The sun hung low over Ashford Meadow like a bruised peach, spilling gold across the trampled grass and turning the dust kicked up by hooves into a shimmering haze. Maekar sat his destrier at the edge of the lists, helm tucked under one arm, feeling the ache settle into his shoulders where the lance had struck true more times than not. His silver-gold hair clung damp to his brow, and the pox scars on his cheeks itched in the heat. He ignored it. He ignored most things that did not serve the moment.
He had unhorsed three men before noon—solid knights, proud houses—and then the fourth, a Baratheon bannerman whose name he had already forgotten. The crowd had roared each time, a wave of sound that crashed against his ears without truly reaching him. Maekar fought the way he lived: methodical, unrelenting, an anvil against which lesser steel bent or shattered. No flourish, no grand gestures. Just force applied precisely until the job was done.
Yet when the herald called the final tilt, when the lists cleared and the marshal raised his hand, Maekar felt something shift inside his chest; a quiet, stubborn certainty. He had won the day. The melee champions had yielded earlier; the joust belonged to him.
He rode the length of the field at a slow walk, the black stallion snorting plumes of breath, barding clinking softly. Banners snapped overhead: red and black, gold and green, the roaring stag of your house prominent among them. Lord Lyonel Baratheon sat in the high pavilion beside his kin, laughing that great booming laugh of his. And there, half-hidden behind the broad shoulder of her brother, sat you.
Lady Baratheon. Younger sister to the Laughing Storm. Shy where he was thunderous, quiet where the world expected storm. Maekar had noticed you the first evening of the tourney, when the feast tents glowed with torchlight and music drifted on the warm wind. You had worn storm-grey silk trimmed in black, hair braided with silver thread, eyes downcast as though the clamor might swallow you whole if you met it directly.
He told himself it was nothing. A passing observation. Princes noticed things; it was their duty. But the noticing had continued. Each day since, he found his eyes seeking you in the crowd—on the stands, near the pavilions, once even walking the meadow path with a maid trailing behind, skirts brushing the wildflowers. You moved like someone accustomed to being overlooked, yet impossible to ignore once seen. Something in the set of your shoulders, the careful way you smiled when Lyonel roared a jest at your expense, tugged at him. A gentleness he did not possess, a stillness amid the chaos he could never quite achieve.
Now the herald's voice rang out again.
"Prince Maekar Targaryen of Summerhall claims the honors of the day! Prince Maekar, name your Queen of Love and Beauty!"
The field fell quiet enough to hear the creak of leather, the distant whinny of a horse. Maekar lifted his lance and turned his mount toward the pavilions.
He could have chosen anyone. A dozen highborn ladies waited with practiced smiles, cheeks flushed with anticipation. His brother's wife would have been politic. A Reach girl would have been politic. Even one of the Ashford daughters would have been expected.
Instead he leveled the lance at you.
The crowd murmured, then swelled. Lyonel's laughter cut off mid-bellow; his eyes narrowed, then widened in surprise. You froze. Maekar saw the exact moment color flooded your face; rose blooming across pale skin, eyes going wide and unguarded. Your hands clutched the railing as though it might keep you from falling.
He rode closer. The stallion's hooves thudded soft on grass worn thin. Up close you looked smaller, but your chin lifted when he drew rein before you.
"My lady," he said, voice low enough that only you and the nearest retainers might hear. Rough from shouting commands, edged with the same sternness he carried everywhere. But softer, too. "If it please you... I would crown you Queen of Love and Beauty."