Chapter 3: Of Lions and Dragons
The confirmation came from a grey-faced, nervous maester who could not meet Rhaenys’s eyes. He mumbled about the quickening of blood, the sure signs, the blessings of the Mother. Jaime stood by the hearth, a statue carved of gold and tension, until the man finished. He dismissed him with a flick of his wrist.
When the door shut, the silence was absolute.
“Well,” Rhaenys said. She sat on the edge of the bed, her hands flat on her thighs. The word fell into the room like a stone into a deep well.
Jaime poured two cups of wine. He brought her one. She took it but did not drink. He drained his in one long swallow, his throat working. He stared into the empty cup.
“Robert will be pleased,” he said, his voice oddly hollow. “His decree satisfied.”
“Is that all?”
He looked at her then, and the conflict she saw there was a tempest. Triumph, yes. A fierce, primal victory. But beneath it, the old guilt stirred, looking at her young face, at the life now irrevocably chained to his own. He had saved her from a sword only to impale her on his legacy.
“No,” he said finally. “It is not.”
He crossed to her, took the untouched cup from her hand, and set it aside. He knelt before her, his hands going to the laces of her gown. He didn’t speak. He undressed her with a slow, ritualistic care that felt more intimate than any of his violent takings. When she was bare, he leaned forward and pressed his lips to her stomach. It was a dry, warm pressure. He stayed there, breathing against her skin.
“I can’t take it back,” he murmured, the words muffled against her. “I wouldn’t if I could.”
Her fingers found his hair, the golden strands soft between them. “I know.”
That night, he didn’t fuck her. He made love to her. It was a strange, tentative thing. He touched her as if she were made of glass and fire, his mouth mapping every new curve, his hands worshipping the subtle fullness of her breasts. When he entered her, it was with a slow, aching glide that made tears prick her eyes. He moved with a profound, shaking tenderness, his eyes never leaving hers.
“Rhaenys,” he whispered, a broken thing. It was the first time he’d said her name like that, stripped of duty or defiance. He came with a quiet gasp, his release a warm flood that felt like a benediction, not a claiming. He held her afterwards, his body curled around hers, one hand splayed protectively over her womb.
It was a peace that could not last.
Cersei knew. She knew the moment Rhaenys entered the Small Hall for a private supper, the loose cut of her gown unable to hide the new, subtle roundness, the unmistakable glow. The queen’s smile froze, then twisted into something beautiful and ghastly. Her green eyes, so like Jaime’s, turned to chips of ice.
“Sister,” Cersei said, the word dripping with venom. “You look… fertile.”
The meal was a torture. Robert boomed about the strength of Lannister seed. Jon Arryn spoke politely of healthy succession. Cersei said little, but her gaze was a scalpel, dissecting Rhaenys bite by sip by breath. Jaime’s knuckles were white around his goblet.
Later, in the labyrinth of the keep, Rhaenys sought air. The nursery. It was an instinct, a pull she did not understand. The room was dusty, silent, forgotten. A wooden dragon, one wing broken, lay in a corner. She picked it up, the paint faded under her thumb.
“Sickening, isn’t it?”
Rhaenys turned. Cersei stood in the doorway, a silhouette against the torchlight of the hall. She stepped inside, letting the door swing shut. The air grew cold.
“This sentiment. This… maternal farce.” Cersei drifted closer, her gown whispering on the stone. “He’s trapped, you know. By his own honor. By my father’s command. Fucking you is a duty. Planting that bastard in your belly is a political maneuver. Do you think he looks at you and sees a woman? He sees a vessel. A living, breathing reminder of every oath he’s ever broken.”
Rhaenys held the dragon tightly. “You don’t know him.”
“I am him!” Cersei hissed, closing the distance. Her perfume was suffocating. “I know every thought in his head. Every beat of his heart. That child is a chain around his neck, and you are the smith who forged it.” Her eyes dropped to Rhaenys’s stomach. A spasm of raw hatred contorted her beautiful face. “It should have been mine. Our children. Golden and perfect. Not this… this mongrel thing of dragon and lion.”
Rhaenys’s hand shot out, a crack echoing in the still room. The slap connected with Cersei’s cheek, snapping her head to the side.
Silence.
Cersei turned back slowly. A red mark bloomed on her porcelain skin. Her eyes held a terrifying calm. “You will lose it,” she said, her voice a low, deadly promise. “Or it will be born dead. Or it will live, and I will make sure it knows it was never wanted. By anyone.”
She left then, a queen in retreat, leaving the scent of jasmine and malice in her wake.
Rhaenys told Jaime that night, in the dark of their bedchamber. She told him of the nursery, of the slap, of the threat. He listened in a silence that grew more and more dangerous.
“She will not touch you,” he said, his voice flat and cold. “She will not speak to you again.”
“You can’t command her. She’s the queen.”
“I can,” he said. And she believed him.
His protection was a cage of a different kind. He was everywhere. He attended her like a shadow. He tasted her food, dismissed servants who looked at her too long, stood between her and any corridor that might lead to Cersei’s apartments. The fear, a cold serpent, had coiled around the fragile beginnings of their peace.
It came to a head three nights later. Jaime returned from a council meeting smelling of wine and fury. Robert had joked, crudely, about the wifely duties that secured an heir. Cersei had smiled her razor smile and asked if the babe would have scales or a mane.
Jaime slammed the door. He was vibrating with a contained rage. He saw Rhaenys, standing by the window in her thin shift, her body rounded with his child, and something in him snapped.
He crossed the room in a blur. There was no tenderness now. The fear, the threat, the sheer fucking impossibility of their situation boiled over. He grabbed her, his kiss brutal, consuming. It tasted of salt and violence. He bit her lip, and she gasped into his mouth.
“Mine,” he grunted, tearing the shift from her body. “You are mine. This is mine.” His hand pressed hard against her belly. “She will never have any part of this. Do you understand? Never.”
He pushed her back onto the bed. His hands were rough on her thighs, pushing them apart. He was still clothed, his breeches unlaced in a frantic yank. He freed his cock, thick and angry-looking, and positioned himself at her entrance. He was not gentle. He drove into her with a single, deep, punishing thrust.
She cried out, a sound of shock and sharp pleasure. Her body, sensitive and changed, responded instantly, clenching around the sudden, familiar invasion. He fucked her with a frantic, desperate rhythm, each slam of his hips a wordless rebuttal to Cersei, to Robert, to the whole damned world.
“Tell me,” he demanded, his breath hot and ragged against her neck. “Tell me whose cunt this is.”
“Yours,” she gasped, arching to meet him. The raw carnality of it, the sheer claiming, burned away her fear. This was a battle, and they were allied in it.
“Whose seed is in your belly?”
“Yours!”
He changed the angle, plunging deeper, making her see stars. “And who fucks you? Who owns this? Who fills you up?”
“You! Jaime, you!”
He roared, a sound of pure, unfettered possession, and his climax tore through him. He pumped into her, jet after hot jet, as if he could drown Cersei’s words in his own essence. He collapsed, his weight heavy and real on top of her, his face buried in her hair.
They lay like that, tangled and spent. Slowly, his breathing evened. He shifted, pulling out, but didn’t leave the bed. He lay beside her, his hand returning to her stomach, his touch now remorseful.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
“Don’t be.” She turned to look at him. In the dim light, his face was etched with exhaustion and fear. “That’s what she wants. For it to make us hate each other. For it to make you… careful with me. I don’t want your care, Jaime. Not like that. I want this.” She took his hand, the one that had been so rough, and pressed it harder against her skin. “I want you to remember what you’re fighting for.”
He looked at her, truly looked, and saw not a girl he saved, nor a vessel for his heir, but a woman forged in the same fire as he was. A partner in the dark game they were trapped in.
He kissed her then, slowly, deeply. It was a seal. A pact.
When he moved over her again, it was different. The rage had burned out, leaving a smoldering, intense determination. He entered her with a slow, deliberate thrust, his eyes holding hers. He began to move, a deep, rolling rhythm that was both possessive and reverent.
“I will keep you safe,” he murmured against her lips, each word punctuated by a stroke. “Both of you. I will build a wall around you with my own two hands. I will burn this city down around her ears if she so much as looks at you wrong.”
She wrapped her legs around him, pulling him deeper, accepting the oath. His pace quickened, not with anger, but with a focused passion. He kissed her breasts, laving the sensitive nipples until she cried out. He slid a hand between them, his fingers finding the swollen bud of her pleasure, and rubbed tight, clever circles.
The climax built in her, a slow, deep wave that started in her core and radiated outwards. She came with a shuddering sigh, her inner muscles fluttering around his length. He followed moments later, his release a hot, claiming pulse that seemed to go on forever.
After, he fetched a warm cloth and cleaned her himself, his touches gentle. He helped her into a soft nightgown. When they lay down, he arranged her against his body, her back to his chest, his hand once more resting on the slight curve of her womb.
“We leave for Casterly Rock at first light,” he said into the silence. “I’ve had enough of this pit.”
“Robert won’t like it.”
“Fuck Robert.” The words were calm, final. “My place is at the Rock. With my wife. With my heir.”
The word ‘my’ rang in the air, but it felt different now. Not just possession. A statement of fact. A responsibility he was choosing, fiercely.
As she drifted to sleep, lulled by the steady beat of his heart against her back, Rhaenys thought of the broken wooden dragon. She would not be broken. What grew inside her was not a chain. It was a shield. It was a promise.
And in the darkness, Jaime Lannister lay awake, plotting the fortifications of a new world, one he would defend to his last breath.
And in the darkness, Jaime Lannister lay awake, plotting the fortifications of a new world, one he would defend to his last breath.
The pre-dawn escape was a quiet, military operation. Jaime’s most loyal Lannister guardsmen, men from the Rock who looked at Rhaenys with wary respect, had the wheelhouse and outriders ready in the bailey. The sky was the color of wet slate. Jaime handed Rhaenys into the carriage, his grip firm on her elbow, his eyes constantly scanning the high windows. He saw no one. It felt like a retreat, and the taste of it was bitter in his mouth.
“We’re not running,” he said, more to himself than to her, as he climbed in beside her. The door shut, sealing them in dim, cushioned silence.
“Aren’t we?”
He took her hand. “We’re regrouping. On my ground. Not hers.” The wheelhouse lurched into motion, rolling through the gates of the Red Keep. The sound of the iron-shod wheels on the cobbles was like a drumbeat marking time. Rhaenys watched the looming towers recede through the small window, a tightness in her chest she hadn’t known was there beginning to loosen.
They made camp a day’s hard ride west, far from the kingsroad. Jaime chose a defensible spot in a pine copse, a stream chuckling nearby. He was everywhere, checking pickets, speaking in low tones with his captain. His protectiveness was a physical force, a wall that moved with her. When she walked to the stream to wash the dust from her face, two guards materialized, keeping a respectful but firm distance.
That night, by a fire of fragrant pine, he was different. The tension of the capital had begun to slough from him, leaving a raw, watchful intensity. He watched her eat stew from a wooden bowl. The firelight danced in his green eyes.
“Do you truly not hate me?” The question came out of nowhere, quiet and stark.
She looked up, startled. “For this?” Her hand rested on her stomach.
“For all of it. For pulling you from under that bed only to chain you to me. For every time I took you, thinking of duty and walls and legacy, not… you.” He poked at the fire with a stick, sending up a shower of sparks. “I used your body as a battlefield. I know I did.”
Rhaenys put her bowl down. The honesty in the crackling air was more vulnerable than any touch. “At first, I did. Hate you. Or the idea of you. But the hate was a cold thing. It kept me numb.” She drew her knees up. “What you did… it wasn’t gentle. But it wasn’t indifferent. I could feel you fighting something. Yourself, perhaps. That was real. Cold hate can’t live next to that kind of heat. It melts.”
He stared at her, the stick forgotten in his hand. The confession hung between them, more intimate than nakedness.
He stood abruptly, the movement fluid. He held out a hand. “Come.”
He led her away from the fire, from the guards, to a small clearing where the moonlight filtered through the pines. The ground was soft with needles. He spread his cloak. The air was cool, carrying the scent of damp earth and resin.
He undressed her slowly, his hands sure but not hurried. The night air kissed her skin. He shed his own clothes, and the moonlight carved the hard planes of his body, the old scars, the new tension. He pulled her against him, skin to skin, and the heat of him was immediate. He just held her, his hands roaming her back, her sides, coming to cradle the swell of her belly.
“I feel like I’m only now seeing you,” he murmured into her hair. “All those times, I was looking at a ghost, or a task. Now I see the woman who carries my child. The woman who isn’t afraid of me.”
“I’m afraid of many things. You are not one of them.”
He kissed her then, a deep, searching kiss that tasted of smoke and honesty. He lowered her onto the cloak, the pine needles a yielding mattress beneath. His mouth traveled down her throat, over the full curves of her breasts. He took a nipple into his mouth, sucking gently, then with more pressure, his tongue flicking until she gasped and arched off the ground. His hand slid down her stomach, through her curls, and found her wet and ready.
“So responsive,” he breathed, slipping two fingers inside her. He crooked them, stroking that deep, sensitive place that made her vision blur. “This perfect, hot cunt. It weeps for me.”
“Jaime…” His name was a plea.
He replaced his fingers with his tongue. He ate her with a focused, relentless hunger, licking and sucking her swollen flesh until her hips bucked and she came with a sharp cry, her fingers tangled in his hair. He didn’t let up, drinking her release, pushing her through the shuddering waves.
Before the last tremor faded, he was moving up her body. He poised himself at her entrance, the broad head of his cock nudging her slick folds. He looked into her eyes, his own dark in the moonlight.
“This time,” he said, his voice thick, “it’s just you. And me. No ghosts. No debts.”
He pushed in. It was a full, claiming slide, but there was a reverence to it now. He filled her completely, a stretching, delicious fullness that made her whimper. He began to move, a slow, deep rhythm that was about connection, not conquest. Each withdrawal was a promise, each thrust a confirmation. She wrapped her legs high around his waist, taking him deeper, meeting his slow rolls with her own.
“You feel like heaven,” he grunted, his forehead against hers. “Tight and hot and mine. All mine.”
“Yours,” she agreed, the word a moan. The pleasure built again, deeper this time, a rising tide from her core. He felt it, and his pace increased, his thrusts becoming more urgent, more powerful. The wet, rhythmic slap of their joining echoed in the small clearing.
“Come with me,” he demanded, his breath ragged. “Let go. I want to feel you come on my cock.”
It was the raw command that undid her. Her climax tore through her, a blinding, silent rupture that clenched around him like a fist. He cried out, a ragged, broken sound, and drove into her one last, deep time. He pulsed inside her, a hot, endless flood, his hips grinding against hers as he emptied himself.
He collapsed, careful to keep his weight on his elbows. They stayed like that, joined, breathing the same air. He softened inside her, but made no move to withdraw.
High in the branches of a venerable pine overlooking the clearing, concealed by a thick cloak of shadow and needled boughs, Cersei watched.
Her knuckles were white where they gripped the rough bark. The journey had been brutal, a desperate, reckless push on a fast horse with only one silent, paid guard for company. She had to see. She had to know if it was a mummer’s farce, a political performance.
What she saw was not performance.
She saw the tenderness in her brother’s hands. She saw the way Rhaenys arched for him, not in forced submission, but in hungry answer. She saw the raw, unguarded ecstasy on Jaime’s face as he spilled into the girl, an expression he had never shown her, not in a thousand secret trysts. This was not duty-fucking. This was a man worshipping at a new altar.
The heat that flooded her was not desire. It was a vitriolic geyser of loss and betrayal, so profound it blurred her vision. She saw the pale curve of Rhaenys’s pregnant belly in the moonlight, a blatant symbol of her own irreversible displacement.
The hidden guard beside her in the tree shifted, a whisper of sound. Cersei’s gaze, sharp as Valyrian steel, snapped from the lovers below to the man. She saw the faint, undeniable bulge in his breeches, the quick, ashamed adjustment of his stance. He was aroused by the spectacle below.
A cold, precise fury crystallized within her. Her lips peeled back from her teeth. Without a word, she descended, branch by silent branch, her silk gown snagging and tearing. When her feet touched the forest floor, she stood perfectly still for a moment, listening to the distant, contented murmur of voices from the clearing.
Then she turned and melted back into the darkness, a queen dethroned, a plan of exquisite violence beginning to knit itself together in the wreckage of her heart. The guard, confused, followed the rustle of her departure, leaving the lovers in their innocent peace, unaware of the poison that had just taken root in the shadows.
The needle-sharp silence of the forest swallowed Cersei whole. Each snapped twig beneath her slippers was a detonation. The memory of Jaime’s face—that open, shuddering release—was a brand on the inside of her skull. It was the expression he wore only in deepest sleep beside her, never in waking passion. He had given that to the dragon whore. In a filthy clearing. Like an animal.
Her guard, a sellsword with a rusting mailed fist on his surcoat, crashed through the undergrowth behind her. “Your Grace, the horses are—”
She whirled. Moonlight caught the wild triumph in her eyes, a glittering, fractured thing. “Did you enjoy the show, ser?”
The man stopped, his throat working. “I… I kept watch, as commanded.”
“Your cock stiffened in your breeches. I saw it.” Her voice was a silken scrape. She closed the distance between them. The clearing where they’d tethered the horses was a small, dark pocket in the world, just like the one she’d left behind. “Watching a lord fuck his pregnant wife turned you to stone, did it?”
He was a big man, but he shrank under her gaze. “No, Your Grace, I swear—”
“Liar.” She smiled. It was a terrifying sight. Her hand shot out, not to slap, but to palm the thick bulge straining against his laces. He jolted as if speared. “This doesn’t lie. It’s honest. It wants what it saw.” She squeezed, hard. He gasped. “You want to fuck a queen. Is that it? You want to put your common prick where a king has been?”
“Your Grace, please…” His protest was a weak thing, swallowed by the pounding of his own blood. He was looking at her mouth, at the exposed skin of her throat.
“You will not have a queen.” Her whisper was icy fire. “But you can have the pieces of one.” Her fingers worked at the laces of his breeches with a brutal efficiency. He stood frozen, paralyzed by fear and a base, overwhelming hunger. “You can have the shadow of what he throws away.”
She freed him. He was thick, veined, ruddy in the gloom. Without ceremony, she turned, bent over the mossy trunk of a fallen oak, and hauled her skirts up around her waist. The night air was cold on her bare skin. “Do it. If you have the courage. Fuck the shadow.”
He was on her in a second, a grunt of animal need escaping him. He wasn’t gentle. He didn’t even use his hand to guide himself. He shoved, a brutal, dry thrust that made her teeth clamp together. The burn was exquisite. She welcomed the pain, let it scour the image of Jaime’s tenderness from her mind.
“Is this what you wanted?” she hissed over her shoulder, her nails digging into the rotten bark. “Is this sweaty, grunting effort all it takes to make you feel like a king?”
He didn’t answer with words. He answered with a frantic, pounding rhythm, his hands gripping her hips hard enough to bruise. The slap of his flesh against hers was a vulgar, rhythmic counterpoint to the gentle murmurs that still haunted her. She felt nothing but a hollow, stretching friction. She closed her eyes and saw Rhaegar Targaryen’s solemn face, then Jaime’s ecstatic one. They blurred together, twin betrayals.
“Faster,” she commanded, her voice flat. “Or are you spent already from just watching?”
He groaned, a sound of effort, and obeyed. His pace became punishing, a mindless drive for release. She used it. With each jarring impact, she forged her resolve harder. The child in that other clearing would not live. It would not have Jaime’s smile. It would not have those violet eyes looking up at him with borrowed love.
The sellsword’s movements grew ragged. He was close. Cersei reached a hand between her own legs, fingering herself as he rutted. She was dry, but the mechanical stimulation, mixed with the violence of his taking, brought a sharp, clinical climax. It was a spasm without pleasure, a muscle remembering a habit. It was enough.
“Finish,” she ordered.
With a choked cry, he obeyed, slamming into her and shuddering. She felt the hot, unwanted spill inside her. He collapsed against her back, panting.
She waited exactly three heartbeats before shoving him off with a violent twist. He stumbled back, his member already softening, slick with her and his own release. He looked dazed, ashamed, terrified.
Cersei let her skirts fall. She turned, her composure an impenetrable wall. She looked at the mess of him, at the evidence of his weakness dripping down his thigh. “Clean yourself. We ride for King’s Landing within the hour.”
“But the horses need rest—”
“I do not care.” She stepped closer, her eyes holding his. The madness was gone, replaced by a calculative chill more frightening than any rage. “You will speak of this to no one. You will forget the clearing. You will forget what you saw. You will remember only that the Queen required an escort. If you fail in this, I will tell my brother the Kingslayer that you forced me. He will take you apart piece by piece, and I will watch him do it. Do you understand?”
The man nodded, a quick, jerky motion. The arousal was gone, replaced by the cold sweat of survival.
“Good.” She turned toward the horses, not bothering to wipe the ache between her own legs. It was a reminder. A fuel. As they rode hard through the dying night, the plan solidified in her mind, cold and clean as a surgeon’s blade. It would not be a knife in the dark. That was too simple, too merciful. It would be a unraveling. It would start with a whisper, placed in the right ear. A doubt about the child’s true parentage, perhaps. A rumor that the last Targaryen whore had found comfort with a loyal guardsman during her captivity. Robert would latch onto such a gossip with the relish of a boar scenting blood.
Jaime’s precious certainty would rot from the inside out. She would make him look at that violet-eyed brat and see a betrayal, not a legacy. She would take the thing he’d built in that forest clearing and burn it to the ground before it ever drew breath.
And then, only then, would he come back to her.