Work Text:
Already three of her women have complained about the cloaked figure in the corner, frightening would-be patrons away.
“If he does not purchase women or drink, send him out,” Elayne scolds, “This is a pleasure house, not a poor house.”
“I cannot," Lyria murmurs, ducking her head close so as not to be overheard. "He is Targaryen.”
That, at last, catches Elayne’s attention.
That, at last, catches Elayne’s attention. The Crown Prince of the realm has been a Flea Bottom fixture these past years — not unlike his uncle before him — but beyond Aegon and his depraved tastes, royals are a rare sight indeed.
This one, at least, is easy to place a name to. When she drifts over to his table, her long skirts sweeping the rough-planked wooden floors, he tilts his head in silent question and folds of dark fabric slip back to reveal a badly-scarred face. The dim lantern light catches a thousand times in his savaged left eye, tiny pinpricks of stars that dance as he looks up to her while his good right eye, dragonlord-violet, gleams dark and dull and gray in the shadows of his hood.
Aemond One-Eye is uninterested as could be, but Elayne still lays a hand on his shoulder and bends close, waves of dark hair falling about both their faces. “Any woman you desire, my Lord. Speak it and she’s yours.”
This prince is nothing like his brother, haughty and impetuous as his gaze slides away from her and settles in the near-distance. “I have no interest in paying for my pleasures.”
Elayne straightens, drawing her shoulders back as she returns to her own impressive height. “No interest in paying, or no interest at all?” That gets his attention, she can tell by the tightening of his jaw, but before he can deliver the undoubtedly sharp words forming on his lips, she adds, “It makes no matter to me, of course, but it does leave me questioning why a man who is not interested sits at one of my tables.”
Shrugging her hand off his shoulder like a horse shakes off flies, the prince finally looks at her. “I await my dear brother, to escort him back to his duties with utmost discretion. That is, assuming he hasn’t moved on to other depravities by now."
Interesting, that such a chore should fall to the second-born son and not the gold cloaks (or, Seven forbid, those untouchable white knights) but Elayne knows better than to start asking questions. Instead, she slides into the chair across from him with a smile. “Aye, your brother is here, though he may be a while yet.”
Aemond hears her words, she’s sure of it, but he doesn’t react beyond the unblinking stare he levels her way. Though he must wonder at her company, he is either unwilling or, nigh as likely, uncaring enough to ask, so it falls to her to break the silence between them. “Your eye — what is that?” Though his expression barely changes, Elayne can tell the question takes him aback. “I’m sorry, you must not be used to anyone addressing it so directly.” It is human nature to skirt around issues deemed discomfiting, Elayne has found, and that jagged, bloody mess of an eye is nothing if not discomfiting.
“I am not,” he admits after a long pause, and though his demeanor remains distant, she suspects her boldness has earned her a measure of respect. “It is a sapphire.”
“Certainly a stunning choice, visually, but why not garnet to match your other eye?”
Aemond’s brows draw together. He returns her question with one of his own. “Why does a brothel madam sit here asking after such trivial matters?”
Why, indeed? A serving girl passes by with a tray and Elayne waves her down, taking a cup and proffering a second to Aemond, who refuses.
Hm. Certainly not his brother, this one.
Swirling the wine in her cup without any intent of drinking, Elayne just smiles at the young prince. “I blessed you with my company because you sat here hidden in your cloak with that beautiful dagger on display…” She nods to the blade sitting unsheathed on the table, resting between his calloused hands like closely guarded treasure. “ …refusing to imbibe of any drink or women. You were frightening my girls and scaring away my customers.”
Aemond once again says nothing. He looks down at the dagger and back up at her, then shifts his gaze over her shoulder as one foot begins to bounce in a remarkably unrestrained display of impatience. When he sees her looking, he falls still, perhaps remembering a mother’s reprimands.
Aemond is strange. Intense and self-important, as Targaryens tend to be, yet reserved in a way young men tend not to be. Serious in a way she could never call somber, quiet in a way she could never call sullen. His eye is alight with animal alertness as he scans the room, though he refuses to let his gaze so much as land on anything unseemly. He holds himself like a soldier and conducts himself like a prince and over the weeks he returns again and again in his wayward brother’s wake, countenance never softening but… warming to Elayne in a way that surprises her.
Most of that first visit is spent with silence stretching between them. When she finds him at the same table weeks later, in a different cloak with the same dagger laid before him, she keeps him company once again, and once again he is reticent.
The third visit, she tries to engage him in conversation and he snaps at her. The lean lines of his body were pulled taut like a bowstring from the moment he stalked into the pleasure house, so Elayne doesn’t take it to heart when he turns to her with dragonfire in his eyes and says, “I spend my days with scholars and maesters and men of the most learned backgrounds; please do spare me the idle chatter of a courtesan, as I’m not in the mood to discuss gemstones this morning.”
If he expects his words to cut deep, he will be sorely disappointed.
“I may not have a royal education, prince, but I am fond of history if that’s conversation you’d prefer.”
He snorts, derisive, and doesn’t deign to look her way again, but on his fourth visit he’s not been in his chair five minutes before, shoulders drawn up to his ears, he asks if Elayne has heard of a long-dead house called Atharine. She has, in brief, but he tells her more while he waits on Aegon. She accepts it for the apology it is.
From there, his reluctant visits to her brothel aren’t so wordless. She had meant what she said that first time, that she sat with him simply to soften his imposing presence, but as time crawls on, the self-serious young man becomes a welcome guest. There are few who think to engage in intellectual conversation with a brothel madam, and although her own meager schooling cannot compare to Aemond’s well-honed intelligence, it is a refreshing change to be respected for her mind, not her body.
He remains Aemond Targaryen, of course. Withdrawn, imperious, prone to long silences. Few things make him smile and the only time she hears him laugh is once, at the expense of another, but occasional callousness is far from the worst trait he could bear. In Aemond, Elayne sees all of Daemon’s cold calculation yet none of his unfettered violence, nor does she see Aegon’s sloppy, vicious cruelty. Despite all he does to keep himself private, Elayne catches glimpses of the boy beneath the armor, a younger brother desperate for more than he’s been given.
She’s hardly in the business of pitying nobles, but she does feel for him. Anybody with half a mind can see that Aemond, for all his faults, is better suited to sit that damned iron throne than his drunken sot of an elder brother, and yet the order of birth denied him. Instead, he stands at his brother's shoulder and staunchly defends him and spends hours upon hours in pleasure houses and dens of iniquity he wouldn’t be caught dead in just to make sure that same drunken sot makes his way home, safe from muggers and the scorn of the smallfolk.
It’s a miserable lot in life, to be sure.
The last time she sees him (not that she knows it to be), he brings her a gift. Reaches into his cloak the moment she sits down and silently slides something heavy across the table.
A book. Maester Stormwell’s History of Northern Rule; The story of Westeros’ largest kingdom, from the Brandon The First to the King Who Knelt.
Elayne was born to wealth, and although that comfortable merchant’s life lies decades behind her and clouded from memory, she still knows her letters. She might read frequently, she often thinks, if it were easier to get her hands on a book.
And now here she is, being gifted an ancient tome by a Targaryen Prince himself.
Not long after, war breaks out and King’s Landing grows ever more dangerous. Elayne manages to escape in the chaos, that book one of two things held tight in her hands as she evades the gold cloaks and leaves the fetid stench of King’s Landing behind.
The other thing she managed to rescue sits across from her now, carefully mending a torn dress by firelight. Alys looks up from her work, feeling her wife’s eyes, and smiles. “Read to me?” she asks with a nod to the History sitting open in Elayne’s lap. Elayne finds the chapter about Arran Stark, the warrior-king whose rule ended in exile, and begins reading aloud.
Aemond Targaryen is dead, his dragon and much of his family with him. To say she mourns him would be a lie, but nonetheless she stubbornly holds on to her own tiny piece of him and thinks in vain about what might be different if the second son had indeed been born first.
Nothing, she suspects, could have stopped the House of the Dragon and its civil war, but still she reads and remembers and wonders.