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There is a point, more seen than felt, at which the wood abutting the girl’s village becomes perilous. The village stands there still - you can find it if you venture off the Kingsroad, taking several easy-to-miss roads that wind around far more important towns to a place so negligible, so unimportant that before the Queen’s decree no one in Westeros had ever heard of it.
It is a settlement of houses made of timber and unhewn stone - nothing more, nothing less - inhabited by a couple dozen farmers, laborers, and artisans of no distinction. They are a simple people. They pray to the Seven and frequently toast the health of their Queen; they abide by superstition, passing down stories from elder to child, from elder to child, and one of those stories - many, in fact - is the story of the wood at their backs, of the missing, and the passing travelers foolish enough not to heed the warning every speaking child in the village knows: Beware the Green Wood. What is lost there may never return.
The girl’s grandmother should have been the one to tell her the stories. She was one of the old and honored wise, but the girl’s grandmother was also her mother, and her father as well, and so she pursed her lips, refusing to speak of the wood, only scolding whenever she caught the girl staring, dawdling, wondering what lived beyond the beech, beyond the mist, high up in the mountain. It was their one point of contention. Aside from this, they were closer than any mother and child could be. They shared chores, meals, and worries, and the single bed, and they did share stories, pleasanter ones, about kings who rode dragons, and maidens, and trees that wept tears of blood; about spells and magic visions, not all of them kind; about woods where only good creatures dwelled.
They shared these like crusts of bread, and they were happy - though later, when neighbors told the girl’s story, they would say she was a strange, ungrateful child, that she held notions beyond her station and never desired to fit in. They were wrong. It was only that the girl and her grandmother were so close, there was no room for another.
That should have been the first sign - the fact that the girl had never imagined herself a bride. She knew she must marry and that she must put herself in another’s keeping, if only to ensure her grandmother would have a warm bed the rest of her days. The morning of her wedding would come, eventually, and after that, children would grow in her belly and perhaps they would have to leave the little house at the edge of the village for one of the farms. The girl’s husband would be plain and brown-haired. She would give him sons, and she would learn to be content. More than that, she would learn to be grateful.
Except no mortal has ever discerned the will of the gods. Their ways are as unknown to us as the sky which lies beyond the sky - and who is to say? They might have decided her fate long ago, when she was a child not yet born, a dream held in her mother’s womb.
What is known is that one day, at the start of winter, the girl’s grandmother fell gravely ill. Her chest wheezed and rattled, her breath came with difficulty and sometimes not at all, ‘til the girl feared her grandmother - who was both her mother and her father, remember - would die in the night. She didn't. But, once morning came, the girl had learned what it was to be afraid. To be truly afraid. Not of shadows or ghosts or storybook villains, but of aloneness.
Aside from the old woman, she had no friend or kin in all the world. She was alone - utterly, entirely alone, and she feared further solitude, feared necessity; feared the wolves that would come pounding at her door, the men her grandmother had kept at bay with a father’s ferocity, claiming, “She’s too young; she is too young and I have need of her, and she is too good for the likes of you.”
The girl’s only hope was a story, rare indeed, about a flower which bloomed in the depths of the dark forest and could reverse the flow of death.
It was not a common tale, and she had heard it only once, from the old midwife who had assisted most of the births in the village and who had died the spring before. As far as hopes went it was desperate, but then, so was her future; and thus armed with the only recourse at her disposal, she kissed her grandmother’s cheek and turned her face toward the wood that very morning, hoping her return - if she returned - would not find her grandmother already dead.
Cold crept into her bones as soon as she opened the door. Wind lashed her skin. It was a terrible winter - they talk of it still, and of the snows which blighted all, the fog that descended over the village so that you couldn't see your hand before your face. The girl’s cloak, though serviceable, was thrice mended and unlined. Flurries melted down into the gray cloth, dampening her head, and doing less than it ought for a trek through bitter cold and frost.
Still she was determined. She had no fear of ghosts, though they said the wood was haunted, and - naively perhaps - the only danger she expected was from beasts and the elements. At the treeline, she had time to repent, to wonder, Who was she to strife against death? Oughtn’t she go back, nurse her grandmother back to health or else do what all the others did - hold her hand as her soul departed before dressing the body and watching it lowered into the loamy ground?
She considered it, even stood in front of the first trees and waited for a sign to turn back. One of the neighbors might have seen her, and any minute now they might come running, boots slipping in the fallen snow, demanding, Girl, have you gone mad? But no one came. And their absence told the girl all she needed to know about her lot in life: there was no one else; there had never been.
Death had claimed her mother first and then her father, taken them both before she'd had the chance to learn their faces, their voices, the tender weight of their hands. All she had left now was the old woman and their house with the single room, and so what was she to be - who was she to be - if she was now left barren, stripped of everything she loved and left to find her own way?
Had she not given enough?
Surely, she had given enough! - surely she was owed this one, small miracle. Closing her eyes, she prayed to any god who would listen, Let my grandmother live but a winter more… just one winter, it is all I ask. And then I’ll be ready. I'll have made my peace.
Meanwhile, no well-meaning friend called for her or came to her rescue. She stood alone at the forest’s edge, surrounded by harsh weather and skeletal trees, gripped by a fear she must learn to overcome or else allow to win.
---
If she had her doubts about magic, she soon lost them. Her walking felt eternal, too long to run on human time, and though at first it helped to ward off the cold, after hours of it she began to tire, and after hours of that the exhaustion became more wearing than the cold. She hardly felt it for the pain in her limbs, her lungs, her back. She traversed rocky up-paths, jumping over frozen streams and nearly losing her footing once, only to scrabble for a tree root to escape dashing her head upon the hard-packed snow. She could hardly see. Often, her way was barred by icy mist, and sometimes, when fear was strongest, she was certain she would die in that wood, her risk for naught, having condemned the one she loved most to a lonely end.
It was a fear colder than deepest winter. But instead of shrinking back, she let the fear kindle her into an ancient rage, perhaps the most ancient - the rage against death. And so, she took the bruises and the chill and the seemingly endless circles, the bone-tiredness, the loneliness, holding onto the hope for an answer.
The path was too hard to end in nothing. Only magic would take such a toll.
Afterward, she would not be able to say for how long she walked. It could have been hours, it could have been days, or minutes, for all she knew, but she walked until the landscape began to gradually change from dense fog to a lighter mist. The snow stopped. A white carpet lay beneath her feet, and her cheeks were spared the onslaught of ice so sharp it felt like knives. She saw that the skeleton trees were far behind her, replaced by dogwood, spruce, and pine, and that her wanderings had led her high up the mountain, higher than she would have dared had she known where she was heading.
The land was perilous, but the air was crisp and she felt the power in it, the promise that her hope had not let her astray.
After perceiving neither day nor night for an unnatural stretch of time, she was almost glad to see the sky darkening and the moon rise. It reminded her that the world was still the world, though it be strange and touched by the hand of unknown gods. The celestial bodies were both her anchor and her compass as she proceeded through a more spacious stretch of forest, and by the time night fell, a feeling began to grow inside her chest that the end was drawing near - not the end, of course, but the end of something… of everything she had been taught and believed to be true. And though she couldn't say why or how the knowledge came, the girl suspected that was the purpose of the long and grueling walk - that, somehow, the wood had broken her down in preparation for what was to come. Maybe that was why, when she finally came across the castle sticking out of the darkness, it was almost like she expected it and she was fairly certain that she had seen it before, in a buried memory or a forgotten dream.
There were towers, of course, crenelated, and turrets rising higher than her eyes could see in the settled dark; but the more she advanced, the more she saw that the castle walls were half-ruined, crumbling, overgrown with shrubbery and weeds, and there were no signs of life. At best, she thought it might provide a shelter for her until morning came but she was wary of entering, more frightened of the castle than she had been of the cursed forest.
The forest was a growing thing. This… this was a growth, black and unnatural on the mountainous cliffside, and who knew what lay in wait?
She gained entry through a side door opening onto a long, narrow passageway. Half expecting the attack of a feral beast, she stepped carefully, wishing she had a light or at least a weapon with which to defend herself. But it was only an empty passageway after all, dusty and dark - perhaps a servant’s entrance, for she found a kitchen at the end of it, a hollow organ devoid of life but, curiously, with a trace of warmth in it still, as if the great fire possessed the heat of embers.
She looked inside. Nothing. The grate was empty… not so much as a trace of ash.
Where did the smell come from? Holding her arms about her, she continued, discovering rooms likewise suspended between life and its absence.
In the great hall she thought for a moment she could smell lemon cakes and roasted lamb, and that her ear - it must be exhaustion - detected the faint strain of stringed instruments, and a bard’s rich baritone reaching the end of a song about love and loss. In another room, she found the whiff of a woman's scent - rosemary, lily, violet, and clove - and a chamber with views to the open sky and the dark wood below whispered, sometimes even bellowed with a distinct air of the masculine, of pride and pettiness and sometimes - she must be imagining things - of a deep, unspeakable, and therefore unspoken grief.
She was unsettled by these knowings; they were things she could only know by means of magic. But had she not set out in search of the uncanny? Had the wood not taken her certainty, her scruples, and her misdoubt, broken them down and taught her to believe in what she could feel and see, regardless of previous notions and fastheld belief?
She could hardly turn back now she had come so far only because a few ghosts had made themselves felt, disclosing secrets she had no wish to know. And, in a way, she did want to know. The more she saw of the dark stone walls, the dust-covered chairs, the hangings and the tapestries of various shadowed form, the hairbrushes, the children’s toys, the remnants of a different time, the more she wondered what sort of magic lived in this place, and whether it was related, in any way, to the magic that would make her grandmother well again.
At last she reached a pair of twin doors banded with iron. After the murmurings heard in the other rooms, she was most shocked by the silence drifting out from beneath, by the heaviness like a weight settling over her chest as she faltered.
She took hold of both handles and pushed, spurred on by the same instinct which had brought her safely through the wood, up the mountain, and into the house of long-forgotten things - an inner-voice which she now doubted came wholly from within. Oft the gods fancy taking us for a spin, her grandmother used to say, and more's the jest, they expect us to clap and wheel as they bid.
She opened the door, and was borne down by a blaze of moonlight streaming - glaring white - through an oculus set in a high dome, an Eye fit to inspire the mind with fear of the endless dark and what might live inside, above and beyond it. Then there was the moon. It birthed long and strange shadows, and left great swaths of the round chamber in darkness. To be sure, she felt herself suspended in the Eye, in a glow of white light while, without, all else remained darkest, deepest night.
She ought to have feared. Many others had stood beneath the oculus and felt the certainty of death, had seen the dark reflected back at them until it drove them near to mad, but the girl merely looked - a curious, wondering, open stare - until a voice came from the shadows, shattering the holy calm.
“It would seem you have lost your way.”
She gasped and stumbled back, nearly tripping over her battered boots. “I - I beg your pardon, I believed the castle to be undwelt in,” she stammered, believing for a delirious moment that the voice belonged to Death, or to Shadow, or to the lord over the many ghosts she had heard and sensed in the empty dark.
“You believed wrong.” A cloud shifted, altering the angle of light coming down from the oculus and shining it upon a figure dressed all in black, his hair unbound, the color white enough to look silver beneath the beaming glow of the moon.
He was tall, and rapier-limbed, appearing only a little older than the girl, but his face… something about his face seemed older, all stark cheekbones and sharp planes. Hungry - that was the word which came to mind and it set her heart to racing, pounding a rapid beat.
He had a scar running long and thin down the left side of his face… and his eye was missing, the socket covered by a leather patch. As he left his throne, he stepped towards her with the saunter of a man who knows his own danger and how to use it - he kept the good side of his face mostly in shadow, letting light play upon his scar and the mystery of his ruined eye.
He asked, “What’s the matter? Are you afraid of me, little dove?”
Had the man not smiled at her, feigning innocence while mocking her, she might have stayed afraid - might have stumbled and kept on stumbling until she was huddled against the door, a poor cowering thing overcome by the weariness of long travel and the sigh of ghosts.
But the girl hated being led. Pretense had always made her spine straighten and her temper flare.
“Is that not your wish, sire?” she shot back.
“Bold… and foolish, and brave. Do you know the stories told about this wood, girl - about my wood? Those who enter are given into my hand. I could keep you… It would be well within my rights as lord.”
“For what possible purpose?”
“Do you not know? Ah… I see you do not.” He was making fun of her. She could tell from the hard twinkle in his good eye, and though unable to solve his true meaning she felt a flash of embarrassment at the pitch of his voice.
Satisfied, he turned back to solid flint. “Tell me, brave little dove, why have you wandered into a place where no one dares?”
“For love, lord.” The eye flashed with displeasure. She lifted her chin, forcing herself to go on. “My grandmother is ill… and it is said that a flower blooms, here in deepest winter, which can ward off all manner of sickness and reverse the flow of death.”
“You came here,” said the man, “believing a story?”
“Is it not true?”
“It is,” he said, after a moment. She wasn't sure if he meant to deny it, to lie. Reluctance was painted in the rigidity of his jaw and he seemed almost angry with her, as if wishing her suddenly gone from his sight. “But tell me,” he asked, low and dangerous so that she shivered in her damp, gray cloak, “why should its power go to an old woman whose better years are far behind? What makes her more deserving, when so many have met the Stranger in due course and taken their leave as one of the faithful? Do you not hold to the Seven?”
For the first time, the girl looked away. She had to think and it was hard to do so with his eye upon her, daring her to speak or to do the wrong thing. It was the wood all over again - he was testing her mettle, and like the wood, if she foundered, the consequences for her would be dire. She knew that much. The man before her was no ordinary man.
“Perhaps some deserve it more,” she said at last. “But where are they? Where are those who would speak on their behalf? Who else has braved capture and death—”
“Perhaps their bones rot beneath your feet, girl. Have a care.”
“Apologies, my lord.”
“Prince,” said the man. “I am prince of this realm - your Queen has no sway in the Green Wood.”
“Am I a soothsayer, Your Grace, to know the ways of a land so forbidding—”
“You have a temper,” he laughed. “Is this your idea of diplomacy? Were you planning on strolling in and taking all that you desired with so little care for the gods?”
“Are you a god, then?” she asked, annoyance rising until he smiled at her ignorance and said,
“Of a fashion.” To her horror, she saw that his throne was not merely a chair - that it moved, unwound until it grew as tall as the room. It had eyes, and wings, and gave a warning shriek that turned her blood to ice. It was mostly in shadow - but there was no mistaking the glow in its mouth or the suggestion of many teeth. It was a dragon - a real life, enormous dragon.
She could not look away.
She was trapped, trembling with awe and fear. As if from a considerable distance she heard the man speak, pride ringing in his voice.
“I would tell you not to fear, but Vhagar is to be feared. She is the fiercest dragon in the land - the largest too.”
“Impossible…” breathed the girl. Her mind raced with every tale, every history of dragons she had ever heard. “The Queen—”
“Your Queen is a liar and a whore,” the man seethed, “and all who treat with her - all who are loyal, who bend the knee and call her ‘Grace’ are unwelcome here! I told you - you are not the first, not the second, the third, or the fortieth… From all parts they have trespassed. For the bloom - for my dragon - my head, or my eye. Your village has been more reverent than most, until now. They have kept to the old ways, left these parts undisturbed… until now. So I ask, for the first and final time: will you reconsider your position?”
“I do not understand,” said the girl, a note of hysteria in her voice. She felt herself failing. To have come so far… to have the bloom in her grasp, and to fall… Perhaps their bones rot beneath your feet. It wasn't fair; in lucid fits, her grandmother might awaken and see that she was gone, might think she had abandoned her, might call out her name hoping for a little comfort and find the room bare, cold and empty.
The man doubled down, insensible of her distress. He smelled blood, and his dragon with its great, flaring nostrils, smelled fear. It was a chilling combination - trapped, trapped, she felt utterly trapped. Her heart lodged in her throat; her bones locked, refusing to heed her command.
“What is it you offer,” said the man, “in exchange for your kinswoman's life?” There it was: the moment of truth. The question she had braved both fear and death to answer, and now that it was here, she found herself lost, without a voice, and to reinforce indignity, she felt the sting of tears, hot and insistent, at the corners of her eyes.
“If I stay, what will become of her? She has no one… no one else… no one else in all the world, but me.”
“That is not my problem, doveling. Nothing comes from nothing - you know that. A balance must be kept.”
“A life for a life, then? Is there no other choice?”
Later, she would not say it was her misery which gave him pause. In a way, she could tell that although he seemed capable of cruelty, he was not being needlessly cruel. He was like the wood - he had a function and he must carry it out.
He looked at her, long and hard, as the dragon Vhagar awaited his command. Then, with a sigh - or she thought, though she couldn't be sure that he sighed - he turned on his heel and approached a plinth upon which stood an hourglass made of glass and iron. “Think on it. You have until the last grain of sand falls.” He turned the object with both hands, his voice impassive. “Pray to the old gods, pray to the Seven… but do not be deceived. I am not a merciful man. Your tears will not move me, your story does not move me. I deal only in scales. Pray yours balance lest you end up like those who came before. Vhagar!” Speaking in an unknown tongue, he mounted his dragon, and though the girl cried out, certain that the eye of the dome would shatter and rain glass upon the chamber floor, the prince and his beast cleared it, passing as through mist into the star-filled night.
---
“I have made my choice, Your Grace.”
No sooner had the last grain of sand fallen to the bottom of the glass than he reentered through the double doors, having the courtesy - this time, at least - of making his presence known before scaring the heart out of her.
He cut a strange figure against the whitish light. A part of her still couldn't believe that the dome-glass was intact; it was odd, and she supposed perversely humorous that this one, small detail was the hardest for her to grasp: not the dragon, not the dangerous man (was he a man?) with the missing eye and the unreadable face. It was the glass.
Gods, but she was weary… She felt hollowed out and foolish, defeated. Small.
Still she met the prince’s gaze and willed herself to show her grandmother’s dignity; to remember the cold, focused rage she had found while battling the elements.
He respected strength. Only strength might save her now.
“Let us hear it, then,” drawled the prince. He waved a hand before clasping them both behind his back. He looked the picture of a man who had stood in that place for a thousand years and who would continue to stand, perhaps for a thousand more until the sands on his hourglass met their sluggish end. He is tired of this, the girl realized; if he dwells here, it is not of his choosing.
The thought bolstered her - it forged a common thread between them, receded her fear, gave her the confidence to look him straight in the eye and say, “I will have what I came for.”
“And what will you give?”
“Nothing,” answered the girl.
“Nothing? Bold as brass… You dare come into my presence and say ‘nothing’?”
“If I give you something now, my lord, it would be of no value. Say I make my own life forfeit. How will I know if the bloom’s magic is real? I would have fallen for a trick with my eyes wide open and who could I blame for it then but myself?”
“Are you calling me a liar?”
Step carefully, her grandmother warned. He is a prince, not a god - and unlike gods, princes have quick swords and hot tempers, fragile egos, a mortal’s patience.
“Quite frankly, I have no idea who you are - how could I? I know only one dragon, one Queen, and that is Rhaenyra of House Targaryen and her mount Syrax.”
“You know nothing!” roared the prince. His voice echoed off the chamber walls as, overhead, she heard Vhagar land on the roof and let out a warning growl. His hand flew to the hilt of his sword - it was a soldier’s gesture, an instinct she did her best not to think about in greater depth.
“If I know nothing, it is through no fault of my own! I came here unawares - ignorant, really - but not in bad faith. I merely propose you meet my goodwill with some of your own. Let me leave this place and return to my village, Your Grace. Let me see my grandmother safely recovered, in good health and made whole; let me make arrangements for her; let me be certain of having paid off my debts. I have known no other father, no other mother but her. She is owed this, from my hand. Then, when my ledger has been wiped clean and I have done my duty… I will return to you, a life for a life.”
“For what possible purpose?”
“That is for you to decide.”
The quiet lay heavy, suffocating. He was breathing hard a few mere feet away, and she saw his hand remained upon the sword at his hip and that his true eye darted, roving, scanning her face for a hidden motive, a deception, a trick.
He seemed out of sorts. Mentioning the Queen had thrown him off balance, clouded his composure with the vise grip of hate. “How do I know you will not play me false - you, who know no other Queen but the Black Bitch of Dragonstone? Will you give me your word?”
“Is my word not enough? Do vows hold no power in your Green Wood?”
“On the contrary - you may be unfamiliar with the traditions of Old Valyria but vows made in blood and fire are often held the most sacred.”
“I will make a vow, then - right here, right now - in whatever manner you wish and I swear I will keep it.”
He huffed at that - it was almost a laugh, and she was glad to see the dark humor slowly leaving his face, to see his shoulders fall, his hand withdraw from its fighting place upon his sword. His former distress had been distressing to her - not out of fear but because it seemed bottomless, like the grief in the upstairs council room, and she had felt that, unleashed, it might have the power to swallow her whole. Who was he, really? Why was he here, in the Green Wood, and why did he hate the Good Queen?
He shook his head at her, clicking his tongue, and called her “Brave little bird… Or should I say ‘clever fox’? You mean to outfox me out of my treasure, then - is that it?”
“A life for a life, Your Grace. I mean no trickery.” Not once in her life had anyone called her a liar.
Her petulant scowl, the outward sign of her displeasure, caused him a smile. He seemed to take pleasure in provoking her, what with the gibes and the constant comparisons to woodland animals, which was unfair, really, when she couldn’t do the same because power was so entirely his.
“I may be a fool for saying this but I’m inclined to believe you. What do you say, Vhagar - if we are being deceived, what will it be to you but another meal? Give me your hand.” The request startled her, especially when he unsheathed the dagger at his hip, the steel sharp, singing in the cold night air and glinting with obvious danger.
He made a sound of impatience as he waited for her to comply, and when she finally mustered the wherewithal to do so, he smirked - actually smirked - at the tremble he perceived in it, the slight shake that belied her stretched-out nerves.
“Hm… perhaps not so brave after all,” he drawled.
“Have I run screaming?”
“Wolf,” he laughed. “You have fangs.” Yanking her close, he put his lips to her ear and whispered, “Will they still be in your mouth by next frost, I do wonder?” Then he pulled back, so suddenly she almost doubted the ghost of his breath against her cheek.
His expression was impassive, old as the stones beneath her feet, and she realized that the carved plinth that had so lately held the hourglass was beside her, that in place of the timepiece there was a metal brazier, lit and sparking golden embers.
She was frightened. The magic frightened her far more than the prince. She stared into the flames, lost in the wonderment of that ordinary fire stoked by an extraordinary force. What is this place? To what powers have I foolishly pledged myself?
He took her chin in his hand to make her look at him. Eyes on me, he seemed to say, and though there was annoyance, and some impatience in his features, she welcomed the touch of another person, the gravity in his voice when he said the words meant to bind her to a promise. “You will return to me in a moon’s time?”
“I swear it,” she replied.
“In fire and blood?”
“In fire and blood.”
He touched the knife to her palm and made the cut. Blood flowed, red and thick and dripping to the floor, and she winced as she watched him do the same. Then he held his hand in hers - a more familiar gesture of a mutual vow. What was less familiar was his thumb upon her lower lip, the hesitation, the stony-faced look that flashed across his features when he drew a shape upon her forehead, in between her worried brows. He bid her do the same, and she wished - how she wished! - she was not so fully in the dark. She stared at him as if waiting for an explanation. But none came. The air was heavy with solemn ceremony, and he seemed reluctant to speak. And regretful. She swallowed down the urge to ask him what was wrong.
“It is done,” he announced at last. The fire went out and he reached into his coat to pull out a gold-colored flower. It glowed with live magic and it was short-stemmed, beautiful.
“You already have it?” she asked. “How—” How did he know I could win it?
“Call it a dragon’s intuition,” he said. “Now begone; the time flies. You will face no perils on your way out of the wood, my word is given.”
She took the bloom with the utmost care, tucking it inside her clothes so it wouldn't be crushed on the journey. She kept feeling there was something missing in her dealings with the prince, that matters between them were not yet settled, not yet complete.
It is the vow, she instinctively knew. It weighs upon me already; I can feel it inside me, like a song in the blood. “I don’t even know your name,” she said to the man to whom she had sold the rest of her life.
“Is it necessary that you should know it?”
“I know your dragon’s name,” she pointed out, “and the name of your realm.”
“In your stories they call me the One-Eyed Prince.”
She frowned. “But that is not your name.”
“My name doesn't matter. Go now - say your goodbyes and return. Don’t look back.”
She almost did. At the doors, she nearly glanced behind her to catch a final look at the prince of the wood, but she felt the weight of her promise, the weight of her duty and his strange almost-kindness, so she didn't. She walked out of the castle, watched the sun begin to rise and found her way home in less than an hour.
---
The change in her grandmother was miraculous. More than cured, she appeared in better health than before, vibrant, bustling and full of fervid energy. She never asked about her illness, taking it for granted that she had turned a corner and had been healed by the grace of the gods, and the girl never offered an explanation. She didn’t speak about the house on the mountain, or about the prince with silver hair, but, like her grandmother, she was also changed by the events of that day. She was quieter than usual, prone to brooding spells, and she worried at the long scar on her hand, a cut of unknown provenance the old woman sometimes scolded her for.
“You should be more careful. Limbs don’t grow on trees,” she said to her once.
“I know… I will.”
“Hm.”
The old woman knew something was wrong but something stopped her lips. She felt a quiet fear growing at the back of her head, a feeling that something dark and secret had occurred during her illness. She would never… I have taught her to know better; she knows not to treat with ghosts and strange magic. The more the weeks drew on, however, the more she began to doubt. And still she did not speak, only watched her granddaughter go on a series of never-ending and yet peculiar errands - she went on visits with their more trusted neighbors, staying with them for hours and talking seriously; she planted winter crops; bargained for repairs to the windows and roof; and harvested enough wood to last them until springtime. It was highly out of character… and it didn’t take long for the village folk to set to gossipping.
“An odd thing that a woman so lately frail would emerge from her sickbed looking five years younger and with a spring in her step.”
“That girl… she came to me and asked for help with the calving, though it is still midwinter and the calves won’t be weaned until spring. ‘Even so,’ she said… and she looked so strange and forlorn when she did it, like she knew something the rest of us didn’t.” It was this, far more than the odd requests and her grandmother’s return to health, that birthed the most suspicion: the inkling that the girl withheld from them a hidden knowledge, that she was in on a secret - that they should know the secret too, that she had stolen it - stolen it from them.
“I saw her coming out of the wood one day,” said a little boy, no more than twelve. He was the tanner’s son, a watchful, troublesome boy born to parents who were very much the same. “It was around the time the old lady got better - me mum said she’d never make it but she did. Now she’s fat as a hen and the girl stares out her window and looks at the wood, touching that funny scar on her hand.”
“What scar, dear one?” the boy’s mother asked.
“The one on her hand! Haven’t ye seen it? Ugly-like, but straight and clean. Hey! S’ppose she cut herself on purpose in some sort o’ unnatural ritual. Glennda Varley always says there’s dark magic in those woods, that you can consort wit’ wily spirits an’ the like, and even talk to the Stranger.”
“Close your mouth and eat your supper, boy,” his father scolded. But he looked at his wife across the table and, the very next day, he told the blacksmith and the butcher and his wife told the weavers, the farmers’ wives, the village septon. They grew angry… angry because that winter was cold and unforgiving, and already it had taken the Rolfeses’ first baby, and pretty Alys Briggton, and Sam Maddock, the foremost builder and a father to six. His wife, Aedda, was heartsore and desperate. She had loved the builder; now she had six children to feed and no man to provide and her second-youngest, Harrold, came down with the hack and none of the maester’s brews could make him better.
When she learned that the girl had been to the Green Wood and had saved her grandmother’s life, she raised an almighty clamor. “Why should she get special treatment? What has she done to deserve it? The way I see it, you trade in arts contrary to the Seven and you ought to be punished for it!” And the septon agreed.
They came for her, in the middle of the night - on the third week after the girl’s deal with the prince - to pull her out from her bed and drag her to the sept under a half-moon.
There was snow on the ground, the air was cold, and though a few in the village did not agree with the girl being branded a witch, they stayed silent - stayed out of it - went back to their wood-and-stone houses and their children and their warmer beds, pretending the unpleasant thing wasn’t happening. That they weren’t letting it happen.
“Child, what in the gods’ name did you do?” the grandmother demanded. She pressed her face to the iron bars - there were tears in her eyes, and fear… Fear for her but also fear of her. “What did you do? With whom did you speak? What did you give in exchange for my life? Answer me!”
The girl was beyond giving answers. She wept as if the world were breaking, and in a way it was. She had grown up in that village - had been held in the arms of the builder’s wife, had embroidered the pillow for baby Rolfe with her own needle - and now they hated her, her grandmother feared her, and she had sold her life away for nothing.
She had nothing, no one.
The girl’s grandmother watched as she cried, saying nothing, only holding her hand through the bars of the cell, shedding her own tears on occasion, and when those tears had seemingly dried, she broke into a torrent of angry, bitter words. “Foolish, selfish, foolish girl! I taught you better - you should have let me die! In fact, I wish I were dead! I wish both of us were dead!” The girl listened, hollow-eyed. What does it matter? What does anything matter? As she railed, the old woman took a needle from her shawl and picked the lock on the cell-room door.
“You must go,” the grandmother said. “Leave this place.”
“And go where?”
“Anywhere - I don’t care. We must be parted, you and I. In fact, I don’t know how long I’ll be allowed to stay. You have made a bargain with the wood, child. I wish you hadn’t done it, but it is done; there is nothing more to say. They will have your head if you remain here until sunrise - Aedda Maddock will make sure of it. Go to the wood. It is your only hope for a life, and though it is a cruel place, it takes care of its own.”
“Am I not your own, grandmother?” the girl asked.
The old woman stared, grief-stricken, silent, her chin trembling with the force of unspoken words. She opened the cell and kissed the girl on the forehead, right where the prince had bound her with blood. “Go. Run fast. I will keep the septon away from the door.”
---
The wood takes care of its own. She knew the truth of it that early morning, when the darkness was nearly full. The trees protected her from the icy wind and the ground remained level, firm, and dry, and not so much as a tree root appeared to stop her, to slow her down or cause her injury.
She arrived at the castle in a mere quarter-hour. She fell upon the door with knees that refused to hold her weight a minute longer, and as if by magic - it was magic - she was spared even the pain of hard stones because the prince was there, holding her up and keeping her legs from buckling. “What is it? What has happened?”
The girl shivered, wept. She was freezing cold but he knew it wasn't the wood’s doing - she was babbling with fear and mourning, nonsensical words like “Nothing… all for nothing… all, all gone…” The prince realized then what must have happened.
“Hush now,” he said, taking her in his arms, his voice a lot less gentle than his hands. “Come inside and away from the cold.”
Carrying her into a room with a fire, he set her down upon a couch the color of midnight and stoked the flames, pausing to throw a blanket around her shoulders and ascertain that, at least physically, she remained unharmed. Still she continued to cry until his temper could no longer stand it. “Enough!” he commanded. “Quit your weeping and tell me what has come to pass.”
After a rough start, she gave him a brief description of the last few weeks. He was not surprised her people had turned on her, and he said as much. “You sought a power beyond men and you thought they wouldn’t punish you?”
“I don't care about them!” she warbled, rubbing the tears from her face. “But she - the way she looked at me… she - she said I should’ve let her die, that it was foolishness, arrogance, selfishness to try cheating Death—”
“Your grandmother was right.”
“She hates me.”
He sighed, pinched the bridge of his nose. “I have had quite enough of your dramatics. Did you return here just to sulk?”
She blinked owlishly, reddened - well, that was something. She was much prettier when she didn't look like a sorrowing ghost. “I - I came to keep my vow—” she said in a halting voice.
“Silence! I did not bargain for a weeping child, I bargained for a wolf. Have you no pride?” the prince asked. “No dignity? You shed tears because they hate you, you wallow because they do not understand you - I am sick of it! You have stood in my hall and faced a creature of unbounded strength yet you deign to cower before peasants?”
“I am a peasant!”
“If ever you repeat those words, I shall cut out your tongue!” the prince explained. “Do you hear me? Do you hear me? Your life is mine… your life was mine a moon ago, and it will remain mine until the moon ceases to be. You are no peasant-girl. You dwell in my hall, my wood. I have drawn my blood upon your lips - you will conduct yourself accordingly. You are not to weep for those who scorn you, you are to scorn them in return. You are to hate them, do you understand? Here.” He knelt before her with an eye like blue fire, held her steady by the shoulder as, with the other hand, he touched her chest over the rapid beating of her heart. “And you will feed that hatred, every day, and with every new urge to shed a tear until, one morning, you will wake to find that tears have wholly gone from you.” His voice was low, intimate. Fired with conviction and rage. This was part of the bargain. If she stayed with him, she must learn to put her grief away, as he had done, to forge it into something different and not so easily used by those who had tried killing her.
But I can stay. Cast out of her home, she hadn't realized how much of the weight crushing her chest was the fear that he, too, would shut the door in her face. But I can stay… that is something, at least.
“Tell me your name,” she asked of him, a soft plea against the crackling of woodfire and the distant song of an owl.
Again, he shook his head. “My name is not important.” And again, the girl frowned, displeased.
As if in a trance, she watched her own hand rising to touch his mouth, and he went rigid, painfully still. Not even his blue eye dared to move as, in a repetition of the unknown ceremony during which she had promised to return, she stroked him with the pad of her thumb and said, murmuring, “I have drawn my blood upon your lips…”
He seized her hand. He had no wish to hurt her but he could hardly breathe and he was angry - not at her, at himself, more than anything. I should never have done that. Why - why did I do it? “The hour is late,” he groused, and rose to his height. “I will show you to your chambers.”
She had expected… what had she expected? A barren room with chains on the walls? A tower cell? A dungeon? A dirty crypt? The room he led her to was large and airy, with high ceilings, and tapestries fit for a grand lady or a queen. She had a draped bed, a table, a looking-glass, a wardrobe big enough to fit the clothes she didn't have, and there was a fire - already lit - a window open to the early morning sky.
“Is it really mine?” she asked, and turned inquiringly towards the prince, who stood in the doorway with his hand upon the latch. “I mean… is it mine alone?”
“You think I bought you to be my whore?”
“No, I—” She flushed, a deep pink he had never seen, and he immediately regretted the words. They brought to mind her hand on his lips, the weight and scent of her as he’d carried her in his arms. Damn everything… Fuck everything and those peasants, too.
“I suppose I am well within my rights to take your maidenhead,” he heard himself say. The words escaped him without his consent, burning his tongue along the way - now he would be thinking about her maidenhead.
Unless of course - he stared at her and asked, “Or have you given it to another?”
“Of course not!” she exclaimed.
“I am not squeamish, little wolf. Either way, it makes no difference. You are in no danger from me. Look here” - he showed her the mechanism on the door - “it even locks. Now, if my brother were alive a lock would be of little use… not even iron would keep Aegon away from the scent between your legs. But why plague your sleep with evil ghosts? Good night.” He had thoroughly shocked her, and it eased him, somewhat, to know he had regained the upper hand.
“And where do you sleep, my lord?”
He gripped the door so hard, his fingers went white. “Why do you wish to know?” he levelly asked.
At first she said nothing. It was a question she hadn’t meant to ask and the answer was a tangled thing. In truth, she was wary of him but she couldn't say why, and had no wish to offend. Or to make him treat her, yet again, as an empty-headed fool of a girl. “In case I should have need of you,” she said at last.
Stony-faced, he inclined his head in a general westwardly direction. “My rooms are just beyond that wall,” he said, and before she could respond, he had closed the door.
After that, she heard nothing more except the sound of his boots moving to the castle’s east wing. Still feeling out of sorts, like they had spoken in a strange, unknown language, she lay down on the bed and slept for twelve hours without pause. When she awoke, she found there was food and watered-down wine awaiting her, and in the wardrobe, the castle had given her a lady’s worth of fur-lined cloaks and fine winter gowns.
---
The castle, in that way, became her first real friend. In the light of day, its magic was less alarming - it was almost quaint, sometimes even fussy. When it found she grew bored of staying in her room and feigning not to be avoiding the prince, it placed a library across her room. Only, she rather enjoyed the walk to the lower east wing; it killed the time and gave her something to do, even if that something consisted merely of a few extra hundred steps. Consequently, what followed was a droll farce of Where’s-the-Library, with the girl and the house contending over where the best placement for it was… both forgetting that there was a third, unwitting inhabitant who might at times require that very same, specific library.
They declared a ceasefire - her library took its final place downstairs, across from the main staircase, after the prince ordered every book, tome, and volume he required taken out of it and moved to a study less capricious.
The girl was embarrassed. She was unused to being a houseguest, and though the prince was an accommodating host he did nothing that could be perceived as going out of his way to make her feel welcome. Mostly, he kept out of her way, which would have made a different sort of girl very happy, but she was used to sharing, to having company, to not feeling entirely left on her own.
She was lonely. More than that, she was annoyed at him for expecting her to live like this - as if she were just another castle ghost, drifting through the halls with a swish of skirts and a wordless sigh.
What was the point of her, then? Or was this how he wore down his indentured souls, by driving them slowly mad with the quiet and the lack of any human warmth?
The house took note of her dissatisfaction, and she found cause to lament that she had complained so loudly about it in her head, for on the twelfth day, the prince knocked on her door and said, with a sardonic curl of his lip, “It seems you have managed, in an impressively short span of time, to turn my own castle against me. Apparently, it means to starve me out unless I invite you to dine.”
The girl glared at the doorposts. “I never said—”
“You should know by now that you needn’t. The castle knows.” He raised his right eyebrow at her like a father scolding a vexing child. “If you wished for a change in custom, all you had to do was ask - instead of waging a war of attrition with my house on your side.”
“Would you have assented?”
He shrugged. “You’ll never know now, will you?”
There were worse dinner companions, she decided that night. He still took pleasure in discomforting her, enjoyed ruffling her, challenging her to sudden and unasked-for games of wit. He found her laughable ignorant about philosophy and the politics of her own kingdom, but he was less snide than he might have been and he seemed to appreciate her love of history, of stories, and her willingness to not remain unlearned. They had dinner every night, and then they took to breaking fast, and after that, it became rather silly for them to avoid each other’s company.
He allowed her use of a horse, a gorgeous black mare named, in the common tongue, Obsidian. She was a showy, high-spirited thing - rather like the castle, the girl thought.
“Rather like her rider,” said the prince.
They went out together sometimes, when the weather allowed. But in truth, she liked her solitary jaunts - just her and the horse and the open sky, the new terrain - and he deferred to her need for privacy. He required the same when he went flying, though she found herself looking out tower windows or climbing battlements to catch sight of the bronze-scaled Vhagar.
When it came to the training yard, however, she ran out of excuses.
It wasn’t that she was entirely naïve. She had spent her life among cattle, among sheep, goats, and pigs, and she had seen her fair share of blacksmiths and farmers down to their trousers and nothing else. But this was different. He was a gifted swordsman - that much was certainly true. It was also true that she’d be lying through her teeth if she said she looked at him for his footwork. These feelings disquieted her. She lost sleep, hours, and appetite in pursuit of understanding the strange yearning.
It is fascination, nothing more. She had always been an uncommonly curious girl - there had never been a mystery she didn't wish to solve. It was how she had ended up in the thrall of the Green Wood, and now she was fixating on the prince because she knew so little about him. That was all.
And well, if she often thought about the smoothness of his lower lip, it was merely a passing fancy. She had been sheltered, protected as a most precious stone, had never even kissed a boy or held his hand. It will pass. In time, he would lose his air of mystery, and therefore any interest he might possess for her, and it would pass. It would pass.
“Why will you not tell me your name?” she blurted out one afternoon. They were on the white-covered lawn, watching Vhagar fly circles around the turrets. It occurred to her that this was one occasion where he had sought her company - he had no reason to be there after concluding his ride. But he had seen her sat upon a covering on his way inside the castle and he had joined her, saying little but in no real hurry to take his leave.
“Because you have no need of it,” he repeated, straightening the already straightened cuffs of his black coat.
“Perhaps… Perhaps I can get by calling you ‘sire’ and ‘Your Grace’ all our lives but I find I do not want to.”
He huffed, smiled. “Obstinate thing.”
“And so are you!” she dared to point out. In daylight, he was an entirely different creature to the one she had met in the domed hall. He appeared younger, almost as young as her, and there were no shadows for him to use and hide behind. He was simply the prince - one-eyed, but that had long ceased to be of any note with her. The scar across his left eye was the least interesting thing about him, and even with it - perhaps because of it - there was something striking in his appearance.
“Tell me why you wish to know,” he said, drawing her attention away from the pale line of his neck.
“I would like to know what to call you… in my thoughts.”
His lips quirked. “Do you think of me often, then?”
“Aside from Vhagar and Obsidian, you are the only soul I have seen or spoken to in a season.”
“That is not what I asked,” he chided her gently. She blushed because, when he finally lowered his eye to look at her, she felt every one of her witless thoughts must be written upon her face - every longing stare, every craving for his company, his secrets - him. “Honesty begets honesty, little dove - it doesn’t come for free.”
It didn’t pass, not after winter turned to early spring. If anything, her longing for him grew ‘til she worried the house would give her secret away. Please don’t… do anything! she instructed the house, but it had a will of its own, and though it never went so far as to confess her one mortifying secret, it did feed her morsels of knowledge about her prince of the wood. One day, during the fourth moon of the new year, it led her to a hidden gallery with portraits upon the walls. The girl’s gaze was drawn to five in particular - four of them fairly young and with the prince’s distinctive silver hair. Of these, she stared the longest at, admittedly, the plainest. But there was a gripping quality to her eyes… a depth, or else… an absence, as if she were seeing things beyond the here and now.
After a time, she heard the familiar step of the prince. By now she knew he could be quiet as a cat when he pleased, but he let his boots sound upon the flags for her benefit, because she hated being startled.
“Who is she?” the girl asked when he had taken a place at her side. For a while she thought he wouldn’t answer. Then he opened his mouth, and in a manner that revealed the length of time during which the name had probably gone unspoken, he said,
“My sister… Helaena.”
“She is very beautiful. You’ll say I'm lying and that she’s rather plain, but I don’t think so. What happened to her?”
“She died,” he explained, “by your Queen’s hand. In truth, by mine. Her children are also gone - the ones she had by my elder brother.”
“Aegon,” the girl supplied. “The bad ghost.”
His jaw went hard. She could practically hear his teeth grinding in his mouth. “My brother was a shit. A monster and a fool. But he was the eldest… he had the birthright, and so…”
“You hated him.”
“I loved him,” he amended. “I’m glad he is dead.”
“And is that your mother?” She gestured at the first portrait that had drawn her eye. The woman was stunning, auburn-haired, elegant, with jewels gleaming bright around her neck. He nodded once, and she recognized the hollow look enough to ask, “How long ago…?”
“I couldn’t say whether she lives or not. She was taken captive.”
“By Queen Rhaenyra? Is that why you hate her, why you are in exile?”
“I am grown tired of your questions…”
She should have left well enough alone, then. He did look tired, as if he, like her, had also lost hours, appetite, and sleep to some unnamed worry. But the castle had teased her with the answers she desired; and she was hurt, more than she ought to be, by his reticence, his unwillingness to see how much she longed to give him comfort.
“You say I belong to you but you will not let me know you?” she asked in a wounded voice.
“You are not here to know me.” There was a note of warning, a take heed in how he said it, but she was too far gone; she had closed the door on what she felt for him, so tightly that what she had hidden there had grown teeth and claws and sprouted wings. It wanted out - it wanted free of her, and it didn’t care that she had promised to never again show him weakness.
“Then why am I here? Why am I here, Your Grace? I am not your maidservant, you never come to my bed—”
He seized her by the arms, shaking her. “Is that it? Would it put your mind at ease if I fucked you? Would it still your presumptuous tongue if I made sure you used it for something other than talking?”
He was trying to frighten her. The coarse language, putting his hands on her… And yet, through it all, his grip on her remained just shy of painful so that she knew it was a feint. A bluff, a misdirection.
“Tell me your name… Tell me your name and you can take me to bed,” she said to him. “Do what you like… You said I was yours, after all.”
He released her as if touching her burned. “You have no right to set terms. And besides, you cannot give into my hand something which is already mine.”
“But it isn’t. That first night, when you told me you would never force me to lie with you… did you mean it?”
Of course he meant it. He had seen enough of his brother’s savagery to make the very act of forced bedding repulsive. He would rather cut off his own hands, and she knew it.
“Then you gave my maidenhead into my keeping - any claim you had on it was forfeit from that very night. It is mine to withhold now, mine to bargain with… mine to give away, if I choose.” She put her hands on his chest. Never before had she touched him so brazenly. He was on a knife’s edge, cornered. He could barely breathe. “Tell me your name and you can have it, freely.”
“No.”
“A different bargain, then—”
“Enough!” he boomed. He rounded on his heel, determined to leave if she would not, but she ran after him, saying,
“You say honesty begets honesty? I do think of you - often, all the time. You are my first waking thought in the morning, the last to cross my mind before I sleep, and I wish to know your name because I - because I love you!”
He stood frozen, chilled, horrified, at the door to the gallery where the ghosts of his dead family dwelled. “You know not what you speak.”
“Please!”
“Away with you! I don't know what you think you're playing at, but I will not have it! You forget yourself - you are not a guest in this house but my prisoner. Perhaps I have been too soft on you,” he remarked, wearing a mask of cold indifference. “My mistake - it will not happen again.”
He waited until he saw that every hope of hers had been dashed; until he was certain a small part of her had broken; until he felt, deep in his bones, that he hated himself all the more for what he’d done - for having started it, for encouraging it, for wanting it.
My mistake - it will not happen again. Only when he felt the thought coating him like armor did he allow himself the luxury of retreat. He expected the house would be angry. He was prepared for it, familiar with its petulant moods, its capriciousness. But he wasn't prepared for its cool cold shoulder. From that day on, it bent to his will with a sniffy air of “if I must.” No longer did fires burn preemptively, or windows open or close in anticipation of his comfort. He hardly slept, he was irritable at not being free to move about the castle as he wished, and even Vhagar, sensing his prickliness, became so in return until he found no pleasure in their morning rides.
He needed a fight… Of course, there was no one living for him to knock swords with, and every day the contentiousness within him festered. He was aware of it, could feel it singing in his blood, hardening his bones, which was why - on this particular night, after a solitary dinner - he installed himself in the furthest room in the western corridor with his foul temper and a bottle of wine.
It took the house less than an hour to play its trick on him.
First he heard her step in the hall. Then the door opened, and there was a startled pause as she saw him sitting in the chair before the fire, and she considered - he knew that she considered - leaving with her errand undone.
But she was a proud little thing, and even with his back turned he knew that she would straighten her spine and retrieve what she had come for - a forgotten thing the house had moved in order to make his life an even greater hell.
The pause at an end, he heard her dress whispering against the floor. Fresh air… heliotrope… oak moss… He had lived with her long enough to know she smelled like spring; and, unobserved, he closed his eyes and breathed her in until he felt her in his mouth, on his tongue… Then she ruined it by speaking.
“I wish not to disturb you,” she said in a sunken tone. “I will take my leave of you… sire.” He drained the rest of his wine. Am I to have no fucking peace? And he laughed - he couldn't help it. A dark, exhaled sound fueled by bitterness and strong wine, a sneer laid at his door. The woman was against him, the castle was against him…
“I curse the day you stepped foot in this house,” he threw over his shoulder. “Better an ignominious end - better the solitude of ages than the sight of your wan-faced misery.”
“If I am miserable, then it is your doing.”
“You foul-mouthed bitch!” He clattered to his feet, chair falling, beaker shattering against the floor. And she just stood there, looking weary as he felt.
Unmoved by his sudden violence.
“Anything else, my lord? By now, you must have called me every name under the sun - I am quite tired of it. I am quite tired of you.”
It was a fighter’s instinct, nothing more. His body moved before he could command it, and he charged at her, not knowing what he intended to do - but harm… never harm. She reacted by moving away from him, flinching, fleeing - away from him - him, who had never given her a reason to fear. He felt sick, out of his own control.
And he was afraid.
“Wait!” he called after her, chasing her out into the hall. “Wait, damn you - I would never have struck you!”
“And how can I be sure of that?” She stopped, keeping her distance. She was angry at him - that was something at least; he could take her anger. She could hate him for all he cared, it was no less than he deserved. But if she ceased to trust him… if she became afeared of him… “You swore you would never hurt me.”
“I never have… I never will.”
“But you do!” she exclaimed. “Every single day in this wretched, horrible place! If you had struck me, it would be no worse than your silence, so do it! End it now before I am further driven mad. You think you are the only one who curses? the only one who has regrets? I wish I had never come here… I wish I had never met you! You told me a life for a life, but I have given you far more than that. I have lost everything and you don't even have the decency to take it!”
“Temptress! Witch!” he bellowed out. “You were sent by the gods to punish me!”
She looked at him sadly then, ruefully, giving him up for lost. “Had you both your eyes, you would still be blind,” she said, dealing him the killing blow. It was what he had wanted - he had wanted a fight and he had wanted her to win. But he returned to his chair feeling emptied and more certain than ever that he was paying, paying for his failures and his sins, for the greed he had never learned to quash and which he had no interest in quashing.
He was who he was. The second son of a weak king. A man responsible for the death of his family, his house, the ruin of his entire line while, in King’s Landing, his mother’s enemy ruled from the Iron Throne and kept the dowager queen locked away in a tower. Or her bones in a crypt. He was lord over nothing, just a mountain and a wood touched by magic. He had no army. He had only time, and Rhaenyra knew it.
He would outwait her. It was always part of the plan.
What he never counted on was her - the girl who felt like springtime. He needed her gone; she wasn't made for war, and he could only disappoint her in the end.
He would release her, he decided. He would let her go, but it would cost him more than he’d bargained for. Already he felt frayed at the edges, the careful composure he had built with years of study and discipline compromised by the simple touch of her hands in his domed hall.
He couldn't have her, and he resented how difficult she had made his life - how she endangered the many vows he had made to his mother, his sister, his brothers… and yet, he had taken her bloodied hand in his. She had no way of knowing what it signified, or how closely they were bound. The part of him that had always wanted his father’s throne could admit that he was glad at having done it. She was his - by oath and by ceremony. After she went from him, he would desire no one else. He would make sure of it. He would—
Something was wrong. The castle, alive with magic, alerted him to a change in the air, an absence.
He could no longer feel her within the castle walls, and when he reached for her, his blood turned cold. There was an icestorm, a remnant of winter during a spring moon. He could hear the wind, cruel and wailing through the leaded windows, and he could see… he could see nothing, and she was out there, in that perilous weather.
He swore an oath. He had wanted her gone, but not like this. Not—
He thought of Helaena, wasting away. She had wanted to die in the end, but the girl… she hadn't lived long enough to even mourn the loss of children, and if he had to scour the wood now for her frozen corpse…
No. He was prince of this wood and it would lead him straight to her - unharmed; she would be unharmed. He hushed his mind and went out into the pallid night, calling for Vhagar to find her, to hunt her down. And though he hadn’t prayed in over a century, he issued a challenge to the old gods and to the Seven, to the gods of doomed Valyria and the forgers of his magic wood: if she was dead, he would bring about unholy ruin.
---
The fire in his chambers crackled, sparking red and gold into the flue. He hadn’t peeled his eye away from her since he found her, so he could see that she was stirring, waking. What an awful night…
Her eyelids fluttered. She opened her eyes and frowned at his ceiling, disoriented, drowsy.
“Stupid girl,” he said to himself, but there was relief in it, and in seeing her turn her head and ask, in a weakened voice,
“What happened?”
“You nearly caught your death in the wood. I should have let you freeze,” he couldn’t help adding.
The girl agreed. She ached everywhere, and she was cold - still relentlessly, endlessly cold - and she felt foolish for having gone into the storm. Headed nowhere, just to make a point.
Oh, a point was made, all right… In the moment, she had felt an unreasonable desire to be away from him but she had never meant to court her own death.
She had simply lost her head, her sense, and then her way. And it had happened so suddenly… she couldn’t remember how she came to be at the foot of an oak, half covered in snow, or how she was conveyed back to the castle and to the prince’s room - but she did know he had searched for her willingly, that many a man would have not done the same, and so, in spite of her injured pride, she turned toward him and said, “Thank you, for not leaving me there.”
“You are more trouble than you're worth… little dove.”
He held the pose of someone who hadn’t moved for hours and she felt the shame of it - his fatigue, his worry… they were all her doing, but she took heart in it too, because there was no way he was indifferent to her if he had gone looking for her in the middle of a storm. She could forgive it all, his attempts to push her away, his ill-treatment, his lashing out, but they would have to quit this nonsense once and for all. She wouldn’t leave him. She wouldn’t leave him, and he needed to get used to the idea.
“Are these your chambers?” she asked, an absurd prelude to making love. “You have quite a lot of books.”
“Why, did you think I couldn't read?”
“Don’t.” She glowered. “Must you always assume the worst of me?”
“Must you always argue?”
Detestable man… She looked back at the ceiling, lamenting: “I am too cold to fight.”
“And whose fault is that?”
She gave no reply; she was shivering beneath the furs, and something about the smallness of her body in the enormous bed made for a pathetic sight.
He clicked his teeth. “Come…” And rising from his chair, which made a scraping sound, he removed all of his clothes without ceremony. Tunic, trousers, and boots came away and dropped to the floor before her startled eyes - but it was his manner which shocked her, far more than his nakedness.
Detachedly, he joined her on the bed, pressing his chest to her freezing back, rubbing her arms so they might rally heat. She squirmed against him, embarrassed by her nudity, embarrassed by his… and more than that, she was shamed by his utter lack of feeling. This wasn't the way she had wanted him to touch her - methodically, devoid of any lust. And yet, in spite of his lack of interest, the sharp tang of desire filled her mouth like blood.
Her face warmed. Her heart pounded as if in fear and, worried he might hear it, she tried scurrying away, naively pressing into his groin until his arm came around her in an iron vise.
“Will you hold still? It’s not as though I’m attempting to rape you,” he hissed into her ear.
“I never said you were!”
He threw back the covers and left her side. She felt colder than before, for all that her skin had lost some of its stubborn chill. Over her shoulder, she saw him gathering his clothes. His back was scarred, but aside from that, he seemed… shockingly ordinary. A human being. A man.
Why could they not figure out what lay between them? Why was it so difficult when she knew full well that she wanted him and that he, in his own way, must want her in return?
“Stay… please. These are your chambers. Where will you sleep?”
“There are other rooms.”
“Sleep in this one.” It was nowhere near what she wanted to say. But she awaited his answer with bated breath, certain he would walk away like he always did. That wouldn't do. She needed to be bolder. Holding the furs against her chest, she reached for his wrist, tugging gently, not pressingly, until he looked down at their twined hands.
It seemed to transfix him, the sight of her hand in his. He dropped his garments and sagged into bed, sitting on the edge, not turning, never moving. “What are you doing?” he asked when he felt her against his back. She drew the covers around him, scattering kisses upon his shoulders and the side of his neck. She was careful, sweet, hair falling around him in a cascade of honeysuckle and silk. He could do nothing - his hands were curled into fists, his jaw hard, teeth gnashing.
Then she turned his face and kissed him properly, and she might as well have held his head beneath water. She was all softness and heat; he groaned at the feel of it, his cock twitching at the thought of that same heat around him, on him. Sensing a weakness, she pulled him into bed with her, draped her body over his, kissing his mouth and his cheeks, his good eye, the tip of his nose. He was drowning, and in a last-ditch effort for life, he seized her by the waist and said, “Stop… stop it, I say.”
She hushed him with another kiss, this one languid, relentless. She pulled off his eyepatch, revealing the ruined eye, and without gawking, without remarking upon the long slash of the scar, she kissed his cheekbone, his brow-bone above the glowing sapphire he had placed in his socket all those many years before.
“Tell me your name…” she breathed against his skin.
“Witch.” He dug his fingers into her side. He almost hated her then, with her warm slick against him, cruelly teasing - as if she desired him… as if she truly wished to be his.
“I? I am the witch? It is you who keeps me here.”
“Be off, then! I release you. Leave with the sun…”
“No.”
“Return to your people…”
“I have no people,” she said, shaking her head. “You are all that I have… all that I need.”
His hands softened around her waist, clinging, climbing up her back and into the waves of her hair. He was drunk on it - the taste of her mouth, the slow drag of her cunt. Poisoned, he thought, and with a shuddering breath he latched onto her neck, suckling, scraping his teeth against the threefold beat of her heart.
She held him there, like a child, dropping kisses upon his head and his temples and the nape of his neck. “You said I was yours until the dying of the moon. You swore it,” she reminded him, “in fire and blood and the ways of Old Valyria. You said the vow was sacred…”
“Serpent, wily fox…”
“But I am your serpent, your fox.”
She pulled him by the hair into another kiss, placed his hand on her breast, sighing, wriggling her hips as he ran his thumb across her nipple. She had notched herself perfectly, the exquisite little thing… Did she mean to take him like this, unprepared, running on nothing but desire and an unpracticed urge?
“You do not kiss like a maiden,” he tauntingly remarked.
“Because I have no wish to be. I’ve been trying to get you into my bed for months, or have you so easily forgotten?”
He breathed a laugh, incredulous against her mouth. “If I take you, will you finally quit your talking?”
“For a time, perhaps.” The smile she gave him nearly stopped his heart. It was playful and fond and there was no fear in it - no revulsion or turning away.
It couldn’t last, said the voice inside his head. It would soon turn to hate, disgust, weariness. The fear closed around his chest, not allowing him to move, to breathe…
And then she tucked his hair behind his ear, stroking a line from his shoulder and down the length of his arm. She kissed him as if she were afraid of breaking him - a strange feeling, that… he had been a fighting man since before he’d been a man, and here this woman held him with infinite tenderness, her mouth full of promise.
I am his and he is mine.
That was the moment he gave in fully, and he could feel the glowing softness of her body as he quit the fight. Her happiness, her joy.
Could he deny her anything now? He still felt like the One-Eyed Prince full of rage and ceaseless hunger. But it was like the old gesture - the drawing of the bride into her husband’s cape. They were one flesh, one heart, one soul. He could not say where she ended and he began, and he found he didn’t care. He didn’t want to know. She was his wife… let Rhaenyra Targaryen try and part them.
“Please.” She was eager, so very eager that he felt it on his tongue.
“I promised not to hurt you,” he wistfully reminded her.
“I don't care.”
“But I do.”
Reaching down, he bid her open, thrilling at her pliancy, her ready submission as her thighs fell apart. She glistened in the firelight, a dusky pink from which he could not - from which he dared not - look away as he dipped his fingers in her slick, stroking softly, rubbing at the flesh around the little nub which made her sigh and shift impatiently upon his bed. Gathering wetness, he eased one of his fingers inside of her, caring for nothing except her pleasure and his own restraint.
“Breathe…” he coaxed. She strained and whimpered. He caressed her thigh, glancing at her face on occasion but mainly focused on the movements of his hand. She felt a stinging sensation, a queer fullness, a resistance she tried to quell with each shuddering breath, and underneath it all, there was pleasure, bright and sharp and waiting to be found.
She felt her walls close around him, clamping down, coaxing him further in, and the more she received from him, the more he praised - you're doing well… can you take another? Yes… she would have said yes to anything, she had waited for him so very long.
When he finally entered her, he had to groan against the urge to sheath himself and take his fill. She was warm and wet against him, so tight, and she fluttered around him, shyly meeting his thrusts as he withdrew and drove back in. Her sighs became moans. He learned where she liked to be touched, where she liked to be kissed, and he repeated the motions, again and again, a little harder, a little faster each torturous time.
She came undone with a precious litany of whimpers and cries, and when his own end came it hit him with the force of many years without a woman’s touch.
It was a felling blow, greater than any he had ever felt in the heat of battle - even during the fateful duel with his uncle above Gods Eye. That had been his first demise, the moment that sent him hurtling into the twilight realm, and it was now to him as nothing.
Greater was the death he found between her thighs - and still he continued to thrust, kissing her right temple, filling her to the brim. When he withdrew and saw that some of his seed had left her, an unknowable urge made him reach down and push it in.
It was the work of a moment. He never meant to put a child in her, but now he was gripped with the fear it wouldn't take. He needed her… wanted her… as mother to his child, could she really leave him then?
Gently, as if she understood his fleeting madness, she touched his shoulder and said, “Your name - your true name.”
She was everything then: a little bird shuddering beneath him, a wolf, a clever fox, a goddess no longer the Maiden but not the Mother yet.
She was like him, something in-between, and because she had learned his rules so well, his springtime girl, his death-dealing witch - his sworn woman, sealed in fire and blood - she looked down at him with a power which could not be denied. The proof of it was on his fingers, coating his hand:
A life for a life.
I will give you children, boys and girls with stars in their hair and eyes blue as sapphires. And I will stay with you… forever and a day… but first I must have you - all of you. Without armor. Open and honest and unconcealed.
He was condemned by his own laws, trapped in a snare of his own making, and he had not even the wherewithal to rage. Defeat… after centuries and he relished it, met it gladly, kissed his sweet assassin upon the lips. “Aemond,” he spoke, slightly pained, into her mouth. “My name was Aemond.”
“And you are Aemond still.” Smiling up at him, she placed her palm atop his scar. “Just think, you could've saved us the trouble had you answered my question the day you married me.”
He laughed, and then he kissed the girl’s hand. Yes, he thought, there might be time for some peace before the final war.
---
No one enters the Green Wood.
It is a place best forgotten. Best left unseen.
So goes the counsel of Good Queen Rhaenyra, the First of Her Name, who reigns like the Valyrian half-gods of old and rides upon her dragon, the yellow-scaled Syrax. Together with her children, she draws the tides of prosperity to the shores of Westeros, bringing peace to her people, keeping them safe.
Many years ago, her word went out amid whispers that a peasant girl had twice wandered into the wood in search of ancient magic. She was a witch, they said, and after the second time, she never returned.
For the most part, her story has long been forgotten now; it features in no books, no songs… but ask one of the old women who know about the shadowed mountain and they will tell you about a girl who tamed a feral dragon, who married a dark prince and bore him children with silver hair and eyes of sapphire blue.
Their tales are not the full, unalloyed truth - you will find hyperbole there, some exaggeration, outright perversion depending on the old woman you ask. But the gist of it remains the same: take care in the Green Wood. What is lost there may never return.
The young men and the maidens laugh, not believing. But sometimes, it is said a bronze dragon can be seen through the mists, spreading her great wings against the pale winter sky.