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THUNK!
Aemond drove his sword into the practice post again. Steel bit deep into grain before the impact broke through with a sharp crack, splinters bursting outward and scattering across the stone like shattered bone.
A pair of guards near the archway shifted at once. Neither stayed long enough to witness what came next; both retreated into the corridor shadows.
No one stood near Vhagar’s rider when his restraint began to thin, not since his grandsire forced him into all this!
Aemond felt insulted when his grandsire asked him to pursue Rhaenyra after Ser Laenor’s sudden death.
But what followed was a reintroduction to a woman who, without meaning to, drew him away from the Street of Silk entirely.
A woman who commanded a room with a single glance—nothing like Helaena, nothing easily dismissed or softened.
CRACK!
The sound of approaching footsteps barely registered through the haze in his skull until a familiar voice cut clean through the yard.
“So it is true!”
Aemond’s blade halted mid-swing.
Princess Rhaenyra walked beneath the archway, Velaryon blue skirts moving sharply in the evening wind. No escort. No herald.
Aemond’s grip tightened on the sword hilt. Leather creaks under his hand.
He forced his attention back to the present. She descended the steps toward him with quiet fury.
He lowered the sword slowly, chest still heaving.
“Princess.”
“Do not ‘Princess’ me now.” Her eyes flashed silver in the fading light. “I have spent the better part of an hour discovering my future has apparently become a matter discussed between your grandsire and my father without anyone thinking to inform me.”
He admitted the eldest of their family was no fool, and for months, she made it exceedingly difficult for Aemond to come anywhere near what his grandsire required of him.
She's disrespected him several occasions, dismissing him as if he were a large toad. She ignored his presence anytime he attempted to speak to her. She even began to avoid him in the Dragonpit.
Still, Aemond decided that if there was any peace to be won from this arrangement, it would be bedding the woman who had begun to haunt his sleep.
And for that, he hated himself more than he had ever hated the idea of wanting her at all.
Her silver hair, loosened just enough to escape its restraint, spilled over one shoulder, refusing to settle.
Aemond felt his gaze drift. The line of her throat drew his attention first, exposed in the turn of her head.
Then lower, to the hollow at the base where collarbone meets skin, briefly visible beneath the shifting line of her neckline.
The Dragonpit. Heat rising off stone and dragonfire. Syrax shifting above them, impatient. Rhaenyra dismounting in motion and sweat and sun, her throat slick with it, hair half-loosened from its pins. Thighs toned even under her riding leathers.
Aemond bent to retrieve the discarded shield near the post.
He fastened the shield onto his arm without looking at her.
“Do you hear me?!”
“Yes,” he replied.
A short, disbelieving laugh escaped her.
“Of course. You already know of this.”
Aemond resumed his stance before the practice post. The next strike rang violently across the yard.
“Will you continue training while I speak to you?”
“If I stop,” he said evenly, “I may say something unwise.”
Steel crashed again. Rhaenyra moved closer but Aemond struck again to force her back.
“Will you speak to me or not?”
“Forgive me,” Aemond replied, breathing hard, “...you are angry already. I see little reason to worsen it.”
Another strike. Wood splintered.
She folded her arms tightly across herself as she watched him train.
“Who would send his grandson to court the heir to the Iron Throne?”
Aemond’s jaw flexed.
“My grandsire supported my decision to pursue you.”
“Oh, did he? I suppose that is why you appear everywhere lately. Council chambers. Dinners. The Dragonpit. Gods forbid I take air in the gardens without finding you lurking somewhere behind me like a shadow.”
The accusation landed harder because it was true. That however, was not what his grandsire planned.
Aemond struck the post again, and he hit so hard the wood almost split.
“You could have refused the proposal,” Rhaenyra seethed. “Unless your grandsire still commands you like a child.”
“I am not commanded by anyone.”
The force beneath the words sent a brief silence through the courtyard.
He looked down at her. It should have given him distance. It did not.
Rhaenyra stood just beneath his height, close enough that he could not ignore the details even when he tried.
The wind moved her silver hair over one shoulder, and with it came the brief line of her throat, the hollow at its base catching what little light remained. She was smaller, yet did not yield an inch of space.
He told himself he has known women before. They were either young ladies who fawned over him or older women who praised him from afar. Sylvie did what he knew some of them feared to.
Rhaenyra was different. It was clear she despised him, elder sister or not.
“Then why? What is it you want from this marriage?”
Aemond looked away first.
“Are you witless? I am speaking to you!” she asked.
“Careful.”
“No!”
His grip tightened around the sword hilt. He had hoped it frightened her. It did not.
“I am tired of being careful! I buried one husband already. I endured years of whispers and vile insults over my succession. And now I am to smile politely while a boy is sent to court me like some prize broodmare?”
“I am not a boy, Princess.”
"This is absurd!"
Rhaenyra laughed. She threw her hands up.
He became aware of her too near, the faint scent of citrus and lavender carried on the wind and heat, threading through smoke and sweat.
“You are young! Why would you of all people, willingly court an older widow? Unless your family demanded it of you—”
“I care not a whit for your age!”
Rhaenyra froze. Her composure slipped for the first time as his words hit her with horrifying clarity. Veins popped out of his neck.
“I did not come to you as a boy sent to nod and smile and obey! I came as a man who knows his own will! I came because I chose it! Because it is you I desire at my side! Before me, beside me, in front of me, on top of me—wherever it pleases you, so long as it is with me!”
The words cracked through the courtyard like dragonfire. The answer came before he could stop it.
Silence followed instantly. Terrible silence.
Fuck.
Aemond realized what he had done the moment the sentence left his mouth. Rhaenyra did too.
His chest rose sharply beneath the black leather. Sweat glimmered along his throat. One gloved hand flexed hard around the sword hilt as though he wished to break it in half.
But he would not look at her now.
The slip into High Valyrian and the heat beneath them undid the control that had held him so tightly a moment before.
He shut his eyes briefly, furious with himself. When he spoke again, his voice was lower.
“My apologies, Princess. Forgive me.”
The formality returned like armor slammed back into place.
Aemond removed his gloves with sharp, irritated movements and tossed them onto the bench beside the ruined practice post.
Then he walked toward the corridor without another word.
Rhaenyra watched him go.
Days later, after a quiet reprimand from his grandsire, Aemond went to the kitchens and asked what the Princess preferred when she ate alone.
The cooks were wary at first, until his voice softened into something almost courteous, almost harmless. In the end, they told him: lemon tarts. Sweet, simple, the only indulgence the heir to the Iron Throne seemed to allow herself without argument.
And when he saw her again, he watched as she broke one apart with her fingers, licking the sugar from her skin without thought for who might see.
Weeks later, she came to him at night.
Not in silk or courtly dress, but in plain peasant garb that did nothing to hide the fact that she had slipped past guards and stone and expectation itself. She asked him, as if it were the simplest thing in the world, to walk with her into the city.
He did not ask how she had left her chambers. He simply followed.
They moved through the streets unseen enough to be unremarkable. They watched a play beneath flickering torchlight, drifting through crowded markets where no one bowed or named them.
When the night watch finally turned a blind eye for coin or favor or fear of consequence, Rhaenyra led him into the gardens beyond the city’s noise.
There, beneath the open sky, she spoke of stars as if they listened. Aemond did not reply.
He gently reached down to guide her face toward his. And when she did not pull away, he bowed his head and kissed her.
Where Sylvie smothered, the Princess stoked a fire; where Sylvie’s voice turned soft and blurred, Rhaenyra’s remained hushed.
Rhaenyra had melted easily in his arms. Sylvie doused him with the milk of the poppy.
The princess let him lift her as her arms settled around his neck.
It left him feeling less like a man entertained and more like a warrior returned from a long, brutal war, still unarmored, and newly aware of what he had stepped into.
He walked her back to her chambers in silence.
At the threshold, he only inclined his head.
“Good night, Princess.”
She kissed him on the cheek. And in that simple dismissal of every safer path he might have chosen, he sealed his fate to the Realm’s Delight.