Chapter 24: The First Kiss
ULF
Three days after the battlements, Helaena told me a storm was coming.
She said it while she was counting the legs of something she'd trapped under a cup on her windowsill, and she didn't look up to say it.
"The sky will weep, and the weirwood will witness."
I'd stopped dismissing her prophecies weeks ago. "When?"
"Tonight." She turned the cup a quarter turn. "Too many legs for a beetle. Too few for the other thing. Nobody has given it a name yet."
"Should I be somewhere?"
She put her ear close to the glass instead of answering, as though the creature might answer instead.
The first drops fell as evening turned to night. By the time I reached the godswood the rain was hammering the stone paths, and the garden had gone to wet shadow, every hedge a place a man could stand unseen, thunder loud enough to cover his boots. Three lanterns still burned along the cloister wall. Three windows with faces behind them, if anyone cared to look out at weather.
She was already there.
Under the weirwood, soaked through, her hair gone dark with water and stuck flat to her skull, staring up at the lightning-split sky like she was reading messages in the clouds.
I ran to her. Pulled off my cloak and held it over us both, one arm up, the wool already heavy as chainmail.
"You're going to catch a fever," I said.
"The dreams showed this. The storm. You. Me." She turned to me. In the white flashes her face was the same colour as the tree's bark. "Fire and blood and you standing in the center, burning but not consumed."
"I won't burn. I promise."
"How can you promise that?"
"Because I'm preparing for it. The dragon fire training. The resistances. All of it." I drew her in under my arm, out of the worst of it. "I won't burn because I refuse to leave you alone in this nightmare."
Thunder came down on top of the words. She flinched into my chest and stayed there.
"I'm so tired," she whispered. "Everyone thinks I'm mad. My mother pities me. Aegon despises me. Even Rhaenyra looks at me like I'm broken." Her voice cracked. "My children are the only reason I wake each morning."
"You're not mad."
"Everyone says—"
"They're wrong." I tilted her chin up and made her look at me. Rainwater ran off her jaw onto my wrist. "You're not mad. You see things others don't. Patterns they miss. Futures they can't imagine. That's not madness. That's sight."
"You truly believe that?"
"I know it."
Her hand came up and touched my face. Her fingers found the ridge on my forehead, the scar from the beam I'd cracked my skull on down in the undercroft, and traced it end to end. Then again. She counted everything twice.
"Why do you care? Really care? You could have any position, any reward. Why stay with someone broken?"
"Because you're not broken. And because—"
I didn't finish with words.
I closed the distance and kissed her.
Gentle. Hesitant. Asking permission with every heartbeat.
She froze. One moment, perfect and terrible, in which I was certain I had ruined her life and ended my own.
Then she kissed back.
Fierce. Desperate. Like she was drowning and I was air. Her hands fisted in my shirt and hauled me closer. The cloak fell, forgotten, and the rain took us both.
Thunder shook the sky. Lightning printed us white against the trunk, and I thought about the three lit windows on the cloister wall, and I didn't stop.
When we finally broke apart, she was crying.
"I didn't know," she gasped. "I didn't know it could feel like this."
I wiped her face. The rain took the tears off my thumb before I could tell them apart. "Like what?"
"Like being seen. Like being chosen. Like..." Her voice broke. "Like I matter."
"You matter to me. More than anything."
She kissed me again. Slower this time. Deliberate. Claiming.
The storm went on around us and we stood inside it, under a tree older than the Keep, two people choosing each other against every reason not to.
When we separated, breathing hard, the world came back in pieces. The cold in my boots. The lantern at the end of the cloister that had guttered out while we weren't looking, and the two that hadn't.
"This is dangerous," she whispered. "If anyone finds out..."
"I know."
"They'll kill you. Adultery with a princess. With the future queen."
"I know."
"Then why—"
"Because some things are worth the risk."
"You say that like a man laying a coin on a table." She was not smiling. "They will not need to kill me. They will only need to say one word near my son. Say it often enough and the crown comes off him on its own, and no one has to be seen touching it."
"Then we give them nothing to say."
"You cannot give a court nothing. They eat what is set in front of them, and when the dish is empty they eat the dish."
I'd thought about nothing else since the battlements, standing at her door through three nights of it. "If Aegon learns of this, he'll have my head off in the yard before midday and call it justice. Your grandfather won't kill me at all. He'll put it in a drawer and take it out on the day you refuse him something. And if the court gets it before either of them, they'll strip your name for sport and hang me for treason, and both those things will be one afternoon's business."
She heard all of it without moving.
"You have thought about it very carefully."
"Yes."
"And you kissed me anyway."
"Yes."
She looked at me then. Really looked. Past the guard and past the fighter, down to whatever was left of Marcus Cole under Ulf's skin.
"I love you," she said. Simple. Direct. "I don't know when it happened. But I do."
The words should have frightened me. Instead they dropped into place like a bolt seating in a door.
"I love you too."
We held each other while the storm went out of the sky, the thunder dragging itself east over the bay, the rain thinning to drizzle in the leaves.
Eventually she pulled back. "We need to return. Separately. If anyone sees..."
"I know." I kissed her forehead. "You go first. I'll wait ten minutes."
She wrung the water out of one sleeve and studied it. "My bedmaid will see the hems. She sees everything and says nothing, and I have never known which of those to thank her for."
"Tell her you watched the lightning from the sept steps."
"I did watch the lightning. Tomorrow? In the godswood?"
"Always."
She smiled through the tears at that. Then she went, stepping around the puddles unhurried, as if she had only come out for the weather.
I stayed under the weirwood and counted to six hundred, watching the dark where she'd gone.
My quarters. Alone. Soaked through. I stripped off the wet clothes, pulled on dry ones, and sat on the edge of the bed with my boots in my hands.
I'd just kissed a married princess. The future queen. In a kingdom that executes men for far less.
My hand came up and touched my lips. Her mouth was still there, a ghost of pressure.
I'd do it again. Right now. Without hesitation.
Somewhere between the first morning I stood at her door and tonight, the line between protecting her and loving her had worn thin and gone through. I'd started this meaning to prevent a tragedy. Save her children. Change one small piece of what was coming.
Now?
Now I loved her. Genuinely, completely, stupidly loved a woman I could never openly claim.
The Dance would come. The dragons would burn. The realm would crack down the middle.
But tonight I'd given her the one thing nobody in this castle had thought to give her: the feeling of being seen, chosen, and loved. That was worth any price. My life included, if it came to that.
I pulled the wet boots back on and went out to stand the rest of the night in the corridor outside her door, where her guard belonged.