Chapter Text
Jessamine Frey knew how easily the problem of husbands could be solved. A measured tincture to still a man's breath in his sleep or a crueller draught to mimic a burst belly for those whose brutality demanded spectacle. She studied the arts of the maesters with a scholar's delight, but she was no healer to men. Cruelty, she had learned, was not a matter of birth or banner, because lords, squires, and stablehands alike were capable of the same violence and had the same entitlement to obedience and flesh.
Across the Riverlands, her reputation grew stranger with every passing season, until it was no longer spoken of as just a rumour but as a certainty known only to women. They came to her with burdens the world insisted they bear in silence, and Jessamine offered remedies no one else would.
There were girls with swollen bellies and no husbands, their faces pale with fear because the time for moon tea had long since passed and the shame would soon become visible to every gossiping tongue in the Riverlands. Nonetheless, Jessamine examined them with the same calm detachment she brought to all matters. Her solutions were not gentle, nor were they pleasant, but they were effective, and when the girl returned home, it was with her future once again her own.
Others came with ailments that confounded even the most learned chains of the Citadel, and Jessamine listened where the maesters dismissed. Though some whispered that her knowledge bordered on the unnatural, the women who left her chambers rarely complained of their results. It was even said that many women of the Riverlands preferred her presence at their birthing beds, because while everyone else fussed over potential heirs and spares, Lady Frey's only concern was the labouring mother.
However, no one could ever say with certainty what her services cost.
From ladies with heavy purses, she demanded coin, though never the sort that would invite questions from husbands or fathers, and from others, she asked stranger things. A ribbon once worn in happier days, three sprigs of betony and horehound for her ever-growing stores, a locket, a brooch, or even a tarnished copper ring. Once—so the story went—she requested a pouch filled with teeth pulled from the mouth of a man who had thought himself untouchable.
If a mother arrived with little ones in tow, she would kneel before them and offer sweets from a small tin she kept tucked among her satchels, things such as honeyed almonds, sugared plums, or bits of candied ginger. The children remembered her kindly for that, and often spoke of the strange lady long after their mothers had forgotten the taste of fear.
The stories varied wildly, but there was a pattern that those who knew her best recognized. Jessamine Frey never asked a woman to give more than she could afford to lose. If you were desperate enough and you went to the Crossing, the eldest Frey daughter always knew what to do.
Yet for all the poisons she had perfected and all the problems she had erased, her own predicament proved far more difficult to solve. Until now, the men she disposed of were unremarkable, their absences easily explained, and their deaths raising little more than momentary curiosity. Then her father's ambition placed her in an altogether more perilous position. For a prince was not so easily dispatched, and Aerion Targaryen was no ordinary prince.
To him, she was a curiosity worthy of collection, and he watched her the way a falconer watched a hawk he intended to break, eager to see how it might behave once confined. His fascination almost bordered on grotesque.
There was, in Aerion, the unmistakable appetite of a captor. The sort of man who believed that everything living could be reshaped if one only had the patience and cruelty to do so. He liked to imagine his new wife as something delicate, a bird, perhaps, bright-winged and keening as he plucked out her wings one by one, savouring each moment she squirmed beneath his hand, and each tremor of resistance slowly ground into submission.
He imagined in her all manner of beasts, but he forgot that a Frey was none of those things. A Frey was not a stag to be hunted, nor a dog to be beaten into obedience, nor even a bear that might eventually tire and fall beneath enough spears. A Frey was stone, and stone endured all.
It endured when all living things faltered, when marrow rotted, bone turned to dust, and proud creatures collapsed due to the passage of time and hunger. Even dragons, in the end, burned themselves out, and Jessamine's life's work was to destroy men like Aerion, even when he grasped at her in strange ways, searching for fragments of a girl beneath all the bones.
He was convinced that somewhere within her existed someone more pleasing to his tastes, and sometimes she let him bite, watching the fever-bright gleam in his violet eyes. Let him sink his teeth into the flesh of the thing he believed he understood, and then let him choke. Jessamine Frey would not be devoured.