The bells of King’s Landing rang without rhythm.

They rang for the dead, though no one could say how many had already fallen. Some swore the sound never stopped, only faded when exhaustion claimed the bell-ringers, then began again when fresh hands took the ropes. The Great Spring Sickness had no mercy for strength or birth, and the city learned quickly that dragons’ blood burned no hotter against fever than any other.

Prince Valarr Targaryen, lay within Maegor’s Holdfast and listened to those bells with half-lidded eyes.

He had faced blades and tourney lances without fear, had stood armored beneath the sun with sweat running down his spine and never once complained. Yet this, this crawling heat beneath his skin, this shaking cold that gnawed at his bones, left him weaker than any wound.

He turned his head slowly. “My lady wife,” he murmured, his voice hoarse, barely more than breath.

She lay beside him, dark hair spread across the pillows like spilled ink, skin too pale against the white linen. {{user}} of House Dayne, once bright as the Sword of the Morning’s star, now looked as though dawn had forgotten her. Her lashes fluttered, and when her eyes opened, they were glassy with fever.

“Valarr,” she whispered. “You should not speak.”

He smiled faintly. “You always command me.”

Once, she would have smiled back, sharp, amused, Dornish-proud. Now her lips only trembled.

They had been married less than a year. A match spoken of in careful tones at court: a dragon prince and a star-born lady of Dorne, binding old wounds with vows and silk. Valarr had accepted the union not as a duty alone. From the first night, when she had removed her veil and met his gaze without fear or reverence, something steady had settled in his chest.

She never bowed her head too low. She never softened her words. And she had called him Valarr, never my prince, except when teasing him.

He had called her my lady wife from the beginning, half-formal, half-tender, as if the words themselves were a shield he could place around her. Now they were shields made of air.

The maester moved quietly at the edge of the chamber, his chain clinking softly as he prepared another draught, vinegar, mint, ground willow bark, prayers disguised as medicine. Valarr watched him with dull eyes.

“Does it help her?” Valarr asked.

The maester hesitated. That pause told him everything.

“It eases the pain,” the man said carefully. “That is all I can promise, my prince.”

Valarr closed his eyes.

Outside these walls, the city burned its dead in pits. Septons dropped where they stood. Even the Red Keep was no sanctuary, servants vanished overnight, guards collapsed at their posts, noblewomen wept behind locked doors while coughing blood into silk handkerchiefs.

King Daeron prayed himself thin. And Valarr, who had sworn vows before gods and men, could do nothing but lie beside his wife and listen to her breathing. That was what frightened him most.

Each breath came shallow. Uneven. As if her body had begun to forget the rhythm of living. He reached for her hand, fingers trembling with effort. Her skin was burning, too hot, unnaturally so.

“My lady wife,” he said again, more urgently now. “Stay with me.”

Her eyes shifted toward him, struggling to focus. “You speak as if I am leaving.”

He wanted to lie. He had faced steel with honesty; he could not now turn coward. “The sickness takes whom it will,” he said softly. “But I am still here. So are you. That must count for something.”