Chapter 5: The Day After

“I ask the full backing of the crown in shutting down these pits,” Daemon finishes.

“You shall have it. See it done,” Rhaenyra pronounces with a smile. “Now—”

“Your Grace,” Otto Hightower interjects, right on time. “Let us consider this for a moment.”

“What is there to consider, Lord Hand?” Rhaenyra inquiries. “Children are being brutalized for amusement in my capital. The City Watch is there to preserve the peace of the city. It should never have been allowed to continue this long.”

“The enthusiasm with which the Prince has resumed his role as Commander is admirable—”

It goes as Daemon should have anticipated. Otto is ready with many objections. Technically, no law is being broken, because as the Lord Hand understands it, the children are orphans, in which case, they are being given room and board and are also paid, which is the right of the people to work to feed themselves, and the rest are managed by their parents, and it is the prerogative of parents to dispose of their children as they see fit. Oh, the queen could order it shut down regardless, yes, but it would be viewed by some as an act of tyranny. The queen is young and her gentle heart is admirable but she does not yet understand the way the world works. Moreover, Flea Bottom is calm at the moment. The last thing they need before her coronation is to destabilize the city, and of course, this matters, as Her Grace has rejected being crowned by the High Septon in Oldtown as Aegon had been.

-

“I know nothing.” Rhaenyra does not whimper the words now but spits them as she rages around the godswood that afternoon. “I am queen. I have councilors to advise me. But how am I to choose among their advice when it differs, which it usually does, if I have no independent knowledge to determine who is correct?”

“Don’t you trust me?” Daemon demands. “I have seen those pits—”

“Of course I trust you. I agreed with you immediately because I trust you. It was exactly as my father did with Otto. He trusted him implicitly and never had to form his own judgment. His judgment was Otto’s, as you learned to your cost.”

Is that what wanted with her, to be her Otto? Isn’t that what he’d wanted with Viserys? To be trusted. To be relied on. As Otto was? A trust that meant distrust of all others, a reliance that must be total. With Viserys at least it had been an impossible dream. But being mastered, as Daemon was—shouldn’t that earn you something?

“I'm not asking for you to make my judgment yours, generally, but in this instance—”

“And what about the next? I will be back to the exact same place.”

“Monarchs must delegate. They must rely on the expertise of others. You gave me the city and asked me to secure it for you. There is no dishonor in trusting me on this.”

“But for you, there was some basis to judge their expertise. You were Master of Laws, Master of Coin—”

“Not for long.”

“Still, as heir, you were trained. You were given responsibilities. Perhaps if I had longer as heir that would have come in time, but considering I spent my evenings helping father with his damn model—” Rhaenyra cuts herself off. “I treasure those memories now. I do.”

“I spent my evenings when I was your age in every brothel in the Street of Silk, so it was hardly—”

“Exactly!”

“I'm not sure how much that helped me with knowing whether I should raise the grain tax or not.”

“You knew the city, its inhabitants. And you weren't just in Flea Bottom. You’ve seen far more of the realm than I did on that one tour with my mother. You've traveled all over Essos.”

“And yet I was determined unfit to rule. A taste for rough company and foreign places was a mark against me, if anything.”

“To them. But you were a prince. You did what princes do. To train them for what they will do. The training of princesses is quite different. It's not even adequate for what they will do.”

“Weren't you taught the arms of all the great houses, who is married to who, who has a blood feud with who?”

Daemon agreed this was inadequate. It was no training as Visenya or Rhaenys had received, to allow them to truly be of service to their king. It was he who’d had to insist to his brother Rhaenyra be taught High Valyrian. His grandmother had certainly possessed far more knowledge and ability than that, but he gets Rhaenyra’s point. She’d gained it at Jaehaerys’ side and by his leave.

“As if you weren't taught that. It's important. It's just not enough. I wasn't taught anything about sex.”

“I don't think that is a princess’s destiny.”

“It's their only destiny. We are to marry, to provide heirs.”

“You don't need sex for that,” Daemon scoffs. “You’re supposed to just lie back and take it.”

(Rhea, lying back on the bed, staring up at the ceiling, naked and corpse-still. Come on, get it over with.)

“Yes. Unless you—can’t.”

“It shouldn’t be that way. Fucking is a pleasure.”

“And you knew that when you went into your marriage. How did you learn about sex? It was all those evenings in brothels.”

“You think that is what men learn in brothels? They learn to take their own pleasure, maybe.”

“So you have no idea how to please a woman?”

“I didn’t say that. I’ll say it took effort on my part. A brothel teaches you how to get your cock wet and brutalize women—”

“If that is what the men who are to be our husbands learn we at least ought to be educated in their education.”

“Will that be your first act as monarch? To open a school for aristocratic girls in a whorehouse?”

“Perhaps!” She bites her lip and looks down at her hands. “You did learn somewhere. I—last night. I’d never…no one told me I could feel—I’m a baby,” Rhaenyra says, stepping closer and looking up at him from under her lashes.

Daemon knows what she’s asking. She knows nothing about anything. There is that sick thrill of satisfaction in it. She knows nothing, and she has only Daemon to teach her. If she trusts him now, how easy it would be to make that dependence—total.

There is another feeling. The urge to keep her safe, precious. He could make it good for her. He knows this. He could take care of her. If only Viserys had granted him his wish—when he’d held her for the very first time, although six-and-ten, he’d almost been in tears at how tiny she was, how vulnerable, how dear. Betrothe her to me, Daemon had burst out. I’ll take good care of her, I promise.

You were that small, when father placed you in my arms, Viserys had said.

Rhaenyra knows nothing of those streets where children claw at each other. But she knew the Red Keep, her own chamber, where it hurt happened.

She is right again. On his wedding night, laughable failure that it turned out to be, he had at least known a thing or two, and in the end he’d been able to mount Caraxes and leave.

He hadn’t, for two whole years, because Viserys had commanded him to stay, and when he left although he could have flown anywhere in the wide world, and eventually did, above the pyramids of Slaver’s Bay, over the Great Grass Sea with the vast khalasars moving through it only tiny specks to his eye, up the green bend of the Rhoyne fringed by its ghost-girded ruins, first—he’d gone home.

“Yes. You are my baby. So it's on me to show you, and I will.” Rhaenyra relaxes and sways towards him, eyes fluttering shut. Daemon swallows. “Do you still have the page boy clothing Mysaria sent you, when you accompanied Alicent?”

His niece’s eyes snap back open. “Yes? I do. Why?”

“I’ll show you the city. As I once saw it.”

The—was it disappointment?—vanishes from her face, pushed out by a brightening excitement. “Really? I was so anxious last time I barely noticed anything.”

“You remember the way through the passages though, right? Meet me there tonight, just after the changing of the guard. You should see your city, my queen.”

-

“The night we burned my mother and brother, you came here,” Rhaenyra says.

Her tone is even, neither angry or disgusted. Her eyes wide as saucers—as they had been all night as they wandered through the alleyways of Flea Bottom, at the whores whistling at them from doorways, the carousing young men that travel in rapacious packs, old women offering to read their fortunes, hawkers selling meat on sticks, until, worried about the strain on them, Daemon had thoughtlessly made the promise it would not be the last time she saw these sights—she takes in the writhing bodies around them. Mysaria waves a serving girl over and offers them cups of wine from the tray she carries.

(Where else would he have gone? He’d resided here, for the most part, the last two years of Aemma’s life. His goodsister, dead of her last child, her only girl tear-stained but safe asleep in her bed, would not have approved of such a wake. It had been around the time his pretty young cousin began to swell with her first babe that he’d walked out of the gates of the Red Keep one night with some of his fellow squires and realized no one had any interest in stopping him. The heir for a day: the only thing approaching a eulogy he’d been asked to offer, the whores and lickspittles he offered it to key to the insult.

A bit earlier, peeling away from the crowd that watched a pair of Braavosi acrobats tumbling, hand-in-hand, laughing, Daemon’s ever-present alertness had sharpened when a hooded figure stepped into their path before the hood was pushed back and he recognized Mysaria.

“Lady Misery!” Rhaenyra said.

“I trust you are enjoying your evening, Your Grace? I would like to offer you my hospitality.”

Rhaenyra looked at Daemon; he’d shaken his head. He was as surprised as she was by Mysaria’s sudden appearance. But he supposed it was only a matter of time before Rhaenyra thought to demand he secure the invitation Mysaria was now offering.

His niece tripped after Mysaria, the stream of questions she’d thrown Daemon’s way all night directed at this fascinating new target as they entered the Street of Silk.

How many golden dragons? One hundred? Do they really—in their mouths? She looks so young, how old do you think she is?

“Young, my queen. Many are younger. There are many that enter the skin-trade before the age of ten years.”

Rhaenyra fell silent. She does not ask how old Mysaria had been. “Foolish questions. Who enters them into the trade? Are they orphans? Or their parents—in the pits—”

“They are not foolish questions. They are just the first questions. But behind each one, there are more, yes?”

With that they'd reached the front door of the brothel and followed Mysaria in.)

“How have you found your city so far?” Mysaria asks.

Rhaenyra slowly tears her attention away from one of Mysaria’s girls tumbling into the lap of a green-haired Tyroshi merchant.

“It is—overwhelming.”

“Mhm. You seemed to enjoy the dancing bear.”

“Where do they keep it, do you think?” Then she squints suspiciously. “Were you having us followed?”

“Not specifically. But I know many things that happen in this city.”

“Oh. I do thank you for sharing your knowledge when I requested. For I wish to learn about the city I rule from. I’d never seen it except from the window of a wheelhouse until…that time you offered your assistance. Which is why I again…” Rhaenyra waggles a hand at herself, to indicate her resumed disguise.

“So you got your uncle to show you.”

“I am a poor teacher in some respects, but I have something to offer here, perhaps.”

“The Prince of the City,” Mysaria salutes, raising her cup at him in a toast.

“The Lord of Flea Bottom,” Daemon replies, echoing the gesture.

“He should be a good teacher. He was here more than the Red Keep.”

This again.

“After I put the baby to bed,” he says, heedless of Mysaria watching them. She’s seen far stranger than anything he can put before her. Why should Rhaenyra be upset? Hadn’t her childhood grown more peaceful when he stopped stumbling into the keep to sit down to breakfast still drunk, little Rhaenyra starting to cry into her porridge as Viserys ordered Ser Westerling to dunk his head in a bucket of icy water and haul him off to his chambers to sleep it off?

“Now the baby makes you take her out with you.”

“Only fair. You can take me out of the cupboard any time now, remember?”

“Or put you back in,” Rhaenyra mutters. Then she turns back to Mysaria and says, “How did you meet Daemon? He would never tell me.”

“He was drinking here and chose me to keep him company for the night. Then he contracted my services on an exclusive basis. What I saved from what he paid me allowed me to buy this place when I left his service,” Mysaria recounts blandly.

“Really? I heard you were a dancing girl that caught his eye…” She trails off, appearing abashed at the romanticism of this. “Gossip isn’t reliable, I suppose.”

A couple staggers past, and the man palms the girl’s breast out of her thin gown and starts to suck it before they stumble into one of the private rooms. Rhaenyra looks on with steady interest. Mysaria observes her.

“You are taking all this with aplomb.”

“I am a married woman, am I not?”

“Still, all this can be…overwhelming, I imagine. As well, forgive me, I have heard…”

“What?” Rhaenyra demands.

“The Prince Consort’s tastes are a matter of common gossip. Of course, gossip is not always reliable.”

“It’s always powerful, though. Sometimes it’s even right. I am a silly little virgin, Lady Misery.”

“There is no shame in that.”

“There is when you are the queen, and the realm awaits an heir.” Her protective fury melts away. “We tried. It isn’t my husband’s fault. It—it hurt,” Rhaenyra admits with that familiar miserable flush of shame, as if she is confessing some horrible defect.

“And so your sweet young husband stopped,” Mysaria murmurs. There’s a look on her face that seems equal parts wistful and condescending. How rare it is, that another’s pain ever gets anyone to stop doing anything.

And how little is such restraint rewarded. “I wish he hadn’t,” Rhaenyra grumbles. “I wish it was over with.”

“You need an heir,” Mysaria agrees. “Your husband will not hurt you. So it must be made not to hurt. I can help.”

“You can?”

“I can teach you about pleasure, my queen. Your own, and your husband’s.”

Now that it is not aimed at him and now that he is so filled with Rhaenyra that even Mysaria’s vast charms are a matter of abstract interest only, he can observe with admiration for that which is masterfully done how she kindles her allure to a burn and directs it with precision. The heat in Rhaenyra’s cheeks is no longer from humiliation. He has led her right into the trap. Mysaria had severed her fate from Daemon’s when it was clear he would never be king, but here is the queen, and Mysaria could help give her an heir.

“Mysaria—” he starts warningly.

This is probably a very bad idea. Gossip about the queen learning the art of love in a pleasure house was one of the last things her newborn reign needed, although whether Mysaria took her upstairs or not, she had the power to start that rumor and the basis for it because Daemon had brought the queen to the pleasure house in the first place. Perhaps Daemon should have kept her in the Red Keep and shown her what passion was in her darkened chamber.

“You have taken on her education, have you not? Let me help.”

Daemon watches Rhaenyra, who appears as intrigued as she had been stumbling through the busy, heady city. Curious, bold, hungry.

“She demanded education. I simply obeyed. It’s up to her.”

Rhaenyra nods, and places her palm in Mysaria’s outstretched hand.

Mysaria would take good care of her. Perhaps trusting a whore of uncertain origin who clearly had her own ends is a rashness of the kind all the old men around the council table would condemn. Their eyes meet, and fuck what anyone else might say—he knows he wouldn’t trust Rhaenyra with anyone else.

“I’ll wait here,” Daemon begins, and then a small hand flies out to grasp his arm. The sigh that explodes from him is resigned. He doesn’t even allow her to voice her now anticipated plea. “Very well. If Lady Misery does not object to my presence.”

“Fine. Chaperone your pupil,” Lady Misery responds with the one-shouldered shrug of the unflappable professional.

The inner chamber of the suite of rooms he’d been shown into before, Mysaria lighting candles from the taper she held. Rhaenyra still held Daemon’s hand, having gripped it on the stairs.

“Alright?” he whispers.

“I want to know,” she says.

Had Daemon known somehow when he took his niece’s hand tonight that this is where they would end up? Not this, exactly, but Rhaenyra and he in one of the rooms in this city where others' cries or pleasure or pain seep through the walls? He’d imagined it in exile, yearning for her, yearning to be bold enough to destroy his brother. Why not combine them? He would come back and he’d seduce her, get his hands all over his brother’s precious, neglected girl. Daemon would get his filth on her, in her. He’d break her to his cock in her childhood bed right under Viserys’ nose. He’d bring it home again. Or he’d drag her down into it with him, to the place whence he’d fled his home, the regions where he’d found his element. He’d muddy her, mark her, unloose her. Daemon’s foulness on his darling or undoing her, making her in his image by teaching her his own foulness, showing her the path?

Mysaria comes towards them. She smiles at Rhaenyra and reaches up to pull off her cap now they are behind a locked door. “Have you ever been kissed, my queen?”

Rhaenyra glances at him. “Yes.”

“Kissed well?”

She licks her lips. “I haven’t been kissed enough to know.”

Daemon thinks Mysaria’s laugh might be genuinely charmed. He feels inexplicably proud, as if he is really somehow responsible for Rhaenyra’s existence.

His chest tightens as Mysaria holds Rhaenyra’s face still and kisses her gently. It is a pleasing sight: the confidence from Mysaria, the initial hesitance from his niece melting under that assurance into eager response. Rhaenyra doesn’t let go of his hand.

When the kiss ends, Rhaenyra giggles.

“There is some more knowledge for you, Your Grace.”

Rhaenyra darts forward rapidly to kiss her again, her free hand hovering uncertainly as if she wants to touch but isn’t sure it’s allowed, and Mysaria indulges her for a moment before she pulls back just as abruptly, a little abashed. “I haven’t kissed a woman before.”

“And how do you find it?”

“It’s—nice,” Rhaenyra says, the pink tint on her cheekbones deepening to red.

“Mm. May I?” Mysaria asks, with her hands tugging Rhaenyra’s shirt from her waistband.

She darts a glance at Daemon again and then withdraws her hand from his to fumble the shirt over her head, Mysaria stepping in to free her from the neck when she gets tangled in it. Then without further prompting Rhaenyra shoves her pants down her hips and steps out of them.

Her chin just out and she clenches her fists at her sides.

He looks. Even lovelier than she had been, as much woman as girl.

Mysaria gestures for Rhaenyra to sit on the edge of her bed and kneels before her. Rhaenyra holds out her hand to him. Daemon swiftly disrobes. There’s no helping it; Mysaria would kill him if he even thought about sitting on her bed with his clothes on. Rhaenyra’s eyes flick frankly up and down his body and then with several last fascinated focused glances—she’d seen Laenor’s cock, surely, but perhaps only briefly—she gazes expectantly at Mysaria. He comes and sits beside her and she slips her hand back in his.

Daemon thinks the blankness on Mysaria’s face has a certain forced quality.

“Have you ever tried to pleasure yourself?”

“I have.”

“What handsome knight helped you figure that out?”

At this another jerk of Rhaenyra’s gaze towards him. “It felt good, but I didn’t…I got bored. And my hand cramped. Isn’t something supposed to happen?”

“You’d know if it had. That’s alright. For women it can sometimes be difficult to get there on their own.”

“They have to wait for men to help?”

He supposes her doubt was fair. Her wedding night with Laenor, rocking on her hand in front of her uncle, and she hadn’t come once.

Mysaria laughs. “Sometimes they might need the knowledge of what passion feels like. Then the memory of it is like a map one can follow.”

“It will have to be memory. My husband is not here to learn any of this,” Rhaenyra says, breath coming faster as Mysaria plays with her.

“No. But you will know it, and how to please yourself.” Mysaria removes her hand from Rhaenyra’s breast to guide the girl’s fingers through giving her own nipple a pinch. “And you can show your husband how to touch you.”

“Oh. Well. He is…”

“He prefers men, yes? Desire is not always necessary.”

“Yes,” Daemon says sourly. “If he can fuck you, he can make sure you enjoy it.”

“It would be nice, though—to be desired.”

“Desire can sometimes be quite loathsome, my queen.”

No softening addendum to this hard statement is offered. Her gaze on Rhaenyra is sharp. Daemon thinks this isn't typical of such an introduction to pleasure here. Oh, my prince, the girl had sighed rapturously beneath his feverish, clumsy rutting, and even then Daemon had known how equally it could be a desperate, calculating lie or a truth she either was grateful for or disgusted by or somehow both.

“I suppose that's true,” Rhaenyra says as the movements of her hand make her squirm a little, the consideration in her eyes dimming as they flash down to where Mysaria’s gown clings to her own breasts.

“As a young princess you were pursued by many. I'm sure the presence of their desire would not necessarily have made bedding some of them any easier.”

“No,” Rhaenyra laughs. “It could be worse.”

“It could also be better. After all, it can be nice to desire. Do you desire me?”

“You are very beautiful.” The motions of her fingers slacken as she says doubtfully, “I don't think I desire Laenor, though.”

“You don't know? Have you not desired enough to know?”

When Rhaenyra looks in his direction this time, her gaze finds his. “I don’t—I don't desire him.”

“I cannot fix that. But desire or being desired are not always necessary for pleasure. Although I do agree—it is nice.”

Then she lowers her head to Rhaenyra’s cunt.

After a moment filled with slick sounds and overwhelmed sighs, Rhaenyra says, “What was your first time like?”

At least she’s a bit breathless, but Daemon, bemused, taps her on the nose and says, “Mysaria must not be doing a good enough job if you can think about that.”

Mysaria is doing such an expert job that glaring at him does not even necessitate pausing her ministrations.

“N-oo. Ah! Maybe you were as much a virgin on your wedding night as I was.”

It might actually have gone better for Daemon if he had been. “Maybe. Perhaps stories of my debauchery are greatly exaggerated.”

“Oh, oh—I know that’s not true. Everyone says—”

“Who’s everyone? We’ve established you shouldn’t trust gossip. And I never shared such filth with you.”

This was despite Rhaenyra’s best efforts to convince him otherwise. She’d danced around him at two-and-ten, lobbing questions at him. What’s she like, your dancing girl? She’s not from Westeros, is she? Is she as beautiful as they say? She’d been furious when he only winked and denied her, hating even then to not know, and it had been some work to charm her out of the resultant sulk. But Daemon had, as always, and he’d picked her up and spun her around, her shrieks of childish laughter sweet in his ears, and then there Viserys had been in the doorway.

“How old were you, when you first”—a needy, desperate whine—“visited a brothel like this?”

“Four-and-ten,” he confesses.

“Really? Uncle—” she starts, before it breaks off into an overwhelmed moan. Daemon is pointedly not looking down her body at what is causing her to make that noise, but he doesn’t need to. He closes his eyes and it fills every inch of his mind with a bloody haze. He could kill something. It should be him making her sound like that, and he can’t stop the images of exactly what he would do to earn them: parting the slick seam of her with his thumbs and tracing his tongue along the tender opening he’s given himself. Gifting teasing kisses to her little clit until it was hard and ready enough for slow sucks, offering an anchoring grip just like this as she pulses against his tongue.

Rhaenyra squeezes enough that he opens his eyes again. Her head is turned so she looks right at him and he can’t help but return her wondering smile. If it was Daemon who was the cause for the way she grins with pride as if she’s discovered something, as if no one has ever felt this way before, he wouldn’t know it, he wouldn’t get to see it, not like this, in vivid detail. Every twitch of that muscle in her cheek before her lips jump upward in a smile, the acrobatic leaps and dives of her eyebrows as she gasps, every almost soundless laugh, disbelieving, delighted.

Only good memories for her, and Daemon will be in them. It seems that can’t be helped. And Daemon—he will remember this.

“Will you kiss me?” Rhaenyra asks hoarsely. “I liked it when you kissed me.”

His eyes burn as he nods and bends over her to set his lips against hers, his palm releasing hers to cradle her cheek. As her cunt opens to Mysaria’s mouth her own mouth opens to Daemon’s with a pleased sigh. She tangles her hand in his hair and he can feel the tension building in her in the trembling mouth under his, in the sharp pulls of her fingers. She breaks away and Daemon rests his forehead against the side of her head as she gasps, “Oh, oh, uncle, Mysaria—that’s. That’s so nice,” and both Daemon and Mysaria laugh at the incongruous understated sweetness of the word. He’s never thought of it that way, but another person bringing you pleasure—yes, it can be nice, so nice.

With her thumb and forefinger encircling his wrist she guides his fingers from her face into her suckling mouth, and Daemon can’t stop the noise of relief it pulls from him. Inside his baby again as her lashes clump with tears for a new reason. She shakes, afraid again to give herself over to this terrifying immensity of feeling, a force pushing her beyond her bounds. He soothes, settles, with a stroke to the spongy flex of her cheek, a kiss to the outside where his fingers push at it, her teeth scraping his knuckles as she starts to thrash.

He yanks his fingers from her just in time to prevent her choking herself on them as she sits up to glare imperiously down at Mysaria for cruelly withdrawing her mouth at the vital moment. She smiles serenely up at Rhaenyra. “You have the map, Your Grace.”

The pads of Daemon’s fingers throb. Their wet yearns to join hers, that other seeking opening. He seizes Rhaenyra’s hand and sucks her fingers until they gleam so they will meet herself with a honeyed glide when he guides her hand down the heaving plane of her belly, releasing it just before it meets the drenched silvery curls that sear the back of his eyelids when he shutters them against the sight of whatever of her own motions make her whimper and her stomach tremble against his palm as he steadies her shuddering hips.

A noise of frustration as her fingers don’t immediately render up to her the release she craves. “Please, I can’t—”

“You can, my baby, you can, it’s yours,” Daemon insists and opens his eyes as she moans gratefully so he might thirstily drink in her own sealed ones as she surrenders wholly to sensation, her slack-jawed gleeful smug awe as she brings herself over the edge.

“Nice, isn’t it?” he says with a kiss to her ear.

Rhaenyra only lies panting in the aftershocks for a moment before she says, “You said you would teach me about my husband’s pleasure.”

“I did,” Mysaria confirms, sitting on Daemon’s other side.

His niece turns her attention to Daemon’s cock and then deflates a little when she sees the state of it.

“You said desire was not always necessary.” Her voice wobbles a little.

Lack of desire. Laughable.

“There are many reasons a man might find it difficult to perform, Your Grace.”

“Laenor’s reason is he likes fucking boys,” Rhaenyra says baldly. “How might I address that?”

The warmwet tease of Mysaria’s mouth at the head of Daemon’s soft cock is not unfamiliar. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. His head falls back as he loses himself in a patch of damp on the ceiling. The weight of Rhaenyra’s eyes watching Mysaria’s skillful kisses and licks make the blood rush into his cock and then away. Rhaenyra’s lips brush his shoulder.

It should be humiliating as it always is, but somehow it isn’t when she says with delight, “Oh! It’s sort of hard? But not really.”

Mysaria pulls back to pump him with a spit-slick palm. Daemon emits a whimper that Rhaenyra echoes. “Yes. Not hard enough to penetrate anyone, so this is not helpful to your predicament. But I am sure you and Lord Velaryon can manage.”

“But can he—can you—make him feel—nice?”

“Would you like me too, my queen?”

“Oh, yes—”

Daemon blindly turns his mouth to find Rhaenyra and lets it roll through him.

-

After, Rhaenyra, dazed and clearly drained, attempts to grope Mysaria with a slurred, “Can you—I would like to please you—” that did not bode well for her being able to fulfill that wish tonight, and when Mysaria says, “Another time, my queen,” she blinks and walks out the door after running into the frame.

Daemon presses the gold coins into Mysaria’s palm, craning his head to ascertain Rhaenyra has not run out into the night but plopped herself down on one of the stairs halfway down, listing against the wall. “Excuse her. She has no money. She barely knows what it is.”

“She is in need of education.” There is that calculating expression again on Mysaria’s face. Daemon wonders. At the door, he says:

“You told me you did not come into my service for money or power or station, but to be liberated from fear.”

“Yes. That was true.”

“Is that still what you seek?”

“I found it.”

“I’m glad you found it. If you had to leave me to find it, I’m glad you left.”

“No. I found it with you. It is something you gave me. It took me leaving to realize it. Or perhaps it took you returning and realizing I was not even tempted to beg for your protection.”

“Mm.”

His confusion must be evident. “I left you, didn’t I? I was not scared to leave you.”

-

Rhaenyra begins to stagger halfway back. “Uncle,” she whines fretfully. They pass a crumbling wall and when Daemon points to it she scrambles to the top and he crouches a little, so, with a giddy giggle of exhaustion, she can wrap her legs around his waist and arms around his neck. The breath goes out of him when he stands fully upright once more. She’s a lot fucking heavier than when she was eight. She drops her forehead to his shoulder and he is the one staggering along the road, dodging a dozing drunk who had not made it home himself.

“Did you mean it? When you said it wouldn’t be the last time?”

“I’m at your service, Your Grace.”

She wriggles, cutting off his airway for a moment. “What if I wanted to go alone? I know the passageway. I could.”

His steps pause for only a moment. “The city isn’t safe for pretty boys. Or for pretty queens when they figure out what they’ve really gotten their hands on.”

“But I could,” she insists, breath hot on his nape.

“You can. May I make one request, though?”

“You can make it,” she says peevishly.

“Let me teach you how to gut a man first, alright?”

She lowers her head again. Daemon feels her press a kiss against his neck. “Thank you, uncle.”

Then, satisfied, safe, she falls asleep.