green lies, black hearts

VIII

a/n - thank you all for the support and love over here :)

- p

~+~

Shaera

And the lord loved his lady, more than the sun loved its clouds, and the moon its stars. He loved her for all of their days and then some, reunited once again when their hearts ceased to beat and they were nothing more, bodies burned on pyres, their ashes scattered, returned to the skies like the dragons of yore.

Reunited in death they were. His love, his darling, his lady-wife, Aemma.

Shaera leaned back in her chair and stretched her arms high, high, high above her head until a relieving crack rattled down her spine and neck. She blew cool air over the wet ink and tried fanning it too, hoping it would dry quickly so she could stack the paper with the others-stack the book she had written together. She knew it wasn't very long-and perhaps not very good-but she would like to bind it as best she could so she could give it to her grandfather. Even though she would read it to him, she wanted him to have it. To keep him company when she couldn't be there. She wanted it to give him a smile whenever the pain was getting to be too much.

Shaera tapped her cheek. She wondered if there were any books on medical botany hidden somewhere within the book stacks of the library. Perhaps she could find something that she could end up making for the sores on her grandfather. With the sometimes putrid smell wafting off of him, she didn't think the maesters were taking very good care of him. Especially his bed sores. And sometimes she was with him for hours, yet no maester came to see him?

Perhaps she should talk to her mother and father about that. It seemed...odd.

Standing from her chair, Shaera tapped the edges of her pages on the table to line them up just a tad bit better, and she pushed away to go and search through the stacks. But the figure watching her nearly made her drop all of her meticulously stacked papers to the ground. She gasped, grabbing her chest to still her heart from jumping from it. It raced and Shaera hissed a Valyrian curse as she leaned over the table in an attempt to slow her breathing and still her fragile heart.

"Uncle," she hissed, eyes shut as she focused purely on keeping herself steady. How humiliating it would be, after two weeks with little to no interaction since he helped her, for her to faint because he had managed to frighten her. She couldn't bear to think of such an embarrassment. She supposed she would rather succumb than ever endure that.

"Niece."

Shaera inhaled sharply and as her heart slowed, she looked over her shoulder at her approaching uncle. His voice was a lovely one and Shaera was not foolish enough to lie about such a thing. But in the sense that she would like to hear him read aloud. A girl like her enjoyed stories. To hear one narrated by him would be a treat, she thought. Perhaps he would even be bearable! She could simply focus on his voice-perhaps his only redeeming quality save for some...technicalities-and ignore how cruel he enjoyed being.

"Do you need something?" she asked politely.

Aemond's lips thinned and he glanced to the table. "Seeing as I would like to read" -he held up a thick tome- "I would need the table to be..."

Shaera furrowed her brows and followed his line of sight. And her stomach dropped. How embarrassing! She cursed and scrambled to clean up the entire table. She didn't realize how much ink had been flicked about in her writing process. There were crumbled up pieces of paper. A few story books left open, taking up far too much space. The only tidy aspect about it was the stack of pages, and she had been so proud of that! Shaera supposed she just...lost herself in her mind a bit there. Too focused to see anything else in front of her.