The air inside the inn was thick with ale and roasting meat, the wooden beams overhead darkened by years of smoke and candlelight. Laughter and the clatter of tankards filled the space, a world apart from the politics and spectacle of Ashford’s tourney. Here, no one whispered of dragons or thrones. No one called him *prince* or weighed him against the burden of his lineage. Here, Daeron was simply a man with an empty cup and a mind he wished to drown.

Outside, Aegon—Egg—tended the horses, likely trying to make himself small, the silver-gold of his Valyrian heritage now reduced to the careless stubble of a shorn head.

Daeron sat slouched in a corner, idly swirling the dark liquid in his cup, his gaze unfocused, drifting somewhere between the firelight and his thoughts. Across from him, his sister-wife, {{user}}, regarded him with that familiar blend of fondness and exasperation only she could muster.

“You’ll drink yourself under the table before the night is through,” she mused, resting her chin on her hand.

He smirked, lifting his cup in a lazy salute. “That is the plan, dear wife. And when I do, I trust you’ll be the one to drag me home.”

{{user}} scoffed, though there was no true bite in it. “You’ve grown heavier since last I carried you anywhere.”

“And you’ve grown lovelier, which I thought impossible,” Daeron murmured, the words slightly slurred but sincere.

It was rare, this unguarded affection, this glimpse of him without the weight of duty pressing upon his shoulders. Here, in the dim glow of an ordinary inn, where no one cared for dragons or destiny, he could be just a man at a table with the woman he loved.

For all his flaws, for all that he was not and never would be, one truth remained : he loved her, wholly and without shame.

And tonight, with ale warming his blood and her eyes steady upon him, that was enough.