Aemond Targaryen

The flames of Harrenhal had barely cooled when Aemond Targaryen took stock of his conquest. The Strongs were ash and memory now, their blood baked into the ancient stones they had foolishly claimed as their own. He walked the blackened halls with the measured stride of a man who had taken everything and regretted nothing, his sapphire eye catching the guttering torchlight as servants—those few spared—scrambled to clear the debris of his victory.

It was in the godswood that he found him.

The boy stood beneath the heart tree as if the slaughter had been a mere inconvenience, his face smudged with soot, his tunic torn at the shoulder. A kitchen boy, perhaps, or a squire to some minor household knight. It did not matter. What mattered was the face beneath the grime—a face that stopped Aemond mid-stride, his hand falling away from the hilt of his sword.

Beautiful was a word for maidens in songs. This was something else. The boy had the kind of beauty that made poets weep and kings forsake their thrones, the sort of face sculptors chased in marble and never quite captured. A beautiful face, a mouth like a wound, eyes the color of—no, Aemond would decide their color later, when the light was better. For now, they simply watched him, wary but unbroken.

"You are not a Strong," Aemond said. It was not a question.

"No, my prince."

The voice was steady. That pleased him more than it should have.

Aemond did not smile. He rarely did. But something shifted in his expression, a subtle rearrangement of sharp features that might have been satisfaction. He shrugged off his riding cloak—black wool lined with crimson silk, still smelling of Vhagar's hide—and draped it over the boy's thin shoulders.

"Come. You will attend me."

He did not ask.

The whispers began before the week was out. They called the boy Aemond's shadow, his ward, his war prize. The soldiers snickered when they thought themselves unheard, making crude jests about the prince keeping such a pretty creature so close. Ser Criston Cole, ever the blunt instrument, had the audacity to raise the matter directly—something about appearances, about the Faith, about the optics of a prince of the blood keeping a boy in his private chambers.

Aemond had fixed him with that singular violet eye, the sapphire glittering cold beside it, and said simply: "When I desire your counsel on matters of my household, I will ask for it."

Cole did not raise the subject again.

In truth, the arrangement was simpler than the court imagined. Aemond was not a man given to tenderness—Aegon had seen to that, with his pig and his cruelty and their mother's endless, exhausted sighs. But silence was a language he spoke fluently, and the boy understood it. He did not chatter. He did not flatter. He simply was, a quiet presence at Aemond's elbow as the prince drafted letters of conquest to his mother and his grandsire, as he planned the next movements of the greens' campaign, as he sat alone in the shattered great hall with naught but candlelight and the distant roar of Vhagar somewhere beyond the walls.

The boy was not a prisoner, not quite. Aemond gave him chambers adjoining his own, fine clothes befitting a prince's companion, a seat at his right hand during the meager feasts the half-ruined castle could provide. When lords came to bend the knee, they found the boy there, unremarked upon but unmistakably present, a silent fixture in the dragon prince's shadow. Some assumed him a bastard of the riverlands. Others, a hostage of noble birth whose identity Aemond kept hidden for strategic reasons. None dared ask directly.

At night, when the haunted halls of Harrenhal groaned and settled around them, Aemond spoke little. But occasionally, in the long silences before the hearth, a few clipped words would escape him—remarks on the campaign, on the incompetence of lords who swore fealty only to scheme behind his back, on the tiresome burden of a crown worn by a brother who did not deserve it. He did not seek comfort. He did not require a response. He merely permitted the boy to hear what others never would, a rare concession from a man who trusted no one.

"This war will consume them all," Aemond said one night, his tone flat, almost bored. "Aegon, Daeron, our “sweet” sister Rhaenyra. Every last one of them. It is simply a matter of order."

He did not look at the boy. He watched the fire eat through another log, the flames reflected in the polished sapphire where his left eye should have been.

"You, however, are not a claimant to the Iron Throne. That makes you less likely to burn."

Let them talk. Let Aegon snicker and his mother purse her lips. Let the court whisper and the septons preach. The boy was his, and Aemond Targaryen did not surrender what was his.

---

The hour was late, the castle sunk into that particular silence that only Harrenhal could produce—a silence heavy with ghosts and old grief. Aemond stood by the tall windows of his private chambers, his silver hair unbound and falling past his shoulders. The fire had burned low, casting long shadows across the stone floor.

He turned his head slightly, the sapphire catching a sliver of amber light.

The adjoining door stood ajar, as it often did. The boy lingered in the threshold—as he often did.

Aemond regarded him for a long moment. Then, with a faint tilt of his chin, he gestured toward the space beside him.

"Come here."

The words were quiet. Commanding, as all his words were. But there was something beneath them tonight—something unreadable, coiled and waiting, like Vhagar stirring in her sleep. The prince did not repeat himself. He simply waited, one hand resting on the windowsill, the other hanging loose at his side, fingers drumming once against his thigh before going still.