Chapter Text
Alicent's POV :
The docks of Dragonstone smelled of salt and smoke, and Alicent Hightower stood at the edge of them, watching her children say their farewells.
Aegon and Helaena would fly. So would Daeron, small as he still was, seated before Helaena, thrilled at the prospect. Only Aemond would go by ship.
It had been his own choice. He had asked for it, in fact, in that quiet, deliberate way he had taken to speaking lately, as though every word had been weighed twice before it left his mouth. She had not argued. A part of her — the part that still remembered him as a boy who cried for a dragon of his own — had almost been relieved. A ship could not fall out of the sky.
Viserys had commanded that the royal party stop first at Dragonstone, to collect Rhaenyra and her sons, so that the family might arrive at Driftmark together. A show of unity, he called it, something owed to Corlys Velaryon in his grief. Alicent had said nothing against it, though the thought of days spent in close company with Rhaenyra sat in her like a stone.
She watched Aemond now, speaking with his siblings near the gangplank. Helaena said something that made him almost smile — a small, private thing, gone as quickly as it came. Aegon clapped him on the shoulder, careless as ever, already looking toward the sky and the dragon waiting for him rather than at his brother. Aemond only nodded, the way he nodded at most things now, and let them go.
She thought, watching him, of the conversation they had had on the beach a day past.
"I have something I want from you, mother."
He had wanted her blessing, or near enough to it, for a plan he would not fully explain. He had spoken of Vhagar in the careful, circling way he spoke of everything he wanted badly — never quite saying the thing outright, only enough of it that she could guess the shape of the rest. He wanted to claim the dragon. He had not told her when, or how, or what he intended to do about the fact that no one else had ever managed it and lived to boast of it unscarred. She had asked him plainly what his plan was, and he had given her pieces of one — enough to worry her, not enough to let her stop him.
She had let him go anyway. That was the trouble with loving a child who had learned, somewhere along the way, to need so little from anyone.
"My queen."
She turned. Aemond had crossed to her, his expression unreadable in the way it so often was now — a stillness that had settled over him sometime in the past few months and never quite left.
"You are certain you would rather sail," she said, though it was not truly a question anymore.
"I would rather sail," he agreed.
She studied his face, looking for whatever it was he was not telling her. She found nothing. He had gotten good at that.
"Take care of yourself," she said instead, and reached to smooth a crease on his doublet that did not need smoothing.
He allowed it, this time, without pulling away. "I will, mother."
Then he was gone, down toward the ship and his cabin below, and she was left standing on the dock with the wind pulling at her skirts.
Ser Criston came to stand beside her, as he often did now, close enough to be a comfort and far enough to be proper.
"He seemed calm," Criston said.
"He is always calm," she said. "That is what worries me."
"You think he means to do something at Driftmark."
"I think," Alicent said slowly, "that my son told me half of a plan and expected me to be satisfied with it. I was not satisfied. I simply had no way to make him say the rest."
Criston was quiet for a moment. "Shall I watch him, once we land?"
"Watch him," she said, "but do not stop him, unless he means to do something that cannot be undone. He is not a boy who takes kindly to being handled, Ser Criston. You of all people should know that by now."
He inclined his head and said nothing more, and she was grateful for it. There was nothing more to say. Whatever Aemond intended, he had already decided it long before he asked her blessing — she understood that much about him now, if little else.
---
Driftmark received them in grey skies and grief. Lord Corlys stood at the water's edge like a man carved from the same stone as his castle, and beside him Rhaenys, whose face gave away nothing at all, which was somehow worse than if it had given away everything.
Laenor's body lay in state before the funeral, and the whole of the realm's great houses came to see her off — Velaryon black and silver everywhere Alicent looked, the smell of the sea mixing with incense and candle-smoke.
Viserys stood through the ceremony leaning more heavily on his cane than he had a year ago, his face gaunt beneath the crown he insisted on wearing even here. Daemon stood at Rhaenyra's side, and it was Daemon — of course it was Daemon — who could not let even a funeral pass without finding some private jape to murmur to his brother, low enough that only those nearest could hear, about Otto Hightower's ambitions, about Alicent's green gowns, about the shape the court had taken since Aegon's mother had climbed so high. Viserys, still laughed under his breath at some of it, and Alicent felt the laugh land on her like a slap she was not permitted to acknowledge.
She saw Rhaenys's jaw tighten at the sound of it. Whatever else the Queen Who Never Was thought of Alicent Hightower, she thought less of laughter at her son's funeral, and for one strange moment Alicent felt almost aligned with her.
The moment did not last.
After the ashes were given to the sea, Alicent found her opportunity and did not waste it. She came to Viserys that evening, gentle in her approach, the way she had learned gentleness worked best on him — not demanding, only suggesting, only wondering aloud whether it might ease so much grief if Laenor's family sat together, properly, away from court eyes, and prayed for his soul to reach the Seven's doorstep. Was that not what he wanted, in the end? Peace between his daughter and his wife?
Viserys, worn thin by watching his House scatter into factions even at a funeral, seized on the idea the way a drowning man seizes on driftwood. He commanded it himself — commanded Rhaenyra and her sons to attend along with the Velaryons, so that no one might say later he had not tried.
Rhaenyra came to the meeting with her chin lifted, the particular way she held herself when she expected to be attacked and had already decided not to show it. Her sons flanked her — Jacaerys solemn, Lucerys watchful.
"You wished to see us together," Rhaenyra said to Alicent, before Viserys had even finished seating himself. "How thoughtful."
"I wished for peace," Alicent said. "Your father wishes for peace. I thought, perhaps, we might all wish for the same thing, if given the chance to sit and say so plainly."
"Peace," Rhaenyra repeated, as though tasting the word for poison. "Is that what you call it."
Alicent held her gaze and did not answer that. There was no answer that would satisfy either of them, and she had learned, over long years, not to spend her breath on ones that wouldn't.
"So," she said instead, turning to the septon waiting quietly at the room's edge, and to the assembled family with their carefully arranged faces, "let us begin with the prayer."
---
Aemond
He waited until the castle had gone quiet with its grief, until even the guards seemed to walk softer, before he slipped from his rooms and down toward the cliffs where Vhagar was said to make her lair.
No one would stop him this time. That was the thought that carried him down the dark path, sure-footed despite the poor light — not Maegor's memory of failure, but the simple, settled knowledge that he was Aemond now, and Aemond was the one who was meant to do this. History did not need his help to happen. It only needed him not to be a fool about it.
He found her among the rocks, vast even in sleep, her hide scarred by a century of wars he had only ever read about in books written by men who had never once felt her breath. He approached slow, the way he had planned, speaking low, offering nothing but his presence and his patience, the way a man might approach a thing far older and far angrier than himself and ask, quietly, to be allowed something he had not yet earned.
She woke. Her eye — the great, ancient, golden eye — found him, and for a long moment neither of them moved.
Then he was climbing, and then he was aloft, and every thought he had ever had about what it might feel like to fly fell away as inadequate the instant the ground dropped out beneath him.
It was not like anything. That was the truest thing he could have said of it. The wind did not simply rush past him; it seemed to pass through him, scouring away everything that was small and slow and earthbound. Vhagar's wingbeats came like the tolling of some vast bell he could feel in his chest before he heard it. Driftmark unspooled below — the castle, the cliffs, the grey sea catching what little light the clouds allowed — and he understood, in that moment, why men had burned kingdoms down for the chance to sit where he now sat.
He let himself have it, just for a while. Just the flying, and the letting go of every careful, measured thought he had carried with him since he woke up in this body a boy of thirteen with a dead man's memories crowding his skull. Up here there was nothing to plan around. Up here he was only Aemond, and Vhagar was only his.
He brought her down some distance from the castle, in a stretch of rocky shoreline he thought would be empty at this hour, on this day, with half of Driftmark still shut indoors for the meeting he knew his mother had arranged.
Jacaerys was standing there.
Aemond stopped short, water still dripping from Vhagar's descent pooling around his boots. Of everyone he might have expected to find waiting on this stretch of shore, Jace was near the bottom of the list — he was meant to be inside, at that meeting, seated beside his mother and brother while Alicent said her careful words and the septon said his prayers.
"You claimed her," Jace said. His voice was flat, but his eyes were not. "You actually claimed her."
"I did." Aemond kept his own voice level. He had promised himself, before ever climbing down to the cliffs, that whatever happened here would not be his doing — not his temper, not his pride, nothing that could be laid at his feet later and used against him. Maegor had learned, in another life entirely, how a small spark left unattended could burn down a great deal more than the man who lit it. He did not intend to make that mistake twice. "Vhagar chose to allow it."
"She's a Targaryen dragon."
"So am I."
Something moved across Jace's face — not quite anger, not yet, but close enough to its shore that Aemond watched it carefully. He understood, distantly, that this was not really about the dragon. It had not been about the dragon in whatever life he remembered either. It was about fathers and blood and all the things boys their age were made to carry without ever being asked if they wanted the weight.
"You shouldn't have come," Jace said. "Not today."
"I didn't come for you," Aemond said, and meant it as simple fact, not provocation — though he heard, even as he said it, how it might land as one anyway.
It landed as one.
Jace moved before Aemond had finished deciding whether to step back, and Aemond, who had sworn to himself he would not be the one to strike first, found himself with no choice at all but to answer it. He kept his words even through it, kept his hands as careful as he could make them, gave Jace nothing that could later be repeated at court as proof of a vicious, unprovoked Targaryen prince cutting down his cousin. He did not want this fight. He had planned, quite specifically, not to have this fight, not like this, not today.
None of that mattered to the blade when it caught him.
The pain came sharp and sudden along his side, hot in a way that made the cold sea-wind feel very far away, and Aemond staggered back a step onto the wet stone, one hand pressed instinctively to the wound, staring at Jace, who was staring back at him with an expression that was already, even in that instant, beginning to look like something closer to horror than triumph.