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After the ceremony, they supped on fish spiced with herbs and lemons from Dorne, crusty white bread, and roasted vegetables in every shade but green. Daemon looked pleased when she noticed that, his eyes sparkling with the sort of mischief she remembered from dozens of his adventures and misadventures throughout the years.
The children sat silently through the meal, but they all ate. She noticed glances between the four of them, lifted brows and narrowed eyes that belied the short time they’d known each other. Each was still bruised and cut from the fight on Driftmark; perhaps that blood had brought them closer than that they shared.
Rhaenyra took a bite of her fish. The lemon stung the cut on her lip, but she welcomed the reminder. They were wed now, bound soul to soul in the way of Old Valyria. Her tongue ran over the cut, and Daemon’s eyes followed the motion, dark with want.
Perhaps Jace had noticed her movement as well, because he asked, “Does it hurt, Mother?”
“Just a sting, dear boy,” she said. Almost a sweet one, she didn’t.
It was as though Jace’s question opened the floor to an inquisition, though a more pleasant one than the one at Driftmark three nights past.
“What about the cuts on your hands?” Luke asked, at almost the same time as Baela said, “Did you truly drink each other’s blood?”
Daemon turned his eyes to Rhaena. “No questions from you?”
Rhaena’s eyes widened, as though she were surprised to be spoken to. “I wondered what the priest was saying?” Before Daemon could reply, Rhaena went on, words hurrying out of her mouth. “Something about glass and stars and time?”
“And blood of two becoming one,” Baela said, and grumbled something under her breath about that not meaning they had to drink it.
Rhaenyra looked to Daemon. Most of what she knew about their family traditions had come from him, from evenings in the Godswood, their bodies cradled by the roots of the weirwood tree. Daemon had told her that the Valyrians believed the stars stood as witness to all things, gods of bright flame an eternity away, and had taught her their names in their native tongue. She had given him her heart then, she thought, though she hadn’t known what it meant until much later.
“Blood of two, joined as one,” Daemon said, first in Valyrian, then in the Common tongue. “Ghostly flame and song of shadows. Two hearts as embers forged in fourteen fires. A future promised in glass. The stars stand witness, the vow spoken through time, of darkness and light.”
The children had not looked away from him since he started speaking. Rhaenyra could not blame them. They were all that was left of Old Valyria, its magic, its fire and blood, and none more so than Daemon, sparks in his eyes and dragon’s blood thrumming inside his veins.
“Where there is flame there is also shadow,” he said, “and where light, darkness. One cannot be complete without the other. So too those bonded in fire and blood.”
She wanted to reach for him, take his hand, press her lips to his and devour him. Her heart pounded with the want of it, and she knew his beat the same.
But—
The children.
They all gave a jumble of questions, Rhaena about grammar, Baela about why there had been more than fourteen fires, Luke about whether the stars could see inside the keep. And Jace…
“Can we learn?” he asked. “Valyrian, I mean? I only know commands, for Vermax.”
Rhaenyra didn’t dare look to Daemon, though her eyes did not want to look upon anything else these days. What sort of judgement would be on his face? She should have taught Jace herself, but each time she used the language, she thought of the last time she’d spoken to her uncle. Take me to Dragonstone and make me your wife. And then he’d left her, amid Joffrey Lonmouth’s blood, and the flame in her heart had dimmed until it was nothing more than an ember.
“Of course,” Rhaenyra said, her voice only a little strangled. “Maester Gerardys—”
“You can learn with us,” Baela said, cutting her off and then her eyes widening in realization of her rudeness.
“A good idea,” Daemon said, “if the princess does not mind our stealing her sons.”
She did look at him then. There was sadness at the corners of his eyes but softness too, as though he understood. One cannot be complete without the other, he had said. Perhaps he did understand.
“Daemon taught me Valyrian,” she said, without looking away from him. The tenderness in his eyes cut into her heart like a knife. “There is no better teacher. You shall be in good hands.”
“We begin in the morning,” he replied. “And then I shall need someone to train with, if you boys would accept my presence in the yard?”
Luke agreed readily, Jace more slowly, probably thinking of Harwin, or of Criston, or of Aegon laying him flat on his back.
“Off to bed then,” Rhaenyra said, finally tearing her eyes from Daemon’s.
“Avy jorraelan, kepa,” Baela said and kissed Daemon’s cheek. Rhaena did the same, a quick peck, and then she skittered away after her sister.
Her boys also offered her a kiss each, and followed after their cousins, Jace asking what Baela had said.
And then they were alone.
“A romantic explanation of marriage,” Rhaenyra said with a smirk, “for a man who once called it naught but a political arrangement.”
Daemon smiled a little. “Is it not different, to choose the bond you make and join together before the gods of your people? Rhea and I wed in the sept, our hands joined by a prune of a man who spoke of gods neither of us believed in and chained us in a union neither of us wanted.”
Rhaenyra was not sure she had ever heard him call his first wife by her name. The question slipped out before she could stop it. “Did you kill her?”
“We are all capable of perversions,” he repeated, “and none more than the man who wants what he cannot have.” There was no anger in his tone. No shame either.
You have me, she wanted to say. He’d had her then too in truth. Take me to Dragonstone and make me your wife. A challenge, but not a bluff. She’d wanted it. His hand had burned where it wrapped around her neck. She wondered still whether he’d felt her pulse race against his palm as he dragged her closer.
Take me to Dragonstone and make me your wife.
He’d finally done it. He’d made it to Dragonstone mere hours before her, but she’d arrived to the priest called forth, their wedding garb set out, and dragonglass sharpened and ready.
“Still,” she said, “I find your knowledge of Valyrian wedding ceremony surprising. Who was the last to wed here before us?” She did not mean in the sept and he knew it. Who had been the last to light the candles, to sip from the chalice that was older even than this castle?
“Maegor,” he said. “The robes were found in the chambers that had been Visenya’s.”
The passive voice did not fool her. He would have sent no one into those chambers but himself. She laughed. “When did you have time to look?”
Rhaenyra expected a flippant answer, or a story told of his youth, digging through trunks of clothing in search of gold or Valyrian steel.
But instead, he ducked his head. Bashful, almost, had the idea not been absurd.
“I’ve known where they were for a decade,” he said.
A decade. Her breath caught. “You—” she said, but could not speak further.
“Your father banished me back to Runestone, but instead I came here. To lick my wounds.” The smirk on his face was mocking, but for once, he seemed to be mocking only himself. “I was angry. He’d called me a plague. Refused me your hand.”
She hadn’t known he’d asked for her hand. She’d known he’d wanted it, had spat as much at him at the feast that had become her farce of a wedding. But that he’d asked… Nothing had come of it, until now, but it made her heart beat a little faster.
“I returned to the island on the night of the new moon. The stars were bright in the sky, and there were flames on the beach, one for each star, it seemed. The priest was offering to Meleys, and when Caraxes and I alighted on the beach, he offered us fourteen blessings from the goddess of love. And I knew.” His eyes flickered up to hers. “I spent the night preparing what we’d need, and in the morning I left for Runestone.”
She could picture him, sparks in his eyes, pulling the robes from their place among the heirlooms Visenya had left behind. Sharpening the dragonglass so the obsidian would cut clean and deep. Speaking to the priest, readying the man for a return that would not happen for ten years.
“But you left.”
The pain was not so deep anymore at the thought. Not since that night on the beach. The anger in his eyes had been a better balm than any apology. He’d thought he’d done right by her, so much was clear. But she didn’t know why.
“You’d have lost everything. The alliance with the Velaryons. The throne. Your father’s love. I could not do it.”
“I would have had you.”
“A decade in exile, and the fairness of that exchange would have been apparent,” he said.
She didn’t know how to argue with him. He, who had spent the bulk of his life out of favor, expelled from court, disinherited due to Hightower gossip and his own ill-thought actions. How could she argue a fate she had never suffered would be worth it, for their love? How, a dark part of her mind whispered, did she know it would have been?
He had always been willing to sit in silence, Daemon, when he had no argument to make, or no opinion that he no doubt thought his manly experience gave credence to. But now, he reached for her, his palm cupping her cheek, his thumb brushing the cut on her lip. He’d done that in the brothel, she remembered, and she knew, suddenly, what he’d been imagining when he did it. “It matters not. We’ve wed now, and the priest compensated for his wait. Your father will no doubt be wroth, but I will stand with you, to press your claim.”
That wasn’t all she wanted him for. Her fingers threaded through his hair until she reached the skin of his neck. She wanted to dig her nails in and pull him to her. To mingle their blood and souls, and tangle their limbs together until they were one. “Husband,” she breathed against his lips and felt his fingers tremble, “take me to bed.”