Chapter Text
The great dragon shakes Storm’s End when she comes. Baelon feels her landing, the thud echoing through the stones beneath his feet, vibrating up through the soles of boots and into his bones.
He wonders if Muña feels it, too. His quarters are set apart in the northmost tower of keep. In the afternoons, Muña’s dragon, Arrax, circles and circles the tower, ‘round and ‘round. The stones at the top are scoured from his claws. When first Muña went to live there, his dragon screeched and screamed all the day long. But then Father had words with him, and Arrax made no more sounds after. Baelon missed his trilling.
This dragon sounds nothing like Arrax. After she lands, she gives one great roar, louder even than the storm they had at the start of winter, when Muña had covered his ears for him all through the night so he could sleep through it. This has Baelon jumping from his seat and running to the window to see if he can spot where she’s landed. If it’s the great dragon, the king’s great dragon, then he can’t have landed her in the walls. Vhagar is too large even for the Dragonpit in King’s Landing, or so Muña said.
He can’t see her though. Maybe—maybe a glimpse. Maybe the rise of her back far past the wall like a green hill. He’s still looking out the window, craning his neck, when his door opens without knock or ceremony.
But then, the guards never knock. “Your lord father requests you.”
“Because the king is here?” he asks.
For a moment, the man looks put out that Baelon’s asked a question. “Seems so,” he says at length, and nothing else. He grunts and jerks his head to the door. Baelon goes, less because he was told to and more out of curiosity. Three guards Father sent this time. They like to move in packs around him. Some of the guard are kind to him, in passing, but most are not. Most still remember the tear of his teeth and nails in their skin on the day they took Muña from him. Some still have scars. He looks up at the guard closest to him and sees it—a scar beneath this one’s eye, and another red and raw across his chin.
Dragon, they named him, for the way his claws rent their flesh. Dragon he is still. Dragon he will be. He catches the man’s eye; the guard looks and steps away.
They hate his eyes. They hate looking at them. Even Father now. But Muña—Muña never did. Muña braided his hair back from his face and kissed his forehead and said sometimes, softly, You are the loveliest thing.
The guards lead him down the steps, through the great hall that serves as Father’s throne room and out to the courtyard. Father turns to him when. Father is already waiting there, wide and red faced.
“You’ll behave,” he says as greeting. “Damn you, not a word lest the king asks. And be polite, boy.”
As if he is ever anything but. He is his mother’s son. It’s only, sometimes he bites. “Why is here?” Baelon asks.
Father looks surprised at his speaking. They rarely have words, and never by Baelon’s choice. He returns his gaze to the gates. “No doubt to pick another wife now the queen has passed.”
The queen—Baelon’s elder sister by half her blood, but only in name. He sees his sisters rarely, and knows them less, and anyway Floris was married already to the king when Baelon was born. They say a sickness took her in the winter, but of what kind, no one would say.
She had no children.
Ten years without an heir, and the succession is clear as mud. He hears whispers and rumors of it now and then, but King’s Landing is very far away it seems and no one cares past gossip who will take the throne. Not his brother’s children, not after his abdication in the war. And not any of the rightful queen’s sons, for all but one of them was exiled to Dragonstone and to Essos after the war. No. The king must have an heir, they say, for heirs matter. That’s what the histories say. That’s what Father says. That’s why Baelon is here awaiting the king and Muña is not.
“Did the king send word he was coming?”
Father does not look at him. “No more questions.”
So he asks no more questions. The horn sounds when the gates open wide; the king’s retinue enters. The attendant at the head of the guard is dressed head to toe in vicious black. He announces the king with all his titles. It seems a formal affair, but the guards are still in their black travel cloaks, with only a glimpse of white armor beneath. It seems they’ve traveled fast and hard. And it seems Baelon a great show of force for a man who, by all reports, needs no guard at all.
The king walks in after them. He’s in riding leathers, not of the style Muña once wore but cut like armor, the leather black as soot. The king’s white hair reaches low down his back. Valyrian, Baelon thinks, exactly as Muña said he was. Beyond the gate, beyond the wall, Baelon catches a flash of yellow-green scales on Vhagar’s heaving flank. He looks back to the castle, to the tower where Arrax is perched now like a statue. He’s not half the size of the king’s dragon, but still nearly as big as the tower now. He eats much. Whatever else father could take from Muña, he could not take the dragon, and the dragon takes whatever else he wants with ease.
When Baelon looks back, the king is looking at Arrax, too. The silver dragon gives a sharp cry like he has not in ages and ages. The ruby spines on his back shudder with the sound. Father flinches. The king does not.
“Your grace!” Father greets, voice booming. “Forgive me, we did not expect your arrival—”
The king waves it off. “How could you. I sent no word.”
And there is an answer to that question. A very strange answer, indeed. The king surveys Father with disinterest, and then his gaze shifts and Baelon finds they’re looking right at each other, he and the king. The king stops cold. His guard fans out about him. Muña spoke of his eye, the one sapphire, but spoke nothing of the other. The color doesn’t match the rest of him. It’s too bright—like the blue flowers that grow on the meadows Muña once took them to in spring.
“How long has it been since last I was here?” the king muses. The question is for Father, though he’s still looking at Baelon. His hand is on the pommel of his sword.
“A decade, I think,” Father says.
“Ten years. Yes.” The king does not look away from Baelon, and Baelon does not look away from him. He has hard features, sharp features. And he’s thin. Baelon imagined him like Father, thick and tall. He’s one but not at all the other.
Father looks between them. “This is my son. Baelon, greet the king.”
“Your grace.” He gives the smallest of bows, one that allows him to keep his gaze on the king.
“A fine heir,” the king says, but his voice is strange. It’s soft and almost quiet. It doesn’t match the rest of him, and Baelon has the oddest sense that the softer he speaks, the more dangerous his words might be. “How fares your mother?” he asks Baelon then, voice very gentle indeed.
Rage blacks Baelon’s vision at the mention of Muña, as it always does. No one brings up his mother unless it is to say something cruel. He’s quiet too long, quiet long enough for Father to answer for him. “He’s resting.”
The king’s brow flickers downward, but then his face smooths, back to stone, back to nothing. “I should like to look in on him while I’m here.”
Father waves his hand. “In time, your grace. Let us show you our hospitality first.” He orders the men to take the king’s horses and see his guard settled and then claps a great, familiar hand on the king’s shoulder. “The hunting in the Stormlands is the best in the Seven Kingdoms. I dare say we might find something to feed your dragon while you’re here.” He laughs at this, in his short, barking way. “Perhaps another of my daughters will catch your eye.”
The king hums, and then he is looking at Baelon once again, and away. “Perhaps.”
It’s all the confirmation Father needs. He is moving already toward the doors again, calling for mead, for a feast. It is show; the feast was in order the moment the dragon was spotted. Baelon lingers outside the doors, counting the steps between him and Muña’s tower. Twenty, perhaps, if he was fast. But there are guards posted outside, and he left his dagger in his room.
The king walks past him, but pauses a moment and says as if he could be commenting on the appearance of a dog, “You have your mother’s look, boy.”
Baelon turns on him with a snarl, but the king is already past and in the door. His guard trails him. Each one finds him as they go, their eyes staring at him with open interest. A dog, yes. That’s what he is to them. To all of them. Would that he had a dog’s teeth to bite with.
He counts once more the steps to the north tower and then follows them inside the cold of Father’s keep.
The boy looks nothing like Baratheon.
But in truth he looks little like Luke. At least, not as Aemond remembers him. Too much of the boy is too sharp. His young face has lost some of the softness of childhood already and his eyes, oh. They look at the world like they mean to cut it in two. And there is nothing of Baratheon in that, nothing of Baratheon in anything but the dark shade of his hair. It does not curl like his mother's, nor does it come in waves like his father's, but falls in a straight black curtain that's long for the common style. No one has set it, tied it, or braided it. It hides his face when he lowers his head.
But there is no hiding those eyes. They are not his mother's hazel nor his father's brown but the pale purple of the sea under a red dawn and Aemond knows them.
Aemond once had two in the same shade, full of the same violence. The boy tries to pin him with them from across the table as the slapdash feast is set out. When Aemond holds his stare, the boy turns his gaze on his plate, as if he might get it to crack if he looked long enough.
“Will my nephew be joining us?” Aemond asks.
Borros wipes his mouth on his sleeve. “No.” He sighs, and then says in a way that seems as if he has suffered deeply, “I no longer permit the boy to be around his mother. I let them stay too close when the boy was young. It’s what’s kept the bitch from whelping again, or so the maesters say.”
The boy in question remains expressionless, but his hand is a fist around his fork, the skin of his knuckles going white. Aemond notes he has not been given a knife.
“You've had no second child?” Aemond asks. As if he does not know. As if every spare bit of news and rumor from the Stormlands he has not pored over.
Borros shakes his heavy head. “No. I would think him barren but for this one. A happy fluke.” He speaks of his son like he’s a stranger.
The soft purple of the boy's eyes runs to fire. “May I go to my lessons?” he asks, without inflection. He’s eaten almost nothing off his plate, but Borros nods and waves him off. The boy’s chair screeches across the stone as he goes. At the door, he looks back at Aemond, once, and it feels like he's the one who's been dismissed when the boy leaves at last.
They watch him go. Two guards fall into step behind him, and Aemond sees they were not there for Borros’s protection but for this task. Borros scoffs at his plate as he spears a generous bite of roast beef and says, “Lessons,” as though the notion is ridiculous. “He’s read every tome in the castle. He and his mother.” It sounds a tragedy to him.
“He has no skill with the sword?”
“No—not that. He’s fair with any blade or bow. He got that much from me, but he's too bloody minded. He nearly took a hand off my man-at-arms last year. We let him practice with himself now.” He takes his bite, chews it, says through it, “It’s his mother’s blood, you see. The princess’s.”
Rhaenyra’s, he means, as if he was not once common with her cause. “Indeed,” Aemond murmurs. Of course, he recalls how bloody minded their family can be and his nephew in particular. The scar still pains him now and then and what a strange thing, to have every moment of one's life a reminder of one who must think of him little if at all. “It is in the blood,” he agrees.
He knows. For it’s in his, too.
The night draws long. Borros has them retire to an upper hall, one with a fireplace at least as wide as any in the Red Keep and the fire within big enough to heat the whole of the wide room and all within it. Animal heads hang on walls and it every surface that can accommodate one is covered in a fur of some sort. The doors at one side of the hall open onto a terrace that overlooks the sea. It's only by the grace of the fire and the beginning of spring that the room isn't made freezing by the open air.
Instead, it smells only of the sea.
Not once since his arrival has he scented his nephew. In none of the hallways, in none of the rooms. Not even on his son. Not even here, in his husband's own quarters.
The man in question is deep into a barrel of sweet wine he opened for the occasion. Aemond was poured a cup but he makes it a habit not to drink anything in another lord’s castle—especially one who wed an enemy of the crown during the war. But Borros seems happy enough to drink his share for him. The lord speaks of his recent hunts—many—and of his daughters—of which there are still two unwed. Aemond lets him talk, waiting to hear something of interest, but he says nothing of his wife and son unless prompted.
Aemond watches the fire while Borros talks, and recalls the boy’s eyes.
In a lull he ventures an old question, one he’s long feared the answer to. “Did you take your wife to mate?”
Borros blinks through his drink and answers at length, “No.”
No. Of course not. Aemond smiles because he knows why. It's the same reason he never marked Floris—always waiting for a better thing to come along. Or, truer to say, he’d had better and knew she was not it. Borros hoped for a better bride, younger, prettier, more willing to give sons. Not one has headstrong as his nephew surely was. “They can be… difficult,” he says, letting his smile be mistaken for agreement.
But surely Borros knew he would do no better than Luke. A prince of the realm, Targaryen by blood and Velaryon by name. There must be a reason he never marked Luke. Aemond rolls the thought around in his head as he rolls the wine in his cup, still without drinking.
“More difficult than you know.” Borros lets another cup be poured and then says with the air of one confessing a great hardship, “...A madness took him during the winter. He tried to take Baelon on dragonback to only the Stranger knows where. Off to his mother, no doubt. Somewhere far away. We’ve never seen eye to eye.” He sighs into his own cup, and empties it again. “I suppose I should be glad the bitch gave me a son at least.”
“And that’s why you’ve kept him… sequestered.”
Borros nods. “That, and that he might give me another. But he’s stubborn. And I’m not so young as I was.” It’s true. The man is pushing his fifth decade, and heavy with age.
“How long?” Aemond asks then.
Borros frowns at him, blinking stupidly.
“My nephew. How long have you kept him from the boy?”
“Oh. Since a year past. Only for his own protection, you see, and my son’s. I have little hope he'll give me another, but ah, well. One must try.”
Aemond raises his cup. “One must try,” Aemond says in toast. He doesn't drink, but Borros does. “Would that I had been so lucky.”
“Yes, well. Floris was…” Borros flounders.
Floris’s qualities were few and unnotable. She was pretty, given to fits of demands and a love of expensive things and the notion she deserved them—innocuous, truly. He counted himself lucky to have a wife who asked for nothing he could not ask someone else to provide. He saw her only on the nights they attempted a coupling, rare that they were and rarer as the years went on. It was never more than a perfunctory act. There was almost camaraderie in their shared disinterest.
The one thing it had not gotten him was a son. Or any child. Indeed, not even the threat of one, and she was too stupid a woman—or too honest—to try in any other bed.
“She will be mourned,” Aemond promises. He wears black at this moment in his mourning but they never mated, and so he will be expected to observe it for no more than a moon. Then he will be expected to take a second wife, one young enough to give him his long expected heir, one positioned enough to add some value to the kingdom. The crown is a cage in this way.
“Maris has asked after you,” Borros lies. “And Cassandra, my eldest remains unwed. They’re both of fine stock—less flighty than their sister, and still of age.”
Barely of age, with both in the third decade. They have not asked after him; he will not see them. He will certainly not wed either of them. “In time,” he says, and then, “I should like to check on my nephew, as I said.”
Borros nods and nods, also to the fire, perhaps not really hearing him.
“Now, I think,” Aemond muses. “Summon him.”
Borros blinks in confusion. “Who?”
“My nephew. Call for him.”
“He’s hardly fit for company. It's late, your grace. He'll be at rest. Perhaps in the morning you might—”
“Call for him. Now.”
At last Borros hears the danger in his tone. “Of course.” He rises to call a guard in, swaying on his feet as he goes. The silence after is thick enough to cut with a knife after he returns to his seat, but they don’t have long to wait. Borros has hardly finished his next cup before there is a knock on the door.
Aemond scents Luke before he sees him. It’s the brush of a sea breeze in summer, the first bite of an evening storm coming in over the Bay.
Luke is pushed inside the door by the guards. He is utterly changed. He’s gained height, but lost whatever weight he had. His features are no longer soft but lovely, and there are no freckles on him now. He’s gone pale, hollow cheeked. His hair long enough that it brushes well past his shoulders in dark, unkempt curls. He looks a ghost come to haunt, and perhaps he is. Aemond last saw him in these halls. His skin under moonlight, sweat slicked and sweet on the tongue.
But it’s his eyes that draw Aemond’s gaze. The hazel is dark and full to the brim and Aemond sees in that moment: he has never seen his nephew angry. But he is angry now.
“Nephew,” he greets, and only then does Luke turn those eyes on him.
His complexion goes from pallid to ill. “Aemond?”
He nods to Lord Borros. “Your husband has been regaling me with tales of your… disobedience.”
Shock plays a moment in those eyes, and then they shutter. Of all his nephew’s skills, not showing emotion was never one of them, but evidently he’s learned something of the way. His expression goes blank as he looks past Aemond, to his husband. “Why have you called me here, my lord?”
“I called you here,” Aemond says, drawing his gaze back.
He rises from his seat and approaches his nephew, taking in all he can: the dark gold of Luke’s tunic, which is cut long as a dress. Baratheon colors don’t suit him. The yellow is gaudy; it washes him out and makes the blue about his eyes stand out like a bruise.
“I met your son.” Aemond traces a path with his eye, from Luke’s face to the pretty unmarked arch of his neck, and says with his voice low, “A shame he doesn’t have your eyes.”
Luke shivers. “Why have you called me here?” he repeats, and Aemond’s hand twitches at his side with a desire to do something irrational—to touch his mouth, his throat, to demand an answer and feel it spoken against his hand.
“He only wished to see you were well.” Borros makes an aborted attempt to stand but returns to his seat with an oof . Aemond spares him a glance and Borros slurs out, “As—as you can see, your grace, my wife is in good health.”
Aemond returns his eye to Luke, to the ill shade of his skin and the thinness of him, the unwashed hair and the fire in his gaze now. He does not look from Aemond as he asks his husband, softly, “May I return to my quarters?”
Borros waves him off, as he waved his son at dinner. “Yes, be gone with you. And eat. These dramatics of yours have gone on too long.”
Dramatics.
He waits again for a rise, for anything, but it doesn’t come. Luke turns from him for the door, no honors, no graces. But he’s so close that the scent of him sweeps from his curls as he moves. Something lost to Aemond long ago, but not forgotten. Never forgotten.
Aemond watches his own hand snap out as he grabs Luke around the arm. “Wait.”
Luke does not. He tries to wrench himself free from Aemond’s grip and there, again, is his fire. Overflowing like his son’s, but kept behind a better facade, for all that it’s worn thin. “Take your hand off me.”
Aemond grips tighter, pulls him closer, so his next words are between them and them alone. “How like you your choice of husband?”
He did not mean to ask, but it’s the question that has plagued him every day of his rule since he woke alone and cold on that morning ten years past. He holds Luke there as he waits for an answer, but when it comes he regrets the asking, for Luke’s eyes grow bright as he says, “This is why you’re here. To mock me. You, who has everything.”
“Not everything.” He jerks Luke closer to him, so close his scent and breath fill his senses and run him ragged.
“Your grace?” Borros asks from far away.
Luke looks at him, over Aemond’s shoulder, and his gaze goes frantic. He rips his hand away and stumbles back a step, catching himself on the table there. His sleeve rides up, revealing a yellowing ring of bruise around his wrist in the shape of a larger hand. Aemond can’t make out Luke’s expression, if it’s nearer to laughter or nearer to tears. “You—even now you cannot leave me be.” And there are tears in his eyes now, welling out, but his smile is fixed and mean and without joy. It’s hideous for how it transforms his face into something not lovely but dangerous. “Do you regret not taking my eye that night? Would that satisfy you?”
Luke knows it would not. Luke sees him too clearly—has, since they were children. He knows Aemond will never be satisfied.
Aemond looks from his face to his bruised wrist and back. His words are lower still when he answers, “No. No, it will not. And you, boy? Are you satisfied?”
Perhaps he knows something of Luke, too, for when his nephew drops his gaze and hunches his thin shoulders, Aemond has his answer. It’s an answer he cannot abide.
“What is this?” Borros asks. “What are you speaking of?” The man is standing now, but barely.
Aemond spares Borros a glance and a smile. “Forgive me, my lord. I have only one more question for my nephew and I will go.”
He turns back to Luke—bruised, starved, pale—and finds the answer to the question he came to ask no longer matters, and perhaps never did. This night will have the same end, but still, he must ask it. He must know.
“Your son. Is he mine?”
Luke’s mouth falls open and his eyes widen so far that one fat tear shakes loose from his lashes and draws a line down his cheek. “You dare—you dare ask me that.”
He doesn’t ask again, but holds Luke’s gaze until he looks away first and answers, “How could he be?” But his voice breaks on the lie.
A meaty hand comes down on Aemond’s shoulder. Lord Borros, moving at last, and lucid enough to understand the question, to know the answer for himself perhaps. “What is the meaning of this?”
Aemond shakes him off, still looking at Luke. “The truth. You owe me an answer. You owe me that much.”
Luke’s mouth twists as if in pain. He looks to Aemond, and then to his husband, and then down, at nothing. “Yes. He is yours. Of course, he’s yours. Have my head for it, both of you.”
It’s as if someone has struck a bell, and the bell is in him. Its ringing shakes through him. He feels a mad smile come to his mouth though he could not say how the answer feels like victory as complete as his crowning.
“You—” Borros starts, stupidly. He puts a hand on Aemond’s shoulder again, tries to pull him from Luke, but only to insert himself between them as he snarls at his wife, “You lying little whore. I knew he came too soon. I knew he looked wrong—I told the maester so. And you.” His ire turns on Aemond, but this is a mistake, for the hilt of Aemond’s sword is already in his hand and Borros did not think to carry one in his own house.
Borros is drunk now, and slow, but the meaning of hand on a blade is not so hard to understand. :You—you both,” he mutters as he staggers back, putting space between them, as if that will save him. He fumbles for the hunting knife on his belt and Aemond draws his sword at last. He puts himself between Borros and Luke. Borros brings his knife up, and what he lacks in speed and wit now he makes up for in size. Aemond blocks a wild slash, but it skitters down his sword and parts his sleeve, drawing blood. Aemond uses Borros’s closeness against him then, grabs the man’s hand with the one he kept free and presses on the joint of his thumb until the blade drops to the floor. He kicks it away. Borros stares first at the knife, and then at Aemond as he raises the tip of his sword up and level with Borros’s chest. The big man tries to move away and back again, stumbling as he goes until the wind is around them and his back is against the stone balustrade of the terrace that overlooks the Bay.
He is too drunk or too stupid to call for his guard. Or, maybe, wise enough in the moment to know there is no end to this that is not the king taking both boy and mother, and no silence Borros can offer that will be more complete than death.
“I knew,” Borros says weakly. “I knew there was a sickness in your blood, all of you. You will kill me and what, take the bitch to your bed? He’s ruined. The slut—he lied to us both—”
His words end in the sweet schick of metal sliding through flesh. Aemond feels the pop and ease of pressure as his blade pushes through skin and flesh and cartilage and then through, through to the other side of him. It is not a killing blow but a suffering one.
Shock crosses Borros’s face. He looks down at his own chest. “You whore,” he says again of Luke, bringing his hand up to the blade. “Look, look what you’ve done,” but there is blood on his mouth now. Aemond twists the blade, until there is only pain on his face. Only then does he pull it free.
Borros holds himself up against the stone railing of the terrace, his other hand going to the pooling blood between his breast and wide belly. Aemond covers Borros’s hand with his own, feels the heat of the lifeblood leaking from his body and the width of the hand that left the bruise around Luke’s arm, and pushes. Gently. Almost with kindness. It takes little to overtop the bulk of his body. He struggles against the stone railing for only a moment before he seems almost to trip on his own feet and over the edge.
He makes no sound as he falls. All else is lost against the soft sound of waves crashing against the cliffs far below.
The stars are out. Aemond breathes deep the sea air mingling with the sour salt of blood and wine and something far sweeter.
When he turns back, Luke is staring at him, open-mouthed. “What have you done?”
Aemond returns to him. His sword is still in his hand. “What have I done? What have you?”
Luke stares at the blade in Aemond’s hand. “What I had to.” He leans back as Aemond approaches, but he has nowhere to go with the table behind him. “Will you kill me for it?”
He brings the blade to Luke’s neck, to his chin, to tip it back. Luke is not Borros. He doesn’t fight or flee or even flinch, but tips his head back more, revealing his unmarked neck, the throb of his pulse.
“I should, for keeping him from me. Why?” He surprises himself with the hurt in his voice.
Luke takes the blade in one hand—not moving it, only holding it. “Yes, why didn’t I tell the madman waging a war on my mother that I carried his child? After one— one mistake. One night.” He swallows. It presses the blade deeper into his skin. “I did what I had to,” he repeats.
And he so he had. His single act was ruinous. It pulled Borros from his cause, lost him the Stormlands and the Baratheon forces both for long enough to muddle loyalties, long enough to give Stark time to march his greybeards south, long enough that the bleed became so profound it seemed both land and sea would run red with their war. It bought Luke’s side nothing in the end, only the last desperate chance for his mother to flee to Essos, for his brothers to be secure in their exile on Dragonstone. Aemond’s rage was equal to the task. The betrayal was but fuel for his fire, and when he could have seen his sister’s family killed, he’d thought instead of his nephew trapped in the Stormlands, parted from his fool family for the rest of his life, and told himself that would be his mercy and his vengeance for all Luke had taken when he left Aemond for Lord Borros fucking Baratheon.
Only—Luke had taken more even than that, hadn’t he?
Luke looks at him from under his lashes, eyes bright against the blue that rings them.
“I would have made you my bride.” Aemond casts his hand to the room around them, to Storm’s End, to the dark stone and fetid scent of old fur. “Is this better? Was I truly the worse choice?”
“There was no choice. My mother sent me to secure an alliance and instead I ended up empty handed and pupped.” Luke reddens. “I was terrified. Of course, I ran.” His grip on the sword is unyielding, still pressed right to his pulse. “You made me no promises.”
“If you’d stayed—”
“And given you another chance to ask for my eye out? Ruined my mother’s prospects for an alliance twice over? Or let you take me back to King’s Landing as hostage?”
Aemond cannot deny it.
Luke’s gaze falls. “I told no one of Baelon.”
His hand is shaking now around the blade, his fingers pale white. If he grips any tighter, he will make himself bleed, and now Aemond feels as if he’s the one with steel at his neck and Luke the one holding it there.
“Do it,” Luke orders. “Take your revenge, and at least one of us might be happy.” He looks back toward the balcony, toward where his husband fell. “They will see me dead for this anyway.”
Aemond lowers the blade, slowly, so slowly. Luke releases his grip. A line of red stands against his neck, but it isn’t his blood. The blade clatters to the floor when Aemond drops it. He fists his hand in Luke’s tunic then, crushing the ugly velvet as he pulls Luke to his mouth. Stillness takes them, and then a sound of shock that he swallows as he parts Luke’s lips with his tongue and Luke lets himself be so opened. The kiss is a simple thing—no more experienced than their first those years ago, and that could be this night again. The same place, the same rage, the same need, all and the years between carved away.
Luke breaks first, tears from him and turns to brace himself on the table with a hand over his mouth. Aemond doesn’t give him room to run; he’s learned his lesson. He comes up against Luke’s back, winds an arm around his waist and says, “This is done. All of this is done now. You will return to King’s Landing with me.” He tightens his hold, until he can feel Luke’s heat beneath his clothes and the press of his lungs against his ribs. Luke stays, one hand on the table, one over his mouth, hunched over and breathing hard. Aemond scents the air and smells a thing he cannot put a name to. Only that he had known its absence, and will not know it again.
“What of Lord Borros?” Luke asks faintly
“What of him? A drunken night. He fell.”
“No one will believe that.”
He tightens his grip. “I am king. They will believe what I tell them to, or burn.”
“And Baelon—”
“Will return with us.”
Luke’s breathing slows incrementally from its near-panic. He’s an animal caught, and he knows it. “I could take him,” he says without fire. “I could flee.”
“You could,” Aemond says softly, still cradling him. “And I would follow. You will not run from me a second time.” He lowers his face, nose to Luke’s hair, breathing deep until he feels dizzy from the scent.
Luke’s hand comes to hold the arm looped around his chest. “Aemond,” he says, and the scent of his tears overwhelms all else. “I want to see my son.”
Aemond holds him tighter. “As you say.”