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“You know what I really want. Let’s stop pretending, Shiera.”
She laughed, raising an eyebrow. “Last night was not enough for you? At the pace we were going, I might need to bathe in the blood of a thousand maidens to refresh myself.”
Shiera was fully aware about the things whispered and rumored about her. She was not a fool, except in this one matter where she pretended to be completely oblivious and ignorant. Pretended to be unaware of Brynden’s deepest desire, of the one thing that would bring him happiness, the one thing she could give him, but adamantly refused to do.
He was weary of her games and her dissembling, her pretence that his proposals of marriage need not be taken seriously, because he had not truly meant them. As if it was merely a game they liked to play, the push-and-pull, the proposals extended and then refused. As if she could see into his heart and knew him better than he knew himself.
Well, she was wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Brynden knew exactly what he wanted. It was never a game he was playing with the proposals, despite Shiera’s assertion to the contrary, despite her refusal to take him seriously.
“I want you in my bed as my wife, not my whore,” Brynden exclaimed.
Her eyes narrowed. “Careful, Brynden,” she warned him. “Or you might not have me in your bed at all.”
“Is it Bittersteel? Do you care for him the way he cares for you?” His voice sounded sulky and petulant even to his own ears, but he was beyond caring. He wanted to know her reasons. No, he needed to know her reasons.
She tossed her hair and fingered her necklace. The gesture, at once so familiar and yet still so alluring to him, brought only pain and agony this time.
I want you. All of you. All the time. Every day and every night, every waking moment.
“Our dear brother Aegor does not really care for me. He is confusing lust with caring, mistaking the desire to possess with true love,” Shiera said pointedly, gazing at Brynden with a cryptic expression on her face.
Brynden winced. “Do not call him that. Bittersteel is not our dear brother.”
And I do not like you calling him Aegor, as if he has any right to that kind of intimacy.
Shiera smiled. “Our dear half-brother, then. Just like you are my dear half-brother, Brynden.”
“Is that why? You will not marry me because we were born of the same father? Have you forgotten that the blood we share is the Targaryen blood?”
Incest is not only allowed, but encouraged for those with Targaryen blood, were his unspoken words.
Shiera sighed, turning away from him. “Why must there be a reason? Can’t I refuse without being submitted to an extended interrogation every single time? Can you not be graceful in defeat?” Her tone was irritable, her mismatched eyes blazing with impatience, highlighting the contrast between the blue and the green.
“Once, perhaps. You could refuse me once without explaining yourself. But not time and time again,” Brynden replied.
He blinked, and she was suddenly standing next to him, close enough for him to feel the beating of her heart. Her fingers traced the birthmark on his cheek, her sharp nails drawing blood over the flesh. “Did you ever consider that it’s time for you to stop proposing, Bloodraven? Perhaps then you would not be refused so often.”
Bloodraven. She had never called him by that name before. She despised the name, and the people who would call him by that name.
Her touch had delighted him last night, and many nights before, but now it only felt like mockery, like a cruel jape she was playing on him. His fingers seized the sapphire-and-emerald necklace gleaming on her throat, the alternating blue and green of the stones matching the colors of her eyes.
“Let go,” she warned him. “Now.”
“Why? I only want to help you take it off. Have you ever taken your necklace off, Shiera?”
She stared at him, her gaze steady and unwavering. “You will regret this, Brynden. I promise you.”
I know many things about you as well, Brynden, her gaze seemed to be warning him. Secrets and lies, we are both in possession of more than our rightful share.
“Brynden.” Her voice was cold, colder than the winter that lasted a hundred years.
Her necklace was the key to her secrets, but she knew the key to his secrets in return. He had confided too much, risked more than he should, chanced more than it was wise with Shiera.
He released his grip on the necklace. It was a momentary madness he was already regretting. She had her secrets and her arts, just as he had his own. That was what had brought them together in the first place, what separated them from mere mortals like Aegor. He could not risk severing that connection with her. No one else understood. No one else wanted to understand.
Only Shiera.
Only her.
“Forgive me. Shiera, I was –“
Desperate. Bitter. Yearning.
“We will never speak of it again,” Shiera said, with a finality that told him that he was dismissed, discharged, unwanted in her presence. He had only himself to blame for that.
He nodded. “Very well.” He turned to leave her. He was at the door when he heard her voice. “Don’t forget your present,” she said.
There was nothing she could give him that he would want, except her acceptance of his proposal.
She had given him a longbow, an exquisitely-crafted weirwood longbow. It was the longbow he would later use to defeat Daemon Blackfyre and helped crush the rebellion. But not before Bittersteel had taken one of Brynden’s eyes first.
“You have a thousand eyes in your service. You have no need for the one you lost,” Shiera would tell him when he came home from battle.
“Promise me you will never call him Aegor again. Bittersteel, not Aegor.” That seemed the only thing that mattered to Brynden at the moment.
Shiera sighed. “What does it matter now? He is gone, thousands of miles away in exile. I will not be calling him anything at all.”
“Promise me,” he insisted.
She nodded, reluctantly.
“Will you be my wife?”
She shook her head swiftly, without any hesitation.
He shrugged. “I had to try.”
“I know,” she replied, looking sad.