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

Chapter 33: Hush

Daemon does not wait to hear more. Pushing the boy aside, he barks a hasty order at Strong, a directive to take over, marching out of the courtyard and back up the steps. His feet pound against the stone to the rhythm of his heart, loud and fast in his chest.

The memory of Driftmark flashes across his mind as he moves, the night you stepped between the Hightower whore and your sister, a silly little girl trying to head off a conflict years in the making. He remembers the impotent fury that had possessed him at the sight of you, precious and small and trapped between the two older women. While you had been caught up in a battle that was never yours to fight, he could do naught but watch as the Kingsguard held him back. It had not been so long since that evening—since that bitch of a Queen had sliced his wife's arm open—that the taste doesn't still linger in his mouth, bitter and stinging and terror-tinged.

When he arrives to your shared chambers, storming through the door in a huff, you are seated upon the mattress and sniffling, nose red and eyes wet, the austere form of Maester Gerardys bent over your exposed leg.

"What the fuck happened?" he asks.

Rhaenyra is standing beside the bed, calm of disposition, which eases him somewhat. If it were life-threatening, she would look far more concerned. Laenor is prattling on in a futile attempt to distract you, though from the way you watch the physician with miserable eyes and a grimace, he can tell your goodbrother is utterly useless in this endeavour. He ignores all of this, white noise that is irrelevant in the face of his panic.

"She tripped down a few steps while carrying a stack of books," Rhaenyra says, sympathetic gaze fixed on you.

At the sight of you, lower lip quivering and expression vulnerable, an exposed chink in titanium armour, he seats himself upon the bed next to you, heedless of the dirt and sweat and muck he is sure to be trudging in. He pulls you comfortably to him, stroking your spine gently and hushing you, glancing down at the reason for the Maester's visit.

He winces; it is a nasty, bloody abrasion, peeling away several layers of flesh and leaving the gummy soft underlayer of unprepared dermis, oozing and sore. Gerardys glances up at him, nodding his head in brief greeting, before returning to his oils and potions and powders, blending together the necessary remedy from the stock in his knapsack.

"They weren't just books," you say miserably, "they were Ser Lysan's life works—and I ruined them!"

No wonder you're so upset, Daemon thinks. Your kindly old tutor had amassed a considerable collection of tomes he'd written with his own hand, accumulating his knowledge absorbed from a lifetime of dedicated learning. From languages old and new across Essos, obscure histories and treatises on cultures unknowable to the rest of the known world, to dissertations on philosophies so obscure that to peruse the pages was to incite a migraine of epic proportions, the man is a formidable talent. You take slavish care of these volumes, dusting and carrying them from room to room, not trusting any hands but yours or the frail scholar himself to lay fingers upon their bindings.

"You dropped them, sister," Laenor says. "It is not so bad as all that."

Your eyes narrow in on your goodbrother. "I knocked into a maid!"

Daemon glares at the Velaryon scion. Fucking Laenor, always making things worse.

"She spilled a carafe of wine," you wail, "and I dropped the books in it! They are ruined!"

"Come now, darling," Rhaenyra says. "Ser Lysan wasn't angry at all. In fact, he even says he should be able to salvage most of the pages."

"Most—"