The suit-gifts were presented on the third day after the feast, in the Queen's Ballroom of Maegor's Holdfast, before witnesses, as custom required — and Aerion came to the occasion the way a headsman comes to work: rested, punctual, and beautifully dressed for it.

Custom required a great deal, it turned out. Custom required the Hand of the King to preside, so his uncle Baelor stood at the head of the room being gracious enough for everyone, which was as well, since no one else intended to contribute. Custom required the suitor's household in attendance, so the storm lords filled the eastern half of the ballroom with gold and black and barely contained good cheer, like weather shut indoors. Custom required the omega's kin, so his father stood at Aerion's shoulder radiating the particular silence of a man who has been made to swear things beforehand. And custom required ladies — dozens of them, the court's finest, ranged along the walls in their silks with their fans working, because a suit-gifting was the best theatre the Red Keep offered in peacetime, and every one of them had heard about the betrothal feast.

Aerion stood at the center of it all in white and silver, hair loose to his waist, hands folded, wearing the demure and luminous expression of a septry carving, and waited for his moment the way fire waits in a lamp.

Lord Lyonel Baratheon entered to the sound of his own men's approval, which seemed to follow him about the way gulls follow a fishing boat. He had dressed with care — someone had gotten him into a doublet of black brocade that fit his enormity like a glove and made the ladies' fans work faster — and behind him came his squire, a red-headed sprout of a boy staggering under the ceremonial weight of a carved chest, and two serving men bearing the rest.

"My prince." The stag lord bowed. Storm-blue eyes found Aerion's and stayed there, warm and entirely too knowing, as though the two of them shared a private jest that Aerion had somehow not been informed of. "I've brought you the Stormlands. As much of it as would fit on a mule."

A ripple of laughter from the east side of the room. Aerion let it die completely before he spoke.

"How economical, my lord. Most men would have needed two."

Fans paused. Baelor's smile acquired a fixed quality. Lyonel Baratheon grinned like sunrise and turned to the chest, and the gifting began.

The velvet came first. The squire and a serving man unrolled it between them, a full bolt of it, and even Aerion — who had been dressed out of the best looms of Myr and Lys since before he could walk — had to govern his face, because it was not black, as he had first thought. It was the color of deep water under a green sky, a darkness with storm in it, and when it moved, light ran along the pile like far-off lightning.

"From the Weeping Town," Lyonel said. "The dyers there guard the making of that color like a keep. My grandmother wore it. She said it was the only cloth ever made that fit the weather of her temper." He paused. "I thought of you at once."

Another ripple — fond, this time, dangerously fond, the room beginning to warm to him — and Aerion put a stop to it.

"It's very dark." He touched the velvet with one finger, as one touches something a dog has brought in. "We do have cloth in King's Landing, my lord. We have had it for some years now. Perhaps word travels slowly through all that rain." He withdrew the finger. "Take it away; the color would drink me. I am not some marcher wife who needs help looking like weather."

The velvet was rolled and set aside. The room's warmth banked itself. His father's breathing, behind him, acquired texture.

The amber came next, in a casket lined with sailcloth — a dozen pieces of sea-amber, honey and fire and one great lump the size of a goose egg, cloudy gold, with a shadow at its heart.

"Off the wrecks in Shipbreaker Bay," Lyonel said. "The sea keeps what she takes, mostly, but now and again she pays a little back on the shore, and the wreckers' children sell it for bread. That big one—" he lifted the goose egg, held it out— "hold it to a candle, my prince."

Aerion should have refused. He knew it even as his hand came out; but the whole room was leaning, and refusing would look like fear, he told himself, and so he took the amber — warm, absurdly warm, like a living thing — and held it up between his eye and the nearest candelabrum.

Inside the golden cloud, wings.

Some small creature had died in that gold a thousand thousand years ago with its wings spread wide, and time and sea had made of it a shadow, and candlelight made of the shadow — his breath stopped for half a heartbeat, he would deny it to the Stranger's face — a tiny dragon, caught rising, burning in a drop of fire.

The nearest ladies had seen it too. He heard the soft ohh run down the wall like a dropped stitch.

"The wrecker girl who found it called it a fly in a stone," Lyonel said. His voice had gone quieter, pitched for a smaller room. "I bought it from her for more than her father's boat was worth, because I thought — well." Aerion could feel the storm-blue eyes on the side of his face. "I thought some things only show what they are in the right light."

The amber was warm in Aerion's palm. It weighed nothing and it weighed a great deal, and for one appalling moment he wanted it so badly that his fingers had already begun, minutely, to close.

He set it down on the casket's edge with a click.

"A dead bug in a stone." He wiped his fingertips on his handkerchief, delicately, thoroughly, while the room watched. "The treasures of the Stormlands stand explained at last. Do the wrecker children also sell you your compliments, my lord, or are those washed up on the beach as well?"

Someone among the ladies drew a breath with an edge on it. Lord Baratheon looked at him for a moment — at him, Aerion had the sudden crawling certainty, not at the performance but through it, at the fingers that had begun to close — and then he smiled, easy as ever, and shut the casket without another word, and Aerion hated him freshly and completely.

The cloak he dismissed before it was fully unfolded — black fox from the rainwood, lined in that storm-water velvet, clasped with a silver stag's head — "You would badge me like livestock, my lord; give it to one of your men, they look the sort to huddle" — and the room had stopped rippling now, had gone instead to that taut theatre-silence of an audience no longer sure the play is a comedy. Baelor had begun, very smoothly, to talk about the weather to no one in particular. Maekar had gone past texture into stone.

Then they brought the hawk.

She came in on the fist of Lyonel's falconer, hooded in tooled red leather, and even hooded she owned the room at once: a goshawk, but such a goshawk as Aerion had never seen, storm-grey above and barred like driven rain below, big as an eagle almost, mad and perfect. The storm lords made low appreciative sounds, connoisseurs' sounds. Somewhere a lady's little dog began to whimper and was smothered in silks.

"Out of the rain-woods on Cape Wrath," Lyonel said, and there was no mistaking the change in his voice now; this was the pride of the whole gifting, the thing he had chosen first and built the rest around. "Passage-caught this spring past. My own falconer manned her, but she's flown for no one yet — she's not mine to fly. She has no name." He took the gauntlet from his falconer, held it out toward Aerion across the space between them, leather worn dark and soft. "She's yours to name, my prince, and yours to fly. There's not a bird in the king's mews will touch her."

"I don't doubt it," said Aerion. "They'll have heard about her accent."

Laughter — startled out of the storm lords themselves, damn them, a great crack of it before they remembered whose side they were on. Even the falconer's mouth twitched. Aerion rode the laugh with his chin high, cold and glittering, and gestured, negligent, at the hooded splendor on the man's fist.

"Take the creature to the royal mews and put it with the other unwanted things. I have no use for—"

The falconer, misunderstanding the gesture — or understanding it, Aerion would wonder later, far too well — stepped forward and offered up the fist.

And the goshawk, that mad grey princess of the rain-woods who had flown for no one, who had (Aerion would learn afterward, from Marra, who had it from the mews boys, who spoke of it for a fortnight) footed two falconers bloody and screamed the Red Keep's mews into rebellion for three nights running — the goshawk went still.

Utterly still. Hooded, blind, wild — she turned her head toward Aerion as if hearing a note pitched under the world, and her talons eased on the glove, and her whole fierce trembling architecture settled, and she was quiet.

The room was quiet with her.

Aerion stood pinned in the sudden hush with every eye in the Queen's Ballroom moving between him and the bird, and he watched the whole court see it — see the metaphor assemble itself midair, gaudy as a mummers' banner: the wild thing gone gentle, the untamable tamed, the storm lord's gift knowing its master, oh, they would be embroidering it onto cushions by nightfall — and the rage that went through him then was white and total, because it was not the bird's stillness that undid him.

It was that for one breath — one — the stillness had gone both ways.

"How touching," he said, into the hush, in a voice like frost forming. "It's stupid as well as drab. Mews. Now." And to Lyonel, wheeling on him with his skirts snapping: "Is there more, my lord, or is the mule empty?"

For the first time that day, something moved at the back of the storm-blue eyes — not hurt, he'd have paid gold for hurt — something attentive, banked and patient, a man marking where the fish were rising. Then Lyonel Baratheon reached into the carved chest himself, and brought out the last gift, and crossed the floor, and put it directly into Aerion's hands, warm from the chest's dark like a live coal.

A dagger.

Not a courtier's toy. A true blade a foot long in a sheath of black leather chased with silver, and when Aerion — because the room was watching, because refusing to touch it would look like fear, because, because — drew it, the steel came out with a whisper that stiffened every spine along the walls, and the ladies' fans stopped dead. An omega prince, bare steel in hand, at his own suit-gifting. Septa Alerys, somewhere by the door, would be laying in candles for a week of prayer.

The blade was castle-forged, watered grey, plain and perfect. The hilt was dressed in pearl — not studded with it, dressed in it, sea-pearl from Shipbreaker Bay laid in flawless sheets, cool and smooth as the inside of a shell, and it fit his hand as though someone had measured him sleeping.

"Where I come from," Lyonel said, quietly, only somewhat to the room, "we don't give an omega only soft things. My mother carried its like from her wedding day to the day she died, and her mother before her. Storm wives sleep better armed; it's an old custom and a good one." A pause. "The pearl was my notion. The smith called it vanity. I told him he'd not seen you."

Aerion turned the dagger in the light. He was aware of the silence banking higher around him, of his father's stare boring between his shoulders, of Baelor's diplomatic cough assembling itself — and he was aware, with a strange ringing distance, that his heart was beating in his fingertips where they lay along the pearl.

He set the edge against the pad of his thumb and pressed, unhurried, until it parted the skin.

Gasps, plural, satisfying. A bead of blood rose, very red. He looked at Lyonel Baratheon over it while he brought the thumb to his mouth, deliberate as an insult, and took the bead away.

"It's sharp," he said. "How rustic."

Then he sheathed it, click, and dropped it back atop the folded fox-fur cloak as though it had bored him, and turned to address his uncle the Hand, the room, the realm, in tones of silvered regret:

"Lord Baratheon does me honor past all deserving. Alas—" the sigh of a martyred saint— "it is not the custom of Targaryen omegas to accept gifts of the suit before wedding vows are sworn. An old custom," he added, gently, into Baelor's blank stare and the visible whirring of every septa present, because there was no such custom, and everyone knew there was no such custom, and no one could prove there was no such custom without calling the king's grandson a liar in open court. "A very old custom. We are an old family. Return them all to my lord of Storm's End with my compliments, and my — gratitude."

He gave the last word a shape that made it unmistakably a fourth-rank insult, made his courtesy to his uncle, to the room, a fraction of an inch to his betrothed — and swept for the doors through a silence you could have quarried and dressed for building stone.

Behind him, unhurried, warm as ever, carrying easily to every corner of the ballroom and through the closing doors and down the corridor after him like a hand laid flat between his shoulder blades, came the stag lord's voice:

"Then I'll bring them again after the vows, my prince. And more besides." A beat, and Aerion could hear the grin, could hear it gathering the whole room back into its skirts, storm lords and scandalized ladies and all. "I'm told I'm stubborn."

***

The gifts were stacked in his antechamber that night, waiting for the morning and the mule.

This was, Marra explained, apologizing, the steward's doing — the return could not decently be made after dark, it must go back by daylight, formally, with a note; and so the whole glittering rejected pile of the Stormlands sat in Aerion's antechamber under a linen sheet like a body, and Aerion lay awake on the other side of the door, listening to it.

Gifts did not make sounds. He was aware of that. Nonetheless.

Past midnight he rose, told himself he was checking that nothing had been thieved — the Red Keep's servants would steal the crumbs from under a raven — and lit a single candle, and lifted the sheet.

The velvet first, storm-water-dark, drinking his little flame. He did not touch it. The fox cloak, the silver stag cool under his fingertip for exactly one second. The casket of amber. He was not going to open the casket of amber.

He opened the casket of amber.

The goose-egg piece lay on top where the servants had repacked it, and it was warm — amber was always warm, he told himself, it was a property of the stone, the maesters had written tediously about it — and he held it to the candle, just once, just to confirm it had been a trick of the ballroom's light.

The little dragon burned in its drop of gold fire, wings wide, rising, going nowhere, forever.

Some things only show what they are in the right light.

"Sentimental rubbish," Aerion told it. His voice came out strange in the dark room. He put it back — he made his fingers put it back, one at a time, and folded the sailcloth over it, and shut the casket lid on the small fire inside, and it cost him more than he would ever admit to any living creature, which was precisely why he did it. Wanting was a door. He was done leaving doors where other people could see them.

The dagger lay at the bottom of the pile.

He looked at it for a long time by candlelight, the black sheath, the silver chasing, the pearl hilt giving back the flame in one soft unbroken line, like the horizon at sea. His thumb throbbed faintly where the edge had parted it — he had refused Marra's fussing, refused the salve — and he found he was rubbing the little cut with his forefinger, slowly, around and around.

It has tasted me, he thought. There are places where returning a blade means blood-feud. Someone told me that once — some Marcher hostage, some song. It would be an omen, to send back steel. It would be practically a declaration of war, and the whole point of me, I am given to understand, is peace.

He was aware that this was a lie. He was constructing it with great care, the way one constructs anything one intends to live inside.

Also: I am alone in a keep full of people who sold me, and my betrothed is a mountain who bows correctly, and a prince should be armed. Mother was armed. Mother slept with steel under the bolster her whole life; I saw it once and she laughed and said, "This is the only counselor your father cannot argue with."

Also—

There was no third also. He stood in the dark with the candle guttering, waiting for the third also, and it did not come; there was only the pearl warming under his fingers where they had, at some point, without any instruction from him whatsoever, picked the dagger up.

"Oh, be silent," Aerion said — to the dagger, to the room, to the small hot mutinous country of his own chest — and blew out the candle, and took it to bed.

He slid it under his pillow, sheathed, hilt outward, where his hand could find it. Where his hand did find it, and stayed.

He slept the night through, deep and dreamless and whole, for the first time since the herald's staff came down. In the morning, watching from his window as the storm lord's mule was led away across the yard with its rejected treasure lashed and gleaming, he decided not to notice this, and — for a while — he genuinely believed that he had managed it.

***

Lyonel Baratheon had decided, by the end of his first fortnight in it, that the Red Keep was a very fine place to visit and no place at all to live. Too many stairs and not enough weather. The air indoors tasted of stone and secrets, the air outdoors tasted of the city, which was worse, and a man could stand at the highest window in the River Wing and see the bay lying there flat and tame as a millpond and feel homesickness take him low, under the ribs, for water with some argument in it.

He was at that window, missing the sound of Shipbreaker Bay hitting his walls, when the mule's cargo came back.

"All of it, my lord." Steffon staggered in under the casket of amber, red hair on end, thirteen years old and personally affronted on his cousin's behalf, which he had been, loudly, since the ballroom. "Every last — he sent it back with a note. Ser Arstan has the note. It says—"

"It says," said Ser Arstan Selmy, coming in behind him with the folded paper held at arm's length, the way he held anything he suspected of being poisoned, "*'With gratitude.'* One word underlined." He set it on the table between them and regarded it. Ser Arstan was sixty, grey as a March sky, and had served three Lords of Storm's End with a face that gave away nothing and a tongue that occasionally gave away everything. "In my day, my lord, when a body wanted to say go home, they said go home. Court manners. Takes 'em twelve syllables and a mule."

"Unpack it," Lyonel said. "Let's see how it traveled."

They laid it out on the long table: the velvet, the cloak, the amber. The gauntlet, returned; the goshawk herself had gone to the royal mews and stayed there, that being where her prince had banished her, and Lyonel had sent his falconer to see her settled and paid the king's mews-master to let the man tend her daily, which had raised eyebrows and solved them with silver.

Steffon smoothed the velvet, checked the cloak's clasp, counted the amber twice.

Then counted the table.

"My lord." The boy's face had gone from affronted to appalled, which in a Connington was a journey of some distance. "My lord, the dagger. The pearl-hilt. It's not — I've been through it all twice, it's not here." He was already backing toward the door, already composing, Lyonel could see, the righteous scene he would make of it. "Thieved. On the way, or by his servants, or — I'll go to the steward this instant, they'll turn out every—"

"You'll go nowhere."

"But my lord — your gift — some light-fingered—"

"Steffon." Lyonel had crossed to the table. He stood looking down at the returned Stormlands, at the four gifts and the space where the fifth was not, and he was aware of a grin starting somewhere down in his chest, deep and slow and entirely against his better judgment, the way the big swells start half a sea away. "Count again, lad. Nothing's missing."

Steffon counted again, moving his lips. Looked up, lost. "Four, my lord. There were five."

"There were five," Lyonel agreed. "There are four. And nothing is missing. When you're older you'll find things can be arranged so."

He caught Ser Arstan watching him, then. The old knight had picked up the note again — with gratitude, underlined — and was looking from it to the table to his lord's face, and whatever he found in the last of these made him set the note down slowly and say, in the voice he had once used to inform Lyonel's father that the roof of the great hall was on fire:

"He kept the knife."

"He kept the knife," Lyonel said.

"The one he opened his own hand on. In front of the Hand of the King and half the ladies of the realm."

"That one."

"My lord." Ser Arstan pinched the bridge of his nose. "I have held my peace for a fortnight. I held it through the feast, when the king's grandson called you a dog before the assembled peerage of Westeros and you toasted him. I held it through the ballroom, gods aid me, through the bug in the stone and the — I am an old man, Lyonel. My peace has held all it can hold. Give me leave to speak plain."

"When have you ever waited for leave?"

"Plainly, then." The old knight squared himself. "Beg off. Go to the king — he's a kind man, they don't call him the Good for his hunting — tell him the Stormlands are honored past measure and the marches want their lord and the match wants a gentler season, and let it die of politeness the way half the betrothals in this realm die. No one will fault you. Half that hall would bless you. There are omegas from here to Oldtown, sweet-tempered, well-dowered, who'd thank the Mother on their knees for a lord like you — the Rowan girl, the young Tarly — and instead you sit here grinning like a spring tide over a stolen knife from a creature who has done nothing, nothing since the day the ravens flew, but spend the wit the gods gave him working out how best to make you bleed in public. He is poison in a silver cup, my lord. I say it with respect to his blood: they should have named him for the other Aegon. Go home."

The fire popped. Steffon stood frozen by the amber casket, eyes going between them like a boy at his first melee.

Lyonel let the silence sit a moment. Then he pulled out a chair and turned it and sat astride it, arms folded along its back, which Ser Arstan had told him a hundred times was no way for a Lord Paramount to sit, and looked up at his father's oldest friend.

"You've taken a haggard, ser. In your day. Don't tell me otherwise, I've heard your day, at length, most of my life."

Ser Arstan's eyes narrowed at the turn. "…Two."

"Then you know how it goes. Passage bird's one thing — young, green, half-wild, she'll come to the glove by winter if you're patient. But a haggard." Lyonel held up his left hand, turned it, showing the old white seams across the back of it, glove-scars, mews-scars, twenty years of them. "Full-summed. Wild-caught, grown, never a hood on her in her life, never once needed a thing from a man. First sennight on the fist she'll bate till she hangs upside down screaming. She'll foot you to the bone. She'll starve herself out of spite, scream the mews into riot, and any fool watching says, loose her or wring her neck, the bird's mad." He looked at the space on the table where the dagger wasn't. "She's not mad. She's honest. Every fist she's ever seen came with a cage behind it, and she's the only bird in the mews with the wit to know it. You don't master a haggard, ser — my father taught me that with these same scars — you outlast her. You stand there, day upon day, being the one thing in her sky that doesn't flinch and doesn't lie, and you let her spend her rage on you till she learns your arm is bedrock, and then some morning — not soon; you'll bleed first — some morning she steps to you. Her own wings. Her own choice. And a haggard won to the fist—" the grin got loose again; he let it— "there's nothing in the sky flies fiercer, ser, nor comes back truer, and every falconer living knows it, and that's why old men with scarred hands keep taking haggards."

The fire ate a log down and settled. Ser Arstan looked at him for a long, long moment, sixty years of weather in his face.

"The king's grandson," he said at last, heavily, "is not a bird, my lord."

"No," Lyonel agreed. "He's got a crueler tongue and far better jewels. But he took the knife, ser." He rose, and clapped the old knight on the shoulder, and went back to his window and his tame flat millpond of a bay, and the grin went with him. "Blades and hawks. He sent back everything soft and kept the one thing with an edge — the one thing I told him storm wives keep to sleep sound. Poison in a silver cup, you say. Maybe so." Out on the water, a fishing boat was beating in against the wind, heeled over, stubborn. "But nobody steals a knife to hurt the man who gave it. There are easier knives. He kept it because it's his — first thing in this whole gilded horror of a keep that's been only his, asked for by no one, owed to no one — and he'd sooner eat it than say so." He watched the boat make its slow fierce way. "That's not poison, ser. That's thirst."

"He does not wear your token either," Ser Arstan said, with the air of a man playing his last stone. "The red gold. Not once. The whole court remarks it."

"Aye," said Lyonel Baratheon, comfortably, watching the water. "The token he was handed in front of two thousand people. Wouldn't wear it myself." He glanced back, and something in his face made old Ser Arstan, who had watched him grow from a squalling black-haired scrap into the biggest lord in the Stormlands, look suddenly as though he were seeing his old master instead, the dead lord, the one who had also never in his life let go of a thing once he had decided it was worth holding. "Write to Storm's End, ser. Tell them to begin on the bridal apartments — the sea-facing rooms, my mother's old ones, new glass in every window, the big hearth rebuilt. Tell them their lady is a prince of the blood of the dragon and cold rooms are treason." He turned back to the window. "And tell them to build the mews out. We'll be wanting room."

Behind him he heard Ser Arstan pick up the note again — with gratitude, one word, underlined — and sigh from his boots, and go to find ink.

"Thirst," the old knight muttered at the door, not quite to himself. "Seven save the thirsty, then, for they know not what they've drawn from the well."

***

The court went hawking in the kingswood on a bright cold morning a few days after, and the wonder of the age condescended, at last, to attend.

Lyonel knew the moment it happened without needing to look — knew it from the way the cavalcade's noise changed behind him, the chatter dropping and re-forming around a new center like water around a dropped stone. He turned his courser and there Aerion was: on a palfrey grey as morning, in riding silks of deepest charcoal shot through with dark red — colors a shade's breadth from Targaryen mourning, worn with rubies, so that the whole ensemble hung somewhere between grief and bloodshed and dared the court to name which — hair braided back off his face for once into a long silver rope, and his beauty in the outdoor light was a plain fact like the cold, and his expression was the expression of a siege engine being wheeled into position.

He rode straight to Lyonel's side, took up station there as a betrothed omega ought, arranged his reins, and said, pleasantly, without preamble:

"I have decided to take an interest in you, my lord."

"I'm honored, my prince."

"You should be terrified."

"Where I'm from, the two keep close company." Lyonel whistled his falconer up. Around and behind them the court arranged itself into its bright ambling river — the king had not come, but Prince Baelor had, and half a hundred lords and ladies, hawks on fists, dogs weaving, the morning going up in laughter and breath-smoke — and the wonder of the age settled down, with the dedication of a scholar and the delicacy of a maester at his knives, to the work of taking him apart.

He started with the accent, because Lyonel made the mistake of pointing out a likely covert and saying they'd find fahwl along the stream there.

"*Fahwl,*" Aerion repeated, marveling. "What is that? Is it Andal? It has such a — texture. Say 'water.'"

"Watter."

"Extraordinary. Say 'my prince, forgive me.'"

"You'll have to give me cause first."

"Say 'hawks.'"

"Hahks."

"*Hahks.*" Aerion turned to the nearest lady — Lord Rowan's daughter, pink with the effort of pretending not to listen — and confided, in a voice built to carry to the back of the cavalcade: "We are going to need a translator. Ride to the Citadel; tell them it's urgent; tell them to send whichever maester keeps the dictionaries of thunder."

The lords and ladies laughed. They could hardly help it; it was funny, everything the creature said was funny, that was the poison's coating — and Lyonel laughed too, easily, honestly, and watched the flicker of fury behind the violet eyes when he did. Laughter's no good to you unless it's at me, is it, princeling. It has to cut coming and going or it's wasted.

The manners came next. Lyonel whistled — two fingers, a marcher's blast that turned heads for fifty yards — to bring his falconer up for the first flight, and Aerion closed his eyes as though wounded by an arrow.

"He whistles," he told the sky. "At people. Do you whistle at table, my lord? Do you whistle at the septon? When we are wed and the King comes to guest at Storm's End, will you summon him to the venison with two fingers and a — no, look at me, I must know before the vows—"

"Only if he strays out of line of the beaters," Lyonel said. "Kings wander. It's the crowns; heavy in front."

The education after that, over the stirrup cup at the first halt: a swift merciless catechism on the Nine Voyages of the Sea Snake ("no?"), the lineage of the Gardener kings ("*no?*"), the correct form of address for a Princess of Dorne in the old Rhoynish style ("gods above"), the poets of the Freehold — "Name me one. One Valyrian poet. A verse. A word—"

"Dracarys," said Lyonel.

A beat. Somewhere behind them, a storm knight choked into his cup.

"That," said Aerion Targaryen, with the icy dignity of a cat that has sat in something, "is not poetry."

"Shortest poem I know. Great deal of matter in it, I'm told." Lyonel handed his cup down to a page. "My education went otherwise, my prince, I'll grant it freely. I can read a coast in the dark by the sound of the water. I can tell you what the sky will do tomorrow from the smell of it today, and be right four times in five. I know the name and the face and the father's name of every man who holds land of me from Storm's End to the Dornish Marches, and I know which lord's granaries will come up short by autumn and which lady's sons need fostering out before they turn wild, and I learned my letters young and my numbers younger, because my father held that a lord who can't check his own steward's sums is a sheep who has learned to sign for his own shearing." He gathered his reins. "But you're right that I can't give you the Freehold's poets. You'll have to say them to me. I'm told I'm a fair listener, and we'll have the years for it."

For a moment — one, unguarded, gone as fast as it came — the wonder of the age looked as though he had been handed something he had no shelf for. Then the fury came back down over it like a visor, and the morning went on.

The goshawk flew at midday, and shamed every bird in the field.

Lyonel flew her himself — she would go to no one else save the falconer, and barely him — and she went up off his fist like something loosed rather than launched, rang up in two great spirals to a pitch that made the court shade their eyes, and came down the sky at a heron over the stream-meadow like the judgment of the Seven, a grey bolt out of a grey heaven, and bound to it, and brought it down in an explosion of white feathers to a shout from the whole company. Ladies applauded. Lords who had wagered against a goshawk at that pitch paid up, marveling. Prince Baelor himself rode across to say that he had not seen the like in twenty years, and meant it.

Aerion watched the whole flight without once permitting his face to move, which — Lyonel was learning to read him now, a coastline in the dark — was itself as loud as a shout.

So Lyonel, taking her back hooded onto the glove, feeling the fierce grey weight of her settle, did the thing he had told himself all morning he would not do, because a wise man did not fly the same lure twice at a bird who'd already refused it in front of the whole mews.

He rode to the palfrey's side, and drew off his spare gauntlet, and held it out.

"She flew for me because there was no one better on the field," he said. "There is now. Take her to the downwind side of the meadow and cast her off at what rises. She'll answer you."

"She is not mine."

"She's yours. She's been yours since the ballroom, and every soul present saw it, which is why you can't forgive her." He kept his voice down and his hand out, the worn leather lying across his palm between them like a bridge. "One flight, my prince. Not for me. Not for them. Because it is a cold bright day, and she is the finest thing on wings south of the Neck, and you want to."

And the wanting was there — he watched it, the way he'd watch weather come up over the rim of the sea: the violet eyes going to the hooded grey head, the lips parting a fraction, the gloved fingers actually lifting from the rein, an inch, two — the whole proud architecture of him leaning, leaning, toward the one thing on the field that was wild in the same key —

— and then Aerion caught himself wanting in public, and Lyonel saw the catch, saw the door slam somewhere behind the beautiful eyes, and knew what was coming the way he knew weather, and could do nothing at all but sit and take it.

"How she flies is no wonder," Aerion said. His voice had gone up into its carrying register, silver and carrying and vicious, pitched for the drifting court, for Baelor, for the ladies, for the record. "Look what she's fed from. Everything out of the Stormlands learns the same single trick, my lord — you throw yourselves at what's above you and call the falling glory. A heron. A wall. A Blackfyre line. It's all one to your kind, isn't it? That's the whole use of Baratheons, when the maesters write it plainly: you hold what you're set to hold because you are too stubborn to die when more elegant men would have the good sense to. The realm keeps you as it keeps piers. Things for the sea to hit." He smiled, and the smile was all edge, and his eyes were too bright, and he was not stopping; Lyonel watched him hear himself not stopping. "Why, your own lord father, I'm told—"

"Careful," said Lyonel Baratheon.

He said it quietly. But something had come into his voice that had never been in it in all this fortnight of feasts and insults and mule-loads, some bass note out of the keel of him, and the nearest riders discovered urgent business elsewhere, and even the dogs went quiet, and Aerion Targaryen — blood in the water at last, after fourteen days of fishing this vast unhittable sea and finally, finally feeling something strike — leaned into it and set the hook with all his strength.

"—your own lord father took eight years to die of one Blackfyre point," he said, sweet and clear and unforgivable. "*Eight years.* The stubbornness of the man. Did he mistake the Stranger for a bannerman, my lord, that he kept him standing at the door so long? Or is it simply that no one at Storm's End has the education to know when a thing is finished—"

He did not get further, because Lyonel dismounted.

It was not a threatening movement. That was somehow the worst of it, Lyonel would think later; a man reaching for a sword can be met, but he had simply swung down off the courser, passed the hooded goshawk to his falconer, and walked around to stand at the palfrey's shoulder, close enough that the little grey mare blew nervously and Aerion sat above him ringed in cold sunlight with his cruelty still hanging in the air between them — and Lyonel looked up at his betrothed and did not shout, and did not plead, and did not turn away.

"He took my hand at the end," Lyonel said. "My father. He couldn't speak by then — the wound had gone to his chest that last winter — so he took my hand, and he put it flat on the wall of Storm's End, on the old stone, the stuff Durran raised, that seventy generations of weather have hit and lost against. And he held it there. That was the whole of his last testament, my prince. No maester wrote it down. Be the wall. So." He drew a breath; it went in steady and came out steady; he made sure of it. "You've spent your morning at my accent, my manners, my learning, and my blood, and you've had good sport, and I've laughed, because it was funny, and because none of it cost you anything and none of it cost me anything either. But you'll leave my father out of your mouth. Not because I'll rage for you — I know that's the coin you're fishing for, you've been dangling for it since the ravens flew, and you may go on dangling till the Wall melts. Because he was a better man than either of us, and mocking the dead is the one thing on this field today that was beneath you."

The meadow was very quiet. Downstream, oblivious, a moorhen scolded.

"Beneath me." Aerion's voice had gone thin and glittering. Two spots of color stood high on the white of his face. "You dare speak to me of beneath—"

"Aye, there it is. Your blood again. Your precious blood." And Lyonel felt the last mooring go, felt himself say it, the thing he had been watching and weighing and carrying for a fortnight, and some part of him stood off appalled at the size of what was leaving harbor and the rest of him let it sail: "Shall I tell you what I've learned of your blood in fourteen days, my prince? You are spoiled. Spoiled as fruit is spoiled — not from too much love; I've watched your kin around you, I doubt you've had a spoonful of the true stuff since your lady mother died — spoiled from sitting too long in the one gold bowl. And under the spoiling, you are frightened. No — don't reach for the whip-look, it's no use on me, I grew up under weather that could sink a fleet and I've been shouted at by the sea. Frightened. I watched you this whole cold morning, and do you know what I saw? I saw your lord father never once look at you. Not once — and I saw you watch him not look, every furlong of the ride, while you sharpened yourself on me to fill the time. You're a little dragon snapping through the bars of a gilded cage, and it isn't the cage that maddens you — you've lined every inch of it in silk yourself, you'd defend that cage to the death, it's the only country you've ever ruled. It's that someone has come and opened the door. On a side you didn't choose. Onto weather you don't know. And you cannot bear — you cannot bear — that when you finally flew at something with all your claws out, meaning to be dropped, meaning to be proof that everything they whisper of you is true—" he spread his empty scarred hands, palm up, in the cold light— "the fool just stood there. And is standing there still. And likes you."

Silence, entire. Even the moorhen had thought better of it.

Aerion Targaryen sat his grey palfrey above him, white to the lips, absolutely motionless, and Lyonel — braced for the storm of the age, for screaming, for the riding whip, half-hoping for the whip, a whip would have been simple — watched instead the strangest weather he had ever seen cross a living face.

The fury came first, whole and white; he knew that country. But it did not break. It rose, and hung, and then — like a wave meeting some unseen seawall far out from shore — it stilled, all of it, all at once, into a flat shining dangerous calm; and out of the calm the violet eyes fixed on him with an attention he had not seen in them before, not once, not at the feast, not in the ballroom: narrow, and sharp, and utterly awake, the look of a creature that has been circling a strange new thing in its territory for a fortnight and has just now, this instant, caught its scent.

And the scent — gods. The wind was wrong and then it was right, and it came over Lyonel like a door opening onto a forge: the hot-metal-and-woodsmoke he had catalogued that first day in the throne room, the burnt-sugar edge that flared with the prince's every cruelty — all of it shifting, darkening, sweetening, smoke turning to incense turning to something warm and resinous and slow that had no business at all on a cold morning in the kingswood, something that reached down his spine and closed a fist there. His own blood answered before his mind could vote on it — a slow deep roll like the sea taking hold of a hull — and Lyonel Baratheon, who had faced a Blackfyre charge at seventeen without his mouth going dry, stood in a sunny meadow feeling his mouth go dry, and took, deliberately, a step back from his betrothed.

Not from the anger. He could have stood in the anger all day.

From the understanding — arriving in him the way soundings arrive under a keel, felt before fathomed — that he had just answered some question the prince had been screaming at the whole world for six-and-ten years, and that neither of them yet knew what the question was, and that everything, everything, had somewhere in the last minute changed.

Aerion looked down at him a moment longer with that new, still, sharpened look.

Then he turned the palfrey without a word — no cut, no exit line, nothing, from him, whose whole art was the exit line — and rode back toward the bright oblivious river of the court at a collected, unhurried, perfectly controlled walk, spine straight as a lance, silver braid swinging; and Lyonel stood alone in the meadow with his heart going like a drum and watched him the whole way.

"Well," he said at last, to the goshawk, hooded and fierce and quiet on the falconer's fist beside him. "Now I've done it."

The goshawk, who had known it all along, said nothing.

***

After the kingswood, Lyonel Baratheon went to school.

Not that anyone watching would have called it that. What the court saw, in the days that followed, was what the court had seen all along: the storm lord at his suppers and his sword-work and his easy laughter, patient as a pier while the wonder of the age broke over him twice daily in glittering waves. If the waves had changed — and they had; Lyonel could not have said how he knew before he could have said how he knew a tide had turned, but the venom came differently now, came aimed, came with those sharp still eyes riding behind it watching what landed — well, no one else was close enough to feel the difference in the water.

But Lyonel had spent his whole life learning wild things by standing near them, and he settled in now to the longest, strangest, most consequential piece of that work he had ever undertaken, and he went about it the way his father had taught him to go about all of it — hawks, horses, storms, men.

Watch. Test small. Never lie to the animal. Never lie to yourself about the animal.

Words, first.

He learned it almost by accident, at a supper for the Dornish envoys, four nights after the meadow. Aerion had been at him since the soup — brilliantly, viciously, in that new aimed way — and had eaten nothing, was eating nothing ever at these things, Lyonel had begun to notice, too busy fencing to feed himself, wound tighter every course; and somewhere past the third remove, without planning it, out of nothing loftier than the plain marcher instinct that a creature in a temper wants food and doesn't know it, Lyonel stopped answering the latest sally and said, level and low, the way he'd say it in his own hall:

"Drink your wine and eat your capon. You've taken nothing since noon."

He heard it come out of himself — no my prince, no if it please you, none of the fortnight's careful cushions, just the flat quiet settle of an order — and braced for the eruption.

The chin came up. That was first, always, he would learn: the chin, the full haughty tilt of the bloodline. But under the jaw, in the pale column of the throat, the pulse — he was close enough to see it — jumped, and jumped again, quick as a caught bird; and the scent bloomed off him, that dark sweet resin-and-woodsmoke that had ambushed Lyonel in the meadow, sudden and strong enough that a passing server faltered mid-stride; and Aerion Targaryen, chin still high, eyes still fixed on Lyonel in glittering fury, picked up his wine and drank.

And then ate the capon.

And then — having apparently caught up, mid-swallow, with what his own hands were doing — went so magnificently, so incandescently vicious for the remainder of the evening that two of the Dornish envoys later asked Prince Baelor, in confidence, whether the marriage was in truth a punishment, and if so for what crime, and whether the Stormlands had been consulted.

Lyonel gave every appearance of weathering it. Inside himself, in the quiet counting-room where he kept his true ledgers, he wrote it down.

Coaxing, he spits out. Commands, he takes — and hates that he takes, and pays you back double for the taking. The fury is the receipt.

Tone, next; and the shape of the thing grew clearer, and stranger, and made him more careful, not less.

Because there was fear in his prince, true fear — Lyonel met it the following week, in the long gallery, and it taught him the difference in one bad minute. He had come early to some gathering of the households and heard, from an alcove, Prince Maekar's voice ahead of him around the corner: low, even, and working, the way a blade works, on the subject of the suit-gifting, of the mule, of shame, of every day you find some new coin of this family's honor to spend on your performances — and Lyonel had rounded the corner in no haste, giving them time to hear him come, and had seen, in the half-second before both Targaryen faces shut like keeps:

Aerion, backed against the gallery rail, utterly silent. Not fighting. Aerion Targaryen, not fighting — hands still at his sides, eyes down at his father's collar, gone small in some way that had nothing to do with size — and the scent in the gallery was ash. Cold ash and something sour under it, wrongness, a fire drowned; nothing, nothing, kin to the dark sweet smoke of the meadow; a scent that reached the oldest part of Lyonel's hindbrain and said, plain as a bell in fog: this creature is in distress.

He had not decided to intervene. His feet decided. He had simply arrived, huge and cheerful and impossible to talk around, full of an urgent invented need for Prince Maekar's opinion on the disposition of the wedding guard — marcher lords, precedence, a question of banners, he could improvise questions of banners for an hour, he discovered, at need — and had walked the prince of Summerhall gently and irresistibly away down the gallery on a tide of protocol, and left the wonder of the age standing at the rail alone with his ash-cold scent and his unreadable face.

He had glanced back once, at the gallery door. Aerion was watching him go. Lyonel could not name what was in the look — it was not gratitude, gods forbid, nothing so simple; it was the look, he thought later, of a scholar who has caught his text in a contradiction — but he carried it off with him, along with the second entry in the ledger, the one that steadied and sobered everything, the one he made himself write plain:

So that's his true fear, and mark it well: it goes quiet. The blazing, the spitting, the claws out and the colors up — that's not his fear, old son. That's his reaching. Never confuse the two. Confuse the two and you'll deserve everything Ser Arstan ever said of you.

Proximity, last — and that test the prince ran on him, though Lyonel doubted he knew he was doing it.

It was simple as arithmetic, once seen. At table, in the gardens, at the interminable sept ceremonies of the betrothal season: when Lyonel kept a courteous distance, the venom drifted, went general, lost interest in itself — Aerion would flay a passing lordling or the fashion of the season and his heart would not be in it. When Lyonel came close — leaned in to pour for him, or reached past him for the salt cellar with all the storm-and-leather bulk of himself, or stood at his shoulder in a window embrasure to make some idle remark about the shipping in the bay — the viciousness spiked. Instantly. Reliably. The nearer Lyonel came, the crueler the beautiful mouth, insult stacked on insult, faster, brighter, reaching — and the scent underneath telling its counter-story the whole time, woodsmoke sweetening toward resin, the forge-door easing open, until Lyonel learned to stand in the doubled blast of being savaged and summoned in the same breath and keep his face merely pleasant, which was the hardest work he had ever done standing still.

He drives you off with his tongue and hauls you in with everything under it, the ledger said now, in his father's blunt hand, because everything true he had ever learned arrived in his father's hand. The insults are the leash, boy. He's been trying to put it in your hand for a month. He doesn't know that's what he's doing — or he knows it the way the sea knows the moon, without a word for it — and either way—

Either way. There Lyonel stopped, every time; there he made himself stop, and stood a long while at his window over the flat tame bay, being honest.

Because his own blood had a vote now. That was the plain truth of it, and a man who wouldn't look at it was a man walking a cliff path with his eyes shut. Something in him rose to that dark sweet summons like the sea to the moon's pull, deep and total and older than thought; he was an alpha of five-and-twenty and his betrothed was the most beautiful creature in seven kingdoms and the scent of him in fury was becoming, gods help them both, the scent of him in want; and it would be easy — it would be so easy, and worse, it would look like kindness — to answer what was underneath before it was ever said aloud. To take the leash that was being thrust blind into his hands and call the taking mercy.

"No," said Lyonel Baratheon to the window, to the bay, to the moon that pulled at seas. "Not that way."

A bird comes to the fist free, or she doesn't truly come at all; every falconer living knew it, and the ones who forgot it ended with broken birds and called the breaking training. Whatever was being asked of him in that doubled blast of venom and summons — and something was being asked; he was country-bred, not stupid — it had never once been asked in words, and until it was, it did not exist to be answered. He could stand close. He could hold the line, and be the wall, and refuse the lies, and command the capon eaten when the creature was starving itself out of fury — small things, table things, keeping-alive things, the things one owed. The rest waited on words. The rest could wait years, if it must. He had told the ballroom he was stubborn; he had not told them the half of it.

The king sent for him that same week — wine in the solar, the tired kind eyes, the gentle fencing — and asked, at the last, in a voice from which twenty years of statecraft could not quite strain the grandfather: "And how do you fare with him, my lord, in truth?"

"Famously, Your Grace." Lyonel considered. "He's threatened to have me flayed twice, which his brother tells me is a warm sign, and put about the court that I whistle at septons, which I do not, or not often. And two days past he spoke to me for upward of a minute about the shipping in the bay without once drawing blood, though I could see it cost him." He turned his cup. "We get on, Your Grace. He just doesn't know it yet, and I'd count it a kindness if no one tells him before he's ready. He bites news that comes at him too fast."

Daeron the Good looked at him for a long moment over the Myrish lenses — looked the way he was said to read, twice over, once for the words and once for the man — and something in the old face eased that Lyonel suspected had not eased since the herald's staff came down.

"Storm-cut stone," the king murmured, obscurely, to his wine. "Well. I am occasionally right, whatever my son says." And aloud: "More wine, my lord. And tell me about this business with the mule."

***

The storm lords went home at the moon's turn — back to their marches and their autumn courts and the making-ready of a wedding, a hundred lances of them riding out the King's Gate in gold and black with their spirits high and their lord not at their head, and Aerion stood at his window watching the column dwindle down the kingsroad and understood, with a sensation he declined to name, that the enormous person to whom he was affianced was still in the Red Keep, and staying.

"Till the wedding," Marra reported, wide-eyed, fresh from the laundry-court where all true intelligence lived. "The king's own asking, they say. The whole court's talking of it, my prince. A Lord Paramount, half a year from his own seat, only to—" she caught his expression and folded the rest away, but her face finished the sentence anyway, treacherously, glowingly: only to court you.

"The king requires a hostage against Stormlander manners," Aerion said. "Someone must answer for the whistling."

But the leave-taking feast was that night, and he had a new gown for it — the storm-water velvet's exact color, achieved out of Myr at triple cost and worth every dragon for the way it would almost say something and refuse to be proven to have said it — and if he was honest with himself, which he was not, had no intention of being, had lately taken specific measures never again to be, Aerion Targaryen had been sharpening himself for that feast for three days the way other men sharpen swords.

Because the fortnight since the kingswood had been a rout. He could admit that in the privacy of his own skull, where he was still, barely, sovereign: a rout, a disaster, a slow-motion sack of every position he held. Item: he had eaten a capon on command, before witnesses, before the assembled envoys of Dorne, and his body had done it — that was the horror, his body had simply done it, smooth as a hand into a glove, while the rest of him stood inside screaming like the sacked city. Item: he had thereafter lain awake cataloguing the incident and had arrived, against fierce internal opposition, at the truth that the screaming had not entirely been rage. Item: his father had cornered him in the long gallery with that low flaying voice that undid all his hinges, had always undone them, since he was small enough to be stood on a stool for it — and the storm brute had happened to the conversation like weather, huge and stupid and impossible to talk around, all banners and precedence, and had walked his father clean away down the gallery — and Aerion had stood at the rail hating him with his whole chest, hating him for seeing, hating him for the rescue, hating him for the fact that the gallery's air had gone easier to breathe the moment that storm-and-leather bulk arrived in it, and that, that last item, he had taken to the vaults and buried at midnight with no witnesses and no stone.

Item, item, item. He slept every night now with his hand on a pearl hilt, and slept well, and woke furious about it. He caught himself listening down corridors for a particular landslide laugh and then despising the corridors. His own scent had developed opinions — had taken, in a certain person's vicinity, to announcing things Aerion had not authorized, in a language older than he was, and no amount of Lysene perfume would talk over it, he had tried, he had drenched himself, the storm brute had only looked at him with those weather-eyes as though Aerion had shouted the thing instead of hiding it.

He was losing. He had never lost anything in his life — he had been robbed, often, of things before he could win them, which was different, which was the whole difference — and he was losing this, whatever this was, this war he had declared on a man who would not fight it, and there was only one response left in the arsenal that had never once failed him.

Louder. Crueler. Everything.

The leave-taking feast glittered. The storm lords in their travel finery were loud in joy, as advertised; the king came, and stayed late; the wine went round. Aerion arrived exquisitely late in the storm-water velvet, watched the whole high table look from the gown's color to Lord Baratheon's face and arrive at nothing provable, and settled beside his betrothed with the serene expression of a man carrying a lit taper into a granary.

He was inexhaustible that night. He was, though no one would dare set it down in a chronicle, magnificent — he heard it in the pauses, felt the whole hall bracing between his sallies the way a crowd braces at a rope-dancer's turns. He toasted the departing bannermen: "To your swift journey — and I do mean swift; do not let the grass grow, sers; you will want to be home well before the realm learns you were the cultivated half of the Stormlands." He was ravishing about the roast ("The boar has been overcooked in mourning, I expect, for the conversation it died to accompany"). He speared his own brother's fumbling toast, gutted a Marbrand, made a Fossoway cry with one adjective.

And to the mountain beside him, all night, course after course, he was poison poured slow: the accent again, the whistling, the hahks; the smallfolk manners; the great empty seat at Storm's End — "half a year, my lord, your poor keep, though I suppose stone cannot tell it's been abandoned; how it must comfort you, kin that can't count" — and getting nothing, nothing, the weather-eyes only resting on him between sallies with that maddening banked attention, patient as a pier, until Aerion heard his own voice begin to climb its registers and could not stop it, until he was reaching, in front of his own interior horror, for the knives from the very bottom of the case:

"—and Valarr was asking after you only yesterday, did I say? My cousin. You'll remember him, tall, royal, the one I was meant for—" the violet eyes wide, guileless, wicked— "he dances beautifully, Valarr. Breeding, you understand. It shows above all in the dancing. But then you'd not know—"

Nothing. A nod. The great scarred hand refilling Aerion's water cup, unasked, infuriating, tender, and the fury went up another turn, and the hall's music was starting, and the king — the king, beaming, terrible, oblivious or otherwise, Aerion would never know — was calling for the betrothed couple to open the dancing.

Trapped. By custom, by two thousand eyes, by his own legend: the wonder of the age did not refuse a floor. Aerion rose in a hiss of storm-colored velvet, set his hand on the enormous offered arm as though onto a headsman's block, and went down into the cleared golden space at the heart of the hall to dance with the man he was going to marry.

It was a slow measure, an old one, the Lords' Round — processional, formal, two palms pressed upright between the partners, then the parting, the turn, the return. The worst possible dance. The intimate kind. Their palms met and the storm brute's dwarfed his entirely, warm as a hearthstone, and the scent of him this close was rain on hot rock and lightning-air and leather, was the entire coast of a country Aerion had never seen, and Aerion's traitor blood rolled over like the sea taking a hull, and he did what he did to every unbearable thing.

He got louder.

Under the music, pitched for one hearer, smiling his court smile at the turning golden room: "I will make you a map of your future, my lord, shall I? Since your education wants for maps." Turn. Part. Return; palm to palm. "They will cheer us at the wedding. They do so love a wedding. And then you will take me back to your rock in the rain, and I will give you winter. A winter for a marriage. I will salt every field of you. I will teach your own hall to flinch when I pass, I will make your bannermen pray for the Blackfyres to come back and relieve them—" turn, part, the room wheeling gold and oblivious, return— "and every night of your life you will lie beside the most beautiful thing the blood of the dragon ever made, knowing it hates you, and you will grow old that way, my lord, politely, stubbornly, holding what you were set to hold—" his voice was climbing, cracking somewhere under its silver, saying things now from the very bottom of the case, the true knives, the unforgivable— "like your father before you, dying by inches of something you were too proud to pull out—"

The hand closed around his wrist.

Not hard. That was the first thing every screaming courier in Aerion's blood reported, incoherently, all at once: not hard, not cruel, nothing that would bruise, nothing anyone watching would even remark — the movement flowed out of the dance's own turn, my lord partnering my prince, graceful as weather — and utterly, entirely, geologically immovable. A keep door closing. A coastline arriving at the sea's edge. The whole Stormlands, closing without haste around the fine bones of his wrist, over the pulse that leapt and leapt and told him everything, and the storm lord bent his dark head down through the music and the candle-gold, close enough that the word touched Aerion's ear as breath before it was ever sound, and said:

"Enough."

The world stopped.

Not the hall — the hall went on, gold and turning, the music went on, somewhere his grandsire the king was smiling at the beautiful couple and the couple were only pausing in a figure, only a heartbeat, nothing — but inside the storm-colored velvet, inside the cage of pearl-boned corsetry, inside Aerion Targaryen, everything, all of it, the whole shrieking gale of the last month and the last fortnight and the last six-and-ten years, stopped.

The word went through him like a bell through a tower. He felt it in the stone of himself, in footings he had not known he had — one syllable, downward, final, warm — not a plea, they had begged him before, begging was wind; not rage, rage was weather, he ate weather — a verdict. Spoken low, spoken certain, spoken by the one creature in the realm who had seen the very worst of him, taken it full in the face for a month, taken this, tonight, the true knives, his father's death dragged out as a weapon in a dance —

— and who was not leaving. That was the thing inside the word, that was the country under the syllable: the hand around his wrist was not throwing him away, was not even holding him back, it was simply holding, the way the wall held, the way stone held, here is the line, little dragon, here is the edge of the world, and I am still on your side of it.

Aerion trembled.

He felt it start in the caught wrist and go through him whole — one long fine shudder, root to crown, entirely beyond any government of his — and he stood in the golden turning hall shaking like a struck harp string, and his scent broke over them both like a wave over a bow, resin and woodsmoke and dark sweetness, announcing him, drowning the perfume, drowning the feast, and he could no more have stopped it than stopped his heart; and above him the storm-blue eyes darkened and steadied and did not look away, did not gloat, did not pity, only saw — and the fire in his head, the fire that had roared behind his eyes every waking hour since he was old enough to know what he was, the fire he had spent tonight stoking to burn down the world—

—went quiet.

All at once. Like a hand closed gently over a candle. Not out — never out — but banked, held, quiet, and in the quiet, for the first time in longer than he could remember, Aerion Targaryen could hear the music.

They finished the dance.

He would have no memory of it afterward, only report: that the wrist was released into the next figure as smoothly as it had been taken; that the wonder of the age danced the remaining measures in perfect silence with his eyes very bright; that the hall applauded the beautiful couple; that the storm lord bowed over the prince's hand at the last chord, correct in every degree.

"My men ride at first light," Lyonel said, low, at the bow. Around them the court was flooding back onto the floor.

Aerion found his voice at the second attempt. It came out almost level. "The realm rejoices. I shall wave from something high."

"I don't ride with them." The dark head came up; the weather-eyes held his, steady as soundings. "The king has asked me to bide at court until the wedding, and I've a mislike of refusing kings. Also of leaving things half-flown." He straightened. The great warm hand withdrew, and its absence rang on Aerion's wrist like a shackle struck off, or on — he could not tell, that was the abyss of it, he could not tell. "Good night, my prince."

And he was gone into the gold and the crowd, huge and unhurried, taking the whole coastline with him, and Aerion stood alone at the center of the floor with the music starting up and his pulse still shouting in the circle where the fingers had been.

***

He did not remember deciding to leave the feast, only the corridors, cold and empty and blessedly dark, and then his own rooms, and Marra dismissed with a look, and the laces attacked alone, savagely, until the pearl-boned cage came away and he could fold over his own knees on the edge of the bed and breathe.

Rage, he decided. He lay in the dark and drafted the chronicle, because someone must, and it could be entrusted to no one: the prince withdrew early, in rage. He had trembled — very well, it would be reported, to himself, once, and then sealed — he had trembled in rage, at the insolence, at the hand, at the word, at the — his own scent was still telling its version through the dark bedchamber, sweet and slow and shameless, and he pressed his face into the pillow to smother the informant and found his hand had gone where it went every night now, and closed on pearl.

The hilt was warm. It was always warm. It was a property of the — the maesters had written —

Enough.

The word rang in him again, unbidden, low and final, and again the whole gale in his head lay down before it like grass before wind; and Aerion Targaryen lay still in the dark of the keep that had sold him, hand on a stolen blade, wrist still shouting, and made himself, at last, because he was brave, because whatever else was rotten in him he had never once been craven, look directly at the single fact of the evening that could not be drafted around:

Terror, he knew. He was a connoisseur of terror; he had studied under his father, in the long gallery, on the stool, all his life. Terror went quiet and small and cold as drowned ash. He knew its taste the way he knew his own name.

The trembling had not tasted anything like it.

"Well," he said softly, to the dark, to the dagger, to the ruin of a perfectly good war, and his voice came out strange — younger, and unbarbed, and shaking very slightly still, like the last stir of a string after the note has gone. "*Well.*"

The dark, wisely, made no answer. Somewhere far below, in the yards, the storm lords were singing their leave-taking songs, deep voices in the old marcher harmonies, of walls and weather and things that hold; and long after the singing stopped, the blood of the dragon lay awake in the black, holding his one kept gift, listening to the place where it had been.