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mirrorwitches) wrote2023-07-12 11:49 pm
mirrorwitches) wrote2023-07-12 11:49 pm
(hotd) unwanted consequences, chapter four
UNWANTED CONSEQUENCES, CHAPTER FOUR
🐉masterpost🐉
Rhaenyra does take that nap, after she dries herself off, sniffling, throwing herself back into bed to cry herself into a fitful slumber. She wants to run after him, but she does have some pride, enough that when she descends to dinner she doesn’t allow herself to ask anyone if they’ve seen her husband. He doesn’t return that night, and she hates herself for the way she aches for him, finds it almost impossible to rest in the huge lonely expanse of the empty sheets.
She must finally drop off into another uneasy doze, because she wakes with a start at a hand on her head. Daemon is perched at the edge of the mattress, stroking her hair.
“Uncle,” she says, voice thick with sleep and more tears, unshed. “Daemon—”
“It’s alright,” he whispers, which provokes her. Maybe it isn’t alright! Maybe she was going to take him to task for abandoning her, for spending the night the gods only knew where, with gods knew who. Yes, that was what she was going to say. Not, I’m sorry, not, please don’t be mad at me. Anger is what she feels. Certainly not pathetic relief at the tender way he smooths his palm down her back. “Get dressed, if you wish to train.”
“Perhaps I shouldn’t. Perhaps it’s too much for me,” she says, shaking off her hand and sitting up.
Daemon stands up too. “I’ll be in the yard.”
“Where were you last night?” she spits. “With some whore?”
He doesn’t respond, only moves again toward the door. In the light of the candle he has set on the table, she thinks she perceives a certain tightness in his shoulders.
She gets dressed, furious at him, at herself. But of course she dons her training garb again, stomps down the stairs to the yard. He’s told her where he'll be, and there he is, waiting for her.
It’s worse the second day. Her bruises throb, and new ones getting added. Her entire body burns. She lets her frustration spur her on, but it does not serve her any better than the desire to impress him, because she ends up sprawled in the dirt, dumb blunt useless little sword flying, just as often.
The last time, she knocks away the hand Daemon holds out to help her up, and clumsily gets to her feet on her own, so spent she has to roll to her front and lumber upward on all fours, grumbling. She expects to see her uncle smirking once she’s upright, but when she stands before him, wiping her damp, dirty palms on her equally damp, dirty jacket, he’s looking at his own feet, before he darts a glance up at her from under his lowered brows.
“Have your ladies draw you another bath,” he says softly. “I’ll be up in a moment.” Then he picks up her sword and turns on his heels towards the armory.
“You don’t have to,” Rhaenyra calls after him. “Not if you have more important business to attend to, husband.”
He has his sphere, and she has hers. She makes her way towards the keep, the grime coating her body unbearable in the absence of Daemon’s excitement. Fine. She will get clean, let Annora wash and comb her hair, clothe her in silk.
Daemon enters the room as Rhaenyra sits in the rapidly cooling water, brought to her piping again by servants failing to hide how much tiresome extra work Rhaenyra’s new routine is making for them in heating the huge cauldrons of water and hauling them up the stairs, because the princess can hardly sluice off in the yard with a bucket of icy spring water with the rest of the men. Annora is picking up Rhaenyra’s discarded clothing to take them to the laundry, tutting about the loose threads and worn places that must be mended and patched.
“Don’t bother,” Daemon instructs her. “Clean those, but there’s no need for you to waste your time mending them. I’m having some made especially for her. She won’t have to wear them much longer. Leave us.”
Annora doesn’t need to be told twice.
Her uncle sits in a chair and simply looks at her. Rhaenyra gazes back. It’s odd: in some ways Daemon is so transparent to her. She had always been unable to understand the fear or trepidation he seems to instill in others, her father, Otto Hightower. His features may be opaque, his true emotions hard to read, and yet—it was just Daemon.
Just Daemon.
She can’t bring herself to apologize or work out what she would even be apologizing for. She only knows that this sudden distance is crushing. And yet she cannot break the silence first.
“Are you clean?” He asks, voice measured, intonation-less.
“Yes. I’ve had my bath, as you can see.”
“Good. Come here.”
Rhaenyra glares at him. “Why?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” His hand taps restlessly on the arm of the chair. “I want my wife. I want your body, which is mine. As you so helpfully pointed out yesterday, it is my duty to fuck you, often. Not well, mind. That part is merely my innate generosity. Come here.”
Her expression must be bewildered, Rhaenyra knows. He has never spoken to her like this. The way her thighs shift together beneath the water says her body does not find it completely distasteful, even as her mind rebels.
What if I don’t want to? She almost says it.
Almost. She had unconsciously clasped her arms across her breasts when he came in but now she removes them, trailing her fingers through the water. Leans back, tilts her chin up. “I thought your husbandly prick didn’t care for skinny, spoiled brats.”
A tiny, bitter smile, there and gone. “It doesn’t matter much what I or my prick want. I have a duty, do I not? As do you. Again, I have you to thank for so kindly correcting my course yesterday. Come here.”
Rhaenyra wants to. To close the space between them. She also feels a strange obligation, a sense of fair play. Isn’t this what she had demanded of him? Too late now to say, no, please. I don’t want to. Daemon, I’m so frightened.
(For what if he said: I don’t care. Come here.)
She comes and stands before him. Daemon doesn't call her his gorgeous girl now, and his eyes are hard. He grabs the towel she’d used to dry off from her shoulders and flings it away, and passes his hand down Rhaenyra’s side like he might examine horseflesh. Her body, which is his. He then puts it to her breast, rolls her nipple under his thumb until it is stiff and throbbing. With his other hand at her hip he urges her forward until she stands between his legs. With her nipple taut, straining towards him, he lowers his mouth to it, sucks it onto his tongue.
The moan that tumbles from her mouth is startlingly loud. He has stroked and licked and teased and kissed her there, but not applied these insistent pulls, forceful enough to make his cheeks hollow. He looks up at her through his lashes. Flailing, knees unsteady, she must reach out and touch him, grip him by the hair.
Needy, desperate suckling. As if he were their own child, nursing at her breast. Would that feel like this, like there’s a line straight from his mouth to her fluttering belly, to her cunt, which pulses sympathetically? Of course she would not know. She would have wetnurses. She would not nourish her own babes, as Daemon’s mother had never nourished him. Her breasts would remain hers, his—
His mouth unseals with a wet pop. Her nipple, swollen, red, spit-slick, like the lips that made it that way, is so sensitive that the touch of the air makes her hiss. He applies himself to her other breast and then leans back, eyes heavy-lidded, to observe the pleasing symmetry.
Daemon turns her around with his hands at her waist again and stands up behind her, pushing her forward until her knees hit the edge of the bed. He’s still dressed—his shirt scrapes against her back. He nudges her legs apart with a booted toe at her ankle, until she has to lean forward, put her hands on the mattress for balance. His fingers tease at the entrance of her cunt as they had that night at the brothel, questioning. Her body had answered, and his cock had slid between her thighs, along her folds. Not this time. His fingers do not push into her and Rhaenyra does not at last turn around, needing to kiss him, to see his face. And he does not leave. With one hand on her ass, he spreads her apart with his thumb. Her damp skin has been trembling, but at that her blood goes so hot that any chill is banished.
“Your body is mine. Including—” his thumb moves inward to tap at her asshole “—here.”
“A good whore should service you with all her holes, is that it?”
“I could pay any whore in King’s Landing for the use of their ass, but you’re my wife, so it’s mine for free.”
“Any wife with any self-respect would relieve you of your cock for daring to suggest such a thing,” Rhaenyra snaps, confused again. Good wives would no doubt be horrified at such a presumption, such an insult. They must submit, but surely rebellion was permissible at such a trespass—
“Is that what you are? A wife with self-respect?”
It should be an insult. It sounds suitably scathing from his mouth, cruel. But for a long moment Daemon stands silently behind her, as if he’s truly waiting for an answer.
Then he drops to his knees. Then he puts his mouth on her ass.
The strangled noise that punches out of Rhaenyra’s mouth sounds barely human. She can't believe it. In the brothel, that parched well to which she must keep returning, she had seen many things she hadn't previously known to imagine, to imagine to want, tantalizing flashes that teased at her incessantly. Whores, as Dameon had implied yesterday, were the only women who would deign to take a man’s cock in their mouths. But what amount of coin would buy this? What did these long, slow passes of his tongue make Daemon?
She immediately clenches up in an instinctive embarrassment, but Daemon’s hands worry bruises into her hips as he pins her in place, his thumbs making twin marks where he forces her apart for his mouth, and though Rhaenyra's mind might be full of an outraged dignity, but her body has other ideas. It lacks the same qualms, capacity for shock, any idea of propriety. The sensation is initially too strange for her to decide if it feels good or not, but everything below her hip bones turns molten anyway. She feels herself relax against his lips while her face goes red, squeaks of protest and giggles of disbelief falling from her lips.
However much she might like to remain closed off, whole and entire to herself, the wet flex of his tongue has her body seeking him, opening for him. He works it in tighter circles and it’s a moment for further wonderment, with what little of her brain can still think, that Daemon wants inside her, even there. Shouldn’t it be degrading to want someone that deeply, no part of you too good for any part of them? Yet—couldn’t Rhaenyra understand that? She gives as he bullies past that resistant ring of muscle, and just like that she’s let him in, as she has to her cunt, her mouth, as she’ll let him into her ass, and doesn’t she want that just as much? To crawl inside him. She thinks wildly that she could crack his rib cage apart to make space for herself in his chest, if that meant she could finally know that she was in every part of him as much as he was in her. Or this—inside him, his body slowly opened for her, the way he’d prepared her cunt for the breadth of him with his mouth, his fingers, she could do that, she would, if he thought it lowered her as his wife to suck his cock he has no idea how much lower she could go, he would open for her, yes, exactly like this, as she is now, that’s how deep it goes, that no part of them was sealed to you—
Daemon stands up. Rhaenyra cranes her head around to look at him and sees him staring at the wreck his swollen mouth had made of her. Her asshole flutters, yearning for his touch. She wonders how it looks, spit-slick and red and throbbing as her nipples had been, transformed by him.
He moves his thumb in again, and this time she parts a bit around him. He sounds hoarse when he says, “This hole knows it’s mine. You gave your cunt away to that pious fool, but you’ve had no one up here. Or have you? It was a long four years, after all.”
It’s painful, how casually he refers to those years of his absence. It makes her ache to even think about them. But there is hunger there, jealousy. Criston still eats at him. There is a dark, pleased current in his tone at the thought there is some part of her that is still to be only his.
“No,” she is forced to admit when he doesn’t say anything, like it was a reasonable question that required an answer.
He moves his thumb down to gather some of the wetness slicking her thighs as her overeager, envious cunt responds with typical dramatics to his ministrations elsewhere, and then presses back in in little circles.
“That’s how some whores do it, you know. They’ll give their ass to every new recruit in the Watch and then sell their maidenhead to some lordling. Neat trick for a smart princess, hm? And of course some whores will only let you have them there—that’s one way to make sure they’re never…inconvenienced.”
Her heart stutters but before she can say anything he’s putting the fat head of his cock to her hole.
“Daemon,” she hisses, panicked. It had felt like it had taken him all night to warm her up enough to enjoy his cock, that first time, and she’s not even wet there.
“Don’t worry. I’ll bugger you, but I’ll make sure you like it, your unused cunt will be weeping with pleasure, I promise you—you just have to ask.”
“What?”
“You just have to ask. You have to say please fuck my ass, uncle, or I will go attend to my other duties.”
“I already begged,” she spits, eyes stinging. “Yesterday. Remember?”
“You aren’t much of an actress.” Daemon still stands behind her, and even twisting her head around so her neck twinges, she only sees part of his face. It is hard, still, but there is a pleading intensity as he repeats, “You have to ask. Beg me. Convince me you want it.”
Rhaenyra smarts. He had seen right through her. She could not hide from him.
“Beg to be your whore? You liked that, did you?” Was he so vain, that he couldn’t fuck her yesterday because he intuited some part of her was less than absolutely desperate? Was his pride so monstrous, his need to know his mastery over her so great?”
“You don't want to be my whore anymore? Alright. What’s something else you like?” He presses his cock to her, over and over, never pushing inside. He pauses, then: “You can be my boy. My squire, serving me in all ways. If you want that, I’ll give it to you.”
She shudders into the sheets. Grateful, furious. She can’t hide from him. She hadn’t even known, not really, that this is something she might welcome, until he charmed her out of her gilded bower into the muck.
And yet—could he see? Could he truly understand what terrified her? Could she tell her husband such a thing, but trust in her uncle, in Daemon?
“Is that what training me in the use of the sword is all about? Some perverted fantasy?”
Daemon stretches over her back, places his hand on top of hers so they are swallowed entirely, pins her to the bed with his weight. He thrusts against her, his cock hitching up along the crack of her ass. He kisses her ear. Rhaenyra’s body wants to go limp at being so enveloped, but she grits her teeth and bucks a little against him.
“Isn’t it nice to imagine? I should have started you on the sword as a child, as I said. Taken you to the Stepstones with me. You could have kept my gear and I could have used your ass or your mouth whenever my blood was up after a battle.”
Another shaft of agony. She had imagined it many a time at another bitter dinner seated silent and fuming between her father and Alicent, whenever the guests’ gossip turned to Daemon’s exploits. She could mount Syrax and fly to him…but her reveries had ended there. What could she have done but keep his supper warm? And even that she would have welcomed. Her hands tense under his and she feels the new callus forming in the soft meat between thumb and forefinger.
“Is that how you made use of Ser Laenor?” She tries to sound scornful but worries instead she only sounds as jealous as she feels.
“No. A fine squire he was to me, but I knew he could never compare. The night after I knighted him, though…”
“So that isn’t how you served whatever old lord you cleaned tack for?”
There is excitement in merely saying the words, although her breathless, girlish voice may not be able to express it, may be doomed to echo Alicent, prim, scandalized. Perhaps that is what is called for, but it’s never been possible for Rhaenyra, at least since the time she saw so many naked bodies meeting in an infinity of ways and only wanted to catalog every one.
And she is not picturing an ancient, wheezing lord, but a strong bearded knight in the flower of his youth and strength, allowing his eyes to linger on her uncle—with the long hair she misses, so like her own, and his smooth cheeks, his boyish face, a slim, puppyish grace—as Daemon helps him don his mail. Her breathing picks up. She feels Daemon’s smile against her neck.
“Convince me you want it,” he says again.
Rhaenyra starts to twist and bunk and writhe against him, with a thrill at how little it achieves, at how easily he holds her down. But after a moment he eases off her, holds himself up on his arms above her so she can make her escape. She slithers onto her back under him, slippery as an eel, and lays beneath him, breath coming in harsh gusts.
She surges up to kiss him. She can feel his surprise in the way he is slow to kiss her back, thrown by the eager way she licks into his mouth after where it’s been. He’d expected her to be outraged at the pleasure house, at his kiss, at him revealing her cunt to a room full of hungry eyes. She hadn’t been. Why shouldn’t she kiss him, why shouldn’t she be every inch as dirty, foul, unspeakable? She fists her hand in his hair and rubs her body against his.
Convince me you want it. Rhaenyra begins to think about his cock in that untouched place and feels a tightly mingled fear and desire. Good fear. Could she take it, would he tear her apart? But it would not be a child that ripped her open, not if he had her there. Her brain, numbed in its miserable terror, realizes this has probably been Daemon’s intent. Fucking her mouth, fucking her ass—like a whore, like a boy, not like a wife.
There was no hiding from him.
He pulls back to rest his forehead against hers. Rhaenyra says nothing. She does not beg. She could say she wanted it and he would know if she lied. She did not have to say anything and he would know the truth. If she said no, would he heed her? He had once before, and perhaps she could trust it. Or perhaps it didn’t have to matter.
When he starts to work an oiled finger into her ass, Rhaenyra says, into the pillow she’s buried her face and mostly to distract herself—how is that just a finger—“So, if you had trained me in the sword—”
“I should have,” he says again. “Behaved myself long enough to win some leeway. Worn Viserys down.”
Rhaenyra certainly doesn’t want to think of her father at this moment, but she can’t let it stand.
“You never behaved that badly I could see. He never would have let you.” She knows that. It is a fantasy she is building. “But if he had.”
“You could have been my squire.” He corkscrews his finger slowly, opening her up so she has him to the first knuckle.
Daemon does not say: if you were born a son. She likes that he does not say the obvious thing, the one twist of fate that could make it not a fantasy. If she was a boy then that might have simply been her life. Hearing that from her uncle might have been unbearable.
But she, Rhaenyra. As she had been at fourteen, in the Red Keep’s yard as she had been in Dragonstone’s this morning. At Daemon’s side, envious of his power and prowess, the beauty and skill with which he wielded Dark Sister. Her long hair, her downy cheeks, the grace she possessed from twirling around with Alicent under their dancing master’s eye, taking turns being the man, leading and being led. His eyes would linger on her as she tightened the straps on his breastplate. She would hold his horse as he mounted to enter the lists, wishing him luck, belly fluttering at his responding wink.
Her cunt squeezes, abandoned as it is, a fire licking up her spine. In a different tone she says, “And what would being your squire have required, my prince?”
“Keeping my gear in good order. Watering my horse. Handing me a fresh lance at the lists.” She gives a little involuntary wriggle of impatience, and Daemon laughs, his finger all the way inside her and held there as she aches around him. “But after I trounced all my opponents—”
“Mhm—”
“I’d recline on furs in my tent, drinking a cup of wine you’d poured for me, accepting congratulations from well-wishers while you kept my cock warm with your mouth.”
Rhaenyra is pretty sure she’d have heard if that was what squiring for Daemon Targaryen entailed. She’s pretty sure he’d have been run out of King’s Landing long before the eve of her fifteenth nameday.
He could never compare. Of course they couldn’t. No one could be his niece, his squire, his bedwarmer.
She wonders if she would have preferred that. She had certainly also enjoyed sitting in the royal box in a new gown, gossiping with Alicent about the combatants and fellow spectators alike. Best of all had been her handsome, dashing uncle asking for her favor, and the admiring caress of all eyes as she laughed and tossed it down to him.
And after a certain age she had daydreamed after every one of Daemon coming to her room and…it never got much more explicit than that, then. The idea of them alone in her dark room, she clad in nothing but the moonlight and her nightgown, her uncle perhaps asking for one kiss in reward for his victory, one secret favor—that had been exciting enough.
Still, she tries it on: “That’s what it would have meant, to be—your boy.”
“My boy,” Daemon says, voice very low. “My wonderful boy.”
Yes, Rhaenyra likes that. The idea of being Daemon’s wonderful boy, his curious, perfect, gorgeous girl.
He removes his finger and she feels the blunt pressure of his cock against her. She can picture its sheer size in her head and recall the burn of it in her cunt. It’s too much, he’ll never be able to get it inside her, not yet. But she only takes in slow, deep breaths, clenches her fists in the sheets, as he presses in and withdraws, again and again, and she opens up a little more around his cockhead each time.
Her uncle showers frenzied kisses on the back of her head, “And what a brave, brave boy you are, you can take it—”
It hurts when the head pops in and she relishes it. Daemon would not be so gentle with his boy.
“You would have taken me to the Stepstones with you,” she moans.
“Yes,” he whispers reverently. “Oh, Rhaenyra, you have no idea how hot a battle can make you. Feeling death pass close enough to touch, stealing your life back with each death you deliver—you need to remember you’re alive, after, you need to feel it.”
“And I would be waiting for you, back at camp—” Daemon taking her, without even washing the gore of the men he’d killed from his face, knowing how alive he was only by burying himself in the warm clutch of her body, hot as his pumping blood.
“It’s even better when you’re both in that frenzy, grappling at each other’s armor—”
It’s laughable, the idea of Rhaenyra beside him in the thick of battle, blood dripping from her own sword as they fought their way forward together, but when he abruptly pulls out and flips her around so she’s on her back blinking up at him his face is wild, fierce. He hitches her legs up by the knees so he can press back into her, a little deeper this time, enough she hisses at the sting, and he says, “Go on, stroke yourself.”
With a moan, Rhaenyra slides her hand down her stomach to rub her heel against the top of her mound in the way that makes her gasp, toes curling. It makes her dizzy, how impossibly full she feels back there, like he’s altering her in some fundamental way, remaking her, and how empty her cunt feels, and Daemon has kept this promise—she’s so wet from his words, from his cock, that she’s dripping, that it tickles, makes her shiver as it slides down her thighs, that it might even be helping ease his way. She can feel how open it is, as if it remembers what it is like to be stretched beyond its limit like that.
Daemon is looking down at the place where only a small fraction of his cock, gods, is stretching her wide, at the engorged red mouth of her cunt.
“You would take my ass, not my cunt?” Rhaenyra pants.
“I would be saving your maidenhead for when you became my wife.”
She trembles. He’d take her to war, and bring her back to Dragonstone to wed. A boy in his tent, a virgin bride in his bed. A mockery of—all of it.
“You’d just leave my cunt alone?”
He smirks at her, his hair sticking to his forehead with the exertion of holding himself carefully in check, of moving his hips in a slow, restrained rock, the same scant inches, in and out, screwing her wider. He hooks his thumb in her slick, empty hole and pushes down, down, until she can feel it rubbing against his cock in her ass through whatever thin barrier separates them. Rhaenyra’s eyes roll back, her legs jerk in spams. “Don’t worry, I can keep all your holes satisfied, my fingers, my mouth, my hand—”
Tears leak from her eyes. “No,” she chokes. “My cunt, you—”
“And I can use this perfect ass, I can’t get all the way inside tonight, but I will. Your mouth—”
“I want you in my cunt, it's yours, you can’t leave it empty—”
She’s almost crying, almost coming. But then Daemon is snatching at the hand moving on her clit, gathering both wrists in one huge palm and pinning them both above her head.
Rhaenyra thinks she’s angered him again. But he kisses her cries from her lips sweetly as his cock manages to slide halfway inside her. She thrashes, whimpering, caught on the precipice, desperate to be allowed to tumble over the edge.
Maybe she didn’t need to say it for him to know—but also she needs to say it. The fear of what he would say in response was so great she had resolved it would be better to let him fuck her and live with the unwanted consequences instead. Because if she spoke the truth plainly—husband, I do not want you to get me with child, I do not want to die like my mother—only for him to say she must, as it was in his power to do, as was his right, for how could any man bear his wife saying such a thing, it would destroy something. It would destroy her.
She can’t say it, but he says it for her. A part of it, he gives voice to. “Rhaenyra—” kissing her eyebrow, her cheek, “you’re scared, I know—”
🐉masterpost🐉
Rhaenyra does take that nap, after she dries herself off, sniffling, throwing herself back into bed to cry herself into a fitful slumber. She wants to run after him, but she does have some pride, enough that when she descends to dinner she doesn’t allow herself to ask anyone if they’ve seen her husband. He doesn’t return that night, and she hates herself for the way she aches for him, finds it almost impossible to rest in the huge lonely expanse of the empty sheets.
She must finally drop off into another uneasy doze, because she wakes with a start at a hand on her head. Daemon is perched at the edge of the mattress, stroking her hair.
“Uncle,” she says, voice thick with sleep and more tears, unshed. “Daemon—”
“It’s alright,” he whispers, which provokes her. Maybe it isn’t alright! Maybe she was going to take him to task for abandoning her, for spending the night the gods only knew where, with gods knew who. Yes, that was what she was going to say. Not, I’m sorry, not, please don’t be mad at me. Anger is what she feels. Certainly not pathetic relief at the tender way he smooths his palm down her back. “Get dressed, if you wish to train.”
“Perhaps I shouldn’t. Perhaps it’s too much for me,” she says, shaking off her hand and sitting up.
Daemon stands up too. “I’ll be in the yard.”
“Where were you last night?” she spits. “With some whore?”
He doesn’t respond, only moves again toward the door. In the light of the candle he has set on the table, she thinks she perceives a certain tightness in his shoulders.
She gets dressed, furious at him, at herself. But of course she dons her training garb again, stomps down the stairs to the yard. He’s told her where he'll be, and there he is, waiting for her.
It’s worse the second day. Her bruises throb, and new ones getting added. Her entire body burns. She lets her frustration spur her on, but it does not serve her any better than the desire to impress him, because she ends up sprawled in the dirt, dumb blunt useless little sword flying, just as often.
The last time, she knocks away the hand Daemon holds out to help her up, and clumsily gets to her feet on her own, so spent she has to roll to her front and lumber upward on all fours, grumbling. She expects to see her uncle smirking once she’s upright, but when she stands before him, wiping her damp, dirty palms on her equally damp, dirty jacket, he’s looking at his own feet, before he darts a glance up at her from under his lowered brows.
“Have your ladies draw you another bath,” he says softly. “I’ll be up in a moment.” Then he picks up her sword and turns on his heels towards the armory.
“You don’t have to,” Rhaenyra calls after him. “Not if you have more important business to attend to, husband.”
He has his sphere, and she has hers. She makes her way towards the keep, the grime coating her body unbearable in the absence of Daemon’s excitement. Fine. She will get clean, let Annora wash and comb her hair, clothe her in silk.
Daemon enters the room as Rhaenyra sits in the rapidly cooling water, brought to her piping again by servants failing to hide how much tiresome extra work Rhaenyra’s new routine is making for them in heating the huge cauldrons of water and hauling them up the stairs, because the princess can hardly sluice off in the yard with a bucket of icy spring water with the rest of the men. Annora is picking up Rhaenyra’s discarded clothing to take them to the laundry, tutting about the loose threads and worn places that must be mended and patched.
“Don’t bother,” Daemon instructs her. “Clean those, but there’s no need for you to waste your time mending them. I’m having some made especially for her. She won’t have to wear them much longer. Leave us.”
Annora doesn’t need to be told twice.
Her uncle sits in a chair and simply looks at her. Rhaenyra gazes back. It’s odd: in some ways Daemon is so transparent to her. She had always been unable to understand the fear or trepidation he seems to instill in others, her father, Otto Hightower. His features may be opaque, his true emotions hard to read, and yet—it was just Daemon.
Just Daemon.
She can’t bring herself to apologize or work out what she would even be apologizing for. She only knows that this sudden distance is crushing. And yet she cannot break the silence first.
“Are you clean?” He asks, voice measured, intonation-less.
“Yes. I’ve had my bath, as you can see.”
“Good. Come here.”
Rhaenyra glares at him. “Why?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” His hand taps restlessly on the arm of the chair. “I want my wife. I want your body, which is mine. As you so helpfully pointed out yesterday, it is my duty to fuck you, often. Not well, mind. That part is merely my innate generosity. Come here.”
Her expression must be bewildered, Rhaenyra knows. He has never spoken to her like this. The way her thighs shift together beneath the water says her body does not find it completely distasteful, even as her mind rebels.
What if I don’t want to? She almost says it.
Almost. She had unconsciously clasped her arms across her breasts when he came in but now she removes them, trailing her fingers through the water. Leans back, tilts her chin up. “I thought your husbandly prick didn’t care for skinny, spoiled brats.”
A tiny, bitter smile, there and gone. “It doesn’t matter much what I or my prick want. I have a duty, do I not? As do you. Again, I have you to thank for so kindly correcting my course yesterday. Come here.”
Rhaenyra wants to. To close the space between them. She also feels a strange obligation, a sense of fair play. Isn’t this what she had demanded of him? Too late now to say, no, please. I don’t want to. Daemon, I’m so frightened.
(For what if he said: I don’t care. Come here.)
She comes and stands before him. Daemon doesn't call her his gorgeous girl now, and his eyes are hard. He grabs the towel she’d used to dry off from her shoulders and flings it away, and passes his hand down Rhaenyra’s side like he might examine horseflesh. Her body, which is his. He then puts it to her breast, rolls her nipple under his thumb until it is stiff and throbbing. With his other hand at her hip he urges her forward until she stands between his legs. With her nipple taut, straining towards him, he lowers his mouth to it, sucks it onto his tongue.
The moan that tumbles from her mouth is startlingly loud. He has stroked and licked and teased and kissed her there, but not applied these insistent pulls, forceful enough to make his cheeks hollow. He looks up at her through his lashes. Flailing, knees unsteady, she must reach out and touch him, grip him by the hair.
Needy, desperate suckling. As if he were their own child, nursing at her breast. Would that feel like this, like there’s a line straight from his mouth to her fluttering belly, to her cunt, which pulses sympathetically? Of course she would not know. She would have wetnurses. She would not nourish her own babes, as Daemon’s mother had never nourished him. Her breasts would remain hers, his—
His mouth unseals with a wet pop. Her nipple, swollen, red, spit-slick, like the lips that made it that way, is so sensitive that the touch of the air makes her hiss. He applies himself to her other breast and then leans back, eyes heavy-lidded, to observe the pleasing symmetry.
Daemon turns her around with his hands at her waist again and stands up behind her, pushing her forward until her knees hit the edge of the bed. He’s still dressed—his shirt scrapes against her back. He nudges her legs apart with a booted toe at her ankle, until she has to lean forward, put her hands on the mattress for balance. His fingers tease at the entrance of her cunt as they had that night at the brothel, questioning. Her body had answered, and his cock had slid between her thighs, along her folds. Not this time. His fingers do not push into her and Rhaenyra does not at last turn around, needing to kiss him, to see his face. And he does not leave. With one hand on her ass, he spreads her apart with his thumb. Her damp skin has been trembling, but at that her blood goes so hot that any chill is banished.
“Your body is mine. Including—” his thumb moves inward to tap at her asshole “—here.”
“A good whore should service you with all her holes, is that it?”
“I could pay any whore in King’s Landing for the use of their ass, but you’re my wife, so it’s mine for free.”
“Any wife with any self-respect would relieve you of your cock for daring to suggest such a thing,” Rhaenyra snaps, confused again. Good wives would no doubt be horrified at such a presumption, such an insult. They must submit, but surely rebellion was permissible at such a trespass—
“Is that what you are? A wife with self-respect?”
It should be an insult. It sounds suitably scathing from his mouth, cruel. But for a long moment Daemon stands silently behind her, as if he’s truly waiting for an answer.
Then he drops to his knees. Then he puts his mouth on her ass.
The strangled noise that punches out of Rhaenyra’s mouth sounds barely human. She can't believe it. In the brothel, that parched well to which she must keep returning, she had seen many things she hadn't previously known to imagine, to imagine to want, tantalizing flashes that teased at her incessantly. Whores, as Dameon had implied yesterday, were the only women who would deign to take a man’s cock in their mouths. But what amount of coin would buy this? What did these long, slow passes of his tongue make Daemon?
She immediately clenches up in an instinctive embarrassment, but Daemon’s hands worry bruises into her hips as he pins her in place, his thumbs making twin marks where he forces her apart for his mouth, and though Rhaenyra's mind might be full of an outraged dignity, but her body has other ideas. It lacks the same qualms, capacity for shock, any idea of propriety. The sensation is initially too strange for her to decide if it feels good or not, but everything below her hip bones turns molten anyway. She feels herself relax against his lips while her face goes red, squeaks of protest and giggles of disbelief falling from her lips.
However much she might like to remain closed off, whole and entire to herself, the wet flex of his tongue has her body seeking him, opening for him. He works it in tighter circles and it’s a moment for further wonderment, with what little of her brain can still think, that Daemon wants inside her, even there. Shouldn’t it be degrading to want someone that deeply, no part of you too good for any part of them? Yet—couldn’t Rhaenyra understand that? She gives as he bullies past that resistant ring of muscle, and just like that she’s let him in, as she has to her cunt, her mouth, as she’ll let him into her ass, and doesn’t she want that just as much? To crawl inside him. She thinks wildly that she could crack his rib cage apart to make space for herself in his chest, if that meant she could finally know that she was in every part of him as much as he was in her. Or this—inside him, his body slowly opened for her, the way he’d prepared her cunt for the breadth of him with his mouth, his fingers, she could do that, she would, if he thought it lowered her as his wife to suck his cock he has no idea how much lower she could go, he would open for her, yes, exactly like this, as she is now, that’s how deep it goes, that no part of them was sealed to you—
Daemon stands up. Rhaenyra cranes her head around to look at him and sees him staring at the wreck his swollen mouth had made of her. Her asshole flutters, yearning for his touch. She wonders how it looks, spit-slick and red and throbbing as her nipples had been, transformed by him.
He moves his thumb in again, and this time she parts a bit around him. He sounds hoarse when he says, “This hole knows it’s mine. You gave your cunt away to that pious fool, but you’ve had no one up here. Or have you? It was a long four years, after all.”
It’s painful, how casually he refers to those years of his absence. It makes her ache to even think about them. But there is hunger there, jealousy. Criston still eats at him. There is a dark, pleased current in his tone at the thought there is some part of her that is still to be only his.
“No,” she is forced to admit when he doesn’t say anything, like it was a reasonable question that required an answer.
He moves his thumb down to gather some of the wetness slicking her thighs as her overeager, envious cunt responds with typical dramatics to his ministrations elsewhere, and then presses back in in little circles.
“That’s how some whores do it, you know. They’ll give their ass to every new recruit in the Watch and then sell their maidenhead to some lordling. Neat trick for a smart princess, hm? And of course some whores will only let you have them there—that’s one way to make sure they’re never…inconvenienced.”
Her heart stutters but before she can say anything he’s putting the fat head of his cock to her hole.
“Daemon,” she hisses, panicked. It had felt like it had taken him all night to warm her up enough to enjoy his cock, that first time, and she’s not even wet there.
“Don’t worry. I’ll bugger you, but I’ll make sure you like it, your unused cunt will be weeping with pleasure, I promise you—you just have to ask.”
“What?”
“You just have to ask. You have to say please fuck my ass, uncle, or I will go attend to my other duties.”
“I already begged,” she spits, eyes stinging. “Yesterday. Remember?”
“You aren’t much of an actress.” Daemon still stands behind her, and even twisting her head around so her neck twinges, she only sees part of his face. It is hard, still, but there is a pleading intensity as he repeats, “You have to ask. Beg me. Convince me you want it.”
Rhaenyra smarts. He had seen right through her. She could not hide from him.
“Beg to be your whore? You liked that, did you?” Was he so vain, that he couldn’t fuck her yesterday because he intuited some part of her was less than absolutely desperate? Was his pride so monstrous, his need to know his mastery over her so great?”
“You don't want to be my whore anymore? Alright. What’s something else you like?” He presses his cock to her, over and over, never pushing inside. He pauses, then: “You can be my boy. My squire, serving me in all ways. If you want that, I’ll give it to you.”
She shudders into the sheets. Grateful, furious. She can’t hide from him. She hadn’t even known, not really, that this is something she might welcome, until he charmed her out of her gilded bower into the muck.
And yet—could he see? Could he truly understand what terrified her? Could she tell her husband such a thing, but trust in her uncle, in Daemon?
“Is that what training me in the use of the sword is all about? Some perverted fantasy?”
Daemon stretches over her back, places his hand on top of hers so they are swallowed entirely, pins her to the bed with his weight. He thrusts against her, his cock hitching up along the crack of her ass. He kisses her ear. Rhaenyra’s body wants to go limp at being so enveloped, but she grits her teeth and bucks a little against him.
“Isn’t it nice to imagine? I should have started you on the sword as a child, as I said. Taken you to the Stepstones with me. You could have kept my gear and I could have used your ass or your mouth whenever my blood was up after a battle.”
Another shaft of agony. She had imagined it many a time at another bitter dinner seated silent and fuming between her father and Alicent, whenever the guests’ gossip turned to Daemon’s exploits. She could mount Syrax and fly to him…but her reveries had ended there. What could she have done but keep his supper warm? And even that she would have welcomed. Her hands tense under his and she feels the new callus forming in the soft meat between thumb and forefinger.
“Is that how you made use of Ser Laenor?” She tries to sound scornful but worries instead she only sounds as jealous as she feels.
“No. A fine squire he was to me, but I knew he could never compare. The night after I knighted him, though…”
“So that isn’t how you served whatever old lord you cleaned tack for?”
There is excitement in merely saying the words, although her breathless, girlish voice may not be able to express it, may be doomed to echo Alicent, prim, scandalized. Perhaps that is what is called for, but it’s never been possible for Rhaenyra, at least since the time she saw so many naked bodies meeting in an infinity of ways and only wanted to catalog every one.
And she is not picturing an ancient, wheezing lord, but a strong bearded knight in the flower of his youth and strength, allowing his eyes to linger on her uncle—with the long hair she misses, so like her own, and his smooth cheeks, his boyish face, a slim, puppyish grace—as Daemon helps him don his mail. Her breathing picks up. She feels Daemon’s smile against her neck.
“Convince me you want it,” he says again.
Rhaenyra starts to twist and bunk and writhe against him, with a thrill at how little it achieves, at how easily he holds her down. But after a moment he eases off her, holds himself up on his arms above her so she can make her escape. She slithers onto her back under him, slippery as an eel, and lays beneath him, breath coming in harsh gusts.
She surges up to kiss him. She can feel his surprise in the way he is slow to kiss her back, thrown by the eager way she licks into his mouth after where it’s been. He’d expected her to be outraged at the pleasure house, at his kiss, at him revealing her cunt to a room full of hungry eyes. She hadn’t been. Why shouldn’t she kiss him, why shouldn’t she be every inch as dirty, foul, unspeakable? She fists her hand in his hair and rubs her body against his.
Convince me you want it. Rhaenyra begins to think about his cock in that untouched place and feels a tightly mingled fear and desire. Good fear. Could she take it, would he tear her apart? But it would not be a child that ripped her open, not if he had her there. Her brain, numbed in its miserable terror, realizes this has probably been Daemon’s intent. Fucking her mouth, fucking her ass—like a whore, like a boy, not like a wife.
There was no hiding from him.
He pulls back to rest his forehead against hers. Rhaenyra says nothing. She does not beg. She could say she wanted it and he would know if she lied. She did not have to say anything and he would know the truth. If she said no, would he heed her? He had once before, and perhaps she could trust it. Or perhaps it didn’t have to matter.
When he starts to work an oiled finger into her ass, Rhaenyra says, into the pillow she’s buried her face and mostly to distract herself—how is that just a finger—“So, if you had trained me in the sword—”
“I should have,” he says again. “Behaved myself long enough to win some leeway. Worn Viserys down.”
Rhaenyra certainly doesn’t want to think of her father at this moment, but she can’t let it stand.
“You never behaved that badly I could see. He never would have let you.” She knows that. It is a fantasy she is building. “But if he had.”
“You could have been my squire.” He corkscrews his finger slowly, opening her up so she has him to the first knuckle.
Daemon does not say: if you were born a son. She likes that he does not say the obvious thing, the one twist of fate that could make it not a fantasy. If she was a boy then that might have simply been her life. Hearing that from her uncle might have been unbearable.
But she, Rhaenyra. As she had been at fourteen, in the Red Keep’s yard as she had been in Dragonstone’s this morning. At Daemon’s side, envious of his power and prowess, the beauty and skill with which he wielded Dark Sister. Her long hair, her downy cheeks, the grace she possessed from twirling around with Alicent under their dancing master’s eye, taking turns being the man, leading and being led. His eyes would linger on her as she tightened the straps on his breastplate. She would hold his horse as he mounted to enter the lists, wishing him luck, belly fluttering at his responding wink.
Her cunt squeezes, abandoned as it is, a fire licking up her spine. In a different tone she says, “And what would being your squire have required, my prince?”
“Keeping my gear in good order. Watering my horse. Handing me a fresh lance at the lists.” She gives a little involuntary wriggle of impatience, and Daemon laughs, his finger all the way inside her and held there as she aches around him. “But after I trounced all my opponents—”
“Mhm—”
“I’d recline on furs in my tent, drinking a cup of wine you’d poured for me, accepting congratulations from well-wishers while you kept my cock warm with your mouth.”
Rhaenyra is pretty sure she’d have heard if that was what squiring for Daemon Targaryen entailed. She’s pretty sure he’d have been run out of King’s Landing long before the eve of her fifteenth nameday.
He could never compare. Of course they couldn’t. No one could be his niece, his squire, his bedwarmer.
She wonders if she would have preferred that. She had certainly also enjoyed sitting in the royal box in a new gown, gossiping with Alicent about the combatants and fellow spectators alike. Best of all had been her handsome, dashing uncle asking for her favor, and the admiring caress of all eyes as she laughed and tossed it down to him.
And after a certain age she had daydreamed after every one of Daemon coming to her room and…it never got much more explicit than that, then. The idea of them alone in her dark room, she clad in nothing but the moonlight and her nightgown, her uncle perhaps asking for one kiss in reward for his victory, one secret favor—that had been exciting enough.
Still, she tries it on: “That’s what it would have meant, to be—your boy.”
“My boy,” Daemon says, voice very low. “My wonderful boy.”
Yes, Rhaenyra likes that. The idea of being Daemon’s wonderful boy, his curious, perfect, gorgeous girl.
He removes his finger and she feels the blunt pressure of his cock against her. She can picture its sheer size in her head and recall the burn of it in her cunt. It’s too much, he’ll never be able to get it inside her, not yet. But she only takes in slow, deep breaths, clenches her fists in the sheets, as he presses in and withdraws, again and again, and she opens up a little more around his cockhead each time.
Her uncle showers frenzied kisses on the back of her head, “And what a brave, brave boy you are, you can take it—”
It hurts when the head pops in and she relishes it. Daemon would not be so gentle with his boy.
“You would have taken me to the Stepstones with you,” she moans.
“Yes,” he whispers reverently. “Oh, Rhaenyra, you have no idea how hot a battle can make you. Feeling death pass close enough to touch, stealing your life back with each death you deliver—you need to remember you’re alive, after, you need to feel it.”
“And I would be waiting for you, back at camp—” Daemon taking her, without even washing the gore of the men he’d killed from his face, knowing how alive he was only by burying himself in the warm clutch of her body, hot as his pumping blood.
“It’s even better when you’re both in that frenzy, grappling at each other’s armor—”
It’s laughable, the idea of Rhaenyra beside him in the thick of battle, blood dripping from her own sword as they fought their way forward together, but when he abruptly pulls out and flips her around so she’s on her back blinking up at him his face is wild, fierce. He hitches her legs up by the knees so he can press back into her, a little deeper this time, enough she hisses at the sting, and he says, “Go on, stroke yourself.”
With a moan, Rhaenyra slides her hand down her stomach to rub her heel against the top of her mound in the way that makes her gasp, toes curling. It makes her dizzy, how impossibly full she feels back there, like he’s altering her in some fundamental way, remaking her, and how empty her cunt feels, and Daemon has kept this promise—she’s so wet from his words, from his cock, that she’s dripping, that it tickles, makes her shiver as it slides down her thighs, that it might even be helping ease his way. She can feel how open it is, as if it remembers what it is like to be stretched beyond its limit like that.
Daemon is looking down at the place where only a small fraction of his cock, gods, is stretching her wide, at the engorged red mouth of her cunt.
“You would take my ass, not my cunt?” Rhaenyra pants.
“I would be saving your maidenhead for when you became my wife.”
She trembles. He’d take her to war, and bring her back to Dragonstone to wed. A boy in his tent, a virgin bride in his bed. A mockery of—all of it.
“You’d just leave my cunt alone?”
He smirks at her, his hair sticking to his forehead with the exertion of holding himself carefully in check, of moving his hips in a slow, restrained rock, the same scant inches, in and out, screwing her wider. He hooks his thumb in her slick, empty hole and pushes down, down, until she can feel it rubbing against his cock in her ass through whatever thin barrier separates them. Rhaenyra’s eyes roll back, her legs jerk in spams. “Don’t worry, I can keep all your holes satisfied, my fingers, my mouth, my hand—”
Tears leak from her eyes. “No,” she chokes. “My cunt, you—”
“And I can use this perfect ass, I can’t get all the way inside tonight, but I will. Your mouth—”
“I want you in my cunt, it's yours, you can’t leave it empty—”
She’s almost crying, almost coming. But then Daemon is snatching at the hand moving on her clit, gathering both wrists in one huge palm and pinning them both above her head.
Rhaenyra thinks she’s angered him again. But he kisses her cries from her lips sweetly as his cock manages to slide halfway inside her. She thrashes, whimpering, caught on the precipice, desperate to be allowed to tumble over the edge.
Maybe she didn’t need to say it for him to know—but also she needs to say it. The fear of what he would say in response was so great she had resolved it would be better to let him fuck her and live with the unwanted consequences instead. Because if she spoke the truth plainly—husband, I do not want you to get me with child, I do not want to die like my mother—only for him to say she must, as it was in his power to do, as was his right, for how could any man bear his wife saying such a thing, it would destroy something. It would destroy her.
She can’t say it, but he says it for her. A part of it, he gives voice to. “Rhaenyra—” kissing her eyebrow, her cheek, “you’re scared, I know—”