Chapter 1: Beneath the Lemon Trees
The air in the lemon grove was thick and sweet, humming with the scent of crushed petals and unripe fruit. Golden light dripped through the gnarled branches, painting the sunken mosaic paths with lazy, shifting patterns. The tiles were worn smooth, each one a faded dragon’s scale from a forgotten age.
Aemond Targaryen followed his betrothed, his boots silent on the ancient stone. He watched the swing of her hips, the wild cascade of her black curls with that single, defiant silver streak. She was all Dornish fire and Targaryen mystery, and it irritated him. This whole arrangement irritated him.
“It’s quieter here,” Naerys said, her voice cutting through the drowsy heat. She didn’t look back at him.
“A fact for which I am profoundly grateful,” Aemond replied, his tone dry as the dust between the tiles. “The celebration of our impending union was becoming tiresome.”
She paused, plucking a pale green leaf from a low-hanging branch. She rolled it between her thumb and forefinger before crushing it. The sharper, cleaner scent burst into the air. “You don’t want this,” she said, not a question.
“Do you?” He moved to stand beside her, his single sapphire eye fixed on her profile.
She offered a small, innocent smile that didn’t reach her sharp violet eyes. “I want many things. A crown is not one of them. I already have a seat waiting for me in Sunspear. This?” She gestured vaguely between them. “This is politics. My uncle’s design. My father’s concession.”
“And you are just a pawn,” Aemond finished, a sneer touching his lips. “How dutiful.”
“I am a princess of Dorne,” she corrected, her voice dropping, losing its playful edge. “We are not raised to be dutiful. We are raised to be dangerous.” She finally turned to look at him fully, her gaze traveling over his face, lingering a heartbeat too long on the leather patch that covered his left eye. “They say you claimed Vhagar the day your eye was lost. That you flew her that very night.”
“They say correctly.” He held his chin high. “A dragon is not a pet to be coaxed. It is a force of nature to be dominated. You take, or you are consumed.”
Naerys laughed, a soft, genuine sound. She began walking again, leading him toward a crumbling stone bench overgrown with jasmine. “Is that what you did? Dominated the oldest, largest living dragon in a single afternoon? How very… Targaryen of you.”
He felt a flicker of heat in his chest that had nothing to do with the sun. “You speak as if you have an alternative method.”
“I do.” She sat, arranging her skirts. She looked up at him, the sunlight dappling her olive skin. “I claimed Vermithor.”
Aemond went still. The Bronze Fury was a legend, a mount of kings, unridden for decades after the Old King’s death. He had been a monster, even larger than Vhagar in his prime. “You lie.”
“I sat at his feet for three days,” she said, her gaze drifting to the distant mountains as if she could see the dragon there. “He was chained in the caverns beneath the Sandship, brooding. They said he was too wild, too grief-stricken to ever bond again. I just… talked to him.”
“Talked.” Aemond’s sneer was back, full force. “Did you discuss the weather? The local cuisine?”
“I spoke to him as if he were a wounded hound,” she continued, ignoring his jab. Her voice was softer now, almost confessional. “I told him about my mother. About missing her. About the quiet in our halls after she died.” She looked back at Aemond, and for the first time, the mask of clever amusement was gone. In its place was something raw and knowing. “He was lonely. I understood loneliness better than most. On the third day, he lowered his head and let me touch his snout. The chains weren’t what held him. It was the silence.”
Aemond found he had nothing to say. The image was absurd. Preposterous. And yet, it settled in his gut with a strange, heavy truth. He had taken Vhagar with blood and fire and sheer, desperate will. This girl had taken Vermithor with whispered secrets and shared solitude.
He slowly sat on the far end of the bench, the warm stone biting through his linen trousers. “A novel strategy,” he managed, his voice uncharacteristically flat.
“It’s not a strategy.” She leaned forward, elbows on her knees. “You look at a dragon and see a weapon. A symbol. I look at mine and see a companion. A mirror.”
“And what does your mirror show you, princess?” The question left him before he could stop it, laced with a curiosity that felt like a weakness.
“It shows me that fury and grief are two sides of the same scale,” she said, her eyes tracing the scar that peeked from beneath his eye-patch, a rivulet of pale, ruined tissue. “It shows me that something doesn’t have to be broken to be in pain. Or to be dangerous.”
The distant murmur of the fountains seemed to grow louder in the quiet that followed. Aemond’s pride warred with a startling, unwelcome pang of recognition. He saw not a meek bride, but a rival. An equal in a way his brother Aegon never was. She had not been given a dragon. She had won one, on her own terms, in a way he could never have conceived.
“My uncle Daemon,” Naerys said, breaking the silence, “he told me you were all icy pride and sharp edges. A one-eyed hawk waiting to strike.”
“My uncle Daemon,” Aemond echoed, the name bitter on his tongue. “He would know all about striking, wouldn’t he?”
“He said you had a chip of ice where your heart should be.” She tilted her head. “But I don’t think that’s true. I think you have a furnace in there. You just direct all the heat outward. It’s easier to burn others than to feel the warmth yourself.”
He stood abruptly, the conversation suddenly too close, too revealing. “You presume to know a great deal about me after one conversation in a garden.”
“I know your story,” she said, remaining seated, utterly unruffled. “The second son. The spare. The one who had to take the largest dragon in the world just to be seen. I understand that, too. In Dorne, I would rule. Here, I am a bargaining piece. We are both more than what they have made us, Aemond. And less, somehow.”
He stared down at her, the dappled light dancing in her wild hair. His initial resentment was still there, a cold, hard knot in his stomach. But it was now tangled with something else—a thread of fascination, a spark of challenge. She was not a cage. She was a maze. And he had never been able to resist a puzzle.
“We should return,” he said, his voice tight. “They will send search parties. They will assume I have done something… unspeakable to you.”
Naerys stood, brushing a stray petal from her skirt. A small, crooked smile returned to her lips. “Would you? Do something unspeakable?”
He offered his arm, a gesture of stiff formality. “It is too pretty a day for unspeakable things, princess.”
She took his arm, her hand resting lightly on the black velvet of his sleeve. Her touch was warm. “Don’t worry, my prince,” she said as they began the walk back toward the palace, the shadows lengthening around them. “The day is young.”
“The day is young.”
They walked back along the mosaic path, the silence between them now charged, a live wire strung with things unsaid. The distant sounds of the feast—clinking cups, overlapping laughter—began to seep back into the grove. It felt crude compared to the quiet understanding they’d just navigated.
Aemond’s mind worked, turning her words over. A furnace, not ice. He had never been perceived that way before. It was unsettling. It was intriguing.
A figure resolved from the shadows near the grove’s arched entrance, the white cloak unmistakable even in the dappled light. Ser Criston Cole stood with his hands clasped behind his back, his expression the perfectly carved mask of the Lord Commander. It didn’t fool Aemond for a second. He could see the slight tension in the knight’s shoulders.
“My prince. Princess,” Criston said, giving a curt nod. “The Queen thought you might have lost your way. The… complexity of the grove’s paths is known to confuse guests.”
Aemond’s jaw tightened. His mother’s message was clear: she did not trust him alone with his betrothed, and she certainly did not trust the Dornish princess. The insult, veiled as concern, was typical.
“We were merely admiring the architecture,” Naerys said smoothly, her hand still resting on Aemond’s arm. “The tiles are quite fascinating. Though I imagine the Queen’s true concern is the reputation of the Keep’s scorpions. I hear they are particularly venomous this time of year.”
Ser Criston’s eyes flickered. He said nothing, falling into step a discreet distance behind them as they moved from the grove into a wider walkway lined with tall, pale roses.
The public path meant eyes. Servants trimming hedges, a pair of ladies taking the air. Aemond felt the performance of it all settle over him like a stiff mantle. He leaned slightly closer to Naerys, his head tilting toward hers. The scent of lemon and jasmine clung to her skin.
“My mother fears you’ll bewitch me,” he murmured, his voice so low only she could catch it. The words were for Criston’s benefit, a show of princely disregard. But as he spoke them, he found he meant them differently. “She sends her fiercest knight as a shield against your Dornish wiles.”
Naerys kept her gaze forward, a faint smile playing on her lips. “Is it working?”
He let his lips brush the very edge of her ear, feeling her subtle shiver. His next words were a dark, intimate whisper, a thread of sound woven through the rustle of leaves. “I find myself wondering how your sun-warmed skin would taste. If your clever mouth would be as sharp sighing my name as it is fencing with me.”
A vivid blush swept up her neck, staining her olive cheeks. She didn’t pull away, but her fingers tightened minutely on his forearm. She turned her face just enough to meet his single eye, her own wide with a mixture of shock and a spark of something hotter. “You’re trying to scandalize the chaperone.”
“Is it working?” he echoed, a faint, smug curve on his own mouth.
From behind them came a sudden, ragged cough. Ser Criston had stumbled slightly on an even flagstone. He recovered instantly, straightening his cloak, his stare fixed on some distant point in the gardens ahead. The tips of his ears, however, were a bright, furious red. He began to hum a tuneless, gruff approximation of a hymn, loudly and with great dedication.
Aemond leaned back, satisfied. The game was petty, but it was power. A small rebellion. He had made the unflappable Dornish princess blush, and he had reduced the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard to a man desperately pretending to be deaf. The forced walk back to the stuffy hall, to the political grasping and his mother’s suspicious gaze, suddenly seemed more tolerable.
Naerys, composing herself, looked ahead, but the blush still warmed her skin. “When you whisper like that,” she said quietly, her voice now also just for him, “I hear the dragon, not the prince.”
“They are the same thing,” he replied.
“No,” she said, finally looking at him again, her composure regained, that clever light back in her eyes. “I don’t think they are. But I look forward to finding out.”
Ser Criston’s humming grew a fraction louder. Aemond didn’t bother to hide his smile.