Chapter Text
The change was subtle at first, a series of small cracks in the careful peace they had built at High Tide.
Aemond noticed it in the third moon of their marriage, in the quiet hour before dawn when he would wake—as he always did, an eye’s worth of sleep being all he ever managed—and find Lucerys already stirring beside him. Lying perfectly still, his breathing a shallow thing.
Aemond would pretend to sleep, his single eye slitted open, watching the rise and fall of Lucerys’s chest beneath the furs. He’d learned the pattern of his husband’s breathing in the dark: the quick pace after a nightmare, the deep tide of true sleep, the soft catch that meant he was awake and thinking. This was new. Shallow. As if Luke were listening inward, measuring something Aemond could not hear.
Aemond’s pulse ticked up without permission. He held his breath to make the counting cleaner and felt his heart knock against the mattress in short taps.
Then something else shifted.
Most days their chamber was a truce of smells: his own held tight and cold—storm-air, saddle leather, rain on stone. Lucerys’s omega scent was the sea: salt-spray, sun-warmed driftwood, a thread of lemon. It was usually a steady and calm shore. Now mornings came with a bright, piercing sweetness that put an edge on Aemond’s teeth. By noon it thinned into something warm and faint, like spilled milk drying on sunlit planks.
That hint of milk tugged an old door open in his head.
He remembered Luke small as a gull chick, padding the Red Keep’s corridors with curls still damp from the baths, smelling of sweet soap and new wool and the kitchen’s steam—milk and bread and a smear of honey he’d deny. He remembered the way that pup-scent used to drift down the stairwells before the boy did, how it would wedge into the hollows of stone after supper.
He remembered an afternoon in the library: a bar of sun through a high window, full of spinning dust. Luke had one of Ser Laenor’s books open on his knees, ink on his fingers and a smear of honey on his chin from a pilfered cake. He’d laughed at something—nothing, really—and the laugh lit his face. His scent then was milk and faint hearth-ash, soft on the air; it found the quiet places in Aemond and sat there as if invited.
Those were the easy pages of memory, unwrinkled.
Other pages turned behind it, spoiled at the edges. Aegon lurching past with wine on his breath, ruffling Luke’s hair too hard, calling him “little fish” in a voice that promised nothing good; Aemond’s jaw locking while he pretended not to see. Rhaenyra sweeping through the corridor, soft-voiced from the small council, ink on her fingers; Luke’s head tipping toward her without thinking, the way hatchlings turn to heat. He could taste how those moments had soured.
He exhaled and the pages shut. The room returned in pieces: knife, plate, the soft scuff of a servant’s shoe, the way Luke’s breathing had gone small and strange these last mornings.
When a servant set down a platter of eel, seared crisp and glistening with oil, the room turned. Luke’s scent curdled sharp, and color drained from his face. His hand went white on the table; the knife clicked down too neatly. Aemond sent the dish away with two fingers and watched Luke’s profile for the next ten breaths, jaw tight enough to ache. He offered no remark. They did not discuss such intimacies.
He watched him the way he always had—out of habit, out of want—and lately the watching found new notes. Luke moved with that loose grace of boys raised on decks and dragonback, all rope and balance, yet sometimes he stopped mid-step and set a hand low at his belly for the space of a heartbeat, then hid the gesture like a prayer. Each time, a strange, hot-cold flush would creep up the back of Aemond’s neck. His palms, resting against his thighs, would grow damp.
By night the bed was easy; Luke came to him as readily as ever, scent steadying, temper sleeping. By day the oddness returned.
He noted how Lucerys, who could devour books of navigation charts and trade ledgers for hours, now lost focus, his gaze drifting to the window and the sea beyond, a soft, unfathomable expression on his face.
Proof arrived in the Sea Snake’s solar, during Lucerys’s lessons with Corlys.
Lord Corlys, still recovering from his wounds but fierce in mind, was explaining the intricacies of toll-fees in the Gullet. Lucerys was listening, or trying to. Aemond took his usual post by the hearth, there to be useful and to watch.
A servant slipped in with a tray—a carafe, two cups, and a small plate of honeyed almonds—and set it down between them.
The scent of the honey, cloying and thick, hit the air.
Lucerys’s head snapped up. His eyes went wide. A violent shudder wracked his frame. He clapped a hand over his mouth, his face draining of all color, going white and then a sickly green-grey. The chair screeched across the floor as he lurched up; the tray rattled; Corlys’s voice stopped mid-sentence; Luke half-stumbled, half-ran. The door banged against the jamb and swung back, Luke’s scent surging sharp with nausea.
Corlys looked at the almonds. Then at Aemond. The old man’s eyes—clever as nets, cruel when needed—softened by a finger’s width. Pity and understanding made an old-salt blend Aemond did not care for.
Aemond did not move. Beneath the paper and wax, under the lemon and salt that lived in the stone of High Tide itself, he could smell the change he had been pretending not to smell: warmth deepening under Luke’s shore, the faint animal sweetness of new growth. The little signs locked together, one after another, like the interwoven rings of a knight’s mail. Shallow dawn-breaths. The unguarded hand. The wandering gaze. The sudden loathing of honey.
So. It had taken.
The knowing hit like a mace to the helm, a cold rush that emptied his chest. His mind threw up old scenes he couldn’t stop: torchlight on steel; the wet heat across his face; a boy’s hand steady on a knife. How could something be made straight from something cut so crooked? What if the life stirring in Luke took after the worst of their making? What if Luke’s slight frame—so well known to him now in the dark, all fine bone and stubborn muscle—failed under the weight of it? He could see the silence they’d forged—days measured, nights clean of quarrel—splintering at a first cry. His body wanted to pace, to bare teeth. He locked his hands behind his back instead, stood very still, and counted breaths as if counting would keep the sea from rising.
He found Lucerys later, in a disused linen closet off the main hall, sitting on a crate, his head buried in his arms. He was shaking.
Aemond stood in the doorway, blocking the light from the corridor. He did not know what to do with his hands. He wanted to shake Lucerys. He wanted to pull him to his feet and demand to know why he had not said anything. He wanted to put his arms around those trembling shoulders and hold very, very still.
He did none of those things.
A part of his mind was counting backward. Three moons since their wedding in the Red Keep. And in all that time, the one place they had not been strangers was in the marriage bed.
He should have expected this. Rhaenyra had borne five children with apparent ease. Lucerys would have inherited her fertility along with the shape of her eyes and her stubbornness. It was simple, inevitable. Aemond felt foolish for not having calculated sooner, and then angrier with himself for thinking of it as calculation at all.
“You are unwell,” Aemond stated, his voice flat.
Lucerys lifted his head. His eyes were red-rimmed, his face still pale. “It was the honey,” he muttered, as if that explained everything. “The smell…”
“It is not the honey,” Aemond said, the words coming out harder than he meant.
Lucerys’s gaze flickered away. He drew his knees up to his chest, a defensive, vulnerable curl. The silence stretched, filled with the sound of their breathing and the distant crash of waves.
“Look at me,” Aemond said.
His husband did, wary and young and stubborn. Aemond felt something in his chest give and lock again.
“You will see the maester,” he commanded, turning the fear into authority because it was the only language he had. “Tomorrow. At first light.”
Lucerys looked at him then, a long, searching look. He saw the fear. Aemond knew he did. Lucerys had always been able to see through him, even when they were children, even when Aemond wished he could not.
“Yes,” Lucerys whispered, the fight gone out of him, replaced by a weary acceptance. “Tomorrow.”
Aemond gave a sharp nod and turned to leave, to give him privacy, to go and wrestle with the roaring in his own head. He fixed on a list: speak to the maester, clear the kitchens of honey, post a man at the stair, count the steps between their chamber and the bath, learn the hours of the tide. Order first. The rest could come after.
“Aemond.”
He stopped, but did not turn back.
“It might be nothing,” Lucerys said, his voice small in the dark closet.
Aemond stood rigid in the doorway. It wasn’t nothing. He could smell the change under salt and lemon, the faint, new warmth like milk drying on sunlit wood. The body tells the truth even when the tongue lies. He knew, too, the count: the timing fit. How many times had he pressed Luke down into the mattress and taken, then held afterward in the quiet because holding was the only apology he could give and the only one Luke would take. Enough.
“We will see,” he said, and walked away.
The maester had departed, bowing with that particular blend of reverence and pity that set Aemond's teeth on edge. The words still hung in the solar of High Tide, thick as sea fog.
Your husband quickens.
Aemond stood at the window, his hands braced against the carved stone sill. Below, the sea churned against Driftmark’s cliffs, grey and restless.
It had been four moons since the King’s rotting corpse was laid to rest. Three since his own wedding—a tense, silent binding in the Red Keep’s sept, a stitch that stopped the realm from bleeding out. Let them say Rhaenyra took the throne; in the quiet ledger he kept, he had won it—his hand on Luke’s, his name bridged to theirs, the marriage that made their father’s crown Rhaenyra’s again. Two moons since they took up residence here, in the future seat of the boy he’d once mocked as a bastard, under Lord Corlys’s watch with no warmth in it, and Princess Rhaenys’s watch with judgment enough for both.
And now this.
He heard the door open and shut. He did not need to turn. He knew the cadence of Lucerys’s steps, the faint, clean scent of sea salt and lemon that clung to him, cutting through the room’s smell of wax and aged parchment.
A muscle at the corner of Aemond’s jaw began a slow, rhythmic pulse. His hand, resting on the stone sill, curled inward until the knuckles stood white as stripped bone against the grey slate.
“He told you,” Lucerys said. It wasn't a question. His voice was quiet, almost curious.
Aemond turned slowly. Lucerys stood just inside the room, in a simple wool tunic and breeches, a smudge of dirt on his cheek. He had been down at the shipyards again, no doubt, with his grandsire.
His mouth went dry. The grime only made the fine lines of him show cleaner: the delicate hinge of jaw, the stubborn mouth. His hand wanted to reach, to wipe the mark away, to count the breaths in Luke’s chest and tally them true. He kept both hands flat at his sides until his fingers stopped wanting to curl. His heart gave two short knocks and steadied to a hard, thin beat.
“You are covered in filth,” Aemond said, his voice tighter than he intended.
Lucerys glanced down at himself, then back up, a faint, puzzled line between his brows. “It’s pitch and sawdust. From the dry dock. The Mermaid’s Song is being re-caulked.”
“You should not be scrambling over half-built ships,” Aemond stated, the words coming out cold. He crossed the room in quick strides, his eye scanning Lucerys as if inspecting a fortification for weaknesses.
Lucerys took a small step back, his puzzlement turning to wariness. “It’s my duty as heir to know the state of the fleet.”
“Your duty,” Aemond bit out, “is here. Resting. Being… careful.”
Understanding dawned in Lucerys’s warm eyes, followed by a flicker of amusement. “Aemond. I am with child, not ill.”
“The distinction is meaningless,” Aemond retorted. His jaw was a hard line, the muscle ticking beneath the skin. “You do not know what could happen. Your condition makes you vulnerable. The shipyard is a place of falling timber, shifting loads, and fools who do not watch their step. It is an unacceptable risk.”
Lucerys watched him, his head tilted. “I am well. The maester said I am hale.”
“Maesters are wrong as often as sailors drink.” Dry. And too sharp.
Aemond set a palm to Luke’s shoulder without thinking, feeling the grind of leather seam under his hand, the warm life beneath. “You will not go to the yards again,” he said, voice level, as if calm could turn to law. “Not without me. No swimming. Your duties will be conducted from the solar. You will rest. You will do as I say.”
Luke’s mouth did a little twist—a suppressed laugh that turned into a sigh. It was the look he got when he felt Aemond was being especially himself: terrifying and ridiculous in equal measure.
Aemond saw it and his grip tightened a fraction, as if he could physically squeeze the defiance out.
“Do you hear me?” he asked.
“I hear you,” Luke said, and the words were gentle, which made them weigh more.
Aemond’s worry didn’t manifest in tender words—words stuck in his throat like fishbones—but in rigid action. The next morning, a meticulously scheduled day was presented to Lucerys. Hours for rest, for light study, for gentle walking in the sheltered gardens.
Lucerys stared at it, then at Aemond, his expression a flat sea of disbelief.
Undeterred, Aemond sent a boy to hide Arrax’s saddle on the highest beam of the mews. He instructed the guards on the cliff stairs. He cleared the kitchens of honey and anything that stank of it. He spoke to the laundress about lighter linens. He told himself this was care, not control. His heart did not believe him; it still beat quick every time Luke left a room.
For a handful of days Luke humored the rails. He read where Aemond could see him. He walked the long gallery and let Aemond count his turns. He drank the maester’s pale tea. He slept on his side when Aemond nudged him there.
Then one afternoon Luke was gone.
Aemond found him from the cliff path—down on the hidden crescent where the tide laid out a mirror and the world forgot itself. There: a pale back cutting through grey water, the clean arc of an arm, the slick flash of hair.
Aemond’s stomach dropped in a fast, mean swoop. The air felt thin. He had the sharp, ridiculous urge to go down fully clothed and haul him out by the scruff like a misbehaving pup.
He measured the depth. Counted the sets between strokes. Tracked the pull of the longshore current. Calculated how many steps to the stairs, how many heartbeats to the shore. Numbers steadied his hands.
Luke rolled and floated, face to the sky, breath fogging. In the water he looked other—longer, edged by cold and light—beautiful in a way that belonged to places Aemond did not. Sea-beautiful. Seal-slick and sharp-eyed, a creature that would dive if a hand grasped too fast.
Aemond waited at the top of the steps with a wool blanket, jaw set. When Luke came up the shingle—shivering, pink to the elbows, his face alight with the smug triumph of a boy who’d outwitted his keeper—Aemond wrapped him tightly.
“Are you mad?” he asked, voice low.
“I was hot.” Luke’s teeth clicked. “The water is calm.”
“The water is cold.” Aemond’s eye flicked to the surf. “The current runs west on the turn. A cramp pulls you five strokes and I find you in the nets at dusk.”
“Drowned you mean? ” Luke said, the sarcasm thin with chattering. He studied Aemond’s face and some of the edge left his own. “I’m not so fragile, Qybor.”
Aemond kept his hand on Luke’s arm and took the outside of the path, between him and the drop. Luke had called him qybor since they were small— and more often when he was cross, as if the old name could win the argument for him. It never sat wrong in Aemond’s ear. He counted steps until the pull in his chest let go.
Halfway up, Luke tugged the blanket closer and said, mildly, “You don’t get to command me, you know.”
“I do,” Aemond said.
Luke blinked. “I will be Lord of Driftmark. You are the consort.”
“You are my wife.” Aemond didn’t change his tone. “I command where danger is concerned.”
Luke stopped, wet hair dripping into his eyes, expression tilting toward annoyed and faintly amused. “That is not how lordship works.”
“It is how marriage works,” Aemond said, and set his palm flat between Luke’s shoulder blades to get him moving again. “Walk.”
“I am walking.”
“Slowly.”
“I am walking, Aemond.”
“Mmm.” He paused, then added, because he could give a reason: “If you fall on these steps I will throw you over my shoulder and carry you through the yard where every sailor may see.”
Luke narrowed his eyes. “You wouldn’t.”
Aemond did not blink.
Luke huffed a breath that might have been a laugh if he weren’t so cold. “You are intolerable.”
“You are blue,” Aemond said. “Up.”
At the top of the stair, Luke made the mistake of arguing again, soft and stubborn. “I decide when I swim. I decide when I ride. I—”
Aemond bent, caught him around the hips, and lifted him cleanly onto his shoulder. Luke let out a startled noise that sounded undignified even to the gulls.
“Aemond!” His fist thumped Aemond’s back. The impact was solid; there was strength packed into the boy, more than his size ever warned. The word for it stuck behind Aemond’s teeth. He had made a vow, the day he married him, never to call him strong again. “Put me down. I am not a sack of—”
“You are not,” Aemond agreed, already striding along the turf. “You are cold. You will take a hot bath and you will drink the tea the maester prescribed.”
“That tea tastes like boiled hedge.”
“It keeps your stomach,” Aemond said. “And soothes your humors.”
“My humors need no soothing.”
“Your humors are not being asked.”
Luke made a strangled sound. “You cannot carry me across the whole castle.”
“I can.” Aemond adjusted his grip an inch so Luke’s weight sat properly over his shoulder, cloak falling to hide as much damp as dignity. “It is less distance than you swam without my leave.”
“Without your—” Luke broke off, breathless more from indignation than the ride. “You cannot give me leave. I outrank you in this hall.”
“In this castle, you are my lord,” Aemond conceded. “But in this marriage, you are my wife. Your body is my charge. Your health is my command. On this, there is no rank. Only my will.”
Silence stretched for four steps. Aemond felt Luke’s fingers curl in the fabric at his back.
“This is madness,” Luke muttered, voice muffled by Aemond’s cloak. “If anyone sees—”
“They will see a consort doing his duty,” Aemond said.
“They will see me carried like a child.”
“Then do not behave like one.” He felt Luke stiffen in scandalized outrage and added, deadpan, “Kick again and I will call for a nurse maid.”
Luke went still. Then, grudgingly: “Fine. Bath. Tea. And then I’m going back to the yard.”
“In the morning,” Aemond said.
“This evening.”
“In the morning,” Aemond repeated. “With me.”
The breaking point came a week later, in the Sea Snake’s solar. The air was thick with the scent of lemonwood and salt. Lucerys, determined to prove his competence, was deep in review of a complex trade proposal concerning timber imports from the Stormlands with his grandsire. Corlys, leaning on a cane but with eyes as sharp as ever, was explaining the nuances of grain versus war-grade wood.
Aemond took the post by the window where the draft moved. From there he could watch the door, the stair, the set of Luke’s shoulders. He told himself he was guarding the room. He was guarding Luke’s breath.
The servant brought tea. The steam carried a sharp, grassy bite that would rattle an empty stomach. “That brew is too sharp for his stomach,” Aemond stated, not looking away from the window. “Fetch the mild one from this morning. The pale herbs.”
Lucerys paused mid-sentence, his jaw tightening. Corlys waved the girl out with a ghost of a smile that said he had seen both the order and the reason for it.
Minutes later, as Lucerys leaned forward to point at a clause in the contract, Aemond was suddenly there, his hands adjusting the silk cushion behind Lucerys’s back with two precise tugs. “You were sitting crooked. You’ll feel it in your back by evening.”
Lucerys shot him a look that could have curdled milk. “Thank you,” he said, the words clipped. Aemond accepted it; better his temper than his pain.
At the light lunch brought to the solar, Aemond’s quiet veto fell like a gavel. A platter of fresh, gleaming oysters was set down. “No,” Aemond said, his voice flat. “Shellfish from the inner bay this time of year turn the stomach. Take it away.”
Corlys finally spoke, his voice a dry rumble. “I’ve eaten oysters from that bed for sixty years, Prince Aemond. They’ve never done me a harm.”
“With respect, my lord,” Aemond replied, his gaze still fixed on Lucerys, who had been eyeing the oysters with clear longing, “your humors are settled. His are… in flux. It is not worth the risk.”
Lucerys pushed his plate away, his appetite vanished.
The final straw came as Lucerys rubbed at his temple, a genuine gesture of concentration. Aemond was at his side in an instant. “The close work strains your eyes and your head. You’ve had enough. The light is poor. You need to rest.”
That was when Lucerys’s quill snapped in his hand with a sharp crack. A small blot of ink bloomed on the parchment like a dark, angry eye.
Corlys cleared his throat. “The Prince Consort… shows a keen interest in matters of health.” His tone was drier than Dornish sand.
Lucerys stood up so quickly his chair scraped. “Yes,” he said, his voice dangerously calm. “He does. Thank you, Grandsire. We will continue tomorrow.”
He did not look at Aemond. He turned and walked out of the study.
Aemond followed, a shadow to his storm.
Later, in their chambers, Lucerys turned on him. “Enough.”
Aemond, who had been re-laying the fire for the third time to ensure no smoke would back up into the room, stilled. “Enough what?”
“This!” Lucerys gestured vaguely at Aemond, at the room, at the invisible cage of worry that had enveloped them. “You follow me like a shadow. You schedule my breaths. You look at me as if I’m a fortress under siege, and you must find the one weak stone before the walls give way.”
“Is that not what you are?” Heat pricked beneath the patch. Aemond set the poker down with care so it would not clatter. “A keep to be held? One breach in the defense, one chill wind through the arrow-slit, one moment when the guard falters…” He could not finish. His heart gave two quick knocks and leveled to a hard, thin beat.
Lucerys walked to him, stopping close enough that Aemond could see the flecks of brown in his eyes, smell the salt in his scent. Close enough that the scar along Aemond’s temple began its old tug. He did not touch him.
“Listen to me,” Lucerys told him. “What will happen will happen. A maester’s tonic cannot stop it. Your schedules cannot stop it. You forbidding me from living cannot stop it.”
Aemond tried to look away, but Lucerys’s gaze held him. “Do not speak like that.”
“I must. You need to hear it.” Luke lifted a hand, not touching, holding it a finger’s width off Aemond’s sleeve so Aemond could feel the heat of it and the restraint both. “I need you to have trust.”
The word was a foreign thing in the space between them. Trust. They had no history of it.
“Trust in what?” Aemond’s voice was rough, disbelieving. “The gods? Fate? Your stubbornness?”
“Trust that our child will be born,” Lucerys said, and now his fingers did brush Aemond’s wrist, a fleeting contact. “You’ve called me ‘strong’ often enough. Then trust that I am strong. Trust that… that this,” he gestured between them, at the marriage, at the heat of their bed, at the life growing within him, “that my body will do its work. Believe that what we began will come to term.”
Something in Aemond gave. Enough to let in air that was not fear. He looked down at Luke’s hand, then up at Luke’s mouth, Luke’s eyes. Saw the boy who had cut him and the man who stood his ground both living in the same face. Saw the young lord who had held the yards in his head all afternoon. Saw the omega carrying what they had made.
The anger emptied out, leaving a raw scrape behind it. His hand turned; he caught Luke’s fingers and held them as if the floor had shifted. “I cannot lose it,” he said, barely sound—the nearest he could come to naming the thing beneath it.
Lucerys’s breath hitched. He stepped into the circle of Aemond’s arms, a solid, bracing press of body to body, and set his forehead to Aemond’s shoulder. “You are not going to. I am strong, qybor. Strong enough for this, I know it.”
They didn’t do this often. Touch, outside the bed, tended to be practical: a hand to a stirrup, a palm at a back through a doorway, knuckles brushing when a cup changed hands. This was different. It pricked at him warmly, unfamiliar as sunlight in a room that usually faced north. The last true embrace he could remember had been his Mother’s at Driftmark, her hand in his hair while the world bled red. He had been smaller then, or only felt so.
He held on now. Luke was no weight at all and somehow all of it; heat and breath and the clean line of a spine under his palms. Aemond thought—foolishly, fiercely—that he could feel a faint flutter where his hand lay. The terror did not vanish; it rarely did. But it shifted, making room for something else—a steadying heat, a vow tightening, the first, fragile thread of the trust Luke had asked for and Aemond found, to his surprise, he wanted to give.
“From now on,” he murmured against his skin, his voice regaining some of its customary steel, “if you swim, I will be in the water with you.” He let that stand a moment, then added, because he could give this much, “I’ll keep pace. You won’t even know I’m there.”
Luke huffed, almost a laugh, almost a sob, the sound damp against his collar. Aemond felt it through bone. “I always know when you’re there.”
“Good,” he said, and finally allowed himself one breath that didn’t scrape. “Then hear me: I will be.”