Enigmas | Aemond Targaryen

FOUR

"You've got to stop this."

Startled, I loosened my good grip on the bowstring and unleashed prematurely. The slender snow-feathered silver-tipped arrow went whistling out, but struck the human silhouette on the wooden neck, bouncing off its leathery hide and falling harmlessly to the training grounds. Frustration spiked inside me. I spun to face Aemond with a scowl. "Is this truly how we are going to get along henceforward? With you stalking after me?"

For a while Aemond didn't say anything, just surveying me with eerie intensity.

Not too far away, Jace was drilling with a blunt-edged tourney blade under supervision of that sycophant Ser Criston, while Aegon stood idly against the wall, thriving himself into downright boredom. Every fleeting moment Jace inadvertently extruded from his gritted teeth some pained noises, I felt an anger penetrating deep into my stomach, curling low and heavy at the bottom pit. Hooking my fingers around the handle of my double-curved dragonbone bow anew, I slid another arrow from the quiver, nocked, drew, imagining the training dummy to be Crispin the Child-Torturer, and let it whizz. This time, I won't miss. And I didn't.

The arrow pierced the heart of the training dummy clean through.

I might be half the swordsmen my brothers and uncles were, but I was twice the archer, always.

"Staggering shooting." Aemond said rather indifferently, arms crossing over his silvery-armor-clad chest, a transparently false smile plastering over his mouth.

"For the love of gods, Aemond," I lashed out, grimacing. "Speak what you have to say, and be done with it."

"You've been avoiding me, Visenya." Aemond blurted out. "For reasons I cannot comprehend. And I'm done letting you do it arbitrarily so."

"Arbitrarily so is your groundless allegation." I countered, pulling up another arrow from the quiver, swiveling it around my fingers as I stubbornly affixed my gaze to the training dummy, refusing eye contact with Aemond. "I have done no such thing. We collide with one another each day, do we not? I know of no reason why you should think as such."

"Yet, you won't talk to me. Never since I —" The third arrow I released thunked into the previous one, splitting it in half. I shot at Aemond a look that should have the same devastating effect. "Don't."

Aemond halted his tongue, the muscles in his jaw tightening. A surge of hot regret swept over me. Aemond must saw it in my face, too. He ventured a step or two nearer. "Don't." I repeated, without sense of what I actually meant. Neither my breath nor the beating of my heart was steady and calm any longer. Sweat cloaked my palms whilst a heat rose in my cheeks. I had meant to harden my heart and drive Aemond away, reasoning that no enticing political expedients at all would come out of the two of us on intimate terms, but words strangled in my throat as his hand folded over mine with the gentlest of touches. "Don't what, Visenya?" Aemond asked, mellow as the voice was, I shivered, with a nausea seizing my gut.

Don't what, exactly, indeed? Don't come closer; don't start what you know would doom us both in the end; don't take thought to offer me ungrudging affection in a fickle and treacherous world men succumbed to power and ambition as if moth to flare, all the court's a stage and we mummers complied with naught but political savvy and sophistication; don't disillusion me into musing on the possibility of a future for ardor, not gain and advantages... All these, yet, my traitorous tongue withheld to utter not a sound. My whole body stiffened against Aemond, conflicts must be written all over me that Aemond gave me a little squeeze as though encouraging me to speak up.

I stood still. I didn't even hear the rapid crunching of footsteps coming my way until I felt a sudden tight grip on my sleeve. Lowering my eyes, I saw Luke with tears brimming in his big brown eyes. "Visenya," he cried out in a shrill and shaky voice. "It's — it's mother, she was bleeding! The new baby! Mother was all bleeding and Maester Gerardys said it won't stop!"