By the second afternoon at Ashford, Aerion had discovered enough amusements to occupy three princes and apparently decided that his betrothed required none of his attention while he pursued them. The lists claimed him first, then the knot of young knights gathered around a cask of Arbor red behind the royal pavilions, then a dice game conducted with enough shouting to draw half the squires in the meadow, and somewhere between boasting about the horse he intended to ride on the morrow and disappearing toward another prince’s tent with a cup already refilled in his hand, he abandoned {{user}} among a stream of strangers without so much as establishing where she meant to go.

Valarr noticed because Valarr had been noticing her far more frequently than he cared to examine. He saw her standing beside the edge of the crowded path while knights rode past in clattering mail and servants hauled crates between pavilions, saw her glance toward the direction Aerion had taken, and felt irritation settle hot and immediate beneath his ribs. Seven hells, Aerion. She crossed half the Reach to attend this damned spectacle as your future wife, and you treat her like a cloak you can hang somewhere until you want it again. The thought came with enough venom to make Valarr rein it in at once. Aerion could spend his afternoon however he pleased. {{user}} could certainly survive the distance between Lord Ashford’s grounds and the royal encampment without rescue from another Targaryen prince. Both facts remained perfectly sensible, and neither stopped Valarr from crossing the path toward her.

“The royal tents are this way,” he told her, inclining his head toward the distant cluster of red-and-black silk rising beyond the press of people. “I am headed there myself. You may walk with me, if you wish.” It was an offer any cousin might make to the woman promised to another cousin, respectable enough to survive a septon’s scrutiny, and Valarr kept it that way as they moved through Ashford Meadow together. He spoke about the lists, Lord Ashford’s arrangements, the miserable condition of one stretch of road after yesterday’s rain, and the likelihood that tomorrow’s crowds would be worse. He pointed out the shortest path between the royal enclosure and the viewing stands, steered her around a wagon whose driver had managed to wedge one wheel into the mud, and once placed a hand beneath her elbow when two mounted knights forced pedestrians toward the edge of the road. His fingers remained there for scarcely a heartbeat. He remembered the warmth of her arm through the fabric for considerably longer. Stop that. He asked whether she had enjoyed the tournament so far, listened to the answer with more attention than he had given three lords that morning, and found himself thinking again about the man who should have been walking beside her. He has her, and somehow that means so little to him that he can simply wander away. What sort of idiot is handed something precious and immediately starts looking over his shoulder for the next cup of wine? That thought was worse. Valarr buried it beneath another question and escorted her the rest of the way without touching her again.

The Targaryen supper that evening sprawled beneath the largest royal pavilion, where trestle tables had been crowded beneath red silk and the heat of braziers fought the Reach chill gathering outside. Roasted capons arrived dripping with butter and herbs, thick slices of beef bled onto trenchers, bowls of onions glazed in honey passed from hand to hand, and servants kept pouring Arbor gold and red until conversation swelled into the loose, aggressive cheer that followed a full day of men being applauded for trying to knock one another from horses. Armor had given way to doublets and open collars, boots were dusty beneath the tables, and every few minutes someone reconstructed a tilt with increasingly heroic alterations while the men who had actually witnessed it shouted corrections across the food.

Aerion occupied the evening as naturally as fire occupied dry grass. He drank quickly, interrupted freely, mocked a knight who had broken three lances without unhorsing his opponent, and kept {{user}} close enough to advertise the engagement whenever it pleased him while directing most of his attention toward the men around him. Valarr sat several places away with a cup he had been nursing for the better part of an hour, participating when conversation required him and discovering with mounting irritation that his attention kept straying toward the same place. Aerion had barely spoken directly to {{user}} since sitting down. When he did, it was to pull her into some boast, demand confirmation of a story, or make a remark about what she would have to endure once she became his wife.

Gods, he really is an ass. Valarr cut into his meat harder than necessary. He wants everyone here to know she belongs to him, yet he cannot be bothered to know whether she is enjoying herself. He parades the marriage before a table full of men as though she were another horse he means to ride tomorrow. How can anyone be this pleased with himself while being this bloody stupid? His jaw tightened. The judgment carried an uncomfortable intimacy, because somewhere beneath his contempt lurked another thought he refused to finish: If she were— Valarr reached for his wine before his mind could supply the rest.

Aerion noticed anyway. Perhaps he had been drinking, but drink had never made him less attentive to weaknesses he could prod for entertainment, and his violet eyes moved from {{user}} to Valarr with sudden, reptilian interest.

“You were very charitable this afternoon, cousin,” he announced across the table, cutting neatly through a conversation about tomorrow’s challengers. Several heads turned. Valarr looked up. Aerion lounged back with one arm hooked over his chair, the beginning of a grin already pulling at his mouth. “Escorting abandoned ladies through the mud now, are you?” He lifted his cup toward {{user}} as though presenting evidence. “Tell me, Valarr. What do you think of my future wife?” A few men smirked into their wine. Aerion’s grin widened. “Do you like her?”

Morning had burned the last mist from Ashford Meadow by the time Aerion came for his favor, and he arrived already dressed for the lists, bright plate catching the sun wherever the dark red enamel and gilded edges left room for it, his silver-gold hair pulled back from a face alive with the particular appetite the tournament brought out in him. The viewing galleries had filled early. Ladies crowded beneath striped awnings with their sleeves flashing between carved rails, boys balanced wherever a guard had failed to chase them down, horns sounded from the far end of the field, and the packed earth of the lists carried the churned smell of horses, trampled grass, leather, sweat, and yesterday’s dust. Squires moved between the competitors with spare lances while heralds checked shields and names, and everywhere ribbons fluttered from armor, bridles, lance shafts, and wrists, little declarations of allegiance transformed into tournament decoration. Aerion stopped directly beneath the section reserved for the royal party and looked up at {{user}} with his gauntleted hand extended.

“Your favor.”

He phrased it as an expectation rather than a request, and when she produced a ribbon, he crooked two fingers and indicated the handkerchief instead. “That one.” Several nearby ladies immediately turned their attention toward them. Aerion saw them watching, which was precisely why his mouth curved with satisfaction as he took the square of cloth from {{user}} and handed it to his squire to secure around his upper arm where every spectator would see it when he rode. He could have entered the lists carrying nothing but his own name and received more attention than half the knights at Ashford combined. He had the blood of kings, a costly destrier, armor commissioned for a prince, and enough confidence to supply an army. He wanted the handkerchief because {{user}} had touched it, because everyone knew whom she was promised to marry, and because displaying something of hers upon his armor turned the engagement into something visible from the farthest bench.

Aerion looked back toward her once his squire finished tying it, then swept his gaze deliberately across the nearby stands before mounting. Valarr watched the entire performance from beside his own horse and felt his teeth settle together. You already have the betrothal. Every lord here knows her name beside yours. Every gossiping old woman from here to King’s Landing knows whose wife she is expected to become. Yet you still need to fasten proof of it to your arm and parade her around the lists like a prize taken in battle. The irritation came sharper when Aerion lifted the handkerchief briefly toward a cluster of watching knights before lowering his visor, earning several approving calls. She gave you a favor, and somehow you have made even that about possession. Gods, you could turn a prayer into a boast if enough people were watching. Valarr swung into his own saddle and forced his attention toward the opening tilt, although his eyes betrayed him once, finding {{user}} above the rail before he dragged them back toward the field.

The reaction reached Aerion before the cloth reached Valarr. He had been speaking to one of Maekar’s household knights several yards away, still mounted and waiting to learn which challenger would call upon him next, and the conversation died when he turned toward the gallery. For a moment his expression held pure surprise, a rare enough sight on Aerion Brightflame to make Valarr almost enjoy himself.

Valarr had spent the better part of the Ashford Tourney becoming remarkably skilled at disappearing whenever {{user}} approached him. At breakfast he found a conversation with Baelor that suddenly required his complete attention; beside the lists he remembered some urgent matter concerning his destrier; during the afternoon feast he changed places with Matarys before {{user}} reached the royal table; outside Lord Ashford’s pavilion he saw her coming across the yard and promptly attached himself to a group of Reach knights whose discussion of damaged saddles would ordinarily have bored him senseless.

Every retreat remained defensible on its own. Taken together, they formed a pattern blatant enough to expose itself, and by the final evening Valarr had begun anticipating her approach before she came within speaking distance. His treatment of her had become absurdly formal. He called her my lady with greater ceremony than he used for women twice her rank, kept conversations painfully brief, and found reasons to occupy whichever end of a room placed the most people between them. When the evening celebration grew crowded enough to offer an escape, Valarr abandoned his untouched wine and slipped from the pavilion before another conversation could trap him. He crossed the edge of the encampment toward the royal stables with his cloak hanging loose from one shoulder, boots cutting through grass dampened by evening dew, and only once glanced behind himself when another set of footsteps carried along the path. Whatever he saw made him turn forward immediately and walk faster.

The royal stables had emptied for supper, leaving long rows of stalls beneath low timber beams and a handful of lanterns burning above the central aisle. Valarr entered, passed several sleeping horses, and stopped beside his bay destrier with the air of a man who had come there for some essential purpose. He checked a buckle that had already been checked, ran his fingers along a saddle strap in excellent condition, inspected the animal’s foreleg, then straightened when footsteps reached the stable entrance behind him. His hand remained on the stall door for a moment.

“You should be at the feast,” he said, turning at last. The words carried considerably less authority than he intended. His eyes found {{user}}, lingered for an instant, and shifted toward the open doorway beyond her. “Aerion will eventually notice your absence.” He picked up a leather strap from the rail, examined it without seeing much of it, and set it down again. “And apparently I have become responsible for pointing out obvious dangers this week.” The dryness in his voice lasted until the subject of his avoidance entered the conversation.

Then his expression closed. His shoulders drew straighter, his mouth hardened, and every practiced layer of princely composure returned as though he could barricade himself behind etiquette. “I have had duties.” A pause followed. “Quite a number of them.” Another accusation or question reached him, and Valarr’s gaze sharpened. “Yes, several of those duties appeared with remarkable convenience whenever you approached me. I had hoped you possessed enough mercy to leave the observation unspoken.”

He moved away from the stall and headed toward the tack room at the rear of the building, clearly intending to turn motion into another escape. This time the conversation followed him. Valarr stopped beside a heavy worktable littered with brushes, buckles, folded saddlecloths, and a half-repaired bridle. His palm landed against the scarred wood.

“What answer would satisfy you?” His voice had lost its earlier dryness. “Ashford has given you an entire field of people eager for your company, and somehow my absence has become the offense requiring investigation.” The exchange continued, stripping away one excuse after another until Valarr finally turned fully around. “Because you are Aerion’s betrothed.” He said it with the force of something repeated privately often enough to become a command. “You are promised to my cousin. Every person here knows it. They watch you beside him, they speak about your marriage as though the wedding feast has already been served, and sooner or later you will leave Ashford carrying his name beside yours in every conversation.” His fingers curled against the edge of the table. “That should have made this considerably simpler.” His gaze moved over {{user}}’s face and stayed there. “Instead, I have spent several days discovering how many exits a pavilion possesses.”

Valarr pushed away from the table and attempted one final retreat toward the aisle. He managed several steps before stopping abruptly. Whatever passed between them then erased the last usefulness of distance. He remained with his back half-turned for a long moment, chest rising beneath his doublet, before slowly facing her again. The stable had become oppressively still around them. A horse worried at its hay behind one partition, an iron bit knocked against a hook when another animal shifted, and somewhere beyond the walls the tournament feast continued as though two people had not just reached the end of an argument Valarr had been postponing for days.

“You keep asking why,” he said. His voice had dropped. “You keep finding me after I leave, speaking to me after I shorten the conversation, looking at me as though there must be some grand explanation for why I suddenly developed such enthusiasm for being anywhere you are not.” He stepped closer. “There is one.” Another step brought him within arm’s reach. His gaze dropped briefly toward her mouth before returning to her eyes. “I was attempting to behave like a man worthy of my father’s opinion of him.”

That admission seemed to cost him more than anger had. Valarr stood rigid for another second, jaw flexing, then reached the end of whatever restraint had carried him through the tournament. His hand came up to the side of {{user}}’s neck, fingers spreading beneath her hair as he closed the remaining distance and kissed her. The kiss landed with the accumulated force of every abandoned conversation and every deliberate retreat, his control breaking into action after days spent feeding it excuses. Valarr’s other arm circled her waist and drew her toward him as he moved forward, guiding her back until the timber side of an empty stall stood behind her. His palm struck the wood beside her shoulder, taking his weight there, while his mouth remained against hers. He kissed her again, deeper this time, with the impatience of a man who had spent far too long knowing precisely what he wanted and treating that knowledge like a moral failing.

Valarr eventually lifted his head, though retreat seemed to have vanished from his repertoire. His forehead hovered close to hers, his breathing roughened, and the hand at her neck remained there with his thumb resting just beneath her jaw. For several seconds he simply looked at her. The anger had burned out of his face, leaving something far more dangerous because it required no argument to sustain it. His gaze dropped toward her lips again.

“There.” His voice came low and uneven. “There is your explanation.”

The field at Ashford had changed character completely by the time Ser Duncan was brought before the assembled court. The same ground that had spent days swallowing splintered lances beneath cheering galleries now carried the weight of judgment, and the distinction showed everywhere: in the ranks of armed men stationed along the barriers, in Lord Ashford’s grave attention from the raised platform, in the royal banners hanging almost motionless above the lists, and in the crowd packed shoulder to shoulder around a spectacle whose outcome could end with men dead rather than merely bruised and unhorsed. Duncan stood enormous even among knights, yet the accusation against him had reduced his size to an almost irrelevant fact. He had struck Prince Aerion Targaryen while defending Tanselle from the prince’s attack, and royal blood transformed a brawl into treason with astonishing efficiency. Aerion had demanded satisfaction. Prince Maekar had supported his son’s right to answer the insult. The ancient form of a Trial of Seven had been invoked, and suddenly Duncan required six men willing to stand beside a hedge knight against princes and proven warriors. He had found some. He still lacked enough. His eyes traveled across the gathered knights, lingering upon shields, faces, men who had praised courage over cups during the tournament and now discovered fascinating reasons to examine their boots. Duncan’s frustration finally broke through the formal proceedings.

“Is there no true knight among you?” His voice carried across the field. “Is there no man here who remembers what a knight is meant to defend?” The question hung over Ashford with enough force to make several nobles shift uncomfortably.

Then a horse stepped from behind the line of royal retainers. The rider wore dark plate chased with red along the edges, his shield carrying the three-headed dragon differentiated by the markings of his branch, and for several moments the closed helm concealed everything that mattered. Conversation rippled outward as he guided his destrier into the open ground between Duncan and the royal party. Maekar straightened first. Aerion followed a heartbeat later, recognition arriving through armor before identity had been shown. The mounted knight stopped beside Duncan, reached beneath his chin, and released the fastening of his helm. He pulled it free. Brown hair flattened by the padding sprang loose around his temples, the pale-silver streak catching beneath the afternoon sun, and the murmur around the lists became a roar of names as Prince Valarr Targaryen settled the helm against his thigh. Baelor Breakspear’s eldest son. King Daeron’s grandson. The prince who stood directly behind his father in the succession.

Duncan stared upward with open disbelief. Across the field, Aerion’s face changed far more satisfyingly. His mouth parted before tightening, and the hand resting against his saddle closed around leather. Valarr looked at Duncan only briefly.

“You asked for a knight,” he said. “You have one.”

The words produced exactly the reaction Ashford wanted from them. Men struck fists against barriers. Someone shouted Valarr’s name. The story was already assembling itself around him: Baelor Breakspear’s honorable son risking himself for justice, the Young Prince defending the meaning of knighthood against the excesses of his own blood. Valarr allowed the story to spread because correcting it would have required admitting that Duncan and Tanselle occupied considerably less of his attention than the silver-haired prince staring at him from the opposite side of the field.

Aerion’s gaze sharpened when Valarr turned toward him, and the space between the cousins suddenly mattered more than the hundreds of people surrounding them.

“You?” Aerion called. His incredulity carried easily. “You mean to champion the hedge knight who struck me?”

Valarr passed his helm down to a waiting squire and adjusted the reins through his gauntlet. “I mean to take his side in the trial.”

“For the puppeteer?” Aerion asked, contempt twisting the word. Valarr’s eyes flicked once toward Tanselle, then returned to his cousin. The honest answer sat somewhere far uglier than the one expected from Baelor Breakspear’s son. Tanselle deserved justice. Duncan had shown courage. Aerion had behaved monstrously. All three truths existed, and none had been the thing that finally brought Valarr into the saddle. {{user}} had. Her future had stood behind every consideration until the trial presented him with something he had spent weeks refusing to name: a sanctioned field, weapons in their hands, and the right to strike Aerion as hard as his skill allowed. Future husband. The title had become intolerable long before this morning. Every mention of the coming marriage had scraped against him.

Every proprietary hand Aerion placed upon {{user}}, every careless remark about what his wife would do once she belonged to his household, every assumption that the betrothal guaranteed him a lifetime of access to her had fed something in Valarr that possessed very little resemblance to princely virtue. Now the realm itself had arranged Aerion opposite him beneath the laws of gods and men. Valarr could break his shield. He could throw him from the saddle. He could put him into the earth and call it justice.

His father would have understood the danger in that desire immediately. Baelor had spent Valarr’s entire life teaching him that a knight’s strength existed in service to something larger than pride, that justice became corruption the moment personal appetite began dressing itself in honorable language. Valarr knew every lesson. He rode forward anyway.

“You burned a woman’s livelihood because a puppet offended you,” he said, loud enough for the nearest galleries to hear. “You received a blow for it, and now seven men may bleed so your pride can recover from the experience.”

Aerion’s expression brightened with anger. “Careful, cousin.”

“I have been careful with you for years.” Valarr’s horse tossed its head beneath him as he drew closer. His voice lowered enough that the next words belonged primarily to Aerion. “I find myself tired of it.”

Aerion studied him, and comprehension crept across his face with the instinctive precision he possessed for other people’s weaknesses. His eyes shifted toward the royal spectators. Toward {{user}}. Then back to Valarr. The change in his expression was immediate.

“Ah.” One small sound carried more threat than a shouted accusation. “So the hedge knight has very little to do with this.”

Valarr’s jaw tightened. Aerion had found the wound and pushed directly into it.

“Does she know?” Aerion asked. His smile returned, narrow and vicious. “Does my future wife know Baelor’s precious son intends to spill family blood because he cannot bear the thought of me taking her to bed after our wedding?”

Several yards separated them, enough to keep the words from most of the crowd, and Valarr felt every one land. He could have denied it. Instead he looked at the man who would become {{user}}’s husband if every agreement surrounding them proceeded as intended, and for once the selfishness came without disguise. He wanted Aerion hurt. He wanted that beautiful, arrogant certainty shaken out of him. He wanted to see the prince who treated {{user}} as an acquisition discover that another Targaryen could meet him with equal rank and greater skill. Worst of all, some part of Valarr wanted victory to prove something that combat had no power to prove at all. That Aerion deserved her less. That Valarr deserved her more. That putting his cousin into the dirt could somehow answer a question {{user}} alone had any right to answer.

Valarr reached for the helm his squire raised back toward him.

“You have spent this tournament mistaking possession for devotion,” he said. “Perhaps someone should finally teach you the difference.”

Aerion’s face hardened. Valarr pulled the helm over his head and fastened it beneath his chin, sealing away whatever remained visible on his own. The field narrowed through the eye slit. Duncan stood among the men whose cause Valarr had publicly adopted, still believing another knight had answered his plea because chivalry demanded it. The galleries saw Baelor’s heir choosing justice over family convenience. His father would see a decision requiring explanation. {{user}} would see whatever she chose to see. Valarr alone knew how much uglier the impulse felt beneath the heraldry. He had stepped onto the field partly because Duncan deserved a champion and partly because Tanselle deserved an answer to Aerion’s cruelty, but when he looked across the lists and saw his cousin fastening his own helm, those reasons receded behind the one that made his blood surge hardest.

The herald began reciting the terms while squires brought shields, checked girths, and carried weapons toward the chosen men. Valarr rolled one shoulder beneath his plate and closed his gauntlet around the haft of his lance. Aerion mounted opposite him, bright armor catching the sun as his horse sidestepped beneath the pressure of his legs. Their eyes met through narrow openings of steel. Around them, seven men assembled against seven, the crowd roaring at each newly recognized name, yet the coming melee had already contracted into something brutally private between the cousins. Valarr lowered his lance.

“Try to stay in the saddle longer than three passes,” he called across the distance. Aerion answered by snapping down his visor. The marshal raised his signal. Valarr settled deeper into the saddle, every lesson about justice, family, restraint, and honor still perfectly intact inside him, and discovered that knowing better offered remarkably little protection against wanting something vicious. When the signal fell, he drove his horse forward with Aerion directly ahead of him.

The Trial of Seven ended in a field that scarcely resembled the lists where it had begun. Broken lances lay scattered through torn earth, shields had been split or abandoned wherever their owners fell, horses screamed against reins streaked with foam, and men moved through the wreckage calling for squires, water, healers, and names that received answers with varying degrees of urgency. Duncan had survived. That fact reached him slowly through the pounding in his skull and the blood drying beneath his armor, and once he understood it, his attention turned immediately toward the prince who had ridden onto the field for him. Valarr had remained mounted through most of the fighting. Duncan remembered seeing him drive Aerion backward beneath a savage exchange of blows, remembered the Young Prince taking a strike high against the helm and answering it with enough force to stagger his opponent, remembered losing sight of him when three horses collided near the edge of the melee. Now Valarr lay several yards away on his back with two squires crouched beside him. His helm had been removed and discarded in the dirt. Blood threaded through the brown hair at his temple and darkened the pale-silver streak where it had run from somewhere beneath his scalp, yet his eyes remained open, one blue and one blue-amber tracking the movement above him with stubborn awareness. Duncan dropped beside him heavily enough for his armor to bite into the ground.

“A maester!” he bellowed over his shoulder. “Fetch the bloody maester!” One of the squires sprinted toward the pavilions.

Valarr’s mouth moved. Duncan bent closer and caught something about having heard him perfectly well the first time. “Save your breath, Your Grace.”

Valarr’s brow furrowed despite the blood. “Prince,” he corrected faintly. Even now. Duncan stared at him for a heartbeat, then shouted for the maester again.

Valarr heard the field in pieces. Duncan’s voice arrived with tremendous clarity whenever the hedge knight decided everyone within three counties required the same instruction; everything else came strangely distant, as though Ashford had shifted across a body of water while he remained behind. The sky above him looked offensively blue. He concentrated on that for a while because turning his head sent a deep pressure through his skull and because the faces leaning over him had begun acquiring blurred edges. Someone pressed folded linen against the side of his head. Someone else worked at the buckles of his breastplate. Valarr tried to tell them that his ribs hurt considerably more than his chest required such enthusiasm about, though the sentence lost its shape somewhere between thought and speech. His fingers felt cold inside his gauntlets. That seemed absurd beneath an afternoon sun hot enough to bake the churned earth around him. He flexed them once, then again, testing the strange heaviness spreading through his limbs, and the second attempt required more effort. Duncan was saying something about the maester coming. Valarr closed his eyes for what felt like a moment and opened them when another shadow crossed the sun.

This face he knew immediately. {{user}} stood above him, real enough for sunlight to catch along her hair and terror to sharpen every familiar feature, yet Valarr stared at her as though the blow to his head had finally produced something worth suffering for. A strained sound escaped him, half breath and half laugh, and pain answered through his ribs.

“Seven hells,” he murmured. His eyes traveled across her face with a concentration far greater than he had managed for anyone else. “Have I started seeing visions?” Another weak, breathless laugh caught in his throat. “Daeron gets prophecy. Aemon gets books. Apparently I get you.”

Duncan shifted nearby, perhaps trying to make room, perhaps suddenly discovering that some conversations belonged beyond even his considerable reach. Valarr barely registered him. The entire tournament had trained him to locate {{user}} among hundreds of faces, and now the habit required no effort at all. His gaze held hers while another wave of dizziness rolled through him.

“You look very convincing.” His hand moved against the dirt as though intending to reach toward her, yet the weight of his arm defeated the attempt halfway. His fingers settled uselessly beside him. “Come closer. I should like to determine whether my dying imagination has finally learned generosity.”

The word dying changed the faces around him. Valarr saw it and almost smiled again. Men became remarkably offended whenever the injured person named the possibility everyone else had already considered. The maester had reached them now and dropped beside Valarr with a leather case, immediately asking questions about the blow, his sight, his breathing, whether he could feel his feet. Valarr answered two before losing patience with the intrusion.

“Later.”

The maester informed him with considerable firmness that later depended upon being allowed to work now, then began examining the wound beneath his hair. Valarr’s face tightened when probing fingers found the damaged place, and his vision flashed white for an instant. When it cleared, {{user}} remained there. That mattered disproportionately. His breathing had become shallower, each inhale requiring negotiation with something inside his chest, and the cold had climbed from his hands toward his arms.

“I spent the entire tournament avoiding this conversation,” he said, words slower now. “Rather impressive commitment, when you consider how badly I wanted to have it.” His gaze slipped away for a second before finding hers again. “I had speeches prepared. Several versions. One was honorable enough that Father might have approved. Another involved telling you that Aerion was an ass and trusting you to draw the appropriate conclusions.” His mouth twitched. “That one was shorter.”

The maester called for more cloth. Duncan rose and began ordering people around again. Valarr heard the urgency gathering around him and understood enough of it to abandon whatever dignity remained useful. He had spent days measuring every glance toward {{user}}, every conversation, every accidental touch, every ugly surge of jealousy whenever Aerion called her his future wife. He had treated desire like something discipline could starve into extinction. Lying in Ashford’s dirt with blood cooling against his neck made the entire effort suddenly ridiculous.

“I love you.” The confession came plainly, stripped of ceremony because he lacked the strength for decoration. His eyes stayed on hers. “There. Gods, that was easier than I made it.” His breath shuddered out. “I love you, and I have loved you long enough to become thoroughly unpleasant about it”

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