bakerstreet | Wedding Night

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Wedding Night

The Marriage Consummation Meme
a smut meme

The wedding bells have rung - or the correct sacrifices have been made, depending on your culture. Whatever the case may be, you're married now, and the night is yours. However, there is one expectation on you: it's time to consummate the marriage.

Whether you're in love, in this marriage because it was arranged, or absolutely in hate with your new spouse, you're with them now. Have you two been intimate before this, or is your first time...with them or first time period? Do you know what you want and are you full of lust, or do you have no clue what's going on? Maybe you even have to seduce your partner who wants nothing to do with this!

...or, most forbidden of all, you're not the one getting married to this person. You just have to be with them on their wedding night, because you want them no matter what!

Comment with your character and include your preferences.
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Thread out wedding night smut and shipping.

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[ One of my favourite things! There are so many possibilities - is it a marriage of love, or has it been arranged against their will? Maybe Silas has been taken hostage/captive/used as a chess piece by some rival ruler or warlord? ngl, I would love to do something involving dubcon/noncon, but I'm always up for consensual things as well! ]

(can be arranged or not depending on verse. most likely to be the case for default or asoiaf au; modern or hashira au's more likely to be romance-based. kinks in journal!)

They are keeping dragon eggs, his father had told him, in the glacial tones of a resenting secret. There were, by the Mad King’s estimation, petrified dragon eggs hidden in the crags of Rohan’s mountains. There were eggs deceptively kept from rightful finding, eggs stolen and greedily treasured within its halls. The legacy of the dragons had been thieved away across those distant green plains, stowed between mountain and vale to be kept among undeserving horse-lords. They must take back what had been so cowardly stolen, a crime committed before the eyes of the gods. But if the gods would remain silent, if they would not strike the treacherous riders of Rohan with a smiting hand, then the dragons must recover their own, with their very own hands. They would wrest back what had always been rightfully theirs, what lesser men could never tame. The fractured pieces of their dynasty would not be sold to make rich the barbarians across the sea.

They would not, those horse-lords, hesitate to wed their fairest maiden to the prince of the Seven Kingdoms. This was the scheme his father had devised: the throne would bring before it a renowned lady of Rohan, the alliance would yield a profitable exchange of trust and intelligence and owed tributes, and soon there would no longer be a single egg, a single scale, amiss amid the dragon’s hoard. And then, his father had gone on, Rohan would be made to pay at last for its furtive dealings, for its keeping of marvels which it was not owed. The lady would be slain, Rohan would be decimated, and the dragons would never again be played for fools by common horse breeders. Was this a plan with even a grain of truth planted somewhere within it? Or was it only a venomous, dying tendril strangling its way up from what was left of his father’s mind? By the cackling laughter that accompanies this treason as it is shared, by the madman’s shine in his eyes and the deepening shadows beneath, by the clawing of his taloned fingers, there can be no denying that the Mad King has earned his name. It is no wonder that it is no longer even merely whispered.

And yet all is not lost in the withering wit of a madman’s paranoia. No matter the uncertain pretext, no matter the risk and the gain, no matter their own pride and their own suspicions, the riders of Rohan do send their finest treasure, aside from the supposed eggs, to be wed to the king’s son. And she is fair, and rich with noble blood, and gentle, it would seem, of word and hand. Rhaegar will not believe that his father, even in the roiling depths of his mania, would order a lady of innocence murdered to atone for sins most certainly imagined. It is, all convoluted notions of vengeance and retribution aside, a union ordered by the king, and thus it must be done. The king may be ailing, and his mind may be slipping and his once great visions of the realm may have begun to collapse beneath the weight of a poisoned spirit, but Aerys is his father still, and Rhaegar has always done his duty.

He has also always shared his sole intimacies with tomes, with parchments and maps and studies, and before he weds the White Lady of Rohan, he abandons himself to every legend and history he can read of his betrothed’s homeland. He reads of the kings of yore, of the hill fort capital, the rivers and the mountains, and the peerless tenacity of its riders. He learns of feats won afield, of the legendary horses, and the language, too. It is with a diligent maester that he practices that precarious speech, that he wonders at how much he does not know.

So much still that he does not know even when the day comes that she arrives, that they are to be wed, that his father’s idea of justice is to be set into motion, that he has carefully mastered the most necessary of Rohirric phrases. He intones his vows as he had known he one day must, and he does so dressed in uncreased formal blacks, with a cloak of scarlet red and dragons worked in coiling silver at shoulder and throat. It is the same silver of his hair, which falls past his shoulders, a plait from his temple to the back of his head denoting ceremony. He cannot know what his new wife makes of the dragon’s hall, of the tremendous sea of gathered revelers, and of his own father the king, at turns gregarious and soaring, frothing and sneering. He is grateful, in truth, when the festivities and the audience must recede, when the prince might be allowed a brief respite with his wife before they will be reminded of the duties that await them this night. For now, perhaps, they might have an hour uninterrupted while the radiant gluttony of a royal wedding goes unchecked.

So it is atop the curtain wall that he has asked her to join him, for a view of the city, those parts which are domesticated and those which are not, and the sea, and the high, dark shape which circles languidly above. He has not yet had the dragon down near enough to be a spectacle among the merriment of the wedding. He has not wished to impose so upon his wife, knowing not what she makes of the royal dragons of Westeros, of a splendor unfathomed by most until they beheld the truth with their own eyes. The noble beast is kept, then, as a high, vigilant shadow, and his own bearing is gentle, demanding nothing, for all that is utterly foreign between them.

“I had hoped, my lady, to find one extra hour within this evening, if you are not too weary. Much has indeed already been asked of you.”

In Rohan, they bear little love for dragons. It has been many centuries since any such beasts menaced the Éothéod - since Fram slew Scatha the Worm, in fact, some thousand years ago; since before the Mark was settled, when her people were still nomads - but although the Eorlingas are not an especially long-lived people, their memories and stories linger well enough. Enough times has Éowyn heard of Morgoth's dragons, of those sly and fell beasts that hounded the realms of Men and Dwarves for centuries; enough times has she thrilled to the hunting of Scatha and the terror of his forebears. She had never thought that she would see one herself, and she does not know how to feel when she does; it fills her with an echo of remembered dread, of dark wings beating and a shrieking cry that still haunts the shadows of her nightmares. At the same time, it is an echo only, and what shadow does fall from the dragon's wings does not cut chill and fearful to her heart; there is none of that oozing evil that she had felt from the Witch-King's mount, nor imagined from the dragons of old; and if she is truthful with herself, there is a beauty in the creature's looping flight that puts her more in mind of the eagles above the White Mountains. It does not feel evil.

She cannot say the same for the king. She is not blind - she knows madness and bile when it parades itself before her. She is polite, and forebearing, and she swallows any anger he spurs in her; but still, she watches him warily, thinking him not unlike a rabid dog, in how he turns so swiftly from merriment to frothing, snarling rage. If there is a creature of Shadow in this city, she has a sense that it is not the circling dragon, but the king who wears its sigil.

And what of his son? She has not, as yet, been able to take a true measure of the man to whom she has bound herself. It is almost enough that he is handsome, and that she has heard that he is bold and noble; it would be enough, she thinks, if this match had been brokered a year earlier, before she knew herself, and if she had not met his father. Now she finds that she questions it all, and that girlish excitement that had (she is embarrassed to admit it) still blossomed at finding herself a husband both handsome and noble has, in short order, withered back to doubt.

Then again, what good is doubt? It comes too late, now. She has sworn herself to this duty - had sworn herself to it long before she swore a word to Rhaegar himself - and it is done. And here she is; gold to his silver, white to his black, and while Rohan's white horse is worked in careful embroidery all over her gown, it is dragons that she has been cloaked in.

In Rohan, they bear little love for dragons. But, she reminds herself as she follows her new husband, neither do they fear them. She is not insensate to the dangers of her position, a stranger in a strange land; no more than she is insensate to the knowledge that there is more power in these halls than in the damaged walls of Meduseld. No more than she is insensate to the duties still to be done, on both of their parts.

"I am not too weary." It is not entirely true, but nor is it entirely a lie; the weariness that hangs on her is only that which has been upon her for years. The mask of her station is heavier than any armour, but it is one she knows how to wear. "And nothing has been asked that I did not grant ere I came. What would you have of me?"

What steel-forged woman would admit to her weariness, after all? What trust could she possibly have in this place which might lend her easily to the peace of rest? She is composed, was composed even in the kaleidoscopic face of his father, which frightens so many others. Composed she was for the speaking of their vows, and for all which came after, whether it be courteous introductions or the kindly fielding of drunken admirers. She has not yet taken on the look of one grievously imposed upon, of a lady bravely bearing her dues, of a wife already worn thin by the perceived edges of the life which awaits her. She has been resolute and gracious, and she is as lovely out here in the violet light as she had been inside, awash in the glow of stained glass and copious candles and the sun, while it lasted.

And she is composed still, and making no lie, he thinks, of the fortitude which remains to her. She is the sort who would leave no task unfinished, no duty forgotten no matter how she might ache to be elsewhere, no matter her exhaustion. He wonders if she does ache to be elsewhere - if she is stubbornly refusing to shed tears for the life she had left behind, or if she will shed them later, when she thinks herself alone. Or had she simply decided that there will be no place for them, and has in fact turned her attention dry-eyed to what lies ahead? He does not think it is so, does not believe she has shed all that she was in favor of what she has come here to be: she wears, atop the gown which bears so many rearing white horses, a horn which is most foreign to the styles he himself is accustomed to. She wears all the careful manners of her fine breeding, and she wears a cool mask which does not slip.

A divot between his brows deepens, and he finds that he does not like to have the question returned to him this way: he will not have anything of her, nothing which she does not care to give. His hands are gloved and linked behind his back, and his own expression is not, despite the implied frivolity and glad tidings of the day, without its melancholy cast. The lavender of his eyes drinks gently of the light as he glances back up, watching for a moment the easing spiral of the black beast which roves its vaulted realm above them. There is no carrying, formal call he need issue to summon the dragon; he need only cease in willing it away, in commanding in silence the sea of space which had felt necessary for this day. Now that sea begins to recede, and that winged galleon begins to sail in smooth rings downward, throwing into shadow, at turns, the sea, the wall, and the red path they walk.

"I would like to be certain that if you find yourself dreaming of dragons while you are here, you dream of them as they are." She might be of the opinion, and reasonably so, that the Targaryen dragons were vicious horrors, abominations of ages long past used now only to incite fear, to blaze to ruin any who stand in opposition to the king's reign. This is not, in the histories, altogether untrue, but he will not have it be said of his own incipient rule, on the day of his wedding and before the eyes of his wife, that she looked upon his own dragon in fear or in repulsion. From his reading, dragons were long a menace to her people, more weapon than animal, and certainly not to be counted among kin.

The descending creature has begun to find for itself a clinging perch against the craggy cliffside along which the wall wanders, within sight and, once they will stroll near enough, within reach. It seems, for the time being, to be luxuriating in the open spread of its wings, in flexing so much leather-supple muscle, the sinking sun glowing through dark amethyst hide in flickers of translucence.

"If it please you," he slows in his steps, leaving unobstructed their path away if she so chooses, back to the milling and laughing crowd which has heralded their marriage, ushering her neither one way or the other, "I had thought to make a proper introduction."

There is a moment - brief, only brief - where the descending dragon crosses their path, and its wings blot out the light, and it is not these walls that she sees; when she could swear for a moment that there is a ring of steel in her ears, and she hears, as from afar, the scream of a horse and the dull crashing of its rider crushed. Come not between the Nazgûl and his prey, a cold and deathly whisper, a clutching in the scarred filigree of her ribcage; and she knows, in that moment, that this is the dream, and none of this has come to pass, that she still lingers on the brink of death before the walls of Minas Tirith, and she cannot reach her king's hand.

In that moment, her composure slips for the first time, and the blood drains from her face, her expression one of distant horror; and then she gropes at her hip, and finds no sword, but the cool silver of an ancient horn, and the shadow has shifted, and the moment has passed. She sways a little, and sets her jaw, and her thumb traces the runes worked into the silver. Beneath her hand, the wrought figures of mounted horsemen gallop in their eternal path along the smooth curve of the metal.

It is enough. She is the blood of Eorl, and she is here by duty, and she is not afraid, and it is enough.

She takes a long, slow breath in, and gives Rhaegar a long, even look that dares him to pass comment. Under the fair skin of her throat, the tendons tense, then loosen, and she exhales softly. "Then you had better lead the way, my lord." Her voice shakes not at all; there is, at worst, a slight tautness to it. "I do not know the proper way to greet such a creature." Save with a sword in hand.

Is that fear which falls like a shadow across her face? It is not a riffle of the light being broken as his dragon descends, and it is not the insensate dark of fear or disgust or rage. There is something else to it, something which recognizes, and stalls in that recognition. Then there is something with the aspect of blank terror, of gripping memory. He glances at her fingers as they fall to her hip, as they come around the horn she wears. What the precise purpose of that horn is, he has yet to ask her. But by the way she holds it now, by the way her fingers smooth over its etchings and by the way her face has paled, one might think she means to use it to call a defense between herself and the beast waiting on the wall.

There is nothing unreasonable in that; what man or woman looking upon a dragon so near, and with neither armor nor weapon at hand to combat it, would not go briefly rigid with fright? It would not matter if she were armored and armed, should the beast open its bladed jaws and gape upon her a ribbon of glittering fire. He is not sure what he had expected, now that he has offered to broker a meeting between the two - wonder? Something of marveling awe? Perhaps that had been the greatest presumption.

But she does not demand that the dragon be sent from them, and she does not turn on her heel and flee. She does not fall to antics of fear or fury, simply drawing her breath in as neatly as she seems able, and he holds his eyes on her face for a long moment, lips parting around a question as it finds its form on his tongue.

There it promptly dies, something in the look she gives him like a pail of cool water over embers. He elects to dip his chin in silence, stepping forward to place himself before the heaving dragon first. It heaves with little more than the act of breathing, ebony scales lifting, turning the light, and then smoothing flat as its sinuous body feeds upon the same human inhales and exhales - only massively amplified. Amber eyes catch within them all, steady pools that drink in motion at its most miniscule: the crunching of stone beneath their boots, the bending of wayward weeds beneath the breeze that reaches in from the sea, the catching and steading of muscle, the ripples of tension in their voices.

Rhaegar reaches to rest a hand on the pebbled hide of the dragon's snout, as one might a friendly horse, turning the ghost of a rueful smile upon his wife. "With greater exuberance than you were obliged to greet me, my lady. This creature will never ask anything of you."

It will never ask anything of anyone, she thinks, for such a beast need not ask, but only take as it will. And yet, she does not think it with horror, or with fear, save the lingering echoes of dread that still ripple through her. It is not dragons that she fears. It is not the teeth or the claws or the heat that bakes from its skin, a reminder of what it could unleash; it is only memory. Only a passing thought, and a darkness that has been broken. Not the beast itself. There is, she still believes, no beast that she would allow herself to fear.

It is bigger, this close, even than the Nazgûl-mount; and there is more intelligence in its eyes, too, though not so much as she might expect from the tales of old. It puts her more in mind of the horses of Felaróf's line, those in whom the Mearas blood runs less than entirely true: a sharp intelligence, she sees there, and an understanding, but an animal one, nonetheless. It does not speak when she approaches, does not offer sibilant and sly greetings; it is not the kind of dragon which twines through the stories and songs of her people, though it is undoubtedly a mighty and awe-inspiring sight.

Nonetheless, she greets it more as a person than a beast, inclining her head in a small, polite bow, before she mimics Rhaegar in reaching out, her hand lingering in front of the dragon's nostril. Hedging her bets, perhaps, to greet it as she would greet a horse, too.

"I was not taught to greet man nor beast with exuberance," she says quietly, as she does so. "It is not personal, my lord; I mean you no disrespect by it."

Exuberance is, he would agree, the province of children. It is for those with little enough to lose, those who worry not for their pride or the obligations of titled appearance. Exuberance is for songs, and the merry weddings contained therein, where heroes encounter their maidens through the lovely vines of fate, where all is beauty and kindness, and every heart is made of gold. Exuberance can only breathe, after all, in the absence of fear, or within a fear that is brightly tinged with excitement. He can expect only uncomplicated wariness of his new wife. Why would she have come with anything like excitement feathering the edges of her soul? He knows nothing of her soul; he cannot begin to guess whether it is edged in steel or silk. If he has not misread the look on her face, he would have to think her forged rather than sewn.

Even so, despite the somber course his own thoughts are wont to take, he smiles when she bows to the beast. Courtesy has, it would seem, been bred with great purpose in her people. He watches as the dragon's venting nostril flares against her fingers, the gem-veined eye rolling in the sideways fashion of reptiles, the wings drawing to a leisurely fold atop the black-spined back. The jaws part, dying sunlight flickering up the tapered edges of onyx fangs. They are both aware that no dragon need ask for what it would take, of course, though he hopes still that she can find in this creature, if nowhere else on these western shores, something of a companion, something with no reason, political or manipulative or with the affliction of human cruelty, to do her harm. Perhaps he has spent too many years reading stories after all.

"You find your joy where you will, as you will, and there is no fault or apology in that." As one who did not incline easily to outbursts of gaiety himself, he cannot scorn her solemnity. Yet she is his wife, regardless of whether or not she ever would have willed it on her own, and there is a pang of unfulfilled duty in him that would like nothing more than to see her bright with genuine happiness, if only for a moment. That was all he was generally able to manage on his own.

He runs his hand over the rough overlay of scales, observing in ever unceasing wonder the way their sheen takes on an opal ripple in all casts of light. "Did any among your people ever ride them?"

I find my joy nowhere, she almost tells him, and do not linger on its lack. But that is not his concern, husband or not; this is not anyone's concern but her own, for her joys and sorrows are not part of her duty.

Besides, he is still talking, and asking a far more direct question - one which, in its very simplicity and lack of understanding, almost makes her laugh. It does not seem possible that their knowledge of dragons can be so thoroughly opposed - but then again, it does not seem possible, in truth, that this is a dragon at all, which sniffs and shifts beneath her hand as she rests it at last against smooth and pebbled scales, which watches her with animal eyes.

She does not laugh. She does, however, show her incredulity in the way she looks between him and his mount, in the slight furrow of her brow. She does wonder, in her heart of hearts, if he is mocking her. Wonders, too, if the beast before her can scent, on the horn at her hip, the creature it was taken from all those centuries past. My people do not ride dragons, she might say, if she did not care to be polite; they slay them, and all things of the Shadow.

"The dragons of old," she decides, at last, choosing her words carefully, "would not have borne being ridden; and in my lands, at least, they have never been friends to the races of Men." Nor most other races, for that matter: the Dwarves they hated utterly, and the Elves still more so, and even the creatures of Morgoth, the Orcs and the Trolls and the other, darker forces, by all accounts were disdained by the great dragons of old. It seems unwise to say as much, before not only a dragon-rider, but the beast itself; and yet, what else can she say? That the only tales she knows of anyone riding a dragon, in her own lands, are of Morgoth himself, and the havoc he wrought that brought the world almost to its destruction? That she is less and less convinced that they can even mean the same thing when they say dragon? "And the Eorlingas are Horse-Lords, not Dragon-Lords."

No, she is right, by any of the recorded histories he has read: only the Targaryens rode the dragons in earnest. It was only his own infamous lineage that had known an affinity with the beasts that transcended the understanding of mount and rider, of wartime allies. It was more than domestication, more than coercion, neither of which would have ever brought a true dragon to heel, anyway. More than a kindly indulgence on the part of the beast, and more than stupendous luck on the part of the would-be rider. It was something that, had her people practiced it, would have been recounted in pride. It would have been evidenced upon her face.

There is still only that wariness he had detected at the first, and a distrust that he could never blame her for, given the magnitude of the creature he has brought her to stand before. There is that firm courtesy she bears, her reserve, and the precise way she perceives her world and his both. Horse-Lords rule her lands, and Dragon-Lords his own. It was not a question which need be asked, truthfully, though he did not ask it from a well of ignorance, and he did not ask it to prick her, to intentionally open a wound to fester with the differences between his world and her own, never to be bridged.

He has only asked it to be certain that what he means to offer will not be a diversion already known to her, and as he glances over the fair planes of her face, down the lean cut of her body, over the horn at her hip and down to what are undeniably a rider's legs, he acknowledges with another deferring dip of his head the correction she makes. Dragons are not friends of men, generally speaking, and there are age-spotted scholars who would attribute the tolerance between beast and man now to centuries-old magic, to the black power of blood, and to a reign of power such as the world has never known, which has never been overthrown.

It defies explanation, the dark beast's being here with them at all, and while he would not deny her people their glory as Horse-Lords - or his wife her own glory, for renown won upon the back of a horse - neither would he deny that a capable warrior could be both. With one hand still resting upon the dragon's weathered and shining hide, he extends his other, an upturned palm, toward his wife.

"Would you like to be the first Eorlingas, then, to be lady of both?"

She looks at his outstretched hand, for a moment, with unalloyed doubt. Not fear, not distaste - only doubt. Loud ring the cautions of old, in song and story; the clamour of undenied association with darkness and with evil; and loud, too, rings the memory of how the Witch-King had gazed down upon her from a beast not wholly unlike this one, cold and mocking, before she cleaved the creature's head from its neck.

And it is said that they rode horses, too - the Nazgûl, and other servants of the darkness too. Will you eschew horses, too, as things of darkness? It is not the same. She knows it is not the same.

But the thought is enough, for in truth, his offer is one that her heart sings to, thinking of how the dragon had wheeled and banked in the sky. When she was a girl, she had often watched the eagles above the mountains, and thought of flying; she had closed her eyes when her horse plunged through the grasslands at full gallop, and in her heart, she had imagined the ground gone from beneath them. She has longed always for freedom, for strength, for unfettered and wild air. How, then, could she deny such a chance?

A smile, almost furtive, creeps at the corners of her mouth, and touches for the briefest moment the storm-grey of her eyes. There is, in that look, a hint of a girl that she once was, before the armour settled into her skin and the shadows overtook her; of a girl who wrestled with her brother, and muddied her skirts in the river, and who would not be talked out of the training yards. Of a girl who knows that what she does is not what she should do, but knows with equal force that she will do it anyway. Her hand - slender and pale, but calloused, too, from rein and sword - is, all at once, in his, and her eyes turn up to meet his.

"Show me how."

He thinks, the moment he has offered his hand, that she will laugh. She will think this a madness, or an insult, and she will whirl away, back into the shelter of the castle which will be theirs. Or will she simply withdraw into herself, decline this impromptu suggestion, and refuse to be drawn any direction which is not the narrow path they had begun to take along this high wall? He does not know, does not know enough of her to venture a forecast of what her mood might bring, if it will bring anything at all.

What he does not await is mirth, or an eager readiness. She has just spoken of her estrangement from exuberance, hasn't she? At best, one might expect polite refrainment. Her mannered hand, however, finds its perch in his own, and her skin is not wholly spring-soft. There are rough callouses there, too, and they match his own; for as dearly as he might favor his hours with his tomes over the hours he is obligated to spend with a sword, his are hands that work. And as they know the friction of rein and the tenacious grip required for a sword hilt, they have known, too, the steadying hold of palms and fingers around a dragon's obsidian spines.

That smile nearly reaches her eyes, spills a brief sparkle across the gray, like moonlight over water. He does not allow it to pass, will not linger beneath the yoke of uncertainty. His harpist's fingers curl around her own, and he draws her forward a gentle step, around the dragon's scaled and heavy jaw.

"You will find that it is not unlike learning to ride a horse, I think," he assures her, releasing her hand with a slow uncurling of his fingers that bespeaks his intention to guide her once more in a moment, with their hands rejoined. But first he must climb up between the reaching spines that adorn the dragon's shoulder, the beast inclining its weight forward to allow for an easier ascent. Scale holds as soundly as stone beneath his boots, and the dragon, despite being an animal, with an animal's blood and an animal's whims, holds itself steady and still, the amber of its eye threaded with new gold as the light hangs sheer as silk between the clouds.

"I can show you where to sit, but the rest you must feel for yourself." And where he means for her to sit is, clearly, directly before his own body. He reaches an assisting hand down to help her, the thumping in his chest vastly overshadowed by the heart which beats between the dragon's black bones, as sonorous and unrelenting as the tide which is the voice of the sea.

She could tell him, truthfully, that she does not remember learning to ride a horse: that it is something that feels to her as natural as walking or speech, and that she remembers its study no more. She could tell him that this is nothing like riding a horse, in any case: that not since she was a small child has she had to scramble up an animal's side like it was a cliffside. But why tell him any of that? It is no deterrent - even if a part of her is oddly nervous that she will hurt the beast in the process; the rest of her is calmer and notes the dragon's lack of perturbation at his own weight on its scales - and his meaning is clear enough.

Which leaves only one problem, and that a small one. She is attired for her wedding, in a fine gown whose skirts hang heavy with embroidery: she did not exactly dress for climbing and riding, and the thought of putting on breeches under her skirt, as she so often does day-to-day, did not exactly occur when dressing for so ladylike an occasion. She hesitates for a moment, and then remembers - with a rush of strange excitement that is, again, more youthful and more carefree than she had known she could still be - that it need not matter; that the very thing she does fear tonight frees her from shame. Her head turns this way and that, briefly, as though to check they are alone; and then she bends down to gather up the hem of her skirt before reaching up, with the other hand, to take his offered aid.

So it is she mounts a dragon for the first time, pale legs bare to the thigh and gleaming in the dying light, a wealth of fine silk and embroidery balled roughly in the hand she uses to steady herself, and, despite herself, with a blush rising to her cheeks. Still, having come this far, she will not hesitate; and she is clearly careful of where to put her weight safely, but soon enough, she is straddling the rippling scales, and Rhaegar is at her back, and it is with some reluctance, she finds, that she looses his hand.

"If you had warned me," she says, after a moment, meaning to make a joke of it, "I might have come better-dressed for such an errand." The evening air is cool on her bare calves, and she will not even try to settle her skirts more modestly - that is a fool's errand on a horse, and the dragon's back is wider. They cover what must be covered, and nothing more, and that will have to be enough; and she is a little embarrassed to find that she does not all that dearly wish it were otherwise. There is something in this - in the cool evening air on bare skin, in the knowledge that she ought to be ashamed and is not, in the warm scales beneath her and the warmth of her new husband's body behind her - that is thrilling, that makes her feel for once almost free of the stifling weight of duty. Strange, when this day - this night - is the gravest duty of all, to feel so much that she need not care what she ought to do. She can feel how her heart pulses in her throat; she can feel the echo of it between her thighs, where sinuous muscle shifts beneath smooth scale. Her hand trails over the scaled skin before her, wondering, and she looks back at Rhaegar; and there, still, is that light in her eyes, a living sunlight behind dark iron clouds.

"He is beautiful," she says, and it is true. From here, the resemblance to the creature of her nightmares is gone; from here, the grim shape of spreading shadow resolves itself into taut muscle and gleaming scale, reflecting and refracting the light, hiding colours in the dark sheen of scale and spine.