CHAPTER III: The Crossroad of Fates
It was in their fourteenth year that Daenerys and Daemon ceased to be children.
They had grown beside one another in the Red Keep, their lives like parallel streams, always near, always flowing in the same direction, but never meant to touch. Now and then their fingers brushed beneath a table, or their eyes lingered too long in a crowded hall. Those moments passed like sparks—brief, brilliant, and dangerous.
It began with letters.
Daemon had taken to training at night, when the yard was quiet and the torches burned low. His squire duties kept him busy by day, and Daenerys had her lessons, her embroidery, her prayers, and always the watching eyes of the court. So he began to leave her notes, folded in the pages of her books, tucked beneath her goblet at supper, hidden in the hollow of the old godswood tree where they once played.
They were never signed, but she knew his hand. He wrote in High Valyrian and riddles, verses of old romances, fragments of Dornish ballads, sometimes only a single line:
You are the only flame I fear.
Or:
My dreams know your name.
She kept them hidden in the lining of her jewelry box, behind the velvet where she stored her mother's brooches. The notes frightened her and thrilled her all the same. She prayed on them at night, asking the Maiden to grant her wisdom, and the Crone to grant her foresight.
But in her heart, she did not want to be wise.
They met more often in secret after that. First in the library, in the hours between supper and sleep, when Maester Alfrid would doze in his chair by the hearth. Then in the empty halls of Maegor's Holdfast, where the guards grew lax in the twilight hours. Once, Daemon dared to scale the wall beneath her window, like a knight from some bard's tale. He brought her a peach from the kitchens and kissed her hand in mock ceremony.
"Someday I'll have a hall of my own," he told her as they sat on the parapets, the city stretching out below them. "You'll have your own solar, and a garden full of sweet-smelling things. I'll build it with red stone and white marble and call it Daeny's Keep."
She laughed at the time. "What would the king say?"
He only smirked. "He says many things. I listen to few."
There were others who noticed. Prince Baelor, her solemn, soft-spoken cousin, gave her a look of quiet worry when he caught her blushing one afternoon in the sept. Ser Mervyn warned Daemon to keep his "eyes above his station," though Daemon only smiled and bowed low in mock obedience.
It was Queen Naerys who said nothing, and everything.
"You must guard your heart," she told Daenerys one day as they embroidered side by side. "A woman's love is like wildfire. It burns quickly... and consumes what it touches."
Daenerys did not answer. Her fingers trembled slightly, and she pricked herself on the needle.
The blood was bright against the white linen.
The first kiss came in the godswood.
They were fifteen, and the summer air was thick with the scent of roses and riverwind. She had come to read beneath the heart tree, though her eyes did not find the page. He arrived with no warning, sweat-damp from training, his tunic unlaced at the neck.
"You shouldn't be here," she said, but she did not move.
He stepped closer. "Then send me away."
She didn't.
The kiss was gentle at first, unsure. His lips were warm and hesitant, tasting of steel and sun. She pressed into him before she could think better of it, and for a heartbeat the world was only breath and skin and fire beneath the skin.
When they parted, she did not speak.
But that night she slept with one hand over her heart, as if to keep it from escaping.
What they had was never spoken aloud, not truly. There were no declarations, no promises. Only the glances that lingered too long, the hands that brushed and did not pull away, the silences that said more than words ever could.
She loved him. She knew that much.
And though he never said it, she believed he loved her too.
But love, in the Red Keep, was a luxury afforded only to fools and corpses.
And both, in time, they would become.