Terms of Endearment │Part I: The Princess and the Rogue

Chapter 20: Bedding

THE PRINCESS

The fire crackles merrily in the hearth while your ladies-in-waiting prepare you for the evening. You stare unseeingly at the blaze as Ceryse brushes out your pale hair and Senna ties the laces at the neckline of your shift, allowing the flames and the warmth to lull you into a false sense of calm.

"Look at me," Senna says. You look up. She is smiling sympathetically at you. "There is nothing to be afraid of, Princess."

"I'm not afraid." It is true. You aren't—and you are. You know not what to feel. That is the problem, is it not? It is the not-knowing, the unknown, that makes you anxious.

"His Highness will be good to you." She makes no comment on your response, but you can tell she does not believe your affirmation, as hesitant as it was. "He loves you."

"Of course he loves me. He's my uncle," you say absent-mindedly, but even the knowledge of your shared Targaryen blood does little to assure you of this.

Love. It is a word that has been bandied about by many throughout your short courtship—but how can he love a person he does not know? You know not what love a man like Daemon can have for you, if it even exists at all. Seven years old when he left, seventeen when he returned, three moons' courting and less than half a year of reacquaintance in total is not near enough time to relearn a person, even if they are family.

You exhale tremulously when the door to your chambers—the new, unfamiliar room you feel as though you had scarcely been given a moment to accustom yourself to—opens. The sound of merrymaking and raucous chatter from the wedding feast in the Great Hall, even so far away as it is, spills in as the witnesses file in. The chairs had been laid out, the wooden screen already unfolded, the gauzy curtains arranged to ensconce the bedframe, not that any of these measures serve to wholly shield the marital bed from view. It hides enough, but one can still see the outline of bodies, the vague impression of movement. You had Ceryse and Senna help you test it. You suppose idly that this is the point—a bedding, especially a royal one, must be seen. You steadfastly ignore the low whispers, the shuffling and scraping of chairs as the witnesses take their places. You know who you would see if you did.

Lord Lyonel. Grand Maester Mellos. Lord Tyland. Lord Lyman. Alicent. You could almost tolerate what would no doubt be an ordeal of humiliation, if not for the necessity of the presence of your family—

Father. Laenor. Rhaenyra.

It seems cruel to you that Rhaenyra is here, made to sit beside her own husband—a match of convenience, no more—and watch as the man she had always longed for beds her little sister. It is cruel that your uncle will have to consummate a union to the wrong niece after spending ten years abroad, drowning his sorrows after she had wedded Laenor. It is cruel that you must play second-best to Rhaenyra even in this, your marriage, when you have felt her shadow over you your entire life—the second daughter, even more useless than a first daughter.

You had even heard tell of the most salacious rumour concerning your uncle and a whore with silver hair playacting as his niece in the slums of Flea Bottom, and when you had asked him of it, he had refused to provide an answer. Doomed before it has even begun, you think wryly to yourself.

The door adjoining the marital bedchambers across the room opens with a creak. From the sudden cessation of noise from your left and the abrupt absence of Ceryse and Senna's warmth at your front and back, you assume your uncle—your husband—has arrived. You make no move to acknowledge his presence, even as his footsteps draw nearer to you.