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I see thy glory like a shooting star
Fall to the base earth from the firmament.
Thy sun sets weeping in the lowly west,
Witnessing storms to come, woe, and unrest.
— Richard II (Act 2, scene 4)
In the perfumed pavilion of the Lysene pillow house the world was reduced to sweat, to cloying incense thick on the tongue, and most of all to heat. Heat from the body, from the beeswax candles, from the tropical weather of this seaside paradise. Heat was good; heat was purifying. What was a dragon but heat formed in flesh?
“Harder,” Aerion hissed.
The fingers around his throat were pale as the petals of a moonbloom flower, and just as weak. The whore on his lap squeezed hard, but she was not enough. So much for a woman’s strength.
He snorted, snarled, hands winding up to grasp her tight by the wrists, fingers encircling easy. “I’ve had enough of you,” he said, his lip curling. His throat wasn’t even sore. “Enough of this farce.”
“You haven’t had me at all,” the whore shot back. She jerked her head towards Aerion’s groin, where his cock lay limp in its nest of silver-gold curls. Along his thigh, darker in the candlelight, the puckered line of a scar zigzagged across the skin.
But she wasn’t stupid. Not entirely. She saw his look, and switched her tone. “Please, your grace.” Breathlessness, that obvious surrender. She didn’t even try to wrench free of his hold. “Let me use my mouth.”
Her obsequiousness was miscalculated. Such a display from a body like hers—so obviously of the blood of Old Valyria, all creamy skin and beaten-gold curls, and those bruising blue eyes—he could be nothing but revolted.
And so he shoved her hard off the bed. She fell crashing to the floor, crying out, but no one came to her rescue; he’d paid too much for that. “Out,” he bellowed. “And thank whatever gods you pray to that I’m too bloody tired to give you the beating you deserve.”
“Should I send for—”
The goblet at his bedside was hurled with such a degree of precision that Aerion felt, for a moment, disappointed at the lack of an audience. His master-at-arms would have been pleased, he was sure. It struck the whore right between her breasts, wine spilling down the white expanse of her belly and soaking into the plush carpeting on the floor.
She got the message, then, and left.
He threw an arm over his eyes, flopping backwards onto the pillows with a groan. These women, these great Lysene beauties—he should have been gorging himself here, fucking and feasting and fighting until Father saw fit to recall him from Lys back to Summerhall. But ever since the tourney—ever since that Ser Duncan—
Another groan. Unthinking, his free hand dropped down to palm at the still-sore scar, so near to his sex. That hedge knight had nearly made a eunuch out of him. And wouldn’t that have been the be-all, end-fucking-all humiliation. Had he not suffered enough? Bashed in the skull with his own shield, dragged through the muck, propped up like a puppet with that thick-headed, small-brained idiot crushing his ribcage and bellowing out commands. As if he had the right to command even Aerion’s lowliest groom, let alone the prince himself.
His cock twitched. Finally, you stupid thing, Aerion thought. He’d had unexpected difficulty ever since he’d arrived in Lys. It had begun, very slightly, to unsettle him.
He took himself in hand before he could flag. One, two, three strokes of his shaft, and oh, he was proper boiling, the conflagration of heat in his pavilion centered on the long line of his cock. He arched back, groaning. Thank the fucking gods Ser Duncan hadn’t lopped this off. With his sword or—or otherwise—
It came then, unbidden. A lightning-bolt flash behind the webbing of his eyelids, blinding in its intensity, his teeth rattling on the thunderclap: Ser Duncan flush against his back, hand fisting his cock so hard Aerion would bruise across the pelvis.
His eyes flew open. In his own hand his cock jerked and drooled. “Fuck,” he gasped. His fingers were shaking. A muscle in his thigh twitched.
That was—well, nothing, surely. He’d never gone in for the rough, not when there was so much smooth to be had. And certainly not with himself playing the woman. He cast about for an explanation: fatigue from his journey across the Narrow Sea, or sheer exhaustion from the pain of his recuperation.
But no, he’d made this trip before, he’d been hurt before. This was different, he thought, his heart lurching in his chest, his pulse thudding in his prick. This was new.
He pumped his cock and swallowed back bile. These whores were to blame. The thought flitted past; he latched onto it like a dog on a mallard’s neck. These useless women unable to get him up and off, plying him with their queer foreign teas, bathing him in their noxious perfumes—it was their fault that he was left so... so backed up. All he needed was an excision, a purification of fire and blood.
Yes, that was it. These heated thoughts were nothing more than a self-administered shock to his system, like the purging tonics the maesters had forced upon him as a boy. It had hurt, but he’d sweated it all out, and felt all the lighter for it on the morrow.
And so he closed his eyes and let the thoughts take him.
Ser Duncan at his back. He swallowed wetly, but his strokes did not falter. The sense-memory of that hedge knight pressed against him, of the enormity of that body—it was all so fresh. He could still hear the roaring of the crowds, the blood rushing past his ears. And he could still feel the width of Ser Duncan’s pelvis bracketing his own, dwarfing his slim hips like he was a maid being mounted for breeding.
His stomach rolled. The poison of his thoughts coursed through him. Ser Duncan at his back; Ser Duncan’s hand on his cock. The knight had massive hands. They’d be heavily knuckled, Aerion knew. Rough, callused, working hands. Good for grasping a sword or gripping princely balls. Ser Duncan wouldn’t know what to do with the latter. Aerion would have to moan out instructions—harder, tighter, rougher, every panted command muffled by the sound of iron dragging across gravel as Aerion scrabbled and strained to keep his feet on the ground.
Big, stupid knights were good at taking direction from their betters. That was the whole point of them, wasn’t it? If Aerion told Ser Duncan to wet those blunt fingers and press into him like a woman, he’d do it—
Aerion’s moan was a low and guttural thing. Almost an animal noise. His cockhead wept, the velvety tip growing slicker by the moment. Across the bed he stretched taut as a bowstring. The field and its mud and its noise vanished, blinkered away and replaced with velvets, furs, cool stone, warm fires, the privacy of Aerion’s rooms back home. The phantom sound of flesh against flesh rang in his ears.
He sucked in air like a man drowning, his fist pumping at a fever pitch. In the dark of his room he could go on hands and knees and take the brunt of Ser Duncan’s strength. He could push back, thighs quivering, sweat pouring down his spine and coarse chest hair tickling his back.
His balls were so tense he half-feared they’d burst. A man that size had to carry a broadsword in his smallclothes. He’d split Aerion right down the middle.
If he asked. If he wanted it.
But knights took a vow in the name of the Seven, and sodomy was a heavy sin. To disobey one’s lord, though—that was a sin, too. Which sin would prove the heavier?
Perhaps, he thought, his heart thumping madly, when I’m back in Westeros, I’ll find out.
His orgasm ripped through him then. He jackknifed, degutted, seed spilling across his palm and onto the fine pale hairs of his belly. A laugh slipped out of him, hoarse and wheezing. He wiped his hand on his thigh. The scar throbbed when he touched it, and so he pressed harder, until in the low light of the pavilion his vision blinkered with the plain, blackened, the flicker of his bedside candle nothing more than a fading, falling star.