The Maiden and the Drowning Boy

Chapter 10 - I Let You Stop Me

Aegon had woken blearily in the watery grey light of pre-dawn, frowning at the drooling girl on his shoulder. Her hair was a soft, fawn brown, getting into his mouth where she had curled against him, and confusion overtook him at the utter lack of red. He had dreamed of red hair and blue eyes, a turned up nose and cinnamon sugar freckles across pale skin. The lack of it was jarring and annoying.

He'd not been the first man to sow Marla Lefford's fields, and Aegon felt little guilt at plying the lady with cups of wine and sweet words in an effort to ease the pain from the gaping wounds clawed open inside him. Aegon shoved at her shoulder, and the girl startled awake.

"You best get going before you're caught," he grumbled, pushing her unceremoniously from the bed, and tugging the covers back over himself. She sputtered in sleepy confusion as she grabbed her things. Whatever else she had complained about went unheard as Aegon and his pulsing headache burrowed face down into the pillows. He reached beneath to twist his fingers into Abby's torn nightgown, gripping it like a child's toy and letting the lingering scent of bergamot and soap lull him back into a miserable sleep.

'You're pathetic,' was his hazy thought on the cusp of dreaming and awake. The headache that pulsed behind his eyes was an old friend. Aegon sunk into the acrid taste in the back of his throat and the miserable vestiges of red hair in the firelight.

The next time he opened his eyes was to the spike of pain jarring through his left shoulder as he was yanked from the bed. There was no time to yell, to flail or kick. He hit the cold stone floor with a painful thump, his legs still tangled in the bed sheets. Light now streamed properly into his bedroom and Aegon was left blinking on the floor as Otto Hightower stepped into the shaft of light, a moon blotting out the sun.

"Fuck," was all Aegon managed to groan before the boot to the ribs sent him gasping.

He barely heard the sharp inhale of his mother as he was hauled up, stumbling and tripping naked from the bed. "I should have you thrown in a horse trough," his grandfather snarled, and shook him violently by the arm so that his teeth clacked and rattled. "Or maybe I should have you thrown from that window." Aegon gritted his teeth to keep from letting the man know how badly it hurt to be jerked around by his arm. It was his sword arm. His gaze lowered for a moment to the fallen tangle of sheets at his feet, to the lyre that lay hidden beneath them. 'Your playing arm,' he thought, fuzzy and distant in the moment. When was the last time he'd even played?

'Don't dislocate it again,' he silently begged, for prayers were useless for a monster such as him. 'Maybe I'll get a scrap of honour if I win the melee.' If he won his bout, maybe he'd be worth something. Maybe Abby would look at him gently again instead of avoiding his gaze.

"Grandfather," Aegon rasped, and his bloodshot eyes tracked around the man's shoulder to see his mother by the door. She was pale and beautiful, her auburn hair a single tight braid coiled around her head. How young she looked, with her round face and smooth skin. How frightened she looked, with her brown eyes wide and glossy and the ever careful veneer of propriety and calm cracking with her worry.

Worry for him? 'Will wonders ever cease? First a duplicitous rabbit hiding claws and now a mother who cared. How lucky am I?'

"Loras Lefford claims you deflowered his sister! How can you be so bloody stupid, boy!"

"Did I?" Aegon asked, manic laughter edging along his words amid his fear and the pain pulsing through his ribs. "Unless he's trying to cover up getting to his sister first, someone else had the honour. She was decently practised-" The back of his grandfather's hand struck him so hard Aegon saw stars, crashing into the poster of the bed from the force of it.