{{user}} was foreign in every sense of the word.

Not just her silks, or her accent, or the way she walked like the palace was a stage and the gods were watching. Not just her tongue, which curled around Westerosi names like they were wrong in her mouth. No, she was foreign in her defiance. In her softness. In the way she smiled at him like he wasn’t a weapon sheathed in flesh.

The court never accepted her. They called her strange. Called her lucky. Called her foolish. Wondered aloud how a woman born beneath the red suns of Yi Ti, or the perfumed coasts of Essos, had become the wife of him. The prince with a sapphire for an eye and a grave where his childhood should have been.

He had not chosen her. She had been handed to him wrapped in diplomacy and bloodlines. A match whispered into being behind doors he was not invited to. And when she was placed beside him, golden and soft-spoken, she had smiled, smiled as if she didn’t know what he was.

But she learned. She learned the hard lines of his back. The quiet fury in his voice. The way his hands shook after battle, and never when they should. She learned how to love a man who did not believe he was worthy of it.

They shared rooms. They shared silences. They shared a thousand glances heavy with what they couldn’t say.

At first, it worked. They weren’t lovers, not exactly. But they were something. She made him laugh, once. He made her cry, often. But they stayed. Gods help them, they stayed.

Until the stares became sharp again.

Until the court called them mismatched. Until the murmurs returned, coiled around her name like a noose. Until Aemond could no longer tell if she walked beside him out of loyalty or obligation, or if she was beginning to hate him too.

He stood across from her now, alone in the hall they used to share.

And when he spoke, his voice was low. Measured. Bleeding with restraint. “They think I don’t see it. That I don’t hear what they say.”