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Maris Rowan had learned, over the years, that there were quieter ways to ache.

One did not have to sigh at windows or weep into pillows to be made foolish by wanting. One did not have to chase after a man through crowded halls, nor blush so prettily that every lady in attendance turned to whisper behind lifted hands. Longing could be a disciplined little thing. It could sit straight-backed at table, hands folded, eyes lowered to a cup of wine gone untouched and bitter. It could smile when spoken to. It could curtsy when required. It could survive years on scraps.

Daemon Targaryen had given her many scraps.

A glance across a hall at King’s Landing when she was sixteen and newly come to court. A careless compliment on the pale green of her gown, delivered as though he had forgotten her name before the words had finished leaving his mouth. The brush of his shoulder against hers during a feast at Highgarden, warm through velvet and gone before she could decide whether it had happened at all. Once, at Dragonstone, he had taken an apple from the table beside her and smiled with half his mouth when she startled.

For a wiser woman, it would have been nothing.

Maris had made a kingdom of it.

She knew it was pathetic. She was not so gentle-minded as to be unaware of her own humiliation. House Rowan had not sent her from Goldengrove’s green-and-gold halls, from orchards heavy with blossom and courtyards trained into careful beauty, to moon over a prince twice as dangerous as any song had ever dared make him. Her mother had expected advantageous friendships, polished manners, perhaps a husband with broad lands and a tolerable temper. Her father had expected good sense. Maris had possessed both, once.

Then Daemon had looked at her as though she were something amusing and easily forgotten, and she had been ruined by the wanting to be remembered.

Now, in the smoky chamber where the commanders of the black host bent over their maps, Daemon did not look at her at all.

He stood at the head of the table with his silver hair bound back, one gloved hand braced beside a scatter of carved markers, the other resting on the pommel of Dark Sister. Candlelight caught on the sharp line of his cheek, on the old blood darkening his sleeve, on the restless impatience in every inch of him. He looked as though he had been fashioned for war before anyone had thought to ask whether he might be fit for peace.

Maris stood near the wall with the other ladies permitted to linger because they carried messages, fetched wine, listened well, or had been born valuable enough that no one wished to offend them by ordering them out. She held a roll of parchment in both hands and tried very hard not to watch him.

She failed, of course.

Everyone watched Daemon. Men watched him for command, for violence, for the promise that he would lead them toward victory or death with the same bright hunger. Ladies watched despite themselves. Lords watched because not watching a dragon was a poor way to survive one. But Daemon’s attention was fixed upon the woman across from him, her dark braid hanging over one black-clad shoulder, her fingers stained with ink and horse-leather rather than rose oil.

Black Aly had arrived from the riverlands with mud on her boots and three better ideas than the men who had been arguing since dawn.

“If you send them through the lower pass, they’ll be dead before the sun clears the ridge,” Alysanne Blackwood said, tapping the map with the blunt end of a dagger. “The ground is soft there. Too soft for mounted men. They’ll sink, and while they’re trying to pull themselves free, the greens will cut them open like fish.”

One of the lords bristled. “You are very certain of yourself.”

“I usually am when I’m right.”

A rough laugh went around the table. Daemon’s mouth curved. It was not much. It was barely a smile. But Maris saw it because she had spent years teaching herself to notice every flicker of expression he spent so thoughtlessly on others. His amusement was there, quick and dangerous, and worse than that, approval.

Daemon leaned closer to the map. “And where would you have them go, Black Aly?”

The nickname came easily from him. Too easily. As though he had rolled it over his tongue before and found it pleasing.

Maris looked down at the parchment in her hands until the words blurred. She was ashamed of the sting beneath her ribs, because Black Aly had done nothing to earn it. She was magnificent in exactly the way songs preferred women to be magnificent now that war had come for them all: bold, blooded, clever before men who wished her silent. She spoke of terrain and ambush as easily as Maris spoke of seating arrangements. She wore a sword as if it had grown there.

No wonder Daemon looked.

Maris had soft hands when they were not ink-stained. She knew the names of flowers by season and which lord preferred his wine cut with water and which lady would forgive a slight if seated close enough to power. She was small enough that northern swords looked obscene beside her, iron things nearly as long as she was tall. She could shoot, a little. Better than most ladies, worse than most men who had been taught because their lives might depend upon it. With a blade she was clumsy, all wrist and fear, forever stepping back when she ought to press forward.

She was not made for war. But perhaps that was the trouble. Perhaps Daemon Targaryen had never noticed things that were not made to burn.

The yard below the eastern curtain wall was empty when Maris found it. That was the only reason she stayed. By daylight it belonged to men: shouting men, sweating men, men who laughed with their mouths full of blood after taking a practice blow to the teeth. They filled it with the clash of blunted steel and the stink of horse and leather and old confidence. Maris had watched them from balconies and covered walks often enough to know that they moved as though the hard-packed earth had been made for their feet alone.

At dusk, after the command chamber had emptied and Daemon had gone off with Alysanne Blackwood and half the captains to inspect the lower ridge, the yard became only a yard. Wind moved along the stones. A torch guttered near the armoury door. Somewhere beyond the walls, Caraxes screamed at the darkening sky, and every horse in the stables answered with nervous hooves.

Maris stood in the centre of the yard with a sword in both hands and wished she had been born wiser.

The blade was not even sharpened. It had been left among the practice weapons, plain and nicked, its leather grip smelling faintly of sweat. Still, it felt enormous. Too heavy at the tip. Too eager to drag her wrist downward. When she lifted it the way she had seen knights do, her shoulders tightened almost at once, and the muscles in her arms began to tremble with embarrassing speed.

“Ridiculous,” she muttered.

The straw man before her offered no argument. It had been stabbed, hacked, and battered into a lopsided shape that might once have resembled a person if one were generous and very drunk. Maris squared herself before it, adjusted her grip as best she could remember, and swung. The sword struck low and slid off the stuffed torso with a humiliating scrape. She nearly followed it.

Heat rushed up her neck. There was no one there to see it, which somehow made it worse. At least if someone had laughed, her anger might have had somewhere to go.

Again, she told herself. She swung again. Then again. Each attempt jarred her arms and set her teeth together. The straw man accepted her violence with patient indifference. Her footwork was worse than her grip. When she stepped forward, she came too close. When she stepped back, she nearly tripped over her own skirts, which she had tied up around her knees with such determination and so little elegance that she looked less like a warrior than a laundress fleeing a flood.

Black Aly would not have tripped over her skirts. Black Aly would have worn breeches, spat in the mud, and asked for a heavier blade. Maris hated her a little for that and then hated herself more for being the sort of woman who could hate someone for being everything she was not.

She lowered the sword and pressed the back of her wrist to her mouth, breathing hard. Her palms had begun to sting. A thin line of broken skin showed where the grip had rubbed her thumb raw.

“You’ll lose that hand before you take a head.”

Maris turned so quickly the sword nearly slipped from her hand. Alysanne Blackwood stood beneath the archway that led in from the lower steps, one shoulder propped against the stone as though she had been there long enough to be either amused or concerned and had not yet decided which suited her better. There was mud on the hem of her coat. Her braid had come half loose from the wind. A dagger hung at her hip, and the sword at her back looked as natural there as another limb.

Maris tightened both hands around the practice blade as if dignity might be wrung from leather. “My lady.”

“Don’t ‘my lady’ me while you’re bleeding on a training sword.” Alysanne pushed away from the wall and crossed the yard with the easy, unhurried stride of someone who had never once wondered whether she was allowed to take up space. “Show me your hand.”

“It is nothing.”

“That is often what people say about things that fester.” There was no kindness in the words, exactly, but neither was there mockery. That made it harder to refuse. Maris held out her hand. Alysanne took her wrist and turned her palm toward the torchlight. Her fingers were calloused, her nails cut short. She inspected the raw place at Maris’s thumb and made a low sound in her throat. “You’re gripping it like it means to fly away.”

Maris pulled her hand back, cheeks warming. “It is heavier than it looks.”

Alysanne’s gaze moved over her, taking in the tied-up skirts, the strained shoulders, the sword angled point-down because Maris could not quite keep it level. “Who taught you?”

“No one.”

“That was my next guess.”

Maris looked away first. It was that or say something foolish, and she had already exhausted her allowance for the evening.

Alysanne reached for the sword. “Give it here.”

For one miserable heartbeat, Maris wanted to refuse. She wanted to prove that she could hold it, swing it, become the sort of woman who did not need to be corrected in empty yards by women Daemon Targaryen smiled at. Then her thumb throbbed, and pride felt briefly less important than keeping the rest of her hand attached. She surrendered the blade.

Alysanne weighed it once, then shifted her grip. “This is too long for you. Too much reach to control before you’ve learned what to do with your feet. If a man gets inside it, he’ll take it from you.” She glanced at Maris’s hands. “Or you’ll give it to him by accident.”

“I can learn.”

“Of course you can.” Alysanne’s answer was immediate, which somehow made the next part worse. “But not by tomorrow.”

Silence settled between them, broken only by the slap of wind against banners far above. Maris’s mouth tightened.

Alysanne sighed through her nose, not quite impatiently. “Look at me, Rowan.”

Maris did, because the command was impossible not to obey.

“If you mean to stand in a battle, learn the first rule before you learn to look impressive.”

“Which is?”

“Do not die beautifully.” Alysanne set the sword point-first into the dirt between them. “It is a waste of everyone’s time.”

Maris stared at her.

“You’re small,” Alysanne continued. “That is not an insult unless you decide to make it one. You are not going to outmatch a knight with a practice blade and two hours of stubbornness. You will not become taller by wanting it. You will not become stronger because a man once looked pleased at a woman who was.”

The words struck with such clean accuracy that Maris forgot to pretend she did not understand them.

For once, Alysanne had the grace not to press the wound immediately. Instead, she looked toward the armoury. “Can you shoot?”

Maris hesitated. “A little.”

“That usually means yes, but you were taught not to boast.”

“It means I can hit a target if the target is still.”

That earned her the smallest flash of a grin. “Most men in battle are not still. They are loud, stupid, frightened, and moving in the wrong direction. Fortunately, that makes many of them easier to shoot than they deserve.”

Alysanne crossed to the weapon rack and returned with a short bow, plain and well-used, the kind a scout might carry. She tossed it lightly toward Maris, who caught it against her chest with far less grace than she would have liked.

“There,” Alysanne said. “That looks less like it wants to murder you.”

The feel of it steadied something in Maris despite herself. The bow was not elegant, but it fit her hand. Its weight was familiar in a way the sword could never be, recalling summer mornings at Goldengrove when she had loosed arrows at straw circles while her brothers laughed and wagered whether she would split one shaft with another.

She had, once. Her brothers had stopped laughing then.

Alysanne pointed to the straw man. “Shoot him.”

Maris swallowed. “In the heart?”

“In whatever part stops him.”

Maris nocked an arrow. Her hands still stung, but the motion was known to her: feather against cheek, breath held, the small tightening world between eye and target. The yard, the torch, Alysanne’s watchful silence—all of it narrowed to a point.

She loosed. The arrow struck the straw man high in the left shoulder and quivered there. Maris exhaled, disappointed despite every sensible reason not to be.

“Shoulder is fine,” Alysanne said. “A man with an arrow in his shoulder has one less arm to kill you with.”

Maris glanced at her. “That is not what the songs say.”

“Songs are written by people standing far from the killing.” That, more than anything else Alysanne had said, made Maris’s stomach twist. Alysanne saw it. Of course she did. “You are frightened.”

Maris lifted her chin. “I am not.”

Alysanne gave her a look dry enough to sour wine. “That lie will kill you faster than a green knight.”

There was no answer to that, not one Maris could make herself speak.

Alysanne stepped closer, lowering her voice. “Everyone is frightened. Some men shout so they do not hear it. Some women smile so no one sees it. Some fools call it courage and get themselves cut open before noon. Fear is not the thing that matters.”

“What does?” Maris asked.

“What you do while it has its teeth in you.”

Caraxes cried again somewhere beyond the wall, nearer this time, the sound scraping red through the dusk. Maris looked toward it before she could stop herself. When she looked back, Alysanne was studying her with a new sharpness.

“If you are going into battle because you want Prince Daemon to look at you,” she said, “do not.”

Maris’s face went hot, then cold. “I am going because the host needs every able hand.”

“That is a better answer.” Alysanne tilted her head. “Not a true one.”

The yard seemed suddenly too open, the sky above it too large. Maris looked at the arrow lodged in the straw man’s shoulder and thought of Daemon bending over the map, his smile quickening at another woman’s boldness.

Maris sighed. “I know I am pathetic. I can imagine I am the sort of woman you would be ashamed of.”

“Risking your life for his notice is pathetic,” Alysanne said. “Wanting to be seen is not.”

Maris flinched as if Alysanne had stepped close enough to strike her.

For a moment, neither of them moved. The wind worried at the loose strands of Alysanne’s hair, tugging them across her cheek. She looked suddenly younger in the torchlight, or perhaps only less untouchable. Then Alysanne sighed, and some small part of the hardness went out of her shoulders.

“That was crueler than I meant it to be,” she said.

Maris blinked. Of all the things she had expected from Black Aly, apology had not been among them. “It was true.”

“Most cruel things are. That is why people enjoy saying them.” Alysanne looked back toward the straw man and the arrow quivering from its shoulder. “I do not.”

The admission sat awkwardly between them, rough-edged and sincere. Maris did not know what to do with it. She had known how to dislike Alysanne when the woman was only boldness and mud and Daemon’s approving smile. It was harder when she stood in an empty yard and admitted to being unkind.

Alysanne took the bow from Maris’s hand, not to keep it, but to turn it in her grip and settle it properly against Maris’s palm. Her touch was brisk. Practical. Almost gentle, if one did not look too closely at the almost.

“You want him to see you?” she asked.

Maris’s throat tightened. She could have lied. She had lied all evening, poorly and often. “Yes,” she said.

The word came out small, stripped of pride. It hung there, humiliating and honest. Alysanne did not laugh. That was worse, somehow. Better, too.

“Then live long enough for it to matter,” Alysanne said.

Maris looked up.

Alysanne’s expression had not softened into anything sentimental. It was not encouragement meant to shine prettily in the dark. It was an order, plain as a whetted knife.

“That is your battlefield rule,” she said. “Do not chase glory. Do not chase a prince. Do not chase a man who has fallen where you cannot reach him. You keep distance. You keep your feet. You shoot what comes too close, and if your hands shake, you shoot anyway.”

Maris repeated it silently, each piece lodging somewhere beneath her ribs. Keep distance. Keep your feet. Shoot anyway. “And if someone gets past the bow?” Maris asked.

Alysanne looked at the sword standing in the dirt between them. “Then you do not try to be strong. You become difficult.”

“Difficult?”

“Yes.” Alysanne stepped around behind her and nudged Maris’s stance wider with the toe of her boot. “Small women die when they pretend they are large men. Small women live when large men discover they are hard to hold, hard to hit, and entirely willing to put a knife somewhere regrettable.”

Maris turned her head. “I do not have a knife.”

Alysanne stared at her for one appalled heartbeat. “Gods help every southern girl,” she said, and pulled the dagger from her own belt. The blade was short, plain, and ugly, with a dark wooden grip worn smooth by use. Alysanne held it hilt-first.

Maris did not take it at once. “I cannot take your dagger.”

“You can if I am giving it to you.”

“Why?”

Alysanne’s mouth twisted, not quite a smile. “Because if you die after I have had to watch that sad business with the sword, I will take it personally.”

Maris closed her fingers around the hilt.

***

That night, Maris did not sleep.

She lay in the narrow bed allotted to her within the keep, staring up at the dark beams while the wind dragged its claws over the shutters. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw the command chamber: Daemon bent over the map, Black Aly’s dagger tapping a path through death, the brief curve of his mouth when she spoke. Then the yard returned instead, torchlight and straw, Alysanne’s hand turning the bow in hers.

Do not chase glory. Do not chase a prince.

Maris turned onto her side and drew her knees up beneath the blankets. The dagger lay beneath her pillow, ugly and solid and impossible to forget. She had placed it there after washing her hands, then moved it to the table, then moved it back again because the table was too far away if someone came through the door, which was a foolish thought in a locked chamber within a friendly keep and nevertheless true enough to keep her awake.

Her thumb throbbed where the practice sword had rubbed the skin raw. She pressed it against her palm until the sting sharpened, as if pain might prove she had done something more than make a spectacle of herself in an empty yard.

Wanting to be seen is not pathetic.

The words would not leave her. They sat beside every other truth Maris had spent years folding small enough to hide. She did not want to be Black Aly, not truly. She did not want mud on her boots or blood beneath her nails or the easy certainty of someone who could place men on a map so that fewer of them died. She wanted Daemon to look at her with that same sudden attention. She wanted, foolishly and fiercely, to believe that wanting such a thing did not make her pathetic.

Near dawn, when sleep had finally crept close enough to mock her, horns sounded from the walls.

Maris rose before she could think better of it. She dressed without calling for her maid. A plain dark gown first, then a leather jerkin borrowed from the stores and tightened until it sat awkwardly over her ribs. She braided her hair twice, badly both times, and settled for pinning the loose pieces wherever they would obey. The dagger went beneath the jerkin, tucked against her side where its weight pressed cold and certain through the linen.

She looked at herself once in the small polished mirror near the washstand and almost laughed. She did not look like Black Aly. She looked like a girl playing dress-up in someone else’s war. Still, when she took up the short bow and quiver left for her outside the armoury door, her hands did not shake as badly as she had feared.

The lower yard had become a chaos of noise. Men shouted over the creak of wagons and the stamping of horses. Captains barked orders. Septons moved through the ranks with pale faces and trembling hands, pressing blessings onto men who pretended not to need them. Above it all, Caraxes circled once beyond the walls, a long red shadow against the bruised morning sky.

Maris found the archers near the east gate. Most were boys younger than her brothers or men too old to ride in the first charge. One woman with a scar through her eyebrow glanced at Maris’s clean boots, clicked her tongue once, and said, “I’m Morya. If you panic, do it behind me.” Then she checked the fletching on her arrows without looking down. Maris decided to be grateful. Keep distance. Keep your feet. Shoot anyway. She repeated it until the words lost meaning and became only rhythm.

Then the yard shifted, not loudly, but completely.

Daemon Targaryen entered as though the morning had been waiting for him. He wore black plate and dark leather, his silver hair drawn back from his face, Dark Sister at his hip. There was no softness in him now, no careless courtly amusement, no languid prince leaning too close over a cup of wine. This was the man the songs tried and failed to make beautiful: lean, sharp, eager for ruin.

Men straightened as he passed. Some smiled. Some went still. Maris lowered her eyes too late.

“Lady Rowan.”

Her breath caught before she could stop it. Not my lady. Not girl. Her name, nearly. Her house, at least.

Daemon had stopped before her, gaze moving over the bow, the quiver, the ill-fitted leather buckled over her gown. His mouth did something that was not quite a smile. “This is a poor place for silk.”

For once, Maris did not look away. “Then it is fortunate I am not wearing any.”

The faintest spark crossed his face. It vanished almost at once, swallowed by the call of a captain and the answering clatter of men forming ranks. Daemon looked past her toward the gate, toward the road, toward the violence waiting beyond the morning mist.

“Stay with the archers,” he said. It was not concern. It could not be concern. It was command, nothing more.

Maris bowed her head anyway. “As my prince commands.”

Daemon looked back at her then, brief and unreadable. Then he turned away, and the gate opened.

The sound of it was worse than the horns. Iron groaned against iron. Chains rattled up through the stone. The eastern gate lifted by degrees, revealing the road beyond and the pale, low mist pooling over the fields like milk gone sour.

No one cheered when they marched out.

Maris had thought there would be some great sound to mark the beginning of battle, something the singers could seize upon later and make mighty. A roar. A clash. A prince lifting his sword beneath a dragon’s shadow.

Instead, there was mud. It sucked at the soles of her boots and clung to the hem of her gown where she had tied it up beneath the jerkin. It spattered her calves. It made every step ugly. Around her, the archers moved in a loose line beside the road, bows held low, quivers knocking softly against hips and backs. The older man to Maris’s left kept muttering a prayer under his breath. Morya clicked her tongue again, spat once into the grass, and checked the fletching on her arrows without looking down.

Keep distance. Keep your feet. Shoot anyway. She fixed her eyes on the ridge ahead and repeated it until the words became the measure of her breathing.

The enemy did not look like monsters from a distance. That was disappointing in a way she was ashamed to admit. Across the shallow valley, beneath banners she refused to study too closely, the green host was only men: helms and shields, horses stamping white breath into the morning, boys shifting nervously in ranks too straight to last. Somewhere among them were people who had mothers, sisters, hands that had once held cups and combs and little children. Somewhere among them were men who would kill her if they came close enough.

Maris’s stomach turned.

Then Caraxes screamed. The sound cleaved the morning open. Every head lifted. The Blood Wyrm came over the ridge in a long, red coil, wings beating mist into shreds, his shadow streaming over the field before him. Fire gathered in his throat like a second sun.

When he loosed it, the world became orange.

Men who had been men an instant before became shapes inside flame. Horses screamed with such high, terrible voices that Maris forgot horses could sound like that. The front of the green line buckled, not from strategy or steel, but from horror. Smoke rolled toward the archers in thick, bitter sheets.

Beside her, someone laughed. Not because anything was funny, Maris understood at once, but because the body sometimes mistook terror for mirth when there was no room left for anything else.

“Nock!” shouted a captain.

Maris’s hands moved because they had been taught to move, because Alysanne had set the bow correctly in her palm, because long-dead summer mornings at Goldengrove had left their ghosts in her fingers. Arrow to string. Feather to cheek. Breath held.

“Loose!”

The first volley flew.

Maris watched her arrow vanish into smoke and bodies and could not tell whether it struck anyone. She told herself that was mercy. She told herself it was cowardice. She did not know which lie she preferred.

The second volley came faster. The third faster still. The rhythm swallowed thought: nock, draw, loose; nock, draw, loose. Her shoulder began to ache. Her raw thumb split open again, slicking the bowstring with blood. Smoke stung her eyes until tears blurred the field, and still she shot because the captain shouted and those around her shot and stopping seemed more impossible than continuing.

Then the lines met. There was no song in it. Steel struck steel with a sound like anvils breaking. Men collided and vanished into one another. Shields cracked. Someone screamed for his father. Someone else screamed for a god who did not answer quickly enough. Caraxes passed overhead again, so low the heat of him rolled across Maris’s face, and Daemon was beneath him on the field, black and silver and red, cutting through the chaos as though it had been made for him.

Maris saw him because she had always seen him. He moved with dreadful grace, Dark Sister flashing in his hand, his face alight with that terrible joy she had once mistaken for beauty. A man came at him from the left and died before Maris had finished drawing breath. Another tried to strike from behind and Caraxes’s flame took three men at once, leaving only blackened shapes where they had stood.

“Rowan!” Morya snapped beside her. “Eyes front!”

Maris jerked back to herself just in time to see a rider break through the smoke, bearing down on the archers with a green shield splintered across one arm. Keep distance. Keep your feet. Shoot anyway. Her hands shook. She shot anyway.

The arrow struck the horse in the neck. Maris made a sound she did not recognize as the animal pitched forward, screaming, and threw its rider hard into the mud. The man vanished beneath hooves and bodies before she could see his face.

She wanted to be sick. There was no time.

Another shape came through the smoke, and another. The archers scattered back, then reformed, then scattered again as the battle warped around them. Maris stumbled once and nearly went down. A hand caught the back of her jerkin and yanked her upright.

“Feet,” Morya barked.

Maris found them.

For a little while, that was all survival meant. Feet in the mud. Bow in hand. Breath enough to draw and loose. Maris stopped thinking of the field as a field and saw only what came nearest: a flash of green cloth, a bare throat beneath a lifted helm, a hand with a mace, a man staggering backward with fire on his sleeve. She shot too high once and too low twice. She struck someone in the thigh and heard him scream. She missed a boy who could not have been older than her youngest brother and was glad with such sudden force that she nearly dropped the bow.

Then Morya went down.

There was no warning. One moment Morya was there, cursing and shooting and hauling Maris back into the world by the scruff like an ill-trained pup. The next, an arrow jutted from the gap below her collarbone, and she was on her knees, staring at it with an expression of profound irritation. “Oh,” she said, and fell forward into the mud.

Maris stared at her back.

Move, she thought. The word did not reach her legs.

A horn sounded somewhere to the left. Men shouted for the line to wheel. Caraxes roared above them, farther now, his flame raking across a cluster of men trying to regroup near the ridge. The heat flashed over the field and vanished, leaving cold smoke in its wake.

And through that smoke, Maris saw Daemon fall. It was impossible at first. Her mind rejected it so completely that the sight broke apart into pieces: the black gleam of his armour, the silver slash of his hair, Dark Sister lowering a fraction too late. A man with a broken shield came at him from the side while Daemon turned toward another, and the pommel of a mace caught him hard against the temple.

His head snapped sideways. Blood marked his hairline in a dark sudden line. Daemon Targaryen dropped to one knee. For one breath, he still seemed like something that could not be killed.

Then he fell face-first into the mud.

Do not chase a prince.

Black Aly’s voice cut through the din as clearly as if she stood beside her.

Do not chase a man who has fallen where you cannot reach him.

Maris was already running.

She did not remember deciding to move. She only knew that distance vanished beneath her boots in great, foolish, slipping strides. Someone shouted after her. Someone may have grabbed for her sleeve. The bow knocked against her palm, useless while she ran, and the quiver beat against her back like a second heart.

Keep distance, Alysanne had said. Maris threw distance away.

She reached him as another green soldier staggered toward Daemon with a short axe raised in both hands. The man’s helm was dented and his face was streaked with soot. He did not see her until she had stopped, planted both feet in the mud, and drawn. Her hands shook so badly the arrowhead wavered over his chest. She shot anyway.

The arrow struck him beneath the jaw. He fell without a word, axe dropping from his fingers.

For half a heartbeat, silence opened around Maris.

It was not real silence. The battle still raged, loud enough to shake the marrow from her bones. Men shouted. Horses screamed. Metal shrieked against metal. Caraxes roared somewhere beyond the smoke. But Maris heard none of it. She heard only her own breath, thin and ragged, and the wet sound the man made when he struck the ground.

She had killed him. There was no time to understand what that meant.

Daemon lay at her feet, one cheek pressed into the churned mud, blood darkening the silver hair at his temple. Dark Sister had fallen just beyond his reach. His fingers twitched once, then went still.

“No,” Maris said, though she did not know whether she spoke to him, the gods, or herself.

She moved without thought, stepping over him, turning her back to his body and lifting the bow again.

Another man came through the smoke. This one was close. Too close.

He was broad in the shoulders, his green surcoat torn open over a dented breastplate. Blood ran from a cut above one eye, striping his face red. When he saw Maris standing over Daemon, his mouth split into a grin that made her stomach drop.

“Well,” he said, voice rough with smoke. “What have we here?”

Maris drew an arrow. He lunged before she could set it to string. The bow was knocked from her hand. Pain burst through her fingers. She stumbled back over Daemon’s arm and nearly fell across him, catching herself at the last instant with one hand in the mud.

“Pretty thing,” the man said, raising his sword. “You should have stayed behind your walls.”

Maris snatched for Dark Sister. Her hand closed around the hilt, and the weight of it nearly pulled her shoulder from its socket. She had never touched Valyrian steel before. Some absurd part of her expected it to feel alive. It felt like a sword. Too long, too heavy, and utterly indifferent to whether she deserved to hold it.

The first blow drove her to one knee. She caught it badly, steel shuddering down her arms until her teeth clicked together. The second came from the side. She turned too slowly. The force of it spun her, and if the blade had not slid off Dark Sister’s edge, it would have opened her from shoulder to breast.

Do not try to be strong, Alysanne had said.

You become difficult.

Maris let the next strike push her backward instead of fighting it. She slipped in the mud, caught herself, and scrambled away from Daemon’s body just far enough that the man had to step after her. His boot sank deep. His balance shifted.

She swung at his knee. The blow landed flat and clumsy, but he cursed and staggered.

“Little viper.” He came harder then. Faster. Maris barely saw the sword before it crashed against hers. Dark Sister tore from her grip and spun away into the mud.

For a moment, she stared at her empty hands. Then his boot struck her chest.

Maris hit the ground hard enough to drive the breath from her lungs. The sky wheeled above her, smoke-black and dragon-red. Her ribs screamed. Her fingers clawed uselessly at mud.

The man stood over her, breathing hard. His gaze moved once over her face, her throat, the torn leather buckled over her gown. “Shame,” he said. “Pretty woman like you. Might have had some fun before I opened you.”

Caraxes roared. The sound came close enough to shake the ground beneath her back.

The man looked up, smile vanishing.

“Sorry, beauty,” he muttered, lifting his sword in both hands. “No time.”

Maris saw the blade rise above his head. She thought, with absurd clarity, that Alysanne would be very cross about the dagger.

Then steel burst through the man’s chest.

His mouth opened. Nothing came out but blood. The sword withdrew, and the man pitched sideways into the mud.

Daemon Targaryen stood behind him.

Blood ran down the side of his face, bright against the silver at his temple. One eye was narrowed, unfocused with pain. Mud streaked his armour. He looked less like a prince than a corpse that had remembered, out of spite, that it was not finished.

For one wild moment, Maris thought she had imagined him. Then he looked down at her.

For a moment, neither of them moved.

Maris lay half in the mud, one hand pressed to her ribs, staring up at him as if the whole world had narrowed to the blood on his face and the sword in his hand. The battle crashed around them, but Daemon seemed apart from it, swaying slightly, breathing through his teeth.

His gaze moved from her face to the dead man beside her, then to the bow trampled near Daemon’s boot, then to Dark Sister lying in the mud where she had lost it. Something shifted in his expression. Not softness. Not gratitude, not properly. Daemon Targaryen did not look grateful in battle. But interest sharpened there beneath the blood and fury, bright as a blade catching sun.

“If you mean to die for me, sweetling,” he said, voice rough and almost amused, “choose a better day. I have only just begun to find you interesting.”

Maris might have laughed if she had any breath left. Instead, she made a broken sound somewhere between outrage and relief. “You were unconscious,” she managed.

“And yet,” Daemon said, bending to seize her by the arm, “I appear to be handling the situation better than you.” He pulled her up too quickly. Pain flashed through her side, and her knees nearly failed beneath her. Daemon caught her before she fell, one arm locking around her waist for a single brutal heartbeat.

He was hot with fevered blood and dragonfire, solid beneath armour, and terrifyingly alive. Maris gripped his forearm because there was nothing else in the world that felt steady.

His eyes flicked down to her hand, then back to her face. “Can you stand?”

“Yes.” It was a lie, but a useful one.

Daemon released her only enough to stoop for Dark Sister. When he straightened, the movement was too sharp; his face went briefly blank with pain before arrogance closed over it again.

“You can hardly stand either,” she said.

His smile showed teeth. “Then we are both liars.”

Another roar tore across the field. Caraxes came low through the smoke, red wings beating hard, his long neck twisting toward them. Men scattered before the shadow of him.

Daemon’s grip tightened on Maris’s arm. “Go,” he said.

Maris looked past him at the field, at the broken places in the line, at men still fighting and dying in knots of mud and flame. “The archers—”

“Are not your concern if you cannot draw a bow.” His eyes dropped to her injured hand, the blood slick across her fingers. “Get behind the second line.”

“I can still—”

“You can still bleed on my field, yes.” He leaned closer, near enough that she could see the blood caught in his lashes. “Do not.”

It should not have sounded like concern. It did.

Before Maris could answer, Daemon shoved something into her hand. Alysanne’s dagger. She must have dropped it when she fell. Daemon’s thumb pressed briefly over her knuckles, forcing her fingers closed around the hilt.

Maris stared at him. Somehow, impossibly, he smiled. Then he turned from her and went back into the smoke.

Maris stood where he had left her, dagger in hand, mud to her knees, and watched the smoke swallow him. For one foolish moment, she almost followed.

Her body decided against it before pride could. Her ribs burned with every breath. Her right hand throbbed so fiercely that the dagger felt less held than trapped between numb fingers. When she took one step, the field tilted. When she took another, she nearly went down.

Behind the second line, he had said. So Maris went.

Not bravely. Not beautifully. She stumbled through churned mud and trampled grass with one arm pressed to her side, flinching at every clash of steel that sounded too near. Twice she raised the dagger at shadows that were only men of her own host running past. Once, a wounded soldier caught at her skirt and begged for water, and she froze so completely that another man had to kneel beside him in her place.

Shame followed close behind.

Then Caraxes screamed again, and the green line broke. It did not break all at once. It buckled at the ridge first, where dragonfire had eaten through men and courage alike. Then a gap opened near the road. Then another. Orders became shouts, shouts became panic, and panic moved faster than any horse. Men threw down shields to run more quickly. Others died because they turned their backs. The black host surged after them, ragged and roaring, too exhausted for elegance and too full of blood to stop.

Maris reached the second line as the first cries of victory began to lift from the field. They did not sound the way she had imagined victory would sound.

There was relief in them, yes. Triumph, yes. But underneath it all lay something rawer, something animal and thin. Men laughed because they had lived. Men wept because others had not. Men shouted names that would not answer.

Maris found a broken cart and sat because standing had become impossible. The dagger remained in her hand. She could not remember how to unclench her fingers.

A healer passed by and glanced at her, took in the blood on her face, her split hand, the way she held herself around her ribs. “My lady?”

Maris opened her mouth. Nothing came out.

The healer’s expression changed—not pity, exactly, but recognition. She crouched without asking and pried Maris’s fingers gently from the dagger one by one. “You can keep it,” the woman said when Maris made a small sound of protest. “Only let me check your hand first.” Maris looked down and saw, as if from a great distance, that blood had dried beneath her nails.

She thought of the man beneath her arrow. The horse screaming. Morya sinking into the mud with irritation on her face, as if death had inconvenienced her.

I was afraid, she thought.

It only made her tired.

By the time the horns sounded again—not warning now, but recall—the field had already begun to change from a place of battle into a place of aftermath. Men dragged the wounded toward the road. The dead lay where they had fallen, suddenly smaller without motion in them. Smoke curled low over the grass. Somewhere beyond it, Caraxes bellowed, restless and displeased, while the sky above him cleared to a hard, indifferent blue.

Maris did not remember the walk.

She remembered pieces only: the healer binding her hand with linen that turned pink almost at once; someone insisting her ribs were bruised, not broken; a boy with soot in his hair vomiting into the ditch beside the road; Caraxes crouched beyond the walls like a red nightmare with smoke leaking from his jaws. She remembered asking after Morya and receiving no answer that mattered.

Inside the keep, victory had already begun turning itself into noise. The great hall smelled of smoke, wine, sweat, and blood no amount of rushes could hide. Men who could hardly stand leaned against trestle tables and lifted cups with shaking hands. Someone had started a song and forgotten half the words. Someone else laughed too loudly at nothing. Servants moved between them with pitchers and bowls and bandages, their faces pale and set.

Maris sat near the end of a bench with a cup of wine untouched before her and Alysanne’s dagger laid carefully beside it.

She had washed her face twice. Blood still darkened the fine lines around her nails. Mud clung beneath the hem of her gown, dried now into a stiff brown crust. Every breath pulled at her ribs. Every shout from the hall made her shoulders tighten.

Across the room, lords were already making the battle cleaner with words. A good strike. A costly but necessary push. They spoke of the dead by number when they could, by house when they had to, and by name only when the wine made forgetting impossible.

Maris hated them a little for it. She hated herself more because she knew that by morning, perhaps by next week, she too would need words to make it smaller. If she did not give the day edges, it would swallow her whole.

“You lived.”

Maris looked up. Alysanne stood beside the bench with one cheek bruised, her braid nearly undone, and a bloodied bandage wrapped around her upper arm. She looked tired enough to be mortal. Somehow, that steadied Maris more than anything had all evening.

“So did you,” Maris said.

“I make a habit of it.” Alysanne’s gaze dropped to the dagger on the table. “You brought that back.”

Maris touched the hilt with two fingers. “Prince Daemon returned it to me.”

Alysanne’s brows rose, but she only said, “Did he?” There was a tone in it Maris did not have the strength to examine.

“I failed your rule,” Maris said.

“Which one?”

“Most of them.”

Alysanne considered that, then lowered herself onto the bench with a wince she did not bother hiding. “You are here to talk about it. That means you followed the important one.”

Maris looked at her hands. “I was afraid the whole time.”

“Good,” Alysanne said. “Fear remembers to keep you alive. Pride forgets to.”

Maris let out a breath that might have become a laugh in another life.

At the high table, someone called for another cup in Prince Daemon’s name. Maris looked before she could stop herself.

Daemon stood near the hearth with a cup in one hand and a strip of linen wrapped around his head beneath the fall of his silver hair. Blood had been washed from his face, but the cut at his temple had reopened, staining the bandage red. He was pale beneath the firelight. He was laughing at something one of the captains said as though he had not been struck down in the mud hours before.

Alive, Maris thought, and hated the weakness of her relief.

Across the hall, as though he felt the shape of her looking, Daemon’s gaze found hers.

He did not smile. He only looked. It was worse.

Maris turned away first.

“Ah,” Alysanne said.

“Do not,” Maris warned.

“I said nothing.”

Despite herself, Maris nearly smiled. It failed halfway and became something smaller, sadder. She pushed the untouched wine away. “I cannot stay here,” she said.

Alysanne’s amusement faded. She looked at Maris’s face, really looked, and nodded once. “Then do not.”

Maris took the dagger with her. She did not mean to make a scene of leaving. She had neither the strength nor the vanity for it. She rose quietly, one hand braced on the table until the hall stopped dipping beneath her feet, then tucked the dagger against her side and slipped behind a cluster of men arguing over whether the left flank had broken before or after Caraxes’s second pass.

No one stopped her. That was almost a mercy.

The corridor beyond the great hall was dim and blessedly cool. The noise followed her through the doorway, muffled by stone, thinning with every step until the victory behind her sounded like weather in another room. Torches burned low in their brackets. Their light trembled over the walls and made the shadows look as if they too were trying to breathe.

Maris walked until she found an alcove beneath a narrow window, half-hidden where the corridor bent toward the stair. The air smelled faintly of rain and old smoke. Through the slit of glassless stone, she could see only the darkening yard below and, beyond it, the red shape of Caraxes curled near the outer wall.

She leaned one shoulder against the cold stone. For a while, that was enough. Stone. Darkness. Her own breathing. The dull pulse in her hand. The sharper pull of bruised ribs. The dagger’s hilt pressing into her palm because she had not realized she was gripping it again.

Then the quiet made room for everything else.

The man dropping with her arrow in his throat. The horse screaming. The scarred woman staring at the shaft in her chest as if offended by it. Daemon face-down in the mud. The blade raised above her. The wet heat of blood where steel had burst through a man’s chest.

Maris bent forward before she knew she meant to, one hand clamped over her mouth. Nothing came up. There was nothing in her to give. She only shook, silently and viciously, furious at herself for doing even that where someone might see.

Black Aly would not have hidden in a corridor. Black Aly was probably sitting in the hall with blood on her sleeve, drinking wine because her hands were too steady to betray her. Or perhaps they shook too, when no one looked. Perhaps Maris knew nothing at all about what women survived by becoming.

She pressed the heel of her bandaged hand against her eyes until sparks burst behind them.

“A poor hiding place.”

Maris went still.

Daemon stood at the bend in the corridor, one shoulder near the wall, a cup of wine dangling forgotten from his fingers. The linen around his head was stained red at the temple. Without the hall’s firelight and noise around him, he looked worse. Paler. Sharper. The sort of man who had left death behind him and not yet decided whether to laugh at it.

Maris lowered her hand from her face too quickly. “I was not hiding.”

His gaze flicked over her: the bright eyes she wished were not bright, the bandage around her hand, the dagger gripped hard enough to whiten her knuckles.

“No?” he said. Daemon’s mouth curved faintly, but the expression did not reach his eyes. He pushed away from the wall and came toward her with the slow, deliberate care of a man too proud to limp and too injured to move quickly.

Maris noticed despite herself. The slight drag in his step. The way his fingers tightened once around the cup before he set it on the stone ledge beside her. The fresh red creep at the edge of his bandage.

“You should be sitting,” she said.

“You first.”

She almost laughed. It felt dangerous, laughter. Too close to sobbing. “I am perfectly capable of standing.”

His gaze dropped to the arm she held close to her ribs. “We are back to lying, then.”

Maris looked at him then, properly, and wished she had not. He was too near. Near enough that she could see the exhaustion beneath the arrogance, the pain he carried like an insult rather than an injury. Near enough that the memory of his arm around her waist on the field returned with humiliating force.

“I thought you would still be in the hall,” she said.

“I was bored.”

“Of being toasted as victor?”

“Of hearing men describe a battle they survived from ten paces behind me.”

That startled something out of her—a breath, almost amusement, almost agreement. It vanished quickly.

Daemon watched it go. “You should have stayed with the archers,” he said.

“Yes.”

“You should have run when the first man fell.”

“Yes.”

“You should not have touched my sword.”

Maris’s mouth tightened. “Your sword was doing very little at the time.”

For the first time since he had appeared in the corridor, Daemon smiled. It was a small, sharp thing. Unfairly alive. Then it faded, and his attention returned to her hand around the dagger.

“Why?” he asked.

Maris knew what he meant. She wished she did not. Why had she run? Why had she stood over him? Why had she gone into the mud in the first place with a borrowed bow and another woman’s dagger tucked against her ribs? There were noble answers. Loyalty. Duty. The host needed every able hand. All the lies she had already told and nearly believed because truth was such an undignified thing.

She looked down at the dagger. “I thought,” she said, and stopped.

Daemon did not help her. Of course he did not. He was not kind enough for that.

So Maris made herself finish. “I thought it might make me someone worth seeing.” The words sounded smaller in the corridor than they had in her head. Smaller, and far more naked.

Daemon’s face changed. It was not the change she expected.

She had braced for amusement. For that careless, cutting smile men wore when handed too much of a woman’s heart and found it useful only as entertainment. She had braced for pity, which would have been worse.

Daemon gave her neither.

He looked at her as he had looked across the battlefield, as he looked at maps and enemies and dragons: sharply, wholly, without the courtesy of looking away from what was true.

“You thought battle would make you brave?” he asked.

Maris’s fingers tightened around the dagger. “I thought it might make me useful.”

“That is not what you said.”

No. It was not.

Maris swallowed. Her throat hurt. “I am not her.”

She did not have to say Black Aly’s name. It stood between them anyway, mud-booted and fearless and everything Maris had tried, so poorly, to become.

Daemon glanced once toward the hall, where noise and firelight still pressed against the closed world of the corridor. When he looked back, his expression was unreadable again.

“No,” he said. “You are not.” Shame moved through her, hot and swift. Then Daemon reached out and caught her chin. Not gently. Not cruelly. With the same terrible certainty with which he did all things. He turned her face back to his before she could hide from him properly.

“Good.”

Maris forgot, for a moment, how to breathe. His gaze moved over her face, the fading mud at her cheek, the red-rimmed eyes she had tried to hide, the bandage at her hand, the bruised way she held herself upright because pride was sometimes the last thing left standing.

“I saw you,” he said. There was no tenderness in the words, not as songs would have made it. No vow. No sweetness. Only the plain violence of being answered exactly where she had bled.

Maris stared up at him, helpless before the sudden sting in her eyes. “I was afraid,” she whispered.

Daemon’s thumb shifted against her jaw. “Yes.” It should have sounded like condemnation. It did not. “That is what made it worth noticing.”

The corridor seemed to narrow around them. The hall was distant now, the war distant, even Caraxes’s restless shifting beyond the window no more than a low thunder under the silence.

Daemon looked at her for too long. Long enough that she thought he might mock her. Long enough that she wished he would, because mockery she understood. This silence was worse.

Then Daemon kissed her.

It was not gentle. It was not cruel. It was too brief to be a promise and too deliberate to be an accident.

When he drew back, Maris could do nothing but stare at him.

His thumb brushed once over the corner of her mouth, as though he had not meant to do that either.

“Go to bed,” he said.

Maris blinked. Of all the things he might have said, it was so absurdly practical that a laugh slipped out of her before she could stop it. It sounded shaky and ruined and terribly alive.

“You followed me to tell me that?”

Daemon’s mouth curved, but he had already turned away. “I followed you,” he said, “because next time you decide to throw yourself between me and a sword, I would prefer to know where to find you.”

Then he left her there in the corridor, mouth tingling, ribs aching, dagger in hand. She had not become Black Aly. She had not burned. She had only stood, shaking, between death and the man she loved. And for the first time in all the years she had spent wanting Daemon Targaryen to look at her, Maris wondered what might happen now that he had.