Chapter Text
Rhea I
Lady Rhea Royce woke before dawn on the worst day of her life and knew it at once, because the first thought that greeted her upon opening her eyes was this: I have to marry Daemon Targaryen today.
It arrived with all the grace of a thrown stone.
She lay perfectly still beneath her blankets and stared up at the dark canopy over her bed as if sheer refusal might stop the day from proceeding, as if the sun itself might see fit to remain below the horizon out of pity for her situation. It did not. The pale light creeping at the edges of her chamber curtains only brightened. Somewhere beyond the walls of the guest apartments in the Red Keep Rhea could hear the muffled stirring of servants and the relentless machinery of a royal wedding already in motion.
Rhea shut her eyes again, not because sleep would return, but because it felt preferable to pretend she was still in Runestone and this was only some especially ugly dream conjured by too much lemon cake and too many warnings from old women about the dangers of handsome men.
It was not a dream. By the gods, if anything, reality had proved more dreadful.
The first time Prince Daemon Targaryen had truly offended Rhea had been the day they met, though in fairness he had probably intended to begin offending her from the moment he heard her name. Rhea could still see the Great Hall clearly if she allowed herself the indulgence. The hard shine of the floor beneath torchlight, the solemn weight of royal attention, her father speaking with Prince Baelon and King Jaehaerys while Rhea held her posture and her temper as best she could. And then the stupid prince himself, all silver hair and black silk and vicious adolescent arrogance, standing there staring at her as though her very existence had been arranged to inconvenience him alone.
‘The sheep really are prettier’, Daemon had declared, out loud, in full hearing of the king and both their fathers, with disgust on his tongue as though she were some ugly horse hauled in from the wrong stable.
Rhea had not cried. She had not gasped. She had rolled her eyes because anything else would have rewarded him far too much. But later, alone with only her women and her own furious thoughts for company, Rhea had sat on the edge of her bed and had to remind herself that murdering a prince before the betrothal was formally sealed would probably be considered poor form.
And treason.
By the time one of her ladies came softly into the chamber to wake her properly, Rhea had already been awake and resentful for the better part of an hour.
“Good morrow, my lady,” said Ysilla, too gently for Rhea’s liking, because everyone became cautious around brides as though impending marriage made them fragile creatures liable to dissolve into weeping if not handled like spun sugar.
“There is nothing good in this morrow,” Rhea sighed, rolling onto her back and dragging a hand over her face. “It has arrived fully poisoned.”
Ysilla, who had known her since childhood and therefore possessed the excellent habit of not taking her dramatics too seriously, only pulled the curtains wide and let the morning in. Silver light poured over the chamber, cool and clean and entirely too cheerful for such a cursed occasion. Another servant entered with a basin and fresh cloths, and the room began filling in that slow, intimate way it did when women prepared one another for ceremony. There were footsteps, murmured practicalities, ribbons set out, water poured, brushes and oils and folded silks waiting their turn. Rhea sat up as if she was a condemned woman allowing herself to be dressed for execution.
Breakfast arrived soon after, laid out on a small table near the window with typical royal abundance. There were sweet rolls glazed with honey, soft eggs, sliced pears, butter still cool from the morning, and a little dish of jam so artfully arranged Rhea almost felt guilty for glaring at it.
Her women settled her before the mirror with a tray balanced across her lap while two of them began fussing over her skin, smoothing soothing creams over her face and throat with reverent attention. Rhea endured it with the patience of a woman who knew resistance would only prolong the inevitable. She broke off pieces of bread and swallowed them mechanically while the women talked around her in soft tones about whether the white silk should be pinned just so.
Rhea caught sight of herself in the mirror -dark hair tumbling down around her shoulders, brown eyes narrowed in active resentment, mouth set hard enough to crack stone- and thought that if Daemon Targaryen had the poor sense to want a meek and pretty little wife, he was in for an educational day indeed.
Daemon had annoyed Rhea countless times since that first meeting.
One of the worst had taken place less than a month after their betrothal, when Rhea had still been making a good-faith effort to decide whether his appalling manners concealed anything remotely salvageable. She had found him in one of the outer courtyards after supper, sword in hand and temper fully visible, carving at a practice dummy with the sort of violence usually reserved for battlefield enemies.
Rhea had, in what she still considered a grand act of helpfulness, remarked that even though he hated the arrangement, he might at least try resenting it secretly, with dignity. Daemon had wheeled around at once and informed her that he possessed dignity in abundance, simply none he intended to waste on “a bronze mountain bitch.”
Rhea, who had been in no mood at all, had asked whether dragonlords came from the cradle already insufferable or whether that particular skill was taught to him by some private master. He had smirked in that infuriating way of his and replied, “No, Lady Royce. For me it comes as naturally as your ordinariness.”
She had thought, very seriously, about shoving him into the fountain.
Now, seated before the mirror with honey on her toast and rosewater cooling on her skin, she found the memory only increased her irritation.
“Eat a little more, my lady,” urged one of the women, dabbing gently at the corners of her eyes with some herbal nonsense meant to brighten them. “You’ll faint if you go to the sept with nothing but temper in you.”
“I have managed perfectly well on temper alone this long,” Rhea said.
“You are indeed resilient," Ysilla replied from behind her as she began the long process of combing out Rhea’s hair, “and strong, but even the most resilient lady requires sustenance on her wedding day. The whole event is daunting even in the best of circumstances...”
That drew the smallest unwilling huff from Rhea, but it did not lighten the knot in her stomach. Wedding. The word itself felt like a trap when attached to Daemon. Not because he was ugly -gods knew he was not, and that really pissed her off- but because everything in Prince Daemon Targaryen seemed wholeheartedly against obedience. He took up space as if the world owed it to him. He argued as if argument were blood sport. He looked at duty as if it was a suggestion, and at everyone else as though they were forever one poor sentence away from disappointing him.
Rhea could have handled a solemn husband, or a vain one, or even a cold one. But one who was all silver fire and princely arrogance and looked at her as though her very House should apologize for not being Valyrian enough? That was the sort of husband a woman wanted to throw from a cliff.
By the time they brought out the gown, Rhea had convinced herself of one thing very firmly: Daemon Targaryen did not deserve her at her prettiest.
The dress was exquisite, which only annoyed Rhea further because it meant she could not in good conscience dislike it. Vale work, of course, though adapted for a royal wedding, it had ivory silk layered with pale bronze embroidery that caught the light like frost over metal and fitted close at the bodice before falling in rich, heavy folds to the floor. The sleeves were long and elegant, the neckline modest enough for court but flattering besides. When her women drew it over her shift and began fastening it properly, Rhea had the realization that she looked exactly as a Royce bride ought to look: proud, highborn, and very much herself even under all the silk and ceremonial softness.
“He does not deserve this,” Rhea informed the room while one maid pinned the last fold at her shoulder and another adjusted the fall of the skirts. “Not one bit of it. If he wanted a stupid Valyrian bride he should have found a way to weasel himself out of this arrangement. But he couldn’t, because he is an incompetent fool, and now I look fantastic for a man who finds me uglier than sheep. He should have kept his insults to himself, damn it all, so that I might at least try to enjoy my goddamn wedding day!” She ended her rant with a strangled scream into the nearest pillow, smudging some of the work done to her face.
Her ladies, who had reached the point of treating these declarations as weather patterns rather than actual threats, responded with practiced reassurance and just enough honesty to keep her from throwing her pillow. “You look stunning, my lady, who cares what some spoiled princeling thinks?” said Ysilla, stepping back to admire the effect with the unabashed approval of a woman who had helped dress Rhea half her life.
“A true Vale lady,” added another.
“Bronze and beautiful.”
Rhea looked at herself in the mirror again and, against her own will, could not quite disagree. The gown made her appear more mature somehow, more settled into womanhood, with her dark hair finally tamed and braided back from her face beneath a veil light enough not to hide her. She looked like a bride. She looked like duty. She looked as if she were stepping willingly into the next shape of her life instead of being marched into a doomed marriage by fathers and kings.
The last conversation Rhea and Daemon had before the wedding took place in the gardens, two weeks before the ceremony, beneath a climbing wall of summer roses so beautiful it made the whole exchange feel particularly intriguing. Rhea had been walking alone, or trying to, when Daemon appeared with that prowling, restless energy he carried as naturally as other men carried cloaks. He had looked her up and down in open displeasure and said, without preamble, “Do you always stalk about like you mean to annihilate the hedges?”
She had turned on him at once. “Only when I hear you nearby. It puts me in the proper detestable mood.”
He’d laughed then. Not kindly, never kindly, but with genuine amusement that made his face infuriatingly handsome. “You are very quick for a girl so designated to plainness, I suppose I should be thankful that you have some sort of brains in that bronze head of yours.”
“And you are very loud for a man who says so little worth hearing.”
That ought to have ended it. Or at least steered the conversation toward its usual rhythm of mutual provocation and retreat, but Daemon had been in one of his fouler moods and stepped close enough to whisper, “You should be grateful. Any other lady would be swooning at my fucking feet from just the thought of marrying a dashing prince.”
Rhea had lifted her chin until she was almost nose to nose with him. “It seems that I am not any other lady, or maybe I am just waiting for the so-called dashing prince to arrive?
Daemon had looked startled then- not wounded, which might have satisfied her, but startled in the way men often were when a woman answered their cruelty with better cruelty. “You are impossible,” he’d spat out.
“I think you meant to say incredible. I thank you for the compliment, my betrothed.”
“I would rather marry my dragon.”
“And I would rather marry the dragon than its rider. What a predicament! Should we duel for Caraxes’ hand- no! Claw?”
Daemon let a chuckle slip past his lips, which stopped him cold for one glorious, shining heartbeat. Then he narrowed those offensive indigo eyes and said, “Don’t be funny, it annoys me.”
To which Rhea had replied, very sweetly, “do not grow envious of my humor, maybe one day it will rub off on you and you will finally be funny too!”
That memory, returning now as her veil was adjusted and her bracelets clasped into place, almost made her smile despite herself.
Almost.
Instead the next thing she knew, she was standing at the altar. Rhea did not entirely remember walking there. One moment she had been in her chamber thinking murderous thoughts while women fussed around her; the next she was before the septon with the hall stretching out in a blur of faces and candles and polished stone. Her father stood somewhere to one side. The royal family gleamed in clusters beyond. The white-and-crystal light of the sept made everything feel unreal. And beside Rhea, draped in regal black and red, stood Daemon Targaryen looking unfairly beautiful and, to her endless fury, entirely composed.
Rhea had been so busy cursing him in her head that she did not realize the septon had spoken until the silence after the question had begun to lengthen. “My lady?” the septon prompted.
Rhea blinked.
The old man was looking at her with patient concern. Several people in the front rows had gone very still. Somewhere in the corner of her eye she saw her soon to be good brother, Prince Viserys Targaryen close his own briefly in what looked suspiciously like secondhand embarrassment. “I’m sorry,” Rhea spoke clearly through the awkwardness, though she felt her face heat at once because naturally this was the moment her dignity chose to desert her. “Would you repeat that?”
An unmistakable snicker came from beside her.
Daemon.
Rhea turned her head just enough to catch his smug smirk, and the sight of it made fresh humiliation rush through her in a hot wave. If she had not been in a sept before gods and family and half the realm, she might have driven the heel of her foot straight into his groin.
Instead Rhea Royce faced forward again, burning with mortification, while Prince Daemon Targaryen stood at her side trying not to laugh at her on their wedding day. And Rhea Royce, dressed in ivory and bronze and all the best dignity the Vale could offer, thought with perfect clarity that this was still the worst day of her life.
By the time the ceremony concluded and the wedding feast properly began, Rhea had learned two things. The first was that marriage, as an institution, was grossly oversold by everyone. The second was that Prince Daemon Targaryen had an inexhaustible talent for making every shared moment feel like a goddamn duel.
They were seated at the center of the high table, which felt less like an honor and more like a punishment devised by a malicious god with a taste for irony. King Jaehaerys sat not far off in all his aged authority, Queen Alysanne shining beside him with the serenity of a woman who could smell nonsense from twenty paces. Prince Baelon was near enough to keep his younger son under observation, which he did with relentless focus. Viserys sat on Daemon’s other side looking as good-hearted as ever, though Rhea had already caught him hiding amusement behind his cup at least twice. Her own father was present too, along with enough Royces and Targaryens to fill the dais with bronze, silver, red, black, and the mutual strain of two families determined to call the evening a triumph no matter how loudly the bride and groom radiated disagreement.
Rhea and Daemon had not stopped needling one another since the vows were spoken. They had done it quietly, of course, because both of them possessed just enough sense not to scandalize the hall beyond recovery after surviving the sept. But quiet jabs, she had discovered, could be every bit as vicious as open argument when two people were determined enough.
Daemon had complained under his breath during the blessing that Rhea smelled like old books and cheese of all things. She had replied that perhaps Daemon required getting his nose checked, because it was clearly the septon who reeked, not her. He had muttered during the first course that bronze somehow managed to look dirty when worn by her relatives. She had informed him that silver hair made his whole family look prematurely old.
None of the remarks had improved the evening. Both of hers however did improve her mood.
Their first dance had been a special circle of hell. The musicians had struck up something stately and noble, the sort of dance meant to display grace, lineage, and marital promise before the watching court. Daemon had taken her hand with the expression of a man touching a flopping fish. Rhea had accepted with the look of a woman resigned to crossing a swamp in her best shoes.
They moved well enough, because that was another damned inconvenience of him -he danced beautifully, light on his feet and infuriatingly elegant when he chose to be- but every step had been edged with distaste. King Jaehaerys had watched the whole thing from his seat with such cold and unmistakable expectation that even Daemon, for all his rebellion, had thought better of making an outright scene. So they had turned and stepped and touched under royal scrutiny while trading murderously polite expressions and little barbed comments behind their smiles.
“You dance like a mountain man.” Daemon had murmured.
“And you dance like you think everyone ought to applaud because your feet know how to work,” Rhea had returned.
“Perhaps they should.”
“Perhaps I should stomp on yours so that they no longer work.”
The king’s stare had concentrated then, and Daemon had the decency to shut up.
Now, mercifully, they were eating. That brought a temporary peace. There was something about actual food being set before people that forced even the unhappily married toward common human instincts. Rhea had discovered that if she focused on the roasted chicken, buttered turnips, river trout, and sweet onions set before her, she did not have to think about Daemon Targaryen except as an unpleasant warmth in the next chair over. Daemon seemed to have reached the same conclusion from the opposite direction.
For a brief and glorious stretch, they ignored one another almost completely while the feast pressed on around them in waves of music, laughter, toasts, and old lords pretending not to watch the couple at the center of it all. Then the wine happened.
At first it was only practical.
Rhea drank because sobriety had served her very poorly all day and because the hall was full of people smiling too widely at her as if she ought to be grateful to have been saddled with one of the realm’s most handsome nuisances. Daemon drank because Daemon, it seemed, was determined never to face any unwelcome duty without enough alcohol in him.
Cups were refilled. Goblets replaced. Sweet red, dry gold and something Dornish all appeared in turn. No one said anything, because weddings were for drinking and because both bride and groom looked just dangerous enough that even the servants knew better than to interfere.
Then it became competitive.
Rhea was not entirely sure when the shift occurred, only that at some point she noticed Daemon draining his cup with the smug little air of a man certain he could outlast everyone in the room, and immediately felt compelled to prove him wrong. She finished her own. He noticed. Another was poured. She took hers faster this time. He did the same. Neither acknowledged what they were doing.
Viserys glanced from one to the other with growing concern and then, sensibly, chose not to comment. By the third round the thing had become a silent war. By the fourth it had become very much not silent, because wine and mutual irritation rarely produce restraint in people already inclined toward poor judgment.
Daemon leaned back in his chair with the lazy arrogance of a prince who had drunk enough to make himself luminous with bad ideas and looked sidelong at Rhea over the rim of his cup. “You should count yourself fortunate,” he smirked. “There are women in this hall who would be thrilled to be bedded by me.”
Rhea turned to stare at him.
He was flushed with drink, silver hair disordered at the temples from dancing and heat, his indigo eyes burning with drunken confidence men often mistook for charm. Under other circumstances she might have admitted that he looked very fine like that. Under these circumstances she chose instead to narrow her smoldering eyes and consider whether she could get away with shoving him off the dais. “Would they?” she asked cloyingly. “How ambitious of them.”
Daemon smirked. “You needn’t sound jealous, wife.”
Rhea laughed into her wine. The look on his face at that -offended, baffled, and a little too intrigued for his own good- made the whole miserable day worthwhile. “Jealous?” she repeated. “Daemon, you are fiercely overestimating your abilities to charm women.”
The, actually somewhat charming, man in question looked scandalized. “What the fuck did you just say?”
“You heard me.” She tipped her cup idly, watching the red cling to the edge before it slid back down. “You strut. You preen. You insult people as a form of courtship and seem genuinely surprised when they do not swoon. I wish, for my own peace, that I could be attracted to you. It would make this arrangement easier. But the gods were kind enough to deny me that particular weakness.”
Daemon set his goblet down with unnecessary force. “I could bed anyone in this room.” The words came out with the reckless clarity of a drunken bet just beginning to form.
Rhea turned toward him properly now, delighted despite herself. “Anyone?”
“Anyone.”
Viserys, hearing enough of that to know danger was coming, leaned slightly closer. “Daemon-”
But Daemon was already committed, which was the least reversible version of him. Rhea smiled slowly as she raised her hand to Viserys. “A bold claim from a man whose chief seduction technique appears to be announcing his own excellence and berating the woman in question.”
“It works.”
“It does not.”
“It absolutely does.”
“Prove it.”
That got his attention in full. Daemon sat forward a little, eyes sharpening despite the drink. “How?”
Rhea glanced out over the hall, where the next round of dancing was beginning to gather. It was not the formal display of the newly wed, but one of the looser group dances that drew cousins and courtiers and household knights into easy circles while musicians played something lively enough to blur propriety at the edges. Her mind, helped along by wine and spite, moved at once toward the funniest possible answer. “During the next group dance-”
Daemon’s grin flashed immediately, too quick and too pleased. “-Done.”
“You haven’t heard the terms.”
“I don’t need to. I know I'll win.”
Rhea almost laughed right then, because only a prince this drunk and this arrogant would stride so willingly into his own humiliation. “During the next group dance,” she repeated with a hiccup, leaning close enough that her veil’s trailing embroidery brushed his sleeve, “you must successfully woo a woman of my choosing.”
He tilted his head, looking a bit like a curious silver dog. “Successfully?”
“She must show genuine interest. Enough that I believe you could bed her if you wished.”
Daemon looked insulted by the possibility that this might be difficult. “Very well.”
“And if you fail,” Rhea continued, savoring every word, “you stop whining, do your duty, and consummate this marriage without further theatrics.”
That gave him pause, but only because the stakes now felt real enough to heighten the game. He looked at her then with that shiny, reckless challenge in his eyes, and Rhea saw exactly how certain he remained of victory.
Poor fool.
“And if I win,” he said with a mean grin, “we never consummate the marriage.”
Rhea considered him for one beautifully petty moment, then lifted her cup. “Done.”
Daemon clinked his goblet against hers. Viserys, who had now heard enough to understand the broad and horrifying wager, looked between them as if contemplating whether it might yet be possible to fetch both fathers before disaster flowered fully. He was too late. The dance was already drawing people to the floor, and Rhea had already selected her champion.
Her cousin Alyra Royce stood three lines into the forming set, laughing with one of Rhea’s own ladies and looking entirely too pleased with life for Rhea’s tastes this evening. Alyra was stunning, sharp-witted, and devoted almost exclusively to the company of women in every sense that mattered, though one had to actually know her to know it. Daemon, being Daemon, did not know her at all beyond “another bronze person attached to my wife’s side of the hall” and thus strode toward the dance floor with all the confidence of a dragonrider approaching conquest.
Rhea sat back and watched with wicked amusement.
At first, it went exactly as Daemon believed it would. He was beautiful, after all, and princely, and drunk enough to radiate careless charm from every angle. Women smiled at him when he passed. Men made room. He slipped into the forming dance near Alyra with a sly grin that promised trouble and entirely expected to be welcomed for it. Rhea nearly pitied him.
Nearly.
From the high table she watched him begin whatever he thought wooing looked like in his current state. There was too much leaning, too much smirking, and some flourish of the hand that would perhaps have impressed a serving girl from Flea Bottom but had absolutely no effect on Alyra beyond mild curiosity. Rhea could not hear the words from where she sat, but she did not need to. She knew Daemon’s confidence by now, knew how he offered himself as if beauty and rank ought to do all of the work before his temper arrived to tear it all down.
Alyra listened. Then she laughed. Not a flirtatious laugh. Not coy. Not tempted. The sort of laugh one gives a jester one does not dislike but would also never dream of kissing. Rhea pressed her lips together and downed another drink in an effort to contain her glee.
Daemon tried again.
Alyra’s brows rose and said something. Daemon actually stumbled. Then, to Rhea’s exquisite elation, Alyra patted his arm like one might soothe an overexcited hound and turned away to draw Lady Meredyth Corbray into the dance instead, smiling at her with the unmistakable warmth of real preference.
That was when Rhea lost the battle with her own composure and snickered outright.
By the time Daemon made a third, increasingly confused attempt to recover his footing in the encounter, she was laughing openly into her cup. The sound drew looks from both sides of the table, though she cared very little. Even Viserys, poor sweet man, had gone a little glassy with secondhand embarrassment for his younger brother. Prince Baelon, who had been occupied in conversation and only gradually come to understand that his younger son was now publicly making a spectacle of himself while trying to seduce one of the Royce women during his own wedding feast, rose from his seat with a slowness that boded ill for the poor unruly prince.
One moment Daemon was trying, with diminishing grace, to recover from Alyra’s complete and cheerful lack of interest; the next his father’s hand had closed around his shoulder with the inescapable finality of justice descending from on high. Rhea saw Baelon say something low and lethal into his son’s ear. Daemon’s face changed at once from princely seduction to aggrievement. He turned to protest, thought better of it under his father’s expression, and allowed himself to be marched off the dance floor like a chastened fool before half the court.
Rhea laughed harder. She did not even try to stop herself. It came out breathless and wholly undignified, and if the gods had any kindness in them, Daemon heard every bit of it as Baelon pushed him firmly back into his seat beside her. He landed with all the grace of a dropped swordbelt. “Enjoying yourself?” Daemon muttered with a scowl.
Immensely pleased, and perhaps a little drunker than was wise, Rhea turned toward him with tears of laughter still threatening at the corners of her eyes. “More than I have all day.”
Daemon glared at her, cheeks flushed with wine and humiliation both, while across the table Viserys looked as though he might either laugh himself or lie down on the floor and let the feast continue over him. Rhea lifted her goblet in lazy triumph. “Well,” she said. “Looks as though you have no charm after all, husband.”
Rhea was drunk enough to enjoy the moment properly and sober enough to memorize it for later cruelty. Daemon looked magnificent and furious all at once, silver hair askew, black-clad shoulders rigid with affront, mouth set in the sort of line men wore when the world had failed to recognize their greatness. It would have been a very handsome expression if it had not been so transparently wounded. Rhea took another sip of wine and let the pleasure of his humiliation warm her from the inside out.
Daemon turned toward her so quickly she thought for one wicked moment he might actually bite. “The bet does not matter.”
Rhea raised a brow. “It matters a great deal to me.”
“It ought not,” he snapped. “I still would not bed you if my Valyrian Gods themselves descended to personally request it.”
That should not have annoyed Rhea. On a sensible day, perhaps, it would not have. On a sober day she might even have laughed at the absurdity of two newly married nobles sitting at their own wedding feast swearing mutual disinterest with the force of blood oaths. But this was not a sensible day, nor was she sober, and beneath all her complaining there lived a hard Royce core of duty that did not disappear merely because she despised the arrangement. Rhea was her father’s heir. Runestone would one day be hers. Marriage was not meant to be a petty game of wounded pride and bedchamber wagers. It was supposed to mean something, however tiresome that truth might be.
Daemon, of course, chose that moment to make himself even more offensive. “You should look into mothering some bastards for Runestone if you’re so desperate for heirs,” he said with a careless, drunken shrug, as if discussing horse-breeding arrangements rather than her future.
Rhea stared at him, then set down her goblet very carefully. “You insufferable asshole.”
Her husband had the gall to look smug. “What? I’m solving your problem.”
“No,” Rhea said, voice mounting with irritation. “You are creating seven more.”
Part of her wanted to fling her wine in his face. A larger, far more entertaining part wanted to beat him at his own stupid game so thoroughly that he would have no choice but to choke on it. Rhea turned in her seat just enough to scan the floor again, where the dancing had shifted once more into easy sets of laughing younger lords, ladies adorned with jewels and flushed with music, and the various orbiting satellites of courtly desire. “Very well,” she announced with a stiff nod.
Daemon narrowed his eyes. “Very well what?”
Rhea looked back at him with sudden, reckless delight. “I suppose it is my turn to try.”
That caught Daemon off guard before he scoffed. “Oh, please.”
“What?” Rhea asked with faux joy. “You tried to prove your irresistible charm to the hall and failed before one of my cousins. Why should I not have my own chance?”
Daemon leaned back and looked her over with sheer disbelief, as though the mere notion were preposterous. “Because it would never work.”
Rhea smiled. That smile, she knew, was one of the more dangerous expressions in her arsenal. It had gotten her out of trouble as a girl often enough, and into better kinds of trouble as she grew older. Drunk as he was, Daemon noticed it too late. “You sound frightened,” she smirked.
He sat forward at once. “I’m not frightened of anything.”
“Then choose.”
“You want me to choose?”
“I do.”
Daemon looked around the hall with aggressive confidence, and Rhea almost laughed because she could see, as clearly as if he had shouted it to the room, that he was putting no actual thought into the matter beyond selecting the handsomest unattached man visible. No consideration of who in the hall might already know her. No effort to judge her chances by history, preference, or sense. He was too drunk and too vain for that. He wanted spectacle. He wanted to see her fail.
And so Prince Daemon Targaryen, with all the gall of dragon-blood and all the intelligence of a beautiful man making a wager on his own wedding night, pointed across the floor and said, “There. Him.”
Rhea followed his gaze. Then she nearly laughed in his face.
Ser Terrence Templeton stood near the center of the dance, well-muscled and gold-haired and easy in company, exactly the sort of handsome Vale man a prince from King’s Landing would pick if he wanted the room’s most obvious answer. He was also, rather crucially, the last man who had courted Rhea in earnest before Queen Alysanne decided she would instead be married into the royal line. Terrence had hunted with her, ridden with her, and had kissed the back of her hand in Runestone one evening with such shy sincerity that Rhea had nearly wed him on the spot before her father informed her of the royal match.
Daemon would have known that if he had bothered to learn a single damned thing about his wife. Instead he looked terribly pleased with himself. “Him,” he repeated. “Go on, then. Seduce him.”
Rhea rose at once. “Gladly.”
She did not even let him finish looking smug. She gathered her skirts and slipped from the high table with all the happy swiftness of a woman stepping toward justice, leaving Daemon staring after her with the first crack of doubt just beginning to open in his expression. It was not enough yet to be satisfying, but she trusted time. Time, wine, and male vanity were excellent servants when properly combined.
Terrence saw Rhea almost immediately. He smiled the moment she approached, not with arrogance or courtly performance, but with the warm satisfaction of a man who had once wanted her honestly and had perhaps not entirely stopped. He bowed, and because Rhea was not too far gone to savor the irony, she let him kiss her hand before allowing him to draw her into the dance. “My lady,” Terrence said, and there was laughter in his voice. “Should I be flattered or concerned?”
“Flattered,” Rhea replied with a rare genuine smile. “Concern is for later.”
He laughed then, and the sound of it was so familiar that a little ache opened behind Rhea’s ribs before she could stop it. Gods, but it would have been easier with Terrence. Not hateful, not bloody, not some dead alliance forged in obedience alone, simply easy. Terrence knew her temper. He had admired it. He had never once suggested she ought to be grateful merely for being wanted.
The dance carried them together, hands touching, bodies turning close and apart in rhythm. As they moved, Terrence looked at Rhea with exactly the sort of pleased attention Daemon had failed to win from Alyra and would now no doubt be watching with shock. Rhea laughed more freely than she had all night. Terrence said something dry and charming in her ear. She answered in kind. When his hand settled at her waist during the turn, it felt natural there, familiar enough to be dangerous.
Terrence was looking at her too openly now. Not with vulgarity. Worse. With want and memory both. Rhea met his gaze and knew, with a little lurch of drunken sadness, that if things had gone differently this could have been her life instead of some violent royal spectacle with a husband who insulted her in public and dared her toward bastardy in private. Terrence’s hand tightened very slightly at her waist. She moved closer. It would have been very easy, she thought dimly, to let herself lean all the way into this moment and see what happened next. Terrence would let her. More than let her.
Then a black-clad fury cut into the dance like a dragon.
Daemon.
He arrived without grace and without permission, one hand landing at Rhea’s wrist and the other on Terrence’s shoulder in a move just shy of outright shoving. The dance broke around them in startled fragments. Terrence stepped back at once, more from surprise than fear, brows rising as the prince inserted himself bodily between them. “Enough,” Daemon snapped.
Rhea felt her eyes widen at him. Terrence looked from one to the other, understanding dawning, and to his immense credit he merely bowed and stepped away rather than making a scene. Rhea had just enough time to pout and wave at him over Daemon’s shoulder like a child being dragged from a fair before her husband seized her hand more firmly and started hauling her off the floor.
“Daemon-”
He did not answer.
“Daemon,” Rhea repeated, giggling now because the whole thing was ridiculous and because wine had made consequences feel charmingly remote. “I was about to win.”
Still nothing.
Daemon was walking faster now, practically towing her through the edge of the hall while people politely looked elsewhere with the exaggerated innocence of nobles scenting scandal and pretending not to. Rhea stumbled once, caught herself, and then grew indignant enough to tug back. “I was about to mother some bastards,” she informed him with a drunken grin. “Just like you suggested.”
That just made him angrier.
She felt it in the iron set of his hand around hers and in the hard line of his shoulders as he dragged her through the doors and out into the corridor beyond the feast. The music hushed behind them. The noise of the hall fell away to a muffled distant thrum. Rhea’s shoes slid a little on the polished stone as she hurried to keep up, her wedding gown dragging at every turn like a protest of its own. “Where are we going?” she demanded.
Daemon said nothing. He only pulled her faster.
That unsettled Rhea a little. For all his temper, Daemon was usually verbal about his grievances. He bit with words almost as often as he did with looks. This silence felt different- less theatrical, more decided. Rhea frowned, tried to plant her heels, failed because she was both tipsy and being hauled by a dragonrider in a mood, and thus resorted to pestering him with growing offense.
“Daemon.”
No answer.
“Have you gone deaf?”
Nothing.
“This is a dreadful way to court a woman, in case you meant to improve.”
Still silence.
By the time he stopped, she was prepared to hit him. Instead she found herself staring at a door she vaguely recognized from earlier in the day. It was one of the princely chambers set aside for members of the royal family and now, apparently, one she was meant to enter on account of being married to the most irritating man in the Seven Kingdoms. Daemon shoved it open, tugged her inside, and shut it firmly behind them.
The quiet that followed rang.
Rhea stood in the middle of the chamber breathing a little harder than the short walk deserved, skirts in disarray, veil half-shifted, her hand still warm where his had gripped it. Daemon remained by the door for one long moment with his back to her, shoulders rising and falling once, twice. Then he turned slowly.
“What,” Rhea asked, suspicious now as well as annoyed, “are you doing?”
Daemon sighed as though she were the unreasonable one, though the sound came out labored. “I’m doing my fucking duty,” he grunted with darkened eyes raking over her face carefully, averting them when they landed on her own confused stare. He did not look at her for a while as he let Rhea soak in his words. Instead Daemon unclipped his doublet, letting the black fabric slide down his back as he started pulling at the straps of his shirt. The flush of the unruly prince's cheeks burned a deep shade of crimson as he ran a hand through his medium length hair, and he lifted his searing gaze to Rhea's lips. “Because I lost the damned bet.”
Oh.
Oh.
And that was when Rhea Royce, bride of Prince Daemon Targaryen, realized with a sudden rush of heat, exactly why her husband had dragged her from the hall and into his bedchamber.