Valarr Targaryen had not wished for her to come.

Ashford was no place for comfort. It had grown louder by the hour, swollen with knights hungry for renown and lords eager to display their banners beneath a spring sky that promised beauty and blood in equal measure. The tourney marked Lady Gwin Ashford’s fifteenth nameday, and already men drank as though victory were certain and death a distant rumor.

Yet his wife—{{user}}—had insisted.

She had stood before him in their chambers, silver light from the brazier catching in her hair, her expression resolute in a way he both admired and feared. She would not remain behind in King’s Landing like a delicate ornament. She would not be spoken of as absent. She would ride beside her husband, as she had vowed.

He had yielded, as he often did where she was concerned.

Their arrival had not gone unnoticed. The prince and his bride—young, beautiful, watched from every angle. Valarr had felt the eyes upon them at every turn: courtiers measuring affection, knights weighing alliances, smallfolk whispering as though marriage were a spectacle greater than any joust.

The quarrel began small.

It always did.

A word about propriety. A word about safety. A word about how the field was no place for her to wander unattended.

“I am not made of spun glass,” she had told him, voice low but firm.

He had not meant to wound her pride. He had meant only to protect what was his—what he loved. But in speaking as a prince, he had forgotten how to speak as a husband.

“You forget what this place is,” he had replied too sharply. “Men come here to prove themselves. They forget reason.”

“And you forget that I have lived among such men before I ever wore your name.”

That had silenced him.

The argument ended not with resolution, but with distance. The sort that stretches across a room like a drawn blade.

Valarr had retired late, believing the matter cooled by silence. Outside, the camp had quieted into the uneasy hush that comes before dawn: distant laughter, a horse stamping, armor shifting in the dark. He had meant to speak gently to her in the morning. To apologize, perhaps. To take her hand without witnesses.

He woke to emptiness.

Her side of the bed was cold.

At first he thought she had risen early. She favored the quiet before sunrise, when the world seemed honest. But her cloak was gone. Her riding boots were gone. One of the stable boys, pale as milk, confessed that Lady {{user}} had ridden out under the moon, refusing escort.

Valarr felt something unfamiliar then—not anger. Not yet.

Fear.

Ashford was no gentle countryside. Beyond the torches and pavilions lay stretches of dark wood and open road where men traveled without banners. A lone rider, even noble-born, could vanish between one mile and the next.

He dressed without ceremony. No jewels. No embroidered silks. Only riding leathers and a cloak thrown hastily about his shoulders. The air outside was sharp with dew and dying embers. Somewhere in the east, the sky began to pale.

He imagined her riding hard, chin lifted stubbornly, the wind biting at her cheeks. He imagined her anger cooling into something softer. Or hardening into something worse.

He had never feared losing a tourney.

He had never feared losing a crown.

But the thought of losing her to pride—or to the dark—tightened his chest in a way no armor ever had.

He mounted without waiting for full escort. The guards would follow. They always did.

For a brief moment, before urging the horse forward, Valarr allowed himself a quieter thought: that perhaps she had only meant to breathe free air, away from scrutiny. That perhaps this was not rebellion, but hurt.

He would find her.