Archive of Our Own

“Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you've been ruined.”

Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.

Maekar did not need much; this was by design.

On his eighth nameday, Maekar brought his first dagger to a royal smith, who delighted in a boy’s first communion with the Warrior. Craftsman hand on princeling wrist, he guided Maekar to reverently feel the coarse grains of steel with the pad of a thumb. Preached to him that a blade was defined by its absence just as much as its substance. To only trust in an edge starved thin.

“A good sword needs discipline, my Prince.” 

From a sloshing bucket of grey water came a whetstone. Maekar watched studiously as stone ground on steel until the dagger revealed itself to have always been a bar of light. Unalloyed. Uncompromising. Maekar wondered then if he, too, could strive to be so wholly himself.

He spent the ensuing afternoon practicing his combat form. His swings were swift and sure, though no one else was there to witness him. It was Maekar’s nameday, and he was alone. He tried not to hold these two thorny facts too closely together in his mind. They were related only coincidentally.

Father and Baelor had left the Keep a whole moon prior to herd Marcher lords into fealty. His older brother, at least, had instructed a servant to leave the dagger on Maekar’s bed as soon as he woke. In any other castle, a blade where the royal head had rested would be a threat, but Baelor knew him well, and had loved him enough to tell him so on the first daylit hour. 

From Father: silence. Mayhaps a late raven, mayhaps not.

Mother had also not forgotten, probably. He had not glimpsed at a hint of her silk all day so he could not say for certain. Cries echoing down hallways announced that today was a “difficult day” for Rhaegel. A half-moon bite scar on Maekar’s arm ached at the sound. Maekar did not begrudge Mother her task of taming the tempest of a son. He didn’t.

The day crawled. Simmering under his skin was something putrid and needful that he beat back, hour after hour. He tried running laps in punishing sunlight to clear his mind. Aiming to cleanse himself like maesters’ tools in clean fire. It helped not at all. The struggle persisted until nightfall, when at last the sapping wound demanded lancing. 

He slipped into Father’s solar at dusk; easier to pretend that nothing was amiss at the pale, transient hour of day tipping into night. The door clicked close behind him. Dornish rug soaked up his cautious steps. All was quiet.

Beeswax and hippocras: the air was so thick with Father’s scent that Maekar’s eyes watered. At the center of the room was a long ashwood table that predated his being. He could so clearly picture them—Father and Baelor, Father and the Grand Maester, Father and any number of Lord Paramount—bending their heavy heads over piles of ledgers. Maekar could not find a place to sit; the room was crowded with ghosts.

A cloak, draping over Father’s empty chair, rich crimson hemmed with rabbit fur. Maekar carefully approached it as though the animal was still alive. A timid brushing of his hand on fur was all it took for the softness to beckon him like a song. He imagined wrapping himself in the perfume of Father’s wax and wine. There might have been enough left to assemble the weight and warmth of Father embracing him.

He stayed back. That sort of imagination was an excess, and an excess ought to be met with a whetstone.

At supper, after a clipped exchange of greetings and well wishes, he and Aerys ate pepper crusted mutton and bread that broke open steaming. Maekar couldn’t taste much. When a honeyed cake came—floral and cloying—he pushed it away.

“No,” he snapped at the server, “and don’t bring it to me again.”

A fortnight later, Father and Baelor returned.

They were received at the gate of the Red Keep. Maekar saw Father first, his deep-set frown and the shadow digging into his eyes. While not yet King, Father bore the burden of one, and his shoulders had been caving inward ever since the accursed knighting of Daemon Waters.

Absence and substance, Maekar recalled the smith’s words. The blade Blackfyre had wounded Daeron’s claim deeply in its absence.

Father summoned his advisers before he had properly dismounted; the Marcher lords’ barely concealed ambition must be dealt with haste. He rushed past Maekar for the council chamber with nary a murmur of a greeting. When his cloak brushed past Maekar’s side, Maekar indulged in a notion that it was a tender hand on his shoulder.

“Do forgive Father for his curtness,” Baelor sighed, breaking Maekar from melancholy. His brother dismounted and came to a stop beside him, smelling of dust and bitter roads. “We have journeyed long for a feeble alliance. Our presence was less welcomed than we had hoped.”

There was wariness in Baelor’s young face that wasn't there prior to the travel. Maekar understood just enough that he himself—a prince dipped in silver and violet—walked a different world than his brother did. It must exhaust the soul to play courtesy with men who would spit at the color of your skin.

“The Other can take them all,” Maekar blurted. Anger was a welcomed change. “We should tax them twice for each mouth they speak from—one on their face and another in their arse.”

Baelor bursted into laughter, warming Maekar from chest to cheeks. His brother could barely tame his chuckles enough to reply. “I shall relay your prudent counsel to Father.” 

The mirth was short-lived though, as a guard approached Baelor—and only Baelor—with a summon.

“I am bound to rejoin Father now,” Baelor said tiredly. “Alas, it will likely be a long session. Father had it in his head that the problem could be sealed away with only the right words. I will come find you later.”

Later was a time so ill-defined that Maekar might need the stars to divine it. He wanted to stomp his feet and whine at the injustice—had he not been good and fair and patient in waiting? But his want was a pathetic thing compared to the enormity of a Kingdom’s contempt. His hand instead found the leatherbound hilt of the dagger at his belt. It groaned under his grip. In time, the leather would soften from repetition and learn silence.

Baelor’s eyes followed the gesture and brightened when he saw the dagger. “Ah! I see that you have found your gift. Is it to your liking?”

The gleaming steel, made pure from grey water.

Maekar nodded firmly. “Yes, it has taught me much.”

Maekar refused cake again on his ninth nameday, and forgot the taste of it entirely by the tenth.

Father, freshly crowned, hosted a tourney. Maekar turned ten on the third day of the festivities. Once again, these two facts were only coincidentally related. 

All four princes were put on display in a royal pavilion, seated in birth order, to be gawked at by the masses and the nobility alike. Was the new Crown Prince standing closer to his Dornish mother than his Valyrian King? Was Prince Aerys’ hair the color of true silver or weak whey? Such were the questions exchanged scandalously behind cupped palms. They sweated from more than just the sweltering heat.

“Unity” was the King’s command. They must embody the blessed union of Valyria and Andal for all to see—a new vision for the rapidly splintering realm.

So Maekar endured. Bastard-loving eyes raked over them like nails, searching for weakness, seeking where blood swelled close to peach-frail skin. He ground his teeth and stared defiantly ahead. Not fidgeting like Rhaegel. Not disappearing for hours at a time like Aerys. Pain pulsed in his jaw, but he found that endurance was a close, if lesser, brother of patience. He could endure.

But even a parade of horned armors and green plumes grew dull after a time. To distract himself, Maekar watched Baelor perform for a row of ring-kissing audience: names of thirdborn lordlings precisely recalled, cheerful laughters granted to birdbrained jests. Maekar stared at beads of effortful sweat gathering on the back of Baelor’s nape, marveling at the otherworldly restraint to not simply kick the bootlicking faces in the teeth. 

Maekar’s gaze must have been a tangible thing, because his brother turned towards him. Their eyes met halfway. Baelor tilted his head, smiled—a real one, with dimples like thumbprints—and put a hand on his own chest. His lips mouthed the words: deep breaths.

Fondness rushed through him. Maekar fiercely mourned his request that Father had denied: for Baelor to enter the list with Maekar as his loyal squire. He yearned to stand right next to Baelor when his brother at last earned a name in battle. A warrior name would wash him clean of libel. Maekar could have been the one placing the decisive spear in Baelor’s hand. Could have, in ways however small, braided himself to Baelor’s legacy.

But such wanting was frivolous. Maekar sat still as stone, grounding those boyish thoughts away.

Whetstone on a blade—it needed discipline.

The tourney ended after seven days of sordid circus, to which point they had been bled dry of courtesy like stuck pigs. On the last day, Mother found them breaking fast, sleep-drunk, pushing cold food around their plate. The orange of her silk was wincingly loud to their tired minds.

“My darling, dazzling boy,” Mother sang. She reached for Baelor, cupping his handsome face. Kissed him on both cheeks. “You have been magnificent, every bit the Crown Prince of the realm. Your father is ever pleased.” Her ringed fingers caressed the weave of dark hair that twinned her own.

“And Maekar as well. Was he not regal at the stand?” Baelor quickly added. 

“Yes, yes, you too, my son.” The same hand came to rest upon Maekar’s head like a dry leaf falling down. “You had the conduct of a man fully grown. How sensible you were.”

Sensible.

The word pressed into Maekar’s mind like a signet ring into soft wax.

There was a bluntness to it, a utility. He told himself that it sufficed. Never a darling, he could settle on being sensible.

He told himself that it was enough.

Later, while the King and Queen and heir were sending off champions, Maekar stole away to Mother’s dressing chamber.

A mirror greeted him, from which he quickly averted his eyes. Looked instead at jewel boxes standing in an orderly row. Loveliness, glittering in dying daylight. Maekar plucked out two rings from the box: one set in coral and another in ruby. They slid down his knuckles none too easily, cold.

A ringed hand—his, but for this moment not—weaved through his long hair. Once, twice. The ruby caught on a tangle the third time, and the lie broke.

Maekar ripped the rings off his fingers and threw them at the dresser. He bolted out of the room.

Maekar made Mother’s word his personal sigil: a sensible fourth son.

None of his brothers could help being what they were. Baelor had just as much say in being the heir as Rhaegel did with the chaos of his mind. They were needful, so Maekar resolved to be a creature of little-need. 

He grew tall. Sword giving way to mace, he had liked the honest heft of it and never asked for a second opinion. Maesters could time the hour by his regimented footfall. Where there would be no plan, he would source his own in the training yard, accompanied by masters-at-arms and Kingsguards and sometimes Baelor but never the King nor Queen.

When his parents deigned to ask after him, the report rarely deviated: The Prince progresses, the Prince is disciplined, there is nothing else of note.

Maekar was proud of the brevity. It meant that he was honing thin as an edge.

He was three and ten when he woke before daybreak to the sound of his own clacking teeth. Sitting in his bed, he calmly took inventory: fever, sweats, knife-bright pain. A balmy breeze felt like early winter. Yet, resolutely, he got up and made his trek. On quivering legs he walked through Maegor’s Holdfast—past his brothers’ quarters, past his parents’ chamber—towards the infirmary, alone.

Maekar did not see his family again until he had outlasted the thrice-cursed pox. There was an immediate sequestration period, and there was also the fact that Maekar did not alert anyone early on. At the time, it did not seem like a sensible thing to do.

Maekar told Baelor as much when asked. Like a blow to his guts, Baelor’s tall frame folded one joint at a time until all of him crumbled into the chair beside the sickbed.

“I have let this happen, right under my watch,” Baelor whispered.

Maekar absently scratched his neck, where rashes were healing pink and tender.

“Can you not let even one thing be wholly mine? What claim do you have on my ill, unless you had prayed to the Stranger to be rid of me?”

Baelor grimaced. “I wasn’t talking about the pox. It is you, Maekar, electing to tell no one. You spoke just now of early aches and chills, fatigue persisting even after deep rest. And yet you chose silence over us.”

“What good would your vigil have done? Cure my blood?” Maekar scoffed. It triggered a small coughing fit that bent him over.

A hand on his back. The touch came so suddenly Maekar nearly shouted, but as the fingers drew small, soothing circles, his tensed muscles eased.

“You have walked past our doors, my door, and did not think your life was worth a knock,” Baelor said, pained. “What if the pox had struck me instead? Would you rather find out a day late as I have?”

Maekar frowned at the absurd question. “That’s different, you oaf. Harvest fails at the sound of your cough. The family would have been breathing down the maesters’ neck from your first unwell hour.”

“And you? Would you have been there?”

“Of course I would have.”

Baelor screwed his eyes shut, fingers kneading the bridge of his nose. “Then you must see how this has been a grave wrong. You shouldn’t have been alone.”

“Like I said, if you weren’t too deaf and daft to hear, there was no need!” 

But Maekar’s rising anger found no opponent. Ever so slowly, ever so carefully, as though Maekar was a bird teetering on a branch, Baelor moved from the chair to the sickbed. The mattress dipped. His brother settled not an arm’s length away.

“Pray, would you have wanted me to be there?”

Like a longsword planted into the ground between them.

Maekar felt its danger keenly—that wanting. He had cut himself on it in the feverish days and nights.

“Why does it matter?” He rasped, his throat suddenly flooding with salt.

Baelor’s words were viciously, ruinously kind. “Come now, Maekar. I’ve never known you to be evasive. I plead that you trust me with your truth. Did you want me there?”

A confession, perching on his lips: Father’s cloak, Mother’s rings—and his own trembling fist, having hovered inches away from Baelor’s door. 

He had never learned how to ask. 

But he had wanted. Wanted and wanted and wanted.

Maekar uttered no reply. His answer was written on his glassy eyes and bitten lips.

In lieu of words, his brother gently pried Maekar’s thinned hand away from his own throat, where skin tore under mindless picking. Baelor laced their fingers together. Brown skin over white. Neither adorned; both were plain and honest.

“No more of this,” Baelor vowed.

A voice rose from a cold, safe recess of Maekar’s mind, warning him that this—this hand, this tenderness—was an excess too.

But louder than the voice was the sound of Baelor’s breathing, close enough to brush his cheek. Maekar did not pull away. He reasoned that he could let go whenever he chose.

Baelor’s effort was measured in years.

The first token arrived without ceremony. It was four days after Maekar had been declared hale and whole and yet, somehow, unfit for company. Mother had insisted that he remained in his chamber until his face healed into something less ghastly.

“It wounds me to see you like this.” 

Mother had wept as though he had done the wounding. He supposed that he had—his face raked raw, her fair son made horrid. He tried to reassure her that it mattered not; he could go on unwedded, joined the Kingsguard, spent the rest of his days helmed and armored. Only for his words to feed her wail. Helpless, he had submitted to her request then.

His brothers tried to help him pass the time. A dusty tome from Aerys, a pouch of glass marbles from Rhaegel. Maekar loved them both to the marrow of his diseased bones, but he left the gifts untouched, preferring to stare at the ceiling and wishing that the pox had been quick about killing him.

That was when Baelor brought him a new mace.

A training mace, hollowed, half the weight of a war-ready one. Maekar had a mace like this when he first switched from swordplay, although he had graduated to a real weapon since he was one and ten.

“This is an insult!” Maekar threw the mace at the ground between them. “You might as well have given me needles and handkerchiefs!”

He could feel his face flushed red, hoping desperately that Baelor read from it only fury—and none of the humiliation that the sickness had unmanned him in the eyes of his only martial brother.

Baelor bent down to pick up the weapon. “You have mistaken me. Calm, brother.”

“Don’t fucking tell me to calm down!”

“Maekar, Maekar. Do you wish to return to the training yard?”

“Of course I do!”

“Upon your return, you will fail.” Baelor cut in before Maekar could resume his indignant shouting, “Because you will be set up to fail. The pox hasn’t touched your spirit, that I can attest.” He jerked his chin at Maekar’s heaving chest, where lungs were working twice as hard to suck in half the air they needed. “But it has exhausted your body. When Ser Quentyn puts a war mace in your hand, it will tip you over.”

The cold logic doused Maekar’s anger somewhat. He looked down at bones pulling the skin of his hands taut. After a moon of thin broth, he was nearly two stones lighter, much weight shredded from his sword arm. He would return a stumbling fool in the yard—a spectacle for Daemon’s pitying glance and Aegor’s mockery. He could already hear the chirping of washerwomen, gossips dripping from their loose mouths: the gods had rendered Daeron’s bloodline weak.

Baelor offered him the mace again. Begrudgingly, Maekar took it by the handle. Gave it an experimental swing.

“Fine,” he spat. “I’ll break myself back in while I remain here. Might as well, until my face releases me from this sentencing.”

Baelor blinked. “Your sentence?”

“Mother’s plea.” Maekar waved away Baelor’s questioning look. Turning his attention back to the mace, he frowned at its glinting polish. “Why have you brought me a new one, then? Surely my old training mace is still in the armory. And why is it so… ” he struggled for words to describe the five-pronged head, elegantly curved like dragonscales “... pretty?”

At this, Baelor’s mouth twitched into a grin. “Because it pleases me—” His voice curved towards an ending, but on a second thought, hastened to continue. “—that a trueborn prince is always well-armed. Our device should befit our status, don’t you agree?”

Maekar huffed and did not argue.

The mace did not join the tome and the marbles in the corner of the chamber. Maekar spent the rest of the day training. His knees wobbled from merely one set of footwork, and yet he felt strong for the first time since that teeth-clacking night. He was choosing this hurt, this burn in the muscles. His body was once again a raw ore for shaping.

The next instance was a while after. Baelor always left just enough time to pass between each token that Maekar could not draw a line straight through. One only realized that moon-chasing tides had risen when it lapped against the ankles.

A brooch, amber sun with cross-body ropes of pearls. It was a diplomatic gift for Baelor who, already accused of thin dragon blood, thought it unwise to wear himself. The pearls nevertheless looped around Maekar’s chest at a perfectly measured length, making soft noises with each hesitant step he took towards his first feast with the pitted face. Baelor’s warm hand played with it as he gently encouraged Maekar forward.

A hawk, storm-grey and clever. Maekar held no love for hawking, but Baelor reasoned that the ritual of lure and release and chasing would recondition his body to labor. They ended up naming the creature Kyrax and embarked to train it to peck at Ser Quentyn’s hands on command.

On Maekar’s fourteened nameday, a bottle of ambrosial Arbor red. Fourteen had become a dreadful number. At that age, Aerys had passed out at his own nameday feast from mindless sips of strong ale, loudly smacking his head on the King’s table on the way down. Maekar would rather die than be carried between two Kingsguards by his arms and feet.

“Let us find your limit; our dynasty falls if sweet wine pries secrets from princes,” Baelor laughed. 

They huddled close in a spiral stairway, where the wall curved so sharply it pressed their ankles and knees together. The wine tasted of black plums and late summer berries. As Baelor chatted away, shoulders light and limbs loose, Maekar found himself staring at Baelor’s lower lip—a red stain, like blood blooming from a dragonglass cut, in an oath to join houses and souls.

Maekar blamed the rogue thought on the wine. Mayhaps he did find his limit.

In the following year, a new set of armor. And then twice more as Maekar quickly outgrew each one.

“You’re putting me to shame, little brother!” Delighted, Baelor held out his hand, leveling it between the crowns of their heads. “I reckon that you’ll stand taller than me in a year’s time.”

Maekar lightly slapped the hand away, annoyed, and pleased, and annoyed at being pleased.

Something began to grate at his conscience. There was nothing strange about armors, weapons, or wine. Time, though, given so freely from the Crown Prince to the fourthborn spare, was most queer. 

Baelor’s attention was a precious commodity. Yet, with Maekar, his brother never hurried. Never rushed. Time spent in extravagant abundance on hunting trips, in training yards, under a forgiving sun. After lessons they took the long way back to Maegor’s Holdfast through gardens framed with smokeberry vines and elm trees.

This closeness was unearned. It set his teeth on edge. The gods were not known to look kindly upon fools who glutted themselves on good fortune, and what was it that Maekar was doing, if not gorging himself sick.

“You’re making a thief out of me,” Maekar accused.

They were alone on one of their meaningless walks that Maekar so treasured. Baelor turned towards him, their arms brushing briefly—skin to silk to leather to leather to silk to skin.

“What do you mean?”

Maekar threw his arms vaguely at their surroundings: the garden, its white stone path, sunset pouring through woven branches. It was the kind of unabashed peace that begged the gods to rain fire upon their heads.

“Every moment you spend with me is time stolen from the realm. Your slow feet make me complicit. If you run back, there are probably four petitioners whose grievances you can resolve before day’s end.” In a voice suddenly small, “Surely you have somewhere better to be.”

Baelor narrowed his eyes. Maekar braced for a sharp rebuke, or worse, an agreement.

“Have our parents bothered you about this?”

The answer was so unexpected it caused Maekar to stagger. “What? No. Do you think that I have no mind of my own?”

“That is not what I said,” Baelor sighed. “Do you wish me gone? You only need to say the word.”

Here was an opening. He could end their farce now. But Maekar had spent the last few years addled on wine and a warm gaze. He said nothing.

“It is true that I always have people demanding my presence,” Baelor deliberated, “but somewhere better to be? No, never. When I have the choice—admitedly a rare and blessed thing—I yearn for nowhere else. I can breathe easy here.”

“I rather think that I ruin your respite.”

“You do not.”

“I do. I am doing it right now. I had just dragged our conversation from Aerys’ betrothal to this matter.”

What an ill-made creature he was. He could not kill this old impulse in him to pick at scabs, like sneaking into rooms despite knowing that there was no chair set out for him.

“What of your gentle Lady Jena? Can you not breathe easy with her?”

Baelor surprised him by scoffing.

“Especially not with Jena. She has charm aplenty, true, but also a sharp penmanship. Any blunder I commit would fly to the Marcher lords with her raven. All of Father’s painstaking work would have been for naught.”

A cold thought dripped down Maekar’s neck. “Is she not… trustworthy?”

“Calm, brother. Jena isn’t a viper lying in tall grass. I am not in danger.”

Maekar frowned at Baelor, but nodded for him to continue.

“She is a comely girl, sensible—” Maekar suppressed a flinch “—she knows the dance as well as I do: a vow, and then a son, mayhaps another if she permits. She will govern the Keep and I the realm. Steps painted on the floor, not one toe out of line, until the end of our days.”

But then Baelor revealed a bejeweled smile. The thumbprint dimples begged to be cradled. Maekar clenched his hands into tight fists.

“With you, there is no dance, no song. I can fall, and know for certain that you would help me up.”

“I would leave you on the ground, actually.”

Baelor laughed, “Then I would pull you down by your ungenerous hand! We would be wrestling just as we do in the yard.”

“Ser Quentyn said that we’re too old for such a display.”

“And I say, fuck him.”

Maekar gasped, mirthful, “Your Grace!”

Baelor drove an elbow into Maekar’s ribs. Maekar stumbled back, a rare grin threatening to usurp his face.

“A blessing, then, that I am so removed from importance. You are free to be your most rotten self with me.”

The air seemingly grew warm at his words, like a flint struck, a sept candle lit. Baelor’s eyes somehow gained that worshipful orange glow.

“Rotten, aye. But also most utterly, nakedly true. Sometimes I feel as though I exist nowhere else but beneath your gaze. So do you see? You cannot steal what I give willingly. If anything, it is you who gives and I the greedy receiver.”

Memories thrown into sharp relief: the Marches dust on Baelor’s travel cloak, beads of sweat behind his tanned neck during the stifling days of the tourney. There was no such weight on his brother now. Just a sunloved face, crowned with the golden light of an unnamed evening. He looked so youthful that he might outlive their dynasty.

“And one more thing,” Baelor added, breaking Maekar’s reverie. “Don’t speak of yourself like that.”

“Like what?”

“‘Removed from importance’,” Baelor recalled. “Banish that talk at once. You are a prince of the blood. Even moreso, you are my—” a sharp, open-mouth inhale, as though Baelor would swallow the sky whole, “—dear brother.” His chest deflated. “One whom I hold dearest. I would not stand abiding by someone insulting my beloved.”

Maekar could hear Baelor’s mind changing mid-sentence. He sorely wanted to chase after whatever Baelor had kept caged. Was it a red bleeding heart, to match the one in Maekar’s own throat?

But whatever it might be, it was not Maekar’s for the taking. Few things were.

They steered back to the safe ground of brotherly banter—“So what do you think of Lady Penrose?” “I think that Aerys can’t pick her out from a crowd. He seldom looks at her face!”—and continued their walk. They would soon reach Maegor’s Holdfast, where they would wash away the training yard grime in a basin of cold water, and along with it, this blooming warmth on their skin. Emerging clean would be the heir and the fourthborn spare once more.

Maekar told himself to be content with this: his place justified, his thievery absolved. It would be madness to take more than his due.

And yet, Old Valyria ran thick in his blood. A whispering madness disguised in Baelor’s soft, reverent voice: I can breathe easy here, I exist nowhere else, beloved, beloved.

And then summer ended. Leaves reddened. Nightfall greedily claimed hours from the day, giving cover for clandestine plotting. Maekar tracked the Great Bastards in their shared yard, eyes narrowing at how Aegor’s mouth was granted a frequent audience of Daemon’s ear. Poison fed to a sapling. It would matter not if the green shoot was blameless; the harvest would kill the realm all the same.

Father must have seen it as well, which was why he had set out to forge friends in time to confront enemies: Baelor and Jena Dondarrion to be handfasted at last, and a betrothal for Maekar with Dyanna of House Dayne.

“Unity,” was the King’s decree. “Us and the Seven Kingdoms.”

Baelor stood at the center of the grand solar. Back straight, he absorbed the command like an armor plate taking a blow. Maekar could not see his brother’s face from where he stood—at the edge of the room where shadow melted into light. Maekar needn’t be near. His input would not be sought after.

“We cannot afford to be poor in alliances,” Father said.

Father was not a warrior king. Nevertheless he was the king who had finished Aegon’s Conquest and folded Dorne into the Seven Kingdoms. This was the sword of his choosing.

“Remember well, my sons. Maps are drawn in bloodlines, and battles are won by bannermen.”

Maekar pictured a quill dipped into the ink well of his veins. Charting jagged lines of mountains and cliff tops, writing babe’s names under coiled tree branches. A pen not in his hand drawing blood from his open wrist.

Baelor was not looking at Father. His eyes set on a beam of light cutting through a high slit window, dust motes floating, sinking.

“Once,” Baelor said wistfully, as though recalling the shape of a dream, “we ruled by fire.”

Father allowed him that dream—a time bygone when their people could be whoever they wanted, love whoever they wanted—for a moment, and then smothered it in its crib.

“Precisely, Baelor. Once. Now we rule through people, not over them. Our reign does not live in the sky any longer.”

Baelor bowed his head. That was as close to an objection as he had ever gotten with any duty.

A bile-soaked scream threatened to rush out of Maekar. He choked it back. Taking deep steadying breaths, every inhale pulled in beeswax and hippocras. He wondered if Father had been drinking for courage prior to this decision.

It begged the question, then, if Father had anticipated a difficult son. Which among them was the spoiled princeling needing to be reined in with a riding crop?

Father’s gaze shifted from Baelor to Maekar, expectant.

Violet on violet—Maekar had always bore Father’s colors proudly. The one gods-given closeness that he could claim, that nothing could take away, even as everything else hinged on his obedience.

“What fine matches,” Maekar muttered. He winced at the resentment in his own voice—loud enough for the whole Keep to hear. He knew Dyanna, had known her growing up in Mother’s court, and should know better than to mire her in such bitterness. He straightened. “I won’t bring you shame.”

Baelor sucked in a breath, saying nothing.

That night, Maekar found himself standing before Baelor’s chamber door. 

A hand hovering, white swallowed by the blue dark.

He reminded himself that he was the fourth son: sensible, little-need.

He knocked.

The door yielded open.

Greeting Maekar was a bruised smile. Baelor looked as though he had aged a lifetime since they last met. He stepped aside and let Maekar into his room.

In truth, Maekar could not put into words why he had come. Only that there was a fire in him that needed suffocating. A wild, ugly grief begging for a burial.

“Well met, Prince of Dragonstone.”

Baelor chuckled humorlessly. His lone violet eye gleamed Arbor red in low light. The memory of wine-stained lips assaulted Maekar where he stood. Maekar fought down the sharp ache. 

“Aye, I shall bring the gargoyles to heel.” Baelor attempted at mirth, failed, grimacing. 

Maekar noticed a small glinting thing at Baelor’s shoulder—a sewing needle. He gestured at it.

“Ah.” Baelor plucked the needle out. “I was with Mother earlier, and her wicked seamstress. You ought to have seen their haste in making my groomwear. Mayhaps they feared that I might elope.”

Would you? Maekar could feel the needle in Baelor’s hand breaking skin, sinking into his nailbed.

“When is your voyage?” He asked instead.

“Two moons after the ceremony. A short stay, just to orient myself and Jena to our new hearth, and then I shall return to the Keep before year’s end,” Baelor paused pointedly—another needle, “for your wedding.”

“Funny, how you were given years to nurture your betrothal, and I mere moons.”

“Don’t seek offense where there is none, brother. Take it as a sign of trust. Father knows that you always do your duty.” Baelor walked back to put the needle down on a table, turning away from him. “Would you rather live out my fate? I was promised before my first joust, so green in the matter of the heart that I wouldn’t have known what love was if it had punched me in the nose.”

Maekar, who had punched Baelor’s nose in sparring, had grinned and laughed and pulled Baelor back up onto his feet, asked, “Do you now know?”

Baelor did not answer him. His long fingers toyed with the needle’s tip. At any moment now, one of them was going to draw first blood—to wound, to release.

There was no song and dance with Maekar. It was he who spoke.

“You owe me.”

It was not what Baelor had expected. His brother turned back to face Maekar at last, brow lifted. The lines on his face smoothened with boyish amusement.

“What is it that I owe you?”

“An answer,” Maekar demanded. His heart threw itself against his ribcage.

“You can ask me anything, dearest.” Dearest. Dearest. Gods, Maekar ought to break Baelor’s nose again for it.

“I want one word: yes or no” Maekar jabbed a finger at Baelor’s chest. “Do not ramble. Do not spin a grand speech out of this. If you give me diplomacy, I will hunt you for sport.”

“Right.”

“With dogs.”

“Of course.”

“And feed our hawk your liver.”

“As you wish.”

Baelor was fighting a smile and losing. His fondness was so palpable it brimmed over like a cup of nectar. Maekar could drink from a well of it and never know peace.

What a fool Maekar was.

All along, he had never been able to deny himself this one sweet thing.

“Is this real?”

Baelor’s almost-smile vanished. 

“I need to know if this exists only in my mind. So tell me plain and I will live with your answer: this—between us,” the intertwined hands from long past that he swore he could let go, and had not let go, “has it been real?”

Baelor went entirely still. Not a single twitch of muscle. Maekar could not even see the rise and fall of his chest. His fixed gaze could set fire on dry hay.

A heartbeat, and then another, and then another. Empires had crumbled in briefer time. Maekar wished that he could pick up Mother’s needle and sew his mouth shut. Unlearn words. Unspeak his wanting.

“... I understand,” he breathed. “Forget that I asked. I will take my leave.”

Baelor lurched forward and kissed him in a fury.

Chest collided chest. Hands in his hair. Baelor pushed him against the chamber door so suddenly that Maekar’s head knocked against the wood panel. Thoughts left him. Strength left him. In their place, a blazing summer. Fire made sweet. He drank from Baelor’s lips ripen wine and sun-drenched desire. His eyes fluttered close.

He shoved Baelor back with full force.

His brother staggered, nearly falling over. Mismatched eyes were blown wide in surprise. In another time, Maekar would have taken bitter pride in rousing something so unguarded from the perfect heir.

“Seven Hells, I said one fucking word!”

Baelor rubbed the spot where Maekar had struck him, wincing. “My answer is ‘Yes’.”

Maekar furiously dragged his sleeve across his lips, trying to rid himself of the ghostly heat that lingered. Hot tears welled up unbidden.

“You insolent, thoughtless, selfish… ” He choked. “Why did you do that? Don't you realize… You’ve damned me. This is cruelty.”

Baelor looked near tears himself.

“My dearest.”

“Stop!”

“My heart’s own blood.”

Maekar forced three frantic steps between them. The distance might as well have been the ferocious sea that divided King’s Landing from Dragonstone.

Baelor reached out a hand, before dropping it limply.

“I merely… I cannot have you living in doubt.”

“And what am I to do with this?!” Maekar shouted.

They faced each other, chests heaving. The air was thick with an awful truth finally hatching open.

“I asked,” Maekar gritted out, ashamed—not for the sin nor the unnaturalness of his desire, those would come later—for the weakness of having asked at all, “for but one word. So that I can put an end to this question and… move on. But now… this memory… ”

They were already memories to each other. Bygone. Could have and have had and nevermore. That realization, more than anything else, was what pulled tears down his cheeks.

“How am I meant to survive you?” He sobbed.

He would go on burning until his pyre. He would go on knowing Baelor’s touch and taste and heat and never having it again. There would be no rain, no relief. No length of time—short of from this day until their last day—would ever be enough again.

To this, Baelor offered no answer.

Maekar covered his face with his forearm, shaking. Shoulders caved in. His long hair a veil hiding his grief. A barren silence stretched over them, punctured only by his angry, ragged breaths.

Footsteps. And then, body heat. Baelor crossed the chasm and stopped, just close enough, to lean his weight against Maekar’s side. Shoulder against shoulder. Wet cheek upon wet cheek. It was contact without hold.

Until—a tug, gentle, at the nape of Maekar’s neck.

Slowly, in confusion, Maekar lifted his face. What he saw was Baelor, having taken a lock of Maekar’s hair, winding it around his index finger. A thin spool of thread that had no hope of binding them close.

Maekar found peace in war.

The world had reordered into something that he could finally read with ease. Politics and dual-meaning words gave way to a simple, end of day sum of their living and their dead. 

Maekar could not put a foot wrong in battles. His arm was the mace, the lance, the morningstar. The Warrior Himself pointed Maekar at soft flesh and thin armor. Black dragon’s blood scattered like rubies. White bone fragments, torn from men screaming for their mothers, seeded themselves in the wet soil, where they would one day grow into trees.

At last, he was put to use. His rage, his strength, all that was unfit for court and care, his lifelong sharpness directed at his father’s enemies. War had been a homecoming.

Nary a word had flown between King’s Landing and Dragonstone since the two royal weddings. Here in a war tent, though, he and Baelor found a new language: intelligence, troop positions, Blackfyre sighting. A safe ground soaked in gore. They stood a permanent arm’s length apart, even though the mere sight of Baelor chewing his lips, lost in thought, made Maekar feel like he was bleeding out on the council table. He endured.

Father had made Baelor the Chief Commander, who despite his absolute authority, still deferred to Maekar for harsh, clear-eyed counsels. Mayhaps this too was the King’s design: after the Rebellion ended, Baelor Breakspear would ascend into song, while all of the blood-dark tactics could be assigned to his rabid dog of a brother. What clever use of a fourth son. He endured that too.

The whetstone within him had patiently waited after all this time. He returned to it now, dipping it into red water. Sharpen, he rode and he fought and he killed. 

It was on the tenth grueling moon of their campaign when their bastard uncle Brynden—the pale, many-eyed spymaster—came to Baelor’s pavilion in the hour of the nightingale. 

With him, a map of their final confrontation. The plan was thus: Maekar’s battered vanguard would lure Daemon deep into the throat of the Crownlands valleys, standing fast against the onslaught until Brynden and Baelor arrived with reinforcements. A trap with a trueborn bait. Dark wings had carried words to Brynden of rotten morale in Blackfyre camps. The pretenders would jump at a chance for a silver and violet head on a spike.

“No,” Baelor rejected.

“Yes,” Maekar accepted, in the very same breath.

Brynden looked between the two of them, his unnatural eyes crawling from Baelor to Maekar and back again, and said, “I shall leave you two to decide.”

The second the tent flap closed behind Brynden, Baelor snapped at Maekar, “My words precede yours. I will not be going forward with this plan.”

Maekar fired back, “Fuck you. Listen to yourself. Did you not say mere days ago that our supply lines are at risk of discovery? We have to attack from a position of strength or lose ground.”

“There has to be other ways. We will reduce rations in the meantime if we must.”

A harsh laugh. “Our men are already eating three-quarter ration, Your Grace. If you care to spar with them, you will hear grumbling bellies and grievances run amok. There will be scorpions in your bed the day you reduce the ration to half.”

“Then we ought to recuperate. Gather our forces near neutral land.”

“And let our enemies do the same? No. If Brynden is right, the pretenders are even hungrier, more desperate than we are. They will bite.”

Baelor quirked his brow mockingly. “I did not realize that you hold our uncle in such high esteem. Mayhaps you do not despise bastards as much as you claim.”

“The Others take you.” Maekar shivered in disgust at the mere suggestion. “Father made him spymaster to do what you cannot: tearing out prisoners’ nails until they give up the markers on your maps. How else do you keep your hands pristine?” The last part came out more nakedly bitter than he had intended. 

Baelor seemed unbalanced by the venom as well; his next words were unguarded. “Accuse me all you like. I will not have you treated as meat.”

There it was: the heart of this clash.

Love and loathing warred within him, but neither mattered. Maekar must make Baelor see reason, and if logic would not cleave a path through, he must reach for something else. 

His mind cast out blindly, and it grasped onto a memory already held close. Held too tightly. A fragile thing, glass-spun, it had no place among their daggers and ledgers of plain sums. But he knew that the truth of it would speak for him.

“Do you recall,” Maekar began quietly, letting the echo of Father’s solar fill the space between them—the white light falling through a slit window, the scent of beeswax and ink, “when you told Father that we used to rule from the sky?”

Baelor flinched.

Maekar felt ill to continue, but onward he pushed.

“Our bannermen, we have earned each and every one of them through our marriages.” A hot breath caught in Maekar’s throat. To his horror, his eyes began to water. He blinked the moisture away. “And we are losing them by the day the longer this Rebellion drags on. Have we not given up much—” everything “—for their fealty?”

Baelor’s eyes dropped from Maekar’s face to the space between them—the damnable, exacting arm’s length.

“We have,” he admitted.

“What a waste it is, then, for a meager stalemate. Brynden’s plan could be the final push we need, Baelor. This is a worthy gambit for Father’s reign, for your reign.”

Baelor inhaled, shook his head, aggrieved. “No, I will not accept it. How can I sit on the Throne one day, knowing that the steps to it were drenched in your blood?”

At this, Maekar gave a bare-teeth smile.

“Why are we taking my death as a certainty? Have I not proven myself a competent sword? I can outfight and outlast every single one of those fucking pretenders. Trust me, brother. This is what I am made for.”

Maekar could see the steel in Baelor’s eyes yielding. Pride glowed like an ember in his chest; years of forging himself for fighting had borne fruits at last in this precise moment of decision. But even his evident prowess was not yet enough to bend Baelor’s will. 

A vision intruded on Maekar’s mind: a long war of attrition lasting into the bitter depth of winter. Bastards and trueborns alike scrabbling for grains just as much as territories. Snow stalled harvest, and then hunger led to plundering. Rage born from famine was a perilous thing—it emboldened, drove commoners to storm castles and slay dragons, toppled kings.

He must walk Baelor the final steps towards safety.

Hesitantly, Maekar braved a tender savagery—he reached for Baelor’s hand and curled their index fingers together.

Baelor’s eyes grew wide, lips parting.

Maekar thought back to the gold-speckled garden. That briefness in time when Baelor had elevated them to more than just the heir and the fourthborn spare, the unsaid confession that Maekar had nevertheless heard. Beloved, beloved.

“You have given me much over the years, so let me balance the scale.” A cup of his blood for a cup of sun-ripened wine; it was only fair. “I owe you this much.”

Baelor squeezed his eyes shut, pained, surrendering.

“If anything—anything—goes wrong, should you suffer grievously, I will have Father send Brynden to the Wall.”

Relief flooded Maekar so quickly he felt lightheaded. “Good. I should fucking hope so.”

Baelor sunk into a thinking quiet. He stroked a thumb down Maekar’s finger, sending sharp shivers down Maekar’s spine.

Maekar pulled his hand away as if burnt.

“This is not all you are made for,” Baelor rebuked softly. He flexed his own hand, now empty, as though Maekar had ripped something precious away. “There will be a place for you in peacetime. I will make sure of it.”

Maekar had his doubts. 

He wanted to see to the end of this battle, where every Blackfyre loyalist shall lie dead for the earth to claim them. But he struggled to envision where he would stand in a peaceful realm. What happened to a blade after it had exhausted all use?

Father sat upon the Iron Throne, draped in a rich crimson cloak hemmed with rabbit fur. Maekar was eight again, not a war-won knight kneeling before his king.

“Summerhall?”

“Yes, my son. Summerhall.”

There was ringing in his ears. Maekar felt as though he had been hit in the head.

“As a reward for your loyalty. None were more fierce in protecting the trueborn’s good name than you, or so I have been told from—” Father waved a hand at Baelor “—good authority.”

Baelor beamed at the mention.

With the Hand pin gleaming on his chest, his brother looked every bit the bard-sung Prince Breakspear. The heroic Hammer. Savior of Redgrass. Maekar had lost track of the rest. Baelor stood tall at the King’s arm, well rested and washed clean.

The same could not be said of Maekar. Sleep had eluded him since their return. In the choking darkness, he dreamed of Baelor’s vanguard not arriving in time, or Brynden’s arrow missing the finger-width gap in Daemon’s visor. Gore clung to him. Blackened his hand prints. More oft than not he left his wife’s cheek unkissed and his little sons unembraced, lest his stench get on them—lest their milk-sweet faces follow him into the stillborn dreams, cracked open, spilling pomegranate seeds.

“The castle has been prepared for you and yours’ arrival. You can ride out as soon as a fortnight.” Maekar snapped back to the present. Father looked pleased with this grand idea—clearly ushered along by Baelor, if his brother’s luminous grin was any sign. “It is a magnificent seat of lordship. Imagine, if you will: a marble estate atop a green hill. Glass domes showered in starlight. Surrounded by gardens—”

“—and the Marcher lords,” Maekar interrupted. “You are speaking of an unfortified castle at the heart of the pretenders’ friends. What am I to do with gardens?”

Father tilted his head, bemused. “Walk through them? Teach your children a plant’s patience? I suppose you could take the lesson yourself, if you must interrupt your King.”

Maekar sank deeper into his knee, chastised. Out of the corner of his eyes, he caught Baelor wincing.

“The Rebellion has finished, thank the Seven,” Father said. “What a brutal, idiotic affair it has been; countless good men lost on both sides. Now we have peace, or close to it—much needed pledges and hostages to make it lasting. Now is the time for us to cultivate what had been trampled.”

“But Aegor is still at large, and with him the Conqueror’s blade!” That shit-sniffling traitor had fled amidst the chaos of ten thousand clashing shields. There was no peace until the cupped palm of poison that Daemon had supped from was lopped off from the wrists.

“Yes, a terrible shame that you were not able to retrieve it,” Father sighed. Maekar flinched at the soft sound as if it was a crack of a whip. “But it is none of your concern now. You have done enough.”

“So this is my punishment, then, for my failure to reclaim Blackfyre.”

Before Father could speak, Baelor quickly stepped in, hands raised in a placating gesture.

“A reward, dear brother. Much like Dragonstone, you will be in charge of your fief and territory, a great ownership entrusted only to the capable. You and I are equals in this regard.” 

Baelor offered a radiant smile that might have sated Maekar when he was younger, starving for scraps. Before he was given a dagger, and a whetstone, and an admiration for thin long blades.

“Equals, you say?” It took great restraint for Maekar not to spit the words. “There you stand at the Throne, and I will be twelve days of riding away from the Red Keep. Why am I alone to be removed from my family?”

Father’s eyes bore into him. Grooves in his furrowed brows deepened.

“I have broken from tradition, gone over Aerys and Rhaegel’s due to grant you your seat. Why must you insist on being difficult, child?”

Child. 

Not a prince, nor a war commander. His throat swelled until he could no longer speak.

“You’re right that Summerhall rests where lords had looked elsewhere for kingship until recently. This is why a prince must go. You will be our hand extended in friendship. And our sword, should they become forgetful. This is how we cultivate peace.”

Father paused. Then, lightly, as though a mere afterthought: “I am told that your Dyanna is expecting a third. The Keep can only shelter so many dragons, too many are as dangerous as too few.”

A sword in his flesh would have hurt less. Had hurt less. The pain was eerily similar—he was three and ten, pox-stricken, and Mother had bidden him to hide his ruined face away from view. This was yet another exile of ill-made, unseemly things.

He inhaled shakily but his lungs refused air. In blurring vision, Baelor wretchedly mouthed at him the words: deep breaths.

He tried. He reached to touch the cornerstone within him, ached for its steadying truth.

He was the fourth son: sensible, little-need.

Fourth sons did not ask.

And yet.

“Let me stay,” he asked, voice near trembling, “I do not wish to go.”

Father grimaced from his high seat. “Then pray, what is it that you want?”

Before Maekar could stop himself, his treacherous eyes sought Baelor’s. Their gaze met in the middle of the vast hall, like two cups touching rims, threatening to brim over.

His hand found the nameday dagger at his belt—his first teacher. Its leatherbound hilt greeted his palm like a lifeline. He fought against drowning.

Father read obedience in his silence. 

“A kind sun may yet change your mind,” the King decided, waving a hand to mark the end of his thought. “Go to Summerhall. Even one such as you can learn to love the quiet. You are dismissed.”

Maekar bowed numbly. Taking his leave, he commanded his steps into a measured pace, even though all of him wanted to break into a run.

Glass domes, glass windows. He saw them clearly: the prying eyes of bastard-lovers, sons and grandsons of those whose guts had stained Redgrass, spying on the household of their sireslayer. Akin to the tourney pavilion of his youth, where he and his brothers were arranged like dolls for viewing. He wanted to race back to his chamber and gather up his young wife and small children in his arms. Held them close, away from sight, from harm.

But neither Father nor Baelor had understood the need for walls. Mayhaps they felt no threat in the open air. Why should they; they were the Good, the Chivalrous. Crowds threw flowers before their path. They did not see the enemy’s heartland like he did.

“Maekar!”

Baelor’s voice chased him down the corridor. Maekar halted his steps, half-expecting Baelor to collide into his back. But his brother came to a stop exactly an arm’s length away. He could tell their distance from the heat of Baelor’s body alone. 

What loathsome knowledge. What ruinous fate Baelor had condemned him to.

“Let us speak,” Baelor panted, his breath coming fast. “I fear that you’ve mistaken us.”

“No, Your Grace. I understood perfectly well,” Maekar snarled. “Father needed a hound, and you put forth my name. I should be thanking you for the honor.”

Baelor’s face twisted. “That was not what we said. Summerhall is a recognition of your gallantry. The outcome of our last battle was much too close.” There and gone—shadow touched his bright face. “Had you not held the line, it would have been our blood renaming the field.”

“And for my good deed, I am banished to some house of glass! Where my pale-eyed children will be pointed at like circus curiosities and jeered!”

Baelor stepped forward, the heat of him wafted like summer haze. Maekar retreated. The precise arm’s length maintained.

“Father wished to send you across the Narrow Sea,” Baelor confessed, words rushing out. “You were right about our heirloom sword—he wanted you to hunt Bittersteel on a grueling, fruitless endeavor. I fought for your stay, dearest. I pleaded to him that you’ve earned your keep for you and yours. Summerhall would make a fine inheritance for your son and his son after, away from the shadow of the Throne.” Baelor promised, “You will always be the Prince of Summerhall, if nothing else.”

If nothing else.

The word rattled like knives going down his throat. Rage bled out of him, pooling on the pale marble. He stared at his benevolent older brother, the perfect heir, who had secured Maekar a title he couldn’t earn on his own—out of pity.

Smiling like a gash torn open. “Who am I to question kings and kings-to-be? It is peacetime, as you say. Your Graces would rather keep politicians close and retire the soldiers.” Maekar began walking away. “And I do make an ever poor politician, if nothing else.”

Baelor followed. The desperate strike of his boots was loud against the stones.

“We are not trying to cast you away. Heed the words from my mouth, brother, and not in your head.”

Maekar hastened his strides, eyes fixed ahead. “I heard you loud and clear.”

And then Baelor’s hands were upon him. One turned him around, and the other—warmth so sudden it flashed like fire—cupped his cheek.

Maekar nearly gasped. His joints locked in place. Baelor looked just as stunned by his own daring, the pad of his thumb momentarily grazing pockmarked skin. The touch frayed them raw in daylight. Baelor quickly masked the boldness of the gesture, sliding his hand upward to tuck a stray lock of hair behind Maekar’s ear, easing the transgression into an innocent thing.

Maekar’s skin remained alight at the touch.

“I will come to you,” Baelor proclaimed like a vow before gods and men. “Every harvest, every festivity. I will come and worship. Every one of your namedays, from this year until your last, I will not rest until the slow tilt of the stars brings me to your gate.”

A promise ever sweet, ever summer-green. Maekar tore himself away. Cold air rushed into the space between them and starved the flame.

“No. Don’t you dare.” Maekar’s voice quivered. “The Others take your liar’s vows.”

“I speak true, dearest.” Baelor said with a future king’s conviction—grand, naive. 

“How true can they be, when we command the sky no longer?”

In the days of old, when they were closer to gods, they could have broken any tradition, braved any scorn. They could have unmade history for the simple bliss of holding each other in the morning light.

It would take nothing short of that world-breaking power again to kiss his beloved.

Maekar shook his head. “We are fathers ourselves, so let us not play pretend like children do. What you’ve spoken of, that life,” he swallowed thickly, “it is no kindness.”

Baelor’s resolute gaze did not waver, but his voice betrayed him; pain crept in. “What is it to you?”

Maekar pictured the waiting: it would not be a mere twelve day ride between them, but the whole screaming realm, clawing Baelor bloody for his attention. Apologies would grow long as visits grew scant. Letters would be all Maekar had to subsist on, scented of fruits and spring blossoms. He would have to burn them afterwards. He would have taken ash for a lover.

The waiting would become him. A kind of dying.

Maekar whispered brokenly, “Go back to the Throne room, Baelor. Duty expects you there.”

He fled to be with his grief. And this time, Baelor did not follow.

Breathless by the time he reached the cold safety of his chamber, he threw himself against the heavy door. Pressed the heel of his palms into his eyes, willing the unshed tears away.

“Da!”

He startled, one hand shooting to his dagger. But it was merely Aerion stumbling towards him. His babe, almost two of age, was loveliness spun from Old Valyria itself. Aerion grinned wide, revealing little nubs of baby teeth. Frail bones. Like the white pieces Maekar’s war-mace had raked out of men. 

Bile flooded his mouth. He felt ill.

“Da! Da!”

Oblivious to his turmoil, Aerion pumped his plump fists up and down. It was a wordless command they both knew: lift me.

Maekar hesitated. There was no blood on him, he reminded himself. He had checked earlier that morning between the folds of his clothes and underneath his fingernails. Yet a talon of certainty dug into his flesh—that his touch only wrought harm.

But his babe reached for him, sweet as dawn, and in that moment Maekar could deny him nothing.

He scooped Aerion up against his chest with immense, frightened care, tucking the boy’s softness close to his heart. Aerion went to work at once, his wet mouth chewing on his lapel.

Maekar rocked gently from foot to foot. The motion, as well as Aerion’s comforting weight, gradually soothed his racing mind. Anguish receded to the corners of the room—ever present, but for once undemanding. Maekar pressed his nose in Aerion’s pale hair and inhaled deeply. There was no blood here, only milk and sleep. 

Slowly, the distant war drums in Maekar’s ears faded. His own pulse hummed to the rhythm of Aerion’s breaths. 

Here, he felt as far as he could be from the Throne room and Father’s solar, the training yard and the corridors, and Baelor, who cast a long shadow across every stone in the Keep.

Mayhaps the distance would be a mercy. There would be no brushing sleeves, no brimming glances. No heat. Maekar could learn at his great age to wean himself off the nectar of Baelor’s presence—carve himself thin again. 

It would take work, but Maekar had never been shy of labor.

A tug, gentle at first, and then sharply painful. Maekar hissed. Aerion was giggling, his chubby hand tangled deep in the long hair hanging down Maekar’s back, pulling with all his tiny might. Maekar worked his fingers into Aerion’s fist, tickling the fat folds of his wrist—a trick he and Dyanna learned through necessity. Aerion released him before long. The boy rolled over where Maekar set him down upon a bed, thoroughly pleased now that he had caused his day’s worth of mischief.

Maekar remained standing beside the bed, running his hand through the knots. His hair had grown out in the many moons of the war campaign; it had survived blood and mud and muck, only to fall at the perfect length for sticky, spit-coated fingers.

Here was an excess, and he had a dagger.

Four quick steps led him to a mirror. When steel bit into silver, he told himself that it was only sensible. 

Hair fell as softly as snow. Along with it went the haunting of another pair of hands: tucking a lock behind his ear, sinking into the thick mane amidst a kiss, winding a single strand around a finger like a ring.

All of them ghosts. All of them ground away, until he was wholly himself.