❝ There was a feeling of inevitability when I met you. And our lives were fated to converge like some cosmic dance. And I think I had to break your heart and you had to break mine. ❞
As Cressida Black's lungs ceased to draw breath, Aurelia Martell's...
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Being back in the Red Keep after having tasted freedom in her homeland and in the Stepsones is, admittedly, an adjustment. Once more, the food she is served is bland and tasteless and she is surrounded by men who see women as nothing more than adornment and a tool for childbearing.
Women who'd previously had no problem with her now look upon her with suspicion and false smiles. She feels the hairs on her neck and arms rise when they interact and she knows deep inside she has very few friends in the capital. They are wolves, and lions, and foxes, and snakes — beasts, all of them. They smile, bright and blooming when it suits them, but behind is the promise of blood.
I am a Martell, she thinks. I am the sun. All beasts bow to the sun.
And, yet, Aurelia becomes a Targaryen in a Targaryen court.
She must do so, even if she hates it. Her daughters and the child growing in her womb are Targaryens and they only have her for protection. The court is filled with vipers who would not hesitate to use her girls and they are only babes. Aurelia must become a Targaryen in order for them to be safe.
She wears her thick, dark hair in the Northern style, piled on top of her head with a single braid draped around the curve of her breast. She has not let it down in public since she left the Stepsones, and in court, out of the corner of her eyes, when she glimpses the man her husband so hates, Otto Hightower, eyeing her with grim approval, she lets her mouth curl, and quenches the fire in the pit of stomach, her Dornish soul.
She wears heavy dresses in the Northern style, of samite and cloth-of-gold and Myrish lace, but no more silks, no — she does not wear any more silks, any more veils, not even in the privacy of her own chambers. Daemon has married a Dornish princess, yes, but Dornish princesses will not survive long in King's Landing. Once, she leaned more into her Swann heritage; now she must do the same. Aurelia puts her silks and her veils away, and dutifully, every morning, tells Maddalyn to braid her hair, and allows Keira and Liane to help her into the heavy folds of her dresses, red and black and gold. She is a Targaryen now. She must be.
━━ ⋅𖥔⋅ ━━✶━━ ⋅𖥔⋅ ━━
Harwin noticed her in the first week the Princess Aurelia returned to court — a tall, slim woman with dark hair and expressive blue eyes. Someone like her was hard to miss and in the days after the Princess returned, he was determined to catch more glimpses of her and her ladies, hoping to see her again.
Over the days he learned that she was from the Dornish Marches. The only Stormlander amongst Princess Aurelia's ladies.
Although there were others who served the Princess, three with the official title of her lady-in-waiting, Harwin only had eyes for her.
It had been nearly a moon when they were finally pushed together by circumstance. The King was throwing a feast to celebrate their return to court and Harwin was eager to pull her into the floor, heart beating strong inside his chest. The woman accepted with a bright smile, looking up at him with flushed cheeks. She was tall, but he was taller still.
