Chapter Text
By the time Lucerys Velaryon laughed at him in the training yard, Aemond Targaryen had already been angry for years.
It had not begun that day. That was the lie men preferred when they wished to make bloodshed tidy. Aemond knew better. Rage did not arrive whole in a single breath. It was cultivated. Fed. Starved. Fed again. It grew in the dark places of a boy expected to bow his head and be grateful for scraps of consideration from a father who looked through him as if he were smoke.
King Viserys loved Rhaenyra loudly. He loved her children publicly. Their laughter filled halls Aemond had been taught to cross quietly. Their triumphs were feasts. Their hurts were tragedies. Alicent’s sons were duties, embarrassments, complications in green velvet and silver hair.
Aemond had learned young that wanting was a dangerous thing. Wanting praise earned silence. Wanting justice earned a lecture about peace. Wanting what was owed to him earned his mother’s hand tight around his wrist and her voice in his ear, low and frightened: not here, not now, not before them.
Worst of all, he had been the last of the boys to shift.
The blood was in him. Everyone said so. Targaryens carried the old fire in their bones, the old shapes under their skin, the old right to become more than human when the moment demanded it. Aegon had shifted first and boasted for a month. Jacaerys had shifted next and been praised as though he had conquered a kingdom. Even Lucerys, small and soft-faced and forever glancing toward his elder brother for courage, had managed it before Aemond.
They had laughed then. Not always cruelly. That was worse. Sometimes the laughter had been careless, affectionate, easy as breathing. As if humiliation were harmless when it came from boys who had never had to swallow it alone.
Now Aemond could shift faster than any of them. He could hold a form until muscle and mind agreed. He could become hawk, hound, serpent, and, when fury sang hot enough in him, something scaled and winged that made the yard fall silent. Skill had not erased the memory of being watched while he failed. Mastery had only sharpened it.
On the morning Lucerys died, Aemond’s mother told him he was becoming too much like his brother.
It was an insult only because she meant it as one. Alicent did not shout. She rarely needed to. Her disappointment was a narrow blade, polished by fear and piety, and she pressed it beneath his ribs with the practiced hand of someone who believed pain could keep her children alive.
He had spoken sharply to a lord who had looked too long at Helaena. Or perhaps he had refused to smile at supper. Perhaps he had simply stood too still beside the wall while Rhaenyra’s sons charmed the king. By the end of his mother’s reprimand, the cause mattered less than the familiar conclusion: he was wrong in some essential way, and any wound he carried must be made smaller for the comfort of others.
His father did not look up when Aemond entered the solar afterward. Viserys was bent over a painted model of old Valyria, one trembling finger tracing roads no living man remembered. “Later,” he said, though Aemond had not yet spoken.
So Aemond swallowed that too.
By noon, he found Aegon tangled in the sheets with the dark-haired girl from the stables, the one whose smile had followed Aemond for three days and whom Aemond had been fool enough to think he might approach with something like gentleness. Aegon saw him in the doorway and grinned over her bare shoulder.
“Brother,” Aegon drawled. “Did you want a turn, or only a lesson?”
Aemond shut the door on Aegon’s laughter.
He went to the training yard because men were allowed to hate there.
The yard smelled of oiled leather, sand, sweat, and sun-warmed stone. Blunted swords cracked together. Boys shouted. Men corrected stance and grip. Above it all came laughter, bright and easy, from the far end where Jacaerys and Lucerys practiced together beneath the indulgent gaze of a master-at-arms who never looked at them the way he looked at Aemond.
Aemond took up a practice blade. He told himself he would drill until his arms shook, until his body burned through what his mind could not release. He told himself many things.
Lucerys noticed him first. “Careful,” Luke called, breathless from sparring and drunk on the safety of his brother’s nearness. “No matter how well you do it now, uncle, we all remember how long it took.”
The words were not the cruelest ever thrown at him. That was the trouble. They were small. Petty. Familiar. A pebble dropped onto a cracked pane of glass.
Aemond turned.
Jace said his name once, warning in it. Luke’s smile faltered. Aemond crossed the yard without haste, which was perhaps what frightened them most. His anger had gone very cold. It no longer shook in his hands. It had become purpose.
“Say it again,” Aemond said.
Luke lifted his chin. He was brave when watched. They all were. “I said perhaps you should practice,” Luke replied. “You were always slow to become what you ought.”
Aemond struck him.
The first blow was human. The second was not. Claws split through Aemond’s fingers before he had willed them there, dark and curved and made for rending. Luke stumbled back, eyes wide, practice blade half-raised and useless between them. Around them, the yard erupted.
“Aemond!” Jace shouted.
Luke was not fast enough. He had never needed to be. There had always been someone older, stronger, more beloved standing close enough to pull him out of danger. He looked toward Jace now, panic turning his face young.
Aemond swung.
Had Luke stayed still, the blow might have glanced across his shoulder. Had Aemond pulled back, it might have ended in bruises, blood, another reprimand, another secret carried under the carpets of the Red Keep. Instead, Luke turned toward his brother at the exact wrong breath, and Aemond’s half-shifted hand found the soft place beneath his jaw.
There was no heroic sound. Only a wet, startled gasp.
Lucerys fell.
For one impossible moment, Aemond stared at him and understood nothing. Blood darkened the sand. Luke’s eyes were open. His mouth moved once, as if searching for a word, a breath, a brother.
Then Jace screamed. He came at Aemond with no training, no prince’s restraint, no thought beyond grief sharpened into a blade. Aemond saw the knife too late. It flashed from Jace’s boot, small and bright, and cut across the left side of his face.
Pain took the world apart.
Aemond remembered, with brutal clarity, that no one would save him from this. Not his mother with her frightened prayers. Not his brother with his careless laughter. Not his father, who had never looked quickly enough to see the wound before it scarred. The yard had already chosen its victim and its monster, and Aemond knew which one they would make of him.
So he did not wait for protection.
He shifted.
Bone narrowed. Skin feathered. Arms broke into wings with a violence that made him choke. The courtyard fell away beneath him as he became a pale hawk, ragged and blood-blinded, beating upward through shouts and reaching hands.
He flew badly.
Blood slicked the feathers around one eye. Every gust of wind struck like a hand. Towers blurred. Bells began to ring behind him. The Red Keep spilled its alarm into the city, and Aemond flew over roofs and chimneys and laundry lines until his wings forgot their rhythm.
He struck a tiled roof, rolled, clawed for purchase, and fell.
The alley received him without mercy.
He landed among fish bones, spoiled cabbage, rainwater, and ash. His hawk’s body spasmed around the wound. He could hear men shouting somewhere distant. Jace would come. Rhaenyra would come. Daemon would smile when he found him.
Aemond dragged one ruined wing beneath himself and forced the shape smaller.
White fur pushed through blood. Talons became claws. His skull changed with a nauseating twist, and then he was a cat, small enough to vanish beneath a broken crate, proud enough to hate the body even as it saved him.
His pristine fur was no longer pristine. The alley blackened him by inches. Soot clung to his belly. Filth matted his paws. Blood turned the left side of his face red and made one pale eye a swollen ruin. He curled beneath the crate and bared his teeth at the dark.
He had killed Lucerys Velaryon.
He had not meant to.
He had still done it.
The distinction mattered terribly to him and would matter not at all to anyone else.
Dusk thickened over the lower city. Rain began again, thin and cold. Aemond shook until shaking hurt too much, then went still. He listened to footsteps pass the alley mouth, to carts rattling over stones, to a woman laughing somewhere nearby, to the ordinary life of the city continuing despite the prince bleeding beneath broken wood.
When the next footsteps stopped, he opened his remaining eye.
“What have we here?” a woman murmured.
She crouched at the edge of the alley with a basket hooked over one arm and a shawl pulled tight beneath her chin. Her dress was faded green wool, patched neatly at the cuffs. A few brown curls had escaped her braid and clung damply to her cheek. She looked tired enough to pass by any other suffering thing and poor enough that no one would have blamed her for doing so.
Instead she set down her basket. “Oh, poor love,” she whispered.
Aemond hated her immediately.
He gathered what remained of his strength and struck when her hand came near. His teeth caught the edge of her glove. Not flesh. Not enough. Never enough. She did not flinch back the way sensible women did.
“There now,” she said softly. “I know. I would be cross too.”
She lifted the crate with care, as if he were something precious rather than a filthy, half-dead creature with blood in his fur. Aemond hissed until the sound broke. She only reached beneath him and gathered him into both hands, gentle despite the claws he tried and failed to use.
“You are freezing,” she murmured, tucking him into the hollow of her shawl. “And stubborn. That is a terrible combination.”
Her body was warm. Her pulse moved beneath his cheek. She smelled of rain, thread, cheap soap, and the heel of bread wrapped in cloth at the bottom of her basket. No perfume. No court. No dragon smoke. No scheme he could see.
That made her more dangerous than any of them.
“Come on, then,” she said, rising with a small grunt of effort. “Let us get you home before a dog finds you.”
Aemond tried to bare his teeth again, but his body had betrayed him completely. His head sank against her wrist. The alley blurred. Above him, the woman bent her head against the rain and shielded him from it with her own shoulder.
He did not know her name yet. He would learn it soon enough.
Briony carried the wounded thing home, and beneath the folds of her shawl, Aemond Targaryen listened to her heartbeat as if it were a language he meant to master.