Chapter Text
‘The little princess.’
That was what the rest of his family had taken to calling her, since she still had no name of her own.
Aerion hated it.
He had hated it from the very first moment. When the babe had curled her tiny fingers around Daeron’s as he held her for the first time, everyone had gathered around in wonder, cooing over her.
“Such a dear little thing,” they had whispered. “She cannot even reach all the way around.”
It made him want to scream.
The weight that had settled over him ever since she had been placed in his arms for the first time pressed deeper into his chest every time he heard the supposed endearment. It had not weighed over him so heavily since he had left King’s Landing nearly five years ago, and now it was accompanied by an unsettling pit of nausea in his stomach.
Aerion stood in his bedchamber, shaking after the interaction he had just had with his father, it was the first time they had been alone together since that cursed tourney. He sank to the floor beneath the memory he could not outpace. What had started to lift from his shoulders the day his knight had come for him in his tower was back now, crushing everything they had grown together beneath it.
Aerion looked at the door where just a stretch of corridor down, Duncan would be, in the bedchamber he used when Aerion needed space—on the rare days when any touch, no matter how gentle, dragged him back by steel fingers to the tourney field beneath a grey spring morning.
For a moment, he thought of going to him—of asking him to hold him as he had the very first time they had found the elm tree that became theirs in the godswood of the Red Keep.
It had not been long after Aerion had started finally emerging from his apartments. Ser Duncan was always with him when he did. The knight called himself stupid, and Aerion was inclined to agree, but even so he quickly worked out that the prince did not like walking the Keep where the eyes of courtiers, guards, and servants could see him, so he sought out other, quieter places where he might find some peace.
The godswood was the most obvious choice. Aerion avoided the training yard like grayscale, and much else of the castle besides, and while the gardens offered some reprieve, they were never truly theirs.
Lords and ladies still wandered the paths—more so now that the prince and the hedge knight had begun frequenting them as well. Their curious glances intruded on what little privacy they might find.
One day they had been walking past the fountain when Lord and Lady Stokeworth had chanced upon them. Aerion caught them glancing back at the pair as they walked away. He shot them a violet glare—sharp and hot with all the fire of the dragon’s blood within its purple hue—and they quickly hastened their pace.
As they did, Aerion was sure he heard them whisper: “Beaten to a pulp by that hedge knight.”
But they were not left alone for long. A cluster of young scullions came through, carrying baskets of apples; one of them bore a bucket of water that she nearly dropped at the sight of the King and Queen’s third son standing in the open light of day again.
Aerion shot them the same look, and they quickly hurried away, water sloshing accusingly in the pail.
“Snapped that woman’s finger right in half,” Aerion was sure he heard as they fled.
Again, they were interrupted. This time it was the captain of the guard, Ser Horren, along with the master-at-arms, Ser Emstan, passing through during a break from their duties. They each nodded to the pair and wished them good day, but Aerion caught the look they exchanged. And then he heard fragments of what passed between them:
“His own father sided against hi—”
Unable to bear it any longer, Aerion covered his ears, trying to shut out the whispers the breeze carried with it, even as the others retreated and he and the knight were left alone once more.
“Are you well, my prince?” the knight had asked with concern.
“Rhova.”
Ser Duncan tilted his head in clear confusion, but Aerion gestured to the water trickling in the fountain, the breeze whipping through the hedges, and the faint clink of their swordbelts that only grew louder as the two knights walked away, and he understood:
“Loud.”
His knight took his hand, and together they stole into the bracken of the Old Gods.
Over the course of the next few days, they would disappear deeper into the woods whenever the outside world grew too loud, whenever the present began to blur into the memory of Ashford Meadow. The prince would look up at Duncan and say, “Rhova,” and that was all the command he needed. The knight would take his hand, and together they would slip away.
Despite living in the Red Keep all his life, Aerion had never paid much mind to the Godswood before. But he had plenty of time to explore it now. One afternoon, they found a great elm tree, and the knight laid his palm against its bark with quiet reverence.
“A beauty,” he said, spreading his fingers over the surface. “There was one just like it at—”
He stopped himself then, realising his mistake before he spoke it. But when he turned around again to face his prince, Aerion did not pierce him with his glare. Instead, he slowly sat down on the roots, pressing his back against the great tree.
“Demas,” Aerion said.
“What does that mean?”
“Sit. You great oaf.”
So he sat, smiling as he did so.
They sat together for a long time, content to simply be in each other's company. They remained in silence, true silence; the safety of the godswood keeping the whispers at bay.
That had been their custom to begin with. In time, they began to speak of other things. First of nonsense, then truer things; uglier things.
There were several times during those weeks in King’s Landing with Ser Duncan when they would be walking hand in hand, and Aerion would find himself thinking of the other men he had known.
There had been times in his life when the splitting in his head became too much to bear, when the itch beneath his skin grew unbearably hot, and demanded a different kind of relief. In those moments, he would slip from the Keep long after the hours deemed acceptable for a prince, especially one of his sex, and find the kind of company that he needed. Not that his mother and father knew anything about that, he was always careful.
As he sat there beneath the tree, sunlight dancing softly on his skin, Aerion found himself wondering if Ser Duncan would still sit beside him as he was now, if he told him about those men.
He got his answer less than a week later, when he finally asked.
“Of course not. Why would I?”
Aerion hadn’t answered straight away.
He was so stunned by the sheer earnestness of it—the honesty, the slight tilt of Duncan’s head as he looked at him in open confusion—that Aerion had to look away. He didn’t want the knight to see his shame.
For a while he fixed his gaze on the trees instead, on the leaves dancing softly in the wind. They moved with an easy, unthinking grace, green fingers wagging at him as if in gentle mockery, as though they knew a kind of peace he feared he would never find again.
Aerion tore his eyes away at last and forced himself to look back. Not at Duncan’s face, not yet. His gaze dropped instead to the knight’s legs, to his knees, to the quiet weight of him seated there. He found himself wondering, unbidden, how soft he might be beneath the steel that he had felt before. His armour rested beside him now, he had shed it so they might sit together comfortably. Aerion tried to look away again, but his gaze kept getting drawn back to the metal shell beside them, and the knight between.
“Would you like to sit on my lap, my prince?”
Aerion had known that question before. In his experience, it usually came with men who planted their feet wide and slapped their knees with a drunken, conceited grin, as they pulled a princeling into their grasp as if that was somehow some divine truth of the status they had imagined for themselves.
His first instinct was to snap at Ser Duncan—or strike him outright.
But when he looked up, he saw no mockery in his knight’s face. No arrogance either. Only something steady, spoken softly and without demand. His gaze was gentle and unexpectant and the hatred that had coiled in Aerion’s gut unravelled under it. Heat rose in his face so quickly he had to look away, certain it must have gone a faint pink beneath Duncan’s cool blue eyes.
Aerion did not answer with words. Instead, after a long while, he turned slowly and crossed the small distance between them, crawling on his hands and knees. He told himself that he shouldn’t be so nervous, he was a prince, and could take what he wanted, but his heart was thudding hard in his chest. He avoided the knight’s gaze as he settled himself onto his lap.
Before he could think too much about it, he had pressed himself forward, burying his face in the soft fabric of Duncan’s undershirt and holding on as though he might vanish otherwise. He felt unmoored—feral in a way he could not name, like a wild animal that had forgotten how to be anything else.
He sat rigid, muscles held tight in expectation of blows that never landed, and struggled to keep Ashford at bay—the memory of that morning, of his defeat, of steel coming down on him, his own shield slamming against his head again and again and again.
How long he stayed with his face pressed against Duncan’s chest, Aerion could not say. Only that he remained there until his muscles yielded their stiffness, and the frantic thudding of his heart eased—though it never fully settled, still heavy beneath his ribs.
When he finally gathered the courage to look up, he saw that the sky had shifted to a pale orange, and it wasn’t his own shield above him.
“Hello,” his knight said softly, smiling down at him.
“Rytsas,” Aerion replied after a moment.
Duncan asked what it meant, and Aerion told him it was hello in his mother tongue. His knight said he sounded very beautiful when he spoke it. Aerion, flustered, buried his face back into Duncan’s chest and called him a great stupid oaf.
But in time, he found himself teaching him other words, too.
Aerion called the knight his vestrion and told him it meant storyteller. When he said, “vestriarzir,” which meant story, Duncan would tell him one. Sometimes they were the old fables all children of Westeros knew; other times, quieter tales from his own childhood of the places that he had travelled with his Ser Arlan. His knight would talk endlessly of those, his hand gently rubbing Aerion’s back as he did so, his face buried into his chest, until Duncan’s own memories chased his own away.
There was seldom a moment during the waking hours that they were not together in the godswood. Aerion could almost forget the Keep around them when they lay beneath their elm tree, Duncan’s weight warm against him, the world narrowed to the hush of leaves above and the steadiness of breath between them. No one ever found them there, so deep within the woods they were.
But his knight could not keep the whispers away forever. As time passed, they returned. Even hidden within the woods, they found them. They slipped through the gaps in the leaves, softened by the light but not stopped by it, carried on the wind like something reluctant rather than cruel. The court followed with them—distant still, but nearer than Aerion liked to admit. A world still turning beyond the trees, pressing closer with every passing day, even here where he had once believed it could not reach him.
Aerion began to despair until the cube of lemon cake touched his lips and the memory of Summerhall returned to him.
He travelled by carriage, his knight and the rest of his retinue riding in escort around him. By now he had recovered enough that he could have ridden himself, had he wished it—but he did not. He had not sat a horse since he had fallen before the realm, and he found no desire to try again.
It would not have been the same. Not like it had been when he was a boy, racing his father and brothers through the Kingswood.
It was the one thing that he could always beat Valarr at, they were more evenly matched in the sparring grounds. Once, not long after his brother had presented as beta, and not as an alpha as Aerion knew that he had hoped, Valarr had knocked him down in the yard. He had been graceful about it, offering his hand to help his brother upright, that only made it worse.
Aerion, never one to take defeat lightly, had used his words, in lieu of his broken training sword, to mock that very wish loudly. Valarr, usually so composed, had snapped, and said that Aerion, an Omega, shouldn’t even be here, gesturing to the training yard as a whole.
Aerion had lunged at him then with a fury so fierce that, even without a weapon, Valarr was knocked clean off his feet. He pushed his brother to the ground, but Valarr held onto him and soon they were reduced to scraping in the mud, as if they were young boys again.
The master-at-arms commanded them to stop, but Aerion couldn’t; his anger was too great, too complete, too hot. He reached for Valarr’s hair, the one strand of silver-gold that he had, the one speck of dragon’s blood he could claim as his. Aerion knew Valarr was envious of his full head of silver hair and purple eyes, and wished he had them and not the blue and brown ones of their father.
Aerion pulled hard, a mad thought flashing through him that he could rip it out, but before he could, he and his brother were pulled apart by guards under the furious command of their mother, who had burst out of the castle once she was informed of the chaos.
They were both sent to their rooms without supper in disgrace. “Feral,” was what their mother called them.
Aerion hadn’t let his face be coloured by shame as Valarr’s had been, he was too angry. He held on to his fury for hours as he paced his rooms, occasionally punching at the walls until he grew weary and buried his face on the pillow on his bed, trying to crush the hot angry tears that slid down his cheeks.
The door knocked softly and the door opened. Aerion didn’t look up. He didn’t need to. He knew who it was.
His father entered, and a hand—gentle, firm—was at his shoulder.
Aerion had sworn he wouldn’t speak, wouldn’t look at him, wouldn’t let anyone see his tears. That he would be angry forever. But at touch he sat up and whirled around to face his father he couldn’t stop them falling, heating his face.
“I fucking hate him! He sai—”
His father held up a hand to halt him.
“I know what he said,” Baelor replied. “And he has been punished. As are you.”
Before Aerion could speak, Baelor’s hand moved from his shoulder to rest against the silver-gold at the crown of his head. He had a strange expression on his face, Aerion had never quite been able to place it. Something between worry and fear. It leaked into his next words as he spoke them:
“This vanity of yours, it will get the best of you some day. I pray it doesn’t, but I fear it will.”
That memory had followed Aerion more times in the carriage than he would care to admit, refusing to be chased away. It lingered as the rolling fields of the Crownlands gave way to the Marches, and the steady sound of hooves outside made his vision swim.
Besides, champions rode. Victors rode. And he was neither of those things—not anymore, if he had ever been. He knew that well enough. He was going to Summerhall in defeat, just as he had been hauled back to the capital after his defeat at Ashford Meadow: his broken body dragged up the Kingsroad in a cart like slaughtered livestock while his mother whispered sweet comforts into his silver-gold hair.
On the seventh day, when the carriage finally rolled to a stop and the herald announced his arrival, Ser Duncan himself opened the door—though strictly speaking, it was beneath his station to do so. He held out his hand for Aerion to take, giving it a gentle squeeze as he stepped down into the light.
It felt, for a moment, like stepping backward through time. The darkened interior of the carriage gave way to faint afternoon light, warm and forgiving, as though it remembered him. The soft golden light wrapped around him, soft in its embrace. Aerion stood on the gravel half a boy again, staring at a place he had once known so well. The place where he had spent so many days as a child with his brothers and sisters, without any true troubles of his own.
He might almost have believed it was truly sorcery, that he had truly been carried back to those soft summer mornings of his boyhood, if not for the sight of his brother, Daeron, already waiting on the steps with open arms
Aerion still had to blink twice. Daeron was not so young as he had been in childhood, but he looked younger all the same. The thin sheen of sweat that had once marred his face was gone, swept away by the cool mountain air; the purple hollows beneath his eyes had faded, and when Daeron reached out to clasp his hand, Aerion saw that his no longer shook so badly as they once had.
Aemon’s tonics had worked miracles in chasing away the dreams that had plagued Daeron for as long as Aerion could remember. He remembered how, back in the capital, their mother and father had waited with bated breath to see if they had finally found something to quiet the prophecies that haunted him.
It was true that Daeron had improved since beginning the concoction. But even so, something had remained heavy on him. Then, one morning, Daeron had confessed to the King and Queen that he no longer felt fit to be heir. The weight of it, he said, was too great, and he feared slipping back into old habits beneath its strain. They had given him a few weeks, to see if he would change his mind, and when he had insisted that this was truly what he wanted, they had allowed him to abdicate his position, and Valarr was named as the heir in his stead.
Aerion had been annoyed at first, declaring beneath his breath with a scowl, “Great, now I’ll have to listen to that prick for the rest of my life,” as he nodded toward Valarr while Daeron bade them farewell in the courtyard, preparing to begin the next stage of his recovery at Summerhall.
“I am glad you have come, brother. Truly, I am.” Was how Daeron greeted him now, and Aerion allowed him to lead him inside.
All Aerion’s fears vanished within the first few hours. That first evening, he climbed to the top of the Westward Tower and stood in the rooftop pavilion that overlooked the entire castle and the mountainous landscape beyond. From here, the neighbouring castles of Blackhaven and Grandview lay hidden from sight. It was unlike the Red Keep, where places like Stokeworth, Rosby, and the Dun Fort and others besides could be seen on the horizon, along with the constant movement of ships on the Blackwater, bringing more people, more noise, more eyes.
He was not so naive as to believe word of what had happened at the tourney at Ashford Meadow had not spread—the whole realm of Westeros had heard, and the tale had likely crossed the Narrow Sea too. But here, the whispers couldn’t reach him, and it was possible—just for a moment—to pretend otherwise.
It felt almost as though this were the only castle left in the world. Aerion allowed the childish thought to settle over him for a few precious moments as the sun sank softly over the mountains, and the last gold of the day slipped into night, carried away on the wings of fireflies that drifted through the air around him.
The silent spell was broken only by the sound of footsteps on the white stone staircase, but Aerion did not flinch. He already knew who it was before he turned.
“Rhova?” his knight asked, tilting his head slightly.
Aerion shook his head and stepped forward.
“Vūjīs,” the prince said instead.
Duncan moved toward him at the same time.
“And what does that mean, my prince?” his knight asked, a faint tilt to his head and a glimmer of curiosity in his eye.
Aerion’s heart thudded in his chest—not with fear, but with anticipation. He stepped closer again, and Duncan mirrored him until there was no distance left between them.
They stood chest to chest, just as they had laid together so many evenings in the Godswood.
Slowly, Aerion rose onto the tips of his toes and pressed a soft kiss to his knight’s lips.
Duncan bent down, meeting him halfway, and kissed him back, as soft and tenderly as the summer night.
“That’s what it means,” Aerion murmured.
The summer sun soon became witness to more and more of their stolen kisses. But it was the moon, full and circular, that saw the first time Aerion lay beneath Ser Duncan since the Trial of Seven: it was on their wedding night.
“We don’t have to,” Duncan began. For a moment, Aerion feared he had already changed his mind, that something in what they had sworn had broken. But then the knight continued, nodding toward the space between them. “If you are not ready, I mean. We can wait.”
Duncan told him he would only continue so long as Aerion promised to speak if he wanted him to stop. Aerion agreed. Usually he would have lied without hesitation, but the sting still lingered in his arm from when they had sworn to the other, and so he was honest when he promised again.
“We should pick a word,” Duncan said after thinking for a moment. “So that I will know. So I don’t hurt you, my prince. I will never hurt you again—I swear it.”
He kissed the cut on Aerion’s arm, sealing in the promise.
Aerion thought for a moment.
“Gūrogon,” he said at last.
His knight tilted his head. “And what does that mean, my prince?”
Aerion shook his head slightly.
“It doesn’t matter what it means.”
Slowly, Aerion lowered himself back onto the moss-covered ground. His heart was thudding as fiercely as it had the day he had first climbed into Duncan’s lap. Salt stung at his eyes, though he kept them tightly shut.
He could not bear to look. Could not bear what he might see if he did.
For one terrible instant, he feared it was all a trick—that when he opened his eyes, his knight, his sweet knight who held his hand and made sure he ate and told him sweet stories, would no longer be there. He feared that instead, he would open his eyes to that shadowed figure again, the one who had stood over him in blackened armour, bringing his shield down upon him again and again and again, demanding he yield as Aerion was brought to the cusp of death.
A thought struck him then, and panic chilled him to the bone.
What if it’s a trick, like before?
The memory came unbidden, dragging him back with cold, iron fingers.
The grey spring morning. A rider in Valarr’s armour. Aerion had laughed—loudly, almost madly—convinced his brother had come to meet him there, to turn the bout into one of their childhood games again.
But then the helm had been lifted.
And his laughter had died in his throat.
It was not his brother.
It was his father.
His mismatched eyes had found his violet ones across the tourney grounds, not standing beside him, but watching from the opposite side entirely. For the first time in his life, Aerion felt not the heat of anger coursing through him, but something empty and cold…
Then, through the fear, a word came down and freed him from the memory.
Words Aerion had never taught him fell softly from Duncan’s lips.
“Avy jorrāelan.”
Aerion’s eyes flew open.
And there he was—not the shadowed figure of that nightmare, not the one who had brought him to the brink of death—but his knight. The man who had held his hand, who had drawn soothing circles against his back, who had told him stories in the quiet and brought him back into the light.
Hours later, when they lay beneath their tree, skin to skin and breath finally unguarded, Duncan’s seed still warm between them and slowly slipping back in the aftermath, Aerion asked him how he had known the words.
His knight only smiled, soft and unhurried, as he brushed them into Aerion’s silver-gold hair.
“I asked your brother, my prince.”
They remained in the arms of the other through the rest of the night.
“Prick,” Aerion said the next evening as he and his brother supped together at the top of the West Tower.
Daeron only laughed softly. “It was not a slight, brother. He was very nervous when he came to me. He could barely get the question out actually. It was quite sweet.”
Yes, he is sweet, Aerion thought, idly tracing the faint red line carved deep into his skin. Too sweet for you. Too good for you. The thought followed, quieter but far less kind.
Daeron’s gaze dropped to where Aerion was absently stroking his arm. “I can’t believe you actually did that,” he said, a huff of laughter escaping him—almost impressed.
“Yes you can.”
“Well… yes, I suppose I can,” his brother conceded, cutting into his lamb again.
Aerion, suddenly disinterested in his dinner, twirled his knife between his fingers and half-pointed it toward Daeron. “If you’re going to tell me I shouldn’t hav—”
“Of course not, Aerion. Gods, who do you take me for, Valarr?” Daeron cut in with a grin, batting his hand away and nudging the knife back toward his plate.
Aerion scowled, but obediently took a small bite of his carrot.
“’Twas a good thing, that you wed, I mean.”
“Yes.”
“And that you came to Summerhall at all.”
“Hm.”
“And that you wrote to father.”
Aerion was so stunned he dropped his knife.
“I didn’t write to father.”
“Yes, you did. I saw the letter.”
“That was to mother.”
“And father.”
“To inform them of my marriage.”
“Yes.”
Aerion had a sudden urge to pick up his cup of sweet milk and throw it over his brother. Duncan would have been displeased with him, however, so instead he scowled and took a slow sip, using the rim of the cup to obscure Daeron’s face for a moment until his irritation ebbed somewhat.
Daeron looked across the pavilion and out over the mountainscape beyond.
“They’ll know by now.”
Aerion only hummed in response.
He had sent the raven the morning after they returned from the woods, while the blood of his scar was still wet enough that it would have stained his fingers if he pressed too hard.
“Mother will be furious.”
“I suspect so.”
“He’s probably on his way here as we speak.”
“More than likely.”
Daeron hesitated.
“Father—”
“I don’t care what he thinks!”
Aerion slammed his cup down. Honeyed milk sloshed over his hands, sticking to his skin like blood.
Aerion had left the tower then, not wanting to look at his idiot brother any longer. He had hoped Duncan would be in their chamber, but it was empty, and Aerion found himself slowly reaching for the chest he kept underneath their bed.
It was filled to the brim with letters.
Every week since he had left King’s Landing, he had received one.
They left a cold, empty pit in his stomach.
The whispers that had plagued him in the capital couldn’t reach him here at Summerhall.
Everything was fine.
Perfect, really.
If it hadn’t been for those bothersome ravens.
They flew over the mountains and straight into the castle, each bearing his father’s seal, his father’s hand. They each weighed heavy in Aerion’s hands, far heavier than a sheet of parchment should have.
Now, as he stood there and looked at the chest, Aerion wondered how something so heavy did not simply break through the floor, through every level beneath it, down to the very bottom of the tower.
He hadn’t opened that first letter straight away, it had taken him a long time. When he finally did, he heard a whisper—a sound that he hoped he had banished forever—slip from the page, soft and sinister.
They had been locked within the chest until now. Now, they were back, with a new shape. One that his knight couldn’t rub away.
'The little princess.'
Aerion’s head split in two, every sinister whisper he had heard in the capital entered it then, each voice echoing the very name that his cursed family had given her. It was not only them, either. He had heard the guards whisper it once, and even the wet nurse, he was sure of it.
It had been his father.
He started it.
Cautiously, Aerion slipped back into the nursery with the hope that Baelor would already be gone. He was, it was just the nursemaid there.
But it wasn’t.
The guard was at the door.
For a moment, Aerion simply stared at him, the realization settling cold and heavy in his chest. The safety of Summerhall had been fading, but now it felt worse—like even its private corners had begun to grow eyes.
“Give us space,” he commanded.
The maid quickly gathered herself and withdrew. The guard remained.
Aerion’s head thudded in pain, that familiar pressure building behind his eyes as though his skull had been forced apart and left open to the air. Each breath felt too loud. Too close. Too much.
He tried to focus on an object. The chair. The blanket draped over it. Duncan’s swordbelt with his dagger attached from where he’d been here earlier. But he couldn’t, his attention was always pulled back right to the very centre—towards the crib.
He knew what was inside; He moved towards it anyway.
And when he looked at her, his vision went strange—softened at the edges, pale and drifting, as though the world had lost its anchor.
The babe stared up at him.
Brown hair. Blue eyes. Small.
So small it was almost unbearable to comprehend.
Something inside him tightened violently. A deep, crawling itch flared along the scar on his arm, as though it were remembering something his mind refused to name. His fingers twitched once at his side, then stilled, then twitched again.
For the first time since arriving at Summerhall, a word surfaced in his mind—sharp and unbidden, one that he had resisted saying to his knight in those early days in King’s Landing, no matter how much he had wanted to.
Izūgan.
Aerion reached out slowly. His hand shook as it descended toward the child. The closer he got, the hotter the air seemed to become, until, when he came within a hairs breath of her forehead it felt as though fire were licking at the edges of his fingers, warming—no, burning—
Warm.
Too warm.
He stopped just short of her skin.
“A maester!” he shouted, snapping his head toward the guard, sharp and vicious. His voice was raw, it left no room for hesitation. “Get me the maester, now!”
The guard did not question him, he was already moving, hurrying to fetch Maester Melaquin. Once the door, swinging on its hinges, finally slammed shut, Aerion moved himself.
He looped Ser Duncan’s swordbelt around his waist and secured it, feeling the weight of the dagger against his skin.
Then he approached the little princess.
And reached into her crib.