand groped her breast, kneading it roughly. The other slid between their pounding bodies, his thumb finding her clit, circling it with ruthless precision. Pleasure, sharp and unwanted, coiled tight again deep within her, fed by the terrifying, Exhibitionist danger of it.
“You hear that?” he grunted, his thrusts becoming harder, faster. “That’s the sound of your legacy dying. I’m fucking it into her. I’m seeding the future right here, and you get to listen to me do it.”
Naerys buried her face in his shoulder, biting the leather of his tunic to stifle her sounds, but he wouldn’t allow it. He pulled her head back, forcing her mouth open with his, swallowing her moans. His kiss was a punishment and a benediction.
His control shattered. His hips pistoned, his rhythm fragmenting into a frantic, pounding rush. He was chasing his own climax, but also orchestrating Rhaenyra’s torment. “Take it,” he snarled, his voice breaking. “Take my seed. Fill that womb. Show her what a real fucking looks like.”
He came with a raw, guttural shout that echoed off the stone, pumping into her in hot, pulsing waves. He held himself deep, grinding against her as he emptied himself, a physical brand. His breath sobbed in her ear.
For a moment, there was only the sound of their heaving breaths and the drip of moisture between them. Then, from the other side of the wall, a faint, almost imperceptible sound. A rustle of silk. A stifled, wet gasp.
Rhaenyra.
Daemon let out a low, dark chuckle against Naerys’s sweat-damp skin. He slowly pulled out of her, a lewd, wet sound in the stillness. He reached down, gathered her ruined gown, and used it to wipe roughly between her legs before letting it fall to the dusty floor.
“Dress,” he said softly, his voice now a private, intimate thing. He handed her his own undershirt. She pulled it over her head. It swam on her, smelling of him, of sex, of victory.
He took her hand, his grip firm. He led her away from the peephole, deeper into the black maze of passages. They walked in silence for what felt like an age, through turns and down slopes, until a sliver of moonlit night air appeared ahead—a hidden door opening onto a deserted lower courtyard.
The cool night air was a shock. Naerys gulped it, her legs trembling. Daemon leaned against the rough stone of the outer wall, watching her, his eyes gleaming in the moonlight.
“She will hate you now,” he said, matter-of-factly. “More than she hates Aegon. More than she hates Alicent. You are the living proof. The chosen vessel.” He pushed off the wall and came to her, cupping her face. His thumb stroked her cheekbone. “But her hatred is a shield. It makes you interesting. It makes you dangerous. It keeps Aegon’s damp hands and Alicent’s poison away. They will all be too busy watching the hatred between you and her to see the knife until it’s in their throats.”
Naerys looked up at him. The thrill of the act was draining away, leaving a cold, metallic fear in its place. She was a message. A statement. A weapon he had forged and now fired.
“You used me,” she whispered. The words were not an accusation. They were a realization.
He leaned down, his forehead resting against hers. “I claimed you,” he corrected, his voice finally stripped of all performance, leaving only a terrifying sincerity. “In the one place in this fucking castle where truth still lives. In the dark. Against the stone. Where the only witnesses are ghosts and vipers.” He kissed her, gently this time. “Now come. We have a reign to prepare for.”
He led her toward the Tower of the Hand, where their chambers were. The castle loomed around them, full of watching windows. Naerys kept her head high, the taste of him and the echo of Rhaenyra’s shattered breath mingling on her tongue. She was no longer just a secret, or a womb. She was a war cry, written in flesh and seed on ancient stone. And the battle, she understood, watching the shadow of the Red Keep against the stars, had just begun.
The silence of their chambers was a vault after the echoing conspiracy of the secret passage. Torchlight lapped at the walls, making the embroidered dragons seem to stir in a wind that didn’t reach inside. Daemon bolted the door, a single, definitive thud that severed them from the vipers’ den. The sound seemed to release the tension in his shoulders, not into relaxation, but into a different, more focused energy.
He turned to her. His eyes, in the steady light, were not violent now. They were deep, searching pools of violet, taking in her disheveled hair, the way his own overlarge shirt hung from her frame. He crossed the room, each step measured. He didn’t grab her. He lifted a hand and slowly, carefully, brushed a strand of silver hair from her cheek. The gesture was so unlike him it stole her breath.
“You were perfect,” he said, his voice low and rough.
“I was a pawn,” she replied, but her voice lacked its earlier heat. It was just a fact, hanging in the air between them.
“You were a queen,” he corrected softly. “And you didn’t even know it.” His thumb traced the line of her jaw. “You let her see. You let her hear. You took every fucking thing I gave you in that dark. You were magnificent.”
His praise was a warmer, more disorienting violence than his anger. It unlocked something behind her ribs, a flood of tangled feeling—pride, shame, a terrifying sense of purpose. She saw her own reflection in his eyes: not a girl, not a secret, but a counterpart. She leaned into his touch, a silent surrender.
His kiss then was nothing like the punishing claim against the stone. It was slow. Deliberate. A rediscovery. He cradled her face in both hands, his lips moving over hers with a devotional intensity that felt like a prayer to some dark god. He tasted of salt and her, and something else, something like grief. When he finally broke away, his breath was warm on her lips.
“Let me see you,” he murmured, his voice thick. He didn’t tear the shirt from her. He lifted the hem with infinite slowness, revealing her skin inch by inch. He watched the fabric rise with a focus that felt like worship. When she stood naked before him, he didn’t pounce. He knelt.
He pressed his forehead against her belly, his arms wrapping around her hips to hold her there. His eyes closed. He simply breathed her in, the scent of their joined bodies, the subtle, sacred change in her skin. “My blood,” he whispered into her navel, the words a vibration against her flesh. “My own blood, right here.” The possessiveness was there, but it was tempered now by a wonder that felt older, stranger.
He lifted her then, carrying her to the bed as if she were made of dragon glass. He laid her down amongst the sheets that still smelled of the sea from Dragonstone. He undressed himself with a quiet efficiency, his movements stripped of all theatrics. When he joined her, it was not with a conqueror’s hunger, but with a solemnity that tightened her throat.
He loomed over her, his weight braced on his arms, studying her face as if memorizing a map. “Every part of you,” he said, almost to himself. “From the color of your eyes to the shape of your fucking cunt, it’s all mine. I made it.”
Then he entered her, not with a furious drive, but with a slow, inexorable push that filled her completely. She gasped, arching up to meet him, wrapping her legs around his waist. He buried his face in the crook of her neck, holding himself still, deeply seated inside her.
“This,” he groaned, his voice ragged with an emotion she couldn’t name. “This is the only truth. Everything out there is noise. Lies. This,” he began to move, a deep, rolling rhythm that seemed to start in his soul, “this is the only kingdom that matters.”
The rawness was still there. The sheer, carnal physicality of it. But it was directed now, focused into a single, worshipful act. He fucked her with a desperate, intense devotion, each stroke a vow, each gasp a scripture. He whispered filthy, tender things into her skin—how perfect she was, how tight she felt, how her cunt was his holy place, how he would die inside her if he could.
His hands moved over her with a knowledge that felt ancient. One cupped her breast, his thumb stroking her nipple with a reverence that made her whimper. The other slid between them, his fingers finding her clit and circling it in time with his deep, piston-like thrusts. The pleasure built not in a frantic rush, but as a deep, rising tide, pulling her under with irresistible force.
“Come for me,” he breathed into her mouth, his own rhythm beginning to stutter. “Come around my cock. Let me feel you. My girl. My own.”
The endearment, twisted and tender, broke the last restraint within her. She cried out, a sound that was part sob, as her climax tore through her, a series of deep, convulsive waves that clamped around him, milking him relentlessly. He followed with a guttural, broken shout, pumping his release into her in hot, pulsing jets.
He collapsed atop her, spent, his body heavy and slick with sweat. But he did not roll away. He remained inside her, softening, holding her close as their hearts hammered against each other. He nuzzled her neck, placing soft, almost chaste kisses along her shoulder.
After long minutes, his hands began to move again. Gentle, smoothing circles on her back. A touch so tender it made her eyes sting. He shifted, lifting his head to look down at her. His cock, still nestled within her, began to stiffen again.
“I’m not finished,” he whispered, his voice hoarse. “I need to see it again.”
He rolled onto his back, pulling her atop him. She straddled his hips, feeling him harden fully once more inside her. He guided her movements with his hands on her hips, his eyes locked on hers with an unnerving, paternal intensity. “Take it,” he urged softly, his thumbs stroking her hipbones. “Take what’s yours. It’s all for you.”
She rose and fell on him, setting a slow, grinding pace. He watched her, his expression one of awestruck agony. He reached up, brushing her hair back from her damp forehead. “That’s it,” he murmured, his voice thick. “My beautiful girl. Riding me so perfectly.” His hands slid up to cradle her breasts, his touch worshipful. “You have no idea what you are. What you do to me.”
This peak was slower, a sweet, heavy coiling in her core. His words, the intimate control, the sheer depth of his gaze, undid her. She came with a silent shudder, her inner muscles fluttering around him. He bucked up into her, his own release following with a low, sustained groan, his hands tightening on her, holding her down onto him as he emptied himself a second time.
Long after, they lay tangled in the silence. His fingers traced idle, possessive patterns on her bare shoulder. The complex, unsettling truth of it hovered in the air between them—a protection that felt like a cage, a love that wore the face of obsession, a secret that was the foundation of their entire world. He had marked her again, branded her from the inside out, not for an audience this time, but for himself. A silent vow in the dark.
Finally, he spoke, his voice gravelly with spent passion. “Aegon will announce a hunt tomorrow. A grand spectacle to celebrate the ‘blessed event.’” He said the words with flat distaste. “We will attend. You will smile. You will glow.” His hand settled once more on her belly, a habit now. “And you will remember, every time you feel his eyes on you, that the life you carry is the only one in this castle with a claim that matters. The rest are just noise, waiting to be silenced.”
He pulled her closer, his body a wall of heat against the gathering chill of the night. Outside, the Red Keep slept, or pretended to. Inside, the pieces were set, the lines drawn in blood and seed. Naerys closed her eyes, the phantom sensations of his devotion still singing in her veins, a lullaby and a war drum all at once.