The Whim of the Fourteen

by InsideTH3fire23

Summary:

In Dragonstone’s forsaken halls, Rhaenyra Targaryen treads where no light lingers.

In a chamber steeped in ash and memory, ancient power wakes to her blood. A bargain is struck, and from it will rise scars that bind her flesh, bend her lineage, and alter the fate of House Targaryen for all time.

Chapter 1: The Promise

The halls of Dragonstone loomed around her like a tomb.

Torchlight spilling long shadows that clung to the damp stone. Rhaenyra drifted through the dark, her nightgown little more than a shred of silk against the chill.

It did not warm her.

Nothing did.

She thought of the name they had once given her The Realm’s Delight and nearly laughed.

What delight remained in her now?

Her hair was unpinned, a wild tangle about her shoulders; her lips, once stained with courtly rouge, were pale and bitten raw. She felt herself a ruin in white cloth. A bride defiled not by violence but by emptiness.

The travesty of her wedding night lingered like a bruise inside her, and no veil could hide the truth: her husband would never give her what duty demanded.

She did love Laenor...her cousin was kind, fair, even noble in his way.

A finer man than most who prowled the court. But a husband? A consort? He was a horror of one.

A sword swallower, she thought bitterly, the phrase striking hot and cruel in her mind before she could stop it.

Shame followed hard on its heels. She hated herself for the thought, hated the small, jagged pleasure of cruelty it carried. Laenor was not unworthy. He simply could not be what she required. And for that, the burden fell to her alone.

Her thoughts snarled in the dark, too loud in her own skull, when the stone bit back.

A jagged edge rose from the floor like a fang, splitting clean through slipper and flesh.

The pain was sudden, sharp enough to steal her breath. She staggered, clutching at the wall, as warmth spread across her foot and bled into the pale blue silk. The stain blossomed quick and dark, a wound blooming where every eye might see.

The castle seemed to shiver around her. Each step forward smeared her blood across the ancient stone, a trail claimed. She was not watching her path, only the ruin at her feet, and so she did not see how the floor opened until it was too late.

The ground gave way.

She fell hard, struck bone against stone, and crumpled into a chamber below.

Breath ragged, body trembling, she dragged herself upright against the cold wall. Her pulse roared in her ears.

And the room was waiting.

The air was wrong here.

Heavy, acrid, alive.

It clung to her skin like smoke and salt, but beneath it ran another current, older, fouler, steeped in fire long spent. The chamber reeked of Valyria, of blood burned to ash and power left to rot.

Even her veins protested.

She was Valyrian born, dragon’s blood through and through, yet the place stung her as though she were unworthy.

The air split.

Pressure buckled through the chamber, rattling stone and bone alike.

Torches that should have guttered long ago flared to life, their flames bowing inward in a most unnatural fashion. The walls groaned, the floor shivered, dust trembling down like ash. It was not just a voice that filled the space. It was the room itself made to speak.

The words came in High Valyrian, brutal and flawless, carried on a resonance so deep it clawed her marrow:

“Ābrar hen rȳbagon. Vezof jin azantys ziry īlon. Ao sagon ēdruta, se ao sagon jurnegon.”

Child of dragons. Even here the fire judges you. You are weighed, and you are found fragile.

Rhaenyra’s breath caught. The cut on her foot throbbed, blood pattering softly against stone, and with each drop the chamber seemed to quicken, as though the walls drank her offering.

The unseen voice coiled through the dark again, the flames guttering low as it spoke:

“Yn ao ūndegon. Yn ao rūs.”

And yet you bleed. And yet you answer.

The room trembled with it, alive, watching, listening. She was not alone.

Her pulse hammered in her ears, yet she forced her chin up. The stone pressed close, but she would not cower.

Not here.

Not before this.

Her tongue shaped the language of her blood, crisp and steady despite the tremor in her limbs.

“Ñuha jorrāelagon gaomagon nyke dōrī. Nyke māzigon ēza rȳbagon, se nyke daor arlinnon.”

My worth is mine to decide. I was born of dragons, and I will not kneel.

Her voice cracked at the edges, but she did not look away into the dark. 

For a long moment the chamber was still. Only the sea’s distant roar and her ragged breathing filled the silence.

Then the air shivered again, low and amused, a sound like molten rock shifting beneath the earth.

Laughter.

The sound was neither wholly cruel nor kind, but vast, too vast, as though some ancient mirth had split the realm on whim. 

From the shadows, he coalesced into form, every line of him too exact, too flawless, a vision of silver and moonlight that stung the eyes.

When he smiled, it was ruin and promise both. The chamber bowed to it, the flames straining low as though even fire bent in reverence. 

“I am Tyraxes,” he said, the name striking the stones until they rang with it. “One of the Fourteen, born of fire and ash. God of music and prophecy, of art and of beauty in its most perfect, masculine form. Brother. Husband. Eternal consort of Syrax.”

He stepped nearer, each word making the air quake, every syllable dragging the blood in her veins toward him.

Rhaenyra’s breath stuttered in her chest.

The sheer brilliance of him seared her eyes, the weight of his voice pressed her bones toward the floor. Her defiance, her bitter pride, all of it faltered beneath the presence of a god. She bowed her head, sinking to her knees upon the cold stone, nightgown clinging damp to her skin, hair tumbling like a wild veil around her face.

Her lips moved before thought could stop them, shaping words of worship she had been taught since girlhood.

The prayers of the Fourteen spilled from her tongue in halting High Valyrian, her voice raw with awe: invocations to flame, to fate, to beauty and song.

Her cut foot bled freely.

Drops hissing as they struck the stones.

Tyraxes looked upon her with violet eyes that burned like twin suns. 

“Yes,” he said, voice ringing with terrible delight. “Kneel as a daughter of Valyria should."

His gaze dropped to the spreading stain across the pale blue silk at her foot. The smile widened.

“And I thank you for the offering, little dragon.”

The torches hissed as if in answer, and the whole chamber seemed to inhale her blood like incense.

Tyraxes moved, and the air itself shifted with him.

The weight of his presence pressed against her until she thought her bones might crack, yet his hand was a contradiction, cool as marble, smooth as carved ivory, as he reached down and touched her chin.

With a single finger he lifted her face, forcing her violet eyes to meet his own.

The contact was unbearable, as if fire and ice warred beneath her skin, but it held her fast. His beauty was a torment at such closeness: flawless features wrought too perfectly to be human, lips curved in a smile that promised both rapture and ruin.

“You have bled for me,” he said, voice rolling through the chamber like thunder harnessed to silk. “Now you will speak.”

His grip tilted her face higher, so that her prayer-raw lips trembled open beneath his gaze.

“Name what you desire, daughter of dragons. Name it, and know that what you ask will be given, though no gift comes without its price.”

The torches flared higher, their flames bending toward her as though the whole room leaned in to hear her answer.

Her throat burned beneath his touch, but she forced the words out, proud even on her knees.

“The throne,” she said, the syllables sharp, defiant. “It is mine by right. That is what I want.”

For a heartbeat, silence.

Then Tyraxes’s laughter poured over her again, low and unyielding, rattling the very stones.

“Think deeper, child,” he taunted, his thumb brushing against her chin, tilting her face higher still. “A throne is stone and metal. Empty. What do you need to secure it?”

Her breath caught. Shame and truth warred inside her, her pride resisting, her heart pounding as though the answer were being dragged from her marrow.

At last, in a voice scarcely above a whisper, she gave it shape in the language of her blood.

“Ñuhys dalirii.”

Heirs.

The word seemed to hang in the air, heavy and irrevocable. Her lips trembled as though she had spoken an oath rather than a plea.

Tyraxes’s smile unfurled, slow and terrible, violet eyes gleaming like twin flames. His hand lingered at her jaw, thumb pressing faintly against her skin as though sealing the word into her flesh.

“Yes,” he said, voice like music dragged across iron. “Now you name your truth.”

The torches leapt higher, their fire bowing toward him, and the whole chamber seemed to exhale in satisfaction.

Then, with languid ease, Tyraxes drew a dagger wrought of blackened steel. He turned his palm upward and pressed the blade across it.

From the wound spilled not red, but gold, thick, radiant, shimmering like molten sunlight. It caught the torchlight and outshone it, a liquid hymn.

“This is my blood,” he said, holding the cup beneath his palm as it filled, dark stone drinking his divinity. “The marrow of prophecy, the vein of beauty, the fire of gods. You will drink it, Rhaenyra Targaryen. You will carry it.”

He lifted the cup to her lips, and though her hands trembled, she did not resist. The golden blood burned as it touched her tongue, smoke and metal and ash, music and thunder, every note too sharp for mortal flesh.

She choked, but he pressed the vessel harder against her mouth, forcing her to swallow.

When the last drop was gone, Tyraxes’s smile deepened into something merciless.

“Seven days,” he told her, his voice both prophecy and sentence. “Seven days and seven nights. You will wish for death before the first dawn. Your body will break, your voice will turn to a scream that never ends. But if you endure, if you hold through every flame and every knife, you will have them all. Three children, of my blood and yours. Fail, and they die with you.”

The golden taste seared her throat. Already the chamber spun, heat clawing through her veins, her stomach twisting as though filled with knives. She stumbled forward, clutching at herself, her breath ragged. The torches hissed, bending low as if listening for her scream.

Tyraxes laughed softly, delighted. “Do not weep, little dragon. This is only the beginning.”

Chapter 2: Ash and Hymn

Rhaenyra stirred beneath the heavy silks of her marriage bed. For a moment she could not place herself, whether she lay in the haunted chamber beneath the castle, or in her own body at all.

Her throat was scorched as if she had swallowed smoke, her stomach uneasy. 

Her eyes flicked to the man beside her.

Laenor Velaryon lay sprawled across the mattress with careless grace.

His mouth parted slightly in sleep, soft as a boy’s.

He was broad through the chest, the lines of a swordsman etched in his frame.

Yet the curve of his lips and the languor of his posture belonged more to a court minstrel than a hardened knight.

A man of the sea, not of the throne.

Rhaenyra let her gaze fall to herself.

The nightgown clung damp to her skin.

Her hair loose in the night had tangled itself into wild snarls. She tugged some free from the corner of her mouth, its ends knotted together.

Her bare foot slipped from the coverlet. 

The sole was whole.

No jagged cut split her flesh, no blood stained her skin. Only a faint pink line lingered where memory told her a stone fang had pierced her.

She touched it with trembling fingers, but it did not sting.

Had it all been dream?

The descent into black stone, the voice of a god, the taste of gold burning down her throat?

Laenor shifted beside her with a small hum. His hand fell across her stomach. Warm and careless. 

“Morning, wife,” Laenor said, voice rough with dreams.

Rhaenyra forced a small smile. “Morning.”

For a time, neither moved.

The chamber was hushed but for the restless sigh of the sea beyond the shutters.

Laenor’s hand still rested over her stomach, but there was no claim in it.

Only weariness.

At last he shifted, rolling onto his back. The light caught in his hair, turning it to pale silver flame, though his eyes fixed on nothing above. 

Laenor flung one arm across his brow. “They will remember that feast,” he said at last, voice flat. “Though not for vows spoken, nor for dancing.”

The words hung unfinished, the weight of them needing no explanation.

Rhaenyra did not answer.

She only reached across the space between them, letting her hand find his. He gripped it at once, tightly, as though some tide threatened to pull him under. His lashes fluttered shut, and for a moment she thought he might weep. But no tears came.

Only the long silence of someone who had wept already, too much, too often.

The warmth of her hand was all she could offer. 

Laenor exhaled at last,  and turned his face toward her arm. Not a lover’s gesture, but a friend’s. She let him rest there, her tangled hair falling over both of them like a curtain.

“Duty.” He rolled the word like a stone on his tongue. “That is what they expect of us. You and I, heirs both.” His smile was thin and crooked, violet eyes darting toward her. “Mayhaps enough wine will see me to it. Or some poultice. Or prayer.”

"Wine will not give me heirs,” she said gently.

“No.” His laugh frayed at the edges, hollow. “Then what will? Gods know I am no better mummer than I was a husband last night. But I will try, cousin. I will try, though the gods mock me for it.”

Rhaenyra studied him, the boy who had once raced her through Driftmark’s shallows, hair flying, salt spray in his mouth, eyes alight. He was still that boy, only bruised by a grief that had hollowed him, and now shackled to a future he was not made for.

She tightened her grip on his hand. “You are no shame to me, Laenor.”

He gave her a broken sort of smile, half gratitude, half despair. 

“Enough of this,” she said more softly. “Let us awaken and find breath in being away from the cesspit of court. Here, at least, we are not their spectacle.”

The chamber stirred with life before long. Servants slipped through the carved doors, silent as shadows at first, then blooming into purposeful bustle.

Rhaenyra sat upright, drawing the coverlet close as the women set about their tasks. Laenor groaned faintly beside her, dragging the sheet over his face, unready to meet the day. She almost envied him for it.

Her maids worked quickly, trained to hands that did not linger.

One stripped the tangled nightgown from her shoulders, another set out the day’s gown, pale lavender velvet, trimmed with pearls at the sleeves. Rhaenyra moved through it as though her body belonged to them, not herself, arms lifted, hair gathered, feet guided.

When the comb met her head, she flinched.

Her hair was a snarl of gold and silver, knotted from the night’s tossing.

The servant worked carefully, but each tug through the tangles felt sharp, too sharp, as though the comb dragged through more than glossy hair. As though it tore at her very marrow.

In the hush of her own mind, laughter echoed.

Seven days, Tyraxes’s voice purred. Seven nights. You will wish for death before the first dawn.

She gripped the arm of the chair, knuckles white.

The comb hissed again through a tangle.

The servant winced at the sound, mistaking it for her crown princess’s temper, and tugged more gently.

Her throat still burned.

The taste of gold lingered at the back of her tongue, metallic, sweet, impossible to swallow away. The morning gown settled heavy against her skin, yet she felt no warmth in it, only the weight of his promise, seeping like fire through her veins.

One servant pinned her hair back into a braided crown, muttering about the strength of Dragonstone’s winds, while another drew silk slippers onto her feet.

Rhaenyra glanced down,  whole, uncut, but she could not forget the sight of blood blooming across the pale blue silk, or how the stone itself had seemed to drink it.

“Princess?” one maid whispered, uncertain, waiting for her word of approval.

Rhaenyra blinked, recalling herself. She nodded, and the girl bowed, reassured.

Around her, the morning moved on as though nothing had changed. Laenor groaned again, dragging himself half-upright, muttering about wine with his breakfast. The servants smiled indulgently.

But Rhaenyra felt the chamber breathe, heavy and watchful. She knew Dragonstone remembered. 

It must. 

It must. 

---

The solar smelled of ink and salt.

Light from the narrow windows fell across the table where Maester Gerardys waited, quills set in order, ledgers opened.

He rose stiffly as she entered, bowing with the weight of both courtesy and habit.

“Princess.”

Rhaenyra crossed the chamber with the unhurried step of one accustomed to being observed.

The pearls at her sleeves caught the light with every measured motion.

She seated herself, back straight, chin lifted, and folded her hands atop the carved arms of the chair.

“Attend me, Maester,” she said.

Gerardys adjusted his posture and bent over the first ledger. “There is damage from the last storm. Three turrets along the western curtain wall require repair. The masons assure me they will hold another month, but their cost is doubled if we delay.”

Her eyes traced the lines of ink, but she spoke without hesitation. “Summon the masons. The work begins at once. Dragonstone’s walls must never be left to crumble, not while I keep it.”

The old man inclined his head, quill already scratching.

He shuffled another parchment forward. “The fishermen petition for relief. Two boats lost their nets outright. The men fear hunger will follow if coin or grain is not granted.”

Rhaenyra leaned slightly forward, her gaze cutting sharp to the figures scrawled in the margin. “Coin,” she decided. “And new nets from the stores. If their lines fall silent, our tables will follow. See it done before the week’s end.”

“Yes, Princess.”

She allowed a breath to fall, steady, regal, as though every word had been chosen with the ease of destiny. 

A sound pressed through the stone beneath her feet. A hum like a harp string plucked. 

It was too faint to name, yet insistent, threading through Gerardys’s voice.

Her throat tightened.

For a moment the words before her blurred, lines of black swimming like smoke across the page.

“Princess?” Gerardys looked up, concern flickering in his weary eyes. 

Her hand had curled too tight against the chair, nails biting her palm.

She stilled it at once, forced her lips into a measured smile.

“The fishermen,” she said, tone cool and unbroken, “will also be sent salted provisions from the castle’s stores. Let them see their Princess tends them swiftly.”

The maester bowed, reassured, quill scratching fast.

Rhaenyra leaned back, every inch of her body carved into poise.

But the hum lingered at the edge of hearing, weaving itself into her pulse. She forced herself to ignore it, to listen only to Gerardys’s steady recitations, to wear her crown not yet of metal but of composure.

The heir of the Iron Throne did not falter. Not before her court, not before her maester.

Yet inside, the echoes of Tyraxes coiled, laughing low.

Maester Gerardys hesitated, parchment trembling faintly in his hand. “One other matter, Princess.”

Rhaenyra inclined her head. “Speak.”

“It is Syrax,” he said at last, his voice lowered to a hush. “The keepers say she is unsettled. They say it began in the dead of night. She circled the skies until the stars guttered out, her cries echoing down the mountain. The ground itself shook with the beating of her wings.”

Rhaenyra’s chest tightened.

The dead of night.

The very hours when golden blood had scorched her throat, when Tyraxes’s laughter had pressed the stone around her.

“The keepers cannot approach her,” Gerardys went on. “She snaps at their presence, flame in her throat before they dare take a step. They tell me she has devoured more in these last hours than in the moons before combined. Deer, sheep, even a pair of oxen offered for market. She leaves nothing but ash and bone.”

The hum was louder now. 

Eternal consort of Syrax.

“Dragons are fire made flesh,” she said evenly, her voice carrying the weight of command. “Syrax is mine. She will settle when I do.”

Gerardys inclined his head, though worry still tugged at his brow. “Of course, Princess. She waits for you.”

She drew herself taller in the chair, voice steady as steel. “Then I will go to her. Syrax is mine, and I am hers. Let no one else attempt it.”

The maester bowed deeply, relief softening his aged features. “As you command, Princess.”

Rhaenyra turned to the narrow window. The salt wind struck her face, sharp and cold, but did nothing to cool the heat twisting in her belly.

Beyond the cliffs, she thought she heard it, the keening roar of her dragon. 

Rhaenyra dismissed the maester with a cool nod and swept from the solar, but once the doors closed behind her, her composure cracked. The corridors of Dragonstone seemed narrower, darker, as if to whisper: Go to her.

She did not resist.

Her maids followed in silence to her chamber, where she shed her velvet gown for her riding leathers.

The familiar weight of boiled leather and heavy boots steadied her, as did the feel of the dagger’s hilt at her hip.

Her hair was pulled back into a thick braid, practical, no pearls or pins, only the garb of a dragonrider.

She dismissed the servants with a curt wave.

This was not for them.

The air grew hotter as she climbed the winding path toward the dragonmount, sulfur and salt mingling in every breath. Even before she reached the ridge, the sound of Syrax’s cries split the sky.

The keepers had gathered at a distance, a nervous cluster, their faces pale. They bowed low as she passed, but none dared follow.

“Princess,” one stammered. “She...she will not let us near. She burns at the sight of us. We feared…”

“You feared rightly,” Rhaenyra cut in. 

They bent their heads, relieved to be dismissed.

Rhaenyra strode on, the path trembling beneath each quake of Syrax’s wings. When she reached the plateau, the sight struck her breathless.

Syrax wheeled overhead, golden hide gleaming against the ashen sky. Her wings tore the air with each beat, scattering stones, sending heat in rippling waves across the ground. She was not the placid mount Rhaenyra had known since girlhood. This was no trained beast, no steed. She was wild fire, feral and furious.

The dragon shrieked, a sound that shook the cliffs and set the sea birds scattering. Her claws ripped at the rock, her eyes burned molten gold, and smoke curled from her maw in furious coils.

Rhaenyra stood her ground.

“Syrax,” she called, her voice sharp, commanding. The word carried not as plea but as claim.

The dragon’s great head swung, nostrils flaring. For an instant, flame flickered in her throat. The keepers, watching from afar, gasped and fell to their knees.

But Syrax did not burn her rider.

With a keening cry that rattled the air, the dragon folded her wings and lumbered forward, claws gouging trenches in the stone.

Her heat struck Rhaenyra like a forge. She lowered her head, scales shimmering, and pressed the length of her muzzle against Rhaenyra’s body.

Straight to her stomach.

The weight of it staggered her back a step. The heat seared through leather and flesh alike, a claim as much as a caress. Rhaenyra gasped, clutching at the dragon’s jaw, her heart hammering.

“Easy,” she whispered, voice ragged but gentle. “Easy, dear girl. I am here. I am yours, as you are mine.”

The dragon rumbled, smoke curling from her nostrils, breath hot enough to sting Rhaenyra’s eyes. Still she pressed closer, closer, as if she could sink into Syrax’s flesh and drown out the burning that still coiled in her belly.

“You feel it too, do you not?” she murmured, words meant for dragon’s ear alone. “The fire that is not ours. The song that is not yours. But you are stronger than it, and so am I.”

Syrax shifted, great wings rustling, claws scraping sparks from the stone. Her molten eyes fixed on Rhaenyra’s face with an intensity that was almost human.

Rhaenyra’s hands smoothed down the curve of her muzzle. She tilted her head, pressing a kiss against a scale that burned her lips. “Let us fly, dear girl. Let us breathe above it all.”

The dragon keened, the sound so sharp and vast it split the air. With a thunderous sweep of her wings, Syrax crouched low, the stone trembling beneath her weight. Rhaenyra did not hesitate. She climbed the ridged neck with the practiced grace of long years, leather scraping against hot scales, until she slid into the saddle and wound the reins around her wrist.

The air itself seemed to hold its breath.

Then Syrax leapt.

The ground dropped away in a rush of wind and ash, the sea churning white far below. Rhaenyra clung to the saddle, her braid whipping back, the heat of her dragon searing through every seam of her leathers. The sky opened wide around them, grey, vast, endless, and for the first time since the dead of night, Rhaenyra drew a full breath.

“Higher,” she whispered, and Syrax obeyed, wings cleaving through the clouds like knives of fire and gold.

Below, Dragonstone brooded. Above, only the wind, the sky, and her dragon’s cry.

For the first time in moons, Rhaenyra’s lips curved into something unforced. A smile.

It startled her, the feel of it how strange, how forgotten.

Since Daemon had left her to wilt alone in that brothel, a girl abandoned at the edge of desire.

Since Alicent had turned her back, eyes sharp with betrayal where once they had been soft with friendship.

Since the farce of a wedding meant to crown her triumph but marred in blood and hollow vows.

All of it had pressed upon her, crushing, suffocating.

But here, here there was only air and flame.

“Faster!” she cried, laughter threading her voice, and Syrax answered at once, diving in a smooth, wild arc. The wind tore at her braid, salt spray stung her lips, and still she grinned, teeth bared to the sky.

The dragon shrieked her triumph, a sound that split the clouds and scattered the gulls in panicked flight. Rhaenyra leaned low, pressing close to the warm scales, her arms wrapped around the ridged neck as though embracing not a beast but her truest self.

All the weight of court, of duty, of betrayal, it fell away like ash from flame.

“Good girl,” she whispered, breath stolen by the wind. “My fierce, wild girl.”

Syrax rumbled in answer, wings banking to catch the sun breaking through the clouds. For a heartbeat the world was gold and white, sea and sky burning bright.

And Rhaenyra, heir to the Iron Throne, laughed aloud.

Chapter 3: The Laugh of the Dragon

A moon had passed since the wedding, no more.

Barely enough time for a seed to quicken, and yet already the whispers pressed like knives.

Was she carrying?

Did her belly swell?

Would the match prove itself in flesh, or in failure?

The king had called her back to Kingslanding, and Rhaenyra knew what he sought in her face, in her frame...signs, omens, any hint that her womb had answered duty’s demand.

She did not know if the god had spoken truth.
Tyraxes’s laughter still threaded her dreams, golden blood still burned faint at the back of her tongue, but each morning she woke to the same emptiness. Her body gave no answer.

Laenor had tried.

Awkward hands, wine-soured breath, attempts that ended more often in sighs and silence than in coupling. He had been kind, in his way. Gentle. Too gentle. 

And yet she must return as wife. As heir. As hope of the realm.

The morning was pale when she mounted Syrax for the flight. The dragon’s cry split the air, fierce and wild, a sound that turned every head on Dragonstone’s cliffs. Rhaenyra pressed low against her neck, braid whipping loose, leather gloves tight on the reins.

Laenor rose beside her on Seasmoke, silver hair glinting in the ash-light. To the eyes of any watching from the shore, they were a perfect pair: prince and princess, sea and fire, dragonriders bound by blood and promise. But Rhaenyra felt only the hollow space between their flights, his mount veering wide, his gaze fixed on the horizon, never quite meeting hers.

Syrax rumbled, wings beating harder, faster, as though she felt her rider’s unrest. The heat of her body pulsed through the saddle, steady and fierce.

“Fly, girl,” Rhaenyra whispered into the wind. “Carry me home.”

Dragonstone dwindled to black stone behind them. Ahead, the Red Keep rose in her mind’s eye, courtly eyes sharp with suspicion, her father’s frail hands searching her face, Alicent’s gaze like a blade.

Syrax’s claws struck stone as she landed before the Dragonpit, wings folding with a hiss that rattled the air. Her scales gleamed pale gold in the morning light, heat rippling from her flanks as she lowered her head to the ground.

Rhaenyra slid from the saddle, one hand lingering against the curve of her dragon’s muzzle. Syrax’s molten eyes narrowed, smoke curling faintly from her nostrils as though reluctant to let her rider go.

“I will return,” Rhaenyra whispered, her palm pressed firm against warm scales. “Wait for me. Guard yourself until I call.”

The dragon rumbled low, breath searing enough to sting her skin, then turned away at last, lumbering toward the cavernous mouth of the Pit.

Laenor slid from his saddle with less grace, boots striking stone too heavily, and offered only a brief pat to his dragon’s shoulder. Seasmoke huffed, then slunk after Syrax. 

By the time Rhaenyra and Laenor entered the waiting carriage, the clamor of the city had already begun to gather.

Fishermen, washerwomen, and merchants crowded the streets, craning for a glimpse of their princess returned. The carriage lurched forward, wheels clattering over cobblestones slick with morning dew.

Laenor leaned back against the paneling, a wineskin dangling from his hand though it was scarcely past dawn. His cloak bore Driftmark’s colors, trimmed in sea-blue, but his hair was loose and his eyes red-rimmed from the night before.

“Home again,” he muttered, voice slurring faintly with fatigue...or drink. “Or as much of a home as that pit can be.”

Rhaenyra did not turn. Through the carriage window the Red Keep loomed larger with every turn of the road, its towers jagged against the sky like broken teeth. Smoke clung stubborn to its walls, as though even the sea breeze could not strip it clean.

“Kingslanding is..." she said quietly. “It is a cage with too many eyes.”

Laenor gave a dry laugh, lifting the wineskin in a mock toast before drinking deep. “A cage it may be, but better cages than coffins. We live, cousin. And in this family, that is victory enough.”

His words fell heavy between them, like stones dropped into dark water.

Rhaenyra’s hands curled in her lap, knuckles pale against the silk of her gown. She felt the faint hum beneath her skin, the whisper of gold in her veins. Even here, far from Dragonstone’s cliffs, she thought she heard it still: music threading through the rattle of wheels, notes too ancient to belong to any harp or lute.

The carriage jolted to a halt at the foot of the Red Keep.

Outside, the courtyard was already thick with bodies, gold cloaks standing in gleaming rows, and beyond them a crush of courtiers in silks and jewels. Their whispers carried like the drone of bees disturbed, sharp and insistent.

The door swung open.

“Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen, heir to the Iron Throne, Lady of Dragonstone!” the herald called, his voice cutting across the throng.

Rhaenyra descended first, cloak of deep twilight purple sweeping over the stone, embroidered with Syrax’s golden wings. Her braid was crowned in silver clasps, her violet eyes catching the sun as though the realm itself might burn in their reflection.

Every gaze clung to her. Some dipped in bows, some in shallow nods, but all measured: her face, her hands, her stomach.

“Prince Laenor Velaryon, consort to the Realm’s Delight, heir of Driftmark!”

Laenor followed, handsome enough in Driftmark blue, though his smile was thin. The second cheer was dutiful, but brief. The stares slid back to her as soon as courtesy was done.

The difference was plain.

For her, the silence was sharp, expectant, heavy as a blade.

For him, the whispers were of wine and weakness.

Rhaenyra lifted her chin, spine straight as steel drawn from its sheath. 

Let them look. Let them weigh. They would see only steel.

On the dais, Viserys stirred.

His frame had grown thinner, but his eyes lit with sudden warmth as she approached. His smile broke across his face with all the fragile joy of a man who saw in her a balm for his unrest. 

“My darling girl,” he breathed, though the words carried only to those nearest.

And when Rhaenyra smiled, soft at the corners, her lips curved just so, the hall seemed to still.

For in that smile was Aemma Arryn reborn, the queen long buried. The woman Viserys had loved beyond all others.

The king’s face crumpled with aching fondness, and the weight of the court seemed to fall away.

Only Alicent did not soften.

She stood beside him in a gown of gleaming green, her posture flawless, her hands folded in her lap. Her lips curved in courtesy, but her eyes, watched everything.

“Father,” Rhaenyra said softly as she reached the foot of the throne. Her voice was gentled, the edge she held for courtiers smoothed into warmth. “It gladdens me to be returned to you.”

The words, simple as they were, broke him.

He reached a trembling hand toward her as though he might draw her up the steps, as though she were still his beloved child and not the woman the court would devour.

Before he could speak, Alicent’s voice carried, sweet and clear.

“Princess Rhaenyra,” she said, the title poised like a jewel on her tongue. “And Ser Laenor. How heartening to see the royal couple returned from Dragonstone. The court delights in welcoming you both as husband and wife."

The words rang smooth, polished. 

Rhaenyra turned to her stepmother with a smile as smooth as polished steel. “Gracious of you, stepmother,” she returned, inclining her head just so. “And yet it is no less heartening to see the realm so well-ordered under its queen consort’s eye. My father is fortunate indeed to have such loyal care at his side.”

For a heartbeat the air between them tightened, each smile drawn a fraction too sharp.

The courtiers rustled like reeds in wind, heads bent, ears straining.

Viserys, oblivious to the venom flowing beneath the courtesy, beamed upon them both. 

At last he raised his hand, shooing away the formalities as though they were cobwebs unfit for family.

“Enough,” he said, his voice cracking with joy. “Enough of this court’s stiff ritual. I would see my daughter.”

He clasped her hands, then drew her into an embrace, clinging as though to something he feared the gods might yet strip from him. For a moment Rhaenyra’s poise softened, and she let her head rest briefly against his shoulder, her lips curling in a smile that lit her face. 

“My darling girl,” Viserys murmured, before pulling back to study her. “Come, tell me. How fares Dragonstone? How stand its walls, its winds, its halls?”

Rhaenyra steadied her smile, speaking with measured ease. “It endures, Father. The storms batter, the stone holds. The folk are tended, the keepers loyal.”

“And what a sight you made,” Viserys said, his voice lifting with a rare vigor. “Syrax wheeling above the city, her wings casting shadow over the streets. The folk will remember it, my girl."

“Syrax has been… restless.”

Viserys’s gaze sharpened.

His expression warmed, hopeful. “Restless, you say? Perhaps she carries a clutch. The blood of dragons grows fierce in such times.”

He let the thought linger, his gaze pressing heavy and meaningful on her, as though Syrax’s unrest might mirror her own womb.

Heat rose in Rhaenyra’s belly, with bitterness that burned. She held her father’s gaze, lips curved faintly as courtesy demanded, though inside her thoughts turned cruel.

Did he speak so tenderly to her mother, once?

Did Aemma smile at such gentle urgings, even as she bled, even as her body broke beneath the weight of his “kind” hope?

From the dais came Alicent’s voice, each word poised to cut.

“How fortuitous that would be, indeed,” the queen consort said, her smile serene. “It is no small blessing, to carry new life so swiftly. For some women, it comes as easily as drawing breath.”

Her cold eyes swept the hall, then returned to Rhaenyra.

“For others,” Alicent continued, her voice softening into a facsimile of sympathy, “it is… a more perilous trial. Some struggle. Some suffer. Some are not spared at all.”

The burn of rage licked up her throat, fierce enough she thought she might choke on it.

But Rhaenyra did not break.

She forced her lips into the faintest curve, her eyes narrowing not at Alicent but at the space just beyond her. Her fury she buried deep, smothered beneath the iron of her will, until only her father remained before her.

She turned her face to him, her expression softening like dawn after storm.

“Father,” she said gently, her voice pitched for him alone though the court strained to hear. “It has been too long. Will you not dine with us tonight? I would speak with you at leisure, away from this hall and its eyes. I have much to tell you of Dragonstone.”

Viserys’s features brightened, his weariness lifting like mist before sunlight. He clasped her hand again, smiling with the unguarded joy of a man who saw not a political heir.

Only his beloved daughter.

“Yes,” he said at once, his voice breaking with warmth. “Yes, of course. Tonight. We will dine as family.”

Rhaenyra let her smile deepen, luminous and steady.

The court dispersed slowly after Viserys’s declaration, courtiers peeling away like carrion birds reluctant to leave a feast. Rhaenyra endured their bows, their curtsies, the too-bright smiles stretched across faces eager to see her stumble.

When at last she slipped from the throne room, the air of the hall felt no freer. 

Her slippers whispered across the rushes as she moved through the corridors, Laenor trailing behind at a distance with a pair of guards. She thought of Dragonstone’s winds, the clean sting of salt on her lips.

Here the air reeked of candle wax, sweat, and secrets.

At the curve of the passage, two ladies paused beneath a tapestry, their heads bent together. Voices hushed in the way of those who did not expect to be overheard.

“…she looked exquisite, I’ll grant her that. The purple suits her eyes.”

“As it should. The court spoke of little else.”

A soft laugh.

“Not of her husband, though. Poor boy, he trailed after her like a shadow. They’ll say what they will, but it is the princess they measure.”

“And measure they do.” The first voice lowered further, heavy with implication. “Every glance was toward her belly. So soon after the vows… well, it is only natural to wonder.”

“Of course. Perhaps the gods will smile on her swiftly. It would ease so much.”

The second voice lingered, then softened into mock kindness. “She is young still. There is time.”

Rhaenyra’s hand tightened on the stone wall until her knuckles whitened.

Their words were not cruel, not overtly.

There was no insult spoken, no barb flung.

Only the gentle pressure of expectation.

Repeated and repeated until it choked.

The women moved on, their laughter soft, polite, unthinking. The kind of laughter that left wounds no one could name aloud.

Rhaenyra stepped into the corridor’s light, her pace measured, her chin lifted. Neither lady dared look back, but their words clung to her like smoke.

And somewhere deep beneath her skin, the echo of laughter stirred again.

The door shut heavy behind her, muffling the hum of the Red Keep’s corridors.

At last she was alone...or near enough. Her maids lingered at a distance, startled by the sharp wave of her hand that dismissed them. The latch fell into place, leaving only the quiet crackle of a brazier and the restless rasp of her breath.

Rhaenyra paced first, her skirts whispering, then stopped before the tall mirror set in a carved frame of oak. She stared.

She looked every inch the princess they had seen in the hall. Exquisite. Untouchable.

And yet she could still hear the whispers.

Every glance was toward her belly.

So soon after the vows…

Perhaps the gods will smile on her swiftly.

Her hands rose, almost without thought, pressing flat against the curve of her waist, then lower. Her palms skimmed over silk, searching for some sign, some answer her body refused to yield. She turned sideways, eyes narrowed, as though any swelling of her stomach would betray her before she herself knew.

“Empty,” she whispered, the word slipping raw from her lips. “Empty, still.”

The gown fit too perfectly, her figure unchanged.

No promise of heirs, no proof of fertility to silence the court’s gossip. Only the faint burn that coiled in her belly, gold fire twined into her blood since Dragonstone.

Her fingers dug harder into her bodice, bunching the silk where Syrax’s wings stretched in gold thread. 

She recoiled, breath sharp, then steadied herself against the frame of the mirror.

Rhaenyra forced her chin high, her lips pressed into that same perfect line she had worn in the hall. But in her own eyes she saw the truth: the flicker of rage, the shadow of doubt, the echo of Tyraxes’s laughter buried deep.

The court had not broken her mask.

But here, in the privacy of her chambers, she saw the crack.

---

Two moons had passed since she returned to court.

Two moons of silks heavy enough to choke her.

Of whispers sharpened to needles.

Of every glance darted toward her waist.

She was tired always.

The days blurred: councils, feasts, courtly smiles. Her limbs dragged as though weighted, her nights restless. Sometimes, in darkness, she pressed her hand against her stomach, willing it to answer her with some sign.

But there was nothing, only the faint ember-heat that had coiled in her belly since Dragonstone.

She had not spoken of it.

Not even to herself.

But her father knew.

Viserys sat hunched at his desk in his solar, crown cast aside, his skin drawn tight as old parchment. Yet when she entered, his eyes brightened with fragile joy.

“Rhaenyra,” he said, voice trembling with an eagerness that startled her. “The gods have been merciful. You are with child.”

Her steps faltered. “Father?”

Viserys leaned forward, hands gripping the chair’s arms. “The maesters are certain. Your sheets, two moons now with no stain. A child stirs within you.”

Her blood iced.

Her sheets.

Carried down the halls, unfolded, inspected by hands not her own, passed to gray-robed men who charted her womb as if it were a field.

Her voice broke, harsh and unsteady. “Who agreed to this?”

Viserys blinked, as if baffled by the sharpness of her tone.

“Why, I did. For caution’s sake. For care. Do you not see? It is not cruelty, but concern. You are heir to the realm. The life in your belly is its hope. What is a little privacy weighed against such need?”

Her breath hitched. “A little privacy?” Her fists bunched in her skirts. “My body is stripped bare before I myself can know it. That is not care, it is theft. My blood, my truth, handed from chambermaids to maesters like I am cattle—”

Viserys lifted a hand, weary, and reached across the table. His fingers brushed hers where they clutched at the carved wood.

The gesture was soft, paternal, familiar.

For a heartbeat, she wanted to cling to it.

Then he spoke.

“You are young still,” he said gently, almost indulgent. “You cannot yet understand the weight that rests on you. In time, you will see this for what it is, not malice, but necessity. Not insult, but love.”

The words landed heavier than any blow.

Childish.

That was what he called her, without saying it.

Her hand lay limp beneath his, every bone stiff with rage she dared not show.

She forced her chin high, though her throat burned raw. “If love is counted by the stains on my sheets, then may the gods spare me from it.”

Viserys’s mouth tightened, but he only patted her hand once more, as though soothing a fractious daughter. “In time,” he said, with a smile that did not touch his eyes. “In time you will thank me.”

The brazier hissed.

Sparks flared.

And in her heart, Rhaenyra knew she would not.

Seven days. Seven nights.

The promise, the threat.

She would scream until her voice broke, burn until her bones begged for death. If she faltered, if she failed, she and all within her would die.

Her throat tightened, terror rising like bile. Her father’s voice had called her childish, ungrateful, yet it was not just his judgment that hollowed her.

It was the god’s laughter, echoing still, reminding her what price had been set.

And still...

Her fingers curled slowly into her skirts.

The rage coiled beneath the fear.

Her children, she could see them in her mind’s eye, though they were still only whispers beneath her ribs.

Gods.

Little gods, quickened in her blood.

The thought set her spine straight, even as her heart pounded. They would be born of her fire and Tyraxes’s golden blood, not bound by the realm’s hunger but beyond it.

Let the court gossip.

Let her father pat her hand and call her young.

She was a dragon.

And what stirred within her was older, greater, hungrier than any throne.

---

By the third moon her belly told on her.

The swell was undeniable, rounded too swiftly, heavy enough that gossips said she looked near to her sixth moon rather than her third.

Her gowns could not keep pace.

Brocade and silk were let out, seams pulled and re-stitched, but each adjustment was overtaken before a fortnight passed.

At feasts she sat beneath the blaze of torches with her chin lifted, hands folded demurely over her lap, wine untouched.

Yet every gaze curved low, dragged down toward the swell that strained the fabric of her bodice.

The courtiers never dared speak their poison to her face.

She was the heir still, the Realm’s Delight by name if no longer by innocence.

But their whispers slithered just loud enough to pierce.

“I wonder how soon the marriage bed bore fruit,” one lord murmured to his companion, though his eyes lingered on the curve of her belly rather than the gilded plate before him.

“Strange how swiftly it shows,” came the reply, voice dripping with mockery, wine staining his lips crimson. “As if the vows were… belated.”

The laughter that followed was soft, muffled behind a handkerchief, but sharp enough to cut.

A lady’s fan snapped shut with a crack that echoed like a judgment.

Her eyes darting back to Rhaenyra’s figure before dropping away, as though caught in some unseemly curiosity.

They never dared speak Daemon’s name aloud, but his shadow stretched across every jest.

Her uncle’s hands… her uncle’s lust… her uncle’s child swelling in her belly before the vows were even spoken.

Always just shy of treason. Always couched in ambiguity, phrased as careless jests.

And Alicent, oh, Alicent did not need words.

Her silence was louder than any rumor.

Green silk clung immaculate to her figure, green jewels glinted hard at her throat and wrists.

Her lips pressed thin, her gaze heavy, as if the very sight of Rhaenyra’s swollen form were an affront offered solely to her.

Judgment without a syllable, condemnation borne in posture and silence.

Viserys, blind, saw none of it.

His smile, wavering and sickly, spread wide each time his eyes fell upon her belly. As if every inch of its impossible roundness were proof of the gods’ favor. He drank deeply of the illusion, clinging to it like a man parched, while never once hearing the whispers that gathered like smoke behind his back.

To him, her body was triumph.

To the court, it was scandal.

Rhaenyra bore it all with her head high, her back straight. Outwardly calm, a mask carved from dragonstone itself. But within, her rage churned, molten and sharp, eating at her ribs.

For she knew the truth.

Three.

It was not one child that quickened in her, but three. She could feel them, faint as candleflames, flickering and insistent. The swell of her belly was no scandal, no shame. It was proof of Tyraxes’s promise: heirs shaped not by duty but by god’s fire.

Her fingers pressed lightly to her stomach beneath the tablecloth. The whispers gnawed, but she let them glance off. 

Little gods. That was what she carried.

The urge rose in her like a tide, the wild desire to stand in the hall, to bare her teeth at their sly jests and scream the truth: I am not shamed, I am blessed. I have borne the fire of a god and lived. I carry not one child, but three. Not heirs, not bastards, gods, small and growing, bound in my blood.

Her pride swelled hot against her ribs, fighting the iron band of restraint she had wrapped around herself.

She wanted to throw back her head and laugh as Tyraxes had laughed, to scorch their whispers into silence.

But she swallowed it down.

Her face remained smooth, her voice even when spoken to, her chin unbowed. She wore her calm like armor, even as her heart pounded like war drums. 

So she spent most of her days in the dragonpit, avoiding the constant pressure of court. 

And even the beasts seemed to know.

Dreamfyre hissed low when Rhaenyra approached. The she dragon lowered her head, vast and terrible, until her snout hovered just above the swell of Rhaenyra’s gown. Her breath steamed hot against the silk, nostrils flaring deep, as though she scented not merely flesh but the fire quickening within. 

Seasmoke grew restless in his cavern, tail lashing, claws sparking fire from stone. He paced and turned as she passed, neck curving, throat thrumming with a sound that vibrated the very air, a note so low it unsettled the keepers. 

The keepers faltered in their duties, eyes averted, muttering prayers in cracked Valyrian.

Rhaenyra only laid her hand upon her belly.

Heat seemed to answer her.

Her lips curved into the faintest of smiles.

The court might believe it Daemon’s seed that swelled her. Alicent might glare in her silent fury, and Viserys might blind himself in his fragile joy. The lords and ladies might veil their treason in sly jests and glances cut like knives.

But the dragons knew.

The dragons had always known.

And the dragons were never wrong.

---

By the fourth moon, her pride grew heavy with her flesh.

The swell of her belly pressed tight against her small frame, making every step a reminder of how swiftly her body had turned against her.

What had once been whispers of fatigue now became a constant drag in her limbs, a dull ache in her back, a tenderness in her breasts that made the lacing of her gowns a torment.

Her skin stretched, the silks clinging unkindly, seams tugging no matter how many times the seamstresses adjusted them.

Laenor was rarely at her side.

His excuses were endless...rides, hunts, jests with friends in the yard.

He played the dutiful consort only when ceremony demanded. Smiling on her arm before slipping away again. And though she told herself she had never expected more, bitterness burned in her throat all the same.

He left her to play her role alone, bearing the stares, the whispers, the weight of every eye as though it were hers to shoulder only.

She wrote to her good-mother, Rhaenys, seeking solace, perhaps even counsel.

The Sea Snake’s wife had weathered court with enviable grace; surely she would understand.

But the letters that returned were stilted.

Their politeness sharpened to a knife’s edge.

Each line a blade of courtesy, every word a measure of distance.

The silence between those words cut deepest.

Rhaenyra folded those letters carefully and placed them aside, but the sting remained. It gnawed at her, made her jaw tight, her pride ache worse than her bones.

And her body… her body was no longer the ally it had been.

Her back screamed when she rose too quickly. At night, sleep eluded her; her belly pressed hard against her lungs, making her breaths shallow, her dreams restless. She was too young for this, she thought in her weakest moments, too slight a vessel for such burden, and yet the burden was hers to bear.

She pressed her palm to her rounded stomach, feeling the pressure of it against her ribs.

Her pride whispered, I am chosen.

Her body groaned, You will break.

And between the two, her silence deepened.

---

By the fifth moon, the court could no longer pretend her condition was anything but extraordinary.

Her pallor had grown pronounced.

Cheeks once flushed with fire now pale as wax, lips bitten raw, dark shadows clinging beneath her eyes.

Still she bore herself with her chin high, the mask of dragonstone unbroken. 

It was at a family luncheon, beneath the painted beams of Maegor’s holdfast, that her father finally remarked upon it.

Viserys raised his goblet, his smile thin but genuine, and his gaze softened as it lingered on her. But then his eyes narrowed, troubled.

“You look pale, my girl,” he said, the words spilling into the hush that followed. His voice was quiet, but it carried. “So pale… as your mother once did.”

The table flinched as one. 

Rhaenyra’s stomach turned sharper than any sickness.

To be compared to Aemma, who had been hollowed out and broken upon the birthing bed, was a wound she could not armor against.

She saw it then, the fear in his eyes, the memory of his queen bleeding out beneath the midwives’ hands. And in her his daughter seated with belly too swollen, skin too white, body too fragile.

Seven days.

Seven nights.

The god’s voice echoed in her skull, laughter curling like smoke: You will wish for death before the first dawn.

For a moment she could not swallow, the air tight in her throat.

The prophecy seemed to press closer around her, a shadow crouched at her shoulder.

Alicent broke the silence with the smallest shift of her chair.

Her green silks rustled as she leaned back, her lips curved into a smile that was not kind. “The princess does look… diminished."

Every word dripped judgment.

Rhaenyra’s hand tightened around her cup.

She could have let it pass, could have worn silence like armor as she always had. But the weight in her belly, the ache in her bones, the sting of her father’s words, it tore something loose.

“The maesters believe I carry more than one,” she said at last, her voice steady though her chest burned. She let the words fall with the weight of truth, cutting through the mutters. “That is why I am so… round.”

The silence shattered with Viserys’s laugh.

He thumped his cup against the table, relief washing across his face. “A blessing!” he declared, eyes bright as though he saw in her not danger but triumph. “Twins! The gods smile doubly on us.”

His gaze softened, pride rising to hide the fear that had glimmered before.

But across the table, Alicent’s eyes sharpened further.

Her smile did not shift, but her gaze flicked to Rhaenyra’s swollen stomach, then up to her pale face.

Calculation lingered there, as cold and precise as steel.

She was measuring, not the babes, but the mother.

And what she saw was a girl too frail for the weight she bore. A girl who might die as her mother had, her blood spilled across the sheets.

Rhaenyra felt it, Alicent’s gaze like a knife against her skin. She pressed her hand against her belly beneath the table, feeling the living fire stirring there, and forced her spine straighter.

She was a dragon.

And even if seven days and seven nights awaited her, she would endure.

When the meal ended, Rhaenyra retreated in silence, every step measured until the door of her chambers closed behind her.

“Be strong,” she whispered, her voice breaking low. “My little dragons, my fire-made babes. You must fight for me as I fight for you. We will survive the seven days and seven nights, together. But you must not leave me.”

Her throat ached, tears stinging her eyes. 

A flutter.

One, then another, sharp and insistent beneath her hand. A third, answering in turn. Not faint candleflames now, but quick sparks striking against her flesh, alive and certain.

Her breath caught. She laughed once, ragged and half-sobbing, clutching herself as the three kicks rippled beneath her palms.

“Good,” she whispered fiercely. “Good. Fight for me. I will carry you through fire itself.”

The fear did not vanish, it never would, but pride rose above it, molten and sure.

She lay back at last, one hand still splayed across her belly, the other wiping at the tears that had slipped free. The chamber was still. Outside the court pounded, and in her chest her heart beat steady and strong, matched now by the rhythm of three smaller hearts stirring within.

And for the first time since she drank down Tyraxes golden blood, Rhaenyra almost believed she would endure.

---

By the sixth moon, Rhaenyra felt the Red Keep closing in around her like a coffin.

Every step pressed fire into her hips.

Every breath dragged shallow against her ribs.

Her body was stretched thin, made fragile by its own abundance, and still she bore it alone.

For days she had pleaded with her father.

“Dragonstone,” she whispered, her hand curved over the swell of her belly. “Let my babes be born in the seat of their blood, under stone and fire, not here where every wall listens and every corridor whispers.”

Viserys only shook his head, his pale hand trembling as it reached for hers. “No. Here you are safe, here the maesters can tend you. Do not tempt scandal with talk of fleeing to Dragonstone. The realm watches, daughter. It will see cowardice where you mean only comfort.”

Cowardice.

That was how he named her plea.

Each time she asked, the word cut deeper.

And so the days spiraled into argument, never resolved, leaving her weaker, more alone.

Laenor stood beside her at council, spoke dutifully when pressed, but his words lacked fire. He wanted only to escape the chamber, the weight, the eyes. She felt it each time his hand slipped from hers the moment they left their father’s sight. He did not share her burden; he fled from it.

So she took quill to parchment herself.

In her chambers, she bent over the desk, belly pressed uncomfortably against the wood, ink staining her fingers. Her letter to Dragonstone’s maester was short, sharp with need:

When the hour comes, come to me. Bring your skill, bring your loyalty. I will not trust my babes to the whispers of this court.

She sealed it with wax, the stamp trembling in her hand. Her breath caught as the babes shifted inside her, three sparks pushing against her skin. She pressed her palm to the mound, whispering beneath her breath, “I will bring you forth. I will not fail you.”

Behind her, Laenor was rifling through his own letters, lips moving faintly as he read. A frown darkened his face.

“Did you know?” he asked suddenly.

Rhaenyra looked up from her seal. “Know what?”

“Daemon.” His voice was flat, almost disbelieving. “He’s wed. To Laena."

The words landed like a blade thrust beneath her ribs.

Her throat closed. She bent her head at once, fussing with the parchment as though the seal were of utmost importance, though her hand trembled so violently the wax cracked. Her hair fell like a curtain, hiding her face.

Inside, her heart keened. Daemon and Laena. Laena, her cousin, beloved and admired.

Daemon, the man who haunted her nights, whose shadow the court draped across her swollen belly.

Married, gone, claimed by another.

She forced her voice calm. “It is no matter. A prince may marry where he wills.”

But even to her own ears, the words rang hollow.

Laenor sighed, folding the parchment away.

He did not reach for her, did not offer comfort.

He slipped out instead, boots echoing in the corridor, leaving her in silence.

Later she would learn where he had gone, not to her side, not to share the weight of her grief, but to the brothels of the city with male whores.

Alone at the desk, Rhaenyra pressed both hands to her belly. Tears pricked her eyes but did not fall.

Her father dismissed her. Her husband abandoned her. Her good-mother’s letters were sharpened into knives of courtesy. Alicent watched her like a hawk waiting for blood. Daemon was lost to another.

And here she sat, swollen and aching, her body breaking beneath the strain.

“Be dragons,” she whispered hoarsely to the life within her. “Burn for me, as I burn for you. Fight for me, as I fight for you. I will carry you through fire, even if I must carry you alone.”

The words had become her mantra. 

Something she told the babes when her throat burned with urge to scream. 

The chamber gave no answer but the faint crackle of the brazier. The wax seal on her letter cooled, red as blood.

And Rhaenyra, heir of the Iron Throne, felt herself utterly, irrevocably alone.

---

It began near the end of her seventh moon, when the moon itself was running thin.

A tightening deep in her belly bent her at the waist, at first a cramp, she thought, another cruel ache of carrying too much too young. But the heat spread along her spine, low and searing, and her breath caught on a cry she could not swallow.

The maids ran.

The corridors whispered before she could find words to send them.

By dusk, the Keep knew: the princess’s labors had begun.

The pains came quick.

Too quick.

Clamp. Breath stolen. Black at the edges.

Release, thin, trembling.

Another clamp. A sound she didn’t know was hers.

Release. Too short. Not enough.

Each one seized her body like a vise, dragging screams from her throat until her lips split with the force of them. Sweat drenched her hair, stuck it wild against her face, as her body clenched and heaved, trying to drive forth three babes from a frame too slight to bear one with ease.

By nightfall, her chamber stank of blood and salt.

The ache burrowed into her spine, an iron fist at the base of the back, until every wave drove her hips apart. 

Maesters shuffled, their hands clumsy, their voices muttering prayers that did not soothe.

The maids wept silently at the edges, clutching cloths, water basins, clean linens already soaked through with red.

Rhaenyra clawed at the sheets, her nails raking through fabric until her fingertips bled.

“Seven moons. Seven days,” she gasped, voice ragged, “seven nights—” The words fractured into another scream as fire tore through her hips.

Her vision swam. Sometimes it was the canopy above her; sometimes it was the vaulted stone of Dragonstone’s secret chamber, Tyraxes’s violet eyes gleaming in the dark, his laughter echoing through her marrow. You will wish for death before the first dawn.

The pain was endless.

Knives twisting in her womb, fire gnawing at her bones. 

The first night dragged on: one candle guttered to a stub, then another; the brazier re-stoked twice; clean linens turned red and were carried out, then replaced, then carried out again.

The maesters spoke of progress, but none came.

The babes turned restless within her, pressing, thrashing. Their kicks like hammer blows against her stretched flesh.

She clutched her belly through the sheets, half-sobbing, half-praying: “Dragons… fight for me… fight—”

But there was no relief.

Only pain.

A shadow fell across her, and then a cup was pressed clumsily to her mouth.

Water sloshed, spilling over her chin, cool against fevered skin.

She swallowed greedily, gasping for more.

“Laenor,” she rasped.

His hand shook as he steadied the cup, knuckles white with strain.

His face was drawn, pale in the torchlight, eyes darting between her contorted body and the maesters whispering useless words.

He looked like a man who would rather face the sea in storm than this bed.

Rhaenyra hated him for that weakness.

Hated him for the tremor in his voice when he whispered, “Drink. Please. You must drink.”

But gods, she loved the water. Loved the relief of it, fleeting though it was.

By the time dawn pricked faint across the sky, Rhaenyra lay drenched in sweat, her hair plastered dark against her skull, lips cracked, voice gone to a rasp. 

The first night had ended.

Six more awaited her.

By the second day, her screams had worn raw. Yet the pains did not relent. They came harder, deeper, as if knives had been driven into her womb and twisted slowly, unceasingly.

The agony was not only without.

It was within.

The babes pressed cruelly against her ribs, her lungs, her hips; she swore she could feel their limbs scraping along her bones. Their weight threatening to split her open from the inside.

The maesters circled, gray-robed and solemn, muttering of patience, of endurance.

One placed a hand against her swollen stomach, murmuring of “movement within.”

She struck his wrist away with what little strength she had, her eyes burning.

She would not be handled like livestock.

Hours dragged, each longer than the last. Sweat stung her eyes, blurred her vision. Sometimes she saw Viserys pacing the far side of the chamber, wringing his hands, muttering Aemma’s name beneath his breath. 

Every nerve screamed for release, every breath burned shallow, as though her chest were a forge bellows crushed by unseen hands.

The babes shifted constantly now, their kicks sharp, bruising, relentless.

She could not tell if it was life or torment they pressed into her, only that each movement felt like fire inside her marrow.

By nightfall she was near delirious, muttering half-formed words, sometimes in the Common Tongue, sometimes in High Valyrian.

She begged, she cursed, she vowed, she wept.

One midwife leaned close, voice a rasp in her ear. “Four breaths with the pain, my princess, four in, four out. Good, again. Three more… two… one…”

Rhaenyra endured.

By the third day Viserys sat slumped by the window.

He lurched to her side with a cloth, father, not king, and tried to blot the fever-sweat from her brow.

The cloth smeared a gray crescent there instead.

Ink.

The sight was small, almost nothing, but it seared through her like fire.

Letters.

He had been writing letters while she bled and screamed. 

Laenor, her lord husband, sat further off.

The lines of his face tense. His eyes darting to the door more than to her. He shuffled through folded papers, muttered brief answers when spoken to, his jaw tight with a resignation that stank of cowardice.

The maesters circled, their whispers mere taunts to her ears. 

Rhaenyra’s rage rose hotter than the pain.

Her eyes snapped to her father first, narrowing on those ink-darkened fingers. Her voice broke like a whip.

“You sit there with your hands blackened in ink, writing my death before my body has given it! You think me gone already, don’t you, Father? Already a corpse.”

Viserys flinched, lips parting, but no words came.

Her gaze whipped to Laenor, her breath a ragged snarl. “And you. My lord husband. Do you even look at me? Do you pray for me to live or for your bed to be empty again?”

Laenor’s mouth tightened.

Her lord husband tried to pass her a cup.

Her next cry shook the room and the tin slipped from his fingers, water splashing his boots.

He did not bend to retrieve it.

“I curse you both. Father. Husband. King. Consort. May the gods damn you for naming me dead while I still bleed and burn!”

The chamber fell to a stunned hush. 

Viserys’s fingers, still stained with ink, hovered in midair as though he’d been struck.

Her words hit him like arrows, each one finding its mark. For an instant he saw not a queen-in-waiting but the little girl who had clung to his hand after Aemma’s death, violet eyes full of confusion and grief.

“My sweet girl—” he began, but the words faltered.

He took a half-step forward, then stopped, his gaze flicking to the blood on the sheets, the strain in her face, the tremor in her hands. Her curse rolled over him, raw and searing, and he felt it burn away every defense he’d built between himself and her pain.

But he did not lash back. He did not roar. Instead, his shoulders slumped, and something weary passed over his face, not anger, but a hurt too deep to name.

“I do not name you dead,” he said at last, his voice soft, almost breaking. “I cannot.”

He reached a hand toward her, but not close enough to touch. “I… write because I fear, Rhaenyra. Because I have lost too much already."

He swallowed hard, trying to steady himself as she writhed with another contraction. 

By the fourth day she drifted in and out of sense, her eyes always glassy. 

It was then Alicent came.

The queen glided into the chamber in her emerald silks, her jewels glinting sharp as thorns.

She sat by Rhaenyra’s bed, folding her hands in her lap with that measured poise that had once seemed sisterly.

Her perfume, green apple and crushed myrtle, caught in Rhaenyra’s raw throat, cloying, sweet as rot.

“I hate to see you suffer so,” she said, voice low, smoothed to gentleness. “Truly, I do.” She paused, studying Rhaenyra’s pale, sweat-damp face. “We were friends once, were we not?”

A cool hand grazed Rhaenyra’s temple without leave. She flinched as if from a brand. It might have sounded kind. From another mouth, perhaps it would have been.

But from Alicent’s lips, the words rang like scripture: weighty, inescapable, leaving no space for answer.

Rhaenyra’s eyes cracked open, fever-bright, her breath ragged with another spasm of pain.

She laughed, a dry, broken sound, closer to a sob.

“Friends?” Her lips curled around the word as though it tasted of ash. Her hand clawed weakly at the sheets, her voice shaking but sharp with venom. “Until you snuck off to be my father’s broodmare.”

The air froze.

The maids gasped, clutching their cloths tighter to their chests.

Alicent’s face did not change, not much.

But her eyes flickered, quick and cutting.

“You are cruel in your pain,” Alicent said, tone almost pitying. “But it is pain that makes us cruel. That is its way. It carves us, bends us, tests us.” Her gaze fell deliberately to Rhaenyra’s swollen belly, lingered there, then rose again. “And in the end, it proves us worthy.”

Rhaenyra’s nails dug into the sheets.

She wanted to spit at her.

Claw at that perfect face, but her body betrayed her, wracked with agony too vast to cage. The words struck deeper than any lash: worthy. 

She tasted blood where she had bitten her lip. 

The silence stretched, broken only by her ragged breathing, by the creak of the bed as her body strained.

“I was given no choice, as you were given none,” Alicent continued softly. “I bore what was asked of me. I endured. And so must you. For it is through suffering that we are shown favor. Through the breaking that we are sanctified.”

The words coiled like poison in her ears.

Aemma’s screams haunted her.

The stench of blood on the birthing bed, her mother hollowed out by duty.

Rhaenyra had sworn she would not die as her mother had.

And yet here she was, another womb torn open for the realm to peer into.

Her face pressed to the pillow, she felt the wetness sting her lashes. She hated the tears. Hated that Alicent could see them.

“Breaking,” she echoed hoarsely. “I will not break.”

Her body heaved with another contraction, a scream ripping out of her throat until she thought her bones might splinter with the force of it. The maids wept openly. The maesters muttered hurried prayers. All their pity, all their prayers, useless.

And Alicent...

Alicent sat unmoved. Hands folded. Eyes steady. Watching like a vulture perched above the battlefield.

She wants me to break, Rhaenyra thought, rage searing through the pain. She wants me small, ruined, nothing but proof that dragons bleed as easily as hens.

“Do not—” Her voice cracked, shredded to a rasp. She forced it out again, a growl beneath the scream. “Do not look at me like that. Get out.”

Alicent blinked slowly, calm as a cat, her lips curving faintly. “Even now you cannot allow anyone to care for you.”

Care? Rhaenyra’s mind spat. This is not care. This is worship of my ruin.

“I said leave!” She tried to rise, to summon the strength of a queen, but her body collapsed against the pillows, her belly clenching again.

Another wave of fire tore through her, dragging her down into the dark tide.

She screamed until her voice cracked raw.

When it passed, she lay gasping shallowly, her chest rising in broken jerks.

Her vision swam, the chamber a smear of shadows and green silk.

And Alicent...still there.

Hands folded, eyes bright with that terrible pity. Not kindness. Never kindness. The pity of one who sees a rival finally brought low.

Something inside her snapped.

Her lips curled, her voice a guttural rasp, venom scraped raw from her soul.

“Cunt.”

The word lashed the air like a whip. Low. Ugly. Sharp with hate.

For the first time, Alicent flinched. Her composure wavered, the faintest tremor breaking at the corner of her mouth. She rose slowly, silks whispering like serpent’s scales. 

“I will leave you to your labors, Princess,” she said coolly. Yet her eyes lingered, hungry, hateful, as if to memorize the sight of Rhaenyra undone. “May the gods have mercy.”

The door shut softly behind her, but in Rhaenyra’s ears it thundered.

She lay trembling, the taste of blood still on her tongue, the pain still burning her belly raw.

Mercy, she thought bitterly.

The word became a snarl in her head.

Mercy had no place here. Mercy had not sat by her bed or touched her brow. Mercy had not fed her Tyraxes’s molten blood, had not watched her swell like an over-ripe fruit for the court to prod and whisper over.

Her nails dug into the sheets.

She hated them all, father with his ink-stained hands, husband with his empty eyes, queen with her green pity.

And beneath it, an uglier hatred: herself.

For opening her mouth to the god in the dark chamber. 

For believing, even for a moment, that she could take fire into her body and come away untouched.

The voice of Tyraxes murmured from the memory’s depths. You will wish for death before the first dawn.

“I do,” she whispered hoarsely, her own voice strange to her ears. “I do.”

Tears burned but she didn’t wipe them. 

The god’s laughter, Alicent’s perfume, her father’s voice, all of it pressed against her skull until she thought she might burst.

Little gods, she had called them.

Now they felt like parasites clawing at her from the inside.

And yet, even as the next spasm wrung a scream from her throat, some splinter of pride remained, jagged and unbroken.

Hate them. Hate me. Hate him. The thought rattled like a prayer in her chest. But I will not break.

On the fifth, the bell tolled in her bones: five of seven.

Her body was a flame itself. 

The chamber seared too bright, too loud.

She no longer knew whether the hour was night or day; the world had collapsed to fire and salt and blood.

And then the sky itself had split.

She remembered it dimly, through fever-haze: the screams of the commons, the shaking of the Keep as dragons descended from the clouds. Wings vast as sails, the earth shuddering as they landed. Not one, not two, but many, their roars echoing like thunder through the Red Keep’s bones.

She had thought, in one mad instant, they had come for her...her dragons, her blood, answering her torment.

But no.

They came for what her body carried.

The corridor beyond her chamber was never empty now. She heard them even through oak and iron. Voices layered, constant, pressing through the cracks like smoke.

Corlys’s low rasp, every word heavy with command.

Rhaenys’s clipped tones, sharp with steel.

Laena’s voice, taut with worry.

Daemon...gods, Daemon...cutting through them all, harsh, barking, the snap of a whip.

And others. Always others.

Her father, his voice hoarse, breaking on her name.

Laenor, distant, strained, the timbre of guilt.

And Alicent, cool and measured.

The great lords and ladies of her blood, the sea, the flame, the crown, gathered like mourners in waiting.

Not for her.

Never for her.

For them. The babes.

The promise of succession.

The trophies of her womb.

Another contraction wracked her, fire splitting her hips. She screamed into the pillow.

Still the voices outside carried on. Debating. Waiting.

Vultures, she thought.

The word clawed up her throat, a rasp ripped raw from her lungs. She spat it, hoarse and cracked, the syllables dragging blood with them.

“Vultures!”

The air in the chamber rang with it.

She saw them in her mind’s eye: wings outstretched, eyes bright, circling closer with every cry that left her throat. Waiting for the maesters to come out pale-faced, shaking their heads, to say it was finished. Waiting for her blood to still so they could gather her babes like spoils of war.

Her body convulsed again, a scream tearing her voice ragged. She laughed through it, a sound broken and wild, dripping hate.

A dragon’s laugh, jagged, hopeless, laced with madness.

“You are mine,” she rasped, her voice breaking into hoarse whisper. “Only mine. We will outlast them all. We will burn them if we must.”

The hourglass on the mantle had been turned four times; sand still fell.

Daemon’s voice rose again, sharp, the words blurred in her fever. 

Tears scalded her eyes.

Uncle.

She had thought of him as fire, danger, the one who saw her not as child but as a woman.

As Rhaenyra.

Who made her feel more dragon than girl.

And he too had abandoned her, married another, left her to this bed.

She had never despised him more than in that moment.

They were not family.

Not flesh, not love, not kin.

A court of enemies, waiting for her to fall still so they might descend. And she, she was the dying feast, the blood-warm carcass over which they bickered.

And beyond the door, the voices faltered.

Daemon’s snarl broke first. “Open it, damn you! Open the fucking door!”

His fists slammed against the oak so hard the hinges rattled, his voice cracking sharp as steel.

He looked ready to rip through with his bare hands. 

“No man may enter,” a maester stammered, blocking the way. “The birthing bed must be kept pure—”

“Pure?” Daemon spat, trying to tear past him. “She is dying in there, and you prattle of purity? Stand aside or I’ll cut you where you crawl.”

Laena’s voice rose quick, tugging at his arm. “Daemon....please—”

Her eyes were wide, her grip desperate, as if her touch alone might keep him from tearing the Keep down stone by stone.

Corlys muttered low, the sound like a growl, thunder contained behind his teeth.

His eyes did not move from the door, but his jaw clenched until the bone stood sharp beneath his skin.

Rhaenys’s voice came sharper, cutting through like a blade. “She is in pain,” she snapped, her own composure fraying. “She knows not what she says.”

Yet her arms tightened around Laena, then Laenor, pulling them both close.

Their faces pressed to her shoulders, and in her eyes a shimmer rose, glassing her lashes.

For all her steel, empathy tugged at her like an undertow. She remembered her father’s face, her own labors, her bloodline, pain mirrored across generations.

Viserys’s voice rose above them all, raw, breaking. “My girl...my sweet girl—” He lurched toward the door, shoulders hunched as though he might ram it down with his frail body.

“Rhaenyra, nykeā rūklon, hear me! I am here, I am here!” The desperation in his tone was naked, unguarded, a father’s grief writ raw across a king’s face.

And yet he could not touch her, could not soothe her, could only hear her scream.

The guards blocked him, hands splayed against his chest, muttering of omens and purity. “Your Grace, you cannot—”

Viserys’s voice cracked like glass. “She is my daughter! I will go to her!”

But the maesters held firm, whispering of fever, of contagion, of the birthing bed as sanctum. “If you cross the threshold, you endanger her more.”

Viserys sagged against their arms, undone by his own helplessness. His crown tilted on his thinning hair, his face streaked with tears he no longer cared to hide. “She calls for me,” he rasped. “She curses me. Gods forgive me, she curses me…”

Rhaenyra's scream tore loose, as if answering her father, shaking the chamber, shaking the hall beyond.

For a moment even the dragons chained in the Pit below stirred restlessly, their low rumble echoing through the stone.

By the sixth day, Rhaenyra no longer knew where the chamber ended and the fever began.

She drifted in and out of the torches’ glow, in and out of herself.

Then a hand smoothed the hair from her brow.

Her eyes fluttered open.

The world was gone.

She lay not on silk sheets but upon black stone, slick with salt and blood, the air damp and cold as a tomb.

Her mother knelt at her side.

Aemma’s face was pale, but not the pale of ivory or moonlight.

It was the pallor of stone left too long in the rain.

Her lips were bloodless, her skin cool, too cool, the hand she placed against Rhaenyra’s cheek brought no heat.

Not the warmth of dragon’s blood, but the absence of it. Hollow. Dead.

“Shh, my sweet girl,” Aemma whispered. Her voice was low, sweet, almost the same as it had been, and yet frayed, as though spoken through water.

A lullaby sung from the grave. “I am here.”

Rhaenyra sobbed, her throat tearing with the sound.

She clutched at her mother’s hand, clung to it, though the flesh felt wrong, slick, chilled, as though touched by the Stranger.

“Mother,” she rasped. “It hurts. Gods, it hurts so much.”

“I know,” Aemma murmured, bending to press her lips to her daughter’s damp brow. The kiss was weightless, cold. “I know, my love. They told me it was my duty. They told me it was their right. And I bled for them, bled and broke. But you—” Her voice cracked, hollow in the vaulted dark. “You can endure what I could not.”

Tears burned hot down Rhaenyra’s cheeks.

She pressed her face harder into that deadened palm, desperate to make it warm. “Am I dying?”

Aemma’s eyes softened, but they glistened strangely, as though milk had filmed them. “Not yet. Not if you fight. Not if you hold fast. You are not alone, not while I am here.”

For a moment, she was a child again, clinging to her mother’s cool, too-still hand.

Then the stone beneath her throbbed with heat.

The air split open.

From the shadows stepped Tyraxes.

He was radiant, too radiant.

Gold hair molten, eyes violet fire, a beauty so sharp it mocked her wrecked body. Where her skin sagged with sweat and blood, he gleamed perfect, unmarred, terrible in his loveliness.

“Seven days,” he said, his voice deep enough to crack the stone. “Seven nights. You have passed through five. You stand now in the fire. Do you still wish for death?”

Rhaenyra clutched at her mother’s hand, but Aemma’s fingers were stiffening, curling inward like bone. Her lips trembled. “No.”

Aemma bent, pressing another cold kiss against her temple, her voice almost pleading. “Then you must fight, my daughter.”

Tyraxes moved closer, heat pouring from him until her skin blistered where he stood.

He placed his hand on her belly.

The burn was instant, searing, but inside, her womb answered.

“They are yours,” Tyraxes said, smiling as though at some private jest. “Yours before all. Endure, and they will be born gods.”

The vision wavered.

Aemma’s touch blurred, her face fading like smoke. Tyraxes’s radiance shattered into torchlight. The black stone dissolved back into linen soaked red.

The pain rushed in again, tearing a scream from her throat.

But as she clutched her belly, she still felt the echo of her mother’s kiss, the strength of her god’s fire.

And she whispered, through cracked lips, “I will endure. For them. For me.”

By the seventh day, she had no screams left.

Her voice was a rasp of breath, her body a wrecked field of fire and blade. 

Her hair clung damp to her temples, her lips split, her nails broken and bloody.

She wanted death.

Not in passing, but truly. Fully.

The wish sat in her chest like lead, heavier than the babes she carried.

She imagined slipping under, silent, away from the pain, away from the whispers and ink-stained fingers.

Let them take what’s inside me.

Let me go.

Through the haze, shapes moved. Voices rose and fell. She caught only pieces — “…blood loss…”, “…no progress…”, “…too long…”

Then a new phrase cut through it like steel.

A maester’s voice, thin and careful, pitched toward the king:

“…if we cut her open now, perhaps one might live…”

Rhaenyra’s eyes snapped open.

The world swam, but she saw.

Viserys stood stiff and pale, his crown askew, his hands trembling at his sides. The maesters bent close, gray-robed, eyes averted, their mouths spitting out calculations as though she were a mare to be gelded, a sow to be slaughtered.

Alicent lurked in the shadows, her face still, her eyes gleaming with something she could not name, was it pity, or judgment, or triumph?

And Laenor, her lord husband, lingered by the door, eyes darting like a cornered boy.

His mouth worked, but no words came.

It was then she laughed.

The sound startled even herself.

Low, cracked, splintered, half a sob and half a curse.

It scraped out of her like broken glass, a jagged thing torn from a throat too raw to carry it.

It was not mirth. It was despair given voice.

All gone. All hollow. What remained was a girl left to bleed alone, spoken of like offal while she still drew breath.

Tears stung her eyes, though she tried to swallow them. She had never felt so small, so reduced, as in that moment: Rhaenyra, heir of the Iron Throne, reduced to a body stretched, a womb weighed, a vessel for heirs they already planned to carve free of her.

“If you cut me open,” she rasped, her voice breaking, “perhaps one might live. One. And I—what am I, then? Meat? A husk? Do you write my name already, Father? Do you carve my stone?”

Her eyes burned as she looked at them, each in turn.

Viserys, Alicent, Laenor. Her kin, her cage.

Her betrayers.

Her laugh fractured into a sob, into a snarl.

Her chest heaved with it, torn between the scream she no longer had voice for and the silence they wanted of her.

“Syrax!” she screamed. 

The name tore from her like a summons; the syllables were salt and iron and something older, a command the dragonpit could not ignore.

Outside the oak the hall went suddenly still.

The maesters’ murmur faltered.

A wingbeat answered her, distant at first, then closer: a shadow ripping the sky, a thunder that ran down the spine of the Keep. Guards looked up, mouths open. Someone hissed a curse. Daemon’s hands curled until his nails dug into his palms; Rhaenys turned as if to fly; Corlys’s face went stone. Viserys let out a raw sound that might have been a prayer or a plea.

Rhaenyra’s fingers curled into the linen as if to anchor herself, and the laugh that followed was not one of surrender but of defiance.

“Come towards me with blade,” she rasped, spit and blood on her lips. "Mark me, cut me and I will show you what a dragon does.”

The maesters sank to their knees, prayers spilling from them small and frantic. Guards shifted, uncertain whether to hold the line or flee.

Alicent’s face, when it showed at the doorway, went utterly still; even her practiced composure trembled under that living shadow.

Rhaenyra’s eyes burned bright in the fever-dark, fierce as flares. Her hands gripped the sheets, her teeth bared. “I am Rhaenyra of House Targaryen, Heir to the Iron Throne. I will bring them forth myself, and I will live."

Syrax answered with a sound Rhaenyra had never heard from her before.

Not the low contented rumble that had once been their private language, but a raw, keening roar that split the air and set the torches rocking.

Rhaenyra pushed herself up on one elbow, every muscle bruised with grief and fury. Her eyes glittered, fever-bright. The name of her dragon came out like a benediction and a curse all at once.

“Syrax,” she breathed. “My golden lady. My vengeance and my shield.”

If they chose the blade...the realm would remember what it meant to carve at a dragon.

And she would burn them all.

Kingslanding falling beneath Syrax’s flame. 

Hours blurred.

The chamber held its breath.

And then, as the seventh day bled into its seventh night, the fire broke.

With a final cry, her body split around the first, crowning, a ring of fire, and then a rush: a boy.

The second came on the heels of the first, shock like lightning, her hips seized, bore down, another boy, slick in the midwife’s hands.

The third fought her.

She bared her teeth and pushed until stars burst at the edges of her sight.

Then the girl, fierce as a spark struck to tinder.

The cries of the newborns filled the chamber, thin and wild, and yet as fierce as any battle horn. The maids scrambled, the maesters stammered prayers, but Rhaenyra sagged back against the pillows, her chest heaving, her face streaked with tears and sweat.

And outside the Keep, Syrax roared.

Meleys answered, her crimson cry booming like war drums, a queen’s fury layering over Syrax’s rage. Vhagar’s ancient roar followed, deep, cavernous, terrible as an earthquake. Dreamfyre’s piercing keen wove itself between them, sharp and shrill as a blade drawn from the scabbard.

Caraxes screamed.

It was no roar but a shriek, a long, bone-deep wail that split the sky like a wound.

Windows shattered at the sound.

The unbonded hatchlings in their pens writhed and shrieked, beating their wings until sparks lit the hay, as if the whole pit had gone mad with fury.

The chamber quaked with it. 

They were beautiful already, though their shapes were only glimpses through the haze.

Skin slick, hair dark or fair...she could not tell.

And she cared none for it but breath and heat. 

Rhaenyra closed her eyes, her hands trembling as she reached for them, not caring which she touched first. Her palm brushed damp skin, tiny fingers curling instinctively around hers.

The pain still roared in her body, but the death-wish was gone. She had survived the seven days and seven nights.

And in the hush after the storm, her laugh came again, not cruel despair this time, but hoarse, exhausted, triumphant.

In that moment, it was not a broken girl on a bed who had suffered, nor a princess undone by pain.

It was Old Valyria risen again.

A covenant of mother and dragon, a vow written in blood and fire: any hand raised against her would find only ash.

The Keep knew it.

The city knew it.

The realm itself knew it.

Seven days and seven nights of torment had not made her meek.

They had made her monstrous.

And her children, her little gods, were born to the roar of dragons. 

Chapter 4: Little Gods

The cries of the babes softened into fretful whimpers, and even the dragons outside, whose roars had shaken Kingslanding to its bones through every hour of her travail, quieted as if soothed by the sound of new blood. 

Those gathered in the room dared not speak too loudly.

They had witnessed more than a birth.

It had been battle, storm, augury.

Now they moved with care, swaddling the infants, their little limbs slick and trembling.

One midwife crossed herself and whispered that the gods were watching.

Another swore it was the dragons, not the gods, who kept their vigil.

No one argued.

Rhaenyra slept on, lashes pale against her cheeks.

A sheen of sweat on her brow.

She had fought the fire and brought forth life, but her strength had faltered at last.

She did not stir when the youngest boy wailed or when the girl’s fist closed around a strand of her mother’s loosened hair.

It was not her eyes that beheld them first, but those of the keepers, the servants, the maesters. 

And they would remember. The way the air tasted of ash and smoke, and the terrible quiet of dragons listening, as if the whole world were waiting for the princess to wake and claim her brood. 

The door creaked open, and the three babes were carried out in swaddled linen.

Waiting beyond were only their kin.

Prince Consort Laenor stood nervous and taut, hands twisting against themselves, fear and wonder warring in his face. Beside him, his good-father, King Viserys I Targaryen; his eyes, hollowed by fear.

Close at hand, Lord Corlys Velaryon and Princess Rhaenys Targaryen, bound not only as Sea Snake and Queen Who Never Was, but as grandsire and grandmother.

Their blood and hopes braided into the swaddled children.

Prince Daemon Targaryen lingered with Lady Laena Velaryon at his side.

Yet the prince’s face was set in shadow, his gaze cutting to the door where Rhaenyra lay beyond insensible.

He had heard her fight the fire, bleed and break for these babes.

To him, no birth was worth the death of her.

Not heir, not legacy, not prophecy. 

Beside him, Lady Laena knuckles tightened against her skirts, her breath shallow.

Empathy darkened her gaze and fear bloomed in her heart. Seeing firsthand the suffering of their birth was beyond anything she had imagined. Nothing had prepared her for the smells, the screams, the madness of it. To her, it seemed a cruelty...that a woman’s body must be broken so utterly to give life.

And standing a little apart, Queen Alicent Hightower watched with her gaze honed to a knife’s edge.

She had not flinched at the cries, nor at the blood.

To her, suffering was necessity, the price of legacy and station. 

Alicent had endured it herself and would again, if duty required. But now, she had come to see truth unwrapped from linen, to measure each small face for the telltale marks of deceit.

In her heart she expected bastards.

Proof of sin paraded as dragons’ heirs. 

The first child was lifted.

His skin was pale as fresh-fallen snow, luminous even in torchlight. Silver hair clung damp across his head, shining faintly as though the strands themselves caught fire.

When his eyes opened, they gleamed light purple, not merely the hue of Valyria, but bright, alive, the shade of amethyst caught in sun.

The sight struck King Viserys dumb.

Princess Rhaenys whispered hoarsely, “He looks so alike...my father,” her voice breaking as her father’s visage seemed to stare back at her through newborn eyes.

The babe’s beauty was too exact, too flawless, the kind that belonged not to mortals, but to statues of forgotten gods.

And then, from the cluster of servants, one maid could not contain herself. Awe broke from her lips like prayer: “The firstborn,” she whispered, trembling. “The heir to the Heiress.”

Prince Daemon’s eyes cut toward her, sharp and swift, and for a flicker of a moment his gaze softened. He of all men understood the weight of such a naming.

Queen Alicent’s gaze narrowed. The child was too Targaryen, his blood too clear.

Her lips curved in the faintest smirk, but it was not wonder that moved her. Her eyes slid instead to Prince Daemon, weighing him.

Alicent’s smile slipped as the second bundle was drawn forth, smaller, restless, his cry sharper than his brother’s hush. Where the first had been moon, flawless and still, this one was sea.

His curls gleamed silver even slick with blood, but his skin bore warmth, a touch of sun-kissed bronze that marked him different, yet no less Valyrian.

When his lids cracked open, eyes of stormy violet-blue glared out, dark at the rim like clouds before a tempest. It was as though the sea itself had lent its hue, as if the boy had been shaped not only of flesh, but of tide and salt.

The chamber stirred uneasily.

Lord Corlys Velaryon’s throat worked once.

Pride thick and wordless, for in the child’s coloring he saw the legacy of Driftmark plain as day.

Princess Rhaenys leaned forward, lips parting, as if some grief of her own was momentarily soothed.

But Alicent stilled, the perfection of the firstborn had shaken her, but this second child muddied the line.

Moon and sea, silver and sun-bronze, amethyst and storm. She could not decide if the sight was curse or omen, only that her certainty was gone, and in its place came unease.

Laenor exhaled audibly, shoulders trembling as though he had been holding breath since dawn.

“A true Velaryon,” he whispered, half in prayer, though the words rang brittle.

Daemon alone smirked faintly, as if the boy’s fiery wail pleased him.

King Viserys, by contrast, could barely see through the swell of fresh tears. His hand trembled as though reaching for both grandsons at once, undone by their existence, too overcome to speak.

Then came the girl.

The moment cracked like thunder and fell into silence.

Her skin was golden, radiant as though kissed by sunlight itself. Her curls shimmered silver laced with molten gold, glinting like sunfire woven through moonlight. But it was her eyes that undid them all.

One opened violet, fierce and unyielding, the mark of dragonlords.

The other opened blue, deep as the sea, Driftmark’s legacy staring back.

Fire and water. 

Both truths alive in one face. 

For a long, impossible moment, no one breathed. 

King Viserys wept openly, tears spilling into his beard. “The gods are merciful,” he choked, reaching toward the swaddled bundles as though touch alone might anchor him to the sight.

Laenor swayed, caught between awe and fear, his lips shaping silent prayers he could not voice. Rhaenys pressed a hand to her lips, her eyes glistening; even Corlys, who had stood like stone through wars and storms, whispered a prayer to gods long abandoned. Daemon alone did not move. His eyes burned, sharp and assessing, fixed on the children as though he beheld weapons or omens, not infants. Laena’s hand steadied him, but even she looked stricken with wonder.

And Alicent her lips pressed thin.

She had come certain she would find proof of bastardy.

Yet one after another, the children had been revealed as visions.

Two of the three bore Velaryon features too plain to deny, sea-storm eyes, bronze warmth, the unmistakable stamp of Driftmark.

She ground her teeth at the thought, questioning bitterly how a sword-swallower like Laenor Velaryon could have fathered such perfection.

Yet here they were.

No bastard’s faces.

No flaw to seize upon.

“Targaryen,” Rhaenys breathed, her voice soft. She looked to the firstborn boy, pale and perfect as carved marble. “The very image of our line, unchanged since Old Valyria.”

Lord Corlys bristled, his chest swelling.

“And yet the second bears Velaryon blood clear as the sea.” He gestured toward the wailing, storm-eyed child, pride hardening his voice. “That boy is ours. The strength of Driftmark lives in him. He is beautiful because he is Velaryon.”

Rhaenys’s eyes flashed, still a Targaryen princess no matter what house she wed into. “Do not forget whose fire bore him forth. Beauty such as this belongs first to dragon’s brood.”

Daemon gave a sharp laugh.

“Dragons bow to no ship, no sea.” His gaze slid to the girl, golden-tan and bright as dawn, her eyes split between fire and tide. “But that one…” He tilted his head, a predator’s interest glinting. “Mark me, she will not be claimed by anyone’s house but her own.”

Laenor’s voice cracked as he stumbled forward, desperation sharpening it. “They are mine, my children, my heirs—”

“They are heirs to more than you, boy,” Corlys cut in, his tone like steel drawn half from its scabbard. “They carry Driftmark’s legacy."

“They carry Valyria,” King Viserys rasped, fierce as a dragon’s cry.

“Both,” Laena said softly, her voice the only balm in the room, though it trembled. “Fire and water, sky and tide. They are proof of both legacies.”

Daemon’s low laugh returned, darker now.

“The Realm’s Delight was called the fairest of her age.” His gaze lingered on the swaddled bundles, each one radiant in a different way. “It seems she has given the realm new delights. Beauties enough to unsettle thrones and stir envy in every heart.”

The silence after Daemon’s words held like glass.

Rhaenys stepped forward, her movements measured, as though she feared the moment might shatter if she reached too quickly.

Her hands, strong from years in the sky flying, lifted the firstborn boy. 

For a breath, Rhaenys could not speak. Her gaze drank him in, the high, proud brow.

The luminous eyes. 

A mouth too grave for such tender flesh.

Her lips parted, but no name came. Only a soft, raw praise: “He is...beautiful."

The words clung to the chamber walls, heavy with the unspoken. The resemblance was a balm she had not known she needed.

A salve upon the wound of her father’s legacy denied her, of a crown promised then stolen.

Rhaenys pressed her cheek to the child’s downy hair, her eyes closing against the sudden swell of longing. 

Viserys stepped forward.

The maids placed the second-born into his arms, the golden boy, flushed from his cries, his small fists still tight with newborn fury.

Viserys’s hands steadied as he cradled him, and pride straightened his bent shoulders.

He studied the child’s features, the soft curve of his nose, the shape of his cheeks, echoes of Aemma.

A smile, fragile yet fierce, broke across his tear-streaked face.

“My daughter has given the realm a future,” he said.

He lifted the boy higher, showing him to the gathered kin, as though presenting him to gods and men alike. 

Last, the swaddled girl was pressed forward.

For a beat no one moved, as if wary of being the first to lay claim to a child who carried both fire and tide in her mismatched gaze.

Then Daemon stepped forward, his expression unreadable, and took her into his arms.

He had expected weight, some small echo of the power that already stirred the dragons outside, but she was light, shockingly so.

“So small,” he whispered, more to himself than to the room. His thumb brushed against the golden-tan of her cheek, the curls silver and gold at her crown, glimmering in the torchlight. Her dual eyes blinked open, one violet as fire, the other deep blue as sea. 

Laena leaned close, her breath catching, her eyes brimming as she gazed down at the child in her husband’s arms.

“Gods,” she whispered, tears streaking her cheeks. “She is… lovely.” Her hand touched Daemon’s sleeve, trembling with awe. “As if the gods themselves shaped her.”

Alicent spoke then.

Invoking Gods a burn against her faith.

“So rare,” she said softly, her hands folded into the sleeves of her dress. Her gaze lingered on the swaddled babes. “Three at once. Some might call it unnatural… and yet who could deny their beauty?” A faint smile curved her lips, brittle with strain. “Perhaps the gods have sent a sign." 

Inwardly, she marked witnesses the way septas count rosaries: Rhaenys’s tears, Corlys’s boast, Laenor’s tremor, the king’s open weeping, Daemon’s sharpened hunger, the ledger of belief hardening against her. 

Laenor’s head snapped up, color rising in his cheeks. He stepped forward, his voice roughened with pride and defiance.

“Seven moons she bore them,” he said, his tone gathering strength with each word. “Seven days and seven nights she labored. And from that trial, three babes. Proof. Proof of her strength, proof of her worth, proof of the blood that runs true.”

His gaze met Alicent’s, steady as iron. “Call itsign if you wish, but I call it triumph. And the realm will remember it as such.”

“Well said,” the king declared, his voice thick but sure. “A triumph indeed.”

The words rang with conviction, yet even as he spoke them, his gaze strayed toward the bedchamber door. Guilt pressed against his chest, that he had been so enthralled by the children’s beauty, by their seeming divinity, he had forgotten the mother who had borne them forth.

His voice softened, strained. “And my daughter? Is she—?”

“She is strong, Your Grace,” a maidservant answered at once, bowing her head low. “The ordeal was long, but her breath and heart are steady. She only sleeps.”

Viserys’s shoulders sagged. 

“Strong,” he whispered, savoring the word as if it absolved him. “My daughter is strong.”

Yet guilt lingered in his eyes, the shame of a father who had marveled at legacy before the flesh that had bled to make it.

Laenor stepped forward then, his chest still heaving, voice unsteady with pride.

“She thought of everything,” he said. “Before her pains began, she had three eggs chosen for them, each one laid aside in readiness. She meant for their bond to begin at once.”

At this, Daemon stirred.

“Three eggs, three babes,” he said, his voice low, edged with an authority that stilled the room. “Three heads of the dragon.” His gaze cut from Viserys to Laenor, sharp as a blade. “I will fetch them. They should be placed beside the children tonight.”

Daemon looked down at the babe in his arms.

She blinked up at him, mismatched eyes bright and steady, her tiny fingers curled around the fabric of his sleeve. His expression softened, then he turned and strode toward Laenor.

“Take her,” he said, his tone clipped.

He handed the child into Laenor’s arms, but his gaze bored into the young man’s face with a warning sharp enough to wound.

The message was clear: be gentle, or you will answer for it.

Laenor’s mouth tightened as he adjusted his daughter carefully against his chest, irritation flashing across his face. “I know how to hold my own child, cousin." 

For a moment their eyes locked.

Daemon’s dark with challenge, Laenor’s hard with pride.

Daemon let the silence speak for him and turned away, his cloak stirring at his heels as he moved toward the chest where the eggs waited in their bed of ash and silk.

Alicent’s smile held, but her nails pressed crescent moons into her palms.

Inside, she seethed.

One birth, and Rhaenyra had given the realm three heirs, and not frail, squalling things like so many babes, but creatures the whole room seemed to bend toward in awe.

And yet, when her children had come into the world, there had been no such hush.

No trembling torches, no gasps of omen.

Only the tired praise of maesters, the perfunctory bows of lords, and the quiet relief that she, Alicent, had survived another tearing of flesh and bone.

She had bled for the realm, body broken again and again, and still the kin of the dragon had never looked at her sons and daughter as they looked now upon Rhaenyra’s brood.

She laid a hand across the curve of her belly, heavy with her fourth quickening, as though the gesture might sanctify her in their eyes. 

“Must it be so soon?” she asked, gaze fixed on King Viserys, her husband. “The babes are scarcely hours old. Should fire meet them before even milk?”

Viserys turned to her. 

“My queen,” he said gently, almost indulgent, “you know little of dragonlore. A babe and its egg must be bound early, while the breath of birth still clings to them. It is no cruelty, but gift, the greatest gift we can bestow. Rhaenyra has been wise in this.”

The words were meant as reassurance, yet they fell like insult. Alicent’s smile froze, her throat tightening.

Little of dragonlore.

Alicent’s smile held fast, but behind her teeth she tasted bitterness. 

Then the door to the birthing chamber creaked open. A midwife slipped through, her face pale from the long vigil, but her eyes alight. She curtsied quickly, her voice trembling with the urgency of her words.

“The princess is awake,” she announced. “She asks to see her babes.”

The hush broke at once.

Viserys’s face cracked into tears again, relief and pride warring across his features. Rhaenys exhaled shakily, as though a rope had been loosed from her throat. Even Corlys’s shoulders dropped, his steel composure fraying with the news.

And Daemon, who just rounded the corner carrying a steaming chest, looked...alive. 

The iron lid hissed faintly in his grip, tendrils of steam curling upward, the scent of ash and heat trailing him like a second cloak. Fire bled from the seams, the eggs within restless, yet his stride was steady, sure.

For once, it was not only the promise of prophecy that lit his eyes.

It was relief.

Fierce, unguarded relief.

Rhaenyra lived.

The knowledge struck him harder than any blade ever had.

His chest felt scorched with it, his veins alight.

In the span of heartbeats, he seemed younger, sharpened, unchained, the weight he bore no burden at all. 

And behind the hunger at the corner of his mouth, there was something else: a glimmer of the man who loved her. Not as ally, not as kin, but with the reckless devotion that had always burned at his core.

The chamber quieted as the doors opened, and they entered to see Rhaenyra.

Pale from the ordeal, her hair unbound, her body still heavy with weariness, yet her eyes found her children at once, and in their sight, all else vanished.

Her world narrowed to three small bundles held in arms not her own.

“Bring them to me,” she commanded.

They were placed one by one into her waiting embrace, and she gathered them as if she might never let go again.

The first stirred softly, lashes pale against his marble skin, sighing as though at last returned to his rightful place. The second wailed, fists beating the air, until her warmth folded around him and the storm quieted into peace. And the third, the little girl of fire and tide, opened her mismatched gaze and reached upward with fragile fingers, clutching at the fabric of her mother’s gown as though she already knew her.

Rhaenyra bent her head low, tears shining in her eyes but refusing to fall.

With careful hands she loosened their wrappings, pressing the swaddles closer, tucking them so that all three could rest against her heart at once. They breathed in unison, tiny bodies curling into the curve of her arms, as though they had never been parted.

Her whole world was here, gathered in her arms, and she held them close with a love that burned brighter than fire, stronger than any chain.

In the tongue of the realm she said first, words shaped by love.

“My darlings. My heart, my breath, my soul. You are my world entire.”

Then her voice slipped into High Valyrian, the syllables curling like flame and song.

“Ñuha zaldrīzes, ñuha ābrar, ñuha byka. Ānogrose issi se ānogrose ñuha.”
"My dragons, my dawns, my little ones. You are eternal, and you are mine eternal.”

The babes stirred as though the words were woven into their very blood. The pale boy sighed and nestled deeper, the bronze one stilled his fretful fists, and the girl with eyes of fire and tide lifted her gaze as if listening.

Around them, hearts broke and swelled.

Rhaenyra’s arms tightened around the three of them, her gaze lifting at last.

“They will bear names to honor blood and bond,” she said. “Not only mine, but all that has made me.”

She turned first to the eldest, pale and perfect, silver hair damp against his brow, amethyst eyes steady as though he had already known the world before he entered it. 

“You are Aemon,” she whispered, her lips shaping the name like a prayer. “Prince Aemon Velaryon… until the day the crown rests upon your brow, and then you shall be Aemon Targaryen. Named for my good-mother’s father. Let his strength and honor live anew in you.”

Princess Rhaenys pressed her lips together, tears brightening her lashes.

Her gaze fell then to the second babe, driftmark blue, fierce and restless in her arms, his fists striking the air as though already testing its weight. She bent her head and brushed her lips to his temple.

“You are Aenar,” she declared. “Prince Aenar Velaryon, for Aenar the Exile, who heeded his daughter’s dream and carried our house across the sea. Without him, we would not stand here. May you bear his foresight, and his courage, and the fire of his faith.”

At the name, Viserys drew a ragged breath.

Daemon’s eyes narrowed, the faintest glimmer of approval sparking, he, too, knew the weight of such a name, the name of the man who had trusted prophecy and preserved their line.

At last, she bent to the smallest, her daughter, her golden-tan skin glowing as though kissed by sunlight, her curls gleaming with silver and gold.

The babe’s tiny fingers curled into her mother’s gown, and Rhaenyra’s composure broke.

She pressed her lips to the child’s brow, tears falling freely.

“And you, my heart… you are Aemma. Princess Aemma Velaryon. Named for my mother. May her love guide me still, and may her strength live on in you.”

King Viserys’s cry shattered the hush, raw and unrestrained.

Tears fell down like rain as he staggered forward, hand half-reaching toward the child who bore his late queen’s name, undone by grief and grace alike.

And in that wordless pain, Daemon moved.

He strode to the steaming chest he had carried, his expression sharpened into purpose.

The iron was hot beneath his palms, faint wisps of smoke coiling from its seams.

Without ceremony, he threw the lid wide.

Three great eggs lay nestled.

Black veined in crismon, pale ivory streaked with gold, deep green threaded with silver.

They burned, pulsed, shimmered as if each were a heart beating, as if fire itself lived within their shells.

A crack split the hush.

Then another.

And another.

The sound sharpened, relentless.

Shells shuddered, splintering beneath invisible force. Heat rolled outward in waves, the ash hissing, the silk curling to cinders.

The eggs were hatching.

Not in some week or moon, not in secret years to come, but now, in the very hour of birth.

The babes in Rhaenyra’s arms stirred violently at once, their tiny bodies writhing, voices lifting into urgent cries.

The pale boy wailed first, then the golden-haired one, then the little girl whose mismatched eyes fluttered open wide. Their cries joined in chorus with the cracking shells, as if the children themselves summoned the fire forth.

Wings unfurled, wet and trembling, claws damp with yolk. 

They leapt at once into the air. Small, yet radiant, one a black shadow veined in red, one pale ivory streaked with molten gold, one green bright as a jewel with silver running like veins of moonlight.

Their wings beat unsteadily, but together, and they rose.

They hovered about Rhaenyra and the babes, their cries answering the children’s wails until it seemed the mother and her brood were crowned in living flame.

It was a vision too dazzling to look upon, mother and children encircled by dragons. 

Queen Alicent’s face paled. Her smile faltered, her stomach twisted. 

Rhaenyra’s eyes lifted to them, shining with tears, then dropped to the three small faces pressed against her breast.

Her voice carried like a vow.

“All the pain, all the blood… it was for this. Every cry, every breath torn from me,  it was worth it.” Her smile trembled, radiant through her tears. “For in this hour, flesh and flame are bound. My children, my dragons… my heart made manifest.”

She gazed down at them and though her body ached from the storm of birth, her voice came steady.

“They must be fed,” she whispered, pressing her lips to the pale boy’s crown. “They have taken their first breath, seen their dragons rise, now they must drink. From me.”

Alicent stayed still, eyes lingering on the beasts who danced above the bed. 

“It is not fit.” she said. “Princess, you have suffered enough. It is unseemly for heirs of the realm to cling to flesh when they might be tended in purity. A wetnurse shall be sent for, as is proper.”

But Rhaenyra’s head lifted, her cheeks flushed, her pride burning brighter than the torches.

“No,” she said, voice firm as steel. “Not some lesser blood. They will drink of me, as they were meant. My body bore them, my body bled for them, and my body will sustain them.”

Her words rang through the chamber like iron struck on stone.

Alicent’s smile froze.

She bowed her head faintly, but her eyes gleamed cold.

This was not devotion but arrogance: Rhaenyra setting herself above the order of the Seven, above the modesty of queens, as if her milk itself were holy.

King Viserys stepped forward, his eyes shining wet, his voice breaking as he raised his hand.

“Clear the room,” he commanded. “All but her women. Leave her peace.”

Servants and maesters alike bowed and withdrew, moving as though dazed

Until only Rhaenyra’s ladies remained, bustling quietly with clean linens and freshened cloths.

Viserys’s gaze never left the sight before him, his daughter pale but radiant, her arms full of squalling miracles, three dragons prowling at her feet. 

“Cradles. Three, here at her side. Let no nursery take them from her.”

A maid dipped low. “Your Grace, the royal nursery—”

“No.” Viserys’s tone cracked like a lash. “Here, where their mother lies. And bring meat, fresh and plenty, for the hatchlings. They shall feast as the children take milk.”

He turned again, voice firming. “And food for the Crown Princess as well. Broth, bread, fruits, what strength can be given back to her. Fresh water, clean cloths. Let nothing be spared.”

Rhaenyra’s lips parted, a breath hustling through her chest.

“Thank you, Father.” 

Viserys bowed his head as though the words themselves were a coronation.

One by one, the kin of dragon and sea withdrew: Rhaenys guiding Corlys with a hand, Laena pale with awe, Laenor flushed with pride, Daemon lingering longest, his gaze sharp and unreadable.

At last, Viserys turned, Alicent was there to catch his arm, their figures moving together toward the door.

They left the chamber arm in arm: the king radiant with awe, whispering blessings under his breath, the queen’s smile fixed and brittle as glass, her heart sour with envy. 

Someone angled the tall bronze mirror toward the bed, and Rhaenyra caught her own reflection, hair unbound, throat raw with labor, eyes rimmed red and bright.

Not a maiden’s icon.

A maker’s face.

“Bring my daughter first,” she said. “Aemma.”

They placed the smallest to her breast.

Her body answered before her mind could catch it, milk let down with a hot ache, the babe’s perfect jaw working, the sharp sting of nipple easing into a deep pull that made her breath hitch. In the mirror, a queen nursed and did not look away from herself. She held Aemma until the child grew drowsy and slack-mouthed, then lifted her to her shoulder, palm firm on tiny spine. A soft pat, the smallest burp, a sigh.

“Now Aenar.”

The storm-eyed one rooted like a little wolf, furious until he wasn’t. Heat rushed her again; she rode the pull and kept her spine tall, refusing shame, refusing smallness. When he released, she tapped his back, cheek to his damp curls, breathing him in, salt and ash, her son.

“And my firstborn, Aemon.”

The moonlit boy latched with grave determination. Watching herself feed him, she felt the strangest steadiness: the realm could argue prophecy, bloodlines, law. But this was proof no tongue could unmake. When he finished, she pressed her mouth to his pale crown and tasted salt, her tears, his life.

In the glass, three cradles and three small dragons made a frame about her, mother enthroned not by jewels, but by the simple, sovereign act of giving. 

---

The birthing chamber lay behind them, heavy with the tang of smoke, milk, and blood.

Even in the corridor, the scent clung to their garments, the memory of fire and wailing babes thick in the air.

Viserys leaned on Alicent’s arm as they walked, his steps uneven but his face alight. He whispered blessings under his breath. 

Thanks to gods, thanks to fire itself.

Ahead of them, white cloaks moved with solemn purpose.

Ser Criston and two more of the Kingsguard kept close, their mailed feet ringing softly on the stone, their hands resting on sword-hilts though no danger threatened. To the servants who lingered in shadowed alcoves, the sight was near sacred.

The king radiant with awe, his young queen at his side, guiding him like a dutiful daughter of the Faith.

Alicent wore her role perfectly.

None who watched would doubt her devotion. 

When she spoke, her tone the very mirror of wifely concern.

“Of course,” she gave, “it was pain that made her speak so. None could mistake it. She suffered, and yet… she prevailed.”

Viserys’s hand tightened on hers, his voice hoarse. “Pain and triumph. Did you not see, Alicent? The dragons rose with her children. It was blessing, a gift, a miracle.”

She inclined her head, lips shaping a soft assent.

“A miracle, yes. Few would dare deny it.” Her lashes lowered, her breath shallow, as though she hesitated even to speak what pressed at her heart. “And yet… the maesters who stood near, the maids who served, they heard more than her cries. She cursed her king, her husband. Even her queen, spoken of in… unseemly terms. I know it was agony that loosed her tongue."

She glanced away, as though reluctant, then laid her other hand across her belly, heavy with child, her voice lowered to near prayer.

“It was no fault of hers. Yet…” She shook her head softly, her lashes brushing down, her tone feather-light. “Such words, once spoken, cannot always be gathered back.”

Viserys halted, his jaw tightening. “They were born of suffering, nothing more.”

“Of course,” Alicent agreed at once, demure, yielding. Her hand squeezed his arm, her eyes lifting briefly to his face, filled with gentle concern. “Still, my love… you know how one sharp word can weigh more heavily in memory than a thousand blessings.”

She let the thought hang, her hand resting lightly against his sleeve.

The perfect queen, offering comfort, never accusation.

Viserys exhaled and allowed her to guide him onward.

“My love… you have poured your heart upon Rhaenyra and her babes. And rightly so. It was a marvel, what we beheld.” She smoothed her palm across her rounded belly, her tone hushed with piety. “But would it not ease you to look upon our children also? To see Aegon’s smile, Helaena’s gentle grace, little Aemond’s bright eyes? They wait for you too, their father.”

Viserys paused, his lips trembling with the ghost of a smile.

For a heartbeat she thought she had moved him.

But he shook his head faintly, his voice tender yet firm.

“Not tonight. The hour is late, and the night has been long. Let them sleep. I will go to them on the morrow, when my heart is steadier.”

Alicent bowed her head at once, her voice as soft as silk. “Of course, my king.”

Her tone was the very mirror of submission, her smile gentle as polished glass. She squeezed his hand lightly, as though nothing in his words had wounded her.

But inside, bitterness burned. 

When Viserys had been guided to his own chambers, weary, still half-lost in awe, Alicent kissed his cheek dutifully and turned away.

The doors closed behind him, leaving her to return to the hush of the Queen’s apartments.

Here, the air was different.

No tang of blood or dragon-smoke, only the faint perfume of rose oil and the clean wax of burning tapers. Her ladies moved to greet her, but a single lifted hand dismissed them.

One by one they vanished, leaving only Ser Criston standing sentinel at his post, white cloak stark against the shadows.

Alicent seated herself at her writing desk, emeralds glimmering in the lamplight. She drew parchment and quill near, her movements serene, her expression mild. To any watching, she was simply the dutiful queen, penning a letter to her father with care. Father, you must be apprised of what has transpired this night…

The words flowed in her precise hand, edged with enough unease to plant seed and stir action.

The wax had barely cooled when Ser Criston spoke. 

“They name it miracle. I call it blasphemy. Three babes, three dragons, all in the same hour? Such things reek of sorcery.”

Alicent stilled, her brow softening into faint lines, her gaze turning toward him with gentle reproof.

“And the children,” Criston pressed, his voice tightening. “Dress them in fire, crown them with silk, it changes nothing. Bastards remain bastards. She has taken a Velaryon cousin. A sailor’s son, perhaps. It is the only way such trickery could hold.”

For a long moment, Alicent only regarded him, lashes lowered, her fingertips pressing lightly to the sealed parchment before her. 

“Ser Criston,” she said, her voice smooth as still water, “to call them so would be folly.”

His brows drew together, confusion flickering across his stern features.

She rose slowly, the candlelight catching her emeralds, casting her in shades of saintly green. Her voice sharpened, though her tone never lost its grace.

“You saw how the hall looked upon them. You saw the hush, the dragons circling as if at holy vigil. To denounce them is not to shame Rhaenyra...it is to make liars of the Kings beliefs.”

Criston’s jaw tightened, but Alicent’s words carried the weight of court.

She moved closer, her hands folding before her in queenly composure. “Truth is not enough in these halls, ser. What matters is what can be believed. And tonight, belief belongs to her. To those children.”

The knight bowed his head at once, chastened, though darkness still burned in his eyes.

Alicent let silence linger, her hand smoothing the folds of her gown. When she spoke again, her tone was hushed, as though reluctant to give shape to the thought.

“The Seven watch over us,” she intoned, her eyes on the flickering candlelight. “They see all, even what we would rather not."

She paused, her lashes lowering, her voice softening further, edged with unease.

“And yet… I cannot help but wonder. Were the cries of dragons truly blessing, Ser Criston? Or was it blasphemy that summoned them? There are rites the Faith forbids, whispers of sorcery. What if such… profanities were woven into this birth, hidden beneath the guise of miracle?”

Criston looked up, his jaw set, his voice hard. “You think Rhaenyra trafficked in such sins?”

Alicent’s lips parted in a faint gasp, and she shook her head at once, the very picture of modesty and restraint. “I would never accuse her so crudely. She is the king’s daughter, heir to the throne. But…” She drew in a slow breath, her hand drifting to her swollen belly, resting there as if for reassurance. “The realm has long memories. It does not take kindly to signs that stray from godly order.”

She looked to Criston then, her gaze steady though cloaked in sorrow. “I fear for her. I fear for us all.”

Her fingers tightened faintly over her belly, and her voice lowered to a whisper. 

Criston’s eyes flashed at her words, but he held his tongue.

He bowed again, lower this time.

The bitterness in him hardened now into grim conviction.

---

The chamber was quiet, its last embers glowing like the eyes of watchful beasts.

Silk sheets lay tangled across the bed where Laena sat, her hair unbound. Her gaze steady on her husband.

Daemon had not settled.

He paced the chamber like a caged thing, boots whispering over rushes. His shoulders tight, as though battle still raged in him though the cries of birth had long since faded.

“She lives,” he said, as if testing whether the words would hold if struck.

“I kept hearing her cries,” he admitted, barely a sound. “Thought...if she went where I could not follow—”

He bit off.

“She lives,” he said again time, voice sharp, clipped, stubborn. “The danger has passed. In a sennight we’ll be gone from this nest of vipers. Pentos will suit us better.”

Laena’s eyes shifted to him, sharp and knowing.

“A sennight?” Her mouth curved, not in a smile, but in something closer to disbelief. “Do not feign indifference, Daemon. The moment you heard Rhaenyra might not survive, you would have burned a fleet to cinders to reach her. An army could not have held you back. And now you speak of leaving as if none of it touched you.”

He halted his pacing. 

His mouth tightening, but he did not answer.

Laena rose then, crossing the chamber with the unhurried grace of one who had been born knowing dragons. She laid her hand on his arm, her touch light, her gaze unwavering. “I do not scorn you for it."

Daemon’s eyes shifted to hers, defiance gleaming there, though beneath it something raw stirred, the memory of Rhaenyra pale with sweat and agony. 

“What I saw,” he said, low and harsh, “was her broken. The sound of her near death. Do you call that miracle? I call it torment.”

Laena’s hand slid to his chest, over the restless beat of his heart. Her voice softened, though her words did not relent.

“And yet you could not look away. None of us could. Three babes, three dragons, Daemon, you felt it. Will you truly turn from it? From them?”

His eyes flashed, sharp as the edge of steel.

“And you,” he retorted, voice low and cutting. “Do you not resent it? Most wives would. Most wives would spit to see their husband torn toward another woman.”

Daemon searched her face, hungry for even the smallest crack. Jealousy, resentment, some wound he could strike at.

Instead, he found only steadiness.

“I love her, Daemon,” Laena admitted, her voice trembling only at the edges. “She is family. And what came into this world tonight was family, too. To stay is not to wound me.”

The words landed with the weight of truth.

Daemon said nothing.

His jaw worked, his eyes restless, unsettled, darting away from hers only to return again, unable to escape her gaze.

Then, with a sharp exhale, he turned away. His hand raked down his face, as though to scrub the feeling from it, to wrestle it into silence.

“Kin,” he muttered at last, the word caught between pain and pride. 

Laena stepped closer, not yielding. Her fingers slipped into his hand, refusing to let him flee into shadows.

“You say a sennight. I say longer. A lifetime, perhaps. For what we saw tonight was not chance. It was legacy.”

Daemon’s grip tightened around hers, his smirk faltering, his armor slipping just enough to show the rawness beneath. “You would tether us here.”

Her chin lifted, unflinching.

“Not tether,” she said. “Anchor. Think, Daemon, if we go back to Pentos, what will those babes be raised among? Lords who bow to gold, not to dragons. They will grow without true kin at their side.”

“But if we stay? They may be raised among us. Among you. Among me. Among any children we bring into this world. Dragon with dragon. Kin with kin. Our brood and hers, growing together, fire answering fire. That is the strength that will endure.”

Daemon mind imagined it. His children side by side with Rhaenyras'. 

“I looked at them tonight,” Laena continued, her voice hushed but fervent. “At the boy with hair like moonlight, the other with gold in his curls, and the girl...gods, Daemon, the girl with sea and fire in her eyes. They are part of us, as much Velaryon as Targaryen. If we leave them behind, we weaken our own.”

She lifted his hand, pressed it against her breastbone, steady over her heartbeat. “Do you not see?”

The fire popped sharply in the hearth, casting shadows across his face.

Daemon’s eyes flicked away, to the window, to the faint red glow above the city where Caraxes stirred, restless as his master. His mouth twisted, torn between defiance and a truth he could not spit out.

At last, rough and grudging, his words came.

“You would have me stay… for them. For children not mine.”

Laena’s lips curved faintly, not triumph but calm certainty. “For ours, Daemon. For all of them. For what we are meant to be.”

“Very well,” he said. “We stay. For now.”

Laena’s fingers tightened around his. A quiet smile curving her lips, not triumph, but calm, steady knowing.

She inclined her head as if it were enough, though she recognized it for what it was: the first step, the first crack in his restless urge to flee.

Daemon exhaled sharply, dragging his free hand through his hair, still scowling as though he could ward off the truth with stubbornness. But he did not pull away from her grasp.

He let her hold him fast even as he bristled.

Laena bent and pressed her lips to his knuckles, lingering there. When she lifted her gaze again, her eyes were softer, full of warmth. “For now,” she echoed.

Then she tugged gently at his hand, guiding him toward the bed where silks lay tangled.

The firelight caught her unbound hair, gilding her like flame.

“Come,” she said, her voice low but certain. “Enough of pacing. Let me keep you here tonight, at least.”

He hesitated only a heartbeat, then allowed her to draw him down beside her. His arm went around her waist almost of its own accord, pulling her against him, his scowl easing as the warmth of her body pressed close.

Laena rested her head against his shoulder, her lips brushing his throat in the faintest kiss.

“Here,” she whispered. “Stay with me.”

---

The brazier’s fire cast long shadows over Driftmark’s lord.

Corlys Velaryon stood as if before a council of lords, not his own kin.

His hand sweeping across the map table strewn with markers of seas and ships. His eyes gleamed with restless pride.

“They shall not want for anything,” he declared. “The king may give them names and oaths, but from Driftmark will come substance. Ships, each of their own, crafted of the finest timber, one swift and sharp as a gull’s wing, another broad and mighty for trade and war, and the third a vessel wrought as jewel-box, fit for a queen upon the waves.”

He turned, his eyes gleaming, already seeing their sails cut the horizon.

“For each, coffers of gold and gems. Let their cradles be lined with wealth the world cannot mistake. Let no one forget: their blood runs to the sea as well as to the sky.”

Rhaenys’s violet eyes glittered, and though her hands rested still in her lap, the curve of her mouth betrayed her mirth.

“Ships for babes, jewels for children not yet weaned,” she mused, her tone light as seafoam. “Shall we give them crowns of coral too? Thrones carved from whale-bone? Will you set a pearl in each of their mouths, so their first cries are gilded?”

Corlys turned, bristling for a heartbeat, but her laughter danced in the air, disarming him. She leaned back in her chair, regal yet indulgent, her voice lilting like the tide.

“Perhaps you’ll command the harbor filled with toys! Miniature galleys to rock upon the tide, sails stitched with silk, oars gilded, a fleet of playthings so grand even the Lyseni will envy them. And when they crawl, shall we pave the floor with coins, so every handprint is pressed into gold?”

“I could do such,” Corlys replied, pride burning, though a smirk betrayed him.

“Oh could you?” she asked, wickedly pleased. 

Laenor barked a laugh, sharp and startled, smothering it with his hand though his shoulders still shook. “Aye, and bankrupt Driftmark in the doing.”

Corlys’s stern façade cracked fully, a grin tugging at his mouth, unwilling but present.

“Mock me if you will,” he rumbled, affection threading through the boast, “but I’ll not be outdone by any man, not even the king himself, when it comes to gifting my grandchildren.”

Rhaenys let out a low, musical laugh, her eyes dancing. “So that is what it is, then. You mean to be remembered as the greatest grandsire the realm has ever seen.”

“Why not?” Corlys shot back, smug and unrepentant, and for a rare moment the Sea Snake looked less lord than grandfather, swelling with pride that no tide could wash away. 

Laenor lowered his hand, his laughter faltering into something more fragile.

He straightened, chin lifted, though the flicker in his eyes betrayed the turmoil behind it.

“Well then,” he said, forcing steadiness into his voice, “I will not be outdone either. They are mine, my children. And I’ll give them all I have, not only ships and pearls, but myself. Let no one say their father stood lesser beside them.”

The words hung bold, but inside, doubt coiled like smoke.

He remembered blurred nights, wine-heavy and careless, remembered laughter and bodies. 

Could perfection such as theirs truly have come from him?

Could so flawless a lineage be traced to his blood, when he himself felt bent, unsteady, never quite enough?

Rhaenys’s mirth softened at once.

Her gaze slid to her son, and in it there was pride gentler than any jest.

“Spoken well, Laenor,” she said, her voice warm, maternal. “They will need more than gold and sails. They will need you.”

Corlys’s chest swelled, his pride crashing through the chamber like a tide.

He clapped his son’s shoulder so hard Laenor staggered.

“Aye! That’s the truth of it, boy. You’ve done your duty and more. Three children, strong and fair, finer than any I’ve yet seen. Perfection, each one of them.”

Laenor flinched under the weight of those words, though he masked it with a tight smile.

Duty. Perfection.

A crown of praise that pressed too heavy.

And yet, his blood sang when he thought of them.

He had seen their faces, pale as moon, golden as sun, bright as dawn.

He had heard their cries, fierce and wild, felt something rise in him he could not name. Whatever doubts gnawed at him, they had not silenced the fierce, protective chord thrumming through his veins.

He swallowed, forcing a steady breath.

“They will not want for love,” he said at last, quieter now, but truer. “Not while I live.”

Rhaenys’s hand brushed his, a fleeting touch of comfort, though her eyes had turned distant again, lost to thoughts she did not share. Aemon reborn, she thought, her father’s visage staring back from her grandson’s amethyst eyes.

It was everything. It was terror.

Corlys, oblivious to her silence, only beamed, already dreaming of fleets and splendor, while his son stood caught between pride and dread, his heart aflame and unsteady, singing and breaking all at once.

---

The great tumult of the birth had faded into silence, yet Rhaenyra lay wide-eyed, her body aching, her limbs heavy with exhaustion that would not claim her.

She could not look away.

Three cradles had been brought, set close by her bed as she had demanded.

Within them, her children slept uneasily, tiny chests rising and falling.

Little fists twitching as though even in slumber they dreamed of flight.

The hatchlings lay coiled at their feet, steaming with the scent of ash and meat, their scaled bellies swollen from feasting, their wings folded in contented rest.

Rhaenyra’s gaze roamed from one cradle to the next, her throat tightening with a wonder so sharp it hurt.

Aemon, pale as moonlight, eyes amethyst bright even in sleep.

Aenar, gold-touched and restless, his lips pursed as if already tasting salt air.

And her daughter, her little Aemma, skin golden as sun-warmed sand, curls glinting silver and gold, mismatched eyes closed but vivid in memory.

She pressed her hand to her lips, stifling the sob that rose unbidden.

Her lids drooped heavy, but she would not close them.

She had fought too long, bled too much, nearly broken herself in two to bring them forth.

She would not waste a single heartbeat of sight.

Her hand trembled as she reached toward them, brushing the edge of the linen that covered her daughter.

“Mine,” she whispered hoarsely. “You are mine.”

The hatchlings stirred faintly at her voice, their scaled heads lifting, eyes glinting molten in the low light.

For a breath, Rhaenyra thought they understood.

That they, too, kept vigil.

And Rhaenyra, felt something shift deep within her.

All her life she had been doubted.

Too willful, too proud, too soft, too unfit.

She had been called reckless daughter, spoiled heir, the Realm’s Delight, as if beauty were her only gift.

She had been paraded, praised, and dismissed in the same breath. Always measured against the shape of men, and always found wanting.

But not now.

Here was proof that she was more.

That her blood ran true, fierce as fire, enduring as stone. Three babes born together, each carrying the mark of gods and dragons, each bound already to living flame. No king, no council, no whisper of bastardy could deny what the realm itself had witnessed.

She had nearly died for them, had cursed her father, her husband, even the gods themselves as her body broke.

But the agony had crowned her.

She felt vindicated, remade.

The torment was no weakness.

It was her strength, her crucible.

Her enemies would try to twist it, she knew.

They would call her impious, unseemly, a whore, a heretic. They would sharpen every blade of doubt against her. But when they looked upon her children, the realm would remember the hush that fell. 

She felt stronger than she had in years.

Stronger than she had ever been.

If the realm wished to test her, let it. She had birthed her proof in blood and flame.

And she would not be denied.

“At first light,” she told her women, her voice low but firm, “send word to the Great Sept. Not some septa or minor priest—the High Septon himself must come. Let him bless my babes here, in this chamber, with my blood still fresh in the rushes. If tongues would whisper of heresy, let them first bite through his benediction.”

Her gaze sharpened toward the doors.

“The doors stay shut,” she added. “No petitioners. No lordly visits. Only my ladies, the maesters I name, and the Kingsguard I choose.” Her gaze touched each cradle as if counting them into law. “Post Ser Harwin and Ser Erryk at the threshold and rotate no man I have not approved. Write it plainly: entry without my leave is trespass against the heirs. And set a ledger by their cradles. Any soul who enters, be it king or servant, will sign name, hour, and purpose. Let every witness bind themselves to ink as well as oath.”

She looked once more to the mirror.

The woman reflected there was not meek, nor merely grateful, she was crowned in her own suffering, her children her regalia.

“And have a scribe summoned. Each who stood witness tonight. My father the king, Princess Rhaenys, Lord Corlys, Prince Consort Laenor, Lady Laena, and Prince Daemon. Will give their word in writing. One line each: that the eggs cracked, the dragons rose, and they beheld it with their own eyes. Seal it in wax and send a copy to the Citadel by raven. Let the maesters keep it as precedent, ink against rumor.”

Her hand shifted to the cradle nearest, her voice softer but no less firm.

“From the maesters and midwives, I will have a report. Nothing gilded. Seven nights of labor. Three live births. Each child breathed at once. Infants vigorous. Mother stable. Dry truth, plain as bone. No lord can twist it, no Faithman can scorn it. Set it down now, while the cries still echo in the rushes.”

She looked back to the mirror, eyes bright as flame through exhaustion.

“Write it all. Seal it. Spread it where tongues wag most. If they will not believe me, they will believe their king, their queen who never was, their lord of the tides, their prince consort, and their rogue prince. They will believe the Citadel. They will believe ink and oath. And in every word, the truth will be bound: flesh and flame are one.”

One of her ladies, Elenda, quick and silent, slipped forward with a small ledger bound in pale leather.

She laid it carefully at the foot of the cradles, setting a fresh quill and an inkpot beside it.

Elenda hesitated, her gaze lifting to the princess she served. “My princess…” her voice faltered with awe, “…you seem changed.”

And yet Rhaenyra's mouth curved, slow and sharp, a smile edged like a blade.

“I am,” she said, vicious and proud. “And the realm will learn it soon enough.”

Chapter 5: Precedent

The chamber had been stripped of its chaos.

The maids had lit new tapers and laid fresh linens, but the air still bore the hush of something unearthly.

Three cradles stood beside the bed, close enough that Rhaenyra might brush them with her hand.

Within, her children stirred and sighed. Their fragile breaths threading through the faint hiss of hatchlings curled at their feet.

And upon the bed, the princess waited.

She had chosen her gown with care.

Not silks bright with conquest, nor the heavy brocade of a queen, but the very pale blue her mother Aemma had once worn after her labors.

The fabric hung loose at the waist, the sleeves flowing.

A garment of comfort turned into strategy.

Her hair, brushed smooth until it shone, lay unbound across her shoulders.

She wore no jewels, no crown.

The children were her adornment. 

And she knew, with a faint thrill and ache, that she resembled her mother now.

The youth of her face, smoothed by the exhaustion of ordeal, had settled into Aemma’s likeness. Those who entered would see not only the Realm’s Delight, but the queen who had died to bear heirs. 

The great doors groaned wide, and heralds’ voices rose to fill the hush.

“His Grace, Viserys of House Targaryen, First of His Name, King of the Andals and the Rhoynar and the First Men, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms, Protector of the Realm.”

The king was first to enter, crownless yet cloaked in his titles, his step uneven but driven by eagerness. 

“His High Holiness, the Most Devout, Shepherd of the Seven, Voice of the Faith, the High Septon.”

The priest swept forward in vestments heavy with cloth-of-gold, the crystal crown of his office scattering shards of light across the chamber as if stars themselves bent to his brow.

“And Her Grace, Alicent of House Hightower, Queen of the Seven Kingdoms, Lady of the Faith.”

Alicent followed, her hand resting lightly on her husband’s arm.

Septas drifted after like a tide, whispering half-heard prayers into the air.

The king’s step faltered the instant his gaze found Rhaenyra.

He froze, struck as if by a blow.

A ghost sat before him.

The years fell from him in an instant.

His throat closed, his eyes blurred. For a heartbeat he feared if he moved, she might vanish, that the vision would dissolve back into grief.

Then Rhaenyra shifted slightly, and the babes stirred in their cradles, their small voices piercing the hush. Reality rushed back in, but the ache in his chest did not ease.

Alicent followed his gaze...and she herself flinched. 

The dress.

Once she had laced its ties herself, bent over a frail queen’s bedside with hands that shook. 

One of the hatchlings hissed, a wet, sibilant note that raised the fine hairs on the Queens arms. 

Alicent’s smile held, but it hardened at the edges. 

At the foot of the cradles lay a ledger bound in pale leather, ink and quill set ready.

The book was already open, its fresh page spread wide.

Across the top, a scribe’s neat hand had written the hour of birth in bold strokes.

Viserys Targaryen, King of the Seven Kingdoms.

The signature uneven but proud, his arrival fixed forever at the seventh hour of night.

Princess Rhaenys Velaryon, her hand sharp and steady.

Lord Corlys Velaryon, bold and sprawling, ink blotted where his quill pressed too hard.

Prince Daemon Targaryen, angular and curt.

Laena Velaryon, the signature rush and looping. 

Laenor Velaryon, Prince Consort, the ink still faintly smudged where he had lingered too long with the quill.

And below these, a second column, humbler hands, but no less binding.

Dyanna, maidservant, her script small and neat, the time marked beside her name.

Ser Erryk Cargyll, sworn Kingsguard, his oath pressed into the page with soldierly precision.

Ser Harwin Strong, bold hand sprawling across the line.

Marelys, midwife, her name crooked but legible, ink spotted where her fingers still shook.

Benerro, dragonkeeper, the Valyrian glyph he used to mark his hand scrawled dark as coal.

Serena, royal seamtress, her script small and faint.

Olyvar, boy of the stables, a shaky hand, but present.

The names filled the page like strata, high and low, lord and servant, knight and maid.

Each line bound not only to the hour, but to the truth of what they had witnessed. An account of all who came near Rhaenyra’s babes. 

The High Septon’s gaze lingered on it, his lips thinning.

This was no mere steward’s record.

It was already a relic, a wall of testimony stretching from throne to stable-yard.

To add his hand was not to bless only, it was to bind himself to a chorus already begun, one that would outlive whispers and survive long after tongues turned to dust.

And still the quill waited, silent and patient as judgment.

Alicent’s smile sharpened as she looked upon it. The quill felt like a shackle. Thin, elegant, inescapable.

“A curious record,” she said. “Kings beside maids and stableboys. A dragonkeeper’s glyph upon the same line as royalty. One wonders if such mingling of witness does not lessen the dignity of the greater names.”

Her gaze flicked, sly as a knife, toward the High Septon.

“Surely the gods see all souls alike. Yet men… men recall rank. What will posterity make of such a book, when great lords are scrawled among servants?”

Viserys chuckled, oblivious, charmed by what he took for wit.

“Posterity will call it proof, my queen! Proof that none may twist. The king’s word, the knight’s, the midwife’s, all bound together, all saying the same.”

Rhaenyra tilted her head against the pillows, her expression serene, her tone careless but edged.

“So my babes may know,” she said breezily, “who sought them at their birth. Whose names stood written first in witness. King, queen, or servant. Let them all set their hands to truth.”

She shifted slightly, her gaze sweeping over the gathered company, then back to the open ledger.

A pause, the faintest smile tugging at her lips. “And it would not do for their mother to explain, years hence, why their queen left her line empty these first days. Surely Her Grace has been much occupied since the night of their birth.”

A flicker moved through the company, maids ducking their heads, septas stirring uneasily. 

Alicent’s smile did not falter.

 She inclined her head, voice smooth as cream.

“A queen’s duties are many, Princess. One must sometimes forgo sleep and solace alike to see them tended. But I am not so burdened that I cannot lift a quill.”

She stepped forward, her skirts whispering across the rushes, and took up the pen with practiced grace. Her hand moved steady across the page, each letter crisp and deliberate. When she was done, she replaced the quill with a faint click and drew back, chin lifted.

Viserys, eager as a boy, shuffled forward at once. He bent heavily over the ledger, his crownless brow shining, and scrawled his name in broad, sprawling lines. The ink blotched where his hand shook, but he did not care, he beamed at the page as though it were a new coin struck with his likeness.

The High Septon’s gaze lingered.

Hesitancy cursing his frame. 

His hand was meant to anoint, not to tally.

And yet, once the king’s name lay there, bold and wet with ink, what choice remained?

To leave the line blank would be to question the king’s word.

To question the princess.

To stand apart when lords, ladies, knights, and servants alike had already bound themselves.

Slowly, with the gravity of one laying down a stone in a temple, the High Septon reached for the quill. He wrote his title in careful strokes, his hand steady but his jaw tight, each letter seeming to weigh him deeper into the page.

When he set the pen aside, the chamber exhaled. The ledger gleamed, fuller now than it had been, heavy with names high and low, the king’s hand anchoring one end, the High Septon’s the other.

Rhaenyra inclined her head faintly, her eyes bright with something unreadable.

“So it is,” she said. 

Inwardly, her pulse warmed. 

Before ever raising his crystal crown, before speaking one word of blessing, the High Septon had already given the babes his sanction.

Prescribed in his own hand, sealed upon the page for all posterity.

The High Septon drew a breath as if to clear his throat, to recover his dignity after bending to ink. But when his gaze at last fell to the cradles, the words caught.

Three small faces turned in sleep or half-waking dream, breath rising faint as candleflame.

The pale boy, lashes white upon marble skin, amethyst eyes fluttering beneath lids.

The second, bronze-tinged, fists twitching as though he struck at waves in some dream of the sea.

And the girl...gods above...the girl whose curls gleamed sunfire and moon-silver, whose mismatched eyes cracked open just enough to gleam violet and blue in the light. The Faith taught that all babes were alike before the Seven, but as his gaze lingered, he could not summon such comfort.

No seven-faced god had shaped those eyes, he thought. That was dragon’s work, raw and dangerous.

The Septon’s lips parted soundlessly.

He looked less like a priest than a man struck dumb at the altar of beauty.

Viserys, eager, mistook his awe for reverence.

“You see?” the king whispered, tears brimming once more. “The gods’ own hand is upon them.”

Alicent’s hand tightened at his sleeve. Her eyes, sharp as emerald glass, flicked toward the Septon, inviting, pressing: here is your chance, crown them with your words, let the Faith mark them righteous, or hold back, if you dare.

The High Septon’s fingers twitched against his crystal crown. He bowed his head at last, voice low but carrying.

“In the sight of the Seven who watch unceasing, I bless these children,” he intoned, though unease threaded the cadence. “Seven faces look upon them. Father, Mother, Warrior, Smith, Maiden, Crone, Stranger...and find in them… beauty. And strength. May they be warded from shadow, and may their steps follow the light of the gods.”

The chamber released its breath, the blessing spoken, the Faith’s sanction given.

Yet beneath his crown, the High Septon’s eyes were unsettled, lingering too long on the golden girl as though she shone too brightly for comfort. 

Rhaenyra inclined her head, cool as marble, as if the words were no more than what she had expected. “Your blessing honors them, High Septon. And it shall not go unwitnessed.”

Her gaze slid toward the ledger, then back, serene.

“The Citadel’s riders are already on their way. Within two nights, archmaesters and scribes will stand here to hear the accounts of all who were present. The cries, the dragons, the hour, the birth itself. Every name, every word, set down in their books to endure. Perhaps…” Her smile flickered, nearly coy. “…you might see fit, High Septon, to add your own hand to such record. So that your blessing, might outlast even our stones.”

Viserys nearly glowed, his face lit with boyish delight.

“What foresight!” he exclaimed, clapping his hands together. “What wisdom, my dear girl! Yes, yes, of course. Our descendants shall have it. No more half-remembered tales, no guessing at what was, but truth. Truth set down plain. Gods, what I would give to know such detail of Aegon’s birth, of Visenya, of Rhaenys.”

He shook his head, eyes damp, voice thick with yearning. “We mustn’t deny our own children what history denied us.”

Alicent’s smile had grown very still, the kind that did not reach her eyes. Her hand rested tightly upon her swollen belly. 

The High Septon bowed his head, heavy crystal crown refracting light across his cheeks.

Trapped between king and princess, with the Citadel’s quills already en route, he could not refuse. “If it pleases the Crown Princess,” he said, the words like stones on his tongue, “then I will set my hand as witness.”

Rhaenyra reclined back against her pillows, the silk of her mother’s gown whispering at her arms. “It pleases me,” she said softly, and though her tone was mild, her eyes glimmered with quiet triumph.

“Too much ink can be its own peril,” Alicent said lightly, her tone the very picture of reason. "One wonders if such records will not furnish malice more than memory.”

The High Septon’s gaze flicked toward her, faintly relieved by the sense of caution in her words.

Viserys only chuckled, eager to dissolve what he heard as a harmless quibble. “Yet, when truth is so clear, why should we fear the page? The Seven themselves have borne witness!”

Rhaenyra did not answer her stepmother’s warning at all.

She merely turned her gaze down to the cradles, her lips curving in a smile that was bright and distant. 

Alicent tensed.

The ledger was sealed, the Citadel already summoned.

No blade could cut those bindings now.

So her gaze shifted, slowly, deliberately, to the floor where the three hatchlings lay coiled, bellies round from meat, wings twitching in half-dream.

Their scales glistened damply in the torchlight, each one too alive, too near.

Her hand strayed to her belly as though to guard the child quickening there.

“And these… creatures,” she said softly, voice smoothed of any sharpness though her knuckles whitened against her gown, “are they to remain here? In a chamber of women and children? The Dragonpit was raised for such purpose. Strong walls, iron bars, keepers sworn to their care. Surely it is unseemly...unnatural...for newborn heirs to lie with fire at their feet.”

The High Septon’s head inclined ever so slightly, his crystal crown glinting uneasily, as though the thought pleased him.

Viserys hesitated, torn, his gaze flickering between the cradles and the little beasts curled protectively at their bases.

But Rhaenyra did not look to him.

She let her hand drift across her coverlet until her fingers brushed the side of her daughter’s cradle. Her voice came quiet, calm, but edged with memory sharp as a knife.

“When I was no older than they are now, an egg cracked in my crib,” she said. “Syrax clawed her way into this world as I wailed in mine. They sought to part us, to carry her to the Pit while I was left to a wetnurse. And I…” A faint smile curved her lips, more dangerous than soft. “I screamed until I bled the throat raw. Nothing stilled me until she was set at my side again. My father can attest.”

Viserys startled, the recollection pulling him swiftly back.

His face warmed, his voice unsteady with fondness.

“Yes,” he breathed. “She would not sleep, nor eat, nor rest unless Syrax lay beside her. Gods, how she cried. I feared she would waste away in grief. And when I yielded, the bond was made true.”

His eyes misted, pride overtaking unease. “I would not deny such a bond to these babes, not when fire has chosen them so plainly.”

The hatchlings stirred as if in answer, one unfurling a wet wing, another lifting its sharp snout toward the cradles. Their hiss was soft but thrummed like a vow in the chamber’s hush.

“Besides,” Rhaenyra said carelessly, “the dragonkeepers come tomorrow. They will make charcoals and sketches, record each scale and hue for their journals. They will whisper their blessings in their own tongue, guard the lineage in their vaults. Until then, the babes and their dragons remain together, as they should.”

“Well, stepdaughter,” Alicent said, the words wrapped in silk though the barb was plain, “you have surely made every preparation for your babes.”

Rhaenyra did not flinch, nor shift her gaze from the children swaddled before her. 

“I certainly have,” she replied coolly. “As any mother should.”

Viserys’s smile flickered before he forced it back, eager to hear only harmony.

---

The council chamber smelled of tallow and parchment, the air thick with the hush that followed ceremony.

King Viserys sat at the head, his fingers curled loosely over a goblet he barely remembered to sip.

His eyes still shone from the morning’s blessing, tears not yet dried from the corners.

To his left sat Queen Alicent, hands folded neat, her expression the picture of composure.

She had not pressed to attend, no, she had only “inquired.”

And like Alysanne before her, she had been granted a chair.

Around the table, the king’s men: Lyonel Strong, the Hand, heavy-browed and grave; Lord Beesbury, fumbling with his tally rods; Lord Tyland Lannister, young and sharp as a dagger polished too often; Grand Maester Mellos, fingers stained with ink and herbs, his eyes hooded in habitual solemnity; and the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, white cloak pooling silent behind his chair.

Viserys raised his goblet with a weak smile. “Well, well. Let us have glad business today, eh? A fine beginning, after such mercies.”

A small silence followed, the scrape of Beesbury’s tally rod against the table, the creak of Lyonel shifting his weight.

Alicent lowered her eyes, her lashes casting shadows onto her cheeks. One hand smoothed the fold of her skirts, lingering as though she debated whether to speak at all.

When the king’s gaze fell on her, she touched her throat lightly, a gesture of apology.

“If it please Your Grace…” Her voice was soft, uncertain, as though she offered only because silence demanded it. “I know my presence here is courtesy, no right. Yet, if mercy is to be spoken of, then… perhaps it is fitting I begin.”

She allowed her gaze to lift slowly, meeting Viserys’s eyes, then dropping at once, demure as a girl beneath her lord’s regard.

The table stilled. Even Lyonel’s steady eyes lingered on her, waiting.

Alicent let her fingers knot loosely in her lap, then ease open again, as though she summoned courage. “Seven days and seven nights,” she said, her tone shaped with hushed awe. “The Princess endured as few women ever have. A labor fit to be remembered in song.”

Her throat worked with a swallow. The silence bent toward her.

“Yet such labors leave their mark,” she continued, a tremor of breath at the edge of her composure. “Her body is sorely tried. Her spirit too, I fear.” She smoothed her palm over the table’s polished wood as if it were a fevered brow, then withdrew it, folding her hands small and still.

“For her sake, and the babes’,” she said, voice lowered almost to prayer, “I would urge two moons of rest. That she be eased of petitioners, audiences, and the grind of council until she regains full strength.”

Mellos seized the opening with priestly fervor, his old joints creaking as he leaned forward, sleeves rustling like altar cloths.

“The queen speaks as the Mother herself would,” he intoned, each word weighed as though it came down from the Seven-Pointed Star itself. His fingers, mottled with ink and age spots, lifted as if to trace invisible scripture in the air. “The humors must be balanced after such event. Milk must settle in the breasts, blood must cool in the womb, the mind’s vapors must be soothed lest they sour into melancholy.”

He paused, heavy-lidded eyes sweeping the table, daring any man to gainsay physic cloaked as gospel.

“Fever and flux are no strangers to women who rise too swiftly from childbed,” Mellos pressed on, voice dipping low, grave. “We have buried queens and highborn daughters for less. Two moons is but mercy, and mercy, as the Mother teaches us, is duty."

His hand closed gently over the pommel of his staff, knuckles pale, as if sealing his words into law.

“Would we gamble babes so blessed, heirs so precious, against a mother’s pride to rise too soon? Better she rest, and let her strength return with the seasons. The realm will not founder for want of her voice at this table for a little while.”

Beesbury sputtered, the tally rod slipping from his fingers to clatter against the table’s edge.

His bent shoulders hunched, breath puffing quick as a bellows, the flush creeping high into his weathered cheeks.

“Sanctity? Mercy?” His voice cracked with age and indignation, thin but sharp as a quill-scratch. “I call it pretext! The Princess is heir by law and blood, not by your humors, Mellos. To deny her council, even for a day, is to weaken her claim in all but name! You may dress it in scripture, aye, but I smell ink beneath the incense.”

He jabbed a trembling finger toward the table, as though the very grain might rise to agree with him.

Across from him, Tyland Lannister only smiled, the expression narrow and gleaming, a blade wrapped in velvet.

His hands rested lightly atop one another, signet ring glinting each time the candlelight caught it.

“No denial, Lord Beesbury,” Tyland purred, his tone smooth enough to lacquer over the barb. “Only presentation."

He tilted his head, golden hair catching the glow, the curve of his lips never faltering. “Captains struck by storm do not seize the wheel at once. The first mate steers until the seas are calm. That is seamanship.”

Beesbury snatched up his rod again and jabbed it toward him, the wood rattling against parchment. “And who, Lord Lannister, is this ‘first mate’?” His old voice shook with fury but did not falter. “The Hand? The king? Or the queen herself, whispering mercy into decrees while the Princess is kept from her seat?”

The air seemed to hold its breath.

Alicent’s hands smoothed her skirts, her voice emerging calm and low, the very picture of patience.

“My lords,” she murmured, “there is no need to speak of decrees. It need not be writ in law, nor proclaimed from the steps of the Sept. Simply… a resting period. Encouraged. Honored. For the sake of her health, and the babes’.”

For a moment, silence reigned. Then Lyonel Strong shifted, the scrape of his chair against stone steady as the weight of his voice.

“My queen,” he said, slow and deliberate, “you speak with a gentleness none here would deny. Yet I must give the plainer word, for law is not so soft. What the council ‘encourages,’ the realm will hear as command. And what command we utter here, it will whisper abroad as curtailment.”

He set one broad hand flat against the table’s polished wood, as if anchoring his words there.

“To say the Princess may rest is harmless. To frame that rest in ordinance, decree, or even proclamation. However clothed in honor, is another matter. The realm will not read ‘mercy.’ It will read ‘weakness.’"

His gaze swept the table, heavy and unblinking, then returned to Alicent. “Choice, my lords, is the line. The Princess must choose her own rest, or else we trespass upon the office that is hers by right.”

Alicent inclined her head slightly, the movement demure, but her voice was velvet edged with iron.

“I seek no trespass, Lord Strong. Only mercy. I simply do not wish to tempt the Stranger.” Her fingers folded tighter in her lap, pale against emerald silk. “We all heard the screams of the Princess. The halls shook with them. Would it not be folly to press her back to burden when death itself brushed so near?”

She let the words hang, delicate as prayer, yet heavy enough to conjure again the image of Rhaenyra’s cries echoing through Maegor’s Holdfast, a reminder that even dragons are brought low in the birthing bed.

Viserys’s fingers tightened around the stem of his goblet, knuckles whitening until the gold bit into his skin.

For a heartbeat he seemed present, and then his gaze went glassy, fixed on some sound that was not in the chamber but echoing in memory.

“Yes,” he whispered, voice catching. “Gods help me, I heard them.”

The council stilled, watching as his shoulders hunched slightly, as though under a weight only he could feel.

His breath had gone uneven, the wheeze of a man reliving something he had begged himself to forget.

“It was her mother’s voice,” he said hoarsely, eyes darting toward the stone floor as if the cries might yet ring up through the rock. “The same wailing… the same terror. Seven nights, seven days, it was Aemma again, and I—” He broke off, throat working.

A tremor ran through his hand.

The goblet tipped, spilling a dark stream across the cloth.

He did not notice.

His ears rang with remembered shrieks, the sound that had cracked him in two all those years ago. He could smell it even now, the iron stink of blood, the sour sweat of fear, the candlewax melting too fast because no one dared snuff them.

“When Rhaenyra screamed,” he forced out, voice ragged, “I thought… the Stranger had come for her as he came for Aemma. That it would be my doing again. That I had cursed them both.” His chest heaved once, twice, as though it were still hard to draw air.

The silence that followed was suffocating.

Even Beesbury, ready to protest, pressed his lips together.

Tyland looked down at his hands, Mellos bowed his head in solemn approval, and Lyonel’s jaw set like stone.

At last, Viserys dragged in a breath, thick with grief.

He blinked rapidly, tried for composure, but his voice carried the quaver of dread. “Mercy, yes. Mercy is wisdom. Let her rest as she wills. The Princess must not be pressed again.”

When his gaze finally lifted, it went to Alicent. Gratitude softened his features, as if she had spoken aloud the very fear that had been gnawing at his heart since the cries first tore through the keep.

Alicent, seated at his right, moved at last. Her fingers slipped across the table’s edge, light as breath, and came to rest upon his hand. Her touch was cool against his trembling knuckles, steady where he shook.

“My love,” she said softly, pitched for him though all the council heard it. “Once again your wisdom is without censure."

---

The gallery had been swept and made ready. Candles burned low in sconces, the scent of beeswax clinging to the air.

A few guards lingered at the edges, their helms polished, their silence watchful. It was no court session, yet the hush carried weight.

Rhaenyra stood before the hearth, flanked by the three cradles set upon their low dais.

By evening, she had chosen war colors. 

Dressed in velvet crismon heavy with gold thread, a torque of dragonsteel about her throat.

The gown’s weight pressed sorely on her ribs, her back ached where she held herself too straight, and her belly was tender yet from the long birth.

But her chin was high, her posture regal. She would not greet the Citadel in nightclothes like a convalescent, she would greet them as the blood of kings.

The doors opened.

The procession entered to the scrape of iron hinges: grey-cloaked figures, chains glinting against the torchlight.

At their head came Archmaester Vaegon, slow but steady, the king’s own uncle cloaked in the Citadel’s authority.

At his side walked Septa Rhaella, robed in white trimmed with green, her silver hair bound tight, her eyes sharp with both piety and kinship. Behind them filed three lesser archmaesters, younger, parchments and ink prepared in their hands.

Rhaenyra inclined her head only so far as courtesy demanded, her hands resting light on the curve of her gown.

“Archmaester. Septa. Lords of the Citadel,” she said clearly, her voice filling the chamber without need of strain. “You honor us with your presence, and by the swiftness of your journey.”

Vaegon bowed with stiff gravity, his chain rattling faintly.

Rhaella bent lower, murmuring a blessing.

One by one the others followed, yet all eyes were drawn to the Princess standing tall in her gown of crimson and gold, pain held in silence, resolve blazing brighter than the candles.

Archmaester Vaegon advanced first, his steps deliberate, the weight of his chain clinking against his narrow chest.

“Princess,” he said, voice dry as parchment. “Your letter reached the Citadel with clarity. You asked for my presence. And for witnesses fit to bind what has transpired here beyond rumor. I have come, as have they.”

He motioned once, curtly, to the three grey-cloaked archmaesters trailing him, each clutching fresh vellum and sharpened quills. “We are prepared to record in full.”

His eyes, pale and shrewd, flicked briefly to the veiled cradles and the small, restless shapes coiled at their bases.

He said nothing of them, but the tightening of his jaw spoke volumes.

Septa Rhaella stepped forward in his wake, her white and green skirts whispering across the floor.

“Princess,” Septa Rhaella said, “your words touched me most. You asked for kin and for the Faith both, and I could not refuse. I am here, as you bid me.”

Her gaze softened, finding the cradles. 

Unable to see the children through their coverings. 

“It was a long road, yet a glad one. Blood calls to blood, and the Mother herself would not forgive me had I stayed in Oldtown when you asked so humbly for my witness.”

Rhaenyra inclined her head, her smile faint but formal. “You honor me, Archmaester. You honor me, Septa. And in so doing, you honor the realm. Let the truth be set down plain, so no tongue may twist it.”

The archmaesters had begun to set their instruments in order: vellum unrolled across the long table, quills trimmed sharp, inkpots uncorked and steadied.

Archmaester Vaegon moved among them with brusque efficiency, his chain clinking as he directed which hands should scribe and which should witness.

Septa Rhaella lingered by the cradles, her hands folded at her breast.

Her voice, low and melodic, wove soft Valryian over the sleeping babes: promises of the Mother for health, of the Smith for strength, of the Warrior for protection. The words drifted like incense, soothing, steady.

And then the doors burst wide.

“His Grace, Viserys of House Targaryen, First of His Name—”

The herald’s voice swelled into the chamber, nearly drowned by the shuffle of many feet. The king entered, his step unsteady but urgent. Alicent glided at his side, serene as glass, emeralds winking in the candlelight.

Behind them came Rhaenys and Corlys, Daemon and Laena, Laenor trailing.

The blood of House Targaryen gathered as though the gallery were a throne room.

The archmaesters startled, quills poised in mid-air, glancing uneasily at Vaegon. Rhaella’s words stilled on her lips.

Viserys’s eyes swept the chamber and fixed upon his daughter. In crimson velvet, her hair unbound and shining, her face pale but luminous with resolve, she struck him as vision. 

“My daughter,” he breathed, voice thick with feeling. “How beautiful you are. Glowing as fierce as fire itself."

Viserys lifted a trembling hand, his signet glinting in the firelight as though he conferred a blessing. “And now, as you have asked, your witnesses are gathered, the truth secured. You shall have what you deserve: peace. Rest. Time free of burden. After this, you will truly have two moons to recover.”

The words fell warm, affectionate, but to Rhaenyra they rang oddly hollow, as though the floor beneath her shifted.

Her smile froze. Confusion pricked sharp beneath the velvet of her composure.

Peace. Rest. Two moons.

Her gaze darted, to Vaegon’s untouched vellum, to the quills still dry, to Rhaella’s lips closed around prayers that had not yet been set to ink.

The record was not yet begun.

Nothing had been secured, nothing sealed.

And yet her father spoke as though the work were done, as though her private summons had been his boon all along.

“Rest?” she repeated softly, her voice steady but sharpened by disbelief.

Her eyes lifted to Viserys’s tender smile, and for a heartbeat she did not recognize him. 

“What do you mean?”

The silence that followed seemed to stretch. Alicent’s emerald gaze was serene as ever, her hand resting lightly on the king’s sleeve. Rhaenyra felt her cheeks heat, not with pride but with the chill of being outmaneuvered.

The ache in her back pressed harder, the weight of velvet suddenly suffocating. She stood straighter all the same, though her fingers tightened imperceptibly at her sides, as if to anchor herself before the tide swept further from her grasp.

Viserys’s brow furrowed, as though he had not expected the question.

“Why, only what is right, my girl,” he said gently, voice warm with paternal concern. “Seven days and nights you labored, near tore yourself in two to bring forth heirs for the realm. I will not have you dragged back into petition and council, not when your body still bleeds and your spirit is so sorely tried. The realm can wait. You need not lift a finger but to cradle your babes. That is all the burden I will permit you.”

Tenderness, chain-forged. 

For a moment, the company was still, the archmaesters bowing their heads as if such mercy were self-evident, Rhaella murmuring agreement.

Alicent’s eyes gleamed with quiet triumph, though her face wore only sympathy.

Laenor shifted at Rhaenyra’s side, lips parting as though to speak, then closing again, confusion plain on his features.

Daemon, leaning against a pillar with arms folded, let out a soft huff of laughter, low, edged, as though he alone saw the trap sprung and enjoyed watching the jaws close. Laena glanced sharply at him, then back to Rhaenyra. 

Corlys’s face was carved into stone, but his eyes were watchful, measuring the drift of power like a sailor reading the wind.

It was Rhaenys who broke the silence.

Her voice, clear, controlled, and sharp enough to slice through the chamber. Shattered the uneasy hum of Viserys deciding what was “best” for a woman who had borne three babes only days past.

“Not necessary,” she said at last, and the weight of it pulled every gaze toward her. She stepped forward, chin lifted, eyes sweeping the table like a reprimand. “The princess has endured as all women of her house must, yes. As I did. As my mother before me. But do not mistake me.”

A faint, dangerous pause.

“I am not saying she should be dragged from her bed and made to stand under torchlight while you recite ledgers and grievances.” Her tone tightened. “What I am saying is that her council should not be silenced because her body is healing.”

With the cool decisiveness of a woman used to commanding ships and storms:

“If this room is too harsh for a new mother, then you soften the room. You make it fit her needs. Cushions, warmth, servants, a screen if she tires. You adjust the council to its princess, not the princess to the council. You do not smother the future Queen of the Seven Kingdoms because men feel uneasy at the thought of her listening while nursing.”

Rhaenys’s gaze swept the gathered lords, archmaesters, and kin, her chin lifted.

“We are here to account the miracle of birth we all saw,” she continued, her tone measured yet ringing with authority. “Seven nights the halls shook with her cries. Seven dawns the torches guttered but did not fail. That is the truth the realm must know. Not a tale of weakness, nor of seclusion, but of a mother who labored as. And who rose from it still standing.”

Her words hung in the air, heavy as the toll of a bell.

Archmaester Vaegon, quill still poised above his parchment, inclined his head slightly.

As though conceding the point had merit.

A faint smile ghosted across Rhaenyra’s lips, a thread of warmth breaking through the iron of her composure.

For once, it was not she who had to lift her own defense; it was her good-mother, the Queen Who Never Was, who bore the words like armor on her behalf.

But across the chamber, Alicent was ready. 

“No one doubts the princess’s fortitude,” she said softly. “Nor do I question the dignity of her line, my lady. But childbirth cleaves a woman’s body and spirit in ways that take time to restore. Even the strongest of us are not meant to rise from such strain and sit among matters of war and coin before the blood has even cooled.”

She let her gaze drift over the men in the room, inviting agreement without demanding it.

“Screens and cushions cannot disguise the truth,” she continued gently. “A woman recovering from childbed should not be made to hear the quarrels of lords or the grievances of bannermen. It is neither fitting nor respectful.”

Her eyes dipped, as though in pained understanding.

“Let her heal in peace. Let her rule through the regents appointed until she regains her full strength. That is no diminishment, it is protection. A mother must think first of her recovery, then of her children. The realm will wait, Lady Rhaenys."

The words were soft as wool, but wound tight with steel.

Viserys’s eyes darted between his wife and his cousin, torn.

Rhaenys’s head tilted, the faintest smile curving her lips though her eyes were sharp as glass.

“Princess,” she said corrected, cutting across the hush. “I am no lady, though wed to a lord. I was born of House Targaryen, and that blood does not lessen with marriage.”

Daemon laughed.

It was the laughter of a man who had waited for the mask to slip and now savored the sight.

Leaning off the pillar, he let his arms fall open as though to embrace the tension in the room.

“Well said, Princess.” The word landed like a challenge, his smirk curling as his gaze flicked to Alicent. “Titles matter. Best to be precise. Else one might forget who was born to fire, and who only warms herself by it.”

Alicent opened her mouth to speak but a small sound broke it, a coo, soft as a dove’s note, rising from one of the cradles set near the dais.

Heads turned instinctively, as if drawn by a thread.

The babes stirred faintly, their tiny mouths pursing, lashes fluttering against plump cheeks. The hush that followed was gentle, broken only by the faint rustle of their linen wraps.

Rhaenyra’s gaze went first to her children, then back to the hall.

She let the faintest smile touch her lips, warm yet weighted, claiming the moment.

“I will rest,” she said, her tone measured. Her eyes found Alicent’s across the table. “Thank you, stepmother.”

The courtesy was faultless.

Yet beneath it, her stare was heavy and hard.

A stone dropped into deep water, ripples spreading outward.

Her hand drifted along the cradle’s edge, fingers brushing the wood. “But I have no need of two moons. A sennight will suffice.”

Viserys stirred, his wine cup trembling faintly in his hand. “At least a moon, Rhaenyra,” he said gently, his voice laden with the fretfulness of a man who still heard her screams in his marrow. “At least that.”

Rhaenyra inclined her head, her lashes lowering, the picture of dutiful assent.

“As you command, Father.”

Then, without missing a beat, her gaze slid sideways, sharp and deliberate, finding Rhaenys.

“But if I must be at rest, then let the Princess of House Targaryen bear my duties in my stead. Will you, Princess Rhaenys?”

The words hung like a thrown gauntlet.

Not to Alicent, nor to Viserys, but to the realm itself, a declaration that her voice would not be silenced. Only echoed through blood just as royal as her own.

Rhaenys leaned back, the ghost of a smirk curving her lips.

Her eyes glinted, amused and appraising in equal measure.

“Of course, good-daughter,” she replied smoothly. “Gladly.”

A stir moved through the gathered kin, Laenor’s expression lightening with pride, Corlys’s mouth tightening with something like satisfaction, Daemon’s eyes dancing with a predator’s delight.

Even the archmaesters’ quills scratched more urgently, as though eager to seize the moment ink would make indelible.

Rhaenyra’s smile lingered. Her hand stilled upon her daughter’s cradle, then lifted to rest lightly at her waist.

“Then shall we begin the recounts,” she said, her voice calm but heavy with intent.

Archmaester Vaegon’s gaze lingered on her for a long moment.

At last he inclined his head. A small gesture of concession, or perhaps of approval.

“As you command, Princess. But first among witnesses must be the King. His Grace was present in the chamber. Let his word anchor the record.”

He gestured, and vellum was smoothed before the scribes, quills poised.

Viserys shifted in his seat, caught between pride and memory. The cup trembled faintly in his hand as he set it aside.

His eyes swept over the council, then drifted back toward the cradles.

When he spoke, his voice was soft at first, but it grew as the words unfurled, steady, sonorous, like a man caught between sermon and song.

“Seven moons the princess bore her burden,” he began. “Seven moons of trial, her body heavy with not one, but three. And when the hour came due, it was no fleeting thing. Seven days and seven nights the labor stretched, as though the gods themselves meant to test her.”

He drew a shuddering breath, his eyes shimmering with tears unshed. “I heard her cries. We all did. They shook Maegor’s Holdfast to its bones. No man nor woman within these walls could claim not to have heard her voice, not to have known the cost.”

He pressed a trembling hand to the table, steadying himself.

“And yet… when the final hour struck, it was not only her voice that filled the night. The dragons answered. Caraxes in his fury, Syrax in her fear, even Dreamfyre, Vahgar, Meleys... their roars split the skies above King’s Landing. Fire answered blood. It was as though all dragonkind rose to herald what was being born within those walls.”

The chamber stilled, breathless. Even the scratching quills faltered for a heartbeat.

Viserys’s voice roughened, but carried still. “Three babes drew breath that night. Pale Aemon, strapping Aenar, golden Aemma. Each cried in turn, each marked by fire. And with them, three hatchlings clawed free of their shells, answering their kin with voices of smoke and flame. I saw it with my own eyes. I swear it by my crown, by the Iron Throne, and by the blood of Old Valyria that runs in my veins. This was no common birth.”

He paused, his chest heaving, and when he spoke again his tone broke into wonder. “A covenant of fire and blood. A sign from gods and ancestors alike that House Targaryen still stands in their favor.”

The scribes bent forward, quills racing to capture each word. Septa Rhaella’s lips moved in prayer, and even Archmaester Vaegon’s stern mouth twitched, as though the weight of Viserys’s testimony pressed him to silence.

When the king fell quiet, the hush that lingered was not of disbelief, but of awe, fragile and heavy as incense.

Vaegon inclined his head, his voice low, deliberate. “So sworn. The king’s word anchors the record.”

One by one, the others were called.

Rhaenys spoke next, steady, unsparing, her testimony ringing like struck iron.

She gave the account plain: she had seen the agony, heard the roars of dragons tearing through the night sky, and borne witness to fire’s answer in flesh and shell alike. “It was truth, and I will not gild it, nor will I deny it,” she said, her voice cool but unshakable.

Corlys followed, his words a sailor’s oath. He spoke of the cries echoing even to the harbor, how mariners whispered of storm and omen, and how he, within the chamber, saw strength that shamed the waves themselves. His recount was insistent, blunt with the authority of salt and steel.

Daemon laughed before he began, his voice a drawl that turned sharp as steel. He spoke of dragons as brothers to his own blood, of the smell of birth and smoke entwined. His testimony was as much challenge as witness, daring any man or maester to question what he had seen.

Laena’s was gentler, yet more vivid, her words lingering on the moment the hatchlings cracked through, her eyes bright with the awe of one who had known dragonbirth since girlhood.

Laenor’s followed, fervent, his pride in both wife and babes spilling into a recount that pressed insistently, leaving no doubt as to the miracle.

Each voice seemed to rise above the last.

More insistent, more detailed, until the air itself thrummed with testimony.

And then the queen spoke.

Alicent’s voice was measured, precise, but pared to the bone.

She gave the fact, she had been present, she had seen what others had seen, and no more.

No frills, no poetry, no flourish.

She could not deny the events without making herself false, yet she would not give them wings. Her words fell short, the barest line on the page.

The contrast was stark.

When the last name was inked, Vaegon raised his quill, his stern voice cutting through the hush. “So stands the record. By King and Queen, lord and knight, priest and princess, it is sworn.”

At that cue, Rhaenyra’s ladies moved.

The cradles were drawn gently forward, veils of silk drawn back. For the first time, the babes were presented in full.

Gasps stirred the chamber as small faces turned in sleep and waking.

Pale Aemon with lashes white as frost, bronze Aenar twitching fists as though striking waves, golden Aemma blinking mismatched eyes of violet and blue.

At their feet, the hatchlings shifted, scales glistening damply, their soft hisses threading into the chamber’s hush like vows unspoken.

Rhaenyra’s gaze swept the gathered, then fixed on the two she had summoned.

“Archmaester Vaegon. Septa Rhaella.” Her voice was measured, resonant, laced with the quiet gravity of command. “I sent for you not only to bear witness, but with another plea.”

Her hand rested upon her daughter’s cradle.

The babe stirred and cooed, a sound that hushed the hall as if the gods themselves leaned closer.

“My children are the blood of the dragon,” Rhaenyra continued. “But blood untutored falters. They must learn. Of the Citadel’s wisdom, of the Faith’s light, and of their own house. The House of the Dragon. I would ask you both to remain at court, not only as servants of realm and gods, but as guides to my babes. To be their teachers, their keepers of truth.”

Archmaester Vaegon’s eyes narrowed, his chain clinking softly as he stepped closer.

He studied her face first and then bent over the cradles.

The three hatchlings stirred, slit-pupiled eyes flashing.

The red-and-black wyrmling at Aemon’s side hissed, sharp and protective. Wings shivering faintly against its body.

The sound clawed at Alicent’s nerves, the hairs at her neck rising.

Every instinct told her it was profane, unnatural.

And yet none spoke against it.

Not even Viserys, who gazed with damp-eyed pride.

Vaegon lowered one ink-stained hand, deliberate and grave.

Alicent’s heart thudded in her throat, if the beast struck, would even the king’s word save him?

But it did not strike.

Instead, the white-and-gold hatchling by Aemma’s cradle nosed forward, wings trembling, and pressed its snout against his palm.

The little creature nuzzled him like a favored hound.

Daemon’s smile slanted with sharp amusement.

Vaegon’s austere face shifted, awe cracking his severity. “By all the vaults of Valyria…” he whispered, wonder threading the gravel of his voice. “They know their kin.”

Septa Rhaella’s eyes brimmed with tears. She folded her hands, her voice rising in tremulous prayer. “Mother guide them, Father guard them… the Stranger pass them by. To be taught is holy. To be guided, sanctity.”

Rhaenyra’s smile curved, faint but edged.

“Then you will remain,” she said, not question, but command.

Vaegon bowed his head, chain clinking like history itself. “I will remain.”

“And I,” Rhaella whispered, lowering her gaze.

Alicent’s throat felt tight.

Before her eyes, the Citadel’s stone and the Faith’s crystal were gathered neatly into Rhaenyra’s hand, pressed into the service of fire and blood.

She schooled her features into blankness, but her thoughts churned dark as stormwater.

Every step she takes, she binds another cord.

Rhaenyra’s gaze swept the hall once more, her voice calm but resonant. “Then let it be known: the House of the Dragon will be guided by wisdom and faith, and by fire.”

The words settled over them like a crown.

And Alicent, her smile serene and her fingers white-knuckled against her gown, could only bow her head.

Chapter 6: Borne to the Skies

Beyond the high walls of Maegor’s Holdfast, Kingslanding slept.

Within, its heir did not.

Rhaenyra sat beneath the canopy of her bed, the air thick with memory and silence.

For all her titles, no one had stayed when the pain came after the babes.

Not father, not husband, not court...only her.

The door creaked softly, and Laenor stepped through like a penitent at prayer.

She turned her head at the sound of him, gaze steady through the veil of exhaustion. Her fingers raw where she’d clutched the sheets. And only at night after a day of walking, did she allow her thighs to tremble beneath silks.

“You should rest,” voice hushed as though the babes themselves must not be disturbed.

“So should you,” he returned, managing a wan smile. He crossed to the cradles, and paused before the second.

Aenar stirred in his sleep, bronze-tinted skin flushed, tiny fists twitching as though striking waves in some dream of the sea.

Laenor’s throat tightened.

He looked back at Rhaenyra, uncertainty flickering across his face.

“May I…” His voice caught; he swallowed and tried again. “May I carry him?”

Rhaenyra lifted her head from the pillows, her eyes kind despite it all. 

“He is your son,” she said simply.

The words struck him harder than any spear point. 

“Truly?” he whispered. The single word trembled, as though some raw thing had torn loose inside him.

Rhaenyra did not answer at once.

She had called for him once, twice, until her throat split and only the empty air answered.

And now he came with clean hands, asking to hold what she had almost died to bring forth.

So she only stared at him, the silence deep as stone.

At last, she inclined her head the faintest measure.

“Hold him,” she said, voice resolute. “And then come sit by me.”

Laenor’s hands shook as he reached into the cradle.

Aenar stirred, let out a thin mewl, and then quieted the instant Laenor drew him against his chest.

The weight of him was so slight, and yet Laenor felt as if the whole of Driftmark’s tides had been laid across his arms.

He crossed to the bed and lowered himself beside her.

All he was capable of was staring at the boy’s slack mouth, the delicate fists tucked beneath his chin.

Rhaenyra’s hands moved, she bent to the first cradle, and with the ease of a mother who had borne her strength in fire and blood, and lifted pale Aemon.

She held him close, breathing slow against his crown.

Beside them, Aemma slept on. 

Rhaenyra turned her head slightly, her hair spilling across her shoulder as she looked to Laenor.

Her son against his heart, her son against her breast, and her daughter lying in a cradle between.

“I am going to say something that sounds false,” she spoke, her gaze fixed not on him but on the child in her arms. “False as the fancies children whisper in darkened halls. A story made up to soothe themselves.”

Her fingers traced the curve of Aemon’s swaddling, pale against pale.

“But it is the truth.”

Rhaenyra’s eyes stayed fixed on Laenor’s face. For a long time she was silent, and then she whispered...

“No man’s seed quickened these babes.”

Laenor stiffened, clutching Aenar tighter to his chest.

The hatchlings stirred faintly at his unease, their hiss soft as rustling parchment.

The candlelight caught her eyes, and for a heartbeat she seemed both daughter and mother, girl and queen, firelit and shadowbound.

“On Dragonstone,” she said, her voice falling low, “the night the mountain shook. I bled into the stone, and the stone answered me. Tyraxes, the god of the Fourteen, rose from the dark with eyes like violet suns, and he set his hand upon me. He gave me his golden blood. He told me I would scream through seven nights and seven days, that my body would break, that I would wish for death. But if I endured, I would rise with heirs born of both his flame and mine.”

Laenor’s breath came ragged, disbelief warring with awe in his face. “Rhaenyra—”

"You think I jest because it sounds mad,” she near growled. “But madness was all that kept me breathing. I begged the gods to make the pain mean something. And one answered.”

His eyes lifted then and what he found exploded. 

There was no guile in her. 

No coy deflection, no mask of queenly poise.

Only the raw blaze of truth, lit sharp and terrible behind her exhaustion. Her eyes shone like molten glass, daring him to see her and still believe.

And he did.

Gods help him, he did.

“I see no lie in you,” he whispered, his voice breaking under the weight of it. 

She shifted, drawing Aemon closer, glancing to the cradle where Aemma slept.

“This is the truth, Laenor. They are children of dragons. Not Daemon’s lust, not your absence, not the realm’s doubt. They are fire’s answer. They are mine. And if you choose, they are yours too. To raise. To shield. To love.”

Laenor bowed his head, his lips pressed hard against Aenar’s soft crown. 

How can that be?

The thought battered through him like a storm tide, wild and unmoored.

How could any woman drink golden fire and live?

How could any man take her hand and call her wife, knowing gods had already laid their claim?

How could she speak to him now with such calm, as though the world had not tilted, as though their children did not carry eternity in their veins?

“Golden blood,” he repeated. His eyes lifted, wet and searching, and landed on her face. “I will have them. All three. No matter how they came to be.”

Rhaenyra’s lashes lowered, and for the first time her smile was unguarded.

Weary but bright with fierce pride.

“They came to be through me,” she said. “And through gods older than thrones. But they will live through us.”

Laenor’s chest tightened.

He felt both hollow and unbearably full, like a ship pressed by too many winds at once.

His gaze dropped to Aenar’s small face, lips parted in sleep, the faintest mewl rising from his throat. Mortal. Fragile. And yet, if Rhaenyra spoke true, wrought by something beyond mortal.

His son, her son, a child of gods.

How am I to father them?

The question scalded him, silent, unspoken. His arms tightened around the boy anyway, as though flesh and bone might anchor what prophecy and fire had wrought.

When he raised his head again, his eyes were wet but steadier, lit with a defiant devotion.

“I am sorry,” he whispered, the syllables thick as saltwater. “Sorry for being as I am. For babes you had to suffer to win, when it should have been my duty… my gift… to give them to you.”

His voice broke.

He bowed his head over Aenar, shame searing hotter than any fire, as though he were a husband carved hollow, a man found wanting.

Rhaenyra watched him a long moment.

The hush of the chamber wrapping close around them, broken only by the babes’ soft breaths and the faint hiss of the hatchlings at their feet.

Then she shifted, her free hand rising, pale fingers brushing the line of his cheek with startling gentleness.

“I will never accept any apologies,” she said, her voice quiet but unyielding. “Not for who you are. Not for who you love. There is no sin in loving differently than the world decrees.”

Her thumb traced the hollow beneath his eye, catching a tear before it fell.

“But do not mistake that mercy for absolution. The moons before they came into the world, I was alone, Laenor. I bore their weight and their terror in silence. The court whispered, Daemon was gone, and you—” she drew a shaking breath, “you stayed away. Whether from fear or shame, I do not know. But I remember every empty hour between each pain. Every cry swallowed because no hand reached for mine.”

The firelight trembled over her face, gilding exhaustion with something fiercer.

“That solitude carved me. I will not pretend it did not. And yet—” she looked down at the cradle between them, voice softening, “it also taught me what I can survive.”

Her hand fell to his, pressing his knuckles gently against her thigh. “I will not let you carry guilt for your nature. But for your absence… that you must never forget.”

Laenor’s breath hitched.

He did not flinch from her touch, though the truth in her words burned hotter than any wound he had taken in battle.

“I deserve that,” he replied, voice rough as surf on stone. “Every word.”

A small, broken sound escaped him.

“The songs will call me gallant, the faithful consort who stood at his Princess's side. But you and I will know the truth, won’t we? That I was not there when it mattered most.”

She drew a slow breath.

The movement tugged pain through her abdomen, a dull, steady throb that reminded her the birthing bed had claimed as much of her as the throne ever would. 

“I need you to be by my side,” she said. “Not in name only. Not as a shadow. As consort. As shield. As father to these babes before the realm.”

Her free hand brushed Aemma’s cradle, a small, protective gesture, before returning to him.

“They will need a mother who is fire, and a father who stands steady in the wind. I can be the first. Will you be the second?”

Laenor’s arms tightened around Aenar.

He lifted his head slowly, eyes searching hers, seeing not only the woman who had just confessed a god’s golden blood but the queen who was asking him to stand beside her in defiance of a kingdom.

“What of love?” he asked. “Truthfully.”

Rhaenyra regarded him in the wavering candlelight, her lashes heavy, her face pale with exhaustion and resolve. She smoothed her palm once more down Aemon’s swaddling, then lifted her chin.

“You may have it,” she said, matter-of-fact, though not unkind. “As many male lovers as you please. Hidden, mind you, quietly. The court already seeks cracks in our union. We must give them none to exploit.”

Laenor flinched at the bluntness.

“And I,” she continued, her voice softer, “I have all the love I need with them. My sons. My daughter.”

Softly, Laenor pressed his lips to Aenar’s crown and whispered, “For now.”

Rhaenyra’s head lifted sharply.

Laenor’s gaze met hers, earnest, pained, steady.

“For now that is true. But babes grow, Rhaenyra. They will one day be men and woman, and their love will turn outward to the world. And when that day comes… what will be left for you?”

The question hung between them.

Rhaenyra’s eyes flashed dangerously. 

“Do not speak to me of what may come,” she said, the words quick and sharp as snapped bone. “I have no want for anything beyond what lies in my arms. I will not be found lacking, nor pitied, Laenor.”

Laenor swallowed, but he did not look away. He shifted Aenar carefully, steadying his voice though his heart hammered.

“And yet Daemon stays,” he said quietly. “In these halls. In your orbit. As if waiting.”

Her face hardened at once, the lines of it closing like a door slammed against the night.

“Am I to care?” she asked coldly, each word clipped, deliberate, her chin lifting as though daring him to push further.

Laenor looked at her, really looked, past the mask she wore and the iron she summoned.

He saw the shadows beneath her eyes, the trembling of her hand even as she clutched Aemon closer, the brittle edge that was not indifference but exhaustion and fear dressed up as armor.

“No,” he said softly. “You are not to care. Not tonight.”

Rhaenyra’s breath caught, her lips parting as if to strike again, but his tone held no mockery, no challenge.

Only gentleness.

Only truth.

“I understand more than you think. I can never forget our betrothal feast, Rhaenyra, and not because of fondness. I remember Joffrey’s blood on the floor. He was all I had, and I wanted him too. Wanted him as much as you wanted what you could not have.”

His gaze dropped to Aenar, who stirred faintly in his arms. “I know what it is to ache for one thing and be bound to another. You needn’t confess it to me.”

Rhaenyra’s gaze lingered on him.

For a moment she seemed all steel and flame, a queen holding her walls against every siege.

Laenor watched her in silence, the weight of her fire reflecting in his eyes.

Slowly, he shifted Aenar higher against his chest. The babe purred, small fingers curling into the fabric of his tunic, seeking warmth, seeking anchor.

“I cannot be what the realm calls a husband,” he said at last, voice low, the words shaped with reverence more than sorrow. “But I can be a father. For them.”

That eased her shoulders. 

She drew in a breath that seemed to reach the deepest corners of her, and when it left her, it was not quite a sob but near enough.

“I am tired, Laenor,” she admitted at last, the words hushed, nearly breaking. Her eyes closed briefly, lashes trembling against her cheeks. “So tired my bones ache with it. I feel as though I have been set alight and burned down to ash.”

She had wanted someone’s hand, anyone, to hold her.

To be by her side.

None came.

Reaching out again...feels like a foolish endeavor. 

Her hand shifted over Aemon’s swaddling, clinging more than cradling now. She opened her eyes, and in their depths the exhaustion had not dimmed the blaze but sharpened it.

“And yet,” she whispered, fierce despite the tremor in her voice, “I feel more fire in my heart than ever before. As though I could set the whole of Kingslanding alight if they dared reach for what is mine.”

She looked to Laenor, almost pleading, almost daring him.

“Do you see? I am weary to my soul, but the flame does not fade. It grows. And I… I do not know if that is strength, or if it is some curse laid on me with the babes.”

Laenor shifted carefully, mindful of Aenar’s soft weight.

He edged nearer across the coverlets until their shoulders brushed, until she could feel his warmth pressed against her arm. The small, simple contact steadied them both.

“Lean,” he said, and when she did, resting the crown of her head against him, the taut coil of his chest eased.

He lowered his cheek to her hair.

For a long while there were only the sounds of the babes breathing, the soft hiss of the hatchlings near the cradles, and their two hearts thundering in uneasy rhythm.

Then Laenor’s lips curved, not in jest but in rueful, aching truth.

“Wife,” he said softly, “I am sorry to say… but I believe that is motherhood.”

The words drew a breath from her that was half a laugh, half a wail. 

---

The bells of Kingslanding tolled faint and far, muffled through stone and shutter.

Morning light spilled pale across the chamber, softening the shadows of gilded pillars and the velvet canopy above their bed.

Rhaenyra stirred first.

She woke sore, every bone in her body remembering the trial of fire and birth, yet for once she was not alone in the vastness of the mattress.

Laenor’s arm lay draped over her waist, his body curved gently along her back.

For a long moment she let herself rest in it.

The weight of him, steady and warm.

Beyond the bed, the cradles stood in a neat row.

Each babe slept soundly, skin pressed against the small, coiled bodies of their hatchlings. 

The sight made Rhaenyra’s throat ache. She turned slightly toward Laenor, catching his gaze where he had already been watching her.

“You stayed,” she said, her voice rough with sleep.

“I did,” he said softly. “It seemed… wrong, to leave you to the night after what you told me. Besides”—his lips quirked in a small, wry smile—“you would have only mocked me for cowardice come morning.”

Her mouth curved faintly despite herself. “Perhaps.”

Silence settled again, but not the strained kind of before. It was softer now, woven through with the breaths of their children and the slow hiss of hatchlings dreaming.

Laenor’s fingers brushed along her wrist, tentative, steadying.

“They are well,” he said, nodding toward the cradles. “Safer than any babes ever born, I think.”

Rhaenyra’s eyes lingered on the dragons nestled to their children’s skin. “Safer… and more vulnerable than the realm will ever understand.”

He followed her gaze, his jaw tightening. “Then perhaps, wife, today we show the realm what blood they carry. Let Syrax and Seasmoke look upon them. Let the court see them for what they are.”

Rhaenyra shifted, testing her strength, the ache of her body undeniable but not defeating. She drew a long breath and met his eyes, her chin lifting.

“Sore,” she admitted. “But not incapable.”

The hush did not last.

A soft rap sounded, and before Rhaenyra could answer, the doors eased open.

Ladies and servants filed in, their arms laden with fresh linens, warm water, trays of fruit and bread.

Almost at once the babes stirred.

Aenar was first, his small fists batting at the air as his dragonling hissed in protest. Aemon mewled softly, pale lashes fluttering, while Aemma’s whimper rose to a sharp cry that cut through the clamor of maids.

Rhaenyra pushed upright with a groan, ignoring the hands that darted forward to assist her.

“Bring me Aemma,” she said, her tone brisk but not unkind. “Then the boys.”

Within moments all three babes were settled in her arms in turn, and she bared her breast without hesitation, guiding each child swiftly and firmly. She fed them with the ease of one who had already fought harder battles, her expression soft but practical, her shoulders squared against any gawking eyes.

Laenor, still propped beside her, watched with a kind of startled admiration.

He had expected awkwardness, modesty perhaps, but she tended them with unflinching purpose.

His lips curved.

“You’ve got the handle on that quickly,” he remarked, keeping his voice low.

Rhaenyra shifted Aemon to her other side, her gaze never leaving the child. “When you bleed fire for seven nights and live, Laenor, there is little left to fear from babes at the breast.”

The maids exchanged looks but kept their eyes lowered.

Hands busy with smoothing sheets and laying out gowns.

The hatchlings hissed again, unsettled by the stir, but quieted as Rhaenyra’s voice softened to a murmur meant only for her children.

He tilted his head, eyes flicking from babe to babe. “Why feed her first? Why not Aenar, or Aemon?”

At that, Rhaenyra glanced at him, her lashes heavy with exhaustion yet edged with steel.

“Because she is the smallest,” she said simply. “The larger babes will thrive. The smallest must be fed first, or she will fall behind.”

Her hand brushed over Aemma’s downy curls as she spoke, her tone both matter-of-fact and fiercely protective.

“It is the way of mothers. You feed from weakest to strongest. The strong will wait, but the frail cannot.”

Laenor’s gaze lingered on Rhaenyra, on the small, fierce certainty in her words.

He let out a breath that was almost a laugh, though softened with awe.

“Yes,” he voiced at last, his voice low and steady. “That does make sense. More sense than half the maesters’ mutterings, if I’m honest. The sea teaches the same. Tend the weakest rope, or the mast comes down.”

One of the maids, emboldened by his quiet, stepped forward with a folded doublet draped over her arms. “My prince, shall we help you dress for the day?”

Laenor raised a brow, then glanced at Rhaenyra with a spark of wry amusement. “In silks and buttons, when dragons wait? No.” His tone brooked no argument, though it was not unkind. “My riding leathers are in my chambers. Send someone to fetch them.”

The maid bobbed a quick curtsey and withdrew.

Laenor leaned back slightly, his eyes returning to the babes in their cradles, dragons coiled close against tender skin.

Each babe was soon swaddled again, nestled against the warmth of their dragonlings, who hissed and curled closer as though reluctant to give them up.

Her ladies moved in at once, helping her to her feet and guiding her to the dressing chair. 

They reached for silks and gowns, but Rhaenyra lifted a hand, firm.

“My husband has spoken true. We are going to the skies today. Bring my riding leathers.”

Startled glances flickered between them, but the order was obeyed.

The supple hide was brought forth, smelling faintly of smoke and oil.

Piece by piece they dressed her: fitted breeches, quilted tunic, and the long black coat stitched with crimson thread.

The leathers clung more snugly than she remembered, her body changed by the fire and burden of childbed. At her bust the fastenings strained faintly, tighter than ever before, pressing tight over her breasts heavy with milk.

One lady tugged carefully at the straps, but Rhaenyra waved her off, eyes flashing.

“They fit well enough,” she said, her voice cool and resolute.

At last her hair was combed smooth and bound in braids, crown-like but meant for wind and helm. When she rose, the leathers creaked against her frame, lending her not the elegance of court but the unmistakable presence of a rider ready to take the sky.

Laenor did not interfere.

He had taken a seat near the cradles, a tray of meat set before him at his gesture.

One by one, he tossed scraps to the hatchlings, laughing quietly as they leapt and snapped.

Wings flaring in miniature displays of ferocity.

Their little teeth tore through flesh with delighted hisses, and Laenor’s eyes shone with boyish wonder.

“Quick as gulls after fish,” he said, half to himself, as a black-tinted dragonling snapped a morsel from the air before its sibling could. “They’ll be fierce ones.”

Rhaenyra glanced over, her mouth curving in the faintest smile, soft, fleeting, a reflection of something she could not yet name.

“Send word to Princess Rhaenys,” she instructed one of her servants. 

The young woman curtsied and slipped out, skirts whispering over stone.

Laenor turned, brows lifting. “Mother? Why summon her?”

Rhaenyra crossed to the cradles, her fingers brushing lightly over Aemma’s curls before lifting her gaze to him.

“Well,” she said, her tone calm but threaded with quiet iron, “we have three babes and two dragons. I think my good-mother would be honored to take one of our children on their first flight.”

There was composure in her voice, yes, but beneath it, something colder stirred.

A patience worn thin by memory.

Laenor hesitated.

“You’ve not attempted to seek my mother in some time,” he said carefully. “What has changed?”

Rhaenyra’s lips curved, not a smile, exactly. “Only that I remember.”

He frowned. “Remember what?”

“She arrived on the fifth day,” she intoned as if reading from a book, not quite looking at him. “When the screams burned my throat raw, when even the maesters feared I would join the pyre. She came then."

Her lashes lowered, her expression unreadable.

“Our children are strong,” Rhaenyra said after a long silence, smoothing a hand over Aemma’s curls. “And whole. The gods have a curious way of rewarding silence with life.”

Laenor said nothing, though be fought off a flinch. 

He thought of the empty weeks when gossip filled the Red Keep like smoke.

Of his mother’s distant letters.

Politely worded, perfectly useless.

He remembered how the Queen’s ladies had whispered, how even he had hesitated at the door.

Rhaenyra’s fingers lingered a moment longer on her daughter’s curls, then fell away.

“Word will be sent to her all the same,” she said at last, “Let her come. Let her see that the blood she holds so dear did not falter.”

Laenor inclined his head, though the guilt pressed sharp against his ribs.

By the time the hatchlings settled, bellies round from an array of meats. 

A table had been laid with warm bread, honeyed fruit, and a trencher of salted fish.

Rhaenyra took her place at the head, clad in black and crimson leathers that creaked faintly with each breath. Laenor sat beside her, his own riding gear flecked with dragon oil, his eyes alight with boyish eagerness.

The doors opened again.

Princess Rhaenys entered in leathers of deep wine-red stitched with silver, the supple hide molded to a frame honed by decades astride dragonback.

Her silver hair was bound in tight braids, severe yet regal, the style of one who had lived half her life with the wind scouring her face and fire roaring at her heels.

A smile touched her mouth, quick and knowing, though it did not soften the edge of her bearing.

“So,” she said, voice low but carrying as she drew nearer, “you mean to waste no time.”

Laenor rose at once, his grin bright and unguarded, stripping years of weight from his shoulders.

For a heartbeat he was not consort, not son of the Sea Snake, but only a young man proud of his wife, his children, his dragons. “Why should we, mother? The skies wait, and our children with them.”

Rhaenys’s gaze lingered on him, a flicker of warmth in her eyes, before turning back to Rhaenyra.

What she found there...pallor beneath the fire, jaw set unyielding, leathers pulled tight over a body still sore from birth but already braced for wind and saddle, stilled her.

Slowly, Rhaenys inclined her head.

The gesture was not casual, but grave and ceremonial.

“I am flattered,” she said first, her voice steady. Then her eyes flicked back to the cradles, to the tiny chests rising and falling beside the flicker of scaled wings, and the steel in her tone wavered.

In the quiet of her mind she remembered carrying Laena and Laenor down to her dragon, both no bigger than sparrows.

Fearing foolishly that Meleys might not know them, not claim them.

“It is the highest honor,” she continued, lower now, more intimate. “To bear a child on their first flight, to place them in the wind, to show them the sky. No crown, no council seat, no victory in war compares to it. For what is all that, against this?”

Rhaenys’s words settled like embers in the hush. For a moment no one spoke. The babes stirred faintly in their cradles, the flick of hatchling wings whispering against linen.

Rhaenyra inclined her head in turn, though the movement was slow, more acknowledgment than agreement.

“Honor, yes,” she said softly, “and necessity.”

Her tone was courteous, but there was no warmth in it. “The court is already restless. They weigh the babes quickly."

Her gaze lifted to meet Rhaenys’s, steady and unblinking. “And now that you have seen them. Seen their faces, their hair, their eyes...you can speak to what you know."

The words were perfectly measured, even gracious in form, but the undercurrent ran cold and unmistakable.

Rhaenys’s jaw tightened, the faintest tremor beneath her composure.

“You think I came to judge them?” she asked quietly.

Rhaenyra’s smile was small, controlled, devastating. “I think whatever doubts once lingered have been laid to rest. And with certainty, affection often follows. For that, I am glad of your visit.”

For the first time, Rhaenys did not answer at once.

She had told herself she stayed away for sense.

Not neglect.

That Laenor’s peculiar nature, already whispered, would make her nearness a cruelty to him and a burden to Rhaenyra.

But standing here, seeing the light dance over her good-daughter’s face, the proud lift of her chin so like her own had been once, those excuses rang hollow.

Her gaze drifted to the cradles.

Aemon, the pale prince.

His skin near translucent in the candlelight, lashes white as spun glass. 

So achingly similar to Rhaenys’s own father. 

Her gaze moved to the second cradle. Aenar, one small hand fisted near his mouth, bronze skin warm beneath the shimmer of silver hair. When the light caught his lashes, she saw his eyes. Velaryon blue ringed with a faint violet halo.  Appearing more Velaryon than Targaryen even.

And the third, Aemma.

Golden-skinned, her cheeks flushed with life, a tumble of silver curls with perfect gold threaded through. One eye violet, the other the clear blue of Driftmark skies. A child perfectly divided, a living truce between salt and flame.

Rhaenys felt something twist inside her.

She had doubted them.

Not aloud, never aloud, but in silence.

The smallest sound...Aemma’s sigh, soft as a seashell’s whisper...shattered her composure.

Gods, they looked like her.

Like hers.

Aemon's entire face the near copy of his namesake, the curve of Aenar’s nose, the glint of her father’s gaze in Aemma’s mismatched eyes, the Driftmark sun in their skin.

Every breath they drew was her blood made new.

When she looked up again, Rhaenyra’s gaze was already waiting. 

Rhaenys’s throat worked once before sound found her.

“They are… remarkable,” she said at last, voice low, loving despite herself. “Driftmark and Dragonstone both. The gods must have smiled, to make of such union something so whole.”

Her eyes flicked briefly to Rhaenyra’s, the faintest shift beneath the mask of formality.

“You have honored Driftmark well, Princess. Far better than we have honored you.”

The last words were soft, nearly swallowed by the hush. Perfectly harmless to any who might overhear, yet unmistakable to the woman they were meant for.

Their eyes held, guilt and pride, within that silence, understanding passed between them.

Apology offered, acceptance withheld.

The past acknowledged but not absolved.

Laenor broke the silence easily. In that way of his. 

“Then perhaps the gods were generous to all of us,” he said, voice bright enough to carry but warm enough to soothe. “Driftmark keeps its sea, Dragonstone its fire, and I—” his gaze flicked to the cradles, softening— “I have three small reasons to thank every star above.”

The tension eased like a breath long held.

Rhaenys’s lips curved faintly; even Rhaenyra’s shoulders loosened by a fraction.

“Though,” he said, eyes bright with play, “I tremble to think what they might inherit from you, Mother. The Seven have mercy on us all if they grow into your beauty and your tongue. The one’s slain hearts enough, the other could slay armies.”

Rhaenys arched a brow, the smirk that followed pure Targaryen. “Better a sharp tongue than a dull wit, my son. Gods know the realm suffers from enough of the latter.”

Laenor laughed, bright and unguarded. “Then the court had best pray they favor my gentler nature.”

“Gentler?” Rhaenys echoed, a note of dry amusement in her tone. “You forget I changed your swaddlings myself. There was little gentleness in those lungs.”

Rhaenyra’s mouth curved at that.

Rhaenys let her gaze fall again to the babes, the candlelight catching the gleam of silver and gold. Her voice, when she spoke, was quieter, but her eyes had shifted to Rhaenyra.

“If they take anything from me,” she said, “let it be their seat in the saddle. A steady hand for the wind.” Her gaze lingered, deliberate, sharp as appraisal. “The rest they’ll learn by watching their mother.”

Rhaenyra inclined her head, composure settling over her like armor. “Then they shall fly sooner rather than later. The blood demands it.”

Rhaenys studied her for a breath longer, something unreadable glinting behind the polished calm of her face. 

“So it does,” she said. “Best we teach them early to love the sky.”

She turned her gaze toward the cradles once more, the faintest shadow passing behind her eyes. “I’ll have Aemon,” she said at last, voice firm, carrying easily in the chamber. “My first flight was with my father. I shall now take his likeness and namesake to the sky.”

As she bent to the cradle, the room seemed to fade around her. Her hand hovered for a moment above the child’s chest, as if memory itself had slowed her. Aemon’s breath rose and fell, steady, fragile, achingly alive. It came not as pain, but as pressure: a tightening in the throat, a tremor in the ribs, the echo of her father’s laughter long faded. 

She gathered him carefully, as she did, the hatchling that had slept coiled at his side unfurled itself, black and red, its scales glinting darkly in the torchlight.

With a sharp hiss it leapt up to perch upon her shoulder, curling its talons into her leather and settling there as if it, too, claimed its place.

Laenor bent to the next cradle, lifting Aenar with practiced ease and settling the boy against his chest. “Then Aenar is mine. The sea is already in him, best I make sure he dreams of skies as well.”

The hatchling at Aenar’s side slithered forward, scales verdant and silver like sunlight on waves. It climbed his arm with surprising swiftness before draping across his shoulder, its narrow wings folding as it pressed close, eyes glittering like wet emeralds.

Rhaenyra had already reached for Aemma.

Her daughter was the smallest, the quietest, curls brushing soft against her mother’s leathers as she nestled close.

Rhaenyra wrapped her securely against her chest, hand resting protectively over the fragile rise and fall of breath. “And I will take Aemma. Let her first flight be at her mother’s heart.”

From Aemma’s cradle came a pale hatchling streaked with gold. It shook its wings, then climbed with deliberate grace up Rhaenyra’s arm, perching delicately near her neck. Its pale-gold snout nuzzled at Rhaenyra as if reassured by her heartbeat.

Servants stepped back in hushed awe as the three of them stood together.

Royalty, each with a babe bound neatly to their chest, and each with a dragonling perched at their shoulder, the trio of young beasts hissing softly as if sensing what was to come.

Laenor glanced at the others, grin flashing boyish and bright. “Well then,” he said, the words carrying like a promise, “shall we give Kingslanding a sight it will not soon forget?”

The walk through Maegor’s Holdfast and down into the city stirred whispers like leaves in a storm.

Every corridor they passed seemed to birth more onlookers.

Lords’ retainers, washerwomen, goldcloaks half-turned from their posts.

All craned their necks to glimpse what had been hidden: the babes of the realm’s heir, each bound close to mother, father, and grandmother, guarded by hatchlings perched on royal shoulders.

And at the center of it all was Rhaenyra herself.

Barely a fortnight past her birthing bed, yet already arrayed in dragonleathers, her pale braids gleaming like a crown of fire. The fastenings strained across her breast, her step still marked by the ache of recent labor, but she bore herself with such unyielding pride that the whispers turned from scandal to awe.

By the time they reached the gates of the Dragonpit, word had flown ahead of them like wildfire.

A small crowd lingered at the edges of the yard: dragonkeepers, stablehands, a scattering of courtiers whose duties had suddenly led them here.

Every face strained to see the children Rhaenyra had kept so fiercely under lock and key.

And waiting before the yawning mouth of the pit were Daemon and Laena. Caraxes’s shadow stretched long over the stones behind them, and Laena’s hand rested lightly on her swelling belly, her own leathers fitted close.

At the sight of Rhaenyra, Laenor, and Rhaenys bearing the babes, Laena’s mouth curved, a flash of white teeth beneath her silver braids.

“Well,” she said sweetly, her voice carrying just enough to reach them over the restless hiss of dragons within. “What fortune, to find us all gathered so.”

Daemon said nothing, but his eyes lingered on Rhaenyra, sharp, intent, unreadable, as though he had been waiting for this moment all along.

He had seen her since the birth: once in a corridor, once across a hall, her arms full of swaddled linen, her face pale with exhaustion.

But never close, never within reach. Words had not passed between them, only glances, quick as knives, dulled by the press of others.

Now, with no distance between them, he drank her in.

The babe bound against her chest, curls brushing her chin. The hatchling perched upon her shoulder, its pale-gold snout nuzzling her throat as if it had known her always.

Yearning flared hot and raw in him, untempered by reason.

Laenor, oblivious or unwilling to care, shifted Aenar proudly against his chest.

The verdant-silver hatchling tightened its coil along his shoulder as he lifted his chin, voice carrying over the restless hiss of dragons within the pit.

“Our babes take to the skies today,” he declared, the words bright with a pride that was both father’s and rider’s. “Syrax, Seasmoke, and Meleys shall know them.”

“Then perhaps,” Laena said, her tone lilting, “we should make it larger still. A spectacle. Let Vhagar and Caraxes take to the sky alongside Syrax, Seasmoke, and Meleys. Let all the city hear their roars and know the babes are christened not in whispers, but in flame. An announcement, as grand as their blood demands.”

The yard stirred at her words, dragonkeepers glancing at one another.

Rhaenyra’s eyes softened, her smile blooming slow but genuine as she adjusted Aemma against her chest. “That,” she murmured, voice low but carrying, “would be lovely.”

Rhaenys’s face softened, pride flickering across her strong features.

“Well done, Laena,” she said warmly, her voice carrying the weight of approval rarely spoken. “It is a fine thought. Worthy of the blood you bear.”

Laena inclined her head, satisfaction in her eyes, though her smile remained demure.

At a sharp gesture from the keepers, the pit stirred.

Doors creaked open, chains rattled, and one by one the dragons were led into the yard.

Syrax came first, gold and sinuous, her great wings folding close as she prowled across the stones. Seasmoke followed, pale as seafoam in the morning sun, then Meleys, her scarlet scales gleaming like coals.

The babes stirred faintly as the air thickened with heat and the stench of ash, but each was held firm, wrapped against their bearer’s chest.

At the keepers’ bidding, Rhaenyra, Laenor, and Rhaenys lifted them, presenting them high, so dragon might look upon child.

The bonded hatchlings—black-and-red, verdant-and-silver, pale-and-gold—were pried gently from royal shoulders, hissing but compliant as they were handed into the waiting arms of the keepers.

The little beasts thrashed their tails but quieted, eyes never leaving their humans, as though promising to guard them even from afar.

Syrax loomed closest.

She bent her golden head, her nostrils flaring as she drew in the scent of Aemma.

The babe whimpered softly, tiny hand twitching, and the pale-gold hatchling in the keepers’ arms shrieked once, wings flaring in protest.

But Syrax only exhaled a long, hot breath that stirred the wisps of Aemma’s curls against Rhaenyra’s chin. The dragon’s eyes, molten, unblinking, seemed to hold mother and child alike in a gaze that was not merely recognition but claim.

Rhaenyra’s heart beat fierce in her chest.

She pressed her hand against Aemma’s back, whispering low, soothing, though her gaze flicked constantly between the others.

She saw Laenor standing tall as Seasmoke lowered his pale snout to Aenar, the boy’s tiny fists twitching like waves against the air. And beyond, Rhaenys’s face was solemn as Meleys bent her crimson head to Aemon, the black-and-red hatchling in the keepers’ grip crying as if in echo.

Still, it was Syrax and Aemma that held Rhaenyra rooted. The sight of her dragon breathing the breath of flame over her smallest child was both terror and awe, a bond reforged in the blood of generations.

The dragons had taken their measure.

Rhaenys was first. With practiced ease she slung herself into Meleys’s saddle, Aemon bound firm against her chest. The black-and-red hatchling keened from the keepers’ arms, but Meleys’s answering rumble seemed to still it.

Laenor followed, Aenar nestled close, his verdant-and-silver hatchling thrashing as if eager to join. Seasmoke dipped his pale head low, the Sea Snake’s son swinging up with a fluid grace, the boy cradled securely to his heart.

Then came Rhaenyra.

She mounted slow, careful, her body still tender, her limbs stiff with soreness only a fortnight past birth.

But she did not falter.

She settled herself into the saddle, strapping the babe across her chest with firm, unshaking hands.

Still, fear gnawed at Rhaenyra like a wolf at her heels. 

Her gaze darted constantly, to where Seasmoke shifted, Laenor laughing low to calm him; to Meleys, vast and crimson, Aemon’s pale face tucked beneath Rhaenys’s chin. Every beat of her heart was torn three ways.

She could feel the sweat gathering beneath her braids, the tight pull of leathers across her breast, the ache in her hips where pain lingered.

She kept her hand pressed to Aemma’s back, and her eyes sharp, as though sheer will might guard all her children at once.

Syrax shifted beneath her, wings stretching wide, and the ground itself seemed to tremble. The keepers scattered back, their prayers tumbling in a dozen tongues.

Rhaenyra drew a long breath, steadying the fire that burned fear and love into one. She lifted her chin, eyes on the sky, though her gaze still flickered once more to Laenor and Rhaenys… her family, her children, her dragons.

And with a cry that split the morning, Syrax surged upward, wings tearing through the air, Aemma bound close to her mother’s heart.

Seasmoke followed, pale wings flashing silver in the sun, Laenor’s laughter ringing wild and boyish as he urged the dragon higher.

Aenar stirred at the sound, tiny fists clenching against his father’s chest as if he too reached for the wind.

Meleys was next, scarlet wings unfolding like sheets of fire.

Rhaenys sat straight-backed, Aemon bound securely against her, the boy’s pale lashes fluttering at the sudden rush of air. The black-and-red hatchling shrieked from below, but Meleys’s thunderous bellow swallowed the sound, the bond already sealed.

And then Caraxes rose, his serpentine form writhing through the air with a hiss that sent the keepers to their knees.

Vhagar, vast and terrible, answered with a roar that shook the very stones, her shadow blotting half the yard as she climbed.

Five dragons wheeled above the Dragonpit, their cries echoing like thunder across King’s Landing. Golden, silver, scarlet, crimson, and ancient bronze filled the sky, their wings blotting the sun.

The city stilled.

On the streets below, bakers and butchers, goldcloaks and fishwives, children clutching crusts of bread, all lifted their faces to the sky, mouths open in awe.

Bells fell silent mid-peal, the ropes slipping from startled hands.

Merchants forgot their coin, stalls abandoned as their eyes followed the thunder of wings.

Septons stumbled over their prayers, some gasping as if struck dumb by the holy terror of it.

For many, it was the first time they had seen dragons so close, so many, all at once.

For all, it was a sight not to be forgotten: the Crown Princess’s children, barely two weeks old, borne to the heavens in fire and roar, their cries drowned beneath the thunder of wings.

From Flea Bottom, ragged men and women fell to their knees, crossing themselves, some in fear, others in reverence.

The heirs of fire. The blood of gods.

Mothers pressed their babes to their breasts and whispered prayers for mercy, while boys darted up crumbling walls for a better glimpse, eyes wide with wild devotion.

From the Red Keep’s towers, courtiers crowded the battlements, whispering in disbelief.

They are real. They live. Dragonspawn, all three.

Their voices trembled with awe, with envy, with dread of what this would mean for the realm.

Within Maegor’s Holdfast, King Viserys stood at a high window, his hand braced against the stone sill. His face was pale, eyes wet, the sight of dragons wheeling in the sky tearing loose both pride and grief.

He had dreamed of such a vision all his life, the blood of House Targaryen blazing so openly before the realm.

Yet it cut him as keenly as it exalted him. “By the gods,” he whispered hoarsely, “they are truly hers.”

Alicent stood a pace behind, her hands clasped tight, her knuckles bloodless.

Her face was a mask of courtesy, but her green eyes burned with unease. She had borne children too, sons who had not been lifted aloft in fire and song, sons whose blood the realm would weigh against these babes. 

And Rhaenyra...

Rhaenyra felt the wind rush fierce at her, and she felt whole. 

Not hollowed by pain, nor weighted by exhaustion, but burning. Her body ached still, raw from birth, yet that ache only sharpened the wonder of this moment. She had brought forth life, and now she bore it into the skies.

A shudder passed through her that was not fear but awe.

To ride with a babe bound to her. Her babe. Was unlike anything she had ever known.

When she had first clung to Syrax’s neck as a girl, she thought she had tasted all the world’s fire. 

Rhaenyra pressed her hand more firmly to Aemma’s back, steadying the babe against her.

She felt the swell of her daughter’s breath, the trust in that small body curled so close, and tears stung hot at her eyes.

Two weeks past birth, her limbs still sore, her belly tender, yet here she was, astride her dragon, her daughter bound to her heart, the sky theirs together.

Chapter 7: She Knows Her Sky

The glory of the sky did not last the night.

For wonder, left too long in mortal hands, always turns to fear.

In the days that followed the flight of dragons, awe curdled into unease.

Wonder soured upon the tongue.

The city that had stilled beneath wings and fire began to murmur again, in the wine-sinks of Flea Bottom, in the whispering cloisters of septs, in the perfumed chambers of the highborn. The roar that had shaken the heavens left behind a silence too loud to bear, and into it, suspicion crept.

Why were the babes not shown clearly?

Why the shrouds, the smoke, the gauze of dragonflame between mother and child?

In the alleys, beggars and bakers alike spun stories to soothe their fear.

“There were no children,” some muttered over cups of sour ale. “Only dolls wrapped in silks, lifted high to trick the eyes of fools.”

Others swore they had glimpsed too much, a dark curl against pale linen, dragonseeds. “Not royal babes,” they said, “but changelings. Bastards smuggled in.”

In the Street of Silk, courtesans told tales between customers of a princess who had lain with a dragon in disguise, whose womb smoked as she bore her brood.

In the septs, the voices were sharper.

Septons thundered from their pulpits that no godly womb could bear what was born in smoke. The Seven, they cried, had turned Their faces away. 

Even among the pious, dread coiled like incense smoke.

Some whispered the children were marked by more than dragon blood, that their cries were not human, that their eyes shone too bright, too knowing.

Others said the babes were not blessed, but forged, molten things shaped by hands that defied the gods.

“Born of gods,” they hissed, “means born against them.”

But not all the Faith agreed.

In quiet septs far from court, they preached that seven days and seven nights of labor was no curse, but a sign. That the Mother’s own hand had rested upon the princess’s brow, keeping her alive when no mortal woman should have endured. To them, Rhaenyra’s pain was proof of sanctity, her survival a miracle, her children the living answer to prayer long unspoken.

And so even the Faith divided, incense curling toward two heavens at once.

One crying sin, the other, salvation.

In the Red Keep, courtiers spoke more softly, but their gazes lingered too long. “If they are monsters,” one lordling murmured to another, “then whose sin begat them?”

“They say their eyes are not amethyst, but brown.”

“They say their skin is not Velaryon, but Dornish.”

“They say one of them bears a birthmark shaped like a flame.”

"They said the bells rang once at dawn with no hand upon the rope."

Each “they say” spread like a contagion.

Soft-footed, untraceable. No one ever knew who “they” were, only that “they” were everywhere.

Sayings multiplied like rats in a granary: unseen until it was too late, gnawing at the foundations of truth. What had once been miracle curdled into myth, and myth into menace.

Even those who dared not question her blood found the veil troubling. The city had seen dragons wheel above the Dragonpit, aye, but not the faces of those meant to rule them.

To some, it was proof enough that the princess had something to conceal.

The city whispered; the Keep listened.

Rhaenyra heard it all.

Her ladies thought her deaf when their voices faltered mid-sentence, when the comb stilled in her hair, when pins trembled between nervous fingers. But Rhaenyra felt the change in the air.

The Red Keep had always been her home, yet now its halls listened in ways she did not trust.

Lords’ bows grew shallower by the day. Eyes strayed from her crown to the shrouded cradles that trailed her. Servants crossed themselves as she passed, whispering half-prayers to the Mother, as though a blessing might shield them from her brood. Even those who had cheered beneath dragon-shadow now looked upon her with unease, as if they feared the fire might leap the pit and burn the city clean.

But Rhaenyra was not blind, nor cowed.

She veiled her children because she chose to veil them.

They were hers.

The world had no right to look upon them.

Not yet.

Let them mutter. Let them gnaw their tongues bloody with speculation. She knew what it meant to be a mother of dragons: to guard what the world could not comprehend, to bare teeth and flame against the first hint of threat.

Every scrap of gossip, every whispered insult, every doubtful word, she let them grow unchecked.

Because doubt left to fester did not bloom into truth.

Let them hunger.

Hunger learns names.

And named teeth do not forget throats.

By torchlight, while her babes slept, she had whispered it to herself again and again: Not until their first year. Not until the realm has starved for the sight of them. Then, when the veils are lifted, the doubts will curdle and die

Aemon, pale as moonlight, lashes white as silk. Even in sleep, his skin seemed to hold its own light, as if kissed by starlight before birth. His eyes, when open, were shards of polished amethyst.

Aenar, bronze-touched and burning, his every motion restless, fierce. In his clenched fists and storm-silver curls she saw the sea and the sun at war. Old Valyria’s fury remade in mortal shape.

And little Aemma, her golden-silver curls glimmering even in the dim, her gaze bright with impossible will. The torchlight loved her; it bent to her, wrapped her in radiance.

When Rhaenyra looked upon them all, her heart swelled with awe so vast it hurt.

Creation itself had moved through her, had shaped their faces with the precision of divinity.

The gods had not turned away.

They had knelt.

Their beauty was proof.

She veiled them not only to guard them from envy and poison, but to keep that divine radiance unsullied by the smallness of mortal judgment. 

Let them hunger. Let them whisper. Let them dream of what they were forbidden to see.

When the veils at last were drawn aside, the realm would not merely look...it would worship.

And the songs that rose then would drown every slander ever spoken against her name.

So, she would curl herself about the cradles like a dragon guarding her clutch, limbs tense, eyes half-lidded, every motion deliberate. 

While now, her gown was black as midnight, a living shadow stitched in velvet, cut close to her form. 

Her bust was fuller now, heavy with milk, her hips richer with the memory of bearing life.

The neckline of her gown glimmered with jewels.

Rubies and pearls burned in her ears; sapphires coiled around her fingers.

She did not take Laenor’s arm when she entered. She came alone.

Her step was steady despite the ache still singing through her bones.

Every pace was an act of reclamation.

Eyes followed her.

The Iron Throne loomed before her, jagged, merciless, a monument forged of a thousand conquered swords and a thousand spilled dreams. Its blackened metal caught the torchlight. As though the thing still remembered every hand it had cut, every king it had wounded to remind them whom they served.

Viserys sat upon its edge like a man communing with a god that might, at any moment, devour him. 

The weight of years clung to his frame, but when he beheld her. His precious girl, his chosen heir. The frailty in him burned away.

“Sit,” he rasped, loud enough for the gathered court. His hand trembled toward her, as if he offered not just the throne, but his very breath. “Let the realm see its future.”

The words struck like a spark to kindling.

She turned, gathered her skirts, and lowered herself upon the Iron Throne.

The iron teeth bit through velvet and silk, pressing against her skin. She shifted until an barb took a thread of silk and a bead of skin.

A queen’s due.

The chair drank.

She did not flinch. 

Viserys’s breath caught, a man witnessing his own immortality take form before him.

Below the dais, her babes were arrayed in their veiled cradles, lined neatly beside their father.

Laenor stood guard over them, a hand upon Aenar’s cradle as if it were a hilt.

A young lord of middling name stepped too near, eagerness shining like grease upon his lip. “Only a glimpse, Ser Laenor, only that the realm may sleep—”

The black veil seemed to breath in.

The hatchling hissed, no louder than steam, but the silk over Aemon’s cradle smoked where the breath touched.

The boy jerked his hand back with a yelp.

Laenor moved between, smile pleasant, voice not. “The realm may sleep without your fingers.”

Laughter, broke like glass.

The air quivered with it.

Rhaenyra would give them nothing. 

Today, after all, was for gifts. 

Viserys rose.

“Lords and ladies of the realm,” he began, “today you stand before the future of our House, the babes of purest Targaryen and Velaryon blood, born beneath wings and fire.”

He spread his hands toward the veiled cradles at Laenor’s side.

“It is the honor of this court to offer gifts to my grandchildren, the first dragons of a new age. Their birth binds once more the blood of Old Valyria and the seas of Driftmark. Let every lord present remember this day. For from these cradles shall rise the next age of dragonlords.”

The air trembled. Even the flames seemed to lean closer.

“The Crown Princess Rhaenyra,” Viserys continued, “has named the hatchlings that lie sentinel at her children’s cradles, guardians and mirrors of their spirits.”

He turned first toward the largest cradle, the black-silk drape faintly shivering with breath.

“For her eldest son, Prince Aemon, future King of the Iron Throne, the black and red shall fly again. His dragon named Vhaelyx. He hatched at the hour of birth and dragonkeepers swear his blood runs old, of Vhagar and Balerion, the mightiest of our forebears. In him the shadow of the Black Dread stirs again." 

Murmurs broke against the silence like surf upon stone. 

“Let the realm bear witness,” Viserys said at last, his gaze sweeping the gathered lords, “for in Vhaelyx lives the memory of what we were, and in Prince Aemon, what we shall become.”

Viserys’s gaze softened as he moved to the second cradle, its blue drape glinting in the torchlight.

“For her second son, Prince Aenar, future Lord of Driftmark and Master of the Tides,” Viserys declared, “the deep green and silver shall soar anew. His dragon named Vermax.”

“He hatched at the hour of birth, as his brother’s did,” the king continued, his voice carrying through the hushed hall. “The dragonkeepers swear his blood runs mingled, born of Seasmoke and Syrax, of tide and flame both. His scales gleam deep green threaded with silver.”

“Let the realm bear witness,” said Viserys, pride lighting his eyes, “for in Vermax breathes the bond of sea and fire, and in Prince Aenar, the living bridge between them.”

And at last, the smallest cradle, pale as dawnfire.

“And for her daughter,” said Viserys, his voice softening, reverence rising to meet pride, “Princess Aemma, the Realm’s Heart. beauty made flesh, love made flame.”

“Her dragon named Vaerith, the Dawn Serpent.”

“She too hatched at the hour of birth, as her brothers did,” he continued, the words trembling with awe. “Her shell was pale as pearl, veined faintly with gold; and when it broke, light spilled forth as though the sun itself had cracked the sky. The dragonkeepers believe hers was the last viable egg laid by Vermithor and Silverwing. A relic of their long-spent love, slumbering through the years until woken by her cry. They swear her flame burns gentle but bright, a golden fire that warms where others scorch, and her scales glimmer like dew in morning light.”

The hall, seemed to glow.

“Let the realm bear witness,” said Viserys, voice thick with feeling, “for in Vaerith burns the grace of beauty, and in Princess Aemma, the love that binds the blood of dragon and man alike.”

With a slow sweep of his hand, he signaled for the procession to begin.

“Let the realm offer its blessings,” he declared.

The heralds moved first, their voices rising in ritual cadence as they named each house and gift.

From the Lannisters came coffers of gold heavy enough to strain the arms of the men who bore them.

From Dorne, silks dyed with crushed roses and the glimmering glasswork of Sunspear.

The Reach sent jewels set in living vines, blossoms opening and closing as though breathing.

Driftmark’s offering outshone them all. 

The Sea Snake himself strode at their head, his cloak trimmed in the pale furs of the far North, his chain of office heavy with pearls and driftglass.

When he bowed, it was not to the king, but to Rhaenyra.

At his word, the heralds announced the gift of Driftmark: three new ships to be built in the babes’ honor, each to sail under the joint banners of dragon and seahorse. Their names rang through the hall like a promise: The Stormdancer, The Seafoam’s Grace, and The Maiden’s Flame.

Vessels of war and beauty both, swift as the tide and carved in likeness to dragons rising from the waves.

But the Sea Snake’s offering was not the only one borne from Driftmark’s depths.

Laena Velaryon stepped forward, her beauty bright as summer sun on water.

She bowed low before Rhaenyra, then bent to the veiled cradles, her hands steady despite the hush that fell.

In her arms she bore a chest of fine infant garments.

Silks woven in the colors of Targaryen red, Velaryon azure, and Arryn blue, the three great houses that twined through their blood. Each tiny robe was embroidered with dragons and seahorses dancing in gold thread, and fastened with mother-of-pearl buttons.

“For their first year,” Laena said softly, “that all may know them as kin of fire, wave, and wind.”

Then Laenor approached. 

As father, his offering was simple and solemn: from a velvet pouch he drew three scales from Seasmoke’s hide, their sheen caught between pearl and stormlight. He laid one upon each cradle, and with them, a parchment sealed in sea-wax.

“Three scales,” he said, “for my three children. And with them, every coin I earned upon the Stepstones. Spoils and wages alike. They shall be sealed in the coffers of Driftmark, untouched until these babes come of age, and divided evenly between them. May their inheritance be clean, their legacy unburdened by war.”

He set the sea-wax parchment down and did not look at it. 

And last came Rhaenys, the Queen Who Never Was.

She bore no chest, no jewels of the realm, only a small vessel clasped in both hands.

The vessel was opened to reveal a heart-shaped stone, no larger than a child’s palm, deep blue shot through with veins of gold. It gleamed wetly, as if drawn still-beating from the ocean’s breast. The torchlight caught within it and turned the veins to living fire.

“This is the Heart of the Sea,” Rhaenys said, her voice even, resonant. “It was found in the belly of a leviathan slain off Driftmark’s coast. For generations, it has lain in our vault. A relic of the depths, said to pulse in rhythm with the tide.”

She bent and placed it between the three cradles, her hand lingering upon the silks that veiled them.

“It belongs to all of you,” she said, “as you belong to one another. May it remind you that the sea endures as the fire burns, that power means little without memory, and that even the deepest depths hold light.”

The Velaryons had not merely offered gifts.

They had made a declaration.

Gold, ships, scales, silk, and now the Heart of the Sea.

All claimed by Rhaenyra’s veiled brood before they had even drawn their first crowns of teeth.

What rumor could withstand such spectacle?

What whisper of bastardy could survive beneath so many banners and vows?

And Corlys Velaryon, shrewd as ever, felt it.

He stepped forward once more, his smile as cutting as salt upon an open wound.

“My King,” he said, bowing low, “forgive an old sailor’s indulgence, but it seems poor sport to send gifts without pledges to guard them.”

Laughter rippled through the tension, cautious at first, then genuine, eager for permission to breathe again.

“Driftmark’s strength,” Corlys went on, “is not measured only in ships or coin, but in loyalty. And so, before all gathered, I ask that every man and maid of my house bend a knee.”

He turned, raising a hand.

From the rear of the procession, the full retinue of Driftmark advanced, knights in sea-green cloaks, ladies in pearl-threaded gowns, stewards and sailors alike.

One by one, they sank to their knees before the cradles, the sound of armor striking stone echoing through the vast hall like thunder on distant waves.

“Swear it,” said Corlys. “Swear fealty anew. To the blood of sea and sky. To these children, born of my line and the Crown’s.”

Voices rose in unison, a low chant that built and broke against the vaulted ceilings:

“By tide and flame, by salt and storm.”

As the last “storm” struck the rafters, three small wings flicked in unison beneath silk, a sound like parchment turning.

Several lords crossed themselves at once.

One fainted, very neatly.

The realm’s rumor-mongers, once so eager to call the babes changelings, now looked upon them as living omens.

The court, in its frenzy of awe and envy, foamed at the mouth.

Corlys, satisfied, allowed himself a thin smile.

“There now,” he said lightly, the jest gilding the iron beneath. “The sea has spoken. Let no man say Driftmark keeps its treasures too close.”

The hall erupted, laughter from those too nervous to remain silent.

Applause from those eager to align themselves with power.

It was difficult for the procession to continue after Driftmark’s power.

No gift that followed could compare.

Each new offering seemed smaller, humbler, more desperate in the wake of so complete a display.

What coin could outshine ships named for fire and tide?

What jewel could gleam brighter than a heart drawn from the ocean’s depths?

Still, they tried.

From Oldtown, an ancient tome bound in pale calfskin and inked in seven-pointed starfire. A relic of the Faith, offered “that the young princes and princess might learn virtue before victory.” From the Stormlands, three blades forged in a tempest, hilts wrapped in blue and crimson leather for hands yet too small to wield them. From the North, a carved chest of heartwood lined with white fur and sealed with weirwood sap, said to keep the babes warm when southern loyalties run cold. From Lys, moon-silk fine enough to pass through a ring, and gems carved like tears from the sea. And from Pentos and Volantis, wines and rare oils, each envoy eager to prove devotion to the blood that ruled both sky and sea.

Yet no matter how the treasures piled, it was Driftmark’s tide that lingered. 

Well. 

Until, the Arryn contingent stepped forward. 

No gold gleamed in their hands, no jewels flashed in the light only the cool shimmer of pale blue.

At their head came Lady Jeyne Arryn, proud and serene, her gown the color of a clear winter sky. She carried no coffer of wealth, only a small cedar chest bound in silver.

When she knelt before the veiled cradles, the hall fell utterly still.

“This was found in the Eyrie’s keeping,” she said, her voice even but touched with something tender. “Made long ago, by the Lady Aemma Arryn, before she came to court, before she was Queen.”

She opened the chest.

Within lay three folded blankets, soft and pale as frostlight, embroidered by the uncertain hand of youth.

Each bore the falcon, the mountain, and the sky.

The stitches were young and stubborn, knots where patience failed, thread bit and worried, a girl teaching her hands to speak love in blue.

“For her daughter’s children,” Jeyne said quietly, “that they might be wrapped not only in silk and prophecy, but in the memory of the grandmother.”

A breath shivered through the hall.

No chest of coin nor heart of the sea could match it.

Driftmark had given glory.

But the Vale had given grace.

Rhaenyra’s breath caught.

It was the smallest gift of the day, yet it undid her utterly.

She stood, leaving the Iron Throne for the first time.

Her body moving without thought. 

Her fingers brushing the edge of one blanket. The embroidery caught faintly beneath her skin, the thread rough from time and touch. For an instant, she could almost feel her mother’s pulse in it.

Nearby, Viserys had stiffened. 

He looked at the blankets as though they were relics of a faith he had long forsaken, the last proof that Aemma’s love had not vanished into smoke.

The pale veil at the smallest cradle stirred.

A narrow muzzle, pearl-bright and veined with gold, nosed its way beneath the silk. 

Vaerith.

The Dawn Serpent slipped free of the cradle’s shadow and went not to her dam, nor to the great Heart of the Sea, but to the little cedar chest and the blue folded cloth laid before it.

Beneath the jagged iron, a truer silence fell. 

She lowered herself upon the blanket as if upon a sun-warmed stone, all languid grace and kitten-soft weight.

Her nose pressed to the falcon stitched in pale thread; a bright, bell-thin trill trembled out of her. 

Jeyne Arryn did not move, save to bow her head the smallest degree, palms open upon her knees.

A dragonkeeper assigned to the hatchlings took a step forward and stopped, halted by Rhaenyra’s hand. The princess did not touch the hatchling. She only watched as Vaerith tucked herself closer, a coil of pearl. 

Viserys’s mouth parted on something between a laugh and a sob.

“Do you see?” someone whispered, awed and stricken at once. “She knows her sky.”

Another voice, thinner, tried for scorn and could not quite find it. “Tricks. Mere tricks.” But even that man’s hands were clasped as if in prayer.

Rhaenyra let the moment breathe.

Vaerith’s eyes, opal light in a lambent face, closed. Her small heart beat against the falcon’s thread, steady as tide. 

Rhaenyra’s fingers found Jeyne’s and pressed once, firm, deliberate.

“You have given the realm back its heart, my lady. The Vale shall ever be remembered for its grace.”

Her words carried, soft enough for courtesy, clear enough for the scribes.

Jeyne bowed her head deeper, eyes glinting wetly. “Then may it ever beat steady for you, Princess,” she said. The faintest tremor ran through her voice. Not weakness, but conviction. “For all our sakes.”

When Rhaenyra released her, the gesture left the imprint of alliance on both their palms.

Alicent felt heat brush her cheek, gentle as breath yet wrong. 

One hand twisting in the fine silks of her gown, the other closing around Aegon’s small hand with unconscious force.

The boy winced, a faint sound catching in his throat, but she did not release him. Her fingers pressed harder, knuckles whitening, until his pale skin blanched beneath her grasp.

The pale creature still lay curled upon the Arryn cloth, tail coiled, throat rising and falling in a rhythm too quiet, too alive. The hall looked on in rapture, but to Alicent it was wrong...unnatural in its innocence, that thing of smoke and scale pretending at gentleness.

A beast, not a babe.

A symbol carved from sin. 

The light seemed cruel in that moment, falling full upon her children.

Upon Aegon, restless and bored, tugging at her skirts with his free hand as if trying to reclaim it. Upon little Helaena, her wide eyes following a lone fly that drifted above her head, lost in some dream beyond reach.

Upon Aemond, small and silent, his purple gaze fixed upon the hatchling as though trying to memorize every flicker of its pale breath. He leaned forward slightly, as if drawn by a sound only he could hear.

The dragon’s head lifted.

Aemond did not look away.

The Dawn Serpent’s pupils thinned to razors, then widened; the little throat thrummed. The little painted dragon in his fist seemed smaller for being seen. 

Aemond’s lips parted, eyes gleaming. 

“Aemond,” Alicent hissed, low, desperate. “Do not stare.”

He turned to her at last, confusion flickering across his young face. “But, Mother… she looked at me.”

The words struck her like blasphemy whispered in a sept.

Her grip slackened only when Aegon whimpered, softly, and she smoothed her thumb over the red mark blooming across his knuckles.

Her apology never came; it lived and died behind her teeth.

Around them, laughter and applause began anew, courtiers already moving on to the next procession, the next gift...but Alicent felt the moment fixed in her marrow, terrible and indelible.

The prayer went out like breath on glass; nothing answered back.

She smoothed Aegon’s hair until the shine returned and pretended the silence was consent.

The last two gifts came from House Targaryen itself.

First, Daemon.

The sound of his boots against stone cut through the murmuring hall like a heartbeat. Conversation died at once. Every lord and lady seemed to draw breath in unison as the Rogue Prince stepped forward, his presence dark and restless, as if the very air recoiled from him and yet could not let him go.

He did not kneel.

He did not even bow.

Instead, he walked straight to the base of the Iron Throne...to her.

“Princess,” he said, the title shaped like mockery and sededuction both. 

He held no chest, no scroll.

Only a narrow case of blackened iron inlaid with Valyrian runes.

“For your sons,” he said, unlatching it.

Inside lay two Valyrian-steel daggers, their blades dark as smoke. The hilts were wrapped in leather the color of old blood, the pommels set with small, pale rubies that caught the light like captured hearts.

“For when they are old enough to defend what is theirs,” Daemon continued, voice low, smooth.

He closed the case gently, then drew from within his cloak a small velvet pouch.

From it, he lifted a delicate necklace of silver and onyx.

Its links fine as spun glass, a single teardrop ruby at its heart.

“And for your daughter,” he said, his eyes flicking once to the smallest cradle. “A thing of beauty for beauty’s child.”

Laena’s breath caught, so slight no one saw but Rhaenys.

The necklace caught the torchlight, and memory with it. She had seen its twin before, resting atop the silken lining of Rhaenyra’s jewel-casket, half hidden beneath rings and dragon-wrought brooches.

Laena caught the glint and chose the wind over the weight.

With a slight tilt of his head, Daemon added, his voice carrying just enough to reach the farthest corners of the hall, "For the realm, one final gift, on behalf of my kin and their mother. Three moons’ taxes for King’s Landing and the Crownlands, paid from my own coffers,” Daemon said, almost idle. “Bakers may sweeten their loaves, butchers cut thicker, taverns draw not water.”

The calculation ran like cold through the lords.

Rents deferred, levies displaced, a prince buying love with the purse that once bought war. 

Even the gold cloaks at the doors shifted, uncertain whether to cheer or bow.

Daemon smiled, slow and sharp, the kind of smile that always looked like a threat dressed as charm.

“A celebration,” he said softly, “should feed more than the court, should it not?”

He looked straight to Rhaenyra.

She should have looked away.

Should have remembered the eyes of the court upon her, the hundreds of witnesses measuring every breath.

But she didn’t.

Daemon’s eyes lingered, a half-smile ghosting across his mouth.

Then he turned and strode from the dais.

Finally, the King himself. 

The King’s smile was gracious, but the set of his shoulders betrayed him. He would not let Daemon’s theatrics command his hall.

Not tonight.

Not ever. 

“Generous,” Viserys said, voice smooth, carrying easily through the chamber. “My brother has ever had a flair for spectacle.”

A ripple of laughter followed, nervous and eager to please.

“But,” he continued, “a father must not be outdone, not in love, nor in loyalty.”

Viserys rose from his place at the foot of the dais, the murmur of the court dimming at once. He lifted a hand, an old habit, both kingly and kind, and the hall quieted beneath it.

“My lords,” he began, his voice rich and sure, “you have shown our house a generosity beyond measure. The realm’s bounty has graced this hall, and for that, I am grateful.”

He glanced toward the veiled cradles, his expression softening.

“Know this, your gifts will not be the last. For every year these children live, I will see them celebrated anew. The blood of the dragon will not go unhonored.”

He turned then.

His gaze climbing the steps to where Rhaenyra sat upon the Iron Throne.

“But today, my gift is for their mother. My heir. She who suffered seven days to bring forth three babes, whose strength has matched any Queen that came before her.”

From the attendants beside him, Viserys took a casket of carved blackwood inlaid with silver filigree. When he opened it, light struck upon the gleam of three crowns nestled within, each distinct, each steeped in memory.

"Three children,” he said. “Three gifts, as is only fitting.”

He lifted the first, a weighty circlet darkened with age, the sheen of dragonsteel dulled by time, its curve adorned with black pearls that caught the firelight like trapped smoke.

“The first,” he declared, “is Queen Alyssa Velaryon's crown. Mother who bore King Jaehaerys and Queen Alysanne. May her courage guard you, as it did our house.”

He set it aside carefully, then drew forth a band of pale silver, delicate yet resolute, sapphires glinting like frozen stars.

"The second, Queen Alysanne’s diadem, wrought in silver and set with sapphires as blue as winter skies. The beloved Good Queen, who flew Silverwing and softened highborn and common alike. May her grace temper your fire.”

And last, from the casket, he lifted a slender circlet of gold, simple, luminous, unpretending.

"And the third, Queen Aemma’s coronet. No grand jewel, no heavy metal, but the circlet she wore upon high feasts. Remembered not for its worth, but for the gentle brow it once adorned. May her memory live on through you, as a mother’s love reborn.”

For a long moment, he looked up at her, his daughter, his heir, his proof that love and lineage had not failed him.

"You are the living legacy of queens and of dragons, Rhaenyra. And through you, they rise again.”

---

The feast was held in the Queen’s Ballroom.

Servants wove through the throng with measured grace, bearing roasted duck dressed in orange glaze, trays of sugared figs, and goblets heavy with Arbor gold. The harpists played low and sweet, the rhythm of power made polite.

Rhaenyra’s babes had long since been carried away, each placed in the presence of the nurses she had chosen herself, women sworn to Dragonstone and the blood of the dragon. Not to the Keep.

Across the room, the Hightower children were tended differently.

Oldtown nurses, moved with measured precision, while septa attendants came after. 

Little Helaena sat apart upon a cushioned stool, her small hands cupped around a fluttering moth she had caught between courses. Her nurse smiled indulgently but never touched her. Only straightened the child’s posture and murmured a blessing when the insect escaped toward the chandeliers.

Beside her, Aemond fidgeted, kicking softly against the chair leg. The wooden dragon in his grasp, carved and painted a modest pale green by one of the septas, bore none of the ferocity of the creatures that slept beneath the Dragonpit.

He clutched it anyway, as though trying to imagine heat in its hollow belly.

They were quiet children, perfectly kept.

Seen, but never touched too long.

Watched more than they were held.

The long high table gleamed beneath the chandeliers, its guests arranged not by chance, but by the deliberate choreography of power.

At its center sat King Viserys, crown glinting, cheeks bright with wine and pride.

To his left, in the place reserved for consorts, sat Alicent.

Of the Hightower children, only Aegon sat with the grown. 

At seven, he was a picture painted for display,  curls brushed to gold, cheeks still round with boyhood, his tunic of black and green brocade catching every flicker of candlelight. A silver goblet, half-filled with watered wine, sat before him, though his hand strayed more often to the sugared fruits placed close for his keeping.

Bright, unveiled, and haloed in light.

He swung his legs beneath the table, distracted and restless, yet every glance from his mother stilled him instantly.

When he did remember to sit tall, she rewarded him with the faintest smile.

Beyond them, Princess Rhaenys and Lord Corlys Velaryon spoke softly to one another, their words low and even.

To the King’s right, Rhaenyra sat radiant trading words with Laenor, whose laughter...bright and effortless, drew smiles from those near enough to hear.

Further down, Laena Velaryon leaned toward Prince Daemon, the two of them a study in motion and shadow. 

And near the end of the table, Archmaester Vaegon had been seated at the King’s invitation, a figure of dusty solemnity amid so much splendor.

He ate little, drank less, and watched everything, his quill-keen eyes flitting from the King’s gestures to the Queen’s hand on her son’s arm, to the easy grace of the heir who laughed beside her cup.

Conversation flowed like wine at the high table, warm, glinting, and treacherous.

The King, rosy with pride, spoke easily of dragons and the songs that would be written of this day. Every so often, his laughter rang out, full and unguarded.

Rhaenyra smiled when he did, though her fingers toyed absently with the rim of her goblet.

Beside him, Alicent leaned close, her voice soft enough that only he might hear.

“Your Grace,” she said, her smile never faltering. “You’ve made a fine show of it today. The realm will remember such devotion.”

Viserys chuckled, distracted, warmth spilling easily. “You think so?”

“I do,” she said softly, her eyes on her goblet. 

Viserys chuckled, still drunk on his own joy. “As they should. It will do them good to speak of unity for once.”

“Unity,” she echoed, the word turning over sweetly in her mouth. Then, in the same breath, almost tenderly—

"They’ll speak, too, of how she veiled them.”

Viserys’s brows drew faintly together. “Veiled?"

Alicent’s gaze lowered demurely, her voice dropping into that soft, honeyed cadence that always made her sound reasonable.

“It is curious, is it not?” she said, fingers tracing the rim of her goblet. “The High Septon laid his blessings upon the babes in the birthing chambers, quietly, only days after her labors. And people...well you know how the people are, foolish as ever question the necessity of such a thing. The babes veiled so tightly, hidden away as if the sun itself will harm them."

Her tone carried no accusation, only the faintest sigh, like a woman lamenting gossip rather than planting it.

Viserys frowned, lifting his goblet to stall the sudden discomfort. “The ceremony was for the court, not the common rabble.”

“Of course,” she said quickly, soothing. “Only, well, you’ve ever been so generous with your people. They might take comfort, I think, in seeing the children who will one day sit where you do.”

He smiled then, the argument dissolving before it could form. Her hand brushed his sleeve, brief, perfect.

Across the table, Rhaenyra caught the tail of their exchange, not the words, but the look of it: her father’s easy laughter, the Queen’s measured tilt of the head, the shared intimacy that came so effortlessly.

Her wine tasted suddenly sharp on her tongue.

Viserys must have felt her glance, for he looked up, smiling wide enough to bridge every unspoken rift.

“Our Rhaenyra is still a young mother,” he said fondly, his tone carrying easily over the din. “The mother of dragons must be fierce in her protectiveness. You know how they are, fire first, reason after.”

A ripple of polite laughter followed, the courtiers eager to mirror his cheer.

Rhaenyra inclined her head, her smile careful and composed. 

The compliment was meant to warm, but it pressed like a hand against the back of her neck. 

Alicent’s gaze dropped to her own child.

The watered wine left a rosy stain on Aegon's lips that made him look older, almost princely.

She reached to still his small hand as he lifted the cup again, her fingers brushing the soft silver of his hair. “Careful, my love,” she cooed, her voice all silk and sunlight. “You’ll dull your wits before the pudding’s served.”

Aegon laughed because the room wanted it.

He was very good at wanting what rooms wanted.

Viserys’s eyes softened. “A boy after my own heart,” he said, raising his cup again. “Already knows how to enjoy a feast.”

The court laughed anew.

It might have ended there.

Warm, harmless, a tableau of family and fortune, had Daemon not chosen that moment to speak.

His voice slipped through the laughter like a blade through silk. “Best enjoy your feasts while they’re still sweet, little prince.”

Daemon lounged back in his chair, wine cradled lazily in one hand, his smile all teeth and trouble. “When the dragons grow, they eat more than sheep.”

Viserys’s laughter stopped. 

“Gods, Daemon,” he said, half fond, half exasperated. “Must you darken every joy?”

“Not darken,” Daemon replied, swirling his wine. “Only remind.” His eyes slid down the table, finding Rhaenyra. “Feasts end. Knives don’t.”

The words hung there, delicate and terrible.

Rhaenyra met his gaze across the glittering expanse, the noise of the hall fading to a hush that seemed meant for them alone. The corner of her mouth curved, slow and deliberate. “Then best we learn to use them well, uncle.”

He laughed softly, one of those dangerous, delighted sounds that seemed to pull air from the room. 

Viserys waved a hand, smiling again too broadly, eager to drown the tension. “Enough of blades and beasts tonight! There has been too much of both.”

Down the table, Alicent’s hand found Aegon’s shoulder, stilling his restless fidgeting.

Her voice, sweet as milk and prayer, carried just far enough for the courtiers nearby to hear.

“My love, if the High Septon were to offer a blessing here, just a simple rite, the smallfolk’s hearts would rest easier.”

Viserys brightened; rites always softened him. “A fine thought, my queen.”

Rhaenyra’s laugh was soft but edged, her words deliberate, loud enough to carry. “Oh, there is no need. The High Septon has already blessed my babes and myself in the birthing chambers, three drops of holy oil upon each brow.”

The reaction was immediate.

A ripple of sound cut through the hall, a dozen voices whispering at once. 

Already blessed? The High Septon himself? 

Rhaenyra let the noise swell.

She turned slightly, gaze sweeping the table. “And when they are one year, they shall be blessed again, before the Fourteen, upon Dragonstone. As is proper for those born of both flame and flesh.”

That name, the Fourteen, rippled sharper still. Somewhere a septon’s ring scraped stone; a Hightower cousin rose, excused himself, already imagining a raven to Oldtown. 

A sharp hiss of breath, the faint scrape of chairs shifting.

Viserys shifted, uncertain whether to smile or frown. “Ah, yes,” he managed, laughter forced. “The Fourteen… the old ways. A harmony of faiths.”

“Harmony,” Alicent echoed, tasting the word like bitter milk. Her all grace and venomous calm, green silk drawn tight. “Of course,” she granted. “Each to their gods.”

“Indeed,” said Rhaenyra, her goblet raised, the ruby wine catching firelight like blood. “And each to their faith.”

The courtiers waited, unsure whether to laugh, to pray, or to breathe.

Somewhere down the table a goblet clinked too loudly; a nervous cough scattered the tension without dissolving it. The harpists faltered, strings humming uncertainly in the heavy air.

Then Rhaenyra rose. 

“My lords,” she began, her voice clear and even, carrying easily through the hall. “You have been generous beyond measure. The gifts laid before my children will be spoken of long after they themselves learn the weight of names and crowns. For that, you have my gratitude.”

She lifted her cup slightly, the gesture poised between benediction and warning.

“But the truest gift,” she continued, her gaze sweeping the hall, “is not gold or silk or ship, but faith....the faith you’ve shown in House Targaryen, in its future, in the bond that ties sky and sea, fire and blood.”

There was pride in her tone, but no arrogance,  only the subtle gravity of someone who knew her own myth and had decided to speak it aloud.

“I was born of a mother who ruled her hearth with grace, and of a father who ruled his realm with mercy. It is my hope that my children will learn both.”

Her eyes flicked briefly toward Viserys, whose expression softened; then, past him, to Alicent, whose smile had grown very still.

“May they grow under the watchful eyes of the realm,” Rhaenyra said, lifting her goblet higher, “and may the realm remember: dragons do not hoard what is freely given, but they never forget what is freely pledged. And they do not mistake mercy for measure,” she finished, and the hall reacted as if it were pretty when it was not.

A ripple moved through the lords, half admiration, half unease, but none could deny the artistry of her phrasing.

It was thanks and warning both. 

Daemon raised his cup to her, grinning like a man who recognized a strike well landed.

Viserys laughed again, full of pride. “Spoken like your grandsire himself!”

Alicent’s goblet touched her lips, but she did not drink.

As the applause faded, Rhaenyra let her smile soften. 

“And one more thing,” she said, her tone light, almost playful. “A feast such as this leaves bounty enough for ten halls. Let no dish go cold and wasted. When the music ends, have the kitchens open their doors to the city below, the smallfolk who have stood since dawn to see their dragons fly. Let them eat as we have eaten, and drink to the health of the princes and princess as we have done.”

She turned slightly toward her father. “If it please Your Grace,” she added, perfectly deferent, perfectly knowing.

Viserys, caught between pride and delight, laughed aloud. “Yes! Yes, of course! Let it be done!”

The hall erupted into applause, softer this time, genuine. Even the servants along the walls looked startled, then grateful.

Across the table, Alicent’s smile did not reach her eyes.

The queen lifted her goblet, toasting her stepdaughter with grace so polished it gleamed.

Rhaenyra inclined her head, the picture of filial courtesy, and thought, not for the first time, that every victory at court left a wound somewhere unseen.

---

The feast had ended hours past, yet its noise still clung to her like smoke.

Rhaenyra moved swiftly through the dim corridors, the black velvet of her gown whispering around her ankles, heavy with gold thread and the scent of wine and ash.

She hated the separation.

Every heartbeat away from her babes felt like something torn from her chest.

Her pace quickened, breath shallow, until the quiet tap of her slippers struck sharp against the stone.

Behind her, the Kingsguard fell into a near-march, their armor rattling softly as they hurried to match the driven tempo of their princess.

At last, she reached her own chambers, though they could hardly be called hers now.

She had remade them utterly.

The scent of milk and lavender clung to the air where once there had been only incense and amber oil. The silk screens that once hid her bath had been moved aside to make room for rocking chairs and linen chests. 

Her writing desk now held basins and folded cloths, silver rattles and coral teething charms from Driftmark. 

The great bed of carved ebony and gold stood at the center like an altar, surrounded by three cradles of polished oak, lined with softened silk. Little trinkets hung above them. Crystal charms to catch the light, gold shaped into stars, a coil of red ribbon for luck. Around them she kept her wards close: salt in the corners, dragon glass tucked beneath each cradle, protection stitched into every seam.

Here, the room no longer belonged to a princess or a wife.

It was a nest, a kingdom of soft cloth and carved wood, firelight and lullabies.

By the hearth sat Septa Rhaella, her posture straight despite the hour, her face softened by the amber glow. In her arms rested the pale prince, Aemon, small and still as moonlight caught in flesh. 

Upon her breast lay his dragon. 

The beast’s narrow head rested just above the babe’s heart, wings folding and unfurling in perfect rhythm with his breath.

No one else could have borne such closeness. The dragon’s heat alone would have blistered mortal skin, and its temper was already forming....quick, possessive, unyielding, like the child it guarded.

Yet Septa Rhaella did not flinch. 

Vows had not made her tame to flame, only aimed.

Across the chamber, Nurse Meris cradled little Aemma.

Rhaenyra had chosen Meris herself, a woman known not only for steady hands but for the gentleness that never wavered. The babe cooed faintly in her sleep, fingers curling and uncurling as though grasping dreams.

Near the window stood another nurse from Dragonstone, stout and red-haired, bearing Aenar. His small face was flushed with life, his expression fierce even in slumber. The woman held him with the surety of one accustomed to restless babes. 

Their dragons sprawled upon the floor beside them, two small creatures of smoke and scale. Their tails tangled together in sleep. They twitched now and then, small sparks fluttering from their nostrils, as if the dreams of dragons mirrored those of men.

For a long moment, Rhaenyra only watched them. 

She had not known she’d been holding her breath since the doors of the ballroom closed behind her.

The applause, the praise, the endless watching eyes...none of it had quieted her heart.

Only this sight did.

Her babes. Safe.

The ache of distance melted from her limbs, replaced by the low, fierce hum of belonging that only their presence could summon.

She took a single step forward, and then another, the soft rustle of her gown the only sound. The nurses and Septa Rhaella bowed their heads as she approached 

“Give them to me,” Rhaenyra said softly.

Her voice was calm, but it carried command, the kind born of blood and right

Meris stepped forward first, offering the smallest, Aemma, her sudden soft wail no louder than a sigh. Rhaenyra took her with practiced ease, cradling her close until the cry gentled. The babe rooted instinctively, and the Princess let out a breath that trembled between laugh and giggle. 

“There now,” she murmured, swaying slightly. “Greedy little dragon.”

When Aemma’s hunger eased, Rhaenyra passed her gently into Meris’s waiting arms and reached for Aenar, who was already fussing, his small face flushed. Aemon, still held by Septa Rhaella, gave a drowsy protest, and his dragon lifted its head to hiss softly.

“Patience,” she said, smiling faintly. “Your mother has two hands, not six.”

Aenar latched quickly, his small fingers curling against her gown. The sharpness of his hunger drew a hum from her chest, that instinctive sound known only to mothers and beasts.

“How were they?” she asked softly. “Did they rest easily?”

“They did, Princess,” Meris replied. “Princess Aemma woke once crying for you. She would not be soothed until she was held against my shoulder.”

Rhaenyra’s gaze softened.

“She has your stubbornness, that one,” Rhaella said quietly. “Aemon slept through it all. Aenar…less so. He does not like the dark.”

Rhaenyra smiled faintly, bending her head to kiss Aenar’s hair. “Nor did I, when I was small."

Aenar made a small, pleased sound against her skin, the rhythm of his suckling slowing. When he finally released her, his lashes fluttered and his body went limp with contentment. She shifted him gently, pressing her lips to his temple before passing him back to the waiting nurse.

“Place them in their cradles,” she murmured. “Let them sleep.”

Rhaenyra reached for Aemon. He whimpered softly, his tiny mouth already seeking, and she gathered him close, drawing him close with practiced grace.

The nurses moved swiftly, Meris lowering Aemma into her cradle while the red-haired woman settled Aenar beside her. Their dragons followed as if drawn, wings rustling faintly as they crawled to the foot of each cradle. 

Rhaenyra turned her attention to Aemon.

He fed slowly, his calm steadying her. She brushed a strand of silver hair from his brow and hummed a low tune from Dragonstone, soft enough that even the fire seemed to quiet to hear it.

Her gaze drifted toward the table near the hearth. Three translucent veils' lay there—folded neatly. One seafoam, one pale blue, and one black.

The black veil, Aemon’s, seemed darker than before, the sheen of the silk bearing a smudged print. 

Frowning, Rhaenyra reached for it, lifting the cloth between her fingers. A sharp, cloying scent clung to the weave, thick with resin and sanctified oil. She drew it closer, nose wrinkling.

Her voice came out low, dangerous. “Who touched this?”

The nurses froze where they stood, eyes wide. Septa Rhaella was the first to move, her expression turning grave as the scent reached her.

“Myrrh, starflower, and a thread of septa’s balsam,” Rhaella murmured. “Oldtown favors this blend for second anointings.”

The word second sounded like a slap. Such rites were not blessings, but corrections. Reserved for the impure, the penitent, the child born beneath ill stars.

In the Faith’s eyes, a second anointing meant the first had failed. That the soul still carried stain. That prayer alone had not been enough to make it clean.

Rhaenyra’s gaze snapped back to the veil, anger flashing like a blade in her eyes. “Then someone has forgotten their place,” she said softly.

She rose, Aemon still in her arms, the veil clutched in her free hand. The scent of it...of sanctity forced upon her child, was an offense that burned hotter than flame.

“To anoint him again,” she said, voice trembling between fury and disbelief, “is to say the first blessing failed. To say he is unclean. A heathen, in need of washing.”

“Some would think dragons need more prayer than most,” whispered Rhaella, her own silver brows tugged in frown. 

Rhaenyra’s lips curved in something that was not a smile. “Then let them pray,” she said. “But not over mine.”

The fire crackled sharply, as if in agreement.

“Wake the night-steward,” she said. “Names. Every hand that touched cloth or door from dusk till feast’s end. Laundry, lantern-lighters, cellarers. We begin with the veils.”

Septa Rhaella rose without a sound. “And if they swear ignorance?”

“Then they may swear it twice,” Rhaenyra said. “Once to me. Once to dragonfire.”

Chapter 8: The Weight Of Sanctity

Notes:

My Rhaenyra is a feral mama Dragon. She really will do whatever for her babies 😊

Candlelight burned low in the chapel’s undercroft, gilding the stones in dull amber and smoke.

Hours earlier, Rhaenyra had torn through her own household.

The Red Keep slept fitfully while she prowled its veins.

Ledgers. 

Postings. 

Rosters. 

Each name scrawled by her steward’s hand, each face she had thought loyal.

Pages littered the floor of her solar like shed skin. Maids, septas, scullions, guardsmen. She charted their origins, their appointments, the invisible hands that had placed them there.

A pattern began to form.

Those from Driftmark and Dragonstone she knew, chosen by her own hand and were tested, proven.

But here, at court, the ink ran foul.

Too many from Oldtown.

Too many bearing the faint, identical sigil of the former Hand.

Otto Hightower’s touch lingered like mildew in her walls.

And the more she traced it, the more unclean she felt.

Her children’s cradles—watched.

Her birthing bed—listened to.

The very women who wiped her brow, who whispered “My Princess” with lowered eyes, might have been his eyes, his ears. His rot wearing the faces of service.

Her fingers trembled as she turned the page.

Another name. Another lie.

A maid who had dressed Aemma.

A midwife who had swaddled Aenar.

A boy who had fetched water for the cradle bath where Aemon slept beside her bed.

Her throat tightened.

What if the maid had pressed too hard, too long, and her daughter’s breath had caught?

What if the swaddle was loose allowing chill?

What if the boy had stumbled, spilled something, and smiled as he bowed?

The thought curdled in her stomach, hot and cold at once.

She pressed her palms flat against the ledger’s page until the ink bled beneath her skin. Fool. Fool. She had walked back into this nest of serpents thinking she could make it hers again.

She had birthed them under this roof. Bled and screamed and wept until her bones felt hollow, and all the while, Hightower hands stood sentinel with watching eyes. Reaching for her babes' cradles, smiling lips and posioned hands.

Her reflection in the dark window had seemed to watch her then, eyes hollow and burning. “How long,” she’d whispered, “have I been blind in my own house?”

Aemon’s first cry still rang in her mind, high and thin as a blade; Aenar’s tiny fists clutching her sleeve; Aemma’s mouth searching blindly for her breast.

They were hers, and she had let vipers crawl near them.

By dawn’s first hint, she had summoned every servant, every nurse, every trembling girl who had ever stepped foot near her nursery and hailed from the Reach. 

Rhaenyra Targaryen: mother, dragon, heir.

Demanded a reckoning.

She stood with the statue of the Mother rising behind her, its marble hands spread in benediction over her head. The gesture, meant for mercy, became in that moment a coronation of wrath. Her temper had not cooled; it shimmered beneath her skin, heat trembling through the silk of her gown.

Those arrayed before her must have felt it.

The servants knelt in an uneven line, trembling beneath her gaze, their eyes fixed on the floor as though looking upon her might blind them.

Some even dared to whisper prayers to the very figure looming above her, but even the Mother’s stone face seemed to watch in silence.

At Rhaenyra’s right stood Ser Harwin Strong, silent and watchful, his sword belt loose but his eyes sharp. Ser Darklyn shadowed the opposite wall, hands clasped behind his back, as still as stone. Between them, Septa Rhaella, her face pale as milk beneath her wimple.

Only those three where hers.

The rest gathered...his. 

She could feel it now in the air between them, as though Otto Hightower himself had left a print on all their throats.

Rhaenyra’s voice, when it came, was calm. Too calm.

“None shall speak unless I bid it. None shall move unless commanded.”

The sound of her slippers on the stone floor echoed as she walked the line, slow, deliberate, each step its own sentence. The torchlight glimmered on the rings at her fingers, on the bloodless pallor of her hands.

“You were placed in my service long before my babes drew breath,” she said softly. “First to tend to me, then, when the time came, to tend to them as my own hands, my own eyes. To guard what is mine. And yet—”

She stopped beside the youngest maid, a girl with trembling hands and eyes fixed on the floor.

“It seems I have harbored serpents in the guise of lambs.”

The girl began to weep silently.

“Do you know,” Rhaenyra said lowly, her voice ghosting the walls, “what it is to hold fresh babes? To feel their soft breath against your wrist, their hearts fluttering like little birds? To know they rely so wholly on you that a single mistake, one breath too long withheld, might end them?”

The silence deepened, the air thick as honey.

“And to think,” she said, her gaze sweeping the chamber, “that any of you might have brought harm upon them. By negligence, by deceit, by order—”

Her tone broke on that last word. Not with weakness, but with fury caged tight in her chest.

She drew a slow breath, turning toward Septa Rhaella.

“Tell me, Septa,” she said, “what blessing was offered over my children?”

Rhaella’s eyes flicked toward the kneeling line of servants, her lips drawn thin with disgust. “It was… assumed to be...”

“Say it.”

Rhaenyra’s voice cracked like a whip.

Rhaella’s jaw tightened. “Oils, my Princess,” she said, her tone clipped, trembling with restrained outrage. “Meant for a blessing of purity.”

The word purity rippled through the room like a chill wind.

Rhaenyra stilled. For a heartbeat, there was no sound but the soft drip of wax.

“My children were already anointed,” she said quietly. “The High Septon himself blessed them in the very chambers where they drew their first breath. I saw it done.”

Rhaella nodded faintly. “You did, Princess. The record stands alongside the ledger."

“Then why,” Rhaenyra asked, her voice rising, trembling at the edges, “was it done again?”

No one answered.

Her eyes burned. “A second blessing of purity. As though the first were not enough. As though my babes were born unclean.”

Her words fell like stones, each one heavier than the last.

She turned her gaze on the kneeling line of servants. “Tell me,” she said, voice low and dangerous, “did you whisper it as you anointed them? Did you press your holy oils upon my heir’s brow and think to wash his blood clean?”

The servants’ silence was its own confession.

Septa Rhaella stepped forward then, the steel in her voice cutting through the suffocating stillness like the toll of a bell.

“The Faith teaches that no blessing may be given without the mother’s consent,” she said sharply. Her tone rang through the undercroft, every syllable clear as glass. “Not by Septa, not by servant, not even by Queen. For otherwise it is no blessing at all, but a violation. To touch the child without leave, to touch the heir’s heir—” she paused, her eyes flashing, “is sacrilege.”

Rhaenyra met Rhaella’s eyes. Kin recognizing kin. Dragon recognizing dragon.

For a heartbeat, the air between them burned, two flames rising in tandem, joined by outrage older than any throne.

Rhaenyra’s voice broke the stillness, soft but terrible in its composure.

“So,” she said, each word deliberate, each syllable sharpened to a blade’s edge, “someone within these walls has profaned what the Mother granted me?”

The question was false, a test, a snare meant to draw truth like blood.

No one dared to breathe. The torchlight trembled.

Rhaella’s throat worked once before she answered, her voice steady, unflinching.

“Yes.”

The word struck the air like a verdict.

In its wake, the chamber seemed to contract. The walls, the stone, even the candlelight drawing inward around Rhaenyra’s form.

Something ancient unfurled behind her eyes, a wrath that had nothing of the Faith in it. A wrath born of blood, of birth, of fire.

Her gaze swept the rest of the chamber, burning each bowed head into memory. “And in this house, beneath this roof, that is treason of the oldest kind.”

The words reverberated through the undercroft, trembling in the air like the aftershock of thunder. The servants dared not move, their breaths shallow, their heads bowed as though true judgment had already begun.

Behind her, the marble Mother loomed, her carved face half in shadow, half in flame. The play of light transformed her serene expression into something terrible: divine fury caught mid-snarl, mercy twisted into vengeance. The open palms seemed no longer to bless but to condemn. And in that shifting glow, it was impossible to tell where the goddess ended and Rhaenyra began. 

She turned, her gaze finding the two knights flanking the room.

“Ser Harwin. Ser Darklyn,” she said evenly, “tell me, what is the cost of treason within the Red Keep?”

For a moment neither spoke. Then Darklyn stepped forward, his voice low but carrying.

“Death, Princess. By blade or by fire.”

The word fire seemed to hang longer than the rest, pulsing in the hush that followed. Across the line of servants, more tears fell, quiet, hopeless. A single sob broke loose, swallowed at once by the weight of silence.

Rhaenyra did not raise her voice. “Now. Tell me who placed you here. Who opened the doors to you. Who spoke your names to my steward.”

The room remained still for a breath, two, three, then the confessions began, halting and raw.

“Otto Hightower.”

One voice, then another.

“Otto Hightower, the Hand before.”

“His letters, my Princess...his seal.”

“Oldtown’s word, my Princess.”

Until seven voices spoke it, one by one.

Seven, beneath the Mother’s carved hands.

The number itself felt like omen.

Rhaenyra’s eyes shuttered briefly, as though absorbing the echo of their confessions.

Then she inhaled, a long, deliberate breath, and when she spoke again, her tone had changed.

The fury did not fade; it simply coiled in on itself, disciplined, precise.

“So,” she said quietly, “you all served another’s hand before serving mine. You carried his words into my halls, his orders into my nursery.”

She began to pace, each step slow and soundless, her shadow sweeping over the kneeling figures like a tide.

“I wonder,” she said, “who among you carried them furthest.”

No one dared move.

She stopped before the statue’s base, the Mother’s stone eyes watching from above. The incense had burned low now, a faint ribbon of smoke rising between them, sharp and bitter.

“If I ask outright,” she continued, “you will all lie. You will each swear innocence and feign ignorance, and I will spend the rest of this night peeling away your falsehoods one by one until truth lies bare at my feet.”

Her eyes lifted, glinting in the dim light. “But I am weary. I have babes to feed, and an heir whose brow still carries the scent of desecration.”

The word heir fell like a weight upon the room.

“So we shall do this differently.”

She turned, facing them once more, her voice calm now.

Terrible in its calm.

“Tell me which of you anointed my son. My precious Aemon.” The name hung in the air, radiant and terrible. “Tell me who dared lay hands upon my firstborn in mockery of the Mother’s blessing.”

The servants’ breaths hitched.

One woman sobbed openly.

Rhaenyra’s tone softened, falsely gentle. “If you speak the truth, the rest will live. Those who confess will walk free of my house and my castle. You will not return to Oldtown; your service here ends tonight. But you will live.”

She stepped closer, the hem of her gown brushing against the stone. “If you remain silent… I will assume your silence is guilt shared.”

Her eyes moved from one face to the next. Measured and merciless. “And there is no mercy for that.”

No one dared meet her gaze.

Softly, brokenly, one voice cracked through the silence.

“It was I.”

A girl’s voice.

The same one who had wept first.

Rhaenyra turned toward her slowly, the firelight gleaming off the tears on the girl’s cheeks.

“Your name,” Rhaenyra said.

“Allyne, my princess.”

“Who told you to do it, Allyne?”

The girl’s lips trembled. “The Queen. She said it was a blessing of purity. That the child’s blood must be made clean before the realm.”

The chamber went utterly still.

Rhaenyra regarded the girl for a long moment, her expression unreadable. "So it is truth. The Queen herself sought to purify what was already divine.”

Allyne’s sobs came quick and breathless.

“I meant no harm, my Princess...she said it would please the gods—”

Rhaenyra lifted a hand, and the girl fell silent.

“Pleasing the gods,” she repeated, almost to herself. “How eager men are to speak for them. How quick they are to find sin where there is none.”

Her eyes moved to the others, still kneeling in a trembling line. "Those who confessed the Hand’s name. Rise.”

The six rose hesitantly, heads bowed.

“I am not without mercy,” Rhaenyra said, her voice smooth, nearly kind. “You have spoken truth when lies might have saved you. For that, you will keep your lives.”

Relief shuddered through them. 

“You will leave my service, and this castle,” she continued. “You will not return to Oldtown. You will not write, nor speak of this night. Ser Harwin will see you safely beyond the gates.”

Her gaze found Harwin’s. He inclined his head once. No words, no hesitation.

“Go now,” she said gently. “And may the Mother have mercy on you all.”

The servants stumbled to their feet, half-sobbing their thanks. Harwin opened the heavy door, his silhouette black against the torchlight. The sound of their steps faded slowly down the corridor, soft at first, then swallowed whole by the Keep’s depths.

When the last echo died, Rhaenyra turned back to Allyne.

The girl knelt alone, small and shaking, her face blotched with tears.

Rhaenyra approached her slowly, the rustle of silk loud in the hush. She knelt, not to meet her, but to tower close, her presence intimate and suffocating.

Her hand came to rest against the girl’s hair, stroking once, almost tenderly.

“Do you understand,” she asked softly, “what you’ve done?”

The girl swallowed, shaking her head. “I only—”

Rhaenyra’s thumb brushed a tear from her cheek, smearing it away. “You anointed my son. You touched his skin with oils meant to wash away his blood. You told the gods he was unclean.”

Her voice trembled, not with rage, but with the restraint it took to keep from strangling the girl.

“You laid your hands upon the crown of my heir and declared him impure. Tell me, Allyne, what forgiveness do you imagine that earns?”

The girl could not speak. Her lips parted soundlessly.

Rhaenyra smiled faintly, the expression fragile and cruel all at once. “No answer,” she whispered. “Then let me offer one for you.”

Outside, far beyond the undercroft, the faint sound of wings rose through the night, slow, beating, vast. The stone seemed to hum with it.

Rhaenyra’s hand lingered in the girl’s hair, smoothing it back like a mother preparing her child for rest. “Treason,” she said, “must be answered in the tongue dragons understand.”

Rhaenyra rose slowly.

Her hand lifted once, a silent gesture toward Ser Darklyn.

Allyne sagged to her knees, then to her hands, breath hitching in animal gasps.

“Please, princess, please,” she whispered again and again, the words slurring into a wet litany that pooled with her tears on the stone floor.

The knight moved; steel flashed.

The chamber rang once, sharp and bright, and then went terribly still.

Allyne froze, shock stealing sound from her throat, her hands cleanly removed. Only when her body understood did a strangled cry break loose, followed by the sick sound of retching. The air filled with the acrid scent of bile and blood, the incense above doing nothing to hide it.

Rhaenyra’s gaze never wavered. The shadows threw her face into strange relief, half saint, half executioner.

Septa Rhaella stood very still, eyes fixed on her Kin. There was no flinch in them now, no shock, only comprehension, bright and terrible. She understood what she was witnessing: not cruelty for its own sake, but instinct, the reflex of a mother-dragon defending her brood.

The chamber felt smaller for it, heavy with the memory of wings and flame.

Rhaella’s fingers tightened around her seven-pointed star until it bit her palm. She bowed her head, not in prayer but in acknowledgment.

In this moment, the Faith had nothing to teach the blood of the dragon.

When Rhaenyra finally spoke, her voice was calm again, stripped of heat. “Ser Darklyn,” she said.

He stepped forward at once.

Rhaenyra’s gaze stayed on the figure collapsed before her. “See that she is tended enough to live,” she said evenly. “Then take her to the Queen. Tell Her Grace that I send her a gift, a new handmaid to fill her household.”

The words hung in the air, quiet and merciless.

Septa Rhaella’s eyes closed for the briefest moment, a single breath of pity that passed as quickly as it came.

Rhaenyra turned away, her gown whispering over the stone as she walked toward the stairs.

Behind her, the sound of the knight’s boots echoed in steady rhythm, the undercroft heavy with the scent of smoke and iron.

And further beyond the castle walls waited a single carriage, its lamps shuttered against the night.

Inside sat the six who had confessed, wrapped in cloaks and silence. They believed themselves spared.

By dawn, that carriage would vanish into the wild roads of the Crownlands.

Some said it was waylaid by sellswords, others that bandits found it and left no trace but ash and hoofprints.

No one could ever say for certain.

Only that none of the six were seen again, and that Daemon Targaryen rode out before sunrise and returned at dusk with dust on his cloak and nothing at all to say.

---

The summons came before the ink had dried on the dawn petitions.

The King sat wrapped in his furs despite the heat, one hand resting on the arm of his chair, the other trembling faintly as he gestured them in.

“Come,” he said, the word thin as breath. “All of you. It seems the realm itself holds its tongue until we speak plainly.”

Rhaenyra entered first, her gown still the deep garnet she had worn since the sun's first rise.

The silk whispered as she moved, the Mother’s emblem glinting faintly at her throat.

Alicent followed, pale green and immaculate, her hands folded before her like a prayer.

Not a hair out of place, not a thread astray. Her serenity was a blade, honed to mirror Rhaenyra’s composure.

Behind them trailed Vaegon, his maester’s robes rustling like dry leaves; Septa Rhaella, austere and watchful; and two grey-clad septons whose eyes flickered between Queen and Princess, uncertain which they feared more.

Viserys looked from one to the other, and the air itself seemed to strain beneath the weight of unspoken accusation.

“Let us clear the air,” he said. “Before this rot spreads further.”

Rhaenyra inclined her head. 

A stillness so deliberate it chilled.

“The air, Father, is not what offends me,” she said. “It is the hands that reached for my babes beneath our roof.”

A shifting rippled through the septons.

Vaegon’s quill scratched once. 

Alicent’s lips parted, soft with practiced sorrow. She placed a hand upon her breast as though steadying her heart.

“If you refer to the incident with the servant girl,” she said, voice trembling with careful grace, “I grieve that such misunderstanding has taken root. The blessing was meant to honor the gods, not to insult your babes, Stepdaughter.”

She turned her gaze toward Viserys, not Rhaenyra.

“My only thought was for the realm’s peace. For harmony.” Her voice caught, the faintest shiver. “I did not imagine that such devotion could birth… such cruelty.”

Rhaenyra did not flinch, nor raise her voice.

“Devotion?” she asked lowly, but not gentle. “That is what you call it? To mark my heir as unclean in his cradle? To brand my son’s brow with your doubt and call it worship?”

Alicent’s eyes glistened, her mouth a perfect curve of wounded grace. “I would never brand a child, least of all yours. The girl was misguided, perhaps too eager, too young...but her heart was pure. And now…” She exhaled, delicate as a sigh. “Now she pays a price no mother should demand.”

Rhaenyra’s gaze was steady, the faintest curve at her mouth like the shadow of a smile. “You mistake me, Your Grace. I am not demanding. I am answering.”

Viserys’s hand trembled around his cup.

“Rhaenyra,” he began. 

But his daughter only turned her eyes toward him, calm as still water.

The King stared at her, searching for some trace of the daughter he remembered.

The one whose anger had once burned hot and quick and gone.

But what looked back at him now was colder.

Controlled. Terribly precise.

Alicent lowered her gaze, lashes fluttering like the wings of a trapped dove.

“And what justice is it,” she asked softly, “to maim a child of the Faith? To send her to me like a trophy? Is that the piety of your new creed, Stepdaughter?”

Rhaenyra’s tone did not rise. It didn’t need to. “I sent her to you because she served your will, not mine.”

“I sought to spare you further worry,” Alicent said, her voice trembling with ache. “The servants of Oldtown have long tended royal births; their hands are trusted. I did not command her to harm, only to pray for your babes’ souls.”

That phrasing cuts like silk, an insinuation of spiritual illegitimacy disguised as care.

“To pray over my son,” Rhaenyra said. “As though he were born tainted.”

“Enough!” Viserys rasped, the word cracking like brittle glass. “You are both mothers! You both love your children! Must every prayer, every breath, become a battlefield?”

Viserys shifted in his seat, the tremor of his hand spilling his wine.

The ruby trail crept over his fingers before dripping to the floor, staining the rushes dark. He gave a small, brittle laugh. More exhale than sound, and waved his damp hand as if to shoo away the tension.

“A prayer’s a prayer, my dear girl,” he said, looking first to Rhaenyra, then to Alicent. 

The words hung there, light as ash, already disintegrating as they fell.

Rhaenyra said nothing.

She was motionless in a way that drew the eye; even the candlelight seemed to recoil from her calm.

Vaegon’s quill scratched again. His voice was mild but deliberate, the tone of a man choosing each word as though laying stones in a path he knew the king might not wish to follow.

“With respect, Your Grace,” Vaegon said, “the court does not rest on forgiveness.”

Viserys blinked, his gaze flicking toward him, tired, suspicious.

“Royalty,” Vaegon continued, “especially those of dragon blood, are bound by precedent, not sentiment.”

He straightened, the lamplight catching on the steel pins at his collar.

“Even King Jaehaerys, whom we name the Conciliator, would not have allowed the Faith to repeat a rite upon royal issue. It invites whispers. It invites questions of legitimacy.”

Viserys, shifted again, his chair creaking under him as if burdened by his discomfort.

“Whispers,” he muttered, fingers tightening around the cup until the metal bit against his skin. “Gods, I am sick to death of whispers.”

He dragged a sleeve across his mouth, the gesture too quick, too human. The smell of spilt wine clung to the air...sweet, sour, and old.

Rhaenyra did not speak.

Viserys’s eyes flickered toward her and away again, unable to bear what he saw reflected there.

She had always been a creature of motion, laughter, argument, the restless tilt of her chin when defying him.

Now she was utterly still, and that stillness accused him more deeply than words.

The distance between them was small, yet it felt like the length of a reign.

Septa Rhaella’s voice broke through the tension, quiet, deliberate, a thread of reason drawn through the heat.

“Your Grace,” she said, inclining her head toward the King, “the Faith does not excuse what it cannot sanctify.”

Her tone was soft, but the weight of doctrine lay beneath it. “Piety without consent is no act of holiness. To bless what has already been blessed is to question the gods’ first word. And that, in itself, is blasphemy.”

Her eyes flicked between father and daughter, between the King and the living fire before him. “Even a dragon must remember who anointed its wings to rise.”

Alicent moved first, quick as breath, before the silence could deepen into something irreversible.

Her chair scraped softly against the flagstones as she rose, hands clasped tightly before her. Her knuckles were white, her composure trembling just enough to seem unstudied.

“Septa Rhaella,” she began, voice breaking at the edges, “forgive me.”

The words startled the room. Even Rhaella’s stern features flickered, momentarily unsure.

Alicent took a step forward, her tears falling freely now, streaking her pale cheeks. “You spoke truly. I overstepped. I see that now. The Faith is clear in its teachings, and I—” she pressed a hand to her chest as if to still her heart, “—I let fear and devotion blur what should have been obedience.”

She bowed her head deeply toward the septa, every inch the picture of penitence.

“Please, accept my apology. I meant no blasphemy, no insult to the Mother’s word. Only love, for the children, for my husband, for this house.”

Her voice caught, small and raw. “I would sooner be scourged than thought faithless.”

Rhaella hesitated.

The weight of her office warred with the instinct of mercy. Slowly, she inclined her head. “The Mother cherishes repentance, Your Grace,” she said softly. “And so do I.”

Alicent turned then to Viserys, tears shining in her lashes, the light from the windows catching them like jewels. “You see, my love? I only wished to please the gods, to honor the blood of your line. If that was folly, it was born of care, not pride.”

Viserys’s face softened; his anger drained away like wine soaking into cloth.

“My wife," he said shaking his head. “You’ve done nothing wrong. The Faith has always guided you. The realm could learn from your heart.”

Rhaenyra’s gaze did not move from Alicent. Her stillness was absolute, her eyes flat and cold as obsidian. She saw every tremor of the queen’s voice, every calculated tear, every pious bow.

To the others, it was contrition.

To her, it was a mummers show.

Vaegon regarded the queen in silence, his expression unreadable, his fingers steepled just beneath his chin.

When he finally spoke, his tone was even. Dry, almost academic, but the undercurrent was unmistakable.

“Piety takes many forms, Your Grace,” he said, eyes on the parchment before him rather than the woman it concerned. “Some seek the gods in contemplation, others in ceremony. Yet even the most devout must take care that faith not be mistaken for… performance.”

A faint, nervous rustle passed through the septons.

Alicent’s hands tightened around her seven-pointed star, knuckles pale. “I take no pleasure in being accused of vanity before the Mother’s eyes,” she said, voice trembling with wounded restraint.

Vaegon inclined his head, the gesture courteous to a fault. “Nor do I accuse, Your Grace. I only caution that the gods seldom mistake intent, even when men do.”

He returned his gaze to the parchment, the scratch of his quill resuming, light but final.

Rhaenyra’s voice followed after a heartbeat, soft and deliberate. “As ever, my great uncle speaks wisely. The Mother hears what is done in her name.”

Alicent’s tears stilled, drying in the wake of that silence.

Viserys exhaled, the sound thin and frayed.

“Enough of this,” he muttered, rubbing a hand across his brow as though to press the room away. “We tear at each other like dogs in the street.”

He turned to his queen, seeking the comfort of what he knew. “Alicent meant no insult. She is well-meaning, loving. Oldtown ways linger, yes, but in them there is faith, not malice.”

Vaegon’s quill paused mid-stroke, the barest twitch betraying what he would not say.

Viserys’s gaze found hers at last, those deep, amethyst eyes that once mirrored his own pride, his hope, his legacy. 

“My girl,” he said softly, half to himself, as though she were still the child he remembered. “You cannot meet piety with punishment. Removing hands is...” He faltered, the words crumbling under the weight of her silence. “It is barbarous.”

He drew a breath as if to reclaim authority, but the next words betrayed the effort. “The girl was frightened, misled. Gods, she’s hardly a woman grown. What mother would strike at such a child?”

Rhaenyra did not look away.

“She touched my heir,” she said. “She branded him unclean.”

Viserys flinched at unclean, the syllables cutting through the heat like cold water. “She meant no harm,” he insisted quickly, shaking his head as though denial itself could restore order. “The Faith… the Faith moves in mysteries. Perhaps...perhaps the Mother herself guided her hand.”

Vaegon’s quill stilled.

Septa Rhaella’s chin lifted, ready to protest.

But Viserys spoke again before they could.

“And yet,” he muttered, contradicting himself within the same breath, “the Faith must learn its place. No priest or septa governs this house. The crown cannot kneel to every holy fancy. Gods forgive me, we’d have no rule at all.”

He sagged back against his chair, sweat beading faintly along his temple. “Peace,” he murmured. “That is all I ask."

He tried for a smile, small and worn. “No harm meant, no harm done. The gods will forgive a touch of overzeal. You were both only thinking of babes.”

The words rang hollow, brittle as eggshell.

His gaze drifted to Rhaenyra, searching for her to yield, for his daughter to make it easy.

But her stillness gave him nothing. 

Viserys’s eyes darted to Alicent instead, seeking comfort where he might find it. “You meant well,” he said, his tone warming toward her. “You always mean well."

Then, as though catching himself in the mirror of that praise, he turned back to Rhaenyra, voice thinning to reason. “Still… still, perhaps it was ill-advised. Yes. We’ll say that. Ill-advised, not wicked. Let that be enough.”

Viserys sighed, the sound thin, threadbare. He reached toward her, the old affection trembling in his gesture.

“My fiery Rhaenyra,” he labeled, weary and fond, as if naming her temper could tame it.

Her eyes softened for a single, fleeting instant, not in forgiveness, but in mourning.

Then she stepped back, the distance between them absolute. “Don’t let this harden you. You cannot rule through wrath. You must rule through mercy.”

“This was not wrath." she said evenly, "It is the punishment for thieves. And those hands sought to steal my firstborn’s birthright, his very credibility, under your very roof.”

The chamber held its breath.

Viserys’s mouth trembled into something meant to soothe, a fragile smile shaped by denial. “Your anger blinds you—”

“Your mercy,” she said, “asks me to swallow blasphemy so your peace may stand.”

Viserys’s mouth worked soundlessly.

His fingers tightened around the cup until the wine trembled and spilled down his wrist, thin and red as a wound.

“You would let them call me unclean,” she continued, her voice measured as judgment itself, “so long as they call you merciful.”

He shut his eyes briefly, pained. “You twist my meaning.”

“No,” she said, “I simply refuse to forget it.”

Viserys sighed, old and small in his furs. “The gods will forgive,” he muttered, as if to himself. “They must.”

“The gods saw,” Rhaenyra said, and rose. "You see it."

He looked at her then, the daughter he’d once carried on his shoulders to watch the dragons wheel above the Keep, and for a heartbeat, he seemed to see her not as a princess but as the consequence of every silence he had ever allowed.

“My fiery Rhaenyra,” he tried again, softer, pleading now. “You are my heart. Don’t let the realm make a stranger of you.”

Her eyes softened, not in forgiveness, but in mourning.

“Keep your mercy, Father,” she said. “It buys you peace at the cost of my children.”

She turned before he could answer.

Her footsteps whispered across the stone, fading as the door closed behind her.

When the silence returned, it was not peace that lingered, but the echo of something sanctified—

—the Faith’s insult, gilded now by royal indulgence.

---

The royal sept kept its own weather.

Even with the Keep kept warm as a summer hive, hearths always lit, the chapel breathed cold. Above, the colored glass made a drowned daylight, green poured over gold, a wine of light that stained everything it touched.

Alicent knelt before the Mother.

Marble hands opened over her like a promise that never learned how to keep itself.

She laced her fingers together, then unlaced them, then pressed them flat upon the lip of the altar until her bones said enough. The seven-pointed star at her throat bit clean crescents into her skin.

“Mother of mercy,” she said, and her own voice startled her, too loud in the hush, too small for the height of the dome. “Look on Your daughter.”

Silence received her.

Stone received everything.

“I have failed in gentleness,” she continued, because the words must be named or they would curdle in her, “and failed in wisdom, and I will not lie in Your house. I am angry.”

The word rang and seemed to keep ringing.

She set her palms together again, thumbs touching the seam of her mouth.

“I am angry,” she repeated, lower, steadier, “that cruelty can clothe itself in quiet and be praised as justice. I am angry that a mother’s terror—” her voice thinned, caught, “—that my terror is counted as sin while another’s wrath is made a crown.”

The echo bled into silence.

And from that silence, the old memory crept, uninvited, perfect in its cruelty.

Six years old, small enough that her knees barely fit the prayer stool, her hair still the color of old honey instead of strawberries.

She had asked why the Seven needed so many faces when one ought to suffice.

A willful question, not shouted, just spoken with the bare confidence of a clever child.

The Septas had drawn breath as one.

Her father’s voice. Measured, fond in public, careful even in anger, had said, “A lesson, then.”

The switch sang through the air.

Once. Twice. Seven times, for blasphemy against the Seven's mystery.

After the third she had stopped crying; after the fifth she had stopped breathing between blows. When it ended, he’d knelt beside her, smoothed her hair with the same hand that had given the order, and whispered that such discipline was mercy.

That pain was love in its purest form, correction as care.

The Septas had called it holy tempering.

And she had learned to fold her hands properly that day.

Now, kneeling before the same faceless mercy, she thought: If Rhaenyra had ever been taught by loving hands, the realm would sleep easier.

She could see it, Rhaenyra.

Spoiled in red velvet, untouched by the rod or rule.

A girl who mistook her own desire for destiny.

Who believed rebellion was a birthright.

Who would, if pressed, put her children’s lives to sword and flame for the sake of a throne.

Alicent’s fingers tightened, nails biting her palm.

One knock.

Then, Allyne had been there. Wrapped in linen that was already brown where the blood had soaked through.

Her eyes wide and milk-blue with shock, her lips trying to smile because queens deserved smiles, even from ruin.

The girl had tried to curtsy, poor thing, and the wet bandages had brushed against her skirts.

“Your Grace,” Allyne had said, voice thin as spider thread. “The Princess sends me...to serve.”

Serve.

A word so clean it almost made her laugh.

She had thought she knew the shape of punishment.

Perhaps that was why she’d sent the girl away again so quickly, with her careful, quavering steps, because mercy, when met too late, turns to nausea.

A small, untidy breath escaped her.

She bit it back and smoothed her skirt.

“Mother,” she said, and this time the word was almost a plea, “I meant devotion.”

The syllables were soft as dust. They sounded young.

She hated that.

“I meant… I meant to ask for favor on a child I did not bear but must live beside. I meant to guard the peace. For him, for them, for the realm that watches every cradle.” She swallowed. The incense flashed bitter in the back of her throat. “Was it trespass to pray twice? Was it pride to fear that one anointing might not silence the mouths that would call them… unclean?”

The stone did not answer.

The glass made a bruise of green across her hands.

She unclasped her star, held it in her palm.

It looked heavier off the chain.

“Teach me the difference,” she said, clearly now, almost fiercely. “Between zeal and vanity. Between love and the need to be seen loving. If I sinned, let me bring the right tithe to it. If I did not sin…” The words faltered, then found new ground, quieter. “If I did not sin, then strengthen my knees when I stand next to blood that thinks itself holy by its own heat.”

Somewhere in the vastness a candle popped, spitting a spark that died before she could look at it.

The sound called up another room, another fire.

Among so many. 

A long-ago evening when she and Rhaenyra had been girls in the Queen’s solar, arguing over some childish cruelty: a ribbon stolen, a page torn from a book, a remark about dragons and who was or wasn’t meant to ride them.

Rhaenyra had shouted, tears bright and proud, as though even at seven she could not imagine being wrong.

Alicent had shouted back until her throat hurt, until her voice went thin and trembling with the effort to match that fire.

And Aemma, gentle, scented of milk and lavender. Had drawn them both close.

One hand on each girl’s hair.

“Hush now,” she had said, smiling as if the world could still be mended with patience. “Two hearts can burn without meaning to burn each other.”

Rhaenyra had crumpled at once, as she always did with her mother. Her anger folded like cloth in warm hands. She’d buried her face in Aemma’s skirts, murmuring apologies; by the time she’d looked up again, she was laughing through her tears, forgiven and whole.

Alicent remembered watching, aching with something she hadn’t known to name. 

Aemma had turned to her then, brushing a stray curl from her cheek. “You are a good girl, Alicent,” she’d said softly. “Don’t let the world make you hard for wanting to be right.”

Aemma’s lap had been the first place she learned what gentleness felt like without fear behind it.

If Aemma had lived, perhaps all of it, her fear, her piety, even this ache for righteousness...might have taken another shape.

Rhaenyra might still have laughed like that, face wet and radiant, and Alicent might have been allowed to stay kind.

Alicent’s stomach turned.

She pressed her star harder into her palm until the sting gave the thought a wall to break on.

“I will not say she deserved it,” she said, and the vow felt like a thread she could hold. “I will not say it in Your house, even if they say it in theirs. I will not be that kind of queen.”

Her breath steadied.

She let it.

She knew what her face looked like when she mastered a tremor; she had practiced the expression until it wore as easily as a veil.

It was a skill and a shield and a sin, and sometimes the only way to speak without breaking.

“Grant me,” she said, choosing each word with care, “not triumph, but endurance. Not righteousness, but rightness. Let me be small where smallness is mercy, and sharp where sharpness is required.”

Her throat burned. She lifted her chin anyway and looked up at the Mother’s carved mouth, serene, unbitten by any human word.

“Do You love me?” she asked, and hated the need in it, and said it again because the need didn’t care. “Do You?”

The colored light moved as a cloud must have crossed the sun. The lips of stone did not move. But the green deepened, and for an instant the gold above her looked like old honey, and she could nearly believe in answers.

“If You love me,” she said, softer, “do not let my faith be used to drown me.”

The petition fell, unhoused and honest. She let it stand.

And in that stillness, her thoughts turned, as they always did, to her.

Rhaenyra.

Once a girl in sunlight, hair bright as flame and temper to match.

Once sweet enough to giggle in her lap over embroidery gone wrong, to braid Alicent’s hair with clumsy fingers while Aemma laughed at them both.

Now a creature of smoke and rumor.

A woman who let her uncle whisper poison into her blood.

Alicent’s mouth thinned. She had seen the change happen, as one watches the tide pull the shoreline grain by grain. The loosened laughter, the careless eyes, the small cruelties she no longer bothered to hide. It was not the gods who had turned her wild, it was him. Daemon, with his serpent tongue and his disdain for law, his gods older than decency, his hands unclean with the rites of Valyria.

“Mother,” she whispered, pressing a hand to her breast, “keep my children far from such rot.”

“If You cannot cleanse her, then shield them from what she has become. Do not let my sons grow to love sin wrapped in charm, or my daughter believe rebellion is beauty.”

Her eyes lifted to the altar flame; it guttered once, as if acknowledging the wish.

“I love my children,” Alicent said, and this time the admission broke through her composure. “I love them more than I fear judgment. More than anything this world offers. If You are merciful, make me fierce enough to keep them safe.”

She reached for the little crystal cruet at the altar’s edge and unstoppered it.

The oil inside was clean and sweet, olibanum and something faintly floral, memory of weddings and winter-beds.

She touched a drop to each temple, to each eyelid, to the hollow at her throat. The cool slickness made her shiver.

“For my eyes,” she murmured, “to see where malice dresses itself as ministry.”

A drop to her lips.

“For my speech, to stay within obedience without making a god of silence.”

A drop over her heart.

“For my heart, to be an instrument and not an idol.”

She capped the cruet and set it back in its groove. Her hands smelled like a better country.

“I know what they say of me,” she said, and it felt good to say it where nothing could contradict her. “Pious, petty, prim. I know how easily piety becomes theatre in a court that loves a stage. I will not—” she paused, let her breath settle— “I will not let performance swallow purpose.”

The words calmed her more than any silence could.

“Strength to bear,” she said. “Wisdom to choose. Mercy that is not permission. And if a crown of thorns is what You send, teach me where to press it so the blood is mine and not my children’s.”

She rose not in a rush, but as one stands from childbirth, slowly, her hands braced against the altar’s edge.

The movement drew a quiet groan from the stone and from her own ribs alike.

Beneath her gown, the swell of her belly strained against the silk, heavy as an oath. The child shifted within, answering her effort with a flutter that felt like rebuke and benediction both.

She steadied herself, one palm pressed to the small of her back, the other cradling the curve beneath her heart.

The gesture was instinct, devotion, defiance.

“I know,” she whispered to the life inside her. “You grow weary of my praying. But what else is left to give you, little one, except the sound of your mother begging Heaven to be kind?”

She fastened the star back around her throat.

The points kissed the place the oil had marked.

A soft shuffle broke the stillness behind her, small boots on stone, the hesitant rhythm of a child trying not to be caught.

“Aemond,” she said without turning, her voice low, amused despite the ache.

He froze mid-step, his little hands clutching the wooden dragon he never went without. Its paint was chipped at the wings, one eye scratched into missing, but he held it as though it breathed.

“Mother,” he said softly, as if afraid he had stepped into the wrong world.

“You should be with your tutor.”

“I was quiet,” he said quickly. “I didn’t want to disturb the Mother.”

Alicent smiled faintly, despite the ache in her back. “And yet you did, my heart. She hears all footsteps, even small ones.”

“What did you ask Her for?”

Alicent looked down at him, his pale hair fallen into his eyes, his little mouth set already in its stubborn shape. “Mercy,” she said. “For all of us.”

He nodded as if that could be carried in pockets. “Will She give it?”

She wanted to say yes.

She wanted to lie as gently as Aemma once had. But the truth hung between them like incense smoke, impossible to grasp, impossible to swallow.

Instead she reached out, her hand finding his cheek, warm and soft beneath her palm. He leaned into the touch as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

Without thought, she turned toward the cruet on the altar, her fingers dipping into the oil that still glowed faintly gold in the candlelight.

“Hold still,” she whispered, voice low, intimate, trembling with tenderness.

She brushed her thumb over his brow. The oil caught the light, a thin sheen that shimmered as the flame wavered.

“For courage,” she said softly. “For sight. For the strength to be gentle when the world tells you not to be.”

Aemond stilled beneath her hand, lips parted, the wooden dragon pressed against his chest like a relic.

The oil gleamed, clean, holy, alive.

The scent of myrrh and honey thickened around them.

And for one breath, it was as though the world had folded inward, the same ritual, the same blessing, but from love, not decree.

Her touch was not command, nor politics, nor fear. It was the ache of a mother who wanted the gods to spare her child from all she had already endured.

Alicent’s heart trembled.

She thought of the girl, her wrists bound in linen, the sin of a second anointing carved into her flesh.

How Rhaenyra’s wrath had burned through the chapel as if to purify it.

And yet here she stood, her own fingers slick with oil, blessing her son with the same instinct she had once condemned.

A quiet horror bloomed behind her ribs, not sharp, but sorrowful, blooming like bruises beneath silk.

Was this, too, defilement?

Or had the Faith been wrong all along...had love itself been the first sacrament, and all else imitation?

She pressed another drop to his lips, the gesture unconscious, the old rhythm of devotion she had known since childhood. “For truth,” she whispered. 

Aemond’s eyes widened. “It’s warm,” he whispered, awed. “It feels like she heard you.”

Alicent’s breath hitched. She drew him close, pressing his head against her breast, the star at her throat glinting as it brushed his hair.

“Yes,” she said, her voice breaking. “She heard.”

Not a prayer, not blasphemy.

Something older.

A love so desperate it could make even heretical hands holy.

Chapter 9: How to Burn

The hour was deep, too late for courtiers, too still for gossip.

Rhaenyra sat by the open window, her robe a dark crimson that caught the firelight like blood through glass.

Beyond her, three cradles rocked in the gentlest rhythm.

Her gaze never left them.

She counted each exhale, each small twitch, each fragile gasp as though her very heart were strung to theirs by silken thread. The sound of their breathing became her prayer, her pulse, her proof that the gods had not lied.

When one stirred, she leaned forward, breath caught. The cords in her neck drawn tight until the child stilled again.

Only then did she allow herself air. 

These three were what tethered her to the earth.

Everything else was smoke.

The sound came softly at first, stone shifting against stone.

A shadow slipping from behind the tapestry.

Rhaenyra didn’t think, she moved.

The dagger flashed upward, her breath tearing from her chest as instinct took her.

The next sound was brutal and close: the clap of flesh on steel, the hiss of air between clenched teeth.

Daemon’s hand shot out, seizing her wrist mid-swing.

The collision was hard enough to jar her elbow, send a jolt through her shoulder.

The blade stopped a hair’s breadth from his throat, the edge quivering in the narrow space between their bodies.

Her pulse roared.

His fingers were iron around her wrist, not cruel, but immovable. The grip of someone who had done this a thousand times and never flinched.

The dagger trembled between them, her breath shallow and ragged, his steady and close. 

When he spoke, his was low and infuriatingly calm.

“Easy, niece.”

Her eyes darted upward, that grin, that glint, the familiar ruin of him half-hidden in shadow.

Daemon.

Her knees nearly gave beneath her.

Anger rushed in to fill the void where fear had been.

“You—” she gasped, words shaking apart.

His smile deepened. Wicked and pleased.

“So quick to draw steel,” he crooned, breath grazing her cheek. “I’d almost forgotten how sharp you bite when cornered.”

The fire crackled between them, but neither stepped back.

His thumb dragged once along the inside of her wrist, slow, deliberate, a reminder of whose grip had stopped her.

“The dagger I gave you,” he said softly. “Still faithful after all these years.”

Rhaenyra’s breath trembled, fury warring with the leftover terror.

“You armed me,” she said, voice tight. “Did you think I’d never use it?”

Daemon’s smile cut sharper, a flash of teeth in the half-light. “Not against me.”

Rhaenyra did not rise to his baiting.

She forced her hand to lower, the blade catching one last gleam of firelight before she let it fall to her side.

Her gaze drifted back to the cradles, to the small, steady rise and fall beneath silk. The sight steadied her. The babes slept on, untouched by the storm that had entered their mother’s chambers.

“You should not be here,” she said finally, her voice low but iron-tight.

Daemon’s mouth curved, the ghost of a smile that never reached his eyes. 

“And yet,” he rasped, stepping further into the glow, “here I am.”

“Old habits,” she said at last, the words soft but barbed. Her tone bore the weary grace of someone who has outgrown the game, yet still remembers how to play it. “You always did tread where the floor had not been laid for you.”

“Not so,” he breathed, moving nearer, boots whispering against the stone. “Once, you would have opened the door yourself.”

Rhaenyra’s gaze flicked toward the dagger still clutched in her hand. With deliberate calm, she set it down upon the table beside the brazier.

Not away.

Just down.

The metal rang softly against the stone.

“Once, I was young,” she said, turning toward him, the candlelight catching on the edge of her cheek.

He smiled faintly.

“You are still young, Zaldrītsos,” he said, the Valyrian curling from his tongue like smoke. “But changed.”

His eyes moved over her slowly.

The faint hollows of her collarbones glimmered in the firelight, the delicate play of shadow and gold drawing the violet in her eye as surely as a lure. When she shifted, the silk of her robe whispered against her thighs, the sound delicate and treacherous in the quiet. The edge slipped from one shoulder, and firelight poured down the exposed curve like a lover’s hand. 

Her pulse throbbed at the hollow of her throat; the gentle lift of her breasts caught the glow with every breath. There was no haste in her movements, only the languid certainty of a woman who knew what her body could do, what it had already done.

He could not look away.

“I nearly died,” she said, her tone soft but cutting, the shadow of memory flickering across her face. “That changes one.”

He found no answer to that but the old, frightened boy inside his ribs.

When he had come to her chamber on the fifth day of her labors, he had not come to see life.

He had come expecting to witness the ending of one.

The raven had reached Pentos at dusk.

It should never have made the crossing.

The maester had known that when he loosed it into the wind, praying to every god that wings and luck would hold. For the king was desperate for his kin. 

And still, by some cruel mercy, it reached Pentos, feathers tattered, eyes filmed.

The message was barely legible, the ink blurred.

Daemon had read it twice, though once was enough. 

He’d gone to Caraxes like a man half-mad. The dragon had sensed it at once, the way beasts of old blood do, his temper coiling with his rider’s grief. The sky had opened before them, storm-dark and wild. He pressed Caraxes until the dragon’s wings screamed, until sea spray salted his face and his eyes burned raw from wind and fear.

Laena rode Vhagar behind him, though he could barely make out her monstrous form through the rain and distance.

Once, she had called to him, his name flung into the wind.

Laena’s jaw was set, her hands steady on the reins, but her eyes...gods, her eyes...had gone quiet. 

He was shamed by it.

By how easily she saw him undone, by how she did not curse or cry or call him back. And enraged too, though he could not tell at what.

At her silence. At himself.

He urged Caraxes harder, as if speed alone could drown the feeling. 

He could not abide the thought of Rhaenyra dying without him. Of her fire going out where he could not see it.

By the time Kingslanding rose from the sea, they barred him from her chamber. 

Daemon had waited in the corridor, breathless, hands torn and blood-soaked from the flight, listening.

Her screams rose and broke and rose again, hoarse and ragged, raw enough to flay the heart. There was fury in them, and fear, and some terrible refusal...the refusal to yield, to die, to let go. Each one shook the stone beneath his boots.

It was the sound of fire meeting flesh, of a dragon trying to tear its own heart free.

He had pressed a bloodied hand against the door.

Somewhere inside that storm of sound, he could hear the maesters shouting, the women praying, the splintering sob of metal basins.

He blinked hard and the fire blurred. 

He forced his gaze away, to the small babes gathered at her side. 

Three swaddled shapes.

Each with a different music to their breathing.

He had known Rhaenyra as girl and niece and Princess of the realm; he had known the set of her jaw before she demanded something, the curve of her smile when his spoiled niece got exactly what she wanted.

He had not known her like this. 

“Motherhood has burned you anew,” he said at last. “Not tempered you...no. You burn hotter now. A more pointed flame.”

One of the infants, Aenar, the stubborn tide, freed his hand entirely and groped toward the warmth of Rhaenyra’s side.

She shifted, instinct without thought, guiding that small questing fist to her. A quiet hum leaving her throat that he felt more than heard. 

Daemon reached, halted, then looked to her.

At her nod, barely more than a breath, he let his forefinger rest against Aenar’s palm.

The tiny hand closed as if claiming a promise. A leash on a dragon, he thought absurdly, and his mouth burned with a laugh he did not let out.

“Perfect,” he said, but the word was too small and far too mortal for what lay before him. He tried again, voice low, rough where fear had abraded it. “They are… the gods held no blessings back.”

Perfect as they are, he thought (Aemon, Aenar, Aemma), if the Stranger had set a scale: her breath on one side, all this hope on the other...he would have upended the table before letting the weight of his blood cost her.

He would have hurled crowns, lineages, every hungry mouth of the realm into the sea if it meant she opened her eyes again and looked at him as she did now. 

The boy’s fingers tightened, a dragonet’s grip, and Daemon let the small feeling anchor him.

He bowed his head until his hair brushed the blanket, until he breathed the scent of her sons and daughter.

That thin bright scent of beginning.

“Of course they are perfect,” Rhaenyra said, her voice quiet but carrying. “They may as well carry golden blood.”

And he could not deny her.

The children did glow, as if the gods had painted their veins with molten light. 

Valyria marked every inch of them, every breath a quiet inheritance.

“They are the Realm’s hope made flesh,” he said, and meant it.

But she did not look softened by the praise. Her gaze sharpened instead, the set of her jaw a memory of every slight she had ever endured.

“Hope,” she repeated. “You speak of hope now, when you came not for it but to stand at my pyre.”

The words struck before he could brace for them. “Rhaenyra—”

“No,” she said, her tone iron-wrapped silk. “You left, Daemon. You always leave.”

Her voice broke, not from weakness, but from the strain of keeping herself upright under the weight of it. “And when you thought I would die, you came flying like a vulture... to pick through what might remain. My name. My babes. Whatever could still be yours to claim.”

The anger came, sharp and alive, filling the hollow she’d carved into him. “You think I came for spoils?”

“I think you came for what men always come for,” she said, voice low, trembling not from fear but fury long kept banked. “Power. Proximity. The comfort of telling yourself you cared, once the caring cost you nothing.”

He moved before he could think, two steps closer, the heat of him breaking the space between them.

“Do not mistake me for those milk-blooded courtiers you pity and despise,” he said, soft but dangerous. “I did not cross half the world to grasp at your bones.”

Her chin lifted, defiant. “What stopped you, Kepus? The same mercy that stopped you that night in the brothel, when my hand was still my own to choose and you thought to play executioner and lover both?”

Daemon’s mouth hardened. For a heartbeat, the fire threw both their shadows against the wall, hers crowned in gold, his dark and sprawling, winged.

“You do not know what you speak of,” he said.

“I know exactly what I speak of,” she returned. “You wanted to ruin me then. Now you pretend you came to save me. Tell me, Daemon...what difference is there between the two?”

Aemma stirred.

It was not a cry, but a small, contented coo, a sound so tender it seemed to hush even the fire.

Both their gazes broke from battle and found her.

Her lids fluttered open. 

The tiny dragonling curled beside her shifted too, the pale-gold of its scales catching the light as it nosed against her swaddling. 

Rhaenyra’s anger faltered. Daemon’s did too. 

“I was a fool then,” he said. “You think I meant to wound you? No. It was Viserys I sought to strike...his precious peace, his order, his claim to mastery over every wild thing in his reach. I wanted him to see what he had made of me.”

His gaze flicked to the embers, to the shimmer of gold along her sleeves, to the sleeping babes who looked nothing like vengeance. “And I wanted him to know that you were not his to barter. That no man’s word, not even a king’s, could name what a dragoness may take or refuse.”

Rhaenyra let out a bitter laugh, soft and serrated. “And so you used me to make your point.”

He flinched, the truth striking home more keenly than any blade.

“I did not—”

“You did,” she cut in, quiet but merciless. “You made a stage of me, Daemon.”

He drew a slow breath, his jaw tightening until it trembled.

“Yes,” he said finally, the word breaking like old iron. “I watched as it all happened. Because I could not look away.”

She turned toward him fully now, the golden light tracing the lines of her face.

“Do you regret it?” she asked at last, the words quiet but carrying like a blade in the dark. “All of it.”

Daemon’s answer came rough, torn from somewhere far deeper than pride. “Every day since,” he said. But his eyes had already drifted from her face....drawn, helpless, to what lay between them.

The babes.

The Realm would call them Velaryon. Sons and daughter of Laenor.

But Daemon could not look upon them and see anything so simple.

All he could think, the thought so raw it scalded him, was they should have been mine.

Aemon with his solemn stillness; Aenar with his restless flame; Aemma, whose eyes had opened like dawn itself.

They should have been his.

Born of her body, his fire.

Warmed in his arms, fed from her breast while his name wrapped around them like armor. He envied Laenor, his sanctioned place beside her through those long months when her belly grew round. 

Rhaenyra’s gaze followed his, and something in her expression shifted. 

“You would have claimed them,” she said, almost gently. “Even then.”

His jaw clenched. “I would have claimed you.”

The fire snapped softly, its glow breathing against the cradle of gold and silk that held her babes.

Her gaze hardened again, not cruelly, but with the clear-eyed strength of a woman who has borne pain and lived.

“And yet,” she breathed, “soon enough you will have babes of your own.”

The words were not accusation at first, only truth.

“Laena carries.” 

Daemon’s breath hitched, though his expression barely shifted. He could not tell if it was shame or habit that made him glance toward the door, as though distance might spare him.

“Yes,” he said at last. “She does.”

Rhaenyra nodded, gaze falling again to her sleeping children. “Then you’ll know what it is to wait for their cries,” she said softly. “To feel them kick and twist and burn your body from the inside out until you almost forget where you end and they begin.”

He swallowed, the air thickening between them.

“But,” she went on, her tone breaking, not sharp this time, but splintered, aching, “they won’t be ours, will they?”

Daemon’s eyes found hers again.

There was no pretense left in him.

No armor, no smirk, no clever cruelty.

Only the rawness of a man realizing he would live to watch the life he’d once wanted unfold without him.

“No,” he said finally, his voice roughened to ash. “They won’t.”

Rhaenyra’s lips parted as if to speak again, but nothing came. 

Daemon’s chest hitched once, then again, a cough tore through him, dry, ragged, a sound that didn’t belong to the man he’d once been.

He pressed a fist to his mouth, breath shuddering as if the air itself burned to take him. When he looked back at her, his eyes were distant, glassed with exhaustion and something darker still.

“It’s done,” he said abruptly, the words cracking the silence like a blade drawn from its sheath. “The six who betrayed you.”

Her gaze cut toward him, steady and cool. “You carried out my order?”

“I did.” 

Rhaenyra’s shoulders loosened, but it was not peace that settled there. It was the kind of calm born after thunder, the quiet that follows when all the cries have been silenced.

“Good,” she whispered. “They whispered treason while I screamed to bring their future into this world. Let their blood serve as warning. Let the crows sing of it.”

Daemon watched her, the cold composure, the faint tremor of fatigue beneath it, the quiet conviction that only mothers and monarchs ever mastered. He thought there was nothing in the world more beautiful than this: her fury, sharpened into protection.

“You are merciless,” he said softly, and it was not reproach.

“I am a mother,” she replied.

Daemon’s lips twitched, not in mockery, but admiration that bordered on awe. “You ordered death for six souls without flinching.”

“I would order death for six hundred if it meant my babes would wake each morning unafraid,” she said, her tone calm and certain.

He looked down at them, the three small proofs of her defiance, bathed in the soft gold of the hearth, and something inside him shifted, not quite pride, not quite love, but something older and deeper.

“The realm had best remember who you are.”

Rhaenyra’s lips curved, not in gratitude, but in something far sharper. “Let them burn with it,” she said. “All who can still see me.”

Daemon shifted a little nearer, the movement almost unconscious. 

“For there are some,” she went on, voice tightening, “who would rather go blind than look upon what I have made. My father sits a King, yet turns his gaze away when the realm whispers of my children, his grandchildren.”

Another step; the faint scrape of his boot over stone.

Close enough now that she could feel the heat of him at her back.

“Peace bought with insult. Peace bought with silence. Tell me, Daemon, what mother bows her head to that?”

Daemon watched her, a half-smile ghosting across his mouth, not mockery, but marvel. “You speak of the Fourteen,” he said, low and dangerous, “and cut the hands from a girl who dared touch your firstborn. The septons already whisper. They will call you heretic, dragon-queen, unholy mother.”

Rhaenyra’s laugh was quiet, but it shook him.

“Let them,” she said. “The Faith prays to their Mother while denying her wrath. I have merely given it shape.”

She moved closer to the window, but he followed, the air between them narrowing to a single shared breath.

Moonlight traced the curve of her throat; he could smell the salt of her skin, the faint sweetness of milk.

“The Fourteen are not distant stars to me, Daemon. I have seen their faces in flame. They do not demand piety.”

He was beside her now, his voice a rasp just behind her ear.

“Neither do I.”

The words hung there, heat and vow in the same breath.

When she turned her head, his mouth was already a whisper away. 

“Cousin.”

The single word fell like frost.

Daemon froze, the faint curl of breath between them vanished.

Rhaenys stood in the doorway, the torchlight catching in the silver-white of her hair.

“I see,” she said, each syllable deliberate, shaped by centuries of breeding and battle alike, “that restraint remains a stranger in this house.”

Authority rolled from her like tide from a cliff, ancient and inevitable. 

Daemon’s jaw worked once before he could master himself. Rhaenyra’s pulse fluttered at her throat, defiant and shamed all at once.

Rhaenys’s eyes flicked between them

One heartbeat, two, and the silence that followed burned hotter than any kiss denied.

“Leave us,” she said finally. 

It was not a request.

He hesitated, a mistake.

Rhaenys’s gaze lifted to meet his, and for a heartbeat he saw not the woman who had once smiled at his jests, but the blood of the Red Queen herself.

“Now.”

Daemon inclined his head slowly.

The door shut behind him with a sound that echoed like judgment.

When they were alone, Rhaenys stepped forward. 

Rhaenyra did not move.

Rhaenys’s eyes took her in, the flushed skin, the unsteady breath, the quickened pulse that betrayed everything the princess might have wished hidden.

“You play at fire,” Rhaenys said quietly, “and forget what it costs to burn.”

Her voice carried the weight of storms and memory.

“Tell me, good-daughter,” Rhaenys gave, her tone low and terrible, as though she spoke not only as woman but as wrath made flesh, “do you think the realm will forgive what it already suspects? Or must I be the one to remind you that dragons are not immune to ruin?”

“I—”

The word caught, thin and trembling.

Rhaenys did not let her finish.

"Your babes lie before you,” Rhaenys said, voice low as storm-tide. “And you would set their cradle aflame, for one heartbeat’s pleasure."

Rhaenyra’s head snapped up.

“Do not speak of them,” she said sharply. “I would never—”

Her voice broke against the force of her own breath.

She turned toward the cradles as if to shield them, as if her body alone could keep the world’s malice at bay. “I would never endanger my children.”

Rhaenys watched her, unflinching, the way an older dragon might watch a hatchling breathe flame for the first time.

“Not by intent,” Rhaenys said softly. “But the realm does not care for intent. It cares for weakness, and it devours it whole.”

Rhaenyra’s hands had clenched at her sides.

Her eyes were bright, wounded, furious.

“They are mine,” she whispered, the words jumping between vow and plea. “I would burn the realm before I let it touch them.”

For the first time, Rhaenys’s gaze flickered, with something almost like pity.

“Yes,” she let the words taste of smoke. “So would I.”

They held each other’s gaze, neither yielding.

“You think your enemies wear only crowns and crests,” she said quietly. “But you are fighting something older than any man at court.”

Rhaenyra’s brow furrowed, her breath still uneven.

Rhaenys stepped closer, her shadow spilling across the cradle like a tide. “I came because you are waging war on tradition itself. On the Andals and their heritage.”

Her voice darkened, gathering force. “Every whisper that ever said a woman’s hands were made for cradles, not for crowns… every prayer that praised a mother’s patience while caging her fire...you are breaking them. Every breath you take as heir is rebellion.”

The torchlight trembled between them.

“Do you know what that means?” Rhaenys went on, her tone now softer. “It means you stand against a thousand years of men who built their thrones upon the backs of women and called it order. You defy the Faith that would sooner bow before your Hightower brother. You defy the very language they use to name you. Princess, wife, mother. When what you are, what you could be, is dragon.”

The words struck like truth long denied.

Rhaenyra’s lips parted, but no sound came. Something in her face shifted. Grief, pride, terror, all at once, as if she had glimpsed the size of the thing she was meant to bear and found it monstrous.

Rhaenys did not look away. 

Forcing Rhaenyra to confront her meaning. 

“You fight not only for a crown, Rhaenyra,” she said, her voice low as thunder rolling beneath stone, “but for every woman who has ever been told to bow.”

She stepped closer until the space between them was little more than breath and firelight.

“And you,” she continued, her tone softening into something far more dangerous, “are woefully unprepared for it.”

The silence that followed was sharp enough to draw blood. One of the babes stirred, a faint whimper like a ghost of what the world might one day demand of them.

Rhaenyra’s jaw tightened.

“I am trying,” she said, the words breaking with the strain of them. “You think I do not know what I face? The ledger lies by their cradles. Every witness sworn. Archmaester Vaegon from the Citadel, Septa Rhaella installed in my own household. Every breath of mine measured, every act recorded. Proof that my babes are mine, that they are true.”

Her voice had risen, trembling between fury and exhaustion. “What more would you have me do, Rhaenys? Drown myself to quiet their tongues?”

Rhaenys’s expression did not change, but her eyes darkened. “You also cut a girl’s hands off.”

The words landed like a slap.

Rhaenyra’s spine went rigid.

“She touched my son,” she said, sharp, unrepentant. “She reached into his cradle and laid her hands upon him as though he were some curiosity at market. I warned them all, I will not have my babes touched again.”

Rhaenys regarded her for a long moment, neither condemning nor condoning. “And if you had done nothing,” she said quietly, “the Faith would have whispered that your eldest was unclean. That you lacked even the decency to guard his sanctity.”

Her gaze dropped briefly to the cradle, to the soft rustle within. “But by acting, you’ve given them their martyr. There is no victory in such choices, only the illusion of one.”

Rhaenyra’s mouth twisted into something caught between a laugh and a sob. “Then what would you have me do, good-mother?” she asked, the title bitten through with sarcasm. “Pray louder? Smile sweeter?”

Rhaenys did not answer at once.

The fire cracked softly, as if reluctant to break the silence between them.

When she finally spoke, it was with the even cadence of command, not counsel.

“First,” she said, “your household. Only now have you conducted a proper search of it. Only now do you monitor who you employ. You have a pitiful number of ladies to serve you, and with the ousting of seven unloyal members, you are left with gaps a viper could slip through unseen.”

Rhaenyra’s lips parted, but Rhaenys pressed on.

“Fill them,” she said sharply. “With those whose loyalty is proven by blood, debt, or fear...whichever binds tighter. No more gentle charity. You are heir to the Iron Throne, not a foster-mother to strays.”

Rhaenyra flinched at the steel in her tone, but Rhaenys did not relent.

“Second,” she continued, “your coffers. You have three crowns your father gifted you: Alysanne’s, Aemma’s, Alyssa’s, and yet they still sit untouched in the Crown's coffers. All your babes’ gifts, every ounce of gold and dragonbone and pearl, lie here unguarded. Send them to Dragonstone. Have them protected there, by your hand, and yours alone.”

Rhaenys’s gaze sharpened, a glint of something fierce and almost fond. “Do not let the realm’s vultures know the scent of your wealth, Rhaenyra. Let them starve on rumor.”

She paused then, the next words measured.

“Third: Dragonstone itself. Your seat lies unguarded. The king will not permit you to dwell there long, not while your babes are still at nurse. But your holdfast must not stand empty. Send Daemon and Laena. Let them oversee its defenses, carry your treasures home, and—” her eyes flicked upward, deliberate “—grant the court less to whisper of.”

Rhaenyra drew in a slow, tight breath, but said nothing.

“And last,” Rhaenys said quietly, “your mind. You have secured learning for your babes, Archmaester Vaegon and Septa Rhaella, fine choices both. But you, Rhaenyra, will join them. Your education is lacking.”

Rhaenyra stiffened. “You would have me sit among my own children’s lessons?”

“I would have you learn to rule before you are forced to,” Rhaenys replied. “Vaegon and I have already agreed to begin the heirs’ instruction within the fortnight. You will attend. If you must, with a babe at your breast.”

The princess said nothing, though her cheeks flushed with indignation.

Rhaenys’s gaze softened, though her voice did not. “Do not mistake this for humiliation. The realm already measures you against the dead queens who bore those crowns. Prove you are more than their shadow.”

For a long moment, Rhaenyra said nothing. Her shoulders were drawn tight, every line of her body caught between pride and shame.

“I am not a child,” she said finally, though the words lacked their usual steel.

“No,” Rhaenys replied, her tone unflinching. “You are a woman the realm insists on treating like one. And you have let them.”

The air seemed to thin around her.

Rhaenyra’s jaw trembled, not in rage, but in the dawning realization of how much she had mistaken watchfulness for wisdom.

“I have been lectured all my life,” she said, her voice low, brittle. “By men who spoke of duty as though I should curtsy to it. Even Father...he means to guide me, but he only ever… shelters me.”

Her eyes flicked toward the cradles, the soft rise and fall beneath the linen. “And now you speak of what I should have done...what I should have known...and I find myself…” She swallowed hard. “Gods, I find myself feeling a fool.”

Rhaenys did not rush to comfort her.

The elder woman’s expression softened only by degrees.

“Good,” she said simply. “Fools can learn. The dead cannot.”

Rhaenyra looked up sharply, and in that look was the hurt of youth meeting the clarity of truth.

The heat between them eased, just slightly. Rhaenys’s gaze drifted past Rhaenyra to the cradles, three small bundles breathing in rhythm with the hearth. Her voice, when it came, was quieter, shaped by something more fragile than anger.

“I love them, you know,” she said. “Your babes. They are the only innocence left in this house, and I would see them live to outgrow it.”

Rhaenyra blinked, startled by the sudden gentleness.

Rhaenys’s mouth twitched into something like a smile, though it did not reach her eyes. “I did not come here only to scold you, Rhaenyra. I came with something to give. Two things, in truth."

Rhaenyra’s brows drew together, wary. “Gifts?”

“The first, a girl,” Rhaenys said. “One I mean for you to add to your household. She hails from Oldtown.”

Rhaenyra’s lip curled before she could stop herself. “Oldtown.” The word came out like a taste gone sour. “The Reach breeds spies for the Hightowers as easily as it breeds flowers.”

Rhaenys lifted a hand, silencing her. “This one does not bloom for them. She was raped by a Septon. When the matter came to light, she was to be made to atone for tempting him. Her father, a merchant of modest means, sent her to Driftmark to keep her from a repentant whipping.”

The disgust that crossed Rhaenyra’s face was sharp and unguarded. “And you would bring her here? To court?”

“Yes.” Rhaenys’s tone left no room for question. “Because the Queen will never suspect her. A girl from Oldtown, pious by birth, modest by bearing, it will disarm Alicent’s guard. But beneath it is a girl who will never kneel to the Faith again."

Rhaenyra’s eyes narrowed. “Then why not place her with the Queen? Let her listen at that hearth instead of mine.”

“Because the Queen would scent rebellion on her before the hour was out,” Rhaenys replied. “She will serve you better here. Under your eye. You will use her hand to send the Queen what she expects to hear. Let her act as your mouthpiece. Through her, you will feed Alicent the story you wish told.”

Understanding dawned in Rhaenyra’s face.

“You mean for me to control the narrative,” she exhaled. 

Rhaenys nodded once. “Exactly. The Queen will think herself informed, when she is only being guided.”

Rhaenyra exhaled softly, the beginnings of respect glinting in her gaze. “You are teaching me again.”

Rhaenys allowed herself a small smile, the kind that held both pride and warning. “And you, at last, are learning.”

Rhaenyra gave a slow, reluctant nod. “And the second gift?”

At that, Rhaenys’s expression softened further, almost indulgent. “Clothing,” she said simply. “For you and the babes.”

Rhaenyra blinked. “Clothing?”

“You’ve been seen too often in gowns that whisper duty instead of command,” Rhaenys said. “Plain fabric, tired hems. Even your newer dresses are reworked from Aemma’s old wardrobe, and already slipping out of fashion.”

Rhaenyra’s face flushed.

“I had new garments made,” Rhaenys went on, her voice even but proud. “A full wardrobe, multiple styles, all tailored for you. Red and black, of course. But also Driftmark blue, violet, Arryn blue, colors that speak to your blood, your reach. Even a few in rose and blush, for the rare days softness might serve you better than strength.”

Her eyes flicked toward the corner, where two sea chests waited. “There are gowns for court, for council, for ceremony, and for mourning, should it come. Seamstresses skilled enough to rival the capital’s finest will arrive within the week to take your measurements and those of your babes.”

Rhaenyra looked stricken, and for a moment too long she could not speak.

The dresses she wore were plain by courtly standards, heavy with the weight of her mother’s memory. The newer ones, those she had thought beautiful, were only ghosts, reworked from Aemma’s old silks.

The stitching bore the faint, telltale pull of alteration.

Every seam whispered lack.

Her fingers brushed instinctively at her sleeve, tracing the frayed edge she had once pretended not to see.

“Why?” she asked softly. It wasn’t accusation this time, but something smaller. Raw.

Rhaenys studied her a moment before replying, her tone quiet but firm. “Because the realm already doubts what it sees in you. They call you a girl still mourning her mother. A wife playing at princess. But a Queen must look inevitable, even when she bleeds.”

Rhaenyra’s eyes burned.

Rhaenys took a step closer, her presence filling the space between them like the slow advance of tide. “You have fire enough to burn kingdoms,” she said. “But power unshaped is only smoke. The gowns are armor, cloth that commands the room before your tongue ever does. Let them look at you and see something they cannot unsee.”

The words landed like a benediction, terrible and kind.

Rhaenyra looked down, her hand curling loosely against her bodice. “You see all the ways I’ve been unready.”

Rhaenys’s faint smile held no mockery, only the weary grace of a woman who had once stood in the same fire. “I see what you could yet become,” she said. “And I will not let the realm devour another woman’s crown while I still breathe.”

For a heartbeat, neither spoke. The fire crackled softly; one of the babes stirred, sighing in sleep.

Then Rhaenyra, voice barely above a whisper: “Thank you.”

Rhaenys regarded her for a long, silent moment.

Then she inclined her head, not as elder to youth, but queen to queen in the making.

Rhaenys moved past her suddenly, the sweep of her cloak whispering across the stones.

She came to Rhaenyra’s writing desk and, without ceremony, brushed aside the small scattering of carved toys—a dragon, a horse, a wooden block etched with Valyrian script.

They slid neatly to the corner, the sound of them settling soft but decisive.

“Enough mourning,” Rhaenys said, her voice a calm command. “Enough waiting. If you wish the realm to see you as their future, then you must act as though it already bends to you.”

She turned toward the cradles, her steps steady and sure. The elder woman’s hands, capable of guiding ships and wielding dragons reigns, lowered gently to lift the smaller of the triplets. The babe stirred, mewled once, then quieted as Rhaenys tucked the linen tighter, reshaping the swaddle with deft, practiced fingers.

“There now,” she said, a voice low enough to still storms. “You do not yet know the weight of what your mother carries for you.”

She glanced over her shoulder at Rhaenyra. “I will stay through the night if I must. I will see to them while you write.”

Rhaenyra blinked, startled. “Write?”

“Yes.”

Rhaenys set the child back in the cradle, then drew all three cradles nearer the hearth’s warmth, arranging them beside a rocking chair as though the chamber had always been meant this way, order restored, chaos stilled by care.

She sat, one hand resting lightly on the edge of the cradle, setting it into a slow, rhythmic sway.

“You will take up your quill,” she said, the rhythm of her rocking measured, deliberate, “and write to every house, envoy, and merchant who sent you so much as a ribbon or jar of honey to honor the birth of your babes. You will name each gift—the Dornish glass, the pearls from the Reach, the fabrics from Myr—so they know you have seen them. Gratitude, Rhaenyra, is the gentlest leash for the proud.”

Rhaenyra’s lips parted, her pride warring with comprehension. “Every one of them?”

“Every one,” Rhaenys said, never pausing her motion. “Let none say the Princess forgets generosity. And when you are done, you will pen a second set of letters. One for each of the paramount houses, seeking ladies for your retinue. It will quiet talk and gather eyes loyal to you. Every woman of standing has a niece, a cousin, a daughter ready to serve.”

Her gaze flicked toward her, shrewd and knowing. “I have already chosen two to begin. A Maris Baratheon, and a daughter of Vaemond Velaryon. Names strong enough to silence insult, yet humble enough to learn. But the request must come from you. It must sound like your will, not mine.”

Rhaenyra moved hesitantly toward the desk, setting parchment in place. Her hand hovered over the quill, trembling faintly.

Rhaenys looked down at the babes again, rocking them slow, her voice a calm tide. “All letters must be sent at once. If one house receives its gratitude before another, you’ll have insulted two with a single kindness. They must depart together, by raven and by rider. Do this, and you begin to rule without lifting a sword.”

Rhaenyra lifted her gaze from the blank parchment to the sight of Rhaenys. Silver-haired, serene, one hand swaying the cradle, the other resting on its frame like a queen steadying the world itself.

Rhaenys met her look. “Go on,” she said softly. “Write. I will keep them safe while you learn how.”

Rhaenyra drew in a slow breath and seated herself, the motion deliberate, as though her body might remember what it meant to be still.

Her spine remained straight, her composure intact, or near enough to pass for it.

Yet when she looked up, her gaze softened.

Rhaenys sat beside the cradles, silver hair wreathed in the firelight, three babes swaddled in the hush of her keeping.

The scene seemed almost too tender for this world: the Princess Who Never Was, rocking the heirs of the realm with the same steady grace she might have shown a wounded dragon.

Something in Rhaenyra’s chest tightened.

Affection, yes...but something sharper, too.

Recognition. The ache of seeing what she herself might become, or lose.

She gathered the parchment and quill before her, arranging them with care that bordered on ritual. The candlelight caught the ink’s glinting surface, trembling faintly with her pulse.

Her hand hovered above the page, then stilled.

When she spoke, it was so soft that the crackle of the fire nearly swallowed it. “And if the words I write lack… the weight they should, the grace they need, will you… help guide them?”

The question hung fragile in the air, a thing made of smoke and hope.

Dragons were not meant to ask for help. They were meant to command, to burn, to rule. And yet here she was, a dragon seeking not obedience, but guidance.

Rhaenys lifted her eyes. Silence, a heartbeat. Two.

“You were never meant to do this alone,” she said at last, voice low as tide against driftwood. “No queen ever was. You may carry fire in your blood, but even fire needs tending.”

She looked at Rhaenyra with the same softness she had given the babes; warmth crossed the space like touch.

“Write,” she said again, softer. 

Rhaenyra lowered her gaze; her lashes trembled, then steadied. She dipped the quill. Ink gathered, perfect and dark, at its tip.

Behind her, Rhaenys set the cradles into a slow, shoreward sway. “There now,” she whispered to the smallest, “sleep. Your mother has work to do.”

Rhaenyra touched quill to page. The first letter unfurled, clean and sure.

To the Most Honored Lady Jeyne of House Arryn, and to the Eyrie,

Your swaddlings of sky-blue and white, stitched with the falcon’s thread, were laid upon my children this very night. Their softness gentled their breath and turned the chill of stone to warmth. Even the fire seemed to steady in its grate, as if the Vale itself watched over their sleep.

I think often of you, cousin, of the height and quiet dignity that the Vale teaches its daughters. You have ever stood above the storms that shake lesser souls, and I find in that constancy a mirror of what I must become. The world looks upon us and sees our fathers’ names, yet it is through women like you that those names endure unbroken.

Know that your gift is more than token or courtesy. It is kinship made visible, the strength of sky and mountain lent to cradle dragonfire. The Vale has long been a guardian of my house’s memory; let it also be counted among its defenders.

When the realm measures loyalty, I will set yours upon the scale with my own hand and name it true.

Rhaenyra Targaryen
Crown Princess, Heir to the Iron Throne

The room exhaled. Fire whispered. Three small chests rose and fell in time with the hearth.

Rhaenyra wrote.

---

The hour was the same.

The moon rode high above both towers, one washed in red flame, the other in silver sleep.

In the Queen’s chambers, the fire had burned low to embers, their glow gilding the silks that stirred with every faint breath of wind.

Alicent lay half-reclined against the pillows, the swell of her belly luminous beneath her nightdress, pale and taut as the curve of a pearl. A single candle burned beside her, its flame bending and straightening with her breath.

Viserys sat at her side.

His crown lay forgotten on the table, his hand resting on the rise of her stomach. Beneath his palm, life shifted, slow, insistent, sovereign.

“You will wake the babe,” Alicent said voice soft and drowsy, touched with a smile.

He did not withdraw. “Then the child should learn early who guards his sleep.”

She turned her head, studying him through the veil of her hair. The lamplight softened the lines that rule and grief had carved into his face. “You guard everything,” she said quietly. “Even dreams.”

Viserys’s hand moved, a faint stroke over her skin. “I am an old man clinging to the only kingdom that still answers me,” he said. “The one you carry.”

Her laugh was gentle, almost disbelieving. “You make yourself small to please me.”

“I speak only truth,” he replied. “The Iron Throne obeys no man. But you—” his thumb brushed slow circles against her skin “—you have bent me more than dragons ever could.”

She exhaled, the sound half sigh, half surrender. “Then you are the easier conquest.”

He smiled faintly, eyes half-closed with weariness, and whispered, almost to himself, “Aemma…”

The name slipped out like a prayer half-remembered, too soft to be meant, too intimate to be mistaken. It hung between them, suspended in the candle’s wavering light, delicate as dust caught on a sunbeam.

Alicent stilled. Even the air seemed to hush around her.

For a heartbeat she could not move, could not breathe. The name did not belong in this room, yet it had arrived all the same, uninvited, sacred, ruinous.

Viserys’s eyelids fluttered, realization dawning slow and terrible. His gaze snapped to her, startled, then stricken. “Alicent,” he rasped. “I—”

She did not flinch. Only her eyes changed, widening first, then narrowing into something unreadable, a quietness edged in glass. The smile that had rested on her lips faded, not with anger, but with the fragile care of someone folding a wound in silk.

When she finally spoke, her voice was gentle, but it trembled at the edges. “You needn’t apologize.”

The words were merciful and merciless both.

She looked away, toward the cradle of her belly beneath his hand, the candlelight trembling across her skin. “We all say the names of ghosts when we’re tired,” she said. “Yours simply have louder voices than most.”

For a moment, her words seemed to hang there, fragile as spun glass. Then Viserys exhaled, slow, uneven, and let them pass.

He gave a small, weary sound, something between agreement and surrender, and leaned back against the pillows.

His hand remained where it was, heavy and warm upon her skin, as if stillness might make the mistake vanish.

“The child is strong,” he said at last, voice thin but measured, reaching for steadier ground. “I can feel it.”

Alicent only nodded, her gaze fixed on the flicker of flame at the bedside.

He took her silence for contentment, as he always did.

For a time, the only sound was the quiet settling of embers and the faint rustle of silk as the Queen shifted beneath his touch. Peace, or what Viserys called peace, lay stretched between them, thin as breath on glass.

Then, softly, “Viserys.”

His eyes opened, heavy-lidded, patient. “Hmm?”

She did not look at him. Her gaze stayed fixed on the candle’s trembling flame, its light warring gently with the dark. “The birth draws nearer,” she said. “Each night the child turns more restlessly. It wakes me… and when it does, I think of her.”

He said nothing. 

“Rhaenyra,” she said at last, the name a whisper both heavy and raw. “She cursed you in the midst of her pains. And yet, even through that pain, she called for her father.”

Her hand drifted across the swell of her belly, tender, protective. “I understand that. In the hour when all strength leaves you, when every breath feels borrowed. You want someone who remembers you before you were a wife, before you were a Queen. Someone who will not let the chamber forget that you are still a daughter.”

Her voice trembled, just once, then steadied. “I would have that, too. I would have my father near.”

Viserys’s brow furrowed faintly. “Otto was dismissed,” he said, a trace of weariness softening his tone. “He betrayed my trust. You know this.”

“I know,” she said quickly, though her voice was soft, pleading beneath the calm. “And yet I cannot help but think that Rhaenyra’s anger came from the same wound that bleeds in me now. She cursed you, yes, but she still wanted you beside her.”

She turned then, finally meeting his gaze.

Her eyes glimmered in the half-light, not with rebellion, but with something far more disarming: fear. “He would bring me comfort, my king. Not counsel, not cunning, only comfort.”

Viserys exhaled, slow and long, his shoulders sinking into the mattress. For a moment, he seemed poised to answer. But habit.

Old, weary, familiar.

Worn out.

“In the morning,” he said quietly, closing his eyes again. “We will speak of it in the morning.”

Alicent nodded once, though he did not see it. “As you wish.”

The chamber fell silent save for the soft, uneven rhythm of his sleep.

She remained awake, her hand resting over the life beneath her skin. The child turned again, a ripple beneath her ribs. The candle guttered low, its flame bending under its own weight.

“Then I will pray morning comes quickly,” she whispered.

---

Quickly, it did come: morning, bright and sure.

Light ran the length of the Red Keep’s gardens, setting dew to diamonds and the air to gold.

Laena led, arm curved around the child; within her robes Aemon breathed like still water, untroubled by anything but her heart.

The faintest swell of early pregnancy curved beneath her gown, subtle yet evident to seeking eyes. Her quickening happening quickly after marriage.

A blessing, they said. 

The small dragon upon her shoulder, black streaked through with red, purred low and rhythmic, mirroring the even hush of the babe it guarded.

“He hasn’t stirred once,” Laena whispered with a trace of wonder. “I could walk the whole length of the Keep and he’d never wake.”

Laenor smiled as he glanced over, his other son, Aenar, squirming restlessly in the crook of his arm. “Then this one must have stolen all his brother’s fire. He’s been wriggling since dawn. Can’t stand the cloth, can you, little storm?”

The baby’s foot kicked free of the swaddling, and Laenor laughed, adjusting the fold back over him. “He hates being bound. Always has. Like the sea—never still.”

“Perhaps he knows he’s meant for it,” Laena said softly, eyes bright with fondness. “There’s salt in his blood already.”

“He’ll find the wind before he finds his legs,” Laenor agreed, rocking him gently as the tiny dragon on his forearm, green and silver, blinked in the sunlight, a mirror of its restless twin.

Behind them, Septa Rhaella walked with careful grace, her voice a steady hum of comfort.

In her arms, Aemma stirred only slightly, sighing once before nestling deeper into the warmth of the septa’s chest.

“She likes the heat,” Rhaella said, smiling down at the small golden head beneath her chin. “She hums when the sun touches her. See? She’s half dream already.”

Laena turned back with a faint, softened smile. “She was born for light. She’ll never fear it.”

“Nor should she,” Rhaella replied. “The realm needs a little warmth, I think.”

The three walked on, laughter quiet between them, the kind that belonged to shared tenderness, to mornings too gentle to last.

The servants followed at a respectful distance, their arms filled with small comforts: driftwood cradles inlaid with pearl, embroidered blankets of coral and cream, baskets of fruit and honeyed bread, linens for a morning spent beneath the open sky.

Ser Harwin, Ser Erryk, and Kingsguard Harrold keeping pace, surrounding the royals without crowding.

No wet nurse walked among them; the babes had been fed by Rhaenyra before the outing, and peace, for once, seemed complete.

The air smelled of roses and oaks.

The fountain ahead caught the first full strike of sunlight, scattering it like liquid glass.

Aenar stirred again, grumbling softly, and Laenor bent his head, whispering something only his son could hear.

The servants reached the clearing first, moving with the quiet grace of long habit. One unfurled a thick linen across the grass, its weave fine enough to catch the sun like water. Others followed, setting down cushions, rolled blankets, and baskets heavy with fruit, cheese, and honey still clinging to the comb.

Laena paused to watch them work, rocking Aemon lightly in her arms. The babe slept on without stirring, content as still water. “He’d sleep through a storm,” she said with quiet pride. “Nothing unsettles him. Not noise, nor light, nor hunger if he’s fed. He’s calm made flesh.”

Laenor laughed, kneeling beside her to adjust the edge of the linen. “That calm comes dear, then. Rhaenyra was up half the night, wasn’t she?”

Laena’s smile deepened, half fond, half weary. “Learning at mother’s behest. You know she doesn’t believe in rest. She says a queen’s mind must be sharper than her crown.”

At that, Laenor let out a soft groan. “Seven save us, Mother’s lessons are never-ending.”

“Always new things to learn,” Laena replied, amused. “She used to test me on trading routes over supper.”

“Did you pass?” Speta Rhaella teased.

“I survived,” she said, and they both laughed quietly, the sound light as the breeze.

Lowering herself onto the ground, settling Aemma against her shoulder,  Rhaella continued, "You two are cruel,” she chided gently, though her eyes were smiling. “Without those lessons, your beauty would be your only claim."

“Perhaps,” Laena said, laying Aemon down upon a folded blanket. “But even knowledge must sleep sometimes.”

Laenor nodded, easing Aenar beside his brother. The little boy kicked once in protest before curling back into stillness. “Then let them all rest,” he said. “Babes, dragons, and the women who keep them fed and wise.”

The septa’s low chuckle joined their laughter. “If only the realm could learn to be so quiet.”

Laena sank down with a quiet sigh, her gown pooling around her like spilled light. The moment she was settled, she reached for the nearest basket and plucked a ripe fig, splitting it open with her thumb. Juice beaded against her skin, and she made a pleased sound low in her throat as she bit in.

Laenor chuckled, lowering himself opposite her. "Laena, give the poor fruit a gentler death. You’d think you hadn’t eaten in days.”

She gave him a languid glance, wiping her fingers on a cloth before reaching for another piece. “Pregnant women are always hungry,” she said airily. “And besides, someone has to eat while you talk.”

“Talk?” he echoed, grinning. “I’ve done all the work this morning, carrying the sea-born son while you cradle the quiet one.”

Laena laughed outright at that.

“The boy’s as restless as you are. If he learns to swim before he walks, I’ll not be surprised.”

“He’ll have more sense than that,” Laenor teased. “He’ll learn to sail before he swims.”

Septa Rhaella’s voice came, warm and amused. “And who will teach him to keep his head above water, my lord? Surely not his father, who’s never met a current he couldn’t chase blindly?”

Laenor placed a hand over his heart in mock offense. “You wound me, Septa.”

“Only as much as your pride can bear,” she replied.

Laena was laughing again by then, the sound full and bright. “Be kind to him, Rhaella. He forgets he’s outnumbered today.”

“Not forgotten,” Laenor said with a grin. “Simply resigned.”

He leaned back, hands braced on the grass, watching as Laena reached again for the basket, this time for a slice of pear. The morning light gilded her hair, caught in the faint curve of her belly. The hatchlings nearby shifted sleepily, content in the sun.

It might have remained a morning of laughter and ease—

but then came the sound of approaching voices, small and bright against the hush of the garden.

Through the rose arch came the Hightower attendants, their green silk robes glinting like the sea at dawn. At their center walked three children: Prince Aegon, tall for seven and already flushed with the pride of knowing he was watched; Princess Helaena, smaller, her gaze fixed on the fluttering butterflies that danced above the fountain; and Prince Aemond, quiet as a shadow, trailing just behind them.

The air shifted as the two broods met.
One side wrapped in pearl and flame, the other in green and gold.

The servants slowed, uncertain whether to bow or speak. Only the children carried forward without hesitation.

Prince Aegon was first to break the silence. “Are those the new babes?” he asked, peering toward the swaddled forms. “Mother says they sleep all day.”

Laenor smiled, patient and good-humored. “She’s not wrong.”

“They don’t look very exciting,” Aegon went on, though his eyes betrayed his curiosity, wide and searching. He rocked slightly on his heels, hands behind his back in a boyish mimicry of courtly stance.

“They will be,” Laena said, her voice soft with amusement. “Give them time to wake to the world.”

Helaena had already knelt beside the nearest bundle, skirts whispering against the grass. “They’re pretty,” she said, reaching out until her fingers hovered above the silk that wrapped Aemma. “Like little stars.”

Her words drew the faintest smile from Laena. “That one is called Aemma,” she said gently. “The Realm’s Heart.”

Aegon made a face, not unkind, merely honest in the way children are.

“Ser Criston said—” he began, then stopped, glancing back as one of the Hightower nurses straightened sharply behind him. Her gloved hand came to rest on his shoulder, gentle but warning.

Laenor’s smile stayed easy, though his eyes sharpened slightly. “Go on, my prince,” he said lightly. “What did Ser Criston say?”

Aegon frowned in thought, his voice dropping to the confiding tone of a boy who half-knows he shouldn’t repeat a thing.

“He said… sometimes babes can look different from their fathers.” He squinted toward the babes', lips pursed as if to compare faces. “But they do look like you. Well—” his words tumbled over themselves in haste—“the first one looks more like Princess Rhaenyra, I think. He looks all Targaryen.”

His gaze drifted to the second bundle. “That one looks more like you, though,” he told Laenor brightly. “The one with the darker skin. Like Driftmark. He looks as though he belongs to the sea.”

Then, softer, with a puzzled little shrug, “And the girl looks like both. Half sun, half storm. I don’t know which she’ll be.”

The nurse’s fingers tightened faintly on his shoulder. “Children often misunderstand the words of grown men,” she said quickly, her voice too polished, too careful. Around her, the other Hightower attendants stood rigid, green silk catching the light like drawn blades.

Laenor only smiled, the ease returning to his face though his tone had cooled a degree. “A fair eye, my prince. And a poet’s tongue. You’ll make the bards jealous if you keep seeing such truths.”

Laena’s laughter followed, light and lilting, cutting through the quiet that had fallen. “Indeed. He sees what we all see, three babes, each touched by their mother’s beauty and their father’s grace. That seems blessing enough for one morning.”

The nurse bowed her head low, “Of course, my lady.”

For a heartbeat, the air stilled again, caught between politeness and pulse. Then movement drew every gaze downward.

Aemond had stepped forward, hesitant, small boots whispering in the grass.

His nurse made to stop him, but he barely seemed to hear. His eyes were fixed on the small dragons, wide and unblinking.

At his shifting, the smallest dragon stirred, Vaerith, pale as dawnlight, uncurling from where it had been nestled beside Aemma’s wrap. The creature blinked once, then yawned, releasing a soft puff of heat that shimmered faintly in the air.

Aemond froze, wonder breaking clean across his face.

In his hand hung a small wooden toy, his dragon carved from wood and painted a pale green, one painted eye long since scratched away.

He held it loosely, almost forgotten, until Vaerith’s gaze found it.

The hatchling tilted its head, curious.

Then, stretching its slender golden neck, it reached toward the toy. With delicate precision, it tapped the wooden dragon once with a tiny claw, just enough to make it wobble.

The boy gasped softly. He didn’t draw back.

Helaena giggled, delighted. “She likes your dragon!” she whispered, clapping her hands.

Aegon snorted, though even his teasing faltered into fascination. “Careful, Aemond, she’ll think it’s hers!"

But Aemond said nothing.

He only stared, eyes shining, the toy cradled now between both hands as if afraid to break the moment.

Vaerith blinked again, slow and deliberate, and for an instant—too brief to name—it seemed the two understood one another perfectly.

Aegon shifted his weight, glancing toward Laenor and Laena. “Can we stay?” he asked suddenly, earnest and unguarded. “Just for a little while, to play with them?”

His words startled one of the Hightower nurses, but Septa Rhaella only smiled, her voice low and kind. “If you keep your voices soft, my prince. The babes are sleeping still, and dragons do love quiet.”

Aegon nodded solemnly, as though he’d been entrusted with something sacred, and dropped onto the grass beside his brother.

Helaena had already turned her attention to the food laid out upon the cloth. Her gaze fixed on a small bowl of sliced pear glistening in the sunlight.

Rhaella noticed the look and, with a gentle smile, took one piece and placed it into the girl’s hand. “Go on then,” she said softly. “A treat for a gentle heart.”

Helaena bit into it with an audible crunch, her eyes widening in delight. “It’s sweet!” she declared, muffled around the mouthful.

Laena laughed quietly from where she sat, the sound mingling with the soft rustle of leaves. “And peace tastes much the same,” she said.

The children giggled; even the attendants seemed to ease their shoulders. 

The laughter faded into a companionable hush. Sunlight dappled the blankets and the soft curve of Aemma’s cradle; a bee drifted lazily between the bowls of fruit.

Aegon had grown bold enough to let his fingers brush the grass near Vaerith’s tail. Helaena, content, leaned against her nurse and chewed her pear in slow, dreamy bites. Aemond still knelt, toy clasped close, his wide eyes fixed on the golden hatchling as though afraid to blink and lose her.

Septa Rhaella watched them all, the sons and daughters of dragons, the pale babes and the curious, and her smile gentled, though something unreadable flickered in her gaze.

“So the gods introduce the princes and princesses of the realm,” she said at last. “Bound by blood and dragon’s breath, by light and shadow both. May they know peace while they can.”

Her words were soft, almost prayer, almost warning.

The wind shifted, warm and salt-sweet, stirring the veils and the parasols. A few rose petals loosed from the vines above and spiraled down between green and red—

falling, drifting, mingling in the grass.

And for a heartbeat, the garden held still.

Sunlight gilding every color, every child, as if the gods themselves were watching and would remember.

---

Rhaenyra sat near the window, robe loosened at the throat, her hair soft and unpinned.

Across from her stood the wet nurse, a young woman of Dragonstone, her eyes a smoky lilac, her hair a duller silver threaded with dark roots.

Dragonseed.

Bastard daughter of some Targaryen prince whose parental bloodline could no longer be chased.

Rhaenyra had sent for her at dawn, quietly, before the maids stirred. Word had reached her that the girl’s own milk had once been enough to feed multiples, and panic, small but sharp, had driven her to seek counsel.

Now, the princess’s voice was low, a shade too tight with worry. “I’ve eaten sweet fruits, drank the honey water, slept...at least what passes for it. Yet it feels less each day, and my babes only grow hungrier.”

The woman bowed her head slightly, but her tone remained steady. “It comes and goes, my Princess. The milk, I mean. You’ll have days of plenty, days of wanting. Even dragonfire flickers when the wind is wrong.”

Rhaenyra gave a small, weary smile. “And what wind would you have me call?”

“Warmth helps,” the woman said. “And calm. The body listens to peace.”

Rhaenyra huffed softly, the sound edged with amusement.

“Peace,” she repeated. “A rare thing in a keep like this. The only quiet I trust is when they’re near.”

Her gaze drifted outward, through the open terrace doors to the royal gardens below. The air curled through the window, carrying with it the faintest trace of roses and myrtle, and her voice softened almost unconsciously.

“Their father took them early,” Rhaenyra said, more to herself than to any listening ear. “The light’s kind to them and the air gentler.”

From her seat, she could see it all: Laena’s pale gown glinting by the fountain, Laenor’s easy stride beside her, the Septa’s white robes gathered close.

The parasols cast soft circles over the linen blankets, her babes sleeping within—Aemon’s silver head gleaming faintly, Aenar’s curls catching the gold, and Aemma’s tiny hand curled into a fist. 

For a heartbeat, Rhaenyra’s breath steadied. “They look content,” she breathed. “And I… restless.” She laughed under her breath. “I am no good at stillness.”

The dragonseed smiled, her tone gentle and respectful. “No dragon ever is, my lady. They pace even in sleep.”

Rhaenyra turned toward her with a look caught between pride and melancholy. “Is that what we are, then? Pacing beasts in human skin?”

“Only when caged,” the woman said softly.

Before Rhaenyra could answer, laughter drifted up from below, clear, ringing, and unmistakably young.

She rose, crossing to the terrace.

“That’s not Laenor,” she said, leaning to see beyond the vines. The gardens stretched beneath her like a painted scroll, Laena seated upon the grass, Laenor reclining beside her, Septa Rhaella in gentle conversation and near them, flashes of green and gold.

Her half-siblings.

Prince Aegon, tall and proud for his seven years, was chasing a breeze-tossed petal; Helaena crouched beside the blankets, entranced by the dragonlings’ shimmer; Aemond stood a little apart, his small hands cupped around a wooden toy.

Rhaenyra’s lips parted in surprise. “I did not summon them.”

Below, the laughter carried again, Aegon’s bold, Helaena’s sweet, Aemond’s quiet awe.

The dragonseed nurse joined her at the railing, shading her eyes. “They’ve found your little ones,” she said. “And been found in turn.”

Rhaenyra said nothing at first.

Her fingers curled against the balustrade, knuckles whitening against the stone.

Below, the laughter continued, Aegon’s bright, Helaena’s soft, Aemond’s barely a sound at all. The garden glimmered, innocent and golden.

Yet something beneath the surface of that peace pricked at her, a note too sharp in the harmony.

She told herself it was nothing. Only sunlight, only children.

Still, her eyes lingered on the scene below. Her half-siblings stood close to her babes, their attendants in green and gold drawn up like a second hedge, watching without speaking.

The colors clashed softly against Laena’s pale gown and the red-trimmed linen where her babes lay.

Two houses mirrored in miniature, sharing a single patch of light.

Rhaenyra’s gaze found Aemond last.

The boy stood apart, toy in hand, motionless as if spellbound. Vaerith’s golden head had lifted, the hatchling’s neck arched in silent curiosity toward the wooden dragon he held. For a heartbeat, the two were still as statues. Then came the small, deliberate tap of claw against painted wood.

The moment should have been nothing, harmless, sweet. Yet Rhaenyra’s pulse quickened, the air in her lungs seeming to thin. 

The wind shifted. Rose petals drifted down the terraces, red mingling with white, then with green.

Her eyes followed their slow descent until they vanished in the sunlight below.

“Pretty,” purred the dragonseed nurse beside her. “They’ll all remember this day, I think.”

Rhaenyra only inclined her head, her expression smooth as glass. “Perhaps,” she said, her voice quiet, unreadable.

But her fingers did not ease from the railing, and though her face was serene, her mind would not still. The laughter rose again, clear and bright, and something in her chest ached at the sound...too pure, too bright, too fleeting.

She stayed there long after the nurse withdrew, the sun pressing hot against her skin, her gaze unblinking as the children below played on.

Chapter 10: Faith's Favorite

The gates of the Red Keep groaned open as Otto Hightower rode through.

His horse’s hooves struck the cobbles in calm, deliberate rhythm.

Too slow for deference, too steady for defiance.

The green of his cloak caught the first light, the seven-pointed brooch at his breast glinting like a promise...or a warning. His beard was touched with more silver than when last he’d stood in these halls, but his eyes, keen and assessing, had lost none of their edge.

The Gold Cloaks stiffened as he passed, torn between old loyalties and new fear.

A few peeled away, moving swiftly toward the inner court to announce his arrival.

The rest watched, uncertain, as though a single wrong glance might summon blood.

By the time Otto reached the heart of Maegor’s Holdfast, the Hall of the Dragons had been opened for his reception.

The great doors parted before him.

Sunlight spilled through the tall windows high above, striking the carved dragon pillars that coiled along the chamber walls.

The air was warm with incense and torchlight; the murmur of courtiers filled the upper galleries like the hum of bees.

At the far end of the hall, upon a smaller throne carved from dark wood and stone, King Viserys awaited. His crown rested on a low table beside him, as if to mark this gathering as one of kin rather than rule.

Queen Alicent stood just behind the throne, a pale figure in green and gold, her hand resting protectively upon the chair’s carved arm. The swell of her belly was unmistakable beneath her gown. Before her stood the royal children: Aegon, shifting his weight with a bored slouch; Helaena, eyes turned upward toward something unseen near the rafters; and Aemond, too straight, too still, as though eager to prove himself already a man.

Rhaenyra was absent.

Otto dismounted, his boots striking stone as he entered the hall.

His gaze swept the scene.

King, Queen, heirs, and then lowered in a bow just deep enough to honor, not to supplicate.

A boy in sept-green slips along the colonnade, two fingers tapping a lantern sconce in quick measure. In the yard below, a carter lifts a flour sack stamped with a tiny tower sigil no one bothers to see.

“Your Grace,” he said, his voice calm, tempered by distance. “The summons was grace enough. To be received as well, after so long, speaks kindly of your heart.”

Viserys studied him for a long moment, weariness lining his brow. “You were invited, Otto. My Queen would have her father near as she brings our next child into the world.”

Otto inclined his head slightly, the gesture elegant, deliberate. “A wise wish, Your Grace. The days before birth are the province of prayer and patience...virtues the realm too often forgets.”

Alicent’s lips tightened faintly at that; whether in pride or warning, none could tell.

“I would not have stayed in Oldtown while my daughter labors alone,” Otto continued, the words measured, almost tender. “Even distance cannot dull a father’s ear.”

He paused just long enough for silence to thicken.

“And from what reaches it,” he went on softly, “the court seems loud of late. Voices raised where once they whispered. Counsel given not in service, but in pride.”

The words were mild; the meaning was not.

Viserys’s fingers tightened faintly on the arm of his chair. A flicker crossed his face, guilt, perhaps, or the recognition of names Otto had not spoken.

Otto’s expression gentled at once, as if he had not noticed the sting he’d left.

“Forgive me, Your Grace. Old habits linger. I forget myself. I come not as Hand, nor as watchman, only as father to the Queen.”

He inclined his head toward Alicent, and the shift was so deft, so flawlessly timed, that even the courtiers watching from the galleries could not tell whether the old man had chastised the King or comforted him.

Viserys exhaled slowly, the tension in his shoulders softening by degrees. “You’ve not changed,” he said, weary amusement touching his voice. “Still your words arrive bearing two meanings.”

Otto smiled faintly. “Age teaches one economy of speech, Your Grace. And the wisdom to let others decide which meaning they prefer.”

Viserys’s words had scarcely faded when Alicent stepped forward. The movement was poised and deliberate, her hand brushing her husband’s shoulder before she descended the dais.

“Father,” she said, her voice warm with emotion she seldom allowed herself before the court. “It gladdens my heart to see you safely returned to us.”

Otto bowed his head, not to the King, but to his daughter.

“And mine to see you well, child. The gods have kept you close.” His eyes drifted to the swell of her belly. “And blessed you still further.”

Alicent’s hand came to rest protectively there. “They favor us all,” she replied softly. “This babe will bring joy back to the Red Keep.”

He smiled, faint but real. “Then may he bring wisdom with it, and peace to match. The realm could bear both.”

Then, with a subtle turn of her head, Alicent gestured toward her children. “Come,” she said gently, the command wrapped in maternal grace. “Your grandsire has ridden far to see you.”

They approached in order, though not in harmony.

Aegon came first, because he was meant to, not because he wished it.

His silver hair was mussed, his smile lazy, careless, the kind that came too easily to princes who had never been denied. He bowed perfunctorily. “Grandsire.”

Otto’s gaze lingered a heartbeat longer than courtesy required. He saw the charm, the beauty, the trace of Viserys in the boy’s posture, and the dangerous vacancy behind his eyes. A vessel yet unfilled. A son of dragons without discipline.

Helaena followed, pale and radiant in her own strange way. She kept her head slightly bowed, whispering to something unseen cupped in her palms. “Welcome, Lord Hightower,” she murmured, her words soft as the rustle of wings. “The tower’s flame burns bright again.”

Otto inclined his head, though his eyes hardened faintly. The phrasing was peculiar, but not unfamiliar; Helaena had always spoken like one half a step from the rest of the room.

“Your courtesy does you credit, child,” he said, his tone smooth but cool. “See that your words one day do as much for your House.”

Helaena blinked as if startled, then gave a small, uncertain smile before retreating to her mother’s side.

Otto’s gaze followed her a moment longer, measuring what she was, and what she was not.

Beauty she had, and a gentleness that would charm a sept, not a court. A sweet girl, he thought, but sweetness seldom survives long among dragons.

Then his eyes shifted to Aemond, and something in him steadied. Hope, perhaps, or calculation reborn.

Aemond stood straight-backed and sharp-eyed, his chin lifted a fraction higher than his years might warrant. He bowed deeply. “We are honored by your presence, my lord.”

Otto studied him in silence. Where Aegon was untamed sunlight, this one was flint.

Quiet, cold, promising fire if struck. The boy’s posture was almost military, his composure startling.

“An honor returned, my boy,” Otto said at last. “You do your mother proud.”

Aemond’s jaw tightened, the compliment received as a vow rather than praise.

Viserys watched from the dais, warmth flickering briefly in his tired eyes. For a moment, the hall breathed easier, as though family might yet bind what politics had frayed.

But Otto’s gaze, when it returned to Alicent, said what words did not.

Alicent caught her father’s eye, the faintest tilt of her chin enough to summon understanding.

“Your Grace,” she said softly, turning to Viserys, “if it pleases you, my father has ridden far and may wish to rest before the noon meal. I would see him settled.”

Viserys nodded, still smiling faintly at the sight of his family gathered in rare peace. “Of course. Go on. We shall dine together later.”

With a flick of her hand the children’s nurses step forwards while Alicent bowed her head to the King, then turned and began down the side passage. Otto fell into step beside her, his pace measured to match her slow, deliberate grace.

They walked in silence through the torch-lit corridors of Maegor’s Holdfast.

Courtiers and servants bowed low as they passed. The smell of incense gave way to the softer scent of myrrh and clean linen that always lingered around the Queen’s chambers.

Only when the carved doors of her solar closed behind them did Otto finally speak.

“You have done well,” he said quietly. “The King’s heart softens again toward reason. And toward you.”

Alicent exhaled, tension uncoiling from her shoulders. “He misses peace, Father, not reason. Rhaenyra still holds his heart in one hand and the realm in the other. Every word I speak is weighed against hers.”

Otto moved to the window, his fingers trailing along the carved frame. Sunlight broke across his sleeve, catching on the green thread at his cuff.

“Then speak less,” he said. “Let the court fill the silence with its own doubts. That is the nature of rumor; it devours the idle.”

Alicent’s lips curved faintly. “You’ve not changed.”

“Nor have you,” Otto replied, his tone mild as he turned from the window. For a moment, he watched the sunlight spilling across the carved floor. “Tell me, how fare the princess’s little ones?”

The question was soft, almost idle, but it hung in the air like smoke.

Alicent’s posture stiffened. “They are well,” she said after a pause. “Strong, healthy… the court calls them blessed.”

“Does it?” Otto asked quietly. His expression did not change, yet the faintest spark of interest glimmered in his eyes. “And what do you call them?”

Alicent hesitated, then folded her hands together. “They are her children,” she said carefully. “The King dotes upon them. He speaks of their beauty as if it proves the gods’ favor.”

“Beauty,” Otto murmured, almost to himself. “The most brittle favor the Gods could bestow." He looked back at her. “And do they resemble him?”

For a long moment, she did not answer. The hush between them seemed to stretch until the ticking of the clock behind him grew deafening.

Quietly, “They are Ser Laenor’s,” she said. “Beyond doubt.”

Otto’s gaze sharpened. “And yet they are hidden.”

“Not for shame,” Alicent murmured. “For awe.”

“They are… unlike other babes.” Her eyes drifted toward the latticed window, as if recalling them in her mind’s eye. “Their skin shines as if lit from within. The girl, Princess Aemma, her hair catches the light like fire in silk, and her eyes…” Alicent hesitated, voice softening. “One violet, one blue. Fire and sea both. When she opened them, even the High Septon fell silent.”

Otto’s mouth curved, faint, skeptical. “You speak as if they were carved from marble and miracle alike.”

“Perhaps they are,” she said simply. “No painter’s hand could make such faces. Even I...when I first saw them—” She broke off, collecting herself. “It is no wonder the King dotes upon them. He calls them proof of divine favor.”

“Divine favor,” Otto repeated softly. “Or divine interference.” His tone was light, but his eyes were not. “And that name, Aemma. How convenient. The late queen reborn in his granddaughter’s cradle. Tell me, do you think it affection… or strategy?”

Alicent stiffened, the smallest tremor in her clasped hands. “It is a mother’s choice,” she said at last. “A way to honor what was lost.”

Otto’s gaze lingered, sharp as a blade’s edge dulled in velvet. “Honor,” he echoed. “Or reminder. Either way, it binds him more tightly to the princess. A clever move.”

He turned away, pacing a short step, then another, the faint tap of his fingers against the back of a chair marking his thought.

When he spoke again, his tone was almost idly curious. “And the other two? The boys.”

“The firstborn, Prince Aemon,” Alicent said, her voice level but quieter. “His skin is pale as new snow, his hair nearly white, the same shade his great-grandsire Aemon bore, or so Princess Rhaenys says. He’s… remarkably calm for an infant, though the maesters call it solemn."

Otto’s fingers stilled against the wood. “Resemblance to House Velaryon, then?”

“Through Princess Rhaenys, yes,” she allowed. “Though his face is finer. Uncomfortably so.”

A beat of silence stretched. Otto’s hand resumed its slow, rhythmic tapping.

“And the second boy?” he prompted.

“Aenar,” she said. “His coloring favors the sea. Still silver-haired, but his skin holds warmth, bronze at the edges, as though the sun itself laid claim to him. His eyes are darker, blue at the rim, violet within. Wilder. There’s something in him that startles even his nurses.”

She hesitated, then added, “He looks at you as though he understands.”

Otto’s mouth twitched, neither smile nor frown, but a flicker of interest that could have been either. “A bright line of heirs, then. Each blessed in some way, each more remarkable than the last.”

Alicent inclined her head. “Blessed, yes,” she said softly. “But the Queen Who Never Was calls them touched by old blood. She says they carry something of the sea and the sky both.”

Otto let out a quiet breath, his hand finally falling still. “Touched by something, no doubt.”

He turned back toward her, studying her face as if measuring how far he could press. “Tell me, then,” he said after a pause, his voice deceptively mild, “does the court truly believe it was Ser Laenor who got her with child?”

Alicent blinked, caught off guard. “He is her husband,” she said at once.

“Yes, yes,” Otto murmured, eyes half-lidded. “But there are whispers. A sword-swallower, they say, can do many things...but that?” His brows rose slightly. “A miracle greater than all three babes combined.”

“Father,” she said sharply, color rising in her cheeks. “I do not see how else it could have happened.”

The words came too quickly, too stiffly. She smoothed her skirts as if to steady herself. “They are wed before gods and men. It is not fitting to speak so.”

Otto only hummed, the sound neither agreement nor apology.

“Fittingness rarely stops rumor,” he said. “I merely wonder if any of Laenor’s kin happened to visit during their seclusion. Cousins from Driftmark, perhaps? A retainer? A friend of more… robust constitution?”

Alicent let out a breath that was almost a laugh, too tight to be genuine.

“No. They were well and truly hidden away. Only a small guard and household servants attended them. The King saw to that himself.”

“Ah.” Otto’s fingers began their soft, rhythmic tapping once more. “So, no visitors. No witnesses. Only the princess, her husband, and the will of the gods.”

He fell silent for a heartbeat, then looked to her again. “And since their birth? What has happened at court?”

Alicent hesitated, sensing the trap in the question though she could not name it. “Much,” she said at last, her tone cautious. “The King declared a week of thanksgiving. Bells rang across the city. Rhaenyra kept to her chambers those first days, surrounded by midwives, septas, and kin.”

“Go on.”

“She had a ledger placed beside their cradles,” Alicent continued. “Signed by the High Septon himself when he came to bless them. Each entry names who attended, who witnessed, who prayed. It lies open still...anyone who approaches the babes must mark their name and station.”

Otto’s brows arched slightly. “A holy record for infants.”

“It was Rhaenyra’s doing,” Alicent said, folding her hands tighter. “And she’s filled her household with those of learning and faith. The Archmaester Vaegon now serves in her house called from Oldtown along with Septa Rhaella, at Rhaenyra’s request. The Citadel’s scribes transcribed every witness report: the King, myself, the Queen Who Never Was, Prince Daemon.”

She paused, swallowing. “All signed and sealed.”

“A convenient wall of witnesses,” Otto hummed.

“And afterward,” Alicent continued, as though she could not stop herself, “there was a gifting ceremony. The King gave her the crowns of Queen Alyssa, Queen Alysanne, and Queen Aemma. He said no three women had given more to House Targaryen, and that now their legacies would rest on Rhaenyra’s brow. Driftmarks entire procession kneeled before her babes...and Lady Jeyne presented blankets woven with threads the late Queen Aemma herself had spun in her girlhood."

“Blankets,” he whispered, “loyalty and crowns. What else?"

Alicent’s eyes flickered downward. “There was… an incident.”

Otto did not speak, but the faint stilling of his hand against the chair was answer enough.

“One of the maids,” she began, voice tightening. “A girl from the Reach. She was placed in the princess’s household years ago, back when you still held the Hand’s pin.”

Otto’s eyes narrowed slightly. “One of mine, then.”

“Yes,” Alicent admitted. “She was faithful. Quiet. I only thought—” She stopped, gathering herself. “After the gifting ceremony, I sent word that she might offer a prayer on my behalf. A small anointing, nothing more. The Septon’s blessing had already been given, but I thought—”

“You thought it wise,” Otto finished softly, “to see if the boy would be blessed again?”

Her throat worked once before she nodded. “Rhaenyra saw it as insult. She called it blasphemy, that no mortal should dare lay a second blessing upon what the gods had already touched... she sent the girl to me. To join my house as handmaid after taking her hands."

Otto’s expression did not change, but his silence deepened, the kind that pressed on the chest like weight.

“She made a spectacle of it,” Alicent whispered. “Said it was justice for presumption. Then she dismissed every servant and maid you had ever placed in her house. Even the stewards. Replaced them with her own—Driftmark, Vale, Dragonstone’s own.”

Otto drew a slow breath, his eyes fixed not on her, but on the far wall. “And what remains of our eyes and ears?”

“None,” she said quietly. “She cleansed her halls of them all."

Otto’s gaze slid back to her then, cool and assessing. “And you thought sending a blessing would go unnoticed?”

“I thought it was faith,” she said softly. “A prayer for peace.”

“Faith,” Otto repeated, almost gently. “It seems your prayers cost more than gold these days.”

Tap. Tap. Tap. 

He leaned back, eyes narrowing faintly, not in anger, but thought. “So,” he murmured, “the princess has found her footing at last. She has learned to see the board as it is. No matter, you will play your own piece.”

Alicent’s brows drew together. “Now?”

“Yes.” Otto rose, smoothing his cuffs with deliberate calm. “The babe will come any day, will it not?”

She nodded once.

“Then send word to the High Septon at once. Have him ride for the capital, not after the birth, but before. Let him pray beside your bedchamber door. Let the court see the holiest man in the realm awaiting your child’s first breath. Queen Alysanne was prayed over before her first child's birth. There is precedent and men remember optics better than anything else."

Alicent hesitated. “And Rhaenyra?”

“She will call it vanity,” he said, voice almost indulgent. “And in saying so, she’ll make plain her jealousy. You will smile and call it gratitude. The Faith will praise your piety, and the court will remember which queen’s prayers are answered first.”

He adjusted his cloak, fastening the clasp at his throat. “Do it before nightfall. Make it known the Queen seeks only blessing, not favor.”

He turned toward the door, pausing once, just long enough for his voice to soften into something almost affectionate. “Be serene, my daughter."

The latch settled.

Otto did not.

He stood in the hush and listened to the Keep breathe—the draft under the door, the far bell noting a quarter hour, the women laughing somewhere beyond the privy chambers.

It was an old habit: hearing the city through stone. He tapped once (the Faith), twice (the Purse), and again (the Ink). A game was only piety when men watched it being prayed. When they turned away, it became the thing it had always been: placement.

He turned his ring, felt the grooves worn by a lifetime of kneeling men, and walked toward the light.

---

When Rhaenyra entered, every head turned, as though the door itself had drawn breath.

She wore white.

Not the meek white of recovery, nor the cloistered linen of a woman returned from confinement, but the white of ash after fire.

The white that comes after blood.

Rhaenys had it made for her.

“A queen,” the note had read in Rhaenys’s careful hand, “ought never come back small.”

Every thread whispered of the body that had split to bring forth heirs the realm doubted she would be able to provide, of the blood that had baptized her into a power men called maternal only because they feared to call it divine.

She had been made to rest—commanded to it, as though stillness were virtue.

A moon of forced gentleness, of praise for her quiet. Now she came draped in the color of her obedience turned to armor.

White: to mock the purity they demanded.

Red: to remind them of what it cost her to give them their heirs. 

Viserys brightened at once.

“My daughter,” he said, rising half from his chair. “The Council is glad of your presence again.”

“I’m sure it’s been quite restful without me,” she replied, smooth as glass.

A flicker passed through the room, half laughter, half unease.

The lords stood, not from duty but reflex, like old hounds startled by thunder, and sank back to their seats as she approached. The only sound was the whisper of her gown against stone, white and red catching the candlelight like flame on snow.

She took her place beside the King’s right hand, where once Daemon had sat (long ago), before he was exiled again and the seat remained empty. Waiting for an heir. 

Opposite her sat Alicent. Not accident. Intent. 

In the chair that belonged to the Hand.

Otto Hightower's old chair.

Forcing Lord Strong further down the table, like a man edged from his own command.

Rhaenyra stopped before taking her place.

“Your Grace,” she said, her voice light, kind, almost surprised. “You’re misplaced, I think. That chair belongs to the Hand.”

A hush rippled down the table.

Alicent blinked, her lips parting faintly. “I was told—”

“Of course,” Rhaenyra said gently, the smile never leaving her face. “It’s an easy mistake. The Queen consort's seat is further back, there, just beyond the table. Close enough to observe, but clear of the Crown’s counsel. It keeps order, you see.”

Her tone was all warmth, no venom, so carefully measured that Viserys heard only sweetness in it.

“How thoughtful you are,” he said, visibly pleased. “It’s good to see such grace between you two."

Alicent hesitated a moment longer, then rose, smoothing her skirts with that same slow dignity she wore like perfume. She moved to the chair Rhaenyra had indicated, her green gown trailing like a retreating tide.

Rhaenyra inclined her head in thanks, modest, serene.

Then she sat, white and red against the dark wood, the true heir restored to her place.

Lord Strong moved to his proper seat. 

“Princess Rhaenyra handles correction with more grace than many handle favor,” he said quietly, his voice low enough for the King to take it as praise, not politics.

Rhaenyra gave a small, knowing smile. “One learns, my lord. The realm listens more easily when it’s spoken to kindly.”

“Then may it keep listening,” he replied.

Viserys beamed at them both, oblivious to the current running beneath the calm. “See?” he said. “Harmony at last.”

The Council resumed its slow rhythm, like a clock forced to remember the time.

Viserys called for wine; Lord Beesbury fumbled with his notes. The talk turned to tariffs and grain, to unrest in the Crownlands, to repairs at the Dragonpit that had run over budget twice.

Rhaenyra listened, hands folded neatly before her, the picture of compliance.

Every detail of her stillness was deliberate, the way she neither interrupted nor nodded, the way her gaze lingered just long enough to make each lord feel the weight of being seen.

Now and again Viserys would glance toward her, pleased by her quiet, as though her silence proved his governance sound.

Alicent smiled at that, small, tight.

When Beesbury finished recounting the endless balances of harbor levies, she leaned back slightly, the faintest sigh escaping her.

 “So much of the realm depends on men counting other men’s coin,” she said lightly. “And yet, it seems the numbers never favor Dragonstone.”

The words were mild, almost idle, softer than complaint, gentler than accusation. But the room stilled all the same.

She waited for Viserys to look at her, for the familiar fondness in his eyes to soften what must come next.

Then, with that same serene tone, she continued—

“If the Crown finds the island costly to maintain, perhaps it might allow me to govern its expense more wisely. A few small adjustments could ease the burden on the treasury.”

The way she said it, small adjustments, made it sound like mercy.

But Lord Strong’s gaze flicked up, sharp and knowing. He recognized what it was: the opening of a claim.

Rhaenyra drew breath and reached into the neat stack before her. A sheaf of parchment, bound with red silk and sealed with the mark of Dragonstone. 

“Father,” she said softly, and the chamber fell silent. “If I may.”

Viserys turned, smiling, warmed by her tone. “Of course, my dear. Have you a thought on Dragonstone's accounts?”

“A thought,” she echoed, “and a proposal.”

She rose, the parchment whispering against the table as she unbound the ribbon. “During my confinement, I asked Master of Ships Lord Lannister and Lord Strong to send me ledgers of the Crown’s maritime revenues—the stepstone tolls, the harbor dues, the cost of maintaining garrisons and hatcheries. It seems the treasury bleeds in many directions. I thought it wise to see where the wound began.”

A soft murmur moved through the lords.

No one had expected her to bring figures.

Rhaenyra passed a copy to each man, her movements slow, deliberate, the silk of her sleeve brushing the oak as she went. 

Only Alicent was left without one. 

“Dragonstone,” Rhaenyra continued, “bears a heavy share of those expenses, feeding the dragons, tending the hatcheries, maintaining harbors that serve the realm more than the island itself. So, I ask leave to relieve the Crown of that burden.”

“Relieve?” Viserys repeated, intrigued.

She smiled faintly. “By taking it upon myself.”

Her eyes swept the table, steady as flame.

“I propose the formation of a Dragonstone Maritime and Resource Compact. A simple charter, one of efficiency, not ambition. The harbors of Dragonstone and the Sapphire Passage will be brought under one administration. Traders who pass those waters may pay a small, voluntary levy for safe passage beneath the dragons’ protection. In exchange, their ships will bear a royal seal guaranteeing safety from pirates and raiders. Docking fees and tariffs will be collected directly by Dragonstone, not the royal treasury, allowing the island to sustain itself. The hatchery lands, rich in obsidian and salt, will be charter-leased. Their yield, crystal, glass, volcanic sand...will pay for the dragons’ care, the harbor’s maintenance, and the garrisons who keep the peace. In short, Dragonstone will feed its own dragons, pay its own guards, and keep its own books. The Crown will lose no coin and gain a fortress that no longer drains its purse.”

Her tone never lifted. She sounded more like a steward reading an inventory than a princess declaring independence.

Lord Beesbury leaned forward, eyes bright with cautious approval. "A harbor charter that funds itself,” he said. He tapped a column. “Clearly delineated: tolls, tariffs, export duties. Dragonstone accounts in one balance, the Crown’s in another.”

Rhaenyra inclined her head toward him. “The Sea Snake has agreed to oversee the naval accounts and report quarterly to the Crown, to ensure faith in the numbers. Driftmark already guards those waters—it is only fitting the burden fall to family hands.”

Alicent coughs, a delicate working of her throat. 

“A compact,” she repeated softly, eyes never leaving Rhaenyra’s. “That places both harbor and hatchery under your sole administration. Curious, isn’t it? That a proposal to ease the Crown’s burden leaves all coin flowing through Dragonstone’s coffers.”

Her voice was calm, sweet even, but the words drew blood.

Lord Lannister cleared his throat. “If I may, Your Grace, such an arrangement could complicate the realm’s tariffs. Ships entering through Dragonstone might forgo the port fees at King’s Landing entirely. That revenue keeps the city’s harbor afloat.”

Maester Mellos added, eager to appear prudent. “And with respect, Princess, obsidian and volcanic glass are valuable commodities. If their trade passes solely through Dragonstone’s books, it risks confusing matters of Crown taxation.”

Rhaenyra listened, unmoving.

When they finished, she smiled.

“Your concerns are reasonable,” she said softly, and in that moment they almost looked relieved, until she continued.

“Which is why each ledger will be copied and sent quarterly to the Crown’s Master of Coin, certified by Lord Velaryon’s seal. The harbor tolls will appear under a separate column, clearly marked as Dragonstone’s contribution, not deduction. As for taxation, the Compact specifies that all obsidian and glass sold beyond the Crown’s borders will still be subject to royal export duties. Nothing is hidden. Everything is accounted for. The difference, my lords, is that the expense of collecting it no longer falls on the King’s shoulders.”

Her tone carried no boast, only clarity, as though she were correcting a sum miswritten.

Lannister opened his mouth, thought better, and sat back. Mellos reddened, fumbling with his chain.

Alicent tilted her head, her smile thin. “How very thorough you are, Princess. Though I might ask, what of oversight? Surely the King’s Hand should have a voice in such matters.”

Rhaenyra’s gaze flicked toward her, mild as candlelight.

“Indeed he should,” she said. “The Queen consort, however, sits here only as an observer. If her voice now carries the weight of the Hand, then I must have missed a decree.”

The blow landed without motion.

Alicent’s smile froze, her lashes lowering to hide the flare in her eyes.

The council shifted, the faint clink of goblets the only sound between them.

Rhaenyra did not look away. She simply adjusted the parchment before her, a motion so composed it bordered on disdain, and continued speaking as if nothing at all had happened.

“Of course, my lord Hand’s voice must be heard. I would not dream of acting without his guidance. My intention is only to serve the Crown’s purse, not my own. The Compact exists to ease your burdens, not create new ones.”

Lord Strong leaned forward, tone even and measured.

“A fair aim, Princess. Yet such visions demand foundation. How do you propose to begin its funding?”

Rhaenyra’s lips curved faintly, not in triumph, but in purpose.

“From my mother’s dowry,” she said. “Only a portion of it. Enough to launch the first voyage. My son Aenar’s ship, Seafoam’s Grace, will carry the Crown’s colors on her maiden trade route. Dragonstone will provide volcanic soil and glass; the Vale will send sheep, fruit, and wheat; and the North—furs and lumber. Each house gains, each realm prospers, and all under the dragon’s protection.”

She met the room’s gaze, her voice low but clear.

“This first expedition will be small, but safe, proof that the Crown’s reach may serve peace as well as power. Let the lords of Westeros see that trade under dragon wings is not a threat, but a promise.”

"Sound accounts do not diminish crowns; they keep them from pawning themselves,” Lord Strong said, not blessing, not rebuke. Just balance.

A brief murmur rippled through the chamber before Lord Lannister’s voice cut through it, golden and cold.

“An ambitious venture,” he said. “Yet you speak of trade and tariffs without royal sanction. His Grace has not approved such a route, nor granted leave to use his treasury or his name.”

Rhaenyra turned her gaze upon him, not sharp, but steady, as though weighing the worth of the words rather than the man.

“I do not seek to touch the Crown’s coffers, my lord,” she said evenly. “Nor do I take a single coin for myself. The revenue from this trade shall remain untouched until my son comes of age. I merely seek to prepare his future seat. He will be Lord of the Tides one day, let him begin as he means to continue.”

Her eyes softened, though her tone did not.

“Let his first successful voyage sail while he is still in swaddlings. The tides do not wait for a boy to grow into his birthright; they favor those who begin early, and with purpose.”

Then Viserys’s features softened, his face briefly illuminated by something that might have been pride or relief.

“Your mother would have smiled to hear that,” he said. “You think as she did, always looking to those who come after. Gods, Rhaenyra… already you plan for your children’s children.”

He laughed softly, a tender, wistful sound. “It gladdens me to see such care in you. A mother’s heart suits you well.”

Rhaenyra inclined her head, lips curving faintly.

“I hope it does, Father,” she said. “I would have my children secure before they must fend for themselves. If this voyage prospers, I mean to have Aemma’s ship, The Maiden’s Flame, join its second run. She deserves a future as certain as her brothers’....wealth of her own making, not merely the remnants of others’ titles.”

Viserys’s expression softened further, mistaking her clarity for sentiment. “So thoughtful,” he murmured. “Just as your mother was. You think of legacy, not crowns. That is what will make you a good queen.”

Rhaenyra bowed her head in quiet assent.

“Yes,” she said gently. “Legacy.”

The word lingered, sweet as honey, sharp as iron.

Viserys smiled, content in his misunderstanding, already turning to his wine. He did not see the spark in his daughter’s gaze, not softness, but resolve.

Mellos, ever cautious, cleared his throat.

“Your Grace, perhaps the princess’s heart is generous, but such expeditions are not without peril. Pirates grow bold again. Would it not be wiser to delay until the water's fall clearer?”

Lord Lannister nodded quickly, seizing the moment. “Indeed, Your Grace. And what message does it send to foreign ports when the heir of the Iron Throne begins trading beneath her own banner? It may invite…misinterpretation.”

Rhaenyra’s eyes did not so much as flicker. “Then let them misinterpret it as prosperity, my lords,” she said. “Ships flying the dragon’s standard bring commerce and safety alike. There is no shame in the realm’s heir feeding her people, unless you fear the sight of coin in the wrong hands.”

Lord Beesbury lifted his voice, tremulous yet firm. “If I may, prudence and progress are not enemies. The princess’s proposal strengthens the ports and benefits the Crown. Removing the upkeep of Dragonstone off the Crowns coffers."

Lord Strong inclined his head in quiet agreement. "And the eggs and hatchlings, Princess?” he asked, tone neutral.

“Guardianship under Dragonstone,” Rhaenyra replied mildly. “Allocation remains my prerogative under the Compact, loyalties should be hatched, not haggled.”

A ripple of surprise passed through the council. Even Viserys looked up, smiling faintly, warmed by his daughter's thorough purview. 

He pressed the Crown's royal seal into wax, the soft hiss of resin filling the silence. The smell of hot ink and beeswax clung to the air, sweet and faintly acrid.

Rhaenyra lowered her gaze as Viserys straightened, the gold signet still glinting on his finger. He smiled, mistaking the stillness that followed for gratitude.

“My daughter, and my grandchildren, will be well taken care of,” he said, his voice warm, proud, utterly unguarded.

Rhaenyra inclined her head, her tone gentle. “They will, Father.”

He did not see the way her eyes lingered on the parchment as it cooled beneath the seal, the way her pulse quickened not with affection, but revelation.

For Viserys had not read.

Not the Obsidian and Flame Covenant, which granted her exclusive dominion over Dragonstone’s hatcheries and yields for a term of seven years. Eggs, scale, obsidian, glass, her writ first, all others after.

Not the Northern Passage Accord, which named her Warden of the route between Gulltown and White Harbor for that same term, banning double-levies by the Crown upon ships bearing her seal.

Not the Sovereign Stewardship Statute, which removed Crown tolls from those waters for seven years, shifting collection and upkeep to Dragonstone’s ledger in plain columns, no coin touched the royal purse to spend, and none was hidden.

Not the Mutual Oversight Article, which required her own signature alongside the King to amend any of it.

He had seen only the first page, her hand, her seal, her name and called it duty.

Rhaenyra let her breath leave her slowly, steady, the faintest curl of satisfaction ghosting her lips before it vanished again.

Viserys turned back to the council, speaking of harmony and legacy, already lost in his sentiment. The lords murmured assent, soothed by his warmth, believing all had ended well.

Only Lord Strong’s eyes flicked toward her, sharp and knowing.

He said nothing.

Neither did she.

The seal hardened.

And with it, Rhaenyra Targaryen became, for the first time, something her father would never recognize —

a queen by ink, not crown.

Across the table, Alicent’s hand rested lightly upon her cup, her knuckles white against the silver. She had watched the exchange with a stillness born of habit, but beneath it something coiled tight. 

“It is a fine day,” she said lightly. “When the King signs away the realm’s richest isle with such ease. One wonders what will be left for his sons.”

The smile that crossed Rhaenyra’s face was slow and terrible. “Only the peace their sister bought for them.”

Alicent did not understand every line, nor the language of maritime charters and mineral rights.

But she understood dragons.

She understood gold. And she understood that both had just been pulled from the Crown’s reach and placed squarely in Rhaenyra’s hands.

The words on the parchment might as well have been fire.

Alicent’s gaze rose, meeting Rhaenyra’s across the table. The princess inclined her head, serene, courteous, the picture of filial grace.

“Congratulations are in order, Your Grace,” Rhaenyra said softly, her tone all silken warmth. “I hear your father has returned to court. You must be relieved. It’s a comfort, having him near during a confinement. A daughter should never want for her father’s guidance.”

Alicent blinked, the faintest tremor in her composure.

“Indeed,” she said, voice low but steady. “Though I might have expected a word of greeting from the Princess herself. Lord Hightower arrived and you were not part of the welcoming party. It was... impolite, I think, not to call upon him or me.”

The blades risen. 

“Oh, forgive me, Your Grace,” she said lightly. “You must think me terribly remiss. I had meant to pay my respects the moment the maesters declared me fit for company, but alas—” she gestured to her middle with a small, helpless smile, “—my babes have inherited their grandsire’s temperament. They come when they please, do as they please, and sleep only when I’ve long since surrendered the will to live.”

Viserys chuckled, delighted, oblivious. “Ha! Yes, yes, the Targaryen blood! Never could one of ours do anything quietly, not even in the cradle.”

Rhaenyra’s laughter joined his, soft and effortless. “Quite right, Father. It seems they’ve taken after you more than their very own mother.”

The council rippled with polite mirth, the spell of unease broken for everyone but the two women who sat across from one another: one smiling, one smiling back too tightly.

Alicent inclined her head, her composure reassembled, though a faint line remained between her brows. “Of course,” she said. “I’m sure Father understands the demands of motherhood.”

“I’m certain he does,” Rhaenyra replied sweetly. “He’s always been so very patient... when it serves him.”

The seal on the Compact had cooled to iron by then.

---

The Velaryon townhouse had stood on Visenya’s Hill for nearly half a century, long enough for ivy to claim the balconies, and the smell of salt to have worked itself into the stone.

It was not a residence, not truly.

Driftmark was their home, and High Tide their throne. This house was something quieter and more dangerous: a foothold.

When Corlys first purchased the plot, he’d called it an Embassy of the tides a place for captains and merchants to dine beneath the banner of the seahorse, a ledger-house where the affairs of the fleet could move faster than the Crown’s endless councils.

The townhouse was three stories of pale Driftmark limestone, veined with green-blue marble and carved in the likeness of waves. Its windows faced the river, its doors the Sept.

From one side, you could hear the harbor bells. From the other, the morning prayers.

Officially, it served as the residence of the Sea Snake and his lady wife during their time at court.

In truth, it was something far more intimate: a declaration that Velaryon loyalty might bend, but it would never kneel.

Every room bore the mark of that dual nature, the hall of charts, where candlelight spilled across maps inked in both royal and private seals; the drawing room, where shells from Driftmark were inlaid beside dragonbone in the mantel; the balconies strung with salt-hardened roses that bloomed only when the air was damp.

And above, on the upper floor where Rhaenys kept her private chambers, there was a new addition, quietly ordered, quietly furnished, with pale cradles and sea-green tapestries.

A nursery.

No one had spoken of it to the Princess, nor to the King. But every servant in the house knew whose babes the cradles were meant for.

And Laenor had brought the babes' himself. 

No procession, no trumpets, only the slow roll of a covered carriage down the cobbled streets of King’s Landing, guarded by a half-dozen of Driftmark’s finest sailors dressed as household guards.

He had told Rhaenyra he would see to their comfort while she attended the Council.

She had smiled, distracted, trusting.

In truth, he had not trusted anyone but himself.

The Red Keep felt uncomfortable, violent, and oily.

He could not bear to stay another moment in those cursed halls. The sudden paranoia he could not shake left Laenor missing home. And though the Embassy of Tides was no home, it was familiar. 

The babes slept in the new nursery, a place so carefully made that it almost startled him.

Three cradles, each carved from driftwood bleached pale as bone. Sea-glass stars hung over their heads, turning slow circles in the afternoon light. The window had been fitted with shutters of frosted glass to dull the brightness without dimming the warmth.

Aemon’s breath came slow and even, the picture of his grandsire’s calm.

Aenar, darker, restless, fists curled in sleep as if dreaming of waves.

And Aemma...darling, Aemma...her tiny chest rising beneath the embroidered gown Rhaenys had made, golden curls already catching the light like spun silk.

Laenor stood between the cradles like a captain between masts, smiling in that way that kept glancing toward worry and back.

Rhaenyra had given the realm its heirs, or at least the semblance of them, and still he felt like the midshipman waiting for orders from captains wiser, older, more ruthless than himself.

He ran a thumb gently across Aemma’s cheek.

“Your mother fights with words and parchment,” he murmured. “But I’ll fight with walls.”

“You sound like a lord at last,” came the voice from the doorway.

Laenor turned. His father stood framed by the soft light from the corridor, cloak still damp from the morning mist, a faint scent of salt clinging to him as if he had carried the sea in with him.

Corlys Velaryon did not smile, not at first.

He looked past his son to the three sleeping babes, his gaze steady and searching, as though counting them against some private ledger of fate.

“They breathe easy here,” he said at last. “Good. The Keep’s air is full of incense and ambition, chokes a child before he learns to speak. Salt air keeps the truth cleaner.”

A hum of satisfaction thrummed in his chest, warm as a current he’d charted himself.

The court would think today’s council an accident of sentiment, the King’s mercy stirred by his daughter’s soft words.

Let them.

Corlys and Rhaenys knew better.

They had cut those clauses by lamplight, stitched the charters like sailcloth, double-reefed every loophole. Viserys had not signed a proposal...he had signed a ship already bound for sea.

Corlys set a palm to his son’s nape, brief, warm and then, pulled by tide or blood, drifted to the cradles

“Careful, you’ll climb into the cradle if I blink. Oh, the pain to watch my babes supplant me in my father's heart," dramatically Laenor threw his arms out in mockery of a tragic figure. 

“For the first time in your life, boy, you are correct,” he said, eyes already on the first tiny face. “Grandchildren pay better dividends.”

Aemon lay pale as a winter star, lashes like frost on glass. “Quiet one,” Corlys murmured. “The sea loves the quiet until it doesn’t.”

“To be fair,” Laenor said, “he watches more than he wails.”

“Good. Men who watch make the charts the talkers sail by.”

He slid to the second cradle, Aenar, sun warmed along the edges, storm at the rim of his eyes when they opened. “Hungry ship,” Corlys said. “He’ll want to run before the harbor bell.”

“Rhaenyra says the same,” Laenor answered, pride softening his voice. “Seafoam’s Grace leaves on the quarter moon, already his legacy sails before him."

“A proper mother,” Corlys allowed, and let himself savor it: the neat click of a plan coming true.

He and Rhaenys had argued deep into the night the very phrasing...Northern Passage, Stewardship, Mutual Oversight, until the words bit clean.

To see them breathing already in a nursery felt like cheating fate and charging her interest.

He saved his grandaughter for last. Eyes already softening, Aemma, who made light behave. 

“The darling Princess who holds the realm’s heart.”

Laenor went still. “Mother calls her that,” he admitted. “Then says she shouldn’t.”

“Fate doesn’t need calling,” Corlys said, but his voice gentled despite himself.

He straightened and his smugness flickered like sun on chop.

“Your wife laid ropes today and let the King tie himself to them,” he said. “A beautiful mooring. Your mother trimmed the knots.”

Laenor’s mouth curved. “You’re enjoying this.”

“I enjoy good seamanship,” Corlys said, unrepentant. “Especially when I’ve had a hand in the rigging.”

Laenor bumped his shoulder as if to jostle him back from the cradle’s lip. “Truly, if I fell overboard this moment, you’d throw a line to Aemma first.”

“To Aemma, then Aemon, then Aenar,” Corlys said without blinking, “and only then to you.”

He paused, the corner of his mouth twitching. “Though for these three, I might not bother with a line at all. I’d jump in after them myself, and remember you once my head was above water.”

Laenor snorted, half-amused, half-wounded. “Good to know where I stand.”

“Somewhere dry, I hope,” Corlys said, his tone almost fond. “Every man should have sense enough to stay on deck while the gods test the swimmers.”

A soft laugh sounded from the doorway. “How kind of you to spare the thought, Father.”

Laena crossed the threshold like sunlight finding its way through storm cloud, graceful, assured, the faint scent of sea-salt and dragon smoke clinging to her silks.

“I did wonder how long it would take before my dear brother was demoted to ballast,” she said lightly, coming to stand beside Laenor. “I imagine he’ll cling to the wreckage quite nobly while you save the important ones.”

Laenor rolled his eyes, though affection softened it. “You wound me, sister. You might at least feign grief before the sharks circle.”

“Oh, I’d grieve,” Laena said, studying the sleeping babes with a small, amused smile. “But I think Rhaenyra would have the sea searched before I could finish the first prayer.”

Corlys chuckled, still gazing down at Aemma’s cradle. “See? Even the dragons know where worth lies.”

“And still,” Laena teased, “Mother says you’ve gone soft. Doting grandfather, proud conspirator, she said you stayed up late designing new toys for them.”

Corlys glanced at her sidelong, eyes glinting. “Soft? I built fleets that outlived kings. But if the sea took me saving these three, I’d not call it drowning. I’d call it inheritance.”

Laenor leaned against the cradle’s frame, smirking. “Gods, you’re both impossible. One day these babes will talk, and you’ll start arguing over whose eyes they have and who gets credit for which miracle.”

“Your wife,” Laena said sweetly, “will win both arguments.”

It was into that hush that Rhaenyra entered.

She had never crossed this threshold before. Not truly.

There had been invitations, of course, polite, warm, dutiful, but she had always found reason to decline. A Queen-to-be did not linger in another’s hall, even if it bore her husband’s name. 

Some part of her had never felt it was hers to enter.

The Velaryon townhouse had always stood a little apart from the rest of KingsLanding, too proud, too foreign, too certain of itself.

The first time she saw it, years ago, she had thought it beautiful but cold, like a seashell smoothed by hands that would never be hers. Driftmark had been Rhaenys’s chosen residence, Corlys’s triumph, Laenor's birthright. Even Laena moved through it with the easy certainty of someone whose blood matched the stone.

She was the stranger here...the dragon in a house of tide.

Inside, Corlys stood beside the cradles, Laenor and Laena to either side, an unbroken circle of blood and salt. Her children at its center.

Something in her chest tightened.

She had not meant to come. After the council, after the King’s easy smile and the seal cooling on the parchment, she had only wanted to press kisses to her babes. 

To celebrate with their soft love. 

Rhaenyra’s breath caught.

She had imagined them safe within her chambers.

She had not imagined this, her babes beneath a roof that was not hers, surrounded by a family whose pride came from centuries she could never claim.

Laenor noticed her first.

“Rhaenyra,” he said softly, straightening, a flicker of guilt crossing his face before it vanished into warmth. “I didn’t think you’d be done so soon.”

She stepped inside, her expression unreadable, voice calm. “Nor did I. The council was mercifully brief.” Her eyes moved to the cradles. “You brought them here.”

Laenor’s hand rubbed the back of his neck. “They needed air,” he said. “The Keep’s too loud."

“You—” she began, breath catching on the word. “You’ve made another nursery?”

Laenor straightened instantly, caught between guilt and pride. “Mother insisted. Father too. A safe place separated from court but still close enough to return whenever they need to."

Rhaenyra’s gaze moved slowly about the room, taking in the carved masts on the cradle frames, the faint Velaryon sigils worked into the linens, the soft light catching on seashell inlays. It was beautiful, too beautiful, too deliberate. 

Something in her chest tightened until it hurt to breathe.

She had built a nursery of her own, their nursery, in her chambers at the Red Keep.

She had chosen every cradle herself, every toy, every little detail. She had lined the walls with tapestries of stars and dragons and skies, so that even in sleep her babes would remember what they were born from.

It had been enough.

It was meant to be enough.

Betrayal bloomed beneath her ribs, tender as a bruise, and then hardened into something sharper.

When she spoke, her tone was steady, measured to the edge of serenity.

“You’ve all been very busy,” she said, her gaze moving from cradle to cradle. “I hadn’t realized how quickly my children could be improved upon.”

Laenor’s smile faltered. Corlys’s brows knit, faintly.

That same feeling, the one that had burned through her on the fifth night of her labors, rose again, slow and terrible.

The pain had been past human then, deeper than breath, deeper than reason.

And her kin outside her chamber discussing. Vultures, she had screamed. 

The septas had prayed. The midwifes counting breaths. And she had endured, alone except for the fire in her blood and the thing ancient and wordless that had answered it.

She had been the one to drink of Tyraxes’s blood, to survive what should have ended her, to feel the bond of god and dragon twine through her marrow until she thought her body would shatter.

She had been the one mocked when her belly swelled too long, the one the court whispered over. 

She had suffered their laughter, their doubt, their pity.

And now that the babes were here healthy, perfect, their every breath a rebuke to those who had prayed for her failure. 

Now everyone wanted a piece of them.

Corlys was the first to break the silence. His voice was low, deliberate, every word shaped as though tested on the tongue before release.

“It was a gift,” he said.

Rhaenyra turned toward him, the calm on her face thin as glass.

“So the babes may know,” he went on, “that they have a place outside the court. Always.”

Her expression did not soften. “A place,” she repeated. “You speak as if they’ve been cast adrift.”

Corlys’s gaze didn’t waver. “A harbor is not a cage, Princess. It’s where ships return when storms come.”

“They already have a harbor,” she said, the faint tremor in her voice betraying the heat beneath. “Mine.”

He inclined his head slightly. “And so they shall. But the seas turn, and courts turn faster. I would see them anchored in both.”

Rhaenyra’s jaw tightened. “Anchored? Or claimed?”

Something flickered in Corlys’s eyes, hurt, pride, old exhaustion, impossible to tell apart.

“You think this was theft.”

“I think it was presumption,” she said quietly.

He took a breath, slow as the tide drawing back.

“The court is on fire, only the King is blind to it,” he said. “We sought only to give the children peace.”

Her lips curved, not quite a smile. “A generous philosophy. I suppose next you’ll tell me the sea meant no insult when it swallowed fleets whole.”

Laenor shifted uneasily, his voice soft. “Rhaenyra, please—”

But she did not look at him. Her eyes stayed fixed on Corlys, calm and terrible.

“Do not mistake me, Lord Velaryon. I know what this house is. And I know what it cost to build it. But my children are not bricks in your legacy.”

Corlys met her stare for a long moment, then inclined his head, once, precise.

“Nor trophies in yours,” he said.

The words struck clean as a blade.

Before the silence could settle, the door opened again.

Rhaenys entered.

The Sea Snake’s wife moved with the kind of calm that made men step aside before they thought to question why. She was still in her riding leathers, her silver hair pinned back with a single pearl clasp.

“Well,” Rhaenys said softly, “it seems I’ve come upon a council of my own.”

Rhaenyra gave a small, brittle laugh, the sound bright as cracked glass.

“A full one at that.” She gestured with one hand, graceful even in irritation. “Tell me, is there any corner of this house that does not contain a Velaryon? Must I present my credentials at the threshold before I’m allowed to see my own children?”

Laena flinched, though faintly; Laenor shifted, uncertain whether to defend or retreat.

Rhaenys’s eyes cool, ageless, steady...moved over the younger woman. “You speak as though you are unwelcome,” she said. “And yet we built this place so you would never have to knock.”

“That’s generous,” Rhaenyra replied, her smile tightening. “A nursery and a house full of witnesses to remind me of it.”

Corlys’s tone cut through, low and warning. “Rhaenyra.”

But Rhaenys only studied her, curious, almost tender. “You’ve come fresh from council,” she said. “I imagine you’ve already fought a day’s worth of battles in silk and smiles. Must this room be another field?”

Rhaenyra’s composure wavered, then hardened again. “You mistake me, Princess. I came for peace. I found politics dressed as love.”

Rhaenys crossed the room without haste, pausing beside Aemma’s cradle. Her fingers brushed the baby’s hair back from her brow.

“You think this room was built to diminish you,” she said quietly. “It wasn’t. It was built because I’ve seen what courts do when they decide a child’s worth. You won today, Rhaenyra. But victories fade, and envy doesn’t.”

Rhaenyra’s gaze sharpened. “So this is insurance.”

“This is love with memory,” Rhaenys answered. “Because when the crown turns cold, blood is all that burns warm.”

The room went still.

Rhaenyra looked at her children, at the quiet rise and fall of their tiny chests, and for a moment her expression softened, then set again, regal, resolved.

“Then let it be remembered,” she said, “that the mother’s love burns hottest of all.”

Rhaenys smiled faintly, as though she had expected no other answer. “So it does.”

Laena stepped forward then, breaking the stillness. Her movements were measured, her face open, the very picture of calm that came from living one’s whole life between storm and sea.

She reached for Rhaenyra’s hand. Her touch was light warm, tentative, a peace offering.

“No one is taking your babes from you,” she said softly.

The words might have soothed another woman.

But Rhaenyra only tilted her head, the gesture graceful and faintly mocking.

“No? And yet you all gathered so prettily behind my back. How curious that protection always begins with secrecy.”

A flicker of hurt crossed Laena’s face, brief as a ripple on still water. But her voice, when she answered, was steady.

“Having us protect your children too does not warrant a claim,” she said. “It warrants love. And more eyes to see them safe.”

Rhaenyra’s lips curved, the kind of smile that wounds and dazzles all at once. “Forgive me, Laena, but I have seen what happens when too many hands reach for one cradle. It tips.”

Laena did not withdraw her hand. “Then let ours steady it,” she said simply. “Not overturn it.”

Rhaenyra looked down at their joined hands, the contrast stark: her own pale, unadorned, marked faintly by the scars left by maesters’ sutures; Laena’s sun-browned, ringed in silver. Two different houses, two different tempers of love.

She lifted her gaze, meeting Laena’s eyes head-on.

“I only want them to remain mine,” she said quietly, but the words trembled with something far older and fiercer than reason.

Laena did not flinch.

She held that gaze as one would hold a blade, carefully, knowing any movement could cut.

“A dragon’s possessiveness,” she said, her voice soft, almost fond, “is never-ending. It burns through every season.”

Rhaenyra’s mouth curved, though it was not quite a smile. “You make it sound a flaw.”

“Not a flaw,” Laena said. “A danger. To the dragon as much as to the world around her.”

She hesitated then, her composure flickering for the first time. Her hand drifted, almost unconsciously, to her own belly, a small barely there roundness.

A shadow of knowing passed through her eyes.

“I’ve thought of it often,” she said softly. “Of what it would be like. To carry something so powerful it feels like it might burn you alive. To love it so much you can’t tell where you end and it begins. I think I’d go mad if anyone tried to take it from me.”

Her hand fell away, but the tremor in her voice remained, barely perceptible. “You think we mean to take them from you,” she continued, “but look beyond this room. The court already measures their worth in whispers. The realm has already begun to lay claim. Even the Faith would bless them only to make them its own.”

She drew a slow, steadying breath, her eyes finding Rhaenyra’s again. “Driftmark is kin. Not enemy. We guard what you guard. The difference is, we know the sea better than those who would drown them.”

“And yet,” she said softly, “before they arrived, I was left alone.”

The words fell like salt into an open wound.

Laena’s breath caught; her hand stilled over her belly.

Rhaenyra’s gaze drifted beyond her, unfocused.

“You all came on the fifth day,” she said, her tone level but too calm, as though the steadiness itself were a kind of defense. “After the King’s letters went out. After he wrote that I might die in birth. Only then.”

Her breath caught, sharp, trembling. “It took my father’s fear...not love, not duty, fear...to bring you.”

Corlys’s jaw worked once before he spoke, his voice rough with something that might have been regret. “By the time word reached us, the wind had turned foul. The Red Queen flew as fast as she could.”

Rhaenyra turned her gaze to him, cool, cutting, so composed it hurt to look at.

“The wind,” she repeated. “How merciful, that the skies bears the blame.”

Laenor stepped forward, voice low, pleading. “Rhaenyra, I begged them to let us through. Father, Mother, Laena...all of us. But the Maesters said the chamber was sealed to all but the Faith and midwives. He—”

“He said it was for my modesty,” Rhaenyra interrupted, her voice trembling not with tears but rage remembered. “As though modesty mattered while I was dying.”

Corlys’s hand tightened on the cradle’s edge, his silence heavy, eyes fixed on the babes as if their very existence might absolve him. Laenor could not meet her gaze. Laena stood closest, her hand still over her belly, the smallest tremor visible in her jaw.

Rhaenyra drew herself up, the fire returning to her spine. “So forgive me,” she said, “if I guard what I bled for. If I measure love by who came before the letters, not after.”

For a moment, no one breathed. Then Laena stepped forward.

“Then let us be here for you now,” she said softly, but the quiet carried through the room like a vow. “The Compact is secured, your vision made real. Let us do our part to ensure its success.”

Rhaenyra’s gaze flicked to her, skeptical, wary. Laena did not flinch.

“Mother has already told me about Dragonstone,” she continued, her voice steady. “About what must be prepared there. The hatcheries. The harbor. The watchtowers and roads that will carry your trade. It needs a keeper while you remain at court, someone the island will trust.”

Rhaenyra’s brow lifted faintly. “And you would name yourself that keeper?”

“I would,” Laena said without hesitation. “Bind me to Dragonstone. Not by favor, but by duty. I will guard your wealth with Vhagar herself and help prepare your seat with Daemon.”

The mention of his name gave the air a subtle weight; Corlys’s eyes flickered, and Rhaenys’s expression sharpened, unreadable.

But Laena pressed on. “You spoke of legacy today. Of a realm that feeds its own dragons. Then let me tend the roots of that legacy while you build the crown that shields it."

Rhaenyra was silent for a long while after Laena spoke.

The air itself seemed to pause around her. Even the fire burned quieter, as though waiting to see which way her temper would turn.

At last she moved—slowly, deliberately—circling one of the cradles. Her fingers trailed the carved mast rising from its frame, tracing the craftsmanship with absent care. When she finally spoke, her voice was soft, almost contemplative.

“You see further than most,” she said. “You understand what I mean to make of Dragonstone. It was never meant to be a mausoleum for dragons past. It was meant to be alive. Breathing, burning, full of purpose.”

Her eyes lifted to Laena, bright with a dangerous kind of warmth.

"But it will not be easy."

Laena straightened subtly, bracing as though before a wind.

“It will take years,” Rhaenyra continued. “Decades, even. The island has been sleeping too long. You’ll need to wake it...its people, its ships, its trade. You’ll find few willing to follow a young woman’s orders, fewer still to pay her coin for the privilege. Every contract must be drawn through my Compact, every levy, every export. It must bear my seal before a single sail leaves harbor. If it fails, the blame will fall on me. If it thrives, the realm will try to steal it.”

She came closer now, until the flickering light caught the curve of her cheek, the faint shimmer of the sigil ring on her finger. “You would be binding yourself to me, Laena, not just in promise, but in endurance. You’ll answer to no man before me. Not the King. Not your father. Not even your mother. Your loyalty must run one way, upward, through the fire.”

Laena met her gaze, steady as a keel. “I understand.”

“No,” Rhaenyra said softly. “You believe you understand. The true work will test you differently. Dragonstone will fight you. The island resists those who come to tame it. Its cliffs crumble at insult; its storms are never content to pass quietly. You’ll see the sea devour ships you built. You’ll watch men desert. You’ll wake to find your progress undone overnight. And still you’ll have to begin again.”

Laena’s throat moved, but she didn’t falter.

“Then let it demand,” she said quietly. “I will endure it. You said it yourself, Dragonstone was meant to breathe. I’ll help it do so. And I’ll build something that can’t be unmade when your crown comes to rest on it.”

Laena stood tall, unflinching, a living mirror of the sea she came from...bright, untamed, impossible to humble. She was radiant, the kind of beauty that didn’t fade when she fell silent, it deepened.

It struck Rhaenyra with a strange ache: jealousy first, sharp as salt, then something far more treacherous.

Laena had what Rhaenyra did not: the steadiness of belonging.

The certainty of being loved without question. The way men looked at her, Rhaenys’s daughter, Corlys’s pride, wife to the rogue prince, it was as if the realm itself conspired to cradle her.

But still, Rhaenyra could not look away.

Jealousy, yes, but threaded through it was something rarer, cleaner. Respect. 

“You mean to make yourself indispensable,” Rhaenyra said at last, her voice quieter, steadier.

Laena’s lips curved faintly. “I mean to make myself useful.”

Corlys gave a low hum of approval, pride shadowed by wariness. “A Velaryon never minds hard seas,” he said. “But mind her warnings, girl. Even the finest ship burns if it strays too close to fire.”

Rhaenys’s gaze cut to her husband, sharp and fond all at once. “And yet the fire is what lights the way.”

Laena turned back to Rhaenyra, her tone lighter, teasing at the edge of something intimate. “Are you laying this task at my feet, then and not Daemon’s?”

Rhaenyra tilted her head, and for a heartbeat, her smile was almost dangerous. “I am.

Laena blinked, faintly amused. “You’d trust me with what you wouldn’t trust him?”

“Daemon is my blood,” Rhaenyra said, stepping closer, “but not my measure. He burns hot, and the world mistakes his ruin for glory. Difficulty drives him away.”

She stopped a pace closer than courtesy allowed, her voice softening. “But you, Laena… you don’t flee. You face storms and call them teachers. You ride the oldest dragon alive, and she answers you because she knows your heart doesn’t bend where others’ would break.”

Laena’s eyes caught hers clear, dark, unflinching. “You’ve been watching me.”

Rhaenyra smiled, slow, deliberate, the kind that never reached the eyes but still managed to scorch. “It’s hard not to.”

Laena’s breath caught, color rising faintly to her cheeks. “You flatter me, Princess.”

Rhaenyra’s voice softened. “No. I see you.”

The words hung between them, quiet and irrevocable.

For a moment, the air between them shifted, two young women, bound by lineage and expectation, standing in the eye of history neither asked for but both had begun to claim.

Laena inclined her head slowly. “Then let’s make Dragonstone worthy of us both.”

Rhaenyra’s answering nod was slow, deliberate. “We will. And the realm will learn what becomes of women who build instead of beg.”

The silence that followed was not fragile, it was full. The kind that comes before foundations are laid.

Behind them, the fire snapped once, scattering sparks that drifted up like stars.

Rhaenys watched the two of them, one flame, one tide and thought, with something like awe, the realm has no idea what it has just allowed to begin.

---

The bells of the Grand Sept tolled low and slow, their echo rolling through the Red Keep like a tide. By the time the final note faded, the doors of Maegor’s Holdfast swung wide to admit the Faith.

Incense preceded them. 

Thick, golden, cloying. Septas in pale linen glided ahead with candles, septons followed bearing relics that caught the light like teeth.

At their center moved the High Septon, a man robed in cloth-of-gold and smug serenity, his smile broad enough to seem holy.

He spread his hands as he entered.

“Blessed be this house and the womb that quickens its joy,” he proclaimed. “The Seven smile upon a realm so rich in life, so bountiful in promise. Truly the Queen’s virtue is a fountain that does not run dry.”

Soft whispers rippled through the hall.

Alicent bowed her head, demure and shining with gratitude.

Rhaenyra, standing among the Velaryon contingent, inclined hers a fraction more acknowledgment than assent.

The Septon went on, his voice warm with unction.

“May the Mother cradle Her daughter and ease her labors; may each birth strengthen the Crown’s grace upon the earth.”

Not a single word turned toward the Princess who had already given three. 

Rhaenys’s eyes flicked sideways to catch it; Corlys’s mouth set like drawn rope. Laenor shifted, the soft rustle of his sleeve the only sound from their line.

When the chant subsided, the High Septon’s gaze drifted lazily across the chamber, pausing, at last, on the veiled cradle near the dais where Princess Aemma slept.

The movement was almost imperceptible: a slight incline of his head, the stilling of his hands, the faint dilation of his pupils.

He looked not with care, but with interest. The quiet, terrible curiosity of a man seeing a miracle he does not believe in and wants to touch all the same.

The smile that had seemed pious moments ago turned brittle, intent.

Corlys Velaryon moved first.

He did not speak. He simply stepped forward, every inch of him deliberate, his presence filling the air between cradle and Faith. The gold embroidery at his collar caught the light like a warning flare.

His voice, when it came, was low and calm in the way deep water is calm before it swallows a ship.

“The babes rest. We would not have their dreams disturbed.”

The Septon did not blink at once; when he did, it was too slow.

“My lord of the Tides,” he murmured, feigning gentleness, “surely the sight of innocence requires no guard.”

“Perhaps,” Corlys replied, “but innocence draws predators all the same.”

The words cracked through the air like rigging in a storm.

Laenor was already beside him young, quick, blood hot.

He didn’t posture; he simply placed a hand on the cradle’s frame, fingers whitening on the carved driftwood.

His voice was quieter, rougher. “You’ve looked long enough.”

That did it.

A muscle jumped in the Septon’s cheek. His smile faltered, not in apology, but in irritation, like a priest denied access to his own altar.

“Peace, my lords,” he said softly, the tone meant to soothe but sinking like oil through water. “The gods see all. I need only witness what they’ve already blessed.”

Rhaenyra’s voice cut cleanly through the hush.

“And yet their blessings do not require your stare.”

She hadn’t raised her tone, but every candle in the chamber seemed to bend its flame toward her.

The High Septon inclined his head stiffly and withdrew a pace. “As the gods will it,” he murmured again, but his eyes flickered once more toward the veil before he turned.

The movement was small, but Corlys saw it. So did Laenor.

And both men felt the same surge, rage, protective and physical, rising like the sea in their blood.

It was the instinct of fathers and sailors: the need to drag a man beneath the tide and let salt water rinse his blasphemy away.

Only Rhaenys’s hand, light on Corlys’s sleeve, kept him still.

And then—
a sound cleaved the hush.

A choked cry, sharp and startling.

Alicent’s hand had flown to her belly, her face whitening as she bent forward in sudden pain. The sound was not pious; it was raw, human. Her knees trembled. A gasp tore loose again, louder.

“Your Grace!” one of the septas cried, rushing to her side. “The Queen—!”

The High Septon turned at once, his expression transfigured.

What had been irritation moments before bloomed into rapture.

“Praise be!” he thundered, raising his arms. “The Mother stirs within her! The child quickens even as Her servants stand witness!”

The septas fell to their knees. The acolytes began to chant, low and rhythmic, their voices shaking the air like distant thunder.

“Holy blessing upon the Queen!” the Septon cried, his voice swelling. “See how the Mother herself marks this hour, life bursting forth beneath the sight of Her faithful!”

He turned to the court at large, his face radiant with false awe.

“Behold a true miracle! Not a mockery of one, not the work of wayward blood or foreign flame, but the Mother’s own grace, answering piety with fruit!”

The words struck like stones flung at an unseen enemy.

Rhaenyra went utterly still.
Every syllable was deliberate, pointed, sanctified insult.
A true blessing.
Not a mockery.

"Seven save us," Lord Strong said with a harsh inhale. His eyes darting over to Rhaenyra. 

Her hands folded too neatly before her, the knuckles whitening until the rings bit into her skin.

The septons surged forward, gathering around Alicent as she was lowered into a chair. One called for linens, another for holy water. The chanting rose, louder now, ecstatic.

“Mother’s mercy! Mother’s light!”

The High Septon placed his hand upon Alicent’s brow, eyes glistening. “The Seven have chosen their moment,” he declared. “The Queen’s pain is their song of renewal. This is the faith rewarded!”

His gaze flicked, just once, toward Rhaenyra.
He smiled.

And she knew, he meant her to hear the word mockery still echoing beneath the chant.

Behind her, Corlys’s jaw tightened, the vein at his temple beating visibly. Laenor had gone rigid, the muscles in his throat working, silent oaths caught behind his teeth. Even Rhaenys’s face had gone pale beneath its calm; her hand had not left her husband’s arm.

Rhaenyra did not move.
She could not.

The sound of prayer filled the hall, beautiful and terrible, like waves breaking over bone.

And through it all, the Princess of Dragonstone stood unbowed, her face a mask of serenity, her eyes lit with something that looked very much like hate.

The great doors crashed open.

Viserys entered at a half-run, crown askew, face bright with confusion that turned swiftly to wonder.

He stopped short at the sight before him: the Queen surrounded by white robes and incense smoke, the Septon’s arms outstretched, the court on its knees.

“What—what is this?” he demanded, breathless. “Is she—?”

“Blessed, Your Grace,” the High Septon declared. “The Mother’s favor manifests beneath your very roof. The Queen’s hour begins beneath holy witness. The Seven have marked your line with bounty.”

Viserys’s astonishment melted into joy. He pressed forward, seizing the Septon’s hands, heedless of the Queen’s muffled groan.

“So many blessings!” he said hoarsely. “First my daughter’s babes, now this! Another gift, another heir. Truly the gods are generous to House Targaryen!”

The courtiers murmured assent. The Septon bowed deeply, his face alight.

“The gods are generous to faith, my king. The Queen’s devotion has moved them.”

Viserys’s laughter rang against the marble like a hammer on gold. “Yes—yes, her devotion! The gods smile upon piety.”

He turned, sweeping the chamber with an expansive gesture. “You see? Beneath my roof, the realm multiplies! A sign of peace, of favor, of renewal!”

His gaze passed over the Velaryons and caught on Rhaenyra, standing still amid the haze.

For a moment he seemed to expect her smile. When it did not come, his expression faltered.

“My daughter,” he said, still jovial but slightly strained, “you too are blessed! Your babes strong, bright, dragonriders already. Surely your heart rejoices to see the Mother’s grace extend to your Stepmother.”

Rhaenyra inclined her head, the motion careful as a blade being sheathed.

“Of course, Father,” she said softly. “How could it do otherwise?”

The words were flawless.

The tone was glass.

Beside her, Corlys said nothing. His eyes were dark as the depths.

Laenor stared at the floor, jaw clenched.

Rhaenys’s fingers tightened imperceptibly on her husband’s sleeve.

The Septon continued to bless the Queen, his voice rhythmic, fervent, filling the air with sanctity that smelled faintly of rot. Alicent’s breath came shallow and quick, pain glazed across her features. Yet even that, Viserys mistook for grace.

He laid a hand upon her shoulder, radiant.

“Let it be said,” he proclaimed, “that no house in Westeros is so favored as mine. The gods themselves bear witness.”

Otto Hightower entered, his step measured, his expression composed to courtly perfection. He paused only a moment at the threshold, the scene unfolding before him in incense and gold: the Queen bent in pain, the High Septon’s hands raised in benediction, the King aglow with joy.

A lesser man might have faltered. Otto smiled.

His gaze slid through the smoke to Rhaenyra. He did not bow. Neither did she.

“My King,” he said smoothly, bowing just enough to satisfy decorum. “The Mother’s mercy shines indeed. The realm will remember this day, faith and blood intertwined beneath your roof.”

Viserys turned, delighted. “Another heir already stirring.”

Otto’s eyes softened as they fell upon Alicent, his tone tender yet practiced. “My brave girl,” he murmured, stepping closer. “The Mother favors you truly. Come, let her chambers be prepared. The Queen should not weather her trial upon marble floors.”

The Septon inclined his head in fervent agreement. “Ser Otto speaks wisely. The Mother’s chosen should be tended in peace.”

Viserys nodded at once, still grinning. “Yes—yes, see her safely. Let the realm know joy dwells in the Red Keep again!”

Otto gestured, and servants rushed forward to bear the Queen toward her apartments.

He followed a pace behind, one hand lifted in benediction as though he shared the Septon’s holiness. His voice, low and certain, carried easily through the hall:

“Another son for the realm, I think. The gods would not make such signs for anything less.”

The Septon’s laughter joined his. The chamber filled with the sound of men agreeing.

As they passed, Rhaenyra stood immovable in the smoke.

Otto’s gaze brushed hers.

For a moment the hall seemed to shrink to the span of that look, two wills measuring each other across the ruin of incense and hymn.

He did not bow. Neither did she.

In his eyes was approval of everything she despised: the sanctity of pain, the theatre of faith, the crown turned toward piety instead of power.

In hers was the quiet promise that she had seen him claim it.

Then he looked away, following the Queen and the High Septon through the doors.

The scent of myrrh and crushed rose trailed after them, heavy as judgement.

Notes:

To explain the Dragonstone compact in plainer terms.
1. The compact gives her autonomous control over Dragonstone’s harbors, hatcheries, and trade routes.
2. Allows revenues from tariffs, volcanic ash, and obsidian trade to flow directly into Dragonstone's accounts.
3. Legitimatizes her right to collect and manage taxes independently from the crowns.
4. This builds an economic power base, similar to driftmark's. Backed by trade, resources and dragons.
5. By anchoring in the Compact in Velaryon oversight: Lord Corlys’s seal and quarterly reporting give it credibility and continuity.
6. By placing Dragonstone’s hatcheries under her administration, Rhaenyra effectively removes them from the Crown's control. Any new hatchlings, eggs, or breeding pairs fall under Rhaenyra’s direct claim of patronage and lineage, giving her symbolic and literal ownership of the next generation of dragons. This grants her the power to decide who receives an egg...a political act that determines allegiance, succession, and house prestige.
7. All of this makes Dragonstone an independent and wealthy lordship. A rising power.

Chapter 11: The Unveiling Part: 1

Emeralds gleamed at Alicent’s throat like small, patient serpents. Their weight comforted her, a reminder of lineage and restraint.

Still, nothing stilled the unease rising beneath her ribs.

The Red Keep thrummed with something like fever; courtiers whispered as if the whole city were a hive, eager to sting.

Tomorrow: the unveiling.

The triplets of Rhaenyra Targaryen and Laenor Velaryon.

One of fire, one of sea, and one of light itself.

She paused at the glass, fingers at the clasp of her cloak. Green velvet drank the light; behind her, ladies spoke of Dragonstone’s storms and feasts and dragons whose cries had already been heard across Blackwater Bay.

Alicent heard only the steady drum of her pulse.

She had seen them and she had thought them... unnatural. Not monstrous, no, never that...but too perfect. 

Aemon, pale as moonlit snow, silver hair already glinting like caught flame. 

Aenar, bronze-skinned and wild-eyed, the sea written in his veins. 

And Aemma, last and most terrible. Gold and silver entwined, a creature of sunfire and dawnlight. 

The memory of them made her skin go cold.

She had sown those whispers herself, a careful skein of doubt that slipped like silk between noble houses. Simple things at first: a question of milk-fed health, a subtle remark on how the infants never cried, a suggestion that their nurses looked at the world with eyes too bright to be human. Then darker threads, that the Princess hid them because they were godless creatures, that the boys were born of something more dragon than man.

Each lie spread like oil on water.

Behind her, laughter rippled. Lady Ceira Hightower leaned in, eager. “They say the dragons have not stopped flying since the summons. The sky above Dragonstone burns at night as if lit by their breath.”

Lady Florent’s laugh was light as a bell. “Or as if they guard something worth watching.”

Alicent met her own reflection: composed, lovely, utterly still. “They are children,” she said. The words were cool and flat. “The realm will tire of its fancies.”

Ceira hesitated, smoothing the Queen’s cloak of green velvet. “And yet... there are whispers. That the Princess Rhaenyra keeps them hidden because they outshine her. That their beauty—”

“—is blasphemous,” Florent finished in a hush.

“Then perhaps it is,” Alicent murmured, her voice thin with something that was not quite disbelief. “The gods punished Valyria for daring to look upon their fire and call it theirs. Men forget that.”

Her ladies’ eyes shone like lanterns.

“Do you truly think—” Ceira began.

“Enough.” Alicent’s voice folded the room into silence. “The realm speaks too freely. Let it not be said the Queen joins them.”

They dipped their heads, chastened and not.
Alicent rose, deliberate as the closing of a door. She drew the cloak close and looked through the window at a city wrapped in gold and mist.

“See my children’s things packed,” she said quietly. “Their cloaks, their books, Daeron’s toys. They leave at dawn.”

Ceira blinked, startled. “Your Grace, do you mean for all the royal children to sail?”

“Of course.” Alicent’s tone left no room for question. “The realm should remember the King’s sons are every bit as royal as the Princess’s.”

Ceira curtsied low. “As you command."

She had poured oil onto water.

Tomorrow she would see whether it burned.

---

They had come to Dragonstone a moon early to prepare.

This, after all, was no ordinary nameday.

It would be the first time the realm saw the heirs of fire unveiled together, no longer swaddled infants, but living emblems of promise. The Compact, the new trade routes, the quiet prosperity blooming in their names, all would be on display.

It had been a relentless moon.

From dawn until the sea bled gold at dusk, Rhaenyra was everywhere at once: her hands ink-stained, her voice carrying over wind and stone. There was always another list to approve, another seal to press, another demand waiting just beyond her breath. Even her silences had become work.

And there was so much to account for.

Aenar’s ship, Seafoam’s Grace, had returned twice already, first from the Vale and the North, and most recently, unexpectedly, from Lys.

Her holds were heavy with proof of loyalty and ambition: casks of myrrh and cinnamon bark, bolts of violet and gold fire-silk so fine they slipped through the fingers like breath, coral idols glinting with inset pearls. One crate gleamed blue in the lamplight, glass said to be fused with powdered sapphires. And among the bounty, a smaller chest, no larger than a man’s heart, filled with crystal vials of scented oil, each stoppered in gold.

It was generous. Too generous. 

“The Lyseni call it Breath of the Gods,” said Maester Charss softly, almost apologetic. He was young still, his robes salt-stained from the voyage. “They sent it as a token. For goodwill.”

Rhaenyra turned the vial in her fingers. The oil caught the light in slow, molten ribbons; amber shading into green, like sun through shallow water.

“Goodwill,” she repeated, tasting the word as if it were bitter. “Or temptation.”

The maester said nothing.

The council chamber was half-shadowed, the sea’s low thunder breathing against the glass. Rhaenyra stood at the head of the map table, its carved waves and continents glinting under candlelight. She had not removed her riding cloak; the damp hem brushed her boots.

“Who gave permission for this detour?” she asked.

The question was quiet. It needed no force to cut.

At last, a seaman named Jakor cleared his throat. “Lord Vaemond Velaryon, Princess. He acted in your husband’s stead. A storm split their mainmast. Lys offered safe harbor. The Archon himself sent emissaries to the docks.”

Rhaenyra’s gaze sharpened. “And lord Vaemond accepted their welcome without question?”

Jakor hesitated. “He believed it prudent.”

Charss spoke quickly, sensing her restraint fray. “The Lyseni expressed admiration for Dragonstone’s growing business. They wish to open trade: exclusive rights, in exchange for access to their shipyards and silks. They spoke of binding their fortunes to yours.”

Her eyes lifted then, bright as drawn steel. “Exclusive.”

“Yes, Princess,” Charss said. “They believe your alliances with the Vale and the North make you... more approachable than Lord Corlys.”

A flicker of a smile ghosted across her lips, cold, knowing, too thin to be amusement. “More approachable. That’s one word for it.”

She drew a steadying breath. 

“Did Vaemond sign anything?”

“No, Princess. Only an understanding,” Jakor said quickly.

“Then he’ll understand,” she said, closing the ledger with a soft thud, “that he’s not to speak for me again.”

Through the open window, the harbor glittered below, alive with the movement of banners and cranes. Seafoam’s Grace bobbed at anchor beside The Maiden’s Flame, two bright vessels bearing her children’s names.

“Send for Lord Vaemond,” she said. “He will answer for his decisions before me and Lord Corlys both.”

“Before us all,” came a voice from the doorway.

Corlys stood there already, silver-haired and sea-worn, his face dark with anger held in check. Laenor entered behind him, no calmer. The salt wind had tangled his hair, and his jaw was set in a way that reminded her painfully of youth. 

“I was told the Seafoam sought harbor at Lys,” Corlys said, his tone dangerously quiet. “Without sanction. Without message. Is it true?”

Rhaenyra inclined her head once. “Lord Vaemond accepted their welcome, and their gifts.”

“Fool,” Corlys hissed, pacing toward the window. “Lys dresses its snares in perfume. He risked Aenar’s ship, our sailors, the cargo—”

“And our name,” Laenor cut in, voice taut. “The Free Cities will think us pliant, easily courted. If anything had happened—”

Rhaenyra’s gaze moved between them, sharp and level. “Then let us ensure nothing does.”

She turned to Maester Charss. “Have every crate from Lys inspected. Every cask, every bolt of silk, every vial. I want the taster’s mark on them before the moon sets.”

The young maester hesitated. “You suspect—?”

“I suspect intent,” she said. “Lys gives nothing freely. Beauty is their poison, and they send it in glass.”

She turned back to the chest of perfume, tracing one finger along its carved lid. “Still, they have opened a door,” she said. “It would be foolish not to look through it.”

She moved to the window again, the sea wind catching her hair, stirring the red silk of her sleeves like flame. “Invite the Lyseni envoy to the nameday,” she said. “Quietly. Let them see Dragonstone in full flame and finery. Let them drink our wine and count our dragons. Then they may decide what sort of power they wish to trade with.”

Corlys’s expression eased, only slightly. “Now you sound like a sailor,” he murmured. “Suspicious of every wind, but still willing to set the sail.”

“Then let them see what happens to men who bring daggers to Dragonstone,” Laenor said, a flicker of pride in his tone. He moved closer to the table, his hand resting on the carved coastline. “If we’re to be courted, let it be on our terms.”

“Precisely,” Rhaenyra replied.

Her gaze drifted down again to the ships below. “Record the Lyseni cargo under Aenar’s account,” she said. “The pearls under Aemma’s. The oils under Aemon’s. Let it be remembered the first gifts offered to the heirs of fire came from across the sea, and that they were tested before they were trusted.”

Charss bowed low, scribbling quick notes, though his hands trembled faintly at the tone of ceremony woven through her command.

“And speaking of Aemma,” she said, turning back. “Tell me of her holdings. I want to know what’s been done.”

Charss hurried to unroll a fresh parchment. “The little princess's accounts continue to grow, Princess. The passage grants you authorized have proven... surprisingly profitable.”

“How profitable?”

“Six hundred and forty-seven gold dragons since last moon,” he said, scanning the inked columns. “Nearly double last moon.”

Corlys gave a low whistle, half pride, half disbelief. “That’s no small purse. And from a single ship?”

“Indeed, my lord,” said Charss. “Every vessel that sails under the Dragonstone banner now pays tithe for the right. Their tributes fill the girl’s coffers.”

Rhaenyra inclined her head, satisfaction flickering behind her eyes. “A fair exchange.”

Laenor leaned over the table, scanning the figures for himself. “Aemma’s name has already become currency,” he said. “Merchants boast of paying her dues, as if it’s a mark of favor.”

Corlys grunted, but his eyes glimmered. “The best kind of power. Soft. Unquestioned. Men believe they’re buying prestige while they fill your vaults.”

Charss nodded eagerly. “It has done more than bring trade, Princess. The route to Dragonstone itself is becoming... revered. Nobles from Oldtown, even a few maesters, petition for passage to study the relics of old Valyria, the caverns, the glass veins. They call it a holy journey.”

“A pilgrimage,” Rhaenyra prettily labeled.“To the mouth of a sleeping god.”

Laenor smiled faintly. “You always did have a taste for drama.”

Her lips curved, amused. “And you, for disbelief. But tell me, Maester, what do they leave behind?”

“Offerings,” Charss said. “Books, relics, old silver. The Citadel has written twice requesting inspection.”

Corlys laughed under his breath. “Of course they have. The citadel smell coin and history, and come running with their chains.

He adjusted his spectacles nervously. “It is truly remarkable, Princess. Her holdings now surpass what most noble houses earn in a season.”

“And yet she stands to inherit nothing by right.”

The room quieted.

She traced a fingertip along the rim of the map table, eyes distant. “Aenar will have Driftmark one day. Aemon will inherit the throne. But Aemma—” she looked up, her gaze bright as flame, “Aemma has only what I give her. If she is to have a place of her own, her coffers must speak for her. My daughter will not live her life waiting for men to give her permission to thrive."

Silence settled, heavy as the tide.

“She is but one year,” Charss said carefully.

Rhaenyra turned back to the window. The sea flashed gold beneath the sun, her daughter’s ship gliding like a living flame across the harbor.

“Yes,” she said sharply. “And already the realm is watching her breathe. Better she learns early what it costs to be seen.”

"There are some who find it uncomfortable."

She crossed to the window again, watching The Maiden’s Flame sway against the sunlight. “They may whisper what they please. Continue the passage grants. Triple the price for those who come from Oldtown. They pay in coin and in pride, both spend easily.”

Charss bowed, ink-stained fingers trembling slightly as he noted her command.

When the door closed behind him, only the three of them remained. The quiet that followed was not peace, but calculation. 

Corlys was the first to break it. His voice came low, threaded with the cautious weight of experience. “You’ve thought far ahead for her, Rhaenyra. It’s admirable. But there are other ways to ensure her place.”

Rhaenyra turned, one brow lifting. “Speak plainly.”

Corlys met her gaze without flinching. “Aemma’s fortune could secure more than respect. There will come a time when alliances must be sealed, and blood must bind them. She could be promised to one of her brothers. Aenar or Aemon, each path would keep the lines strong.”

Laenor stiffened beside him, a quiet frown tugging at his mouth. “Father—”

Corlys’s gaze flicked to him, patient but firm. “And if not Aemma, then consider the others. Newborn Baela and Rhaena. The twins could also be joined to the Princes, if the gods favor it."

Rhaenyra’s expression cooled, but her tone remained measured.

“We have discussed this before,” she said. “My children are too young for such things.”

Corlys inclined his head, unbothered by her steel. “They will not remain so for long. The realm already whispers of alliances to come. Better that we decide the course before the tide does.”

Rhaenyra studied him, her good–father, her ally by necessity.

“Preparedness,” she said, “is not the same as haste. Aemma will not be bartered in her cradle, nor will my sons be bound before they can speak their own names.”

Laenor nodded quietly, the tension easing from his shoulders. “Let them grow before we measure their worth in politics.”

Before Corlys could reply, a soft knock sounded at the chamber door.

Rhaenys entered with two nurses in tow, sunlight haloing her silver hair.

“Forgive the intrusion,” she said, though amusement glimmered in her tone. “The heirs of fire refuse to be left behind.”

Aenar came first, stubborn, determined, his small legs unsteady but fierce in their intent.

He tottered across the threshold, took three triumphant steps, and promptly fell on his bottom. Undeterred, he let out a frustrated sound, tiny hands gripping the rug as if to wrestle the ground itself into obedience.

Aemon stumbled after him, quieter but no less intent, eyes wide and solemn as if the floor were a mystery he meant to solve. He landed in a half-crawl beside his brother, blinked once, and then began laughing, bright, gurgling laughter that filled the room like bells.

Only Aemma was carried, perched in Rhaenys’s arms like a tiny queen. Her gown was of soft red silk embroidered with gold thread.

When her grandmother shifted her, she gave a haughty little sigh, as though aware of her privilege.

“Already spoiled,” Corlys said, though his voice was soft with affection.

“Only beloved,” Rhaenys corrected, pressing her cheek against the child’s pale hair.

Rhaenyra turned from the window, her severity dissolving in an instant. “You should have called for me,” she said, crossing the room to them.

“I tried,” Rhaenys said with a faint smile. “They answered first.”

The nurses knelt to help the boys, but Aenar waved them off with all the imperious will of a prince twice his size.

He wobbled to his feet again, determined, unyielding and this time made it to the map table before collapsing against its leg.

His tiny palm slapped the carved outline of Driftmark, smearing a faint print of drool and triumph.

Aemon, not to be outdone, crawled after him, tugging at his brother’s sleeve and babbling insistently. Together they toppled over in a tangle of limbs and delighted squeals.

Corlys crouched beside them, a rare softness in his face. “That one has my spine,” he said, nodding to Aenar. “And the other—” He glanced at Aemon, whose curious gaze was fixed on the shimmering light from the window. “That one will see too much, I think.”

Rhaenyra only smiled. “Then they are their mother’s sons.”

She turned toward Rhaenys and reached for her daughter.

Aemma was already reaching back, little fingers curling toward the ruby at her mother’s throat.

Rhaenyra gathered her close, brushing her lips against her cheek. “And this one?” she murmured. “She already knows the world belongs to her.”

Corlys rose from where he knelt beside the boys, brushing sea dust from his sleeves.

“The realm will see them soon enough. You’ve planned quite the spectacle, Rhaenyra. Dragonstone hasn’t seen such a gathering in years.”

“Nor has it needed one,” she replied, tone measured but resolute. “The nameday is more than a celebration. It’s a statement. The court will expect a show of strength and they shall have one.”

Laenor chuckled softly. “A feast of dragons and politics, then.”

“Of course,” Rhaenyra said, her lips curving. “The only kind worth attending.” She glanced toward Rhaenys. “The banners will rise at dawn, the ships from Driftmark by midday. The markets are already swelling with merchants and performers. I want the realm to remember that prosperity follows fire.”

Rhaenys tilted her head, studying her with quiet admiration. “You sound like your father when he was young, before the weight of the crown bent his spine.”

“I have no crown to bend me,” Rhaenyra said, though the smile she gave her was softer now. “Not yet.”

The older woman’s gaze gentled. “You will,” she said simply.

For a moment, Rhaenyra looked toward the open windows, where the harbor shimmered beneath the sun.

“And Laena?” she asked softly. “Is she resting at last?"

Rhaenys’s expression warmed immediately, her pride unmistakable. “As much as she ever rests,” she said. “You’ve seen her, she walks the cliffs again, defying every healer’s order. Still, the color has returned to her cheeks. The girls keep her anchored. Baela wails if she’s not held, and Rhaena... gods, that child smiles at everything.”

Rhaenyra’s lips curved faintly, a warmth stirring beneath her composure. “She gave more of herself to this island than anyone could have asked. Even through her confinement, she was still sending orders to the shipwrights.”

Rhaenys inclined her head, the lines at her mouth softening. “She wanted the island ready before your children’s nameday, she said it must shine enough to meet their fire.”

A quiet laugh escaped Rhaenyra. “It does. Every stone, every banner bears her hand. I owe her more than I can say.”

Rhaenys smiled faintly. “Then tell her so before the festivities. She listens better to love than to praise.”

"I will."

Rhaenyra lingered at the window only a moment longer before the familiar rhythm of purpose returned to her. 

“The halls will need polishing before the court arrives,” she said, already thinking aloud. “The marble has dulled since the storms last week.”

Rhaenys’s brow arched faintly. “You plan to greet nobles with shining floors?”

“With reflections,” Rhaenyra corrected. “If the realm must see my children, let them see themselves reflected at their feet while they kneel.”

That earned a quiet, knowing laugh from her good-mother.

Rhaenyra turned toward Corlys and Laenor, who were still half-watching the boys play on the rug.

“Take them down to the caves,” she said. “Vhaelyx, Vermax, and Vaerith have been restless, better my children learn to soothe their dragons' tempers.”

Laenor nodded, scooping Aemon into his arms as Corlys lifted the squirming Aenar with mock severity. Aemma was passed back to Rhaenys, who carried her as though she were light itself.

When they had gone, the chamber seemed to breathe differently, quieter, sharper, as though the walls knew what came next.

Rhaenyra crossed to the long oak table where sketches and scrolls lay spread open.

Maps, seating charts, and fresh designs inked in her own hand. She unrolled one, smoothing the parchment flat with her palm.

“The new mosaic will be finally revealed,” she said. “The dragon glass was finer than I expected.”

Her fingers traced the shape, twelve feet of mirrored sea glass and molten gold, set into the floor before the dais.

The design was a great spiral of flame unfurling into the form of a dragon mid-flight, its wings arched to catch the light from the open dome above.

“When the sun passes the window,” she murmured, half to herself, “the light will fall through the colored panes: red, gold, silver, blue, and scatter across the floor like rainbows. If I time it with the unveiling...”

She stepped back, imagining it, the hush of the court, the sea wind curling through the great doors, her children walking forward beneath the cascade of light.

“Their hair will catch it,” she whispered. “It will crown them in color.”

Her quill moved swiftly, marking adjustments.

Her fingers brushed the parchment’s edge. “Even the gods will look twice.”

Then the rhythm took her.

Scrolls unfurled and overlapped, their edges weighted by ink bottles and half-burned candles. The sound of the sea faded beneath the hush of concentration, her thoughts moving faster than her hand could follow. Lines crossed, redrawn, notes scrawled in the margins, the floor slowly littered with discarded pages that did not please her.

A chart of names. A list of ships. The shape of a hall. The scent of a feast. All the details of a kingdom reduced to ink and correction.

She worked until the light changed, gold to rose, rose to silver. The candles burned low, their smoke curling against the vaulted ceiling. The windows had long gone dark, and still she wrote, each movement deliberate, as though the act of perfection itself might keep the world from shifting beneath her feet.

The quill’s nib caught once, splitting the page. She frowned, set it aside, reached for another.

When at last she paused, her wrist ached and her ink had cooled. 

She flexed her fingers, feeling the stiffness set deep in her knuckles. Her shoulders protested as she straightened.

The corridors beyond her door had gone quiet, the keep itself settling into its own kind of breath.

She stood, the chair groaning softly. 

Her gaze swept the mess around her, the scrolls, the discarded drafts, the faint smudge of ink on her wrist. All evidence of her control unraveling at the edges.

Rhaenyra exhaled and turned toward the door.

She needed to see them, her children. To press kisses to their foreheads as she did every night. 

The corridor beyond was dim, lit only by the torches guttering in their sconces. Shadows moved like water along the stone. Her steps were soft, unhurried, the hem of her gown whispering against the floor.

As she passed the great window overlooking the courtyard, she slowed.

Moonlight poured through the stained glass, catching faintly on the marble where her mosaic glimmered, a ghost of the vision she had conjured.

It shimmered, faint but real, and for a heartbeat she almost believed the light itself bowed to her design.

Then movement.

A shadow stepped from the far end of the corridor.

He did not announce himself, nor did he need to. The air changed. The silence took on shape.

“Still awake,” Daemon said softly.

Her heart gave one steady, unwelcome thud.

“I could say the same,” she replied. Her voice was steady, but something in it trembled, an echo of sleeplessness, or something older.

His gaze dropped to her hand, ink-stained, trembling faintly from exhaustion. and lingered longer than courtesy allowed. “And do the details reward you for it?”

“Eventually.” She straightened, refusing the weakness that pressed at her knees.

Daemon took a slow step closer.

His boots rang soft against the stone, each sound a deliberate provocation. The corridor narrowed around them; the torchlight wavered.

“You should rest,” he said, voice pitched low, roughened by something that wasn’t quite concern. “You look as though the floor’s about to give way beneath you.”

“And you,” she countered, “sound as though you’d like to see it.”

His smile deepened, lazy, dangerous. “Perhaps I would.”

For a moment neither moved. The wind pressed through the arches, stirring the edge of her gown, carrying the faint scent of smoke and sea salt that clung to him.

Rhaenyra drew breath too quickly. “You should be with your wife.”

“I was,” he said. “She sleeps. You don’t.”

The words landed like a touch.

The ache in her spine, the ache in her chest, both sharpened.

“Go back, Kepus,” she said, but it came out softer than she meant.

He reached past her instead, fingers brushing the wall beside her shoulder, close enough that she felt the air shift. “You’re trembling.”

“From fatigue.”

“From fire,” he said simply.

Rhaenyra did not move.

The air between them quivered, hot and thin. He was too near now, close enough that she could see the faint pulse in his throat, the gleam of candlelight caught in his eyes. Every breath drew him nearer.

Daemon’s hand braced against the wall beside her, his other hovering just shy of her waist, the space between them measured only in heartbeats.

You look as though the floor’s about to give way beneath you

Her tired brain snagged on the memory of those words, striking something deep and violent within her. 

For a heartbeat, the world tilted.

She looked down. The marble beneath them seemed to ripple faintly, light pooling in the seams between the stones like water taking breath. The torches shuddered, their flames bowing toward the floor as though pulled by an unseen tide.

Her throat tightened.

This corridor...this place.

She remembered the cold rush, the weightlessness, the impossible light that had devoured her once before. The echo of voice. The oath whispered beneath the stone.

“No,” she breathed, stepping back.

Her heel struck the edge of a cracked tile. The sound echoed too loudly, like a knell.

Daemon’s brow furrowed. “Rhaenyra?”

She took another step, unthinking, her hand lifting as though to ward him off, but he moved forward instead, reaching for her arm before she could stumble.

“Don’t—”

The word broke as her ring caught his skin.

Just a scrape, a flash of pain, then a single drop of blood struck the stone.

It hissed.

For a breathless instant, the air thickened, pressing around them with the weight of the deep. The torches guttered out, one by one. The marble glowed faintly red beneath their feet, the veins of the floor alive, pulsing.

Daemon’s grip tightened on her arm. “What is this—”

The rest vanished in a rush of sound and light.

The ground opened beneath them, not with violence, but with terrible inevitability.

Rhaenyra had just enough time to gasp, to see Daemon’s eyes widen in shock, in recognition, before the world inverted.

They fell as if the world had unspooled its spine.

Stone and air blurred together, weightless and furious.

The rush stole sound from her throat. Rhaenyra’s gown whipped around her like torn flame, her hair a pale banner in the dark. For one fractured heartbeat, she could not tell if they were falling or flying, only that Daemon’s hand found hers, hard and desperate.

The air seethed around them, heat, salt, the scent of dragonfire buried in stone.

Sparks streaked past like embers rising from an unseen forge.

“Kepus—”

She didn’t finish.

He caught her around the waist instead, dragging her against him. His grip was iron; his breath hitched against her ear.

“Hold on,” he said, though there was nothing to hold to but him.

The roar of something vast filled her ears, a heartbeat older than the island itself.

Daemon twisted in mid-fall, dragging her beneath his arm. They hit hard, his shoulder striking first, his back taking the full weight of her body. The breath left him in a sharp, strangled sound, but he did not let go.

Rhaenyra landed sprawled atop him, her palms braced against the ground or what passed for it. The surface beneath them was warm, slick with faint light that moved like living veins under glass.

For a moment, neither spoke. The air shimmered, thick with the smell of iron and ozone.

Daemon’s chest rose against her ribs. “Are you hurt?” he rasped.

She shook her head though the motion was unsteady.

And all around them, the ground breathed.

The walls were carved from obsidian streaked with veins of molten red, the same shade as the stone that had opened above. Symbols she half-remembered burned faintly in the dark, shifting like reflections on water.

She swallowed hard, her voice a whisper barely strong enough to carry.

“Vēzenka perzys hen Vāedaros.”

The heart of Dragonstone.

Daemon stirred beneath her. A low sound escaped him, half groan, half curse, as he shifted and tried to sit.

Rhaenyra blinked, the world swimming for a moment before she steadied herself and reached for him. His tunic was torn along the shoulder, fabric damp with sweat and blood.

“Do not move,” she said quickly, kneeling beside him.

“Not taking orders, zaldrītsos,” he muttered through clenched teeth, even as he winced.

Her hand found his arm, guiding it gently away from his body so she could see. The bruise was already spreading, dark, violent, blooming across the pale skin of his shoulder like ink spilled into water.

The sight twisted something low in her chest. “You took the fall.”

Daemon exhaled through his nose, the hint of a grin ghosting across his mouth. “Someone had to.”

Rhaenyra’s thumb brushed the edge of the bruise without thinking. He hissed between his teeth, and she drew her hand back as if burned.

The space between them hummed, alive with something that was not just pain.

Daemon pushed himself upright with a rough sound, his jaw tight as he rolled his shoulder. “Fuck,” he muttered. “Feels as though a dragon's tail has struck me.”

“What is this place?” he asked, his voice low now, wary, echoing against the stone.

Rhaenyra’s gaze moved over the walls. The patterns in the rock shifted like scales, pulsing faintly as though they heard her name. Her throat tightened.

She touched the nearest wall, her fingers trembling slightly. “I believe... it is Visenya’s altar.”

Daemon stilled.

Something like understanding flickered in his eyes, and in an instant his fatigue vanished. He turned a slow circle, scanning the chamber, its spiraled walls, its heat, its depth.

He ran his uninjured hand along the stone, tracing a shallow groove where symbols curled like serpents. His voice was edged with unease. “Where she called to the blood of dragons.”

He turned then, slowly, and found Rhaenyra watching him.

She was too still.

Too composed.

Not the wide-eyed shock of someone who had fallen into myth, but the quiet resignation of one who had already stood in it before.

Recognition dawned across his face, sharp as the drag of steel. “You’ve been here,” he said.

Her eyes widened a fraction, but she didn’t answer.

“You weren’t surprised,” he pressed, taking a step closer. “Not when the floor gave way. Not when the walls began to breathe.”

Rhaenyra’s lips parted, but no sound came. The red light caught in her eyes like a confession.

“Niece,” Daemon said quietly, the question already shaped like an accusation. “What did you do?”

Rhaenyra’s jaw tightened. “Do not look at me as though I’ve summoned this.”

“You know this place,” he said, closing the last of the distance. “You didn’t flinch. You didn’t even look afraid.”

“Would you have me cower?”

“I’d have you answer.”

“I owe you nothing,” she hissed, eyes flashing in the red light. “You think yourself the only one to ever walk where dragons once slept? You think this island bends to you?”

He moved before he thought. His uninjured hand rose, slow, deliberate, and he caught her chin between thumb and forefinger, not cruelly, but with the finality of a hand on a hilt. His palm was hot; a fleck of his own blood dried at the knuckle. He tipped her face up, angling her mouth away from defiance and her gaze toward his.

“Look at me,” he said.

She tried to turn away on instinct.

He didn’t tighten, only held, steady as a bridle, his thumb finding the quick pulse beneath her jaw. Heat wavered between them, the altar’s glow breathing against their skin.

“Kepus,” she warned, breath catching.

“Then say it,” he ordered, voice dropping, eyes fixed on hers. “Or deny it. But don’t hide behind silence and let the stone speak for you.”

His touch gentled, almost an apology, and he slid his fingers from her chin to her cheek, the backs of them skimming the ink-smudge at the heel of her hand where it lifted, as if to push him away and couldn’t quite finish the motion.

“Tell me,” he said again, quieter now, guiding her eyes back to his. “Tell me what you’ve done.”

Rhaenyra’s throat worked, but no answer came. His fingers loosened slightly, tracing the edge of her cheek as if the motion might coax truth from her skin.

“You would not understand,” she whispered.

“Try me.”

Her breath came faster.

“You would not understand,” she repeated, sharper this time, and her hand came up suddenly, catching his wrist. She didn’t shove; she peeled him off her, slow and deliberate, fingers tightening until his grasp broke.

His palm fell away, leaving the ghost of his touch burning along her jaw.

Her hands were fists at her sides. “I came here once before. I thought it was a dream, a vision, but it wasn’t. The stones listened. They—” She stopped, the confession clawing at her throat. “I made a deal.”

Something in Daemon’s expression shifted, recognition, dread, the ghost of awe. “With what?”

Her temper flared to cover the tremor in her voice. “It doesn’t matter. It was mine to make.”

“Gods, Rhaenyra, do you even hear yourself?” he said, his voice rising. “You struck a bargain with the island..."

“With Tyraxes,” she bit out. The name hit the air like a spark catching dry tinder.

Daemon’s features hardened. “You have gone mad—”

The word tasted wrong even as he said it. Madness was noise; this felt like order older than kings. 

Rhaenyra’s head snapped up. “Do not call me mad,” she hissed. The sound echoed, too loud in the close stone chamber. “You think because you cannot fathom something, it must be lunacy? You’ve spent your life chasing power you barely understand, and you dare—”

She broke off, breath shaking, her fury too bright to hold. Her hands trembled, the sting of his words still burning through her veins.

The torchlight flickered, dimmed. A strange gleam caught the corner of her eye.

Her words faltered, caught behind her teeth.

“Daemon.”

He was still glaring, ready to answer, until he followed her stare.

The blood he’d spilled, his blood, had not dried.

It glistened darkly where it had fallen, pooled against a jagged vein of obsidian. And though no breeze stirred the chamber, it was moving.

The surface beneath it shimmered faintly, like breath misting over glass. Each ripple crawled outward, thin red tendrils bleeding into the stone, disappearing down hairline cracks that glowed faintly from within.

“It is still wet,” she whispered.

Daemon frowned. His throat felt dry; the hair on his arms prickled.

He wanted to drag her back, to swear, to break the spell by sheer noise. But the sight rooted him. The blood pulsed once, twice, as though answering a heartbeat he couldn’t hear.

He glanced at Rhaenyra. Her face was rapt, almost tender, the red light reflected in her eyes. 

“It should not be,” she said, her voice rising. “Not after the fall, not after—”

She crouched before he could stop her, fingers hovering over the slick black rock. 

“Rhaenyra, do not touch it.”

She didn’t listen.

A sharp sting followed.

The obsidian had sliced her skin, a shallow line across her fingertip. She hissed, more in surprise than pain, and watched a bead of crimson bloom where the rock had bitten her. It slid down, bright and small, until it met the darker stain Daemon had left behind.

For a heartbeat nothing happened.

Then their blood began to move.

The separate pools wove together, red folding into red, spiraling into the black glass as though drawn by breath. The stone drank greedily. Heat licked up her palm, searing but not burning, and she couldn’t pull away.

Daemon’s hand shot out, his fingers catching her wrist just as the altar shuddered. The glow along the veins of the obsidian surged, flooding outward, flooding up.

Rhaenyra gasped.

Shapes formed within it.

Three figures, blurred at first, then sharpening in impossible clarity: a woman with a crown of silver fire, her face both terrible and beautiful; beside her, a man tall and severe, his hand resting on the hilt of a blade; and on her other side, a second woman, softer but no less resolute, her eyes holding devotion like a drawn bow. 

Visenya. Aegon. Rhaenys.

They stood over the same obsidian stone.

The same altar.

Their hands were joined, three streams of blood mingling on the black surface, the same spiraling pattern that now burned beneath Rhaenyra’s and Daemon’s palms.

Rhaenyra’s breath caught. She could feel it, the echo of power, of purpose, of something older than prayer.

Visenya lifted her head.

For an instant, one terrible, lucid instant, her gaze met Rhaenyra’s through the veil of centuries.

It was not gentle.

Daemon swore, pulling her back, but the image burned itself into them both, the three siblings, the blood, the flame, the vow.

Then the vision broke.

The figures were gone.

Only the molten veins of the altar remained, pulsing faintly as the last of their mingled blood disappeared into the stone.

Rhaenyra swayed, one hand pressed to her chest. “Did you see—?”

Daemon’s voice came rough, disbelieving. “I saw them.”

The silence after felt heavy, sacred, unbearable.

“Let’s go,” she said.

Daemon blinked. “Rhaenyra."

“I need to see my children.” Her voice was thin but decisive, the kind of command meant to outrun the thought beneath it. She turned before he could stop her, her skirts catching on the uneven floor as she started toward the passage where they had fallen.

“Wait,” he said, following. “You saw them. You saw what that was—”

“I said it is done,” she snapped, not looking back. Her hands trembled as she braced herself against the wall, searching for the narrow cleft of stone that led upward. “Whatever we have woken, I’ll not linger here to feed it.”

“Rhaenyra—”

She glanced over her shoulder, the torchlight catching her face. “If this place remembers blood, then it remembers mine already. I won’t let it claim more.”

And then she was gone, climbing fast, the sound of her steps receding into the dark.

Daemon stood where she’d left him, the silence closing around his breathing. The chamber felt different now, emptied, but not dormant. The air still pulsed faintly, as if marking their passage.

He turned once, scanning the altar again. The obsidian was dark, cool now, though faint heat bled through the cracks beneath.

At its base, something caught the torchlight, a sliver of pale leather, half-buried beneath ash and soot.

He crouched, brushed the dust aside.

A small journal. The cover warped by age, the clasp broken, its corners burned. The ink on the first page had run, but he could just make out the shape of a name: Visenya.

Daemon exhaled, slow and sharp, then tucked it beneath his arm.

When he followed Rhaenyra into the tunnel, the altar gave one faint tremor behind him, like a heart remembering to beat.

---

The climb back to the upper halls felt endless.

The air grew cooler as she ascended, the scent of stone giving way to salt and candle wax. By the time she reached the landing, her palms were scraped, her breath shallow, but she didn’t stop until she reached the nursery door.

The guards rose at once.

She waved them aside.

Inside, the chamber was awash in pale gold. Candles guttered low, their light dancing across silk canopies and carved dragons’ heads. The fire in the hearth had burned down to embers, yet the room felt alive, pulsing faintly in rhythm with her own heartbeat.

They were awake.

All three of them.

Aemon sat up in his cradle, pale hair mussed and eyes wide as moonstones. Aenar stood beside him, unsteady on his feet, gripping the edge of the wooden frame as if ready to climb free. Aemma lay sprawled across Septa Rhaella’s lap, her curls a tangled halo, her gaze fixed on the door before Rhaenyra even entered.

For one breathless moment, they all looked at her.

Something in the air shifted, quiet, eerie, familiar.

The same hum that had lived beneath the mountain trembled faintly here, in this room filled with innocent warmth.

Rhaenyra crossed the floor without thinking, kneeling between them. She touched Aenar’s cheek first, then Aemon’s, then the back of her fingers brushed over Aemma’s golden curls.

“You should be sleeping,” she murmured, her voice breaking on the softness.

Aenar blinked at her solemnly, then reached for her sleeve. His small hand was warm, too warm.

Rhaella stirred, half asleep in the chair.

“They woke all at once,” she said quietly. “No crying. Just... watching the windows. As though they heard something far away.”

Rhaenyra swallowed hard, her gaze flicking to the open balcony where the curtains whispered in the night breeze.

Beyond, the dragons cried faintly over the sea, a long, low sound that set her skin crawling.

She drew the children close, pressing her cheek to Aemma’s hair. “It’s nothing,” she said, more to herself than to Rhaella. “Only the wind.”

Rhaenyra stayed for a long while, her children’s warmth pressed against her like proof that she still belonged to the living.

Proof that whatever happened in that altar left her children untouched. 

Aenar’s head drooped first, heavy with sleep, his curls tickling her chin. She brushed them back with a trembling hand. “Hush, my heart,” she whispered, rocking him gently. “The storm has passed.”

Aemon clung harder, his fingers knotted in the silk at her shoulder. His eyes, those pale, ancient eyes, blinked once, twice, then closed.

Rhaenyra breathed out, slow, measured, though the ache in her chest refused to settle. “You’re safe,” she murmured. “You’re all safe.”

Then Aenar stirred again, stubborn even in half-sleep. He squirmed in her lap until she loosened her hold, reaching for her hand with clumsy determination.

Rhaenyra frowned faintly. “What is it, love?”

He caught her palm in both his tiny hands, his brow furrowing with the solemn intensity of a child trying to understand pain. The faint shimmer still lingered there, gold dust caught in the line where the cut had been.

Before she could pull away, Aenar bent and pressed his mouth to it.

A wet, imperfect kiss. Sticky with sleep and sweetness.

The warmth that spread through her skin was gentle this time, not searing. It pulsed once, deep beneath the surface, before fading into something quieter, a hum that might have been her heartbeat, or something older answering it.

Rhaenyra’s breath caught.

Aenar looked up, satisfied, as if his simple act had fixed something she could not name.

Then, with the blunt finality of a child’s will, he laid his head against her chest and closed his eyes again.

Rhaenyra held him there, fingers trembling as they threaded through his silver curls. “My brave one,” she whispered, pressing her lips to his temple. “Always mending what should not have broken.”

---

The morning came clear and soft, the kind of light that made even Dragonstone’s jagged cliffs glow like embers cooled to gold.

Mist drifted from the sea, rolling in thin, ghostlike veils over the harbor where the royal fleet approached, sails of crimson and black billowing against the pale horizon, the crowned dragon gleaming in the sun.

Rhaenyra stood at her balcony, watching. She didn’t need the cry from the watchtower to know the King’s ship led the rest. Her father had come early.

He always did.

Viserys Targaryen had never been one for waiting when family called. He would want to see the children at once, his grandchildren, his pride, his proof of legacy, and Rhaenyra could already imagine the look on his face when he saw them together.

Behind her, the chambers stirred with quiet readiness. Her ladies fastened the clasps of her gown, smoothing the folds of deep crimson velvet lined in black. Rhaenys conferred softly with Laenor by the hearth, while Laena sat nearby, serene, as a lady fussed with her hair. 

“The King’s ship anchors first,” Corlys said as he entered, his sea cloak trailing droplets. “He intends to come ashore without procession, no banners, no horns.”

Rhaenyra’s lips curved faintly. “Of course he does. He’ll want to see them before any courtier gets a word in.”

Laena smiled. “He’ll ask for the babes before he greets us.”

“He’ll have them soon enough,” Rhaenyra said, still watching the light move over the water. “But not before he steps foot on Dragonstone as my guest, not the realm’s King.”

Rhaenys tilted her head. “And the Queen?”

That drew Rhaenyra’s gaze. “Alicent will expect ceremony. Trumpets, banners, bows she believes form keeps the world from tilting.”

Rhaenys’s mouth curved faintly. “Perhaps she’s not wrong.”

“No,” Rhaenyra agreed softly, “but my father has always led with warmth. It will unsettle her, to see him so easily moved.”

Laenor adjusted the clasp of his doublet. “He’ll be happiest in the nursery, not the hall. He’ll forget half his courtiers’ names once he sees the children.”

Rhaenyra turned from the balcony then, the dawn gilding her hair. “Keep them there,” she said. “Baela and Rhaena as well. Septa Rhaella and the nurses will stay with them. No one enters without leave.”

“Laena and I will join them once the greetings are done,” Rhaenys said. “It will please him to see both broods together later.”

Rhaenyra nodded, her expression softening. “Good. Let him come to them in peace, before the court poisons the hour.”

She drew her cloak close, crimson and black catching the light, the ruby at her throat sparking like a coal. “Archmaester Vaegon will join us on the terrace."

Corlys inclined his head. “He’s already on his way. The servants are preparing the upper hall.”

Outside, the horns began to sound, a low, triumphant note carried across the water.

Rhaenyra exhaled slowly, the corners of her mouth turning upward in something between pride and dread. “He’ll want to see me first,” she murmured.

Rhaenys’s answering look was soft, knowing. “He always does.”

Rhaenyra took her place at the head of the terrace beneath the great archway, her cloak of deep crimson velvet sweeping the ground behind her. The sun caught in her hair, setting it aflame against the dark stone. Behind her, her family stood in quiet formation: Corlys to her right, his sea cloak rippling; Rhaenys beside him, still and regal as a carved figurehead; Laenor a step behind, formal in silver-gray. Laena, smiling faintly, remained at her mother’s side.

Daemon...had not returned to his rooms. To his household he was simply busy. None asked where he had gone; some silences older than courtesy.

Archmaester Vaegon stood slightly apart, his eyes narrowed and his posture strict. 

Through the misted air came the first gleam of the King’s retinue, riders in red and gold, guards bearing the royal standard, and then, at the center, Viserys Targaryen himself.

He dismounted before the last horn finished its note.

Viserys looked up as he reached the final steps. His hair gleamed pale in the sun; his eyes were bright and unclouded, his smile as open as it had been when she was a girl.

He paused only long enough to breathe the sea air before his gaze found her.

“Daughter,” he said, joy breaking through the formality.

Rhaenyra stepped forward then, her every movement practiced grace. She descended the last of the terrace steps and, before the watching guards and courtiers, dropped into a low, formal curtsey, the kind taught to queens, not daughters.

“Your Grace,” she said, voice steady but soft. “Dragonstone bids welcome to its King.”

The words hung in the air a moment, ringing with the weight of her authority.

Then she rose, the formal distance between them dissolving as she took his hands in hers. “And I, your daughter, am glad you’ve come.”

Viserys laughed, warm and unguarded, lifting her hand to his lips. “Formality ill suits you, my Rhaenyra. You sound like a court herald.”

Her mouth curved, wry and bright. “Then take comfort, Father, I charge no fee for my flattery.”

He chuckled, eyes creasing with pride. “You’ve grown sharper than half my council.”

“I had to,” she said lightly, “or Dragonstone would eat me whole.”

That made him laugh outright, the sound echoing down the terrace. “You always did have your mother’s tongue.”

“I prefer to think it’s my own,” she said, and for an instant, they were simply father and daughter again, no crown, no title, just the unshaken affection between them.

Viserys looked past her then, to the family gathered at her back. “Gods,” he murmured, “to see you all together, it does my heart good.”

He moved first to Rhaenys.

“Cousin,” he greeted warmly, bowing his head in genuine respect. “Still the realm’s beauty, I see.”

Rhaenys smiled, elegant and amused. “And you still the realm’s charmer.”

Next, he clasped Corlys’s hand. “And my Sea Snake. You’ve not slowed a league, have you?”

“Never in fair weather,” Corlys said with a grin.

Viserys’s gaze shifted to Laenor. “Good-son,” he said, his tone softening, “you’ve done well. The tales of your ships have reached even the Red Keep.”

Laenor inclined his head. “Then may they carry better news than gossip.”

The King laughed, clapping his shoulder. “That they do.”

Then to Laena: “And my good-sister,” he said warmly. “I see motherhood has not stolen your glow.”

She smiled, radiant and quiet. “It gives me reason to keep it, Your Grace.”

Viserys’s eyes twinkled at that before landing on the Archmaester standing dutifully at the edge of the assembly. “Uncle Vaegon,” he said with a half-smile. “I would say time has been kind, but I know better.”

The old man bowed his head, dry humor glinting in his gaze. “Age spares none of us, Your Grace, not even dragons.”

Viserys laughed again, his joy unfeigned. “Then I shall take what mercy remains before the Queen arrives and reminds me I am mortal.”

He turned once more to Rhaenyra, the sea wind catching both their cloaks. “Come. Show me your island, my daughter. Let me see what you’ve made of our home.”

Rhaenyra lingered at his side, the sea wind lifting the edge of her cloak. “Should we not wait for the Queen and the court, Father? A proper welcome befits their station.”

Viserys waved a hand dismissively, his smile widening. “Leave it to your stewards and ladies. Gods know they’ll enjoy rehearsing the formalities without me hovering. Let the lords preen and the courtiers powder their faces, I’ve had enough ceremony for one lifetime.”

His laughter carried over the terrace, bright and utterly unbothered.

Rhaenyra’s lips curved. “The King discards procedure so easily.”

“Only for my darling daughter,” he said, eyes softening. “You’ve earned the right to rule your own hall as you please.”

She laughed then, the sound light and unguarded, the kind of laughter that once filled the Red Keep’s gardens. 

Viserys reached for her arm. “Now, show me the babes. I’ve dreamed of holding them since the ravens came.”

“They’re in the nursery, Father,” Rhaenyra said, her smile lingering. “Safe and watched.”

He sighed, half wistful. “Still, I shall see them soon.” His gaze shifted to Laena, who stood beside her mother, hands clasped over her gown. “Twins, I hear. Baela and Rhaena, what joy you’ve brought us, my good-sister.”

Laena dipped her head, cheeks warm with pride. “They are strong, Your Grace. Loud, and endlessly hungry.”

Viserys chuckled. “Then they’ll fit well among dragons.” He looked out toward the horizon, the ships still glimmering in the bay. “Six babes in a single year. The gods themselves must smile on House Targaryen. Your three, my dear daughter, Laena’s twins, and my own son Daeron. A blessed year for our blood.”

“May the realm see it so,” Rhaenys murmured.

Viserys nodded, the sun glinting off the ring on his hand as he shaded his eyes. “How could they not? Dragons multiply, and the world trembles. It’s an omen of strength and peace.”

Rhaenyra glanced toward the sea, where the second royal ship had begun its slow approach, golden banners flickering in the wind.

“Peace,” she repeated softly. “Let us hope it lingers.”

Viserys smiled, unaware of the shift in her tone. “Of course it shall.”

He turned back toward the hall, clapping his hands together.

“Come, you must show me what you’ve done with the place. I hear Dragonstone shines again under your care.”

Rhaenyra smiled, but there was calculation beneath the warmth.

“After the greeting, Father. I promise you will see them then.”

Viserys blinked, surprised. “You’d make me wait to hold my own grandchildren?”

Her tone softened, though her eyes stayed steady. “Only long enough for courtesy’s sake. The court travels with you; it would be unkind to keep them waiting at the gates while we steal a moment of joy for ourselves.”

The King studied her for a beat, then laughed quietly. “Ah, you’ve grown wise, and far too careful. I remember when you would have run down the docks before I’d set foot ashore.”

Rhaenyra’s smile deepened. “I remember too, Father. But now I run only when the realm is watching.”

That drew another laugh, proud and unguarded. “Seven save me, you’ve become a Queen already.”

“I hope to be a good hostess first,” she replied. “Come. The Queen’s ship climbs the cliffs even now. Let us receive them properly.”

He sighed, good-natured, patting her hand where it rested on his arm. “Very well. You shall have your ceremony, my dutiful daughter. But the moment it’s done, I’ll have my peace and my babes.”

Rhaenyra inclined her head with a smile that held both affection and relief. “Then I’ll see to it the hall is ready, and the children waiting to greet you once the courtiers are satisfied.”

Viserys turned to the others gathered on the terrace, Rhaenys and Corlys, Laena and Laenor, the Archmaester and household guard, and his voice carried clear and bright over the wind.

“Come then, all of you. Let us welcome the Queen to Dragonstone as befits the realm’s blood and afterward, we’ll drink to the next generation of dragons.”

The family followed him toward the great hall, the banners above the doors unfurling in the sea wind.

Far below, the Queen’s procession wound up the cliffs, green and gold banners trailing behind, bright against the black rock.

Rhaenyra glanced once toward the sea, where sunlight glimmered on the sails. “Let her see,” she said under her breath, “how well the dragons keep their own.”

Then she turned back toward the hall, smile composed, every inch the Princess of Dragonstone and heir of a dynasty newly reborn.

Chapter 12: The Unveiling Part: 2

Notes:

I’ve seen a few comments wondering why Rhaenyra isn’t “doing more,” so I wanted to clarify how this story handles power.
Rhaenyra here isn’t passive, she’s political. Her choices have been deliberate: the maritime contracts, the Emberguard’s structure, and the quiet way she’s turning the Crownlands’ economy toward Dragonstone. Those are acts of war dressed as administration.

It’s interesting that Daemon can slit a throat and be read as decisive, while Rhaenyra signs a treaty or cuts off an enemy’s hand and some readers call her weak. That contrast says a lot about how we’re taught to read female versus male power. She doesn’t need to shout to rule; her violence is structural, not theatrical.

This fic starts with a woman learning to govern rather than react, because all she did was react in the show. She can’t afford Daemon’s chaos if she wants to survive. Not yet. If you’re waiting for the blaze-of-glory version, don’t worry: she’s building it piece by piece. I just believe the fire burns hotter when it’s earned.

The climb to Dragonstone bit at her calves and patience alike.

Alicent tightened her grip on her father’s arm as the wind worried her cloak. Otto did not lean into her. He never had. He moved with a measured, economical pace, hood thrown back, eyes dark and roving over every sconce, banner, and man.

They crested the last rise and the color struck her first.

A rank of soldiers in blood-red cloaks barred the terrace like a wound.

Polished steel; flame-worked sigils; no white cloaks, no gold...only red.

The guards did not react to them, did not thump spear to stone. They watched. Weighed. Their discipline felt…local. Claimed.

Alicent felt Otto go still.

“What host is this?” she asked, low.

“I do not know,” Otto said, just as low, and that was new enough to sting. His gaze knifed along the line, boots, fittings, the uniform cut. “Not Crown. Not City Watch. Not Driftmark’s salt.” A flick of his fingers, almost contempt, almost respect. “Raised quiet. Trained well.”

“By whom,” she said, though she knew.

“By the stone under our feet,” he murmured. “And the woman standing on it.”

Their boots rang hollow against the stone as they crossed the courtyard. The sound of their approach drew eyes, the servants, the courtiers, the dragonkeepers standing sentinel along the walls.

None bowed too deeply. None smiled.

A gust swept the flags, crimson and black snapping above them.

And there she was.

Rhaenyra stood at the courtyard’s heart beneath the carved arch of the great doors, her cloak of black velvet lined in blood-red silk. The ruby at her throat burned in the light. Her family framed her like an altarpiece. Corlys to her right, Rhaenys to her left, Laenor, Laena, Vaegon just behind. 

All in dark hues. All in unity.

Alicent felt the contrast like a bruise. She and her children stood out painfully, green silk, gold embroidery, the colors of a faith and a crown that looked foreign here.

Even Daeron’s small blanket seemed too bright, too clean.

Viserys, radiant and foolishly unguarded, had already gone ahead to greet them. His arm was linked with his daughter’s, his laughter echoing between the pillars. He did not notice the silence that followed him, the still air that gathered behind Rhaenyra like a tide.

When they reached closer, Rhaenyra inclined her head not deeply, not humbly, but with the polished poise of someone who knew the eyes of history were upon her.

“Your Grace,” she said, her voice carrying clear over the courtyard. “And my Queen.”

The title landed soft as silk, sharp as glass.

“Dragonstone is honored by your presence. We had feared the winds might turn your ships aside, it seems the gods themselves wished to see this day.”

The formality was perfect, faultless, and yet the undercurrent in it hummed like drawn steel. It was not welcome so much as acknowledgment: the generosity of a ruler greeting a guest, not a daughter greeting her King or a woman greeting her rival.

Rhaenyra’s gaze lingered on her a breath longer than etiquette required. The faintest smile curved her mouth polite, unyielding, just enough to show teeth.

"You have traveled far,” Rhaenyra continued, “and the road from the capital is not kind to silk or patience. Refreshments await within. The court will join us once your retinue has been settled.”

Viserys, beaming, clasped her hands in his as though he heard only warmth. “My daughter thinks of everything.”

But Alicent saw the precision, the way every syllable fell like the step of a dance choreographed long before they’d arrived.

Even the air seemed to wait on Rhaenyra’s permission to move.

She inclined her head, careful, graceful. “You are most gracious, Princess.”

Rhaenyra’s lashes lowered, a queen’s courtesy disguised as humility.

“We do what we must to honor the realm.”

For a heartbeat, the words hovered between them, realm meaning Rhaenyra’s realm, Rhaenyra’s island, Rhaenyra’s throne not yet named but already claimed.

Otto’s gaze flicked between them, reading every seam of the exchange, his mouth a thin, grim line.

The sea wind shifted then, carrying the scent of salt and forge.

And beneath it, a quieter scent...incense, oil, something sacred and newly born.

Alicent realized it came from the guards’ cloaks: It smelled of spiced fire, cedar and smoke, cloves and dragon’s breath. Sweet and sharp at once, a perfume that burned rather than soothed.

It was not merely dye or oil; it was consecration.

As if each cloak had been baptized in flame and made to remember it.

Alicent’s stomach turned.

Her gaze flicked to the soldiers’ still faces, each expression set, eyes fixed forward, their discipline too complete to be human habit. 

“Their cloaks,” Alicent said softly. “They are not of the Crown’s make. Who commands them?”

Viserys turned, delighted by the opportunity to explain. “Ah! You’ve noticed. They’re magnificent, aren’t they?” He gestured proudly. “Dragonstone’s Emberguard, Rhaenyra’s design. The island’s first true standing force in generations. Daemon has been training them for nearly a year. Five hundred strong, with another hundred and fifty still drilling in the lower barracks. All sworn to Dragonstone itself, as garrisons have been sworn to keeps since Aegon’s day."

Alicent blinked. “Not to the Crown?”

Viserys laughed. “My dear, Dragonstone is the Crown! Our ancestral seat, the heart of House Targaryen. A host here protects the royal line itself.”

Otto’s brows knit, his tone quiet and flat. “A private host, trained by Prince Daemon, sworn to Dragonstone rather than to the throne. A curious distinction.”

“Nonsense,” Viserys said with airy affection. “A sensible one! My daughter ensures her children’s safety. The Crown should commend such prudence.”

Rhaenyra’s voice flowed in like silk poured over steel.

“The Emberguard serve the flame that built this island, Ser Otto. Their oaths are to Dragonstone and the blood that keeps it alive. We protect what is ours before we can protect the realm.”

Her eyes met Alicent’s then, serene, unblinking.

“It is the nature of fire to guard its own flame.”

From the corner of her eye, Alicent saw movement, small, restrained, but sharp as a drawn breath.

Ser Criston Cole’s hand brushed the hilt of his sword before he caught himself, knuckles whitening as he released it.

Lord Beesbury shifted beside him, eyes darting between the Emberguard ranks and Rhaenyra’s calm face, his mouth working as though he meant to speak but thought better of it.

The twin Kingsguard, Arryk and Erryk, exchanged a single glance. Mirrored unease, the brief, silent communication of men who had served too many masters.

Even Otto’s stillness hardened; his fingers tightened around the clasp of his cloak.

The Emberguard, by contrast, did not move.
Their faces remained impassive, eyes fixed forward, but a low, synchronized inhalation passed through their line, a quiet unity that felt more ritual than reflex, like the breath before a prayer.

Viserys, ever eager to dissolve tension, laughed and clasped her hand. “My clever girl. You’ll make every lord in the realm look idle.”

Rhaenyra turned toward the open doors, ruby catching the light like a coal come to life.

"Come,” she said softly. “You have all traveled far, and Dragonstone is best admired from within.”

At her signal, the Emberguard shifted, two stepping ahead, two falling behind, as the great doors swung open to reveal the inner hall.

The King and Queen's party followed close, their boots sounding against the black marble. The chamber beyond was vast, the stone veined with gold and obsidian, banners of crimson and night swaying in the sea wind that breathed through the high windows.

The faint hum of music rose from somewhere unseen, delicate and deliberate, as if the walls themselves had rehearsed for this moment.

Rhaenyra walked beside her father, his arm linked through hers.

“The festivities will not begin until this evening,” she said, her voice smooth and composed. “The unveiling and then the presentation of gifts, and afterward a grand feast. Until then, rest as you will. Servants will bring fresh water and linen, and food can be sent to any chamber.”

Her gaze swept the small group, Otto silent, assessing; the royal children pale against the dark stone, and settled on the Queen.

“The west wing has been prepared for you all,” Rhaenyra continued. “The chambers overlook the bay and share a common antechamber for ease of passage. The nursery adjoins it, should young Prince Daeron wish company, he will find playmates and care there.”

A polite offer, perfectly phrased.

Alicent’s fingers smoothed the silk at Daeron’s small blanket, before she spoke. “That is kind,” she said, voice gentle but firm. “But my son will remain with me. He tires easily after sea travel.”

Rhaenyra inclined her head, not arguing, but her smile deepened by a breath.

“Of course. As his mother wishes.”

Viserys, oblivious to the current beneath their words, beamed. “Always so thoughtful, my girl.”

Rhaenyra’s hand tightened slightly on his arm. “It is Dragonstone’s duty to make the realm’s blood feel at home.”

The courtiers bowed their heads at that, but Alicent heard the quiet claim buried within it. 

As they reached the great staircase, Rhaenyra gestured toward the corridor flanked with torches.

“These doors will remain guarded for your privacy. You are free to walk the terrace or the lower halls until the bell rings for the feast. May the island be kind to you.”

Her tone was honeyed, her expression serene. Only her eyes betrayed the faintest spark of satisfaction, Dragonstone alive beneath her feet, obedient and watching.

Alicent dipped her head, lips forming the shape of gratitude, though the word caught bitter on her tongue.

"You honor us, Princess.”

“Family honors itself,” Rhaenyra replied lightly. “Rest well, my Queen. We have a long day ahead.”

The bell had barely ceased ringing before the next ships came into view.

From the high windows of the inner hall, Alicent could see the sails multiplying like stormclouds, colors bright as jewels against the gray-green sea. Every hour, more arrived: crimson, gold, silver, blue, and black, their sigils glinting as if the realm itself were converging on the island.

The lords had come.

Highborn and hedgeborn alike.

Great houses, sworn bannermen, merchants bold enough to claim kinship with old blood all of them drawn by the same rumor, the same hunger: the unveiling of the heirs of fire.

Alicent had not foreseen this.

Her carefully sown whispers...those soft doubts she had let slip through court like threads of smoke, had done their work too well.

The secrecy had transformed into legend. The more she waited, the more the realm imagined, and when the summons finally came, no lord dared be absent.

Now the bay of Dragonstone teemed with ships.

Hundreds of banners caught the light: the lion of Lannister, the trout of Tully, the falcon of Arryn, the spear sun of Dorne’s emissaries, even minor houses from the Crownlands who had never before stepped foot on volcanic stone.

Almost every noble with coin or pride to spend had come.

The courtyards overflowed with retainers and servants; the harbormaster’s ledgers ran out of ink. 

From her vantage, Alicent watched the chaos unfold: crates hoisted, the shouts of stable boys, the banners snapping in the sea wind. It should have pleased her, proof of unrest, of imbalance, but instead it made her stomach tighten. 

Dragonstone had become a court unto itself.

Even Otto paused beside his daughter, his eyes narrowing as he followed the movement of the carriages winding up the cliff road. “You see it now,” he murmured. “The realm no longer flocks to the throne, but to her door.”

Alicent’s jaw tightened. “You think I have not noticed?”

“Only that you understand what it means,” he said softly. “Every lord who lands here owes her a courtesy. And courtesies, once given, become habits.”

Rhaenyra’s voice carried faintly from the terrace above, clear and measured as she spoke with one of her stewards.

“Ensure the lower courtyard remains clear. The second pavilion must be completed by sundown, the masons will double their work. Every house that sought audience will have it, even if we must raise new halls from the stone itself.”

It was no idle boast.

To house the flood of arrivals, Rhaenyra had ordered two new wings built against the outer cliffs, temporary lodges carved from black rock and shored with timber from Driftmark’s forests.

One for the great houses and their retinues, another for the lesser bannermen who had begged to stand in her light.

Already, laborers were hammering through the din of seagulls and surf, scaffolding climbing like ribs against the mountainside. Smoke and salt mingled with the smell of cut pine and hot pitch.

Alicent stared at the sight until her temples throbbed.

Rhaenyra had not only invited the realm. She had built it a home.

“Lady Arryn,” Rhaenyra greeted, “I feared the mountain winds would keep you grounded. It seems they carried you here instead.”

Laughter rippled through the gathered nobles.

She moved through them like a tide, her cloak trailing like a flame’s shadow.

Every name she spoke, she knew; every child she praised, every alliance she recalled, it was all memory sharpened into weaponry. The island bent around her.

“Welcome, my lords,” she said, her voice carrying easily over the courtyard din. “You have traveled far, and Dragonstone is grateful. A festival awaits you in the town below, three days of fire, music, and wine in celebration of the heirs of flame. The realm’s joy is not contained by walls.”

A ripple of delight moved through the gathered nobles.

Laughter, exclamations, a swelling murmur of anticipation. Rhaenyra raised a hand, stilling them with effortless grace.

“This evening,” she continued, “as the sun turns the sea to gold, the children shall be unveiled. Afterward, a feast will be held within the great hall for all sworn to Dragonstone and the Crown alike. Let there be no division among us in joy.”

She smiled then, serene and certain. “Until that hour, enjoy what the island offers. The festival is yours for three days — the markets, the music, the fire. Dragonstone welcomes your wonder.”

Her words struck like sunlight: warm, blinding, absolute.

Below, the crowd stirred. Courtiers hurried to the balustrades for a glimpse of the celebration already blooming in the harbor town. Stalls crowded the streets, bursting with color and excess: perfumes from Lys, silks from Myr, spiced wines from Dorne. Dancers painted in gold wound through the square; jugglers tossed torches in patterns that mirrored dragons in flight. Drums pounded against the hum of a thousand voices.

The smell of roasting meat mingled with the salt wind; bells rang from the docks where newly arrived ships unloaded barrels of fruit and honey.

Dragonstone...grim, salt-bitten Dragonstone, had become a living festival.

Beside her, Otto’s expression hardly changed, but his voice was low and edged. “She commands them with spectacle. A feast for their eyes before she feeds them her claim.”

Alicent’s reply was little more than breath. “And they love her for it.”

Below, Rhaenyra lifted her hand once more in farewell.

“Enjoy, my friends,” she called. “At the hour of the sun’s descent, we will welcome the next age of fire together.”

The applause that followed rolled like thunder up the cliffs.

Rhaenyra stood amid it all, radiant, untouchable beside the King who clapped along like a fool. 

---

The noise from the courtyards carried even to the cliffs.

Laughter, horns, the crack of banners in the wind, no one on Dragonstone could mistake the sound of half a realm arriving.

Daemon heard it all.
And ignored it.

He sat on the warm stone floor of the dragon’s cavern, the air thick with the scent of ash and iron. Caraxes loomed beside him, coiled in a lazy crescent, his scales radiating heat. The dragon’s breath rose and fell in heavy rhythm; every exhale stirred Daemon’s hair and tugged at the candle flames nearby.

Daemon leaned back against him, shoulder pressed to the smooth, scar-ridged flank.

The contact was grounding, the kind of wordless reassurance only a creature born of fire could give. Caraxes shifted, a low rumble vibrating through Daemon’s spine, as if acknowledging the weight he carried.

On the ground before him lay the journal.

Visenya’s hand, what remained of it, sprawled across the pages in ink gone thin with centuries.

The parchment crackled when he touched it. Some lines were still legible, others broken entirely, words half-devoured by smoke or sea salt.

He squinted, tracing one crooked phrase with his thumb.

…the heart of flame answers only blood that remembers itself…

A low sound left him, not quite a laugh, not quite a sigh. “You never spoke plainly, did you?” he murmured, his voice rough with something closer to respect than irritation.

He brushed his thumb over the faded ink as though it might conjure her ghost.

The page crumbled faintly under his touch. He turned it with care, as one might handle a relic. Wax from the nearest candle dripped onto the margin; he ignored it, eyes tracing the next surviving line.

Blood is a door, not a chain. Dragonstone keeps what it is owed.

Daemon sat very still.

He’d carried her sword for years, Dark Sister’s weight familiar as breath, the edge that had sung for her now bound to his own hand.

Yet even with the blade at his side, he’d never felt her presence as he did now, whispering through the parchment, through the stone beneath him.

He turned another brittle page.

Most of the ink had dissolved into rusted ghosts, but near the book’s spine something caught the candlelight, a diagram, sketched in Visenya’s unmistakable hand.

A circle.

A spiral of flame.

And at its center, a stone.

The sketch shimmered faintly with some old, metallic dust that had fused into the parchment, catching the firelight in veins of red and gold. Beneath it, the faded caption:

Heartstone of Valyria. Not glass, not earth. Forged where dragons were born. 

He traced the outline of the spiral with a careful thumb, the ink smudging faintly against his skin.

He knew that shape.

He had seen it carved into the altar beneath the mountain, seen his blood and Rhaenyra’s mingle upon it.

He leaned closer, trying to read the rest, but the script blurred, curling into illegibility. He angled the candle, craned his neck, brought the page near enough to smell the old ash in it.

“Come on,” he muttered. “You didn’t leave me this to squint at ghosts.”

A line surfaced, half-swallowed by smoke:

The heartstone answers… in kind…

The rest was gone.

Daemon exhaled sharply through his nose, the sound too close to a growl. He turned the page again, faster this time, brittle corners flaking beneath his thumb. More sketches, rings of flame, the shapes of runes, each caption more ruined than the last.

He could just make out fragments:

 …binding through breath and marrow…

…steel that drinks the blood of kings…

…fire made flesh, but greater still when fed…

He stopped. The next page showed only a diagram of a sword, lines radiating outward like sunbursts, half the runes eaten away by fire. He could still read enough to know what it had once described.

To forge Valyrian steel, the blood must burn clean. One life for one edge. Ten for its temper. A hundred for the song it will sing.

His jaw tightened. “Sacrifices,” he said softly, not with fear but with understanding. “Always the same price.”

Another page. The sketches turned bestial, dragons drawn mid-flight, wings exaggerated, lines marking bone and vein. Beneath them, more words, half-melted:

To strengthen the body of flame, blood of its blood must feed the fire. Blood and fire. Blood and fire.

Daemon sat back, eyes still on the fading lines, the echo of the words thrumming in his skull.

Blood and fire.

He closed the journal slowly, fingers lingering on Visenya’s mark pressed into the leather.

“You were never just a conqueror,” he murmured. “You were a maker.”

Caraxes shifted behind him, scales rasping like drawn steel, a low, questioning sound rolling from his chest.

Daemon looked over his shoulder, candlelight catching the edge of his mouth in a faint, grim smile.

“Do not worry,” he said quietly. “I’ve no wish to test it. Not yet.”

A sound rose through the stone, distant, blurred by distance, but unmistakable.

Cheering.

It rolled faintly down from the cliffs above, a swell of voices carried on sea wind and song. The festival had begun.

Daemon stilled, listening. The rhythm of it found the edges of the cavern drums, laughter, the bright clang of bells. Dragonstone, once all wind and silence, was alive with breath again.

He exhaled softly, not with irritation but with something nearer to amusement. “So the curtain rises,” he murmured.

Caraxes rumbled in answer, the vibration passing through the floor and into his bones. The dragon’s eye cracked open, slit gold narrowing against the dim light.

Daemon reached up to rest a hand along the scarred ridge of his companion’s jaw. “Let them make their noise,” he said quietly. “It keeps the realm dreaming.”

He rose, closing the journal with care and slipping it into the leather satchel beside Dark Sister. The metal felt warm beneath his palm, as if it, too, remembered the words on the page.

He drew a measured breath. “Time to dress the part,” he muttered.

Caraxes’s tail shifted, sending a scatter of sparks across the stone.

Daemon allowed himself the smallest of smiles. “Don’t look at me like that. Even a dragon must watch the play.”

He adjusted the strap of the satchel, turned toward the tunnel where light pooled faintly at its mouth, and started up the incline. The sound of the festival grew clearer with each step, music, voices, the deep-throated roar of dragons echoing the crowd’s delight.

The island was awake. The past stirred beneath it.

And Daemon, as always, moved between them both.

---

The terrace had been transformed.

Banners of crimson and black rippled in the salt wind, the braziers flanking the dais burning high and clean. Beneath the open dome, the great mosaic gleamed, a marvel born of Rhaenyra’s design and Driftmark’s craftsmen.

Now, as the hour approached, the crowd held its breath.

Lords and ladies pressed close to the balustrades, their silks and jewels shimmering in the half-light. The murmur of conversation rose and fell like a tide snatches of speculation, flattery, and nerves.

Even the servants, usually invisible, hovered at the edges, faces tilted toward the open dome.

Someone laughed too loudly. Another shushed them.

Every heart beat faster when the first bell tolled.

The air itself seemed to wait.

And then, the light began to change.

The sun slipped lower, its rays cutting through the colored panes like ribbons of molten glass. The dragon’s wings ignited, scales coming alive in fractured rainbows. 

Music faltered, then stilled.

Princess Rhaenyra entered with Prince Consort Laenor. 

She moved with deliberate grace, the embodiment of poise, the long train of her gown sweeping behind her like the shadow of a dragon in flight.

The King beamed beside her, radiant and oblivious to the tremor running through his court. Daemon followed, silent, the gleam of Dark Sister at his side and the faintest curve of intrigue on his mouth.

Then came the nurses.

Three bundles in their arms, no longer infants, but children, each one a living herald of the bloodline that had built this very hall.

Even the highborn craned their necks, their pride momentarily eclipsed by curiosity and something deeper...fear, perhaps.

The first child was lifted into view.

Prince Aemon.

His skin was pale as new snow, luminous even in the fading light. Silver hair framed his face in soft waves, glowing faintly where the sun caught it. His eyes, amethyst bright and alive, the color of polished crystal kissed by fire.

He did not cry or reach.

He looked, quiet, unblinking, as though he recognized every face before him. His stillness carried the weight of something older than speech.

“By the Seven,” someone whispered.

“By the gods,” another corrected softly.

Then came Prince Aenar.

He did not wait to be presented. The moment his nurse carried him into the light, he reached for it, laughing, fearless, as though the sun itself had been made for him. His silver curls caught the gold and crimson beams, shining like a crown as he squirmed to be set down. When his nurse finally obliged, he stood, small boots against the glass mosaic, hands splayed in wonder at the color rippling beneath him.

The crowd gasped as he took an unsteady step forward, laughing when the light followed him. His eyes flared under the sun, storm-violet, rimmed in dark blue. 

“Seven hells,” a knight muttered under his breath.
Another voice, half in awe, half in dread: “He commands it.”

Where Aemon was silence, Aenar was thunder.

And then the third child was brought forth.

Princess Aemma.

Her nurse carried her slowly into the heart of the light, and the mosaic flared before her. 

Aemma’s skin was gold, radiant as though kissed by light itself. Her curls shimmered silver threaded with molten gold, scattering every hue they touched. And when she lifted her gaze...

One eye shone violet, fierce and knowing.

The other gleamed blue, deep as the sea.

One lady’s hand trembled against her throat; a Dornish envoy murmured a prayer under his breath. A knight of the Reach fell to one knee, forgetting himself entirely.

Even Otto Hightower’s sharp gaze faltered for a heartbeat.

It was no mortal unveiling. It was revelation.

The heirs of Dragonstone stood encircled by their mother’s design and their ancestors’ flame, each impossibly beautiful, luminous in a way that defied nature.

For a heartbeat, the court could only stare.

Movement stirred at the front.

Princess Rhaenys rose.

The Queen Who Never Was stood in the trembling light, proud and radiant in crimson silk. The gleam at her throat, caught the reflection of the flames. When she spoke, her voice was low and clear, a tide pulling all other sound with it.

“When I look upon Prince Aemon,” she said, “I see my father’s likeness returned. Prince Aemon, the truest of his line. The realm mourned his loss and forgot his face, but blood remembers. And now that memory breathes again. He bears not only the look of his forebear but the calm, the patience that commands storms without raising his voice.”

Beside her, Corlys Velaryon rose. The Sea Snake’s rings caught the light like drops of molten gold.

“And Prince Aenar,” he said, his voice deep and salt-warmed, “he has the sea in him already. There is driftwood in his hands and the wind’s laughter in his bones. I see in him the courage of the sailors who first braved the smoking seas, and the joy of every child born knowing the world is wide and his to claim. He is our blood made fearless.”

He turned to Rhaenys, their gazes meeting, flame and tide intertwined, like vows renewed before the realm.

“And Princess Aemma,” Rhaenys began, “gold and silver twined, the realm’s heart reborn.”

“The light that tempers fire,” said Corlys, “and the peace that teaches the sea to still.”

“May her light always burn,” Rhaenys finished softly, “that the children of our children know her name as they know their own hearts.”

The torches seemed to bow.

Rhaenys lifted her chin, voice softening as she turned toward the dais. “For this, we give thanks, to our good-daughter and son, who have bound flame and sea in truth. You have given the realm more than heirs. You have given it hope.”

The crowd stirred, moved not only by beauty but by the gravity of the words. 

Rhaenyra inclined her head toward them, eyes bright with restrained emotion.

Even Laenor, usually poised, looked momentarily undone, his throat working before he managed a soft, grateful bow to his parents.

For a moment, it felt as if the island itself exhaled, sea wind through the braziers, light rippling over the mosaic like a benediction.

Alicent felt the shift in the air, the unity made visible. Her gaze moved to Aegon, restless and shifting at her side. The thought came cold and exact: bind the heart early, and the realm follows where it beats.

She smoothed his hair, the gesture too gentle for what it meant.

Then Rhaenyra stepped forward.

The light caught her as it had caught her children, burning in her hair, the Realm’s Delight indeed.

When she spoke, her voice was clear and unhurried, carrying easily across the silent hall.

“Lords and ladies of the realm,” she said, “you stand upon Dragonstone, the cradle of our house, the first breath of fire that forged a kingdom from ash and storm. And now, before you, stand its future.”

She turned slightly, her gaze resting on her children, pride tempered by something deeper, reverence, almost.

“You have waited long to see them, and today they greet you in the light of our forebears, under the gaze of gods and ancestors alike.”

Her words echoed through the chamber, measured and solemn. The crowd bowed their heads instinctively, as though at prayer.

Laenor Velaryon stepped to her side then, every inch the prince consort. Proud, bright, the sea’s reflection to her flame. He raised his chin, his voice smooth but resonant, carrying Driftmark’s salt and warmth.

“Blood of the dragon,” he said, “and blood of the sea. Joined in oath, joined in love, joined in legacy.”

A ripple of sound moved through the court, approval, awe, the soft hiss of admiration.

Rhaenyra’s expression did not change, but her eyes shone faintly as she inclined her head to him.

“Behold them,” she said, lifting a hand toward the mosaic, where the colored light still danced across the children’s faces. “The heirs of Dragonstone. The realm’s tomorrow.”

Applause thundered, the kind that shook banners and rattled armor.

Aemma, startled by the noise, squealed with laughter. She wobbled in her nurse’s hold and nearly toppled forward before both her brothers reached for her at once.

Aemon’s calm hand steady, Aenar’s eager grasp wild and warm.

The three of them stumbled together, their joined laughter cutting through the formal applause like sunlight through glass.

The crowd roared with delight, highborn and servant alike caught in the spell of it. Even the banners seemed to move with the sound, crimson and black alive in the sea wind.

Rhaenyra smiled then, slow, small, knowing.

And Alicent could hardly breathe.

The applause shook the stone beneath her feet. For a moment, she thought it was the mountain itself kneeling.

Gods, she thought. They look like they’ve stepped out of one of Viserys’s tapestries.

Aegon shifted beside her, restless. “Are they really just babies?” he muttered, his tone halfway between envy and wonder. “They look like angels.”

Alicent’s hand found his shoulder, firm. “Quiet,” she said softly.

He wriggled but obeyed, lips pursed, gaze never leaving the dais. Beside him, Helaena sat cross-legged in her chair, watching the shards of colored light with rapt fascination. She reached out as if to catch one in her palm, whispering something to herself about “scales and wings and glass that sings.”

Alicent tried not to hear.

Aemond, smaller, solemn, leaned forward against the railing, purple eyes wide. He was so still that for a moment she could see his father in him, that same hungry awe that had always belonged to Viserys when he looked upon dragons.

“Mother,” he whispered, “their hair shines like fire.”

“It’s only the light,” she murmured, though even as she said it, she knew it wasn’t true.

Alicent’s throat tightened.

Viserys was on his feet, applauding with tears in his eyes. Rhaenyra and Laenor bowed their heads in perfect unity, every motion polished, rehearsed, divine. The court drank it in, not just the beauty, but the message.

Three heirs. Three flames.

And not one drop of doubt between them.

Around her, the nobles were already murmuring blessings and oaths. Lord Merryweather declared it a sign of the gods’ favor. The Septon beside him wept openly. Even Lord Beesbury had risen to his feet, clapping as though to banish his own trembling.

Alicent alone remained seated.

She folded her hands tightly in her lap, nails digging into the silk of her gown to keep them from shaking.

Behind her, Daeron slept in his nurse’s arms, untouched by spectacle. The baby stirred once, sighed, and settled again, the sound almost mercifully human.

Her gaze lifted back to the dais.

Rhaenyra stood encircled by color and fire, her children at her feet, the very image of prophecy fulfilled. The light poured over her as though the gods themselves had claimed her as vessel and sovereign.

And for the first time in all the years Alicent had known her, she could not tell where the woman ended and the legend began.

The light flared gold across Rhaenyra’s face, beautiful and terrible.

Alicent’s lips parted, but no prayer came.

Only a thought. Cold and clear as a blade.

The realm will follow her.

“Not all of it,” came her father’s voice, low and deliberate beside her.

She hadn’t noticed her father step closer, but he stood just behind her shoulder now, half cloaked in shadow. His gaze was fixed on the dais, eyes sharp and knowing, the faintest curl of calculation resting at their edge.

“She burns too bright,” he said. “And bright fires draw their own kind of night.”

Before she could answer, a soft shuffle of robes brushed the marble behind them.

The High Septon had drawn near.

He moved with practiced humility, attendants parting the air before him like ripples in water. His head inclined deeply, his voice a whisper of silk and incense.

“My Queen,” he said politely. “Forgive the intrusion. The sight before us is… divine.”

Alicent turned slightly, forcing a polite smile. “You honor the moment, Father.”

The old man bowed again, the motion slow, deliberate. “How could one not? The blood of dragons, revealed in light. The Seven must surely watch with envy.”

He raised his head then and for the briefest instant, his gaze caught the children on the dais.

The colored light from the dome struck his eyes oddly.

They gleamed...too bright.

Not the reflection of flame, but something colder, deeper. 

The incense turned to syrup in Alicent’s throat. 

The moment passed; he blinked, and the glow was gone. Only the kind smile of a holy man remained.

“Do they not move you, my Queen?” he asked softly. “The girl especially, gold and silver twined as one. Such radiance should be guided.”

“Guided?”

He dipped his head again, servile. “Forgive me. Merely a thought unworthy of the hour. In time, when she comes of age, the Faith shall wish to bless her path. To ensure the maiden walks in the light. There is holiness yet to be shaped.”

A faint unease stirred in Alicent’s chest. It was uncomfortable in its intensity. Something in the way his eyes lingered. 

Still, he was a man of the Seven. To doubt him would be to doubt the gods.

She inclined her head. “Your concern honors us.”

He smiled, slow, deferential, and lowered himself into a bow so deep the points of his crown brushed the floor. “The gods keep you, my Queen. Their eyes are ever upon you.”

As he drifted away, his attendants closing around him like shadows, Alicent exhaled slowly. 

The noise of the hall swelled again, cheers, laughter, the clatter of goblets raised in toast.

It felt distant, muted, as though she were hearing it from underwater. She smoothed her gown, steadied her breath, and rose.

The movement drew attention at once. The crowd hushed, parting subtly as she stepped forward from her seat. The colored light from the dome caught the hem of her green silk but did not claim her wholly as it had Rhaenyra.

It brushed her like an afterthought, paling against the radiance still blazing on the dais.

“Princess. Prince Consort. The court of the Crownlands offers its blessing and congratulations on this joyous day.”

Viserys beamed from where he stood beside Rhaenyra, wine-flushed and radiant. “Ah, my Queen!” he said warmly. “Is it not wondrous? The gods themselves smile upon us!”

“Indeed,” she replied softly, bowing her head in practiced grace. “They shine very brightly here.”

At her gesture, her children came forward.

Aegon, impatient, bounded a step ahead, bowing clumsily before remembering himself.

Helaena followed more slowly, distracted by the colors swirling through the mosaic; she turned her palms upward, catching the glints of gold and red that fell from the dome.

Aemond, quiet and grave, mirrored her perfectly, his small hand brushing his sister’s sleeve.

They stood together before the dais.

The light reached them, but not as it had the others.

Where it had crowned Rhaenyra and her children in fire, it merely touched Alicent’s, slipping over them without reflection, without transformation. Their skin did not shimmer; their eyes did not gleam like gemstones. They were beautiful in the ordinary way of mortal children, warm, imperfect, alive.

Alicent felt the contrast like a blow.

Her children—her blood—looked painfully human beside the creatures of light that gleamed on the dais. And yet, she found herself grateful for it.

They were real. They breathed. They cast shadows.

“May they grow strong,” she said at last, her tone smooth as glass.

Rhaenyra inclined her head, the ruby at her throat flaring red. “As may yours, my Queen.”

Then, before either woman could turn away, a small sound broke through the heavy air, a delighted squeal, high and bright.

Princess Aemma, unsteady on her tiny feet, had wriggled free of her nurse’s hold and was toddling toward the front of the dais. Her curls blazed gold and silver in the fractured light, her small hands outstretched as if reaching for the shifting colors that danced across the floor.

The crowd gasped softly, but no one moved to stop her.

She stumbled once, twice and caught herself by clinging to the folds of Helaena’s gown.

Alicent’s breath stilled.

Her daughter, always watching more than she spoke, looked down.

Usually, Helaena shied from touch; her skin was quick to startle, her gaze always elsewhere, chasing things no one else could see. Yet now, as the little princess clutched her skirts, she did not flinch.

She smiled.

It was small at first, a flicker of light caught between confusion and wonder, then bloomed, brilliant and unguarded.

Before anyone could speak, Helaena sank to her knees right there on the marble floor, heedless of rank, of propriety, of the hundreds of eyes fixed upon her. The green silk of her gown spilled around her like a pool of reflected light.

Aemma reached up with both small hands and touched her face, palms against her cheeks, fingers curling against her jaw with the easy intimacy of a child who knows no boundaries.

Helaena’s breath caught.

“Oh,” she whispered, voice trembling with wonder. “You’re so beautiful.”

The little princess giggled, delighted, pressing her golden forehead against Helaena’s, their curls tangling together, silver and gold, moonlight and flame.

A murmur swept through the court. Nobles exchanged uncertain glances, torn between amusement and reverence.

Even Rhaenyra seemed taken aback, her lips parting slightly, surprise softening the steel of her composure. Laenor laughed under his breath, the sound disbelieving but fond. Viserys, of course, clapped his hands together, his eyes shining with tears.

From where he stood, Daemon’s mouth curved, a shadow of amusement and provocation.

“See how the light knows its kin, wife?” he murmured, voice pitched for Laena yet cutting clear enough to carry. “Some shine; some borrow.”

Laena’s fingers, resting on the edge of the table, stilled. She did not look at him, only exhaled once through her nose, a breath that could have been laughter if it hadn’t sounded like restraint. 

Across the hall, Ser Criston’s jaw clenched, his gauntlet creaked; he planted both hands on the table as if pinning a temper.

Viserys, catching the movement but not the meaning, barked a laugh that rang too loudly. “Ah, ever the jester, Daemon! You’ll set the whole hall on edge with your wit.”

The laughter that followed was obedient, brittle.

Alicent’s smile held.

That was the only place she let it hurt.

Her daughter, shy, otherworldly Helaena, too focused on the girl before her did not hear the insult. 

Then the nurse hurried forward, murmuring apologies, gathering the little princess into her arms. Aemma twisted to look back, giggling, reaching out a small hand toward Helaena as she was lifted away.

Helaena reached back, fingertips brushing hers. “She’s warm,” she said, half-dazed, looking up at her mother. “Like the light feels when it stops being fire.”

Alicent swallowed hard. “Yes,” she said softly. “She is.”

Rhaenyra inclined her head from the dais, her voice smooth again, though her gaze lingered on Helaena a breath too long. “The gods favor the innocence of children,” she said.

Alicent’s answering smile was brittle, thin. “Let us hope they keep favoring them.”

Viserys, eager for his cups, clapped his hands together, laughter booming across the hall. “Enough of speeches and tears!” he cried, joy spilling from him like wine. “The hour grows late, and Dragonstone’s tables groan with plenty. Let the feast begin! Let us dine in honor of our heirs and this blessed day!”

The crowd answered with cheers. Musicians struck up a bright, triumphant tune. Servants began to throw wide the great doors leading to the adjoining hall, where long tables glittered with gold plate and overflowing chalices.

At the threshold, Ser Criston’s hand ghosted toward his hilt again as an Emberguard captain paced the line. He caught himself, jaw tight, and looked away.

Yet amid the swirl of motion, Helaena hesitated. She looked toward Rhaenyra, her expression still soft, almost shy.

“Sister,” she said, her voice small but clear enough to carry. “May I sit near her? The little one.”

The word hung in the air like a bell toll.

Courtiers exchanged wary glances.

Otto’s mouth tightened in disapproval.

Rhaenyra blinked, startled, then faintly moved. The faintest smile curved her lips, though it did not quite reach her eyes. “If her nurse allows it,” she said at last, her voice calm, deliberate. “You may.”

Helaena’s face lit, open and radiant. “Thank you, sister,” she said again, soft as prayer. Then she dipped a quick, clumsy curtsey before following the nurse and little Aemma toward the feasting tables.

Alicent’s breath hitched. The word sister still echoed in her mind, strange and unearthly. She watched her daughter trail sunlight and laughter through the hall, the impossible child at her side.

She might have smiled, had she not seen him.

Across the chamber, half-veiled by the great banner of the Seven, the High Septon stood watching.

He did not move as others did. His attendants clustered close, their incense burners spilling smoke that curled in patterns like grasping hands. His pale eyes gleamed with an unnatural sheen. 

The light did not so much catch in his eyes as fail to leave them.

The moment Helaena reached for Aemma’s hand again at the table, he smiled, slowly, and lowered his head in a bow that was too personal.

Alicent felt her heart knock once, hard against her ribs.

She forced her shoulders to settle, smoothing her gown with steady hands as the guests began to move toward the banquet hall.

The long tables glittered beneath the chandelier’s blaze, the air thick with scent and song. Candles spilled golden light across plates of venison and boar, towers of fruit glazed with honey, and goblets that caught the firelight like blood. The crowd had become a tide, lords and ladies pressing close, laughter breaking in waves.

Alicent followed the King to the high table, her expression perfectly schooled. Rhaenyra and Laenor flanked Viserys like twin halves of the realm itself: dark flame and shining sea.

Daemon lounged a few seats away, all sharp edges and lazy grace, his fingers absently tracing the rim of his cup while Laena spoke softly beside him. At the far end, Rhaenys and Corlys murmured together, their presence an anchor amid the din.

Below the dais, the triplets sat at a smaller table close enough to be seen clearly. Septa Rhaella hovered behind them, patient and smiling, as nurses guided small hands toward bread and fruit.

Helaena had joined them, as promised.

She looked transformed.

The girl who so often shrank from touch now sat surrounded by the youngest heirs of Dragonstone as though born among them. Aemma, perched on her lap, reached for her goblet and giggled when Helaena gently turned it away.

Aenar tugged curiously at a strand of her pale hair, and she only laughed, the sound soft and unrestrained. Aemon, ever solemn, pressed a fig into her palm as if offering tribute.

The sight drew smiles from nearby courtiers; even Rhaenyra’s gaze softened for a moment. 

Kin of dragons painted the hall in living color.

Velaryon silver shimmered like tidewater at dusk; Targaryen black drank the torchlight and threw it back as embers; Hightower in the green they chose to don, shone like a polished promise that would not be honored tonight.

At the King’s right hand, where the office demanded, Lord Lyonel Strong sat, broad and still as quarried stone.

The Hand spoke rarely, but when he did, lesser men leaned forward to catch the shape of it. His great shoulders made Viserys look almost slight, his calm a buffer against the King’s bright, careless joy.

When servants drifted too near Rhaenyra’s children with goblets too full, Lyonel’s eyes flicked once, and the air corrected itself.

Ser Harwin himself indulged, turning his cup slowly between blunt fingers, laughing at something Ser Steffon Darklyn said, but his gaze kept straying to the children’s table as if duty refused to release him. 

His eyes watching for any threats or blades. 

Larys Strong did not stay near them. 

He had chosen a lesser table in the shadow of a pillar carved with curling dragons, half in lamplight, half in quiet.

A polished cane lay along the edge of his place like a pet snake at rest.

He ate sparingly, spoke even less, and let the hall come to him, tidbits of gossip on silver platters, secrets folded into laughter and steam.

Now and again, he lifted his chin the smallest degree, as if tasting the current the way a fish tastes a river’s mouth.

Alicent felt him before she saw him: that peculiar attention that pricked the skin without disturbing the air. He knew to approach when eyes had drifted elsewhere.

“Your Grace,” came Larys’s voice, soft, inflected with courtly warmth that never reached his eyes. He had not approached so much as appeared, cane nested lightly in his palm. “Forgive me. I would not intrude upon joy, only make it easier to bear.”

Alicent did not look at him at once.

She watched Helaena break bread for Aemma, the little one’s hands sticky with honey as Aenar leaned across to steal a grape and Aemon solemnly ferried figs like offerings to a shrine.

The picture should have been harmless.

It wasn’t.

“What do you see, Lord Larys?” she asked, voice mild.

“Paint,” he said after a beat, with a small, admiring tilt of the head. “Laid with a steady hand. The island has taken a brush to its future, and the strokes are bold.” His gaze slid toward the high table. “Lord Lyonel says little tonight. That is how he approves: by not stopping a thing.”

“My lord your father approves much that I do not,” Alicent replied, still smooth. “Is that not what government is? A ledger of tolerances.”

“Sometimes.” Larys’s smile thinned. “Sometimes it is simply a question of where one stands when the music stops.”

Below, a servant’s tray chimed against a goblet; laughter splashed; the scent of cloves and roasted boar climbed like prayer.

Rhaenys leaned to murmur something to Corlys; the Sea Snake’s eyes gleamed sea-bright as he answered. Daemon half-smiled at some joke only he found sharp enough to bleed.

Alicent exhaled through her nose. “Say what you came to say.”

He bowed his head, chastened by command and emboldened by permission.

“Only this, Your Grace. The hall has been arranged to teach a lesson. Fire at the center, sea embracing it, stone—” he tipped his chin minutely toward Lyonel “—bearing it, and the Faith” —his eyes clicked once to the far banner of the Seven— “observing. If a tale is repeated often enough, it begins to look like law.”

“And if it is law?” she asked, too softly.

“Then one chooses whether to be a footnote or a clause,” he murmured, and glanced, finally, deliberately, at Aegon, who had given up on sitting at the high table and snuck away to be with Rhaenyra’s brood. He stacked sugared almonds into small towers for Aenar to topple with glee. “The realm is newly devout to the word heart, I hear.” His smile didn’t change. “A prudent scribe writes it where it cannot be erased.”

Her fingers tightened against the stem of her cup. “You suggest a betrothal.”

“I suggest an answer,” Larys said, the slightest shrug creasing his shoulders. “To a sermon delivered in colored light. Answers need not be shouted. They need only exist.”

“Your father is the King’s Hand,” Alicent said. “What does he suggest?”

Larys’s eyes warmed a fraction, which was to say not at all. “Lord Lyonel prefers that bridges be built of stone and not of children. He is wise.” A breath. “He is also mortal.”

Across the hall, Harwin tipped back a hair, a man at ease who never forgot the wall behind him.

Lyonel spoke three words to a steward, and three problems vanished.

At the children’s table, Helaena lifted Aemma’s sticky palm to the light, watching the honey thread and gleam like spun gold; Aemon leaned into her shoulder as if the world had given him permission; Aenar laughed so hard he hiccuped and clapped both hands over his mouth, delighted by his own noise.

Only Aemond remained at his initial seat, but his lips curved downwards and want tugged at his posture. 

Kin of dragons.

The picture would travel farther than this island, sung badly by men who hadn’t been here, improved by women who had, prayed over by those who feared it.

Alicent felt it settling like ash in the lungs.

“Write me your answer,” she said without looking at Larys. “Quietly. With names I can use and names I can bargain with.”

He bowed, shallow, pleased. “Of course, my Queen.”

He did not leave at once. His gaze drifted to the triplets, then, more keenly, to Helaena.

Something in his eyes flickered, like a thin flame tasting wind.

“Pretty,” he said, the word neutral as a surgeon’s cloth. “How the light loves her.”

Alicent turned her head a fraction. “It will not have her.”

“As you say.” He tapped the cane once to the stone, no louder than a thought, and slipped back into the pillar’s shadow, where men like him grow.

At the high table, Viserys lifted his cup, flushed with pride and wine. Rhaenyra raised hers in answer, ruby burning like a live coal; Laenor’s smile smoothed like water. Lyonel’s big hand closed gently over the King’s wrist as a plate arrived too near the goblet’s edge; the wine did not spill.

“Careful.” Lyonel’s voice never rose; laws rarely had to.

All the while, the island watched its own painting dry.

Chapter 13: The Unveiling Part: 3

The feast hall exhaled like a dying god.

Larys Strong lingered at the threshold, his cane resting lightly against his palm, his gaze hooded beneath half-lowered lids.

He liked this hour best, when the music died and the masks slipped, when the smell of victory began to sour.

The heirs of flame had left the high table not long before.

Even now their image lingered: silver hair catching every light, eyes like twin mirrors of amethyst and frost. Too perfect, Larys thought.

People worshipped things like that only until they feared them.

Then they broke them.

He could already hear the future in the hall’s dying echoes. The laughter, the songs, all of it built a shrine around Rhaenyra Targaryen’s children

The corridor beyond the hall breathed a different air: cool stone, smoke curling low. From here, the kingdom smelled tired.

Otto Hightower waited there, half in shadow, half in purpose. No longer Hand, stripped of the title, but not of the hunger.

He stood as if he’d never truly left the council chamber, only changed its walls.

Larys watched him for a while, amused.

The ghost of the old order. Otto’s pride had teeth; he was too clever to gnash them openly, but the ache of exile showed in every careful breath.

A handful of nobles drifted past, Lord Staunton, Lord Fell, Lord Massey men who prided themselves on 'patience' because they lacked courage.

Neutral, they called themselves. Larys called them fertile ground.

Otto moved then, smooth as prayer. “Lord Beesbury,” he called, voice dipped in honey.

The treasurer turned, blinking behind his spectacles. “Ser Otto...ah, Lord Otto.”

“Neither, these days,” Otto said mildly, stepping forward. “Only a servant of the realm’s good sense. Tell me, what did tonight’s radiance cost the Crown? All that glass, jewels, and new guards...such splendour must weigh heavily upon the treasury.”

Larys’s lips twitched. He opens the vein and smiles while he bleeds them.

Beesbury straightened. “The Emberguard are sworn to the Princess herself. Their upkeep falls to Dragonstone.”

“Ah,” Otto murmured. “Then the heir pays her own soldiers. How modern. Her coffers must be deep indeed.”

A nervous titter passed among the lords nearby. Lord Massey coughed to disguise his interest.

“The Princess spends in the service of the realm,” Beesbury said sharply.

“Service,” Otto echoed, as if tasting the word. “Yes. A generous sort of word. One that can mean so many things.”

The silence that followed had weight.

Larys could almost see the thought forming in their eyes: If she rules her purse, she may rule her crown as well.

Beesbury sputtered. “You insult the Crown Princess.”

Otto bowed his head piously. “Never. I merely admire such… independence. Few heirs dare to shine brighter than the throne itself.”

That earned him the faintest smile from Lord Fell. Larys saw it, and stored it away.

He turned slightly, letting their voices fade.

There were richer whispers elsewhere, two knights near the stairwell trading awe for apprehension.

“She spends like a queen already,” one murmured. “Did you see the gold in the children’s cradle robes? Gods, the embroidery alone—”

“The King’s love blinds him,” said the other. “He’d give her half the realm if she asked.”

Larys traced the head of his cane with one finger. 

He thought of his father. The true Hand, Lyonel Strong. Steady, fair, noble to the point of tedium. Father builds with honesty, Larys mused. Otto builds with poison. I build with memory. He did not need a title to rule; he only needed to remember where the bodies were buried and who had held the shovels.

He glanced back down the corridor. Otto was finishing his performance, soft-voiced and sanctified.

“May the Princess’s flame ever burn as bright, and may it never reach the coffers.”

The laughter lingered, thin and mean, long after Otto’s footsteps faded.

Larys stayed where he was, watching the last traces of the feast dissolve, the torches guttering, the nobles dispersing.

He tapped the head of his cane once against the flagstone.

A habit, a rhythm. The sound of thought made flesh.

Which side, then?

He could see both banners already unfurling in his mind.

One red and black, one green and gold.

Both soaked in the same ambition.

Both certain the gods had chosen them.

The Princess, radiant and adored, her dragon’s fire bright enough to sear the sky. A woman who believed herself destiny made flesh. Larys admired that. Conviction made for strong rulers and even stronger corpses.

Her children, those perfect little idols, were the realm’s mirror and its omen. Beautiful enough to blind, unnatural enough to haunt. Men would die for them out of awe as easily as envy. 

And on the other side: the Queen.

Alicent Hightower, sharp where Rhaenyra was bright, patient where she burned. Hers was the fire that smouldered behind glass, the sort that smoked before it choked. There was power in that, too. The quiet kind. The kind that needed men like him.

He weighed them, not in morals, but in yield.

Rhaenyra had dragons, but dragons devoured everything they protected. A kingdom built on fire must feed it forever, or be consumed.
Alicent had faith, and faith was cheaper than flame. Men would sell their souls to believe they were righteous.

Still… faith made people noisy. It left traces.

He preferred shadows.

Desire moved thrones. Desire burned ships. Desire whispered in Otto’s voice and gleamed in the Princess’s smile.

And Larys...Larys dealt in desire’s ruins.

He looked down the corridor once more. Beyond those walls, the heirs of flame slept in silk, and the Queen’s sons dreamed of crowns they’d been taught to fear.

Both fires will burn the realm, he thought. My only choice is where to stand when the ashes fall.

He turned, the echo of his cane striking in time with his heartbeat.

The Princess will rise first, he reasoned. The Queen will endure longest. 

Larys smiled without warmth.

His cane striking like a metronome through the silence, as he made his way to his father's guest chambers. 

Inside, lamplight pooled across maps and parchments. Harwin sat by the hearth, armor half-undone, his dark hair damp with sweat and wine. Lyonel stood behind the table, pen set aside, eyes following the curve of the coast drawn in ink; Dragonstone to King’s Landing.

“You missed the last toast,” Lyonel said without looking up.

“Better men than I have drowned in such noise,” Larys replied softly. “Besides, I have always preferred what follows the fire to the flame itself.”

Harwin snorted. “You mean to the Princess’s flame? You should’ve seen the crowd, brother. Half the court near wept when her children took to sight. The crown’s vaults will be echoing for moons.”

Larys crossed to the sideboard, pouring wine with slow precision. “You assume she used the crown’s vaults.”

Harwin looked up. “And what else would she use?”

“The Princess has her own,” Larys said. “Dragonstone pays its own debts now, its glass, its salt, its obsidian. She’s been selling it. The Queen’s coin buys prayers, but the Princess’s coin buys loyalty.”

The words settled softly. 

Lyonel finally spoke, his tone measured. “So she’s done what the Conqueror once did. Made her island a kingdom in truth.”

“She’s made herself sovereign,” Larys corrected. “And if the realm cheers her for it, the realm forgets whose sigil still sits the Iron Throne.”

Lyonel raised his gaze at that. “You speak like a man who fears a woman’s wealth more than her dragons.”

Larys smiled faintly. “I fear what people worship, Father. And tonight, they worshipped her.”

He turned back to the table, poured three cups. One for Harwin, one for Lyonel, one for himself. His sleeve brushed the rim of his father’s cup, a whisper of dust fell soundless into the wine.

Harwin took his with a grateful grunt. “If it comes to choosing between fire and faith, I’ll take fire. At least it keeps you warm.”

“Until it eats you,” Larys murmured.

Lyonel lifted his cup, turning it once in the light. “You’ve grown bold, speaking of sides so freely.”

“We all stand somewhere,” Larys said.

Harwin’s jaw flexed. “Then you’d best stay far from Dragonstone, brother. That’s where the true blood burns.”

“Perhaps,” Larys said. “But blood stains easily. Coin does not.”

The wind clawed at the shutters. The chamber’s fire flickered blue for a moment, fed by the sulfur in the air.

Lyonel reached for his cup. His hand stopped halfway. “You’ve grown too free with your questions.”

“Questions are all that keep me alive,” Larys murmured.

“You think too much, brother. The Princess is the heir. Let her act it. You should’ve seen her standing beneath the dragons tonight. The people believe in her.”

“They believed in Aegon the Conqueror, too,” Larys said, “until his heirs burned each other for the right to sit his throne.”

Lyonel’s voice cut through the silence, soft but iron-edged. “Enough. I will not have my sons whispering like cutpurses in a queen’s hall.”

“You call her queen?” Larys asked.

“I call her the future,” Lyonel said. “And if you have any sense, you’ll start measuring which way the wind turns before it carries you off the cliffs.”

He lifted the cup then, slowly. The wine caught the lamplight deep red, rich. His eyes lingered on his son. “To the realm,” he said.

Larys inclined his head. “To its debts.”

Their cups touched. Only Harwin drank. Lyonel placed his back on the table, untasted.

He turned another parchment toward the light, its wax bearing the Hand’s seal. “I’ll see the Princess reimbursed from the royal treasury for tonight’s expenses.”

Harwin blinked. “Reimbursed? But she paid for it herself.”

“Then let the ledgers show the King provides for his heir,” Lyonel said. “And let the court remember whose seal closes the purse.”

Larys’s tone was almost admiring. “So you’ll pay her with her own gold, dressed in royal gratitude.”

“I’ll remind her that even Dragonstone still answers to the realm,” Lyonel said. “For now.”

Outside, thunder cracked or maybe it was a dragon shifting in its sleep.

Harwin rose, stretching. “You’ll both be gray before dawn if you keep talking in riddles.”

“Better gray than blind,” Lyonel murmured.

When Harwin left, the silence deepened. The torchlight trembled.

The wind howled outside, carrying the scent of salt, ash, and the sleeping dragons below.

Lyonel didn’t look up. “Go to bed, Larys.”

“I will,” Larys said, slipping into the corridor, the tap of his cane fading down the hall. “When the fire cools.”

Far below, a forge hammer struck in the dark, counting coin in iron, while Dragonstone thrummed, all stone-artery and heat.

---

The morning broke like fire over the sea.

Dragonstone’s cliffs burned gold in the dawn, and smoke curled from the mountain’s crown, the island breathing as its masters stirred. The festival had not yet ended; tents and banners still littered the slopes below, their silks rippling in the salt wind. Servants cleared wine cups from tables that still smelled of roasted meats and dragonflame.

Rhaenyra felt their eyes as she stepped into the light.

Her father’s voice carried from the dais. “Let them come forward! Let the realm see what we have built!”

A show of strength disguised as joy. That was his way. He believed celebration could cover a wound if it bled slowly enough.

She descended the stairs with Laenor at her side, the murmur of the court swelling around them.

Every head turned.

Rhaenyra had been beautiful since girlhood, but it was no longer the soft beauty of youth. Birthing her children had honed her into something sharper, deliberate. 

A woman in fullness, with hips that flared wide and powerful beneath her gown. When she breathed, the fabric tightened, emphasizing the roundness of her breasts and the narrowness of her waist beneath the embroidered laces.

The eyes always followed her, to the sweep of her gown, to the gleam of her jewels, to the children she had brought forth. Their proof. Their threat.

Her sons were ahead, the nurses guiding them gently, and between them toddled Aemma, her curls glinting gold where the sun touched.

The sight of them struck something tender in Rhaenyra’s chest, a softness she hid behind composure. 

Laenor leaned close, voice pitched low. “They’re restless,” he murmured.

“The court?” she asked.

“The dragons.”

She smiled faintly. “Then let them come.”

The air shifted before the sound did. A heaviness, a pressure that prickled against the skin, the way a storm gathers over the sea.

Then came the hum.

Low at first, almost beneath hearing, until the courtyard began to vibrate with it, the steady beat of wings approaching from the cliffs. Servants froze; lords lifted their heads. The sound deepened, reverberating through the bones of the mountain.

“Gods,” someone whispered.

And then he appeared.

Vhaelyx.

He tore through the clouds like a wound opening across the sky. Black as night, vast beyond comprehension. A creature too large, too soon. His wings unfurled like the banners of conquest, veined with molten crimson that caught the sun and scattered it in sparks.

The sight of him broke something in the crowd.

Gasps turned to cries, and several lords stumbled backward as the wind of his descent swept over them, hot enough to sting. 

At only a year, Vhaelyx was already the size of an elephant, his shadow engulfing the entire yard. When he roared, the air itself trembled, banners whipping, armor ringing, the mountain answering in a low, hollow echo.

Viserys was laughing and weeping all at once. “By the gods—look at him! He looks just as Balerion did!”

But Rhaenyra did not laugh. 

Vhaelyx banked sharply, the wind of his wings nearly toppling a guard from the stair. He landed beyond the balustrade with a crash that made the marble shudder beneath their feet. Dust rose in a plume, gilded by sunlight, and through it came the slow, rhythmic sound of his breathing, deep enough to rattle the teeth in one’s skull.

Rhaenyra felt her pulse mirror the dragon’s.

Her children were laughing, reaching toward the sky, and she knew—without question—that Vhaelyx was not looking for her.

He was looking for them.

Above him, two smaller shadows circled, Vermax darting through the haze, green and silver bright against the smoke, and Vaerith gliding higher still, a line of gold light against the dawn.

The court’s awe curdled into unease. Even Daemon, usually unmoved by such displays, had straightened at her side.

A gust of wind tore through the courtyard as Vhaelyx roared again not in challenge, but in recognition. The sound rolled over the island, carried out to sea.

And from the walls, someone whispered what they all feared to speak aloud:

“He shouldn’t be that large.”

Rhaenyra’s lips curved a small, dangerous thing.

The nurses gasped, too late.

Aemon, Aenar, and Aemma had slipped free.

Three tiny shapes breaking from the circle of hands and skirts, stumbling toward the beast with the unsteady gait of children just learning balance.

Gasps erupted across the courtyard. A guard cursed under his breath; a lady screamed.

“Hold them!” Lyonel barked, but none dared move too close to the dragon.

Lord Beesbury’s breath whistled; Lord Staunton’s signet clicked against his goblet; Even Criston’s knuckles blanched around his pommel.

Rhaenyra’s hand twitched at her side, though she did not call out. She only watched, heart hammering

The triplets moved together as though pulled by the same invisible thread, not racing, not hesitating, simply going.

The court erupted into chaos, lords calling for sense, ladies crossing themselves, guards frozen between instinct and fear.

But the dragons paid them no mind.

Vhaelyx lowered his head to the children’s level, the massive, horned skull dipping until it almost brushed the scorched stone.

Aemon toddled forward excitedly, eager to be nearer to his dragon. 

Aenar, braver than sense allowed, toddled after his brother and reached out to touch the glossy black scales. He lost his footing, caught himself against the dragon’s flank and instead of flinching, Vhaelyx stilled.

The crowd gasped as Aenar pressed his palm flat to the beast’s side.

The dragon’s head turned, slow as a turning moon.

He stared down at the small boy balancing himself against his leg, nostrils flaring.

Rhaenyra’s throat tightened.

Aemma’s giggle broke the tension like sunlight through stormclouds. The pale-haired child clapped her hands, and high above, Vaerith answered, her golden flame curling through the air in thin, perfect circles.

Vermax dove sharply from the sky, green and silver flashing, landing with a hiss beside the black giant. He stalked close, tail lashing, not in hostility but agitation—the kind of restless jealousy born of creatures who love too fiercely.

Vhaelyx did not bare his teeth.

He simply turned his massive head and looked at Vermax, the air vibrating between them, before lowering his snout again toward the children.

The three dragons inhaled together.

The triplets laughed. All three.

Something tugged under Aemond’s ribs. Want, edged like a hook.

The court also wasn't amused. 

What they saw was wrong. Sacred. Unnerving.

The dragons were not merely acknowledging their riders...they were sharing them. Smelling all three, breathing all three in as one.

Someone whispered hoarsely, “Do they—do they know all of them?”

Rhaenyra moved before she realized she was moving.

The crowd murmured behind her, their voices splintering like glass, but she barely heard them. The heat rolling from the dragons was unbearable; the air shimmered with it, sharp as iron drawn from flame.

She stepped closer.

The guards stirred but did not stop her. No one would have dared.

Vhaelyx turned his head toward her. Slowly. Deliberately.

The motion alone sent a ripple through the court.

But the dragon only looked, great golden eye unblinking, the molten slit contracting once before settling again.

He knew her.

Not as rider. Not as threat.

As something of the same blood.

Rhaenyra stopped just beyond his reach. 

Aemon was still touching his muzzle, Aenar still steadying himself against his leg, Aemma laughing at the air itself. 

Her heart swelled, then ached.

They were hers.

Flesh of her flesh, flame of her flame and yet, looking at them now, she understood what her father never would: she had brought something into the world that belonged to no one.

The dragons’ eyes followed her as she knelt. Not a single hiss, not one sign of agitation. They watched, vast and ancient, as she reached for her children.

Aemon turned first, grinning, the light from Vaerith’s fire dancing in his eyes. “Muna,” he said softly, proud of a word he had only just learned.

Rhaenyra’s breath caught. 

She gathered Aemma into her arms, her small body warm, her laughter still spilling like bells. The other two pressed close, their tiny fingers streaked faintly with soot, their curls damp with heat.

Above, the dragons exhaled, all three at once.

The gust rolled over the yard, heavy and soft, the sound less like wind than a sigh.

Rhaenyra lifted her gaze.

They were watching her still.

Waiting.

Not for obedience, not for command, but acknowledgment.

And she gave it.

A small bow of her head. The gesture of one sovereign to another.

The dragons blinked as one, slow and deliberate, before drawing back, wings folding, tails sweeping, bodies settling into the stone like great shadows coming to rest.

She shifted Aemma in her arms, pressing a kiss to the crown of her daughter’s head, tasting salt and smoke in her curls. “Come,” she murmured softly. “Let’s show them how dragons walk.”

Her sons turned at the sound of her voice, Aemon steady, Aenar still unbalanced from excitement. She lowered Aemma back to the ground, her small feet wobbling for a moment before finding surety against the warm stone.

“Slowly,” Rhaenyra guided, crouching low, her hands ready.

The children began to move, one unsteady step after another.

The air was thick with silence; every noble and servant watched, holding their breath as if afraid the spell might break.

When Aenar’s foot caught against the uneven marble, he teetered—

Rhaenyra’s hand was there instantly, a light press against his back, steadying him without thought.

Aemon reached next, catching her gown in his fist for balance.

The fabric strained, the thread stretching in the light, but she did not mind. He released her a heartbeat later, taking a brave, wobbly step toward his sister.

They walked together, all three.

Rhaenyra followed, slow and sure, her hands always hovering near, a quiet promise that she would catch them if they fell.

Each time one of them faltered, she leaned, letting them steady against her legs, her skirts, her open palms. Their laughter rose again, small and uncertain but bright, echoing through the courtyard.

The King waited there, trembling with pride, his hands gripping the balustrade as if to keep from reaching too soon.

When the children drew near, Viserys’s restraint failed him. He let out a booming laugh that startled the nearest lords from their silence.

“Look at them!” he cried, his voice breaking with joy. “My grandchildren, the heirs of fire indeed!”

Corlys twitched as though he wished to intercept them and claim the triplets before the King could. 

He swept forward before anyone could stop him, dropping to one knee before the children, his crown slipping slightly askew. “Come here, little dragons,” he said, his smile broad and unguarded. 

Aemon reached for his grandsire’s beard, Aenar toddled into his cloak, and Aemma hid shyly against her mother’s skirts. 

Viserys laughed again, half-choking on his own delight. “Gods, you can smell the fire on them still!” he said, touching Aenar’s soot-streaked cheek with wonder. “They’ve the look of conquerors already.”

From behind her, Laenor laughed, warm, easy, his voice carrying just enough to reach the King.

“Willful things, Your Grace,” he said, a crooked smile tugging at his mouth. “They seem content to stay exactly where they please.”

Viserys followed his gaze. 

The dragons had not flown.

Instead, they had settled in the courtyard, an impossible, tangled mass of wings and scales and breath. Vhaelyx lay half-sprawled across the marble, his black body coiled protectively around the smaller two. Vermax’s green tail was draped lazily across his flank, while Vaerith rested between them, golden neck stretched over her brothers’ sides like a living thread binding the three together.

Viserys’s grin softened into wonder. “Even their beasts are bound by love,” he said. “The gods could not have granted a truer sign.”

Laenor inclined his head. “Aye, though I’d rather their affection not melt the courtyard stone. I suspect the masons will charge double for repairs.”

That drew a ripple of uneasy laughter from the lords nearby, the tension breaking like glass underfoot.

Rhaenyra smiled faintly but said nothing. Her gaze lingered on the dragons, on the slow rise and fall of their breathing.

Then a voice, soft and deliberate, cut through the hum of whispers.

“In Kingslanding, we chain what breathes fire,” said Queen Alicent, voice gentle as glass. “We call it mercy.”

Rhaenyra turned her head slightly, eyes finding the Queen across the courtyard. Alicent stood a little apart from her household, her hands folded tight at her waist.

“Mercy is a cage you build for other people’s power,” Rhaenyra said. “Mine does not fit.”

Alicent was composed. She was always composed, but her eyes betrayed her: wide, glinting with unease as they flicked toward the sprawled dragons. 

The sight of their tails coiled, their bodies tangled in sleep, seemed to shake her more than their flight had.

“They belong behind the Dragonpit’s walls. Caged. Chained. Safe.”

Her father looked from one woman to the other, uncertain. “Chains,” Viserys echoed weakly, half-laughing, “Dragonstone has no use for chains.”

He tried to make it sound jovial, but his voice wavered under the weight of the silence that followed.

Alicent bowed her head slightly, her fingers knotting together. “Forgive me, Your Grace. I only mean that power so great should be… tempered.”

Daemon’s laugh was soft, sharp as a blade. “Tempered?” he echoed. “And tell me, how does one temper a mountain or a storm?”

Alicent’s eyes flicked toward the dragons again the three of them still sprawled across the marble, vast and breathing, their smoke curling into the pale light. Her voice dropped, almost a whisper. “By praying it never wakes.”

Rhaenyra’s mouth curved like a drawn wire, her tone calm but edged. “And yet here we stand within its shadow.”

The words lingered in the air like heat.

Viserys cleared his throat and tried again, louder, the warmth returning to his tone as if noise alone could dissolve the tension. “Let it be, let it be, the dragons are calm, and that is enough for me.”

But Rhaenyra’s gaze stayed on Alicent, on the tightness of her posture, the small tremor at her jaw.

And behind her, she saw her half-brother Aemond, wide-eyed, silent, transfixed.

Staring at the dragons as though he were seeing his own heart for the first time.

When Alicent finally spoke, her voice was quieter, but it carried.

“Still,” she said, “when they return to the Red Keep… they will need to be chained.”

The words hung there. 

“For safety,” Alicent added, the edge of apology in her tone almost convincing. “Kingslanding is no Dragonstone. The people sleep easier when the beasts are bound.”

Viserys looked stricken.

“Bound?” he repeated, his disbelief unfeigned. “They’re but yearlings, Alicent...they’ve done no harm.”

“They will,” she said simply. “All dragons do, in the end.”

The silence that followed felt colder than the sea wind.

Daemon’s mouth curved into something halfway between amusement and contempt. “A Queen who prays for safety,” he murmured, “should not marry into fire.”

A few lords glanced toward the sky, as if expecting the dragons to wake again, to answer the insult. But they slept on, coiled together.

Rhaenyra turned her face toward them, her voice low but sure. “They will not be chained,” she said. “Not while I draw breath.”

Alicent’s answering smile was small and cold. “Then let us pray you never leave Dragonstone.”

Viserys’s face tightened; the joy had drained from his eyes, leaving only exhaustion and the frantic wish that love might still hold his house together.

“Enough,” he said at last, his voice gentle but firm, the tone of a father more than a king. “This is not the time.”

He glanced between them.

His daughter standing proud amid the smoke, his wife rigid in her green silks, both shining and sharp in the morning light.

“We will discuss the matter further,” he said carefully, “later.”

His words carried that desperate brightness he always used when trying to turn discord into celebration. “Today is for joy. For family.”

Rhaenyra inclined her head, the gesture graceful, obedient in form if not in spirit. “As you wish, Father.”

Alicent bowed slightly, her smile thin. “Of course, Your Grace.”

Viserys exhaled, the sound rough but relieved. “Good,” he said, as though the word alone could mend the fracture. “Let it end here.”

The courtyard began to stir again.

Servants moved softly, as though afraid to make sound, and the lords resumed their low, cautious chatter.

Aemond lingered at the edge of it all, half-hidden behind his mother’s skirts. She was speaking with the King now, her tone low, careful, the kind of careful that always meant she was frightened.

He barely heard her.

All his attention was on the dragons.

He wanted to move closer. He wanted to see how the light moved beneath their wings.

Aemond took one step forward before a hand touched his shoulder.

“Steady, my boy,” said a voice above him, mild and smooth.

He turned to find his grandsire. Otto Hightower had bent down to his level, his face carved with the kind of smile that never quite reached the eyes.

“They are beautiful, aren’t they?” Otto said softly. “But beauty alone can be dangerous.”

Aemond blinked, unsure if he was meant to answer. His fingers itched. “I want to see them,” he whispered. “I want to touch one.”

Otto’s smile deepened, though something colder flickered beneath it. “Ah,” he said quietly. “And so you will. In time. But remember, Aemond, dragons answer only to blood. And blood is not given freely.”

Aemond frowned, not understanding. “But I have their blood,” he said quickly. “Mother says so. Father too.”

Otto’s hand lingered on his shoulder, a steady, gentle weight. “So you do, my boy. You have the truest of it, from the line of kings themselves.”

The words soothed Aemond’s confusion, though his chest still felt tight. His gaze drifted again toward the courtyard, to the dragons coiled in sleep.

“They won’t let me near,” he said quietly. “Not like them.”

Otto’s eyes followed his. “No,” he agreed, voice low, almost sympathetic. “Those belong to the Princess’s brood. They were bred for her line. But there are others, Aemond. Many others.”

“Others?”

“Dormant eggs in the Dragonmont,” Otto said, tone soft as silk. “Unclaimed beasts roosting along the cliffs. The blood of old Valyria runs through more than one child, and dragons are… creatures of discernment. Sometimes they wait for the one who truly sees them.”

Aemond’s small brow furrowed. “Wait for me?”

“Perhaps.” Otto’s smile was faint, but there was a spark behind it, something Aemond was too young to read. “If you are patient. If you are bold. Dragons do not yield to those who stand still, my boy. They are won.”

The word lingered, heavy and thrilling. Won.

Aemond’s pulse quickened. He looked back to the black one. To Vhaelyx, massive and still, and wondered how something so large could sleep so quietly.

Otto leaned closer, his voice dropping to a whisper. “Do you see him there? The great black beast?”

Aemond nodded.

“That one remembers strength,” Otto said. “The world bows to those who command it. Man or dragon alike.”

The boy’s heart thudded.

He didn’t know what to say, so he only stared, breath shallow.

Otto’s thumb stroked once, absently, grandfatherly over Aemond’s shoulder, the way a falconer checks a jess.

“Come now. Let your mother worry herself to death. One day you’ll have a dragon of your own, and she’ll see there’s nothing to fear.”

He began to turn away, his cloak sweeping the stones.

Aemond stayed a moment longer, his gaze locked on the beasts sleeping in the sun.

“They’re waiting,” he whispered, though he wasn’t sure for what, or whom.

And somewhere deep within the courtyard’s heat, one of the dragons shifted, its wing flexing just enough to stir the air.

It was nothing.
A ripple of breath.
A trick of light.

But Aemond felt it like a promise.

The thought took root before the morning’s embers faded.

By nightfall, the castle slept. Only the sea was awake, whispering against the cliffs below Dragonstone, carrying the smell of salt and burnt stone.

Aemond could not rest.

He rose quietly, the whisper in his head.

They are won, thrumming like blood in his ears. The air in his chamber felt too small, too still.

He found Aegon first, slouched in bed, half-asleep and wholly irritated.

“You’re mad,” Aegon muttered when Aemond tugged at his sleeve.

“Grandfather said there are dragons here,” Aemond whispered, eyes bright. “Unclaimed ones. Waiting in the cliffs.”

Aegon yawned. “And you think they’ll wait for you?”

“They’re dragons,” Aemond said. “They don’t wait. You take them, or someone else will.”

That earned him a reluctant smirk. “You’re braver than you are wise.”

“I’m both,” Aemond said stubbornly.

Aegon sighed, rubbing his eyes. “Fine. But if we burn, I blame you.”

They crept into the corridor, the air thick with heat and silence. The walls seemed to hum faintly, the heartbeat of Dragonstone itself thrumming beneath their bare feet.

They were nearly to the outer steps when Helaena appeared.

She stood barefoot in the torchlight, hair spilling down her back, her nightgown whispering against the stone. Her expression was faraway, as if she’d stepped from a dream she hadn’t yet left behind.

“Where are you going?” she asked softly, her head tilted.

Aegon grinned. “Aemond thinks he can steal a dragon.”

“Not steal,” Aemond said quickly. “Claim. There are unclaimed ones in the cliffs.”

Helaena’s gaze found his, sharp and distant all at once. “You won’t find them tonight.”

Aemond frowned. “Why not?”

She stepped closer, her voice low, almost kind. “Because the fire’s still sleeping,” she said. “And if you wake it now, it will only burn you.”

Aegon snorted. “There it is again. Riddles. You’re not even making sense.”

Helaena ignored him. She looked at Aemond instead, her tone soft but unyielding. “You’ll have a dragon one day. But not tonight. Not while you still have both eyes to see it.”

Aemond froze. “What do you mean?”

She smiled faintly.

Sad, knowing, unbearably gentle. “The mountain knows who it keeps, little brother. And what it takes.”

For a heartbeat, none of them spoke. Even Aegon went still, unsettled by the tone.

Then Aemond’s jaw tightened. “You can stay,” he said. “I’m going.”

For a heartbeat, no one breathed.

The torch nearest them flickered, its light sliding across the carved dragons that lined the walls. The air itself seemed to listen.

Helaena’s eyes dropped to the floor, her hands twisting in the fabric of her nightgown. When she spoke, her voice was very small.

“You’ll go whether I stop you or not,” she murmured.

Aemond’s chin lifted, stubborn, defiant. “Then don’t stop me.”

Helaena looked at him for a long moment, her gaze searching his face as though she might find another version of him there, one that would listen, one that would wait. But all she saw was the gleam of determination and something fiercer: need.

At last, she sighed.

“Very well,” she said softly. “Then I’m coming too.”

Aegon groaned. “Gods preserve us. Do you both mean to make me the sensible one?”

Helaena gave him a look that silenced further complaint. “If he goes alone,” she said, “the fire will find him too soon.”

Aemond frowned, confused by her words, but her tone left no room for argument.

The three of them moved together then, descending the narrow passage carved into the heart of the mountain. The air grew thick and warm, alive with the slow pulse of Dragonstone itself.

Every few steps, Helaena would glance over her shoulder, eyes half-closed as if listening to something deep within the rock.

When Aemond asked what she heard, she only said, “Dreams.”

Aegon snorted. “You’d better hope they’re good ones.”

“They never are,” she said simply.

And still they went on, the heat rising, the sound of the sea fading behind them until all that remained was the steady beat of their own hearts and the faint, echoing sound of something vast breathing somewhere below.

The air thickened the deeper they went, heavy with sulfur and heat, until every breath tasted faintly of smoke.

Helaena walked between her brothers, bare feet soundless against the warm rock. Her hand brushed the wall as she moved, fingertips tracing the ancient carvings of dragons etched into the mountain’s flesh.

“The stone hums,” she whispered. “Can’t you hear it?”

Aemond could.

It wasn’t a sound, not really, more like a pressure, a vibration under his skin, the mountain breathing around them.

They turned a final bend, and the passage widened into a great cavern.

The heat hit them like a heartbeat.

Below, the earth opened into a hollow filled with mist and smoke. The air shimmered with the deep orange glow of magma running in thin streams across the ground. Jagged rocks jutted from the floor like the bones of some ancient god, and scattered among them.

Pale shapes gleaming in the gloom, were eggs.

One of them was larger than the rest, black with faint red marbling, its shell faintly steaming where it touched the rock. The air above it seemed to warp with heat.

“That one,” he said, pointing.

Helaena’s hand shot out, catching his sleeve. Her grip was surprisingly strong.

“No,” she whispered.

Aemond turned to her, startled. “You said there were dragons waiting.”

“There are,” she said, her eyes reflecting the magma’s glow. “But that one waits for another.”

Aegon gave a nervous laugh. “You can’t know that, Helaena.”

But she only shook her head, her hair clinging damply to her cheeks. “The mountain keeps its own counsel,” she murmured. “And it remembers blood.”

Aemond’s jaw tightened. “Then it will remember mine.”

He took another step forward. The heat pressed harder against his skin, almost unbearable now, but he didn’t stop.

Something deep in the cavern shifted, slow, heavy, alive.

A breath.

The air trembled.

The nearest egg gave a faint sound, like stone cracking under pressure. A thin curl of smoke rose from a fissure in its shell.

Aegon stumbled back. “Gods...Aemond, stop! We shouldn’t be here!”

The mountain answered before Aemond could.

From the depths of the cavern floor, shadows moved.

Two great eyes opened in the dark.

Vast, gold, and ancient as the first fire.

Vermithor.

The Bronze Fury. The dragon of the Old King himself.

He rose from the rock as though the mountain were giving birth to him anew. Dust and ash cascaded down his wings. His scales gleamed dull bronze in the firelight, streaked with black from years of sleep. His horns scraped the cavern roof as he lifted his head.

Vermithor did not bow. He did not blink. He looked, and found them wanting.

When he exhaled, the heat hit like a wave, fierce, punishing, alive.

Aemond stumbled back, raising an arm to shield his face. The heat clawed at his skin, the sound filled his ears, the very air roaring with it.

Aegon’s voice broke into a strangled shout. “Run!”

But Aemond couldn’t.

The roar hit before the fear.

It wasn’t sound, it was a force. The world seemed to split under it. The torches guttered out, pebbles rained from the ceiling, and the molten river below leapt like a struck vein.

Aemond fell to one knee, hands over his ears. The heat scalded his face, blinding tears cutting through soot. He tried to look up and couldn’t, the sight was too large, too bright, too alive.

Aegon grabbed him by the arm, shouting something lost in the noise. Helaena’s voice rose sharp and clear only once: “He remembers the crown!”

Vermithor’s head reared back, his nostrils flaring as if tasting their blood.

Then the beast roared again.

Aegon yanked Aemond to his feet. 

They ran.

Helaena’s bare feet slapped the stone behind them, her hand clutching the torch Aegon had dropped. The flame danced wild, throwing their shadows up the walls as they fled through the narrow passage.

Behind them, Vermithor’s roar followed.

Rolling, thunderous, alive. The sound chased them through the tunnels, a storm in the mountain’s heart.

When they burst back into the night air, the wind hit cold and sharp, stealing their breath. The mountain still rumbled beneath them, the cliffs trembling in its anger.

Aemond turned once, just once, staring into the black mouth of the cavern. Smoke poured from it like breath.

And then came the ache.

It wasn’t only fear. It was rejection.

A hollow, cutting thing that sank deep and twisted. The dragon’s roar still lived inside him, not as music, but as denial.

He had called, and the fire had answered only to cast him out.

Aemond’s throat burned.

He wanted to scream back into the dark, to demand why, but his legs were already moving, carrying him down the slope after his siblings, into the cold salt air and the waiting light of torches ahead.

The dragon’s roar had woken everyone.

The royal household stood gathered under the moon, a sea of silk and disarray, their nightclothes rippling in the wind. The mountain’s glow painted every face in shades of red and gold, like blood caught in candlelight.

King Viserys stood in the center, his robe half-fastened, the crown askew on his pale hair. His expression was confusion and terror made one.

Beside him, Alicent clutched her robe to her throat, knuckles white, her face ashen beneath the green silk. Her eyes found her sons immediately wild, relieved, then horrified.

Rhaenyra stood slippered, hair loose and gleaming like molten silver, her nightdress unbelted but her posture regal and composed. 

The torchlight threw gold along her cheekbones, turning her calm into something dangerous.

Daemon stood behind her, half dressed, sleeves rolled to his elbows, eyes sharp with dark amusement. There was no fear in him, only recognition. Laenor and Laena were near the steps, faces drawn tight, Laenor gripping a sword he hadn’t buckled, Laena’s hand over her heart. Rhaenys and Corlys emerged from the shadows, the Sea Snake’s expression unreadable, Rhaenys’s gaze sharp with dread.

The Archmaester clutched his chain and muttered about stupidity. Septa Rhaella held the triplets close, the little ones restless, whimpering at the distant thunder of the mountain.

They were ash-streaked and trembling, eyes wide from heat and terror. The youngest’s sleeve was blackened; Helaena’s torch sputtered, dying in her hand.

Viserys’s voice broke the silence first. “What in the gods’ name have you done?”

No one answered. The wind carried the faint echo of another groan deep beneath their feet, the mountain’s heart still shifting, still angry.

Aegon swallowed. “We only wanted to see,” he said weakly.

Daemon’s head tilted, his tone darkly curious. “See what?”

The question hung in the air, sharp and cold.

Aemond’s jaw tightened. The wind tore through his hair, stinging his face with ash, but he didn’t look away. Slowly, he straightened his back, shoulders squared despite the tremor still in his hands.

“To claim one,” he said. His voice was hoarse, but steady. “I was going to claim a dragon.”

The mountain had answered him with fire’s oldest word: no. The dragon had not chosen him; he had cast him out.

Viserys’s mouth fell open, disbelief chasing horror across his features. “Claim—?”

Alicent gasped, clutching at her youngest as though to pull him behind her skirts. “You could have been burned alive!” she cried. “Do you even know what that beast is?”

Aemond didn’t flinch. “I know,” he said, too quickly. “Vermithor.”

Daemon’s brows arched, faint amusement curling his mouth. “The Bronze Fury,” he murmured. “You thought to take the Old King’s mount for your own?”

“I thought he would answer,” Aemond said.

The words came out small but fierce, a confession and a declaration all at once. His chin lifted, eyes bright with something between pride and wounded awe.

Daemon studied him, truly studied him, and for a heartbeat, the older man’s expression softened into something that might have been respect.

“Bold,” he said quietly. “Foolish, but bold.”

Rhaenyra’s eyes narrowed, fury cutting through her composure.

“Bold?” she echoed. “He angered the mountain, Daemon! He woke a dragon that could have killed us all!”

Daemon’s gaze flicked to her, then back to Aemond. “And yet he lives.”

Rhaenys stepped forward then, her tone clipped and sharp. “Only because Vermithor chose not to strike. The Bronze Fury has never been a gentle creature. If he had taken offense—”

“He did,” Daemon interrupted. “You could hear it in the roar. A temperamental and territorial one our Bronze Fury is."

The crowd murmured uneasily. The mountain still glowed faintly red behind them, a heartbeat of fire under stone.

Alicent’s voice broke again, trembling. “He’s a child, not a dragonlord.”

Daemon’s smile curved without warmth. “No,” he said softly. “Not yet.”

Aemond’s breath caught. He didn’t understand why those words felt like a promise or a curse.

The silence that followed quivered with heat and shame.

Then Alicent’s voice cut through it, sharp, trembling, brittle with fear.

“This is her doing,” she said.

Every head turned.

Rhaenyra’s eyes snapped to her, disbelief hardening into anger. “Mine?”

Alicent stepped forward, pulling Aemond with her.

The torchlight caught the sheen of sweat on her skin, the green silk of her robe clinging where her arm shook. “Your Emberguard patrol these cliffs! They swear Dragonstone is secure, that your dragons are tamed. Yet my sons nearly died beneath that mountain while your men slept!”

Rhaenyra’s jaw tightened. “My guards protect the stronghold and all who dwell within it,” she said evenly, though her voice carried like steel through the wind. “If your children wandered into the mountain’s heart, it was not my men who failed them. It was your vigilance.”

A gasp rippled through the nosy nobles who snuck out to see the royal family squabble.

Alicent’s lips parted in outrage.

She advanced another step, her hand still gripping Aemond’s shoulder, knuckles white.

“Do not lecture me on vigilance, Princess. My sons should never have been brought to this cursed rock. Dragonstone is a fortress of death! Your dragons, your monsters, roam freely!”

Daemon moved then, stepping out further from the shadow. 

The wind caught his open shirt, his hair wild and dark against the firelight. “Careful, Your Grace,” he drawled. “You’re in a dragon’s den, and your voice smells of fear.”

Alicent turned on him, eyes wide and glittering. “Fear?” she spat. “I call it sense. Dragons do not love, Prince Daemon. They devour. You’d do well to remember that.”

Daemon’s smile was all teeth. “And yet you married into their brood.”

Viserys lurched forward, one hand raised, his robe trailing open, his crown slipping askew.

“Enough!” he barked, voice breaking. “You’ll not turn this into another quarrel.”

Metal rasped twice, Arryk’s blade a thumb’s breadth free, Erryk’s palm locking the scabbard; mirrored instincts stilled by the glare of dragon-heat. Across the steps, the Emberguard flashed a tight triangle with their fingers: hold line; eyes on the Queen’s sons.

Alicent rounded on her husband, voice shaking but steady enough to carry. “No, my king. Not this time. Not after tonight. The Emberguard failed to protect my children, and you call that a quarrel? Dragonstone is unsafe, and I will not see them kept here another day.”

Viserys’s face twisted in disbelief. “You would call my blood unsafe on the very soil that birthed our house?”

“I call your daughter’s arrogance what it is,” Alicent said, her tone sharp enough to draw breath from the courtiers.

Rhaenyra stepped forward now, the hem of her white nightdress sweeping the ashen ground, her hair streaming in the salt wind.

“Say what you mean, Alicent,” she said quietly. “You fear what you cannot command. You’d chain fire and call it righteous.”

The Queen’s composure cracked; she trembled but held her ground. “I would chain it to keep my children alive.”

Daemon laughed, low and dangerous. “Then you’ve already lost, my queen. Fire doesn’t bend, it only waits to burn.”

Alicent’s eyes flashed toward him, but Rhaenyra’s voice cut in before she could answer. “You speak of my guards as though they serve only me. Yet when danger comes, they stand before the realm, not behind it. The fault is not mine if your sons mistake a dragon’s lair for a cradle.”

The words struck like steel. The lords around them shifted, uncertain whether to flinch or applaud.

Viserys dragged a hand down his face, his exhaustion palpable. “Enough, both of you!” His crown nearly slid from his head; he caught it with a shaking hand. “We’ll speak of this later, when the gods grant me peace to hear sense.”

But Alicent pressed on, her grief breaking into fury. “Later may come too late! That beast, what did Daemon call him? Temperamental? Territorial? He could have killed them all!” Her voice wavered. “He wanted to.”

Daemon’s smirk faded. “He did,” he said. “Vermithor does not suffer intrusion. You were lucky he spared his fire.”

The words hung heavy in the night.

Rhaenys’s composure faltered; she turned toward the mountain’s glow. “If Vermithor stirred, it was not to greet them. It was to warn them away.”

Rhaenyra looked to her father, her voice lower now, steady.

“He felt their trespass. Even dragons have tempers. Dragonstone breathes through them, you can feel it when it shifts.”

Viserys’s shoulders sagged.

He looked from wife to daughter, brother to grandson, the firelight painting him in sorrow.

“The night has taken enough from us,” he said quietly. “We will not speak more of it. The children are unharmed, by grace alone. Let that be mercy enough.”

He turned to Aemond then, voice softening, but his gaze still clouded with fear. “You are lucky, my boy.”

Aemond said nothing.

He only looked toward the mountain, where a faint column of smoke still rose, pulsing red in the dark like a heartbeat. His sleeve was singed; his palms were raw.

The dragon had not claimed him.

It had rejected him.

And yet, somewhere beneath the shame and the fear, something colder sparked, the sting of being unworthy.

The boy said nothing.

The crowd began to disperse, robes whispering across the stone as the courtiers retreated from the mountain’s shadow. 

Aemond stood where he was, his mother’s hand on his shoulder, her fingers trembling faintly. The heat still burned across his palms; he could feel it throbbing beneath the skin. The Bronze Fury’s roar lived in his chest like a second heartbeat, a reminder of what had denied him. 

And then he saw them.

Rhaenyra had turned toward the steps, where Septa Rhaella stood clutching the three children— the triplets, half-asleep and murmuring softly. 

The torchlight caught their faces.

Silver and gold gleamed faintly beneath the soot-dark sky, small reflections of their mother and father, of dragons and gods.

Even half-drowsing, they seemed otherworldly: skin flushed with warmth, their curls catching the firelight, their little hands curling and uncurling as if remembering flame.

The air around them shimmered faintly.

Vhaelyx, Vermax, and Vaerith were surely stirring somewhere beyond the cliffs. The bond between rider and dragon humming, restless.

Rhaenyra bent to kiss one of their heads. Laenor hovered close, hand brushing her back. The sight was intimate, almost sacred, family and flame, all in one frame.

And Aemond felt something shift inside him.

It wasn’t awe. Not anymore.

It was want.

Sharp, unclean, and hollow.

They were born of it, this magic, this belonging. Even their cries had power.

He felt his stomach twist.

It wasn’t fair.

His mother’s hand came to his cheek, soft, trembling. “You’re safe,” she whispered, her voice breaking. “That’s all that matters.”

He nodded because she wanted him to, because he always did. But his eyes stayed on Rhaenyra’s children.

Safe. Blessed. Chosen.

He could still feel Vermithor’s heat, the ghost of it crawling along his skin.

Aemond blinked, and for a moment, in the wavering light, it almost looked like the triplets were glowing.

Faint halos of warmth rising off their bodies, the fire in them sleeping but alive.

He looked down at his own hands. Blistered. Empty. Human.

And for the first time, Aemond Targaryen felt the shape of hatred, small and quiet, but real.

He turned from the sight before anyone could notice, his jaw set, his heart pounding with the promise of something he didn’t yet have a name for.

But it burned all the same.

Chapter 14: Terms Of Fire

Notes:

You all will hate Viserys this chapter.

Rhaenyra did not rise when King Viserys entered.

Always, she was the one who was summoned. 

The one who crossed the distance, who visited upon his request, who softened her voice to make him listen even when all she wanted was to scream. 

Her feet had worn grooves into those floors, the endless pilgrimage of a Princess called to the King.

So she did not rise now. Not for him. Not anymore.

It startled her, the sight of him framed in her doorway, stripped of all the trappings that had once made him untouchable. No crown, no court, no banners.

Only a man, in night clothes and breathing hard from the climb, the storm at his back.

He looked smaller than memory had left him. The salt wind had turned his hair to pale silver wisps, and the weight of his crown, absent now, seemed to linger in the stoop of his shoulders.

For a fleeting, cruel instant, she felt something like triumph.

Rhaenyra turned her gaze back to the fire. Its light caught the faint tremor in her hands, but she willed them still.

Let him speak first.

Let him try to reach her now.

“Little flame.”

His voice was quiet, almost swallowed by the wind. The name fell into the room like a relic, worn smooth by years, soft enough to hurt.

Once, she would have gone to him at the sound of it.

Once, that voice could have pulled her from sleep, from grief, from pride itself.

Now, it only made her spine stiffen.

“I did not wish to wake you.”

“You didn’t.”

Viserys hesitated. “May I come in?”

Rhaenyra’s mouth curved, just barely. “You’re the King. You need no permission.”

“I did not come as King,” he said finally, voice roughened by the climb and by what he meant to ask. “Only as your father.”

Rhaenyra let the silence answer him. The crackle of the logs was louder than his words.

Viserys crossed the threshold anyway.

The air between them tightened as if the very stone remembered what it was to bear witness to quarrels older than kings. When he drew close enough for the firelight to find him, she saw how much the years had eaten away.

The waxen skin about his mouth. The faint sour scent of medicine.

He lowered himself into the chair opposite hers without waiting for leave, the cane resting against his knee.

“I have felt you distant this past year,” he began quietly. “Even when you stood beside me in the hall. You looked at me, yet it was as if you looked through me. I thought perhaps it was the weight of the children, or the court, or the weight of grief between us...but now I see it is something I cannot name.”

Rhaenyra’s gaze stayed fixed on the flames. “Perhaps you cannot name it because you never cared to look closely enough.”

Viserys drew in a slow breath, the kind that carried both weariness and resolve. His hand tightened once around the head of his cane, not from pain, but to keep himself steady.

"When your heirs were placed in my arms, I thought I might see a bridge between us. I thought—”

“Do not speak of them,” she interrupted. Her tone was soft but final. “You will not make them a balm for what you broke.”

His jaw tightened, the flicker of temper buried beneath exhaustion. He straightened his shoulders, not in defiance but habit, the reflex of a man who still remembers what it means to be obeyed.

“I only wanted—”

“To understand me?” she cut in, her voice slicing through his like a blade through silk. The interruption landed with the weight of sacrilege.

For a heartbeat, the room seemed to still. Even the storm outside seemed to pause, as if shocked by her audacity.

Rhaenyra rose slightly, not enough to challenge outright, but enough that the shift of her body was unmistakable, the heir, not the daughter, addressing her sovereign.

Her eyes met his, dark and steady, the violet deepened by the fire’s reflection. “You never understood me, Father,” she said, the title carrying both reverence and accusation. “You only ever wanted me obedient.”

Viserys’s hand tightened around the armrest, the faint creak of wood breaking the silence.

“I wanted you safe,” he said, the word sounding smaller than he meant it to, as if it no longer belonged to a king but to a man stripped of every defense.

Rhaenyra’s laugh was low, bitter. “Safe. You use that word as though it were a kindness.”

He looked at her helplessly. “And what would you have had me do? You were dying, Rhaenyra.”

Her expression did not change, but the stillness in her face became dangerous.

“So this is why you came,” she said softly. “To speak of that night.”

The air between them seemed to shrink. The fire gave a low, hungry sound, devouring the last of its wood.

Rhaenyra’s eyes glinted like struck steel. The silk of her nightgown slid across her skin, pale as the light before dawn, and her shadow stretched along the floor toward him.

“You remember the seventh day,” she said, and the way she said it turned the air to glass.

Not a measure of time; a name.

The Seventh Day.

The day the castle forgot how to breathe.

The day the realm waited for its heir to die.

Viserys flinched. The storm outside beat against the shutters in answer.

“I had no voice left to scream,” she went on. “The maesters whispered of blood loss and failure while I still breathed. They spoke over me as if I were a corpse waiting to be claimed.”
Her hand lifted, a ghost of the gesture that once clutched at her belly, nails half-moons against her own flesh. “They said I would not last the next candle mark.”

The fire spat.

She stepped closer, each movement deliberate, the soft thud of her bare feet drowned beneath thunder.

“You stood there,” she said, and her voice wavered, not with anger now but with the tremor of memory. “When they spoke of cutting me open, I looked for you. I thought—” her breath caught, “—if I could just see your face, I would know I was safe. That you would stop them. That a father would never let his daughter die like that.”

The words broke apart, quiet, raw. “But you didn’t move. You trembled, yes, but you didn’t move.”

Her gaze found him again, luminous and wet, grief and fury bound so tightly together they were indistinguishable. “And in that moment I understood. You would let them."

Viserys’s lips parted, a whisper of protest dying before it could form.

The memory hit him like a blade drawn without warning: the blood, the cries, the maesters’ voices droning through the haze.

But hearing her say it now "I looked for you" he saw what she had truly seen: not a father, not a protector, but a man frozen in fear while his daughter begged for life.

“I called for her,” she said. “Bē vōrre zaldrīzes."

The true dragon of my heart

The High Valyrian words hung in the air like an invocation, their syllables soft and perilous, older than prayer.

“Syrax heard me when you would not.”

The firelight trembled, catching on the fine sheen of sweat at her temple, the faint rise and fall of her chest. “They said I was delirious, that I was mad from fever to call a dragon to the birthing bed. But she came. She came because I asked, because I was hers and she was mine. She came when you would not.”

The King’s cane clattered against the stone as his grip faltered.

“She tore through chains and clouds, Father.”

Rhaenyra’s voice deepened, the edges rough with awe. “My Syrax, her wings shackled to the very walls that once rang with our house’s glory. Iron sunk deep into stone so she could not rise.”

The fire hissed, throwing up sparks like cinders from a forge.

“But for me,” she said, the words trembling, “she broke them. Every link. Every bolt. She ripped the chains from the walls, brought the pillars down around her, and the air itself caught fire when she opened her wings.”

Her voice softened, not in mercy, but in mourning. “I told them if any man came near me with steel, she would burn the Red Keep to ash.”

Rhaenyra stopped before him. The firelight climbed her throat, flaring against the pulse that beat there.

Viserys’s face went ashen. “You would have doomed us all.”

“I saved us all,” she said. “Saved your heirs, your dynasty, your precious legacy. I brought them forth myself, while the rest of you cowered. And I lived.”

She exhaled then, trembling, not with weakness, but with the violence of contained fire. For a moment, the storm and the hearth seemed to breathe with her.

The room felt small enough to burn.

Viserys’s mouth worked before the words came, thin and shaking. “I feared losing you,” he said. “I feared the gods had come to take you as they took her. I thought if I stayed still, if I did nothing, they might spare you. I thought silence was mercy.”

His eyes lifted to hers, wet and wild. “Every breath you drew after that night, I thanked them. You lived, Rhaenyra. You lived.”

Her lips parted, a sound leaving her that was half a laugh, half a sob. “And you call that living? I remember the taste of iron, Father. I remember praying for death while you prayed for deliverance. We were not saved. We were left.”

The last word shuddered through the chamber, the kind of sound that didn’t fade so much as echo inward.

“I was heir to the Iron Throne, and yet no one came. Only my dragon answered. Only she remembered what it meant to be mine.”

He flinched, but reached for her anyway, hand trembling between them. “Then tell me what I can do now,” he whispered. “Tell me how to make it right.”

For a moment she almost did.

The ache of it pressed behind her ribs, sharp as breath after drowning.

She wanted, absurdly, to take his hand, to believe he meant it, that he could mean it.

For all the crowns and council chambers, he looked so small then, so lost, that some hidden part of her almost broke.

But the memory rose up again: the maesters’ blades gleaming, the whispers, the fear.

The way he had looked away.

Viserys’s hand hovered nearer, the warmth of it brushing her sleeve.

His fingers shook as they touched the edge of her wrist not a grasp, only a question.

She froze.

For an instant, neither breathed. The crackle of the fire filled the room like the sound of a living thing.

Rhaenyra drew a long, deliberate breath, pulling her hand back as though the air itself had turned to glass. She steadied the tremor in her voice.

“There is nothing to make right,” she said, the words quiet, final. “There is only what remains.”

Viserys’s hand fell back to his side.

The firelight guttered between them, the distance widening once more.

“I miss you,” he said finally, the words small, as though he were confessing a sin.

“You speak as though I have vanished. But I have been everything you asked of me, Father. I have sat every council since my confinement ended. I have presided over petitions, managed the harbor tariffs, reviewed the fleet ledgers with Corlys, and studied governance with Archmaester Vaegon and Princess Rhaenys. I meet weekly with the Hand, lord Strong to oversee Crown appointments and and to deepen my understanding of royal duties. I go over the coffers with Lord Beesbury until my eyes ache from columns and ink. I listen, I advise, I decide. I have done everything that was ever demanded of an heir.”

Her voice wavered once, then hardened.

“And yet still, it is never enough. If I were a man, these same acts would be hailed as the makings of a worthy king. Songs would already be written of my diligence, my discipline, my grasp of rule. But because I am your daughter, it is called obligation. A novelty. A courtesy you permit.”

She exhaled, a long, steady breath that quivered at the end. “I have been present. Consistent. Diligent. Even when all I wanted was to come home, to bring my babes back to Dragonstone, where they belong.”

She met his gaze, unflinching.

“And when I finally unveil my heirs,” she went on, her voice low but vibrating with restrained fire, “my perfect children, born of my blood, the flames of old Valyria itself, what is the word spoken by your Hightower wife?”

Her chin lifted slightly, each word sharper than the last. “Unsafe. My ancestral home, my birthplace, the heart of our house, called unsafe by the King himself.”

The word cracked in the air between them like thunder.

Viserys flinched. “I did not say such a thing of Dragonstone,” he said quickly, as if denial could erase the echo of it.

Rhaenyra’s laugh was soft, disbelieving, a breath of smoke more than sound. “You did not have to.”

Her eyes burned, bright and merciless.

“Your silence said it for you. You let her speak those words before the court, before your children, before mine...and you said nothing. Not a word to defend the seat of our blood. Not a word to remind them that Dragonstone is older than the crown itself.”

Viserys’s mouth opened, shut.

The muscles in his jaw worked as if he were chewing on the truth.

“I meant to spare you a quarrel,” he said at last, his tone pleading, almost weary.

“Spare me?” Rhaenyra’s voice sharpened, incredulous. “You spared her. You spared her pride, her trembling piety, her fear of dragons and in doing so, you shamed me in my own house.”

She took a step closer, the stormlight catching the sheen of tears she refused to let fall.

“You call me heir, yet you allow your court to speak of my home as though it were a plague pit.”

Her voice dropped to a whisper, raw and steady. “You let them make me foreign in the very blood that bore me.”

Viserys’s face crumpled, his voice breaking against the quiet. “You think I did not hear it? You think I did not feel the insult in my bones? Gods, Rhaenyra, I did. But what would you have had me do?”

He spread his hands helplessly, the gesture both kingly and pitiful. “Alicent is my queen. Before all the realm she spoke from fear, not malice. To rebuke her would have humiliated her, made mockery of my marriage. I sought to end the matter, not fan the flames.”

Rhaenyra let out a quiet, mirthless sound, not quite a laugh, not quite a sob.

“You sought peace,” she said.

“I sought balance,” he corrected, almost desperate. “The court is divided enough without my heir and my queen at one another’s throats. If I can keep their tempers at bay, perhaps the realm might breathe.”

She stared at him, incredulous. “You would silence truth to keep the peace of men who already conspire against me.”

Viserys’s voice softened, the plea returning. “I would silence pain. The world is sharp enough without our own blades adding to it.”

Rhaenyra shook her head slowly, her expression almost pitying. “You mistake rot for calm, Father. You let the wound fester so the patient might sleep a little longer.”

Viserys’s mouth tightened. “And what would you have me do? Turn my halls into a battlefield?”

“They already are,” she said.

The words landed like stones.

For a heartbeat, silence. Then his temper broke through the cracks in his restraint.

“Gods be good, Rhaenyra,” he snapped, the words rougher than he intended. “You sound just like him.”

Her brows knit. “Like who?”

“Daemon,” he hissed, the name cutting through the air like a curse. “Always ready to draw blood to prove a point. Always so certain that the world will bend if you shout loudly enough. Do you think I do not recognize the tone? I have spent half my life enduring it.”

He stepped toward her, the weight of his crownless authority still enough to fill the space. “You call yourself heir, but you speak as he does. With fire first, reason last. Must every Targaryen I love turn on me with the same flame?”

Her lips parted, astonished. “So now my sin is that I remind you of your brother?”

Viserys’s tone sharpened, weary but defensive. “You both mistake defiance for strength. You think to meet the world’s cruelty with your own, as if that will make it yield.”

Rhaenyra took a step closer, the stormlight flaring behind her. “And what would you have me meet it with? Silence? Submission? You crowned me heir and then taught me to bow.”

“I taught you restraint,” Viserys said, his voice trembling. “Because I have seen what unbridled fire does. It consumes everything. Daemon burned every gift I ever gave him out of pride. I will not see you do the same.”

Her laughter came low and bitter. “No, you would rather see me smothered under a peace built on your fear.”

“Gods be good, Rhaenyra,” he snapped, the words rougher than he intended. “In moments like this…I do not see my daughter at all.”

A breath, thin as paper. “I see my rival.”

Something in her went very still, like metal cooling, shaped now, yes, but never again what it had been.

There was no rage in her face, no cutting retort poised on her tongue. Only the slow, dawning grief of someone watching the last illusion collapse.

He had called her a rival.

After everything, the councils, the bleeding, the crowns and chains and compromise. That was what he saw. Not the daughter who had broken herself to fit his shape, but another threat to manage.

Her lips parted, but no sound came. The hurt was too large for words.

Viserys seemed to sense it, and for a heartbeat his expression softened, guilt flickering across his features like light on old glass. But he didn’t take the words back. He couldn’t.

The silence between them deepened until even the sea seemed to hush beneath it.

When Rhaenyra finally spoke, her voice was barely a whisper.

“I am not your rival, Father.” Her gaze didn’t waver. “I am your legacy.”

And then, quieter still, almost to herself, “Though perhaps that’s what frightens you most.”

Viserys’s shoulders sagged, the fight draining out of him. “Rhaenyra,” he said softly, as though the word itself might mend what his silence had broken. “I did not mean—”

She looked at him, unblinking.

“Do you intend to supplant me with Aegon?”

The question landed like a blade drawn in a temple quiet, sacrilegious, absolute.

Viserys’s eyes widened, wounded. “No. Never. You are my chosen heir, named before gods and men. The boy is but a child. He will grow under your guidance, as will your own heirs. Aemon, Aenar, and little Aemma—”

“Stop,” Rhaenyra said, the word sharp enough to cut through the room.

He blinked, startled.

“Do you support me, Father?” Her voice rose, not in anger but in something deeper, a desperate, aching demand for truth. “Not my right. Not my title. Not the oath you swore before a hundred lords. Me. The daughter of Aemma Arryn. Do you still believe in me? Just me, as I am?”

Viserys’s breath caught.

He opened his mouth, but whatever words he found tangled in his throat. The silence that followed was answer enough.

Rhaenyra’s eyes glistened, but she held his gaze, unflinching. “That is what frightens me most,” she said quietly. “Not your doubt of my crown, your doubt of me.”

The storm surged outside, rattling the shutters as if echoing her words.

Viserys took a half-step toward her. “Rhaenyra, please—”

But she turned from him, the firelight catching the wet shimmer at the edge of her lashes. Her silhouette wavered in the glow, pale silk, unbound hair, the ghost of the girl he once knew turned to flame and shadow.

“You should go before the dawn, Father.” She hesitated then, not to wound, but to remind. “And when you return to your queen, check on your son. Aemond burned his palms tonight on Vermithor’s heat.”

The words landed like a closing door.

For a long moment, Viserys didn’t move. His gaze drifted across the chamber, to the cradles still by the hearth, the folded cloths, the toys scattered around her private chambers.

The life she had built without him.

He wanted to speak, to reach for her, to call her little flame one last time, but something in her stillness warned him it would shatter her if he did.

So he bowed his head instead, the King of the Seven Kingdoms diminished to an old man before his daughter’s fire.

When he turned, the cane’s tap against the stone was barely audible over the rain. The door opened to the storm and closed again with a low, final sound.

Rhaenyra didn’t move until she was certain he was gone.

Only then did she let the tremor take her, a single, shuddering breath as she sank to her knees before the hearth. The firelight blurred through her tears, gold and red and endless.

---

Dawn came gilded and gentle, as if the storm had never been.

Light spilled through the arched windows of the great hall, soft and golden, warming the flagstones where servants moved quietly between tables.

The scent of salt and honeyed bread mingled with roasted fruit and spiced tea.

It was almost peaceful.

The royal family gathered as they always did for the King’s departure, though the hall felt smaller for the number of hearts it contained.

Queen Alicent sat beside her children.

Aegon with his head lowered over his cup, Helaena tracing idle shapes in a pool of honey, and young Aemond with both hands bound in clean linen.

The salves gave off a faint herbal scent. He hid them beneath the table whenever his mother glanced his way.

King Viserys presided at the center, his crown set aside, the morning light catching in his thinning hair.

To his right sat Otto Hightower, his quill tapping lightly against a folded parchment; to his left, Lord Lyonel Strong, coughing softly into a kerchief and blaming it with polite humor— when Rhaenyra inquired kindly — on Dragonstone’s winds.

Across from them, the Velaryons shone like living flame.

Corlys and Rhaenys sat in quiet unity, their faces carved in calm.

Daemon lounged with deceptive ease beside Laena, who cradled one of their twin girls.

The other slept in a nurse’s arms, swaddled in silks the color of deep coral.

At the smaller table near the hearth, Rhaenyra's children sat under Septa Rhaella’s watchful gaze, three bright-eyed triplets surrounded by nurses.

Aemon toyed with his spoon; Aenar dipped bread into milk with grave concentration; little Aemma babbled softly to a carved dragon, holding it as though it were alive.

And young Aemond watched them.

His eyes pale, intent, and far too old for his years, never left the trio by the fire.

He didn’t blink when Aemma’s laughter rang out, or when Aenar leaned over to babble something that made his brother smile. He simply watched, the longing unspoken but visible in every still line of his face.

Rhaenyra’s smile faltered when she noticed.

For a heartbeat, their gazes met: the young prince watching her children with something she recognized too well longing, envy, and even wonder.

She might have offered a smile, something soft to bridge the space between them.

But the moment he realized she had seen him, Aemond looked down, his jaw tightening and his hair making a curtain around his face. 

Rhaenyra turned back to her plate

Lifting her cup to her father in perfectly courtly manner, the gesture was poised and entirely without warmth.

Viserys raised his own in return, a faint tremor passing through his hand.

Then a small sound broke the formality, a tiny thud, followed by the scrape of a chair leg.

Aenar had escaped his seat.

The boy toddled away from the children’s table with determined steps, curls catching the morning light, a piece of bread clutched like a prize in one hand. His little feet pattered across the stone floor, the sound drawing fond smiles from the nurses too slow to catch him.

He made straight for Ser Harrold Westerling, who stood near the hall’s entrance, white cloak bright as snow in the sun.

Ser Harrold blinked down, startled, as the prince tugged insistently at his cloak. “And what’s this, my little Prince?” the old knight murmured, his voice gruff but warm.

Aenar looked up at him with wide, sea-glass eyes and lifted his arms a silent, wordless command that needed no translation.

The hall stilled for a heartbeat, then softened.

Ser Harrold’s stern face melted into a smile.

“Seven save me,” he muttered, and stooped to lift the boy. Aenar squealed, bright and bubbling, his laughter echoing off the high rafters.

It was a sound so pure that even Daemon’s mouth twitched at the corners, and Laena laughed outright. Across the table, Rhaenyra’s hand came to her lips, her eyes bright with quiet amusement.

The little prince reached for the knight’s cloak clasp, tugging at it with fascination until Ser Harrold chuckled and let him touch the dragon-engraved pin.

“Careful there,” he said, his tone soft with memory. “Your mother once did the same, though she bit it for good measure.”

The laughter that followed was easy, unguarded.

Even Viserys smiled, truly smiled, for the first time that morning. His gaze lingered on Rhaenyra a moment longer than it should have, the memory softening his face.

“You used to make him chase after you,” he said, voice thick with nostalgia. “Through the halls, through the gardens. Gods, you’d vanish for hours, and poor Ser Harrold would come back pale as a ghost, swearing you’d outflown him.”

Rhaenyra’s lips curved, the smile real this time, touched by warmth. “He always found me,” she said.

Viserys chuckled, but something faintly bitter crept beneath it, not anger, but an old, unspoken ache.

“He always did,” he murmured, eyes dropping to his cup. “Ser Harrold was always quick to your side.”

The words lingered, softer than reproach, but not without weight.

Rhaenyra tilted her head slightly, sensing it, though she said nothing. The silence between them was filled by the gentle noise of Aenar’s laughter as Ser Harrold carried him back to his nurse.

The boy twisted in his arms to wave at the hall, crumbs still clinging to his cheek.

Rhaenyra called softly, “Come back, my sweet boy.”

Aenar’s answering giggle filled the hall like sunlight through storm clouds.

For a moment, it seemed enough.

The laughter, the scent of bread and fruit, the children’s chatter, all of it wove a picture of peace that might have been real if one didn’t look too closely.

Viserys lingered in it, eyes soft with something almost wistful. Then he cleared his throat, the sound gentle but commanding enough to still the hall.

“I have been thinking,” he began, his tone measured, “on how best to keep such mornings as these close to us, to remind ourselves that we are, all of us, one family.”

He looked down the table, pausing on Alicent and her children, then on Rhaenyra, his gaze resting longest there. “I would see more of you, Rhaenyra. Of the little ones.”

Rhaenyra’s hand stilled around her cup.

“To that end,” Viserys went on, “I have spoken with my council. I believe it would serve the realm, and our family, for my heir to divide her time. Six moons spent upon Dragonstone, six in King’s Landing. So the blood of the dragon might live in both our homes, not one alone.”

He smiled faintly, as though it were a simple kindness and not a proclamation. “This way, my daughter need not feel torn between crown and kin. Her children will know both castles, the stone that guards the dragons, and the one that guards the throne.”

The words were soft, meant to soothe. But beneath them ran the weight of royal decree.

Rhaenyra carefully arranged herself in her seat, keeping her expression passive. 

She inclined her head with quiet composure, her tone light, almost agreeable. “Of course, Father. Six moons upon Dragonstone, six in Kingslanding, a fair balance.”

For a heartbeat, it sounded like concession. Then she added, still serene, “So long as my children’s dragons and mine own remain unchained.”

The words slipped into the air softly, almost tenderly, but their weight drew the warmth from the room.

Viserys blinked. “Unchained?”

Rhaenyra’s gaze didn’t waver. “Dragons will follow their riders no matter where we dwell. If I am to split my year between Dragonstone and the capital, then so too will the dragons. Freely.”

A soft clink of silver followed, the Queen setting down her cup.

“Forgive me, Princess,” Alicent began, her voice smooth, her smile composed. “But the dragons of the Red Keep have been chained since King Jaehaerys’s day. The practice was begun for safety, for the peace of all who dwell within these walls. Surely even you would not dispute the wisdom of that?”

Her tone was honeyed, yet the weight beneath it was iron.

Peace. Safety. Words wielded like prayer and blade alike.

Rhaenyra turned her head, slow as turning a sword in sunlight. “And yet they were still seen daily above the city. Ridden freely, left unbound whenever one of our blood desired it. Tell me, Your Grace, were they less dangerous then, or simply more convenient?”

A pause stretched, taut as a drawn bowstring.

Alicent’s fingers whitened against her cup. “I only meant—”

Rhaenyra’s smile deepened, soft but merciless.

“You meant to remind me of rules written by men who feared their own power. But dragons have never cared for locks or ledgers.” Her eyes flicked to Viserys, then back to Alicent, deliberate as a knife turned in velvet. “Nor do I.”

Alicent’s lashes lowered.

“A Queen’s duty is to temper power, not indulge it,” she said gently, though her gaze glittered like the edge of glass. “Even fire must be contained, else it consumes what it was meant to warm.”

Rhaenyra inclined her head, the gesture almost gracious. “Without fire, we freeze.”

Daemon laughed. Low, delighted, entirely without shame. “Spoken like a true dragon.”

Across from them, Laenor’s shoulders tightened. He looked toward the children. Three small figures haloed in candlelight, silver and gold catching the flicker like coin. The sight steadied him. His jaw firmed; his hand closed around his cup with quiet resolve.

Alicent’s smile thinned, just slightly. Viserys’s sigh came next, weary as old stone.

“Cease,” the King said, his voice weary but decisive. “Yes, Syrax and your children’s dragons will remain unbound. They are not beasts to be caged, but symbols of our strength. Our legacy and future.”

He paused, the weight of rule dragging through his tone.

“But should they harm any soul, or take hunt from the farmers’ fields, you, Rhaenyra, will see the injured repaid in full, from your coffers alone. A dragon’s glory must not come at the cost of the realm it serves.”

The words settled like ash, fair, but cold.

Rhaenyra inclined her head once more, every inch the dutiful heir. “As you command, Father. The realm shall rest easy.”

The words had barely settled when Alicent’s voice rose again, soft, precise, the sweetness sharpened just enough to draw blood.

“And yet,” she said, “if the realm is to rest easy, should it not be guided in peace as well as in strength?”

Rhaenyra’s smile lingered, but her eyes cooled.

Alicent turned to the King, her tone thoughtful, almost deferential. “If the heir is to divide her year between Dragonstone and King’s Landing, perhaps it would be wise to ensure the royal children are taught the same lessons. One curriculum, consistent and moral, shared among all of royal blood. It would foster unity.”

Otto’s approving nod came almost before she finished speaking.

He did not look at Alicent, nor at the King, but at Rhaenyra, a faint, knowing curve at the corner of his mouth, as though the suggestion had been his all along.

“Wise counsel, Your Grace,” Otto said mildly. “Inconsistent teachings breed division. Better that all the royal issue learn from the same script, the same hand.” His gaze flicked toward the triplets, bright and beautiful beneath the candlelight. “It would ensure their loyalty to the same crown.”

Viserys leaned back, weary but intrigued. “A sound proposal,” he said, though the words carried no conviction.

He heard harmony and unity where Otto had spoken of control.

The very air seemed to tighten. 

At the far end, little Baela gave a sharp cry, quick and startled, as if she too had felt the shift in the air. Laena hushed her gently, pressing a kiss to the child’s silver curls. “Hush now, sweet one,” she murmured, her own eyes flicking toward the King, wary and knowing.

Laenor spoke then — Rhaenyra’s husband in name, her friend in truth.

“An interesting suggestion, Your Grace,” he said pleasantly, leaning forward with the easy grace of someone unbothered or pretending to be.

“Though I confess, I see little need to amend my children’s tutelage. They learn beneath Archmaester Vaegon, blood of the dragon, who bears more links than any man alive and knows more of governance than most will ever dream.”

A faint rustle moved down the table as heads turned toward the elder in question.

Vaegon did not rise, but his pale eyes flicked toward the Queen, cool and sharp as forged steel.

“If Her Grace doubts my methods,” he said, his voice dry as parchment, “she may petition the Citadel for one more suited to her taste. Though I suspect they might struggle to provide a dragon of its own.”

A few muffled sounds, a cough, a half-stifled laugh.

Daemon’s lips twitched. Rhaenys’s brow arched, amused. Otto’s expression did not change, though a muscle worked once along his jaw.

Alicent’s smile didn’t falter, but her gaze flicked toward him, sharp as glass.

“Naturally. But children benefit from harmony as much as knowledge. The lessons taught at Dragonstone may differ from those at court.”

Laenor returned her look with a flash of charm that carried an unmistakable edge. “You are right, my queen. On Dragonstone, they learn to live beside dragons without trembling.”

A pause short, perfect. Then:

“Perhaps that, too, is a kind of harmony.”

Laena let out a smirk, her eyes glittering in her brother's direction. 

Viserys cleared his throat, the sound gentle but deliberate, the way a weary father might step between children pretending to play nicely.

“Then it is settled,” he said, voice warm but carrying the faint rasp of strain. “The curriculum at Dragonstone and the Red Keep will differ, as they should. The heirs of flame ought to be well-rounded, taught by both dragon and stone.”

He glanced between them, forcing a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “In Kingslanding, they will learn the arts of court, crown, and council. On Dragonstone, the ways of our blood...the language, the lore, the dragons themselves. It will make them stronger than either place could alone.”

Rhaenyra inclined her head with perfect grace. “A wise arrangement, Father.”

Alicent’s smile remained frozen, polite to the point of fracture. “As His Grace commands.”

Laenor leaned back, satisfaction flickering at the corner of his mouth.

Daemon’s low chuckle rumbled like distant thunder. “Well said, brother,” he murmured, “though I expect they’ll learn far more on Dragonstone.”

A soft cough followed, light and deliberate. All eyes turned toward Laena.

She smiled, her mother’s composure softened by her father’s boldness.

“If it pleases the King,” she began, “Driftmark would offer its own tutors to accompany the heirs of flame while they stay in Kingslanding. Our traditions are old as Dragonstone’s, the reading of the winds, the lore of the tides, the maps of stars that once guided Valyrian sails across the narrow sea.”

Her gaze flicked briefly toward Rhaenyra, then back to Viserys. “It would be a pity to see such knowledge lost when they travel inland.”

Viserys blinked, then smiled, a real one this time, small but touched with pride. “A fine idea. A marriage of sea and sky, both parts of the same song. Let the children learn from every corner of our legacy.”

From further down, Archmaester Vaegon inclined his head, the movement slight but solemn.

“If the King commands,” he said, “I will attend the young ones as well. Their studies should not waver with distance. I will see to them year-round, in Dragonstone’s shadow or beneath the Red Keep’s walls.”

Alicent’s voice, sweet as glass, followed a heartbeat later. “Surely the little ones need not be burdened with so much instruction.”

Laena’s smile didn’t waver. “And yet, my queen, what is an heir if not prepared to face distraction?”

A faint stir of laughter rippled down the table, quiet, but unmistakably in her favor.

Viserys lifted a hand, his tone brooking no dissent. “No, no — Lady Laena and Archmaester Vaegon speak wisely. Knowledge is never a burden. The more the children learn, the stronger they will be.”

Rhaenyra inclined her head toward Laena, a glimmer of genuine warmth passing between them. 

Whereas Vaegon stared Otto Hightower down as though to dare him to speak again. 

Corlys’s expression softened. Pride and amusement mingling in his eyes, while Rhaenys watched her daughter with a smile that was almost hidden, but not quite.

Even Daemon’s smirk carried something fonder than mockery.

The matter might have ended there, but Viserys, pleased by the lull of agreement and the faint smile on his daughter’s face found himself speaking again.

“Yes,” he said, glancing toward Lord Lyonel Strong, who had just finished blotting a note. “Write this down, my lord Hand. Let it be known as the Six Moon Accord.”

Lyonel dipped his quill obediently, though his cough returned, muffled against a kerchief.

Otto inclined his head, his hand unconsciously moving to reach for a quill before stilling. 

Across from him, Archmaester Vaegon did not blink. The look he leveled upon the dismissed Hand was colder than any sept’s marble: a silent abacus, already tallying what the Hightowers thought they’d won.

Viserys turned to the table at large, his tone softening into something almost paternal. “The Queen will remain in Kingslanding, as is her wish. I will not ask her to visit Dragonstone, knowing the place unsettles her. But the royal court shall travel there every other winter, to see the heirs’ progress and the prosperity they’ve built. The reports speak of thriving trade and new ships at the harbor. Let the court witness such enterprise for themselves.”

Across the table, Corlys inclined his head, his expression proud but restrained.

“And when the court winters upon Dragonstone,” Viserys continued, “they will abide by her laws and customs, as is proper when one visits the seat of the heir.”

Rhaenyra’s eyes flicked briefly to her husband, the faintest smile curving her lips.

She said nothing of the ledgers she kept hidden from the crown, the quiet fortune growing beneath her harbor.

Viserys’s tone warmed, pleased by his own sense of fairness. “And the Emberguard, your fine new order of knights, my daughter, they will remain answerable only to you in times of peace. But in war, they serve the realm entire.”

Lyonel nodded, his quill scratching steadily across the parchment.

Satisfied, Viserys leaned back, but before the silence could settle, Alicent’s voice returned certain and practiced.

“Your Grace,” she said, hands folded neatly before her. “One final matter, if I may. The Faith has long expressed unease about dragons within the city. If the children are to ride in the years ahead, perhaps it would ease all hearts if their vows were sanctified beneath the Seven.”

Viserys frowned slightly, uncertain. “You mean…?”

“A code,” Alicent supplied, her tone patient, instructive. “A promise sworn before the gods, that no dragonrider shall ever use dragonfire against the innocent. The Faith would call it a holy safeguard. It would still the whispers that the old powers answer to none but themselves.”

Otto murmured approval, nodding faintly. “A wise reassurance, Your Grace. Symbolism carries weight in peace as much as in war.”

Viserys turned toward Lyonel. “Write it, then. Let it be called the Code of Conduct. All future dragonriders shall swear, before the Faith, to wield their fire only in defense of the realm.”

A satisfied hum moved through the Hightowers’ corner of the table.

But Rhaenyra’s smile was small and knowing, her tone light as she spoke. “And if the realm’s defenders do not keep the Faith of the Seven, Father? What then?”

The words drew the faintest pause.

“Not all of dragon’s blood bends the knee to the same gods,” she went on, still mild, almost curious. “The Velaryons keep the sea rites of the Mother of Tides and some of us keep to the Fourteen. Would you have the dragons swear to the Seven when they answer only to flame?”

Alicent’s fingers stilled against her cup, the faintest sound of porcelain tapping wood.

Viserys looked to his daughter, and in her eyes saw the echo of another flame, golden and unyielding.

His throat tightened.

He drew a long breath. “Then let it be this,” he said finally, voice softened by compromise and guilt. “Those who hold to the Seven shall swear before their altars. Those who hold to the old gods, or to the fires of Valyria, may swear in their own way. The vow remains the same, that dragonfire will never fall upon the innocent.”

He managed a small, weary smile. “So the Faith is honored, and our blood remains free.”

Rhaenyra inclined her head. “That,” she said, “I can accept.”

Daemon murmured under his breath, just loud enough for Laena to hear, “And when war comes, the Faith will find that innocence burns as easily as guilt.”

Laena elbowed him lightly, though her smile betrayed agreement.

Viserys pretended not to hear. “Good,” he said, more to himself than the hall. “Then we are agreed.”

Lyonel cleared his throat and read as his quill moved: “Vow: Dragonfire shall not fall upon the innocent, save in defense of realm and crown, nor for sport, nor for petty quarrel; and any harm done. Whether by flame, wing, or fright shall be reckoned and repaid.”

A promise no dragon would ever truly keep.

“Then let it be this,” he said at last, voice softened by compromise and guilt. “Until the heirs of the Crown Princess reach their tenth nameday.”

Rhaenyra’s lips parted in disbelief. “Tenth?” she echoed. “Father, that is half a childhood spent being torn between sky and land. They will grow knowing neither home as theirs.”

Viserys’s expression tightened. “It is the surest path to peace.”

Rhaenyra leaned forward, voice soft but unwavering. “Then let the accord end when my children reach their seventh nameday. Seven moons they were born beneath, on the seventh day. Let there be seven namedays to measure the peace between Dragonstone and the Redkeep.”

Alicent’s head snapped toward her, eyes bright with offense. “You would twist the holiest number of the Faith to serve your own design?” she demanded, voice taut with disbelief. “Seven is sacred, Princess, meant for prayer, not politics.”

Rhaenyra’s answering smile was thin and deliberate. “And yet, Your Grace, prayer has ever been the realm’s favorite form of politics.”

Viserys stared at her.

The flicker of candlelight caught on Rhaenyra’s hair, and in that shimmer of red and gold he thought he saw Aemma seated where his daughter sat, pale, steady, smiling through pain she would not name. The air seemed to tremble, heavy with ghosts.

Do you see, my love? the phantom whispered, her voice made of memory and smoke. You asked for heirs. One in my image stands before you.

His breath faltered. For an instant, he could almost smell the lavender oil they’d used to wash her hair; could almost feel the warmth leave her hand beneath his.

Then the vision broke.

Rhaenyra remained, living flame where Aemma had turned to ash.

He blinked, swallowed hard, and forced a weary smile that convinced no one. The symbolism was too perfect to ignore: holy, maternal, Valyrian and Andal entwined.

“Seven days of labor. Seven moons. Seven namedays,” he said, as if repeating a prayer until it fit. “So be it.”

The hall breathed again, soft and uneasy.

Daemon’s low chuckle broke the spell. “A fragile peace,” he murmured, eyes glinting like embers. “Measured in sevens.”

Viserys barely heard him.

The numbers blurred together in his mind, not a decree, but a quiet plea for time. Six moons here, six there... a rhythm that might keep her near him a little longer.

Perhaps, in those shared seasons, she would come to forgive him, for her mother, for the crown, for not reaching towards her. 

He told himself it was politics, a balance between realms.

But beneath the crown’s weight, the truth whispered differently.

It was not the realm he wished to reconcile.

It was his daughter.

---

The king departed Dragonstone in the pale hush of morning, after the breaking of fast.

The sea carried his retinue back toward King’s Landing beneath a bruised, wind-streaked sky.

The harbor swelled with banners, black and crimson, as the royal ships pulled away. Dew still clung to the stone quays; gulls wheeled low over the surf, their cries lost to the rising wind.

Alicent’s pale figure stood on the foremost deck, veil snapping in the salt air beside the king’s drooping standard. Behind her, the lords of court and the ever-watchful septons vanished one by one into the mist, their voices fading beneath the crash of waves.

When at last the sails were nothing but pale specks swallowed by the horizon, Dragonstone seemed to exhale, the island’s first true breath since dawn.

Rhaenyra lingered long after the others had gone, watching the sea swallow the last trace of the royal banners.

The ache in her chest was not grief, but something quieter, the hollow weight that follows endurance.

Her father’s voice still clung to her ears, his weary smile, the ghost of her mother behind his eyes. It left her restless, untethered, yearning for something that did not speak in politics or prayer.

By the time the sun climbed higher, she was already striding down the worn paths that curved toward the Dragonmont, her cloak snapping in the wind.

The air there was thick with heat and sulfur, the ground veined with cracks that breathed steam.

She heard Syrax before she saw her, that low, golden rumble that vibrated through the stones, half-greeting, half-reproach.

“I know,” Rhaenyra murmured, approaching slowly. “I missed you too.”

The great dragon’s eyes, bright and molten, fixed on her as if she understood.

Her head lowered, scales shimmering like coins caught in sunlight.

Rhaenyra pressed her palm against the warm, living gold of Syrax’s snout. Her voice slipped into High Valyrian, low and soothing. 

“Ñuha āeksio, ñuha ābrazȳrys. Vestragon ao iā nyke rȳ istan.”

(My queen, my lady of gold. You know me even when I forget myself.)

Syrax’s breath fanned over her, hot and steady.

Rhaenyra smiled faintly. “He means well,” she whispered, half to herself. “But he doesn’t see me, not truly. Only what’s left of her.”

Another soft rumble rolled through the air, deeper this time, almost protective.

“Kessa,” Rhaenyra murmured, her thumb tracing the edge of a scale. “You’ve always known better, haven’t you, my golden lady?”

Syrax blinked, slow and deliberate, as if to agree.

A new sound rolled through the cavern: deeper, rougher, followed by the scrape of wings.

Caraxes slipped from the steam, long and crimson, his sinuous neck coiling toward Syrax. He slid his head along her flank, a ripple of scarlet against gold.

Rhaenyra laughed under her breath.

“Sly dragon,” she said in Valyrian, voice lilting, amused. “Do you seek to woo my golden lady?”

Caraxes huffed, a gust of heat that ruffled her hair. She lifted a hand, daring, and he allowed her touch, his scales hot beneath her palm, rough as old stone.

“You charm them all, don’t you?” she whispered, half to him, half to the air.

“Not all,” came Daemon’s voice from the shadows.

She turned. He was already close, the steam drawing across his shoulders like smoke made flesh.

“Careful, niece,” he murmured in Valyrian, eyes glinting. “Caraxes hears what pleases me.”

“And what pleases you, Uncle?” she asked, tone light, though her pulse quickened.

Daemon’s smile curved, slow and knowing. “Fire that bites back.”

Syrax gave a soft trill, the sound almost like laughter. Caraxes rumbled in answer, his breath mingling with hers, gold and red coiling in the rising heat.

Daemon came closer an old journal clasped in one hand, its leather cover scorched and warped, the clasp half-melted. The firelight threw his face in bronze and shadow.

Rhaenyra turned, surprise flickering across her features. “What is that?”

He lifted it slightly. “What you left behind,” he said. “I found it at the altar, buried beneath ash, near where our blood fell.”

His tone was almost gentle, almost accusing. “Visenya’s journal.”

Her breath caught. “You kept it.”

“I couldn’t leave it there.” He moved closer, the heat rolling off him and the book alike. “The place still remembers what we saw. Aegon, Visenya, Rhaenys. Their blood joined on the stone. Ours joined with theirs.”

Rhaenyra’s gaze dropped to the journal. The edges were black with soot; the sigil on its spine was half-burned away. “Have you read it?”

“I’ve tried,” he said. “Some of the words are gone, but the meaning remains. She wrote of the blood binding siblings and dragons alike. Of fire that answers fire. Of power left sleeping in the veins of this island. Our power.”

He looked past her to where Syrax and Caraxes rested side by side, golden and crimson, smoke coiling between them. “They feel it too. They always have.”

Rhaenyra reached for the book.

Their fingers met along the scorched leather. Something woke in the stone beneath them, slow as breath drawn in a forge.

Heat rushed her skin. 

The air ripened with the scent of hot iron, clean, metallic, unignorable as if the mountain had pressed a seal upon them both.

Behind them, Syrax blinked once, slow and molten; Caraxes answered with a chest-deep hum, not warning so much as recognition.

“And you think it can be learned?”

Daemon’s mouth curved, part challenge, part confession. “It can be remembered.”

She hesitated, her voice softer now. “And what good will it do, Daemon? Power is never without its cost.”

He regarded her in silence for a heartbeat, the way one studies a riddle that’s already begun to answer itself.

“Maybe,” he said finally, his tone quiet but precise, “the same good your deal has done.”

Rhaenyra froze. The word struck like a drawn breath turned weapon.

Her gaze flicked up, sharp and searching, but his face revealed nothing, only curiosity, faint and dangerous.

He didn’t know.

Not truly.

And yet her pulse stumbled.

The memory of that crimson light, of the blood sinking into stone, of the power that had answered her call, and of the children who’d followed after rose unbidden, filling her chest with heat and guilt in equal measure.

Daemon’s eyes caught the flicker in hers.

“You see?” he murmured, softer now, almost kind. “There’s always purpose in what the blood remembers.”

Rhaenyra turned from him, breath shallow, the journal pressed tight against her ribs. “And there’s always a price,” she said.

The dragons stirred behind them, restless, as if the island itself had heard.

Daemon’s voice came low, threaded with mischief. “Then perhaps,” he said, stepping closer, “we should find out what that price buys.”

Rhaenyra half-turned toward him. “You would pay it so easily?”

His smile curved, slow and deliberate. “For knowledge? For power?” He leaned in, his breath warm against her ear. “For you? Tell me, niece, which do you think tempts me more?”

Her heart jolted. “You should not.”

“That,” he said lightly, “has never stopped me.”

He reached for her then, not rough but sure, fingers brushing her forearm. The instant they touched, something rippled, a deep, invisible pulse rising from the mountain beneath their feet.

The heat of it burned through their skin.

Blood answering blood.

Rhaenyra gasped, the sound catching between fear and want.

Daemon stilled, feeling the flare along their joined hands. “You feel it too,” he said quietly. “The island remembers us.”

“Let go,” she whispered, though her voice lacked conviction.

He did not. The heat pulsed once, twice a smith’s hammer in the vein, until she tore her hand free.

He tilted his head, eyes gleaming with a strange tenderness. “If I do,” he murmured, “will it stop calling for you?”

The light pulsed again, a slow, thrumming heartbeat that neither of them could name.

Rhaenyra tore her hand back at last, the connection breaking with a faint hiss. 

She held his gaze, breath uneven. “You see? Even touching it asks a price.”

Daemon’s grin returned, crooked and dangerous. “Then it’s lucky we Targaryens are very good at paying in blood.”

Rhaenyra turned away first, forcing her breath to steady. The heat still lingered on her palm, a phantom heartbeat that refused to fade.

“Enough,” she said quietly, more to herself than to him.

Daemon’s smile softened, unreadable. “If you insist, Princess.”

She pressed the journal to her chest, as if its weight could ground her. “Whatever calls to us here,” she murmured, “it will keep calling. We should learn its tongue before it learns ours.”

“Then we’ll read,” he said, stepping back, his gaze lingering a heartbeat too long. “But not today. Even dragons must rest between flights.”

Syrax shifted, brushing her snout against Rhaenyra’s shoulder. Caraxes’s rumble answered, deep and low.

The mountain exhaled once steam, breath, promise and the sound of it followed them as they turned toward the path that wound back to the castle. 

Chapter 15: Fire for Fire

Notes:

Please be gentle in the comments 💕

The eastern training yard lay carved into Dragonstone’s spine, a hollow of black volcanic glass and broken basalt where even the wind seemed to burn.

From here, the Dragonmont was only a shadow on the horizon, the crater’s mouth pulsing faintly with heat. 

Daemon liked it that way; distant from the court, from Rhaenyra’s carefulness towards him, from the politics of fire. Here, discipline was his alone to command.

The Emberguard moved in brutal rhythm.

Bare arms, soot-dark faces, eyes sharp with hunger, these were not noble sons or trained knights.

They were dragonseeds: the unwanted spawn of sailors, servants, and silver-haired Kings who had forgotten their names.

Driftmark’s orphans, Kingslanding’s bastards, the ghosts of broken oaths.

Men who had lived entire lives as shadows, until the Rogue Prince called them from the gutters and promised them fire.

Here, in the hollow of the cliffs, they became something else.

Their armor was mismatched, scavenged, patched with blackened mail and strips of steel that glimmered faintly under dirt. Their shields bore no sigil but the ember mark Daemon had burned into each one, a crimson spiral like a flame caught mid-breath.

It wasn’t a house, not yet.

It was a warning.

“Again!”

Twelve swords struck in unison.

The sound was music, harsh, disciplined, magnificent. Sparks flew from the black sand and the smell of iron filled the air. The yard seemed to pulse with heat, as if Dragonstone itself were breathing through them.

The Rogue Prince stalked the line like a living spark, bare arms gleaming, eyes burning with pride and cruelty in equal measure.

He saw the tremor in their shoulders, the cuts at their knuckles, the blood rising beneath their grime, and smiled.

“You strike like men with doubts,” Daemon barked. “You are not men anymore. You are flame given form.”

He moved among them, no armor, no cloak, only a black leather tunic and his sword, Dark Sister, gleaming. The cut of his jaw was sharp enough to wound.

He grabbed one recruit’s wrist mid-swing and twisted until the sword fell loose. “Feel it,” Daemon hissed. “If you do not own your weapon, it owns you.” He shoved him back into line. “Now strike again.”

The man obeyed. Harsher. Fiercer. 

Daemon smiled, half-wild, half-proud. “Good. Again.”

Above them, perched on a high ridge like a crimson god, Caraxes watched. His neck coiled lazily, long and serpentine, the sunlight sliding off his scales in shades of garnet and shadow. A half-eaten sheep dangled from his jaws, its bones snapping with every indulgent chew. Blood steamed where it met the ground.

The men pretended not to stare, but their eyes kept darting upward. 

Daemon saw it. He encouraged it.

 “You want freedom?” he shouted over the clash of steel. “Earn it. Every drop of sweat buys you a name that cannot be stripped by a lord’s quill or a septon’s sermon. Out there, they call you bastards. Here—”

He spun, parrying an attempted strike from another recruit, deliberate, a test.

The soldier’s blade glanced off his pauldron, and Daemon caught his wrist, driving the man to one knee.

“—here you are dragons.”

The yard erupted in cheers, hoarse, defiant, raw.

Caraxes lifted his head at the sound, eyes narrowing in interest. 

The Emberguard didn’t flinch this time.

Daemon lifted his sword, flame reflected along its edge. “Form ranks! Blades up!”

They obeyed instantly, men of pain and hunger, the first true army Dragonstone had ever seen. The rhythm of their movements was hypnotic: strike, parry, pivot, flame. Daemon moved through them like a conductor, every motion precise.

Then, a sound.

Low, almost inaudible at first, but Daemon felt it before he heard it: a resonance, deep as the earth’s pulse.

Caraxes’s head snapped east.

Daemon’s brows drew tight. “Skoros iksos?” he demanded.

What is it?

The dragon gave no answer, only a growl that built from his belly, low and terrible. His wings unfurled with a violent snap that sent half the yard stumbling.

“Caraxes!” Daemon’s voice cracked like a whip. “Lykirī ñuha zaldrīzes!”

Be calm, my dragon!

The ground trembled beneath his claws, tail lashing in violent arcs. Heat shimmered around him, his fury taking shape in the air itself.

Daemon took another step forward, unflinching though the world itself seemed to recoil.

Daemon’s sword dropped to his side. “Keligon, byka zaldrīzes… skoros iksos?”

Easy, little dragon… what is it?

A sound carried faintly on the wind, not human, not dragon, but something between.

A cry drawn across the distance, old as the bond itself. 

The world erupted.

Wind and ash howled together, a living storm that tore through the training yard and sent the world reeling. The very ground seemed to recoil as the Blood Wyrm took flight, a crimson cataclysm unfurling against the sky.

Daemon’s hair whipped wild in the blast.

“Caraxes! Mēre nyke!”

Caraxes! Stay to me!

The words tore out of him, not command but instinct, raw, desperate, devotional.

But the beast did not turn.

Caraxes’s wings scythed through the smoke, vast and terrible, each beat cracking the air like a war-drum. 

A streak of flame against the cloudbank.

An arrow loosed by the gods themselves.

And Daemon felt it, that impossible pull, deep in the marrow, something vast and alive thrumming in answer.

He staggered, one hand pressed to his chest. The heat didn’t fade with the dragon’s departure; it remained, running through his veins like fire tasting for its twin.

The others saw only a prince watching his dragon disobey.

Daemon knew better.

Caraxes hadn’t fled. He’d answered.

The direction burned in Daemon’s mind as if branded there: the cliffs, the mountain, the heart of Dragonstone.

Toward her.

The thought struck like lightning, cold and absolute.

He turned to the Emberguard, to men still bowing in awe, their faces streaked with soot and wonder.

“Arm yourselves,” he rasped, voice roughened by smoke. “If you value your breath, move east. Now.”

They hesitated, glancing at one another, the enormity of what they’d witnessed still clawing at their throats.

Daemon’s head snapped toward them, eyes burning with a light not entirely his own.

“Move!”

They ran.

He didn’t wait to watch. His gaze stayed fixed on the horizon, on the path Caraxes had carved through the clouds, a wound still smoldering in the morning sky.

And beneath his ribs, something ancient stirred.

Not dread, not anger.

Something undefined.

---

Rhaenyra stood near the lowest cavern.

Syrax lay sprawled across the volcanic sand below, her golden scales dull in the early light.

She watched lazily, head tilted toward the movement of three small, silver-haired shapes wobbling around their mother’s boots.

The triplets moved almost as one, three small, silver-haired creatures of flame and laughter.

Aemon tugged at his mother’s cloak, a chubby hand smudged with sand. 

“Muna,” he babbled, the word for mother half-formed. “Muna.”

Aenar echoed him, pointing toward the dragon’s glittering eye.

"Sy–yax!” he crowed, triumphant at his own approximation.

Little Aemma stumbled after them, her curls wild in the sea wind. She lifted both arms and squealed something that might have been “Rax–a!” before bursting into delighted giggles when the dragon’s tail gave a slow, indulgent twitch.

Rhaenyra bent to steady her, laughter caught between pride and ache. “Careful, my little fires. She’ll think you mean to fly already.”

At her side, Archmaester Vaegon kept pace, his stride measured to hers. The wind tugged at his robes, which he had gathered in one hand to keep from catching on the volcanic stone.

His ink-stained fingers curled around a scroll case, and his expression bore the weary patience of a man accustomed to walking beside gods and princes and finding them all foolish. 

“They name the dragons before they name themselves,” he remarked, voice pitched low against the wind. “Always the same with Targaryens. You hand them fire before sense, and then wonder when they burn.”

“They are Velaryons,” Rhaenyra said, more defensively than she meant.

Vaegon’s eyes slid to her, dry and sharp.

He did not argue the point, merely let silence weigh between them until the wind filled it. When he spoke again, his tone was faintly sardonic, touched with something that might have been pity.

“Oh, I know their names,” he said. “And yet blood has a way of remembering itself. The songs of Old Valyria are not easily silenced, no matter what heraldry you stitch over them.”

Rhaenyra rolled her eyes, a small huff of laughter escaping before she could stop it. “You make it sound as though we’re cursed to burn in our sleep.”

That earned her a rare glint of amusement.

“Cursed? No,” Vaegon allowed. “Merely predictable.”

Rhaenyra’s mouth curved, the spark of mischief not quite hidden. “Do you find yourself exempt from that, Grand-uncle?”

Vaegon sniffed, adjusting his grip on the scroll case as though to lend himself gravity.

“Of course,” he said, with the unshakable certainty of a man who had already decided the world would never disagree. “I am a scholar. Observation inoculates one against contagion.”

Rhaenyra arched a brow, eyes glinting. “Well, none can deny the Targaryen arrogance in you, at least.”

“Arrogance,” Vaegon mused, unoffended. “A crude word for accuracy.”

His tone was so even it took her a heartbeat to realize he was jesting, or near enough to it. The ghost of a smile crossed his mouth before he inclined his head toward the children ahead.

“I will say this much,” he went on. “For creatures barely a year in the world, they are uncommonly attentive. Aenar already recognizes color distinctions in flame, called them by name this morning, and Aemma has a startling command of mimicry. She imitates vowels with unsettling precision.”

Rhaenyra’s pride softened her features. “And Aemon?”

“Silent as a septon and twice as observant,” Vaegon said dryly. “He listens to everything and gives nothing back. If he were any older, I’d call it strategy.”

Rhaenyra smiled faintly, gaze returning to her children. “Perhaps it is.”

He handed her the scroll case, the gesture neat and deliberate. “Their temperaments differ, but the mind in each is keen. It would be negligent not to cultivate it.”

Rhaenyra accepted the case, studying him sidelong. “You’ve been plotting their education already, haven’t you?”

“Plotting?” Vaegon echoed, as though the word offended him by its imprecision. “No, Princess. Preparing. The fourteen grant us few chances to instruct minds unspoiled by dull precedent.” He clasped his hands behind his back, eyes on the children as they reached for the shifting light between Syrax’s talons. “They will learn early, observation before recitation, cause before creed. Numbers, tongues, the shaping of sound and the nature of flame. And, of course, history.”

Rhaenyra’s mouth curved. “Of course.”

“Not merely the victories,” he added, “but the mistakes, the indulgences that preceded every fall. If they are to inherit dragons, they should also inherit memory.”

Rhaenyra tilted her head, half-teasing, half-curious. “And will you include the less… scholarly lessons, Grand-uncle? The kind that involve diplomacy, or mercy?”

Vaegon gave a small, humorless sound that might have been a laugh. “In due course. But first, they must learn the weight of truth. I intend to teach them everything I know, whether or not it pleases the realm. Astronomy. Natural philosophy. The properties of metal and glass. The way a word, properly placed, can start a war faster than any sword.”

Her smile dimmed into something thoughtful. “You mean to raise maesters.”

“No,” Vaegon corrected softly. “I mean to raise minds. Maesters serve the realm. Your children must understand how to see it clearly before they decide whether it’s worth serving at all.”

He looked to her.

“And I expect your cooperation, Princess. The future has little use for dull heirs.”

Rhaenyra laughed under her breath, though it didn’t quite hide the chill his words stirred.

“Seven save me, Grand-uncle. You sound as though you’re training conquerors.”

Vaegon’s mouth twitched. “If the gods are kind, thinkers first.” He paused, the faintest trace of irony returning. “If not, well… at least they’ll be articulate conquerors.”

Rhaenyra arched a brow. “All three of them.”

Vaegon gave her a look so flat it was almost mocking. “Obviously.”

“Even Aemma,” she pressed, standing now, fire glinting behind her tone. “She will learn the same lessons. Word for word.”

The Archmaester stopped, turning his head toward her. The wind dragged at his robes, carrying the scent of salt and smoke between them.

“Do I strike you,” he asked evenly, “as a man who cares whether the mind belongs to a woman or a man?”

Rhaenyra said nothing.

Vaegon’s gaze shifted to the golden-haired child toddling after her brothers, small hands outstretched toward the dragon’s warmth. 

"A dragon is a dragon."

Rhaenyra’s laughter was low, genuine. “You’ve grown bolder since leaving the Citadel, Grand-uncle.”

“I have grown honest,” he replied. “And I have found that truth offends fewer dragons than it does men.”

Syrax snorted as if in agreement.

One of the Emberguards dared a laugh, it died in his throat when the ground beneath them gave a subtle shake. 

Vaegon’s head lifted, the faint tremor running through the stone silencing even his breath.

“That is not the tide,” he said sharply.

Rhaenyra went still.

She felt it too, the slow, thunderous rhythm beneath her boots.

From deep within the cliffs came a sound older than language: a rumble, gathering and rising.

Vermithor.

The Bronze Fury, restless again.

He had not forgiven.

Aemond, curious and reckless, had wandered too near the lair. Since then, every echo through the caves carried the dragon’s resentment, a low promise of retribution waiting for its excuse.

Now, that excuse had come.

Rhaenyra’s heart lurched. “Vermithor,” she breathed, recognition and dread tangled in her voice. “He feels the trespass still.”

The triplets stared as one.

The laughter vanished from their faces.

Three small heads turned toward the black mouth of the cave, as if some invisible hand had tugged them by the spine. 

Aenar’s fingers found Aemon’s sleeve.

Aemma’s small hand clutched her mother’s boot.

They didn’t speak.

They didn’t cry.

They listened.

Somewhere in that darkness, Vermithor’s vast wings scraped stone. The growl that followed was no longer warning. 

It was intent. 

Rhaenyra’s throat went dry. “Back,” she ordered, eyes on the cave. “Everyone back, now.”

Vaegon moved without hesitation.

His scroll case struck the ground as he stooped, one arm sweeping Aenar up against his chest before the boy could bolt toward the sound.

His other hand pressed steady against Aemon’s shoulder, firm but not unkind.

Rhaenyra gathered Aemma into her arms, heart hammering.

Together, they backed away across the volcanic stone. 

On the sands below, Syrax surged upright. 

Her wings snapped wide, a living banner of sunlight. She screamed back at the mountain, her cry higher, faster, a warning as sharp as it was protective.

And then, another sound, smaller than Syrax’s thunder, yet fierce enough to cut through it.

Vhaelyx.

He chirped once. 

As the roar from the cave deepened, he answered it, a sharp, defiant hiss that sliced through the burn. 

His wings flared wide, trembling but unyielding, as he planted himself between the cavern’s mouth and the open slope.

Rhaenyra’s breath seized.

“No, stay!” she shouted, voice breaking, but the wind tore her command to pieces.

Vermithor pushed further into view, an avalanche of bronze and shadow. 

Rhaenyra could feel it, the insult in the Bronze Fury’s bones, the way his ancient pride recoiled from the challenge.

He had tolerated no intrusion since Aemond’s trespass; now, to be defied by a mere hatchling?

By one who bore no scars?

It was blasphemy.

Vhaelyx crouched low, but refused to retreat. 

“Vhaelyx, Lykirī!” Rhaenyra cried, but her words shattered under the next roar.

Heat slammed against her like a wall. She could barely see through the whirl of dust and light.

“Āzma!” she shouted next — retreat! — her voice cracking with urgency.

But the young black dragon didn’t yield.

Vermithor advanced another step, his molten eyes narrowing at the insolence before him.

And Rhaenyra’s fear burned.

The thought of her son watching his dragon die...of seeing those black scales crushed beneath Vermithor’s teeth, made her vision blur.

The thought of Syrax throwing herself into the fire to defend them, her golden hide splitting under the Bronze Fury’s claws, made her heart seize.

She couldn’t lose them...not her son, not her dragon, not any of them.

The bond between her and Syrax pulsed hard enough to hurt, their panic bleeding together until she could no longer tell whose heartbeat she felt.

Syrax screamed again, the sound shaking loose stones from the cliffs.

Her wings beat the air into chaos as she lunged sideways, putting herself between Vhaelyx and Vermithor. 

The Bronze Fury reared, his throat glowing, the promise of flame gathering behind his teeth.

Rhaenyra’s cry tore through the roar of dragons and wind alike, raw, wordless, desperate. “Please!”

And from above, as if the island itself answered her. 

Caraxes.

Caraxes roared once, a sound so powerful it silenced every other living thing.

Even Vermithor faltered, his massive head jerking back, the flame in his throat guttering for a heartbeat.

The Blood Wyrm’s long, serpentine body coiled low as he advanced, smoke curling from his jaws. The scars along his neck gleamed white in the light, the marks of battles long survived.

He moved forward, slow and deliberate, the ground trembling under each step. When he reached Vhaelyx, he lowered his massive head and shoved him aside with his snout, not gently, but not cruelly either.

A command.

Almost a father’s snarl.

The young dragon yelped, wings snapping tight to his sides, before scurrying back behind Syrax’s protective bulk.

Syrax bared her teeth, tail lashing once in alarm, but Caraxes swung his head toward her next, eyes burning like twin suns. His growl was thunder rolled in steel. He didn’t challenge her; he moved her, pressing his body sideways until she yielded a step, then another.

Rhaenyra’s breath caught at the sight.

The Blood Wyrm, Daemon’s fury made flesh, was forcing space around her, corralling the younger dragons back, setting himself between them and the Bronze Fury’s lair.

When he had claimed the ground, Caraxes rose to his full height. His neck arched, wings half-unfurled, body blazing red beneath the ash light.

Only the wind dared move as the male dragons stared each other down. 

A new voice cut through. Not loud, not pleading, steady, deliberate, and carved from the same iron that birthed the dragons themselves.

"Jorrāelagon, Vermithor.”

Vaegon.

The old archmaester strode forward, robes scorched and hair unbound, the firelight catching the fine silver threads woven through the black of his sleeves

“Kostilus ao syt ēdruta. Nyke vāedroma ao.”

You think yourself beyond obedience. I remember you.

Vermithor’s head snapped toward him.

Monstrous, gleaming, bronze plates clattering like the shifting of an army’s shields.

His roar broke the world open. The sound tore through the cliffs and drove the Emberguards to their knees, hands over ears, eyes streaming from the heat and wind.

Rhaenyra caught her breath. “Archmaester—!”

But Vaegon didn’t stop.

He raised his arm high, sleeve smoldering, and his eyes, gods, his eyes burned brighter than the dragon’s fire.

“Dohaerās, Vermithor! Dohaerās!”

Obey, Vermithor! Obey!

The command struck like a thunderclap.

For an instant the dragon froze, the molten light in his throat stuttering. The wind held its breath.

Then came the answering roar. 

The ground split beneath his claws, rock shrieking as he surged forward, flame building in his chest.

Still Vaegon did not move.

“Ao issi zaldrīzes hen ñuha ābra. Keso syt ao issa.”

You are the dragon of my house. Remember what you are.

Silence.

Vermithor trembled.

A low, shuddering growl bled from his chest, fading into something that almost sounded like breath. The molten light in his eyes cooled to amber.

Rhaenyra could only stare.

Her heart pounded so hard it hurt.

Vaegon’s voice, when it came, was scarcely more than a whisper, yet it carried through the cavern like a prayer.

“Lykirī,” he whispered.

Be calm.

Vaegon stepped forward.

Each step was measured, unhurried, the soft scrape of boot on stone the only sound left in the world. The dragon watched him, unblinking, pupils wide and ancient.

When Vaegon reached him, he raised one trembling hand and laid it upon the Bronze Fury’s snout. The scales were hot beneath his palm, alive with breath and memory.

Man and dragon stared at one another for a long, suspended heartbeat, two remnants of a dying age, seeing and being seen.

At last, Vaegon spoke, his voice breaking softly through the hush:

“Rūsīr, vȳs āeksio.”
Return, old friend.

Vermithor’s vast head lowered.

The great wings folded.

And the mountain, at last, was still.

When it was done, the old man swayed, just once.

“Even old dragons,” he said hoarsely, “must remember who they are meant to serve.”

He looked up toward Caraxes and added, with the ghost of a smile.

“And some must be reminded less gently than others.”

Caraxes’s snort sent a puff of hot steam curling around him. 

Daemon broke through the haze at a run, more Emberguards on his heels, their crimson cloaks snapping in the heat-heavy wind. 

“Rhaenyra!”

Her name tore from his throat, rough and raw. He reached her first, seizing her shoulders as if to anchor her back to the living world. The heat of her skin burned against his palms.

“Seven hells, woman,” he rasped. “You could’ve been burned alive.”

Rhaenyra’s lips parted, but her voice was lost to the ringing in her ears.

Behind her, the triplets stood motionless.

Aemon tense as a drawn bow, Aenar gripping his brother’s sleeve, Aemma half-hidden in her mother’s skirts.

Daemon went to his knees before them, striking stone with a sharp clang.

“Aemon,” he said, rough but steady, running a gloved hand over the boy’s arms, his hair, his cheeks, searching for any burn or mark. “Are you hurt?”

The boy shook his head, wide-eyed.

Aenar sniffled, voice small. “Loud.”

Daemon exhaled, the sound breaking halfway into a laugh that wasn’t a laugh at all. “Aye. Loud enough to wake the dead.” He brushed the soot from Aenar’s cheek, then turned to the youngest of the triplets. 

Aemma squirmed in his arms when he picked her up, her tiny fingers curling around the collar of his tunic. Her mismatched eyes—one violet, one sea-blue—met his, wide and wet.

Daemon’s voice softened to a whisper. “And you, little heart? You frightened?”

She made a small, hiccupping sound against his throat, and for a moment, the chaos and smoke fell away.

“Next time the mountain shakes,” he said lowly, “you take them and go. Don’t wait to see what wakes beneath it.”

Rhaenyra reached for Aemma as if to take her back, fingers trembling with the leftover terror, then stopped.

Daemon’s arm had already curved protectively around the girl’s small frame, his cheek brushing her silver-gold curls.

The sight disarmed her more than the fire ever could.

Her hand hovered in the air, uncertain, before falling. Then, with a shuddering breath, she turned and drew her sons in close, one beneath each arm, pressing their faces against her chest. Aemon stiffened for only a heartbeat before melting into her; Aenar’s small hands fisted in the leather at her waist.

“She’s all right,” she said, half to herself, half to the man still holding her daughter. “We all are.”

Daemon turned slowly, Aemma balanced in his arms. His eyes found Vaegon’s, sharp even through exhaustion.

“Tell me,” he said hoarsely, “did my eyes deceive me… or did the Bronze Fury bow his head?”

Vaegon’s gaze met his, calm and unflinching. “You saw true,” he said.

Rhaenyra turned at that, the boys clinging to her sides. “You claimed him,” she breathed. “Gods save us, you claimed him.”

Vaegon inclined his head, slow and solemn. “No man claims a dragon, Princess. We only remember the words to ask.”

Aemma stirred in Daemon’s arms.

Tiny fingers reached upward, catching a handful of his silver hair and tugging with the unthinking confidence of the innocent. A soft sound escaped her, a gurgle that might have been laughter, or the last echo of fear undone.

The small, human act broke something in the air.

Daemon huffed a ragged breath, one corner of his mouth twitching despite the ash and exhaustion.

“Easy, little heart,” he whispered, his voice rough but fond. “You’ll tear it from my head before your next nameday.”

Aemma only giggled harder, her hand still tangled in the pale strands.

Vaegon’s eyes found Daemon again, sharper now, testing.

“How did you know to send Caraxes?” he asked quietly. 

Daemon’s brow furrowed, a flicker of confusion threading through his voice. “I did not,” he said. “He broke from the yard on his own. I called, but he didn’t hear me. He just went.”

The air thickened. Caraxes stirred above, restless, the tip of his tail striking the rock in echoing rhythm.

Vaegon’s frown deepened. 

For a moment, no one spoke. The air still shimmered with heat, the world holding its breath.

Rhaenyra’s voice, when it came, was unsteady. “I… do not know,” she said.

Both men turned toward her.

She swallowed hard, gaze darting from Daemon to the sky where Caraxes loomed against the smoke. “When Vermithor woke, I felt it. The tremor, the fire rising. I reached for Syrax, I thought I did, but something else answered.”

Daemon’s brow furrowed. “What are you saying?”

A faint whimper drew his attention downward. Aemma’s fist had wound itself even tighter in his hair. Daemon sighed through his nose, half-exasperated, half-enchanted, and bent his head to free himself.

“Hold still, you mischievious dragon,” he murmured, working her hand gently loose. She resisted, of course, laughing softly, delighted by her own play. 

Only when the last strand slipped free did he glance up again, his expression hardening back into focus. “Go on,” he said quietly, eyes cutting toward Rhaenyra.

Her fingers flexed against her sons’ shoulders as though she might anchor herself. “I felt him. Caraxes. His rage, his confusion… his fire.” The words faltered, fragile and raw. “I called, and...he came.”

Daemon went very still. “That is not possible,” he said, quietly, dangerously. “He’s mine.”

“I know.” The admission broke from her like confession. “I should not have been able to.”

Vaegon’s gaze narrowed, a spark of old dread mingling with awe. But his fear was not the wild kind, it was measured, deliberate, the terror of a scholar whose knowledge had just betrayed him.

“The bond between rider and dragon,” he began, voice low, words tasting of ash and disbelief, “is not shared. It is singular, absolute. Every scroll in the Citadel, every tablet from the ruins of Valyria agrees on this. The dragons will not answer two hearts. They cannot.”

His eyes flicked between them, sharp despite the exhaustion hollowing his face. “When a rider dies, the beast may take another, but never while the first still lives."

He stepped closer, robes dragging ash across the stone, his tone turning almost to wonder.

“And yet I saw Caraxes protect Syrax and Vhaelyx without his rider's command. I saw him shield you and your children, Princess.”

Rhaenyra’s breath shook. “Then something’s wrong with me,” she whispered.

Daemon’s eyes met hers sharply, fiercely. “Or with me,” he said.

Vaegon looked between them, his tone gone grave. “No,” he said. “Not wrong. Unknown.”

Silence gathered, thick as ash.

Daemon’s gaze found Rhaenyra’s, and the air seemed to tighten between them. 

Rhaenyra’s breath caught, her throat working. “The altar,” she whispered.

Vaegon’s head turned sharply. “What altar?”

Daemon hesitated, jaw flexing. “Visenya’s,” he said at last. “Buried beneath the mountain.”

Vaegon’s expression stilled, as if the very name had struck a forgotten chord. “Visenya Targaryen,” he repeated quietly.

“We didn’t seek it,” Rhaenyra interrupted, voice trembling despite her control. 

Daemon nodded once, slow, deliberate. “We bled upon it,” he admitted. “A mistake. A cut, nothing more. But the stone drank it.”

Vaegon’s color drained. “You gave blood to a Valyrian artifact?” 

He stopped himself, eyes sharp now, studying them as though he could see the pulse of what their blood had stirred. “The dragons heard,” he said softly. “They must have.”

Rhaenyra gathered Aenar into her arms, the boy’s small face pressed against her shoulder. “Then what happened today…”

“…was no accident,” Vaegon finished for her.

Daemon shifted Aemma’s weight against his chest, his features unreadable in the glow. “If that’s true, we need to see it again.”

Vaegon bent to lift Aemon, the child’s silver hair glinting in the dim light. “Aye,” he murmured. “Show me what you woke.”

Rhaenyra’s head snapped up. “No,” she said, the word low but trembling with force. “I will not take my babes to her altar.”

The refusal struck the air like a seal pressed in wax, final, trembling, defiant.

Vaegon straightened slowly, something like agreement flickering beneath his worry. “Then we go without them,” he said at last. “But go we must.”

---

The nursery breathed like a living thing.

Rhaenyra stood near the largest cradle, her hand resting against its edge as if steadying herself. Candlelight shuddered over her profile, pale and far too lovely for the hour.

Across from her, Laena bent over the twin girls, arranging the blankets with a care and a sweetness that softened her eyes. Her hair fell forward in loose, silver curls, brushing the edges of her babes' blankets. 

Five small beds lined the wall between them.

Three belonged to Rhaenyra’s children.

They slept restlessly, the air around them faintly charged, as if the island itself dreamed through them.

The other two cradles were newer, smaller, carved of driftwood polished to a sheen. Within them lay Baela and Rhaena, small and carefully swaddled in warmth. 

Laena hummed under her breath, a sound caught between lullaby and invocation. The melody wound through the air like smoke, brushing against Rhaenyra’s pulse.

“I forget what it was to see them so small,” Rhaenyra sighed. “Aemma barely fit in my arms once. I thought if I breathed too hard, I’d break her.”

Laena smiled faintly, smoothing a curl from Rhaena’s brow. “You did not.”

“No,” Rhaenyra said. “But the fear of it stayed. Even now, when they walk and laugh, I still see them as they were, fragile things that did not yet know their own bones belonged to fire.”

Laena looked up. “Do you dream of that?”

“Sometimes.” Rhaenyra’s fingers traced idle circles along the cradle’s rim, her eyes gone far away. “I dream they are newborn again. That I am. That I wake and find everything before me...my mother alive, the world simple.” She hesitated, then added softly, “And then the mountain trembles, and I know I’m lying.”

The words seemed to settle in the air, heavy as ash.

Laena’s voice came quiet, thoughtful. “I dream of flight. Always higher than I have ever gone, until I cannot tell if I am flying or falling.”

Rhaenyra’s mouth curved, though her eyes remained on the children. “You have always been braver than me.”

“That is not bravery,” Laena said, a shadow of laughter beneath the words. “It is hunger. The sky promises freedom, but it always takes something in return.”

Rhaenyra’s gaze lifted, meeting hers across the flicker of candlelight. “And what has it taken from you?”

Laena was silent for a moment.

The firelight softened her, the silver of her hair, the quiet curve of her mouth. “Sleep, mostly,” she said finally. “Peace, sometimes. And lately—” she drew a breath that caught faintly—“it keeps trying to take the dreams that are mine and replace them with his.”

Rhaenyra blinked, startled by the honesty in her tone.

Laena’s lips curved in a faint, self-conscious smile. “Daemon dreams loud, you know. Even when he is silent.”

Rhaenyra’s throat worked. “I know.”

Their eyes held.

The sea’s breath pressed against the glass. The flames wavered, casting their faces in mirrored halves—two women who both loved the same man, and now shared the same quiet grief.

Laena glanced toward the cradles again, to all that was small and sleeping. “They look so breakable,” she whispered. “And yet, sometimes I think they are the only ones who aren’t.”

Rhaenyra eyes drifted, almost absently, “When they were born, I thought the gods were cruel to make something so perfect out of pain.”

Her voice had gone distant, soft as if she were remembering not the birth itself but something older, something that had called to her before the first cry was ever heard.

Her gaze drifted to the triplets, sleeping in their uneasy harmony. “But the pain never left,” she murmured. “It only changed shape. It learned to breathe beside me.”

Laena smiled faintly, hearing only the tenderness in the words. “That’s all motherhood is, isn’t it? Pain made familiar.”

Silence again.

A child sighed.

Somewhere beneath them, the mountain groaned, the sound so faint it could have been memory.

Rhaenyra’s fingers brushed the edge of the cradle; Laena’s hand, resting there too, almost touched hers. Neither moved away.

Laena spoke first. “Sometimes I envy you.”

Rhaenyra blinked. “Me?”

“You were born to fire,” Laena said simply. “It loves you back. For me it’s only borrowed heat.”

Rhaenyra frowned. “You think I wanted any of this?”

“No.” Laena’s voice was soft, steady. “But I think you make it look like wanting.” She searched Rhaenyra’s face as though the answer to something waited there. “I think that is why he can not stay away from you.”

The words settled between them, fragile and cruel in equal measure.

Rhaenyra didn’t speak. Her eyes flicked to the window, to the dark stretch of sea beyond the glass. “Daemon loves you, Laena.”

“I know,” Laena said, and the calm in her tone hurt more than any grief. “But not the way he loves you.”

Rhaenyra turned sharply. “You can't know that.”

“I do,” Laena said quietly. “He says your name in his sleep sometimes. Not in longing...more like confession. As though the gods are waiting to hear it again.”

Rhaenyra’s throat closed around a sound she didn’t make.

Laena gave a small, almost weary smile. “I married him knowing what he was. Knowing what he’d already given away. I thought I could live with being second to the fire.” She drew in a breath that trembled on its way out. “And I can. But it burns, Rhaenyra. Even when he’s kind.”

Rhaenyra pressed a hand to her heart, as if something there had moved wrong. “I never meant—”

“I know,” Laena interrupted gently. “You never mean to. You simply are.”

The words weren’t accusation.

They were resignation, and love, all braided too tightly to tell apart.

For a long moment, they only looked at one another, their faces lit by the same unsteady flame, two halves of the same fevered story.

Laena’s voice fell to a whisper.

“It’s strange, isn’t it? How fire can make everything holy and unholy at once.”

Rhaenyra’s answer was barely breath. “We were born to it.”

“Yes.” Laena’s gaze drifted to the children. “And they to us.”

The sea thundered once against the cliffs, a deep, shuddering heartbeat. The babes didn’t stir.

Rhaenyra reached out then, brushing her fingers against Laena’s sleeve. It wasn’t apology...something quieter, older. 

Laena didn’t pull away. “You’ll go with him tonight,” she said softly. “He will need you. He always does when the mountain stirs.”

Rhaenyra’s head lifted, eyes darkening. “Not like that,” she said, the words low but firm. “I will not… I would never do that to you.”

The protest was gentle, but it carried the ache of a vow, one forged not in innocence, but in guilt understood too well.

Laena studied her for a long moment. The firelight painted them both in gold and shadow, two faces shaped from the same heat.

Then Laena smiled small, sad, knowing.

“I know,” she whispered. “That is the cruelest mercy of it. You do not have to touch him for it to hurt.”

Rhaenyra’s breath caught.

Laena looked away, toward the sleeping children. “He’s already gone to you in every way that matters. The rest is only ceremony.”

Rhaenyra’s hand fell back to her side, trembling faintly. “Then may the gods keep their ceremonies,” she whispered. “I have no use for them.”

Laena stared at her for a long time. Thoughtful and perpetually kind in a way that made Rhaenyra feel guilty. 

“And Laenor?” she asked finally. “How do you and he manage?”

Rhaenyra’s lips curved, but the smile didn’t reach her eyes. “We do not,” she said simply. “Not in the way people expect. He has his ships, his...knights. I have my children. It is enough.”

Laena nodded slowly, her expression unreadable. “That sounds familiar.”

Rhaenyra looked up. “You mean you and Daemon?”

Laena’s mouth twitched, part amusement, part ache. “I mean you and me,” she said. “We are both women who have learned to make peace with half of what we wanted.”

The truth of it hung between them, shimmering like heat.

Rhaenyra exhaled softly, the sound catching in her throat. “And the other half?”

Laena’s eyes flicked toward the window, where the sea shimmered black beneath the moonlight. “The other half learns to live inside us,” she said. “It becomes the part that dreams.”

Silence stretched. The only movement came from the gentle rise and fall of the five cradles, a chorus of small, steady breaths.

At last, Rhaenyra spoke again, her voice softer than the flames. “Watch them for me, Laena. My boys. My girl.”

Laena turned, the sadness in her smile tempered by warmth. “Of course,” she said. “They’re all ours, in one way or another.”

Rhaenyra’s eyes softened. “You love them.”

“I do.” Laena looked toward the triplets and the twins alike, her expression touched with quiet wonder. “They are the best thing any of us have done.”

Rhaenyra nodded. “Then we understand each other after all.”

Laena met her gaze, no envy now, no distance, only the quiet, steady knowing of one mother to another. “Yes,” she said. “In this, we do.”

The two women stood together a moment longer, the firelight moving between them like a heartbeat. Then Rhaenyra turned toward the door, her shadow stretching long across the stone.

When it closed behind her, Laena moved to the nearest cradle and bent low, brushing her fingers against the sleeping child’s hand.

“I’ll keep watch,” she promised. “For all of you.”

The flames guttered once, as though in answer, and the nursery breathed again.

Notes:

Thank you for sitting with a quieter chapter. Laena and Rhaenyra deserved a true conversation, not just fallout. Laena Velaryon is more than a hinge for other people’s choices, she stands. 💕
And yes, Archmaester Vaegon is here being usefully terrifying in the way only an old Targaryen scholar can be.

Chapter 16: The Scholar and The Sinner

Notes:

Alicent’s bitterness always comes back to bite

The passage narrowed as they descended, walls slick with sweat and shadow.

Even Daemon’s breath came ragged now, though his pride would never allow him to admit it. Every few steps a fissure spilled a thin line of molten light. 

Vaegon trailed behind, his robes darkened with soot, the scholar’s calm slipping into focus.

“The temperature alone,” he said, “would drive any normal man to madness. The air should be unbreathable this far down.”

“It would be,” Daemon said quietly. His eyes glinted like coals. “If we were anything less than what we are.”

Rhaenyra said nothing.

She moved ahead of them, her steps steady despite the tremor in the ground. The black and red of her riding leathers gleamed wetly in the torchlight, the seams darkened with sweat. The heat pressed against her like a living thing, yet she did not flinch.

Vaegon slowed, the scrape of his boots grinding softly against the glass-smooth stone. He lifted his lantern high, its flame trembling in the molten air. The radiance spread in waves across the tunnel, catching the subtle curvature of the walls, fluid, sinuous, more like the inside of a creature’s throat than any man-built hall.

He stopped.

“This isn’t carved.” His voice carried low. “There are no tool marks. No mason’s hand.”

Daemon frowned, brushing his fingers along the wall. It was warm and perfectly seamless. “You think it’s natural?”

Vaegon shook his head. “No. This is memory.”

He stepped back, eyes narrowing as if the patterns in the obsidian might rearrange themselves under his scrutiny. “Our ancestors built Dragonstone after their fashion, yes, but this...this predates Aenar's landing…Pre-Conquest. Pre-Doom. The rock wasn’t worked...it was willed.”

Rhaenyra turned slightly, her silhouette haloed by the molten veins running through the ceiling. “By who?”

Vaegon’s voice dropped to a whisper.

“The texts called it drakon itho vala, the dragon beneath the world. The Valyrians believed every volcano was alive, that flame itself could think and hunger. The home of the Gods."

Rhaenyra’s expression didn’t change, though her voice softened to a whisper.

“Then it is waiting.”

When the path finally opened, it did so without warning. The last turn fell away into a cavern so wide it seemed to expel sun. The floor shimmered with heat distortion, and the sound of slow, distant rumbling rolled like thunder underwater.

The three of them paused at the threshold.

Vaegon’s skin was slick with heat; even his hair clung to his neck. His eyes, though, gleamed with hunger, the mind of a man facing proof of every forbidden theory he’d ever whispered in secret.

“This is where I fell,” she said. The words barely carried.

Vaegon looked up, blinking sweat from his lashes. “Fell?”

She nodded, touching her heel to the ground. Even through calloused skin, she could feel it, the faint vibration, as if the mountain recognized her. “A cut,” she shivered. “I bled, and the stone opened.”

Vaegon moved first.

He stepped forward with the hesitant grace of a scholar standing in a temple, eyes darting from rune to relic. His lantern’s glow trembled against the walls, catching on carvings too intricate to have been made by mortal hand.

“By the Seven…” he whispered, then caught himself, almost laughing. “No. By them.”

Daemon said nothing. His gaze tracked the perimeter of the chamber. The hilt of Dark Sister gleamed in his palm, black and mirror-bright.

Rhaenyra didn’t move. Her eyes were on the altar.

As memory promised, the Altar waited.

Obsidian and gold, fused by ancient fire, the shape of wings and spine subtle beneath the surface. But where once it had been still, now it pulsed.

A slow, living thrum, as if the mountain itself drew air beneath it.

Vaegon’s voice broke the silence.

He had crouched near one of the walls, tracing the faint spiral etchings burned into the stone. “These marks. Look, see the repetition?”

He pointed, his finger trembling close to the stone but never quite touching. “The glyph for flame that remembers.”

Daemon’s brow furrowed. “And what does that mean to us?”

“It means,” Vaegon murmured, “that this place was sanctified long before our House ever danced in fire.”

And on the Altar, the surface shone as if wet, and at its center lay the dark bloom of old blood, Rhaenyra’s gaze caught like a hook.

Vaegon drifted closer, hesitant and wary. “Obsidian will hold heat for an age, but to keep such resonance—”

“It is not obsidian.”

Daemon’s voice cut clean across the chamber.

Both turned.

He stood at the edge of the light, sleeve torn, jaw set, a grim knowing moving behind his eyes. “I found her journal,” he said, each word deliberate. “Visenya’s. Here, legible enough.” His fingers flexed once, as though he still felt the parchment. “She drew this place. Named the stone.”

Vaegon’s lantern trembled. “Named it what?”

“Valyrio prūmia,” Daemon answered, the Valyrian shaping itself like an oath. Then, in the common tongue: “Heartstone of Valyria."

The words took the air out of the room. Even the heat seemed to lean closer.

Rhaenyra’s eyes lowered to the stone. The faint shine beneath the old stain brightened, a slow inhale beneath her feet.

Daemon stepped nearer, all edges and control.

“Her hand wrote it plain enough between the ruins of ink: blood is a door, not a chain, Dragonstone keeps what it is owed.” He nodded at the slick, black shine.

Vaegon blinked once, the tremor in his lantern replaced by something sharper, indignation. “You handled Visenya's journal?” 

Daemon’s brow furrowed. “I read it.”

“You handled it,” Vaegon repeated, stepping closer, the teacher’s cadence creeping unbidden into his voice. 

Daemon’s jaw flexed. “It was falling apart already.”

“Because you touched it,” Vaegon snapped, exasperation overriding awe. “You cannot manhandle vellum and expect revelation to survive!”

Daemon gave him a look that hovered somewhere between amusement and warning, sharp as a drawn blade held flat against the skin. “I used my eyes, maester. They seem to have done the job.”

Vaegon straightened, robes whispering as he drew himself to his full, unimpressive height. “Your eyes,” he said, with the brittle patience of a man lecturing a fire, “are not instruments of preservation, prince. Words that have survived centuries deserve more care than a candle and your temper. You could have obliterated entire—”

Rhaenyra’s voice, soft but edged with authority, cleaved clean through his tirade. “And yet he did not.”

The silence that followed was taut, humming with unsaid things.

Daemon’s mouth curved, lazy and smug, the faintest gleam of mischief lighting his eyes. “See? Even the princess is grateful.”

Vaegon’s glare could have soured wine.

“Grateful?” he echoed, voice tight. “I’m astonished the vellum endured you long enough to yield a single word. Gods, next you’ll tell me you blew on it to see the ink appear.”

Daemon tilted his head, lips quirking. “That,” he said, “and a little blood.”

Vaegon went still. “You what—”

Daemon’s tone was maddeningly casual. “The wax had sealed over a few lines. Heat loosened it. The rest answered when I opened a vein.”

Vaegon’s horror fractured into something unwillingly fascinated. 

“You bled on it?” he said, voice cracking between fury and awe.

Daemon shrugged, watching him with wolfish amusement. “Only a drop. I’ve spilled more shaving.”

“Fool,” Vaegon hissed, though the word came raw, shaking at the edges. His hands hovered uselessly in the air, caught between strangling Daemon and shielding him from his own ignorance. He exhaled sharply through his nose, pressing the heel of his palm to his temple as though the very conversation pained him. “Next time you find a relic older than your own arrogance, leave it to someone who understands what not to destroy.”

Daemon’s tone turned dry, iron beneath the quiet. “And miss the pleasure of seeing you scold me like an errant novice? Never.”

Vaegon’s breath escaped between his teeth, a sound like parchment tearing. “Then at least tell me where you left it,” he demanded. “It cannot rot in some dragon-reeking cavern, soaking in soot and molten air.”

Daemon cast him a sidelong glance, insolent and unbothered. “Safe enough where it is.”

“Safe?” Vaegon nearly laughed, though the sound broke halfway. “From whom? The damp? Your dragon’s temper? The next fit of your curiosity?” He took a step closer, the lantern jerking in his grip so the flame leapt wildly. “It needs controlled heat, preservation oils, treated parchment, binding...gods, you probably left it beneath a dripping stalactite, waiting to dissolve into nothing! I want it in my chambers before another word fades.”

Daemon turned then, slow and deliberate. “You want?”

Rhaenyra’s gaze flicked between them, her exhaustion warring with faint amusement. “Let him have it, Daemon. He’ll only haunt you until you do.”

The prince’s mouth curved, slow and sardonic. “Haunt me, he already does.”

Vaegon ignored the jab.

His eyes were bright now, fevered with purpose and disbelief. “You do not grasp the magnitude of what you’ve touched,” he said, voice climbing with each word. “This isn’t some lover’s letter or soldier’s chronicle, this is Visenya’s hand, her record, her mind!”

Daemon’s smile thinned, something colder surfacing beneath it. “That reckless bleeding told me what this is.”

“All the more reason for restraint!” Vaegon snapped. “If the Heartstone is what I think it is, every symbol on that parchment could unravel us if misread. Do you understand? These marks are veins. The text breathes.” His voice softened, almost breaking. “Every mark matters.”

He drew in a long, shaking inhale, lowering his lantern until the flame threw his shadow across the stone. “I’ll have it cleaned, dried, flattened between treated glass. Every rune lifted before decay devours what’s left. Burned text can still be recovered, charcoal tracings, and solvent washes. But it must be done carefully.”

Daemon blinked, unimpressed. “You mean magic with a quill.”

“Study with patience,” Vaegon corrected sharply. “A discipline you’ve never once shown interest in, nor patience enough to attempt."

Daemon exhaled, a rough sound that could have been a laugh or a sigh.

“Strange,” the Rogue Prince said, almost to himself. “I’m the one being scolded for bleeding on parchment, when it was she who made the deal.”

The words fell unthinking, half bitterness, half jest, but the echo they left was sharp enough to cut the air.

Vaegon’s head snapped up. “What deal?”

The color drained from her face, the firelight turning her eyes to molten glass.

Daemon realized his misstep a heartbeat too late. His gaze dropped, jaw tightening. “It is not—” 

Vaegon stepped forward, the lantern trembling faintly in his grip. “You said deal. With whom?”

Rhaenyra’s voice was quiet, controlled. “It’s nothing for you to concern yourself with, maester.”

“Nothing?” Vaegon’s tone wavered between disbelief and fury. “You stand above a living forge of blood and flame, speak of bargains, and call it nothing?”

“Let it rest, Vaegon,” Daemon said, voice low but firm.

But the scholar’s curiosity had already sunk its teeth in. “The Heartstone reacts to lineage,” he pressed, eyes fever-bright. “And yours sings to it. Gods, Rhaenyra...what did you give it?”

Rhaenyra’s breath hitched.

She met his gaze, steady but distant, every muscle held too still. “What was mine to give,” she said softly.

Daemon shifted beside her, protective, warning. 

But Vaegon didn’t stop.

He took another step closer, the lantern's glow trembling over his knuckles. “You cannot expect me to stand here, watch the very bones of Valyria wake beneath our feet, and feign ignorance. What did you give?” His voice cracked with awe. “What did you take?”

Rhaenyra’s jaw tightened. “You would not understand.”

“Then make me,” Vaegon snapped. The tremor in his voice betrayed how close he stood to hunger. “You bled upon this stone and it accepted. You command dragons as if they were extensions of your will. Do not ask me to pretend it is coincidence.”

Daemon’s gaze darted to her, then to the floor, then back again. “Rhaenyra—” he began, but she lifted a hand to stop him.

The motion was small, almost fragile, yet the air obeyed it.

Her eyes met Vaegon’s at last.

The violet of her irises caught the Heartstone’s glow, kindling into twin embers. “It was seven days,” she said quietly, “and seven nights.”

Vaegon’s breathing lulled. “Seven—?”

“I bled here,” she continued, each word pulled from somewhere deep and aching. “And he came to me. Tyraxes. One of the Fourteen.”

The name struck the air like a bell.

For a moment, the cavern itself seemed to flinch. The lantern’s flame bowed low, its embers trembling across the walls like something living.

Vaegon went very still.

His lips parted soundlessly, the name scraping through his mind, stirring every buried myth, every forbidden line of Valyrian scripture. “Tyraxes,” he whispered, voice shaking. “The god of flame’s first song. The one whose fire spoke.”

Rhaenyra inclined her head, eyes distant. “He offered me a choice,” she said. “Power enough to claim what was mine. A throne if I could endure the cost.”

The cavern listened first, as if weighing her worth.

Daemon’s jaw clenched, but he said nothing.

Rhaenyra’s gaze fell to the spiraling veins of light pulsing faintly beneath their feet. “He warned me it would hurt,” she murmured. “That I would wish for death before dawn. Seven days and seven nights of fire and madness. But if I survived…”

Her voice thinned, caught between confession and memory. “He promised I would have them. Three children. Of my blood and his.”

The words lingered, filling the cavern like smoke.

For a heartbeat, none of them shifted. 

The shimmer beneath the stone flared once, soft, golden-red and Rhaenyra’s shadow stretched long behind her, haloed by something older than mercy.

Vaegon’s voice, when it came, was barely a whisper. “You made a pact with a god.”

Daemon’s throat worked, but no sound followed. The sweat on his palms turned cold; even dragons bowed to this kind of fire.

Rhaenyra’s gaze lifted to his, softer now. “I endured,” she said. “And I bore them.”

The silence that followed was not peace. It was the breath before prayer or ruin.

Vaegon’s knuckles whitened around the lantern’s handle. The flame quivered, throwing shivering bands of gold across his face as he stared at her, at the woman who had spoken the unspeakable.

“Then your children…” The words broke apart, the Archmaester's voice briefly human, then rebuilt itself quieter, steadier, and infinitely more afraid. “They are not of men.”

Rhaenyra did not flinch.

“They are mine,” she said simply.

Something in the way she spoke it; without defense, without shame, unnerved him more than any blasphemy could.

Vaegon blinked, dazed, as if her calm might be the true horror. “Your blood carries his,” he whispered, intoxicated and broken all at once. “Tyraxes. The god of fire’s first heartbeat. His marrow in their veins.”

The words clung to the stone like ash.

Daemon’s throat moved again, but still he found no sound. His gaze flicked between her and the floor, between niece and altar, as if searching for some mortal footing in a world that had shifted beneath his boots. The shine from below threw their shadows huge against the cavern wall, monstrous and divine.

“You can not mean—” His voice cracked, raw with disbelief. “You can not mean that Tyraxes. The god of prophecy and flame. They’re dead, Rhaenyra. All of them. Dust and worship and madness.”

“They were never dead,” she replied. “Only waiting.”

He took a step toward her, the motion half pleading, half denial. “And you would have me believe he touched you?” His voice dropped to a rasp. “That he… that your children are his?”

Her eyes met his, unwavering. 

“Ours,” Rhaenyra said softly. “Mine, of his blood and mine. Born of pain. Born of promise.”

Daemon stared at her as though the ground itself had opened beneath her feet and him with it.

The sound of the sea below filled the silence, slow and endless, like the dancing of some vast unseen beast.

Vaegon, meanwhile, stood unmoving, caught between the scholar and the believer, the man who sought truth and the man now terrified he had found it. His lips parted, but the words took shape slowly. “Every time I looked at them,” he whispered, “I thought the light in their eyes was just—” He faltered, remembering the shimmer of Aemma’s mismatched gaze, the way the boys’ laughter caught like struck glass. “—reflection.”

His mouth moved soundlessly for a moment, thoughts spiraling faster than speech could follow.

Rhaenyra said nothing.

The quiet only fed him.

“I have seen them in sunlight,” Vaegon went on, the scholar’s cadence unraveling into wonder. “Their skin shines. Their eyes reflect nothing, they emit. The air warms when they laugh. The dragons stir when they cry.” His voice dipped lower, intense and afraid. “Tell me, Rhaenyra... are they flesh at all, or flame wearing skin?”

Her stillness was answer enough.

Vaegon swallowed, throat working visibly. “If Tyraxes’s blood truly runs in them,” he whispered, “What happens when they come of age? Do they inherit his will? His hunger?”

Daemon’s hand twitched at his side. His fingers flexed once, then curled into a fist.

Vaegon’s gaze darted between them, desperation bleeding through his poise. “If they are divine, can they die? If one of them were wounded, if their blood touched this stone again, would it wake him?”

Rhaenyra’s eyes glimmered with molten sorrow. She did not speak.

The silence invited him closer, drove him further.
“And if they do not die,” he whispered manic, “if the blood of Tyraxes endures beyond the span of men, then what are we building, Princess?” His voice trembled, caught between awe and despair. “A dynasty… or a pantheon?”

The sound that tore from Rhaenyra was sharp, wild half cry, half snarl.

“They are children!”

The veins of the Heartstone flared, light racing outward in violent sympathy, crawling across the floor in lines of molten gold.

“They are mine,” she said, stepping forward. Her voice shook the air raw, absolute. “Mine. I carried them. I bore them. I screamed until my throat bled and the air turned to salt and flame. I felt their hearts beating inside me long before the world knew their names.”

Her gaze found Vaegon’s, blazing now, every syllable cutting like glass.

“And you—” her voice fractured, trembling between grief and fury—“you would speak of them as if they were curiosities.”

Vaegon took an involuntary step back, but she followed, eyes bright with unshed tears.

“They are flesh, and blood, and laughter. They are small hands and fevered dreams and frightened cries in the dark. Do you understand?”

Vaegon’s lips parted, but no sound came.

His scholar’s certainty had fled, replaced by awe and something gentler. “I do,” he whispered at last. “Forgive me, Princess. I forgot the cost behind the miracle.”

The heat in the chamber began to ebb.
The gold glimmer faded from the floor, retreating like the sun sinking below waters at night. 

Daemon’s hand brushed her arm, steadying, wordless.

“Easy,” Daemon pressed. “He meant no harm.”

Rhaenyra’s shoulders heaved once, then stilled. Her eyes lingered on the glowing veins of the Heartstone before she spoke again, her voice low and splintered. “Everyone means no harm,” she said. “Until they do.”

When Vaegon finally found his voice again, it was careful, softened to match the fragile calm between them. “Does anyone else know?”

Rhaenyra lifted her head. The question did not surprise her, but the tenderness in it did.

Her gaze drifted, distant. “Laenor,” she said at last.

Vaegon blinked. “Your husband?”

She nodded.

“He listened. He was kind, as he always is.” She hesitated, her eyes dimming with the memory. “But kindness is not the same as belief.”

Daemon said nothing. His hand still rested lightly against her arm.

The faintest smile ghosted across her lips a fragment of sorrow and pride intertwined. “He loves them as his own. That is enough.”

Vaegon bowed his head, the weight of her confession settling into his bones. “He may not have believed,” he said softly, “but he bore faith all the same.”

Rhaenyra’s eyes glimmered in the dim, flickering gleam. “Yes,” she said. “And perhaps that is the greater miracle.”

Vaegon’s brow furrowed, thoughts shifting visibly behind his eyes. “And the king?” he asked at last, hesitant, but unable to stop himself. “Does Viserys know?”

Rhaenyra’s gaze flicked toward the shadows. The answer came soft, final.

“No.”

Vaegon’s head jerked up, startled. Daemon’s hand stilled against her arm.

Rhaenyra turned toward them both, her expression cold and absolute. “He must never know.”

The silence that followed was so deep it seemed to drink the light.

Vaegon found his voice again, careful, almost pleading. “Rhaenyra, he is your father.”

Rhaenyra shook her head. “Father sees what he wishes. He names them Laenor’s sons, and calls their likeness proof of legacy. He loves them too much to doubt, and I…” Her throat tightened, the words catching before she forced them out. “I love him too much to make him doubt.”

Her gaze drifted to the Heartstone, to the dimming veins of gold that still pulsed faintly beneath the rock. “He would not understand what I’ve done. To him, gods are statues, prayers, relics of ages long gone. Not beings that answer. Not voices that bargain in blood.”

Vaegon’s eyes flicked to the faint shimmer still echoing under her feet. “And yet one did.”

Rhaenyra’s jaw clenched, but she didn’t deny it. “He gave me what I asked for,” she said quietly. “A legacy that would endure. But I learned too late what that meant. Divinity is merciless to peace.”

Daemon’s thumb brushed her arm, a silent anchor. His voice, when it came, was low, roughened by something like jealousy. “And yet you’d do it again.”

Her lips parted, trembling faintly. “Yes,” she whispered. “A thousand times.”

Vaegon’s gaze lingered on Rhaenyra. Studying her with the same intensity he studied the altar. 

“Princess,” he said softly. “I know you mean to keep them safe. I understand that more clearly now than I ever have.”

Rhaenyra looked at him warily, her body still coiled tight as a drawn bow.

“But,” he continued, his voice strengthening as his scholar’s instinct reasserted itself, “if something that defies explanation has taken root in this world, we cannot simply let it grow unseen. Knowledge is protection as much as secrecy is.”

Rhaenyra’s eyes narrowed. “You would have me turn my children into curiosities? Subjects for dissection and ink?”

Vaegon shook his head sharply. “No. Never that.” His tone softened, almost pleading. “But we must understand. Every anomaly, every sign that marks them. You said yourself, they are flesh and blood. That means they are bound by some nature, however divine its source. And if we can trace that nature, perhaps we can defend it.”

Daemon shifted beside her, the movement subtle but full of warning. “Or control it.”

Vaegon’s eyes flicked toward him, weary but unyielding. “Better knowledge than ignorance, Prince. Ignorance breeds fear and fear destroys what it cannot name.”

He looked back to Rhaenyra, his expression gentler now, but unwavering. “You think I seek power. I don’t. I seek understanding. For their blood alone. For ours. The line of old Valyria runs thinner each generation. If what lives in them is a fragment of that first fire, then to know it, truly, is to preserve what the Doom tried to erase. Not for kings or maesters or gods. For us. For the memory of what we once were.”

Rhaenyra’s throat worked, her voice quieter but cutting. “And what would you do with that truth, Vaegon? Write it down? Send it to Oldtown, where the Citadel will whisper of it in their halls? Let the Faith name my children abominations and call their fire sin?”

Her words trembled, brittle with sorrow.

Vaegon took a slow step closer not as a challenger, but as a man approaching the edge of something unseen. His voice dropped, honest. “No parchment. No ink. I would keep it here.” He pressed a hand to his chest. “In the memory of our blood. In those who still remember what it means to be Valyrian. I swear it, Princess. What I learn dies with me if need be, but you must let me learn.”

He hesitated, his eyes shining with conviction and fear alike. “If I can trace the rhythm of it...the way their hearts align with the dragons, the heat, the light, I might find a language for what they are before someone else invents one to condemn them. I would give our blood that defense.”

The words hung between them, trembling with the weight of both promise and danger.

Daemon’s hand tightened on her arm, his voice low, almost a growl. “You speak of defense,” he said, “but what you offer sounds too much like prophecy.”

Vaegon met his gaze evenly. “In Valyria, the difference was never clear.”

Rhaenyra did not move.

The air around her shimmered faintly, heat coiling from the Heartstone like the breath of some slumbering god. Her silver hair caught the glow, strands rising and glinting as though charged with static or light.

When she finally spoke, her voice was a quiet, burning thing. “Then do not fail them, Grand-uncle. Not in thought, not in word, not in cowardice.”

Vaegon lifted his gaze, slowly, compelled as much as afraid.

The woman before him was no longer merely flesh. Her hair had taken on the sheen of forged moonlight, her skin the pale luster of marble veined with flame. Her violet eyes burned brighter than the molten gold beneath the stone, alive with the terrible serenity of certainty.

Daemon stepped half in front of her, but even he seemed unwilling to interrupt what had been set loose. 

“You may learn,” she said. “You may watch, listen, record what you must. But hear me, Vaegon, and understand it to your heart. In the very blood that marks you Targaryen.”

Her voice had settled into something low and steady, the kind of stillness that warned of coming fire. “My children will not be harmed. Not by faith, not by fear, not by your knowledge, nor by the curiosity of men who cannot look upon something divine without wanting to carve it open to see how it works.”

The scholar stiffened under her gaze. She hadn’t raised her voice, yet the air itself seemed to tighten around the words.

“They are not subjects,” she went on. “They are heirs. The future of House Targaryen—”

Vaegon swallowed hard, but she wasn’t finished.

“—Do not think Vermithor will save you from me,” she said softly. The name alone made the chamber tremble. “He may be larger, stronger, older, but Syrax and I are mothers.”

The glow beneath the stone flared, brightening with the force of her conviction.

For a moment, she too seemed lit from within, fire answering fire, blood answering blood.

“Should you ever hurt my babes,” she continued, “then know this: I will meet you in the sky myself. Vermithor will face Syrax, and I will face you. And it will not be him who wins.”

Vaegon’s heart caught, but the tremor in his hands was not from fear. 

It was from being caught under the eye of a true Queen. 

He set the lantern down slowly, bowing his head until the light brushed his hair like a benediction. He bowed lower, until his knees touched stone still warm from her anger.

“I would die before I betrayed them,” he said hoarsely. “Before I betrayed you.”

Rhaenyra regarded him for a long moment, the fury still alive behind her calm. “Then keep that oath close,” she said. “You serve knowledge. I serve them. If the two ever stand opposed, choose wisely, for there will be no second chance.”

Vaegon bowed deeper. “I understand,” he whispered. 

The Heartstone pulsed, slow, deep, and approving, as though the mountain itself had marked their covenant.

Daemon’s voice came quiet at her shoulder. “You’ve made your point, niece.”

Her eyes lingered on Vaegon, then the faint veins of molten light beneath the stone. “Yes,” she said, “And so has the fire.”

---

When their footsteps faded into the tunnels, the chamber did not fall silent. It listened.

The air still carried Rhaenyra’s voice: sharp, commanding, sanctified by grief.

Vaegon stood motionless, the lantern heavy in his grasp. For the first time in his life, the instinct to measure, to question, to categorize felt like blasphemy.

He had always believed in comprehension, the sacred pursuit of reason.

That every mystery, no matter how terrible, could be undone with enough patience, enough light. But this...
this was no relic to be catalogued.

It was alive.

He stared down at the veins of gold running through the black stone, watching the slow pulse shimmer and fade, shimmer and fade.

Then, three smaller flickers.

Brief, but distinct.

Three sparks threading through the larger glow, rising and falling in perfect rhythm.

His head tilted. 

He had felt that rhythm before.

Aemon. Aenar. Aemma.

One in body, three in face, three in name...but never truly apart. He remembered their weight in his arms, the impossible stillness between heartbeats as if the world itself waited for them to breathe. When one stirred, the others sighed. When one cried, the dragons shifted in their sleep. When one laughed, the air warmed.

It was harmony, he realized, not mere coincidence of blood, but a trinity of pulse and flame. The rhythm beneath the stone mirrored the rhythm beneath their ribs. The Heartstone did not echo them. It answered them.

The scholar in him reached instinctively for explanation.

But the longer he stood there, the more those thoughts felt pale and human, fragments of language meant for things smaller than this.

It was not inheritance.

It was recurrence.

Three lives, one soul.

Not copies, not accidents, but facets of the same fire reborn through her blood.

The legacy Rhaenyra had spoken of was not lineage, it was continuation.

He knelt, lowering the lantern toward the floor. The flame bent toward the pulsing gold, the air whispering against his ears like a prayer half-remembered.

The old Valyrians had written that creation began not with word or will, but with rhythm, the heartbeat of the First Flame echoing in the void.

The Fourteen, they said, had shaped that rhythm into form, dividing it among themselves so that no single god would wield it alone.

And now… three children born of promise, beating in perfect time with the Heartstone of Dragonstone itself.

Vaegon’s throat tightened.

He did not mean to speak aloud, but the words left him anyway, a murmur meant for no one but the mountain and the echo of his own disbelief.

“Aemon,” he said quietly, as though naming him might summon light. “The eldest. The quiet one. Always watching.”

His fingers twitched against the lantern’s handle. “He stares at flame as if he knows what it’s saying. I’ve seen him trace the air with his hands, patterns, invisible, deliberate...as though he’s reading something the rest of us cannot see.”

He swallowed, turning his gaze to the next flicker of gold. “Aenar,” he whispered. “Wild as the tide. He laughs when storms come. Once, he ran into the surf and the sea bent around him, as though unwilling to strike.”

Vaegon’s voice broke into a small, incredulous laugh. “I thought it trick of wind, then. Fool that I was.”

The third pulse shimmered faintly beneath the stone. 

“And Aemma…” He hesitated, the words trembling on his tongue. “Gods forgive me, I do not know if I can speak of her without sounding mad. There is light in her eyes that does not belong to flame or sun. Two colors, shifting, as though she carries day and dusk together.” He closed his eyes, whispering to the dark. “She hums sometimes. Just a sound soft, tuneless. But when she does, the air moves. Candles flicker. The dragons still their wings.”

The words faltered. He pressed a shaking hand to the floor. The stone was still warm.

“They are not gods,” he said at last, almost pleading. “They cannot be.”

But the glow beneath his palm pulsed again, three beats, perfectly synchronized.

“Then what are you?” he asked, voice barely audible. “What have you become, little ones?”

The question hung unanswered, absorbed by the cavern’s wholeness. 

A shiver took him.

He could see them now, grown in his mind’s eye, their eyes catching the sun like prisms, their laughter making dragons stir in their sleep. What happens when the world realizes what they are?

Rhaenyra’s warning rang in his ears, her voice low, trembling with power.
They are mine. My children. They will not be studied.

And gods help him, he believed her.

“She would burn the world for them,” he murmured. “And perhaps the world would deserve it.”

The flame in his lantern wavered, but did not go out.

He started to leave, but after a few steps he looked back one last time.

That was when he saw it, half-buried in the shadowed edge of the space, where the lantern’s reach thinned to a soft, dying glow.

A chest.

Large, black, and carved so intricately that for a moment he mistook it for part of the stone itself. The designs crawled across its surface like veins of obsidian lace, dragons coiled around runes, their wings folding into one another until the lines blurred between beast and flame.

Vaegon lifted the lantern slightly.

Gold spilled across its lid, catching on a single inlay of red glass, shaped like an eye. 

He frowned, stepping closer.

The carvings were Valyrian, but old...older than any he had studied in the Citadel’s vaults. Some of the sigils had been half-worn by time, others preserved so sharply they might have been cut yesterday.

There was no lock. Only a clasp fashioned like twin serpents biting each other’s tails.

Vaegon simply stared. Every instinct he possessed (scholar, priest, man) warred between curiosity and dread.

He knew it would strain his weathered back, knew he’d curse himself for it before morning, but still he stooped, slid his hands beneath the base, and dragged. The chest was heavier than stone, its weight uneven.

The scraping echoed up the tunnel walls, a sound too much like a groan.

By the time he reached the stair that wound toward his chambers, sweat streaked his temples.

He paused once, glancing back toward the direction of darkness.

Something tugged within and for the briefest instant he thought he heard it—

a sound not quite a heartbeat, not quite a whisper, but something in between.

Three breaths.

One rhythm.

And beneath it all, the faintest echo of laughter.

He did not look back again.

The castle had gone still by the time Vaegon reached his rooms. The corridors were dim and cool, the kind of silence that felt watched.

He dragged the chest near the hearth, carefully despite his pain. 

He had just begun to unroll a blank sheet of parchment when the latch turned.

Daemon entered without ceremony.

No knock, no greeting.

The prince’s hair was loose, his tunic unbuttoned at the throat, the faint sheen of wine and smoke about him. Under one arm he carried a leather-bound journal blackened at the edges; in the other hand, a bottle of dark Dornish red.

He shut the door behind him with his boot and crossed the room as though it belonged to him.

Without asking leave, he sat opposite Vaegon, pulled two goblets from the shelf, and poured. The red wine caught the candlelight like spilled blood.

Vaegon blinked, too weary to protest. “To what do I owe this invasion?”

Daemon’s mouth curved faintly. “To sleeplessness,” he said. “And to the company of the only man on this cursed rock who might understand what we saw.”

He pushed one goblet toward Vaegon, then set the journal down between them. Its leather was cracked and warm to the touch.

“Visenya’s,” Daemon said simply.

Vaegon’s chest nearly caved. “You brought it.”

“I did,” Daemon replied, leaning back in the chair. He raised his cup in a mock toast. “To old ghosts and inconvenient truths.”

They drank.

The wine was sharp and smoky, the taste of burnt cherries and iron.

For a while they said nothing. The only sound was the faint hiss of wax dripping down the candle’s side.

When Vaegon finally spoke, his voice was low. “She was not lying, was she?”

Daemon’s eyes flicked toward him over the rim of his cup. “About Tyraxes?”

“About all of it.”

Daemon set the cup down with care. “No,” he said after a moment. “She wasn’t.”

Vaegon’s fingers tightened around the stem of his goblet. “You saw her face. She believes every word she spoke.”

“I saw her bleed,” Daemon said quietly. “Belief doesn’t matter. The mountain believes for her.”

Vaegon turned the goblet in his hand, watching the wine catch the light like a liquid ember. “The mountain believes,” he repeated softly, almost to himself. “Strange thought.”

Daemon poured again before answering.

They drank.

The second swallow bit harder. The taste of smoke lingered in the back of the throat, metallic, faintly sweet.

Daemon exhaled through his nose, a rough sound that could have been a laugh or a sigh. “You’ve spent your life chasing the bones of old gods, Uncle. Tell me, what does a man do when he finds one breathing?”

Vaegon studied him. “He stops calling himself a man, I suspect.”

Daemon huffed a laugh at that, bitter and brief.

He tipped his cup again, draining half in one swallow.

The firelight carved deep lines along his mouth, turning the curve of it into something half feral, half tired.

Daemon’s gaze drifted toward the window slit, where the sea wind pressed faintly against the glass. “I knew it,” he murmured, almost to the night. “Gods help me, I think I always did.”

Vaegon frowned. “Knew what?”

Daemon’s hand stilled on the cup. “Laenor,” he said quietly. “That he could not perform the act required of him.”

Vaegon looked up, uncertain. “Could not?”

Daemon’s mouth curved, but there was no humor in it. “He fears a woman’s heat,” he said. “Would rather cross swords with his squires than lie between her thighs.”

He took a long drink, the motion slow and deliberate. “It isn’t hatred, mind you. Just disinterest. The flesh unnerves him. The softness. He’d sooner bleed than bed.”

The words hung there, coarse, matter-of-fact, spoken without venom. Only the faintest trace of pity lingered in his tone, a rare ghost of it

He reached for the bottle again, but Vaegon was quicker, pouring for him instead. The wine caught the air like blood turned to vapor.

Daemon drank. Harder this time.

“And yet the babes came,” he said, the words soft, disbelieving. “Three of them. Perfect. Whole. Bright as new-forged steel.”

He leaned forward, elbows braced on his knees, the cup hanging loose in one hand. “I thought perhaps it was fortune. A rare gift from the gods to a barren house. But then—” He stopped, exhaled, and looked at Vaegon with something like fear in his eyes. “Then they opened their eyes.”

Vaegon’s brow furrowed. “You saw it too.”

“I did,” Daemon said. “All of it. The light. The stillness. The way the air changed. You don’t look upon that and think man made this. You look upon it and think—” He broke off, the words failing.

Vaegon finished for him, voice barely above a whisper. “This made man.”

The silence that followed was longer this time, heavier.

Daemon leaned back slowly, the candlelight catching in his eyes like sparks behind smoke. He exhaled, low and humorless. “We always said Targaryens were closer to gods than men,” he murmured. “I used to think it was vanity. A story we told ourselves to forget we were still flesh.”

Vaegon tipped the bottle and poured again. The wine gleamed darkly between them, thick and red as old blood.

“And now?” he asked.

Daemon turned the cup in his hand before drinking. “Now,” he said, voice roughened by smoke and something older, “I’m starting to think it was prophecy.”

The air between them flickered with the candle’s wisp, thin ribbons of gold stretching across the table.

Vaegon broke the silence first. “If that’s true, then what she’s done isn’t heresy.”

Daemon’s mouth curved faintly. “No,” he said. “It’s inheritance.”

Vaegon considered him over the rim of his goblet. “And if the blood of gods runs in her children, Daemon, what does that make you?”

“Jealous,” he said, and didn’t reach for the cup.

The honesty startled them both.

Vaegon’s gaze softened. “You envy her.”

“I envy the certainty,” Daemon said. “The way the world bends for her and calls it fate.” He leaned back, eyes flicking toward the fire. “I’ve spent my life fighting to be seen as more than a shadow of what our blood once was. She simply… is.”

Vaegon studied him quietly. “And yet, you love her for it.”

Daemon didn’t deny it.

His thumb brushed the rim of his cup. “How could I not? I’ve watched her walk through fire and come out changed, and still call herself human.”

Vaegon’s expression changed, less maester now, more man. “You speak of her as if you saw the gods touch her.”

Daemon’s eyes met his. “Perhaps I did.”

They drank again.

The wine dulled the edges of fear and sharpened understanding.

“You’re not a believer,” Vaegon said after a moment.

“No,” Daemon replied, his voice low. “But I’ve seen enough to know belief doesn’t matter.”

Vaegon’s fingers tightened around his cup. “You think she’s beyond us.”

“I think,” Daemon said, “that we’re all standing too close to something holy, and pretending we don’t feel the heat.”

The words settled between them like embers.

For the first time, Vaegon looked at him not as a prince or a threat, but as a man haunted by the same vision. “You and I,” he said softly, “we will never be believed.”

Daemon’s mouth twisted. “Then let that be our mercy.”

Vaegon’s answering smile was small, weary, true. “A secret shared between the sinner and the scholar.”

Daemon raised his cup. “To sin, then.”

Vaegon clinked his against it. “To scholarship.”

The sound rang low, almost tender.

They drank together this time, no mockery in it, only quiet kinship, the first honest communion either had known in years.

Daemon shifted, meaning to stand, but something caught the corner of his vision, something dark, unmoving, half-shadowed by the desk.

He frowned. “That wasn’t here before.”

Vaegon followed his gaze.

The chest sat near the hearth where he had left it, black and gleaming faintly in the firelight, the red glass eye burning low and dull as if watching. The twin serpents at the clasp seemed to shimmer when the flames leaned close.

Daemon rose and crossed the room, cup still in hand. He set it down beside the chest and crouched, tracing a thumb along one of the carvings. “Valyrian,” he said quietly. “Old work. Not court-made. What is this?”

“It was in the altar chamber,” Vaegon replied. His voice was steady, but his eyes were fixed on the thing as though afraid it might move. “Half-buried in the stone. I nearly missed it. It blended into the walls as if the mountain itself had grown around it.”

Daemon glanced up at him. “You brought it here?”

“Couldn’t leave it there.”

“Why?”

Vaegon hesitated, then poured the last of the wine into his cup. “Because it was warm,” he said simply. 

Daemon’s brow furrowed. “And you don’t know what’s in it?”

“I’ve not opened it,” Vaegon said. “Not yet.”

Daemon’s mouth curved faintly, half amusement, half challenge. “You mean to tell me you dragged a cursed Valyrian chest through half a mountain and didn’t so much as lift the lid?”

Vaegon looked at him over the rim of his cup. “I’m a scholar, not a fool.”

Daemon huffed a laugh, low and rough. “You’re a coward, old man.”

“Perhaps,” Vaegon allowed. Then, after a heartbeat: “But I think you and I are drunk enough to find out which of us is right.”

Their eyes met across the room; Daemon’s glinting with reckless curiosity, Vaegon’s shining with the grim resolve of a man who already regretted his own courage.

The fire popped, a soft crack splitting the silence.

Daemon reached for the clasp.

Both men leaned forward.

The first thing they saw was the glint of metal, not dull or rusted but sleeping, as if flame still lingered in its veins. Valyrian steel. Daggers, short blades, a slender sword folded with ripples that caught the light like dark water.

Daemon’s hand hovered over one of the blades, its edge blackened with time but uncorrupted. “Gods,” he murmured. “I’ve never seen patterning like this. Even Dark Sister doesn’t sing like that.”

Vaegon bent closer, the scholar overtaking the priest. “Each piece is different,” he noted, his voice low, measured. “The tempering marks, see here, these lines..."

“Valyria?”

“Yes,” Vaegon whispered. “The city before it burned.”

They moved the weapons carefully aside.

Beneath them lay adornments, rings and armlets etched with dragon sigils, scales of red and gold, and stones the likes of which neither had ever seen.

Some gleamed like frozen lightning; others shimmered between hues, shifting like oil on water.

Daemon picked one up, turning it in the firelight. 

“You could buy a kingdom with this,” Vaegon said. “But I don’t think that’s what they were for.”

He lifted a small cuff from the pile, engraved in High Valyrian script, worn but legible. He read it under his breath, the syllables rough from disuse:

“For the line that endures through ash and flame.”

Daemon frowned. “An heirloom?”

“Or a promise,” Vaegon said quietly.

They dug further.

More trinkets, yes, coins stamped with dragons devouring their own tails, their edges sharp as razors, square and heavy.

Not minted for trade, but for offering.

Daemon brushed his thumb over one, the gold soft from age. “Old Valyrian coinage,” he said. “Lost even before the Freehold fell. Worth more in lore than gold.”

Vaegon nodded absently.

His attention had caught on something deeper in the chest: a bundle of cloth, its silk turned brittle with time. He lifted it gently, and something small slipped free, a scroll, sealed with black wax imprinted by a dragon’s wing.

He broke it carefully.

The parchment unfurled with a sigh, the ink dark as blood and fine as thread.

When Vaegon began to read, his voice faltered once before steadying quieting. The echo of a father long dead speaking across centuries.

To my beloved daughter, Daenys. 

If you are reading this, then the fire has already come for all I could not save.

I have no gift worthy of your sight. What I leave here is only what my trembling hands could steal from the ruins of our home before the end. Steel, gold, stone. Things that fade. But you, my heart, you are the thing that endures.

You saw what I would not.

You spoke, and I doubted. Yet every breath since has proven your truth. I am shamed by my disbelief, and awed by your courage.

Know this, Daenys: I have trusted you above Gods, above priests, above my own reason. You are the true heir of our house, not through blood or name, but through vision.

Keep these relics.

Guard them for those who will come after you, for the children who will inherit your sight. They will need reminders of what we were before the Doom, and proof that even in destruction, we endured.

If flame must take us, let it remember your name and spare those born from your dreams.

I love you beyond the fire, my daughter.

—Aenar Targaryen, who fled the gods to follow his child.

Daemon sat very still, his expression unreadable, eyes caught in the flicker of the hearth.
“‘Who fled the gods to follow his child,’” he repeated softly. “A father’s love.”

Vaegon nodded, his throat tight. “And her vindication.”

The letter lay open between them, its edges trembling faintly in the rising heat. The words, centuries old, seemed to shimmer as though ink and fire still shared the same breath.

Vaegon’s gaze drifted back to the chest. “He didn’t just leave her relics,” he murmured. “He left her a life.”

Daemon looked down again, and for the first time he saw the careful order beneath the chaos. Each object had been chosen, placed, and preserved, not as hoard, but as inheritance.

There were weapons enough to guard a small house: daggers light as air, a sword forged for a hand smaller than his own, its hilt wrapped in pale leather untouched by time.

Jewels, yes, but not for barter.

They were adornments fit for queens and conquerors, tokens of sovereignty and faith.

And below them, stacks of gold coins.

The wealth of a dozen noble lines, untouched. A kingdom’s ransom.

Daemon exhaled. “He made certain our line would never need bow to another.”

“He gave her freedom,” Vaegon said quietly. “Fortune enough to build anew when the world burned behind her. Tools to defend herself. Books to remember. Gifts to remind her she was more than what was lost.”

He touched one of the bracelets, a cuff of gold etched with fire curling into the shape of wings. “He meant her to live grandly,” Vaegon went on. “To rebuild the glory of what they were, not in temples, but in flesh. In family.”

Daemon’s voice lowered. “He built her a dynasty before she ever set foot on this cursed rock.”

Vaegon’s lips curved faintly, bittersweet. “And she did. His dreamer made dragons sing again.”

The fire caught in the black glass eye of the chest, and for an instant it seemed to breathe slow, deliberate, like a sleeping thing rousing in its sleep.

Daemon glanced toward it, unease flickering in his eyes. “It feels like he’s still watching.”

“Perhaps he is,” Vaegon murmured. “He fled the gods to follow his child. Perhaps, even in death, he never stopped.”

They drank again, neither bothering to measure.

The wine was near gone, the dregs thick and sweet. It burned down clean and left warmth behind, the kind that loosens tongues and steadies convictions.

The crackle of the hearth filled the silence, and the chest’s faint gleam painted the chamber in molten hues of gold and red.

Daemon set his cup down hard enough to make the coins within the chest shiver. “He believed in her,” he said, his voice roughened by wine and something older. “Enough to damn himself, if need be.”

Vaegon nodded. “And in her blood that belief endures. It endures in us. In her heirs.”

Daemon gave a low, humorless laugh. “Yes. We forget, don’t we? How much of the world is still afraid of what we are.”

“Afraid,” Vaegon said, “and envious.” He looked into the fire. “We are all that remains of a people who could shape flame into thought. Who could teach dragons to bow.”

The silence stretched again, but it had changed timbre, no longer heavy with awe, but thrumming with something sharper, prouder.

Daemon leaned back in his chair, eyes distant.

“The blood of Valyria,” he whispered. “Still burning, no matter how many centuries pass.”

Vaegon raised his cup one last time. “Then let it burn bright enough that no one forgets who we are.”

They drank.

The wine was gone, the bottle hollow.

But the fire seemed to grow stronger, licking up the hearthstone, throwing long shadows that danced like banners.

Their eyes met, the same realization sparking in both: the chest, the letter, the heartbeat beneath the mountain, they were pieces of the same inheritance.

Daemon exhaled slowly, a half-smile curling his mouth. “Perhaps we’ve been asking the wrong questions.”

Vaegon’s hand lifted to touch Visenya’s journal, his expression alight with a strange, sober clarity. “Then let’s start asking the right ones.”

For the first time that night, the weariness left his face.

In its place bloomed something else, purpose, fierce and lucid, as though the very blood in his veins had remembered its name.

Daemon leaned forward, firelight cutting across his face like a blade. “We find out what she saw. What they bled for. What still waits beneath this rock.”

Vaegon nodded once. “For the sake of our line.”

Daemon nodded once, something like respect flickering across his face. Then, together, they leaned toward the waiting dark.

And for the first time in centuries, the blood of old Valryia agreed with itself. 

---

The morning found them before dawn, unsteady and sleepless, the sea air sharp enough to sting the wine from their veins.

Daemon’s hair was loose, his eyes bloodshot but bright, the kind of tired that sharpens rather than dulls. He’d never gone to bed. The hour had dragged him forward instead, and he’d brought Vaegon with him, half out of curiosity, half out of a need he could not name.

The nursery was dim, the hearth low, its light gilding the carved dragons along the cradle’s edge. Outside, the gulls had not yet begun to scream; the world was still suspended in that fragile quiet before the day’s first cry.

And there they were.

The triplets.

Aemon sat upright against a pillow fortress, solemn as a king, his pale hair sticking up in wild tufts. Aenar had escaped the nest entirely, crawling, stumbling, determined...and Aemma lay on her back watching dust motes drift, giggling every time one landed close enough to chase with her hand.

But they were not alone.

Across the room, two smaller cradles stood by the window where the sea light crept in. In each lay Baela and Rhaena, their swaddled forms indistinguishable but for the faint curl of hair that glimmered silver-lavender in the half light.

They slept soundly, the fragile rhythm of mortal babies untouched by prophecy or fear.

Two nurses lingered nearby, whispering softly, their presence careful but restless. They straightened as Daemon entered.

He didn’t need to speak loudly.

“Leave us,” he said, the quiet command carrying weight enough to fill the room.

The women hesitated only a moment, long enough for one to glance toward the cradles,  then curtsied low and slipped out, closing the door behind them with care.

Daemon exhaled, the silence that followed feeling heavier, more honest.

“Strange,” he murmured, almost to himself. “Five of them, and not a one sleeps when I do.”

Vaegon said nothing. His gaze was already fixed on the triplets, on the way their small bodies seemed to hum with something just beyond sound.

Daemon moved closer, boots soft against the rug, and glanced down at the infants in their twin cradles. The light from the hearth caught their faces, Baela’s little brow furrowed in sleep, Rhaena’s mouth forming a soft ‘o’ as she dreamed.

For a long moment he only looked at them, the hardness in his expression easing by degrees.

“My beautiful girls,” he whispered.

He bent, brushing a strand of silver-lavender hair from Baela’s cheek, then kissed the crowns of their heads, first one, then the other, careful not to wake them. His fingers lingered a moment longer, tracing the warmth of their skin as if to reassure himself they were real.

Then he breathed them in.

It was instinct more than thought, that need to memorize the scent of what was his. Milk and clean linen. Smoke from the hearth. The faint salt of the sea that clung to everything on Dragonstone. And beneath it all, something softer.

He closed his eyes briefly, the smallest of smiles flickering across his mouth. “You smell like peace,” he murmured, half to himself. “That’s how I know you’re real.”

Vaegon looked up from where he stood, the words striking deeper than he expected. He said nothing. There was no language for that kind of tenderness, the quiet, bewildered love of a man who had learned violence first and mercy after.

Daemon lingered another heartbeat, fingertips resting against the cradle’s edge.

Then he straightened, voice rougher now. “Sleep well, my girls,” he said. “The world will wake soon enough.”

Behind him, Aemma let out a delighted shriek, and Aenar began his wobbly march toward the cradle, determined to see what had captured his attention.

Daemon turned, eyes bright with something warmer than the fire. “And here they come,” he said softly. “The other half of the tempest.”

Aenar reached him first, half-crawling, half-falling, laughter spilling out in small bursts of sound. Daemon caught him easily beneath the arms and lifted him high, earning another breathless squeal.

“There’s the bold one,” he said, spinning the boy once before settling him against his hip. “Always first to the fight.”

Aemon followed, steady as ever, crawling with deliberate patience until he sat beside Daemon’s boot and looked up, curious, unblinking, his tiny hands resting on the leather as though testing its weight.

Aemma trailed last, small palms slapping the rug, her curls wild and her grin wide as dawn.

Daemon chuckled. “Ah, the little court of chaos.” He crouched low so they could all see his face. “Come then. You’ve met dragons and maesters, but not your cousins.”

Vaegon raised a brow, watching him with quiet fascination as Daemon shifted to sit cross-legged on the rug.

Aenar squirmed until he could perch on his thigh; Aemma clambered straight into his lap; Aemon, with grave determination, crawled closer and rested his hand on Daemon’s knee.

Daemon turned them slightly toward the cradles, his voice softening to something near reverence. “Look there,” he murmured. “Baela. Rhaena. Your blood. Your kin.”

The triplets’ heads turned as one, drawn by some invisible thread. The twins slept on, their tiny chests rising and falling in unison, faint curls gleaming pale gold in the hearthlight.

Aemma tilted her head, cooing softly.

Aemon reached out, fingers curling open and closed, uncertain.

Aenar, ever bold, made a pleased noise and leaned forward, reaching as though to touch.

“Gentle,” Daemon said quickly, catching the boy’s wrist before he could grab a blanket. His tone, though firm, was gentle enough to make Aenar blink and sit back with a grunt of confusion.

Daemon's lips curved, brushing a thumb over the boy’s hand. “You’ll have time to teach them mischief, little dragon. Let them dream for now.”

But mischief, it seemed, did not wait for permission.

Aenar’s gaze drifted from the cradles to Vaegon, who was kneeling a little apart, quill already in hand. The maester’s lips moved silently as he scribbled, his eyes darting between the children, noting every twitch and hum. He muttered half to himself: “Triplets demonstrate synchronized gaze response, possible auditory alignment… fascinating—”

Daemon caught the flicker of movement too late.

Aenar turned, his crawl more confident now, and began his determined march toward his next quarry: the shiny links of Vaegon’s chain.

“Gods,” Daemon muttered under his breath, suppressing a grin. “There he goes.”

Vaegon didn’t notice.

His head tilted, completely absorbed by the soft glow that seemed to follow the triplets’ breath. “Even their shadows move in rhythm,” he whispered, awestruck. “As if one spirit animates three bodies—”

Aenar reached him in that moment, small hands slapping softly against the rug. He paused only long enough to gauge distance, then lunged with surprising accuracy, seizing a fistful of chain and yanking.

Vaegon jolted, quill flying, parchment crumpling under his knee. “Seven hells—!”

The child let out a delighted squeal, tugging harder, the chain ringing faintly in the still air.

Daemon burst into laughter, a low, unguarded sound that filled the room. 

Vaegon, flustered and half-laughing himself, tried to disentangle the little fingers. “Aenar, release that at once. That’s an instrument of learning, not a plaything—”

Aenar only grinned, unrepentant, his small face alight with mischief.

Aemma’s delighted giggle joined his, and even Aemon crawled closer, solemnly observing the chaos like a silent judge.

The maester choked out a startled sound. “He’s strangling me!”

Daemon laughed harder, shoulders shaking. “Careful, boy, that one’s an old relic. If he cracks, the Citadel will send an army.”

Aenar babbled in response, a jumble of half-formed syllables, nonsense strung with conviction — "Va-va! Raah!” — as though he were reciting an ancient curse only he understood. His tiny hands fisted tighter, delighted by the maester’s sputtering protest.

Vaegon finally pried at the fingers, managing to gasp, “Release, young Prince.....respect your elders—”

The child only giggled louder, as though mocking him.

“Do you hear this?” Vaegon said between breaths, looking up in exasperation at Daemon, whose grin showed no sign of fading. “I am being publicly humiliated by a one-year-old.”

Daemon wiped a tear from his eye, voice warm with amusement. “Then you’ve just met your match. He’s got your temperament already, takes the world by the throat and refuses to let go.”

At last, Vaegon managed to slip the chain free. Aenar flopped back, triumphant, clutching one of the lower links in victory.

Vaegon adjusted his robes, regaining his breath and dignity with visible effort.

“Young prince,” he began in his most authoritative tone, “this—” he tapped the chain, “—represents years of rigorous study and service. Each link forged through toil and sacrifice. It is not for tugging.”

Aenar blinked up at him, utterly unmoved. Then he babbled again, “Va-va!” and reached for it anew.

Vaegon sighed. “So much for higher learning.”

He didn’t notice the door open behind him.

Rhaenyra leaned against the frame, her hair unbound, eyes bright despite the early hour. Beside her stood Laena, arms folded loosely, a faint smile curving her lips.

Neither spoke at first. They simply watched, the two men seated on the rug, surrounded by chaos incarnate.

Daemon sat cross-legged, hair a tousled silver halo, half-laughing, half trying to keep Aenar from launching himself at Vaegon again. The maester, red-faced but still dignified, was valiantly attempting to recover his chain, now firmly in the boy’s grasp.

Aemon and Aemma, however, had chosen new curiosities.

Aemon crawled toward Vaegon’s inkwell, which the maester had foolishly set nearby and began smacking his palm against the lid with grave concentration. Aemma, delighted by the sound, followed close behind, babbling gleefully. When the lid finally came loose, Vaegon reached too late.

“Oh, gods—no—no, don’t—!”

Too late. Aemma’s tiny hand plunged straight into the inkwell. She giggled, fascinated, then promptly brought her blue-stained fingers to her mouth.

Vaegon exclaimed, horrified, reaching for a cloth. “Princess! No, no, that is not sustenance!”

Daemon was laughing so hard he could barely speak. “I warned you they bite. Didn’t say what.”

Laena stifled a laugh against her sleeve. “You could intervene,” she murmured to Rhaenyra.

“I could,” Rhaenyra said softly, eyes dancing. “But then he’d never learn.”

Vaegon was now caught between rescuing his chain from Aenar and prying the inkwell from Aemma, who had decided its contents were a grand discovery. “Aemon, no, you don’t need to assist her—” he protested as the boy solemnly crawled closer to inspect the damage.

Rhaenyra’s smile grew despite herself. “They’re curious,” she said quietly. “Always have been.”

Laena glanced at her, something fond and knowing in her voice. “Like their mother.”

Daemon looked up at them, hair falling into his eyes. The smile that caught him softened when he saw them standing there, Rhaenyra’s knowing calm, Laena’s quiet amusement, the faint sunlight painting both their faces gold.

“My ladies,” Vaegon said, horrified. “You’ve come to witness the first act of my downfall.”

Rhaenyra stepped into the room, her voice light but edged with affection. “You’ve survived worse.”

“Barely,” Vaegon muttered, peeling Aemma’s ink-stained fingers from his sleeve. “And I fear the worst is barely a year old.”

Aemma squealed at the sound of his voice and reached for his beard, delighted by its texture. Aemon, ever serious, examined the dark ink on his own fingers and pressed them to Vaegon’s robe as if signing some ancient decree.

Laena knelt beside Rhaenyra, laughter hidden in her hand. “They’ve claimed him,” she said softly. “Poor man never stood a chance.”

Rhaenyra’s gaze lingered on them all, Daemon, Vaegon, and the tangle of small, shining bodies around them. The sight disarmed her more deeply than any dream of prophecy. It was chaos, yes, but alive, warm, theirs.

Aemma turned toward her then, inky hands raised like an offering. “Muna!” she squealed, the word imperfect but clear enough to pierce through everything.

"My heart," Rhaenyra crossed the rug, knelt, and gathered Aemma into her arms.

The ink smeared across her sleeve, dark against her pale gown, but she didn’t care. She kissed the top of her daughter’s head, breathing her in, ink, milk, warmth, life.

Laena moved quietly as Rhaenyra soothed her daughter. The soft rustle of her skirts stirred the air. She crossed to the window where the twin cradles stood and bent over them, brushing her fingers along the curve of each small cheek.

Rhaena stirred first, her tiny hand curling in sleep. Baela followed, fussing faintly, her little face screwing up in protest of the changing light.

“Hush now,” Laena murmured, her voice low and melodic. “The day’s barely begun, and already the world is too loud.”

She lifted Baela into her arms with the practiced grace of a mother who knew fragility by feel alone. The babe squirmed, then quieted as Laena began to hum, a soft, rhythmic sound that carried through the room like a thread of warmth.

The others stilled, even the triplets.

The hum seemed to soothe something larger than their small hearts, the pulse of the chamber itself eased in time with her song.

Vaegon found himself frozen, watching.

Aemma sat on Rhaenyra’s lap, chattering contentedly as she smeared ink across her mother’s sleeve. Aenar, still red-cheeked from laughter, had climbed back into Daemon’s lap, tugging at his hair with fierce affection.

Aemon was curled beside Vaegon himself, his little hand pressed over his rings as though comparing the gleam.

And over by the hearth, Laena rocked the newborns, her song folding through the light like something eternal.

It struck Vaegon then, the truth of it, sudden and quiet.

They were gods, yes.

He could feel it in the hum of the air, the faint heat that radiated from their skin, the way their shadows seemed to bend slightly toward each other. But they were also this: ink-stained hands, milk-sweet breath, laughter and shrieks and hunger and fear.

Mortal things.

Fragile things.

Children.

Real children.

He sank to a chair before he realized he’d moved, his chain still askew, his notes forgotten on the floor. The smell of smoke and salt filled his lungs, grounding him in the moment.

Daemon glanced his way, still smiling faintly as Aenar babbled against his shoulder. “What’s that look, maester?” he asked. “You look as if you’ve seen a miracle.”

Vaegon’s voice was soft, unguarded. “Perhaps I have.”

---

The Red Keep had a new pulse now. 

Even at dusk, the corridors hummed with soft, breathless voices; ladies, pages, even guards speaking of Dragonstone as if it were holy ground.

Since the unveiling, nothing else had meaning.

They were perfect, said the courtiers, divinely perfect.

The court’s painters could not labor swiftly enough. Studios once reserved for portraits of kings were now crowded with sketches of Rhaenyra's children. Three halos of silver hair and mismatched eyes that defied pigment and patience alike.

They learned new failures: pearl that refused Aemon’s pallor; seawash that dulled on Aenar’s skin; and for Aemma, no pigment at all...only gold leaf that read as bruise beside her.

Three studios offered a purse to the first painter who could catch the glimmer on the girl’s skin without leaf or lacquer; none could.

Some swore it was magic. Others, trick of the blood.

And Alicent could not silence it.

From dawn till dusk, she heard their names on every tongue; softly worshipped, spoken as prayer, as omen.

The worst of all came from the way they spoke of Aemon Velaryon. 

They called Aemon an omen, a correction of a wound. No one had called her son Aegon anything but trouble.

The likeness to Rhaenys’s father was too precise to be natural, too exact to be coincidence. A gift, they said. A sign. As though the gods themselves had seen fit to correct the wound done to that line.

A wound that had once been her husband’s to heal.

Now, it was his joy to forget.

The court loved him for it, loved the boy who would never be hers, who carried in his silver blood the answer to every doubt ever whispered about the Princess’s worth.

Viserys fed their worship with open hands and tear-bright eyes.

He sent gifts each week: robes of Valyrian crimson, carved dragonets of Myrish ivory, golden rattles shaped like crowns. He spoke of hiring the city’s finest artisans to craft toys worthy of “the heirs of fire and tide.”

He was a man reborn, drunk on his daughter’s triumph, blind to all else.

He called it love.

Alicent called it betrayal.

She watched him from the Queen’s solar as he pored over sketches of the infants’ likenesses, his hands trembling not with age but devotion. The same hands that had once trembled for her, when she had been young and soft and still believed that piety and patience might win her peace.

Now, she could not even recall the sound of his voice when it spoke her name with warmth.

He had none left for her. All his gentleness had been given away, to the daughter who had defied him. 

The Realm’s Heart, they called the girl.

And what was left for the Queen, then, if not the hollow ribs of the realm’s body?

Her sons, her blood, stood forgotten in the shadow of Rhaenyra's brood. 

She pressed her palms to the sill and watched the sunset bleed over the city, the air thick with incense from the sept below.

In the days that followed, the court learned to measure their words around her. Compliments offered too freely to the Princess or her children curdled mid-sentence beneath the Queen’s gaze. A single glance from her could still still a hall; the polite laughter of ladies died in their throats, and even the bolder knights found new fascination with their goblets.

At ladies court, usually held by the Queen, though Rhaenyra held it lately, all gossip returned right back to Dragonstone.

Alicent sat at its center, emerald silk gleaming like drawn glass. Her smile was a measured thing, precise as a blade’s edge.

Fans fluttered like wings of dying birds. Two taps meant dissent. A slow half-open; pity. The room shimmered with both.

Lady Tully of Riverrun was the first to speak of Dragonstone, her voice low and cultured, the accent of the riverlands giving her words a lyrical rise. “The court grows ever brighter, Your Grace,” she said. “The Princess’s little ones are wondrous to behold. The kind of beauty that can’t be taught, only inherited.”

The phrasing was immaculate, the bow of her head polite. But the note beneath was unmistakable.

Lady Myrielle Lannister, daughter to Ser Martyn of the Lannisport Lannisters, cousin to the Lord of Casterly Rock, seated nearby, let out a light laugh. “Inherited, indeed. Some bloodlines are generous, are they not? Fire, salt, dragons.” She toyed idly with her goblet, eyes glimmering over its rim. “One wonders what might bloom from such alchemy.”

Alicent’s needle paused mid-stitch. She did not look up. “Alchemy,” she repeated softly. “A dangerous word, my lady. It tempts fools to believe they can turn lead into gold.”

Myrielle’s smile deepened, sensing the current shift. “And yet gold endures, does it not? Even melted, it shines.”

“Until it cools,” Alicent murmured. “Then it cracks.”

A ripple of laughter moved through the court, polite, uneasy.

Lady Tully inclined her head, unruffled. “Still, one must admit, the Princess’s children have stirred the realm. The court has not spoken so fondly of heirs since the Conqueror’s day. I daresay the Riverlords themselves will send gifts. My lord husband insists that such children could heal old divisions.”

Alicent lifted her gaze, green eyes gleaming beneath the soft fall of lashes. “How gracious of Riverrun to offer healing for wounds it once helped make.”

The room held its airs. 

Lady Tully’s smile did not falter. “Age brings reflection, Your Grace. The river flows where it must.”

“Even when the current drags the silt of past sins?” Alicent asked gently. “I imagine it must make the water… murky.”

A flicker crossed Lady Tully’s eyes, faint as the ripple of a disturbed pool. Around them, the other women went still, feigning distraction behind jeweled fans.

Lady Myrielle broke the silence first, her voice bright as a blade in sunlight. “And yet murky waters feed the richest fields. You’ll forgive me, Your Grace, if I’ve always preferred the taste of wine to water.”

Alicent’s lips curved faintly. “Oh, I believe that.” She turned a little, as though confiding to the room. “It’s said the lions of the Rock are most skilled in indulgence. A talent inherited, perhaps. I recall your cousin lord Jason’s fondness for… excess.”

The silence that followed was sharp enough to cut silk.

Myrielle’s smile froze, perfect and brittle. “You flatter my family, Your Grace.”

“Never,” said Alicent sweetly. “I only hope your cousin’s taste for certain… recreations did not pass to the fairer branch of the line.”

The laughter that followed this time was genuine, mean, delighted, hungry.

Myrielle’s eyes flashed.

Lady Tully’s fan stilled, her voice measured. “The Queen’s wit is as precise as her piety. We are fortunate to be its audience.”

Alicent’s gaze flicked to her. “And you, my lady, are too kind. Though kindness, I find, can be the first refuge of those whose virtue no longer draws admiration.”

It was too clean a cut. Too deliberate.

The laughter died at once.

The Queen’s words hung in the air, crystalline and cruel.

Lady Tully’s head lifted, eyes glimmering like the dark of the river in storm. “Then I shall pray my kindness survives longer than admiration, Your Grace.”

When she rose to curtsy, it was a slow, deliberate thing, a bow that felt more like a closing door.

Lady Myrielle followed, her smile restored, the edge hidden again beneath gold. “Your Grace,” she murmured, “may the gods keep you sharp.”

A vase of hothouse roses from Highgarden suffocated the room with sweetness. Alicent later had them taken away, murmuring only, “The scent overwhelms."

When the door finally shut, Alicent set her embroidery aside and pressed her bloodied fingertip to her lips.

She did not realize until later that it was not the needle that had cut her, it was her own words.

By week’s end, it was whispered that House Tully had sent gifts to Dragonstone, “in the spirit of peace and reverence.”

And that Lady Myrielle Lannister had written to her cousin at Casterly Rock, suggesting that “perhaps the future shines brighter in red and black than in green and gold.”

Otto Hightower read both letters in silence and secrecy. 

When he looked up from them, his face was as still as carved stone.

“The Queen,” he said quietly, “has given her enemies their first invitation.”

Alicent still attended every council session, a mere observer of course, her hands folded and her smiles brittle.

When Viserys spoke of sending another gift to Dragonstone, she made a soft sound, too faint to name as dissent, too sharp to be ignored.

“Your Grace is generous indeed,” she murmured, each word dipped in honey that barely masked the acid beneath. “I pray the realm remembers it as you do.”

The King’s quill stilled. A hush rippled through the chamber.

Viserys lifted his gaze, the warmth of it startling in its clarity.

“They will,” he said. “When Aemon sits the Iron Throne as Targaryen, the realm will remember the boy bears the face of our forebears, Alicent. The realm must see that legacy is not broken. That the blood of the dragon endures.”

Her fingers curled tight against her lap, the knuckles white beneath her rings.

Legacy. Endures.

He spoke as though she were not part of it. As though her own sons, her flesh and prayer and suffering, were pale afterthoughts beside that perfect child born of her husband’s defiance.

“Of course,” she said softly, the words splintering like glass in her mouth. “How proud the gods must be.”

But when she rose to leave, the rustle of her gown sounded like the hiss of something shedding its skin.

Criston followed her from the council, his step precise, his expression composed. Yet once the doors closed behind them, his restraint cracked like lacquer.

“The realm’s fool,” he muttered, voice low enough for her alone. “He speaks of bastards as princes and calls it legacy.”

Alicent did not correct him.

“They are not bastards,” she said instead, the words slow, deliberate. “They are monsters.”

Criston’s mouth twisted into something between a smile and a sneer. “Monsters, aye. Gilded things. The boy with eyes like polished gems, the little prince whose skin gleams as though burnished by flame. And the girl…”

His voice lowered. “The girl looks less child than idol. They call her the Realm’s Heart, but I’ve seen hearts torn from bodies. I know what they look like. Gold and red, glistening and raw.”

Alicent’s eyes flicked to him, startled.

Criston did not flinch. “Accidents happen at sea,” he said softly. “Or the fever takes one, then the others follow.” 

Her hand found the ridge of his vambrace.

"Enough."

The metal was warm. She did not remove her hand.

He bowed his head, but the words kept spilling, thick with conviction. “Their light is a lie, my queen. It’s rot wearing a crown of gold. It will spread. Through the realm. Through your sons’ inheritance. Through every fool who calls it holy.”

Alicent’s hands trembled at her sides.

“And what would you have me do?” she whispered.

Criston stepped close enough that she could feel the heat of his armor through the silk of her gown. “Let me protect you,” he said. “Protect us. There are ways to cut out corruption before it blooms.”

For a heartbeat, she almost believed him. The torchlight caught in his eyes, and she thought, just for a moment, that he looked like a man who might kill a god if she asked it of him.

Alicent’s stomach hurt. “Stop,” she said, but the word faltered, uncertain, as if she had forgotten how to command.

Criston’s gaze did not waver. His nearness smelled of iron and salt, of battlefields and prayer. He had been her blade, her shield. Yet now, standing before him, she could not tell which he meant to be.

“You would raise your hand against children,” she said, voice trembling, half accusation, half disbelief.

“Against what they’ll become,” he answered. “Before the realm forgets what is human.”

The words struck her like a blow, not for their cruelty, but for the echo of her own secret thoughts.

How many nights had she lain awake, listening to the wind batter the Red Keep’s walls, hearing the court murmur the names of Rhaenyra’s children as though in prayer?

How many times had she stared into the flames and seen their faces, shining, unearthly, beloved, while her own sons faded like shadows at the edge of a brighter fire?

Her lips parted. “They are babes,” she whispered. “Not yet grown. Not yet… anything.”

“Then the gods have given you mercy,” Criston said. “To act before they are beyond reach.”

She flinched as if struck. “Mercy?”

His hand lifted, not to touch her, not quite, but hovered near her shoulder, the gesture of a knight ready to swear himself anew.

“The Queen must sometimes do what mothers cannot,” he said. “The crown cannot wait for purity to prevail. Purity is carved out of corruption.”

Her eyes closed.

The words sank deep, lodging where fear had lived too long.

She wanted to recoil, from him, from herself, but could not move.

For the first time she understood that he was not asking for permission. He was offering absolution.

And the worst of it, the part that hollowed her to her bones, was how some dark, quiet corner of her heart trembled with relief.

To be rid of them.

The thought came unbidden, cruel in its clarity.

To silence the whispers.

To see her sons restored to the light they had been denied.

To make the world right again, in the way it should have been, before dragons bred miracles and monsters in the same hand sweep. 

A shudder passed through her. “You speak of murder,” she said, voice raw.

“I speak of preservation,” he murmured. “Of order. Of your legacy.”

Her fingers trembled where they gripped her skirts, nails biting through silk. “And if I refuse?”

Criston bowed his head slightly, his voice a rasp of steel. “Then I will wait until the rot reaches your door, and I will cut it away without your leave. But I would rather have your blessing.”

Silence fell deep, terrible.

Outside, the torches along the gallery hissed in the wind.

Alicent turned toward the window, unable to meet his eyes. The city stretched below her, golden and unknowing, its towers glowing in the last light of day. She thought of Rhaenyra’s children, the way their names had become hymns. Aemon, Aenar, Aemma. Perfect syllables. Perfect faces.

Her whisper was barely a sound. “Gods forgive me… I don’t know what I want.”

Criston’s shadow fell beside hers. “You want peace, my queen,” he said. “And peace demands sacrifice.”

He knelt, not in reverence, but readiness.

She pressed the pad of that same finger, still tender from the needle against the window’s cold stone. It left the faintest smear. Proof of a choice she had not yet made and had already begun to bleed for.

Alicent did not bless him.

She also did not say “no.”

Outside, the torches spat in the wind like snakes shedding skin.

Notes:

This chapter is about remembrance and the bones of lore:

Valyrian theology as a living thing. The Heartstone is my “drakon itho vala”, a place where fire thinks, and blood remembers. Rhaenyra’s confession reframes legacy as liturgy; Daemon and Vaegon drink their way into a creed; the nursery reminds us that divinity without tenderness is just heat. If you caught the echo between Aenar’s letter and Alicent’s choice… good.

 

This is where faith, family, and fear start arguing in the same room.

Chapter 17: The Blood of Our Lineage

When Rhaenyra summoned them, the sky above Dragonstone still burned with the last embers of night.

Vaegon came with his books, Daemon with his temper, and between them the chest, heavy, wordless, alive.

Rhaenyra said nothing until they reached the chamber, until the door sealed behind them. Only then did she turn, the firelight catching in her eyes like a god’s reflection.

“Let us decide,” she said, “whether this belongs to our house or to history.”

Rhaenyra slid the top layer aside with the flat of her palm. Steel blinked up at them.

Daemon went first, of course he did.

He didn’t reach like a thief; he approached like a priest. Two fingers on the spine of a dagger, testing temper the way other men test a pulse. The metal thrummed faintly under his touch, an old note he knew by ear alone. Dark Sister had taught him that, how good steel hums before it sings, how it remembers the hand that blooded it.

Another knife lay beneath, leaf-slender, wicked as a whisper. He weighed it in his palm and his mouth tilted, half fondness, half warning. “This one’s for ribs,” he said. “Or prayers.”

Vaegon made a small, scandalized sound. “Please don’t… categorize.”

Daemon didn’t look at him.

His gaze had drifted to Rhaenyra, always to Rhaenyra, and the heat that lived in her eyes when the world gave her something sharp. The urge rose in him, as it always did, to put weapons between her and the dark and to be the first thing the dark met if it tried to reach.

Rhaenyra’s hand reached over a narrower blade, the kind meant for a woman’s sleeve.

Its guard was etched with a wing unfurling into script. Vaegon leaned closer without touching. 

They lifted the blades out one by one, laying them in a careful fan: a curved gutting knife with a pitted moonstone set in the hilt; a stiletto so slender light passed it like water; a short sword weighted perfectly for a child, the leather grip pale and uncracked.

Daemon’s gaze stuck on that one a heartbeat too long.

Rhaenyra palmed it shut and slid it deeper into shadow.

Beneath the steel, glint on glint, copper trays layered with jewelry.

Rhaenyra took a cuff first, heavy, worked in thorns that braided into flame. The metal warmed against her skin as if remembering her.

“For Rhaenys,” she said, steady as law. 

Daemon reached next, drawing a ring shaped like a serpent biting its tail. The ruby eyes glinted wickedly in the firelight.

“For Baela,” he said. “She’ll wear it like a challenge.” Then he found a pendant of pale glass streaked with gold. “And Rhaena, this one. It listens more than it burns.”

Rhaenyra’s hand brushed deeper, closing around a torque of three woven strands. “For my children,” she said softly. “Three flames. Three hearts. May they never forget what lit them.”

Daemon’s gaze flicked to her. “And Laena?”

She smiled faintly, setting aside a circlet of silver threaded with sea-green stones. “For her,” she said. “She always did love the color of storms.”

Vaegon bent low, lifting a slim book bound in dark leather. “For study,” he said. “For the next to ask why instead of how.” He hesitated, then added, “And for Septa Rhaella, there’s a small reliquary, carved in the shape of wings. She’ll see faith where others see craft.”

Rhaenyra’s hand lingered in the chest a moment longer before finding a small gem shaped like an anchor, its facets dulled by age but steady in her palm. She turned it once, twice, and slipped it into her pocket without a word.

“For Laenor,” she said to herself. “Something to keep him.”

They went on, slower now, their reverence growing as the chest revealed its depths.

Under the jewelry lay folded silks, colors still rich despite the centuries, red as heartblood, gold as flame, black as the mountain’s heart.

Rhaenyra brushed the fabric with her fingertips. “Vestments,” she smiled. “Or shrouds.”

Daemon lifted a length of gold-threaded cloth and laughed under his breath. “Both, if one lives the way Valyrians did.”

Beneath the cloth came bottles, slender, dust-glazed, sealed with wax.

When Vaegon cracked one open, a breath of sweet rot and fruit filled the air. “Wine,” he said, astonished. “Still whole.”

Daemon took a sip and grinned. “Proof that our ancestors feared neither fire nor thirst.”

Books followed: bindings of dragonhide, pages inked in rust. Vaegon’s hands trembled as he turned one open, his scholar’s awe overtaking caution. “Formulas, lineages, theologies of flame,” he whispered. “Half-mad, half-divine. This is what the Citadel burned.”

At the very bottom, they found a map sealed in oiled vellum, its wax dark as dried marrow. When Rhaenyra peeled it open, the smell of age rolled from it. 

The vellum was layered, drawn over itself again and again by different hands, rivers turned to fissures, coastlines gnawed away, mountains marked not for height but for heat. In the center, a black spiral tightened into a dot inked in red: Valyrio prūmia. 

Vaegon leaned closer, eyes wide. “This is not a map of land,” he whispered. “It’s a map of veins. Every place where the earth remembers fire.”

Rhaenyra’s voice came quiet. “And we live inside one.”

Daemon’s blade found what the eye could not: a hairline seam beneath the map’s frame. The wood gave under his knife with a soft crack. A hidden compartment breathed open.

Inside lay three bone tokens. Sun, wave, and hollow circle, and beneath them, something far larger than any of them expected.

A glass vessel, lay cradled in a bed of black silk.

The glass was thick, clouded by time but still faintly warm. Within it moved a dark, viscous red. Slow, heavy, alive. The wax seal at its neck bore the sigil of the dragon, pressed deep and perfect. Beneath it, etched into the gold rim, a single word: Aenar.

The air changed.

Vaegon sank to his knees without meaning to. “Aenar the Exile,” he whispered. “His blood. He kept himself.”

Rhaenyra could not look away. “Preserved through salt and spell,” she said shocked. “A life bottled for memory or return.”

Daemon crouched, studying the slow swirl within. “It moves.” His voice had gone rough. “Gods, it moves.”

“It answers,” Vaegon said, trembling now. “To what’s still kin to it.”

Rhaenyra reached out, her fingers brushing the curve of the glass. The surface pulsed once, heat blooming through her hand, through her veins, like recognition. For an instant, it was as though the bottle itself breathed.

Rhaenyra’s hand lingered on the glass for a heartbeat longer before she drew it away.

The warmth stayed, a ghost beneath her skin.

“What do we do with it?” she asked at last. Her voice was steady, but the question carried the weight of every crown that had ever burned her line. “With all of this. The blades, the gold, the blood itself. It was not meant to sleep forever.”

Daemon rose, rubbing his thumb against the cut that still wept faintly from his earlier test. “Then we wake it carefully,” he said. “Steel to soldiers. Blades to the Emberguard first, men who already bleed for us. Let them wield what’s ours, not relics gathering dust.”

Vaegon’s head snapped up. “You would arm them with Valyrian steel? Each piece was forged before the Doom. Some are temple-made. Sanctified, not tempered for war.”

Daemon’s mouth curved, humorless. “Sanctified steel still kills. You’d rather leave it to rust in a chest?”

Rhaenyra’s eyes narrowed, her tone soft but immovable. “No. But I’ll not see it carried by those who might sell loyalty for coin or fear. I want only those whose loyalty is absolute, whose hearts answer to me alone.”

Daemon met her gaze across the table, the fire throwing red between them. “Then name them,” he said. “Because if we wait for perfection, we’ll die holding treasures too sacred to save us.”

Rhaenyra didn’t flinch. “Then better to die as their keeper than live as their fool.”

Vaegon cleared his throat, careful, measured. “There are two who might be trusted,” he said. “The captains you raised after the trial of the forges, Ser Corren and Ser Merynor. Both sworn by fire and blade. They would die before they turned.”

Daemon nodded once. “They’ve proven as much.”

Rhaenyra considered it, the firelight drawing small storms in her eyes. “Then they will carry what we give,” she said finally. “But not as owners, as extensions of my will.”

Daemon’s grin flickered, wolfish and proud. “Then I’ll see they remember.”

Rhaenyra reached into the chest again, fingers brushing something cool and dense. She lifted a single coin, square-edged, stamped with a crowned dragon whose open mouth seemed to exhale flame.

The metal was darker than gold, heavy as memory.

Daemon’s eyes caught the gleam. “That alone could buy us ten ships,” he said.

Vaegon’s expression hardened. “Because they are holy. Each was forged in tribute beneath the Fourteenth Flame. They are not meant for markets.”

Rhaenyra turned the coin over in her palm, the firelight catching on the ridged edge. “Then perhaps the market should remember what holiness costs,” she said. “There’s enough here to sell some and hide the rest, release them slowly, one by one, until rumor outpaces truth.”

Daemon’s grin spread, sharp and approving. “Scarcity as power. You think like a trader, not a princess.”

Vaegon shook his head slightly, though awe edged his disapproval. “You’d turn relics into leverage.”

“Into survival,” Rhaenyra corrected. She set the coin back among its kin, the metal whispering against metal. “If the past demands to be paid, it can start paying its way.”

Daemon laughed under his breath. “I almost admire it.”

She looked up at him, the fire reflecting in her eyes like tempered steel. 

Rhaenyra turned the coin once more between her fingers. “We need to make it rumor,” she said. “If anyone comes searching, they’ll find stories instead of truth.”

Vaegon nodded, already thinking three moves ahead. “Then we give them a trail worth following. A forged ledger, naming merchants in Lys and Volantis. A courier found dead with a manifest he never should’ve carried. Enough truth to make it believable, enough error to make it dangerous.”

Daemon’s grin was all teeth. “And while they chase phantoms, we sell the real ones.”

Rhaenyra’s eyes flicked toward him, steady as a drawn blade. “Not sell. Control.”

Vaegon’s tone was smooth, precise. “I’ll bury the lies in archives, lace the citations with contradictions. By the time anyone questions the story, it’ll be gospel.”

“And if someone digs too deep?” Daemon asked.

“Then they find nothing,” Rhaenyra said. “Or worse, they find proof we want them to.”

Daemon’s laugh came low, dark with amusement. “You’d make a fine smuggler.” He leaned in slightly, eyes catching the firelight. “Schemes suit you, dear niece.”

Rhaenyra’s mouth curved, not quite a smile. “You mistake strategy for seduction.”

“Do I?” he asked. “Tell me that again when the world buys your lies for gold.”

The silence that followed hummed, before Vaegon cleared his throat, dragging the air back toward sense.

“There’s something I should tell you,” The Archmaester said. “About the writings beneath the altar. I’ve managed to restore more of Visenya’s words.”

Rhaenyra’s gaze flicked toward him. “And?”

“She spoke of what blood remembers,” Vaegon said carefully. “Of how kin, once joined in fire, might echo through it still.”

Daemon’s brow lifted. “Plainly, Vaegon.”

He hesitated, choosing each word. “I think when the mountain answered you both, it did more than wake the dragons. It bound them to each other through you. Not always. Not across every distance. But… enough. When danger finds one, the other might feel it, might call to it.”

The silence that followed was close and listening.

Rhaenyra’s fingers stilled where they had been tracing the table’s edge. “You believe our dragons would answer through us?”

“I don’t believe,” Vaegon said. “I felt it, reading her hand. The script flared as if alive when I wrote your names beside hers. It was the same pattern, the same pulse.”

Daemon’s voice dropped, half wonder, half warning. “Then when Caraxes moved to face Vermithor, it wasn’t chance.”

The words hung between them. For a long moment, neither spoke. The firelight guttered and steadied again, catching on their faces, the same flame reflected twice.

Rhaenyra’s gaze met his, unblinking, searching.

There was no surprise there, only the quiet recognition of something they had already begun to feel.

Daemon’s mouth curved, slow and wry. “I’ve heard worse ties.”

Rhaenyra’s gaze lingered on him a heartbeat too long. The look between them held too much, heat, defiance, something unspoken that felt like the edge of a blade.

She turned away first, smoothing her hand along the table to steady herself. “Enough of ties,” she said, her voice low but not quite steady. “Vaegon, what else have you uncovered?”

Vaegon blinked, as if pulled from a thought too deep to name. “Fragments,” he said. “One page restored from beneath the wax and ash, barely legible. It speaks not of bonds, but of power.”

Daemon’s attention sharpened. “What kind?”

Vaegon hesitated, thumb brushing the edge of a folded parchment. “The kind even the dragons feared to name. A convergence of blood and flame, not a summoning, not quite a weapon. More… a shaping. Power turned inward, made sovereign.”

Rhaenyra’s brow furrowed. “And it needs blood.”

He nodded once. “So the ink implies. But the rest is ruined. The script fades after a single line: what fire cannot master, blood remembers. I’m still recovering what follows.”

Daemon leaned back, studying him. “You mean to say you found a page that promises dominion and ends in riddles.”

Vaegon gave a thin smile. “All true power begins as a riddle.”

Rhaenyra’s gaze drifted to the chest once more, to the black silk covering what should have stayed buried. “Then finish it,” she said softly. “Recover what’s missing. If it speaks of power, I want to know whose hands it was meant to serve.”

The fire crackled.

Vaegon inclined his head. 

“For now,” Rhaenyra said, her voice cutting through the quiet like a blade drawn slow from its sheath, “this stays with you. In your room.”

Vaegon straightened, the flicker of the fire painting his face in bronze and shadow. “You trust me with it?”

“I trust your caution,” she said. “And your fear. Both will serve better than curiosity.”

Daemon’s mouth curved, faint amusement tugging at the edge of it. “He’s clever enough to know that in this house, knowledge is the quickest way to die.”

Vaegon’s answering look was cool. “Then perhaps I’ll live long enough to be dull.”

Rhaenyra allowed the ghost of a smile. “Do. And keep the door barred while you work. Whatever that page remembers, I don’t want it whispering anywhere else.”

The fire gave a low hiss, and the three of them fell silent. Beyond the windows, the sea struck the cliffs again and again, steady, relentless, like a heartbeat beneath the mountain. 

Daemon rose first, his eyes lingering on the chest before turning to her. “You’re learning to hide your dragons well, niece.”

Rhaenyra didn’t look away from the flames. “No,” she said softly. “I’m learning which ones to wake.”

---

The nursery windows were unlatched to the sea. Salt rode the air in a thin, cooling draft, lifting the gauze hangings and the tiny curls at Baela’s temple where she dozed against Laenor’s chest.

Laena sat cross-legged on the low couch, Rhaena drowsing in the crook of her arm, milk-heavy and warm.

The babe’s fist flexed now and then as though kneading sleep; a moment later she sighed and settled, lashes dark on her round cheeks.

“They breathe like tide,” Laena said softly. “In and out and never lost.”

Laenor smiled without showing teeth. His thumb traced the slope of Baela’s spine, the small, insistent life of her. “She dreams of eating,” he said. 

“Her father’s daughter.” Laena's glance skated over him, light, unaccusing.

He huffed at that, almost a laugh, and bent to kiss the downy crown beneath his jaw. In the quiet, the only other sound was the old cradle’s lazy creak where a breeze moved it an inch and back again.

“You haven’t been sleeping,” Laena added after a beat, the words as gentle as fingers smoothing a wrinkle from linen. “Not properly.”

“I sleep enough.” Laenor’s gaze stayed on the window, on the slip and flash of gulls.

She tipped her head. “There’s the Rookery’s wine tally in the steward’s book to answer that.”

“That’s for guests,” he said, and then, because she had waited, “And a little for me.”

Laena shifted Rhaena higher and brushed a thumb along the baby’s cheek until the rooting stopped and the mouth relaxed again. “A little,” she repeated, even. “Every night.”

Laenor’s jaw worked once.

He stayed very still, as though motion might spill what he was holding tight.

Baela hiccupped in her sleep; he pressed her closer, the hiccup subsiding against the beat of his heart.

“It’s quieter that way,” he said, almost an apology. “The parts I don’t want to hear…they drift.”

“Do they?” Laena’s eyes were sea-blue and patient. “Or do they only come back bolder at dawn?”

He looked at her then. The lamplight made him younger and older in turns, boyish mouth, the set of a man who had learned how to turn his face into a mask. 

He swallowed.

The cords in his throat shifted.

“He keeps being alive in here.” He tapped his temple. “The laugh first. Then the mouth he made when he lied. Then the space he took up so I could breathe.”

Laena didn’t flinch from the name absent in his speech. “Joffrey,” she said for him. “He was not a small thing to love.”

“No.” The word wavered, steadied. “He was not.”

Rhaena stirred; Laena hummed under her breath until the tiny body softened again. “Grief is a tide, too,” she said. “It goes no quicker for our shouting. It only leaves us hoarse.”

Laenor let out a breath that wanted to be a laugh and failed, soft and aching. “You sound like mother,” he said.

“On my better days.” She smiled, quick and rueful. “On my worst, I sound like Daemon.”

A wave struck low rock and broke; the nursery shutters shivered, and light freckled the floor where the gloss of polished stone remembered the sea.

“He is everywhere,” Laenor said at last, voice smaller. “In the way my children run, in the color the sun makes when it climbs the water at morning.”

Laena’s hand reached and rested, light, on his wrist. “Then don’t let him go,” she said. “Not yet. Not in the way that empties.”

“How else is there?”

“Let him become,” she said, and the word seemed to choose the room with care, “weight that steadies instead of a blade you lean into. Hold him where he was good. Where he made you braver. Let that stay. The rest will fade on its own or not at all, but you will not die of it.”

Laenor’s eyes shone without falling. “You make it sound simple.”

“It will be anything but.” Her thumb pressed once, assurance rather than pity. “We are not simple men and women, Laenor. Look what we bring into the world.” She nodded down at the sleeping girl on his chest, at the sister in her own arms. “Look what asks us to be better.”

“I am trying,” he said, and there was the truth: stripped, unadorned. “Some nights trying looks like wine. Some nights it’s sitting on the floor counting breaths until numbers come back.”

“Those are both ways back to morning,” Laena said. “But if you take the first too often, the second forgets you.”

He closed his eyes. “I know.”

They sat with the knowing.

The babies slept.

The sea kept up its old, indifferent conversation with stone.

After a while, Laena spoke again.

“Walk with me at dawn,” she said. “Before the Keep wakes. We’ll take the path above the caverns. I’ll carry whichever daughter screams first. You can tell me every foolish, beautiful memory you’re afraid will vanish if you don’t pour wine over it.”

“Why would you—” He stopped; started again. “Why would you want to hear?”

“Because I love you,” Laena said, and smiled when his head jerked in surprise. “And because you are family in every way that matters to me. And because I want Baela to learn her first songs from my brother.”

He tried to answer; failed; nodded instead, a little helpless. “Dawn, then.”

“Dawn,” she agreed.

Baela snuffled and opened her eyes, storm-lavender, unfocused and then, with no warning at all, wailed her displeasure with the world.

Laenor’s hands were already moving, sure and tender, arranging, rocking, shushing a rhythm older than names.

Across from them, Rhaena startled and puckered, the beginnings of a sympathetic cry rounding her mouth. Laena shifted her, baring one shoulder, the motion deft as a dance. The babe latched and quieted; the room softened around the small, fierce work of living.

It was strange to see her like this.

Laena—his sister of salt and wind, who once raced him through stormclouds and laughed when lightning answered, now still and deliberate, her body moving with the quiet certainty of a creature remade.

It unsettled him, this gentleness that had replaced their chaos. She seemed older than him suddenly, not by years but by knowledge: how to hold life without fearing it would break.

The sight made something in his chest twist.

Pride, yes, and love, but also something lonelier, a hollow note struck in a familiar song.

She smiled at him. 

“You’ve no wet nurse,” Laenor said softly after a moment, still half in wonder. It came out less as a question than a realization.

“No,” she replied, her voice low but certain. “Watching Rhaenyra refuse one made the decision easy enough.”

She adjusted Rhaena’s head with practiced care, the baby sighing against her skin. “It seemed wrong to hand her over when I could be the one to quiet her. Rhaenyra said the same once, ‘If the gods gave me milk, they meant me to use it.’ I thought her mad then. Now I understand.”

Laena’s words lingered, soft as the sea’s pull.

Laenor sat back, the slow rise and fall of Baela against his chest matching the rhythm of his thoughts. “It’s defiance, in its way,” he said finally. “Rhaenyra nursing her own children. You nursing yours. The realm looks and calls it unbecoming, unseemly, but perhaps that’s the point. Everything they do is meant to remind us we belong to them. And this—” he nodded toward the babe at her breast, “—this is the quietest rebellion of all.”

Laena smiled faintly. “Rhaenyra said nearly the same. That feeding her babes herself would keep them hers, not the court’s. As if every drop of milk could build a wall between her and their wanting.”

He exhaled, slow and uncertain. “She’s always building walls. Fire for one, love for another. Even her silences are fortresses. And I… I pretend to belong inside them.”

Baela shifted in his arms; his hand followed without thinking, steady, practiced. “My children,” he said. “The world looks at them and sees beauty. The gods’ own reflection, they say. And sometimes I believe it.”

He hesitated. “Other times, I can barely stand to look. “They shine too bright, Aemon’s laugh like sunlight through water, Aenar’s eyes rimmed in silver. And Aemma…” His voice broke on the smallest sound. “When she breathes, even the air seems to bow. They are beautiful beyond reason. Beyond me.”

Laena’s brows knit, but her smile remained gentle. “They are of you, Laenor. That’s what beauty does, it multiplies what it’s given.”

He shook his head. “No. I am their name, their duty, their shield. But when I hold them, I feel counterfeit. Like I signed my name to a miracle and can’t remember how.”

The confession spilled like a wound unsealing. “Some nights, when they sleep, I watch their faces and think...what right do I have to love something so perfect?”

Laena’s gaze softened, unaware of how deep the knife went. “You give them your steadiness, your joy. That is no small thing.”

“Steadiness?” He laughed quietly, but there was no joy in it. “You mistake stillness for strength. I’ve been pretending so long I’ve forgotten the difference. They look at me with those bright, god-touched eyes, and all I see reflected back is what I’m not.”

He brushed his thumb over Baela’s tiny fingers, as if the motion might anchor him. 

Laena adjusted Rhaena’s head on her shoulder, misreading his quiet despair for tenderness. “You talk like a man who’s lost his faith,” she said gently. “They’re only children, Laenor. Beautiful, yes, but yours all the same.”

The words struck deep. Yours all the same.

Gods, how he wanted that to be true.

“I don’t want to fail them,” he said finally, the words rough as gravel, stripped of polish. “That’s all. I don’t need to be the hero in their stories, or the fire in their blood.”

He stared down at Baela’s small hand, the way her fingers curled trustingly around the fabric of his sleeve. “But some days I can barely keep myself upright. The court whispers. The realm watches. And Rhaenyra—” His throat closed on her name. “She meets every strike head-on. She burns, she bleeds, she keeps walking. I watch her take wounds that would hollow me, and she never falters.”

Laena said nothing, her silence kind, waiting.

“I thought strength would come with time,” he went on. “That being her husband, being a father, would teach me something solid. But all it’s taught me is how much I rely on her to keep the world from breaking apart. I try to help her bear it, and she… she thanks me, but I see it in her eyes. She knows I’m tired before I ever say it. She knows I drown easy.”

Laena shifted Rhaena against her shoulder, watching him with quiet ache. “You make it sound as though friendship is a lesser thing,” she said. “As though standing beside her means you do not burn in the same flame.”

He smiled faintly at that, though it never quite reached his eyes. “I carry it,” he murmured. “All of it. But some nights, it feels like it’s burning straight through me.”

The wind pressed against the windows again, soft and salt-heavy. Laena reached for his hand, not to soothe, but to steady. “Then let it,” she said. “Better to burn together as kin than to be untouched and alone.”

Laena adjusted the babe against her shoulder and glanced toward the pale line of dawn sneaking through the curtains. “Come on,” she said. “You owe me that walk. Before Dragonstone remembers to be cold again.”

Laenor blinked, surprised. “Now? The hour’s barely decent.”

“All the better,” she said. “No courtiers, no servants, no mother waiting to correct us. Just the cliffs and whatever foolishness you need to say before breakfast.”

He smiled, slow and genuine this time, and stood.

They called for the nurses. 

Baela made a small sound of protest as he lifted her; he pressed a kiss to her forehead. “We’ll let them sleep, then,” he murmured, settling the babe into her cradle. “They’ve already heard enough confession for one morning.”

Outside, the corridors were hushed.

The torches guttered low, their flames bending toward the sea breeze that threaded through the keep. Laena walked ahead, barefoot, her long braid loose down her back.

“You still walk like you’re racing,” Laenor said, catching up.

She shot him a sidelong look. “And you still walk like a man who expects applause for keeping pace.”

He laughed, the sound echoing softly against stone. “You’ve grown cruel in motherhood.”

“No,” she said, smiling. “Just efficient.”

Laenor made a noise somewhere between indignation and delight and, with a quick flick of his boot, tried to hook her ankle as they walked.

Laena sidestepped neatly, laughing. “Gods, you’re still terrible at that.”

“You used to fall for it every time.”

“I used to let you think that,” she shot back, already a few steps ahead.

“Liar,” he said, lunging to catch up.

She glanced over her shoulder, grin sharp and wind-bright. “Catch me, then, brother.”

Her bare feet slapped against the stone, light and sure, and for a heartbeat the years fell away, no court, no children, no grief, only two siblings racing, their laughter rising above the sea like something reborn.

When the sun finally broke over the horizon, Laenor tipped his head back, eyes closed, breath heaving and let it warm him.

“Maybe you’re right,” he said. “Maybe burning together isn’t so bad.”

Laena smiled beside him, her voice low and sure. “No,” she said. “It’s how we remember we’re alive.”

And together, they stood at the edge of the world, the prince consort who feared his own light, and the sister who carried hers easily, letting the morning turn the sea to fire.

---

By lunchtime in the nursery life had re-aligned. 

Steamed pears and honeyed grains cooled in small bowls, the air thick with milk and laughter.

Aemma banged her spoon against the table, triumphant at the noise it made; Aenar tried to copy her and missed entirely, sending his porridge sliding onto the floor with solemn pride.

Septa Rhaella sighed, though her mouth curved despite herself. “We do not duel with spoons, sweet prince,” she said, wiping his chin.

Baela and Rhaena lay nearby in their cradle, bundled in soft linen, the faint scent of milk and lavender clinging to their curls.

Baela had just finished feeding, her lips still pursed in dreamlike rhythm, one tiny fist resting against her cheek. Rhaena, lighter of breath and quieter by nature, blinked up at the slow sway of the canopy, a bubble forming and breaking at her mouth before a soft hum slipped from her throat, the smallest, sweetest sound of contentment.

One of the nurses smiled, rocking the cradle with her foot. “Listen to her,” she whispered. “Always a song in that one.”

Septa Rhaella nodded without looking up from Aemon’s bowl, her voice soft but amused. “She’ll charm the dragons before she can walk.”

Her gaze drifted then, past the children, past the sunlit curtains, to the hearth.

Two small dragon eggs lay nestled there in a bed of velvet ash and silk. Baela’s was pale green, shot through with veins of pearl that caught the firelight like seawater over glass. 

Beside it rested Rhaena’s egg.

Once, it had glowed softly in the firelight, a tender black hue marbled with threads of gold. Now it lay dulled, its sheen gone to dust, as though the flame no longer knew it. The silk beneath it was cool to the touch.

The Septa’s lips moved in silent prayer, half pity, half awe. That was when the latch turned.

The sound was soft, too soft, and yet every head lifted. One nurse started to rise, thinking perhaps the Princess had come. The door opened a hand’s breadth.

Then the first man came through.

He wore a servant’s livery, plain brown, the kind that belonged to no one. His hands were gloved. Behind him followed two more, quick and sure. By the time the nearest nurse gasped, the knife was already out.

“Take the boy,” one hissed. “The others don’t matter.”

Aemon whimpered, spoon clattering to the floor. The Septa moved before thought, scooping him close, her skirts knocking the bowl aside.

“Back!” she barked, the voice of a woman who had once ruled novices, not infants. “Stay behind me—”

The first blade came fast, slicing through the air where the child’s head had been a heartbeat before.

Rhaella twisted, taking the blow across her shoulder instead.

Pain flared white-hot, but she did not let go. Her grip only tightened, one arm curling around Aemon’s back, the other lifting the heavy candlestick like a shield.

“By the Seven, you will not have him!” she spat.

The second man lunged, steel catching the light. Rhaella pivoted, turning her body to bear the strike, keeping the boy hidden beneath her arm. The knife tore through her sleeve and bit shallow into flesh, but she swung back, iron against bone, the smell of tallow sharp in the air.

Aemon began to cry, his small fists clutching at her collar.

She bent over him, wrapping herself around his trembling form as the attackers closed in. Every motion, every breath was spent on keeping him unseen, untouched. 

Behind her came the sudden, wet sound of impact, steel meeting flesh, and a scream that shattered the room.

One of the nurses crumpled where she stood, hands clutching at the crimson blossoming across her apron.

Another tried to run for the door with Rhaena’s cradle half-lifted.

A blade caught her at the ribs; she went down hard, the cradle tipping, the babe’s thin wail splitting the air.

Baela began to shriek, high and furious, a sound too big for her tiny lungs.

Rhaena’s cry joined hers a moment later, weaker, breath catching in terrified hiccups.

Across the room, Aenar screamed, a wild, wordless sound of confusion. Aemma followed, her cries piercing and panicked from the nurse’s arms.

“Mercy,” one nurse gasped, crawling backward toward the wall. “The babes, please!”

The men did not answer.

One turned his knife toward the cradles.

Rhaella saw it happen in a blink, the dark shape moving for the infants, the flash of steel, and hurled the candlestick with all her strength.

It struck the man’s temple with a dull crack, sending him staggering into the hearth.

Embers scattered across the rug.

The scent of smoke bloomed.

Aemon’s cries grew shrill, his small hands fisting in her habit. Rhaella caught him close again, shielding his head beneath her chin. 

Velvet curtains hissed as flame climbed their hems.

The green egg in the hearth flared once, searing bright, a strange heat rippling through the chamber that smelled not of smoke but of salt and iron.

The second man raised his knife again.

Rhaella braced herself, body curved over Aemon like a shield, whispering what might have been prayer or defiance.

Then the door burst inward.

The world convulsed.

Firelight caught on steel and scarlet, Emberguard cloaks whipped through the smoke like wings of blood. Daemon came first, breaking through the haze like a demon born of it, sword already singing.

The sound was raw metal meeting air, the promise of death.

The man with the knife turned just in time to see him.

It did not save him.

Daemon’s blade split the space between them, catching him from shoulder to spine. The body folded in two before it hit the floor.

“Where are they!” he roared, voice shaking the rafters.

Rhaenyra was next through the smoke, hair wild, eyes fever-bright in the red light. Her skirts were singed, her hand slick with blood from the door’s splintered edge. She didn’t hesitate, didn’t think.

She saw movement, saw a man staggering to his knees, and seized the nearest thing her hand could find.

The fire poker came down with a sound that was less strike than collapse. Bone shattered.

The man’s head snapped sideways, a burst of dark spray cutting through the smoke.

She hit him again before Daemon caught her wrist.

“Enough,” he rasped, though his own voice trembled with rage. “He’s finished.”

Rhaenyra’s chest heaved. The poker dripped. Her face was carved with fury so sharp it looked like grief.

Around them, the Emberguard swarmed, one dousing the spreading flames with a cloak, another kicking burning linen from the cradles. 

Daemon tore through the smoke toward the hearth, where the green egg still glowed like a living wound. “Get the babes!” he bellowed. “Move!”

Rhaenyra stumbled to the Septa, dropping hard to her knees. “Rhaella!” she cried, reaching through the smoke.

The woman’s habit was soaked through, black with blood and ash. Her face shone pale and slick, her lips moving soundlessly before she managed, “He’s safe...he’s—”

Rhaenyra’s hands were already there, fumbling, urgent. “Hold him, hold on—”

Rhaella’s fingers trembled, locked in rigor around Aemon’s small body.

They loosened only when Rhaenyra whispered her name again, softer, breaking on it.

The boy came free with a startled sob, clutching at his mother’s hair as she drew him close, pressing his face against her throat. His cries came ragged and wet, the sound of terror not yet learned but already remembered.

Daemon’s sword hit the stone with a ringing clatter.

He turned, chest heaving, smoke slicking his face and hair. For a long, stunned heartbeat, he looked at her through the wavering light, their eyes catching across ruin.

Blood, soot, fire.

Dragon and flame.

Behind them, the nursery burned.

Two of the nurses lay twisted together near the door, hands still locked as if trying to shield one another.

Another was face-down by the cradle, skirts smoldering, her blood pooling beneath the overturned chair. 

Rhaenyra’s vision blurred. “All of them,” she whispered. “They killed all of them.”

Rhaella stirred faintly, dragging in a breath that rattled deep.

Her sleeve was cut to ribbons, the wound running from shoulder to elbow, blood pulsing through her fingers where she tried to hold it closed. “It’s nothing,” she murmured, voice fading. “He lives. That’s enough.”

“Don’t you dare,” Rhaenyra said sharply, her voice raw with command. “Don’t you dare fade now. Daemon!”

He was already there, ripping the hem from his cloak, pressing it tight against the wound. “You’ll live, Septa,” he said. “You’ve earned it.”

But the smoke kept rising.

The cradle curtains caught, flame crawling fast up their length.

The egg in the hearth pulsed like a heart under glass—alive, almost breathing.

Then the sound came.

A sharp, wet crack.

Rhaenyra froze, her head snapping toward the fire. Daemon followed her gaze.

Baela’s egg had split down one side, a jagged seam of molten gold running its length. Light poured from the fissure, not yellow but white-hot, too bright to look at. The air shuddered with it, the heat pressing against their faces like the breath of something ancient and impatient.

Rhaenyra rose to her feet, Aemon still in her arms. “Daemon—”

“I see it.” 

Another crack split the air, louder this time, followed by the hiss of steam and the soft collapse of ash. The shell peeled back on itself, pieces curling and blackening.

Inside, something moved.

Small, wet, gleaming, a shape of sinew and smoke.

Wings flexed once, catching the light.

The babe’s cry faltered in Rhaenyra’s arms. Even the flames seemed to hush.

Baela’s dragon had come early, born of fire and fear, screaming into a world already burning.

The hatchling gave a piercing cry, thin and shrill, like metal torn through flame.

It thrashed in the hearth, wings slick with birthfire, eyes the pale green of glass before it cools. Smoke curled from its nostrils; when it breathed, the embers stirred.

Daemon moved before sense could stop him.

He tore the edge of his sleeve, wrapped his arm, and plunged his hands into the heat. The air hissed as he lifted the creature free, its body writhing, claws nicking his skin through the fabric.

“Easy, little fury,” he muttered, voice low and raw. “You’ve already proven yourself.”

The dragon hissed, sharp and new, a sound that might have been defiance or recognition.

“Daemon!” Rhaenyra called. “Go!”

He turned toward her, the newborn clutched against his chest, its tail coiling around his wrist.

Together they moved through the wreckage, smoke rising like ghosts behind them. The Emberguard fell in around their Princess, their cloaks dark with soot.

“See to the cradle!” Daemon barked over his shoulder.

They burst into the corridor.

Laena was already there, barefoot, her braid half undone, eyes wide with horror. Laenor close behind her, his tunic thrown on inside out, face pale beneath his bronze skin.

“Rhaenyra!” Laena cried, rushing forward. “The babes—”

Rhaenyra stumbled into her, one arm around Aemon, the other reaching blindly for her good-sister. “They’re alive,” she gasped. “The girls, the boys—alive.”

Aenar was the loudest, his cries sharp as gulls over stormwater, thrashing in the Emberguard’s arms. Aemma wailed beside him, the pitch breaking with each sob until it became almost a plea.

From the nurse’s cradle, Baela screamed in outrage, small fists striking the air. Rhaena’s cry was softer, ragged, as if she had already spent her breath in fear.

The noise rolled over Rhaenyra in waves. Hiccups, sobs, the thin keen of the twins, and the roaring cry of her triplets. 

“They’re alive,” Rhaenyra repeated, half to Laena, half to herself. “Gods, they’re all alive.”

She turned wildly, eyes catching each small face through the blur of smoke and tears.

Aenar reaching for her, Aemma clutching at torn fabric, the twins bundled together and still shrieking.

Laena pressed a hand to her mouth. “Seven have mercy,” she whispered. “I heard the screams, I thought—”

Rhaenyra gripped her forearm, hard. “They tried to take them,” she said hoarsely. “They would have if not for Rhaella.”

Laenor staggered forward then, finding his children by sound before sight. “Aenar,” he choked, catching the boy as the guard passed him over. “Easy now, easy, hush, my sea, hush.”

The boy only screamed harder, burying his face in Laenor’s neck.

Laena turned, her voice sharp through the din. “Baela, Rhaena—”

Baela’s little fists beat the blanket as she screamed, face red as sunset. Rhaena’s lashes were clumped with tears, her cries faltering into hiccups.

Laena bent over them, her tears finally breaking.

“Hush now, my loves,” she murmured, the words shaking. “Mother’s here. You’re safe. You’re safe.”

“Make way!”

Vaegon emerged in near sprint. Two Emberguards followed at his heels, carrying Rhaella between them.

Her habit was scorched black at the shoulder, her arm bound in a makeshift bandage already soaked through. Blood spattered her jaw and collar, and her face, ashen but unbroken, turned toward the sound of the children’s cries as though to confirm they still lived.

“Lay her here,” Vaegon ordered, pointing to the bench that lined the wall. His voice, normally measured, rang sharp as steel. “Keep her upright, if she loses consciousness, she’ll drown in her own blood.”

The guards obeyed, lowering her carefully.

Rhaella groaned, a thin sound, half breath, half prayer.

Vaegon knelt at once, tearing open the bandage with swift precision.

“Gods save us, woman,” he muttered, “you’ve lost enough to kill two men.” His fingers pressed to the wound; Rhaella hissed but did not flinch.

Across the corridor, Rhaenyra clutched Aemon close, his sobs now small hiccupping breaths against her shoulder. She looked toward the emberguard cradling Aemma, reached without hesitation, and drew her daughter into the circle of her arm.

Aemma came willingly, face blotched red from crying, small fingers fisting in her mother’s hair. “Muna,” she sobbed, the word breaking on her lips.

“I’m here,” Rhaenyra whispered, voice trembling but sure. “I have you both, my loves. I have you.”

Aemon clung tighter, his curls damp against her neck. Aemma’s tiny hands traced her mother’s throat as if to reassure herself she was real.

Smoke drifted thick around them, the scent of burnt linen and iron heavy in the air.

Laenor sat with Aenar in his lap, the boy’s crying finally softening into sharp, hiccupping breaths.

Across from them, Laena rocked the twins in her arms, Baela’s furious sobs fading to small, indignant sniffles while Rhaena slept from exhaustion, lashes wet on her cheeks.

Vaegon’s voice broke the quiet, urgent but controlled. “She’ll live, but she needs rest—and clean cloth. Send for the healers from the rookery.”

Daemon barked an order to the guards; one bolted down the corridor at once.

Rhaella’s eyelids fluttered open. “The children?” she rasped.

“All alive,” Rhaenyra said, moving to her side. “All safe because of you.”

The Septa’s lips curved faintly. “Then it was worth the blood.”

“Don’t speak like that,” Rhaenyra said sharply. “You’ll rest. You’ll see them yourself when you’ve strength.”

Rhaella’s fingers twitched weakly toward Aemon; the boy stirred, lifting his head from Rhaenyra’s shoulder. For a moment, their eyes met, the boy’s amethyst and wet with tears, hers dim but alight with quiet pride.

“Brave little prince,” she whispered, and her head sagged as Vaegon pressed clean linen to her arm.

Daemon stood over them, jaw set, eyes dark as the burned doorway behind him.

“This was no common strike,” he said, voice low, dangerous. “They came for the heirs.”

The dragon in Daemon’s arms gave a sharp, rattling shriek, its tiny chest heaving, wings half-unfurled. 

Daemon steadied it with one scarred hand, murmuring something low in Valyrian. 

He crossed the corridor to where Laena knelt with the twins, Baela and Rhaena both red-faced and trembling.

He sank to one knee before them, slow and deliberate, his shadow falling long over the marble.

Baela hiccupped, eyes catching the light of the small dragon in his arms. For a heartbeat, her cries stopped, replaced by a startled breath, the kind that trembles on the edge between fear and wonder.

Daemon looked at her, something raw flickering behind the blood and soot on his face. “Yours,” he said softly, in that strange soft tone only dragons and daughters ever drew from him. “Born of fire for you, little one.”

His other hand slid gently against Rhaena’s soft cheek.

He exhaled shakily, the sound almost a growl, then rose to his full height. The air around him changed, sharp, alive, dangerous again.

“Search the bodies,” he barked, voice cracking through the corridor like a whip. “Purses, seals, letters, anything that names who sent them. I want every coin turned, every insignia brought to me.”

Two Emberguards moved at once, vanishing into the smoke-choked nursery.

Behind him, Vaegon pressed his palm to Rhaella’s throat, checking her pulse, his brow drawn in concentration. The Septa’s blood still welled dark through the linen.

Laenor’s voice cut through the chaos, clear and commanding. “Enough,” he said. “The children go to the Crown Princess’s solar. Now.”

Rhaenyra turned toward him, still clutching Aemon in one arm and holding Aemma close with the other. “Laenor—”

“No arguments,” he said sharply. “You, Laena, and the babes, all of you. That room has stone on three sides and one door. Fifteen of the Emberguard inside, twenty more posted without. No one enters without my word.”

Daemon’s eyes narrowed, fury still thrumming beneath his skin. “And what would you have us do while they cower behind stone?”

Laenor met his gaze without flinching.

“We make certain there’s no one left inside these walls who shouldn’t be. We’ll sweep every corridor, every stair, every hidden gate until we know how they got in. They aimed for our children, Daemon. Yours and mine both.”

Something flickered in Daemon’s face at that, acknowledgment, reluctant but sharp.

The newborn dragon in his arms hissed, its thin body shivering in the torchlight. He steadied it with one hand, his expression hardening.

“Then we hunt,” he said simply.

He turned to the Emberguards.

“You heard him. Get them to the solar. Double the watch. No man breathes within a hundred feet unless I’ve seen his face.”

The guards moved instantly, forming a ring around the women and the crying children.

Laena rose, cradling Baela and Rhaena, her voice trembling but steady. “Come, Rhaenyra,” she said softly. “The children need clean air.”

Rhaenyra hesitated, gaze flicking to the nursery doors still wreathed in smoke. “Daemon—”

He looked at her, soot streaking the lines of his face, the dragon coiled against his chest. “Go,” he said quietly. “I’ll not fail them again.”

She nodded once, wordless, and turned away.

The corridor filled with the sound of boots, the muffled sobs of frightened children, the rasp of armored breath.

Vaegon looked up from where he knelt beside Rhaella, Maester Gerardys crouched beside him, both hands slick with blood. “We’ll keep her breathing,” Vaegon said, his tone clipped but sure.

Gerardys nodded in grim agreement. “She’s strong,” he said. “Stronger than she has any right to be. Go. We’ll send word when she wakes.”

Laenor’s jaw flexed, his voice rough. “See that you do.”

Then he turned, drawing his blade as he fell in beside Daemon.

Together, they strode into the dark, the Crown Princess’s husband and her uncle, lover and protector, flame and salt. Behind them, the Emberguard closed ranks around the women and children, escorting them toward the safety of the solar.

And in the halls of Dragonstone, the air seemed to shift, thick with smoke and promise, as if the old stone itself waited for blood to answer blood.

They found him before dusk.

Alfred Boome, the under-steward of the lower halls—a man known for his quiet service and softer hands—was cornered in the armory, the stink of fear thick around him. His blade was still sheathed when they came upon him.

Daemon said nothing.

Laenor spoke first, his voice like broken glass. “He opened the gate,” he said. “The east passage. Said it was for the fishmongers’ cart. Said the guards were warned.”

Boome tried to speak, but Daemon was already moving. One blow. Quick, clean, almost merciful.

The man fell without a sound.

Daemon didn’t look away. Neither did Laenor.

The Emberguards dragged the body to the courtyard, where it burned with the rest of the dead.

---

By the time they gathered again, the keep felt hollow-still. 

Smoke clung to the stone, and the air reeked of blood, milk, and burnt silk. The nursery had stopped burning hours ago, but the scent still lived in Rhaenyra’s hair.

She hadn’t spoken since the bodies were cleared. Not to Laenor, not to Daemon.

Only to say bring me the book.

Now, in Vaegon’s solar, the fire guttered low, its light broken across her face. Visenya’s blackened journal lay open on the table where she had slammed it down, half its pages warped and brittle from time.

Vaegon hovered near the hearth, his hands still dark with Rhaella’s blood. He began to speak, to reason, but she cut him short with a look that could have scorched parchment.

“They came for my children,” she said, each word carved clean. “Knives in the dark, in their beds.”

She turned to the table, to the blackened journal. “And this book, this thing, spoke once of power. Of violence. Of dominion wrested by blood and fire.” Her voice dropped, low and steady. “I need that now.”

Vaegon flinched at the edge in her tone. “Princess—”

“Do not call me that,” she said sharply. “Call me what I am. Call me mother. Call me heir. Call me what they fear enough to send assassins.”

She pressed her blood-stained fingers to the cover. The old leather was rough under her touch, almost warm. “You belonged to Visenya Targaryen,” she murmured. “You knew what it meant to fight for a line. If there is anything left in you that remembers, wake it.”

Her palm flattened. The blood there met the dried traces in the cracks of the binding, and the book shuddered.

The reaction was immediate.

Silver light spread through the veins of the parchment, crawling outward like roots through soil. The air shifted; the flame in the brazier leaned toward her.

Daemon’s hand went to his sword. “Rhaenyra—”

But she didn’t move. “Let it come,” she said, voice gone calm. “If Visenya wrote of violence, then she wrote it for us.”

The pages quivered, the letters shifting like scales turning beneath water.

Vaegon stepped closer, awe bleeding into fear. “It’s responding to your blood.”

Rhaenyra’s gaze never wavered. “Then let it answer fully.”

Daemon reached for her wrist, but she pulled free. “No. Let it speak.”

The ink writhed, bleeding into new shapes, rings, sigils, lines drawn in fire. At their center, words formed in Old Valyrian so ancient even Vaegon hesitated to breathe them.

He leaned in, translating under his breath:

“To strengthen the bond between fire and flesh… three bloods must be made one.”

Rhaenyra’s voice was sharp. “Say it clearly.”

He swallowed. “The blood of the dragon, the blood of its rider, and the blood of their ancestor, joined under heat. It’s no prayer, Rhaenyra. It’s a shaping.”

Daemon’s brow furrowed. “A spell?”

Vaegon nodded. “An augmentation. It feeds the dragon’s strength through the covenant of blood. The more perfect the line, the greater the yield.”

Rhaenyra looked between them. “Then we have what we need.”

“Rhaenyra—”

She was already moving. “Fetch the vessel. Aenar the Exile's blood. We’ll test it on Syrax.”

Vaegon hesitated. “It was meant for study—”

“Then study,” she said, eyes flashing. “Study what comes next.”

They climbed to Syrax’s cavern beneath the mountain. The air was hot, thick with sulfur and the slow heartbeat of stone. Syrax stirred as they entered, her great eye opening to the scent of Rhaenyra’s blood.

“Ñuhyz ānogar,” Rhaenyra whispered.

My fire.

Vaegon carried the glass vessel carefully, the preserved blood of Aenar the Exile glinting darkly in the torchlight. “The words here warn of balance,” he said quietly. “Power gained too swiftly can turn on its master.”

Rhaenyra’s expression did not soften. “Then let it turn on our enemies first.”

She knelt before Syrax, pressing her palm to the dragon’s muzzle. “We will need yours, my girl.”

Daemon unsheathed his dagger and stepped forward. “Let me.”

He cut lightly along the softer skin of Syrax’s lip. The dragon rumbled but did not recoil. Dark, molten blood rolled into the shallow bowl Vaegon held.

Rhaenyra sliced her palm again, crimson joining gold. “Now the ancestor,” she said.

Vaegon unstoppered the vessel. The ancient blood shimmered, thick as oil. “Aenar the Exile,” he murmured. “Let your flame remember.” Three drops fell into the mix.

The bowl hissed.

Heat surged outward in a wave that made the torches gutter. The ash beneath their feet quivered, rings of glowing script forming where none had been.

Vaegon read quickly, voice unsteady:

“Speak the Binding of Three, and the flame shall deepen.”

Rhaenyra took the bowl, her eyes reflecting its molten light. “Tell me the words.”

Vaegon hesitated, then recited:

“Ānogar īlva ēbrion,
Vembo hen ñuha prūmia,
Rȳbagon hen ñuha qelitsos,
Āeksio hen ñuhor lentrot.
Sȳrity, jaelā, ēza—
ynot ānogar sagon perzys.”

(Our flame remember: dragon of my marrow, rider of my heart, ancestor of our line. Bind, join, rise—let our fire be hotter.)

Rhaenyra breathed the final word into the bowl.

Light jumped.

The blood ignited without burning, spilling into three threads that lashed through the air, one to Syrax’s wound, one to Rhaenyra’s palm, one to the sealed vessel still clutched in Vaegon’s shaking hands.

Syrax roared.

The sound was thunder in a throat of iron; the cavern shook. Her scales brightened from gold to shimmering amber, her chest expanding as though she had swallowed the sun. Daemon’s lashes crisped at the tips; the air sang thin as wire. He dragged his forearm across his brow and came away slick with sweat already drying in the furnace wind.

Rhaenyra’s hair whipped, the ends singeing to curled black. Her expression did not break. “Stronger,” she whispered.

Syrax’s fire built in her throat, leaking light through her teeth. When she exhaled, the flame that left her was pale and searing, the core white, the stone it touched did not blacken; it liquefied and slid.

Vaegon staggered back, awe warring with terror. “It worked.”

Rhaenyra turned; the blood on her palm had cooled to a thin silver sigil that would not wipe clean, a faint spiral like a coiled scale.

“Then we will do the same for the others,” she said softly. “For Caraxes. For Meleys. For every dragon that bears our banner.”

Daemon’s smile was sharp. “And the realm will learn what it means to wake a god.”

Silence, save for the rock ticking as it cooled.

Rhaenyra’s knees hit the stone first.

Daemon caught her before she fell, and hissed: her skin was furnace-hot, like touching a blade too soon after quenching. “Breathe,” he said, voice tight.

Her chest rose shallowly. “She’s… hungry,” she whispered, voice frayed.

Across the cavern, Syrax moved.

Not the familiar, languid grace of a dragon at rest, but heavier, newly certain, as though her limbs had lengthened between breaths.

In the close torchlight the difference sharpened: her shoulder crest, which once sat level with Rhaenyra’s breastbone, now cleared it by half a head; the ridge of her spine lifted by the breadth of a man’s hand; her chest broadened, the muscles beneath the scales rippling when she breathed. Heat haloed her, a wavering shimmer that clung even when she stilled.

Vaegon’s eyes widened. “A year’s growth in an hour,” he said, half to himself.

Syrax turned her head toward them, the heat from her nostrils bending the air. Her eyes burned bright as newly cast gold. Where her breath touched iron, it dulled white before blushing back to red.

Hunger rolled from her, raw and mineral. It struck Rhaenyra low, to the gut, emptiness with teeth. Rhaenyra’s jaw set. “Then feed her.”

Syrax lunged toward the pens.

The first sheep vanished in a wash of white-cored flame; the wall behind did not char, it softened. The second she took whole, the bite a clean scissor through air that rippled like glass.

Each swallow tugged at Rhaenyra.

Her pulse tripped in time with the gullets’ work. Sweat slicked her temples; the veins at her throat stood in pale relief.

When it was done, Syrax stood still, smoke unspooling in soft spirals from her mouth. She turned back, crouching low, and pressed her newly broadened head against her rider’s side, a slow drum rolling from her chest.

Up close, the change could not be argued. Scales thicker, edges darkened to oil-sheen; heat bled a handspan from her body, enough that Daemon’s palm hovered before resting. The air around her never quite cooled, a heat wake that clung to stone and lingered in footprints.

Rhaenyra’s hand trembled as she touched her. “Good girl,” she murmured. “You’re stronger now.”

Syrax’s golden eye narrowed; a careful bead of fire brightened between her teeth, small, controlled, still white at the core.

Vaegon exhaled, awed and horrified. “You’ve altered her essence. The old texts weren’t lying. The flame remembers the line.”

Rhaenyra drew her palm away at last and stared at the silver spiral that had set into her skin. She rubbed it; it only gleamed. Her breathing steadied. “Let it remember,” she said. “Let the world remember with it.”

Daemon glanced at the dark, still-steaming wall. “Gods help whoever faces her next.”

Syrax breathed once, slow; the cavern stayed a degree too warm where she’d passed, as if the mountain itself had taken notice. Her power had not grown monstrous, only more inevitable, condensed and near. 

When she breathed, it sounded like a volcano dreaming, quiet now, but awake beneath the stone.

By sunrise, Dragonstone’s drums carried across the Narrow Sea, and even the Red Keep dreamed of smoke.

Chapter 18: Blood Owed

Notes:

Tw: violence rampant in this chapter.
Misogynistic language.

The pyres were raised on the windward terrace of Dragonstone, where the cliffs broke the sea like jagged teeth and the spray rose high enough to salt the air with every breath.

The wind keened through the arches, low and mournful, catching the banners so that they whispered rather than flared. 

Three biers stood in a solemn row before the gathered court. Narrow, pale things draped in linen the color of bone. The shrouds were bound in silk cords, their hues muted by shadow: coral, sea-blue, and iron gray. Beneath the cords, faint traces of blood had darkened the fabric to rose and rust.

At the foot of each bier rested a sigil, not of house, but of faith.

For Meris, a small coral disc carved with the Mother’s seven-pointed star, its edges polished smooth by years of thumb-prayers. The sea wind rattled it softly against the bier, a whisper of devotion that would not still.

For Maera, a silver shell from Spicetown’s docks, etched with a tide-mark rune from the Faith of the Sea. The water had eaten at its edges, leaving a jagged beauty, like a wound half-healed.

For Lylei, a strip of blackened iron bent into a loop, a smith’s prayer for strength eternal.

Even in the failing light, it seemed to drink the fire rather than reflect it.

The crowd gathered quietly. The air carried the sting of salt and mourning oil. Even the dragons circling above seemed subdued, their shadows crossing the terrace in long, slow arcs.

Vaegon read the names as the bells tolled, his voice low and even, though his eyes shone.

“Meris of Driftmark, nurse to the royal nursery. Maera of Spicetown, daughter of sail-makers. Lylei of Dragonstone, widow, keeper of the cradle.”

A hush followed.

The waves below broke against the rock like the steady beating of a heart.

Rhaenyra stepped forward.

Her hair was braided simply, her black gown plain except for a band of red silk at her waist. No jewels. No crown. Only ash on her palms from the morning’s vigil.

The wind caught the hem of her gown, and still she did not move.

A fever, faint but insistent, had been creeping through her since Syrax. Heat beneath the ribs, in the back of her throat, behind her eyes. Yet her voice, when it came, was steady.

“They guarded what the realm calls its future,” she said softly. “They did not ask for reward or remembrance. Only that the children wake smiling.”

Her breath caught on the last word, barely perceptible, a flicker of weakness mistaken by most for grief. But Vaegon, watching her closely, saw the sheen of sweat at her temple, the too-bright flush in her cheeks.

The Princess was burning.  

She moved to the first bier, Meris’s, and laid her hand upon the shroud.

The linen was cool beneath her palm, too cool. Her own skin burned faintly, as though her pulse had turned to coals.

“I chose her,” Rhaenyra whispered, voice roughened by sleeplessness and something deeper, something that rasped like smoke in her chest. “She was the first to ever hold Aemma without fear. Her hands were gentler than wind. Her heart, stronger than steel.”

She placed a coral bead from Meris’s necklace upon the shroud, and beside it, a folded parchment sealed with black wax, the deed to a cottage near High Tide. The wax softened slightly under her thumb, the heat of her touch enough to smudge its edge.

“To her mother and sister,” she said, louder now, though her breath caught mid-phrase. “Her kin shall have home and harbor for life. And a pension of forty dragons each moon, from my private coffers, until grief grows quiet.”

The sea wind should have chilled her, but it did not.

It met her fever and broke apart, beads of sweat clinging to her temples like dew.

She turned next to Maera, the Spicetown girl who had died trying to take one twin’s cradle to safety. Her shroud smelled faintly of rose-oil, sweet and faint as memory.

“Maera believed the sea heard prayer better than stone,” Rhaenyra said, her voice hoarse. “Then let the sea have her blessing.”

Her fingers trembled as she uncorked the vial of seawater.

A wave of dizziness washed through her, and for an instant, the world swam, the white linen, the silver spray, the faint blur of faces watching. She steadied herself against the bier, jaw tight, and poured. The water ran over Maera’s hands, glinting like glass before dripping to the terrace below.

Then she placed a purse of gold beside her head.
“To her father, who taught her to mend sails. And to her betrothed, Hobb. The debts he owes the harbor-master are paid, and this dowry stands, though death took the wedding day. If he chooses to love again, he does so with my blessing, not guilt.”

Last came Lylei, the widow who had taken the post to feed her son.

The child stood at the front, small as a candle-flame against the wind. Steff was only four, and he had not yet learned how to stand still for grief; his thin hands opened and closed at his sides as if trying to catch the air.

When Rhaenyra stepped toward him, the terrace tilted slightly beneath her feet. She caught herself with a shallow breath, masking it behind a motion of her skirts. 

The boy startled and pressed himself against her, clutching a handful of silk as though she were the only solid thing left in the world.

She went down on one knee, ignoring the stain the ash left on her gown. A flicker of heat bloomed behind her eyes. Still, her hand found the boy’s curls, soft and uncombed from too many sleepless nights.

"Your mother was brave,” she whispered, voice frayed, trembling with the pulse that thundered in her ears. “She stood when others ran. She kept my children safe, and that means she kept the realm itself.”

Steff didn’t answer.

He only buried his face in her shoulder, small body shaking. Rhaenyra gathered him close, one arm around his back, rocking him once, twice, the way she did with her own babes. Her breath came ragged, each exhale hotter than the one before, a faint tremor in her limbs.

“You will never be alone, do you understand?” she whispered against his hair, her lips dry, her voice raw. “You will eat at my table until you are grown. You will learn to read, to write, to build, to fight—whatever you choose. When you miss her, you may come to me. I will remember her with you.”

He nodded into her collar, the motion jerky, and his fingers loosened their desperate hold.

She reached for his wrist and turned his small palm upward. From her pocket she drew a silver button, the last one from Lylei’s sleeve, and placed it there.

“Keep this,” she said softly, folding his fingers over it. “So she can always find you when you dream.”

When Rhaenyra rose, the boy stayed close to her skirts, holding tight until Laenor gently took his hand. 

The child glanced once toward the flames that would soon take his mother, then back to Rhaenyra...as if unsure which to trust, the fire or the woman who burned quietly within it.

“Lylei gave everything she had,” she said to the gathered mourners. “Let it be known that her son will want for nothing.”

Then she reached down once more, brushing the back of Steff’s small hand with her thumb.

A fleeting touch, almost a blessing, and let him go.

The flames rose as the sun sank.

Oil caught, silk flared, and the sea answered in a low roar.

A prayer trembled from Vaegon’s lips, ancient and half-forgotten, and for a moment, the pyres seemed to breathe, three hearts exhaling smoke into the dusk.

Rhaenyra watched until the shapes within the shrouds were no longer shapes at all. Only fire, only light.

The fever pressed closer now, a cruel twin to the heat before her. She swayed, her vision pricked with gold.

A step behind her, a voice rasped low.

“Burning is not the end.”

Septa Rhaella stood with a bandaged arm held close to her chest.

Her pale face was stark in the firelight, the bruises along her body blooming violet.

Yet her eyes, those strange, Targaryen-violet eyes, shone fiercely beneath her veil, twin shards of holy flame.

She bowed her head toward the pyres. “It is the beginning of remembrance.”

The words struck something deep. For a moment, Rhaenyra could not tell whether the heat behind her eyes was from fever or grief.

She reached out, her hand brushing Rhaella’s uninjured shoulder, and the Septa did not flinch.

“They died for my children,” Rhaenyra said, her voice roughened to gravel.  

“You carried them into the light,” Rhaella replied. “As all mothers of dragons must.”

The wind surged again, scattering embers into the night sky like red stars. 

When Rhaenyra turned back toward the flames, Rhaella’s face was haloed by the glow, not as a woman, but as something carved from prophecy, her purple eyes reflecting both faith and fire.

The mark of their kind.

Then the wind shifted, and the smoke carried out to sea.

By the time Rhaenyra reached her solar, the fever had become a living thing.

The corridors swayed like a ship’s deck beneath her.

She closed the door behind her and braced both hands on the carved stone table, the surface slick with the condensation of her own heat.

Her breath came shallow, every inhale scraping against her ribs. She had burned all day for the dead, now the fire had turned inward.

Her gown clung to her skin, her braid heavy against her back.

She tried to unlace her bodice, but her fingers trembled too violently. The world blurred; gold streaked across her vision.

With a soft sound, she sank to her knees beside the bed. The fever pressed against her skull, cruel and bright, until the candlelight itself seemed to bow toward her, flickering in sympathy.

Far below, near the base of the cliffs, Syrax’s chosen cave glowed with the dull orange of her breath.

The air was thick with the musk of smoke and the stone walls etched black where her claws had carved them.

Vaegon stood at the mouth of the den, the dragonkeepers arrayed around him in a cautious semicircle.

Even seasoned handlers kept their distance, Syrax was no longer the lithe beast they remembered.

Her body had grown massive, her neck thick with muscle, her eyes burning brighter than molten glass.

“She’s doubled her feed in a night,” one keeper said, awed. “And still she hungers.”

“It is what it is,” Vaegon replied. His voice cut clean through the hiss of the surf and the dragon’s low growl. “Bring more to feed her”

The keepers exchanged wary glances. “Archmaester, the larders—”

“I said feed her.”

He reached into his belt and drew out a pouch, the clink of coin loud in the quiet. A flash of silver caught the torchlight as he pressed it into the nearest man’s palm.

“Tell the quartermaster I’ll have livestock driven in from Driftmark before the tide turns. Goats, cows, pigs—anything large enough to bleed and still kick when she takes it. I don’t care the price or the distance. Hire every herdsman between here and Spicetown if you must.”

He fixed the man with a level stare. “She’ll eat them live. The meat’s no good once it’s cold.”

The keepers swallowed, glancing toward the dragon whose golden eyes flickered like molten coin. 

No one dared to question him again.

The dragon huffed, a plume of smoke curling toward the ceiling. Vaegon didn’t move until her head dipped, the faintest show of restraint from a creature that had outgrown obedience. Only then did he speak again, low enough that only the fire and the stone might hear:

“Āeksia ao hen zaldrīzes līs,” he prayed. “Dāez iksan syt lua udra. Skoros iksā sēton, ao sēton. Skoros iksā rȳbagon, ao rȳbagon.”

Your fire answers hers. Do not forget who first fed you blood. When she burns, you burn. When she rises, so will you.

---

The morning broke red.

Meleys came out of the dawn like a wound reopened, her scream splitting the fog. The sea beneath her churned white, ships scattering in her shadow as the Red Queen descended on Dragonstone’s cliffs.

Two riders clung to her saddle, Rhaenys and Corlys, the living image of House Velaryon’s wrath.

Corlys was down first, his cloak snapping in the wind, salt-stiff and travel-stained. Rhaenys followed, the scarlet of her dragon reflected in the steel of her eyes.

“Where are my grandchildren?” she demanded before her boots had even touched the stone.

No one answered quickly enough.

The nearest guard stammered, and she was already moving, The Sea Snake matching her stride for stride.

They cut through the courtyard like blades through mist, their fury radiating heat.

Vaegon appeared at the top of the steps, composed but sharp eyed. “They are safe,” he said at once. “The attackers are dead.”

“Not all,” Corlys growled. “There are always more snakes in a pit.”

“The Princess?” Rhaenys asked. Her voice was lower now, but far deadlier.

Vaegon hesitated, and that hesitation was answer enough.

“She’s in her solar,” he said finally. “Fever took her.”

Rhaenys didn’t wait for permission. The guards tried to form a half-hearted line, but Corlys’s glare alone sent them scattering. Together, they climbed the stair, a single heartbeat of silence before the hall erupted into motion, servants darting ahead to clear the way.

When they reached Rhaenyra’s chamber, the air was thick with the scent of damp linen and fever. The princess — her good-daughter — lay half-propped against her pillows, skin flushed and slick with sweat, her breathing shallow beneath the weight of the heat consuming her.

Rhaenys halted at the bedside, the iron in her spine at war with the tremor in her jaw. She brushed a damp curl from Rhaenyra’s brow, then lifted her gaze to Vaegon standing nearby.

“My grandchildren?”

“With your son and daughter,” he replied.

She held his gaze, unblinking. “I should have been called sooner.”

Archmaester Vaegon, her uncle, did not flinch. “You were,” he said evenly. “The raven flew before dawn. The very first to know."

Rhaenys’s jaw tightened, her breath sharp through her nose. “And yet still too late.”

Corlys moved closer to the bed, his heavy boots whispering against the stone. He looked down at Rhaenyra; fevered, beautiful, and frightening in her stillness. The firelight painted her skin gold, as if the flame she carried within were threatening to burn its way free.

“She’s burning,” he growled. 

“She’s fighting,” Vaegon corrected. “The magic clings to her. Blood calls to blood, and she’s not ready to release it.”

Rhaenys turned on him, her eyes flashing. “You let her work bloodcraft on the eve of an attack?”

“I let her survive,” Vaegon replied. “Would you rather she lie cold instead of hot?”

The retort struck, and for a moment, only the sound of the sea filled the silence.

Rhaenys exhaled through her teeth, the motion sharp, controlled. “You play with fire as though it answers to reason, Uncle.”

“And you,” he returned softly, “forget it made you what you are.”

Corlys stepped between them before the air could ignite. “Stop.” His tone carried the weight of command honed over a lifetime at sea, quiet, lethal, absolute. “The dead cannot hear us argue, and the living have need of calm.”

Rhaenys tore her gaze from Vaegon’s and looked again to Rhaenyra. Her hand found the younger woman’s wrist, feeling the faint, furious flutter of her pulse. “Then we act as though she were awake,” she said. “The court must see the realm steady, not faltering.”

Her eyes flicked to Corlys. “Send word to Driftmark. Every ship in the bay armed and provisioned.”

Then, to Vaegon: “No ravens fly without my seal. None. Do you understand me?”

“I do,” he said, inclining his head. “But gossips will still spread.”

“Then we give them an answer.”

She straightened, every inch the queen she refused to name herself. “Summon Kara of Oldtown. She’ll leave before sundown.”

The name drew a flicker of recognition from Corlys. “The girl you installed in Rhaenyra’s retinue,” he said. “The one you said the Faith broke.”

Rhaenys’s gaze did not waver. “A merchant’s daughter,” she said, her voice cutting clean and cold. “Raped by one of the Queen’s septons, then flogged for tempting him. She writes a steady hand, keeps her head bowed, and is smart as a fox.”

“And you’d send her to Kingslanding?” Corlys asked, incredulous.

Rhaenys’s eyes flicked toward the window, where the light from the sea danced against the glass. “Yes,” she said simply. "She’ll be welcomed like a confession.”

Corlys frowned. “And what confession will she bring?”

Rhaenys turned back to him, and in the candlelight, her face seemed carved from something older than mercy. “Only the ones I put in her mouth.”

Vaegon’s brow furrowed, but not in disapproval, in thought.

A faint gleam passed through his eyes, something like respect. “You mean to author the story yourself,” he said quietly.

Rhaenys’s mouth curved, sharp as a blade catching light. “I mean to make the Queen believe she’s reading her own thoughts.”

She drew a slow breath, then added, “When Alicent moves, I want her looking the wrong way. I want her believing the storm has passed, not realizing the tide’s already taken her.”

The room fell quiet. Even the sea beyond the windows seemed to hush, as though listening.

Corlys’s voice, when it came, was low. “And the girl? What happens to her if she’s caught?”

Rhaenys looked toward the bed, where Rhaenyra lay burning and beautiful in her fever. “Then she will burn,” she said softly. “As all women do when the realm forgets what they’re worth.”

The words hung there, not cruel, but certain.

Vaegon bowed his head slightly, an acknowledgment of something he could not yet name. “Then the story begins tonight.”

Rhaenys nodded once. “See that Kara is fed, clothed, and given parchment. I’ll dictate the first letter myself.”

Corlys turned toward the door, muttering, “Seven save us all.”

Rhaenys’s lips curved faintly. “They won’t,” she said. “That’s why we must.”

A knock sounded at the chamber door, three soft, deliberate taps.

“Enter,” Rhaenys said.

Maester Geradys stepped in, the hem of his robe damp from the sea-mist. His satchel clinked faintly with glass and herbs. The old man bowed once, eyes going immediately to the bed. Rhaenyra’s skin gleamed with fever, her breath shallow but steady, her lashes damp against flushed cheeks.

“Her pulse holds,” he said. “The fever burns high, but not past saving. I’ll remain until morning.”

“See that you do,” Vaegon said, moving aside to give him room. “And speak of this to no one beyond this chamber.”

Geradys inclined his head and began his work. The smell of crushed herbs and vinegar soon filled the room, thin and bitter against the salt-heavy air.

Rhaenys lingered a moment longer, watching as the maester bathed Rhaenyra’s brow. Then she turned to Corlys and Vaegon, her voice low and measured. “Take me to the children.”

Vaegon nodded. “This way, niece.”

They left the solar quietly. The corridors beyond were dim, torches guttering in their sconces. The night air clung to the walls, cool and sharp with the scent of smoke and old stone. When they descended toward the nursery, the damage became plain.

The doors had been splintered, the hinges bent. The smell of burnt oak and oil lingered still, mingling with the faint iron tang of blood that no washing could fully remove. One of the tapestries hung half-charred, its embroidery of dragons mid-flight scorched into black silhouettes.

Rhaenys paused at the threshold. “How many?” she asked.

“Three intruders,” Vaegon said. “All dead before dawn. One by Septa Rhaella, one by Dameon, one by Rhaenyra herself.”

Corlys’s jaw tightened. “And the children?”

“Laena and Laenor moved them to her chambers after Rhaenyra’s fever caught.”

Rhaenys’s shoulders eased, but only slightly. “Then take us there.”

They climbed the narrow stairs to the upper tower, where the air grew warmer, the smoke replaced by the faint, clean scent of milk and oil lamps. Laena’s chambers stood open. A brazier burned low, and the sound of the sea filtered through the half-drawn curtains.

Laena sat near the hearth, her long silver hair unbound, a sleeping infant in each arm.

Baela and Rhaena, their tiny faces turned toward the warmth of her chest. 

Across the room, Laenor stood with one of the triplets balanced on his hip. Aemon, heavy with the sturdiness of a one-year-old, his head tucked against his father’s shoulder. Beside them, in a wide cradle lined with velvet and wool, Aenar and Aemma slept entangled. His hand in her curls, her foot pressed against his ribs, as if the womb’s memory still bound them together.

For one heartbeat, all the noise, the world itself, seemed to recede.

Only the sound of five small, steady breaths remained.

“Laena,” she said softly.

Laena looked up, her face pale but composed. “Mother.”

Rhaenys moved first, crossing the room in slow, careful steps. “My brave girl,” she said, bending to press a kiss to Laena’s temple. “You did well.”

Laena’s smile trembled. “We only did what you would have done.”

Corlys came behind her, his cloak still carrying the scent of the sea. He rested a hand on Laena’s shoulder, the gesture firm but tender, before turning to Laenor. “And you, my son,” he said. “You kept them safe.”

Laenor’s expression was weary but proud. “We all did what we must."

Rhaenys’s gaze softened as it fell to the two sleeping infants in Laena’s arms. She reached out, brushing a fingertip down Baela’s tiny cheek, then Rhaena’s. “Look at them,” she said. “Two perfect pearls.”

Laena’s voice was hushed, filled with a reverent exhaustion. “Baela hatched her dragon on the eve of the attack. She hasn’t cried since.”

Corlys’s eyes warmed. “Born to flame,” he said. “Just like her mother.”

He leaned closer, taking in the soft rise and fall of Rhaena’s chest. “And this one? So calm. I wager she’ll be the wise one. Always watching the storm instead of running from it.”

Rhaenys smiled faintly, her hand still hovering above the girls. “They balance one another already,” she said. 

Her gaze lingered for a moment longer, pride, relief, and grief bound tight behind her eyes before it drifted toward the cradle.

Rhaenys crossed the room in silence, the hem of her gown whispering against the stone. She stopped beside the cradle and looked down at Aenar and Aemma, at the faces she had prayed to see unharmed. Their skin glowed warm in the firelight; faint curls of silver-gold hair clung damply to their foreheads.

She reached down, brushing a curl from Aemma’s brow. The child stirred, eyes fluttering open, their mismatched hues—one violet, one sea-blue—glinting through the haze of sleep. A faint, uncertain whimper escaped her, more sigh than cry.

“There now,” Rhaenys whispered, smiling through the ache in her throat. “Grandmother’s here.”

She gathered Aemma gently into her arms. The girl gave a soft, hiccupped breath, her tiny hand seeking purchase until it found the edge of Rhaenys’s sleeve. She clung there, still half dreaming, her warm cheek pressed against the older woman’s collarbone.

Rhaenys swayed without thinking, the movement instinctive, ancient.

The rhythm of a mother turned grandmother, heart and body remembering. 

Corlys moved beside her, leaning over the cradle to gather Aenar. The boy woke with a soft, indignant sound, then quieted as soon as his grandsire’s hand steadied him. Corlys’s great palm spanned nearly the child’s entire back; the sailor’s calluses that had gripped oars and swords now cradled something infinitely more precious.

“He’s heavy for one year,” Corlys whispered, awe softening his voice. “Strong as a tide current already.”

Laenor smiled faintly, adjusting Aemon’s weight. “He bullies his brother and steals his sister’s toys. I’d be worried if he weren’t.”

Rhaenys looked up, her tone gentling. “And Aemon?”

Laenor’s smile faltered.

He glanced down at the boy in his arms. Aemon’s small fingers were fisted in the fabric of his father’s collar, his head resting just beneath Laenor’s jaw, unmoving save for the slow rise and fall of breath.

“He hasn’t wanted to be put down,” Laenor admitted quietly. “Since it happened.”

Rhaenys’s heart twisted. “He remembers?”

“I don’t know,” Laenor said, voice rough with weariness. “But every time I set him down, he wakes. He reaches. He looks for someone, to hold him. As if letting go means losing us again.”

A silence fell, heavy but tender.

The fire crackled. Somewhere beyond the window, the sea crashed against the cliffs.

Rhaenys stepped closer, brushing her fingers through the soft curls at Aemon’s temple. “He won’t remember the fear,” she said softly. “Only the arms that kept him from it.”

Laenor’s throat worked. “I hope you’re right.”

Corlys looked up from where Aenar now dozed against his shoulder. “She usually is,” he said.

Rhaenys turned toward them both, toward her daughter and her son, her husband and the five small lives between them.

“We’ll stay,” she said quietly. “As long as we’re needed. The children will have every watchful eye, and Dragonstone will have its strength back before the moon turns.”

Laena’s gaze softened, gratitude flickering through exhaustion. “You don’t have to—”

Rhaenys cut her off with a look that allowed no protest. “We'll stay."

Corlys nodded once, his voice low, deliberate. “Aye. The garrisons will double, and Driftmark’s fleet will anchor here until the skies settle.”

He hesitated, scanning the chamber. “But where,” he asked, “is Daemon?”

The question landed like a thrown blade.

Laenor’s gaze flicked to Laena before either could answer. She shifted in her chair, tightening her hold on Baela and Rhaena. “He’s gone,” she said at last. “He left before dawn, flew for Kingslanding.”

Corlys’s jaw set. “Without word? Without council?”

Laenor sighed. “He said the trail led there. To those who sent the blades.”

Rhaenys’s eyes narrowed. “He means to hunt them himself.”

Laena’s head lifted sharply. “What else would you have him do?”

The question cut the air clean in two.

Her voice was quiet, but it burned. She rose, careful not to wake the twins, and stood tall before them, barefoot, unadorned, firelight painting her in gold and shadow. Baela stirred, emitting a small, plaintive sound, while Rhaena shifted closer, pressing her face to her mother’s neck.

“They came for our children,” Laena said, her tone trembling with contained fury. “For his daughters. For their cousins. For all the blood that bears our name. And you think he should stay here and count ships?”

Rhaenys’s expression softened but her voice did not. “I think he should think, before he burns half the realm.”

Laena shook her head, silver hair catching the light. “He is thinking. He’s thinking like a father, like a dragon. He’s doing what the realm taught him to do: strike before they strike again.”

Corlys’s tone darkened, edged with dread. “He’s not only a father, Laena. He’s Daemon. His wrath doesn’t end where justice begins.”

Laena’s eyes flashed, wet with exhaustion and defiance. “And yet that wrath has kept us alive. You know it as well as I.”

She drew a breath, voice low but shaking. “He’s not hunting for revenge, not this time. He’s hunting to make sure none of them—none—ever dare touch what’s his again. Our daughters. The triplets. He’s protecting all of them.”

The weight of her words filled the room. Even the flames seemed to bow lower, as if listening.

Corlys’s hand stilled on Aenar’s back. “And if he brings that fire home with him?”

Laena looked down at her daughters, at their soft cheeks and steady breaths, and when she spoke, her voice was barely more than a whisper. “Then let it come. At least it will be our fire. Born of our blood.”

The silence that followed was vast.

Rhaenys’s breath shuddered out, caught between pride and fear. “He’ll light the sky red before the sun does."

Corlys’s mouth tightened, grief flickering through his resolve. “And leave the rest of us to clean the ashes.”

Rhaenys looked down at the sleeping child in her arms, Aemma’s cheek warm against her shoulder, one small hand curled against her throat. “Then we’ll make ready,” she said quietly. “For whatever he brings back with him.”

No one spoke again.

The wind pressed against the glass. The sea hissed below the cliffs. And somewhere far away, the echo of a dragon’s roar rose through the dark...low, mournful, and promising ruin.

---

The stink hit him first.

King’s Landing had always smelled like this: rot and river mud, smoke and shit, the sour breath of too many lives crammed too tight. 

Daemon moved through Flea Bottom wrapped in a dark cloak, hood low.

Caraxes had gone to ground outside the city’s walls, sulking among blackened ruins where the old fields had once been. Too many eyes watched the Dragonpit; too many tongues would wag if the Blood Wyrm coiled there now.

Better to come like this.

On foot.

On the level of the men who’d dared send steel into a cradle.

The alley spat him into one of the wider lanes, little more than a vein of trampled mud between leaning shacks. Night lingered down here long after dawn broke. Smoke crawled from cookfires. A child in an oversized tunic darted past him clutching a stolen heel of bread; no one gave chase. From a doorway came the dry, hacking cough of a man whose lungs had forgotten what clean air meant.

Daemon’s hand rested light on the pommel at his hip. Not for show. Habit.

He knew these streets better than most lords knew their own gods. He had walked them as a prince in exile and worse, the rogue with a dragon and nothing else.

The faces had changed, but the hunger had not.

He turned down a narrower lane, ducking beneath a warped beam. Ahead, a sagging door stood beneath a crude painting of a pale worm on a black field, half-scrubbed away, but not enough.

The White Worm erased nothing by accident.

Inside, the air was thicker. Low light, low voices, the stink of old ale and fish left too long in the sun.

Men hunched over cups, a few women too.

No one looked up. Looking up drew notice. Drawing notice got you dead.

Daemon pulled back his hood just enough for the nearest set of eyes to see his face.

It did the work for him.

The man went pale. His chair scraped back. “My—” He bit off the honorific, swallowed it like poison. “You shouldn’t—”

“Where is she?” Daemon asked.

No title.

No explanation.

The man’s gaze darted toward the back. “She...she doesn’t… see folk here no more.”

Daemon’s smile was thin and wrong. “She’ll see me.”

He crossed the room in three easy steps and caught the man by the collar, drawing him close enough to smell his fear. “Tell her Daemon Targaryen is in her gutter,” he said softly. “Or I start cleaning it.”

The man nodded so fast Daemon thought his neck might snap. He bolted through a warped door, vanishing into the dark beyond.

Daemon waited.

A woman near the hearth risked a glance at him. Her eyes snagged on the pale hair at his temples, the dragon etched in the set of his shoulders.

She looked away quickly.

Good. Let them remember.

He let the quiet stretch. Let Flea Bottom feel him there: a storm in a cloak, patient and coiled.

The back door creaked open again.

“Leave,” a voice said from the shadows beyond. Low, cool, carrying that peculiar lilt he remembered. “All of you.”

Chairs scraped. No one argued. In less than a minute, the room emptied. The man Daemon had grabbed fled with the rest. Only Daemon remained.

Mysaria stepped into the light.

She wore plain wool, no jewels, her dark hair hidden beneath a dark wrap. Only her eyes betrayed her, sharp as ever, assessing him the way a butcher might weigh a prize cut. But there was something else there too: a spark of amusement, a glimmer that slid slow over his face, down to where his hand still hovered near his sword.

“Prince,” she said, her voice a whisper dragged through honey.

“White Worm,” he returned, though it came rougher than he meant it to.

Her mouth curved, not quite a smile. “You do not come here with guards. Or banners. Or your beast.” Her gaze flicked toward the door, then back to him. “Either brave. Or desperate. Both have always suited you.”

“They sent blades into my children’s beds,” Daemon said.

The words were soft, but the air between them shifted, tightened.

Mysaria stilled, though her eyes didn’t leave his.

“I heard whispers,” she said. “Not enough to name. Not enough to warn without burning my web.” She tilted her head, lips parting just enough to draw a slow breath. “I did not know whose cradles.”

Daemon laughed; low, sharp, humorless.

“You heard.” The word came out a snarl. “You heard, and said nothing.”

The chair nearest him went first. He kicked it sideways, the crash splintering the silence. Then the table, overturned in one brutal motion, cups and scrolls scattering, wine streaking down the stone like blood.

Mysaria didn’t flinch.

She stood there in the lamplight as if she’d been expecting the storm. “You think I could have stopped it—”

He was on her before she finished, a blur of movement and rage. His hand caught her by the throat, slammed her back against the wall hard enough to make the plaster crack. The flame in the lamp guttered, throwing their shadows long and jagged across the floor.

“Every whisper in this city bends to you,” he said. “Every rat carries your scent. You knew something.”

Her fingers came up to his wrist, nails grazing his skin. Not fighting, feeling.

“And if I did?” she rasped.

Daemon’s face went blank.

The fury drained into something colder. His eyes, violet gone near black, searched her face as though trying to find the last flicker of the woman he’d once known. Whatever he found wasn’t enough.

“If you did,” he said softly, “then I hope you prayed before I came.”

He moved. Swift. Precise. His hand tore her from the wall and slammed her down onto the table. The wood cracked beneath the weight, parchment scattering like frightened birds. The edge bit into her hip; she hissed, still too proud to cry out.

Her hand came up, trembling, perhaps in self-defense, perhaps habit, and he caught it midair, twisting until she gasped.

“You always wanted to see the real me,” he said. “Here he is.”

The lamplight caught the edge of his dagger as he drew it, slow, deliberate. He didn’t point it at her throat.

He set it against the table instead and began to carve.

The noise was awful.

Wood screaming beneath steel.

“You hear the city’s heart,” he said. “So you’ll tell me where it beats fastest.”

“Daemon—”

“Who paid them?”

Her eyes flicked to the blade.

He smiled, and the expression was wrong. “You think I came here to be merciful?”

He brought the knife down hard, pinning a lock of her hair against the table. The blade sank into the wood an inch from her temple, the strand trembling like a spider’s thread caught in wind.

He leaned close, breath hot against her ear. “You have pretty hands,” he growled. “Soft for all your filth. You lie to me again, and I’ll start with the right one. You’ll watch while I break each finger at the joint, slow enough to hear the pop. Then I’ll take the left.” he drew the word out, a hiss against her skin.

Her composure cracked.

For the first time, Mysaria’s eyes widened, real fear bleeding through the mask.

“You wouldn’t,” she whispered.

“Wouldn’t I?” He turned the blade, its tip glinting just before her eyes. “I’ve killed men better than me. You think a whore’s skin will stop me?”

The words struck harder than any blow.

Her lips parted, a tremor threading her breath. “You’d gut your only friend?”

“I don’t have friends,” he said. “I have names. And debts. And I’m collecting.”

He twisted the blade free from the table, slow enough for the sound to crawl down her spine. The hair he’d pinned fluttered loose, a few strands clinging to the steel.

“Now,” he said. “Say the name.”

Mysaria’s breath came fast, uneven.

Her throat bobbed once. “I do not—” She stopped, then tried again, the words splintering apart under the weight of his stare. “I do not have a name.”

Daemon didn’t move.

He only watched her, the dagger still gleaming faintly in his hand, a serpent waiting to strike.

“I heard a whisper,” she forced out, voice shaking now. “Only that Oldtown’s gold bought the knives. But the hand that sent them wasn’t theirs. It came from inside the Red Keep.”

The silence that followed was worse than a scream.

Mysaria swallowed hard. “Someone close to the crown. A court man. Not the Faith, not your brother’s men...something in between. The gold was Oldtown’s, but the order came from a tongue that lives beneath Viserys’s own banner.”

His face didn’t change.

That was the horror of it.

He was utterly still, except for his fingers flexing once on the hilt of the dagger, the faint sound of leather groaning beneath his grip.

“You heard,” he said quietly, “and you said nothing.”

“I did not know!” she cried. “Daemon, I did not know who they meant. You think I would risk your wrath for coin? You think I’d hold my tongue if I thought the knives were meant for your girls?”

He moved before she could finish, his hand shooting out, gripping the back of her neck, dragging her forward until her forehead nearly touched the table.

The dagger’s tip hovered just above her ear.

“You think ignorance will spare you?” His voice had gone lower, colder, each word deliberate, precise, meant to wound. “If I find even one letter, one coin, one whisper traced to your web, I’ll nail you to this same table and let the rats eat what the fire leaves.”

Her body shook under his hand, but she didn’t fight.

“It was not me,” she gasped. “I swear it. I only heard enough to know something was moving. Oldtown’s gold. The Red Keep’s silence. That’s all I have.”

He held her there for a long moment, the heat of his rage a living thing between them.

Then, slowly, he released her. She collapsed back against the table, chest heaving, one hand pressed to the mark his fingers had left.

Daemon sheathed the blade with a soft, final sound. “You’re certain.”

Her voice was raw. “As certain as a woman can be when death whispers through her walls.”

Daemon studied her as though the words themselves might bleed if he looked long enough. Then he leaned forward, planting one gloved hand flat on the table beside her. The wood creaked beneath the weight.

“You have until tonight,” he said.

Mysaria blinked, disbelieving. “What?”

His tone didn’t rise. That made it worse. “You’ll find more. A name, a place, a trail. Something I can follow. You’ll turn this city inside out if you must. Because when night falls, I’ll come again.”

Her mouth went dry. “And if I can’t?”

He tilted his head, eyes narrowing to slits. “Then you’ll burn with what you don’t know.”

The words hung between them like smoke. Heavy, poisonous, final.

He straightened, adjusting his cloak with precise, almost courtly care, and turned toward the door. For a heartbeat, Mysaria thought he might leave without another word. But then he paused, a silhouette framed in lamplight, the dragon in him barely contained beneath human skin.

“You wanted to trade in whispers,” he said softly, without turning back. “Pray you find one loud enough to save your life.”

Then he was gone, leaving behind the scent of oil, smoke, and fear.

Mysaria stayed frozen where she sat, her pulse pounding in her ears.

The air still thrummed with the echo of his voice.

Slowly, her gaze fell to the table, the gouged wood, the splintered edge where his knife had pinned her hair.

Her fingers trembled as she reached for it. A lock of dark hair lay severed beside the groove, like an offering.

She closed her hand around it and whispered, almost to herself, “Seven take you, Daemon Targaryen."

The streets of King’s Landing were already awake by the time Daemon reached the upper ward.

Fishmongers shouted over the stench of the harbor, sept bells tolled for morning prayer, and the gold cloaks pretended not to notice the blood drying on his boots. He had not spoken since leaving the White Worm’s den.

He did not need to. 

By the time he reached the Red Keep, the sun had turned the walls the color of fresh-forged steel. Guards shifted as he approached, not out of duty, but instinct.

The kind of stillness that came when a dragon entered the room.

The courtyard parted around him.

Courtiers stopped whispering mid-breath.

Every eye followed the prince in black and red as he crossed the stones and vanished through the archway that led toward Maegor’s Holdfast.

He knew where to go.

He slipped through a narrow stair behind a weeping stone angel, emerging in the shadows outside the King’s solar. Two white-cloaked knights flanked the door: Ser Harrold Westerling and Ser Arryk Cargyll. They were speaking in low tones, breaking off only when the air shifted.

Daemon stepped into view.

Both men stiffened.

“Prince Daemon,” Ser Harrold said carefully. “His Grace did not summon you.”

“Then you may tell him I’ve come uninvited.”

He moved past before either could object. The older knight’s hand brushed the hilt of his sword, not to draw, only to remind Daemon that he could.

Daemon smiled without humor. “Careful, Harrold. You’re old enough to know how badly that ends.”

Then he pushed open the door.

Viserys was at his writing desk, sunlight streaming across a scatter of scrolls. A maester was reading softly from some petition until the door slammed back against the wall.

The King’s head jerked up. “Daemon?”

The maester went pale.

Daemon shut the door behind him. “Out,” he said.

The maester looked to the King. Viserys hesitated, then nodded once. “Go.”

When they were alone, Daemon crossed the chamber, boots thudding slow against the marble, the sound echoing like war drums in a tomb.

Viserys set his quill aside. “You might have sent word.”

Daemon’s mouth curved, not amusement, but something darker. “And wait for you to decide whether to open the letter?”

Viserys’s brow furrowed. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means,” Daemon said, each word a deliberate step closer, “that every time I’ve warned you, you’ve done nothing. So this time, I came myself.”

He stopped just short of the desk. The sunlight caught the black in his cloak. 

Viserys straightened, unease slipping into his voice. “What’s happened?”

Daemon didn’t answer right away. When he did, his voice was too soft.

“They sent blades into my children’s beds.”

The air changed. It folded tight, thick as smoke.

Viserys went very still. “What did you say?”

Daemon’s eyes lifted to his brother’s, steady, cold, bottomless. “Three men. Dead now. They climbed the cliffs of Dragonstone under cover of fog. They knew the guard rotations, the servants’ paths. They came for my girls. For Rhaenyra’s babes. For mine.”

Viserys’s face drained of color. “Gods… Daemon—”

“The gods weren’t there,” Daemon cut in. His voice didn’t rise, but something inside it flared, a furnace banked behind every syllable. “Only the blood they spilled, and the blood they meant to.”

He circled the desk like a predator sizing the cage, eyes never leaving his brother. “Do you know what it means for three men to climb those cliffs alive? To find the nursery in silence?”

Viserys’s lips parted, but no sound came.

Daemon leaned forward, hands braced on the table, close enough that the King could smell the iron and smoke on him. “Someone paid for it. Oldtown’s gold bought them. But the hand that sent them lives here. In your keep. Beneath your roof.”

Viserys recoiled as if struck. “Daemon, that’s treason.”

“It’s truth,” Daemon said, quiet and unflinching.

“Do you have proof?”

Daemon’s mouth curved, not a smile, but something colder, sharper. “I have corpses.”

Viserys stared at him as though the words were foreign. “You can’t come storming into my halls with accusations—”

“I can when it’s my blood spilled.”

The words cracked like a whip.

The silence that followed was near-sacred, two brothers, once inseparable, now standing on opposite shores of the same grief. Between them lay a desk, the crown, and the wreckage of what had once been trust.

Daemon’s hands flexed once on the polished wood, the tendons in his forearms taut as rigging before a storm. “You sit in this room and call yourself King,” he said, low, dangerous. “Then act like it.”

Viserys flinched. His hand drifted toward the crown on the table, not to wear it, but to steady himself. “You’d have me start a war over a whisper?”

Daemon’s eyes went dark, something fever-bright burning behind them. “A whisper that crept through the night and into the cradles of your grandchildren.”

Viserys’s mouth trembled. “Daemon—”

“They meant to butcher them in their sleep,” Daemon hissed, voice breaking through restraint now. “Aemon, Aemma, Aenar, Baela, Rhaena; babes, Viserys. Your line. Your blood. They would have slit their throats like lambs and left them for dawn to find.”

Viserys’s breath came shallow, his eyes wide, glistening. “Gods… gods have mercy…”

“The gods were not there!” Daemon thundered, slamming his palm against the table. The sound rattled the quills, the inkpot, the fragile pretense of calm. “The gods won’t save them! You will, or I will, and only one of us will be remembered for it.”

Viserys’s hand came up, shaking. “Daemon stop.”

But his brother didn’t stop pacing, didn’t stop burning.

His boots echoed off the marble, a metronome for his fury.

“I understand your anger,” Viserys said, louder now, trying to cut through it. “Seven help me, I do. But you cannot come here threatening war against shadows and whispers. You don’t even know who—”

“I know enough!” Daemon snapped, turning so fast the light caught on the edge of his cloak. “Oldtown’s coin paid them. This court breeds vipers in silk. And you sit here writing petitions while they draw blades for our children.”

Viserys’s voice broke. “And what would you have me do? Burn Oldtown entirely? Would that bring peace?”

Daemon’s laugh was low and dangerous, humorless. “Peace? You think peace still lives in this realm? It died the moment your council let my blood be hunted!”

Viserys flinched as though struck. “You would bring fire and slaughter to the realm entire? Gods, Daemon, do you even hear yourself?”

Daemon came closer, too close, his face a shadow of fury barely contained. “You speak of restraint while your grandchildren nearly bled out on their pillows. If it were your Alicent’s boys lying cold, would you whisper prayers and wait for a council’s blessing?”

“Don’t you dare—” Viserys’s voice cracked, half command, half plea. “Don’t you dare turn this into some accusation against her. She’s the Queen. You will not make her your scapegoat.”

Daemon sneered, teeth bared. “Then who, brother? Who sits so near your throne they can strike from its shadow?”

“Enough!” Viserys slammed his fist against the table, but the gesture looked more desperate than commanding. His breath came ragged, sweat gleaming at his temples. “You will not act rashly. You will not leave bodies in the streets and call it justice.”

Daemon’s jaw clenched, the muscle twitching. “You think I need your leave?”

“I think you’ve already done enough harm for a lifetime.”

That broke something in the air.

Daemon’s expression flickered; hurt, disbelief, something rawer, before it hardened into ice.

“I bled for this family,” he said quietly. “And you let them come for mine.”

Viserys’s eyes softened despite himself. “I’m trying to protect you, Daemon. All of you. War devours everything it touches.”

Daemon leaned in, his voice almost a whisper. “And cowardice devours it slower.”

The words hung there, sharp and final.

Viserys sank into his chair, the fight gone out of him. “You’re not thinking clearly,” he said weakly. “Go back to Dragonstone. Be with your wife, your children. I’ll send riders to investigate—”

“Investigate,” Daemon repeated, the word spat like poison. “While the killers find new masters.”

“Daemon, wait,” Viserys rasped, rising too fast. The chair skidded backward, nearly toppling. “You will not storm out of here with threats on your tongue—”

But Daemon was already halfway to the door, fury radiating off him like heat from a live flame.

That was when it opened.

Two white cloaks appeared first, startled, and then the Queen.

Alicent swept in with her brother close behind, skirts gathered, breath uneven. Her face was composed, but her eyes betrayed the truth, wide, uncertain, darting between Daemon and her husband.

“Your Grace,” she began, her tone pitched high and sweet. “Forgive the intrusion, but we heard shouting—”

She faltered as Daemon turned.

The look in his eyes froze the words on her tongue. There was no wildness there. Only something worse. Measured. Cold. A calm so thin it looked carved from rage.

“Everything is as it always is,” he said softly. “A kingdom rotting from its heart outward.”

Gwayne moved before he thought, stepping half in front of her, hand on his sword. “Mind your tongue, Prince.”

Daemon’s gaze slid toward him, slow and mocking. “Ah,” he drawled. “Another Hightower. Tell me, Ser, do they breed you pious cunts to irritate me, or does it come natural?”

Gwayne’s jaw tightened. “Say one more word about my line,” he growled, “and I’ll—”

“Ser Gwayne!” Alicent’s voice cracked, high and brittle. 

Daemon smiled, not amused, but hungry. He took a single step forward, and the air in the room seemed to bow with him.

“And you’ll what?” he asked, low, almost tender. “Draw steel in your King’s solar? Spill blood at the feet of your green queen?” He tilted his head, eyes narrowing to slits. “Go on, Ser. Let’s see if your courage matches your father’s sermons.”

The room held its breath.

Gwayne’s fingers whitened around the hilt of his sword. He looked young in that moment, too young to wear armor, too proud to know what it meant to die for nothing. A muscle jumped in his jaw, his throat tight with the effort to appear unafraid.

“Daemon.”

Viserys’s voice cracked the air, hoarse and spent.

Daemon didn’t turn. “Go back to your prayers, Gwayne,” he smirked. “Before I give you a reason to meet the gods yourself.”

Alicent stepped forward despite the tremor in her hands. “Please,” she said, her voice breaking, “this is madness—”

Daemon’s gaze found her, slow and cutting.

It pinned her like a knife through silk. “Madness?” His tone was soft, coaxing, dangerous. “No, Your Grace. Madness is marrying a whore’s conscience to a saint’s tongue and calling it virtue.”

Her lips parted in shock. “How dare you—”

“How dare I?” Daemon echoed, a dark smile curving his mouth. “You think spending enough time on your knees makes you clean? You fuck a crown and think it makes you holy.”

The green of her gown caught his eye, a cathedral shade he now saw stained with Oldtown’s coin. In his mind it bled into the false memory of a knife over Baela's sleeping throat. 

“Daemon!” Viserys yelled scandalized.

Gwayne stepped forward, eyes blazing. “You’ll not speak of the Queen that way, you bastard.”

Daemon turned his head lazily toward him, the faintest amusement glinting in his eyes.

Gwayne’s hand fell to his sword. “Say it again. I dare you.”

“I would,” Daemon said, stepping closer, “but I don’t repeat myself for cunts.”

The word hit like a slap.

Alicent flinched; Gwayne’s face went red, the veins in his neck standing out.

“You’re no prince, you’re filth in a crown’s shadow!”

Daemon laughed. Low. Dangerous. “And yet I could cut you open and fuck the faith out of what’s left.”

“Gods—!” Alicent cried, stumbling back. “Stop this! Both of you!”

Gwayne’s face flushed red. His sword hissed free in one furious motion.

The sound broke the room.

Alicent gasped, “Gwayne, no!”

But it was already too late.

Daemon was already moving.

A blur of black and red.

The dagger flashed.

A heartbeat of light.

He caught the wrist mid-swing. Twisted. A crack, wet, sharp, like ice breaking.

The sword fell. Clattered. Rolled.

Gwayne screamed. Daemon’s fist cut the sound short.

One blow to the gut.

The breath gone.

A spray of spit.

Second to the face. Teeth snapped. Blood on his tongue.

Daemon hit him again. And again. Until the knight folded, choking, half on his knees.

He grabbed Gwayne by the throat. Slammed him back into the wall.

The thud shook dust from the rafters.

Gwayne’s head snapped against stone. The sound, sickening.

“You want to play knight?” Daemon snarled, voice rough, breath hot. “You die like one.”

He flung him down. The armor hit marble with a hollow clang.

Boot to the ribs. Once. Twice. Something broke.

Viserys shouted.
Daemon didn’t hear.

He dropped to his knees, fisting Gwayne’s hair.
Dragged his head up. Eyes unfocused. Blood bubbling at his mouth.

“You done?” Daemon hissed. “Or should I help you pray?”

Gwayne spat blood. Tried to curse.

Alicent screamed, trying to reach them, but the guards held back, none daring to come between a dragon and its fire.

“Daemon!” Viserys roared, stumbling forward. “You’ll kill him!”

Daemon’s head turned, hair falling wild into his face, eyes lit from within. “He drew first,” he snarled. “You saw it.”

Then, with one last brutal motion, he plunged his dagger into Gwayne’s chest.

The blade went in clean, the breath leaving the young knight in a single, shuddering gasp.

The silence that followed was unbearable.

Alicent fell to her knees beside her brother, her hands slick with his blood, her screams breaking into sobs. “No, no, no—”

Daemon stood over them both, chest heaving, the dagger still in his hand. The blood ran down his fingers, hot, vivid, obscene against the black of his sleeve.

He looked at it, at what he’d done, and smiled faintly, without remorse. “Now,” he said softly, “the Faith can pray for one of its own.”

Viserys’s voice came broken, shaking with grief and fury. “You’ve damned yourself, Daemon.”

“I’ve saved your blood,” Daemon said, his voice low, steady. “If one of mine must be damned for it, so be it.”

Viserys staggered to his desk, gripping its edge for balance. The veins in his hands stood out, his face pale with shock. “Get out,” he whispered. “Get out before I call the Kingsguard to drag you from this room.”

Daemon tilted his head. “You won’t.”

Viserys’s voice rose, trembling. “You are banished! Do you hear me? From my sight, from my court, from this city!”

For a heartbeat, Daemon only watched him, the brother he’d bled beside, the King he’d defied a hundred times and never feared once.

Then he nodded once, slowly. “At last,” he said. “Something like a crown in your voice.”

He wiped his blade on Gwayne’s cloak, sheathed it, and turned to go.

Alicent’s sobs followed him to the door, raw and wordless.

Viserys sank into his chair, shaking, whispering as if to himself, “Seven save us… Seven save us from him.”

Daemon paused at the threshold, his shadow long in the sunlight.

“Don’t pray to gods, brother,” he said quietly. “Pray to dragons.”

And then he was gone, leaving blood on the floor, silence in his wake, and exile written in his name once more.

---

The fever did not break.

It changed shape.

Rhaenyra drifted through it like smoke through flame, her body forgotten, her mind caught in a current of heat and shadow.

The world around her was not Dragonstone. It was older, blacker than night, redder than the forge. The ground beneath her feet shimmered like glass, molten yet solid, whispering each time she moved.

A shore stretched before her. Black sand. Red sea.

And three figures waiting at the tide’s edge.

Aegon stood first, his crown fused to his skull by fire. His face was half shadow, half light, voice deep as the heartbeat of a forge. “You sought to bind the world in flame,” he said. “But flame cannot be bound. It remembers itself.”

Behind him came Rhaenys, her hair undone, eyes bright with salt and sorrow. “The fire you tend will wander,” she said. “It will go where even dragons fear to follow.”

Then Visenya approached, pale as ash, her sword drawn but lowered. “Do not mourn what is lost,” she said. “The blood carries memory. The dream continues.”

When she pressed the flat of Dark Sister to Rhaenyra’s chest, heat spilled through her ribs.
The sea caught flame.

And through that blaze, Rhaenyra saw, not a face, not a name...

but a girl.

A shimmer of silver hair against smoke. Bare feet walking through ruins.

A people crying out her name, a city of chains burning behind her.

A shadow of wings blotting out the sun.

The sight hollowed her. It was not envy, nor pride, but a strange, aching certainty, as though she were looking at her own reflection across centuries, meeting the echo of her soul in another age.

The figures began to fade, their words unraveling into wind.

“Wake,” Visenya whispered, already dissolving into light. “Fire is a language. One day, she will speak it.”

Rhaenyra gasped awake.

Her sheets were damp, her skin fever-bright. The candles bent toward her, their flames bowing low as if in worship. From the cliffs below, Syrax’s cry split the dawn, long and triumphant.

And for one breathless instant, Rhaenyra thought she could still hear the echo of a name, carried through the fire, whispered like a promise—

Daenerys.

Notes:

I’ll never understand fics where Valyrian blood magic has no effect. In this story, it does. It has weight, consequence, and memory. The Targaryens aren’t just dragonriders, they’re bound to fire through blood older than Westeros itself. Their lineage is not metaphorical; it’s metaphysical.

When that kind of blood is spilled, the world should answer. It should burn, reshape, remember. That’s the difference between fire as symbol and fire as inheritance. So no, this won’t be one of those worlds where the magic fizzles out quietly. Here, blood remembers what the living forget.

Chapter 19: The Jaws of Dragons

Summary:

I swear every time I think the fic can’t get more political, it laughs at me and adds another web of manipulation

The city had a thousand tongues, and all of them were lying.

In the brothels, they called it retribution, the dragon’s due, blood for blood.

In the taverns, it was madness, a prince lost to rage, carving shame into the King’s stone floor.

Among the gold cloaks, it was fear dressed as admiration. They drank to him anyway. “Better a Targaryen’s fury than a Hightower’s sermon,” one man slurred, before the night swallowed his laughter.

But in the septs, the prayers turned sour.

There, Daemon was not a man, he was an omen.

A heresy wearing dragon skin.

They spoke of him in the same breath as Maegor, as if the gods had loosed another shadow to remind men why faith must rule fire.

The Queen’s priests called him the Devil of Dragonstone, and the bells tolled not for mourning, but for warning.

One old woman near the Street of Silk swore she’d seen Daemon’s eyes burning red as dragonfire, heard him curse Oldtown by name.

Another said she saw him weep in the aftermath, blood dripping from his hands as he begged the gods for silence.

In the markets, the tale grew grander.

Some claimed Gwayne Hightower was the would-be assassin, that he’d confessed before Daemon cut him down. Others swore it was Rhaenyra herself who’d ordered the blow, that the Targaryen whore-princess had finally declared war on piety.

Truth was a corpse with too many hands on it.

Mysaria sat alone at the back of her den, listening as the lies bred in the dark.

Every rumor slid through her web before it reached the streets, and each carried her death a little nearer.

Daemon’s name was a storm again—

banished,
bloody,
unpredictable.

She had been his informant. His lover once. His accomplice always.

The thought chilled her more than any threat.

His exile had not made her safe, it had only stripped her shelter.

Oldtown’s coin had fed her network for years, its weight discreet and convenient. But now she could see the noose in every silver stag. Otto’s ravens had already gone quiet.

No replies, no orders.

Only silence.

She knew what that meant.

“Mistress,” a girl stammered, voice shaking. “They raided the Lantern House.”

Mysaria didn’t look up at first. “Whose men?”

“Gold cloaks. Half-drunk, half-armed. They said the pleasure houses were harboring traitors.”

That made her still. “Which houses?”

“Ours first.” The girl swallowed hard. “They dragged the girls out into the street, said they were looking for ledgers, for names. Tore the rooms apart. One of them... he wore a septon’s sigil on his belt.”

Mysaria’s hand tightened around her cup. “Did they take anyone?”

“Nella. And the red-haired one. The rest ran when the flames caught the drapes.”

Nella. The girl who slept with a knife under her pillow and still laughed like a child in sunlight.

“Burn what’s left,” she said softly. “Every ledger, every letter. If it bears ink, it dies tonight.”

The girl hesitated. “Even the noble accounts?”

“Especially those.”

When she was gone, Mysaria leaned back in her chair, listening to the city breathe through the cracks in her shutters, the distant bells, the cries, the slow, gathering hum of fear.

The smoke clung to the rafters like ghosts that refused to rise.

Not a riot this time, not a purge, just a quiet, methodical cleansing.

The guards had come with torches and holy words, their faces shining with the kind of righteousness that only fire can grant.

Mysaria watched from her window until the last scream turned to cinder.

She didn’t weep.

She counted.

Each voice, each spark, another debt she could never repay.

The coin they’d earned, the girls she’d hidden, the secrets sold in whispers.

All of it turned to ash below.

Her kingdom undone by piety and smoke.

“So this is how holiness feeds,” she whispered.

In the silence that followed, she began to move.

A ledgers’ worth of names burned first. Then the coded accounts, gone.

What could not be burned she swallowed, what could not be swallowed she buried in lime.

When the last of the records curled black in her hands, she sat back in the chair and poured wine over the embers. The hiss sounded almost like applause.

“Let them chase their saints,” she said softly. “We keep the sinners.”

Her hand hovered over a folded scrap. The last piece of information worth anything, the only one she had not yet destroyed.

A name scrawled in an unfamiliar hand, ink smudged by haste.

Ser Criston.

She stared at it for a long moment.

The name itself was poison.

The Queen’s own chosen shield turning up tied to the attempted slaughter of royal children. 

If it was true, the realm would choke on it.

If it wasn’t, truth would still drown beneath the weight of what it looked like.

A Queen’s knight did not move without her shadow falling across his blade. To act was to speak her will. And Mysaria knew the way rumor worked in Kingslanding, it didn’t need proof, only timing.

If she sent this name to Daemon, it wouldn’t just expose a hand; it would expose her. But it would also damn Alicent in a single stroke. A Hightower loyalist turned butcher. The Faith’s darling knight carrying the stain of treachery straight into the septs.

Her lips curved, slow and cold.

Even if the Queen hadn’t given the order, the world would believe she had. And belief, Mysaria knew, was deadlier than any sword.

She could already hear how they’d whisper it in the taverns: The Hightower bitch sent her holy dog to kill dragon babes and burned her own brother in the doing.

All it would take was one letter. One name.

Her fingers tightened around the parchment until the edges bit into her skin.

If she sent the name, it would be like setting fire to the sept itself.

The Blacks could not move openly, not yet. Not while Viserys still breathed and the Queen still wore her crown. The King might be weak in action, but the Faith would rally to his wife’s defense. A knight’s treachery was not the Queen’s guilt, not in public. In the court’s eyes, it would be Daemon’s vengeance, not truth, that lit the pyres.

But truth had never mattered to power, only timing.

If she gave Daemon this name now, it would not be justice. It would be leverage.

And leverage could buy her safety.

She imagined him reading it, that sharp smile, the flicker of comprehension when he realized what it meant: the Queen’s own sworn sword bound to a children's attempted murder. Whether she’d ordered it or not, the implication was enough to turn every sermon to ash.

But Daemon was not a man known for gratitude.

If she sent him the name with nothing else, he might simply take it and let her burn with the rest.

Her mind turned fast, cold.

The Blacks would not yet risk open war, but they would protect a useful ally. Especially one who held the key to shaping the realm’s next rumor.

So she would not beg. She would bargain.

She crossed to her writing table, the inkpot trembling with the quake of distant bells.

On a clean sheet, she began to write, each word a thread thrown toward survival. 

A name for a promise. Protection for truth. Ser Criston moved at her bidding, whether she knows it or not. I can still shape the story, but only if I live to tell it.

It might be a lie.

It might be the truest thing she ever sent.

In this city, there was no difference once a story drew blood.

She sealed it with red wax and pressed a ring, Daemon’s ring, long ago left behind in her keeping, into the soft seal.

Then she held it a moment longer, weighing it like sin in her palm.

“By dawn,” she told the shadow at the door, “this reaches Dragonstone.”

The messenger vanished into the night.

Mysaria sat a long while, listening to the smoke shift in the rafters.

If she was lucky, she thought, she’d die before morning.

If not...

at least she’d die knowing which Queen had started the fire.

---

The Great Hall was heavy with incense and expectation.

The King sat slumped upon the Iron Throne, his pallor almost translucent beneath the candlelight.

Beside him, the Queen stood tall and still, the only thing in the hall that did not tremble. Her gown was a mirror of her intent: green silk cut to perfection, its sheen catching every glint of gold. The prayer beads wound through her fingers clicked softly, a rhythm of restraint that barely disguised the tremor beneath.

Her face was composed, but her eyes betrayed the vigil of a sleepless night. Red-rimmed. Shadowed.

The look of a woman who had prayed herself raw.

She would not break now, not before the lords of the realm, not before her husband who could barely raise his gaze, not before the gods who had turned their faces away.

When the herald’s voice rose, it startled her more than she cared to show.

“Kara of Oldtown, sworn courier to Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen.”

Alicent’s head lifted at once.

Oldtown?

One of hers, a daughter of her city, of the Faith, come draped in the colors of Dragonstone.

If Rhaenyra meant to mend what Daemon had broken, she had chosen her messenger well. Oldtown blood would make every word credible in this hall. And if she had not, if the messenger came with venom instead of olive branch, then the Queen could still use it.

Opportunity breathed at the edges of her grief, subtle and bitter.

On the throne beside her, Viserys stirred. The King’s voice, frail but still commanding, carried through the hall.

"Let her come forward,” he said. 

The courtiers bowed their heads, the soft sigh of silk brushing stone as the bronze doors creaked open.

And then she entered.

Kara of Oldtown.

The woman who stepped into the torchlight drew every eye. She was young, no more than one-and-twenty, with skin pale as candle wax and hair the color of deep wine-dark auburn. 

A bloodier version of the Queen herself. 

Her gown of black and red shimmered with green thread at the seams, catching the light like veins of emerald beneath coal.

Alicent saw it first in profile, the curve of her jaw, the slope of her nose, the same soft mouth. Even the way Kara carried herself, chin poised, shoulders drawn but never tight...was hers.

Alicent’s breath hitched so faintly no one noticed.

It was as if the gods, in their cruelty, had molded another daughter of Oldtown in her image and sent her draped in Dragonstone’s colors to stand before her.

When she reached the dais, she sank to one knee. 

“Your Grace,” she said, the vowels shaped in the accent of Oldtown, polished and precise. “I come bearing word from Dragonstone.”

Viserys leaned forward, his hand trembling against the arm of the throne.

“Rise, child,” he said. “And speak.”

Kara obeyed.

The hall watched her rise in one fluid motion, the light from the windows sliding along her cheekbones, gilding her hair in soft red.

“The Princess bids me bring word of her household, that Your Grace may know her children are safe.”

A flicker of life stirred in the King’s eyes; even the courtiers leaned forward, eager, fearful.

Kara’s voice was low, steady, and soft, the kind that made people lean closer without realizing they had.

“The heirs of the flame, Prince Aemon, Prince Aenar, and Princess Aemma: live.”

Her tone softened, almost mournful.

“Since that night, they wake often. The triplets cry out together in their sleep, as if one dream binds them still. It is said the Princess Rhaenys herself goes to them when the sound begins, and that their father, Prince-Consort Laenor Velaryon, keeps vigil by the door until dawn.”

The hall fell quiet.

It was an image no one could turn away from: the blood of dragons trembling in their cradle, soothed only by an old warrior princess and a father standing sleepless at the threshold.

Viserys’s hand trembled against the arm of the throne as he leaned forward, his voice roughened by disuse and sorrow. “They should never have known fear at that age."

The courtiers shifted uncomfortably, unsure whether to bow their heads or speak.

Alicent’s jaw tightened, the beads in her hand clicking softly. 

Viserys drew a shaking breath and sank back into the throne. “The gods watch over them,” he whispered, though his eyes were wet.

Kara lowered her gaze in perfect mimicry of piety. “They do, Your Grace,” she said softly. “And they watch over you as well.”

The line landed like a benediction.

“The Lady Laena’s daughters as well, Princess Baela and Rhaena, are safe,” she said, her voice dipping to something tender. “They are but infants still, kept close to their mother’s breast. It is said that Baela’s egg cracked the very night of the attack.”

A ripple passed through the hall. 

Kara’s gaze remained lowered, her tone woven through with wonder. “The dragonling hatched in fire and fear, its scales still wet, yet it flared its tiny wings when the shouting began, as if the creature would protect its rider before it had even taken its first flight.”

A hush fell: threat, awe, unease.

She let the image settle before continuing. “Since that night, Lord Corlys himself has set aside his ships. He will not leave Dragonstone’s shores until his granddaughters can sleep easy.”

That detail landed clean and sharp: the Sea Snake, the most unflinching man in Westeros, grounded by grief.

Kara bowed her head once more. “The house of Velaryon stands watch over the children of fire and sea alike. Dragonstone and Driftmark hold fast, bound by blood and sorrow both.”

The court was drawn helplessly into her telling, the candlelight catching on her hair, her voice lilting between prayer and prophecy.

"The nurses who guarded the cradle tower… did not survive. They stood their ground. When the guards found them, one still held a blade in her hand. The other had thrown herself across the babes’ cradle.”

Gasps rippled through the hall.

Soft, horrified

“But not all who fought perished,” Kara continued. “Septa Rhaella, the children’s keeper of prayers, was wounded defending them. She held the intruders at bay alone, armed with nothing but the Mother’s candlestick.”

Viserys’s lips parted, a sound escaping him that was neither breath nor word.

“The Princess was the first to arrive,” Kara said, her voice barely more than a whisper. “They say she found the septa bleeding, the babes still screaming in their cradles, and the last of the attackers at the door. The Princess fought and ended one of them herself.”

The whispers that followed blurred awe and disbelief.

“She bore a wound of her own,” Kara went on, gentler now. “Yet she did not rest. When dawn came, she performed funeral rites for the nurses with her own hands and saw to Septa Rhaella’s tending. She gave silver to their kin and ordered their names carved into the chapel stone of Dragonstone. ‘So that heaven will remember what men forget,’ she said.”

The King bowed his head, his tears falling freely now.

“But grief does not pass cleanly,” Kara continued. “When the pyres were lit, the Princess stood until the wind changed. The healers begged her to go inside, but she would not. Only when the last flame died did she fall. The fever took her before they could carry her to bed.”

Silence filled the hall like breath before prayer.

Viserys’s hand rose, trembling, to his face. “My daughter,” he said. “My brave girl.”

Kara inclined her head, her tone soft as devotion. “The healers say she sleeps still, my King. They pray she dreams of peace.”

The torches flickered, the air thick with the scent of incense and tears.

And in that silence, the court forgot Daemon’s rage and the blood on the King's floors. 

They forgot the whispers of conspiracy, the shadowed doubts that had haunted the corridors since dawn.

They remembered only the image Kara had conjured:

Rhaenyra of Dragonstone, first to the fight, last to leave the dead.

A princess anointed in ash.
A mother sanctified by suffering.

The story moved through the hall like incense, clinging to every breath.

How could a woman who prepared funeral rites for her nurses, who carried her children from smoke and prayer, who knelt barefoot in the ashes of her own making...how could she have ordered any violence?

It was unthinkable.

The Queen’s lips parted, but no words came.

Alicent felt the story take root like rot beneath the marble. Unseen, unstoppable, already flowering in the minds of those around her.

Rhaenyra, the Heir.
Rhaenyra, the Mother.
Rhaenyra, the Martyr.
Rhaenyra, the Innocent.

And there was nothing: no crown, no creed, no king, that could scrub it clean.

The whispers followed her from the hall like smoke, clinging to her silks, to her skin.

By the time she reached the Mother’s altar, she could no longer tell if she’d walked there or fallen.

No courtiers. No husband. No children. No one to watch her be holy.

Just stone and silence.

She knelt too fast, the impact jarring up through her bones. Her hands scrabbled at the edge of the altar, fingers slipping on old wax. The breath left her in a ragged sound that wanted to be a sob and came out strangled instead.

“Please,” she whispered.

It tore out of her throat like it had been waiting there for days, trapped between prayer and scream.

Candles guttered before the seven-pointed star. The colored glass threw shards of red and green across her face, painting her like a broken icon.

“I have done everything,” she said, words tumbling, uneven. “I have done all you asked of me. I...I married where I was told. I bore him children. I forgave—” Her voice snapped on that, splintering. “I forgave what no woman should.”

Her shoulders began to shake. The tremor started small, contained, but once it began, it would not stop.

“I have prayed,” she choked, her voice catching on the word like it hurt to speak. “Every morning. Every night. For him. For the realm. For my sons. For—” She faltered, breath shuddering through her teeth. “For her.”

The name did not make it past her lips. It lingered in the air like smoke after a fire, too thick to breathe, too bitter to swallow.

Rhaenyra.

Her rival. Her mirror. Her sin made flesh.

Alicent’s mouth twisted, but no sound came. The tears came instead, uninvited, sliding hot down her cheeks, pooling in the lines around her mouth.

She swiped at them with the back of her hand, furious that they would not stop.

“They say,” she gasped, almost laughing now, the sound sharp and unsteady, “they say he killed my brother because he was mad with grief. That it was the father in him, not the devil.” Her tone curdled, words tumbling faster, tangled with breath. “They say the realm must show mercy. That love made him blind. That blood excused blood.”

Her breath caught, a sob breaking through despite her will.

“Mercy,” she spat, shaking her head. “For him.”

The word cracked like something shattering in her throat.

Her hands flew open, desperate, pleading, trembling before the Mother’s unfeeling face. “And what of mine?” she demanded. “Where is mercy for my blood? For the brother who died on the floor like a dog because he carried my name?”

Her voice climbed higher, splintering. “Where is mercy for me?”

The echo lingered, raw and naked.

She bowed her head again, but the tears kept coming.

The sept answered with the soft hiss of candlewicks.

No thunder. No sign. Only the sound of her own ragged breath.

Alicent bowed her head until her forehead struck the cold lip of the altar. The pain steadied her for half a heartbeat, then broke her open further. Her words spilled out in fragments, splinters of thought too sharp to hold.

“I did not say to kill them,” she whispered. “I did not. I only said...I only ever said dragons must fear the Seven. That sin cannot stand. That she— that they—” Her throat constricted; the rest died in her mouth. “I didn’t put knives in anyone’s hands.”

The Mother’s stone lips did not move. In the silence, she heard it as clearly as if the statue had spoken: You did not take the blade away either.

Her breath came fast, uneven, almost panicked.

“I am not a monster,” she said, though the way she said it sounded like she was trying to convince the marble instead of herself. “I am not. I am good. I am trying to be good. I am trying to save them all, my children, the realm, even her, and you…” Her voice cracked, sharp and sudden. “You let him bleed my brother like a dog on the floor and walk away.”

The last words ripped from her throat like something torn loose.

Though they rang hollow the moment she spoke them.

She remembered Criston’s jaw hardening in the candlelight as she’d railed about dragons and sin, the way he’d said “Then they must be made to fear” and she had not rebuked him.

Had only gripped her beads harder and let the silence stand in place of refusal.

She clapped a trembling hand over her mouth, wide-eyed, as if the Mother’s stone gaze might come alive and strike her where she knelt. Her breath shuddered through her fingers, hot and quick.

When she spoke again, her voice was softer, threadbare. “If I am wrong,” she pleaded, “show me. If I am blind, turn my head. If I am being used…”

Otto’s voice whispered through memory: For the good of the realm.

The septons’ sermons beneath it: The woman is the vessel, not the will.

All of it sounded so pious once. Now it only sounded like chains.

“Tell me,” she whispered to the air. “Please. Tell me.”

Her shoulders began to shake harder. The prayer beads slipped from her fingers and scattered across the floor like spilled blood.

“For Gwayne,” she sobbed, her voice barely human. “For my children. For...for the girl I was before all of this.”

Her breath hitched, broke, then steadied on a single, trembling word.

“Please.”

Footsteps broke the hush.

Soft. Careful.

Not the heavy tread of a guard, nor the dragging shuffle of a septon. These steps hesitated, as though the intruder feared to disturb even the air.

Alicent flinched.

Her breath caught, sharp as glass, and she wiped at her face with her sleeve, rough and angry at her own tears. The queen’s body remembered what her spirit could not: straighten, compose, rise.

Her spine snapped upright out of habit, not strength, the brittle reflex of a woman who had learned to bury her sorrow under posture.

Only then did she turn.

Kara stood three pews back, half-draped in shadow, the flickering candlelight drawing her shape in soft, trembling gold. Her gown was black silk with faint threads of crimson running through it...but at the seams, hidden unless the light caught just so, there shimmered the thinnest trace of green.

Like ivy winding through coal.

Like allegiance.

It was a dangerous dress, mourning and loyalty stitched together in a single breath.

The girl froze when their eyes met, then lowered her gaze at once. Hands clasped before her like a novice, head bowed in perfect humility.

“Your Grace,” Kara said softly, her voice low and respectful, threaded with that familiar Oldtown lilt that could make even apology sound like prayer. “Forgive me. I did not mean to intrude.”

The words fell like balm, too smooth, too gentle, and for a moment Alicent wanted to strike her for it, for being composed, for not shaking, for not being her.

Her throat still burned; the taste of confession clung to her tongue like ash.

“What are you doing here?” she managed, her voice raw and uneven, not yet smoothed back into queenly calm.

“I came to light a candle,” she said, her tone tender and shaped by piety rather than fear. “For Ser Gwayne.”

The sound of his name was a blade turned inward.

Alicent’s breath caught, small and broken.

Kara went on, quieter still. “If it pleases you.”

Her fingers twitched around the beads. “You… knew my brother not.”

Kara’s lashes lifted, the movement deliberate, gentle.

“No,” she said, her voice a thread of silk through the quiet. “But I know what it is when a good man dies for a cause others twist. And I know what it is for a woman to be left carrying blame that was never hers to bear.” She let the next words tremble, almost shy. “Oldtown girls learn to see such things.”

The phrasing was humble, deferential, and perfectly weighted.

The words slid beneath her armor like warm water, like grace rediscovered.

Alicent's chin trembled. “They are already making him a monster,” she whispered, her voice fraying at the edges. “Daemon, the mad prince. Rhaenyra, the grieving saint. And me—” A bitter smile cracked her mouth. “The green shadow.”

Kara’s head tilted slightly, studying the queen’s face through the veil of her lashes.

When she spoke, it was soft, artless, and exactly what a broken woman would want to hear.

“They are wrong,” she said simply. “A brother does not fall at your feet because you are wicked. He falls because others are allowed to be.”

It was clumsy theology, but it glimmered like truth.

Alicent’s breath shuddered in. The words wrapped around her like a benediction. No clever argument. No council’s poison. Just a girl from Oldtown, sounding more priest than politician, saying exactly what she needed to believe.

Kara saw the shift the instant it happened, the subtle loosening of shoulders, the faint softening of the eyes. She did not smile; that would have spoiled it. Instead, she let a trace of sorrow flicker across her face, as though she carried Alicent’s grief like her own.

“Light it,” the Queen whispered. “For him.”

She took up the taper, lit it from an existing flame, and touched it to a fresh wick. The smoke curled upward, pale and sweet.

“For Ser Gwayne Hightower,” she praised, “who died defending his Queen.”

Alicent closed her eyes.

The lie settled over the room like honey. 

That was the story she wanted, the one she could breathe inside without choking. The flame jumped, caught, held.

Kara turned back to her but did not rise. She remained kneeling, the very image of devotion, a respectful distance away, close enough to be a comfort, far enough to be dismissed.

Alicent opened her eyes slowly, as though waking from a dream.

Her voice, when it came, was faint—hoarse from tears, stripped of its regal cadence.

“You serve…”

The word thinned out, vanished. She could not bring herself to say the name.

Kara understood. Of course she did. The girl bowed her head, her silence answering gently where courtesy could not.

Alicent tried again, quieter. “How… did you come to be there?”

A pause. “At her side.”

Kara drew a slow breath, the kind one learns in silence, measured, mournful, rehearsed.

Her gaze wandered toward the window, where dawn bruised through colored glass. When she spoke, it was the voice of confession: low, deliberate, trembling in all the right places.

“I had nowhere else to go,” she said softly. “When the Stepstones burned, my father’s ship never came home. They say the sea boiled black for three days. I waited on the docks until the tide came in without him.”

Her hands folded neatly in her lap, but her thumb brushed the corner of her sleeve, a small, human gesture of grief.

Practiced.

Believable.

“My mother fell ill after. There was no money for leeches, and the Citadel has no mercy for widows.” A pause, precisely long enough. “I buried her myself. Sold her rings to pay the ferryman.”

She looked down, as if ashamed of the memory, though her tone never wavered. “By then I had nothing left in Oldtown but the sound of bells that would not stop ringing. So I walked. North. West. Wherever the gods would have me. I heard Dragonstone was hiring...scribes, maids, girls willing to carry letters through the smoke. They said the Princess paid fair and asked no questions of those who had nothing.”

A faint smile tugged at her lips, sad but graceful, the kind that suggested she’d made peace with her own misfortune. “It didn’t matter what they asked of me. Only that it was far from the Reach.”

Silence followed, thick as incense.

Alicent’s expression softened, the smallest fracture of pity breaking through suspicion. Her hands, still damp with tears, curled loosely atop the altar.

Kara kept her eyes lowered, head bowed, the picture of humility. But behind the stillness her mind was sharp, coiled. Every pause, every tremor, every word was a thread. And already, she could feel it catching.

Pity first, she thought, serene behind the mask. Trust follows soon enough.

“The world is cruel,” Alicent whispered. “It takes and takes, and still asks us to be good.”

Kara lifted her head slightly, just enough to meet her gaze through the wavering candlelight. Her expression was tender.

“Perhaps,” she replied, “that is why the gods watch. To see who keeps faith when the world forgets mercy.”

The words fell like balm; simple, pious, perfectly shaped to be remembered.

Alicent swallowed hard. Her lips parted as if to answer, but nothing came. Instead, she reached for the taper still burning on the altar and placed it in Kara’s hands.

“Keep it lit,” she said. “For him. For… for all of us.”

Kara bowed her head. “Yes, Your Grace.”

When Alicent turned to go, her steps were slow, the sound of silk fading down the nave until only the echo of her grief remained.

For a long moment, Kara stayed kneeling where she was, watching the door close. Then, slowly, she exhaled. The air left her in one long, quiet shudder.

Relief.

The smell of incense was cloying; it clung to her throat.

She rose carefully, brushing the dust from her skirts, and looked around the sept. The statues’ carved faces seemed to leer in the dim light: the Father stern, the Mother weeping, the Crone forever knowing.

Her gaze lingered on the seven-pointed star, its glass catching a sliver of dawn.

She almost laughed.

“Cruel,” she replied, echoing the Queen’s words. “Yes. But not blind.”

Queens did not fall for banners or sigils.

They fell for reflections.

The candle she’d lit for Gwayne flickered behind her, its flame small and sure.

Kara turned her back to it. Her steps were silent on the stone as she moved deeper into the shadows of the sept, her hands folded, her expression once more the perfect picture of humility.

Inside, beneath the mask, the thought unfurled calm and certain:
The door is open now.
All that’s left is to walk through it.

---

Rhaenyra woke like something surfacing from deep water.

Not gently.

Her eyes snapped open.

The ceiling of Dragonstone swam into focus, black stone, carved dragons.

The taste of ash still thick at the back of her throat.

Her first word was not a name, not a prayer.

“Where.”

Laenor jerked awake in the chair beside her, spine snapping straight, hand flying to her arm. “Nyra—”

“Where are they?” Her voice was cracked but sharp, all edge. “The babes. All of them. Where.”

The room stilled.

Rhaenys by the window. Corlys stiff as a mast. Vaegon with ink on his fingers. Laena at the foot of the bed. And in the shadowed arch, Daemon.

They’d been arguing in low, tight voices before she stirred, Laenor’s sharp hiss against Daemon’s low growl, Rhaenys trying to quiet them both. But the sound cut off the moment she shifted.

Now they all looked at her like she was a ghost they’d dared not summon.

No one moved fast enough.

Rhaenyra dragged herself up on her elbows, every motion sharp with the pull of half-healed muscles. Her voice came rough but commanding, the sound of a woman too stubborn to stay dead. “I asked,” she bit out, “where are my children.”

For a heartbeat, no one breathed.

Then Laena moved, swift, purposeful, as though she’d been waiting for that very order.

“Here,” she said, crossing to the inner door. She beckoned once, and the heavy oak swung open.

Two Emberguards entered, broad-shouldered, armor dulled with soot, boots echoing against the stone. Between them came the triplets.

Three small, fiery miracles.

Aemon sat perched in the first guard’s arms, his silver hair a wild halo. Aenar was tucked against the second’s shoulder, blinking sleepily, while little Aemma twisted and kicked, her chubby hand batting at the guard’s chin in protest.

They were awake, alert, and the instant they saw her, something in them sparked to life.

Aemon squirmed first, his little hands fisting the air, demanding release. The guard set him down, and he made a determined wobble toward the bed on unsteady legs, babbling nonsense in a voice that trembled with joy. Aenar followed, slower but no less certain, and Aemma, impatient as ever, made a sound of fury until Laena scooped her up and set her down to toddle beside her brothers.

Three sets of tiny feet against cold stone.

Three small dragons crawling, stumbling, determined to reach the warmth that called to them.

Rhaenyra barely had time to steady herself before they reached her.

Aenar clutched at the coverlet, until Rhaenyra pulled him up onto the bed. “Muna,” he gasped, the word broken but bright.

The sound hit her like a blessing and a wound all at once.

Aemon echoed him, a little louder, eyes shining like wet glass. “Muna.”

And then Aemma, last and fiercest, threw her head back and squealed it with all the breath her tiny lungs could hold, “Muna!”, as though the word itself were magic enough to wake the world.

Rhaenyra’s body moved before thought.

She gathered them all into her lap, heart thundering, arms trembling as three small bodies pressed against her; warm, wriggling, impossibly alive.

Their little fingers explored her face, tangling in her hair, patting her cheeks as if to confirm she was real.

Aemma pressed a slobbering kiss to her chin; Aenar buried his face against her neck and sighed. Aemon, ever solemn, simply laid his head on her chest and hummed, “Muna,” again, softer this time, content.

The sound broke her cleanly.

She laughed through a sob, pressing kisses into their curls, breathing them in.

Her dragons, her heart made flesh.

Behind her, the room seemed to exhale. The tension melted from Laenor’s shoulders. Laena’s hand brushed Rhaenys’s, relief shining wet in both their eyes. Even Daemon, for once, said nothing.

“Muna,” Aemma whispered one last time, her tiny hand curling around one of Rhaenyra’s fingers.

She scanned the triplets first, frantic and precise, her healer’s hands and mother’s terror guiding the same search. “Any marks?” she demanded. “Bruises? Night terrors?”

Laenor’s answer came softly, guilt in every syllable. “They dream,” he admitted. “But they are whole.”

Rhaenys nodded once. “Whole. Watched. No man gets near them now without three others seeing.”

Rhaenyra’s jaw set, her voice low and edged. “Good.”

But even as she said it, her gaze flicked past them, past the children she held, her breath catching on another fear. 

“Baela and Rhaena,” Rhaenyra said suddenly, the name catching in her throat. Her eyes lifted, locking onto Laena’s across the room. “Let me see them. Please.”

The word please slipped out unbidden, soft, human, terrified.

Laena froze for only a heartbeat.

The look between them, two women who had both bled and burned for the same man, the same family, was brief but raw. 

Laena crossed the chamber swiftly, the skirts of her gown whispering across the stone. The firelight gilded her skin as she returned. Each arm full.

Baela lay curled against her chest, tiny and pink and dreaming, while Rhaena slept against her hip, her small mouth pressed to the fabric of Laena’s sleeve. Both were swaddled in white, the faintest scent of milk and lavender trailing behind her.

Rhaenyra’s breath shuddered out, the tension in her spine unspooling as Laena drew near.

She reached instinctively, half-rising on the bed.

“Are they well?” she asked, her voice rough. “They didn’t—” The rest failed her.

Laena shook her head, gentle but firm. “They are safe. Sleeping, and loud when they wish to remind us.”

A tremor of wry humor softened her words.

Rhaenyra’s hand trembled as she reached out, touching the edge of Rhaena’s blanket, then Baela’s tiny foot through the swaddling. “I was afraid for them,” she whispered. “For you. For all of you.”

Laena sat beside her on the bed, careful not to jostle the children. The mattress dipped under the combined weight of exhaustion and relief.

“We were afraid for you,” she whispered. 

Rhaenyra turned toward her, something raw and fragile in her expression. She didn’t speak, only shifted, making more room. Laena understood without needing words. She eased further onto the bed, careful not to jostle the children.

Between them, the space filled quickly; Aemon nestled against Rhaenyra’s heart, Aenar clinging to her sleeve, Aemma pressed to her shoulder. Laena settled Baela and Rhaena beside them, their tiny forms wrapped in white and breathing softly against the coverlet.

The only sound was the steady rhythm of small breaths, the faint coo of one of the girls, the rustle of silk as the two women adjusted.

Laena’s hand brushing a stray strand of hair from Rhaenyra’s face, Rhaenyra’s arm curling protectively around her own and Laena’s children alike.

Aenar stirred first, mumbling into his mother’s gown, “Muna…” The word was half a sigh, half a plea.

Rhaenyra bent her head and kissed his hair. “Yes, my love,” she whispered. “Muna’s here.”

Laena smiled faintly, her eyes soft. “He knows you,” she said gently. “They all do.”

Rhaenyra glanced up, meeting her gaze.

Baela shifted in her sleep, and Rhaena’s tiny hand reached blindly toward Aemma.

Their fingers brushed, held.

Laena let out a quiet breath that trembled but didn’t break. “Look at them,” she said, her voice no louder than the fire. “They already find each other.”

Rhaenyra nodded, her eyes shining. “Then let them keep doing so,” she said softly. “Always.”

The two women leaned together unconsciously, forming a soft, protective ring around the five children between them. 

Daemon felt it like heat crawling under his skin.

He told himself it was relief. Survival. The animal whiplash of nearly losing everything and finding it, impossibly, still breathing.

But it wasn’t just that.

Rhaenyra’s robe had slipped, baring the pale line of her collarbone, the steady, stubborn pulse there. The fire turned her skin to molten gold, as if she’d been poured from the same flame that birthed her dragons. Laena leaned in close, silver hair wild and unpinned, her mouth soft as she pressed kisses to the babe between them. Two women carved in firelight and exhaustion, circled by the children he had claimed as his to defend.

His.

The word settled heavy and indecent in his chest.

Rhaenyra reached out, fingers trembling, to brush Baela’s cheek.

A tiny sigh escaped the babe’s lips, and her hand twitched in her sleep.

Beside her, Laena whispered something, a wordless comfort, half in Valyrian, half love, and leaned closer.

He wanted to step into that circle and be burned by it.

To set his hand over the place where Rhaenyra’s pulse beat, proof she still lived because he’d put a sword through a Hightower heart. To press his face into the curve of Laena’s shoulder where smoke and milk and dragonstone clung to her skin. To feel all of it under his hands at once: Rhaenyra and Laena both. 

It was not a clean wanting.

It was the hunger that comes after blood, sharp and consuming, the kind that did not know where protection ended and possession began.

Rhaenyra’s lashes lowered, her voice no more than a sigh. “She looks like you,” she whispered, eyes on Baela.

Laena smiled faintly, exhaustion softening into quiet pride. “And like you,” she said. “She carries fire.”

Rhaenyra’s fingers brushed Laena’s wrist, light as a promise.

Daemon felt time falter.

The fire blurred at the edges, the chamber seemed to shrink until there was nothing left in it but them; their glow, their closeness, their breath.

Laenor caught his eye briefly from across the chamber and looked away, jaw set.

Rhaenys’s gaze flickered toward her daughter and goddaughter, then to him, sharp, assessing.

She saw too much, as always.

Laena shifted one arm so Rhaenyra could touch Baela’s small hand. Their fingers brushed, skin against skin, breath against breath. 

Daemon turned away then, pretending to adjust the poker in the hearth.

Sparks flared, gold and red.

His reflection wavered in the iron grate, a man half-eclipsed by his own fire.

He swallowed the ache that rose in his chest and said nothing.

Corlys broke the warmth first, his voice low but steady, the way the tide speaks when it has something terrible to confess.

“There’s no use softening it,” he said. “He’s dead. Gwayne Hightower. Cut down in the King’s own hall.”

The air shifted. Even the children seemed to feel it, the tiny frown that puckered Aenar’s brow, the way Aemma’s small fingers stilled against her mother’s sleeve.

Rhaenyra looked up sharply, her eyes going to Laena first, not Daemon. “Who?”

Laena hesitated, then met her gaze. “Your uncle,” she said softly. “My husband.”

The words landed with the precision of a knife.

Daemon did not flinch.

He stood by the fire, his shadow carved long across the stone, half-lit by the flame, half-swallowed by its smoke. The light made his hair glint like tarnished silver, red at the edges, as though the fire itself could not decide whether to crown him or consume him.

“He raised steel first,” he said at last, voice low and deliberate, each word measured as if it had been forged before it was spoken. “I would not have killed him if he hadn’t.”

His fingers tightened briefly on the mantel, the tendons standing sharp beneath the skin. “I went to find who dared touch what is mine,” he went on, softer now, though the quiet was worse than shouting. “Who thought to spill my blood, our blood, and walk away unburned.”

Rhaenyra’s eyes found his. Her voice was calm, but the undercurrent beneath it could have split stone.

“And what did you find?”

Daemon looked up.

The firelight caught in his eyes like twin coals. “Viserys,” he said flatly. “As useless as ever. Too frightened to choose a side. He refused to do anything of impact. As if treachery were a thing to be prayed over instead of punished.”

A muscle jumped in Corlys’s jaw before he spoke.

“And for your punishment, he named it exile,” he said. “You are banished from the capital, Daemon. From court. The only thing that spares you the Narrow Sea is that Gwayne raised steel first. Were it not so, you would be exiled from Westeros itself.”

Daemon’s mouth curved, not quite a smile. “Then I shall be content with the view from Dragonstone.”

Rhaenys, who had been silent until then, stepped closer to the bed. Sharp, reflective, merciless. “They’re calling you names already,” she said quietly. “In the streets. In the septs.”

Daemon turned his head just enough to meet her gaze. “Let them.”

“The Dragonstone Devil,” she finished.

The title hung in the air, sulfurous and sweet.

For a long moment, no one spoke. The only sound was the pop of the fire, the soft breathing of children half-asleep against their mothers.

Then Daemon exhaled, slow and measured. “They can call me what they like,” he said. “But they’ll remember who they fear.”

Rhaenys’s gaze swept the room, lingering on the cradle of children and the thin line of smoke rising from the hearth. “You’ve made it harder,” she said quietly. “For all of us.”

She turned to Rhaenyra, her tone softening, though only slightly. “I’ve done what I could. The girl Kara carried the story into the court this morning, Rhaenyra the wounded mother, the nurses who died protecting the babes, the septa who fought with her own hands. It spread faster than prayer. With luck, it will take root before Oldtown’s ravens arrive.”

Rhaenyra’s expression flickered, relief tangled with dread.

“But,” Rhaenys went on, her eyes cutting back to Daemon, “your uncle has given them truth enough to damn us thrice over. The King’s hall still smells of blood, and every whisper in the capital now wears your name, Daemon. You will not be welcomed back.”

Rhaenyra’s gaze didn’t move at first.

She sat very still, her hand resting on Aenar’s back, feeling the faint rhythm of his breathing beneath her palm. It steadied her, barely.

When she finally looked up, her voice was quiet but flint-edged. “Are we closer,” she asked, “to knowing who ordered it?”

Daemon’s head turned slowly, the fire throwing molten light across his face. He looked like something half-forged, smoke still clinging to him.

“No names,” he said. “Not yet.”

His tone was calm, but there was something dangerous under it, coiled and alive.

“What we do have,” he went on, “are patterns. Coin trails. Gold that should have stayed in the Crown’s coffers turning up in places it shouldn’t.”

Corlys’s eyes narrowed. “Oldtown.”

Daemon nodded once. “Oldtown,” he repeated, and the word sounded almost like a curse. “The Faith’s silver buys sharper blades than any sellsword’s honor. They wanted dragon blood spilled and our house shamed for it.”

Rhaenyra’s mouth tightened, grief sharpening into focus. “You’re certain.”

“As certain as I am breathing,” he said. “I’ll not stop until I have their names. Every coin that changed hands, every coward that drew steel. I’ll hunt them to the last prayer they whisper.”

Rhaenys’s gaze was sharp as ever. “And in doing so, make yourself the monster they’ve already named,” she said quietly. “The Dragonstone Devil.”

Daemon’s eyes flicked toward her, unreadable. 

Rhaenyra’s hand drifted toward her children again, smoothing Aemma’s hair where it stuck up in pale curls. She did not look away from Daemon.

“You’ll find them,” she said, her tone low, dangerous. “But not alone.”

The small, warm bodies in her lap steadied her like oaths.

“We make men,” she said. “Not courtiers who bow and whisper. Men who know how to vanish, how to bleed for something worth more than coin.”

Her voice carried a strange calm, not the tremor of vengeance but the steadiness of design.

“Recruit from Flea Bottom, the tenements, the rookeries. Bring them here, bind them to us. Train them. Emberguard, but whole and terrible.”

Even the fire seemed to listen.

“Dragonstone cannot hold them all,” she went on. “Nor would it be wise. The King watches this island like a wounded man guards his scar. We’ll plant the roots elsewhere, on the Stepstones. Quiet docks, ruined holds, old towers rebuilt with new names.”

Laenor's eyes seemed wider than ever. 

“The Stepstones already drink blood,” Rhaenyra continued. “Let them drink for us. A garrison there, beyond the Crown’s reach, where ships vanish and spies lose their tongues in the tide. We make it look like exile. A punishment. But it will be a seed.”

Corlys mapped routes in his head; he could see the currents and the merchants’ ledgers that would have to be bribed.

Rhaenys’s gaze sharpened with the ledger’s side of consequence. “You would make lawless ground a fortress,” she said. “You would build a garrison on the King’s waters without his leave.”

Rhaenyra let the warning wash over her and folded it into plan. “Yes."

Daemon’s smile was small and dangerous. “We will be careful. No banners at first...only coin and oath.”

Rhaenys’s voice was low and sharp, the historian in her smelling jeopardy. “It will cost. Ships, men, supplies. Port concerns. The Crown can call it treason and send a fleet. You will be painted a warlord long before you raise a wall.”

Rhaenyra gathered the babes tighter, feeling their heat like promise and culpability both.

The danger was the point.

“Then they will have to choose,” she said. “They can let the coffers pay for the safety they nearly cost, or they can brand us traitors and come take what they think theirs. If they strike first, the Stepstones will be ready to answer. If they do not, then we have a foothold.”

Corlys shifted where he stood, the weight of his silence turning heavy as ballast.

When he finally spoke, it was slow, careful, like a man choosing where to drop an anchor in rough water.

“A garrison, a watch, a handful of blades...that I can understand,” he said. “But you speak of an army. Why so large? Why such a host?”

Rhaenyra looked up from the tangle of small limbs in her lap. Her eyes gleamed, fever-bright, unyielding.

“Because dragons cannot hold ground,” she said simply. “Not forever. Fire burns, but it does not stay. You can scorch a city to ash and still lose it the next dawn if no one remains to claim the bones.”

Corlys’s jaw tightened, but she was not done.

“I will not be caught blind again,” she continued. “Not by Oldtown’s coin, nor by the Faith’s mercy, nor by my father’s blindness to both. If they think me a mother before a princess, let them see what a mother’s fear can build. I will raise a force so strong the Crown itself will hesitate before daring my shore.”

Daemon’s grin flickered like firelight. “And when they hesitate, we will already have the sea.”

Rhaenys’s eyes softened, but only slightly. “You mean to build a kingdom within the King’s.”

The heir to the Iron Throne chose not to reply to that. 

Rhaenyra’s gaze drifted toward the hearth, where Daemon still stood; half in shadow, half in fire.

The corners of her mouth curved, slow and deliberate, like the first curl of smoke before a blaze.

“You will go to the Stepstones,” she said, voice calm but edged with command. “Not as exile, but as purpose.”

Daemon tilted his head, eyes narrowing with interest.

“Fortify the ruins,” she went on. “Train the men. Raise walls where there were once only bones. Make the islands answer to you, to me. Let the realm think it punishment if they must...let them whisper that I’ve sent you away in disgrace.”

Her smile deepened, dark and knowing. “Let them think I have tamed you.”

That last line twisted the air between them into something hot and perilous.

Daemon’s mouth twitched, the faintest echo of a smirk.

He moved closer then, slow and sinuous, the fire catching in his eyes. “You would make me your sword and shadow both.”

Rhaenyra met him without flinching, her lips curving like a challenge. “You already are.”

Rhaenys exhaled through her nose, sharp, unimpressed.

Corlys muttered something about treason dressed as strategy.

Laena said nothing, only watched them with the faintest trace of dread and admiration.

But Daemon’s eyes never left Rhaenyra’s.

Her smile was wicked, radiant, and ruinous. “Let the realm think you are punished,” she hissed. “And let them never sleep easy again.”

Laena straightened where she sat beside Rhaenyra, her silver curls catching the firelight like molten glass.

The softness that had lived in her voice only moments before was gone; what replaced it was measured, deliberate, tempered in something far older than fear.

“If he is to go,” she said, cutting through the hush, “then I will go to Kingslanding.”

The others turned to her.

Even Daemon looked away from the fire.

Laena’s hands were folded neatly in her lap, but her eyes burned. “If the Crown means to name him exiled, they will not do it cheaply. The coffers that fattened the King will now feed the daughters his negligence nearly cost me.”

Rhaenys’s brow lifted. “You would walk into the serpents’ den,” she said softly.

“I would ride,” Laena corrected, the faintest smile ghosting her lips. “Vhagar still remembers her way to the Red Keep.”

The largest living dragon descending upon the capital, its rider not come for war, but for reckoning.

Rhaenyra’s gaze sharpened, a spark of pride flashing beneath it. “You’d demand gold of the King?”

“Not demand,” Laena said. “Collect.”

Her eyes found Daemon’s, steady and bright.

“You are his brother still. Your blood defended his heirs. And I am the mother of the babes who might have burned for his blindness. Let him pay for the fire he failed to stop.”

Daemon’s smirk faltered. What replaced it was rarer, stranger — the look of a man struck by something perilous and beautiful at once.

“Vhagar’s shadow alone will do half the work,” Laena said. 

The words landed like a spark in dry kindling.

He wanted to stand between them and feel them both, to be the hinge upon which their fury turned.

His palms ached to map the terrain of Rhaenyra’s body, to cup the heavy swell of her hips and feel the solid promise of her power beneath muscle and bone. The foundation he could brace himself against as she pulled him toward the embers of her ambition.

Through the thin silk of her gown, he imagined the weight of Laena’s breasts, still full from motherhood, the faint dampness at the seams of her bodice a holy proof of her dual nature:

nurturer and destroyer,

vessel and executioner.

Rhaenyra’s voice lingered in him like smoke; Laena’s steadiness like breath. Between them, the world was already remade.

Rhaenys’s lips curved, approval hidden behind irony. “You mean to make the Crown bleed and thank you for the cut.”

Laena met her mother’s gaze without blinking. “No,” she said, her voice low, glinting with purpose. “I mean to make them bleed and smile through it.”

The fire snapped sharply in the hearth.

Daemon’s pulse answered. Slow, deliberate, hungry. The reflection in the flame showed what he already knew: he would follow them both into damnation, and call it worship.

Archmaester Vaegon, who had been silent by the window all this while, finally stirred.

He looked from one face to the next.

The princes, the princesses, the sea serpent and his wife, all gathered around the bed where the next generation of dragons slept.

His expression was unreadable, half wonder, half foreboding. “It seems,” he said at last, his voice carrying the calm weight of prophecy, “that we have just conducted our first war council.”

No one disagreed.

The fire hissed again, as if in answer, and outside, the wind shifted, turning toward the sea.

Notes:

Kara might be my favorite OC so far (she’s so Giulia Farnese-coded).

Chapter 20: Fire and Frost

Notes:

Rhaenyra chooses fire.

Alicent chooses prayer.

Kara chooses influence.

Otto chooses indoctrination.

Laena chooses Reckoning.

The night air tore at her throat.

Rhaenyra leaned forward against Syrax’s neck, hair whipping wild in the wind, her fingers clenched in Syrax’s harness wraps. The dragon’s wings carved through stormlight like blades, the world below nothing but a blur of black sea and broken stone.

She had not told anyone where she was going.

She had not meant to go anywhere at all.

She only knew that she could not stay.

Syrax roared beneath her, a sound too vast for the heavens to contain, and Rhaenyra wanted to roar with her.

She wanted to split herself open against the sky until the gods were forced to look at what they’d made of her.

Beneath them lay the carcass of an island.

An empty shore, a stretch of black earth and broken stone, too barren for men, too proud for gods.

No lights.

No voices.

Only the sea clawing endlessly at its own wounds.

Rhaenyra circled once, twice, the air growing thicker with salt and rage. Then she drove Syrax downward.

The dragon’s cry split the air; the ground cracked beneath their landing.

The silence that followed was absolute.

Rhaenyra slid from the saddle, boots sinking into the ground. 

Her voice broke off but shs kept screaming the word that had been festering inside her since she survived the seven days and seven nights. 

She faced the horizon, hands trembling, and whispered, “Dracarys.”

A spark kissed the sand and died.

Rhaenyra felt it, the truth of Syrax’s fire. Different. Deeper. A wildfire forged in the bones of a creature who loved her, hurt with her, burned with her.

Her breath shuddered.

“Dracarys.”

Syrax roared, and the world answered. Fire tore across the shore in wild, vicious sweeps. The air itself screamed as it burned. The heat rolled toward her, blistering her skin, but she didn’t move. She wanted it, the scorch, the proof, the ruin.

Pain was the only language the gods seemed to understand. Let them learn it from her.

Her voice broke, but she kept going.

“Dracarys!” she screamed, again and again, until the syllables splintered, until her throat tasted of blood and smoke.

She saw their faces in the flames.

Her children’s small hands reaching, their cries swallowed by darkness and she screamed louder.

“Dracarys! For Aemon! For Aenar! For Aemma!”

Each name a lash. Each syllable an oath.

The fire leapt higher, greedy and gold, licking at the sky as though it, too, wanted vengeance.

“Burn it all!” she howled. “Every hall, every tower, every coward that prayed while my babes screamed!”

Her mind betrayed her then.

She saw the Red Keep rising from the inferno, the godswood shrieking as its heart tree split in two. She saw her father’s court melting like wax, courtiers running with their silks aflame. Otto Hightower, thin smile finally melting from his face. Alicent clutching her rosary as the beads cracked one by one in the heat.

And her father...her father sitting on that rusting throne, letters of apology curling to ash in his ink-stained hands.

Her scream broke open into something not human, not holy.

“Dracarys! Do you hear me, Father? Do you see what you’ve made? Burn it all, burn them all!”

Syrax obeyed, fire cascading outward until even the sea caught light. The horizon vanished into gold and red.

Rhaenyra fell to her knees, hands sinking into scorched ground as smoke curled around her like mourning veils. For one terrible, exultant moment, it felt as though the entire world bowed to her wrath.

When the roar of wings cut through the smoke, she didn’t move.

Not until the shadows lengthened and she felt the heat of another dragon, the darker, older kind that smelled of blood and death. 

Caraxes.

Daemon slid down from the saddle, his boots striking the blackened ground. Smoke wove around him like a living thing.

“Rhaenyra,” he said, quiet but commanding, as though her name might call her back from whatever edge she’d gone to.

She laughed, a broken sound. “Come to watch the Realm’s Delight become the Realm’s disaster?”

His eyes raked across the burning shore, the earth splitting and sagging under Syrax’s fire. 

“This place was already a wasteland,” Daemon said as gently as he knew how. “You’ll bring the cliffs down.”

"I want them down!" Her laugh broke, wild and ugly. “He sends me letters! Not soldiers, not justice, letters. He writes that the matter is under inquiry. He signs it my sweet girl as if I’m a child asking for comfort, not a mother whose babes screamed to the smell of blood.”

Her hands curled, trembling.

“He doesn’t care,” she said at last, her voice shaking. 

Daemon didn’t answer.

He knew better than to interrupt when she had bared her fangs.

“To make it worse,” she whispered, “he sends one man. One.”

Her mouth twisted. “A clerk draped in chainmail, a quill-pusher playing knight. He said he came on the King’s behalf, to observe.”

She rose, trembling with fury.

"He asked if perhaps the threat had been exaggerated. If the guards had panicked. He wanted to know what they were wearing. What they were wearing, Daemon! As if silks and nightclothes could tempt a blade.”

She turned to him, eyes fever-bright, the fire dancing in her pupils. “He made a spectacle of my fear. And my father let him.”

The flames hissed as Syrax shifted behind her, sensing the pitch of her mistress’s rage. Her wings flared once, eyes molten and knowing, fixed on the horizon as if she too could see the Red Keep burning.

Rhaenyra’s fury surged through Syrax’s veins, and Syrax’s fire sang in hers.

It was not master and beast, not even woman and dragon, it was one wrath split between two bodies.

One heart beating against the world that had dared to threaten their brood.

And Daemon understood.
Gods, he understood.

He had spent his whole life hoping Viserys would be less pathetic, that his brother might lift his head from the fog of feasts and courtiers and remember a king was meant to bleed for his house.

Now, watching Rhaenyra burn beneath the same neglect that had once scorched him, he felt the old, corrosive truth rise again: the father weak, the brother a coward, and their line doomed if left in his hands.

Viserys should see her like this, he thought bitterly. See what his neglect has made.

She looked at him then, eyes raw and wet, and for a heartbeat he saw not a queen, not the heir, but the girl he had once carried on his shoulders through the Red Keep, her hands clutching his hair, laughing because she thought he could touch the sky.

“I would have killed them all for you,” he said earnestly. “Every man, every servant, every rat that so much as breathed your name wrong. And I still might.”

“You already killed one.”

“Yes,” he said, stepping closer until the heat of Syrax’s fire brushed against his back. “And I would again. For them. For you. For us. For the right to watch the world tremble when it remembers what happens when a Targaryen grieves.”

He reached for her, slow and deliberate.

When she didn’t pull away, he touched the side of her face, his thumb smearing a streak of soot across her cheek.

“You’re not wrong to want blood,” he whispered. 

Rhaenyra’s eyes flicked toward the flames, reflecting gold and ruin. Her voice came low, careful as prayer. “No one is as accursed as the kinslayer, Daemon.”

He stilled.

The crackle of burning driftwood filled the space between them.

“It all starts with him,” she continued, her breath came sharp and uneven, the words spilling like confession. “The realm takes after its king, Daemon. And this one taught it that striking at the heir means nothing.”

The only sound was the slow hiss of burning earth and Syrax’s steady, rumbling breath.

Then, fiercely: “You finally see it.”

The air curled in on itself.

“Still,” she said, her voice breaking, “it hurts.”

Her voice wavered. “Do you know what my mother used to say? That duty was the shape of a woman’s love. She gave and gave until there was nothing left but the child she died bringing into the world.”

The words dripped from her tongue like poison.

“You’re not her,” he said softly, soothingly. “You’re not Aemma Arryn. You’re different.”

The words were meant as comfort, but they landed like a slap.

Rhaenyra’s eyes snapped to him, sharp and disbelieving. “Different?”

Daemon hesitated. “You are fire made flesh. Aemma was gentle—”

“Gentle,” she cut in, the word twisting in her mouth. “You mean dead. She gave everything, and it killed her. I give everything, and it damns me. You think that makes me different? It makes me next.”

Syrax’s tail lashed once against the scorched ground, sending a tremor through the air.

Caraxes had crept closer, drawn by the storm of her rage. Syrax’s head snapped toward him, jaws parting in warning. Caraxes, stubborn as his rider, edged closer still, his scales flaring dark against the firelight.

Before Daemon could take his next breath, Syrax struck. Her teeth caught the edge of Caraxes’s neck, not deep enough to maim but enough to draw blood, thick, black, and steaming as it hit the earth.

The ground sizzled.

Caraxes let out a guttural roar that made the cliffs quake, but he didn’t strike back. He only twisted, muscles coiled, and snarled low. 

Rhaenyra stared at him, eyes bright with unshed tears. “I am my mother’s daughter and my father’s sin. The rest is just fire and pretending.”

Rhaenyra sank to the ground, the strength bleeding out of her.

Her gown clung to her skin, heavy with sweat and soot. For a long moment, she only stared at the dying fire. “If someone dared come for my children once,” she said softly, “they’ll try again. This isn’t over. It’s a message.”

Daemon said nothing.

He lowered himself beside her, the heat of the scorched earth rising through his palms.

There was nothing to deny, she was right.

Every word of it.

“I need you ready,” she continued, her voice steadier now. “When it comes...whatever it is...I need you on my side. No hesitation. No restraint. If they want war, we give them fire.”

He looked at her then, really looked, hair matted with ash, eyes hollowed by sleepless fury, and he saw the truth of her: his mirror in flame.

“You’ll have it,” he said. “All of it. I’ll go as far as you need.”

Rhaenyra turned to him, her expression sharpening, resolve crystallizing beneath the ruin. “Then I need fourteen men.”

Daemon’s brow lifted. “Fourteen?”

“The ones you will train on the Stepstones,” she said. “The dangerous ones. The ones too clever to die and too violent to follow orders. Take them, shape them how you must. I want them folded into the Gold Cloaks. Quietly. Hidden.”

Her gaze drifted toward the smoke-stained horizon. “I need eyes in the Red Keep, hands that answer to me alone. And a blade at the false dragons's throats.”

Daemon was silent for a long while, the faintest hint of a smile curving his mouth. “Fourteen ghosts,” he murmured. “Slippery, loyal, and blooded. I can do that.”

She turned her hand toward his, fingers brushing.

He caught them gently, then fully, and their hands stayed joined, blackened by soot, ringed with gold light from the burning sea.

Syrax shifted behind them, wings folding.

Caraxes came close to the golden lady, and this time she let him. 

Daemon lifted her hand and pressed his mouth to it. Not tender, but vow-like. “We burn together,” he said sharply. “Always.”

Rhaenyra’s breath caught, and for the first time that night, she stopped shaking. 

“Always,” she echoed.

And as the smoke curled upward, the dragons answered, two roars blending into one, shaking the cliffs until the stars themselves trembled.

I am done, she thought.

Her father would never come for her. Never truly see her. He had never known how to love her at all.

The realization wasn’t rage; it was frost, a slow, numbing ache spreading through her chest.

She thought of her children. They were all she had left that was real.

Daemon said something, she barely heard it, but his hand was warm around hers, grounding her in a world that still burned.

She let her head fall against his shoulder, eyes unfocused on the dark sea. I will not wait for him anymore, she thought. I will not ache for what he will never give.

And with that, the last piece of the girl Viserys had raised slipped into ash.

The sky above Dragonstone was bright when she returned.

Syrax circled once before landing, her shriek scattering the gulls that haunted the cliffs. Rhaenyra dismounted without help, her legs still stiff from flight, her hands raw from the wind.

Servants bowed low, but none dared speak. Daemon followed in silence, a darker shape following at her heels. 

He said nothing of the King or the court, only reached for her once, his hand warm against the cold that had settled in her bones.

She did not take it.

Inside, the halls were dim and restless.

She passed her children’s door and paused only long enough to hear the soft cadence of their breathing. It steadied her, then hollowed her all at once.

At last Daemon said, “Whatever you’re planning, do it. I’ll stay with the children.”

She turned to look at him with something soft shining in her eyes. He had lived long enough beside her to know when she was about to turn her grief into purpose.

“They’ll need watching,” he went on. “The dreams still wake them.”

Rhaenyra looked away suddenly ashamed.

He hesitated, as if he might say more, then only nodded once and stepped back toward the nursery door.

In her solar, the candles were freshly lit.

A single raven waited in its cage, feathers puffed against the draft. The parcel beside it was small and plain: linen-wrapped, twine-bound, sealed in green wax with the mark of a gull’s broken wing.

The seal of a nameless fishing house along the Reach.

No one would have looked twice at such a seal. That was precisely the point.

Rhaenyra dismissed the attendant with a nod. The door closed, locking the roars of Dragonstone out. She stood for a moment in stillness, preparing herself, before breaking the seal.

The parchment was neat, the hand bowed with discipline. The script of a woman who had piety shoved down her throat until she learned to speak sweetly. 

My Princess, 

The city grieves loudly and listens poorly.

In the Red Keep they call you saint and sinner in the same breath, but it is your name that fills the space between them.

The King weeps in public.

The Queen weeps in private. I am near her now. When the Queen prays, I am the hand that lights her candles. When she speaks of mercy, I am the echo that asks, “For whom?”

The lie of me breathes through her like grace.

Now, court is in your favor. The story has taken root. The court repeats what it hears in the sept. The sept repeats what it hears in the women’s chambers. I stand where all three meet.

They fear your sorrow more than they ever feared your fire.

I will write again once the next sermon reaches the capital. For now, the court believes what it needs to believe.

Your servant,

Kara of Oldtown.

She set the letter down carefully, as though afraid to wake it. The candle beside her hissed. 

For a moment, she only stared at the parchment. Kara’s neat hand, the steady rhythm of devotion wrapped around observation. The girl had woven her grief into loyalty, her faith into subterfuge.

Rhaenyra reached for a clean sheet of parchment. The motion was calm, practiced. Her fingers did not tremble.

She uncapped the ink, dipped the quill, and began to write.

To Kara, under the broken gull:

You will continue as you have begun. Speak little, listen often. Let their pity ripen into awe, and when it turns to fear, do not correct them. The realm has never trusted dragons, but they worship what they fear.

Spread what serves us. Do not lie outright. Tell them Dragonstone prays for peace, that the Princess weeps for the fallen. 

I will make Dragonstone a sanctuary. The mothers who died here will be honored. The poor will find bread; the widowed, work.

The Faith will look to Oldtown for sermons and to me for salvation.

Send names. Every septon who whispers of blasphemy. Every knight who blesses his sword before he swings it toward a child. We will remember them.

And to the one who wronged you, when the time comes, speak his name. No sin stays buried beneath my wings.

R.

Rhaenyra sanded the parchment, folded it once, and pressed her false seal into the melted wax.

When it cooled, she set it aside and called for a raven.

“Send this at once,” she told the attendant. “No delay.”

By the time the door closed, Corlys Velaryon was already at the threshold, entering without knocking, his boots leaving faint damp prints on the stone.

“You sent for me,” he said.

“I did.”

He studied her: pale from sleeplessness, but still commanding. “What’s happened?”

“Oldtown,” she said simply. “Their ships still move freely through Driftmark?”

“They do,” he admitted. “Their captains pay high tariffs, but they pay them all the same. Why?”

Rhaenyra rose from her desk. “They helped light the match that nearly burned my house,” she said. “Let them feel the heat. Slowly.”

Corlys’s brow furrowed. “You want me to stop their trade outright? I can’t. The King—”

“I’m not asking you to refuse them,” she said, cutting him off. “Just make it difficult. Quietly.”

He crossed his arms, weighing her words. “How difficult?”

“As difficult as you can make it.”

A slow smile touched his mouth. “That I can do. More inspections. Delays at the docks. Perhaps rumors of pirates along the route.”

“Good,” she said. “Oldtown can keep their prayers. Let them see if faith will carry their grain through storms.”

Corlys regarded her for a long moment. Rhaenyra felt the weight of his gaze, but refused to flinch.

Finally, he spoke, voice quieter. “You remind me of your mother’s words.”

The words caught her off guard. 

“She once told me that you frightened her, even as a child.”

That startled a dry laugh out of her. “Frightened? Me?”

Corlys’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. “Not because you were cruel. Because you were certain. You had this way of looking at the world as if it would bend if you only told it to.”

He leaned his hands on the back of the chair opposite her. The firelight caught the silver in his beard. “ Queen Aemma said, ‘One day, she’ll have no softness left to lose. Gods help us when that day comes.’”

Rhaenyra’s composure wavered for the first time, just a flicker, a breath drawn too sharply. “Did she truly say that?”

“She did,” he said gently. “And she said it with pride.”

Corlys straightened, studying her not as an ally or queen, but as something closer to a daughter. “You’ve her eyes when you think,” he said. “That same light.”

Rhaenyra forced a small smile. “Then it seems I inherited well.”

He huffed a soft laugh. “You did.” After a pause, “Do you want it traced back here?”

“No,” she said, voice steady again. “Let them think the sea itself is against them.”

Corlys smirked. “Then the sea will obey.”

He turned to leave, but at the door he hesitated, glancing back. “Your mother would have been proud of you, Rhaenyra. I hope your father learns to be.”

Corlys’s words lingered after he left, curling through the air.

I hope your father learns to be.

She almost laughed, a hollow, humorless thing that died before it left her mouth.

“My father,” she whispered, “has learned nothing in his life except how to disappoint.”

The window rattled in its frame as wind tore across the cliffs. She turned from it, spine straight, eyes dry.

Whatever affection she’d once held for the man was a ghost now. And ghosts, she’d learned, only weigh you down.

---

The Small Council was already in motion when the doors opened without herald.

Then came Laena Velaryon.

She did not bow, nor wait to be given permission. Her scaled cloak of indigo and black glimmered faintly in the torchlight, a thing made for sea and sky both. The lords at the table shifted uncomfortably. Even Lyonel Strong looked uncertain whether to rise or remain seated.

Viserys blinked as if seeing a ghost of the realm he’d once promised to unite. “Lady Laena,” he managed, surprise softening his voice. “This is the King’s Council.”

“And I am of the King’s kin,” she said evenly, her tone cutting through the whispers like a blade drawn slow. “I come on matter of family.”

The words family and Velaryon had always carried the same weight, an anchor dragging every Targaryen toward the sea.

She stopped at the foot of the table, gloved hands resting upon polished oak. The gesture was unmistakable: her mother’s stance, inherited without needing to be taught. 

Outside, a shadow passed the windows. Vhagar. Her wings blotted out the weak morning light, the sound of her flight a low, ancient thunder. 

Viserys straightened, voice rough with forced calm. “You come in strange fashion, Lady Laena.”

She inclined her head, every inch the queen she might have been. “Forgive the intrusion, Your Grace. I’ve come to speak of my husband’s exile.”

Viserys’s expression hardened, the faint softness that had crept into his eyes vanishing like mist from glass. “There is nothing to speak of,” he said. “Daemon’s punishment stands. His exile will not be rescinded, nor debated here.”

Laena did not lower her gaze. “I did not come to beg pardon for him.”

“Then what, Lady Laena?” he demanded, his weariness slipping into irritation. “To remind me that my brother refuses the limits of his own temper? That he killed a knight of this court before my own eyes?”

Her tone did not change. “To remind you that despite his temper he has two daughters.”

The council shifted uneasily. Lord Beesbury’s pen scratched once, then stilled. Tyland Lannister leaned back, watching her with open curiosity. Mello’s gaze flicked between her and the King, calculating.

Her voice was soft, but every syllable struck like a hammer against the quiet. “I ask only that House Targaryen sees to its own."

Before Viserys could respond, Alicent rose slightly from her seat. The green silk of her gown hissed across the floor. “You come to court astride your dragon and speak of recompense?” 

Laena did not blink. “In exile, Prince Daemon receives no princely income, no allowance. His daughters, my daughters, go without protection or provision.”

Her voice was calm, but the cadence was tidal, relentless, wearing the room down with every word.

Alicent’s reply came clipped and cool. “House Velaryon is the wealthiest in the realm. Surely the daughters of Driftmark will not starve while sitting on mountains of coral and gold.”

Laena’s lips curved faintly, her tone all sweetness and salt. “If House Velaryon is to take their care, then perhaps they should take its name.”

The words hung in the air, delicate and deadly as glass.

Even the candles seemed to shrink from the sound, their flames bowing low as if to escape what came next.

Viserys’s hand clenched around the arm of his chair. “Their name is Targaryen,” he said, too sharply.

Laena’s eyes found his, certain and proud. “Then let House Targaryen act like it.”

The rain began to drum against the high windows, harder now, like the pulse of a living heart.

Laena stepped closer to the table, the flicker of torchlight catching the wet edge of her cloak. “When a man sins, it is his house that bears his punishment. So the septons teach. But when a woman suffers for her husband’s crime, when babes suffer, it is not law that speaks, but neglect. And neglect, my King, is the death of legacies.”

Alicent’s chair scraped sharply against the floor. “You presume much, Lady Laena. Daring to lecture a king on duty? My brother is in the ground because of your husband’s wrath.”

Laena turned her head slightly, just enough for the torchlight to gild the line of her cheek. “And yet the realm mourns him less than it whispers of his folly.”

Alicent’s breath caught in a violent gasp. “You vile—”

But Laena’s tone never rose. 

“I speak of balance, Your Grace. Of blood and fairness. You would have my daughters pay for their father’s temper, babes who have never seen a sword drawn. Tell me, does your god command such justice, or do you?”

The Queen’s rosary snapped between her fingers; beads scattered across the marble like spilled prayers. “You dare invoke the gods in this chamber?” Alicent’s voice broke, raw now. “You who lie beside a kinslayer, a fornicator, a—”

“Alicent,” Viserys said, the weariness in his tone sharpening to authority. “You forget yourself.”

The Queen turned to him, eyes bright with fury. “Forget myself? She—”

He rose, and the motion alone silenced the room. “That she is Lady Laena of House Velaryon,” he said, his voice firm though his hand trembled slightly against the table. “Daughter to the Lord of the Tides, kin to the blood of old Valyria. You would do well to remember to whom you speak.”

Alicent froze, stunned by the sudden turn.

Laena had not moved. She stood as though carved from the same sea-stone as her father’s halls, every inch of her poised, untouchable.

Viserys’s eyes flicked toward her. “This council will not be a field for grievance or insult,” he continued. “The matters of faith and sin are for the sept, not the court.”

Alicent’s throat worked as she tried to swallow her outrage. “You defend her?” she whispered.

“I defend peace,” Viserys said quietly. “And what dignity this Crown has left.”

“Peace,” she repeated, the word curling like ash on her tongue. “This you call peace, Your Grace? To stand idle while a serpent slithers into our court and poisons it with her husband’s crimes?”

Viserys closed his eyes briefly, as if the sound of her voice itself hurt. “Alicent—”

But she pressed on, voice rising. “You think her poise makes her pure? Look at her, preaching virtue while lying with a man who bathes in blood! Is this what you would have your court admire, my King? A whore made holy by her dragon’s shadow?”

The words struck like a thrown goblet, shattering the fragile order of the room.

Laena finally lifted her chin.

“My Queen.”

Soft.

Measured.

Deadly.

Alicent stiffened.

Laena stepped forward, not enough to challenge propriety, just enough that every lord present noticed the shift in the balance of power.

“You have just accused a Velaryon daughter of corruption,” she said calmly. “Before witnesses. In council.”

A flicker of alarm flashed through Alicent’s eyes.

“Do you truly wish to make that a matter of record? My father commands the fleets that guard your trade, your harbors, your food. The fleets that keep the realm safe so your sons may sleep in peace.”

Alicent’s breath caught. 

“And you call me serpent? A whore?"

Laena’s gaze drifted to Viserys, locking there until he shifted. 

A beat passed.

Another.

Laena bowed her head just enough to obey the letter of courtly respect, and not a hair more.

“I will not trade insults in this chamber,” she said. “But let the truth be plain: attacking a lady of Driftmark is not a small matter. It is a diplomatic one.”

Viserys’s face drained of color.

“Lady Laena…” he began, and already his voice betrayed him, thin and wavering. “Your, your point is… well… I hear it. I do.”

He straightened in his chair, as though posture alone could hold the room together. It didn’t. His hands still trembled visibly.

“No insult toward House Velaryon was meant,” he insisted, too quickly. “Seven hells, I would never, your father. Driftmark has ever—”

He broke off, realizing the lords were watching him with sharp, assessing eyes.

“The Crown honors Driftmark,” he said louder than necessary, the volume edged with fear. “We depend upon it. We all do.”

Alicent went rigid beside him.

Viserys’s gaze skittered across the room, frantic, pleading for someone to help him contain the damage Alicent had unleashed.

No one moved.

“This, this outburst,” he continued, the word wobbling, “need not, must not, be taken as…as a matter between our houses.”

He inhaled, shaky and thin.

“There must be no doubt as to the loyalty between the Iron Throne and Driftmark.” A swallow. A tremor. “None.”

The crack in his voice rang through the chamber.

He felt the shame burn hot under his collar. A king declaring loyalty rather than receiving it. A king revealing just how fragile his crown had become.

The silence pressed on him like a weight.

And then he imagined Corlys Velaryon hearing of this.

Rhaenys’s cold disdain.

Daemon’s smirk.

The lords whispering that the Queen held his tongue on strings.

He could feel his pulse in his throat.

“No,” he whispered under his breath. “No, I cannot have this.”

He pushed to his feet abruptly, the movement jerky.

“Lord Strong,” he said, voice cracking like a flag in a gale. “Draft a, gods, draft a writ immediately. Daemon’s former allowance is to be restored in full, redirected to Lady Laena, and… and half again placed in trust for her daughters.”

The room stirred in shock.

Alicent found her voice before sense. “Your Grace, you cannot seriously reward the wife of a man who—”

Viserys spun toward her so fast she flinched.

“Not now,” he said, the words raw. “Gods, Alicent, not here. Not in front of the council.”

The words struck sharper than any blade.

She could not feel her fingertips.

Her jaw parted. “I only—”

“I heard what you meant,” he said, and for once there was steel beneath the exhaustion, but it was the desperate steel of a man cornered. “And so did they.”

Alicent stared at him, stunned.

“You think this chamber is a place to...to air your grievances?” Viserys’s voice shook as much as his hands. “Every word spoken here is carried beyond these walls. Twisted. Used. Do you understand what people will say of this?”

Heat rushed into her face.

“You were meant to help keep the peace,” Viserys said, eyes shining with something like heartbreak. “Not, gods, not to slight my blood before my lords.”

He dragged a hand through his hair, humiliated, exhausted, trembling.

“Alicent, please.” He didn’t sound like a king. He sounded like a man drowning. “You must, you must make this right.”

“My… my King?” she whispered, horrified.

Her stomach dropped as every face in the chamber stared at her, not with sympathy, not even with respect, but with expectation.

Waiting for the Queen to obey.

She was being sacrificed.

He gestured weakly toward Laena. “Apologize. Gods help me, Alicent, apologize before this becomes something we cannot unmake.”

She reeled as if struck. “You would humiliate me? Your Queen?”

Viserys shut his eyes tightly. “Better a moment’s humility than a war with Driftmark.”

A long, agonizing silence.

Alicent trembled, throat burning. 

“Now,” Viserys whispered. “Please.”

And for the first time in years, Alicent felt the sharp sting of envy. 

Of Laena’s strength.

Of Rhaenyra’s birthright.

Of any woman who could speak without fear of offending a king.

Alicent turned, stiff and shaking, and bowed her head.

“My lady,” she forced out. “If my words… strayed beyond propriety, I… I offer you my apology.”

It was thin. Weak. Barely sincerity.

Viserys exhaled shakily, shoulders sagging as though they had held up the whole chamber.

Laena let the silence stretch just long enough for every gaze to fall fully on her.

“My Queen,” she said softly, her voice warm as driftwood polished by tide. “Your apology is received.”

Her tone held no trace of triumph.

Laena continued, her gaze steady, woven through with something dangerously close to compassion.

“I know the weight of loss,” she said. “And how it hollows us out in ways the world cannot see.”

Alicent stiffened.

Laena did not relent.

“The Mother teaches that sorrow speaks before the mind can still it,” she said. “I take no offense from words spoken in such a state.”

Alicent felt the council’s eyes shift.

Not condemning her, worse: pitying her.

Laena’s voice softened even further.

“I pray your heart finds ease, Your Grace,” she said.

It was the most delicate rebuke the chamber had ever heard, wrapped in prayer, in pity, in perfect courtesy.

Larys Strong watched from his quiet corner, head bowed as if studying the grain of the table. Only the faint curl at the corner of his mouth betrayed that he was listening very closely.

Viserys exhaled a shaky breath, as if Laena’s measured grace had thrown him a rope while he was drowning.

“Lady Laena,” he said, his voice softer than he intended, thick with relief and embarrassment alike. “Your… your graciousness honors this council. And the Crown.”

He tried to straighten again, to look like a king instead of a man collapsing inside his own armor.

It didn’t quite work.

The gratitude in his tone was too raw.

Laena dipped her head once, serene and inviolate.

“You owe me no thanks, Your Grace,” she replied gently. “It is the realm we all serve. Not ourselves.”

Viserys’s face crumpled at that, subtle but unmistakable, because she meant it, and he rarely had.

Then she turned, her cloak trailing salt-dark silk across the marble. When the doors shut behind her, the room dimmed, the air shivered, and the only sound left was the uneven rasp of Alicent’s breath.

Once, after Aemma’s death, the realm had whispered Laena Velaryon’s name for him. He had known marrying her would have healed Driftmark’s pride.

He had known it would have been wise.

Yet he had not chosen her.

He had chosen elsewhere. 

Chosen the soft voice that soothed him, the girl who never questioned him, the gentle presence that promised to ease his grief rather than challenge it.

And now, watching Laena walk out like a queen forged by the sea, he felt the old wound of that choice reopen.

He had not chosen the tide.

He had chosen the still pond.

And the still pond had long since gone stagnant.

“Leave us,” Viserys whispered.

No one moved.

His shoulders hunched. “Please… just go.”

Chairs scraped. Lords bowed. Papers were gathered.

The room emptied in hurried, uneasy silence.

When the last door shut, Viserys stood alone with Alicent. Rainlight slanted across his crown, turning the gold dull and heavy.

Alicent spoke first, her voice trembling. “You humiliated me.”

Viserys’s gaze snapped up, hurt, not fierce. “Alicent… you humiliated yourself.”

She recoiled. “How can you say that, before the council, before—”

“Before my kin,” he blurted, voice cracking. “Seven hells, Alicent, what were you thinking? Calling a Velaryon, a guest in my hall, such things?”

“I defended you!” she cried. “I defended the throne from a woman who—”

“You defended nothing!” His hands shook as he raked them through his hair. “Gods… gods, do you not see? Corlys will hear of it before nightfall. Rhaenys too. They will think the Crown mocked them.”

Alicent hesitated, something dark flickering behind her eyes.

“You would take her part over mine?” she whispered, voice too thin, too small.

Viserys closed his eyes with a sound that was not quite a groan, not quite a plea.

“I am so tired of choosing sides…”

He turned away, shoulders bowing as if the crown had suddenly doubled in weight.

“I am trying, trying, to hold this realm together,” he said, his voice trembling. “Every harsh word spoken here becomes… becomes a rumor, a grievance, a reason for war.”

Alicent opened her mouth, then froze.

A shadow passed over the windows.

A great one.

Her head snapped up instinctively, dread coiling in her gut.

Vhagar.

The jade-bronze wings spanned the clouds themselves, beating thunder into the air as she wheeled in a broad arc over the keep.

Even muffled by stone, the deep, rumbling growl of her breath vibrated through the chamber floor.

Alicent’s heart lurched.

Vhagar was not a creature one forgot.

“Viserys…” she whispered, barely audible. “Is she—”

“Returning to Dragonstone,” he replied, following the shadow with haunted eyes.

It was not a threat.

That made it worse.

It was a message:

You do not insult a Velaryon.

Not without answer.

And now Vhagar was flying toward the very family she'd just shamed.

Viserys turned back toward her, exhaustion carving deep lines into his face.

“And you made it sound as though we are petty, jealous children squabbling over faith and propriety.”

Her chin trembled. She tried to muster indignation, but fear crept in beneath it.

“You speak as though she did no wrong—”

“She is kin to the throne,” Viserys said, defeated, “and you are its Queen.”

He swallowed hard.

“You must… you must act like one.”

The words hit harder now that the sky trembled with Vhagar’s passing.

Alicent’s lips parted in shock. “You dare call me—”

“No, no…” he said quickly, rubbing his brow. “Not that. I only mean…” He faltered, the words limping out of him. “The council cannot bear more strain. Not now. Not with… not any insult towards Rhaenys can stand.”

Another heavy wingbeat shook the air outside as Vhagar vanished into rainclouds.

Alicent’s fear sharpened, cutting through her humiliation.

Rhaenys, who had never forgiven Viserys.
Rhaenys, who had never liked her.
Rhaenys, who would defend Laena with every ounce of Targaryen wrath.

Viserys hesitated, then said with visible pain:

“I think it best… if you do not sit in on council for a time.”

Alicent stared at him, stunned, breathless. “What?”

Viserys flinched at her tone, guilt rising at once.
“Only for a little while, Alicent, please understand. Only until Corlys calms. Until people stop talking.”

“But—” Her voice cracked. “You would cast me out.”

“No,” he whispered. “Not cast out. Just… give me time. Give the realm time.”

But all she could see was Vhagar, the shadow of an old, unstoppable power stretching over the keep, blotting out light and mercy.

Everything in Alicent clenched.

She had angered a dragonrider.
A true one.

And Viserys, her king, her shield, her husband.  Was now begging her for peace he could no longer promise.

“Please,” he whispered again.

And Alicent felt, with a sick, sinking certainty,

Her hands trembled at her sides. “You will regret this,” she whispered.

“I already do,” he said softly.

Then, without looking at her again, he removed his crown and set it on the table, between them, gleaming dull. 

“Go,” he said. “Before I speak as husband instead of King.”

When she finally turned away, her hands were shaking.

Her skirts brushed against the edge of the table, scattering a few forgotten parchments to the floor. She didn’t stop to gather them.

The corridor beyond was dim, lit only by the guttering glow of wall sconces. The air felt close, stale with the scent of medicine and melted wax. She walked fast at first, her hand brushing the stone to steady herself, but the faster she moved, the more the tremor beneath her skin seemed to grow.

Footsteps followed a few paces behind her. 

Ser Criston Cole.

Her shadow in white.

Her breath came sharp through her nose as she turned the corner, descending the stairwell that curved toward the inner yard. The night air met her like a slap, cool, alive with holy dignity. 

By the time she reached the great wooden doors, her pulse had steadied to a cold rhythm. She lifted a hand, hesitated, and pushed them open. The hinges whispered their own judgment.

Criston remained just behind her, a white blade wrapped in flesh, waiting for her to step into sanctity so he could stand guard at its threshold.

Beneath the statue of the Mother, someone was already kneeling.

Kara.

The girl’s head was bowed, her lips moving in quiet prayer. Candlelight washed over her hair, giving it the hue of old gold. The sight made something twist in Alicent’s chest, a bitter, unnameable envy for the ease of faith.

She stepped forward, her steps echoing faintly in the vastness of the sept.

At the edge of the nave, an older septa watched the Queen’s trembling hands with a pinched mouth. Once, Alicent’s composure had been a sermon of its own. Now her grief was untidy, her anger ill-timed.

The Faith loved sorrow. It had less patience for disorder.

Kara did not look up until Alicent spoke.

“Do you ever tire of it?”

The question hung in the air like incense smoke, soft, but suffocating.

Kara turned, startled. “Of what, Your Grace?”

Alicent’s eyes, rimmed faintly red from unshed tears, glinted beneath the candlelight. “Of praying. Of asking.”

Kara rose slowly, tucking her own rosary into her sleeve. “The asking is the point, isn’t it?” she said gently. “To remind the gods we still remember them. To remind ourselves that someone might still be listening.”

Alicent gave a bitter little laugh. “And do you think they are?”

Kara hesitated, then inclined her head. “Sometimes. When the world is quiet enough.”

The queen’s gaze drifted to the statue of the Mother, the marble face serene, the hands eternally open. “I have been quiet all my life,” she said. “And still they turn from me.”

Kara’s eyes softened further, her voice almost a whisper. “Then perhaps, Your Grace, it is time to stop whispering your prayers.”

For a moment, neither spoke. The candles hissed, the shadows swayed. Then Alicent stepped forward, resting a trembling hand against the cold stone of the Mother’s outstretched palm.

“I do not know how,” she admitted.

Kara bowed her head beside her. “Then learn. The gods favor the brave.”

Alicent’s lips pressed tight. “Bravery has cost every woman I’ve ever known.”

Kara laughed then, but the sound struck something deep, like a harp string plucked too hard.

“To be a woman is to be brave,” she said, rising with unhurried grace. “We wake to bleeding, to hunger, to men who call us foolish for surviving both.” Her gaze slid toward the marble Mother. “And still they expect our silence to sound like virtue.”

Alicent turned to her, caught between resentment and reluctant awe. Kara’s poise was quiet, assured, her faith neither meek nor blind.

“You speak boldly for a girl of the cloth,” the queen said, though her tone lacked its usual edge.

Kara smiled. “The Mother loves bold daughters best.” She paused then, eyes lifting to meet Alicent’s. “And what is our queen, if not the boldest of us all?”

The words landed like wine, soft, glimmering, impossible to refuse.

Alicent’s shoulders loosened for the first time all day.

Kara watched her carefully, then added, gentle, carefully sweet:

“Your worth is not measured by the King’s favor, Your Grace.”

Alicent startled, blinking hard.

Kara continued before she could speak.

“A queen should not have to beg to be heard in her own hall.”

The words slipped into Alicent like breath into a wound. Cooling, numbing, intoxicating. She didn’t realize the danger of them.

Alicent’s throat tightened, tears threatening but stubbornly unshed.

“I have been trying,” she whispered. “Truly, I have tried to—”

Kara’s expression softened even further, sisterly. The way Rhaenyra once looked at her. 

“Let him come to you, Your Grace,” she said.
“Let the realm see that you stand unbowed. The gods will grant him ears in time.”

Alicent closed her eyes. And for the first time, she allowed herself to imagine it:

Not chasing Viserys’s attention. Not fighting to be heard. Not apologizing for his shame or her righteousness.

Just… standing. Being.

Letting him feel the distance.

Letting him feel the loss.

A shiver of something like power moved through her. 

Kara saw it.

She lowered her head respectfully. “The Mother sees you, Your Grace. And so do I.”

Alicent exhaled, unsteady.

“Thank you,” she said, voice barely a whisper.

Kara stepped back, her cloak brushing the stone floor. "Walk in the Mother’s courage, Queen Alicent.”

She bowed and left her there, alone with the candles, the silence, and the new, bright ache blooming beneath her ribs.

Alicent stared up at the marble Mother, breath trembling.

Kara’s words echoed through her mind.

They felt like salvation.

They were ruin.

And Rhaenyra Targaryen, without even knowing, would one day drink the benefits.

---

The courtyard was empty at this hour, the torches guttering in the wind, the stones still holding the last, fading warmth of the sun. Far overhead, the final sparks of dragonfire drifted down like dying stars, winking out before they could touch the ground.

Aegon scrubbed his sleeve across his mouth, still shaking from the flight.

Sunfyre’s first true blaze.

It had been glorious, and it had been terrifying, and Otto Hightower had watched every moment with an expression carved from stone.

Now he flicked two fingers at the stablehands. They vanished as if the shadows had swallowed them.

“Walk with me,” he said.

Aegon obeyed.

The boy always obeyed when his grandsire used that tone, a sound that seemed less like a voice and more like a judgment already entered.

They crossed the courtyard in silence, night air thick with the sour-sweet smell of dragonfire and singed hay. Their footsteps echoed off the stone, hollow as a crypt.

Above, Dreamfyre swept past, Helaena clinging to her neck like some pale, drifting scrap of prophecy. Otto’s eyes tracked her flight, not with wonder, but with a bookkeeper's focus. 

“Your sister rides well,” he said at last.

Aegon swallowed, unsure whether agreement was required. “Yes, Grandsire.”

They walked farther before Otto stopped without warning. Aegon almost collided with him.

“You bonded Sunfyre today,” Otto said. “Do you understand what that means?”

Aegon’s voice wavered. “They all keep saying I’m grown now, but…I didn’t feel grown. I only felt—”

“Terrified?” Otto supplied, cool as winter glass.

“…Yes.”

“Good,” Otto said.

Aegon blinked. “Good?”

“A king who does not fear fire is a fool.” Otto’s gaze slid past him to the dark where Sunfyre slept, a coiled promise of ruin. “And a fool dies screaming in it.”

Before Aegon could speak, Otto’s hand darted out, iron-fast. He seized the boy’s chin and wrenched his face upward, forcing him to meet his eyes.

“Tell me, Aegon,” he murmured. “Do you want to burn alive?”

The word alive hung between them like a noose.

Aegon shook his head quickly, the ends of his hair hitting his cheeks. “No, no, Grandsire.”

“Then learn.”

The slap cracked across the courtyard, sharp as breaking bone. Aegon’s head snapped sideways. His ears rang. The stones seemed to lurch beneath his feet. His eyes watered, but he did not cry.

Otto released him with a small, disgusted sound, as though the boy’s skin had soiled his fingers.

“You ride a dragon,” Otto said, turning away. “And yet you quake like a milk-sopped babe.”

Aegon stumbled after him, shame burning hotter than Sunfyre’s flame.

“Do you know,” Otto went on, conversational now, as if nothing at all had happened, “what dragonfire does to a body?” His voice grew almost reflective. “Skin blackens and splits. The face—” he glanced back briefly, pale eyes flat as old coin, “—the face is the first thing they stop recognizing.”

Aegon’s stomach rolled. “Grandsire…”

Otto did not slow. If anything, his steps grew quieter, more deliberate, as though moving through a cathedral rather than a courtyard.

At last he stopped beneath the shadowed archway of the inner yard.

“Tell me,” Otto said softly, “do you wish to die like that?”

Aegon froze. The air felt too thin, too sharp.

“N–no,” he whispered. “Gods, no.”

Otto inclined his head as if the answer were obvious, expected, disappointing.

“No,” he echoed. “Of course you do not. No man does. No prince should.”

He turned toward Aegon fully then, pale eyes reflecting the torchlight in an uncanny, corpse-like sheen.

“But understand this,” he murmured. “That is how your enemies will kill you.”

Otto stepped closer, far too close, and laid a hand on his shoulder. The weight of it was heavy, cold, deliberate. A priest laying claim.

“A dragonrider kills by dragonfire, Aegon. It is their privilege. Their birthright.” His fingers stiffened until Aegon hissed. 

Aegon’s breath stuttered.

Otto’s voice dropped to a whisper, soft, instructive, terrifying.

“Do you think she would hesitate?”

Aegon swallowed hard. “She… she’s my sister. Kin, she can't—”

“Sister,” Otto repeated, with something like contempt. “And you are her rival. Her threat. Her undoing.”

He leaned in, breath cold against Aegon’s ear.

“She would not hang you, Aegon. She would not exile you. She would not even show you the mercy of steel. No. If she ever moves against you, she will do it the way her blood demands.”

His hand rose and settled lightly beneath Aegon’s jaw, thumb pressing against his pulse.

“She will burn you.”

Aegon’s knees nearly buckled.

Aegon stared at him, horror raw in his eyes. “You… you think she’d really—”

Otto cut him off with a single, precise nod. “If her claim requires it? Without hesitation.”

Silence crawled between them, thick, suffocating, shaped like prophecy.

Otto let it linger just long enough to root itself in Aegon’s bones.

“So,” he said quietly, “when the time comes, will you accept such an end?”

Aegon shook his head, trembling. “No.”

Otto’s lips curved, almost a smile, almost a snarl.

“Then you must ensure,” he said, “that she burns first.”

Aegon’s breath came faster, panic spiking, but Otto lifted a hand, a quieting gesture, almost paternal in its cruelty.

“Peace, Aegon,” he purred. “Violence need not arise at all.”

Aegon blinked, confused.

Otto stepped back, studying him like a craftsman inspecting the weak points in an unfinished blade.

“There are… gentler ways to disarm a dragon,” he said. “More elegant ways. A dragonrider’s fury is terrible, yes, but even dragons hesitate before fire that might consume their own brood.”

Aegon frowned, trembling. “I… I don’t understand.”

“No,” Otto said softly. “But you will.”

He clasped his hands behind his back, the picture of serene calculation. A man carved from winter marble. A man built to endure.

“You fear Rhaenyra,” he continued. “Every wise man does. Her dragons, her fire, her claim.” He leaned in again, breath cold as a tomb. “But she has a weakness, Aegon. A fatal one.”

Aegon swallowed, throat tight. “What weakness?”

Otto’s voice dropped into a conspiratorial whisper, though no one lingered close enough to overhear. The whisper felt unnecessary, yet all the more terrifying for it.

“Her children.”

The words seemed to fall from his lips like soot.

Smothering.

“She would burn any foe who threatens her crown,” Otto murmured, “but her own daughter?” He tilted his head, birdlike, blade-like. “Aemma Velaryon. The realm’s very own heart. Born with the salt of Driftmark in her blood and the favor of gods in her cradle.”

Aegon froze, his breath turning shallow.

Otto nodded once, slowly, as though confirming a calculation he had already completed hours before.

“Aemma,” he said, “is the one thing Rhaenyra would never scorch.”

Aegon’s stomach twisted. “But… she’s just a baby.”

“Now,” Otto said gently, with the softness one might use to ease a frightened colt. “But she will grow.”

Aegon shook his head, as if trying to shake loose the images forming in it. “Grandsire…”

Otto’s gaze cut to him, sharp and merciless.

“This is tradition,” he said, his voice hollow and echoing as a crypt. “Not choice.”

Aegon flinched. The shadows seemed to lengthen around them, drawn toward Otto’s stillness like moths toward a cold flame.

“She’s so small,” Aegon whispered. “I don’t even—she’s...she’s—”

“You need not think of her as anything yet,” Otto said, brushing Aegon’s trembling words aside as if they were dust on his sleeve. “She will become what the realm requires of her.”

His tone did not change. That was the horror.

No heat. No anger. No shame.

Just inevitability.

He paused, letting the silence twist between them like a tightening cord around Aegon’s ribs.

“And you,” Otto said softly, “will become what the realm requires of you.”

Aegon’s throat clicked. “Which is…?”

“A king,” Otto said. “A husband. A father. A sword against Rhaenyra’s crown.”

The words didn’t fall so much as sink, like hooks dropping into deep water, catching on everything soft inside him.

Aegon curled in on himself. “But… I don’t want to hurt anyone.”

Otto exhaled sharply, disgust curling his lip as though Aegon had confessed to cowardice rather than mercy.

“Wanting is for weak men,” he said coldly. “You will marry Aemma when the time comes. And she will keep peace where you cannot.”

Aegon’s stomach lurched violently. He felt suddenly, horribly cold, as if the courtyard stones were leeching heat from his bones

“She’s just a little girl,” he whispered, voice cracking. 

Otto’s patience snapped like a brittle twig.

He seized Aegon’s jaw again, harder this time, forcing his face up until their noses nearly touched.

“We were all little once,” Otto hissed. “So was Helaena. So was your mother. So was Rhaenyra. The realm does not wait for you to feel ready. It does not care whether you balk or tremble.”

His breath ghosted across Aegon’s cheek, cold, dry, and strangely devout.

“And make no mistake,” Otto said, voice lowering into something eerily calm, “the realm will not hesitate to break you if you fail it.”

Aegon’s chest seized. His knees wobbled. He could taste iron on his tongue.

“Now tell me, Aegon,” Otto said, each word a nail hammered into his spine, “will you be shaped? Or broken?”

Aegon’s vision swam.

He couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. The world narrowed to two pale, pitiless eyes and the pain lancing through his jaw.

“I… I—” His voice crumpled.

Otto shook him once, sharp, jarring, a correction more than an act of comfort. “Answer.”

Aegon gasped. “I’ll… be shaped.”

Otto released him.

The sudden absence of pressure felt like a fall.

“Good.”

He turned then, calm restored, robes whispering as though the conversation had been nothing more than a minor course correction, a tutor adjusting a child’s grip on a quill.

Aegon remained rooted to the stones, shaking so hard his breath stuttered.

“When… when will Aemma be…?” His voice fell to a whisper, as if the very shape of the question made him nauseous. “When will she be old enough for… for any of that?”

Otto turned his head slightly, just enough for Aegon to see the faintest crease of irritation.

“When the realm decides so,” Otto replied. “Not you.”

Aegon shook his head in horror. “But she’s...she’s barely out of swaddling. She’s… she still holds Rhaenyra’s hair when she cries. She still—” He stopped, voice strangling itself.

Otto cut him off with a flicker of contempt.

“You will marry her the moment it is politically advantageous. You will bed her when it cements your claim. And you will sire heirs when the realm requires heirs, no sooner, no later.”

He leaned in, breath cold as grave air.

“She is not a girl, Aegon. She is a duty waiting to be fulfilled.”

Aegon sank.

“Grandsire, I—”

Otto pivoted, eyes like two chips of cold violence. 

“Do not disappoint me again.”

The words struck harder than any slap.

Then he was gone, leaving Aegon alone in the courtyard, small and shaking.

Even Sunfyre lay coiled at the far end, golden scales faintly glowing, eyes closed. The dragon did not lift its head. Did not reach for him. Did not acknowledge him at all.

Aegon’s chest locked. 

Had Sunfyre sensed his weakness?
Would he one day be the rider who burned screaming?

The wind cut through him. The torches guttered. Shadows crawled along the walls as if following Otto’s retreating steps.

Aegon finally forced himself inside, legs unsteady. His jaw throbbed where Otto’s fingers had left their imprint, an invisible brand.

In his chambers, the tapestries tilted strangely in the torchlight. His reflection in the bronze plate he looked pale, wide-eyed, wrong.

His throat closed.

You will not disappoint me.

The words echoed over and over, scraping the inside of his skull.

He sank to the floor beside his bed, shaking so hard his teeth clicked. He pressed his hands over his ears, but Otto’s voice kept bleeding through the cracks.

The realm would shape him.

Or break him.

And everyone expected the latter.

His hand found the wine jug.

Not for celebration.

Not for warmth.

For the rest of his life, when Aegon closed his eyes, he would see his own face blistering in Sunfyre’s light before he saw any crown.

---

The doors to the hall blew open on a hard wind and the pressure of sea-salt and dragon.

Only one rider in the realm could arrive with both.

Laena Velaryon strode in still wearing her riding leathers, cheeks stung red from cold wind and victory. A leather satchel hung heavy at her hip.

Daemon straightened first.

Rhaenyra did not move, she held Aemma on her hip, the boys playing with carved wooden dragons at her feet, but every muscle in her spine went taut, alert, as if the room itself shifted around Laena’s presence.

Corlys exhaled like a man who’d been holding his breath for three days.

Rhaenys’s eyes narrowed, not with suspicion, but with fierce, quiet pride.

Laena walked to the center of the chamber, unbothered by the watching eyes, and dropped the satchel onto the table.

The weight hit the wood with a metallic, ringing thud.

Daemon’s gaze snapped to it.

Rhaenyra’s breath caught.

Laena untied the clasp slowly, deliberate, controlled. The way a woman moves when she knows she holds the room by its throat.

Her silver curls, a river of mercury down to her hips, caught the light with each subtle shift of her shoulders. Eyes Velaryon blue, the color of a storm-tossed sea at midnight, surveyed the room like a queen assessing her domain. No one dared meet that gaze for long.

Gold spilled out.

Not a purse.

Not a pouch.

A river.

Thick-stamped dragons and stags and towers, minted clean and newly handled, some still wrapped in the Citadel’s counting papers. The coins gleamed on the darkwood table, a pile of molten sunshine in the dimness of the chamber. The metallic scent was thick in the air, sharp and promising. 

Laena’s voice broke the silence like a swordtip touching glass, her tone as smooth as silk but as hard as steel.

“An allowance,” she said evenly. “Promised by the King. For my daughters’ safety.”

Rhaenyra stared, her own violet eyes wide as they fixed on the impossible bounty before her. Carefully she placed Aemma to the ground, the little girl immediately crawling over to her brothers.

Daemon’s jaw slackened, not fully, but enough that Corlys noticed and fought a smirk that was part pride, part vindication. The flicker of something hot and dangerous in Targaryen eyes.

Laena folded her hands, calm as a goddess carved into temple stone, her silver spilling over the gold like a waterfall meeting the sun.

“I told him I would take nothing from him that did not serve their future.”

She turned her gaze to Rhaenyra. Not Daemon, not Corlys, not even Rhaenys. Only Rhaenyra, her direct gaze a physical touch that made the Princess sit straighter.

“And so,” Laena said, her voice a soft blade, “I brought it home.”

Rhaenyra swallowed, her throat tight. “Laena… this is—”

“For you,” Laena said simply. “For the Stepstones. For the men you will send. For the safety I was promised but has to be claimed with fire and steel.”

Rhaenyra blinked hard, a tear escaping to trace a path down her cheek.

Daemon seemed to forget breath altogether, his dragon’s greed warring with a profound respect.

“How,” Rhaenyra whispered, the word barely formed. “Laena… how did you secure this? The King, he does not part with coin for anything but grief and celebration.”

Laena’s lips curved not into a smile, but into something cooler, older, edged like truth. A flash of predatory grace in the set of her jaw.

“It was quite easy,” she said.

Daemon’s eyes went wide.

Corlys straightened, wary but intrigued.

Rhaenys’s head tilted, the keenness in her gaze sharpening like a blade honed on stone. The Queen Who Was Never Fooled.

Rhaenyra’s brows furrowed. “Easy?”

Laena nodded once, a single, lethal dip of her chin. “After the Queen called me whore, right there before the full council, the King felt… obliged.”

The word obliged dropped like a stone into still water, sending ripples of shock through the room.

Daemon froze mid-breath, his eyes flashing with the promise of violence.

Rhaenys’s hand curled against the table, knuckles white.

Corlys swore softly in the Valyrian of his ancestors, a harsh, guttural sound.

Even the children seemed to still, as though the room itself held its breath.

Rhaenyra’s voice broke on the first syllable. “She, Alicent...she said that?”

Laena’s tone did not tremble.

It did not waver.

It did not shrink.

“She called me,” she said, her voice clear and cold as the winter sea, “a serpent who lies beside a fornicator and came to beg the Crown for coin.”

Rhaenyra’s mouth fell open in slow, incredulous horror, her hand flying to her lips.

Daemon didn’t speak. His jaw flexed once, twice, a man tasting blood he very much wanted to draw. The air around him seemed to grow hot, as if a dragon was breathing it out.

Laena continued as though discussing the weather, her perfect posture unbroken, her silver hair a cascade of defiance.

“I waited until her voice ran out,” she said. “I waited until her beads cracked in her hand. I waited until every lord at the table looked at her with something between pity and embarrassment. Only then did I look to the King.”

She lifted one shoulder, a gesture of elegant dismissal for the insult and the woman who delivered it.

“He could not afford the scandal,” she whispered. “Not so soon after the direct attack on the heir's heirs. Not with half the realm whispering that Alicent’s grief had made her unholy, her piety a poison.”

Rhaenyra pressed a hand to her own chest, not in fear, but in raw, unadulterated awe. “Seven hells, Laena…”

Laena’s gaze softened, just slightly, her storm-blue eyes holding the warmth of a fleeting summer sun. “I asked for only what was owed.”

“And he gave it?” Daemon asked, his voice low and roughened with a dangerous kind of pride and something else...something heavy and hot and possessive.

Laena turned to him, back straight as a mast, chin high enough to challenge the gods.

“If the Queen wished to call me a whore,” she said, “then the King could pay me as one.”

And in that moment, Laena Velaryon was more powerful than any queen, more dangerous than any dragon, a silver serpent in a den of snakes, and she had just paid for her future in gold.

At the edge of the hall, a serving girl went still, the goblet in her hand sloshing wine onto her fingers. She ducked her head at once, but her eyes were wide, shining.

By nightfall, every scullion and scullery maid on Dragonstone would know: the King had paid for the insult the Queen put on a Velaryon daughter.

Daemon’s exhale was a sound between a laugh and a groan. Disbelief, desire, admiration, rage, all snared in a single breath.

Rhaenyra choked. “Laena.”

“A daughter of House Velaryon,” she said, “named a whore before the full council, in the presence of lords… is an injury to Driftmark itself. To my mother’s line. To the Sea Snake’s honor. To the very alliance between Targaryen and Velaryon.”

Corlys’s jaw tightened, tendons standing like ropes beneath weathered skin. A man who had held storms at bay, who had stared down triarchs and corsairs and the Narrow Sea itself, but never had he looked so close to breaking something with his bare hands.

“And what,” he asked, voice low with the wrath of the deep, “did the King deign to reply with?”

Laena did not smile.

She let the silence stretch, taut as a sail in rising wind.

“The truth,” she answered. “He apologized. In front of every lord.”

A collective inhale moved through the room shock, disbelief, vindication.

“And then,” Laena added, her voice softening into something lethal and elegant, “he made the Queen apologize as well.”

Rhaenys’s breath stilled.

Slowly, very slowly, a grim satisfaction curved her mouth, not a smile, not quite, but the expression of a woman who had waited years to see the Hightowers taste their own poison.

“He made her kneel?” Rhaenys asked quietly.

“Not in body,” Laena murmured, “but in voice. And for Alicent Hightower, that is the same thing.”

Rhaenys stepped closer to her daughter, reaching up with steady hands, not to touch her, but to see her fully.

Her eyes those deep, unmistakable violet mirrors of storms, traced Laena’s face slowly as if committing her to memory anew.

“Your grandmother would have wept to see you today.”

“Which one?” Laena asked.

“Both,” Rhaenys said.

Corlys shook his head in awe, not disbelief.

In an instant he pulled her to him. It was not a polite embrace or a careful lord’s courtesy. It was a father’s grip, fierce, anchoring, the kind men give when they know the world has tried and failed to break their blood.

Laena stiffened in surprise, then melted into it, her breath catching against his shoulder.

Corlys held her a heartbeat longer than pride allowed, then drew back just enough to cup the side of her face with one weathered hand.

“You honor the Velaryon line with every breath you take," he said, voice suddenly thick and eyes suspiciously watery. 

The false civilized mask of the Rogue Prince cracked, spiderwebbed, and began to flake away.

His pupils blew wide, black swallowing lilac until there was nothing left but the hungry, gaping maw of a dragon's eye. 

Rhaenyra stared at her as if she had summoned a queen from her own heart.

It was as if a veil had been lifted, and she was seeing not just her cousin, but an ideal. 

She imagined standing beside Laena, shoulder to shoulder, not as Rhaenyra Targaryen, the King's heir, but as Rhaenyra the Dragon Queen.

It was a vision so vivid and powerful that her fingers curled unconsciously into the silk of her skirts, her knuckles white. The thought was a soft, intoxicating poison: if Laena could burn down her enemies with words, what could they do together? 

Laena folded her hands delicately, almost demurely, a contrast sharp enough to slice the breath from the room.

“And that,” she declares, “is how one deals with a Hightower’s tongue.”

Daemon moves. 

Not toward the door.

Not toward his seat.

Toward her.

He crossed the distance like a man pulled by a tide stronger than bone, stronger than breath. 

“Daemon,” Corlys said sharply, sensing the shift before anyone else.

Too late.

Daemon reached Laena and wrapped his fingers around her wrist, hot and trembling like he’d seized hold of a live flame.

Rhaenyra inhaled sharply.

Rhaenys’s spine snapped straight.

Laena’s eyes widened the slightest degree, surprise, not fear.

“Come,” Daemon breathed.

Not a courtly offer.

Not even a request.

More like the first word spoken by a creature too long caged.

Rhaenys stepped forward at once, violet eyes flaring. “Daemon, enough.”

Daemon didn’t even turn.

He didn’t need to.

She wasn’t the one he saw.

Corlys’s tone dropped like an anchor. “Unhand my daughter.”

Finally, Daemon spoke, voice gravel and hunger and unholy awe.

“She is wife to me,” he ground out. 

The words made no sense and every sense, Daemon was too far gone, mind and pulse overtaken by whatever had snapped inside him.

“Laena,” Rhaenys warned.

But Laena...Laena moved first.

She brushed two fingers against Daemon’s wrist, a soft touch, a permission, and the whole room felt the shift.

She wasn’t being taken.

She was choosing.

Rhaenys inhaled sharply, fury and dread and pride warring beneath her ribs.

Corlys muttered a curse so old it predated the Seven.

Laena kept pace, her head high, silver hair slicing behind her like a comet’s tail.

Rhaenys’s voice shook with controlled anger. “Daemon, she has just returned...let her rest—”

Daemon stopped only long enough to turn halfway, eyes wild, pupils blown to black.

“I cannot rest,” he bit out. “Not after what she just did. Not after seeing—”

He broke off, chest heaving.

Corlys took one hard step forward. “She is not yours to drag about."

“Laena.” Daemon didn’t look away from her, didn’t release her hand. “Tell them.”

Laena breathed once, steady and sure, then faced her parents, her hair wild from flight, her face dusted with salt and wind, a long, thin cut across her knuckle from gripping Vhagar’s reins too hard.

A woman who had walked into the den of her enemies and come out with their gold, their shame, their queen’s apology.

“Mother. Father,” she said quietly, “I am fine.”

Rhaenys stared at her, seeing not her child, but the storm she had become.

“Laena,” her voice cracked. “You’ve been through enough for one day.”

Laena’s eyes softened. “I have not been through half of what I am capable of.”

Daemon made a sound low in his throat.

Corlys scrubbed a hand over his face. “Girl, this is not...this is not the time—”

Laena cut him off with a look so calm, so resolute, so unmistakably Velaryon that Corlys actually fell silent.

“I want to hear what he has to say.”

Silence ignited, short and explosive.

Rhaenyra pressed a hand to her mouth, part shock, part a warmth that looked dangerously like longing.

Rhaenys closed her eyes for one beat.

When she opened them, she looked at Daemon like she could kill him if he hurt Laena and bury him in the sea if he didn’t.

“You bring her back,” she said, voice a razor. “Unmarred.”

Daemon inclined his head, shockingly respectful. “Of course, Princess.”

Corlys growled. “With her dignity intact.”

Daemon’s pupils stayed on Laena as he answered:

“It’s her dignity,” he purred, “that brought me to my knees.”

Rhaenys’s breath stuttered.

Corlys’s mouth snapped shut.

Rhaenyra flushed. 

Her blush wasn’t gentle. It wasn’t maidenly. It was deep, blooming from her collarbones to her cheeks in a slow, rising flush that betrayed every thought she tried to hide.

She could feel it, the thrum in her wrists, the sudden weight in her stomach, the ache of something old and half-buried clawing its way to the surface.

Instead, her violet eyes dragged back to Laena.

Laena who stood so calm, so regal, so burningly alive that even a dragon prince couldn’t breathe in her presence.

Laena whose defiance shone like a blade in torchlight.

Rhaenyra’s lips parted on a soft, involuntary exhale.

And when Laena’s gaze brushed hers, steady, warm, knowing, something inside Rhaenyra tightened. 

She looked away too quickly.

The heavy door swung shut behind Daemon and Laena with a deep, echoing thud.

The hall knew what that thud meant.

No one said it aloud, but the understanding moved through the room like heat. Eyes slid away politely. A servant suddenly found reason to busy himself with goblets that did not need polishing. Even Rhaenys’s mouth pressed into a thin line that was not quite disapproval and not quite surprise.

Rhaenyra felt the flush rise, hot and mortifying, from her throat to the tips of her ears.

They all knew what Daemon was dragging Laena off for. If she followed, they would know that too.

Her gaze dropped to the children as if they were a shield she could still pretend to hide behind. Aemon had abandoned his carved dragon to stare at the door, Aenar leaned into Rhaenys’s side, thumb in his mouth, and Aemma leaned against Aemon, suddenly drowsy. 

Rhaenyra cleared her throat. The sound came out too sharp. “Stay with them,” she said, and hated how thin her voice sounded.

Rhaenys’s arm tightened around Aenar. “We were not planning to set them adrift,” she answered dryly, though her eyes were gentler than her words.

Corlys nodded once, grave. “They are safe with us. Go tend to… whatever you mean to tend to.”

The flick of his brow told her he understood perfectly. That they all did.

Humiliation and want tangled in her chest until she could hardly breathe.

And still, she went.

Her feet carried her out of the hall before she realized she’d chosen to follow. Each step echoed in the stone corridor, her pulse pounding in her throat, heat licking at her spine.

It wasn’t jealousy. It wasn’t only desire. It was something more primal: A pull. A claim. A need sharpened into instinct.

Ahead, she could hear them, Daemon and Laena, footsteps quick, frantic, stopping abruptly as if pressed against one another in a moment she wasn’t meant to see.

Rhaenyra slowed, breath shaking, her fingers curling against the cold stone of the wall.

She wasn’t close enough to see them yet.

But she was close enough to hear Daemon’s voice, low and ragged. 

“Gods, Laena… what you did today—”

Laena’s voice answered, soft but firm, the sound of a storm choosing where to break.

“I know.”

Rhaenyra stepped forward. Quiet. Careful. Unable to stop herself. 

Daemon had Laena pinned.

Her back was pressed to the stone wall, the torchlight gilding her silver hair like a crown of wildfire. But her bodice was undone, laces hanging loose, the edges of her corset pushed aside to reveal the soft curve of her breast to the flickering torchlight.

One of Daemon's hands braced beside her head, the other gripping her waist. Thumb stroking the bare skin above the lace of her stays, tight and possessive in a way that spoke of a man being held back by the Gods themselves. 

Laena wasn't frightened.

She wasn't even tense.

She stared up at him like she'd been expecting this.

Daemon's forehead rested against hers, their breaths tangling, his lips grazing the exposed skin of her shoulder just above the lace. His voice was low, ragged, breaking open.

"No man in that room deserved to look at you."

Laena's lips curved, not gentle, not soft. A storm-smile. A queen-smile.

"I know."

Daemon shuddered.

His fingers dug into the curve of her hip as if anchoring himself to her body was the only prayer he remembered.

The movement caused the laces of her corset to slip further fully exposing her upper half to the warm torchlight.

Laena lifted her chin the slightest degree, her breath catching as his mouth brushed her collarbone.

"Daemon," she teased, voice steady as the tide, "you are shaking."

He exhaled a harsh, broken laugh against her cheek. "You undo me."

Laena's hand slid into his hair, fingertips grazing his scalp until he inhaled sharply, chest lifting against hers. Her other hand moved to his face, thumb tracing the line of his jaw before sliding down to his throat, feeling the rapid beat there.

"Look at me," she said.

He did.

Immediately.

Completely.

The Rogue Prince, brought still by one woman's voice.

And Daemon, Daemon fucking Targaryen, closed his eyes like Laena touched a wound.

Rhaenyra should have turned away. Instead she moved toward them as if pulled by the same tide that ruled their blood.

And that was the moment Laena's eyes slid past Daemon's shoulder, and found Rhaenyra.

She didn't gasp. She didn't flinch. She didn't pull away from Daemon's body.

Instead, Laena's fingers tightened in Daemon's hair, guiding his mouth to her breast. His mouth a perfect, heated seal as he sucked against her flesh. Laena sighed, a low, sound of pure pleasure, her eyes locked with Rhaenyra's. When he finally released her with a soft, wet pop, his gaze following where Laena’s strayed.

"Niece."

It came out like a prayer he hadn't meant to speak.

Rhaenyra could not answer.

Her body answered for her, heart pounding, breath trembling, heat coiling in her spine, as Laena's gaze held hers.

And then Laena spoke, voice low as a tide pulling ships from harbor.

"Rhaenyra," she said. "Come here."

And Rhaenyra's feet, traitorous, carried her forward.

Before she could reach them, Daemon's hand shot out, his grip iron on her waist. He hauled her in between them, caging her against his chest and Laena's body. His eyes, dark and blazing, met hers for a fleeting second before he crushed his mouth to hers.

His kiss was all fire and conquest, the same wild hunger he'd poured into Laena, now turned on her. But it was not merely a meeting of lips. It was a violation, a claiming so absolute and presumptuous it stole her very will.

One hand remained splayed like a brand across her hip, holding her fast against him, while the other came up to fist in the river of her silver hair, tilting her head to his liking. His tongue did not ask entry; it took it. 

When he finally tore his mouth from hers, their breaths came rough and unsteady.

His gaze slid from Rhaenyra to Laena and back again, a fierce, possessive gleam burning there, as if he were already standing crowned between two thrones.

“A dragon has three heads,” he rasped, voice raw with want and certainty. “A prince and his two queens. As it was in the beginning. As it should be again.”

Of course he would liken himself to Aegon the Conqueror.

Of course he would see her and Laena not as women, not as niece and cousin, but as crowns waiting to be stacked on either side of him.

Arrogant bastard.

The thought should have stung. Instead, heat curled low in her belly, fierce and humiliating.

Laena’s eyes flicked over Daemon, then over Rhaenyra, and settled somewhere between the two as if she were testing how close the fire could burn before she reached for it.

Daemon's hand tightened on Rhaenyra's hip, his other hand coming up to cup Laena's cheek. Without breaking eye contact, he gave them both a deliberate, almost feral grin.

"Inside," he commanded, his voice leaving no room for argument.

He backed them into the chamber, pulling them both along with him, his movements possessive and confident.

As the heavy door clicked shut behind them, he turned his full attention to them, his eyes raking over their forms with the hunger of a starving man.

Rhaenyra stood with her usual grace, her straight silver hair fell like a river of quicksilver down her back, unbound and cascading over her curves. 

Laena, by contrast, was all graceful angles and coiled silver coils that fell past her waist. Though she too had borne children, giving her a fullness to her bust, her overall form was taller and more slender. 

Daemon began with Rhaenyra's gown, his fingers deft and swift as he unlaced the ties at her back. As the silk pooled at her feet, he growled low in his throat, his eyes feasting on the sight of her pale skin, the swell of her hips, the generous curves he'd spent years watching from across the royal court.

Then he turned to Laena, his hands moving to the laces of her corset.

Finishing the job by stripping the last of the fabric away. 

He stood between them, his eyes moving from one woman to the other as if unable to decide which sight pleased him more. 

"All mine," he breathed, one hand reaching out to take Rhaenyra's, the other taking Laena's, pulling them both toward the luxuriously draped bed.

But as they drew near the edge of the bed, something shifted.

Laena's fingers slipped from Daemon's grasp, and Rhaenyra felt a gentle but insistent pressure on her own arm, guiding her not toward the prince, but toward the other woman.

Rhaenyra's breath hitched as she was turned to face Laena fully.

She could smell the faint salt of Laena's skin, the scent of the sea that always clung to her. Rhaenyra's eyes, wide with something like wonder, drifted from Laena's face, down the line of her throat, to the swell of her breasts. 

Before she could second-guess her own boldness, before the propriety of her birth could scream for her to stop, Rhaenyra reached out.

Her fingers, trembling slightly, brushed against the warm skin of Laena's shoulder. Laena did not fly away.

Instead, she gave a small, encouraging smile.

Emboldened, Rhaenyra let her hand explore further, tracing the elegant line of Laena's collarbone, then the soft curve of her breast. She was softer than she had imagined.

Her skin was warm, a living heat that seeped into Rhaenyra's own palm.

She had never wanted a woman this way.

Had never wanted anyone with such a consuming, desperate fire. Rhaenyra’s fingers tightened slightly, feeling the softness of flesh as Laena's nipple tightened beneath her touch.

Laena's smile deepened, her eyes holding Rhaenyra's with an intensity that made her knees weak.

"Like what you see, princess?" she teased, her voice a low caress.

Rhaenyra could only nod, her throat too tight for speech.

The sight of them, an intoxicating tableau of curiosity and desire, proved too much for Daemon to witness, his heart pounding a frantic rhythm against them both before he guided them backward.

The edge of the bed met the backs of Rhaenyra's knees.

She fell back, a soft gasp escaping her lips as Laena came down with her, settling gracefully between her open legs.

Daemon followed them down, his weight a delicious pressure as he positioned himself at Rhaenyra's side, leaning over both women.

He moved between them then, his hands mapping every line and curve, learning the differences between them, the way Rhaenyra's softer form yielded to his touch compared to Laena's more taut strength.

His fingers traced the heavy weight of Rhaenyra's breast, then the elegant slope of Laena's collarbone.

He watched, mesmerized, as their lips parted, as their tongues met in a dance of discovery, his own breath growing ragged with the sheer beauty of the sight before him.

The candles burned low.

The night thickened around them.

None of them rose from that bed again until the moon had shifted in the sky and every shadow in the chamber had softened.

By then, the sheets were ruined, the wine forgotten, and any hope of returning to decorum left behind on the cold stone floor.

---

Vaemond Velaryon had never trusted ravens.

Too many secrets pinned to brittle legs. Too many lords who believed that ink and feather were safer than tide and hull.

Tonight proved him right.

The bird had come in on a hard wind, wings crusted with sea-salt. It wore no castle’s proud seal, only a strip of plain twine about its leg, stained with what might have been wine and what might have been blood.

Smuggler’s bird. Not one of theirs.

The Dragonstone rookery boy had done as he was told. Any bird with that twine went first to the harbor tower, not the maester’s coops. A quiet arrangement. A favor the boy did not even know he was doing for Vaemond, only for “the master of ships.”

The boy had left. The tower was empty now.

Only the steady lap of waves far below and the soft rattle of chains in the dark.

Vaemond slit the thread with a thumbnail.

The parchment was thin, foreign, but the hand was neat: a woman’s script trained to servility and turned, somewhere along the way, to knives.

A name for a promise. Protection for truth. Ser Criston moved at her bidding, whether she knows it or not. I can still shape the story, but only if I live to tell it.

The letter was meant for Daemon. 

It carried the shape of a lifeline. A plea and an offer. I can still shape the story. 

Vaemond read it twice. Then a third time, slower, tasting each line for what it might purchase.

Ser Criston moved at her bidding, whether she knows it or not.

Slowly, very slowly, he smiled.

No one ever looked at the man on the dock when the dragon passed overhead. Their eyes went to the sky, not the sea. It had always been like that, gods and dragons and kings. They forgot whose harbors fed them. Whose routes kept their grain from rotting. Whose ships brought their armies to shore.

Corlys Velaryon had made a fortune from that forgetting.

Vaemond intended to make an inheritance.

He laid the letter flat on the table and weighed the corners with small iron anchors. The harbor tower’s chamber smelled of pitch, salt, and the faint, metallic ghost of old storms. A rack of charts lined the wall, seas inked in patient hands: currents, reefs, hidden coves.

He unlocked a narrow chest in the corner and drew out a second sheet of parchment.

It was Dragonstone stock, thicker, harder to tear. The same type the Princess used for her private dispatches. He had made certain the same factors supplied both harbor and solar.

Coin well spent.

On the table beside it lay a small penknife, a shallow dish of sand, and three sticks of wax: black, red, and plain uncolored. The tools of a man who knew letters as well as rigging.

He took up the knife.

Not to cut.

To copy.

Vaemond’s hand was steady as he traced lines.

He matched the angle of letters, the curl at the ends of words. Years of ledger work had trained his fingers to borrow any script he needed. Men who thought harbor masters were mere tally clerks forgot that a falsified manifest could start a war.

He wrote it nearly true.

A name for a promise. Protection for truth. Ser Criston moved at her bidding, whether she knows it or not. I can still shape the story, but only if I live to tell it.

But near the bottom, he paused.

The knife clicked faintly against the wood. A single, clean sound.

Then he added a line.

Your enemy did not walk through stone. Someone opened a way. Someone sold more than conscience. His name is known to me. A man of Gulltown, placed where the harbor watches fail.

He paused, letting the ink sit for a heartbeat before he wrote the next line.

Not a Velaryon. He would not waste blood he might one day need. Better to choose someone whose disappearance would benefit him directly. 

A tide-master elevated by Corlys himself, chosen in a moment of generosity Vaemond had always resented. A man Vaemond had endured for years, loud, opinionated, forever reminding anyone who would listen that he had commanded a fleet before Vaemond ever touched a helm on Driftmark’s behalf.

A Gulltown dog given too fine a collar.

He dipped his quill again.

He is called Marq Shettson of Gulltown, master of the outer tide-gates. His post grants him access to your quays. His purse smells of Oldtown’s coin.

When he sanded the ink and tipped it away, he stared at the name once more.

Marq Shettson.

A man who sneered when Vaemond spoke.

A man who had once told Corlys to choose “real sailors” over ambitious brothers. 

And when the tide receded, the gap he left would belong to Vaemond.

He folded the forged letter with deliberate care, running his thumb along the crease until the edge lay crisp and obedient. The parchment felt lighter than it should. 

Across the table, the true letter waited, rolled tight and bound with its plain twine. The real prize.

The one he would keep pressed close to his ribs where even a knife would need to earn its passage.

Vaemond slipped the forged missive into an unmarked sleeve of oilskin. It would need to look like a tired scrap of intelligence, not something meant to reshape four thrones at once.

Then he unlocked the narrow chest by his feet and drew out a small clay flag. 

He dabbed a finger in the ash-grey paste inside and smeared a faint streak along the bottom edge of the letter, smudging it just enough to suggest hurried handling.

A dollop of seawater would ruin a dispatch.

Fear traveled faster than truth.

He heard the footsteps before the boy appeared. The rookery lad hovered at the threshold, thin shoulders hunched, eyes bright with the hope of earning another coin.

“Inside,” Vaemond said.

The boy approached, gaze flicking nervously to the single letter on the table.

Vaemond closed the distance between them and offered the packet.

“This is to go where Prince Daemon keeps his war maps,” he said. “Not in the rookery. Not in the maester’s rooms. To the prince. Quietly.”

The boy nodded. “Shall I knock, my lord?”

Vaemond lifted his chin slightly, the gesture enough to freeze the question in the boy’s throat.

“No. You leave it among the maps. They are scattered. He rarely knows what lies where until he needs it.” He softened his tone a fraction. “You will not be seen.”

The boy swallowed hard. “And if someone asks—”

“That you found it near the tower door,” Vaemond said sternly. “The wind brought it in. Nothing more.”

The boy’s fingers curled around the packet.

“Go,” Vaemond said.

The boy fled into the stairwell, his steps echoing down the stone spine of the tower.

He tucked the original letter into the safe hollow beneath his doublet.

He snuffed the candle and descended.

He stepped into the yard. A single lantern swung at the end of its rope beside the dock, its light flashing across hulls and rigging. Men moved in purposeful silence around the narrow ship Vaemond had ordered readied at dusk. A courier vessel. Fast. Hungry for wind.

Perfect.

At the base of the gangplank, the ship’s captain inclined his head. “Tide turns in an hour, my lord.”

“We sail on this one,” Vaemond said. “Not the next.”

The captain hesitated. “The wind is stiff from the west. It will be a rough first night.”

Vaemond stepped past him, cloak snapping in the gust. “Then it will carry us faster.”

He paused just long enough to take in Dragonstone’s silhouette against the sky. Black stone. Black smoke. Red veins of heat in its belly. 

Marq Shettson would fall.

Vaemond would rise.

And tucked beneath his doublet was the thing Oldtown would not dare ignore. A queen’s sin. A knight’s obedience. A story waiting to be twisted. Proof that Alicent Hightower, the realm’s model of piety, had lost command of her own sworn shield.

Oldtown worshipped purity.

Vaemond worshipped opportunity.

He stepped onto the ship. The gangplank thudded behind him.

“Set the sail,” he said.

The canvas unfurled, snapping hard as it caught the wind. The ship shuddered once, then surged forward, slicing through the dark water.

Dragonstone receded behind him.
Oldtown waited ahead.

Let the Hightowers and Targaryens bleed each other dry in whispers and sermons. He would be waiting in whichever harbor their ships still needed.

And Vaemond Velaryon, for the first time in his life, felt the tides turn in his favor.

Notes:

Okay, serious question:
How unhinged do we want to get with the sex scenes in this fic?
Should I:

keep it at “HBO fade-to-black but make it spicy,”

go “softcore but with feelings,”

or unleash “full explicit, the gods avert their eyes” energy?

 

Also who was actually shocked by Vaemond? 👀 I’ve been sprinkling hints throughout the earlier chapters. Tiny acts of defiance can snowball fast, specially when someone’s eyeing a throne. How did you feel about the partial reveal?

Chapter 21: The Ink is Wrong

Notes:

It’s long. You’re welcome ❤️❤️

The chamber glowed with the muted gold, light catching on silver hair and bare shoulders like molten crowns.

Rhaenyra lay between them.

Daemon’s arm was draped over her waist. Not gentle, not loose, but heavy with intent. Even half-awake, his hold said mine in a dozen silent ways. His mouth traced slow kisses along her neck, claiming her with the confidence of a man who expected no refusal.

But she didn’t lean into him.

Her hand was already reaching, uncertain, for Laena.

Laena’s thigh brushed hers, warm beneath the sheets. Her fingers found Rhaenyra’s wrist first, firm and steady. A grounding touch. A promise of softness Rhaenyra hadn’t known she needed until it found her.

And gods, it unsteadied her.

Laena shifted closer, curls spilling across Rhaenyra’s shoulder. “You’re quiet,” she said, voice low, almost teasing. Her eyes, however, were gentle and knowing. And Rhaenyra’s heart pounded. 

Daemon noticed instantly.

His next kiss sharpened, teeth scraping lightly at the base of her neck; a warning, a reminder. He lifted his head, eyes narrowing as he followed the line of Rhaenyra’s reach toward Laena.

He didn’t speak.

He didn’t need to.

His hand tightened around her hip, fingers digging in with territorial heat.

Rhaenyra turned her head toward Laena anyway.

Their foreheads touched, Laena’s nose brushing hers.

The sunlight deepened the warmth in Laena’s gaze, softening it into something unguarded. Rhaenyra breathed her in. The salt, the smoke clinging to her braids, the sweet trace of dragon oil at her pulse.

And suddenly the truth rose sharp and clear in her chest:

Laena was beautiful. Undeniably, impossibly so.

Rhaenyra had heard it whispered from every corner of court long before they ever shared space. She had known it, intellectually, in the way one knows of a comet in the sky.

Bright, distant, not hers to touch.

She had seen her.

Laena’s warm brown skin softening the razor-sharp angles of Daemon’s pale brilliance, her vitality balancing his dark confidence. Together they were magnetic. Terrible. Stunning. Rhaenyra had watched them, obsessed, if she were honest, unable to explain the ache that bloomed whenever she witnessed their harmony.

And now she lay between them, and the ache was no longer distant.

And she had no language yet for what that meant.

Daemon smirked, amused.

“I see,” he said, voice low, edged like a blade. “My wife prefers my other wife today.”

He said it so easily. As though the claim were settled. As though the world already spun in the orbit he named.

Presumptuous.

The word sparked through her, bright and immediate.

But the irritation was tangled with something far more dangerous.

Because a part of Rhaenyra thrilled to hear it.

The part of her had spent half her life imagining what it would feel like to be Daemon’s wife, to be wanted by him openly, claimed without hesitation. The young girl she used to be leaned into those words with hungry, reckless longing.

But another part of her, older now, sharper: bristled.

Not because he claimed her.

But because he claimed them.

As if Laena were only an extension of his desire.
As if Rhaenyra’s wanting of Laena did not exist on its own, blazing and bewildering and new.
As if the sweet, steady pull she felt toward Laena’s laughter, Laena’s hands, Laena’s strength was merely Daemon’s influence instead of something wholly hers.

The heat beneath her ribs sharpened.

Laena’s hand slid into Rhaenyra’s hair, protective and bold. It made Daemon lift his head fully, jaw tightening as he watched them.

“She can choose,” Laena said. “Her wanting isn’t disloyal.”

Daemon scoffed under his breath, a dangerous, amused sound.

“Everything is about loyalty,” he replied, leaning forward, caging Rhaenyra between his body and Laena’s touch. “And I won’t have either of you pretending otherwise.”

But there was no cruelty in him.

Just hunger. Just the need to be included. To be wanted alongside, not instead of.

Daemon’s hand slid slowly up her side, deliberate, claiming both her and the moment. His voice, when it came, was softer but no less fierce.

“You want her,” he said. “Fine. But you don’t stop being mine.”

His gaze flicked to Laena. “Either of you.”

Laena’s smile curved against Rhaenyra’s cheek, unthreatened. “Greedy,” she teased. 

Daemon didn’t deny it.

Laena cupped Rhaenyra’s jaw from the front, steady and warm, her thumb stroking lightly along Rhaenyra’s cheekbone.

Daemon watched the way Laena held her.

The softness.

The focus.

Something sharp flickered in him.

Without breaking his hold on Rhaenyra, his free hand reached forward and caught Laena’s waist. He tugged her closer, fingers tightening, pulling her fully into the circle of their bodies.

“Come here,” he muttered, voice low, roughened by want and claim. “You must be close enough for me to feel you too.”

Laena inhaled softly, surprised but not resisting as Daemon drew her closer until her thigh pressed even tighter against Rhaenyra, her breast pressing against Rhaenyra’s own. 

Rhaenyra arched into the dual sensations. Daemon's hard line at her back and Laena's soft yield before her.

Her body pulsed as Laena's knee found its way between her thighs, pressing upward with a slow, deliberate pressure that matched the hypnotic stroke of Laena's thumb along her jaw. 

"Look at you," he breathed, the words meant for all of them and none of them.

Daemon’s focus was everywhere. The way their hair mingled on the pillows, the curve of Laena's spine beneath his palm, the tension in Rhaenyra's neck as she tilted her head back against the cage of his chest. 

He pulled them both fractionally closer, forcing Laena's thigh harder against Rhaenyra's center and pressing Rhaenyra more firmly into his own cock. 

He breathed them in like he could devour the air directly from their lungs. His eyes tracked from one to the other, greedy, enthralled.

Then a distant knock echoed down the corridor.

Soft.

Nervous.

A servant’s knock.

Laena jumped slightly, instinctively prepared to pull away.

Daemon exhaled sharply through his nose.

“Not yet,” he growled, tightening his hold on both women as though the interruption offended him personally. 

The Emberguard would be expecting him soon; matters needed his attention. It was unavoidable.

The world beyond this chamber never stayed quiet for long.

But gods, he didn’t want to move.

Daemon finally pushed himself up onto an elbow, but his hand lingered on Rhaenyra’s waist. His gaze swept over them, bold and unashamed, heavy with want. 

He could hardly bear to pull his eyes from Rhaenyra’s lips, full, parted, flushed from Laena’s closeness. His eyes followed the enticing swell of her breasts, the gentle curve of her waist and lower, to the sweet promise between her thighs.

And Laena, 

Laena was worse.

Far worse.

Just the flicker of her lashes, the teasing glint in her eyes, made something inside him feel unhinged. As if he were one wrong breath from abandoning all responsibility just to drag them both back into his arms. One night of fucking himself in his sweet, wanton niece and his clever, fierce wife wasn't enough. He needed more. Needed their screams of pleasure and whimpers as his cock made home in them. 

Another knock. Firmer.

Daemon cursed softly.

Rage, cold and sharp, lanced through him.

It was a visceral, gut-deep fury at the nerve of the outside world to presume it could claim his attention.

He rose to his knees between them, pale hair falling loose around his face, the sun catching on each strand. He didn’t bother covering himself. He didn’t bother with shame.

He leaned down first to Rhaenyra, hand sliding beneath her jaw, tilting her chin up. He kissed her, slow, authoritative, like a mark he was reasserting before he left her in Laena’s arms.

Then he turned to Laena.

She met his approach without flinching, without apology. Daemon’s hand slid from her cheek to the back of her neck, drawing her in. The kiss he gave her was different, hotter, sharpened by frustration.

By the fact that she had Rhaenyra’s attention in a way he wasn’t accustomed to sharing.

But Laena accepted it calmly, unshaken.

He pulled back with a hair that trembled more than he’d like to admit.

“Lock the door behind me,” he said, voice still rough. “I’ll turn away the servants. No one will disturb you.”

He let his thumb brush once more across Rhaenyra’s lower lip. A final, hungry sweep of his gaze over both women.

Then Daemon rose fully, retrieving his clothes from the floor, pulling them on with distracted force. Another knock. This time he strode to the door himself, swung it halfway open, and spoke in a low, threatening voice that sent the servants scattering like startled birds.

Only when the corridor was silent did he close the door behind him.

Laena was the first to move.

She reached out and brushed a stray piece of hair from Rhaenyra’s forehead, fingers warm and unhurried. “Come,” she said. “Let me care for you.”

Rhaenyra swallowed.

It was all so...gentle. 

Laena helped Rhaenyra sit up, smoothing the sheets around her as though handling something precious, something fragile.

And she guided Rhaenyra lightly, one hand at her elbow, the other steady at the small of her back, toward the vanity across the chamber.

The sea-dragon moved with easy confidence. With every step, the full, heavy weight of her breasts swayed and bounced gently in a hypnotic rhythm. Her hips rolling in a loose, lazy sway, sunlight catching the warm tones of her bare shoulders.

Rhaenyra hesitated at the edge of the table.

Laena did not push.

She simply waited.

At last Rhaenyra lowered herself onto the cushioned seat.

The mirror gathered them both in its reflection.

Rhaenyra, hair mussed from sleep and touch, the flush still lingering high on her cheeks. Laena, standing behind her, bare shoulders gleaming softly under the sun, curls tumbling loose around her face, her expression unreadable but kind. This was not the calculated allure of court flirtation; this was real, messy, and utterly disarming.

Laena reached forward and lifted a section of Rhaenyra’s hair with her fingers, letting it run through her hands before she began untangling it slowly, carefully.

Rhaenyra clenched at first, then released air she hadn’t known she was holding.

Charmingly, with the sweetness of bells, Laena giggled. 

“Do not,” Rhaenyra said suddenly, shaking her head embarrassed and flustered. 

She groaned and planted her elbows on the vanity, pressing her forehead into her palms.

Laena raised both brows in the mirror, bemused.

She placed her thumbs on either side of Rhaenyra’s neck, applying soft pressure to the places where tension had begun to gather. “Do not what?”

“Do not make light of it,” Rhaenyra muttered into her hands. “It is not amusing. It is not light. It is foolish and sinful and dangerous.”

Laena let out an inelegant snort.

“As is anything of worth,” she said, waving a dismissive hand before dropping it back to Rhaenyra’s shoulder. She tugged lightly. “Sit straight, Nyra.”

“Laena. I mean it.”

“As do I,” Laena replied, her tone soft but unyielding. She emphasized the point by pressing her fingers more firmly into Rhaenyra’s shoulders, then slid them up into her hair, nails grazing gently along her scalp.

Rhaenyra went nearly boneless beneath Laena’s touch, eyes fluttering half-shut. The soft sound that escaped her was barely a gasp, a quiet, involuntary, achingly content.

It was a sound Laena hadn’t expected.

And gods, it hit her.

Low.

Sharp.

Laena inhaled slowly, steadying herself. She couldn’t afford to bite down now. 

“Nyra,” she said lowering her voice without meaning to, “we can speak plainly. If you carry questions, I might have the answers."

Rhaenyra turned her face just enough that Laena could see the uncertainty there, quaking around the edges.

“How many women have you known?” Rhaenyra asked softly.

Laena felt a small, warm smile form before she could stop it. Pride. Gentle, protective, astonished, bloomed in her chest. Brave girl, she thought, because Rhaenyra Targaryen did not ask questions unless she wanted truth. 

“Two,” she said, catching a long silver strand in the teeth of the comb. “A servant girl was the second. The first was Lyra.”

“Lyra?” Rhaenyra’s eyes lifted in the mirror, surprised. “The girl who ran from her father’s farm to Driftmark?”

Laena nodded. “The same.”

“You were scarcely ten-and-two.”

Laena paused, brush poised mid-stroke. Her voice softened. “It was before I was meant to be offered off to your father.”

Silence pooled between them.

Rhaenyra wanted to apologize.

She wanted to deny the need to apologize at all.

She wanted to tell Laena she had deserved better, and in the same instant apologize for every choice her father had made.

She wanted to bite her own tongue until she tasted blood.

Laena noticed, of course she noticed.

She set the brush down gently, a soft clink against the table.

“I hold none of that against you,” Laena said. “You had no more say in it than I.”

Rhaenyra stared at the mirror, at Laena’s hands on her shoulders, at her own face caught between tension and longing and apology.

“It feels… wrong,” she managed. “That you were bartered off. That you had no say. That I was always the chosen daughter while you were a bargaining piece—”

Laena squeezed her shoulders, just enough to interrupt the spiral.

“Nyra,” Laena said softly, “your mother had just passed."

The words hit her with the quiet, brutal clarity of iron.

For a long moment, it felt as though her heart ceased beating. Her mind emptied; then flooded.

No one ever said it like that.

Everyone knew Aemma was dead, yes. Everyone nodded solemnly, whispered condolences, moved on.

But Laena was the first to speak of it as something Rhaenyra carried, something that shaped her, moved her, bled into every choice she made.

Aemma’s tired smile.

Aemma’s hand in her hair.

The smell of blood.

How eagerly they pretended Rhaenyra’s grief was an inconvenience.

How easily they stepped over it so her father could hunt for a new wife.

A sudden, desperate urge rose in her, sharp as a knife.

She wanted the nursery.

She wanted the weight of her children in her arms, warm and solid and breathing. Aemon’s solemn little frown, Aenar’s restless legs kicking against his blankets, Aemma’s tiny fingers curling in her hair.

She wanted to press her face into the soft place where neck met shoulder and breathe in the faint, comforting scent of soap on their clothes.

Rhaenyra looked away, jaw tight.

“I was so angry,” she whispered. 

“And rightly so,” Laena said. “As I was angry to find myself taught needlework one day and told the next what kind of queen I would be.”

“It still feels wrong,” Rhaenyra replied. “That you might have stood beside my father. Dressed in my mother’s jewels. Woken in chambers that were not yours, married to a man who… who—”

Who had not loved Aemma enough.

Who had failed her.

Laena’s voice softened again, but there was iron beneath it.

“Your father’s choices were his own,” she said. “And my parents’ choices were theirs. We need not carry them.”

Silence settled between them. Something that sat with the ache of truths finally spoken aloud.

Laena didn’t rush to fill it.

She simply lifted the small vial of scented oil from the vanity, and gently set to Rhaenyra’s hair again. 

The first pass of oiled fingertips against her roots drew a quiet, involuntary gasp from Rhaenyra. 

Laena parted a section of hair with the care of a woman handling something precious. She worked the oil through slowly, smoothing each strand from root to tip before lifting another.

Now, Laena supposed, was as good a time as any.

Honesty after more honesty seemed fitting. 

“You do know,” she said lightly, as though commenting on the weather, “that I read some of your old letters once.”

Rhaenyra spine tightened. 

Laena very nearly rolled her eyes but restrained herself, she could practically feel the tension spike in the mirror.

“What letters?” Rhaenyra asked, too quickly.

Laena’s smile grew. “The ones you and Alicent passed between each other. When you were what, ten-and-two?”

Rhaenyra flushed from the collarbone upward. “You...you were snooping?”

“I was curious,” Laena replied, maddeningly serene. “And bored. And scarcely more than a girl myself. Hardly a crime worthy of the Faith.”

Rhaenyra’s lips parted in outrage, then closed again when she realized she didn’t actually have an argument. Laena’s hands returned to her hair, slowly smoothing another length of silver. 

“Princess,” Laena said with gentle mischief, “did you truly never see it then?”

Rhaenyra’s reaction was immediate. She bolted upright so quickly Laena nearly lost her grip on the comb.

“No one but you can make my title sound so damned condescending, Lady Laena,” Rhaenyra snapped, sharp as a drawn blade. Laena’s grin widened. “Is it too much to ask,” Rhaenyra continued, voice rising, “to have a single fucking secret to myself?”

Laena’s laugh burst free before she could stop it, bright, startled, entirely pleased. Not cruel. Not mocking. Simply delighted by the rare sound of Rhaenyra Targaryen cursing like a dockhand.

The Princess pushed to her feet, moving to the basin, away from Laena. 

She was still gloriously naked.

As Rhaenyra bent over the basin to splash water on her face, her hair fell in a silver wave over one shoulder, exposing the elegant line of her back and the dip of her spine.

Laena had always been comfortable with the female form. The elaborate rituals of dressing, had made nudity commonplace, even mundane. She had long ago learned to pretend she saw nothing but sisterly camaraderie, to hide the well-suppressed urge to look with real purpose.

But pretense was over.

So she let herself look.

Let herself truly see the absurdly perfect curve of Rhaenyra’s ass, the smooth column of her thigh, the way her muscles moved beneath her skin.

“Lady Alicent was all I had,” Rhaenyra said quietly, her voice softened by confession and the splash of water.

It was Rhaenyra’s sudden, blushing vulnerability, a naivety Laena was loathe to admit she found intoxicating. She had always had a preference for teaching, for orchestrating the first steps of discovery in another.

“I do not think I cared for Alicent in… such a manner,” she said haltingly. “Only that I always noticed the women of court. Their gowns. How they… fell on the figure.”

“And that never gave you pause?” Laena asked, her voice low, threaded with a calm challenge.

The question hung there, suspended like a drawn bow.

And it was enough.

Rhaenyra’s embarrassment flared bright and fierce. She recoiled from it like flame. Dragons, Laena knew, bore shame as poorly as they bore leashes.

Rhaenyra moved quickly, rounding on Laena to glare at her, only for her eyes to fall to her own naked body. A flicker of irritation crossed her face as if she were annoyed with herself for being exposed. She spun on her heel, crossing to the closed chest at the foot of the bed, and snatched the night shift from atop it.

With a sharp tug, she pulled the shift up and over her head.

“This need not be so difficult,” Laena said. 

Rhaenyra’s eyes snapped to hers, sharpened with warning. She looked at Laena the way a warrior might regard an opponent drawing steel, braced for danger, though she could not name the threat.

“I do not know where to begin,” she said at last, voice tight. A bitter admission. The sting of admitting weakness. “I do not like it.”

Laena’s mouth twitched. “I can see that.”

Instantly, Rhaenyra’s glare darkened like a storm breaking.

Laena lifted her hands in surrender. “I mean no slight. Truly. I am not mocking you.” She pressed her palms briefly over her eyes, gathering herself. “I just, gods, I remember that feeling. I remember how every thought felt like an accusation…it is not simple thing to desire what the realm tells you you should not."

Laena stepped forward and, without hesitation, drew Rhaenyra into a brief embrace, warm, comforting in the way only someone who feared nothing could offer. 

Rhaenyra went rigid at first, startled by the gentleness. Almost against her will, she softened into it. 

“Begin with the question that frightens you most,” Laena said quietly, keeping one of Rhaenyra’s hands between her own. 

Rhaenyra’s jaw tightened. “I do not know which question that is.”

“Then attempt one,” Laena said soothingly. 

Rhaenyra adjusted her posture like a woman preparing to face a council chamber rather than another woman’s gaze.

“When I think of you… at times even when I merely look at you…” She swallowed. “It feels as though I am committing some wrong. As though I am deceiving you by wanting, by noticing what I should not.”

Her voice wavered, though she forced it steady again.

“I know how a man looks at me when he means to show his interest. That language is clear enough. But I am not meant to look upon you in such a manner. And I recall well how you despised the way the boys at court stared at you.”

Laena’s expression gentled. “You are not one of those boys.”

“But my eyes linger all the same,” Rhaenyra said, her composure cracking. “Gods, Laena, last night, when you returned with that satchel of gold, I could scarce look away from...” She stopped herself sharply, color rising high in her cheeks. “It is shameful.”

Rhaenyra turned her face aside, breath unsteady.

“It is not as I ought to feel,” she said through clenched teeth. “How do I know I am not imagining this? How do I know I am not thrusting myself into your marriage out of loneliness? Or using your kindness because I—” Her voice broke, quieter now. “—have felt… unwanted.”

“Rhaenyra,” Laena said softly.

But The Princess was already pulling away.

As if the air between them had grown too thin to breathe, Rhaenyra crossed the chamber in quick, uneven strides. She dropped to her knees beside the carved chest at the foot of the bed and flung open its lid, the movement sharper than it needed to be.

Silks and velvets rustled beneath her hands.

Rhaenyra rifled through them with a determined, desperate energy, anything to keep her fingers busy, anything to keep Laena from seeing the tremor in them.

Laena remained where she was for a moment, watching her with quiet understanding.

“You need not flee your own feelings,” she said gently.

Rhaenyra did not look at her. “I am not fleeing.”

Laena’s lips curved, the smallest knowing smile. “Of course not. You are merely attempting to drown them in linen.”

Rhaenyra’s hands faltered, just slightly.

Laena crouched beside her, close enough that their shoulders brushed. Without comment, she reached into the chest and pulled out a gown, soft black wool trimmed in silver thread, simple enough for morning wear, cut in a style close to what Rhaenyra favored.

“Here,” Laena said quietly. “This will serve until you return to your own solar.”

Rhaenyra took it with stiff fingers.

Laena’s hand lingered a heartbeat longer than necessary before she withdrew it.

“Stand,” she said softly.

It was not a command, but Rhaenyra rose as though it were.

Laena stepped behind her, gathering the fall of silver hair over one shoulder with slow, deliberate care. She lifted the gown from Rhaenyra’s hands and shook it out once, letting the black wool settle into its proper shape before easing it over her head.

Rhaenyra lifted her arms, the movement stiff with lingering embarrassment. The gown slid down her body in a soft whisper, catching briefly at the curve of her hips before falling into place.

Laena’s hands smoothed the fabric along Rhaenyra’s ribs, fingertips brushing the warm line of her waist as she adjusted the seams. It was practical work, ordinary in every noble household, and yet nothing about the moment felt ordinary.

“Turn,” Laena said.

Rhaenyra obeyed, cheeks still faintly flushed.

Laena moved behind her and lifted the fall of hair again, gathering it carefully so she could fasten the small hooks at the back of the gown. Her fingers brushed the nape of Rhaenyra’s neck, a ghost-light touch, but enough to send a shiver down Rhaenyra’s spine.

“Laena… do you truly not mind?” Rhaenyra asked at last, the words barely leaving her lips. “Daemon and I...he is your husband.”

Laena stilled only a heartbeat, her hand resting lightly between Rhaenyra’s shoulder blades.

“I do not mind,” she said quietly. “And if I am honest, I never imagined the three of us ending any other way.”

Rhaenyra turned toward her, disbelief bright in her eyes.

Laena’s expression softened. “Rhaenyra. Think of the blood we carry. Think of the houses we come from.” She finished the last tie of Rhaenyra’s gown and stepped around to face her. “The gods made us of fire.”

Rhaenyra swallowed, suddenly aware of the pounding in her chest.

Laena lifted a hand and brushed a loose lock of hair behind her ear, gentle as a summer tide. “You have three children,” she said, tone warm as driftwood heated by the sun. “Three babes whom you treasure, bright as dawn, each of them.”

Rhaenyra’s breath stuttered.

Guilt hit her so hard it made her sway.

She had not kissed them good night.

She had not checked their blankets.

She’d let desire take her. Let escape take her.

Let herself vanish into Daemon’s storm and Laena’s sweetness because...because gods help her, sometimes she was so tired of being needed by everyone except herself.

Laena saw the grief flicker, and her touch grew steadier. “And I have my daughters,” she continued. “Little girls who look for me in every room.”

Her voice lowered. “Daemon could have left new babes in us both by now. Seven knows, he had mind enough for it last night.”

Rhaenyra flushed, but Laena did not mock her.

Rhaenyra looked aside. “It does not make this simple.”

“No,” Laena agreed. “But it makes it natural.”

She stepped closer, her eyes bright with something steady and unmistakably true.

“You are Rhaenyra Targaryen,” Laena said softly. “Princess of Dragonstone. Heir to the Iron Throne.” Her voice gentled. “Is it truly so strange that I should care for you? Find you… striking?”

Rhaenyra blinked, unsteady. “I never thought you would—”

“Why not?” Laena asked. “We are of old Valyria. Bonds among us were never as rigid as the Andals believe. Daemon is my husband, your uncle, my cousin. And you…” Her lips curved faintly. “You are you.”

“And the babes?” Rhaenyra whispered.

Laena reached up and grazed her cheek with the backs of her fingers, an intimacy that felt older than both their houses.

“If Daemon ever placed a child in your belly,” she said quietly, “I would welcome the babe as kin. As yours.”

Rhaenyra’s breath caught.

“And if I should find myself with child again,” Laena continued, voice deepening with something near fierce devotion, “I could name no fiercer mother to stand beside me.”

Rhaenyra closed her eyes briefly, breath vibrating. 

Laena’s touch remained, steady as an oath. “We are bound already, Nyra. Your babes are dear to me, as my daughters are dear to you. Fire winds itself where it wills. Blood recognizes blood.”

Rhaenyra opened her eyes.

“Laena…”

Laena stepped back only then, giving her space, her voice softening but losing none of its certainty.

“Is it so impossible to believe,” she asked, “that we might share more than a man? That we might choose one another, in ways the realm will never understand?”

“No,” Rhaenyra said. “Not at all.”

Laena’s expression shifted, only slightly, but enough. A softening at the corners of her mouth, a loosening of the tension in her shoulders. Relief and something warmer flickered through her eyes, like light catching on pearl.

Rhaenyra reached up, just barely touching Laena’s wrist with fluttering fingers. “I do not find it impossible,” she said quietly. “Only… new.”

Laena’s answering smile was small, careful, as though she feared to startle her. “New is not a sin."

Rhaenyra huffed a breath. 

Laena reached gently for the laces at Rhaenyra’s sleeve. “Come,” she said. “Let me finish readying you. Daemon will return soon enough, and I would have him find you composed.”

Rhaenyra did not move at once.

Instead, she held Laena’s gaze, a new steadiness rising in her voice.

“I do not fear the three of us choosing one another,” she said softly.

Laena’s lashes lowered, a tiny betrayal of how deeply the words struck her. She reached up almost cautiously, brushing a stray lock of silver hair behind Rhaenyra’s ear with a gentleness that felt achingly deliberate.

“Nyra…” she whispered, wonder threading through the single syllable.

Rhaenyra’s chest tightened. She hadn’t meant to say it aloud. Hadn’t meant to bare that particular truth yet. But Laena looked at her like she’d peeled open the center of a star and handed it over.

Laena’s fingers lingered against her cheekbone, warm and steady in a way Rhaenyra hadn’t realized she needed.

“You honor me,” Laena said softly. “More than you know.”

Rhaenyra swallowed, and to her own surprise, a thought rose unbidden, unformed, then tumbled out in a low, uneasy rush.

“I should do… sweet things,” she said, almost bewildered by the words as she heard them. “Proper things. Whatever comes after. The realm, Daemon, the crown...you are still a woman.” Her eyes flicked down, uncertain. “And I… I should know how to show regard. Offer gentleness. Gifts. Courtesy.” A flush rose high on her cheeks. “I should know how to honor you with more than wanting.”

Laena went still, not startled, not amused.

Moved.

Deeply, visibly moved.

She parted her lips to speak, but he chamber doors struck the stone with such force the iron hinges screamed and the nearest sconce blew out, flame guttering into smoke.

Laena jolted; Rhaenyra flinched.

Daemon did not enter.

He erupted into the room.

A streak of black and steel and wild silver hair, cloak twisted around his shoulders as if he’d dressed while running. His boots hit the floor hard and fast, a rhythm with no mercy in it.

He didn’t breathe like a man.

He breathed like something that had been running on fury alone.

His eyes weren’t merely enraged.

They were murderous.

“Daemon?” Rhaenyra started.

He didn’t hear her.

He didn’t see her.

He saw only the table.

In three long strides he was across the chamber, grabbing the edge of the oak and slamming a parchment down so hard the legs shrieked on stone. A cup toppled, shattered, water spraying across Laena’s carefully polished floor.

Laena stepped in front of Rhaenyra without thinking, arm half-extended. Not in fear.

Instinct.

“What in the—” she began.

Daemon rounded on them.

“I received a letter,” he snarled, voice torn raw, every word a lash. “Left among my war maps. No seal. No crest. Only treachery.”

His hand on the table trembled, not with fear, but with the effort not to break the wood in two.

Rhaenyra swallowed hard. “From who?”

Daemon’s laugh came jagged, unhinged. Not mirth; not mockery. The sound of a man on the edge of burning the keep down.

“A whore with a web of whispers.”

Laena blinked, caught off guard. “A… what?”

Rhaenyra tensed. “Daemon—”

“YES,” he roared, slamming his palm flat so violently the wood groaned. One of Laena’s silver combs leapt and skittered off the table, clattering across the rushes. “A street rat I once kept fed. A woman who trades rumor the way sailors trade coin.”

His breath heaved.

“But this,” Daemon spat, shaking the paper as though he meant to throttle it, “this is not hers. Not what she uses.”

Rhaenyra’s frown deepened.

“The parchment,” he growled, pacing like a caged animal, “is Dragonstone stock.”

Both women went very still.

He threw the letter down again.

It slid across the table like a wounded thing.

Rhaenyra tried to speak, but Daemon barreled on, pacing so violently it seemed he might wear a trench into the stone.

“And the ink,” he hissed, “is wrong.” He jabbed a finger toward the parchment as if it had personally betrayed him. “Mysaria uses a Braavosi mix. You can smell it before the letter is even open.”

He dragged the parchment up again and pressed it to his nose like a man clinging to an enemy’s scent.

“This,” he spat, “is crude. Weak.”

Laena inhaled, slow and horrified. “So… anyone could have copied it.”

“ANYONE,” Daemon roared, slamming the parchment down again. A hairline crack snapped across the wood.

He looked feral then.

Not merely angry.

Hunted. And hunting.

Rhaenyra moved before either of them realized she’d chosen to.

She stepped forward, snatched the parchment from the table, and held it to the light, tension coiled in her ribs.

Her eyes skimmed the first lines.

Then the next.

Then the next.

Her breath thinned to a thread.

Her shoulders drew taut, the elegant line of her spine transforming into something forged, hammered.

Laena stepped closer, voice barely above a whisper. “Nyra…?”

Something in Rhaenyra’s expression broke. Not like a heart, but like steel bent too far.

A sharp, brutal split.

“Criston Cole,” she said.

The name fell from her tongue like an axe.

Each syllable bitten off so cleanly it sounded as though she were crushing bone between her teeth.

“Ser Criston Cole,” she repeated, louder now, voice raw and shaking, “the Queen’s sworn sword. Her shadow. Her dog.” Her palms burned, jagged and furious. “By the Seven… he dared. He dared to send men into my halls?”

Daemon had entered the room like a stormfront.

Rhaenyra became the storm. The lightning in its heart.

Laena’s hand hovered near her, unsure whether a touch would steady her or melt against her skin.

Rhaenyra’s eyes burned, not wet, but bright with something older than tears. Ancestral fury. The kind that remembered wings and crowns forged in conquest.

“They came for my children,” she said, the words low and guttural.

Daemon flinched, as though scalded.

Laena’s breath trembled, grief and rage knitting together.

Rhaenyra stepped forward, letter trembling in her hand.

“Aemon. Aenar. Aemma,” she said, each name an invocation. “Barely walking.” Her voice sharpened, knives on stone. “And Baela. Rhaena.” Her gaze snapped to Laena, wild. “Your babes. Soft as new dawn.”

Daemon’s jaw locked so hard a sharp crack sounded in the muscle.

The dragons answered.

Syrax screamed first.

A sound like a mountain splitting. A high, furious shriek that rattled shutters and made the glass hum as if it might shatter.

Her dragon was calling for her.

Hearing her fury.

Feeling her grief.

Caraxes answered a heartbeat later, not with a scream but with a deep, bone-dragging bellow that vibrated the mortar in the walls. A warning.

A threat.

Far below, in other ledges and hollows, dragons stirred. Wings shifted. Claws scraped obsidian. One restless rumble rolled through the keep, then another, like a cathedral full of drums waking in staggered, terrifying harmony.

Daemon’s head snapped toward the sound, awe and fear tangled in his breath.

Rhaenyra’s fingers clenched until the parchment crumpled.

“She has held bitterness toward me,” she hissed. “Envied me. Undermined me. Disrespected me. But…”

Her chest heaved.

“But to touch my children. My babes. My blood—”

It struck her then.

Too fast to stop. Too sharp to blunt.

Alicent at fifteen, sitting on her bed in the Red Keep, skirts pulled neatly beneath her knees, laughing quietly as she braided Rhaenyra’s hair. Alicent whispering she would always stand beside her. Alicent’s fingers brushing hers as they passed notes in the sept.

Alicent, warm and soft and loyal.

Then Alicent in Hightower green.

Alicent with her belly full of Viserys’s child. Alicent looking at her with cool, measured distance. Alicent holding Criston Cole on a leash of righteousness and spite.

The memory slid between her ribs like a blade.

A rupture that had never healed straight.

A sound tore out of her.

Not a sob.

Not human.

A sound dragged from the deepest part of her, where dragons were tied to bone and love lived beside violence.

Laena instinctively stepped back, as if a wave of heat had rolled off Rhaenyra.

“Nyra.”

“HE DARES TOUCH WHAT IS MINE?” Rhaenyra roared. Her voice filled the chamber in a way no mortal throat should manage. “HE DARES THREATEN MY BABES?”

The glass panes shivered.

Somewhere inside, the girl she had been shoved the memory of Alicent’s laughter into the fire.

Daemon’s pupils blew wide. A fevered grin cut across his face. The kind worn by men on the eve of battle, slaughter, legend.

He looked at her as if seeing her crowned anew.

“I’ll go now,” he snarled. “I’ll take Caraxes and carve my answer into his bones.”

Rhaenyra spun toward him, shaking with fury.

“No,” she said, breath ragged. “Syrax is faster. I’ll fly her myself. I’ll rip him from the tower and drag him across the courtyard until he breaks.”

Daemon’s chest burned.

“Gods, yes,” he whispered, half prayer, half madness. “Let them see you coming.”

A shadow passed over the window, vast wings beating once.

Dragons gathering.

Rhaenyra stepped forward, and every dragon answered with a surge of sound that shook the stone underfoot.

Laena thrust herself between them, breathing hard, the heat of Rhaenyra’s rage almost physical.

“STOP.”

Her voice barely cut through the storm.

But it landed.

Laena pressed her palms to Rhaenyra’s cheeks, forcing her to meet her gaze even as Syrax shrieked and Caraxes snarled.

“Both of you,” she said, tone low, edged with steel. “You cannot act blind.”

Rhaenyra whipped toward her, eyes bright with murder.

“He threatened my children.”

“We do not know that,” Laena shot back, urgency fraying her usual calm. “All we know is that a name appears on a letter we cannot even confirm is true.”

Rhaenyra jerked as if struck.

“You saw his name!” she cried. “Ser Criston Cole. The Queen’s sworn sword. Who else would dare?”

Laena’s breath stuttered. Gods, she understood their rage. She felt it too. But she forced herself forward.

“Nyra,” she said softly, thumbs steady against Rhaenyra’s jaw, “you are readying yourself for war based on a letter written in a stranger’s hand.”

“It fits him,” Rhaenyra snapped. “His arrogance. His hate. His cruelty. You know what he thinks of me. Of my children.”

“Yes,” Laena said, “but this is different. This is—”

“This is him crossing a line,” Rhaenyra’s voice cracked. “And I will not sit docile while he threatens what I love.”

Daemon moved behind her, hands finding her waist, not soothing but bracing. “Say the word,” he murmured, brimming with anticipation. “Say the word and we fly.”

Rhaenyra’s body shook with terror and fury and a love too big for flesh.

Laena tightened her grip.

“RHAENYRA.”

The shout snapped like a whip.

Rhaenyra actually startled, as if Laena had slapped her with sound. Laena never raised her voice. Not in anger. Not in fear. Not even in labor.

For the first time since she’d touched the letter, something pierced the blaze roaring in her skull. A shard of clarity. A jolt of shock.

Her lips parted.

And Rhaenyra broke, not into tears. Not yet.

Into heaviness.

A fragile, trembling stillness, the kind that comes right before a creature collapses, or rises into something terrible and holy.

Her shoulders sagged, armor slumping off her frame. Her knees wavered.

Daemon moved first, instincts quicker than thought.

Not gently.

Desperately.

His hands clamped around her waist, pulling her back against him as if she might vanish if he loosened his grip. His breath hitched against her hair, an unguarded, broken sound.

“Niece,” he rasped, fingers flexing over her ribs, gathering her in.

Laena was already there.

She didn’t just pull Rhaenyra into her arms, she dragged her in. One hand braced behind her neck, the other locking around her waist, hauling her forward until their bodies collided. Rhaenyra gasped at the force, but she didn’t push away. Her hands flew up, clutching at Laena’s shoulders, bunching silk in tight fists.

She clung.

Laena clung back.

Daemon stepped in harder, chest to Rhaenyra’s back, arms circling both women as if he meant to bind them together by force. He lowered his forehead between Rhaenyra’s shoulder blades, breath unsteady, hands sliding up her sides, gripping her elbows, her forearms, anything that was her.

They tangled.

Arms overlapping. Hands searching. Bodies pressing closer out of instinct, fear, love, need.

Rhaenyra’s breath tore out in harsh bursts, fingers scrambling along Laena’s spine then up into her hair, dragging her closer. Laena exhaled sharply at the strength of the hold and only tightened her own. She slid a leg between Rhaenyra’s to keep her upright.

Daemon’s hand slipped over Laena’s hip and drew her fully into the knot. Not as an afterthought.

As necessity.

Their foreheads knocked together. Rhaenyra’s pressed to Laena’s temple, Daemon’s resting against the crown of Rhaenyra’s head, Laena’s cheek brushing Daemon’s hair.

They formed not just a circle.

A knot.

Breathless. Shaking. Gripping each other as though they’d all been flung from a cliff and the only thing stopping the fall were each other’s hands.

Syrax’s cries softened outside, confused, listening.

Caraxes rumbled low, unsettled but calmer.

Only when Rhaenyra’s breath eased from claws to shaking inhales, only when Daemon’s grip shifted from murderous to protective, only when Laena felt Rhaenyra’s weight truly settle against her chest… did Laena dare speak again.

Her lips brushed Rhaenyra’s temple.

“If this letter is false,” she whispered into the tangle of hair and breath, “and you strike at Alicent’s sworn sword… you start a war tonight.”

Rhaenyra stiffened.

Daemon stilled.

Laena pressed her forehead to Rhaenyra’s cheek, as if to keep her anchored.

“You give them every justification they’ve ever wanted to paint you monstrous.”

Rhaenyra’s breath shuddered.

Daemon’s hands slid more firmly around her, an unspoken agreement with Laena, for once.

Laena softened her voice but not her hold.

“Nyra,” she said, “you cannot burn a city on a lie.”

Rhaenyra didn’t answer.

But her fingers slowly uncurled from Laena’s shoulders.

Laena eased back enough to cup her face.

“Let me read it.”

Rhaenyra released the parchment with a violent exhale.

Laena smoothed it flat. Her eyes traveled down the lines, quick, searching, until a name snagged her breath.

“Marq?” she said, more baffled than alarmed. “Marq Shettson?”

Rhaenyra stiffened. “You know him?”

Laena stared at the ink as if it had insulted her personally.

“Everyone knows Marq,” she said, voice flattening with bewildered disdain. “He’s a drunk. A whore-monger. A gambler who owes half the harbor three favors and the other half a fistfight.”

Daemon frowned.

“But betrayal?” Laena pressed, shaking her head. “No. For all his sins, Marq is a captain of twenty years. He may end a night face-first on a tavern floor, but he’s never once failed a duty that touched the sea.”

Her brows knit deeper, confusion thickening into disbelief.

Laena’s voice softened, troubled.

“He’s foolish. Loud. Sloppy.”

Then quieter: “But he’s not disloyal.”

She tapped the parchment, her face twisting.

“This… this doesn’t feel like him.”

Rhaenyra leaned in, tone low. “He had access.”

Laena’s breath caught, but her gaze stayed firm.

“Yes,” she said. “Because he’s good at what he does. Because father trusts his seamanship. Because Marq knows every bolt and beam on that dock better than he knows the inside of his own home.”

Her throat tightened.

“If he spoke to Alicent’s messenger, he may have been bragging, showing off, gods know he does that. But treachery?” She shook her head again, slower now.

“But... if this is true, our children were in danger.” Her jaw trembled before she steadied it. “But if it isn’t—”

She looked up, dread pooling in her eyes.

“Someone chose him because he was sloppy enough to blame. Visible enough to suspect. And skilled enough that his fall would hurt us.”

Daemon froze.

Rhaenyra’s fury cooled to a razor’s edge.

Laena set the letter down, hand shaking despite her best efforts.

“Either Marq Shettson broke faith…” She swallowed. “Or someone wants us blind.”

Rhaenyra’s fingers tightened around the edge of the table until her knuckles whitened.

The thought didn’t cool her rage.

It refined it.

Made it narrower. Deadlier.

“If this is a forgery,” she breathed, “then whoever wrote it knows us too well. Knows that naming Criston, would make me strike without thinking.”

Daemon’s jaw flexed.

Rhaenyra inhaled sharply, fury sharpening into purpose.

“Daemon,” she said, voice low and decisive, “send word to the...whore with a web of whispers.”

Daemon blinked. “Now?”

“She needs to know someone tampered with her missive,” Rhaenyra pressed. “I want to know what she actually wrote. Every line. Every word. If someone dared twist her message. If someone intercepted it, then she is in danger, and so are we. And if she never named Criston at all…”

Her eyes burned colder.

“Then we will know which part of this venom was poured in after.”

Daemon’s expression darkened with agreement.

“I’ll have a raven ready within the hour.”

He moved as if to stand, the old violence in him stirring like a storm-tide, but Laena’s hand shot out, gripping his wrist.

“No,” she said, breath quickening. “It won’t reach her in time.”

Rhaenyra turned, sharp. “What do you mean?”

Laena’s eyes darted to the letter, then to the window, where the last red smear of daylight bled into the horizon.

“Marq is scheduled to leave,” she said, voice rising despite herself. “Tonight. Before the third bell.”

Daemon stilled.

Rhaenyra’s heart lurched.

Laena pushed on, urgency flaring in her tone.

“He’s captaining Seafoam’s Grace, Aenar’s ship. She’s stocked and ready. The crew was boarding by mid-afternoon.” Her voice tightened. “Father put him in charge of the run to the Vale. They leave with the night tide.”

Rhaenyra felt the cold rush of realization sweep over her. “If this letter is a lie,” she whispered, “and someone wants him gone—”

Laena nodded, jaw clenched. “Then the moment he sails, he’s beyond reach. Beyond questioning. And if someone means to silence him…” She exhaled, the breath thin and shaky. 

The room seemed to tighten around them.

Daemon’s eyes narrowed to slits.

“Or,” he said slowly, “if he is guilty, he’ll vanish into the mountains before dawn and leave us chasing ghosts.”

Rhaenyra’s gaze cut from Daemon to Laena. The firelight caught in her irises, turning them to sharpened amber. Clear as cut glass. Unforgiving.

“We need Corlys,” she said. Her voice had steadied, iron laid over raw flame. “He is in the east tower with Rhaenys. They will both be awake. Send for them now. This touches his fleet, her harbor defenses, everything they have built from salt and blood.”

Laena nodded quickly. The pulse in her throat beat hard enough to see.

“And Laenor,” Rhaenyra went on, not allowing the moment to cool. “Fetch him at once. This is his house, his captains, his children’s future. He deserves to stand at my side when we hear this rot spoken aloud.”

Daemon shifted, already half-turned toward the door, but Rhaenyra’s next words caught him like a hand on the collar.

“And Vaegon,” she added, quieter, the choice no less firm. “We need his mind.”

Laena drew in a sharp breath at that name.

Daemon’s gaze flicked between them, weighing it. “All of them?” he asked.

Rhaenyra lifted her chin. The dragonlight from the window haloed her hair, silver bright against the shadowed stone.

“All of them,” she said. “Corlys for the fleet. Rhaenys for the truth. Laenor for what is his. Vaegon for the knowledge.” Her fingers curled slowly into a fist, the crumpled letter crackling in her grasp. “More of our blood. More of our eyes. No lie survives that many teeth.”

Another dragon rumbled, low and restless, as if answering her.

Daemon’s jaw set.

Something in him settled around her command, the storm in him forced into a single, lethal direction.

“I’ll bring them,” he said.

He turned on his heel. Cloak snapping, boots striking hard against the stone, he strode for the door. The oak slammed shut behind him, leaving only the echo of his steps and the heavy, waiting silence of dragons.

---

The throne room was already too warm.

Late morning light cut through the high windows in long, merciless spears, bright enough that the dust in the air gleamed like motes of gold. Heat clung to skin, turned breath thick. Robes felt twice their weight.

Viserys insisted on holding petitions anyway.

He needed people to see their king, upright, ruling, necessary. If he stopped now…they would wonder what else might fail.

Despite the exhaustion sinking deeper into his bones each week, hollowing him out like soft wood. Despite the gossips whispering that Dragonstone drew power from him like a leech.

Despite Lyonel Strong standing at his right like a crumbling pillar.

The Hand’s skin was grey beneath a sheen of sweat. His collar was too loose, as though someone had already tried to make room for failing breath. Every cough dragged from him like gravel being forced through a pipe not meant to hold it.

Creased brow, trembling hand, jaw clenched to keep from breaking in view of the court.

Viserys saw all of it.

And hated himself for it.

He had done this.

Lyonel’s loyalty. Lyonel’s burden. Lyonel’s undoing.

What is the weight of a realm if not the weight that kills the men who hold it?

He rested a hand on the cold iron of the throne beside him. The metal pressed into his palm like teeth, unforgiving, hungry.

Even sitting, the throne loomed over him.
Judged him.

He felt its message as clearly as fire:

If you falter, another will bleed in your stead.

“Your Grace…” Lyonel rasped, bowing his head to mask another violent cough.

Viserys’s heart jerked in his chest.

Seven save him. Not him. Not this one too.

And the cough...

Gods.

The cough tore out of him like something trying to escape his lungs by force. Violent, booming, echoing up the pillars and down the length of the hall. Each fit bent him at the waist, his shoulders shaking, the sound ending in a wet, horrible drag of breath.

Courtiers shifted uncomfortably.

A few stepped back.

No one moved to help him.

Across from the throne, Alicent watched.

Not with worry.

Not anymore.

She stood perfectly still, hands clasped just so, posture sculpted into formality. Her face was a mask. Serene, distant, faultlessly composed.

A queen standing at court, no more, no less.

Her eyes did not soften when Lyonel doubled over.

They did not widen at the sound of air rasping through a throat that no longer obeyed him.

If anything…she looked past him.

As though she’d stripped feeling from her gaze the way one strips a blade of ornamentation. As though the cost of caring had proven too high in a hall where her counsel was dismissed, her presence unwanted, her influence curtailed.

Farther down the steps, Otto’s hand tightened around Aegon’s small shoulder. The boy stiffened, breath stalling under the weight of that grip, gaze locked on the throne like a mouse staring up at jaws.

And then Lyonel’s cane slipped.

Viserys lurched forward, too slow.

The Hand of the King hit the marble with a terrible, final sound.

“Father!”

Ser Harwin tore free of decorum, sprinting across the dais, skidding onto his knees. He gathered Lyonel up as though the floor might swallow him whole if he loosened his grasp even for a breath.

“Fetch the maesters! NOW!” Viserys shouted, a king’s command cracked apart by fear.

The courtiers scattered.

Alicent did not.

Her eyes slid instead to Otto, cool, unreadable, as if silently returning a piece once taken from him.

Harwin’s voice choked on urgency. “Stay with me, Father. Please. Look at me —”

But Lyonel’s breath came in shallow, rattling gasps.

Blood smeared Harwin’s wrist.

Viserys felt the room tilt.

He gripped the throne for balance, the barbed armrest sliced his palm.

Blood welled.

Iron bit.

As if the throne itself demanded offering.

A cut for a crown.

A sacrifice for stability.

His reign had always required blood.

But why must fate insist it be good men’s?

“Lord Hand?” Viserys whispered, the words too thin against the panic roaring in his chest.

Lyonel didn’t hear him.

Helaena tilted her head.

The movement was small, birdlike, delicate, but it sliced cleanly through the chaos.

Her brows pinched faintly.

She watched Lyonel’s body seize and shake, not with fear, but with the eerie serenity of someone witnessing something inevitable. Something she had already seen in a dream.

Softly, so softly her words barely disturbed the air, she hummed:

“Too much poison makes the wings rot…Even strong wings.”

The hall exhaled around her, oblivious.

But Aemond heard.

His eyes snapped toward her, sharp and questioning.

Aegon frowned and half-turned, lips parting as though to speak, but whatever impulse stirred in him died under the weight of the moment.

No one asked what she meant.

No one ever did.

Helaena blinked once, twice, and then her attention drifted away from the dying Hand of the King. She smoothed the sleeves of her gown, gentle and precise, the way a girl might try to calm the wings of an insect in her palm.

As if the prophecy had already left her.

From a shadowed pillar, Larys Strong watched as his father’s life bled into the stone.

Not a flicker of alarm.

Only calculation. Recalibration.

The king’s gut twisted, horror and shame and recognition all coiling into one venomous knot.

I told myself the realm would break without me…
But it is breaking those who stay loyal.

Viserys knelt beside Harwin, ignoring the way his joints screamed.

A tremor rippled through him, not age, not wine.

Fear.

Guilt.

He reached for Lyonel’s hand, gripping it as though he could drag the man back by force of will alone.

“Do not leave me,” he said, voice cracking. “I cannot lose another.”

Harwin looked up, eyes blazing. “Do something!”

Viserys flinched, helpless under the weight of that plea.

He served me until it killed him.

And still they ask me for more.

He squeezed Lyonel’s blood-slick fingers tighter, anchoring the man to the world by sheer desire that it be so.

But Lyonel’s eyes were already distant.

Harwin bowed his head to his father’s, voice raw, breaking:

“Stay. Please. Stay.”

The realm held its breath.

And the throne, looming behind them, gleamed like a wolf after a fresh kill.

---

The chamber filled slowly, one breath at a time.

Corlys arrived first, bare-armed, boots unlaced, still in the half-dressed state of a man dragged from an early inspection. Salt clung to the ends of his braids, as if he’d been on the balcony when the summons found him. He moved with clipped, lethal precision, not the ease of readiness but the irritation of interruption.

Rhaenys followed close behind.

Her hair was damp from a hastily abandoned bath, slicked back into a quick braid that clung to her neck. A deep blue robe lay half-fastened over her shift, one sleeve shoved up, the other slipping down her shoulder where she hadn’t bothered to fix it. She took one look at Rhaenyra’s face and said nothing.

Her jaw tightened. That was greeting enough.

Laenor came next, still dragging on his doublet, breath sharp with worry. “What’s happened? The children, where are they? Where is—”

“They’re safe,” Rhaenyra said.

Her tone was calm in the way a drawn bowstring is calm. Stretched to its limit. One breath from snapping.

Laenor sagged with relief, though it did not reach his eyes. The fear there condensed into something harder.

Last, the door creaked open again.

Vaegon.

He didn’t enter like a man roused from sleep. He entered like a man pulled from a calculation. His robe was belted unevenly, one sleeve rolled to the elbow, ink still smudged at the edge where a quill had recently rested.

He paused just inside the threshold, gaze moving like a blade sliding along familiar grooves.

Laena near the window, tense but steady. Corlys rigid as a mast in storm winds. Laenor with his heart in his throat and his jaw clenched around it. Rhaenys carved in waiting stone. Rhaenyra at the center, charged like a storm about to choose where to break.

Vaegon dipped his head, the bow small and exact. “You called,” he said, his voice low but weighted with the certainty that he already knew why.

Daemon stepped in behind him, cloak thrown back, boots dusty from three separate staircases.

Rhaenys was the first to speak.

“What is this?” she asked, voice firm. “You drag half my household out of their clothing, girl. It had better be for more than one of his temper tantrums.”

She angled her chin at Daemon without looking at him.

“It is,” Rhaenyra said.

She walked to the central table and set the crumpled letter down with deliberate care, smoothing it flat. The others leaned in. Candlelight crawled over their faces.

Five different expressions, five different fears.

Corlys stalked forward first, fingers biting into the wood as he read. His breath left him in a hiss.

“Marq?” he muttered. “That fool may gamble his coin and drink my wine, but he would never gamble a child’s safety.”

Laenor’s hands curled at his sides. “And Criston Cole?” he demanded. “This says he—”

“That part may be bait,” Rhaenyra cut in. “Meant to send me straight into the sky with Syrax and no thought for the ground beneath us.”

Daemon’s mouth twisted. “It nearly worked.”

Rhaenyra did not flinch.

Vaegon came forward with that precise, deliberate stillness of his, the kind that always made people feel as if they were already mid-lesson.

He didn’t touch the parchment yet. He only studied it.

“The question is not only who wrote it,” he said. “But who understands us well enough to weaponize our tempers.”

The words settled over the table like fog.

Rhaenys moved into the circle of light, robe shifting around her ankles, her damp braid leaving faint marks on her shoulder. Her eyes narrowed on the neat lines of ink.

“And why,” she asked, tone even but edged, “should we trust any of it at all?”

Her finger lifted the corner of the parchment. The sheet swayed once in the flicker of the candles.

“This claims treachery, but it stinks of someone trying to make us dance,” she went on. “If you wanted Dragonstone to tear itself apart, you would send exactly this. A letter with just enough truth to sting and just enough lie to start a fire.”

Her gaze moved to Daemon. Not accusing. Expecting.

He exhaled sharply. A muscle jumped in his cheek.

“Because of who it was meant to come from,” he said.

His voice dipped, roughened.

Laena stilled near the window. Corlys’s shoulders tightened. Laenor’s mouth pressed into a hard line. Even Vaegon lifted his head fully.

Daemon dragged a hand through his hair, restless.

“The White Worm,” he said.

Corlys’s brows lowered. His arms folded across his chest, slow and heavy, the way a man braces for an ugly truth. “You trust a spymistress?”

“I don’t,” Daemon snapped, the retort sharp enough to cut. “I trust her paranoia.”

Rhaenyra’s gaze fixed on him, sharper than any blade in the room. “Explain.”

Daemon planted both hands on the table and leaned over the letter as if he meant to climb through the wood and throttle whoever had written it.

“Her hand is here,” he said. “The shapes. The tilt. The spacing.” His finger traced the script like the seam of an old wound. “Whoever forged this knows her style well enough to mimic it.”

The candles crackled in the pause.

“But the rest?” His mouth curved into something that was not a smile. “Not hers.”

He tipped the parchment toward a candle. The light showed the cheap, even grain.

“Mysaria writes only on Braavosi reed-paper. Tight weave. Water-resistant. It fights you if you try to tear it.” He flicked the page. The sound was thin and ugly. “This is Dragonstone stock.”

Rhaenys leaned closer, eyes narrowing, as if measuring the absence.

“And her ink,” Daemon went on, “is sharp enough to sting your nose. Lampblack and vinegar. This”—he gestured at the lines—“is castle-mix. The kind any mediocre scribe can buy by the flask.”

He ran his thumb over the lower corner.

“And here she always scratches a cut. A tiny mark only she can feel. This is clean.”

He laid the parchment flat again with the care of a man lowering a body.

“Someone copied her manner,” he said. “But they did not have her materials.”

Vaegon shifted closer. Now he reached for the parchment, turning it so the light caught the faint watermark in the paper pulp.

“The forgery tells us more than the words,” he said. “It tells us where it was made.”

His gaze never left the page.

“You cannot buy Dragonstone paper in King’s Landing,” he said. “Nor in Oldtown. Nor on the Wayfarer’s Rest.” His voice stayed soft and exact. “The pulp is ours. The mark is ours. The cut of the sheets is ours. Whatever was done to this message was done with our stock.”

A chill slipped through the room like a draft through old stone.

Daemon’s shoulders straightened. “You’re saying someone on Dragonstone—”

“I am saying,” Vaegon interrupted quietly, “the breach is local. At least in part. This letter did not travel halfway across the realm already dressed like this. Someone near our shelves, near our scribes, near the princess’s own supplies, either intercepted a message or built a lie from whole cloth and our paper.”

Laena’s hand tightened on the back of the nearest chair.

Rhaenys’s face went still in that dangerous way of hers, the way she watched storms forming before anyone else smelled rain.

Rhaenyra’s fingers curled, knuckles whitening.

“So if we send someone blundering into King’s Landing now,” Vaegon continued, “we gain nothing. The knife is here. Not there.”

Rhaenyra swallowed, the fire in her chest cooling from a blaze to something narrower, sharper.

“Then Mysaria herself,” she said. “We still need to know what she truly wrote. If she wrote at all. If someone stole it from her hand, she is in danger. And if she never named Criston… then someone on this rock chose that name because they knew it would make me fly.”

Daemon’s mouth twisted. “Finding her will be difficult even if she lives. If a whisper of my shadow falls on the capital, she will disappear into a hole no one can drag her out of.”

“Precisely,” Vaegon said. “Which is why we do not begin in the capital at all. We begin with the man whose name sits in the middle of this mess without explanation.”

His finger tapped the letter once, on the line Laena had already read twice.

“Marq Shettson.”

“Coarse he may be,” Corlys said, “but his reputation is the only crown he’s ever worn. Serving under my banners made him a name people remember. A captain trusted in every harbor from the Vale to the Arbor. He would sooner drown than let that slip from him.”

He met Rhaenyra’s gaze with the certainty of a man who had spent more of his life on decks than stone.

“And for all his barking, children are sacred to him. He pretends they’re pests, yet he’s hauled more of them out of rigging with his own hands than he’ll ever admit. Marq Shettson would not endanger a babe under his watch. Not for coin. Not for favor. Not for any lord’s whisper.”

His palm pressed flat to the table. Final, unshakable.

Vaegon did not soften beneath Corlys’s certainty.
He stepped closer to the table, eyes fixed on the letter as though it might confess under pressure.

“And precisely because his reputation is so central to our harbor’s stability,” Vaegon said, “we cannot allow him to sail.”

Corlys’s attention snapped to him a flicker of challenge.

Vaegon met it without hesitation.

“Either Marq Shettson betrayed us,” Vaegon said at last, “or someone assumes we are foolish enough to think he did. Either way, letting him sail tonight would be a gift.”

“We cannot leave the ship at anchor either,” Rhaenys countered. “The harbor watches everything we do. The Reach keeps us under a glass. If a vessel meant for the Vale stays moored without explanation, questions will bloom like mold.”

Laenor drew a breath, then stepped closer to the table.

“Then the ship sails,” he said. “But not with Marq.”

Rhaenyra’s head snapped toward him.

“I’ll take her,” Laenor went on. “We pull Marq below on some pretense: illness, a dispute over manifests, whatever you like. No shouting on the docks. No change of banners. Just a quiet shift of command. Seafoam’s Grace leaves when she was meant to, but with me at her helm.”

Corlys studied him. Pride and worry wrestled across his face.

“And Marq?” he asked.

“Kept here,” Laenor said. “Quietly. Questioned thoroughly. Watched even more thoroughly.”

Corlys’s hand settled on his son’s shoulder, heavy. “You understand that if whoever did this wants him dead, they may settle for you instead.”

Laenor’s mouth twisted. “They can try. Seasmoke will be in the clouds above us. High enough the harbor rats won’t see, close enough that he will feel any ship or storm that doesn’t belong.”

Daemon’s eyes warmed with a dark flash of approval.

Rhaenyra held Laenor’s gaze. “I won’t order this of you,” she said.

“You do not need to,” he replied. “I will not sit on this rock while one of ours drowns in rumor. Either he betrayed us, or he is being used to hurt us. I would know which.”

Rhaenyra inclined her head, the gesture small but real. “Very well. Seafoam’s Grace sails on time. Under Velaryon hands. With dragon-wings overhead.”

Daemon’s hand settled at the small of Rhaenyra's back without thought, thumb tapping once in silent reassurance. Laena’s hand followed, light but sure against Rhaenyra’s hip. 

Not dramatic.

Not seductive.

Just instinct.

Three figures aligned without thinking, bodies communicating what words did not.

Rhaenys noticed.

Her eyes tracked the movement, Daemon anchoring her, Laena guarding her flank. A configuration that didn’t belong to politics or accident.

No one else seemed to catch it. Corlys was studying maps. Vaegon was dissecting the ink on the counterfeit letter. Laenor stood stubbornly, facing them but not seeing. 

But Rhaenys saw.

Her daughter’s eyes flicked toward her, brief and nervous, but Rhaenys gave nothing away. Not approval. Not reproach.

Only a slow inhale.

One piece of the board shifted.

It was not enough.

Rhaenyra turned back to the table. The false letter lay between them like a snake someone had tried to dress as a banner.

“This was meant to do more than kill a captain,” she said. “It was meant to turn us against ourselves. To send me roaring for the capital so I could be painted mad and monstrous.”

“And give Alicent Hightower exactly the story she wants,” Rhaenys said quietly. “The troubled heir with a dragon and no restraint.”

Rhaenyra’s jaw clenched.

“Then we answer,” she said. “Not with fire tonight. With something quieter.”

Her gaze slid to Corlys.

“Your work on Oldtown’s lanes,” she said. “You told me last we spoke you had begun to… strain them.”

Corlys’s mouth curved, faint and dangerous.

“Aye,” he said. “A few ships encouraged to take different harbors. Some contracts… delayed. A storm here, a sudden inspection there. Nothing any man could point to as sabotage. Merely costly, unlucky for Oldtown.”

“Unluckier,” Rhaenyra said. “Tighten the noose. Gently. I don’t want a spectacle, I want a slow bleed. Let their ships sit in harbor a day longer than they can afford. Let their captains pay twice the bribes for half the space. Let their grain arrive just late enough that they must buy from our stores.”

Corlys’s eyes lit with something like fierce satisfaction. “You wish to starve their influence,” he said. “Not their bellies.”

“For now,” Rhaenyra said. “Otto wants the realm to believe Oldtown is its spine. A pious city that keeps the crown upright. I want every merchant in Westeros to learn, quietly, that coin and safety live with us instead.”

“And the Crown?” Laenor asked. “They will notice trade shifting.”

“Let them,” she said. “What can Viserys do? Drag your ships back with his bare hands? His court is already crumbling. When he asks why Oldtown’s coffers are thinning, Otto will blame the weather, betrayal amonst captains, anything but the truth. Meanwhile, lords with goods to move will look to the island that actually gets their cargo where it needs to go.”

“A queen’s work,” Rhaenys commented.

Rhaenyra did not pretend otherwise.

“This letter was meant to push us into a war of appearance,” she said. “I would rather win a war of hunger.”

Her eyes turned back to the others, heat flaring under the control she’d wrestled back.

“As for us,” she went on, “we do something the Hightowers cannot even imagine.”

Laena tilted her head. “Which is?”

“We open Dragonstone,” Rhaenyra said.

Four words, dropped like a stone into deep water.

“To whom?” Laenor asked carefully.

“To women,” Rhaenyra answered. “To widows whose husbands died for kings who never paid what they owed. To mothers who stand in drought-stricken fields watching their children starve while Oldtown debates scripture.”

She straightened, voice gaining force with every word.

“We need workers,” she said. “Shipwrights. Net-menders. Quarry crews. Scribes. Keepers to tend dragons and their ledges. We have coin now. We can pay fair wages and feed those who come. So we send word.”

“To whom?” Corlys asked again, differently this time.

“Everyone,” Rhaenyra said. “Letters to lords we trust. Quiet messages to inns along the Roseroad and in Gulltown. A word in the ear of every harbor mistress who hates Oldtown tithe-collectors more than she fears dragons. Let the tale spread: Dragonstone takes women in.”

Laena's breath caught, eyes brightening, seeing it unfold in her mind as easily as she saw a ship’s lines.

“And in return,” Rhaenys said slowly, understanding dawning, “they give you loyalty.”

“They give me witnesses,” Rhaenyra replied. “When Oldtown paints me a monster, I want half the smallfolk to say, ‘Ah, the monster who fed my children? The monster who kept my husband from hanging for debt?’ Let the Faith rail. Let green banners flutter. If the women of the Crownlands know where their safest harbor lies, any war Otto starts will cost him more than it costs me.”

Vaegon’s gaze had sharpened, interest peeling back the layers of his distance.

“And there is… another use,” he said. “An island that boats constantly arrive at and depart from. No one looks closely when a ship carrying two dozen women seeking refuge also carries a crate or three of iron, or oil, or weaponry.”

“The Stepstones,” Corlys said softly, pleased. “The realm will see you feeding mouths. It will not see you strengthening garrisons.”

Rhaenyra’s smile was thin.

“Let King’s Landing think we build a refuge because I am soft,” she said. “Let Oldtown whisper that I court the smallfolk because I lack gods. As long as they are talking about why, they are not asking what, or how many blades fit into the hull of a rights ship bound for Dragonstone.”

“And the women themselves?” Laena asked. “This is not just using them?”

Rhaenyra shook her head. “No. They get safety. Work. Food. A lord in Oldtown would call that charity. I call it a contract. They know who sheltered them. I know who will spread word of what we truly are when the banners finally rise.”

“The Hightowers hoard their piety,” Rhaenys said quietly. “You mean to hoard gratitude.”

“Not hoard,” Rhaenyra said. “Root. Plant it here, in the stone and the harbors. I want Dragonstone spoken of in taverns and sept-yards as the place that opened its gates when others slammed theirs shut.”

She let that sit.

The old way would have been to pace, to snap, to demand blood for blood. She wanted that too. Every part of her still burned with Criston Cole’s name like a brand.

But the world was larger now: shipping routes, step-forts, food stores, refugees, dragons growing faster than they ought.

She would not win this by fury alone.

“There is one more matter,” she said.

The room shifted again, bracing.

“You’ve all felt it,” she went on. “Even if you didn’t name it aloud.”

She looked to Corlys first.

“Syrax,” he said, as if the word had been dragged from somewhere deep. “The keepers say she looks… changed. Her shadow on the yard is longer than it was in spring.”

“She has shed twice in a single moon,” Rhaenys added. “Her wingspan has grown. I see it from the eastern balcony. And the heat that rolls off her when she flies…” Her eyes flicked to Rhaenyra. “It is no natural summer.”

“We told ourselves it was stress,” Laenor said. “The bond echoing what you feel.”

“That is part of it,” Daemon said. His gaze was already on Rhaenyra, sharp and hungry. “But it is not all.”

Rhaenyra didn’t look away.

“We found something beneath Dragonstone,” she said. “Hidden where blood would be pulled to it.”

Laena’s fingers tightened on the back of her chair.

“A journal,” Rhaenyra went on. “Visenya’s.”

The name rippled through them. Not with noise, but with stillness.

“Her notes spoke of fire-binding,” Rhaenyra said. “A ritual to deepen the tether between rider and dragon. To wake what sleeps in their bones. To quicken their growth.”

“You attempted it,” Laenor said.

He didn’t phrase it as a question.

“I did,” she answered. “The blood. The flame. The words in her hand. I followed them all.”

Her voice stayed even, though remembering brought the fever back to her skin.

“I grew ill after,” she said. “A fever that burned straight through to the marrow. Pain down to the nails. Dreams that were not mine.”

“As she described,” Vaegon said quietly.

“And while I burned,” Rhaenyra continued, “Syrax grew. She has never felt nearer. When I close my eyes I know which way her head is turned. When I am afraid, she is already moving before I call.”

Rhaenys exhaled through her teeth. “Gods help us.”

Rhaenyra met her gaze. “Visenya did not ask the gods for help,” she said. “She wrote what she had done and what it cost. I chose to bear that cost. I will not pretend otherwise.”

“Why tell us now?” Laena asked. Her voice was soft, but there was steel under it.

“Because this letter showed us how close we are to being used,” Rhaenyra said. “If someone can take Mysaria’s name and our paper and turn us against ourselves, we cannot afford to walk into war with half-woken dragons and half-spoken truths.”

Vaegon nodded once. “The rite cannot be delayed much longer,” he said. “If our enemies move with the certainty of their god and their gold, we must move with something older.”

Rhaenyra’s gaze found each of them in turn.

“Daemon. Rhaenys. Laena. Vaegon,” she said. “When Laenor has sailed and we have Marq secured, I want you ready. We will not force it on anyone, but we will not go into the next year with dragons bound only by habit, while Oldtown sharpens knives for our children.”

Laenor raised his head. “And me?”

“You are needed clear-eyed on Seafoam’s Grace,” Rhaenyra said. “The fever broke me for days. I would not see a captain at sea struck down the same way. When you return, the choice will be yours.”

He didn’t like it.

She saw that.

But he understood it, and that mattered more.

Outside, dragons shifted on their ledges. The stone hummed faintly underfoot, a low awareness, as if some old pulse in the island was rousing.

Rhaenyra rested her hand on the edge of the table, on the false letter that had started all of this, and felt no tremor in her fingers.

“This was meant to divide us,” she said. “To send me raging at King’s Landing while Oldtown smiled and counted the ways it could call me unfit.”

Her eyes darkened.

“Instead, we choke their trade. We open our gates to those they discard. We bind ourselves to our dragons with rites their septons would faint to read. We put our own house in order.”

Daemon’s breath left him in a slow, hungry exhale.

Rhaenys’s jaw set with new resolve.

Laena’s fingers brushed, without thinking, against Rhaenyra’s wrist. Vaegon looked almost relieved to see a plan taking the shape he had half-guessed already in ink and number.

Rhaenyra’s final words settled like a quiet decree:

“We will not be bait. Not by a forged hand. Not by Hightower schemes. Not by anyone.”

She looked up, eyes bright with something colder than fury and warmer than faith.

“We rise,” she said. “All of us. Our people. Our ships. Our dragons.”

Her hand tightened on the parchment, then released it.

“And when we do,” she finished, “the realm will already be standing on our side and not even realize when it chose us.”

---

The bells had long since fallen silent.

Kingslanding lay under a low lid of cloud, sound pressed close to the streets: distant tavern laughter, the clatter of wheels, the mutter of the city’s endless gossip. Up here, in the upper solar of the Red Keep, the noise came only as a dull, constant hum. It might have been the sea for all Viserys could truly hear of it.

The room stank of wine.

It clung to the air, to the table, to his own skin. A half-emptied flagon stood by his hand, its red contents bleeding across a map of the Crownlands where his unsteady sleeve had dragged it. The ink beneath the spill had blurred, River Road and Rosby melting into an ugly smear.

Appropriate, he thought.

So much of his reign looked like that now. Lines once neat, bleeding into one another. Borders and loyalties smudged until he could no longer say where one ended and the other began.

His hand shook as he lifted the cup.

Not the tremor of age. The tremor of a man whose bones had never stopped shaking since the day he chose a crown over a woman’s life and called it duty.

He took a swallow anyway.

It burned uselessly down a throat already raw.

“Your Grace.”

The door had opened so quietly he had not heard the latch.

Viserys didn’t look up at once. He stared at the map, the wine, the drowned ink, the dark stain spreading slowly toward the stylized drawing of Dragonstone. A malformed tide, creeping toward the one place that refused his control.

“Come, then,” he said. “You’ve hovered in the hallway long enough.”

Soft footfalls crossed the rug.

A breath beside his shoulder, careful, measuring. The faint scent of myrrh and something sharp, clean. Viserys closed his eyes.

He didn’t need to turn.

He knew that smell as well as he knew the iron tang of the throne’s blades.

“Truly,” he muttered, voice hoarse, “do Hightowers train themselves to quiet their steps?”

A pause.

Then Otto’s voice, mild as a winter sun.

“You did summon me, Your Grace.”

Viserys let out a quiet, bitter sound that might have been a laugh.

“Yes,” he said. “I suppose I did.”

He forced himself to look up at last.

Otto Hightower stood a few paces away, not so close as to presume intimacy, not so distant as to risk seeming aloof. His beard showed more grey than it had years ago. His face had thinned. Yet his gaze was as keen as ever, eyes taking in the wine, the scattered parchments, the way Viserys’s fingers dug into the arm of his chair as though that were all that kept him upright.

Behind him, by the door, Alicent waited.

Not at his side. Not tonight. She kept a careful distance, hands joined at her waist, expression composed but tight at the corners. A queen observing, not a girl seeking approval.

Her presence scraped along some nerve he did not have the strength to examine.

Viserys cleared his throat.

“Lord Lyonel is dead,” he said.

The words sat between them like a stone dropped into a shallow pool. No ripple, only weight.

"A dreadful loss. He was an honest man," Otto replied quietly. 

“He was,” Viserys said. “Honest. Diligent. Tireless.”

He swallowed, his throat clicking.

Otto said nothing. The silence was not gentle. It was patient.

Viserys stared at the wine stain until it doubled, then blurred.

“I sent you away,” he said abruptly. “Do you remember?”

Otto’s jaw tightened almost imperceptibly.

“I do, Your Grace.”

Viserys exhaled shakily and reached across the table.

The Hand’s pin sat where the maesters had left it hours before, a small thing, golden and cruel in its shape, the tiny fingers clenched tight around an invisible power. His fingers hovered above it, trembling, before he finally closed his hand around the metal.

It felt heavier than he remembered.

Or perhaps he had grown weaker.

His chair scraped against the floor as he forced himself upright. Otto did not move to help him,  not out of disrespect, but obedience.

He waited.

Viserys took the few slow steps required to stand before him.

“I do not forget,” the king said, voice thick, “that you put spies on my daughter.”

Otto held his gaze. “Nor will I forget why you sent me from your service,” he answered.

There was something like mutual understanding in that moment, sharp, uncomfortable, and completely necessary.

Viserys lifted the pin between them.

“I give you this not because I trust you,” he said quietly. “But because I can trust no one else more.”

The admission cost him. It showed in the tightening around his eyes, the way his throat worked before he continued.

“You will protect the realm. All of it. Even from itself.”

Otto inclined his head, a precise bow. “That is my oath.”

Viserys’s hand wavered.

Then he pinned the badge to Otto’s doublet himself, the clasp clicking shut like a lock sealing.

Gold against green.

Fate against choice.

When he withdrew his hand, the pin gleamed.

The mark of a Hand restored.

Viserys stared at it a moment longer, that symbol of order he desperately needed to believe still existed.

“See that you do not fail this time,” he said. 

Otto placed a hand lightly over the badge. Claiming it, accepting its weight.

“For the good of the realm,” he replied.

But Viserys heard what Otto did not say.

For the good of his realm.

And with the deed done, too late to unmake, Viserys let his arm fall to his side, wine-dulled exhaustion washing back over him like a tide.

The new Hand stood solid.

The king swayed.

And the balance of power in Westeros shifted quietly into place, under candlelight and the smell of spilled wine.

Notes:

Quick heads up, I’m trying a weekly posting schedule now!

I’ve already got a bunch of chapters drafted that just need editing, so I should be able to keep things nice and consistent. One new chapter a week 🖤 Thanks for reading and screaming with me!

Chapter 22: Those Who Stand Between

Summary:

Next chapter teaser:
We’re going to King’s Landing.
Daemon is on the “no travel” list.
Corlys is babysitting a crisis.
Everyone else walks straight into the confrontation I know you’ve all been waiting for.
I hope you’re hydrated.

The docks of Dragonstone throbbed with the low, steady life of a ship about to pull free.

Lines creaked.

Men shouted to one another over the slap of water against the hull.

Seafoam’s Grace sat ready at her moorings, lanterns swinging from her rigging like captured stars, her hull dark and sleek and hungry for the tide.

Captain Marq Shettson stood at the top of the gangplank with his hands planted on his hips and a pipe crushed between his teeth. 

He was a tall bastard, tall enough to look most lords in the eye and make them rethink their titles.

Shoulders broad beneath a battered leather. His skin held the deep bronze of a man who’d lived more years under sun and sea wind than under ceilings. A jagged, pale scar cut through his left eyebrow, pulling at the corner of his eye when he grinned or, more often, when he was two seconds from throttling a fool.

Now, he was two seconds from throttling a whole damned crew.

“Get that crate lashed proper or I’ll gut you with the splinters when it breaks loose,” he snapped. “And if one more fool tries to stow his personal chest atop the powder, I’ll see him swim to the Vale with it tied to his arse.”

The men laughed, quick and nervous. They knew the drill. They knew his tongue. They knew he meant every word.

He swept the deck with a seasoned eye. Lines coiled. Sails ready. Crew in place.

Good. She was sound.

“Captain Shettson.”

The voice cut cleanly through the harbor noise without needing volume.

Marq turned, profanity already warming on his tongue, ready to flay whichever idiot thought now was a good time to test him.

The words died.

Corlys Velaryon stood at the base of the gangplank, silver hair pulled back and sleeves rolled, the very picture of power that never asked permission. Beside him lounged Prince Daemon Targaryen, cloak loose, lips curved like he had teeth hidden behind them, one hand idly draped atop the hilt of Dark Sister as if swords were simply an extension of boredom.

Marq was taller than both of them by a clear head, yet the weight of their attention made the air feel tighter around him.

He took the pipe from his mouth, rubbing a thumb across the gnawed grooves along the stem. “Lord Corlys. Prince.”

Daemon’s gaze moved slowly over Seafoam’s Grace. Not in admiration, but in appraisal, like a man measuring another man’s wife and imagining the taking.

Marq’s spine locked a little straighter.

Corlys did not waste breath on pleasantries.

“Walk with me.”

Marq’s brows crashed together. “We’re casting off within the hour. Tide’s primed. Ship’s primed. Crew’s primed. Seems a fuck of a time to take me for a stroll.”

Corlys lifted a single brow.

The boatswain called out from the deck, a question half-formed, but dropped instantly when Corlys spoke, voice slicing through the din:

“Hold the lines. No one casts off until I give the order.”

“Aye, my lord!” the boatswain barked, paling.

Marq worked his jaw once, twice, anger starting to simmer. “What in seven buggering hells is—”

“Walk,” Corlys repeated.

Marq stomped down the gangplank, boots hitting wood hard enough to complain. Sailors paused, too interested for their own good.

He snapped at them on instinct:

“Back to work, you barnacles, or I’ll tan your hides myself!”

They jolted into motion. Good. A captain didn’t leave his deck hanging on his silence.

His boots thudded down to stone as Corlys led them to a quieter stretch of quay, half-screened by crates and coils of rope. The sea hissed beyond, black and patient.

Marq folded his thick arms across his chest, a barricade in flesh and stubbornness.

“All right,” he said. “You’ve dragged me off my own deck. Best tell me why before the tide sours under us.”

Corlys regarded him with an expression carved from shipwreck wood, immovable, salt-bitten, enduring.

“You’re not sailing tonight,” Corlys said.

Marq laughed a short, incredulous bark. “The fuck I’m not.”

Daemon’s eyes brightened. Amused by bravado, or anticipating a fight.

Corlys did not repeat himself.

He didn’t need to.

Marq’s shoulders tightened. “With respect, my lord,” he said slowly, “Seafoam’s Grace knows my hands. Knows my temper. You put her under some green-gilled pup tonight and she’ll sulk like a spurned mistress all the way to the Vale.”

“Laenor is taking her,” Corlys said.

Marq stared.

Once.

Twice.

Then his mouth twisted into something that could have been a grin, if a grin could taste like blood.

“Laenor.” He rolled the name slowly, tasting it the way a man tastes a wine he already knows will sour on his tongue. His jaw flexed, pipe steam curling from the corner of his mouth. “Of course. Nothing says steady seamanship like a lordling staring lovingly at the bloody horizon.”

Daemon’s eyes sparked, a sharp glint of delight flickering behind the relaxed sprawl of his posture. 

A predator humoring a joke that cuts.

Corlys’s voice iced over, calm becoming something with fangs. “Watch yourself.”

“Oh, I’m watching plenty,” Marq said, heat rising beneath the weathered skin around his scar. “I’m watching twenty years of service get tossed overboard like spoiled fish.”

He jabbed a thick finger toward his ship, where lanterns swayed like stars held hostage in her rigging.

“And now, when she’s fit as a titan and the crew’s tighter than a septa's—” He snapped his jaw shut, teeth clicking. “You tell me I’m to sit on the dock with my cock in my hand while your boy takes her out for a pleasure trot?”

“Laenor is not a boy,” Corlys said. The words were low, undercut with a warning that chilled the air. “He is my heir. And this is his duty.”

“And I’m not your heir,” Marq snarled, voice roughened by spray and old betrayals. “I’m just the bastard whelp of a dockrat who sailed well enough you gave me colors to fly. Gods forbid that counts for more than which cock came out of your wife.”

Daemon’s chuckle slipped free, soft, unkind, almost affectionate in its wickedness.

Corlys turned his head. Slowly.

Daemon raised his brows, all false innocence, gaze dancing. “Let’s not pretend, Corlys,” he drawled. “This realm is stacked bow to stern with heirs who’ve earned not a single command they hold.”

Marq snorted, a sound caught between fury and bitter appreciation. “And now the prince agrees with me,” he said. “Seven hells. That’s reassuring.”

Corlys stepped forward, the lanterns catching the fine lines at his temples and the old scars that laced his knuckles. Reminders of storms and mutinies weathered side by side with the man before him.

“You are being held,” Corlys said. “You are not being dismissed.”

Marq’s expression stilled.

Then it hardened like iron quenched in cold water.

“Held,” he repeated. “For what? Dropping my bow too slow for some puffed-up customs rooster in King’s Landing?”

Daemon’s gaze narrowed, a predator scenting the turn in the air. “Someone used your name,” he said. “On a letter about the attack on our heirs.”

The harbor noise receded, a tide dragged back into silence. Marq stood very still, the wind teasing at the streaks of silver in his beard.

Slowly, he removed the pipe from his teeth. It clicked softly against his belt hook as he set it aside.

“I see,” he said, quieter than before, stripped of bravado.

“And here I thought you just woke one morning remembering you had a son.”

The strike landed clean. Corlys did not flinch, but he took the hit, let it sit where it hurt.

“I would never give my son to a ship I thought unsafe,” Corlys said. “And I would not take her captain from his deck without cause.”

“Uh-huh,” Marq said, shoulders rolling once to shake off emotion. 

Daemon stepped further into the lamplight, eyes raking the truth across Marq’s features. “It says you boasted,” he murmured. “Told the wrong ears what cargo you carry. That you opened doors for cowards who sought our nursery with knives in their hands.”

Marq’s lip curled, not in guilt.

In insult.

“I talk,” he shot back. “That’s what sailors do. A man buys me ale, wants to hear which storms bite or which corsairs lie hungry in the shadows, I’ll spin him a yarn. Doesn’t mean I handed him a babe to drown.”

His chest heaved once, sharp.

He jabbed a thumb toward Seafoam’s Grace, lantern light catching in the calluses and work-earned lines of his palm.

“I call her my girl,” he said. “But she belongs to Aenar. That sweet little cub bit me clean through the skin last time Laenor brought him aboard.”

Daemon’s smirk cracked. 

Marq took a step closer, voice no longer loud, but steady in the way storms are steady.

“You think I’d spill the blood of the boy whose name she carries?” His voice pulled tight, raw around the edges. 

Daemon studied him closely, jaw easing, a predator deciding this was no prey.

Corlys exhaled. Not relief. Something heavier.

“I think,” Corlys said, voice dropping to the floorboards between them, “that someone chose you precisely because your loyalty is real, and loud. Fool enough to brag.” His gaze softened, but only slightly. “Loyal enough that doubting you hurts us both.”

“So that’s it, then? You drag me off my deck on the eve of tide, slap irons on me, and let your pretty son take my ship out shining like a gods-damned toy?”

“No irons,” Corlys said. “Not yet. You’ll be housed on the island. Under watch. Questioned until I am satisfied.”

“And if you aren’t satisfied?” Marq asked.

Daemon’s smile was very small and not at all kind. “Then you will be grateful for how quickly fire melts a man,” he said. “It is a cleaner death than some earn.”

Marq met his gaze.

He did not look impressed.

He looked tired.

“Here’s the thing, Prince,” he said. “If I were guilty, I’d pick a less obvious fucking way to run.”

Daemon’s amusement burned. 

Corlys nodded once, slow. “Then prove it,” he said. “Answer every question Vaegon puts to you. Sit in a room while others sail. If you come out the other side clean, you will have your deck again. If you don’t…”

He let the sentence trail. Some things didn’t need to be spoken; the sea finished them on its own.

Marq’s jaw worked.

He looked past them, out at Seafoam’s Grace.

At the way she rocked, eager, straining for the open water.

At the crew moving across her deck, following the boatswain’s shouted instructions now instead of his.

Laenor was on the gangplank now, one hand on the rail, head bent as he listened to some harried mate. Seasmoke’s shadow flickered faintly in the clouds above, a darker smudge moving with purpose.

He dragged a hand down his face, leaving a smear of tar and old ink on his cheek.

Then he squared his shoulders.

“Fine,” he said. “You want me penned up like a prize cock while the boy plays captain on my favorite girl, I’ll go. But if he scuffs her, I’ll have his hide and yours. That’s a promise.”

Daemon snorted, amused. “You threaten the heir of Driftmark?”

“I threaten anyone who mistreats a good ship,” Marq snapped. “Prince, lord, fuckin’ mermaid, don’t matter.”

Corlys nodded once to the Emberguards waiting up the steps.

Marq groaned loudly.

“Perfect. Dragonstone’s finest, come to escort me like I’m some maiden with weak ankles.”

Marq turned to the guards.

“Drag me off. Question me. Strip my pride. But hear this, if I come out clean, I’m getting my deck back and more fucking coin for the inconvenience.”

He stomped forward.

“Try to keep up,” he barked. “I’ve shat faster than you lot move.”

Then he shoved the pipe more firmly into his belt, rolled his shoulders like a man heading into a storm he hadn’t chosen, and strode toward the waiting guards.

He didn’t struggle when they fell into step around him.

He swore, loud and inventive, about tides and lords and dragons, but his feet never faltered.

Daemon watched until the three figures vanished into the climb.

“You were right,” he said.

Corlys’s gaze stayed on the angle where Marq had disappeared. “About what?”

“He’s an arse,” Daemon said. “And not guilty.”

Corlys exhaled once, long and low, as the first bell for tide began to toll.

“Seven help us,” he said. “That might be the worst combination of all.”

---

The cove below Dragonstone glowed with late light, heat rolling off the cliffs in trembling sheets that made the air waver like a half-formed vision.

The dragons had arranged themselves in a wide, uneasy constellation, each claiming a piece of stone, each radiating their own pulse of ancient power.

Syrax lay farthest off, half in shadow, half in molten gold. Her tail curled around her body like a cord, wings occasionally slapping the shallows with lazy, playful force. Every splash echoed back against the rock, but her eyes never left Rhaenyra.

She was here for one reason alone: her rider.

Vermithor crouched on a higher ledge, the stone beneath him splintering under his sheer weight. Each slow exhale from his massive lungs sent out smoldering drafts that made the sand shiver in rippling lines. His presence was less restless and more waiting. Calculating. 

Meleys, crimson and stately, lounged in the warm hollow carved by centuries of sea wind. Her tail flicked every few breaths, always in Caraxes’ direction. A flick to hush him. A flick to keep him still.

A flick to tell him she’d tolerate no dramatics today.

Caraxes, long as a river and twice as irritable, was coiled beside her like a restless knot. His wings twitched each time Vaegon shifted behind him, the membranes rustling like scaled silk. He tried, gods know he tried, to stay poised.

But every step Vaegon took in his direction sent a ripple of agitation through him.

And Vhagar…

Vhagar was less a dragon than a landmark. A living cliff face. Her exhale rolled out in deep, seismic gusts. Laena stood before her, head tipped back, whispering upward. Soft words for a monster who made her look like an ant. 

Vhagar’s pupils narrowed as she listened, her great jaw lowering in an almost tender tilt.

And in the center of the dragons’ wide ring, knelt Vaegon.

Hands pressed to Visenya’s journal, fingers splayed over the ink like a man seeking pulse or prophecy. His eyes moved quickly, darting line to line, phrase to phrase, absorbing directions only he could decipher. 

Every so often he spoke under his breath. 

Rhaenyra stood a short distance away, watching him, hands clasped to still their restless twitch. The humidity pressed against her skin; even Syrax felt it, tail thumping once in agitation.

Rhaenys stepped up beside her, arms folded, gaze sharp enough to nick stone.

Rhaenyra didn’t have to turn.

Dragons always raised their heads for Rhaenys Targaryen.

Even Vhagar cracked an eyelid open.

Rhaenys folded her arms, gaze fixed forward, jaw set.

“You’ve grown bold,” she said.

Rhaenyra stiffened. “In what regard?”

Rhaenys hummed, low and unimpressed. “In several. But let us start with the one sitting directly beneath our noses. Laena. And Daemon. And you.”

Rhaenyra inhaled sharply. A hot flush threatened along her throat. “I don’t—”

“Oh, please,” Rhaenys said, flicking her hand dismissively. Her eyes sweeping Rhaenyra once, top to bottom, sharp enough to peel bark off a tree. “Spare me the maidenly denial. You reek of him. And of her.”

Syrax’s head swung in their direction, sensing the tension.

Rhaenyra swallowed.

Rhaenys continued, voice cutting clean:

“You and Laenor have fulfilled your duty to the realm. I know what that means. Liberties afforded. Arrangements struck. But that does not mean all things sit well with me.”

Rhaenyra’s tongue pressed instinctively to the back of her teeth, containing the first answer that wanted to leap out, something sharp and threatening.

“…Meaning what, exactly?”
Cool. Controlled. Dangerous.

“Meaning,” Rhaenys said, stepping closer, “that I know my daughter. And I know Daemon. And I know you. And while I am not blind to affection or what flows between people in close quarters… I am also not so foolish as to think men like Daemon Targaryen do not bend the world, and women, to suit their desires.”

Rhaenyra bristled, more steel than shame.

“I am not bent,” she said, voice hard enough to spark. “And neither is Laena.”

Rhaenys turned her sharp gaze on her, unrelenting. “No. But she is dutiful. Loyal. And she is wife and mother. Those roles make women say yes when they wish to say no.”

Rhaenyra felt her pulse jump, once. 

How many times had she said yes out of fear of the realm’s judgment?

Or to avoid another argument with Viserys?

Or to shield Laenor from one more burden that wasn’t his?

How many times had she watched Laena do the same. Softening Daemon’s temper, volunteering herself for calm, for ease, for peace?

How many times had she leaned on Laena’s steadiness, her warmth, her calm acceptance… without stopping to wonder whether Laena chose it freely, or quietly felt she must?

The thought lodged under her ribs like a thorn.

“Laena,” Rhaenyra said, voice low but echoing with heat, “is the rider of Vhagar.”

A step closer. 

“She is not some meek wife nodding through a man’s desires,” she said. “She is a storm. A dragonrider of the old blood. If Laena does something, it is because she wills it, not because she needs anyone’s permission.”

Rhaenys’s expression didn’t shift.

“You want Daemon,” she said evenly. “Daemon wants you. I see it as plainly as the tide rising. And I fear my daughter stands in the middle, yielding because she thinks that is what’s expected of her.”

“That,” Rhaenyra snapped, “is a cruel and presumptuous interpretation.”

“It is not meant to be kind,” Rhaenys returned. “It is meant to be clear.”

Syrax rumbled, wings scraping stone.

Rhaenys pressed on, unbothered.

“I do not condemn what you feel,” she said. “Fire calls to fire. But I will not have Laena devoured. And I will not have you convincing yourself she wants what you two want simply because it suits you.”

Rhaenyra’s hands curled into fists. Suits her? The audacity of it. “You think me that selfish?”

“I think you overwhelmed,” Rhaenys said. “And Daemon insatiable. And my daughter ever willing to placate the storm rather than let it break.”

Rhaenyra glared, voice shaking. “Laena chose to comfort me. She chose to invite me in. She chose—”

“But when, Rhaenyra, has she last chosen herself?”

Rhaenyra felt something twist in her chest. An instinctive flinch she despised.

“That is unfair,” she bit out. “Laena is not some frail, self-sacrificing flower you need to rescue from us.”

“Child,” Rhaenys said softly, and somehow that only stoked the fire in Rhaenyra’s blood, “I am not your enemy.”

Red prickled behind Rhaenyra’s eyes.

“How dare you assume I would ever harm her?”

And now Rhaenys looked at Rhaenyra with an old, aching kind of disappointment. The kind only a mother could carry.

“Not with intention,” she allowed. “But fire does not need intent to burn.”

Rhaenyra’s breath caught, sharp, wounded.

Behind them came footsteps on stone.

Soft, quick, familiar.

Laena.

She wore her riding leathers.

Vhagar’s colors. Burnished oxblood panels reinforced with scaled stitching the same deep green-black as Vhagar’s hide, the sleeves suede-soft but thick enough to weather heat, the chest-piece embossed subtly with Valyrian knotwork. The leather hugged her frame with the silent confidence of a seasoned rider: hips secure, shoulders free, boots laced tight for the sky.

Laena slowed as she saw them, eyes flicking between mother and princess with the precision of someone trained since childhood to read danger the moment it sparked.

“Meleys kept stirring,” she said, one brow lifting. “Syrax too. I knew one of you must be throwing words sharp enough to cut the air.”

Rhaenys didn’t move.

Rhaenyra did.

Her chin lifted instinctively, defensively.

“Mother,” Laena said softly. “Rhaenyra.”

Her tone held the unspoken question: What have you done?

Rhaenys adjusted her posture. “We are having a discussion.”

“No,” Laena said gently. “You are lecturing. She is angry. And the dragons are pretending not to eavesdrop.”

Vermithor snorted.

Caraxes answered with a rumbling hum.

Syrax’s tail thumped once.

Rhaenyra flushed deeper, lashes lowering, every muscle in her throat tight.

Laena moved before either woman could speak again.

She stepped forward and placed herself squarely between them.

A quiet, decisive act of protection. Her shoulders set. Her spine straightened. She blocked Rhaenys’s line of sight as though shielding Rhaenyra from flame, not words. The fabric of her sleeve brushed Rhaenyra’s arm, grounding, steady, unmistakably deliberate.

She faced her mother fully.

“If you have questions for me,” Laena said quietly, “then ask me.”

Rhaenys did not look away.

Did not yield an inch.

“You want my questions?” she said, voice low, controlled, dangerous. “Very well. Here is the one that matters.”

Laena waited, steady and unflinching.

Rhaenys’s gaze flicked between her daughter, Rhaenyra, and the narrow space separating them.

“Do the three of you truly expect the realm never to see this?” she asked. 

Rhaenyra stiffened behind Laena; the air thinned around her, tight as pulled thread.

But Rhaenys was not done.

“You think the court will blind itself?” she pressed. “You think whispers won't pass Dragonstone's land? That the lords who measure your steps, your glances, your breath around each other will simply… pretend?”

Her voice sharpened, stripping the moment to its bones.

“Do you imagine the realm will handle this kindly? That they won’t twist it into the cruelest shape possible? They will not call it choice or desire or even truth. They will call it what they want to see: Rhaenyra and Daemon finally giving in to their desires and you, Laena, the foolish wife dragged along behind them.”

Rhaenyra exhaled sharply, like struck. Laena did not move.

Rhaenys’s voice softened only in grief.

“They will make you the smaller one in this story, the pitiable one. They will use your dignity as a jest in their wine cups.”

Laena lifted a hand.

“Mother.”

The single word landed like a dropped blade.

Rhaenys stilled.

“If the realm wishes to gossip, let it. They’ve done worse to women with far fewer strengths than mine. But they will not dictate my choices. Not this time.”

Vhagar rumbled behind her. Old, seismic agreement.

Laena didn’t look back.

“And if the realm seeks to use this against me, then let it try. I am the rider of Vhagar. I do not bow to rumors.”

Rhaenys inhaled, shaken by the clarity of it.

Laena held her gaze one last time.

“I know exactly what I’m doing,” she said quietly. “Do not mistake my choice for naivety. I see the realm clearly and I choose anyway.”

Laena turned to Rhaenyra.

Laena reached out, fingertips brushing her forearm.

Rhaenyra shivered.

Rhaenys watched their fingers meet, jaw tightening with something that wasn’t disapproval but wasn’t comfort either.

“Very well,” she said quietly. “I see you.”

Laena held her mother’s gaze. “Good.”

Bootsteps on stone.

Lazy.

Confident.

Entirely too aware of the space he commanded.

Caraxes’s head lifted first, long neck coiling like a tightening rope.

Daemon emerged from the shadows cut by the cliffside, leathers half-unzipped at the throat, hair wind-tossed from flying. A wolfish smile ghosted across his mouth as he took them in.

The tableau spoke for itself.

Three dragonriders locked in a triangle of heat and warning.

Daemon’s eyes flicked from Rhaenys’s rigid stance, to Rhaenyra’s too-still posture, to Laena’s fingers still resting against Rhaenyra’s arm.

A slow, knowing exhale.

“Mother troubles?” he drawled.

Rhaenys turned toward him with the force of a tide reversing.

“If I wanted your commentary, Daemon, I’d ask for it.”

Caraxes hissed, tail lashing.

Daemon’s smile sharpened. “Easy. Only an observation—”

“You never make only observations," Rhaenys cut in.

Vermithor’s tail raked a groove through the sand.
Meleys let out a chuff. Agreement or impatience, hard to say. 

Daemon let the tension settle.

And reached for them.

Not casually.

With an unspoken claim. One hand angled toward Laena, the other toward Rhaenyra, drawing them both into his orbit like that was the most natural shape of the world.

Laena met him without hesitation. Of course she did.

Her arm slid beneath his palm with the ease of a path worn by years. Her shoulder softened into his touch, their bodies falling into old alignment: husband and wife, rider and rider, storm and shore. For a heartbeat, Rhaenyra saw it the way the realm was meant to see it.

Daemon and Laena.

Rightful.

Whole.

And then she felt it.

The pull of him.

The pull of her.

Daemon’s hand, reaching. Laena’s warmth at her side. Rhaenys’s words still raw in the air:

Rhaenyra and Daemon finally giving in to their desires and you, Laena, the foolish wife dragged along behind them.

That was the story the realm would tell.

And Rhaenyra felt, with a twist deep in her chest, that if she stepped forward now, took Daemon’s hand and let Laena’s fingers stay on her arm, she would be writing that story herself.

She would be stepping into a place that was not hers.

Not truly.

Not first.

Not by right.

She loved them.

Gods, she loved them. Her kin. The sight of Daemon’s palm open to her, Laena’s touch steady on her sleeve, felt like standing in a doorway with warmth spilling through and knowing the house belonged to someone else.

Rhaenyra reacted before either of them could fully reach her.

She stepped back.

Not far. Just enough that Daemon’s hand met empty air and Laena’s fingers slipped from her forearm.

Laena’s eyes widened, confusion sparking where a second ago there had been only certainty.

Daemon’s hand hovered, suspended in the space where she had been.

His expression didn’t crack, but his pupils tightened; his jaw flexed once. Caraxes’s wings twitched, as though the dragon felt the small rejection echo through the bond.

She wanted to reach out again.

To smooth it over, to take his fingers, to catch Laena’s hand and pull them both close.

But the image had taken root: Laena as the wife the realm would mock, Rhaenyra as the interloper.

She could not bear to be the one to make it true.

Daemon lowered his hand with a slow ease that fooled no one.

A retreat wrapped in arrogance.

“Oh, very well,” he said, voice deceptively light, the edges honed razor-thin. “If we’re all done snapping at each other like hungry hatchlings”—his glance at Laena softened, a fleeting warmth he didn’t bother hiding—“perhaps we can get on with the rite before the dragons decide to settle the matter themselves.”

Rhaenyra’s glare hit him like thrown glass.

He accepted it with a tilt of his head, dark amusement curling his mouth, but his gaze kept slipping back to the gap she’d carved between them.

“We’re ready,” Laena said. “Vaegon is waiting.”

And Daemon did not reach again.

He simply rolled his shoulders, the picture of Targaryen nonchalance, but the tension in him was coiled and unmistakable.

Laena’s fingers slipped from Daemon’s and returned to Vhagar’s warm scale.

Rhaenys stepped back to Meleys.

Daemon turned to Caraxes.

Vaegon, pulse racing, faced Vermithor.

Rhaenyra stood alone. The only one not called to the fire this night.

Vaegon raised the bowl.

The air tightened, hot iron in the lungs.

“Blood of the rider,” he began.

Four daggers flashed in the near-dark.

Four palms bled red.

“Blood of the dragon.”

Each blade touched scales.

Red. Crimson. Bronze. Green.

The dragons snarled and rumbled, not in pain, but in anticipation.

Rhaenyra’s eyes could not sit still. 

It was exactly like before.

Just multiplied.

Vaegon uncorked the vessel. The preserved blood of Aenar the Exile glinted. Thick as nightwater.

Laena, Daemon, Rhaenys, and Vaegon spoke the words together:

“Aenar jin azantys. Avy jorrāelan.”
(Aenar the Exile. We remember you.)

Four drops fell.

The bowls hissed.

Heat waves collided, rippling through the cove.

Rhaenyra staggered back a half-step, Syrax steadied her with a low, protective trill.

Vaegon’s voice quivered:

“Speak the Binding of Three. As One.”

Their voices melded.

Daemonic gravel.
Rhaenys’s command.
Laena’s calm resolve.
Vaegon’s fervor.

“Ānogar īlva ēbrion,
Vembo hen ñuha prūmia,
Rȳbagon hen ñuha qelitsos,
Āeksio hen ñuhor lentrot.
Sȳrity. Jaelā. Ēza—
ynot ānogar sagon perzys.”

The moment the final syllable left their tongues, the world seemed to split.

Not with sound.

With pressure.

And the dragons answered as one.

Caraxes arched his serpentine neck, eyes flaring molten gold. But this time, the motion carried weight, too much weight.

His body lengthened.

Red scales rippled like liquid heat, expanding, stretching, settling over new muscle and growing bone. His limbs thickened. His chest broadened. His silhouette changed, deepening, widening. Still lean. Still deadly. Still unmistakably Caraxes.

Just… more.

Daemon’s eyes went wide, as the dragon he’d mastered now stood before him as something closer to the monster of Valyria he was bred from.

Meleys reared, elegant and furious, wings flaring like a blood-red banner catching the wind.

But her change was different.

Her wings didn’t get larger, they grew tighter. The membranes thinned into something almost aerodynamic, catching the light with a faint metallic sheen. Her whole frame seemed to narrow, as if built for less drag, more thrust.

When she drove her wings downward, the air reacted first. A sharp, concussive pop cracked through the cove as pressure buckled around her.

Then Meleys moved.

One heartbeat she was crouched before Rhaenys. The next, displaced air rocked the stones ten paces to the left, dust spiraling in her wake.

Rhaenys blinked on instinct.

By the time her focus returned, Meleys was already settling back into her original position, talons digging into the rock to brake her momentum.

Vermithor’s massive tail slammed into the stone, splitting it like cracked bone.

Pebbles burst upward, scattering like thrown coins.

But it wasn’t his size that changed.

It was the fire inside him. 

It glowed, white-gold at its core, like the beginnings of dragonflame too hot to contain. His wings snapped open, the gust knocking Vaegon back a full step.

Vaegon felt the connection surge, hot, searing, terrifying. And knew, with absolute clarity, that the Bronze Fury’s flame would be hotter than any living dragon’s.

Hotter than Balerion’s had been in his final years.

Vhagar.

The ancient queen did not grow.

She did not swell with flame or strength.

She did not sharpen like Meleys or expand like Caraxes.

Instead, something older stirred.

Her pupils narrowed to slits, then widened, then narrowed again, each change slow and deliberate, like the opening and closing of a colossal, unseen eye beneath the world.

A rhythm.

A pulse.

Laena’s breath caught as the tug behind her breastbone returned, a pull both physical and perceptual. As though her mind clicked into alignment with something vast and reptilian and unbearably old.

And...she understood Vhagar’s thoughts.

Hunger, not as emptiness, but as heat pooling low in the chest. Danger, not as fear, but as narrowed vision and coiled muscle. Loyalty, not as affection, but as territory marked inside the ribcage. Love, not as softness, but as a pattern of breath shared with another being.

She felt Vhagar.

The memory of fire so old it had burned before the Targaryens had names.

The echo of past riders, blades of will, brief as candles against her centuries.

The sense of time not as years, but as seasons of hunger and flight and war.

Vhagar recognized her.

As kin.

And Laena understood in her bones:

Dragons were not creatures of rage.

They were creatures of pattern

The shift hit them like the sky collapsing.

Laena’s cry tore from her throat first. Raw, strangled, stolen. Her hands clawed at her leathers as if she could rip the fever out of her chest. She dropped to her knees. 

Daemon followed, his spine bowing as if struck by a hammer, breath torn from him in a broken bark of pain. He hit the ground on both palms, fingers digging trenches in the dirt. Caraxes twitched in response, neck snapping in Daemon’s direction like a dragged chain.

Rhaenys bent forward, one knee slamming stone, Meleys keening above her. High, razor-bright, slicing the night in half.

Vaegon collapsed last, Vermithor roaring over him with a sound so old it felt like an avalanche of flame.

All four riders fell.

All four dragons rose.

Rhaenyra knew exactly what was happening, she felt the echo like a phantom strike in her own lungs, but knowing did not help.

It only made it more horrifying.

Syrax shrieked, wings snapping outward so violently the wind stung Rhaenyra’s face like needles. She threw herself between Rhaenyra and the others, every protective instinct in her body igniting like oil on flame.

Caraxes reared, massive, monstrous, newly vast. His silhouette contorting under the fever’s push.

Meleys moved, sand tore from the ground in spiraling ribbons around her, caught in her slipstream even as she fought not to lose control.

Vermithor burned. Not outward. He burned inside and when he roared, the sound peeled the air back in strips.

Vhagar…
Vhagar did not grow.
Vhagar did not move.
Vhagar did not burn.

She knelt.

Lowered her head.

Pressed her maw to the ground beside Laena as if anchoring herself through her rider’s suffering.

Four dragons spiraling closers towards frenzy by the second. 

Rhaenyra could still feel the phantom of her own retreat like a bruise. The choice she made, and how it already ached.

And she barely had time to think, only time to move.

The animals in the pens smelled the fever.

Terror hit them like a whip.

They slammed into the wooden gates, hooves clattering in a frenzy of blind panic.

Rhaenyra sprinted, lungs scorching.

Her vision tunneled.

She felt Syrax scream behind her. Felt Caraxes turn toward the sound. Felt Vermithor’s flame beginning to lick up his throat. Felt Meleys’s wings carving the air too sharply. Felt Vhagar’s hunger bleed through Laena’s pain. 

Her hands shook as she tore the latch.

The second.

The third.

“GO!” she gasped, voice tearing out of her throat like something flayed. “RUN!”

The pen doors burst open.

The animals stampeded into the night, a rolling storm of bodies desperate to escape the hell they’d been born for.

Five shadows lunged with a hunger older than law or language.

Syrax struck first. Her talons punched through a stag’s ribcage with a crack like splintering shields.

She tore upward, wrenching half the animal free, organs unraveling in hot ropes across the sand.

Her second bite crushed the skull, blood spurting in a fine arc across her snout.

Caraxes answered with a roar so violent it rattled the marrow in Rhaenyra’s teeth.

He snatched a boar by its midsection and whipped it against the stone. The impact burst the animal open, a red explosion, flesh slapping the cliffside, bones scattering like hail.

He raked the remains with his claws, dragging them in a zigzag pattern that left streaks of gore marking his newfound size.

Meleys did not roar. She screamed. A sharp, slicing sound that tore at the night.

She streaked across the cove, too fast for the animals to even panic.

One heartbeat: two goats alive.

The next: two limp bodies crushed between her jaws, their legs twitching reflexively before she snapped both spines at once.

Vermithor did not bother with teeth. His flame tore free in a blast so white-hot the darkness recoiled.

It wasn’t fire, it was obliteration.

His prey didn’t burn; it incinerated, collapsing into glowing fragments before the scream fully formed. The sand beneath the blast fused into glass in a spiderweb pattern. 

Vhagar lagged behind only in speed, not savagery.

Her jaws closed around the bull’s back with a crunch that echoed like thunder hollowed out. Vertebrae snapped one by one, each break sending shudders through the ground. When the bull’s legs finally buckled, she lifted the entire carcass and swallowed it whole, blood streaming down the ridges of her throat.

The cove became a slaughterhouse.

Rhaenyra inhaled, lungs burning, and screamed:

“SYRAX! Sȳrior!"

To me!

At first, nothing.

Syrax tore another stag in half, tossing gore against the stone.

Rhaenyra’s throat strained.

“SYRAX! RETURN!”

The gold dragon froze mid-breath.

Her pupils contracted. Her tail twitched. A low, torn sound scraped her throat, as if the command hurt.

Syrax lifted her head from the blood-soaked sand, dripping red.

She looked back at Rhaenyra.

Looked at the feast.

Looked again at Rhaenyra.

The decision nearly split her.

But she moved. Backed away from the kill.

Rhaenyra placed a trembling hand on Syrax’s muzzle.

“It’s all right,” she whispered. “I need you, my golden girl—”

Her voice broke.

Her family.

Collapsed.

Shaking.

Human.

Daemon was on one side, half-curled, face pale beneath the sweat, breath ragged. His hand clawed the earth like he was still trying to anchor himself.

Laena was curled on her side, trembling, her lips parted as she tried to pull air into a body that wasn’t listening.

Rhaenys knelt upright out of sheer posture, even in agony, jaw clenched, chest rising and falling in harsh, uneven shudders.

Vaegon lay sprawled, gasping like someone who had drowned and been half-dragged back into life. 

Rhaenyra’s heart seized.

Gods.

Gods, they looked broken.

Laena.

Rhaenyra reached her first.

“Laena, look at me.” She kept her voice low, controlled. “Breathe. You’re safe.”

Laena’s lashes fluttered, a tremor rippling through her limbs.

A rough groan made Rhaenyra look over.

Daemon, trying to drag himself upright before collapsing again. Rhaenys inhaled sharply, her spine bowing as if something seized her lungs. Vaegon convulsed once, breath catching in his throat.

Rhaenyra moved fast, rolling him to his side so he wouldn’t choke.

“Breathe through it,” she said. “You’re not dying.”

She forced herself to step back just enough to assess them all. 

She could not lift them.

She could not drag them.

She could not take them to the castle. Not now, not with the dragons in this state.

They were still feeding. Still lost to blood-lust. Still thrashing, roaring, ripping flesh from bone.

They wouldn’t hurt their riders intentionally.
But instinct was a wild, ancient force. And any sudden motion, any panic, any misstep near them could trigger a reaction with the force of a collapsing tower.

And worse:

If any dragon broke from the cove in this frenzy...

Dragonstone was dead. The village. The keep. The cliffs. The docks. Every living soul.

Her concern wasn’t just for the four people at her feet.

It was for all of them.

For every life under her protection.

Her pulse hammered, but her mind stayed razor-sharp.

“We cannot risk moving toward the paths or the ridge,” she said. “If even one dragon sees movement outside this cove, gods help whoever they find.”

She turned to Syrax. The only dragon capable of hearing her through the haze.

“Stay between them and the others,” Rhaenyra commanded. “Hold your position. Do not advance.”

Syrax trembled, torn between instinct and obedience, but lowered herself protectively over the riders, wings half-spread to block the view from the feeding dragons.

Rhaenyra wiped sweat from her brow, breath shaking but controlled.

“We shelter here,” she said, voice firm. “We wait out the fever. No movement toward the cliffs. No noise. No firelight.”

She knelt once more beside them, placing a hand on Laena’s arm, another on Vaegon’s shoulder.

“We stay alive,” she whispered. “All of us.”

Behind her, the dragons continued their bloodbath.

Ahead of her, Dragonstone held its breath.

And Rhaenyra became its shield.

---

The Tower of the Hand should have felt triumphant.

Lyonel Strong was dead. Poisoned or struck down by one of the countless enemies he pretended not to have. The city whispered, the Red Keep speculated, but Otto knew better than to waste breath on ghosts.

Death was a tool.

An inconvenience.

A vacancy, useful only if filled wisely.

And yet, the tower felt wrong.

It still smelled of Lyonel: parchment, oaksmoke, and that cursed lemon oil the man used on every surface as though the Hand’s office were a monastery instead of the beating heart of the realm. Otto brushed a sleeve across a shelf, perfectly clean. 

He hated it.

Hated the cleanliness.

Hated the order.

Hated the quiet, meticulous fingerprints Lyonel had left everywhere like insults disguised as improvements.

A second inkpot at every desk, encouraging clerks to write more, not less.

A locked cabinet containing cross-referenced indexes of every treaty, charter, and law. Organized so clearly a halfwit could follow them.

Fresh-cut quills stacked in bundles of twelve, trimmed to uniform length.

A rearranged archive so that even the lowest scribe could find records Otto preferred forgotten.

A map of the Seven Kingdoms pinned with tidy bronze markers showing where food stores were strong and where they were failing.

All Lyonel’s doing.

Small changes.

Subtle changes.

Changes meant to outlast him.

Otto’s jaw tightened.

He opened a ledger. The margins were neat. The sums were honest. The handwriting was maddeningly legible.

Lyonel Strong’s legacy.

Otto shut the book harder than necessary.

The tower had become his.

Not through banners or bluster, but through structure. Through processes that now ran smoother than Otto wanted them to. No bribes needed. No threats required. Lyonel had made the work itself run too efficiently, too transparently.

It was infuriating.

“Chaos masquerading as efficiency,” Otto muttered, even though it was a lie and he knew it. He would have to dismantle all of it quietly, carefully, the way one unspools an old tapestry to repurpose the threads.

He lowered himself into the Hand’s chair.

It creaked. Lyonel had ignored that sound. Otto refused to.

He loathed the indentation in the cushion. The dent in the desk where Lyonel’s ring had tapped. The petitions sorted by urgency rather than political favor. The Raven Log pinned to the wall recording every message sent without routing through him.

But most of all, he loathed the raven letters piling higher each day.

They should have changed by now, shifted, soured, turned fearful. Otto had ensured they would. He hadn’t waited for the body to cool. 

Strike fast. Strike early. Strike while the shock still blurred men’s judgment.

He planted the lies like seeds in wet soil:

that Rhaenyra embezzled the Crown’s coin,
that she tested dragonflame on servants to measure the spread of fire,
that she trafficked obsidian to Essosi warlords in exchange for loyalty,
that she took counsel from blood-priests in Dragonstone’s caves,
that she mocked the Seven by refusing to kneel in the sept,
that she practiced rites forbidden since the Doom.

They should have spread like rot.

Instead, letters arrived addressing her as Crown Princess Rhaenyra, requesting judgment, arbitration, blessing. As if Lyonel’s death had changed nothing.

His rumors dissolved under the sight of families boarding ships for Dragonstone.

Women gripping children like shields.

Fishermen with rope-tied bundles slung over tired shoulders.

Mothers wiping tears as they crossed the planks, whispering gratitude.

Sailors lifting infants into safe arms with practiced gentleness.

Hope had smothered venom.

Otto reread the latest raven report, jaw tightened to a knife's edge.

Twenty-eight widows accepted by Dragonstone. Housing provided.

Jobs assigned.

Food guaranteed through winter.

He opened another.

Rhaenyra’s decree extends refuge to “any woman or child harmed, displaced, or threatened by unrest in the Crown’s lands.”

Otto exhaled through his teeth.

“She steals my city out from under me with bread and blankets,” he hissed, voice low and sharp enough to cut parchment.

How could whispers of corruption compete with the sight of a mother stepping onto a ship with safety instead of fear?

How could accusations of arrogance stand against a princess wrapping a cold child in a clean cloak?

Visible mercy had burned his rumors to ash.

He nearly threw the scroll into the fire.

Dragonstone was thriving, not in theory, not in gold tallies, but in motion.

The Maritime Compact, once dismissed as a spoiled girl’s vanity project, had become a living artery pulling coin, labor, and loyalty toward her shores.

Otto’s fingers tightened until the parchment crackled like bone.

Seven-year exclusivity. Hatchery control. Northern passage exemption. Shifted levies. Her signature required to amend.

Not a treaty.

A coup.

He had not ordered the attack on her heirs. Seven damn the fools who acted, but he hadn’t mourned it. And now she wielded that tragedy like a blade, turning loss into momentum.

He pictured her in Dragonstone’s hall: serene, warm, frighteningly beloved.

Saint Rhaenyra.
Mother of the Smallfolk.
The Dragon Who Protects.

It made him sick.

It made Alicent furious.

She stood increasingly alone in the Red Keep. Bright green sleeves, tight-laced piety, a face growing more pinched each week. She had tithed for years, poured gold into the sept, given alms.

Yet the whispers were not about Alicent’s charity.

They were about Rhaenyra’s shelter.

And the ladies of court were turning. One by one, they drifted away from Alicent’s embroidery circles and afternoon teas. After all:

Alicent had insulted not one, not two, but three daughters of paramount houses.

And women were leaving Kingslanding in droves for an island where girls were valued, where widows were sheltered, where no one spoke down to them through lace fans.

And court ladies whispered:

“The princess cares for women. The queen only cares for rules.”

Alicent heard it, of course she heard it, and blamed Otto.

“You told me we controlled the narrative,” she’d hissed, eyes red. “You told me the realm would see my piety.”

“The realm has the memory of a flea,” Otto replied. “It favors spectacle over righteousness.”

He did not add: And you insult too many women too easily.

He didn’t need to.

Alicent knew.

Otto turned to the lords, his true battlefield.

But even they were shifting.

The Lannisters hesitated.

Not loudly, not openly.

But internally.

A curious new neutrality in the way they spoke of Rhaenyra.

And worst of all, Lyonel’s presence lingered, whispering in his mind:

You underestimated her.

You always did.

He rose, pacing the tower. Boots struck stone with sharp, irritated rhythm.

“House Velaryon declines further audience with the Queen.”

Of course they did.

Alicent had opened her mouth and called Laena a whore in front of half the council chamber. She had done it not with political calculation but with raw feminine spite...sharp, emotional, uncontrolled.

Then another report:

“Lady Tully’s kin have sent grievance that the Queen’s words toward their daughter-in-law were ‘unbefitting royal dignity.’”

Another:

“Lady Lannister has been heard saying the Queen’s tongue is as sharp as her father’s quill.”

Otto despised that it mattered.

But it did.

Because women controlled social currency in a way men never bothered to understand.

A snub from a lady of House Velaryon spread through her cousins in the Stormlands. 

A wounded Tully girl whispered her grievance to Riverlands women.

A Lannister matron’s displeasure filtered down into merchant wives and minor ladies.

He inhaled.

Slow.

Controlled.

Then, quiet as an oath:

“Very well,” Otto said to the empty tower.

If the ladies of Kingslanding had chosen to crown Rhaenyra with soft gossip and sanctimony, then the answer was not to correct them.

It was to remove them.

Take them out of the room where decisions were made.

He would summon the Crownlands lords. Bar Emmon, Staunton, Rosby, and the others whose banners clustered close to the capital. Men whose fortunes depended on the stability of the Throne. Men who resented that Dragonstone now siphoned off their labor, their craftsmen, their future tithes.

He would call it a matter of shipping, tariffs, defense, anything dry and tedious enough to ensure the ladies stayed home. And he would make certain the invitations carried no space for companions or wives.

Clothing it as necessity would be simple.

Men never questioned a meeting that smelled of coin.

Dragonstone was emptying their villages. Dragonstone offered sanctuary that overshadowed their own protections. Dragonstone had begun to pull the realm’s heartbeat toward the sea.

And all of it, was tied to Rhaenyra’s hand, her signature, her mercy.

He could make that resentment bloom.

He dipped his quill again, writing the summons quickly, efficiently.

Sand. Fold. Seal.

As the wax cooled, Otto felt a cool steadiness settle over him. 

This would work.

Let the women chatter in parlors about who insulted whom.

Let them praise Rhaenyra’s compassion till their throats were raw.

None of it mattered if he held the lords.

He reached for the next parchment, already considering which lord would be easiest to turn first, whose pride could be stoked, whose fear could be sharpened.

The realm would not be won with gossip.

It would be won with men.

And Otto Hightower knew exactly how to gather them.

---

Harrenhal swallowed sound.

The torches burned low, their flames bending away from the cold that crept through the hall like a living thing. Harwin Strong had always known this castle hated the living; Harrenhal groaned and whispered and shed stone like a dying beast.

Tonight, it felt like it had finally claimed its due.

His father lay on the slab in the center of the chamber.

Lyonel Strong. Hand of the King. The only man Harwin had ever believed truly clean in a world full of filth. 

They had washed him.

Of course they had. Lyonel’s hair was combed, grey and orderly. His beard was trimmed. His hands had been folded over his chest like he was a statue some septon had carved for lessons on virtue.

Harwin stared at those hands.

He had seen them ink-stained and blistered, seen them steady a quill after hours of council, seen them wrap around a cup of cheap ale at the end of a long ride home. Once, when he was five and too proud to cry, those same hands had lifted him free of a fall and brushed the dirt from his knees without a word.

They did not look like those hands now.

They looked like someone else’s idea of his father.

Harwin’s lungs refused to pull in a proper breath. Every inhale scraped, shallow and sharp, as if the air itself had turned to glass. His fingers curled and uncurled at his sides. He could feel the strength in them, the same strength that had knocked knights from saddles and broken training posts in the yard, and none of it was worth a fucking thing.

All that strength. Useless against this.

“Should have been smoke,” he heard himself say, voice hoarse and unfamiliar in his own ears. “Or the tower coming down. Or a bolt gone astray. Something that made sense.”

The words fell flat. The hall did not echo them back. Harrenhal simply drank them.

He dragged a hand down his face. His palm came away damp and shaking. He couldn’t remember when he’d started crying. It didn’t feel like weeping.

It felt like something inside him had split and the leak had to go somewhere.

A shuffle of movement behind him broke the silence. Soft footsteps on stone, unhurried. Too light for a mailed guard. Too sure for a nervous servant.

Alys Rivers stepped into the room.

Harrenhal’s bastard daughter. His father’s bastard daughter. His sister, though no septon had ever named it so.

“Brother,” she said, her voice low and cool, like mist off the God’s Eye.

Harwin swallowed. His throat felt scraped raw.
“You came.”

“You asked for me.”

“I…” His breath hitched. “I can’t believe he’s gone.”

Alys tilted her head, moon dark hair catching the weak light. “No,” she said gently. “You can’t believe he died like that. In Kingslanding. In a keep that smothers truth.”

Her eyes lifted to Lyonel’s face.

“This is wrong,” she shivered. “Every stone in Harrenhal feels it.”

Harwin’s hands tightened until the veins stood out like ropes under his skin. “Show me,” he whispered, hoarse. “If there’s something here… something I’m not seeing… show me.”

Alys moved without hesitation, too easily, Harwin realized.

His other sisters would not even cross the threshold of this chamber. They had fled the moment the shroud was lifted, weeping into each other’s sleeves, unable to look upon the ruin of their father’s face. The septa had tried to coax them back with prayers; they’d refused to enter a room that felt more tomb than hall.

But Alys…

Alys stepped into the cold like it welcomed her.

There was no trembling in her hands, no flinch, no recoil. Death never frightened her; she had been born in its shadow, raised in its hallways. Harrenhal bent around her as though she were something cut from its stone.

She did not touch Lyonel.

She didn’t need to.

She leaned close to the mouth, inhaling with a healer’s discipline and a witch’s knowing.

Her pupils narrowed.

“Bruising at the lips,” she said, voice echoing faintly, as if layered atop another.

“Discoloration beneath the nails. The blood turned hard inside him.”

A draft circled her feet though no window was open.

“And the scent…” Her head tilted slightly. “Cold. Bitter. Metallic.”

Harwin’s stomach dropped. “What does that mean?”

Alys lifted her eyes to him. They were dark, glimmering, bottomless.

“A poison that kills slowly,” she said. “But tears violently.”

Harwin swayed. His hand slapped against the edge of the slab to keep upright.

“No,” he choked. “No. He—he was strong. He—”

Harwin let out a sound he had never made in his life. A wounded, dying thing. He braced both hands on the stone slab as if he could hold his father to the world a moment longer.

Alys touched his shoulder gently.

“Harwin,” she whispered. “Someone feared what he knew. What he saw.”

Harwin’s jaw clenched. “Otto Hightower? A rival house? Who?”

Alys shook her head slowly.

“There are tides moving in this realm that men pretend not to feel. But I feel them.” Her gaze sharpened. “I have felt them since Dragonstone."

Harwin blinked, hollow with grief. “What does Dragonstone have to do with my father’s death?”

Alys watched him for a long, measuring moment, too composed for someone kneeling beside their father’s corpse. Her gaze slid, not to Lyonel, but toward the lone guttering torch on the far wall.

The flame… bent.

Leaning toward her.

As if listening.

Alys’s eyes flickered, dark and unblinking, and for a heartbeat Harwin felt something slither cold down his spine.

He blinked hard.

When he looked again, the flame was ordinary. Still. Innocent.

Alys turned back to him, expression unreadable.

“You are looking for men to blame,” she said softly. “But not everything in this realm moves at a man’s bidding.”

Harwin stiffened. “Don’t play your witch-games with me. Not now.”

Alys’s voice dropped, becoming something too old, too soft, too heavy to belong in mortal halls.

“Divinity has been born into the realm,” she whispered. “Three children who carry blood older than kings. Older than—”

“Alys.” Harwin’s voice cracked like splitting oak. 

She paused.

Not offended. Not surprised. Almost pitying.

Harwin shook his head, breath shaking violently. “Father is dead. Poisoned. Betrayed. And you’re speaking of gods and visions—”

“The weirwood in my dreams bled light when they quickened,” Alys whispered. “And when your father learned even a piece of what they were—”

“Alys.” His voice broke into a shout. “STOP.”

Silence throbbed through the hall.

Harwin dragged both hands through his hair, breathing hard, furious tears burning behind his eyes.

“My father wasn’t killed by gods.” He spat the word like it tasted wrong. “He was killed by politics. By ambition. By Otto Hightower, that snake-tongued bastard who slithered back into the Hand’s tower the moment Father’s blood cooled.”

Alys did not argue.

She simply watched him with that eerie stillness, as though she saw two scenes at once. His rage, and the deeper truth beneath it.

“And my brother?” Harwin snarled. “Where is Larys in all this? Hm?”

Alys’s mouth tightened, a bitter, cutting thing.

“In Kingslanding,” she said. “Exactly where he chose to stay. Exactly where Otto Hightower sees use in him.”

The words struck like a hammer to the ribs.

Harwin staggered back a step.

Larys.

Still in the Red Keep.

Still whispering in shadows.

Still weaving his spiderwebs.

He had not come home to mourn.

He had not come home at all.

Because Larys never wanted Harrenhal.

He wanted power.

And Otto had given him the seat to claim it.

“He knew,” Harwin whispered. His voice shook with fury so sharp it scraped his throat raw. “Gods… he knew something was happening. He knew and he stayed there. Stayed with them.”

Alys lowered her head in the tiniest, almost imperceptible nod. 

Harwin turned away from Lyonel’s body only because if he looked another heartbeat longer the grief might drown him.

He reached for the table with shaking hands.
Ink. Parchment. Quill.

The tools of a maester, not a warrior and yet they felt heavier than a sword.

His grief hardened into purpose.

Into fury with direction.

He would not write to the Crown.

He would not write to the Small Council.

They were complicit. Rotten. Blind.

He wrote to the only person he trusted to hate Otto Hightower more than he did. To the only person his father had not feared.

The quill dug so hard into the page that it nearly tore through the parchment.

Princess Rhaenyra,

If word has not yet reached you, then let mine be the first:

My father is dead. Not by age. Not by sickness. Not by the will of the gods.

Poison.

A healer might call it swift. I say it was murder. I do not ask you for empty condolences. I ask you for truth.

My father was a good man, too good for Kingslanding, too honest for a council full of vipers. Someone feared what he knew. Feared what he saw. 

He told me only this, weeks ago:
“There is a rot in the Red Keep, Harwin. And one day soon, it will reach us all.”

I did not understand him then.

I do now.

The moment his breath stopped, Otto Hightower slithered back into the tower he’s coveted since the day he was dismissed. My father’s body had barely cooled before Hightower reclaimed the chair, and the power, that was stolen from him by your naming.

I know this man. I have watched him twist loyalty into leverage. I have seen him sharpen his daughter into a weapon. And I believe, with every bone in my body, that he had a hand in my father’s death.

I will not stand idle. I will not swallow grief and call it duty.

I intend to petition the Crown and the lords of the council for a formal inquiry into Otto Hightower’s actions. His corruption, his scheming, his sudden return to power over my father’s corpse.

But Kingslanding does not listen to men of my station, even when they bleed truth.

They will listen to you.

You are the named heir. You are the blood of the dragon. And you are the only one Otto fears enough to tremble when he hears your name spoken in court.

I ask. No, I beg, that you come to Kingslanding at once. Stand with me. Stand for him. Give weight to my accusation so the realm cannot turn away or dismiss me as a grieving son looking for a villain to blame.

If we do nothing, Hightower’s shadow will stretch deeper. He will silence anyone who threatens him. He will twist the narrative of my father’s life, and his death, into something that suits him.

I will not allow it.

I swear to you, Princess, on my father’s honor and on the halls of Harrenhal itself:

I will see justice done. For him. For the realm.
For any man who has died for speaking truth.

But I need your strength beside mine.

If you will stand with me, write swiftly. If you will fly on dragon back for the capital, fly swiftly. 

I will face Otto Hightower in full sight of the court, and I will not blink.

I await your word.

Ser Harwin Strong
of Harrenhal
Son of Lyonel Strong, The True Hand of the King

He folded the letter with the care of a man preserving something sacred, pressed his seal into the wax, and handed it to a courier he trusted with his life.

“Ride to Dragonstone,” he said. His voice was iron. “You do not sleep. You do not stop. Not until she reads this.”

When the door closed, Harwin leaned over the table, breath shaking, eyes burning.

His father had been taken. His brother had aligned himself with the enemy. And Otto Hightower had made himself the architect of Harwin Strong’s grief.

He whispered the vow into the cold, echoing stones:

“I will break him.”

Alys stepped beside him, her shadow intertwining with his.

“And I will help you,” she promised. "For the Gods' will it so."

---

The nursery was calm, but Septa Rhaella no longer trusted calm.

Not even after the masons had scraped the walls clean of blood, rebuilt the doorframe, and sealed every crack.

Not even after the royal builders moved the nursery to a deeper, more secure chamber in Dragonstone, far from windows, corridors, and shadows where assassins once slipped through.

It looked safe now.

Fresh stone, polished floors, new locks on the reinforced door.

But Rhaella’s body remembered otherwise.

Her shoulder ached as she bent to gather toys, an ache that had never fully faded. Not the dull throb of healing flesh, but the sharp, biting nerve-twist that shot down her arm whenever she reached too far. The pain that reminded her exactly where the blade entered, how it burned, how close the babes had been to dying in her arms.

Rhaenyra had told her that she did not need to stay.

“You have earned all the time you wish to heal,” the Princess had said, hand warm on Rhaella’s uninjured shoulder. “There are others who can watch them.”

Maybe that was true.

But Rhaella loved children, always had, always would. Their innocence steadied her, kept her from breaking completely. And these five little ones? These were her heart. Her charge. Her miracles to protect.

So she stayed.

She reached for a wooden wyvern, fingers trembling slightly.

Her grip slipped.

The toy thudded against the new floorboards with a hollow echo that felt much louder than it should have.

Rhaella winced.

Silently praying the sound wouldn't wake the babes. 

Baela and Rhaena slept side by side in the twin cribs.

Velaryon ones for now, though everyone in the household knew Daemon was quietly replacing them with Targaryen-carved cradles in what had become a silent, increasingly petty war between him and Lord Corlys.

Their silver curls peeked over the blankets, cheeks soft, breaths slow and even. Baela twitched in her dreams, a tiny fist curling. Rhaena sucked peacefully on the corner of her blanket.

Curled between the two girls was Baela’s hatchling, no larger than a coiled cat, scales a pale green. Its wings twitched with each of Baela’s movements, matching her dreams, while thin trails of harmless smoke puffed from its nostrils in gentle little sighs.

The creature’s tail lay draped protectively over both sleeping babes, as though keeping its own tiny vigil.

Rhaella watched them for a moment, the sight softening something aching in her chest.

Safe.

Tender.

Together.

The way the gods surely intended.

Across the room, the triplets played in their loose, uneven circle.

Three tiny suns orbiting one another in their own baby constellation.

Aemma lay on her back, kicking her plump legs as though she were trying to dance without standing. Every few kicks she let out a delighted squeal, followed by a tuneless hum that was somehow sweeter than any hymn Rhaella had ever learned.

Aemon sat upright beside her, posture strange in its steadiness for a child so small. His thumb resting in his mouth.

And Aenar, gods help her, Aenar was already on the move.

He launched himself into a crawl with the unsteady enthusiasm of a child who still hadn’t mastered the idea of balance. His little hands slapped the rug in rapid, joyful smacks as he made a determined beeline toward the hearth.

“Aenar, sweetling no, not there,” Rhaella called, her voice thinner than she wanted it to be.

Aenar reached the hearth.

He planted his chubby hands on the warm stone and pushed himself upright with a wobble so dramatic her heart lurched. His curls flopped into his eyes.

He blinked once, then patted the hearth as if greeting an old friend.

The fire crackled softly, bright and steady.

Rhaella’s breath caught.

She didn’t dare move closer.

She didn’t dare startle him.

If he flinched, if he tipped forward into that flame—

Her stomach twisted.

Tiny and fearless, Aenar leaned in. His face lit with wide-eyed wonder, cheeks puffed in delight. He babbled at the flame in a string of soft, earnest nonsense, like he was telling it a secret.

Rhaella's breath locked in her chest.

Aenar babbled again, higher this time, almost questioning.

The flame tilted.

Not with the breeze.

Not with the draft.

Not with anything she could name.

It turned toward him.

A small, impossibly delicate lean, as if the fire itself were tipping its head to listen better.

Rhaella’s heartbeat stuttered.

Aenar squealed in delight, smacking his hands against the warm stone. His curls bounced with every breath. He stuck his tongue out in concentration, readying another string of babble.

He offered it up like a gift.

And the flame answered.

Rhaella’s injured arm throbbed, but she couldn’t move. Couldn’t speak.

Her knees nearly gave out.

The thought formed before she could stop it:

The Seven are speaking to him—

The flame snapped.

A harsh, sharp pop that cracked through the room like a struck whip.

Rhaella flinched so violently her injured shoulder screamed. The babies didn’t startle. The dragonet didn’t stir.

Only her.

The fire twisted, recoiling from the word Seven as though insulted by it.

A shudder ran through Rhaella. Cold, wrong, undeniable.

That wasn’t the Seven, she realized, throat tightening. Whatever heard him, it wasn’t the Seven at all.

Heat rolled from the hearth, soft but deliberate, like the exhale of some unseen creature settling itself.

Aenar giggled, delighted, as though reassured.

Rhaella pressed a trembling hand to her sternum.

Her pulse skittered like a trapped bird.

A septa should not fear holy things.

But this didn’t feel holy.

It felt… ancient.

Older than prayers. Older than septons. Older than the gods she had been raised to worship.

Older than her.

Aenar leaned closer to the flame, resting his cheek against his fist the way a grown man might during gentle conversation.

And the candlelight shifted.

Bowed toward him.

As if greeting a little prince.

Rhaella’s breath finally escaped her, shaky, disbelieving.

“Aenar…” she whispered, voice cracking.

And then, incredibly, Aemma and Aemon followed him.

Aemma scooted forward in determined little hops, humming as she went. She settled beside her brother, leaning lightly against his shoulder.

Aemon came last, quiet and slow, and positioned himself on Aenar’s other side, sitting with perfect calm.

They didn’t look at each other.

They didn’t look at her.

All three stared at the flame.

Their little faces were open, intent, absolutely captivated, not by the light, but by something within the light.

They’re not just watching it, she realized, terrified.

They’re listening.

The flame brightened again, gentle, rhythmic.

Almost like speech.

Aenar tilted his head as if answering.

Aemma leaned closer, eyes wide.

Aemon breathed out a soft, thoughtful sound no one-year-old should know how to make.

A tiny sound slipped from Aemma’s mouth.

“K’pa.”

Barely shaped.

Soft as a kitten’s mewl.

She blinked, tried again.

“Keh…pa?”

Her little finger lifted toward the flame, wobbling as she pointed.

“Kepa!”

This time the word came out bright and sure. And something in the fire answered, a low, rolling swell of heat that pulsed like breath.

Rhaella’s blood ran cold.

A child calling the fire father was wrong, blasphemous, yet Aemma’s voice held a certainty no one-year-old should possess. Not mimicry. Not babble.

Aenar giggled, soft and delighted, as the flame leaned toward him with unmistakable warmth, like a creature lowering its head to nuzzle a beloved child.

Aemon leaned in too, solemn and sweet, tiny brows drawn as though he understood far more than he ever should.

The hearthlight wrapped around them. Gold, deepening to something richer, older, molten, as if answering a call carried in their blood.

Rhaella’s breath hitched.

It felt like standing too close to a great beast’s heartbeat.

Her pulse fluttered painfully. “Sweetling,” she managed, voice unsteady, “your father will be back soon enough. You needn’t… you needn’t call for him.”

Aemma did not hear her.

None of them did.

Their faces were too open, too intent, not looking at the fire, but into something vast crouched behind it.

Rhaella’s skin prickled, every hair rising.

She was a septa. She knew the cadence of prayer, the hush of sincere communion...

This was neither.

Rhaella pressed a hand to her mouth, fighting the dizzy swoop in her stomach.

Rhaella took a careful breath and stepped toward them, her shoulder aching as she bent slightly.

“All right now,” she murmured, voice gentle but firm. “No more crowding the fire. Come away from there.”

She slipped her good hand under Aenar’s arm first, helping him wobble to his feet. He squealed happily, already trying to toddle toward the playmats.

With her other hand, trembling but steady, she guided Aemma upright, brushing a curl from the child’s face as she redirected her from the hearth.

“Come along, little heart.”

Aemma obeyed easily, tiny fingers curling around Rhaella’s skirt as she tottered alongside her.

Aemon was last.

He did not move at first.

Not out of stubbornness, but something quieter. He simply sat there, staring at the flame as if waiting for it to finish speaking.

“Aemon,” Rhaella coaxed softly. “Up you get, sweet boy.”

He finally pushed himself to his feet steady and slipped his hand into hers.

But before he turned fully away, he paused.

Glanced back.

And with a small, solemn seriousness no one-year-old should possess…
he lifted his tiny hand…

…and waved.

A single, slow goodbye.

The flame flickered in response. 

Rhaella didn’t see it.

She was too busy ushering them toward the safe, padded corner of the nursery, all her focus on keeping them from tripping or wobbling.

“All right, darlings. That’s better,” she said, guiding them to their toys.

Behind her, the fire dimmed to ordinary warmth.

---

Hours bled away.

The cove dimmed from molten gold to bruised violet, then to the deep blue that comes before true night. Somewhere along the way the wind shifted, carrying the iron-stink of spilled blood toward the sea.

But in the small world beneath Syrax’s wings, the air stayed close and warm.

She had never moved.

From the instant Rhaenyra called, Syrax had anchored herself over the four fallen riders.

Her wings formed a living vault, a curved shield of gold.

Blood still clung to her claws, dried dark in the seams of her scales and the reek of the slaughterhouse pulsed just beyond her reach.

She ignored it.

And for a dragon, that was madness.

Creatures born of fire and hunger did not turn from fresh kill. They did not restrain themselves once frenzy took hold. They did not choose anything, not even loyalty, over instinct.

Yet Syrax did.

Every few minutes her muscles shivered, a ripple running down her spine, the primal urge to join the others raking at her nerves. Her pupils tightened to thin slits, then blew wide, then narrowed again as scents hit her. The copper tang of blood, the sharp musk of fear, the richer, darker smell of Caraxes cracking bones beneath his new weight.

Any other dragon would have broken.

Hunted.

Torn into the kills with the rest.

But Syrax kept her throat closed. Kept her talons sheathed into the sand. Kept her wings arched, unmoving, refusing the most ancient command written into dragonflesh.

She held the line.

For them.

Because Rhaenyra asked. Because Rhaenyra needed her.

Because something in Syrax’s bond, golden and fierce, outweighed instinct itself.

Rhaenyra knelt in that sanctuary, back braced against Syrax’s foreleg, moving from body to body as the hours dragged.

Laena’s head rested briefly in her lap while Rhaenyra pressed a damp cloth to her temples, wiping away sweat and sand.

Daemon’s hands were cleaned with seawater so the grit would not grind into raw skin when he finally woke.

Rhaenys’s collar was loosened when her breath turned too tight.

Vaegon’s hair was smoothed back each time he flinched in half-dreams. 

Each time one of them shuddered, Syrax’s head came down, a low sound vibrating through her chest. Rhaenyra would rest a hand against the warm curve of her muzzle for a heartbeat.

“I have them,” she would whisper. “Watch the rest.”

And Syrax did.

The other dragons had raged and fed, then slowed, then simply… lay down.

One by one the roaring had dulled into rough, uneven breaths, then into the deep, heavy quiet of spent creatures with full bellies and aching bones.

Now, at last, Caraxes lay coiled with his head on his own tail, eyes half-lidded, throat rumbling softly with each exhale. Meleys had settled along the curve of the rock, wings tucked so carefully it looked almost dainty, her head turned toward the glow of the sea. Vermithor had sunk low to the ground, wings folded tight, fire no longer gathering at the back of his throat, only a faint warmth that shimmered above his nostrils.

Vhagar had not moved far at all.

She lay close to the gold dome of Syrax’s wings, vast head resting on her forelimbs. Her eyes stayed open in thin slits, watching the trembling shapes beneath Syrax with the patient attention of something that had seen too many storms to be easily surprised.

When the last of the snarling had faded, when even the wind seemed to relax, a different sound finally reached Rhaenyra.

A raw, thin breath.

Laena’s fingers twitched first.

Then her lashes fluttered. Rhaenyra shifted, careful not to jostle her, brushing sweat-damp curls back from her face.

“Laena,” she said quietly. “You’re safe.”

Laena’s eyes opened, unfocused at first, then steadier. Her gaze flicked up to Syrax’s curved wing over their heads, then sidelong toward the shadow of Vhagar beyond.

“Is everyone…” Her voice scraped. “Are they alive?”

“Yes.” Rhaenyra’s chest loosened for the first time in hours. “All of you.”

Laena’s hand groped weakly and caught the edge of Rhaenyra’s sleeve. She didn’t speak again, but her grip held.

Behind them, another groan.

Daemon rolled onto his back with a muttered curse, as if the world had personally offended him by continuing to exist.

“My head,” he breathed, eyes squeezed shut. “If this is Visenya’s idea of a blessing, she and I will have words.”

Rhaenyra huffed a quiet, frayed sound that might have been a laugh on a better night.

“If you have breath to blaspheme,” she said, “you have breath enough to drink.”

She tipped a waterskin to his lips. He swallowed, coughed once, then stilled, eyes still closed.

His fingers brushed her wrist. It was not a grasp, just a touch, like a man checking that the tether was still there.

Across from them, Rhaenys shifted with visible effort, bracing on one hand. 

“Stay,” Rhaenyra said softly. “You’ve already suffered enough on my stone for one night.”

Rhaenys opened her eyes.

There was exhaustion there, and pain, and something else when she took in Rhaenyra’s hunched shoulders, the way her hands shook as she recapped the waterskin.

“You have kept us all breathing,” Rhaenys said, voice rough but steady. “That will be remembered.”

Rhaenyra looked away, heat prickling the back of her neck. “It was Syrax,” she said. “She held the line.”

As if summoned, Syrax lowered her head. One golden eye, rimmed in crimson from strain, fixed on Rhaenyra.

She nudged her lightly between the shoulders, a push that carried wordless approval.

Rhaenyra leaned back against her for a heartbeat, letting the weight of that regard sink through bone.

Vaegon woke in fragments. A flinch. A gasp. Fingers clawing at the air before Rhaenyra caught them and folded them gently back against his chest.

“Easy,” she said. “Vermithor is here. The rite is done.”

He squeezed his eyes shut, tears leaking from the corners. “I thought… if I misstepped… if any of you…”

“We did not burn,” Rhaenys cut in, firm now. “Look at us. We are battered, not ashes.”

A brief, fragile silence followed.

Then Daemon laughed.

A sharp, cracked sound that didn’t belong to sanity or recovery, it belonged to dragonfire still crawling under skin.

“Oh, how touching,” he rasped. “All of us congratulating ourselves for surviving. A miracle, truly.”

Rhaenyra turned toward him, brows drawing tight. “Daemon—”

He ignored her.

Or rather, he chose not to hear her.

He sat up with a violent sway, grabbing fistfuls of sand as though the earth might run from him too. His face was colorless beneath the fever flush, eyes near black and bottomless.

“You know what I remember?” he said, voice low, dangerous. “Not the dragons. Not the fire. Not the fucking pain.”

Rhaenyra stiffened.

Laena shifted, tense and wary.

Rhaenys watched with sharp, assessing stillness, as though she’d seen this kind of madness before.

Daemon’s gaze snapped to Rhaenyra, pinning her like a knife through silk.

“I remember,” he hissed, “reaching for you. And watching you flee from me.”

Laena whispered, “Daemon, stop—”

He rounded on her too, not with rage, but with something colder. “Even you saw it. Even you felt it. She pulled away from us like a girl caught spreading her legs for a man she shouldn’t.”

Rhaenyra’s face went bloodless.

But Daemon wasn’t finished.

No, he was just beginning.

His smile curved, cruel and fever-glazed. “Tell me, Rhaenyra… was it shame? Or did you suddenly remember that you’re trying to be a queen? That queens don’t reach for married men in front of their wives?”

Rhaenyra swallowed hard. “You’re not thinking clearly—”

“I am thinking perfectly clearly,” he snarled. “You worked so hard to crawl your way into the realm’s good graces. And then the moment I hold out my hand, you run like I’m about to drag you down into the dirt where you’d ‘ruin everything.’”

Rhaenyra didn’t step back.

She stepped forward.

One swift, decisive movement and before Daemon could brace, she seized his shoulders and shoved him flat onto the sand.

He hit the ground with a grunt, stunned, fever-bright eyes going wide.

Rhaenyra leaned over him, pinning him with a hand to his chest. Not enough to hurt, enough to remind him she was not a girl he could bully with words.

Daemon snarled up at her, teeth bared.

Rhaenyra pressed down harder, her hand feeling the frantic, powerful drum of his heart beneath the thick wall of his pectoral.

“You sleep with who you wish,” she hissed. “You fight who you wish. You take and take and call it your right. And the realm shrugs, because men are expected to be reckless.”

Laena’s breath hitched.

Rhaenys looked away, jaw clenched tight.

Daemon’s fists curled in the sand. “I reached for you—”

“And I wanted to take your hand,” Rhaenyra snapped.

His eyes flared shock, hunger, anger braided into something feral, something ancient, the kind of expression that made even dragons hold their breath.

He surged upward on instinct—

—and Rhaenyra moved.

Not with hesitation.

Not with fear.

With the fluid, decisive certainty of a dragon claiming a mount of her own.

She swung a leg over his hips and straddled him, her weight settling onto him with a force that knocked the breath out of his lungs. Her knees bracketed his waist, thighs cinching tight, pressing into the narrow line of his ribs. She felt the hard ridges of his muscle beneath her, the tremor running through him as her body pressed flush with his, the heat of her core a brand against the rigid length of him beneath his breeches. 

Daemon went perfectly still.

Not out of obedience. Out of shock. Out of hunger.

Her hand slammed flat against his chest, right over his hammering heart, pinning him down with more control than brute force. Her hair fell around their faces like a silver veil, brushing his jaw, trailing along his cheek, enclosing them in a cocoon of breath and heat and wildfire.

Daemon stared up at her as if she were an omen he had prayed for and feared in equal measure.

He opened his mouth, voice rough, rising, desperate,  “Then why in the fuck did you—”

“Shut. Up.”

The command hit him like a slap made of silk and steel.

Daemon froze beneath her.

Not because he stopped fighting, because something in her voice, in her posture, in the way she sat on him… hit him lower, deeper, more devastating than any sword.

Rhaenyra leaned close, her lips brushing the heat of his cheek when she spoke. “You’re fevered,” she said, each word slow and molten, sinking into him like molten gold poured into a mold. “You’re half dragonsfire and half arrogance, and I am not having this argument while you can barely hold your head up.”

Daemon’s breath cracked.

His pupils swallowed the color of his irises, chest rising hard under her palm, muscles tightening beneath her thighs. She could feel the tremor running through him, from the force it took to keep from arching into her.

Then his mouth curved. Slow, crooked, wicked, the kind of smile that had toppled kingdoms and seduced calamity.

"Oh… that's it," he rasped. "All it takes is me nearly burning alive, and look at you. On top of me like this." His gaze dragged down her body, a slow, deliberate path from the fierce set of her jaw, to the tempting curve of her neck, the lush swell of her breasts straining against the leather, and down to the narrow cinch of her waist before flaring out to her hips. He growled low in his throat, a sound of pure, unadulterated appreciation. "If I'd known mortal peril was the price, I would've thrown myself off Caraxes years ago."

Rhaenyra pressed harder, her palm flattening more firmly into the burning skin of his chest.

“Daemon.”

“What?” he crooned, feigning innocence as his eyes grew darker, hungrier. “You’re the one straddling my hips like I’m your unruly stallion.”

“I am holding you still.”

He exhaled a breath that shivered. “Call it what you like.”

“Shut up,” she said again, heat threading her voice.

His grin widened, sweat beading at his brow, fever turning him incandescent. “Keep telling me to shut up. It’s the closest you’ve ever come to admitting how badly you want to stay exactly where you are.”

He lifted his head a fraction, neck muscles straining, to bring his mouth closer to hers. His voice rasped low, dangerous:

“You don’t even know what you look like right now.”

Her thighs tightened involuntarily around his ribs.

Daemon sucked in a trembling breath.

“You’re sitting on me like you belong there,” he whispered. “And gods help me, you do.”

“Say one more word—” she hissed, leaning down until her forehead nearly pressed against his, “and I swear—”

“You’ll punish me?” he breathed, pupils blown wide, fever making him near feral. “Promise?”

Her pulse slammed hard enough that he felt it through her palm on his chest.

Laena turned away, breath trembling, heat rising in her cheeks.

Rhaenys muttered a prayer that sounded like an oath.

Vaegon forgot his own name.

And Daemon, Daemon laughed, breath hitching, ruined and ravenous beneath her.

“Seven hells,” he gasped. “You’re burning me alive.”

His head fell back into the sand, throat exposed, jaw clenched as a tremor ran down the length of him. His hips shifted barely, but enough to betray the want boiling through his blood.

Rhaenyra felt it. Felt him. Felt the fire sparking and catching between them like dry tinder.

“Now be still,” she ordered, her voice softer only because anything louder would have given her away.

Daemon’s lashes fluttered, breath ragged, lips parting.

“Make me,” he whispered a dare, a prayer, a plea.

But exhaustion finally crashed over him like a breaking wave.

Muscles slackened. Heat surged. His eyes fluttered shut, but his hands slid weakly up her thighs, fingertips curling against her skin through her ruined skirts, not to pull her closer…

…but just to feel her.

To confirm she was real.

To anchor himself to the one flame he couldn’t outburn.

His voice thinned to a hoarse whisper, barely there:

“Don’t… move yet…”

Daemon’s breath was still rough beneath her, his fevered smile soft and wrecked, when a sound rolled through the cove.

Not a dragon’s growl.

Not a groan from the sand.

A cough.

Wet, sharp, angry.

Rhaenyra’s head snapped toward it immediately.

“Seven—” She slid off Daemon in a rush, skirts dragging across the sand as she turned to where Archmaester Vaegon had braced himself on one elbow, pale as bone and trembling.

Daemon made a noise, half protest, half wounded pride as she left his body.

Rhaenyra reached Vaegon, kneeling beside him, steadying his shoulder before he could topple sideways.

“Easy,” she said. “Easy. Breathe.”

“I am breathing,” Vaegon snapped, voice hoarse as flint dragged across stone. “I’d breathe better if you two weren’t rutting on the beach like overheated cats while I’m burning internally.”

Rhaenyra choked on air.

Rhaenys closed her eyes like she was praying for death.

Behind them, Daemon lifted his head an inch, eyes cloudy, annoyed, and unmistakably jealous.

“No one was rutting,” Rhaenyra hissed under her breath.

Vaegon hacked another cough into his sleeve. “Oh yes, forgive me. I must have hallucinated you straddling my nephew on the gods-damned sand while I lay here dying.”

Daemon mumbled, “Not dying—”

Vaegon glared at him. “You be quiet. I am too weak to throttle you and that alone is its own torment.”

Laena pressed her lips together, fighting both horror and laughter.

Rhaenyra steadied Vaegon’s back as he tried to sit up further. “Grand-uncle, you’re hurt. We’re helping—”

“Oh, yes. Helping,” Vaegon muttered, gesturing vaguely toward the spot where she had been straddling Daemon moments before. “With your thighs. Very medicinal.”

Daemon, barely conscious but entirely Daemon, muttered, “It helped me.”

Vaegon pointed a shaking finger at him. “I hope your fever cooks your brain entirely.”

Daemon smirked.

Rhaenyra shot him a look that promised violence. “Daemon, shut up.”

Across the cove, Syrax lifted her head and made a low, disapproving rumble, backing her rider.

Rhaenyra eased Vaegon up until his shoulders rested against Vermithor’s foreleg.

The Bronze Fury shifted, careful as a mountain trying not to crush a single tree. His huge head dipped low, until his snout touched Vaegon’s hair.

Vaegon let out a shaky laugh.

The sound rippled outward.

Caraxes lifted his head, blinking heavily. His eyes found Daemon’s prone form inside Syrax’s shelter. A low thread of sound spilled from his chest, questioning.

Daemon, still half-conscious, turned his face toward the noise. His mouth twitched, not quite a smile. “Still uglier than the day I claimed you,” he teased. 

Caraxes’s jaw parted in what might have been an answering huff.

Meleys’s attention sharpened on Rhaenys. Vhagar’s pupils thinned, gaze tracking the rise and fall of Laena’s chest. Vermithor’s rumble deepened, focusing fully on Vaegon.

One by one, the dragons’ scattered awareness drew in.

Not to the scent of blood. Not to the lingering heat on the air.

To their riders.

Rhaenyra felt the moment the mood changed.

The air under Syrax’s wings went lighter, as if some invisible weight had eased. Syrax’s tail uncoiled from its tight brace around them. Her chest rose in a deeper breath, then another. The taut line of muscle along her neck loosened.

“They are done hunting,” Rhaenyra whispered, more to herself than anyone else.

She rested her palm flat against Syrax’s scales.

“You can let them closer now,” she said quietly. 

Syrax’s eyes slid closed for a second, as if listening to a sound only she could hear. When they opened again, the wild edge was gone, replaced by something softer and terribly tired.

Slowly, carefully, she began to lower her wings.

Light seeped back in between the golden membranes. The night sky showed itself in strips. The smell of the sea crept closer, fresh and salty underneath the iron tang.

As the shelter opened, each dragon leaned in more. 

Caraxes dragged himself a little nearer on his elbows, enormous head dropping to the sand so his eye was level with Daemon’s. Meleys inched closer on silent talons until her shadow fell protectively over Rhaenys. Vermithor shifted enough that his massive wing formed a barrier between Vaegon and the worst of the gore-streaked stone.

Vhagar remained where she was but lowered her jaw to the ground beside Laena, so near that Laena could have reached out and touched the old queen’s teeth if she wished. The deep sound that rose from Vhagar’s chest thrummed through Laena’s bones like a slow, distant drum.

Rhaenyra looked around their small, strange circle.

Four dragons, ringed close.

Four riders, barely upright.

Syrax, at her back.

She let out a breath she felt she had been holding since the first bowl of blood was raised.

“The worst of it is past,” she said, voice almost a whisper. “We will move when the sun rises. For tonight, we stay where the dragons can see us.”

Daemon shifted, eyes finally opening fully. “And what are you, then,” he managed, “if not a dragon?”

Rhaenyra looked at him, at Laena curled against Vhagar’s jaw, at Rhaenys leaning into Meleys, at Vaegon pressing his forehead to Vermithor’s scaled leg.

“I am the one who has to count all of you in the morning,” she said. “So sleep. Please.”

The please slipped out before she could stop it.

Laena’s fingers tightened in her sleeve.

Rhaenys closed her eyes and let her head rest against dragon-scale.

Daemon’s mouth curved, small and rueful, before his lashes dropped.

Vaegon’s breathing evened as Vermithor’s rumble rocked him toward rest.

Syrax curled herself more firmly around Rhaenyra, one wing now half draped, not as a barricade, but as a blanket.

“I know,” Rhaenyra whispered. “You wanted to hunt. You should have been hunting.”

Syrax huffed, a breath warm enough to curl the fine hairs by Rhaenyra’s ear.

“You were extraordinary,” Rhaenyra praised. “More than any dragon I’ve ever known.”

Syrax released a low, vibrating sound, almost like a purr dragged up from the deepest part of her chest. She nudged Rhaenyra again, firmer this time, as if urging her to lie back and rest.

Rhaenyra let herself sink against the dragon’s side, her back pressed to warm scales that shifted slightly with each breath.

“I don’t think I deserve you,” she admitted softly, the words slipping out in the hush between them. “Not tonight. Not after what I asked of you.”

Syrax lifted her head just enough to bump her snout against Rhaenyra’s cheek.

A gesture of acknowledgment.

Of loyalty.

Of pride.

Rhaenyra’s throat tightened.

“Thank you,” she breathed. “My fierce girl. My golden lady.”

Syrax curled around her more tightly. Not to restrain, not to command, but to keep her close, until Rhaenyra was wrapped in a cocoon of scale and heat.

The sounds of the cove faded.

The scent of blood receded.

The dragons outside the circle settled into their own whispers of sleep.

And for the first time since the rite began, Rhaenyra let her eyes close.

Safe under Syrax’s wing.

Notes:

If you’re wondering how this chapter got so long:
it was supposed to be one scene.
ONE.

But then Rhaenyra took charge, Daemon got dramatic, Laena said “I choose,” Vhagar started speaking in visions, Otto spiraled, Harwin mourned, the babies talked to fire, and Syrax decided she’s the only responsible adult.

…so here we are.

Chapter 23: Judgement From the Sky

Rhaenyra woke to the pull of her own breath, sharp in her chest like something had startled her out of water.

Her throat tasted of smoke.

She took in her surroundings slowly.

Syrax’s tail lay half-buried in the sand beside her. A ridge of scales pressed into her spine where she’d slept leaning against her dragon’s warmth. 

And through all of it, she felt the echo of Daemon’s voice still lingering like bruises across her thoughts.

Rhaenyra eased herself free of the protective coil of her dragon’s wing. The sand was cold under her bare feet as she stepped out into the faint light, brushing grit from her palms.

A shape moved near the waterline.

Daemon.

He sat on the shore with his arms braced on his knees, hair loose around his shoulders, the breeze ruffling the strands. The fever had broken. His skin was still too pale, but his eyes were clear.

And he was awake.

Watching the horizon like it might deliver something he doubted he deserved.

Rhaenyra crossed the sand, each step deliberate, careful not to wake the others. Dragons stirred here and there but did not rise. Rhaenys still slept with Meleys’s wing draped over her like a living curtain. Laena’s hand rested against Vhagar’s foreleg. Vaegon’s head lay pillowed against Vermithor’s warm scales.

Daemon didn’t look at her.

“You left me.”

His voice was flat, scraped to the bone.

“You were fevered.”

“You left.”

He said it again, quieter. Not accusation. Not anger.

A truth that had wounded him in ways he did not understand how to name.

Rhaenyra inhaled, slow and deliberate, exhaling it through her nose like she was steadying herself on a knife’s edge.

“You were not making sense,” she said.

Daemon turned his head then, and the look he fixed on her was sharp enough to draw blood.

“I was making perfect sense.”

“No,” she said. “You were cruel.”

A muscle jumped in his jaw.

“That’s sense enough.”

“No.” Her voice snapped like a whip. “That’s cowardice.”

The word struck him like an arrow.

His eyes widened a fraction. Cowardice. Jelmazmo.

He tasted the foreignness of the accusation, how absurd it felt on his skin and yet how precisely it landed. 

“Cowardice?” he repeated, voice cooling, thinning. “Say it again.”

Rhaenyra did not hesitate.

“You accuse me of shame,” she said. “But you, Daemon… the moment you are hurt, the moment you feel anything you can’t command, you lash out at me.”

Her words hit him deeper than she knew.

Inside, Daemon felt something shift, like a scale pried off his ribs. He hated how she saw him. He hated how she could. How her gaze pierced right through every armor plate he’d forged across decades.

Nyke daor mittys, he thought. I am not weak.

But he was.

Rhaenyra stepped closer.

“You know my position,” she said. “You know how hard this has been. Every choice I make is dragged through the muck. Every breath I take is measured against a standard no man would survive. You know the pressure. You know the eyes watching. You know what I’ve had to claw back just to stand at all.”

Daemon did know.

He had watched her bruised by the realm her whole life.

He had watched her earn what others were given.

He had watched her fight with teeth and strategy and stubborn fire.

Hearing her speak it aloud twisted something in his chest.

“And still,” she said softly, “you strike me where it hurts most. Humiliating me intentionally.”

Daemon’s face changed.

Not softened. Hardened. Concentrated. 

“That’s what you think I was doing?” he asked quietly. “Humiliating you?”

“Weren’t you?”

Daemon’s chest hurt. 

“No.” His voice trembled with the effort of control. “No. I wanted to wound you.” His jaw tightened. “Because you wounded me.”

Her brows furrowed. “Daemon—”

“You stepping back felt like betrayal,” he said. “I reached for you. And you stepped away.” His eyes narrowed, but not in anger. In pain. “I have been rejected before. I have been dismissed. But never by someone I…” He stopped, swallowing the word before it could betray him fully.

He looked at her with that awful, beautiful nakedness only he ever dared.

“Jemēla, Rhaenyra,” he whispered. You have me.

His voice broke on the next words.

“I do not know how to be gentle with that.”

Rhaenyra’s breath came shallow.

“Say the word,” he whispered, "If you wish it, I will take their heads. Your enemies. Your doubters. Every lord who speaks your name with contempt.” His eyes flicked to King’s Landing’s distant silhouette. “Even Viserys.”

Rhaenyra’s pulse jumped. “Daemon—”

Daemon didn’t stop.

“I will break the Kingsguard. I will burn the Red Keep to its foundations. I will drown Otto Hightower in the blackwater myself.” His eyes were obsidian now, black with devotion and madness and love all braided together. “All you need do is ask.”

His breath ghosted across her cheek.

“Say the word.”

His voice softened, but it only made him more terrifying.

“You do not need to fear shame. Or failure. Or consequences. Not while I draw breath. If you want a kingdom cleared of every threat… I will scour it clean for you.”

Rhaenyra swallowed hard. “You would kill Viserys.”

“If he harms you,” Daemon said without hesitation. “If he denies you. If he removes you from succession. If he tries to break you the way he broke himself.”

His hand rose, fingers hovering at her jaw but not touching, trembling with the force of everything he wasn’t saying.

“Why are you telling me this?” she whispered.

Daemon didn’t blink.

“Because you need to understand who I am.”

She swallowed. “I know who you are.”

Daemon breathed out, slow and deliberate, as if choosing whether to bare a wound or a weapon.

“I burn violently, Niece. Not gently. Not nobly. I do not wound with intention; I destroy. I kill without hesitation. Blood staining my hands means nothing to me. It never has.”

The wind shifted, cold against her cheek.

“I am telling you this because if you walk away from me again… if you recoil from what I feel… if you pull back and make me feel that break again…”

His throat worked.

“…I will not survive it honorable.”

Rhaenyra went still.

Daemon continued, voice barely above a whisper.

“I will burn something. Someone. Myself, if I must.”

Her breath hitched; she felt it all the way down her spine.

“And I need you to know that,” Daemon said, eyes burning. “I need you to understand the danger of my heart… and the danger of having it.”

Rhaenyra’s voice came out thin, shaken. “And if I stay?”

Daemon leaned in until their foreheads finally touched, heat matching heat.

“If you stay,” he breathed, “I will give you everything I am.”

His hand slid around the back of her neck.

“My loyalty. My violence. My children. My fire.”

A pause.

“And the crown you were born for.”

Rhaenyra didn’t move toward him with intent.

It wasn’t desire, or defiance, or even decision.

It was gravity.

Something in her chest gave way. Quietly, suddenly, and she leaned forward as if a string inside her had snapped. Daemon reacted before he could even think; his hands lifted, steadying her as she folded down into him.

She sank against his side first, then his front, her forehead finding the space between his collarbone and shoulder like she’d lain there a thousand times. Her palms braced weakly against his chest before slipping, fingers curling into his tunic as her body gave in completely.

Daemon lowered his chin until it brushed the top of her head, breath catching.

One arm came around her waist without hesitation; the other slid up her back and settled between her shoulder blades, holding her like she might disappear if he loosened his grip.

“Daemon,” she said.

He tilted his head, his nose brushing her hairline. “Hmm?”

Her fingers curled tighter in his tunic, knuckles white with the effort not to strike him.

“If you ever speak to me like that again, especially in front of others—”

She paused.

Just long enough for him to feel it: the temperature shift, the lethal bloom of something older than either of them, something Valyrian and merciless unfurling inside her.

Rhaenyra rose on her toes and pressed her mouth to his ear, her voice a whisper sharpened to a blade.

“…I will order Syrax to burn you alive.”

A low, sinful laugh escaped him, more breath than sound, shaken loose by the thrill that crawled down his spine.

“Ṁyrys zaldrīzes,” he whispered, my fierce dragon, the name dragged from somewhere hopeless and ruined inside him.

Her breath hitched despite herself, fury and heat twining like twin serpents in her gut.

“I’m not jesting,” she said, voice soft but carved from iron. “You will not humiliate me. Not in private. Not in court. Not anywhere.”

Daemon’s grip on her waist tightened just a fraction. Not enough to restrain, just enough to feel her. 

“I know you’re not jesting,” Daemon said, voice slipping into something deep and molten. “That’s what makes it exquisite.”

Rhaenyra pulled back just enough to look at him, eyes narrowed, breath brushing his jaw.

“Ñuha kepus,” she whispered, weighted with threat, history, and something far more intimate. “You test me too far.”

Daemon’s smile didn’t reach his eyes.

It was smaller. Darker. The kind that meant he’d already given in long before she threatened him.

“I will always test you,” he replied, brushing his nose against her cheek. “How else will I know where your fire burns hottest?”

Rhaenyra planted a hand firmly on his chest and shoved.

Not enough to untangle them, not enough to break the hold they had on each other, but enough to force an inch of space between their faces. Enough to make him feel the rejection of the moment.

Rhaenyra exhaled once, sharp. “I stepped back because you forget yourself,” she said, voice low, steady, dangerous. “You speak to me as if I am a woman you can play with in corners.”

Her chin lifted a fraction.

A dragon preparing to roar.

“And you forget most of all, before anything, I am a mother.”

For the first time, something flickered in Daemon’s expression. Something taut, hot, and almost chastened.

His hand on her waist tightened, fingers flexing against the fabric of her gown.

“I have not forgotten,” he said, voice softer than it had been all morning, but no less intense. “How could I? Your children cling to you like the world ends when you leave the room.”

She shifted enough to look at him fully, her face close, her eyes steady. There was no softness now, only truth sharpened into something clean and unyielding.

“Then you should understand, I cannot afford recklessness. Not when my children are still so young. Not when they are barely steady on their feet. Not when they are already watched like omens and threats and wonders.”

Daemon’s expression changed. Not to anger or defensiveness, but something close to grief.

Daemon swallowed hard.

Rhaenyra’s voice lowed, turned quiet and devastating.

“And if I am seen straddling you on a beach. In the open, before dragons, before family...do you know who they will use that against?”

His jaw clenched.

“Aemon,” she whispered. “Aenar. Aemma. And your darling girls too. Baela and Rhaena. And any child I might bear with you.”

His voice came low, unsteady.

“And what does that mean for us, then? For all of us?”

Rhaenyra closed her eyes briefly, as if gathering what little steadiness the morning offered. When she opened them, her honesty hit like a blade sliding free.

“It means we must be careful,” she said softly. “Until the realm is mine.”

Daemon’s breath left him in a slow, pained exhale.

Rhaenyra pressed on, because she had to.

“When I am crowned,” she said, “I will set Laenor free.”

A beat.

“And like Aegon the Conqueror before me, I will take the consorts I choose. Laena, and you, as husband and wife beneath my crown.”

His breath hitched. He didn’t speak. Couldn’t.

Rhaenyra’s fingers brushed the side of his neck, a small anchor, a small mercy.

“But until then,” she continued, her voice tightening with something that was neither shame nor fear, “if my womb quickens… if any child is conceived before that day…”

Daemon’s throat worked.

“They will bear the name Velaryon,” she said.

His eyes darkened, a flash of something like wounded pride flickering beneath.

Rhaenyra didn’t look away.

“Laenor has agreed to these terms,” she added quietly. “Fully. Willingly. He understands the necessity. He understands the truth of what we are building.”

Daemon’s hands flexed at her hips, the slightest tremor running through him.

He didn’t explode.

He didn’t scoff or rage or challenge.

Instead, he whispered, voice scraped raw:

“So this is the cost.”

Rhaenyra nodded, forehead brushing his jaw.
“This is the cost. For now.”

His breath shook out, harsh and unsteady.

Rhaenyra leaned into him more fully, one hand sliding up to his cheek.

“When I am queen,” she murmured, “there will be no pretending. No masks. No borrowed names. My children, our children, will be Targaryen. All of them.”

Daemon’s eyes closed, lashes trembling against her brow.

“And until then,” she whispered, “we survive the way dragons always have. Quietly. Strategically. With fire held tight behind our teeth.”

For a long moment, neither spoke.

The only sound was their breathing.

Hers steady, his ragged.

Daemon lifted his head, just enough to look at her.

“A child of your womb will not be a stranger to me,” he said. Not a threat.

A plea wrapped in pride.

His hand slid up her spine, fingertips tracing each vertebra like a litany he’d memorized long before he ever touched her.

“I want them raised as one brood.” His voice softened, but the ferocity beneath it did not. “A single clutch. Dragons learning together. Playing together. Fighting together. Loving each other.”

Rhaenyra’s breath caught.

He lifted her chin gently, guiding her eyes to his.

“They will grow as siblings,” he whispered.
“Yours. Laena’s. Mine. One family.”

Rhaenyra swallowed, heart pounding against the cage of his arm around her.

She cupped the side of his face, thumb brushing the faint scar near his ear.

“I promise you this,” she said, holding his gaze so he could not doubt it. “All our children, every one born of fire and blood. Will be raised together. One brood. One clutch. One house.”

Daemon exhaled like a man undone, leaning his forehead to hers again.

Rhaenyra's lips curved, slow and wicked.

She tilted her head, brushing her mouth against the corner of his jaw.

“Tell me, kepus,” she purred, voice slipping from solemnity into something silkier, sharper. “How many tiny terrors do you imagine chasing through Dragonstone?”

Rhaenyra’s fingers traced the line of his throat.

“How many little riders tugging at your boots?” she teased. “How many dragon eggs do you plan to steal for them?”

Daemon made a noise that was absolutely not dignified.

Her smile sharpened.

“Gods, listen to you,” Rhaenyra teased, brushing her lips along the line of his jaw. “You sound as if I’ve whispered seduction instead of sense.”

He caught her wrist, not to stop her touch, but to feel it, hold it.

And dragged her hand back to his jaw, his breath breaking ragged across her knuckles.

“Oh, you want numbers, do you?” he rasped, his voice dipping into a low, hungry purr. “Seven hells,” his pupils dilating. “If it were only up to me, you’d have a new egg hardening in a cradle every season."

His eyes burned.

“I’d fill Dragonstone with silver-headed demons who bite ankles and set curtains on fire. Little beasts with your temper and my tongue, gods, can you imagine the chaos?”

Then, with a wicked tilt of her head, and smirk made of glass. “You are an old, dirty man, Daemon.”

Daemon blinked. Then scoffed, offended, aroused, and devastated in equal measure.

“Old?” he demanded.

She pulled back just enough to meet his eyes, delight sparking in her own.

“Older than me,” she said sweetly. “Far more… experienced.” Her fingers traced the collar of his tunic. "And terribly easy to fluster.”

“Fluster?” he repeated, insulted. “By you?”

She arched a brow. “You make sounds, Uncle. Soft ones.”

His jaw clenched like he’d been stabbed by pride itself.

“I do not—”

“You do,” she said warmly, wickedly. “And it’s adorable.”

Daemon growled. An honest, ancient, dragon-deep sound and caught her hips in his hands, dragging her just a fraction closer.

“Adorable,” he repeated, voice darkening, “is not a word I accept.”

Rhaenyra leaned forward until her lips brushed his cheek, her voice a sinful whisper.

“Too late, kepus. I said what I said.”

She smiled against his skin, slow, smug, sensual.

“And besides,” she teased, “you’re the one who keeps talking about filling my life with children. That sounds very childish of you.”

Daemon’s fingers flexed hard at her waist.

“Rhaenyra,” he warned.

“Yes, Uncle?” Honey and danger all at once.

Daemon’s breath left him in a shudder.

And there, a few paces away, Laena Velaryon stood with Vhagar’s massive tail still curled lazily behind her. Her hair was mussed from sleep, her cheeks flushed with warmth, and her expression of...

Pure delight.

“Seven hells,” she said, brushing sand from her arms, “you two look like a painting the septas would ban.”

“Laena,” Rhaenyra muttered, attempting to sit back without looking like she was escaping. “You’re awake.”

“Barely.” Laena stretched her arms overhead, ribs peeking through the edge of her leathers. “But awake enough to see you draped over my irritable husband.”

Daemon’s mouth twitched.

“Jealous?” he drawled.

Laena laughed, bright, unguarded, warm enough to chase off the last of the dawn chill.

“Of you?” She snorted. “Never. Of Rhaenyra holding you like a misbehaving hound who’s finally been leashed? Perhaps.”

Laena knelt gracefully beside them, her knee brushing Rhaenyra’s thigh, her hand settling lightly on Daemon’s shoulder.

Her touch softened him instantly.

“I’m glad to see you speaking,” she said, gentle now. “Truly speaking.”

Rhaenyra lowered her hand, embarrassed heat fading into something softer, deeper.

“We… had things unsaid,” she admitted.

Laena hummed. “That much was obvious.”

She leaned in, placing a feather-light kiss on Rhaenyra's cheek. Then another on Daemon’s temple.

Their responding laughter like molten gold, spreading to the ears of Rhaenys Targaryen.

Meleys shifted beneath her, a lazy ripple of scales that told her the dragon was awake long before her rider.

Rhaenys pushed herself up on one elbow, brushing damp hair from her cheek and blinked.

Not ten yards away, beneath the pale blush of dawn, her daughter, her good-son, and her future queen sat in a tangled arrangement of limbs and proximity that was in no way accidental.

Rhaenys did not gasp.

She did not shout.

She did not even blink twice.

She simply exhaled through her nose in a long, low, entirely unsurprised breath.

“Of course,” she muttered. “Of course they decided to do this now.”

Beside her, another form shifted.

Archmaester Vaegon sat up far more quickly than she did, hair a mess, robes wrinkled from sleep, but eyes sharp as a whetted blade the moment they landed on the trio.

“…fascinating,” he said.

Rhaenys shot him a look. “That is one word.”

“It is the correct one.”

Vaegon folded his hands neatly. “The alignment of their attachment is unusually harmonious.”

Rhaenys stared at him, expression caught between outrage and exhaustion.

“Vaegon. They are wrapped around each other like a lovers’ knot.”

“Yes,” Vaegon said, serene. “Harmoniously.”

Rhaenys pinched the bridge of her nose.

The trio laughed again. Laena bright, Rhaenyra warm, Daemon trying and failing to pretend he was not utterly undone by both women.

Rhaenys exhaled sharply.

“This is reckless,” she murmured. “It is messy. It is, gods, it is typical of Daemon. And Rhaenyra. And apparently Laena now. A perfect storm. Fire and wildfire and… whatever force my daughter is when she is determined.”

Vaegon didn’t even bother to look in the trio’s direction this time.

He simply sighed, long and weary, like a man who had lived through multiple Targaryen scandals and was profoundly unimpressed by one more.

“Rhaenys,” he said, rubbing at his temple, “I am far too old to give a damn.”

Rhaenys glared at her uncle. 

“Triangles, circles, knots. Whatever shape they’re forming over there.” He waved a hand vaguely toward the trio, who were now leaning into one another in a way that absolutely confirmed some shape was happening. “It is beneath my concern.”

Rhaenys drew herself up, affronted. “Beneath your—?”

“Your daughter seems happy enough,” Vaegon said bluntly. 

Rhaenys sputtered. “That’s hardly the point.”

“It is precisely the point,” he countered, adjusting himself against Vermithor as the Bronze fury gazed down at Rhaenys. Matching his riders scholarly stare. “Three dragonriders who actually like each other. No screaming. No bloodshed. No political daggers under anyone’s ribs. It’s a miracle the maesters would choke to put in their records.”

Rhaenys stared at him.

Vaegon shrugged one bony shoulder.

“Frankly, I think we should encourage it.”

“Encour...Vaegon, my daughter—”

“Yes, yes, I heard you.”

He cut her off without remorse.

“It is early. I am tired. And not one of them is currently on fire. That alone qualifies this morning as a blessing.”

Meleys gave a rumbling snort in agreement.

Rhaenys shot the dragon a betrayed look.

“…I despise how reasonable you’re being.”

Vaegon sniffed. “Someone in this family ought to try it.”

Rhaenys let out a long, slow exhale and rolled her eyes skyward, not in prayer, not in patience, but in the kind of maternal disgust reserved for family members behaving exactly as predicted.

Vaegon, meanwhile, attempted to rise.

Attempted.

He got halfway up before his spine made a sharp cracking sound that echoed off the stone.

“Seven—!”

He clapped a hand to his lower back, face contorting.

Rhaenys blinked. “Are you well?”

“No,” Vaegon groaned, “I am old, Rhaenys.”

Rhaenys bit back a laugh.

Vaegon tried again to stand. His robe snagged on a rock. He cursed in three languages. When he finally managed to straighten, he listed slightly to one side like a ship taking on water.

“This is indecent,” he said. “I have dragons in my blood. My ancestors built empires. And here I am—” he gestured sharply at the sand and immediately regretted it, wincing “—being humbled by rocks.”

Rhaenys snorted.

“You are creaking like an old ship.”

He sighed, dramatic and put-upon.

“At least ships float.”

Meleys’s tail swished, delighted with the chaos.

Daemon glanced over catching sight of Rhaenys and Vaegon bickering in the sand.

Daemon muttered, “Gods, morning has come too soon,” and Rhaenyra pinched his thigh in reprimand.

Vaegon groaned again.

The cove brightened by slow degrees, the first strands of sunrise catching on wet rock and dragon-scale. One by one, the beasts shifted. Stretching wings. Shaking off sand. Snorting the night from their lungs.

Rhaenyra rose first, brushing grit from her palms, and Daemon and Laena followed with the reluctant stiffness of people who had slept on stone and adrenaline.

“Inside,” Rhaenys said, already climbing to her feet with Meleys’s rumble nudging her upright. “Before Vaegon expires on the shore and we all have to explain it to the Citadel.”

“I heard that,” Vaegon said, though he accepted Laena’s arm as she steadied him.

The procession toward the castle was almost absurdly domestic in the faint morning light:

Rhaenyra walking arm-in-arm with Laena. Daemon beside them, brushing sand from his hair and pretending he didn’t enjoy how they leaned into him. 

Rhaenys striding ahead with the dignity of a queen on a battlefield.

Vaegon grumbling about “savage terrain” and “youthful degeneracy”, while Laena helped steady him. 

Dragons lumbering behind them, enormous shadows on the pale sand.

By the time they reached the carved stone steps of Dragonstone’s keep, the wind had picked up, carrying salt and smoke and the first hints of a busy day.

Rhaenyra reached the threshold first.

As soon as her hand touched the iron handle, a figure stepped into her path.

A messenger. Young. Breathless. Cloak soaked with dew. His boots were caked in the black mud of the causeway.

He dropped to one knee so fast Rhaenyra actually startled back a half-step.

“Princess Rhaenyra,” he gasped. “Forgive the intrusion, I was ordered not to delay a moment.”

Daemon’s hand immediately found the hilt of his sword.

Rhaenys’s eyes sharpened.

Laena drew a slow, steadying breath.

Vaegon only sighed. “Gods. What now?”

The messenger looked up at Rhaenyra, throat working, voice cracking under the weight of urgency.

“My lady… a raven arrived at dawn from Harrenhal.”

Rhaenyra stepped closer, calm in a way that only made his nerves worse. “Good. You’ve done your duty.”

She lifted a hand. Silent dismissal, elegant, unmistakable.

“Go find a warm meal in the kitchens,” she said. “And rest. You look half-dead on your feet.”

The messenger blinked, startled by kindness he clearly hadn’t expected.

Before he could bow, Rhaenyra nudged Daemon lightly with her elbow.

The meaning was clear.

Daemon huffed a breath, and reached into the inner fold of his tunic. He withdrew a few heavy silver stags and tossed them to the messenger with casual precision.

“Try not to drink yourself blind,” Daemon drawled. “Or do. Harrenhal letters never bring good news.”

The messenger caught the coins, eyes going wide, gratitude overtaking fear.

“T-thank you, my Prince. My Princess.”

“Go,” Rhaenyra said softly.

He obeyed instantly, nearly stumbling in his haste to leave.

Daemon watched him scurry off, one brow arching. “You’re getting soft.”

Rhaenyra didn’t look at him, just kept her gaze fixed on the sealed letter in her hand.

“No,” she said. “I’m getting efficient.”

She broke the wax seal with her thumb.

Laena stepped closer, expression tightening.
Vaegon leaned in, arms crossed, bracing himself for whatever doom Harrenhal had chosen to spit out this time.

Rhaenyra read the letter once. Twice. A third time.

When she finally lowered the parchment, her eyes weren’t soft, or shaken, or overwhelmed.

They were bright.

Daemon noticed instantly. He had always known the temperature of her fire by the way her pupils narrowed.

“Rhaenyra,” he said carefully. “What does it say?”

She inhaled once, steady and deliberate.

“Lyonel Strong is dead,” she said. “Poisoned.”

For a heartbeat, Rhaenyra saw the man, not the move. The patient counsel, the quiet loyalty.

Then the board reassembled itself in her mind.

Laena covered her mouth.

Rhaenys stiffened.

Vaegon let out a long, ancient sigh like he had expected this sooner or later.

But Rhaenyra...Rhaenyra’s eyes glittered.

“Poison,” Daemon repeated, the word breaking into a snarl. “Coward’s work.”

Rhaenyra’s mouth curved, not into a smile, but into something far more dangerous.

“Harwin believes Otto had a hand in it,” she said.

Daemon swore.

Rhaenyra’s gaze sharpened.

“And I believe Harwin.”

Rhaenys stepped closer, jaw tight. “Rhaenyra… do not be relieved.”

“I am,” Rhaenyra said plainly. “I’m glad.”

Laena blinked. “Glad?”

Rhaenyra held up the letter, parchment trembling slightly, not from fear, but from energy.

“This is an opening. Otto made a mistake. A bold one. A sloppy one. If Harwin is calling for justice publicly, if he wants me to stand with him, then the entire court will see their Hand accused by the heir.”

She exhaled sharply, the sound bright as struck steel.

“I’ve waited years for Otto Hightower to misstep in daylight.”

Daemon watched her with something approaching awe.

Rhaenyra’s voice dropped, colder and hotter all at once.

“He murdered a loyal man, reclaimed power before the body cooled, and thinks the realm won’t notice. He thinks I won’t notice.”

Her eyes sparkled like chips of dragon glass.

“Oh, I notice.”

Laena swallowed.

Rhaenys looked both proud and troubled.

Vaegon said, “The rot he speaks of… the boy is not wrong.”

Daemon’s jaw flexed. “Then we ride for Kingslanding at once.”

Rhaenyra froze.

Daemon realized his mistake exactly when her eyes snapped to his.

“Daemon,” she said softly, “you are exiled.”

He flinched like she’d driven a blade under his ribs.

“I will not let you go alone.”

“You must,” she said, stepping in, hand wrapping around his wrist with iron certainty.

His breath left him in a low, furious exhale. “Rhaenyra—”

“You cannot ride into the red keep,” she insisted. “Not yet. Not while Viserys is still swallowing Alicent’s poison like honeyed wine. One glimpse of you and the king will slam the throne room shut before I get within ten paces.”

Daemon stared at her like she’d carved out his name and left him hollow.

Laena’s hand landed gently on his arm. “She’s right.”

Rhaenyra lifted the letter again, but her voice had shifted, colder, sharper, alive with strategy.

“Harwin is calling for me,” she said. “The heir. The name Otto fears.”

Her eyes glittered like sunrise on a blade.

“And I intend to stand before the Iron Throne and accuse Otto Hightower myself.”

Rhaenys inhaled sharply, shoulders straightening.

Daemon shut his eyes, jaw clenched tight enough to shake.

“Then I will wait for you here,” he forced out. “But if Otto lifts a single...”

“He won’t,” Rhaenyra cut in. “Not if we strike first.”

Daemon blinked.

Laena’s head lifted.

Rhaenys’s brows rose.

Vaegon muttered, “Oh gods,” but didn’t disagree.

Rhaenyra stepped closer to Daemon, her fingers sliding down his forearm until they gripped his hand.

“Daemon,” she said quietly, “I need you to go to the Stepstones now.”

His eyes snapped to hers, startled.

“What?”

“I need you further away,” she explained, voice low and urgent. “So Otto cannot even begin to tie your name to this. He will always blame you. That is Otto’s most repetitive move. If you are anywhere near Dragonstone, he will twist this into treason, conspiracy...whatever suits his purpose.”

She leaned in, heat brushing his cheek.

“And I will not give him the chance.”

Daemon stared at her, chest rising hard. “You are sending me away.”

“No,” she corrected. “I am sending you ahead.”

His brows furrowed.

Rhaenyra’s voice dropped into command.

“You go to the Stepstones. Fortify the Emberguard, the trainees. Establish our strength there.”

Her eyes burned.

“And while Otto’s eyes are fixed on court…”

She turned to Laena, then Rhaenys, then Vaegon.

“…we will fly.”

Laena’s breath caught.

Rhaenys’s lips curved in the faintest, deadliest smile.

Vaegon exhaled, ancient and resigned. “A show of force.”

“Exactly,” Rhaenyra said. “We ride to Harrenhal. All four dragons. All four riders. Three generations. A message the realm cannot misinterpret.”

Daemon’s eyes darkened in realization.

She continued:

“We pick up Harwin. Then we fly straight for Kingslanding. From the sky. With his accusation on our lips before Otto even hears we left Dragonstone.”

Laena’s hand slid into hers. “They won’t have time to counter.”

“They won’t even have time to breathe,” Rhaenyra said.

Rhaenys nodded approvingly. “Strike like a dragon. Not a courtier.”

Rhaenyra turned to Daemon again, her hand rising to cup his jaw.

“I need you out of sight,” she whispered. “So Otto cannot see the real blow coming.”

Daemon swallowed hard, eyes burning.

“I hate this,” he rasped. “Every moment of it.”

“I know,” she said softly. “But I trust you. And I need you. Doing this.”

Her thumb brushed his cheek.

“And when the realm tries to guess our next move… you will already be building the next battlefield.”

Daemon closed his eyes for a heartbeat. Long enough to steady the war inside him. When he opened them, the decision was carved into every line of his face.

“Very well,” he breathed.

He reached out, took both women by the wrists, and tugged. Not harshly, but with unmistakable ownership, pulling them toward the keep.

Laena blinked. “Daemon—?”

“Preparations,” he muttered, already dragging them through the archway. “You leave at noon. And you will not ride into that viper’s nest looking like half-drowned celebrants of some gods-forsaken ritual.”

His pace quickened, the set of his jaw impossibly tight.

Rhaenyra exchanged a look with Laena.

Daemon didn’t release them.

“You will bathe,” he said, voice deepening. “You will dress. You will look every inch the Heir of the Iron Throne and the lady of Driftmark. And I—”

He swallowed hard.

“I will see you ready before you fly from me.”

Rhaenys and Vaegon watched them disappear inside.

Rhaenys exhaled sharply. “He is impossible.”

Vaegon made a noise in his throat. “He is in love.”

Daemon didn’t slow until he’d hauled both women up the stairs, down the corridor, and straight into Rhaenyra’s solar.

The moment the door shut behind them, he spun. One hand at Rhaenyra’s waist, the other already drawing Laena close, and kissed them.

Not rushed.

Not soft.

A claiming pressed into two mouths in turn, as though memorizing the exact shape of them was the only armor he’d have to wear.

Laena let out a startled laugh against his lips, fingers curling against his chest. Rhaenyra’s answering breath was a low, pleased hum, her hands sliding up his shoulders.

When Daemon finally pulled back, he looked half-wild. Half-starved. Entirely undone.

Rhaenyra tilted her head, lips still close enough to graze his. “So urgent, kepus?”

He gave her a look that should’ve been a glare, but came out nearer to pleading.

“We don’t know how long I’ll be gone,” he said. “How long the Stepstones will keep me pinned there. How long Viserys’s pride will keep me from your side.”

His hand slid up her ribs, slow and deliberate, as though trying to memorize the shape of her under his palm.

“Let me have this,” he rasped. “Before we separate.”

Laena’s fingers brushed his jaw, her smile softening. “Always dramatic.”

Daemon’s eyes flicked to her, wounded, intense, a little feral. “Do not jest with me about this,” he said, voice thick. “I’ve only just—”

He stopped himself.

Only just had you both. Only just been allowed to be yours. Only just been forgiven.

Rhaenyra’s hand rose, fingers trailing along his jawline, slow enough to make him shiver.

“Daemon,” she teased, voice silk over steel, “we aren’t going to vanish because you fly east.”

“Perhaps not,” he said, “but the realm has tried very hard to take you from me before.”

“And failed,” she said simply.

Laena leaned into his side, warm, grounding. “And will fail again.”

Daemon closed his eyes. Just for a breath, before opening them with a look that should’ve set the room ablaze.

“Then let me have you,” he said, voice tremoring with hunger and need. “Both of you. Let me remember the taste of something that is mine before I’m sent off to build a force this realm has never seen before.”

Rhaenyra smiled.

“Very well,” she whispered, fingers curling in his collar. “But only because you asked so sweetly.”

Daemon moved with the desperate efficiency of a man who knew his time was running like sand through his fingers.

His fingers attacked the knots of Laena’s riding leathers. One sharp tug, a second, a bitten-off curse when the cords held as if mocking him. With a ragged inhale, he pulled Dark Sister free.

The steel sang.

The air split.

Rhaenyra felt the kiss of wind at her hip, cool and thin as the breath of a ghost. A single inch more and Valyrian steel would have parted skin. 

Her breath caught, but Daemon froze first.

His gaze slammed into hers, wild and burning, a possessive fury igniting behind his pupils as though the near-miss had offended something primal in him.

He twisted his wrist, sending the edge away from her with impossible precision, slicing the stubborn cords clean.

Leather slackened.

Laena gasped.

Daemon threw Dark Sister as if disgusted by the steel. The priceless blade clattered across stone, skidding in an arc deliberately wide of Rhaenyra’s feet.

He would rather maim himself than risk cutting her.

Laena laughed, bright and breathless as the leather loosened around her. “Impatient, are we, husband?”

Her skin was a soft, glowing brown, the shade of sun-warmed driftwood and summer afternoons, impossibly inviting beneath Daemon’s hands.

The smooth, gentle swell of her breasts making his mouth water.

“The word is urgent,” Daemon said, though the raw hunger in his eyes made it clear even he didn’t believe his excuse.

One of his palms settled on Rhaenyra's hip, firm and searching, sliding over the place where the blade had almost passed.

“You’re not hurt,” he asked, but it sounded like a prayer he needed confirmed, his thumbs sweeping slow, possessive lines over unbroken skin. “Tell me you’re not hurt.”

Rhaenyra raised a brow, breath caught between annoyance and something softer. “Dark sister didn't touch me."

Daemon’s hands trembled as they went to the ties of Rhaenyra’s riding leathers.

His fingers fumbling against the stubborn knots.

​"Gods, woman,” he hissed, his breath hot against her collarbone. “Why must you both be laced up like a fortress gate?”

​He tugged at another knot. Harder, more desperate. But the stubborn leather held.

​Rhaenyra lifted her hands to help, but Daemon slapped them away, his jaw tight. “No. I have it."

​He did not.

​Laena laughed softly, the sound warm and wicked, a hand trailing down the ridged muscles of his spine. 

​Rhaenyra arched a brow. “Admit defeat, kepus. Your hands are shaking.”

​“They are not,” he snapped, seconds before the laces refused him yet again.

​With a sound somewhere between a growl and a curse, Daemon seized the front of her leathers. He braced his boot on the edge of the bed for leverage, and then he simply ripped.

​The seams gave with a sharp, violent tear, the leather splitting cleanly down the center.

​The tunic fell away in two halves, revealing the pale, moonlit skin of Rhaenyra’s chest. The swell of her breasts rose and fell with the rapid pace of her breathing, her nipples peaked and tight.

​“Daemon!” she snapped, scandalized. “I liked those leathers.”

​Laena let out a low, delighted hum, her own hands rising to trace the newly revealed skin of Rhaenyra's side. “I like this better.”

​But Daemon didn’t give either of them time to react.

​His arms hooked around their thighs, one arm catching Rhaenyra behind her knees, the other swooping beneath Laena with effortless strength. Laena let out a startled laugh; Rhaenyra let out a squeak she would deny until her dying day. Daemon hauled both of them bodily against his chest.

​They collided with him in a tangle of limbs and breath. Rhaenyra's pale skin was flush against Laena's warm one, the contrast a feast for the eye.

​He tossed them to the bed with a guttural sound that was pure need.

The thick furs compressed deeply beneath their combined weight.

His predatory gaze landed on Rhaenyra.

In a heartbeat, he shifted, leveraging his considerable strength, driving himself between her thighs. His hands hooked behind her knees, pulling them high toward his chest and back with unyielding force to deliberately expose the sleek, vulnerable junction of her hips.

​There was no gentleness in the way he bent his head.

No hint of tenderness in the first, scorching swipe of his tongue.

It was a claiming, raw and desperate, the act of a man suddenly starved.

​A choked cry tore itself from Rhaenyra's throat. Her body coiled like a strung bow, her back arching violently off the mattress. Her hand flew to her own mouth, fingers digging into her cheek to stifle the sound. 

​Laena moved with the sinuous grace of a predator.

She leaned over Rhaenyra, the heat of her body a sudden, enveloping pressure against Rhaenyra's side. She pressed a single, silken finger against Rhaenyra's trembling lower lip.

​"Let me hear you, Nyra," she breathed, her voice a honeyed command. "Let me take it."

​She closed the remaining distance, her mouth capturing Rhaenyra's in a deep kiss.

Laena's tongue tangled with hers, a mirror of the rhythm Daemon was setting. A delicious counterpoint to the frantic energy of her legs, which quivered and spasmed against the rigid muscle of Daemon's shoulders.

​Rhaenyra whimpered and whined like a starving thing into Laena's mouth.

He pressed her thighs wider, his hold on them an unyielding brand, his head dipping lower. He flattened his tongue against her clit, dragging it slowly, then sucked with a raw demanding greed.

Her vision blurred. 

Her body tightened.

Stretched.

As the sensation crested, Laena’s hands moved.

One cupped the back of Rhaenyra's skull, tilting her head back to deepen the kiss.

The other slid down further. 

And Laena. 

Dangerous. Intelligent. Wicked, Laena, slid her hand past Daemon's seeking mouth and slipped two fingers inside her. 

Deep.

Precise.

Her knuckles grazed the slick edges of her, then she curled her fingers just right. Hooking them around the sensitive wall. A motion practiced, perfect, aimed like a weapon.

A violent spasm hit her hips, knocking into Daemon’s tongue. 

His large hand rose from Rhaenyra's knee and clamped instantly over Laena's wrist to lock her fingers in place, ensuring that perfect, wicked curve did not shift.

​Rhaenyra shrieked Laena’s name.

Her body breaking into something primal as the sensation exploded, arching off the bed into the shared space between her lovers.

Just as she was about to fall completely overboard into a sea of bliss, Daemon snatched his mouth away.

Rhaenyra’s body shuddered, collapsing back into the furs with a desperate, ragged inhale. Her eyes flew open, hot with tears and unfinished pleasure.

“No!” she pleaded, the word thin and raw. "Daemon, please!" Her hips canted upwards, a silent demand.

He looked down at her, his lips glistening from her. 

“So demanding, little niece,” he said, his voice dripping with mock chagrin but his eyes burning with triumph.

​He seized Laena's wrist again, tugging her hand back sharply. Laena's fingers slid out of Rhaenyra with a wet, obscene sound.  

​Rhaenyra let out a sharp, choked gasp, her hips shuddering violently on the furs.

Daemon's gaze drunk in the involuntary twitch of her body. A cruel smirk touched the corner of his mouth. “Vestragon issa, ñuha lēkia?”(Does that ache, sweet niece?) he taunted, not waiting for an answer as he dragged his fingers through her wetness, collecting the evidence of her unraveling. 

​He turned his full attention to Laena, seizing her waist and pulling her sharply, effortlessly, away from Rhaenyra's side.

​“Your turn, wife,” he commanded, the word a rasp of thick velvet.

​He shoved Laena back onto the mattress, his body weight heavy and demanding. He looked over Laena’s body, meeting Rhaenyra’s wide eyes.

"Still shaking, I see," he observed. 

Her flushed skin, tear-streaked cheeks, heaving chest, parted thighs.

She was wrecked.

She was glowing.

She was his.

Two fingers, slick with Rhaenyra, pushed into Laena with an abrupt, wet plunge. Laena hissed, her head snapping back against the furs, a sharp curse escaping her lips.

Laena’s own eyes, hot and glittering, swept past Daemon to meet Rhaenyra’s gaze.

She let out a low, satisfied laugh that was all challenge.

"Don't worry, Nyra," she purred, her hips already beginning to undulate against the force of Daemon's hand, riding his fingers with a practiced rhythm. "Just rest now. Catch your breath. We'll be quick, and we can get you sorted, yes?"

The words were Daemon's catalyst.

He ripped his hand free, undoing his breeches easily. 

And then he drove in.

It was not a gentle entry.

He breached her in one long, relentless stroke that stole every thought from Laena’s mind, every breath from her lungs. A scream tore from her throat, a raw, primal sound of pain and pleasure that was undeniably his name. He filled her to the brim, stretching her tight, slick walls impossibly wide.

"Yes—" The sound was ripped from her throat, raw and desperate, a pure expression of the overwhelming fullness.

Laena moaned it again, a broken, sobbing sound, as he began to move.

​He pulled back slowly, creating a tormenting friction as he dragged against her walls. Then, with the force of a ram, he drove into her again, his hips slapping against hers.

​Laena’s body arched, her hips bucking instinctively to meet his. She was trying to take more of him, to pull him deeper.

​Rhaenyra moved, sliding close to the bed, close enough for Laena to feel the soft heat of her breath.

The ghost of her hip against Laena's thigh.

She settled there, resting her weight on her elbow, turning her observation into a deliberate, suffocating intimacy.

​"Poor Laena," Rhaenyra whispered, the sound a silken, predatory caress. "It seems my breath was stolen and cast aside. And now, all that remains of it is the voice I shall use to torment you."

​As Daemon pulled back and prepared to thrust, Rhaenyra’s hand, slipped down and curved possessively over Laena’s arched ribcage.

She didn't press down, but merely marked the territory.

Rhaenyra leaned in closer, her voice dropping to a silken, intimate purr.

"You make a pretty spectacle of yourself," she whispered, her eyes holding Laena’s in a demanding lock. "Such common noise for a prince's attentions. Be quiet now. You must suffer with a lady's grace."

Laena’s head strained back biting down a moan that rose up, knowing the sound would only feed Rhaenyra’s cruelty.

Trapped between the agony and the impossible pleasure of Rhaenyra's gaze.

​Rhaenyra’s hand abandoned Laena’s ribs, drifting upward with deliberate slowness. Her cool fingers settled, heavy and claiming, over the soft swell of Laena’s breast, giving it a proprietary squeeze.

​Daemon, however, felt the subtle shift in Laena’s inner walls, the sudden tremor beneath her skin that betrayed the true proximity of her climax.

​He didn't need her noise; he knew her silence.

The feverish tension Rhaenyra's wicked gaze and touch had built in his wife had tightened Laena to the breaking point far sooner than usual.

​He let out a low, predatory sound that was purely for Rhaenyra's benefit.

He shifted his weight just slightly, pulling his hips back to a familiar, shallow angle, then began a series of sharp, rapid thrusts that bypassed brutal depth for overwhelming speed.

​He was precise.

He was efficient.

​Laena gasped, her hips locking up, no longer bucking, but seized by an involuntary, mounting tension. Her eyes squeezed shut, and the cruel pleasure of Rhaenyra's touch was instantly drowned out by the singular, focused assault of her husband.

​Daemon drove her against the mattress, the rhythm accelerating, tightening every muscle in her core until Laena’s body was a taut, shaking bow.

​“Finish,” Daemon commanded, his breath hot against her ear, the word itself a final key turning the lock.

A violent, ripping sound of release tore from Laena's throat.

Her whole body spasmed around him, a shattering wave that Daemon felt as keenly as if it were his own, driving him over the edge in a final, powerful groan.

​He drove deep, one last, reflexive plunge, and with a guttural cry of pure, spent relief, he spilled his seed into the depths of her tight, exhausted body.

​​Daemon collapsed onto Laena, heavy and spent, the full weight of him pinning her to the mattress. His breath was ragged against her shoulder. 

​Rhaenyra, however, did not move her hand. Her cool fingers remained locked over Laena's breast, feeling the frantic decay of the release beneath her palm.

​She leaned down again, her lips brushing Laena's ear, her voice now a triumphant, low hum.

​"So swift, Laena," she teased, her words a brand. "You shattered in half the time, and you did not even have the grace to wait for my permission."

​Rhaenyra squeezed Laena’s breast one last time, a possessive, final punctuation mark, before slowly pulling her hand away.

​Daemon did not linger.

With a grunt, he hauled his weight off Laena, pulling free with a profound, slick schluck of withdrawal. He recovered like a predator: quick, focused, and ready.

​He grabbed Rhaenyra's arm, not gently, and pulled her sharply away from Laena’s side.

Rhaenyra let out a surprised, slightly breathless laugh as he spun her. 

He didn’t lower her carefully.

He placed her.

Bent her.

Shoved her down to her hands and knees in one smooth, forceful motion.

​"Dragons do not finish easily, niece," Daemon rasped, his eyes dark with immediate desire as bent Rhaenyra over the body of his wife. "And you both made a promise of a brood of little dragons."

His hands gripped her hips, adjusting her with sharp authority.

He yanked her back into position, arched her, spread her thighs wider, and gripped her ass in both hands, fingers digging into the soft flesh with no pretense of gentleness.

“This is how I want you,” he growled, voice low and dark behind her. “Open. Wet.”

As he positioned her, Rhaenyra was guided down until her face was level with apex of Laena's body.

The sight of her cunt, still flushed and swollen from their coupling, burned. She could smell the heady, musky scent of Laena, the sharp tang of Daemon's spend. Laena's eyes fluttered open, a slow, languid smile playing on her lips as she met Rhaenyra's gaze.

She didn't speak, but her legs shifted, parting slightly in a silent invitation. 

Without a moment's hesitation, Rhaenyra lowered her head.

Her first tentative taste was an explosion of flavor on her tongue. Laena gasped, a sharp, surprised sound. Rhaenyra moaned in response, the vibration sending another shiver through Laena's body.

Encouraged, Rhaenyra's movements grew bolder.

All the while, Daemon lined himself up, thick and hard again, and gripped her hips with both hands, fingers digging into her flesh like anchors.

​“Draw breath, niece,” he growled.

And then he thrust.

Deep. Brutal.

The force of his slam drove Rhaenyra forward, her cry of surprise and pleasure muffled against Laena's flesh.

The impact shoved her tongue deeper, pressing it hard against Laena's clit. Laena's hips bucked off the bed with a jolt, a strangled cry escaping her.

Rhaenyra couldn't draw breath; her world narrowed to the overwhelming pressure of Daemon inside her and the hot, slick velvet of Laena against her mouth. 

He pulled back slowly, savoring the tight grip of her body around him, before slamming into her again.

The motion fucked Rhaenyra's face against Laena's cunt with brutal efficiency, a wet, obscene rhythm.

​"See, wife?" Daemon grunted, his hips pistoning, his own breath coming in ragged pants. "She could not suffer the waiting. All her fine noise and sharp pride, but deep down..." He punctuated the word with a particularly savage thrust, driving a muffled whimper from Rhaenyra. "...she just yearned to be ridden and well and truly claimed."

​Laena's grip in Rhaenyra's hair tightened, guiding her, urging her into the depth of the flavor.

​"That is right, my love," Laena cooed, her voice a stark contrast to Daemon's brutality. "Consume me. Take your due."

The combination was too much: the double violation, the sudden, sharp taste of Laena’s climax beneath her tongue.

Rhaenyra’s body began to quiver uncontrollably, a mounting distress that Daemon recognized instantly.

​​“Yield, Princess,” he growled low, triumphant. “You are my blood and my destiny, you feel it, don’t you? The hunger toward creation, toward what we will make together.... the brood waiting for us in the flame.”

And Rhaenyra could do nothing but take it.

Take him.

The chamber echoed with the sounds of them, flesh on flesh, wet and relentless, each thrust slapping into her with force that rattled the very air.

Rhaenyra floated, the orgasm building sharp and fast inside her, like lightning, curling low and dangerous, ready to consume her.

He didn’t stop. Didn’t slow.

“Break for me.”

And she did.

The pleasure detonated, a white-hot supernova ripping through her from the inside out. 

​Daemon answered her violent, involuntary surrender with a massive, shuddering groan that tore from his lungs. He felt her pleasure as a vise, crushing him, demanding his everything. With a final, roaring thrust, he buried himself to the hilt, emptying the desperate, hot flood of his seed deep inside her.

​His body seized, rigid and spent.

​Simultaneously, Laena's core clenched around Rhaenyra’s mouth, her legs clamping shut with the force of her climax. A raw, guttural cry was pulled from her throat.

A sound of profound release that felt less like pleasure and more like a collapse.

​“Yes! Gods, yes!” Laena cried out, her entire body falling slack on the furs beneath Rhaenyra.

​Daemon’s weight buckled, and he collapsed onto Rhaenyra’s back, driving her face deep into the spent, trembling heat of Laena. Rhaenyra, boneless and shattered, could do nothing but receive the weight of both of them.

​The room fell into a heavy, gasping silence, broken only by the ragged echo of their breathing and the slick, settling warmth of their ruin.

​Daemon groaned one last, heavy sound of exhaustion, and then, slowly, he shifted.

He pulled himself free of Rhaenyra with a profound, slick sound, and lowered her gently down beside Laena.

​He looked at them.

His wife and his niece, both gleaming with sweat, before leaning over.

His first kiss was placed possessively on Laena’s forehead, damp and tender.

​Then he turned to Rhaenyra, whose eyes were still dazed and unfocused.

Daemon pressed his lips to hers, tasting the lingering wet of Laena. He separated her lips just to deepen the contact, using his tongue to softly capture the flavors Rhaenyra had just consumed. 

​He lifted his head, a look of profound triumph on his face.

He wrapped one arm around Laena’s waist and draped the other possessively over Rhaenyra’s hip, pulling them both close.

“Look at me.”

His voice wasn’t loud.

It didn’t need to be. It had that dangerous, low pull that always lived just beneath his skin.

Laena looked first, steady and warm, fingers brushing his ribs.

Rhaenyra followed slower, blinking through the haze, her lips parted, her pulse still unsteady beneath her skin.

Daemon swallowed hard, his eyes flicking between them like he was taking inventory of a treasure no sane man would ever let another touch.

“You’re both leaving me.”

Not an accusation.

Not even a complaint.

A truth he hated.

Laena’s brows softened. “Daemon—”

“No,” he said, voice tightening, “let me speak.”

He shifted closer, dragging them in with the weight of his arms, as though his body alone could stave off distance.

“You two will ride together. Stand together. Fight together. And I—”

His jaw flexed, the words scraping out of him.

“—I will be buried in those damned Stepstones while you both walk into that nest of vipers without me,” he said, quieter now, but no less fierce. “And yes..." his jaw ticked, “I know you have the upper hand. I know the plan is sound. Gods help me, I know you’ll terrify half the court by simply breathing in their direction.”

Laena smiled faintly at that; Rhaenyra’s fingers twitched on his hip.

“But still.”

He swallowed, the motion tight and ugly in his throat.

He cupped the back of Laena’s neck with one hand, the curve of Rhaenyra’s hip with the other, anchoring both of them as if the stone under his knees were tilting.

“You stay close to each other. You watch each other’s backs. You keep your heads high but your blades higher.”

Rhaenyra’s eyes darkened with something that wasn’t fear. Respect.

Laena nodded slowly, absorbing every word like a vow.

“And when it’s done,” Daemon continued, voice hoarse but steadying, “when Otto’s mask cracks and Harwin stands with you and the court sees the future they can’t outrun…you come back.”

His grip tightened.

“You return to Dragonstone. Immediately. Do not linger in that city a moment longer than needed. Not for pleasantries. Not for politics. Not for pride.”

Rhaenyra breathed in, sharp and soft all at once.

Laena brushed her thumb along his cheek.

Daemon’s voice dropped further, roughened into something almost broken:

“You are my world’s heart. Both of you. And if anything happens...if I’m cut off from news, if the ravens stop—”

Rhaenyra covered his hand with hers. “They won’t.”

“You both will write to me,” Daemon said, overriding her with the fervor of a man who had lost too much. “As often as you’re able. Every halt. Every night. Every moment the realm is quiet enough to breathe.”

Laena said gently, “We will.”

“I need your words,” he admitted, low and unguarded. “If I can’t have your hands, your breaths, your fire...I need your letters.”

Rhaenyra’s thumb brushed across the back of his knuckles. "We promise."

Daemon closed his eyes. Just for a heartbeat. Long enough for the fear to flicker through him before he smothered it with the force of his devotion.

When he opened them again, the rawness had hardened into something fierce and claiming.

“Good,” he breathed. “Because I will be waiting on that shore. Every dawn. Every night.”

His voice dropped to a promise carved in blood:

“And the moment I see your dragons in the sky, I will come for you.”

He pulled them tighter, one arm cinched around each waist, holding them as if imprinting this moment into bone.

When he finally moved, it wasn’t with urgency.

It was with purpose.

He rose slowly, gathering them with him, one arm still around each waist as though afraid the moment he loosened his fingers they would slip through air like smoke.

“Stay,” he said quietly, soft command, softer plea. “Don’t move.”

Laena and Rhaenyra exchanged a look.

Daemon crossed the room with a sudden efficiency, snatching a heavy cloak from a chest and a woven throw from the foot of the bed. He returned in three strides, wrapping the cloak around Rhaenyra first. Fastening the clasp beneath her chin himself. 

Then he turned to Laena.

He draped the throw over her shoulders with a tenderness so unexpected it made her blink. His hands smoothed the fabric down her arms as if ensuring she was properly shielded from the world.

Rhaenyra’s breath caught.

He was covering them.

“Servants will not enter,” Daemon said, already striding to the door. He cracked it open just enough to bark a single order into the corridor:

“Boil water. As much as can be carried. And leave it at the threshold. No one steps foot inside. No one.”

There were startled murmus, a scramble of feet, then quiet.

Daemon shut the door and bolted it.

When he turned back to them, the severity in his face melted into something gentle before he masked it beneath familiar steel.

“You’re cold,” he said. 

They weren’t.

But he needed to do this.

He moved past them to the deep stone tub in the corner, rolling up his sleeves with slow, controlled movements. He lifted a large pitcher from the hearth and tested the water with the back of his knuckles.

Too cool.

He added heated water from the fresh cauldron servants had left.

He’d heard the thud outside and retrieved it himself. Steam coiled upward, softening the air.

Daemon uncorked small vials from Rhaenyra’s shelves.

Her oils, her salts, the things she indulged in regularly. He poured a measure of each into the bath: lavender, smoke-pearl resin, dark rose. The scent rose warm and calming.

Laena’s eyes softened.

Rhaenyra swallowed something thick in her throat.

Daemon tested the temperature again, this time allowing his hand to rest beneath the surface. Satisfied, he dried it on his tunic and returned to them.

“Perfect for dragons,” he said gently.

He lifted Laena first. Effortless, careful, as though she were something breakable. She let out a quiet breath against his shoulder, arms sliding around his neck, trusting him completely. He set her at the edge of the tub, steadying her for a moment before lowering her into the water with slow, controlled movements.

Then he turned to Rhaenyra.

He paused before touching her, as though asking permission with his eyes alone.

She nodded once.

Daemon gathered her in his arms, sweeping the cloak tighter around her until she was hidden against his chest. His cheek brushed her temple as he lifted her. His breath trembled there, he didn’t bother hiding it.

He brought her to the tub and lowered her beside Laena, hands never once leaving her back until she was fully settled and safe.

The steam curled around them.

Daemon knelt behind the tub and dipped a cloth into the scented water.

He wrung it out with slow, deliberate motions.

Without a word, he reached for Laena first, brushing the warm cloth along her shoulder, down her arm, across the line of her collar where the salt of sweat had dried. 

He moved to Rhaenyra next.

He ran the cloth carefully along her neck, smoothing away the remnants of heat and exertion. His fingers brushed her jaw, her cheek, gentling her the way a man touches something he thinks he might lose.

Rhaenyra’s eyes fluttered shut.

Laena leaned into the water with a soft exhale.

Daemon continued his quiet work, dipping the cloth again, pouring warm water over their shoulders from a carved cup, letting it cascade down their skin like a blessing.

Laena sank deeper into the water, letting the heat ease the tension from her shoulders. “Once we finish here,” she whispered, “we need to see the children before we go.”

Rhaenyra’s breath caught. Not sharply, but with the slow pain of truth settling into bone.

Daemon stilled at once.

Rhaenyra's fingers curled beneath the water, brushing Laena’s knuckles. “Baela and Rhaena refuse to be set down when they sense unrest. Aemon does too. Aenar will throw a fit. And Aemma…” She exhaled shakily. “Aemma always knows when change is coming.”

Daemon set the cloth aside with a sharp, steady motion. When he rose, the tenderness on his face sharpened into something protective, ancient, unyielding.

“We see them,” he said. “All five. We hold them. We let them feel our steadiness before we leave.”

Rhaenyra’s lip trembled before she forced it still.

“It will hurt,” she whispered. “Leaving them here. Even for a short time.”

Laena’s hand found hers beneath the water, warm and certain. “Of course it will,” she murmured. “They’re ours. Every one of them.”

Daemon stepped around the side of the tub, bracing his hands on the rim, enclosing them both in his shadow. His voice darkened, low but steady.

“They will not be vulnerable,” he promised. “Corlys stays. Septa Rhaella stays. The Emberguard will be doubled...no, tripled. Every hall, every stair, every courtyard watched.”

Laena lifted her chin. “We trust them. But leaving our babes—”

“—will still ache,” Rhaenyra finished for her.

Daemon nodded once, slowly, as though acknowledging a wound they all shared. “Yes,” he said quietly. “It will.”

He leaned closer, his gaze moving between them with the weight of a vow.

“But listen to me, nothing will touch them. Not while I breathe. Not while this island stands. I will see to every guard myself. I will post men at their doors, their windows, their beds. Emberguard, Velaryon men, even Dragonkeepers if I must. No one will come within ten paces of our heirs.”

Laena leaned forward, touching his wrist gently. “We’ll return quickly,” she promised. “Before the children can even begin to worry.”

“And they will all be waiting,” Daemon said, voice rough with resolve. “Aemon with his questioning eyes. Aenar with his stubborn tantrums. Aemma with tears.”

A pause.

“And Baela and Rhaena, impatient and furious that we dared leave them at all.”

Laena let out a soft, aching laugh.

Rhaenyra reached up, resting her hand over his.

“We go,” she whispered, “and we return to them.”

“To all five,” Laena said.

Daemon nodded, the vow settling like iron in the air.

“To all five,” he echoed. “Whole. Safe. And watched by every guard on this island.”

---

The wind off the cliffs of Dragonstone carried the smell of salt and storm, curling around Corlys’s cloak as he stood at the base of the causeway.

Emberguards lined the stones in disciplined rows, armor catching the light like a sea of small suns.

Septa Rhaella hovered close beside him, Baela slung over one shoulder and Rhaena in her other arm.

Both swaddled, both fussing with newborn urgency.

And at his legs, three small bodies clung like roots refusing to be torn from the earth.

Aemon pressed his face into Corlys’s leg, small hands gripping tight.

Aemma clung to his other leg, wide eyes fixed on the sky above, as if already sensing the moment of separation.

Aenar, always the loudest of the three, had dissolved into quiet sobs, his face blotchy, reaching up for Corlys with both arms.

Corlys scooped him up with a practiced ease, gods knew he had done this often enough for his own children. Aenar curled against him like a little sea-bird seeking harbor, hiccupping into his collar.

“Easy now, little wave,” Corlys soothed, rubbing slow circles on his back. “Your mother will return. All of them will.”

The boy did not understand the words, but he softened at the tone, gripping Corlys’s tunic with fierce, tiny fingers.

Above them, the dragons gathered.

Gods, but they had grown.

Syrax landed first, wings kicking up spirals of dust and wind that sent Aemma squeaking and burying her face behind Corlys’s leg. 

Corlys steadied her with a broad hand, eyes lifting to the golden beast as she settled her talons into the stone.

Her wingspan now stretched so wide that her shadow covered half the courtyard and her confidence radiated like hot iron.

Kingslanding will tremble beneath that light, Corlys thought.

Vermithor descended next, a boulder of bronze and fire blotting out the sky.

The ground shuddered under his weight.

Corlys had known many dragons in his long life, but Vermithor’s presence always drew a sharp breath from him. Ancient, impossible, a reminder of a power Westeros had nearly forgotten.

Then came Vhagar.

Even after all these years, Corlys had to crane his neck to take in her full enormity.

The stones beneath her cracked. Her scales were weathered, pitted by centuries, but gleamed with their own terrible majesty.

Laena sat astride her like she was born in that saddle, because she was.

And last, Meleys.

Meleys didn’t land so much as dance through the sky, scarlet wings slicing the air in bright, lethal strokes. She was smaller than the others, yes, but speed radiated from her in shimmering waves.

Corlys knew she could outfly any dragon alive.

Especially with his wife as her rider. Rhaenys mounted her with ease, her silver hair snapping in the wind like a banner of war.

Rhaenyra sat proud on Syrax’s back, Laena on Vhagar, Rhaenys on Meleys, and Vaegon already astride Vermithor.

Four riders.

Four dragons.

And Daemon, 

Daemon was atop Caraxes, who prowled the far edge of the courtyard like a serpent ready to strike. The Blood Wyrm’s long, sinuous neck curved as he watched the others, impatient for the sky. Of the size of Vhagar now but still shaped like a serpant. 

Daemon looked down at the children.

Something in his face cracked, just enough for Corlys to see.

He lifted a hand to them: a small gesture, but heavy with meaning.

Corlys shifted Aenar in his arms and bent lower to the ground. “Come now,” he said gently, prying Aemon from his leg just enough to look at him. 

Aemon sniffled, stubbornly wiping his eyes with his fist. Aemma whimpered softly, reaching for Rhaenyra, who sat high above on Syrax’s back.

“Shh,” Corlys said, brushing Aemma’s cheek. “Your mother sees you.”

And Rhaenyra did.

Even from atop her dragon, her gaze was locked on them. On all five babes, but especially the three pressed against Corlys’s boots and arms.

Her face tightened as if she were swallowing pain.

Laena glanced down too, her eyes on tiny Baela’s wriggling form in Septa Rhaella’s arms. Rhaena gave a thin, unhappy cry, flailing against her swaddle.

Septa Rhaella bounced her gently. “Shh, little one. Your mother is only flying for a short while.”

Daemon’s voice carried across the courtyard, surprisingly gentle for how the air trembled around Caraxes:

“They’ll be safe. All of them.”

Corlys nodded once. He knew the truth of it.
He would make certain of it.

He bounced Aenar lightly, soothing him until the boy’s wails softened into sniffles. Aemon, brave little thing, pushed his face into Corlys’s leg, hiding his tears. Aemma clutched his cloak, one fist tangled in the fabric like she feared the wind itself might take her.

Corlys rested a steady hand on all three of them, grounding them and himself.

“Go,” he called up to the riders. “Dragonstone will hold them. On my life.”

Daemon inclined his head.

Rhaenyra swallowed and raised her reins.

Laena closed her eyes for a breath.

Rhaenys watched all five babies with a fierce, unspoken promise.

Vaegon called out, “Sōvētīs!”

And with a thunderous sweep of wings, 

Syrax rose.

Vermithor surged upward.

Vhagar heaved into the sky like a mountainside uprooted.

Meleys shot forward like a streak of crimson lightning.

And Caraxes twisted in the opposite direction in a scream of blood-red flame and wind.

The children cried harder at the rush of air.

Corlys held them close.

“You’ll see them again,” he whispered into their soft hair, into their tiny, trembling bodies. “And when they return, they’ll bring the realm to its knees.”

Still, It took an age to calm the children.

Aenar’s sobs came in shaking waves against Corlys’s collar. Aemma clung to his leg until her little fists tired and loosened. Aemon pressed his cheek to Corlys’s other leg, silent, wide-eyed, trembling.

Baela and Rhaena fussed in Septa Rhaella’s arms.

Tiny, confused, and far too young to understand why the sky had suddenly stolen three mothers and a father from them.

Corlys kept murmuring the old Driftmark lullabies, the ones Laenor had once fallen asleep to on ships bound for pentoshi trade routes.

“There now… you’re safe. Hush, little tidepools.”

When the worst of their trembling eased, Corlys led them into his small work chamber. Warm, lamplit, its stone walls holding the scent of old parchment and salt.

Rhaella settled the infants in their cradle with practiced hands.

Aenar crawled straight into Corlys’s lap.

Aemma curled against his side.

Aemon tugged at his sleeve until Corlys let him climb up onto the other knee.

They quieted, not fully soothed but softened by familiarity.

Corlys looked over their heads at the spread of charts, messages, and carved markers across the table.

Ship routes. Oldtown holdings. Emberguard rotations. Notes on every vessel authorized to move between Dragonstone and Driftmark.

A knock came at the door.

One of the harbor stewards stepped inside, bowing low.

“My lord… a report. I thought you’d want it promptly.”

Corlys nodded, shifting Aenar to his other arm. “Speak.”

The steward hesitated. “It concerns the Sea Fable.”

Corlys frowned. “That ship is not due to sail this week.”

“Yes, my lord,” the steward said carefully. “But… it sailed.”

Corlys stilled.

Aemon lifted his head at the sudden quiet in the Sea Snake’s body.

“…When?” Corlys asked.

“Two days past, my lord,” the steward said. “Before any of us were summoned to the courtyard. We… assumed it was on your orders.”

Cold crept into Corlys’s veins.

“Two days,” he repeated, voice thinning.

“Yes, my lord.”

“And where is it now?”

The steward swallowed. “A raven arrived less than an hour ago. The Sea Fable has made harbor at Oldtown.”

Aenar whimpered at the change in Corlys’s breath, but Corlys held him closer, eyes narrowing like the tide drawing back before a crash.

“Oldtown,” Corlys repeated, voice turning to iron.

“Yes, my lord.”

“Who captained her?”

The steward’s gaze flickered in discomfort.

“Vaemond Velaryon.”

Silence.

The kind that could pull the tides backward.

Even the children. Too small to understand, but never too small to feel, lifted their heads.

Corlys did not rise.

He did not shout.

He did not curse.

He simply exhaled once, the way an old sailor does when he knows the storm on the horizon is not passing him by.

Aenar whimpered and clung tighter to his collar.

Aemma pressed her face into his ribs.

Aemon’s small fingers curled into Corlys’s vest, searching for reassurance.

Corlys drew all three of them closer, settling them into the cradle of his arms like precious cargo he had once carried through typhoons.

Septa Rhaella stepped forward, voice gentle. “My lord?”

Corlys’s jaw tightened once, then eased as he looked down at the little bodies pressed against him.

He smoothed Aenar’s hair back from his damp forehead.

He brushed a thumb along Aemma’s cheek until her breathing steadied.

He cupped the back of Aemon’s small head, letting the boy lean fully into his chest.

“…Vaemond is in Oldtown,” he said simply. 

The words tasted of brine and warning.

Aemon pressed his palm flat over Corlys’s heart, sensing the shift even if he could not name it.

Aenar let out a tiny, broken sob.

Aemma clung to Corlys’s sleeve with both hands.

Corlys bundled them closer, one child on each hip, one perched against his shoulder. Rocking them gently in a sway older than Driftmark itself.

“There now,” he said, voice warm and steady, the voice he’d once used to soothe Laena after a nightmare. “You’re safe with me. Nothing touches you here. Not wind. Not wave. Not man.”

The fury rising inside him did not show in his hands.

His touch remained soft.

Certain.

Grandfatherly.

Old as tidewater, and twice as constant.

Only when their breathing steadied did Corlys lift his head again.

And the look in his eyes was calm.

Deadly calm.

The kind of calm that comes when the Sea Snake knows exactly which current has shifted and exactly how far he must now swim to drag his family out of danger.

---

The bells of the Red Keep were already ringing when the shadows appeared.

Great dark masses rolling over the sun, sweeping across the city like a storm no prayer could turn aside. People screamed or fell to their knees in the streets. Merchants abandoned their carts. Mothers dragged their children indoors. Gold Cloaks scrambled into crooked formation, blades half-drawn, unsure if this was threat or omen or both.

And high above them all, Syrax.

Brighter, broader-winged than the last time Kingslanding had seen her.

Her golden hide blazed like a shard of the sun itself. She angled herself toward the very courtyard before the Keep, the closest a dragon had ever dared land to the Iron Throne’s doors without tearing stone apart.

Her descent measured, controlled, deliberate.

Atop her, Rhaenyra held the reins with a commander’s poise.

Behind her, Harwin Strong, hollow with purpose.

He clutched her waist not with fear, not with awe…but with the stillness of a man whose world had been cracked open.

His grief sat in his bones, in his locked jaw, in the unwavering stare fixed not on the city beneath them but on the Red Keep rising like a wound ahead.

He did not feel the dragon beneath him.

Did not flinch at the wind.

Did not glance once at the impossible sweep of rooftops below.

Harwin had come home to bury truth in daylight.

And nothing else existed for him now.

Syrax screamed, sharp, high, commanding, announcing their arrival to every soul in the capital.

But the scream was answered.

Meleys streaked in next, a flash of red wings cutting the sky like a lightning strike across blood. Rhaenys leaned forward, silver hair whipping behind her, unbothered by the panic rising below.

She guided the Red Queen into a steep, controlled dive, so close to the upper ramparts that banners snapped in her wake.

Yet not a single rooftop tile cracked.

Vhagar rose behind them, monstrous wings blotting out entire streets.

Her descent was slower, heavier. The heave of a mountain uprooted and coaxed downward by Laena’s steady hand.

Citizens screamed and scattered below as Vhagar cast a shadow broad enough to swallow entire courtyards.

Yet Laena kept the ancient dragon in a perfect glide, bringing her down with surgical precision onto one of the few stone expanses that could bear her weight.

Vermithor followed. His landing sent vibrations through the ground but cracked no stone.

Vaegon sat poised atop him, robes snapping in the wind, serene as a priest descending from a celestial altar.

Four dragons.

Four riders.

Not one misstep.

Not one broken rooftop.

Not one accidental scorch mark.

This was not recklessness.

This was a show of discipline, unity, and terrifying control.

As they landed in a tight formation before the Red Keep.

Syrax closest to the doors, Meleys and Vhagar bracketing her in lethal symmetry, and Vermithor settling behind with the dignity of ancient royalty.

Gasps rippled through the gathering crowd.

“Vhagar, look at her—”

“Syrax has grown...how—?”

“The Red Queen is faster! Gods save us—”

“Is that Vermithor? By the Seven—”

Even the most composed courtiers could not hide the tremble in their voices.

Rhaenyra dismounted first, boots cracking against the stone with authority.

Harwin slid down behind her, the grief on his face stark and unmistakable.

Rhaenys descended Meleys with the ease of a woman who had mastered both dragon and fear decades ago.

Laena slipped down Vhagar’s saddle, calm but watchful, her dragon looming like a living mountain behind her.

Vaegon stepped from Vermithor with the serene gravity of an omen made flesh.

The dragons stood so close to the Red Keep that the castle’s great doors trembled in their hinges.

It was a deliberate message.

We are here.

We are many.

And we are not afraid of being seen.

Every eye turned toward the Keep’s entrance, 
waiting to see which fool would dare step out first.

Otto Hightower.

Of course it was.

His stride was quick, urgent, but his face carried the polished calm of a man determined not to show the realm he was rattled. Still, Rhaenyra saw his breath hitch. Saw his eyes flick to Vhagar, then Syrax, then Vermithor, and finally Meleys…and widen.

He had not expected this.

Not four dragons.

Not this close.

Not the sheer, suffocating might of it.

Behind him came Alicent.

Her green silks fluttered in the wind whipped up by the settling wings, one hand clutching her cloak, the other hovering near her throat as though she could steady her pulse with touch alone.

Her gaze darted across the courtyard, calculating, recognizing danger in every shadow, every wingbeat. But when it landed on Vhagar, Laena sitting proudly beside the beast, Alicent paused.

Her face alone made Alicent’s stomach tighten.

It had only been days since that council session, since Alicent, raw with grief for her brother, had let the word whore slip like a blade.

A single crack in her composure, born of mourning and fury she had nowhere else to put.

She had told herself she didn’t regret it.

But Laena was before her now, assured, beloved and she with Vhagar at her back.

And finally, Viserys. The King. 

He stepped out with measured purpose, cloak snapping behind him in the turbulent wind churned up by dragon wings. Yet even in his relative strength, he halted at the sight before him.

Viserys swallowed once before speaking.

“Princess…” he managed, voice rough with awe and discomfort. “You return to us with…quite the escort.”

Rhaenyra inclined her head, no bow, no apology.

“Father. We came as swiftly as dragons allowed.”

Otto stepped in front of him immediately, as if shielding the king with his own body.

“Princess Rhaenyra,” he said sharply, “your sudden arrival is highly irregular. A raven would have—”

The wind shifted.

Vhagar exhaled.

Only warm breath, not flame, but the sound and heat of it rolled through the courtyard like a beast clearing its throat.

Otto went silent mid-syllable.

Sweat pricked at his hairline.

Viserys looked between them all. His Hand, his wife, his daughter, the dragons towering above them, and something uneasy flickered beneath his calm expression.

Because whatever this was…

It was not ceremonial.

It was not courteous.

It was not peace.

Rhaenyra took one step forward.

Behind her, as though tethered to her breath, the dragons shifted:

Syrax’s head dipped low.

Meleys’s wings tightened.

Vhagar let out a low, bone-deep growl.

Vermithor rumbled like the earth itself was answering her.

Rhaenyra’s voice carried cleanly across the courtyard, steady and lethal.

“I come to petition the court,” she declared.

Viserys straightened, confusion tightening his features.

Otto’s eyes narrowed.

Alicent froze.

“I bring evidence of treachery within the crown’s own councils,” Rhaenyra continued. “Evidence of murder.”

A horrified murmur spread.

Rhaenyra did not look at Otto.

She kept her gaze firmly on her father.

“I believe,” she said, voice iron-wrought, “that Otto Hightower orchestrated the death of Lord Lyonel Strong. That he was poisoned here, in the Red Keep, so Otto might reclaim the office of Hand.”

Silence slammed into the courtyard.

Otto’s composure cracked, his jaw tightened, color draining from his face.

Alicent’s hand flew to her mouth.

Viserys stared, stunned.

Harwin stepped forward.

It was like watching a storm move.

“My father did not die of age,” Harwin said quietly. “Nor of illness.”

His voice shook once, not with fear, but with the rage of a son forced to carve truth from grief.

“I had him examined,” he said. “By a maester who was not afraid to speak plainly once the body was cleaned.”

The court held its breath.

Harwin’s eyes, normally warm, were cold as deep winter.

“What killed him,” he said, “was a powder. Pale. Bitter. Hidden in wine.”

A ripple of shock moved through the gathered nobles.

“A substance,” Harwin continued, “that eats from within. Slowly. Quietly. Without marks left upon the flesh.”

Otto stiffened.

“That is a grave accusation—” he began.

Rhaenyra cut him off.

“It is a truth we will lay before the court,” she said. “Publicly. Formally.”

Her voice hardened.

“And if deception still clings to these halls, we will burn it away with daylight.”

The dragons growled as one, a deep, unified sound that vibrated the stones beneath their feet.

Rhaenyra lifted her chin.

“We seek justice for the dead.”

Her gaze swept across Otto, Alicent, and finally her father.

“And protection for the living.”

Silence clung to the courtyard like burial cloth.

Viserys looked from Rhaenyra to Harwin, then to Otto standing stiff as a spear, his face tight with fear behind the veneer of composure. 

And something in the king changed.

It was small at first, a breath held too long, a tremor in the hand. But then he drew himself up, spine straightening with a memory of what it meant to be sovereign.

“This matter will be heard,” he declared. “No whispers. No corners. No counsel behind closed doors.”

He lifted his chin toward the Keep.

“We will convene at once in the throne room.”

A ripple of shock broke through the courtyard:

“My king—” Otto began.

Viserys cut him off with a flick of his hand.

A furious, unambiguous dismissal.

“Do it.”

Guards stumbled into motion.

Messengers bolted for the towers.

Maesters, shaken out of their stunned stillness, hurried off with their robes clutched tight to keep from tripping.

The nobles?

They scattered.

A court that had clung to power through whispers and shadows now fled like mice from torchlight.

Syrax leapt into the sky with a sudden golden blaze.

Meleys shot upward like a thrown spear of flame.

Vermithor heaved into the air, a bronze mountain learning to fly again.

And Vhagar, gods help them, rose slow and terrible, wings beating with the force of a storm front rolling in from the sea.

Together, the four dragons spiraled upward, their shadows sweeping across the city in great turning circles.

On the ground, Viserys stared upward, his expression taut with awe and dread.

The dragons were not merely taking flight. They were bearing witness. Keeping watch. Waiting for judgment.

Rhaenyra exhaled, slow and steady, a queen stepping into her own ascent.

She looked at the massive doors of the Red Keep, where truth had been buried beneath green silk. 

“Shall we?” she asked, voice soft but sharpened to an edge.

Viserys nodded, still staring skyward.

“Yes,” he replied. “I will hear the petition.”

Rhaenyra stepped forward.

Laena at her left.

Rhaenys at her right.

Vaegon behind them.

And Harwin Strong.

Grief, rage, and loyalty braided into every breath, at her shoulder.

The massive doors groaned open.

And with the sky screaming overhead, they walked into the Red Keep.

Notes:

💕💕

Chapter 24: For All Five

The hall had never been this full, not even when kings were crowned or kingdoms mourned. Lords and ladies were packed shoulder to shoulder, brocade pressed against boiled leather. 

Whispers slid through the chamber, quick and voracious. Circling like crows above a battlefield.

Otto Hightower’s quiet scheme to stack the gallery with pliant lords had ripened into something monstrous.

It had been meant a weaving of alliances, a closed circle of men already leaning toward Oldtown. But in trying to stack the gallery, he had summoned the realm.

The Iron Throne loomed.

Viserys sat upon it as though he weighed twice what he should. His spine held rigid, shoulders knotted beneath the heavy fall of his robes.

His fingers drummed against the arm of the throne in a staccato rhythm. 

A man trying very hard to look like a king while panic pressed cold against the back of his neck.

Alicent stood beside him, a sculpted figure of obedience and contained fury. Her hands were clasped so tightly her knuckles had gone pale. She kept sending brief, sharp glances toward Rhaenyra. Searching for something. Challenging.

Whenever her gaze neared Laena Velaryon, however, it veered away as though singed. She looked past her, around her, anywhere but directly at her.

Rhaenys stood just behind Rhaenyra’s right shoulder, expression cool. 

Beside her, Archmaester Vaegon with his sharp eyes, hooded by age, swepping the packed tiers with dry contempt. 

Rhaenyra stood at the center of it all.

Clad in pure black riding leathers, she looked carved from the very shadow of Dragonstone. The fitted leather caught the light in dark, subtle gleams. Her hair, braided and threaded with obsidian pins, fell over one shoulder like a spill of moonlight.

To her right, Laena Velaryon stood tall and unshakable, matching Rhaenyra’s darkness with sea-bright poise. 

To her left, Harwin Strong held his place, jaw locked, eyes red rimmed. His hands were empty but his entire bearing screamed of a man who wanted to strike. 

A sudden, sharp crack cut through the chamber. A staff striking stone.

Every whisper died on the spot.

The Herald of the Iron Throne, draped in crimson and black, stepped forward from beneath the shadow of the dais. His voice rose beneath the stone vaults, trained and honed for moments like this.

“Let it be known,” he proclaimed, “that on this day, under the eyes of gods and men, a formal petition has been brought before the Iron Throne.”

The hall shifted as one.

Bodies leaned, breathing shallowed. The attention of the realm turned toward the center like a tide.

The Herald unrolled a parchment with slow, ceremonial care.

“Ser Harwin Strong, son of the late Lord Lyonel Strong, petitions His Grace to hear grievance regarding the death of the former Hand of the King.”

His words carried clearly, bouncing off dragon-carved stone.

“That foul play may have been committed. That justice be sought. And that the truth be laid bare before the Crown.”

He lifted his chin, eyes skimming the tiers of lords and knights and sneering minor men who would repeat these words in a hundred smoky halls.

“Be reminded, by the laws of the realm and the ancient custom of the Conqueror, that once the King renders judgment in such a matter, his word is final.”

No appeal. No council vote. No second hearing.

The judgment of Viserys I Targaryen, sweating and gripping his throne, would decide the fate of the Hightower Hand.

The Herald’s final statement fell like a stone dropped into deep water.

“Let all present remember the gravity of what they witness here. Let none speak out of turn. The Crown hears all.”

He lowered the parchment, bowed low before the throne, and stepped aside.

Harwin moved forward.

He bowed, not deeply, but with the stiff respect of a man who had knelt too recently by a grave. When he straightened, his jaw worked once, the only visible sign of the grief burning in his eyes.

“Your Grace. My lords. My ladies.”

The hall held itself perfectly still.

“My father, Lord Lyonel Strong, died under circumstances I cannot accept as chance. I come before the Iron Throne not only as his son, but as a sworn knight of this realm, charged with defending its truth.”

His gaze traveled the hall. Past lords who had shared tables with him, past knights who had taken blows from him in the training yard, past men who avoided his eyes now, uneasy with the rawness of his pain.

His voice roughened.

“I am not a man of speeches. My words are heavy with grief, and my father deserves more clarity than I can summon while mourning him.”

His shoulders trembled once. Then stilled.

“So I have chosen a voice far stronger than mine. One who knew my father’s honor. One who understands the dangers that stalk this court.”

He turned toward the woman behind him.

“My chosen advocate in this petition is Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen. The realm’s Heir, and the one person I trust to speak the truth of my father’s death without fear.”

Rhaenyra stepped forward.

The black of her leathers caught the torchlight like obsidian; her braid fell over her shoulder like a stroke of silver fire.

“Princess,” Harwin said quietly, “the floor is yours.”

Rhaenyra lifted her chin.

Her gaze swept the hall, taking in each tier, each lordling face, each pocket of power. The certainty in her bearing was not loud, but absolute. Blood that had ruled this land since fire first fell from the sky.

When she spoke, she did not shout. She did not need to.

“Before we speak of plots or accusations,” she said, “let us remember the man whose death has brought us here.”

The hall reacted like an animal that had scented fresh blood.

Shoulders angled.

Necks craned.

Breaths quickened.

The crush of bodies seemed to lean toward her in one unconscious motion, hundreds of faces sharpening with a hunger that bordered on feral.

They wanted a spectacle. They wanted a villain. They wanted to see what the King’s chosen heir would carve into the record.

She gave them Lyonel Strong.

“Lord Lyonel Strong was not merely Hand of the King.”

Her gaze cut a slow path across the assembled lords, catching and holding eyes one by one.

“He was the finest legal mind of his generation. A scholar of rare precision. A man whose counsel was sought long before the crown called him to King’s Landing.”

That struck bone.

Several lords straightened, shadows of old memories crossing their faces. Petitions settled cleanly. Feuds cooled before they spilled into blood. Inheritances clarified before houses tore themselves apart.

“He was not a man inclined to rashness or intrigue,” Rhaenyra went on. “He prized truth over flattery, and justice above favor. And yes”—her gaze slid, briefly and pointedly, toward Otto—“he was often the lone voice willing to contradict the court’s more ambitious inclinations.”

Discomfort rolled across the gallery like a slow wave.

She lifted her chin, voice gaining weight.

“He served my father faithfully. Through political storms. Through the fraying of this court. Through challenges that would have broken lesser men. He did so without complaint. Without seeking his own elevation. His integrity was iron. His mind unmatched. His loyalty unshakable.”

Laena watched her with something close to awe, eyes bright and still.

Alicent’s breath hitched, the smallest falter in her composure.

Viserys flinched as if struck by the memory of what he had lost.

At the back of the hall, half-swallowed by shadow, Larys Strong allowed a faint curve to touch his lips. Not joy. Not mockery. Something smoother, more private. The contentment of a man watching the pieces fall into place exactly as he had arranged them.

Rhaenyra’s eyes caught the torchlight and held it. That uncanny Targaryen violet seemed to deepen until the flames themselves appeared to lean toward her. A fine radiance lay across her skin, not the sheen of heat, but something more elusive.

As though the Fourteen had leaned in to listen.

“So when a man of such caliber dies here, before the Iron Throne itself… not swiftly, not honorably in the field, but slowly, drained in a parody of illness… and when, before his body has even cooled, another man rises to the seat he held…”

The words dropped into the silence like stones.

“Then the realm must ask: was this tragedy, or convenience?”

Sound broke open and then choked itself quiet. The hint of an uproar died the instant she drew breath again.

“We are not here to condemn without proof,” she said. “We are here because the death of a man of such rare caliber demands scrutiny. He was owed that. His son is owed that. And this realm is owed that.”

She turned to the throne. To her father. To the man shifting on his razored seat.

“And so, Your Grace, I bring this petition not from spite, but from duty. From respect. And from the truth that Lord Lyonel Strong was not a man whose death should vanish into rumor and dust.”

She stepped back, her stance a final flare of authority.

“Let the realm remember him clearly, before it dares forget the manner of his death.”

Viserys shifted on the throne, the swords beneath him whispering against one another.

When he spoke, his voice came low and thinned by strain, yet there was a thread of sincerity that even his enemies could not deny.

“Lord Lyonel was a good man,” he said. “A steady man. Too steady, perhaps, for the storms of this court.” He drew a breath that sounded like it hurt. “May his soul find peace where this realm could not grant it.”

He straightened then, forcing his spine against the blades. The movement wrung a grimace from him. He adjusted the crown on his brow, reclaiming what dignity he could.

“Princess Rhaenyra,” he said, “you come before this throne with grave accusations. If we are to proceed, the Crown requires the first piece of evidence that guides your suspicion.”

He lifted a trembling hand, beckoning her forward.

“Let the Iron Throne hear your proof.”

The words rang beneath the vaulted ceiling. A tired king bracing for truths he had no strength left to ignore.

Rhaenyra did not move at once.

She reached instead to her belt and drew out a slim leather case. Dark, well-made, impressed with three distinct blobs of wax.

She lifted it so the gallery could see.

“To guard against claims of favor or partiality,” she said, “three maesters were called upon. None sworn to Oldtown. None in service to the Red Keep. None with prior ties to House Strong or to the Hightowers.”

She drew the first scroll.

“Maester Orryn of Gulltown. Learned in the properties of herbs and venoms, and the humors they corrupt.”

Then the second.

“Maester Caleon of Saltpans. Skilled in the opening of the body and the distinction between true ailment and false.”

And the third.

“Maester Brune of Storm’s End. His chain earned in the study of healing draughts, and the poisons that mimic them.”

The hall listened. Even the shuffling of boots died away.

“These men did not know they labored on the same matter,” Rhaenyra said. “Each worked alone, knowing neither his fellows nor their purpose. They have no former dealings with me, nor with Lord Lyonel’s kin, nor with Oldtown.”

With deliberate care, she unrolled the first scroll.

“Each was given leave to examine Lord Lyonel’s lungs, his stomach, and the soft matter of his skull.”

She let the quiet stretch.

“And each, independent of the others, recorded the same marks.”

Her gaze rose to meet Viserys’s.

“Poison, Your Grace. Not given in a single bold stroke, but in small and cunning measures. A death dressed in the garments of a wasting sickness.”

The intake of breath that followed was not a single sound, but a layered chorus. Shocked. Sickened. Eager.

Rhaenyra stepped forward and placed the scrolls into the steward’s waiting hands.

“These are the findings of the Citadel’s sworn,” she said. “Sealed. Signed. Witnessed in accordance with their vows.”

The steward stepped aside, clutching the scrolls like something hot. All eyes swung to Archmaester Vaegon.

The old man shifted, the chains at his throat chiming softly. Each link a different metal. Each bought with years of study.

His gaze moved across the hall, unimpressed by its hunger, untouched by its tension.

“Let it be known to this court,” he said, voice dry as old vellum, “that should any maester falsify an examination of the dead—whether through deceit, coercion, or coin—their chain may be broken, link by link, and their station revoked.”

He inclined his head once, the motion small and absolute.

“The Citadel does not tolerate lies in matters of life and death. Nor in matters brought before the Iron Throne.”

Lords shifted, glancing sidelong at one another. For more than a few, the reminder landed uncomfortably close. Their own protections, it seemed, were far thinner than a chain honestly earned.

The steward climbed the steps to the dais and bowed as he presented the scrolls to the King.

Viserys took them with stiff fingers.

The wax seals cracked under his thumb, sharp in the silence.

He read each finding in turn, eyes dragging across the lines. The hall waited, lungs tight, while torch flames hissed and spat behind him.

When he finished, he set the scrolls down with a care that made his hand shake.

He closed his eyes.

A long breath left him, heavy with grief and something that felt close to dread.

Then he forced himself upright.

“Very well,” he said.

He drew another breath, steadying himself on a throne that seemed made for flaying rather than ruling.

“The Crown has heard your first submission.”

His gaze found Rhaenyra.

“Present your next evidence.”

The hall braced. Everyone knew they were only just inside the storm.

“My second evidence,” Rhaenyra said, “does not lie in the body Lord Lyonel left behind, but in the realm he tended while he lived.”

Her eyes moved across the hall, taking in the rigid shoulders, the clenched jaws, the way some men could not quite meet her gaze.

“Lord Lyonel Strong held power with restraint,” she said. “He put measures in place to shield the smallfolk from predation. He restructured the Crown’s accounts so coin flowed where it was truly needed. He halted… certain practices that had taken root during the former Hand’s tenure.”

Otto’s jaw tightened.

Alicent’s spine went even straighter.

“These changes did not make Lord Lyonel beloved by all,” Rhaenyra said. “But they made the realm fairer.”

Her gaze hardened.

“Yet scarcely a day had passed after his death before three of those reforms were undone.”

She lifted her hand, counting them.

“First: the regulation of Crown contracts, which Lord Lyonel placed under independent oversight to curb corruption. Reversed within hours.”

“Second: the tax relief for fishermen and dockworkers along Blackwater Bay. Removed before word of Lord Lyonel’s death had reached half the city.”

Voices stirred, sharp and incredulous.

Rhaenyra did not give them time to rise.

“Third: the reallocation of Crown funds meant to repair Storm’s End’s storm-battered roads and breakwaters. Frozen. Entirely.”

The reaction was immediate.

The Stormlords did not merely startle.

They bristled.

Lord Tarth’s jaw clenched until a tendon stood out in his neck. A Buckler cousin muttered an oath under his breath, barely leashed. Old Lord Fell took an instinctive half-step forward, broad shoulders squaring as though he were already on a field rather than a polished stone floor.

Laena’s attention cut to Otto, colder than sea spray on iron. Not wide-eyed. Not shocked. She was weighing him. Measuring distance to impact. As if calculating the height from which a man would need to fall to break upon the rocks.

Rhaenys’s reaction was quieter but no less dangerous.

Her eyes narrowed, not in surprise, but with the glacial fury of a woman who recognized an insult aimed at her mother’s bloodline.

A single accusation had become a regional wound.

“These reversals were not debated,” Rhaenyra said, her voice going quiet and lethal. “Not reviewed. Not announced.”

She let each denial settle before the next.

“They were enacted the very same morning Otto Hightower reclaimed the office of Hand.”

The hall exploded. Shouts, disbelief, outrage. Men craned forward, some red with anger, others pale with the thrill of it.

Viserys raised his hand for silence. His voice cracked on the first attempt. It took him several breaths before the hall began to still.

Alicent leaned forward, lips parted as if to object, yet nothing emerged. She swallowed it back.

Rhaenyra did not look her way.

Her eyes were locked on Otto.

“This is not proof of guilt,” she said, every word honed. “But it is proof of motive. Proof of advantage. And proof of haste.”

The uproar swelled again, loud enough to tremble in the torches.

Viserys managed at last to wrestle the hall into a brittle quiet, his upraised hand trembling.

He looked at Rhaenyra, confusion and strain tightening his features.

“Rhaenyra,” he said, “how is it you know of these reversals? None of these matters were brought to my council. None were set before me.”

Rhaenyra inclined her head, calm amid the chaos she had loosed.

“Lord Lyonel and I spoke of these measures long before they were enacted,” she answered. “He believed it his duty to instruct me not only in law or lineage, but in the daily workings of the realm.”

She allowed the memory to breathe.

“He guided my education in governance. He invited my thoughts on these reforms and, in many cases, shaped them with me.”

Otto’s shoulders tightened, but she did not spare him a glance.

“Lord Lyonel Strong was determined that I should know all an heir must know,” she said. “The burdens of coin. The needs of the smallfolk. The dangers of unchecked corruption.”

Her hand went to the small satchel at her belt.

“I carry the letters he sent me during his time as Hand.”

She drew out several folded parchments stamped with the Strong sigil. Some were crisp and new. Others had corners worn soft from handling.

“In them,” she said, holding them where the front ranks could see, “he lays out his intentions, his concerns, the reforms he labored over. These three he named as matters requiring swift attention.”

She passed the letters to the steward, who received them with careful fingers.

“And when I rode from Dragonstone to Harrenhal to bring Ser Harwin before the Throne,” she added, “I stopped at the Crown’s accounts office. For a brief time only. Long enough to see the ledgers.”

Her voice did not waver.

“The reversals were already inked. Already tallied. Already stamped with the seal of the Hand.”

The hall drew breath as one.

“So yes, Father,” she said, more softly. “I know because Lord Lyonel taught me to watch the ledger first, and the man second.”

She stepped back into place beside Laena and Rhaenys, her presence now a sheathed sword everyone could still see.

Viserys let the letters slide from his fingers into his lap. His breathing came thin and uneven. He swallowed, visibly shaken, then forced his back against the steel behind him.

“Princess Rhaenyra…” He paused, searching himself. “Is there any other evidence you wish to present at this time?”

The question hung beneath the vaulted stone like a raised blade.

Rhaenyra did not answer immediately.

She felt the weight of her leathers settling around her like armor. Her gaze moved across the hall: Stormlords bristling, Alicent pale, Otto rigid, Reachmen unsettled, Laena calculating, Rhaenys simmering.

Only then did she speak.

“There is one final piece of evidence, Your Grace.” Her tone shifted. “It does not come from me.”

A prickle of curiosity tightened the air.

She turned.

Her eyes found Harwin Strong.

He straightened, as if bracing himself for a blow.

Rhaenyra met his gaze and yielded the floor with nothing more than a nod. A future queen granting a man the space to speak his grief.

“Ser Harwin,” she said, her voice taking on a solemn weight. “You are Lord Lyonel’s son. His heir. You knew the man better than any here. Better than I. Better than this court.”

She stepped aside.

“Tell the Iron Throne, and the realm, why you believe Otto Hightower conspired in your father’s death.”

For a few heartbeats, Harwin only stood there. Shoulders squared, hands at his sides, wrestling raw grief into something words could carry.

When he did speak, his voice came rough, but steady.

“Your Grace. My lords. My ladies.”

He drew a breath that shook in his chest.

“My father was not easy to please,” he said. “Not as a lord. Not as a father. He did not drink himself dull. He did not waste his days at dice or in idle company. He read. He listened. He walked the halls at night to think. He was careful with his food. Careful with his wine. He knew the dangers that come with power.”

Some heads dipped. There were men here who had felt the bite of Lyonel Strong’s blunt tongue.

“He remembered every law he had ever read,” Harwin continued, “every precedent he ever wrote. Two men could argue a case before him, and he would recite, from memory, a ruling made a century past that matched it. He could outpace maesters half his age in debate.”

His jaw clenched, grief and fury braided together.

“That is the man my father was,” he said. “He did not wheeze on stairs. He did not lose his words. He did not cough blood. His mind did not wander. His hand did not shake.”

He shook his head once, hard.

“He was not some frail old man at the end of his rope. He was alive. Able. Clear of mind. Strong in body.”

The next words landed heavier.

“Until it became known, clearly known, that he supported Princess Rhaenyra as heir.”

The hall seemed to lean closer.

“My father was a man of law,” Harwin said. “Of order. Of truth. He did not play at shadows. He did not hedge his words. When the Princess’s three babes were presented to the realm, when she stood before this court with her heirs at her side, my father told me, in plain speech, that the matter was settled. Rhaenyra Targaryen would be queen. The succession was no longer a question.”

His eyes moved now, sharp and deliberate. From Otto. To Alicent. Back to the throne.

“And he told me something else,” Harwin said. “That certain houses would never abide it. That certain men had already begun whispering of Prince Aegon. Of alternatives. Of war.”

His jaw hardened.

“He did not name those men. He did not need to.” He let the silence hold for a heartbeat. “We all remember the Queen’s green gown at the betrothal feast.”

Alicent’s fingers dug into the silk of her skirts until the fabric pulled tight.

“House Hightower’s colors are grey and white,” Harwin said, unwavering. “Green is their beacon. Their call to arms. The color Oldtown raises when war is on its tongue.”

Silence dropped over the hall, thick and suffocating.

“From the moment my father made his loyalty plain,” Harwin went on, “his strength failed with unnatural speed. His mind clouded. His body weakened. It was as if the very act of supporting the Princess marked him for removal.”

He turned to Otto fully then.

No theatrics. No roar.

Only the steadiness of a man who had carried his father’s body to the pyre.

“And there was one house that stood to gain,” Harwin said. “One house whose influence was restored within hours of his death. One house that had already signaled its readiness to drive the realm another way.”

The words struck like a thrown hammer.

“My father believed in Princess Rhaenyra,” he said. “And the moment he let that truth be known, he began to die.”

When he stepped back, the silence that followed was absolute.

Viserys sat rigid on the Iron Throne, breath shallow, a tremor visible in the hand that gripped the steel beneath him.

“Ser Harwin…” The words scraped from him, dragged up from somewhere deep and exhausted. “These are grave accusations. Spoken before the realm entire.”

Harwin bowed his head. He did not retract a single word.

Viserys tried again, forcing more strength into his voice.

“You accuse my Hand,” he said, and his gaze flicked to Otto, “and, by implication, those who stand with him.”

The words tasted like ash.

His gaze swept the hall. Stormlords bristling. Velaryons coiled tight. Reachmen pale and shifting like grain before a storm wind.

His eyes found Alicent.

She wore the darkest green in her wardrobe. Rich. Saturated. The silk caught the torchlight, turning it into a banner made of shadow and emerald.

Her hands were clenched in her skirts so hard the seams strained.

Viserys’s breath hitched.

At the color. At the message. At the memory of another night when that green had split his court in two.

A green beacon in his court.

“Queen Alicent,” he said, his voice thinning. “Wearing the color Oldtown raises when calling its banners… and now accused, by association, of waging conflict against the very house she married into.”

His eyes closed.

The Iron Throne loomed behind him, a forest of blades that felt, in that moment, less like a seat and more like a trap.

When he opened his eyes again, they were wet.

He looked down at the scrolls in his lap. At the neat script describing poisoned lungs and corrupted organs. At the evidence that made a lie of peaceful rumor.

His hand came down over them, shaking.

“The Crown cannot ignore these findings,” he said.

The gasp that followed was almost a physical thing. The hall leaned forward, blood-hot, hungry.

Viserys recoiled from the hunger in their faces.

“This matter will be answered,” he forced out. “But not with hasty judgment. Not with wild accusation. Not with this hall frothing like dogs at the scent of blood.”

His voice rose and cracked, the sound of a man trying to hold back a tide with his bare hands.

“The Crown will hear Ser Otto Hightower’s response in full before any conclusion is reached.”

Otto inclined his head. Outwardly calm. Inwardly cold as winter stone.

Viserys sagged back against the iron behind him, exhausted, the crown a weight that bowed his spine.

“For now…” He drew a shaking breath. “Gods help us if there is truth in this.”

Otto Hightower did not tremble.

He did not redden. He did not flare.

His expression was carved from pale marble, the composure of a man who had rehearsed this moment since the first time a king placed a chain around his neck.

He bowed. Deep. Impeccable.

“Your Grace.”

The crowd exhaled as one. The tension shifted from shock to a new, taut anticipation.

He rose, hands clasped behind his back. When he spoke, his voice came low and even. Painfully reasonable.

“I grieve the loss of Lord Lyonel Strong,” Otto said. “I served beside him for many years. I respected him greatly. He was, as the Princess has said, a man of sharp mind and formidable intellect.”

Stormlords frowned. Some Reachmen nodded, relieved to hear their former Hand acknowledged.

“But grief is a blinding thing,” Otto continued. “And suspicion, left to simmer, can twist any coincidence into conspiracy.”

Several lords shifted, drawn by the gentleness of the rebuke.

“Ser Harwin speaks with heat,” Otto said, as if soothing a wound. “As any son would, burdened with sorrow and pain. Yet heat is not proof.”

He turned slightly, including Rhaenyra now, his posture careful, dutiful.

“And the Princess speaks with admirable eloquence,” he said. “She has indeed presented troubling circumstances. Circumstances I assure this court I wish to see clarified as much as anyone here.”

A dangerous line. Cooperation worn like a mask.

“But we must examine facts,” Otto went on. “Not inferences. Not assumptions. Not the kind of coincidences that seem convenient when sorrow is fresh and blame is easy to reach for.”

He inclined his head. Humble. Respectful. Infuriatingly composed.

“First,” he said, “I did not, in truth, reverse Lord Lyonel’s reforms. The documents may bear my seal, yes. Yet the office of the Hand is vast. It requires deputies, scribes, assistant officers. The chain of governance is long. Policies can be carried out—or reversed—in haste by overzealous clerks answering to old instructions.”

Stormlords bristled openly.

Some Oldtown-aligned lords muttered, nodding along.

“If this was done in error,” Otto said, “and I fully believe it was, then the fault lies not in malice, but mismanagement. A matter that can, and will, be corrected.”

Not an admission.

A diversion.

“As for the idea that I would seek personal advantage in Lord Lyonel’s death…” Otto allowed his gaze to lift, as if wounded. “I will not insult the Princess by calling her malicious. I will, instead, appeal to the wisdom of this court.”

A subtle current ran through the tiers.

“When a lord of the realm dies,” he said softly, “his heir rises at once. Without pause. Without ceremony. Without inquiry into whether the timing was… comfortable.”

His eyes slid to Harwin.

“Ser Harwin, for example. Upon your father’s passing, you became heir to Harrenhal within the hour. No one cried out in suspicion. No one called you opportunist. No one demanded an inquest into whether you profited from his death.”

Harwin’s shoulders tensed.

Otto’s tone remained gentle. Almost kind.

“The realm does not stop for death,” he said. “It cannot. Offices must be filled. Duties carried out. Councils must function.”

He lifted his gaze to the hall.

“You all know this,” he said. “You have lived it. Sons replace fathers. Stewards replace stewards. Hands replace Hands.”

A quiet beat.

“Swiftly.”

The reasonableness of it lodged like a splinter.

“My elevation came not through scheming, but necessity,” he said. “The King required a Hand. The realm required continuity. I stepped into the role because duty demanded it, not desire.”

He let that hang, then pressed on.

“Death forces change. Immediate change. That is our way. To interpret that inevitability as evidence of conspiracy is a dangerous path.”

Alicent’s breath fluttered, barely audible, yet noticed.

Otto did not look at her yet.

“As for the matter of green,” he said, letting the murmurs swell, then flatten beneath his composure, “I must remind the court that a young woman is permitted to favor a color.”

Some ladies shifted, frowning. Others looked momentarily relieved.

“A queen may choose a gown because the shade pleases her eye,” he continued. “Because it flatters her skin or brings out the hue of her hair. Because she wishes to feel beautiful on a night of celebration.”

His gaze turned to Alicent, respectful, almost tender.

“My daughter is no exception,” he said. “She is young. She is fond of certain dyes. Green among them.”

He lifted one hand, palm up, as if bearing witness to something harmless.

“Not every stitch a woman selects must be read as a battle standard,” he said. “Sometimes a dye is simply a dye. A gown, simply a gown. A queen’s pleasure in her attire, nothing more than a woman’s prerogative.”

Ladies shifted again, discomfort mixed with recognition.

“To suggest that Queen Alicent: dutiful, pious, gentle of heart, would declare treason through silk…” Otto gave a small, disappointed shake of his head. “Is to misjudge her character entirely.”

He spread his hands, palms open. Reason itself, standing in the center of the hall.

“And if she reached for green on the night of the Princess’s betrothal feast?” he asked.

He let the memory stir like ash in the air.

“Perhaps,” he said mildly, “she simply wished to look her best.”

He lowered his hands with slow, careful grace, as though tucking something away.

“As for poison,” he said, folding his hands again behind his back, “I need not remind this hall that those who serve near the pinnacle of power face dangers most can scarcely imagine. Assassination attempts are not rare among men of station. Nor among those tied to the Crown.”

His eyes swept the hall once, sober, before settling deliberately on Rhaenyra.

“Princess,” he said, his voice gentling, “you of all people know this.”

The hall went very quiet.

“Not long ago,” Otto said, “assassins crept through Dragonstone seeking the lives of your heirs.”

The memory slid over the gathered lords like ice water.

“Children,” Otto said. “Innocents. The most vile of targets. The realm recoiled at the cruelty of it.”

Rhaenyra’s jaw tightened. Only slightly. Enough.

“And though that horror shook us all,” Otto went on, his tone turning very soft, very smooth, “no one claimed it proved a greater conspiracy. No one pointed at a powerful house and said, ‘You profit from this. You must be the architect.’”

The implication gleamed sharp and bright.

“Terrible acts follow in the wake of power,” he said. “That truth is as old as the Conquest. We all rue it. It spares no lord. No lady. No child.”

He bowed his head slightly, humility worn like a cloak.

“I urge the court, and the Crown, not to mistake grief for conspiracy,” he said. “Nor the pains of motherhood for proof of malice.”

The hall reacted as if struck.

A ripple of flinches. A few gasps. A sharp intake of breath from somewhere among the high-born ladies. Several glances darted toward Rhaenyra, then away.

“You are a mother, Princess,” Otto said.

His tone was soft. Paternal. Poison wrapped in wool.

“Motherhood is a burden that weighs heavily upon the heart.”

Rhaenyra went very still.

Laena’s expression cooled to something glinting and dangerous.

Rhaenys’s eyes thinned to narrow slits.

“In the wake of danger to one’s children,” Otto went on, “it is natural to see threats where none exist. To fear shadows. To imagine patterns in tragedy.”

He spread his hands again, as if offering lenience.

“If the Princess sees conspiracy in Lord Lyonel’s death,” he said, “perhaps it is not malice that guides her, but fear.”

He tilted his head, almost kind.

“The realm should not condemn her for the instincts of a mother,” he said. “Yet it must ask whether those instincts are the same as evidence.”

The court split.

Some nodded, uneasy but swayed. Yes, mothers worried. Mothers imagined dangers.

Several ladies traded tight, knowing looks, their faces pale with the recognition of how quickly a woman’s mind could be dismissed.

Alicent let out a shaking breath, relief and dread caught together in her chest.

Otto saw it. And pressed once more.

“And so I say, with all respect due to the Princess and to Ser Harwin’s grief,” he finished, “let us not confuse sorrow with certainty.”

Rhaenyra did not rise to it.

She did not snap.

She did not blaze.

She simply became very, very calm.

The stillness that settled over her was the kind that belonged to dragons. The long, slow inhale that came before flame.

She took one step forward.

“Lord Hightower.”

Her voice did not need to lift. It cut through the hall like a thin line of steel.

Otto’s spine stiffened, just enough to show that he had felt it.

“You say,” Rhaenyra began, “that motherhood blinds me to truth. That fear for my children drives my conclusions. That devotion to them renders me unfit to judge the weight of your actions.”

Her breath eased out in something that might have been pity.

“It is a curious thing,” she said.

The hall seemed to lean nearer.

“For all your reason, all your calm, all your years of counsel,” she went on, “you have spent more of your answer explaining the workings of my mind than defending your own choices.”

Several lords turned their eyes to Otto, as though seeing him more clearly.

“You invoked the attack on my children,” Rhaenyra said, her voice dropping lower. “An attack that left babes bloodied and screaming in their cradle. You spoke of it not to comfort me. Not to condemn the crime. But to make my grief a tool.”

The silence was suffocating.

Even the banners seemed to hang heavier against the stone.

“Fear does not cloud my mind, Lord Hightower,” she said.

Her words thinned to a razor.

“And if there is one lesson I learned in that nursery, while wiping blood from my own hands, it is this: those who strike from shadow are always the quickest to call everyone else afraid.”

Otto drew a sharp breath.

Rhaenyra’s mouth curved.

Not warmly.

Not kindly.

“With that in mind,” she said, straightening, “allow me to reassure you.”

She stood at her full height.

Dragonstone shadow.

Valyrian fire.

The hall seemed smaller around her.

“I am not afraid,” she said. “Certainly not of you.”

The hall tore open.

Shock. Awe. Outrage. Dark delight. Sound crashed back into the chamber all at once. Lords surged to their feet, half from instinct, half from the sheer force of what had just been said. Lines that had been hair-thin an hour ago now glowed clearly in the air: black and green, dragon and tower, daughter and wife.

Rhaenyra did not look at them.

She turned instead to the throne and bowed her head, the gesture precise and lethal.

“Your Grace,” she said, voice smooth, “the Crown Princess, only and true Heir to the Iron Throne, rests her case.”

The storm raged around her.

Viserys sat motionless at its eye.

For a long heartbeat, he did not seem to hear anything at all. The roar of the court became a distant surf, breaking somewhere far below his feet. His hand lay over the maesters’ findings, the parchment crinkling slightly beneath his trembling fingers.

Then he lurched up from the throne.

Blades rasped against each other under his weight. He caught himself on one of the arms, jaw clenching with the pain of the movement. The hall slowly fell back into ragged silence, the sight of the king standing enough to drag every eye back to the dais.

“Silence,” he said.

The word was not loud, but it carried.

“Silence.”

Viserys stood there, crown slightly askew, breath uneven, looking as if the throne itself were trying to pull him back down. His gaze moved from Rhaenyra to Harwin, from Harwin to Otto, from Otto to Alicent’s rigid figure in green.

He looked at his court as a man might look at a fire he had left untended too long.

“On this day,” he began, and his voice was hoarse, “the realm has heard charges of the gravest kind. Poison. Treason. Corruption in the office of my Hand.”

He glanced down at the scrolls again, as though hoping they had changed.

“They are not rumors,” he said. “Not idle talk. They are sworn findings of maesters and matters entered into the Crown’s own ledgers.”

He lifted his head.

“The Iron Throne,” he said, “cannot sit with such a scandal pressed against its side.”

Otto stared up at him, white as carved bone.

Viserys’s eyes found him and did not look away.

“Ser Otto Hightower,” he said, the old ceremony digging its way up through exhaustion, “you have served as Hand of the King for many years. You are father to my Queen. You have borne great burdens at my side in peace and war.”

His throat worked.

“And now you stand under suspicion of profiting from the death of my Hand, and of allowing the work of his office to be twisted to favor your own house.”

For the first time, Otto’s hands tightened behind his back.

Viserys drew a breath, shallow and painful.

“Until this matter is laid to rest,” he said, “you cannot remain Hand of the King.”

The words seemed to suck the air out of the chamber.

Alicent made a strangled sound, half gasp, half protest.

Viserys did not stop.

“By my word as Viserys of House Targaryen, First of His Name,” he said, steadying himself against the spines of the throne, “I strip you of the pin of Hand. From this moment, you hold that office no longer.”

The roar that went up had teeth.

Shock. Satisfaction. Outrage. Relief. The Stormlords’ fury unfurled into something like vindication. A few Reach lords looked as if the floor had just opened beneath them.

One of the Kingsguard stepped forward on instinct.

Viserys flung out a hand.

“No,” he snapped, the word cracking like a whip. “He will not be taken in chains.”

The hall jolted.

Viserys’s gaze raked across them, fierce for once.

“He is not convicted of guilt,” he said. “He stands under suspicion. The realm will not see its King drag his Queen’s father from this hall like a common criminal while the truth is yet unproven.”

A thin line of astonished respect cut through some of the murmurs. Others, more cynical, heard only a man trying not to drown.

Viserys focused again on Otto.

“You will lay down the chain,” he said. “You will remain in Kingslanding under watch. You will present yourself for questioning whenever called. You will not leave these walls without my leave.”

He swallowed.

“That is the mercy I grant you. You will not be imprisoned. You will not be exiled. You will not be condemned on suspicion alone.”

Otto’s jaw clenched. The only betrayal of feeling.

Slowly, he reached to his shoulder, unclasped the heavy golden pin of the Hand, and removed it. The sound it made, links knocking softly together, seemed louder than the court’s earlier shouting.

He held it for a moment.

The weight of years in his hands.

Then he stepped forward and offered it up.

Viserys did not descend. He gestured, and the steward climbed instead, hands shaking as he took it.

“By the King’s command,” the Herald called, voice just a little unsteady, “Ser Otto Hightower is relieved of the office of Hand of the King. The position stands vacant.”

The court rippled.

Alicent stepped forward.

Protocol be damned.

“Your Grace,” she said, breathless, “you cannot—”

Viserys’s head snapped toward her.

Her eyes were bright and wet, her grip white-knuckled in green silk.

“You cannot cast my father aside on this spectacle, on… on the word of distant maesters and a grieving son and your daughter’s anger,” Alicent said, the words tumbling too fast, too hot. “You cannot tear the pin from him while she stands there, already dressed as sovereign, with her dragons circling above to cow and press us.”

Her breath hitched, then something desperate, something defensive flared.

“And when Prince Daemon struck down my brother, Ser Gwayne, before the eyes of gods and Your Grace himself, did my father cry treason? Did he demand the Prince be dragged in irons? No.” Her chin trembled with fury and wounded pride. “He grieved. He stood firm. He did not accuse the Crown’s own blood. We remained loyal!”

A sharp, incredulous laugh cracked through the hall.

Rhaenys.

Every head turned.

“That loyalty lasted,” she said, her voice lifting like a blade sliding free, “until the day you called my daughter a whore in front of the council.”

Alicent's eyes narrowed, lashes trembling with fury she had nowhere safe to put.

She turned that stare onto Rhaenys.

“My grief drove me to it,” she hissed, voice low enough to quake but loud enough for every lord to hear. “Just as Ser Harwin’s grief drives him now. It was irrational. Not reasoned. A sister’s anguish. Nothing more.”

A few ladies gasped; several lords stiffened.

The implication flickered raw and unmistakable:

Harwin’s accusation is as baseless as hers once was.

Rhaenys’s expression did not soften. If anything, it sharpened.

“Oh, spare us the pretty words,” she said, her tone suddenly cool enough to frost steel. “If grief alone were guilty of your tongue, you would have struck at Daemon for Gwayne’s death. Instead you found comfort in striking at a woman with two babes, only three moons old.”

A soft murmur rippled through the gallery, agreement, discomfort, something shifting.

Rhaenys pressed on.

“And now, before the entire realm, you compare that spite to Ser Harwin’s demand for justice for his poisoned father?”

She let the question hang just long enough.

“That is not an equal measure. That is not even a sensible one.”

Alicent’s face flushed hot.

Rhaenys delivered the killing stroke:

“It tells the realm one thing only. That when you are wounded, you choose the enemy most convenient, not the one most responsible.”

Alicent’s breath caught in humiliation. Her chin lifted sharply, defiance flaring bright. 

“How dare you speak to me that way,” she snapped, voice cracking across the hall like a whip. “I am the Queen of this realm. Your better in station. Your better in duty. And I will not be judged by a woman who only wished she could wear a crown.”

Gasps.

Sharp.

Immediate.

Explosive.

Rhaenys did not blink.

Her smile, told the court exactly who had just erred.

Viserys’s expression changed.

For one heartbeat, he looked wounded. Then something meaner, older, surfaced. An old man’s humiliation twisted together with years of feeling pulled between wife and child.

His voice, when it came, was soft and very sharp.

“Be silent, Alicent.”

She faltered to a stop, color draining from her face.

“You are my Queen,” he said, “not my councillor. You were brought from Oldtown to be my wife, to bear my children, to keep my household, not to quarrel with my judgment in the open hall.”

A hot, ugly silence pressed against the stone.

A few men looked away, uneasy.

Others hid smirks behind their hands.

Some of the highborn ladies stared at Alicent with a painful mixture of sympathy and satisfaction.

Alicent’s fingers tightened in her skirts until the emerald silk creased under her nails.

“You will not raise your voice over mine in this chamber,” Viserys went on. “Not before my lords. Not when I have already spoken.”

He turned away from her as if she were no more than a dismissed servant.

The crack in her gaze, as she looked at his profile, was small but devastating.

Whatever lay between them, a new fracture had just been carved right through the center.

Viserys dragged his attention back to the business of ruling, because there was nothing else left to lean on.

“The realm cannot stand without a Hand,” he said, louder now, as if that could erase his own words. “The Crown’s work does not pause because one man falls under shadow.”

His eyes sought out Rhaenyra.

“You speak for the realm today, Princess,” he said. “You claim duty. You claim to fight for justice in its name.”

There was a tired irony in his smile.

“Very well,” he said. “Help me bear that duty.”

The hall tensed.

“As my Heir,” he said, “whom would you see at my side as Hand of the King?”

The question crashed through the chamber like a thrown spear.

Otto’s face went very still.

Alicent’s lips parted, a soundless protest.

Rhaenyra did not answer at once.

She felt the weight of every eye on her skin.

Her gaze moved first, almost by instinct, to Archmaester Vaegon. He stood like an old, discontented heron beside Rhaenys, the links of his chain winking dully in the light. His mind was a weapon as clean as Lyonel’s had ever been. But he belonged to the future education of her children and understanding all Visenya had left behind. Not the Crown. And wrenching him from that would not help her or her little godlings. 

Vaegon saw her look and lifted a thin brow, as if to say, Don’t you dare.

Her mouth twitched.

Her gaze slid to Rhaenys.

The Queen Who Never Was met her eyes calmly, weighing. There was steel in her and experience enough to steer a kingdom. Placing her at the King’s right hand would set half the greens on fire out of pure spite.

It would also rip her from Driftmark, from ships and sea and the power she had carved for herself. After being denied what was rightfully hers to begin with. 

Rhaenys gave the smallest of nods. It was not assent.

It was a warning: Do not spend me lightly.

Rhaenyra let her gaze move again. Up the tiers. Across faces.

Lord Tarth of Evenfall stood among the Stormlords, jaw clenched, his earlier outrage at the frozen roads and broken breakwaters still etched hard around his mouth. The news that funds marked for his region had been seized back under Otto’s seal had hit him like a slap. He looked, now, both insulted and very awake.

Lyonel’s lessons flickered in her mind like a candle behind glass.

Watch the ledger first.

And the man second.

A Hand must be learned, but he must also be seen as just. And the Stormlands had just been made a public example of how quickly their needs could be tossed aside.

Rhaenyra drew in a breath.

“Your Grace,” she said, “the office of Hand demands a mind for law and coin, and a heart that remembers the smallfolk who walk the roads we decide for them.”

She let her gaze rest, openly, on the Stormlords.

“Lord Selwyn Tarth of Evenfall is such a man,” she said. “His house has long answered faithfully when the Crown calls. His judgment is known in the Stormlands as fair, his word as good as stone. He has just been shown what it means when the works of the Hand fail his people.”

A hum of interest rippled through the Stormlords.

The Reachmen looked as if they had swallowed something sour.

Rhaenyra inclined her head to the King.

“If he will accept the burden,” she said, “I would see him at your side.”

All eyes swung to Lord Tarth.

He looked stunned.

Then something like resolve settled over him. He stepped forward, the storm-sun of his house bright on his cloak, and walked down into the clear space of the floor with the heavy tread of a man walking into a gale he had not expected, but would not turn away from.

He knelt.

“Your Grace,” he said, voice rough but steady, “if it is your will, I will bear the pin and serve.”

Viserys studied him.

A man of the Stormlands.

Not a Baratheon.

Not bound to Oldtown.

Offered up by his Heir in front of the court that had just watched her flay his former Hand.

It was, perhaps, the closest thing to balance he was going to find.

“So be it,” Viserys said.

He nodded to the steward.

The pin was brought. Heavy. Gleaming dully in the torchlight, still warm from Otto’s chest. 

As the steward placed it over Lord Tarth, the hall shifted again.

Alliances recalculated themselves in real time.

The Stormlords straightened with new pride, and looked at Rhaenyra with burning respect. 

Oldtown men went cold and narrow-eyed.

Some of the river lords looked thoughtful, already imagining how this new Hand might sit in council.

Rhaenyra watched it all.

She stood very still, feeling the currents change.

Otto didn't blink. 

Alicent stood in her green gown, face pale, eyes burning, caught between her father and her king and the daughter who had just cut both of them away from the heart of power.

Above them all, dragons carved in stone watched with unblinking eyes as the realm’s lines redrew themselves in the echo of the King’s decree.

---

The doors of the throne room closed behind her on a roar.

Rhaenyra stepped into the side passage and the sound became a muffled, pounding thing. Like a storm locked behind a wall.

For a moment she only stood there, palm braced against cold stone, drawing in air that did not taste of sweat and hunger. 

Her heart still beat hard against her ribs. Not with fear. With the echo of it all.

Lyonel. Harwin. Otto’s face when the pin left his doublet. Alicent’s voice cracking in front of the court. Viserys, thin and shaking, clinging to some scrap of authority.

The pin of the Hand settling against Selwyn Tarth’s chest.

She exhaled.

“Princess.”

The word landed behind her like a stone.

Rhaenyra did not need to turn to know who it was. The tone alone carried sharpened edges.

She drew in a slower breath, smoothing her face, and looked back over her shoulder.

Ser Criston Cole stood a few paces down the corridor, helm tucked under one arm, white cloak dragging just slightly from the force of his stride. His jaw was clenched hard enough that the muscle in it jumped. Sweat darkened his hair at the temples.

“Ser Criston,” she said.

The title was a blade between them.

He came closer, boots biting against stone. The torch in the nearest sconce set a thin, restless shine across his breastplate.

“You humiliated the Queen,” he said. “You humiliated her father. Before half the realm. Whatever you think of them, that was folly. Beneath, even you.”

Rhaenyra turned fully, back to the wall, ribs still expanding with the effort of steady breathing. The narrowness of the passage made his presence feel larger, more looming than it truly was.

“Folly,” she echoed. “Is that what you call poison in the Hand’s cups.”

His mouth flattened.

“You have no proof it was him,” Criston said. “No proof anyone in their house touched a vial. Yet you let Harwin Strong and rumors turn the hall into a mob. You would tear down a man who has served the Crown for decades because you cannot bear that he questions your place.”

There was a beat in which the words seemed to hang between them, hot and sharp.

She tilted her head, studying him. “You speak of my temper. Yet here you are, following me from the hall, without herald or witness, your cloak already stained with the Queen’s grievance.”

Criston drew himself up. “I follow you because you are the King’s blood, and the hall is in uproar. I would ensure you are safe.”

“Safe from whom?” she asked. 

His eyes did not soften.

They sharpened.

A thin, ugly light slipped through.

Rhaenyra went still.

It was brief. No longer than a blink, a heartbeat, but in that flicker she saw it:

Something twisted tight with conviction, something hideous and fanged. Something that understood too much about knives in the dark.

And believed them justified.

Her ribs constricted.

That letter had not lied.

Criston’s mouth twitched as if suppressing something. Words he dared not speak, fury he barely choked down, or a truth that tasted like rot.

The torchlight nearest him crackled.

The flame bent away from him.

Rhaenyra inhaled, slow and controlled, as though any sudden movement might snap the last thread holding his composure.

When she spoke, her voice was steady enough to chill:

“…I see.”

The ugly thing in his eyes flickered again. Quick, wounded, defensive, yes. But underneath all of it… something hungry. Something that longed to punish her for standing where he believed she never should have stood.

For choosing someone over him.

For surviving the weight of her crown when he wanted her broken beneath it.

She saw him then.

Truly saw him.

"Your Queen deserves all that befalls her."

His nostrils flared.

“You will not speak of the Queen that way,” he snapped.

“Why not?” Rhaenyra asked. "I did not humiliate her. She did so herself. And like all wounded Hightowers, she does not bite the hand that hurts her. She bites whichever dragon stands closest.”

The corridor seemed very narrow now.

Criston took one more step forward, close enough that she could smell steel and leather and the faint tang of the oil they used on the Kingsguard’s armor. His height blocked part of the light, casting his shadow over her boots.

“You think you have won,” he said, very soft. “You think one spectacle in the throne room has settled everything. That the lines you drew today will stand when dragons take the sky and banners rise. You are playing at war because you have never seen it up close.”

“My mother died in blood for a son who never drew breath,” Rhaenyra said. “I have seen enough of the gods’ warfare for a lifetime.”

“This is not childbirth,” he said. “This is steel and siegecraft and starving men ripping each other apart while lords argue over which of your sons deserves which throne.”

He leaned in, eyes bright and fevered.

“And when it begins,” Criston said, “every man who has ever knelt to you will have to decide what that oath truly means. Whether it ties him to you. Or to the realm. Or to the woman who actually wears the crown beside the King when he dies.”

He held her gaze.

“I will not forget today,” he said. “The Queen will not forget. The Hightowers will not forget.”

“And the Stormlands will not forget,” Rhaenyra said. “Nor the men whose roads rotted while your Hand seized the coin meant to mend them. Nor the smallfolk in Blackwater who will hear that someone finally spoke their name in the throne room.”

He swallowed.

A tight, jerking movement in his throat.

A man choking on a truth he could not spit out and could not deny.

Rhaenyra stepped closer.

Not enough to touch, but enough that he had to look directly at her, with no torchlight or shadow to shield him from what she saw.

“And I,” she said quietly, “will never forget what you attempted on my children.”

“You think you understand—”

“Oh, I understand perfectly,” she cut in. “You blamed innocent blood for a choice you made.”

Rhaenyra’s voice dropped to something colder than steel chilled on a winter battlement.

“If I had known then what I learned today,” she said, voice dropping into a quiet, lethal register, “I would never have allowed you near my body.”

He jerked.

Not backward. Inward.

As if the words had struck bone.

She let the silence stretch, thin and merciless.

“I would sooner have slit my own throat,” she breathed, “than let you touch me.”

The torchlight caught the change in him.

Shock first, small, flickering.

Humiliation next.

He inhaled through his teeth, as if something inside him urged him louder, urged him to punish, urged him to correct.

His fist snapped forward, a blur of iron and bone.

The blow caught her jaw in a sharp, brutal crack. Her head whipped back, a burst of white fire behind her eyes. The copper taste hit her tongue. For a heartbeat the world swayed, 

and then everything went silent.

Not quiet.

Silent.

A deep, ringing silence like the one inside a newborn volcano right before it opens.

Criston’s breath was ragged in her ears, but distant, as though it came from somewhere underwater. The torch beside him hissed, a thin ribbon of gold smeared across stone.

Rhaenyra lifted her head.

Slowly.

“You’ve always been too proud,” he snarled. “Too high for any man to touch without consequence.”

She raised a hand to her mouth, wiped the blood from her split lip with her thumb, then looked at the red smear on her skin. 

Something that had slept beneath Targaryen skin for centuries, now fully awake.

A very old, very cold inheritance.

Fire as will.

Fire as judgment.

Her vision narrowed into a burning tunnel.

Criston Cole’s face sat at the end of it.

A cracking open inside her chest.

“You miserable fool.”

Her hand dipped beneath the folds of her leathers.

Criston saw.

And laughed.

A harsh, brittle sound.

“You wouldn’t dare. You have no stomach for—”

The dagger slid free with a whisper like silk parting.

Valyrian steel, blackened at the edge, drinking the torchlight whole.

Daemon’s dagger. Her first gift of war.

Criston’s laugh died in his throat.

“Put it down,” he said, voice suddenly thin. “Rhaenyra. Put it—”

She moved.

Not with a knight’s training.

But with a dragon’s certainty.

A step. A twist of the wrist. A driving thrust aimed where Daemon had once placed her small hand over his own and said, Here is where men bleed quickest.

The blade slid beneath Criston’s ribs as though his body had been waiting for it.

His breath shattered.

Shock flared across his face. Raw, hurt, disbelieving. As though the world itself had betrayed him by letting her win.

Rhaenyra stepped into him, forcing the dagger deeper until her fist pressed hard against his dying breath.

He gurgled, grasped at her arm, blood bubbling at his lips.

“You—” he choked.

She leaned close, her cheek brushing his ear, her voice a shadow of winter wind.

“You should have remained beneath me,” she whispered. “As you were born to.”

He tried to grab her arm.

Tried.

She tore the dagger free.

He screamed.

And something in her broke open completely.

She hit him.

Not with her hands.

With all of her.

She slammed him back against the stone. The crack of skull to rock rang through the corridor. Blood streaked down the wall like a dropped ribbon.

Criston slid, sagging to his knees, palms smearing red arcs as he tried to stay upright.

His face blurred in front of her.

Her vision flickered. Fame, stone, flame, stone... and the only solid thing in the world was the dagger in her hand and the man who had struck at her children in the dark.

He gasped, “Prin—”

She didn’t hear the rest.

She saw her children.

Blood splashed across a cradle.

A ripped blanket.

The tiniest hand twitching.

Smoke in the air. 

She drove the dagger down.

It sank into flesh. Into bone. Into breath.

Criston’s scream shuddered through the corridor. She pulled the blade out and plunged it again.

And again.

And again.

She didn’t count the blows.

She couldn’t.

The world had dissolved into pulse and heat and red mist.

Her strikes weren’t clean.

They weren’t noble.

They were the violence of a creature pushed beyond sense, a dragon whose egg had been threatened and whose wings had at last found the strength to unfurl.

Blood coated her in bright arcs, dripping from her elbow, splattering her leathers, soaking her hair where strands had fallen loose around her face.

She struck until her shoulder ached.

Until her breath tore itself ragged from her throat.

Until each blow met no resistance at all.

Until the man beneath her was gone.

Not dead.

Gone.

Criston Cole was nothing but shredded cloth and meat in a pool that ran down the stones like spilt wine.

Only when her body shook, not with fear, but with the aftershocks of flame. Did she stop.

Her breath tore in hot, uneven bursts.

Something warm slid down her cheek. She touched it. It was blood. Not hers.

She looked down at her hands.

At the dagger.

At what she had done.

Then she whispered, so softly it barely existed:

“For all five.”

“Rhaenyra?”

Laena’s voice did not echo.

It landed.

Like a hand on the back of the neck. Gentle, grounding, unmistakable.

Rhaenyra’s breath hitched.

She turned.

Slowly.

Her braid was half undone, obsidian pins hanging by threads. There was blood on her cheek, a smear across her jaw, a streak down her neck. Her leathers were soaked through, clinging to her like she had walked out of a storm of red rain.

Laena’s eyes widened with shock.

Not fear.

Not yet fury.

Just raw, stunned disbelief at the sight before her:

Rhaenyra drenched in blood.

Criston Cole reduced to ruins behind her.

And worst of all...

Rhaenyra’s split lip, swelling already, leaking a slow, bright bead of red.

Her gaze swept the scene in one slow, devastating pass: the shredded corpse on the floor, the pool of gore spreading toward her boots, the ragged knife-marks carved into Criston’s remains.

His face was gone.

His jaw unmade.

His ribs open like a butchered stag.

His chest cavity glistened.

Laena’s breath stopped in her throat.

Gods.

What had Rhaenyra done?

What had Criston done to her?

“Nyra.”

Laena said it like a secret.

Like a prayer.

Like she was afraid the wrong touch might break the world open.

Rhaenyra blinked. A slow, disoriented drag of her eyelids, like someone waking from a fever dream.

“I…” Her voice cracked. “He—”

Laena lifted a hand.

Not to silence her.

To steady her breath.

She stepped over the blood without flinching, leathers brushing the stone, dark silk dragging a faint line through the red.

She reached Rhaenyra.

Placed one hand against her cheek.

Rhaenyra shuddered, eyes fluttering.

It was the first human touch she’d felt since the world had gone red.

“Look at me,” Laena whispered. 

Rhaenyra tried.

She gave a broken, half-wild sound in her throat, something between a gasp and a sob and a hiss.

“He hit me,” she whispered, almost childlike in the horror of it. “He hit me. And he tried...he would have—” Her breath fractured. “Our children, Laena. He was the one. His eyes...I saw it—he... He—”

Laena pressed her forehead to Rhaenyra’s.

A soft thunk of bone to bone.

A tether.

“I know,” Laena breathed. “I know. I know.”

Rhaenyra’s knees buckled.

Laena caught her before she fell, arms wrapping around her waist, drawing her close, pulling her out of the blood and into the heat of another living body.

Rhaenyra’s breath came in stuttering bursts against Laena’s collarbone.

Laena kept her upright with the steady strength of someone who had held reins in storms, who had anchored a dragon in mid-air.

She cupped Rhaenyra’s face with both hands, forcing her gently to meet her gaze.

“What did he do?” Laena asked softly.

And Rhaenyra, trembling, whispered:

“Everything.”

Laena’s expression changed.

A dark, furious tenderness sharpened behind her eyes. Something protective and ancient. A queen’s wrath given form.

She slid one hand down to cover Rhaenyra’s blood-soaked fingers.

“Then he deserved everything you gave back,” Laena said.

Rhaenyra’s breath broke.

Not in grief.

In relief.

Laena held her tighter, guiding her away from the spreading pool of blood, maneuvering her so she wouldn’t slip. Her hands were sure, gentle, careful in a way that made Rhaenyra’s chest ache.

As they moved, Rhaenyra whispered again, raw and shaking:

“For all five.”

Laena closed her eyes.

“I know,” she whispered. 

Laena brushed the blood from her cheek with the side of her thumb.

“Come,” she said. “We clean you. We hide this. And then we decide what story the realm will hear.”

Her hand slid firmly around Rhaenyra’s waist, anchoring her.

Steadying her.

Claiming her.

Rhaenyra leaned into her, practically collapsing, forcing Laena to carry her whole weight.

Laena had barely managed to half-carry Rhaenyra three steps down the corridor when voices, sharp, heated, echoed from the far end.

Alicent’s.

Viserys’s.

And Ser Harrold’s heavy armored stride behind them.

“No, no, you do not dismiss me, Viserys!” Alicent’s voice cracked like a whip. “You do not strip my father without so much as a hearing—”

“It was not without hearing,” Viserys snapped, breath thin, gait slowing as though even argument pained him. “He was accused. Evidence was presented. The realm—”

“The realm?” she laughed, bitter. “You mean your daughter.”

A soft wet noise answered her.

A crunch beneath Viserys’s boot.

He looked down.

A smear of red across the flagstone. Not a splash, not a drop, but a dragged stroke, as though something warm had been pulled or kicked across the corridor. It glistened where the torchlight caught it, thin as varnish in some places, thick as syrup in others.

Viserys followed it with his eyes.

Down the passage.

To the shape that resolved into two women standing in a widening lake of blood.

One drenched from shoulder to boot.

The other holding her upright with both arms, as though Rhaenyra might crumble without them.

Alicent’s breath didn’t escape.

It imploded.

Her scream crushed itself into her ribs, folding there like broken glass. She stumbled backward until her spine struck the wall, the stone cold through her gown. Her hand jerked up to her throat, pressing so hard the knuckles blanched.

Viserys looked as though someone had carved the marrow from his bones.

Gray.

Unmoored.

Staring at his daughter as if she were a ghost he had failed to keep alive.

Ser Harrold’s hand flew to the hilt of his sword by instinct, but the scene froze him in place.

Rhaenyra stood swaying, face pale beneath the drying spatters, hair stuck to her cheek in blood-stiff strands. Her lip was split, swollen, darkening to violet-blue at the edges.

Her eyes were distant. Not wild, not furious, emptied, as though the rage had burned through her and left only smoke.

Laena holding her upright.

And between them and the throne room doors:

What remained of Ser Criston Cole.

Not a body.

A ruin.

A pulp of white cloak and exposed bone, pooled in a slick crimson sheet that crept along the mortar lines like a living thing.

Alicent pointed, her whole arm trembling so violently her hand rattled in the air.

“She...she killed him,” she whispered, voice shaking so violently it almost broke into pieces. “Viserys, she killed him...look at her, she—she slaughtered him like an animal—”

Rhaenyra made a sound.

Not pain.

Not protest.

A small, rasping exhale, as if her lungs were remembering how to breathe through shock.

Laena’s grip cinched tight across her ribs, grounding her.

“She defended herself,” Laena said, voice flat, cold, unshakably certain. The words rang like the edge of a warhorn. “He struck her. You can see the blow.”

Alicent’s eyes snapped to Rhaenyra’s lip again.

The split.

The swelling.

The dark bruise creeping down her jaw like a fingerprint pressed into fruit.

Then back to Criston’s carnage.

Then back to Rhaenyra.

And something ancient and terrified crawled up inside her expression and settled.

Her pupils shrank.

Her lips trembled.

And hatred, real hatred, took root.

“She’ll…she’ll do that to my sons,” Alicent whispered, barely sound at all. More like thought escaping. “She’ll do that to my children.”

When Viserys finally tore himself free from the paralysis of horror and stepped toward them, Laena shifted again.

A half-step, barely a breath. But unmistakable. A warning carved in movement.

She would not let even the King touch her until she allowed it.

“Rhaenyra…” Viserys’s voice cracked, brittle as old parchment torn down the spine. “What happened? Tell me.”

Her lips parted. A sound caught in her throat… but she forced the words out, ragged:

“Children,” she whispered. “He… hit me. He meant to finish what he started.”

A violent shiver tore through her limbs. 

Laena turned, pressing her forehead to Rhaenyra’s temple. One hand rose to cradle the back of her head, fingers sliding into blood-matted hair. Her thumb brushed softly along Rhaenyra’s hairline, a touch that carried claim, comfort, and a fury held on a knife’s edge.

“Shhh,” she whispered, meant for Rhaenyra alone. “I have you.”

Then she lifted her head.

Her gaze snapped to Viserys. Sharp, unyielding, a blade forged in fire and salt.

“She will not be interrogated while she is in shock,” Laena said, voice ringing with command. The guards stiffened. Even the torches seemed to still. “She is bleeding. Her knees nearly gave beneath her. Her breath is uneven. And your instinct is to question her?”

Viserys recoiled as though she’d struck him.

“Search his chambers. Now.”

Viserys blinked, dazed. “Why—”

“Because he did not act from anger alone,” Laena said, enunciating each word with lethal precision. “Check. His. Rooms.”

Alicent lurched forward, voice splintering, “No! You will not drag his name through filth to justify your....your brutality—”

Laena’s voice dropped an octave.

“You are welcome to object, Alicent. But you will not stop the King.”

Viserys flinched at the weight of her tone.

Then he turned to Ser Harrold, almost staggering.

“Go. Now.”

Ser Harrold bowed sharply and vanished into the corridor, the echo of his retreat swallowed by the cold stone.

Viserys swayed on his feet.

Alicent shook her head in small, violent jerks, tears falling in silent, stuttering drops. A soundless “no” trembled from her lips, over and over, like a prayer falling apart.

And then Rhaenyra whispered.

Not loudly.

Not even fully formed.

Just three words:

“For all five.”

Alicent recoiled as if struck.

Her knees bent as though the force of Rhaenyra’s whisper had driven her physically downward. When she caught herself, one palm splayed against the stone, her fingers left streaks of dampness behind. Sweat or tears or both.

She stared at Rhaenyra as though she were seeing the future.

And it terrified her.

Ser Harrold returned in a hush so complete it felt unnatural. As if the Keep itself were holding its breath.

He held a small leather pouch.

Dark.

Heavy.

Stained at the seam with something that looked far too much like old blood.

He did not speak.

He didn’t need to.

The weight of the thing spoke for him.

He stepped forward and placed it into the King’s hands with a reverence usually reserved for relics or final confessions.

Viserys’s fingers closed around it.

As if the pouch might burn him.

The moment he touched it, Rhaenyra flinched, a subtle, instinctive twitch like a horse scenting a predator. Laena’s grip cinched around her waist, drawing her closer until their bodies were flush.

Viserys loosened the cord.

The pouch opened with a soft scrape, the sound unbearably loud in the silence.

Something pale slipped out first.

A letter.

Folded thrice.

The seal cracked.

Others followed. Parchment sliding against parchment like whispers of the dead.

Viserys caught a page before it hit the floor.

His eyes scanned the top line.

A sketched map.

Dragonstone.

The next paper was a roster.

Names. Ages.

Sellsword men.

Foreign. Unaffiliated. Paid in advance.

Alicent’s hand flew to her mouth.

Another slip of parchment.

Coin tallies.

Amounts crisp, precise.

Paid in Oldtown’s favored denominations.

A wet sound escaped Viserys’s throat.

Just breath collapsing on itself.

Then a final page. Thin, near translucent, unfolded itself like a dying leaf.

A half-completed contract.

Passage purchased on a Lysene ship.

Departure: a fortnight hence.

Alicent reared back so violently her head hit the wall with a soft, sick thud. She didn’t seem to notice.

Laena felt Rhaenyra sway.

Her arms locked like iron.

“Easy,” she said, breath ghosting Rhaenyra’s ear. “Don’t look. Don’t look at him.”

But Rhaenyra couldn’t tear her gaze from the pages in her father’s trembling hands.

Viserys’s voice finally broke the silence.

Barely.

“He… meant to try again.”

The words landed like a death sentence.

Ser Harrold bowed his head. Not in apology, but in grim confirmation.

Alicent’s knees almost buckled.

No.

No.

No…

Laena tucked Rhaenyra closer, turning her slightly so her face pressed to Laena’s shoulder, shielding her from the charred ache in Alicent’s eyes. The tremor of a mother who had just realized what lengths Criston Cole would go to for her sake.

And what he would have done to the children in Rhaenyra’s cradle.

Viserys closed the pouch with a single, shaking motion.

It sagged in his grip, the leather darkening where his tears fell.

And something inside him ruptured.

The King who had spent two decades avoiding conflict, smoothing trouble, pretending peace into existence, was gone.

“GUARDS!” His voice cracked like lightning off Dragonstone cliffs, raw and furious, pulling men to alert on instinct alone.

“Seal this corridor!” His arm shot out, trembling not with weakness but with barely contained wrath. “NOW!”

Boots hammered stone. Tapestries tore from iron hooks. Heavy cloth dropped over the entry like a shroud. The air thickened with heat and purpose.

Alicent stumbled toward him. Wild-eyed, breath coming too fast, as though the world had tilted beneath her feet.

“She, Viserys, look at him!” Her voice pitched high, almost breaking. She jabbed a shaking hand at Criston’s ruined form. “Look at what your daughter has done! You cannot be serious—”

Viserys rounded on her so sharply she flinched.

His face was no longer gentle, no longer confused, no longer pliable. It was carved from judgment. From grief.

“All I see,” he said, voice shaking with barely caged violence, “is a Kingsguard, my knight, attacking my daughter in a dark corridor."

Alicent’s mouth opened, but nothing came. Panic rose, hot and choking.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to go.

She had seen Rhaenyra bloody, Criston dead, and for a heartbeat she knew the gods had handed her the perfect proof, the perfect moment, the perfect undoing of the princess who haunted her every waking thought.

But now, now Viserys was looking at her as if she were the unreasonable one.

“Viserys,” she tried again, voice thinning. “This… this is your chosen heir. Your daughter cannot simply murder a sworn brother—”

“She did what he FORCED her to do!” Viserys roared, the sound shaking dust from the rafters.

Alicent stumbled back as though struck.

Criston had sworn that he would die defending her sons. That he would protect them from the girl who would steal the crown. He had been her shield against Rhaenyra’s inevitable rise. He had been hers.

And now he was a mangled ruin on the stones.

“She is battered,” Viserys snarled. “She is bleeding. She can barely stand!”

And still she wins, Alicent thought, a flash of despair slicing through her. Still she is the one he rushes to.

“Viserys, if you do this. If you excuse this you are telling the realm that Rhaenyra may spill blood without consequence, that my sons—”

He cut her off like the slam of a door.

“LOOK AT HER!”

A dozen eyes swung to Rhaenyra’s bruised face, wide eyes, shaking hands. 

He turned toward the guards.

“Remove his cloak,” Viserys said, low and lethal. "Burn it before his corpse. Break his sword. Not cleanly. Grind it into the stones. Give his body to the dragons, and when they are done, sweep the ashes into the sewer channels. Let his end be remembered with filth.”

A collective gasp rippled down the corridor.

Alicent’s hand flew to her mouth.

Because this wasn’t simply punishment. This was obliteration. This was taking the man who had sworn his life to her children and condemning him to an ending reserved for traitors and vermin.

Viserys wasn’t finished.

He turned again, and this time he stumbled toward Rhaenyra.

Laena tightened her arms around the princess instinctively, a shield with silver hair and razor eyes, but she did not stop him.

His Rhaenyra.

She was six again.

Running down the Red Keep corridors with scraped knees, hair in wild tangles, demanding he admire some lopsided dragon she’d carved from driftwood.

She was ten.

Brave to the point of recklessness, stubborn to the point of ruin.

She was fourteen.

Crying into his chest after Aemma died, her small hands fisting in his robes like she might drown if she let go.

And now she stood before him, looking impossibly small, as though a single harsh breath might topple her.

He lifted a hand as if to touch her cheek. Saw the split lip, swelling red, the mark of a man’s fist.

His face crumpled, the way cliff rock gives beneath centuries of waves.

“My girl…” he whispered. “Gods forgive me.”

The hallways of the Red Keep had never felt narrower.

Never felt steeper.

Never felt more like the throat of a beast swallowing them whole.

Laena’s voice broke through the air, low and steady, “I will take her away from here.”

Her hands tightened around Rhaenyra.

“As far from this blood as I can.”

Rhaenyra did not resist.

She leaned into Laena entirely, the weight of a woman who had spent everything and had nothing left but flame burning in her bones.

Together, they stepped backward.

Away from the ruin.

Away from the blood.

Away from the broken King. 

And away from the Queen sinking slowly down the wall as the realization shattered whatever innocence she still held about the game she had entered.

---

Laena did not let go of her until the door shut behind them with a heavy, final thud that seemed to cut the world in half.

Only then did she loosen her arms.

Rhaenyra swayed the moment that hold eased and Laena caught her again without hesitation, arms firm around her waist, drawing her against her chest.

“Easy,” Laena breathed, guiding her backward until the backs of Rhaenyra’s knees touched the mattress. “Sit, ñuha jorrāelagon.”

Rhaenyra folded as though her bones had melted. She sat because she was placed there, her hands falling uselessly into her lap. Her eyes were wide and glassy, unfocused, as if something inside her had cracked open and bled out through her pupils.

Laena sank down in front of her.

Kneeling.

Lowering herself until her forehead brushed Rhaenyra’s knee for the space of a breath. Just to let Rhaenyra feel the weight of another body. 

Gently, Laena cupped Rhaenyra’s jaw.

The blood smeared beneath her thumbs. Thick. Dark. Not Rhaenyra’s.

Laena’s breath hitched.

She swallowed it down and reached for the basin she’d set beside her.

The water steamed faintly, scented with rosemary she’d thrown in on instinct. Something clean, something living, something that might remind Rhaenyra she still had a pulse and a body.

Laena dipped a cloth into the warm water, wrung it out, and lifted it.

“Ñēdenkirī, ñuha jorrāelagon,” she said softly. Look at me, my love.

Rhaenyra didn’t move.

Her gaze stayed fixed somewhere over Laena’s shoulder. Somewhere far beyond this room, lost in echoes of stone corridors and wet red on her hands.

Laena touched Rhaenyra’s lip with the cloth.

Rhaenyra flinched. So sharply it cut Laena’s heart open.

“Laen—” Her voice cracked, thin and splintering. “I… I didn’t… I wasn’t…”

“You were attacked,” Laena said. Steady. Controlled. The anchor Rhaenyra had none of herself left to give. “You defended yourself.”

Each slow swipe of the cloth revealed another glimpse of the woman beneath the violence.

The basin beside them was no longer clear.

Rose-tinted swirls drifted through the water, blooming outward in soft, ghostly clouds. Pink, then redder, then dulling into something murky.

Laena dipped the cloth again, wrung it tight, lifted it.

Rhaenyra spoke before it could touch her.

“He sent them to kill our children.”

Laena moved closer, pressing her forehead to Rhaenyra’s temple again.

Her breath warmed Rhaenyra’s skin.

Her hands cupped Rhaenyra’s jaw with a steadiness that belied the storm in her eyes.

“I know,” she whispered again, fiercer now. “And the gods know. And Viserys knows. You were right. You were right to defend them.”

Rhaenyra’s sob had barely left her throat before the panic started to unspool. Fast, wild, uncontainable.

“I’m not sorry,” she choked, as if confessing something monstrous. “I’m not. Laena, I don’t regret it. Not a breath of it.”

Her fingers dug into her own knees, bloody crescents biting through leather. “And I will not repent,” she added hoarsely. “Not for him.”

Laena didn’t loosen her hold. If anything, her grip gentled, her hands sliding to Rhaenyra’s cheeks as though bracing a collapsing structure.

Rhaenyra’s voice kept breaking, tumbling out in frantic shards:

“But gods, gods, everything I’ve built...everything—” her breath hitched hard, “the Stormlands, the Vale, House Celtigar, the treasury reforms...they’ll think I’m—”

Her breath stuttered.

Her lips trembled.

Her pupils were too wide.

“They’ll think I’m mad.”

A fresh sob tore through her.

“Like Maegor.”

The name tasted like rust. Like every story told in a hiss behind her back. 

Rhaenyra pressed a blood-streaked hand to her forehead, fingers shaking violently.

“I—I felt it, Laena. Something was burning inside me, I couldn’t hear anything but the rush in my head. Like fire, like wings—”

Her hand dropped, smearing red across her cheek.

“I wanted him gone. I wanted- I wanted—”

She choked on the word.

“Gone,” she whispered. “Erased. Like he never touched me. Like he never touched our children.”

Her breath came in ragged pulls.

“And I did it. I did it. With my own hands. I didn’t even think. I didn’t care who heard. I just. I just kept cutting. I didn’t stop. I didn’t want to stop.”

Laena steadied her chin again, forcing their eyes to lock.

Rhaenyra only kept spiraling.

“What kind of Queen does that?” she whispered. Her voice was so small it hurt. “What kind of mother? What kind of heir?” Her chest heaved. “The realm will say I’m dangerous. The lords will whisper it. Alicent will scream it. They’ll take my children from me. They’ll say I’m unfit, unfaithful, unstable—”

Laena cut in, quiet but sharp.

“They already say those things.”

Rhaenyra froze.

Laena’s thumbs stroked the backs of her hands, her grip tightening just enough to ground her.

“They said them yesterday,” Laena went on. “They will say them tomorrow. They would have said them even if you had bled out on the floor and died beneath his fists.”

Rhaenyra’s mouth trembled.

“Lae—”

“Hush,” Laena whispered, brushing her nose against Rhaenyra’s. “Listen to me.”

She forced Rhaenyra’s chin up with both hands, dark blue eyes burning with a ferocity that was almost frightening.

“There is no ruin here. Only opportunity.”

Rhaenyra froze.

Laena leaned closer until their foreheads touched, voice dropping into a tone that felt like a secret prayer whispered before an altar.

“We will make Criston Cole into a monster.”

Rhaenyra blinked slowly, a tear slipping free.

Laena wiped it with her thumb.

“Before this night is done,” she said, “the smallfolk will whisper that he struck the Princess. That he tried to kill her. That he meant to finish what he started in your nursery.”

Rhaenyra’s breath stuttered, but she didn’t look away.

Laena brushed a lock of hair from Rhaenyra’s cheek, her fingers trailing blood. Criston’s blood, across Rhaenyra’s skin with an intimacy that bordered worship.

“We will shape the story.”

She leaned in, lips brushing Rhaenyra’s brow as she spoke each word like a spell:

“The lords will see the truth: raising a hand against you is death. Raising a whisper against your children is ruin.”

Another beat, soft and devastating.

“And you will sit the Iron Throne with a realm that remembers exactly what happens when someone targets a dragon’s brood.”

Laena rose in one fluid motion. 

As if she had been waiting her whole life for the moment someone dared harm what was hers.

She crossed the room in three strides and yanked the door open.

“YOU,” she snapped at the nearest servant, a girl who went pale as parchment at the sight of blood spattering Laena’s sleeves. “Fetch Princess Rhaenys and Archmaester Vaegon. Now.”

The servant startled, bowed so fast her forehead nearly hit her knees, and sprinted down the hall.

Laena shut the door again.

Rhaenyra sat unmoving on the edge of the bed, the room quiet except for her shuddered breaths. She looked smaller without Laena’s arms around her, like some essential warmth had been pulled away.

Laena returned immediately, kneeling again, reclaiming Rhaenyra’s trembling hands.

“You are not alone,” she kissed her palms despite the blood. “Not tonight. Not ever again.”

Footsteps.

The door opened without a knock.

Rhaenys entered first, her face going bloodless when she saw Rhaenyra’s condition. But she didn’t speak, not yet. She moved like she was walking into battle, gaze sweeping the room, the blood, the basin, the bruise rising around Rhaenyra’s mouth.

Behind her, Vaegon stepped inside.

He stopped only one pace away and bent. Not fully, but enough to bring his lined face level with Rhaenyra’s.

His eyes narrowed.

Then, without asking permission, he reached out and gently tilted her chin toward the light.

It made Rhaenyra flinch.

Laena moved instantly, but Vaegon lifted his free hand in a small gesture, both unexpected and gentle.

“I will not harm her,” he said. His tone was level, almost toneless, but carried the weight of an archmaester and a Targaryen both.

He studied her face another heartbeat, then began in a quiet, clipped cadence meant for examinations in the Citadel.

“Rhaenyra,” he said. “Does the world tilt when you breathe?”

Rhaenyra hesitated. “A little. Like the deck of a ship.”

“Any ringing of the ears?”

“Yes."

“Blurring of the sight?”

“For a moment.”

Vaegon hummed under his breath, low and grave.

“Do you taste iron?”

Rhaenyra licked her lips. “Yes.”

“Do you hear your heartbeat louder than the room around you?”

A shiver went through her. “Yes.”

Laena’s fingers curled at Rhaenyra’s knees, furious and terrified all at once.

He released her chin with care, as though setting down a relic, and rested his hand briefly against her cheek. The gesture was feather-light, but steady, warm despite the chill of his rings.

Rhaenyra’s eyes flickered.

A sound escaped her wounded and unbearably young.

Vaegon exhaled, the weight of years moving through him like a tide.

“I have seen blows like this,” he said, voice no longer clipped but quiet, almost… human. “On princes in the training yard. On knights thrown from their steeds. On your uncle, the first time Caraxes tossed him from the saddle.”

A wry, tired hum underlined it.

“But never,” he continued, the softness darkening into something sharper, “never on a princess in her own keep.”

Daella.

The ghost of her softness. Her tremble. Her too-large eyes when the world frightened her.

For a candle mark, Rhaenyra’s face and Daella’s overlapped in his mind with painful clarity.

And the shame of it, the bitter memory of every time he had been unkind to his gentle little sister, every time he had folded himself into coldness instead of care. Rose in his throat like smoke.

The sight of Rhaenyra, bloodied and blinking, made it burn.

Vaegon lifted a hand again, brushing a strand of blood-stiff hair from Rhaenyra’s temple with an old man’s care that felt, to him, like penance.

“You will rest,” he said gently. “Your thoughts will wander. You may be sick or unsteady. That is the nature of such injuries.”

His voice softened even further.

“None of it is your fault.”

Rhaenyra’s eyes filled, finally, too full to hold.

Vaegon nodded, as if giving her permission to let them fall.

She lurched forward.

Not gracefully.

Not like a princess.

Like a daughter who had finally found an elder who would not recoil from her blood.

Her arms wrapped around him. Tight and desperate and clinging.

Vaegon froze.

It was only a breath, but it carried the weight of a lifetime spent with books instead of children, scrolls instead of embraces.

And the weight of Daella. Who had never clung to him like this, though he now wishes she had. Or that he had deserved it.

Then, slow as an old tree bending to wind, his arms lifted.

One curved stiffly around her back. The other, hesitant at first, came up to cradle the back of her head, fingers careful not to touch any bruises. 

He held her.

Just held her.

An old Targaryen man and a shattered Targaryen girl, and between them the ghost of a dead princess he had failed.

“You are safe,” he promised, the rarest softness threading under his breath. “You hear me, child? You are safe now.”

Rhaenyra’s sob hit his shoulder, muffled and small.

And for the first time in decades, Vaegon wished, truly wished, he had been kinder, to another girl who once trembled in his shadow.

Vaegon held Rhaenyra another moment.

Long enough to steady her breathing, long enough for the worst of the shaking to subside, before he eased her back with grave care.

“The world beyond this chamber is no longer your concern.”

Rhaenyra blinked, stunned.

Vaegon’s gaze flicked to Rhaenys, who stepped closer, her fury banked but burning under her skin.

“Your good-mother and I,” Vaegon went on, “will see to it that truth spreads, not rumor. That justice is struck, not chaos.”

Rhaenys nodded once, sharp and regal, her hand brushing lightly across Rhaenyra’s spine. A promise she did not need to speak aloud.

“You need not lift a finger,” Vaegon said. “Not tonight. Not tomorrow. The realm will move as we bid it.”

His thumb brushed one last time at the edge of the bruise on her cheek, a grandfather’s gentleness hidden beneath an archmaester’s certainty.

“You will stay here,” he said, “with Laena.”

Vaegon straightened slowly. Old bones, ancient purpose, and the air around him shifted, colder, clearer.

Then he placed a hand on Rhaenys’s arm.

“Come,” he said softly, but there was thunder under it. “There is work to be done.”

Rhaenys stepped forward, smoothing a hand through Rhaenyra’s hair before turning away.

Leaving Rhaenyra in Laena’s arms, finally allowed to breathe.

---

Alicent did not light a candle.

The solar lay in a wash of moonlight, silver and cold, pooling around her feet. Her maids had doused her in perfume. Rosewater, lavender, crushed iris. Layer after desperate layer meant to smother the scent clinging to her.

It only made it worse.

The perfume sat thick in her lungs, syrupy and floral, coating her tongue until she could taste the sweetness.

But beneath it, stubborn and copper-sharp, the ghost of blood pushed through.

She tried to breathe slowly. She tried not to notice the way the scents mixed, sweetness turning sickening, flowers curdling into something metallic and rotten.

It clung to the back of her throat.

It pressed against her teeth.

It felt as though it had sunk into her skin.

For a moment she thought she might retch.

Criston’s blood.

His blood on her.

His body… gods, his body…

The door clicked.

Soft. Careful. 

Alicent did not lift her head. “Leave me.”

A footstep. Then another.

Not timid. Not bold. Just… certain.

“Your Grace.”

Larys Strong’s voice floated into the room, quiet as a draft beneath a door. “Forgive the intrusion.”

Her jaw tightened. She did not look at him. “I said leave.”

“As you wish.” But he didn’t move. His silence thickened the air between them. “Only… I worried you might be in need of company. Tonight was a shock, after all.”

Alicent’s throat burned. “You know nothing of tonight.”

“Only whispers.” A soft breath. “And the scent of fear in the corridors.”

She closed her eyes, fingers curling in her skirts until her knuckles ached.

Criston. His ruined body.

The way his bones had looked beneath torn flesh.

Her mind kept dragging her back to the moment she’d seen him on the floor.

A shape she could not reconcile with the man who had been her shield

Larys’s voice softened. “If you command me to go, I will. But if you wish to speak of what was done… I will listen.”

Silence held.

“She killed him.” The words scraped raw from her. “She tore him apart. Like an animal. Like one of those dragons her kind worship.”

Larys did not gasp or offer platitudes.

He stepped closer, each movement deliberate, measured, like approaching a wounded creature whose teeth still gleamed.

“Ser Criston was loyal to you,” he said. “Fiercely.”

“He was all I had.” Her voice cracked. “All I had, Larys. And she— she—”

“Your friend?” he supplied.

Alicent flinched.

“Friends do not slaughter those loyal to us.” Larys’s tone was gentle, almost sympathetic. “They do not demand we accept their children as heirs while they stain themselves with murder. They do not ask us to smile while they build their power on our misfortune.”

Alicent’s breath trembled.

He knew exactly where the fractures were.

He pressed on them without force, just enough to make the pain bloom.

“She will come for my sons,” Alicent whispered.

“Not yet,” Larys replied. “But she has shown what she is capable of. That is the truth you saw tonight. And truths once seen cannot be unseen.”

Alicent swallowed, tears sliding unchecked.

Larys leaned forward slightly, enough that she could feel the warmth of him behind her shoulder.

“Your Grace… you are alone in this court.”

A soft statement. A knife hidden inside it.

“Your father has been cast down. Your protector lies dead. And the King… cannot protect even himself.”

Alicent stared into the shadows. She did not contradict him.

“But you need not remain alone,” he continued.

It was almost tender.

“Not if you place your trust in the right hands.”

She finally turned her head. Just enough to see him from the corner of her eye.

“You,” she said. “You mean you.”

Larys bowed his head with something like respect, though she knew better: it was hunger wrapped in silk.

“I mean the one man in this keep who would never betray you, Your Grace. Not for crown nor coin nor favor.”

Her breath hitched. “And why is that?”

Larys smiled faintly.

“Because I choose you.”

Alicent’s fingers trembled.

Her grief. Her isolation. Her terror for her children.

All of it knotted together until there was only one truth left in the room.

She needed someone.

Anyone.

Someone who saw what she saw.

Someone who believed her.

And Larys was right there.

Alicent nodded once. A tiny, fragile thing.

Larys stepped into the room fully.

And the door closed behind him.

Notes:

When I first imagined The Whim of the Fourteen, this was the chapter I saw. The very first one. Everything I’ve written up to now has been me working backwards, laying the stones that would lead us here.

This chapter has such a special place in my heart, and I’m genuinely so excited to finally share it with you.

I know it’s close to Thanksgiving and many of you are with family and sometimes that’s comforting, and sometimes it’s… complicated. So if you need a little escapism, a little magic, a little fire-lit corner of this world to disappear into for a while, I hope this chapter gives you that.

Thank you for reading. Truly ❤️

Chapter 25: The Green Court

The morning bell struck twice before the longhouse truly woke.

Wooden beams shuddered as the coastal wind pressed in, carrying the smell of salt and hearthsmoke. Women stirred, children yawned, and the stone floors warmed beneath their bare feet with the first breath of the volcano.

Mila rose from her cot with practiced quiet. Lifting her youngest daughter onto one hip.

Five years ago she had slept in an alley behind the Street of Flour in Kingslanding. Now she lived beneath a roof carved by dragonfire and paid not a single copper for the privilege.

Everywhere Mila looked, she saw the reforms the Princess had laid like stones in a road no one expected her to build. The smallfolk here were not dressed in rags. Their tunics were simple but whole. Their cheeks full, their eyes bright.

Even the streets were swept before the sun rose, smelling of clean water and warm salt instead of rot.

Emberguards in deep red sashes oversaw the food lines, directing families with gentle authority.

“Keep left for the morning stews. Right for grain parcels. Mind the little ones.”

A sudden darkness rippled across the courtyard.

Mila’s breath caught. Above enormous wings carved through the early sun.

Syrax, lazily circling the volcanic crown of Dragonstone.

The others barely flinched. A few children pointed and squealed, always excited under the shadow of wings. 

“Better a dragon’s shadow than a Green banner any day,” someone said. 

A low rumble of agreement rolled through the line.

“And that consort bitch,” an older woman rasped, her voice like torn cloth. “Still screeching that the Princess is cruel for defending her own children. While she kept a Kingsguard snake at her feet.”

Several women hissed under their breath.

Someone spat sharply onto the ground.

The sound was wet, cutting. 

As if the act itself warded off evil.

Finally a third voice finished the name. 

“Ser Criston.”

More spit hit the dirt.

People made warding gestures: fingers crossed, thumb brushed over the brow, the old Valyrian sign used against curses. Even the Emberguards tensed, as if the very name were filth.

Mila shifted her son on her hip, pulse quickening. She remembered the rumors. The truth that had come out later, whispered from kitchen to alley to longhouse: The Princess had been pregnant when he struck her. A babe in her belly when his fist landed.

And mother dragons are said to be most fierce when carrying.  

Some said she ripped out his spine.

Some said she burned him alive without touching him at all.

Some even said she gelded him. 

No one could agree how she killed him, only that Rhaenyra Targaryen did. 

A woman behind Mila whispered, “If she hadn’t killed him, the gods would have. Murdering a mother carrying life? That’s sin older than the Seven.”

A second shadow joined Syrax’s circling form, this one vast and horned, its wingspan blotting out half the sky.

Someone gasped.

“Vhaelyx,” whispered a man behind Mila.

The triplets were coming.

The shadows multiplied. First a sweep of viridian and silver light as Vermax rode an air current over the upper walkways; then a soft, golden shimmer spiraling downward like dawn given form as Vaerith landed delicately atop a carved column.

The courtyard shifted.

The Emberguards straightened.

The smallfolk fell quiet the way people do in a sept when the gods walk past.

And then the children appeared.

They stepped through the far archway in a loose line, sunlight pooling around them like something alive.

Prince Aemon moved first.

Six years old, but holding himself with the solemn poise of a man three times his age. Silver hair clung to his head like wet silk, each strand catching the light as if fire lived inside it. 

Prince Aenar followed, and the air warmed.

Where Aemon was winter, Aenar was the storm before summer. His curls gleamed silver, but his skin bore a bronze warmth. And then, he grinned. Twin dimples carved deep into each cheek, flashing with a mischief that could topple armies or charm entire villages.

Finally the girl came, and the world went bright. 

Princess Aemma.

The moment she stepped into the courtyard, sound itself seemed to fold inward. Her skin glowed golden, as though sunlight had chosen her as its vessel. Her heterochromic eyes so striking that a few mothers instinctively pressed their children closer.

Many said the Mother herself had kissed her brow at birth.

Others claimed different Gods had touched her.

And others still claimed those same Gods had marked all of Rhaenyra’s children.

Especially the babe she carried when the Kingsguard struck her. 

Storm in the Womb, the smallfolk whispered.

Aerion Velaryon. Four years old, wild as lightning, impossibly quick. Seemed determined to live up to every scrap of that name.

“Aerion! Young Prince, slow down!”

It was far too late for that.

A streak of silver burst around the corner of the longhouse, moving with the reckless joy of a creature convinced the world existed solely for him to run through. His tunic hung half-buttoned, his cheeks flushed pink, one shoe entirely missing.

Behind him thundered two nurses and three Emberguards, red-faced and utterly defeated.

“Prince Aerion, stop!”

“Aerion VELARYON, come back here!”

“Gods preserve us… someone block the stairs!”

Aerion heard none of them.

Because Arrax, his tiny cradle-hatch, swooped overhead with a trill of delight. Aerion shrieked in pure joy, the sound echoing off the stone like a hymn to chaos.

“ARRAX! I FOUND YOU!”

He did not run toward the dragon.

He ran with him.

Through the courtyard.

Around a water barrel.

Straight toward Mila’s side of the food line.

The smallfolk parted like a tide before him.

Aerion skidded to a stop before Mila, nearly toppling into her skirts before righting himself with a stubborn confidence that seemed carved into Targaryen bone.

“Hello!”

His grin was enormous, brilliant, a little dangerous.

He peered at the baby in Mila’s arms.

“Your girl is little,” he announced. “Like Arrax! Except she doesn’t bite. Arrax bites. And breathes fire. But she’s nice.”

Arrax swooped low in agreement, chirping like an affectionate cat with wings.

The nurses finally reached him, wheezing, half-dead, clutching Aerion by the shoulders.

“Young Prince,” one gasped, “the Princess asked you to stay inside.”

Aerion smiled sweetly, utterly unrepentant.

“She’ll forgive me.”

Aenar snorted.

Aemon muttered something despairing.

Aemma smoothed Aerion’s hair.

Around them, smallfolk children began appearing in doorways, alleys, steps, and corners. Drawn by the sight of dragons and royal heirs the way bees follow the scent of sugar.

“We’re going to the green court,” Aenar announced. “Jory and Asha are waiting.”

“We’re building the fort bigger today!” A village boy called.

“I brought shells!”

The lane dissolved into a buzzing constellation of little voices, all orbiting the heirs.

Because here, children played together without rank.

A miracle as real as any dragon.

“My mother says I can’t play,” another child grumbled miserably, being tugged back by her apron-string. “But Princess Aemma said yesterday I could help find flowers!”

Aemma, hearing her name, brightened.

“I did. We can make a game of it, whoever finds the prettiest flowers win,” she said softly.

The mother froze. And then, faced with a princess glowing like a child-goddess, sighed deeply and surrendered her daughter’s hand.

“Fine. But no climbing the seawall.”

“Yes, Mama!”

But not all were lucky.

“No, you’re staying HOME.”

A fisherman’s wife grabbed her son by the collar before he escaped. “You didn’t finish your sweeping!”

“Maaammaaaaaa,” he wailed, staring at Aenar with a betrayal so deep it might haunt him into adulthood.

Two younger toddlers in the back burst into tears because their much older siblings were being allowed to go and they weren’t, and life was deeply unfair.

Aemon watched all of this with a tired solemnity entirely too old for six.

“This happens every time,” he said. 

Aenar elbowed him cheerfully. “That’s because everyone likes us.”

Aerion puffed up proudly. “They like me the MOST.”

“Only when you’re not biting people,” Aenar shot back.

“I only bite sometimes."

Aemma let out a soft sigh.

It was still strange.

Still unbelievable.

That Rhaenyra Targaryen. Heir to the throne, rider of Syrax, survivor of treachery and blood, let her children run free with the smallfolk.

Of course, Emberguards shadowed them at all times.

Of course, dragons circled above with ancient vigilance.

But her words had been simple. 

“All children may play. Rank means nothing until the world forces it upon them."

Mila turned and saw them.

Princess Rhaenyra descended the stone steps with the quiet command of someone who never needed to shout. She was breathtaking in a way the world rarely deserved, cheekbones sharp as carved marble, and eyes the molten violet of a dragon’s heart. 

Beside her moved Prince Daemon, all wiry confidence and blade-sharp amusement. Hand resting casually on Dark Sister’s pommel, as though he were the only creature alive unshaken by the radiance at his side.

Between them walked Lady Laena Velaryon, six moons pregnant and nothing short of resplendent.

Her beauty was gentler than Rhaenyra’s, but no less arresting. Sun-warm skin glowed against the sea breeze, her silver curls braided with tiny shells and pearls that caught the light with each step.

And flanking all three like impatient little storms, Baela and Rhaena.

Both five.

Both furious.

Both dragging their feet in identical displays of inherited dramatics.

And among them was young Steff. Taller now, stronger now, but still carrying the ghost of the four-year-old who once clung to Rhaenyra’s gown during his mother’s funeral.

He ate at her table.

He studied beside the royal children.

He lived under her roof.

“Look at them,” a woman near Mila whispered. “Always together."

Rhaena scowled, jumping so fiercely her feet made audible sound when they hit the stone. 

“It’s not fair,” she announced before she’d even reached the courtyard floor.

Baela backed her up with the precision of a twin who had rehearsed this grievance. “We only spilled ink. It wasn’t even that much ink.”

Daemon arched a brow. “It covered half the table.”

“And the cat,” Rhaenyra added dryly.

Laena pressed a hand to her lower stomach, laughter warming her eyes. “If you hadn’t decided to finger-paint your Valyrian letters, you would have been allowed to join the others.”

Baela stiffened at the accusation. “We were expressing ourselves.”

“You expressed yourselves,” Daemon said, “across the fishmonger’s wife’s new cloak.”

“That was an accident!” Rhaena cried, scandalized, utterly without remorse.

Laena released a long, weary exhale, the kind only mothers and saints could manage.

“My darlings,” she said, “you are grounded from play until your letters are finished. Properly. No ink spilt. No shouting. And no more sketching battle plans across the floor tiles.”

Baela gasped.

“You said we could be generals!”

“When you can spell ‘general’ without reversing half the letters,” Rhaenyra replied.

Daemon bit the inside of his cheek to hide a laugh and failed magnificently.

The twins glared at him.

“This is cruelty,” Baela accused.

“This is tyranny,” Rhaena agreed.

“This is parenting,” Laena finished.

The Emberguards nearby tried not to smile.

Rhaenyra only shook her head, caught somewhere between fondness and exasperation.

“Come. Your siblings will reach the green court before we do. And if Aenar is building a fort again, we’ll never hear the end of it if we miss the unveiling.”

Daemon snorted. “It’ll collapse in an hour.”

“Not if Aemma reinforces it,” Laena said softly.

Rhaenyra nodded. “And she always will.”

As they moved through the courtyard, Rhaenyra’s gaze swept over the food lines, taking stock, as she always did. Her eyes caught Mila’s for a brief moment.

Recognition flickered. Not of names, but of shared history.

A mother who had once been hungry.

A princess who refused to let her people starve.

Mila dipped her head in a small, grateful bow.

Rhaenyra returned it with a warm, quiet smile, one meant only for her. Before turning back to her family.

The green court opened before them like a small kingdom of its own. A sweep of soft grass, wildflowers, driftwood structures, and shaded alcoves carved between volcanic stone.

It had been a barren training yard. Rhaenyra herself had turned it into this.

She’d named it the green court deliberately. A reclamation of a color that had been twisted into a banner of hatred and violence. A quiet declaration that green did not belong to war or fanaticism. Green could mean growth. Green could mean childhood. Green could mean peace.

And here, on Dragonstone, it did.

It was an official space. Planned, tended, blessed by the island’s septa and Valyrian priests alike. A place where the smallfolk knew their children were safe. A place where laughter wasn’t a luxury but a right.

Baela’s eyes lit first. “Oh! Aenar’s rebuilding the fort!”

Rhaena clapped her hands. “We can help! We can help!”

“You are still punished,” Laena reminded gently.

“Yes, Muna,” Baela said.

“We know, Muna,” Rhaena echoed.

And then they bolted.

They tore across the grass barefoot and victorious, their stern glares forgotten in an instant. Little silver comets streaking toward the chaos.

Aenar saw them and whooped, dimples cutting deep into his cheeks. “BAELA! RHAENA! Come help with the rampart!”

“We’re not supposed to be here,” Baela shouted gleefully.

“Which makes it better!” Aenar yelled back.

Aemon closed his eyes for a long, impressive moment. 

Aemma only smiled, serene as a small goddess perched among her garland-making circle.

And in the midst of it, Steff found his place as naturally as breath.

Aenar spotted him first. “STEFF! Get the long branch! The one that bends, yes, that one!”

Steff jogged over, taller than most of the children now but still moving with the quiet care of someone who had learned early to take up as little space as possible. He braced the bending driftwood with steady hands while Aenar scrambled atop a rock to instruct him with exaggerated authority.

“No, higher, higher, perfect!”

“Too high,” Aemon muttered, already repositioning another beam to compensate.

Steff bit back a smile and shifted the branch exactly as Aemon indicated. Years of shadowing Rhaenyra’s brood had taught him how to interpret each child’s different brand of chaos.

Aerion was chasing Arrax through the grass, shrieking at the top of his lungs:

“NO ARRAX, DO NOT EAT THE FLOWER CROWN! THAT IS AEMMA’S FAVORITE ONE!”

Arrax paused, flower crown dangling from his tiny jaws.

Aemma lifted one eyebrow in gentle command.

Arrax dropped it immediately.

The twins dove straight into the fort-building madness.

Baela wrestled a branch twice her size into place with feral determination. Rhaena barked orders like a tiny war general, despite her earlier punishment.

It was bedlam.

Pure, radiant bedlam.

Rhaenyra watched them. Her children, the island’s children, all tangled together like threads of the same tapestry, and something in her eased.

They were her true kingdom.

Not the Iron Throne. Not the council chambers. This wild, laughing brood with dragons overhead and grass stains on their knees. Aemon standing too straight for six. Aenar shining like a storm breaking. Aemma radiant in the center of it all. Aerion shrieking after Arrax like a piece of living lightning. Baela and Rhaena already trying to turn a game into a campaign.

“Our brood,” Laena said quietly, as if she had reached into Rhaenyra’s thoughts. Her hand rested over the curve of her belly. “Look at them.”

Daemon followed her gaze, and for a heartbeat there was no war in him.

No pride.

No hunger.

Only a sharp, aching tenderness that would have astonished half the realm.

“They would conquer half Westeros before we blink,” he said. There was rough pride in it, and sweet affection underneath. “And they would do it without meaning to.”

“They already have,” Laena replied, smiling. “The Stormlands talk of nothing else. Half the taverns from Rain House to Felwood have sworn their hearts to you. Say a word against you there and you will start a brawl before the ale reaches the table.”

Rhaenyra huffed a breath that was almost a laugh. “They should not bleed for my name in their cups.”

“They bleed gladly,” Laena said. “They say you elevated all of the stormlands.”

Rhaenyra’s expression warmed as she watched Aerion tumble into a heap of laughing children, then cooled as she exhaled. Joy always tugged the shadow of Kingslanding closer, tightening like a closing fist behind her ribs.

Laena felt the shift before the words formed.

Her fingers brushed Rhaenyra’s forearm, gentle and steady. “You are thinking of Kingslanding.”

Daemon’s head turned, sharp as a blade catching sunlight. His gaze swept the chaos ahead, dropped to Aerion again, shrieking with laughter as he chased Arrax through the grass. Every line of him a mirror of Daemon’s own boyhood.

His expression tightened. A mirror. A lineage. A reminder of what could be taken from them if they were careless.

“Of course she is,” Daemon said softly. “Six moons come due.”

Rhaenyra did not deny it.

“Father has written twice this week,” she said. “He expects me before the next moon turns. He is gentler now. Softer. Too soft, at times. Guilt has eaten holes in him.”

Daemon’s mouth curled, not quite amusement, not quite scorn. “Guilt makes a fine leash for a king.”

Laena lifted her brows in reproach, though she did not contradict him.

Rhaenyra’s eyes drifted back to her children. Her miracles, playing like they had never known fear.

“I don’t dread the Red Keep because of the court,” she said. “Not anymore. Not after what Vaegon and Rhaenys did.”

The words rippled like cold water through warm air.

Laena tried not to smile as she remembered. Blood on marble, whispering lords dragged screaming from council chambers, tongues torn out for lies, hands removed for treachery, names burned from oaths and histories alike.

The elder Targaryens had been ruthless...and right. 

Together, the two Targaryens carved a line through treachery so clean it had divided the entire court into before and after.

Before Criston, the realm whispered.

After Criston, it bowed.

“They did what needed doing,” Laena said softly.

Even Daemon, who had once believed himself the most dangerous creature in any room, inclined his head in agreement.

No one defended a dragon like another dragon.

They had taken great care telling him what happened. 

The truth of the blow could not be written in a letter.

If Daemon had seen those words on parchment, he would have left for the Red Keep before the ink dried. And Westeros would remember that night for a century.

So they waited.

They waited for him to come home from the Stepstones.

Waited until he was standing before them in the quiet of Dragonstone’s council chamber. Rhaenys, Vaegon, and Laena forming a silent wall at Rhaenyra’s side.

Vaegon had spoken first, his voice measured as steel cooled in water.

Laena had placed a hand on his arm, grounding him before the storm could rise.

And only then, only when his breath was steady and the door barred did they tell him what Criston had done.

They told him slowly. Carefully. As if each word might set him alight.

Daemon had not spoken for a long time.

Just stared at Rhaenyra’s face, at the faint silvered mark by her lip, at the place where a Kingsguard’s fist had dared touch her. 

Caraxes felt it worst.

The Blood Wyrm screamed.

A sound so violent and ancient that half the island dropped to their knees.

But Caraxes was past reason.

And Daemon had to be locked away.

For three days.

“Justice does not cleanse a place. And the Red Keep… still feels fouled.”

Daemon’s voice dropped to something raw and lethal.

“As it should. It will always stink while she remains within it.”

Laena spoke more carefully. “Her power is lessened now.”

Viserys had seen to that.

After the truth of Oldtown’s coin found its way into the letters that funded blades meant for Rhaenyra’s brood. After Vaegon laid the ledgers bare.

Alicent's duties were quietly removed.

Then Rhaenys fed the three Hightower cousins, the very ones who supplied the assassin’s purse, to Meleys.

She did not do it in secret.

Meleys rose over Kingslanding in a blaze of red scale and steam, circling once above the Street of Silk, once above the Sept, once above the Hightower manse on Rook’s Rest Lane. Then she dropped like a thrown spear.

The cousins screamed as Meleys’ jaws closed. Not with surprise. With outrage. As if they had been wronged.

The city watched.

Some screamed. Some ran. More stood still. A few even cheered.

By the time the dragon was finished, there was nothing left but scorched stone and a smear of ash. 

Alicent had shrieked until her voice turned ragged.

She demanded the King punish Rhaenys for acting without his leave. For dragging his name into her “barbarity.” For feeding “good men of the Faith” to a dragon as though they were cattle.

Viserys...being Viserys, gave in.

He had summoned her to court.

He spoke of law, of order, of restraint. Of how the realm must see that there were lines even dragons could not cross.

The court parted for her like a wave breaking on rock.

She did not kneel.

She stopped just below the Iron Throne and looked up at Viserys. The way one looked at a man caught halfway through drowning.

He started with her name. Not her title.

“Rhaenys—”

And she struck him.

The crack tore through the hall like lightning splitting the sky. A sound so clean and violent that even the swords in the throne seemed to ring with it.

Viserys reeled.

Her palm print rose on his cheek at once, a bright, blooming red on sagging, royal flesh. His hand flew there, pale and shaking, as if he could press the moment back into his skin and deny it ever happened. Gasps burst like popped blisters. One woman screamed. Someone dropped a ring against the stone and the tiny clatter sounded deafening.

He had never been touched in violence since taking the throne.

His outrage came fast, thin and reedy.

“HOW DARE YOU—”

Rhaenys did not flinch.

Did not bend even a fraction.

“Say it, Viserys. Say Rhaenys Targaryen is guilty for defending her family when her King would not.”

Say it. Name her traitor. Name her wrong.

Say that Oldtown’s coin, paid for your heir’s blood and your grandchildren’s throats, is less sin than the dragon who answered it.

Viserys could not.

Rhaenys tilted her head, assessing him like a dragon assessing a trembling stag.

“No?” she’d ask, almost gently. “I thought not.”

The king’s face crumpled as if under real weight. 

And Archmaester Vaegon who stood a step behind Rhaenys smiled. An expression he never truly made before. 

“Viserys.” 

He said. 

Not Your Grace. Not My King.

“You are a fool, nephew. A sentimental, blind fool.” His voice carried through the hall like a sermon. “Oldtown paid for assassins. Not words. Not rumors. Assassins. And you decide it is not enough to warrant their blood? Truly, were you dropped as an infant?”

Rhaenys hadn’t laughed.

Not even a smirk.

She had simply stared at Viserys like he was a stranger.

And the realm exploded.

Word spread like wildfire. Carefully, deliberately, in calculated whispers that left out just enough to make the imagination run bloodier.

The Queen Who Never Was struck the king.

And Alicent.

Alicent paid for it all.

When she finally tried to step out of the manse on Rook’s Rest Lane, the city greeted her with feces.

Rhaenyra could still see it when she closed her eyes. The Red Keep fetid with old sins, the streets humming with a love that could turn sharp if mishandled. A place that adored her and yet strained at the leash of its own temper.

She drew a slow breath and watched Aerion tear across the grass, silver hair wild, laughter bright enough to crack stone.

“I do not like taking them back to Kingslanding,” she said at last. “Any of them. The court I can stomach. The lords I can manage. But the city…” Her mouth tightened. “The city feels hungry. It loves too hard. It hates too hard.”

Her gaze caught on Aerion again.

“Especially him.”

Laena followed her eyes, understanding flickering there before Rhaenyra voiced it.

“He looks so much like you,” Rhaenyra said quietly to Daemon. “They are polite enough not to name it. For now. But eyes are not blind. Not in the red keep.”

Daemon snorted, not unkindly, but with a confidence that cut clean through her worry.

“He’ll be fine, sweetling.”

Rhaenyra glanced at him, a flicker of disbelief in her violet eyes.

Daemon jerked his chin toward the chaos in the grass.

“Look at him. He’s vicious.” Pride warmed the edges of his voice. “My little mirror. Him and Aenar practically breathe fire. The Keep should be afraid of them, not the other way around.”

Rhaenyra tried not to smile. It almost worked.

“And if anyone asks why he looks like me,” Daemon went on, shrugging, “I’m your uncle. Blood will echo how it wants. The realm hardly knows a Targaryen child who doesn’t look like half their kin.”

Laena rolled her eyes so hard it was a wonder they didn’t fall from her head. A soft laugh escaped her.

“Oh yes,” she said dryly, “that will convince them. Truly, Daemon, you are a master of subtlety.”

Daemon’s mouth curved. “I manage.”

Rhaenyra looked between them. Her partners, her beloveds, and then down to the swell of Laena’s belly. A gentler warmth moved through her expression, dimming the sharp edge of worry.

“I will be back before you labor,” she said quietly.

Laena’s teasing fell away at once. Her eyes softened. “Nesakā,” she said softly. My heart.

“And if the babe comes early,” Rhaenyra continued, stepping closer, “send word. I will mount Syrax that very moment. Not a wall, nor a king, nor a council will stop me.”

Laena’s hand found hers, fingers curling over her knuckles in a way that was more vow than touch.

“I know you will,” she said. “But the babe will wait for you. I’ll see to it.”

Daemon’s hand brushed Rhaenyra’s back. Laena’s fingers remained twined with hers. The wind softened. Even the dragons above seemed content to remain circling, guardians at ease.

Time stretched like warm honey.

The subtle pull of the sun dipping, the quiet hush of the island preparing for evening. Shadows thickened at the edges of the green court. Children’s laughter softened into tired giggles, sticky fingers, tangled hair.

“We should gather them soon,” Laena said.

“Before they decide to sleep in the fort,” Daemon added.

Rhaenyra smirked. “Aenar tried that last season.”

“And woke up covered in ants,” Laena said fondly.

“Serves him right,” Daemon muttered.

They herded the brood, lovingly, with much complaining toward the castle as the smell of roasting fish and spiced greens drifted through the open doors.

Warmth wrapped around them like a cloak.

The great table was already laid, its carved coasts and rivers half-hidden beneath dishes and folded linen, as if the meal itself had tried to conquer Westeros.

Vaegon had claimed a narrow stretch near the far end, scrolls arranged with almost martial precision. Ribbons trailed like little standards, ink still drying in tight, exact lines. At the sound of soft boots and brighter voices in the doorway, his hand paused above a seal. The edge of his mouth eased. He slipped a marker into place and gathered the scrolls, stacking them aside as though shelving away some looming question of state to make room for a gentler one.

Septa Rhaella rose at once, skirts whispering. She bowed her head in greeting to their elders, but her eyes went at once to the children. Pride warmed her face, softening the lines at the corners of her mouth as Aemon and Aenar argued quietly over who would sit nearer the head, while Aemma inspected each cup as if judging whether it was worthy of the Realm’s Heart. Rhaella’s fingers twitched with the urge to straighten collars and smooth wild silver curls. She settled for brushing a crumb from Aenar’s shoulder when he barreled past, the small, familiar touch enough to soothe them both.

Laenor arrived last in a breath of sea air, brushing dried salt from his sleeves as though he had only just remembered court clothes were not meant to taste of spray. His hair was still damp at the ends, his cheeks touched with wind. Aemma broke formation the moment she sensed him, skirts swishing as she darted across the room.

He barely had time to laugh before she collided with him. Laenor caught her around the middle, lifting her clean off the ground and spinning her in a bright, easy arc. Her delighted shriek rang off the stone, startling a chuckle from even the most stoic guard by the door.

When he set her down, Aemma clung for a heartbeat longer, small hands fisting in the front of his doublet. Laenor glanced over her head to the others, eyes crinkling at the corners.

“Storm at sea,” he said lightly. “I barely made it to harbor.”

“You tracked half the harbor in with you,” Vaegon replied, dry as parchment, eyeing the flaking salt on Laenor’s cuffs. But his gaze drifted back to the children, and the lines of thought on his brow eased into something warmer, almost wistful.

Daemon slid into his seat with the casual arrogance of a man who owned the room.

Laena lowered into hers with the elegance of a woman carved from starlight.

Rhaenyra took the center place. Not because she demanded it, but because the others left it open for her without question.

The children crowded in on either side, elbows bumping, feet swinging, voices overlapping in a riot of sound and joy.

Steff took his spot beside Aenar, where he always fit best.

For a moment. One precious, impossible moment, they were all together.

A single family.

A single table.

The last of the sunlight spilled through the high windows, gilding every silver head, every warm smile, every echo of laughter.

Daemon leaned close, voice low.

“Remember this.”

Rhaenyra did.

Would.

Forever.

Because moments like this never lasted.

Not for dragons.

But for this heartbeat in time, she let herself believe the world could stay exactly as it was.

Whole.

Unbroken.

And theirs.

---

The baths on Driftmark were carved out of the cliff itself.

Sea water poured in through a narrow grate, warmed as it travelled the hidden channels beneath the keep.

Steam curled in thin threads toward the high, arched opening that faced the dark.

Rhaenys lay with her shoulders just under the surface. Silver hair fanned around her like a crown tangled in tide. Her eyes were closed, face tipped toward the chill air. Only the slow rise and fall of her chest betrayed that she was not stone herself.

Corlys moved the way men do when their bones have begun to ache.

Careful, then careless, because the water was hot and his joints sighed as they sank.

For a while, they did not speak.

The sea did the talking.

He found her hand under the water, fingers sliding against hers through the heat. Long, lean, scarred. He had known every line of it for half a lifetime and still liked to rediscover each one.

She let him.

Only her thumb moved, brushing his knuckles with absent-minded affection.

“Listen to her,” Corlys said quietly. “She is in a mood.”

He meant the sea.

The waves had a different temper tonight, a restless slap against the rocks instead of the usual slow drag. 

“Driftmark does not enjoy being cut,” Rhaenys answered. Her voice was calm. “She feels the wound.”

He huffed. “Vaemond was not the island.”

“No.” Her lashes lowered, then lifted again. “But he was of it. That kind of amputation leaves a scar.”

Corlys turned her hand over between his own, studying the palm as if it were a chart. Calluses along the line of fingers from reins and swords, a faint pale mark at the base of the thumb from some long-healed break.

And there, over her right knuckles, a new roughness.

He traced that one with his thumb.

“You hit him hard,” he said, almost lightly.

“Not that hard,” Rhaenys replied. “He kept his feet.”

Corlys’ mouth curved. “Harder than when you slapped me after I called Dragonstone ‘a provincial rock with delusions of grandeur.’”

“That was a tap,” she said coolly.

He snorted. “My jaw rang for an hour.”

Without looking at him, Rhaenys flicked her wrist.

Water arced up and caught him full in the face.

Corlys sputtered, blinking through the droplets. “Proof,” he managed, wiping his beard, “that you’ve only grown more dangerous with age, wife.”

“Then stop saying foolish things within arm’s reach,” she said, though the corner of her mouth finally, finally softened.

He lifted her hand to his lips, then let their joined fingers drop back beneath the surface.

Corlys watched her profile.

The light caught the hard angle of her cheek, the small lines at the corner of her mouth that battle and childbirth and disappointed crowns had etched there.

“You know,” he said quietly, thumb brushing the inside of her wrist where her pulse beat steady, “all my jewels and ships and titles together still do not look so fine as you did when you slapped a king.”

She gave him a sidelong look, somewhere between fondness and exasperation.

The water lapped at their shoulders.

Her foot nudged his under the surface.

“Then it is well you married the one thing you could not sell,” Rhaenys said. “Else you’d have talked yourself into trading me for a fleet by now.”

“Never,” he said, and for once there was no jest in it at all. “A fleet I can build again. There is only one of you.”

Silence settled. 

And when Rhaenys dared to open her eyes again it was to see her husband still staring. 

"Say what you wish to say."

“Driftmark gossips,” he said. “You know that.”

“Driftmark breathes.” Rhaenys tipped her head back against the stone. “She has lungs in every hall and throat in every tavern. Of course she gossips.”

“Half the kitchens say Vaemond is lucky we only exiled him,” Corlys said. “The other half say we have maimed the house for pride.”

Her jaw flexed, then eased. “Which half do you believe?”

“The first.” He shrugged, sending ripples across the water. “The second can write their complaints to Oldtown, if they miss him so badly.”

Rhaenys’ lips curved, but it faded quickly.

“His sons do not write complaints,” she said. “They throw them.”

He grimaced. “I heard about the goblet.”

Her eyes rolled violently.

“Apparently we are all traitors here, for daring to still eat at the high table while their father starves on the mainland.”

Corlys lifted their hands out of the water, watched the droplets cling and fall.

“And what did you do?”

“What I always do.” Rhaenys’ voice cooled. “I told them the truth.”

She turned her head toward him, hair dripping against the stone.

“That their father betrayed us. That I fed Hightowers to Meleys so there would be a line in the sand. And that if they wished to follow him into exile instead of eating my bread, they were free to pack their own trunks.”

Corlys whistled under his breath. “Gentle as ever.”

“They stayed.” Rhaenys’ gaze drifted back up to the dark arch, to the sliver of night beyond. “For now. But they speak together with their heads too close.”

He squeezed her fingers. “Houses survive quarrels. Ours has before.”

“Not like this.”

She went quiet for a moment, listening to the sea pound the cliff.

“Vaemond’s girl did not speak,” Rhaenys said at last. “Valaena stood by the door like a ghost. She did not defend him. She did not defend us. She only watched.”

“She is still on Dragonstone most days,” Corlys reminded gently. “At Rhaenyra’s side. In the nursery. On the cliffs. It is hard to shout at a woman when half your heart is playing stones with her children.”

That drew a sound from Rhaenys that might have been a laugh in a kinder world.

“She loves those babes,” she said. “I know. I saw her holding Aemma when the child had her last fever. She did not move for hours."

“Then part of her loyalty aligns with ours already.”

“And part of it still bends toward a father who sits in Hobert Hightower's home and curses my name.” Rhaenys’ teeth caught the inside of her cheek. “We have not only cut out a rot, Corlys. We have split a branch. It will crack further or it will heal crooked.”

Corlys shifted, stepping closer until their shoulders touched under the water. He turned her hand in his again, tracing the web between thumb and finger, the callus where a sword’s hilt had worn old grooves.

“Branches that grow crooked still bear fruit,” he said. “Sometimes the sweetest.”

“Listen to you. Philosophical.” Her mouth softened. “Marriage to a dragon has made you sentimental.”

He snorted. “Marriage to you has made me careful with metaphors. If I say the wrong thing I might wake to find my ship fed to Meleys.”

“Do not tempt me.”

His hand tightened around hers.

That was the thing about Corlys Velaryon in private.

The world called him the Sea Snake, merchant prince, lord of half the tides.

Men pictured tall ships and glittering harbors when they said his name. None of them thought of this.

An old man in a hot bath, cradling his wife’s hand like it was the last piece of driftwood in a storm.

“We have weathered worse,” he said. “Driftmark shook when Laena left for Pentos and married Daemon. Shook when Laenor was too obvious with his...tastes. Shook when the realm denied you your crown. Every time she settled again.”

“This is different,” Rhaenys insisted quietly. “Laena chose her path. Laenor chose his. Vaemond chose to ally himself with knives for children and we chose to cut him away. That is a stain. Even if it does not show on the stone, the people can taste it.”

He thought of the harbor the week of Vaemond's exile. 

Marq Shettson's smirk, chest lifted and eyes dark with disdain. 

Vaemond's sons glaring at Corlys as if he had been the one to commit betrayal. 

He tipped her hand up, palm open, as if he were reading her fortune.

“The songs in the lower town are very clear about which side they think the gods favor. They call you Meleys’ Mercy now.”

She made a face. “Ridiculous. There was nothing merciful in it.”

“Not to Hightowers,” he agreed. “To our grandchildren, with their safety just a little more secured. There is.”

The sea crashed.

The wind shoved a spray of chill air into the warm room and both of them shivered.

Rhaenys leaned her head sideways until her temple rested against his shoulder.

“You think we have not broken the house?” she asked. No challenge in it. Only the question she would never voice before a council.

Corlys’s free hand slid to the rim of the pool, fingers splaying against wet stone.

“I think we chose our side,” he said. “And any branch that refused to bend with that wind was going to snap sooner or later. Better on our terms.”

Rhaenys let herself rest in her husband's arms. 

“Our grandchildren deserve a house that would bleed for them,” he said. “Not one that counts coin before lives.”

She closed her eyes.

Images rose without her consent.

Baela and Rhaena running through halls. 

Aemon’s solemn little face upturned to the sky. Aenar’s wild grin. Aemma with dragonfire caught in mismatched eyes. Aerion, all storm and stubbornness, clinging to Rhaenyra’s skirts.

She had not expected to adore them this much.

“Driftmark will hold,” Corlys went on. “Vaemond’s boys will simmer. Some will leave. Some will stay. The girl will go where her heart is tugged hardest. That is the way of all young things. What matters is that when they look up from their quarrels, the island still stands. The seat still stands. And you on it.”

She opened her eyes again, turned her head slow against his shoulder to look at him.

“And you?” she asked. “Where are you in this fine speech of stone and branches?”

He smiled, a quick, crooked thing. “Clinging to your good hand and counting myself fortunate I’m not the one you fed to your dragon.”

“You would give her indigestion.”

Corlys chuckled. “She has better taste than that. Besides, I am still useful.”

“Yes,” Rhaenys agreed, as if weighing cargo. “A passable lover. On your better days.”

Corlys actually reared back a little in the water, arms tightening around her waist in scandalized offense.

“Passable?”

She arched one elegant brow. “You are not twenty-five namedays anymore, husband.”

“I am improved,” he said, affronted pride sharpening every word. “Seasoned. Perfected. Ask the charts. No sailor prefers a green captain to one who has weathered storms.”

“A bold claim from a man who snored through half last night,” she said.

“I was conserving strength.”

“For what?”

“For you,” he replied without missing a beat.

She huffed, but the sound broke on a quiet laugh. He felt it against his chest, the small surrender in it. His hands slid at her waist, not upward, not lower, just settling more securely, as if to anchor himself to the only harbor that had ever truly mattered.

“Very well,” Rhaenys said at last, tilting her head so her temple rested beneath his jaw. “You are a tolerable husband, a decent sailor, and a sometimes-exceptional lover.”

He made a wounded noise.

“I commanded half the seas of the known world. And this is how history shall remember me.”

She tapped his thigh beneath the water, a small, intimate reprimand. “History will remember you as the Sea Snake,” she said. “I will remember you as the man who stood beside me when I struck a king. Who crawled into a bath with his wife and let her insult him to his face.”

His laugh slipped out, low and pleased.

“It was no hardship. Let the court see it. Let them wonder if House Velaryon has forgotten how to kneel entirely.”

“You enjoy scandal far too much for a man with your titles.”

“Scandal keeps people honest,” he said. “Or at least it keeps their lies interesting.”

He leaned in, pressed his forehead to hers.

“When we go to Kingslanding,” he said quietly, “we go as we are. Not as they remember us. Not as they would have you be.”

Her breath stirred against his mouth. “As what, then?”

"Unbroken."

She lowered their hands again, curling her fingers tight around his.

“Very well, husband,” she said. “We will bathe, and dress, and wear our jewels. We will bring our ships and our gold. We will stand at Rhaenyra’s side before the realm and let Driftmark see that this is the path. If some branches crack under the weight of it, so be it.”

Corlys smiled, fierce and fond.

“That is my queen,” he said.

“Your wife,” she corrected.

“My queen and my wife.”

He kissed her damp knuckles.

“In other news,” Corlys said, voice warm and wicked, “I had better raise my efforts above passable. I would not have my better half bored.”

Her lips curved, finally, into a real smile.

“You may attempt it,” she said. “If your heart can bear the strain.”

He tightened his arms, drawing her closer until the water folded around them in one, steadying embrace.

“My heart,” Corlys Velaryon said, “has been straining after you since the day you refused me in the Hall of Nine. It is well used to the work.”

---

From her solar, Alicent could not see the city, only the faint smear of smoke rising from the lower streets and the pale line of the river. But she heard it. The bells. The distant hum of a thousand throats.

Laughter when the wind shifted right.

Alicent closed the shutters anyway.

The room darkened, light splintered to thin green bars through the glass. She preferred it that way now. Narrow. Contained. The world shrank to the table before her, to the neat stack of letters, to the ink that had already dried sharp along the nib of her quill.

The top letter bore her father’s hand.

Oldtown parchment. Oldtown wax. Oldtown judgement.

You must not let the mob’s fickleness guide your heart, he had written. Crowds howl today and kneel tomorrow. The realm still requires your steadiness. Keep the king’s eye. Shape his conscience. Rhaenyra’s brood is a storm that will pass if contained.

He always phrased it that way now.

Contained.

As if Rhaenyra and her dragonspawn children were a sickness. 

Her fingers tightened on the edges of the parchment until they shook.

He never mentioned the filth that had hit her face. The wet slap of it, the sour stench burrowing into silk. The smallfolk’s eyes, bright with joy at her humiliation. The way the guards had pulled her back and one had hissed, Your Grace, inside, inside, as though she were the shameful thing on display.

Otto Hightower did not waste ink on such details.

He spoke of leverage.

Of patience.

Of the Seven rewarding the steadfast.

A soft knock at the door splintered the quiet.

Alicent’s head snapped up. “Enter,” she said, too quick.

The door edged inward.

Helaena slipped through first, moving with the careful, floating gait she had taken on as she grew. There was always a sense with Helaena that she walked through two worlds at once and needed to place each step with care so she did not fall through.

Aegon followed, dragging his feet.

Aemond came last, straight-backed, his small jaw clenched with effort to seem older than his years.

“Mother,” Helaena said. “You asked for us.”

Alicent’s eyes fell at once to Helaena’s hands.

Dirt. Again. Tiny smears along her fingers, pale skin stained in little crescent moons of black and blue where she had pressed too hard with a quill, or a brush, or gods-knew-what creature she had collected in some corner of the keep.

“Helaena.” Alicent exhaled. “What did I say about playing with beetles in your good gown?”

Helaena blinked, then looked down as if surprised to find the stains there. “They were cicadas,” she said. “Aegon found the shells. They leave their skins behind when they molt.”

“That is worse,” Alicent said tightly. “You are not a street child to come in covered in bugs and mud. Sit.”

Helaena obeyed at once, sinking into the nearest chair, eyes already drifting back toward the window, toward whatever invisible shimmer of meaning she sensed in the world beyond it.

Aegon dropped into his own seat with none of her softness.

One arm slung over the back.

His hair needed combing, his tunic rumpled, collar crooked as though he’d pulled it on without looking.

He was twelve now, and already carried himself with the bored, brittle arrogance of a young lord who’d been allowed too many freedoms and given too little direction. The sort of boy who knew where the wine was kept and how to pour it without being instructed. The sort who hid restlessness behind laziness.

She saw it. Hated it. Could not reach him through it.

“Aegon. Sit properly,” she said. “You are not in the yard.”

Aegon didn’t move at first.

He stared at her flat, unimpressed. Then dragged himself upright with exaggerated slowness, spine curving just enough to show he wasn’t truly listening.

“There,” he muttered. “Proper.”

It was mockery wrapped in obedience. The worst kind. The kind Otto would have slapped out of him in a breath. 

“Feet on the floor,” she said sharply.

Aegon’s jaw tightened, but he dropped his boots to the ground with a dull thud.

He was growing fast. Taller than she expected each season, shoulders beginning to broaden, and there was a heaviness to him lately.

A weight. Usually slouched. Rarely happy.

“Now,” Alicent breathed, smoothing her skirts with quick, nervous fingers, “we will review your prayers before the septon arrives.”

Aegon groaned, tipping his head back so far it hit the chair with a soft thud. “We did that yesterday.”

“And you will do it again today.”

“You hate me,” he mumbled into the ceiling.

Alicent’s mouth went thin. “Do not speak nonsense.”

“It isn’t nonsense,” he shot back, voice rising a fraction. “You don’t like anything I do. You don’t like how I sit, or stand, or breathe—”

“That is enough.”

Helaena blinked, startled out of her trance. Her small hands folded together, twisting. “Mother doesn’t hate you,” she said softly. “She’s… scared.”

Aegon threw her a look sharp enough to cut. “Of what?”

Helaena's eyes flicked to the window. “Too many things.”

Aegon said something beneath his breath. 

“What was that?”

He lifted his gaze toward her, sullen but smooth. “Nothing, Mother.”

Aemond stood instead of sitting. He always did that at first. As if hoping she would see how straight he held himself and praise him for it.

He clasped his hands behind his back. “You sent for us,” he said. His voice had a sharp, precise edge that still startled her. There was nothing soft left in the boy who had once trailed her skirts.

“Yes,” Alicent said. She folded Otto’s letter neatly in half and set it aside. “You will have heard by now that your half-sister and her… brood… still plan to come to court within the month.”

Helaena’s face brightened at once. “Aemma will bring more shells,” she said. “She promised. From the Dragonstone beaches. They’re different there. The colors.”

She spoke colors like it was a prayer.

Alicent barely had time to respond before Helaena’s voice softened into something dream-bound.

“She makes it stop."

Alicent went still.

“Helaena,” she said carefully, “what makes what stop?”

But her daughter was drifting again, gaze tipping back toward the window, toward something distant and shimmering that Alicent could never see. Her lips parted as if she might speak the thought, but it dissolved before it reached the air.

At last she said only, “Aemma is… warm.”

Alicent’s throat closed.

Warm.

Able to hush whatever haunted Helaena’s mind.

Aegon snorted under his breath. “You talk like she’s some kind of saint.”

Helaena shook her head. “No. She’s just...she touches the world differently. When she looks at me, everything stops buzzing.”

Alicent’s hands curled against her skirts.

“Stop,” she said sharply.

Helaena blinked, startled.

Alicent tried to soften her voice. Failed. “She is not your friend, Helaena.”

“She is,” Helaena insisted, quiet but sure. “She braided flowers into my hair. She held my hand when I was—” Her breath hitched. “When the shadows were loud.”

Something in Alicent snapped tight.

“I said stop.”

The word cracked through the room like a whip.

Helaena shrank back in her seat, fingers curling into her palms.

Alicent pressed on, brittle, trembling with emotions she did not know how to name. “You must stop clinging to that girl. She is Rhaenyra’s daughter. They are not—” Her jaw trembled, just once. “They are not yours.”

Helaena stared at her with wide, wounded confusion.

“But she makes me quiet inside,” she whispered.

Alicent’s breath stuttered.

For half a heartbeat she wanted to reach for her daughter. To comfort her. 

But the image of Rhaenyra’s golden brood rising, while her own children wilted under the weight of fear, pushed hard and cold through her chest.

So she reached for the only leverage she had left.

“Listen to me,” Alicent said, voice low and tight. “Aemma is not yours to claim. She is a princess of Dragonstone. And one day. When she is ten-and-three, she will be wedded to your brother.”

Aegon’s entire body tightened.

His shoulders locking, his fingers curling against the chair, his breath catching as though he had been struck across the face. 

Alicent didn’t look at him.

That only made it worse.

Helaena’s lips parted in shock. “Wed?”

“Yes,” Alicent said, tone harsh enough to sting. “It is a proper enough match.”

Because if Aemma is Aegon's. Then she is not Rhaenyra’s. 

Something ugly flickered across Aegon’s face.

He was old enough to know Aemma was… different. Different in a way that made him feel like the dust on her shoes.

“She’s a child,” Aegon snapped, shifting in his seat again, more restless this time. Like a boy trying to outrun a shadow that clung too tightly. “And she...she’s—”

He cut himself off.

Because there were too many words.

And none of them felt safe to say aloud.

Aemma was gentle in a way no one in this keep ever was. She smiled with her whole face. She spoke softly but was never afraid. She moved through the world as though it welcomed her.

Aegon hated the tiny, shameful part that wished he could be like her.

Bright. Certain. Loved without effort.

Hated that everyone said she was special, whispered it like a prayer.

And hated even more that they were right.

Hated how his mother only said her name when she wanted something from him.

“You will honor the match,” she said. “And you will be grateful for what it brings this family.”

Aegon’s jaw tightened.

“And when she is under her husband’s authority,” she continued, “when she has left Dragonstone behind, then you may consider her a friend. But not before.”

Helaena’s mouth fell open, horror and confusion tangling across her face.

It was then that Aemond, quiet as a shadow slipping in through a cracked door, spoke.

“I would be happy to marry Aemma.”

All three turned toward him.

Aemond sat very straight, hands folded neatly in his lap, his pale hair falling over his shoulders. He looked younger than his nine years, and older than any child should.

Helaena’s breath caught.

Aegon’s stomach twisted.

Alicent blinked, startled by her middle son’s certainty. “Aemond,” she said slowly, “that is not the arrangement being discussed.”

“She is brave,” Aemond added softly. “I like brave girls.”

Aegon felt something flare hot and ugly behind his ribs.

Alicent straightened, regaining her authority. “Your brother is the heir among you,” she said firmly. “And Aemma’s match will serve him the best.”

Aemond bowed his head in immediate obedience.

Helaena whispered, almost too soft to hear, “Aemma would be good to either of you. But I think she shines too warm for this house.”

Alicent’s teeth ground, her jaw seizing from the pressure. He didn’t want Aemma. But the idea of Aemond having her. Holding that gentle, golden affection, made him feel like he was disappearing.

Like he was being replaced before he even had the chance to matter.

“You will not speak any of their names as if they were your playmates,” Alicent went on. “They are not kin for you to tumble in the grass with. They are Rhaenyra’s children.”

“Our sister’s children,” Aegon said.

Alicent’s gaze cut toward him. “Your half-sister. Your rival’s children.”

There.

That got through.

“Mother,” Aemond started, “Prince Aemon is—”

“Prince Aemon,” Alicent repeated, the title sour on her tongue. “The boy they call light of Dragonstone and the Pale Prince Reborn and whatever other foolish names they’ve invented this week. You are my sons. You will not join the chorus.”

Helaena’s fingers tapped against the table in a small, uneven rhythm. “Songs do not last,” she said dreamily. “They change. The words molt like cicadas. Leave their skins behind.”

“Helaena.” Alicent closed her eyes briefly. “Please. Not now.”

Helaena fell quiet.

Aegon stared at the windows, face pinched. 

“We have not left the Keep in months,” he said, attempting casualness and failing. “The other boys go hunting. They ride. They go down into the city with their guards. We sit in lessons and stare at walls.”

“You sit in lessons because you will be king if Viserys remembers his duty,” Otto had written once.

You will be king. You will be king.

She had believed it with the fervor of a prayer. Once.

Now she was not sure if she believed anything at all.

“There are people in that city who would gladly kill you,” she said. “You will stay in the Keep. Where I can see you. Where the guards can see you.”

“And where everyone whispers,” Aegon said. Under his breath, but not enough.

Her hand snapped out before she thought it through, flattening against the table with a sharp crack.

All three children jumped.

“Enough,” Alicent said. “Enough of this sulking. Do you think I keep you here for my pleasure? Do you think I enjoy pacing these halls?”

They stared at her.

The room felt smaller suddenly. The green light pressed in. The walls seemed to contort. 

“Mother,” Helaena said softly. “You are bleeding again.”

Alicent looked down.

Her fingers had worked her nail beds so hard the skin beneath it reddened, a faint bead of blood running down. She forced her hand open. Palm flat on the table. The effort made her jaw ache.

“You will obey me,” she said. Quiet, now. “When Rhaenyra comes, you will be polite. You will bow when it is required and speak when spoken to and nothing more. You will not run to her children. You will not play with them in the yards like… like everyone is equal.”

The taste of the word disgusted her.

“But we are kin,” Helaena said. Puzzled. “We share blood. Blood is always equal. It just runs in different directions.”

Alicent stared at her daughter, at her bright, distant eyes. For a moment, she saw herself at that age, standing in the Hightower, hands folded, trying so hard to be good she could barely breathe.

“You will listen,” Alicent said, and this time her voice shook. “You will not leave my sight. You are mine.”

The last word scraped out.

Aegon’s shoulders hunched.

Aemond’s mouth thinned.

Something in Helaena’s face went quiet, like a candle cupped against wind that finally gives up and dies.

A knock sounded again at the door.

This one was brisk, practised, the rhythm of a man who believed the Keep still belonged to him by right of habit and age.

Viserys.

For a foolish half breath, hope rose.

Perhaps he had come to sit with her, to speak of the letters, to ask her counsel as he once had.

“Enter,” Alicent called.

But it was only a servant, red-faced from hurry.

“Your Grace,” he said, bowing. “His Grace the King requests Prince Aegon and Prince Aemond in the lower yard. The royal Maester wishes to see their progress with the lance before the Princess arrives next moon.”

Alicent’s spine went rigid. “The lower yard,” she repeated. “Outside. With the men.”

“Yes, Your Grace.” The servant kept his gaze on the floor. “Ser Harrold will attend them. And Ser Erryk. And Ser Arryk. The King was most insistent. He said…” The man swallowed. “He said they must not grow up afraid of their own people.”

A bone-deep chill slid through her.

Her own people.

The same people who had pelted her with filth.

Aegon’s face lit in a way she had not seen in months. “The yard,” he breathed.

Aemond’s fingers flexed at his sides, the ghost of a smile breaking his careful composure.

Helaena only looked down at her ink-stained hands and seemed, very faintly, to recede.

“No,” Alicent said.

The word came before she could temper it.

“Mother,” Aegon interrupted. “Please.”

He never begged. Not like that.

He sounded, for a heartbeat, like a boy asking for one more hour of light before bed.

“I am not a child to be locked in a room,” he said. “I am your son. I am a prince of this realm. If I hide every time the city looks at me, they will smell fear.”

Aemond nodded. “We will be careful,” he said quickly. “We will stay near the knights. We will not talk to anyone.”

Helaena glanced between them, then to Alicent. “If they go,” she said quietly, “they may come back happier.”

There it was.

The choice.

Trust the city that had mocked her. Trust the guards she no longer believed in. Trust Viserys, who had sat and let his face be struck and done nothing except flinch and look wounded.

Or refuse and watch her children wilt behind shutters.

Otto would have had an answer. Otto always had an answer.

Otto was not here.

The bells sounded again in the distance. That thin, clawing note.

Alicent’s vision tightened momentarily around the edges. She could almost see it: the yard, the sky, the practice dummies. Rhaenyra’s dragon circling high on some future day, casting long shadows over her sons as the city cheered another woman’s brood.

Her breath hitched.

“Fine,” she said, and hated how the word dragged. “You may go. Today. But if I hear even a whisper of trouble, if anyone so much as looks at you with wrong intent, you will come back here and you will stay under this roof until the Stranger claims me. Is that understood?”

“Yes, Mother,” Aegon said at once.

Aemond straightened further, as if granted a command before battle. “Yes.”

They bolted for the door, their sudden boyish eagerness cutting through the heavy air like a blade.

Helaena lingered.

“Go with them,” Alicent said. The words cost something, but she forced them. “Stay close. Watch. If you see anything… wrong… you come to me at once.”

Helaena tilted her head, studying her mother as if she were one of her cicadas.

“Everything is wrong,” she said softly. “But I will watch.”

She drifted after her brothers, skirts whispering along the floor.

The door shut.

Silence crept back in, curled into the corners, stretched itself along the ceiling.

Alicent reached for her father’s letter again.

Her hands would not stop shaking.

She smoothed the parchment.

Read the same lines she had memorized already. The same counsel about patience and duty and waiting out the storm of Rhaenyra’s popularity. About trusting in the Seven and in men’s short memories.

The city’s roar rose and fell like a living thing.

For a long time, Alicent stayed seated, staring at the green light on the table. Listening.

Every cheer sounded like mockery.

Every distant shout might have been her name cursed. 

Or Rhaenyra’s praised. 

She could no longer hear the difference.

---

The king’s solar still smelled faintly of paint.

Old canvases leaned against the far wall, half-finished seascapes and dragons with wings blurred where Viserys’ hand had lost its surety. Dust had gathered along their frames. No one dared move them. No one dared say they had become a kind of graveyard.

Viserys stood at the window instead.

He rarely painted now.

Below, the training yard stretched in a rough square, banners hanging limp in the late afternoon heat. Tiny figures moved on the packed dirt, the bright flash of a lance, the glint of helms.

His sons.

His boys.

He watched Aegon lower his lance with decent form and terrible focus, shoulders loose where they should have been tight. Aemond beside him, posture precise, every movement a measured effort.

“They are growing,” he said without turning. “Look at them, Selwyn. When did they get so tall?”

Behind him, the Hand shifted his weight.

Lord Selwyn Tarth looked almost out of place in the king’s dim, green-lit solar.

He was young by the court’s standards. Barely past thirty, if that and broad in the shoulders. Tall enough that he seemed too large for the room. 

He had the bearing of someone who’d rather be in sunlight than this sickly green glow.

Someone who’d spent more of his life on training fields and cliffside keeps than crowded courts.

“They grow fastest when we are not looking, Your Grace,” Selwyn replied. “That has ever been the way of children.”

Viserys hummed, but the sound carried little contentment.

He leaned his hand against the carved stone, breath fogging the glass. The city lay beyond the yard, a sprawl of slate roofs and crooked streets, the river a dull silver line. Bells rang somewhere distant. He could not hear the words, only the cadence of a crowd.

“They say Aemond holds the lance better than many boys two years his senior,” he said. “The maester tells me he reads above his age as well. Helaena… sees things. Aegon…” He faltered. “Aegon is spirited.”

Selwyn’s beard shifted with the faintest smile. The expression warmed his face briefly, making him look even younger. “That is one word for it.”

Viserys’ mouth curved. Then smoothed.

“The yard does them good,” he said. “I will not have them shut away in this castle like prisoners because the city had a fit of bile last year.”

He did not say Alicent’s name.

He did not need to. The echo of it hung between them anyway, accompanied by the remembered stench of rot and old fish and the wet slap of filth against silk.

Selwyn cleared his throat gently. “On that matter, Your Grace. The city.”

Viserys finally turned.

The Hand stood by the long table, one large hand resting on a map that had not been updated in months. His expression was thoughtful. Not fearful. Selwyn Tarth rarely looked afraid. Only… cautious. And worse, conscientious.

A man who weighed every truth before speaking it, and spoke it anyway.

“The master of whisperers brings the same report each day,” he said. “Of your daughter. Of the… correction visited upon Ser Criston and those who funded him.”

Correction.

A softer word than what had truly been done. Rhaenys’ hand against his cheek still burned in memory, hotter than dragonfire.

Viserys rubbed that cheek now, as though the ghost bruise lived in the bone. “The smallfolk sing of whatever is new and bloody,” he said. “They will tire of it.”

“With respect,” Selwyn answered, “they have not tired yet. If anything, the verses grow more elaborate.”

He produced a folded scrap of parchment from his sleeve.

“I took this from a tavern near Fishmonger’s Square,” he said. “The minstrel had copies for the lords who wished to learn the words.”

Viserys hesitated, then took it.

The ink was crude, the hand far from courtly, but the words were clear enough. A refrain about a queen with red scales at her back and a princess with blood on her hands who had not bowed when the court demanded she break.

His throat tightened.

“They call it A Dragon’s Due,” Selwyn said. “There is another about the day in the throne room. That one is less flattering to His Grace.”

Viserys flinched.

He could see it again. The hall. Rhaenys’ eyes, dark with disappointment. Vaegon at her shoulder. The crack of her palm as it met his face, the sound swelling in horror, in disbelief, in thin, shrill outrage from somewhere near the Hightower column where Alicent stood.

“How far?” he asked quietly. “How far do these songs spread?”

“As far as the Reach,” Selwyn said. “Beyond that, it is harder to say. The Riverlands enjoy their own ballads. The North listens more to ravens than minstrels. But the ports hum with it. The Arbor. Driftmark, certainly.”

“Driftmark,” Viserys echoed. “Of course.”

The Sea Snake would be insufferable with such a song in the air.

Proud.

Satisfied.

Rhaenys at his side, chin lifted. They had won that day in more ways than one.

Selwyn watched the king’s face. Measured his silence, then chose honesty over comfort.

“It is into this climate that the Princess will return,” he said gently. “With her children. With her dragons. It would be… unwise… not to consider what her arrival will stir.”

Viserys bristled. “I am not unaware of my own court, my lord.”

“That is not what I meant.”

Selwyn's tone did not change, but he lifted his hand from the map. Palms open. Appeasing. “Forgive me if I speak plainly. I have no talent for honeyed speech.”

Viserys exhaled, some of the brittle offense cracking. “Plainly then.”

“Plainly,” Selwyn said, “Rhaenyra’s presence is both balm and blade. A woman wronged, a mother defending her unborn child, a dragon who struck back when provoked. They have no songs like that for Your Grace. Or for the queen.”

The words landed with the heaviness of stones dropped into a still pond.

Viserys looked back to the yard.

Aegon had missed his last strike.

The lance skidded off the straw man’s side, splintering with an ugly jolt that popped from the wood. Aegon cursed, tossed the broken shaft away, reached for another without looking toward the viewing gallery where the knights sometimes sat.

There was no one there now.

Only maesters. And the occasional steward taking notes.

“They do not sing for a king who lets himself be struck,” Viserys said quietly. “Is that what you mean?”

Selwyn did not rush to deny it.

“I mean only that the moment passed beyond your control. As moments sometimes do. And now the story of it belongs to the city. They will decide what it means. We can only respond.”

Viserys crushed the tavern parchment in his fist.

“Respond how?” he demanded. “I am not going to punish Rhaenys after the fact to soothe some wounded pride. She did what I should have done from the first.”

Selwyn inclined his head. “I did not suggest you punish her, Your Grace.”

“You suggested it when you brought me this dung,” Viserys snapped, shaking the crumpled song. “When you say the city sings too loud, what else am I to hear?”

His voice rose on the last word. Not with fury. With something like panic.

Selwyn held the outburst calmly. The man was calm in a storm, knowing when to let it pass over him rather than meet it head on. 

“I wish you to see the board as it is,” he said. “Not as you hope it might be.”

Viserys’ shoulders sagged.

“What do they say?” he asked. “When they compare.”

Selwyn's answer was simple.

“They ask why their king’s own seat cannot be as well tended as his daughter’s rock in the sea.”

The words hurt in a deep, dull way. Not sharp like Rhaenys’ hand. Heavy. Penetrating.

Viserys closed his eyes. For a moment he pictured Dragonstone not as the brooding fortress of his youth, but as Rhaenyra had described it in her letters.

Our people eat well, Father. The longhouses are warm. We have set a school in the lower town. The boys drill with wooden swords. The girls learn their sums in the morning and ride in the afternoon. The priests of the Seven share a garden with the old Valyrian stones. They argue sometimes. They laugh more often.

He had read that line twice.

Three times.

He had not answered it.

“I did not ask her to build any of that,” he mumbled.

“No,” Selwyn said. “She did it anyway.”

On the practice ground, Aemond lowered his lance and struck cleanly, the straw dummy’s shield splitting under the blow.

The boy sat straighter in the saddle afterward, throat tipped up toward the keep, toward the window he knew his father watched from.

Instinct moved Viserys before thought did.

He stepped back from the ledge, out of sight.
Out of reach.

“The six moons accord is my law,” he said quietly. “She must come. She must spend her turn in the capital, as agreed. The court expects it. The lords will gather.”

Selwyn Tarth stood with his arms loosely clasped behind his back, the picture of calm conviction.

“Of course,” he replied. “And it is wise she does. The realm must see their future clearly. It would be folly to hide her away on Dragonstone as if she were already in exile.”

That word struck harder than the lance below.

Exile.

The air in the solar tightened, stale and warm. Viserys turned away from the window entirely, one hand gripping the edge of a table he hadn’t realized he’d leaned against.

Daemon.

Daemon, who had not stepped foot in Kingslanding since the day he slaughtered Gwayne Hightower. 

His breath shook through his teeth.

“Exile,” he repeated under his breath. “Gods… is that how the court sees Dragonstone now? As if she were keeping herself from us?”

Selwyn hesitated. 

“Some do,” he said. “Others say she protects the island from us.”

Viserys closed his eyes.

“With that said,” Selwyn added, “her arrival will not be received as a dutiful heir visiting her aging father.”

Viserys frowned. “What will it be received as then?”

He hesitated.

“Forgive me, Your Grace, but I must speak of Prince Aerion.”

Viserys’ eyes softened. “My little storm.”

The boy did not simply remind him of Daemon.

He echoed him.

The same silver mane. The same wicked spark in the eyes. The same feral joy when he ran, as though the wind itself belonged to him.

Daemon reborn in miniature.

And Viserys did not know whether to ache for it…

or fear it.

Sometimes he watched Aerion dart across courtyard and felt his stomach drop, as if he were looking at a ghost or a prophecy.

Daemon had been exiled to the Stepstones for his crimes. By Rhaenyra, no less.

The realm whispered about that too.

Exiled…yet welcomed back to Dragonstone whenever he wished.

Viserys swallowed.

“He looks like my brother,” he said quietly. “More with every passing moon.”

Selwyn set his jaw, choosing his words with care. “…the resemblance is noted. Among the court. And beyond it.”

Viserys’s hands clenched.

“I know what they whisper,” he said sharply. “I am not blind.”

Rumors traveled like rats:

Daemon returning to Dragonstone in the night. Daemon, Laena, and Rhaenyra walking the cliffs together. Daemon and Rhaenyra speaking too closely, laughing too easily. Daemon’s daughters clinging to Rhaenyra as if she were a second mother. Rhaenyra’s children braided into Laena’s hair as though they shared one household instead of two.

By the time the tales reached the taverns, they had soured into something darker. Men said the three of them retired together and did not emerge until the candles guttered out. That Daemon left one bed and went straight to another without ever crossing a hall. That there was no bed at all, only a tangle of limbs and silver hair behind locked doors.

No one agreed whose room they used.

No one agreed how many beds they shared.

Everyone agreed on the shape of the sin. On Dragonstone, the Princess, the Prince and his lady wife were too close. Far too close.

And Aerion.

Was the result of that closeness. 

“Rhaenyra’s arrival is a showing of banners,” Selwyn said. “Princess Rhaenyra comes as the woman who killed to defend your line. Every eye in Kingslanding will go first to the boy. To them he is not only your grandson, but the story itself. The Realm’s Daughter is riding home, Your Grace, and she is carrying her proof on her hip.”

"Good," Viserys said and meant it. 

For a moment, aching pride cracked through him.

Then it frightened him.

Because Rhaenyra’s children were not merely beloved.

They were mythic.

Every single one.

“It is our task to deny them any quarrel,” Viserys insisted suddenly. “Rhaenyra’s arrival must show a united dynasty. Sons and grandsons and granddaughters sharing table alike. No whispers of divisions. No coldness in public.”

He thought of Alicent’s drawn face.

Of the way her mouth had gone hard when he mentioned the yard, the city, the people.

The way she had looked at him as if he were handing their children to a mob with torches.

Selwyn watched his king’s eyes cloud.

“Can the queen manage such a display?” he asked quietly. “Has she… healed enough… from the city’s treatment to stand beside Rhaenyra without shattering?”

Viserys bristled again, protective now. “She is stronger than she seems.”

Selwyn considered the king’s vision.

This clean, shining notion of a whole family standing together, smiling for the realm. As if it were a tapestry laid across the table.

Beautiful from a distance.

Threadbare up close.

“My king,” he said slowly, “unity at court is never a mistake. A meal shared, a hall filled, a greeting well-seen...these things matter. People believe what they watch repeated.”

He paused, choosing his words.

“But Princess Rhaenyra and the Queen… they are not banners to be hung beside each other. They have a history. A deep one. And hurts that did not bloom from politics alone.”

The king moved away from the window, shoulders rounding as if unseen hands pressed upon them.

“What would you have me do, Selwyn?” he asked. “Send my daughter word that her presence is no longer welcome? Cancel the accord? Hide my throne from the very heir I named to sit it?”

The words came out in a rush. 

“No,” Selwyn said. “I would have you prepare for the truth. To expect them to stand side by side without strain is… unrealistic. And asking either woman to pretend nothing ever happened may sour things further. The court is very good at spotting falseness.”

He stepped closer to the table.

Touched the map again.

“When Rhaenyra sets foot in this court,” he went on, “she will bring her own weather with her.”

Viserys swallowed.

“And Queen Alicent will bring her wounds.”

“I am their king,” Viserys insisted softly. “And Rhaenyra's father. I must believe more is possible than what you describe.”

He turned fully toward Selwyn, eyes bright with the last fragile remnants of hope.

“They may not be friends again, I know that. But they can stand beside each other without resentment poisoning the air. They can speak without barbs. They can… remember they cared once.”

A breath, thin and almost pleading, “And if they cannot remember it themselves, then I will remind them. I can hold my house together. I must.”

A pebble dropped somewhere low in Selwyn’s chest.

Just a small, sinking weight that came when a man recognized wistfulness dressed as certainty.

He had seen this before.

In soldiers who wanted peace as they remembered it, not as it truly was.

In fathers who clung to the memory of laughing children while grown sons sat in sullen silence across the table.

Viserys’ determination wasn’t foolish.

Just… fragile.

Selwyn would have to manage this.

Not correct it.

Not shatter it.

Just… guide it.

As one might guide a horse skittish from old wounds. Steady hands, no sudden jerks, and no illusions about how deep the scars ran.

“Alicent by one side,” Viserys said, as if saying it made it true. “Rhaenyra at the other. No distance between them. No room for those who would wedge a knife in any gap they find.”

He did not say Otto’s name either.

He did not need to.

Selwyn nodded slowly. “It is possible,” he said. “If you speak to the queen. If you make clear that this is what you ask of her.”

Viserys gave a short, humorless laugh. “You make it sound so simple. As if words have ever fixed what lies between women.”

Selwyn had no words for that, but he did caution this, “You might also consider your own role, Your Grace. When your daughter arrives, every eye will be on you. They will watch whether you rise to meet her.”

Viserys looked down at his hands.

Paint had once stained those fingers. Ink now darkened the tips. Nothing so noble as blood.

“I will greet her as my heir,” he said. “As my child.”

Outside, the lance struck straw again.

Aegon whooped at some small success. Aemond corrected his grip even in victory, always chasing an invisible, perfect line.

Viserys listened to the echoes.

“When she comes,” he said at last, voice low, “I want the yard filled. Let her see that this keep is not hollow. Let the city see my sons take the field under their sister’s eye and not cower.”

Selwyn inclined his head. “I will see it done.”

“And the streets…” Viserys hesitated. “The crowds. Let them shout what they will.”

“That will please her,” Selwyn said.

“It is not to please her,” Viserys lied. 

Selwyn did not argue the point.

Viserys continued, “I will arrange a hunt. A feast. Opportunities for the city to see all my kin together. United.”

Selwyn agreed but not in the way Viserys would appreciate. 

“We are running out of chances, Selwyn,” he said softly. “To show them anything other than fracture.”

Selwyn thought of Alicent, walking the corridors with her shoulders up around her ears. Thought of the letter from Oldtown he had seen in her hands once, clutched too tight. Thought of Rhaenyra, far away on her island, building courts of grass for children who did not know how close the realm sat to ruin.

“Yes,” he said. “We are.”

Viserys drew himself up, as much as his aching back allowed.

Viserys swallowed. “Anything else I should know?”

Selwyn considered him.

“Yes,” he said. “The whispers from Driftmark say the Sea Snake will be coming to court as well.”

Viserys stiffened.

“And Princess Rhaenys,” Selwyn added, “is still angry.”

A slow, cold breath left Viserys’ lungs.

He touched his cheek unconsciously, thumb brushing the place where her palm had cracked against him. The bone still remembered the insult, the shock, the humiliation. But the deeper wound had been the truth behind her eyes when she struck him.

He had not seen her since.

Had avoided it, in truth. The idea of facing Rhaenys again tightened something in his chest.

He had been furious with her, then.

Incandescent.

No one had ever dared strike him since he took the Iron Throne.

But underneath the fury...embarrassment. 

And beneath the that… a thought that never should have taken root. She would have made a better queen than I made a king.

Rhaenys had always carried herself like someone born to rule. Some small, bitter part of him respected her for it. Hated that he respected her for it. Hated that she had been right.

“Yes,” Viserys said quietly. “I had not forgotten.”

Selwyn bowed his head. “Then you understand, Your Grace… the realm will watch this reunion as if it were a verdict.”

A verdict on Rhaenyra.

On Alicent.

On the succession.

On him.

Viserys whispered, “Gods help me.”

Selwyn straightened, his broad shadow cutting across the green light.

“They will,” he said. “But only if you stand like a King when she arrives.”

Viserys swallowed.

The word king felt heavier than the crown.

Rhaenys had shown him, with a single blow, what it meant to confront a problem without flinching.

He wondered, not for the first time, whether he had ever done the same.

---

Dawn had not yet broken, but Dragonstone felt the change all the same.

Not a departure of one.

A migration.

A pulling of the heart at its roots.

Rhaenyra rose before the sun, though she had barely slept. The chamber was dim, lit only by the low amber glow of banked coals, but the children had already found her.

Sometime in the night, one by one, they had infiltrated her bed like conspirators.

She didn’t remember hearing them come in.

Only waking to the familiar, ridiculous, devastatingly precious tangle.

Aenar curled at her back, small arm possessively around her waist. Aemon pressed against her stomach, legs looped through hers. Aemma sprawled across her chest like a sleepy cat, fist tangled in her hair. Aerion wedged firmly at her side, cheek smashed against her ribs.

A brood of dragons piled atop their mother. Stubbornly affectionate, and apparently determined to physically prevent her from ever leaving bed.

As if sheer proximity could anchor them all to the island.

Aenar grumbled something in his sleep.

Aemon nuzzled closer.

Aemma drooled on her chest with all the grace of a baby dragon in the shell.

Aerion shifted and made an indignant little noise of protest when her rib cage moved beneath him.

Six moons.

Six moons away from their cliffs, their favorite courtyards, their sea winds.

Six moons inside the suffocating stone maze of Kingslanding.

She forced a steady breath.

Aenar’s eyes opened first, rubbing the sleep from them and yawning loudly. 

“Is it time?” he whispered. Not afraid. Just… bracing.

“Nearly,” Rhaenyra whispered with a kiss to his forehead. 

He leaned into it immediately, eyes closing as he smelled her skin. 

“We’ll dress first,” she said softly. “Then we break fast.”

Aemon tightened his hold on her waist. “Then we fly?”

His voice cracked on the last word.

Rhaenyra kissed the top of his head. “Yes. Then we fly.”

Aemma stirred at the sound of Aemon’s voice, her little fingers curling tighter into Rhaenyra’s hair as if she could anchor her in place with nothing but a child’s grip. “I dreamed you left without us,” she mumbled, half-asleep.

Rhaenyra’s heart clenched. “Never,” she whispered. “You’re coming with me. All of you.”

Aerion burrowed harder against her ribs in fierce agreement.

The rest of the morning blurred.

Dressing the children.

Quiet laughter.

A few stolen, grounding kisses from Laena.

Daemon’s hand lingering at the small of Rhaenyra’s back longer than usual.

Rhaena and Baela stuffing little pouches of shells and driftwood into the triplets’ packs “for luck.”

Aemma giving each sister a flower crown she had woven in the half-light. Making them promise to practice their braids so when they returned they can try new styles. 

Aerion hugging Rhaena so tight he had to be pulled off. 

By the time the sun crested the horizon, they were ready.

The bailey swelled with movement and breath and tension.

Winds raced down from the volcanic heights, tugging at cloaks and hair, carrying the scent of salt and warm stone.

The children clustered near Rhaenyra, cloaks fastened, boots laced, faces bright with a mix of excitement and dread.

Little Aerion clung to her hand with stubborn determination, eyes narrowed at the mainland-bound ships bobbing far below.

“I still don’t want to go,” he growled. 

“I know,” Rhaenyra said, brushing her thumb over his knuckles.

Baela knelt beside him. “I’ll send you letters every week,” she promised. “And drawings.”

Rhaena nodded with solemn gravity. “And we’ll keep the garden alive.” She paused. “Probably.”

Aerion glared at the ground. “Don’t let the goats eat my flowers.”

“No goats shall pass,” Rhaena vowed, trying to sound stern but already smiling.

A few paces off, Aemma had sunk along Seasmoke’s jaw as though he were a docile hound laid out for petting. 

She tipped her cheek to his warm muzzle.

Under the Dragonmont’s shadow, Laenor had worked the same shaping Rhaenyra had dared. Seasmoke did not grow in size but he did seem to echo Laenor’s own affections more clearly. 

Vaerith lay curled along Seasmoke’s flank.

The two dragons breathed in unison, their temperaments so alike that they often drifted toward one another when at rest.

“Father,” she said, not looking up, her voice a soothing bell beneath the wind. “Seasmoke says I’m his favorite.”

Laenor smiled faintly. He crouched beside her, careful not to disturb either girl or dragon.

“Does he now?” he asked, warmth threading through his voice.

Aemma tilted her face toward him then, her mismatched eyes bright with mischief and pride. “He says he likes how I sing,” she added, as if sharing a precious secret.

Laenor’s breath caught on a quiet laugh. “Then I suppose I’ll have to sing louder to earn back his favor,” he said, leaning close enough that his words stirred her hair.

Aemma blinked at him. Then, with all the gentle brutality of a child said, “But you sing badly, Father.”

Seasmoke let out a low, rumbling huff that, unhelpfully, sounded suspiciously like agreement.

Laenor stared at her, offended in the way only a thoroughly devoted father can be.

“I do not sing badly.”

Aemma scratched the ridge between Seasmoke’s eyes.

“Yes you do,” she said, full conviction. “You sound like a cow having feelings.”

Vaerith chirped.

Seasmoke rumbled again.

Aenar, not missing the chance to involve himself, laughed violently. 

Laenor opened his mouth, no doubt to defend himself further...

But the ground itself seemed to shift as the air tore open with sound.

Vhaelyx had unscrolled his wings again.

Aemon stood before that fury and did not flinch.

Wind worried his silver hair; his face stayed grave and intent.

Vaegon waited beside him, hands folded behind his back, amusement tucked neatly into his beard.

“When can I fly alone?” the boy asked, voice steady but alive with purpose.

Vaegon’s eyes softened, though his mouth curved in quiet challenge.

“Soon, little prince,” he said. “Your mother took to the skies at seven. If you mind your studies, you may yet beat her to the clouds.”

Aemon’s gaze lifted to Vhaelyx again, the faintest ember of pride brightening his calm. “I will,” he said, conviction sharpening every syllable.

Vaegon’s smile deepened, knowing and indulgent. “We shall see.”

Daemon approached then, cloak snapping sharply behind him in the predawn wind.

He stopped before them. Standing before the small cluster of silver-bright faces and sleep-creased cheeks. His gaze swept over the children with a quiet devastation he didn’t try to mask.

He looked at them as if trying to memorize every detail for a lifetime away.

Aenar’s stubborn jaw,

Aemon’s solemn eyes,

Aemma’s wild curls,

Aerion’s soft, confused frown.

Memorizing.

Cataloguing.

Hurting quietly.

“You listen to your mother,” he said, voice roughened by something deeper than the sea air. “And you write. Often.”

Aemma broke first.

She barreled toward him with the unthinking, overriding certainty of a comet choosing its path. No hesitation. No fear. Just pure, unfiltered devotion.

Daemon actually bent to meet her, the Rogue Prince himself, who barely bowed to kings.

He lowered himself so her arms could wrap around his neck, so her face could bury itself in his shoulder, so he could inhale the warm, dragonscent of his (in his heart) daughter. His hands capable of so much violence, cupped her tiny back like she was made of spun glass.

Aenar followed Aemma, but with far more ceremony. Chin lifted, shoulders squared, trying desperately to appear older than his six years.

He clasped Daemon’s hand in a firm, knightly grip they both pretended wasn’t a hug.

Aemon approached with quiet gravity, the way he approached everything.

He simply leaned forward and pressed his forehead against Daemon’s stomach, a gesture so small, so fleeting. It cracked something in the prince’s ribs.

Daemon’s hand came to rest on the back of Aemon’s head, thumb brushing his silver hair in a motion that felt too intimate for goodbyes.

Aerion…

Aerion did none of that.

He launched himself at Daemon with all the force and confidence of a hatchling certain the world exists to catch him. His small arms locked around Daemon’s thigh, cheek squished firmly against leather and steel.

Daemon let out a startled laugh, genuine and  helpless.

Laena stepped forward then, skirts whispering over the stones as she knelt into the small clearing the children’s bodies made around Daemon.

“Come here, my dragons,” she cooed.

She cupped Aenar’s cheeks first and pressed a loud, unabashed kiss to his forehead. Aenar scowled as though struck by a grievous insult. But the tips of his ears went pink, betraying him utterly.

Then Aemon who tried so valiantly to maintain dignity. Laena brushed his hair back and kissed his temple. Aemon froze, eyes darting sideways to ensure no one saw how much he melted. 

Next was Aemma, who wriggled in her arms like a slippery eel, until Laena kissed both her cheeks in rapid succession.

Aemma’s outraged gasp was immediate.

Laena only kissed the top of her head for good measure.

Lastly Aerion, who shrieked and twisted and flailed as if being kissed were a capital offense.

Laena stood drawing Rhaenyra into a brief, fierce embrace that tasted of salt and unspoken promise.

“All of you must come back to me,” Laena whispered.

Rhaenyra breathed against her cheek, “We will.”

The Emberguards formed their lines.

The wind shifted.

Above them, Syrax screamed once, a note sharp with warning and sorrow.

“It’s time,” Rhaenyra said softly.

Rhaenyra swung to Syrax’s saddle, tucking Aenar and Aerion before her. The boys were already wriggling with impatience, small hands gripping the polished leather as though they could command the dragon.

“Faster than Uncle Daemon?” Aenar asked, mischief glinting in storm-blue eyes.

“Yes!” Aerion echoed loudly.

“Not today,” Rhaenyra said.

“Tomorrow, then,” Aerion vowed, perfectly solemn, as though he’d struck a bargain with the wind itself.

Syrax snorted, wings twitching in amusement.

At the far end of the field, Laenor lifted Aemma onto Seasmoke and settled behind her.

Aemma leaned forward, fearless, her curls lifting in the salt air. She whispered to him in that strange tongue that had no teacher. Seasmoke answered with a low croon, and for a heartbeat his eyes shimmered an otherworldly blue.

“Hold tight, my heart,” Laenor warned. “He means to race Syrax."

“He’ll win,” she said simply, as if she’d already been told.

Aemon lingered with Vhaelyx, small and certain in the curve of the dragon’s vast shadow.

Vaegon set a steadying hand on the boy’s shoulder.

“Now,” Vaegon said, almost to the wind, “let the sky remember you.”

Aemon’s lips curved, not in joy, but in resolve. “It always does.”

They climbed Vermithor together.

Above, Vermax was already cutting the air, barreling forward with a shriek that split the morning wide open.

Rhaenyra looked to Laenor; she looked to Vaegon.

Three nods.

The world broke open.

Syrax surged first.

Seasmoke launched next.

Vermithor rose last.

And behind them, three smaller shadows burst upward, pulled into the heavens by instinct older than language:

Vhaelyx, black and red, keeping perfect pace with Vaerith, pale gold and lit like dawn.

And weaving between them like a spark caught in a gale…

Arrax.

Tiny. Nimble. Wild.

His pearlescent wings flickered with rainbows in the sun as he darted beneath Vaerith’s arc, chirping his defiance at the older dragons.

Vaerith dipped her wing, allowing him to spiral around her throat like a bright ribbon of living light.

Together, they rose.

A storm of dragons.

A family written on the sky.

Below them, Dragonstone shrank into shadow.

Ahead, the horizon waited.

Notes:

This chapter is the deep breath before the knife turns again. A lot of threads are shifting here on purpose. Smallfolk eyes, Driftmark, the Red Keep, the children, the gods, all watching each other. Every choice in this chapter is groundwork. The questions you have? They’re meant to sit in your teeth for a while, and they will be answered on the page

Yell your theories at me in the comments! Im already cackling because I know exactly where this road leads

Chapter 26: Rot Lingers

Notes:

Very long chapter. Sorry in advance ❤️❤️❤️

The flight to Kingslanding was a brief thing, a sweep of wings over a restless sea. By the time the towers of the Red Keep rose through the haze, the city below was already awake. 

From the balcony above, the royal family watched.

Alicent’s fingers were white around the rail, nails biting into old gouges.

The sound of wings filled the courtyard like a living storm. Each gust of air lifting her hair, pressing at her skirts. As if the dragons themselves wanted to shake her loose.

Silver hair flashed in the yard.

Rhaenyra’s unholy brood. 

Viserys, by contrast, looked almost rapturous.

The years had bent him, but pride straightened his spine now. 

“By the gods,” he breathed, voice full of wonder and weary joy. “How they’ve grown. Do you see, Alicent? The blood endures. Ours endures.”

He did not look at her when he said it. He looked at them.

Her shoulders climbed, tight around her throat.

All she could see was Rhaenyra’s line blazing in the yard, the triplets haloed by dragons, Aerion at their side, that impossible 'Storm in the Womb'.

“Yours, perhaps,” she whispered under her breath. 

Viserys did not hear her. 

The gods he loved so much could hear her well enough.

Aemond’s fingers twitched against the rail.

“I would ride them,” he said under his breath, eyes locked on the dragons as if he could will one to look up and see him.

Not them, she realized. That one.

Vermithor cut across the horizon in a slow, deliberate arc. The Bronze Fury, chained now to an old man with ink-stained fingers and a mind full of blasphemous books. Archmaester Vaegon. The king’s uncle who looked at her as if she were a stain on the stone, and spoke of “proper instruction” with a cool disdain that never quite bothered to hide itself.

She saw the way Aemond’s gaze lingered on the dragon, then dropped to the tiny figures at its neck. 

She pinched the bridge of her nose, as if the headache sat there and not in the people around her.

Last time Vaegon was at court he had turned the keep on its head. 

Dragged princes and ladies and stewards alike into his “lessons” on how to treat royalty. On respect, on deference, on the weight of a crown. He had looked directly at her when he said even those raised in lesser branches of great houses must be reminded of their place beside dragons. 

She had sat there like a schoolgirl while half the court watched.

While Aemond drank in every word from the old man’s mouth as if it were scripture.

Alicent looked at her son now. Really looked. At the yearning carved into his face. At the hollow where a dragon should have rested. At the way his shoulders held a tension too old for his years, as if he were bracing against the lack.

Some bitter, frightened part of her wanted to seize him by those narrow shoulders and shake sense into him.

To tell him dragons did not love. That they were weapons. 

Nothing more. 

A lie, of course.

On Dragonstone they were cradle and catechism and crown, all at once. The proof of Rhaenyra’s right, stitched into living fire.

And the city knew it.

By the time their shadows crossed the walls, the tale had run ahead of them.

The Realm’s Delight comes.

The Divine Three comes.

The Storm Born Babe comes.

The children of Dragonstone were hurried through the corridors the second their feet touched the land, their laughter leaving streaks of brightness in their wake.

“Be quick,” Rhaenyra said as she passed them, though she lingered all the same. 

Already the rooms were alive with motion.

Servants flooded in with trunks and satchels, setting them down in practiced lines before pulling them open with swift hands.

Silks unfurled across the beds like spilled sunsets.

Aemma was ready first, perched before the tall mirror as Rhaenyra herself finished the last of her curls.

Aemma’s hair had never fallen in the sleek, obedient sheet the septas praised in their stories. It sprang instead into bright, stubborn coils, soft spirals that caught every scrap of light. When she tugged one straight it reached all the way to her thigh, then snapped back into a curl again, refusing to lie flat for anyone.

Laena had taught her how to honor that.

How to wet the curls before combing, how to work oil through with patient fingers, how to coax each ringlet into shape instead of fighting it.

“Hold still,” Rhaenyra said softly, working one last touch of oil through a stubborn spiral. The curl sprang back against her thumb, alive and perfect.

Aemma watched her in the mirror, mismatched eyes wide. “Do I look lovely?” she asked.

There was no coyness in it. Just the earnest terror and hope of a child about to be seen by too many eyes.

Rhaenyra’s chest ached.

“The loveliest,” she said at once. “In all the kingdoms. They will have to shield their eyes when you walk past.”

Aemma’s gown was a pale rose weave that moved like a sigh when she shifted. At her throat, Rhaenyra fastened a fine gold clasp set with a single pink stone, a strange little flame caught in crystal.

Across the chamber, Aemon stood stiff and self-possessed in black, a deep red cloak at his shoulders, dragon’s-head clasp at his throat. His pale hair had been braided in a coronet, the rest falling loose down his back, just as he had asked. 

Rhaenyra crossed to adjust his collar, fingers brushing the warm pulse at his neck.

“You wear the realm’s colors,” she said. “They will learn to see more than fire when they look at you.”

He leaned into her hand without thinking. “They’ll see your heir,” he replied, quiet as a promise.

Before she could answer, a flurry of feet and flying ribbons crashed through the archway.

Aenar burst in, boots in one hand, hair tousled, cheeks bright. Sea had been poured into him and told to take the shape of a boy: storm-blue tunic, black velvet trim, silver waves stitched along his sash.

“Muna!” he cried. “Aemon says I cannot wear my dragon pin!”

“I said one for the heir,” Aemon corrected, already sounding older than his years. “You’ll lose it before the hour is out.”

“I will not!”

“You will. You lose everything you touch.”

Aenar stuck out his tongue. Treason, perfectly executed.

Aemon answered with a shoulder bump more fond than sharp.

A smaller tread followed, dragging slightly, as if reluctant to be heard.

Aerion appeared in the doorway, absorbed rather than arriving, eyes glass-bright, hands empty.

He wore black and red as was his preference, a little tunic the color of soot edged in crimson thread, his hair mussed, his cheeks blotchy.

“Muna…” His voice wobbled. “Where is mine?”

Rhaenyra’s chest clenched.

“They have dragon pins,” he managed, “and I don’t.”

Aenar’s grin vanished. Aemon’s shoulders dropped.

“I want to look like you,” Aerion whispered. “I want to be big too.”

Rhaenyra knelt and gathered him close. “You already look like them,” she said, brushing hair from his temple.

“Then why don’t I get one?”

“Because yours is being kept safe until you’re ready,” she told him. “When the time comes, it will be waiting for you. Black and red, just like you.”

He swallowed, hope and doubt warring in his eyes.

Aemon stepped forward.

He did not rush.

He moved with that careful, deliberate grace the septas praised and Daemon called “too old for your bones.” He reached his collar, fingers pausing on the familiar weight of dark iron, then unpinned the hatchling from his own throat.

Metal gleamed dully in his palm, a small dragon with wings half-flared, the stone eye set in its head catching the light like an ember.

Aemon knelt so he was level with Aerion’s hurt and Aerion’s height both.

“Here,” he said, lifting the pin with both hands as if it were something sacred. “You may wear mine today. But you must be careful with it.” His gaze searched his brother’s face, solemn and intent. “Do not lose it. Please.”

“I won’t,” he whispered.

He held himself very still while Aemon fixed the pin to his tunic, small fingers curled into the fabric to keep from fidgeting. When the clasp clicked shut, Aerion lifted his hand and touched the tiny dragon with almost painful care, fingertips grazing the carved wings as though he expected it to burn him or vanish.

“It’s warm,” he breathed, wonder loosening his face.

“Dragons are never truly cold,” Aemon replied quietly.

A soft rustle of silk announced Aemma before her shadow fell across them.

She crossed the floor with a practiced grace that still held something of childish bounce beneath it, hands clasped neatly before her. 

“You look very handsome, Valonqar,” she said, gently touching the top of Aerion’s head.

Aerion’s grin broke over his face like sunrise, sudden and blinding. He beamed up at her, shoulders straightening beneath the borrowed weight.

“Do I?” he asked, half breathless, half daring her to take it back.

“You do,” Aemma said. “And Grandsire will see it the moment he looks at you.”

Behind her, Aenar made a soft, scandalized sound.

“And no compliments for me or Aemon?” he asked, hand pressed to his chest in exaggerated injury. “Here I was thinking we were at least a little impressive.”

“You’re not,” Aemma said primly.

The corner of her mouth crooked up, sharp with mischief.

“But you try very hard,” she allowed, gaze flicking between her brothers. “That must count for something.”

Aenar’s dimples flashed. “It should count for everything.”

Rhaenyra's laughter rose then.

Her reasons, her rebellion, her greatest act of defiance against every whisper that said a woman could not create a dynasty from love.

“You four,” she said at last, her voice gentling into command, “look at me.”

Four little heads snapped up at once.

Aemon’s amethyst gaze steady, Aenar’s bright with mischief, Aemma’s soft but luminous as dawn and Aerion’s wide and earnest. 

“Remember who you are,” she said, unyielding, the words carrying the weight of generations. “The realm will watch. It will whisper. Let it. You are all above it.”

They nodded.

Aemon grave, Aenar thrilled, Aemma serene, and Aerion with a serious, exaggerated bob of his head that nearly toppled him forward.

Her gaze sharpened a fraction, warmth giving way to the measured discipline of a queen. “And remember your manners. Aemon, speak when spoken to. Aenar, no racing through the hall. Aemma—”

Her daughter’s lips curved. “Don’t correct Grandsire.”

The corner of Rhaenyra’s mouth lifted. Pride warmed through her composure. “Exactly that.”

“And what about me?” Aerion piped up, voice hopeful.

Rhaenyra brushed a hair from his brow. “You, sweet fire, try not to shout your questions across the hall. Use your inside voice.”

Rhaenyra exhaled softly, a smile tugging at her mouth. “The last time we came to Kingslanding, I believe the four of you nearly gave the court a collective fainting spell.”

Aenar grinned, dimples bright as coin. “Not all of them.”

“Oh?” Rhaenyra asked, feigning regal curiosity. “Which survived you, then?”

“The singers,” he said proudly. “They liked my verses.”

Rhaenyra’s brows arched.

“And you,” she turned to Aemon, amused and admonishing, “refused to kneel before the Septon because you said dragons do not bow.”

Aemon lifted his chin, unrepentant. “We do not. The gods made dragons to rise, not bend.”

Rhaenyra bit back a laugh. “Spoken like your grandsire when he’s had too much wine.”

She shifted her gaze. “And you, sweet girl, hid beneath my skirts when the Queen tried to kiss your cheek.”

Aemma wrinkled her nose. “She smelled as though she’d bathed in incense.”

That broke even Rhaenyra’s regal composure. Laughter spilled from her, helpless and bright. The maids joined her before decorum could stop them.

Beside her, Aerion tugged gently at her sleeve.

“Muna,” he whispered loudly enough for everyone to hear, “I will not hide under your skirts.”

Rhaenyra pressed a kiss to his forehead, laughter softening into tenderness.

Gods, they were so utterly hers.

“Perhaps,” she said with mock solemnity, “this time we might strive for fewer scandals. No rhymes about royal uncles. No challenging septons to debate. And—” she glanced pointedly at Aenar, “no impromptu fires, large or small.”

Aenar nodded, feigning seriousness, though mischief danced in his eyes. “We’ll try, Muna.”

“Try very hard,” she said, her voice gentling. “Let them see what you are. The heirs of Dragonstone: clever, brave, and impossible to forget.”

Aemon bowed his head in acknowledgment.

Aenar puffed his chest like a little knight.

Aemma curtsied so gracefully it drew another ripple of laughter.

And Aerion, not to be outdone, attempted a bow so dramatic he nearly toppled over.

Rhaenyra caught him before he fell.

And kissed the crown of his head.

By the time they reached the grand staircase, half the Keep had gathered to watch.

Silence met them first.

Then the whispers rose like a low prayer, winding up the stone like smoke from a fresh pyre.

“Gods… look at them.”

“Too fair for mortal blood.”

“The Princess breeds not children, but wonders.”

At the base of the stairs, the great doors of the throne room stood open, teeth of oak and iron pulled wide.

The herald’s voice rang out, clear and commanding, cutting through the murmur like a blade.

“Her Grace, Crown Princess Rhaenyra of Dragonstone, and her children, the Heirs of Dragonstone.”

Rhaenyra entered first.

Her gown moved like poured blood, silk catching the light in dark, liquid ripples. Her chin was lifted in unshakable poise, throat bare and vulnerable above the sharp line of her collar, as if to say: let them try again.

Upon her head rested the crown of Alyssa Velaryon, the one her father had given her years ago as token and test.

Wearing it now was no longer remembrance.

It was a quiet verdict on the hall that watched her. A promise that whatever they tried to take, she would not be the one to break.

The children followed her like a constellation pulled along its fixed course. Aemon at her right, every step measured, Aenar at her left, bright gaze scanning the crowd, Aemma and Aerion just behind.

And following their every step fifty knights in crimson cloaks and blackened steel.

They moved in a silence that felt heavier than any shouted oath, a living wall of fire-forged devotion. Since the night the corridors ran red and the bells rang wrong, wherever the children walked, fifty Emberguards followed.

At the far end of the hall, Viserys rose from his throne.

The movement should have hurt.

Most things did, now. Bone ground against bone, old wounds complained, his breath caught beneath the weight of his own crown.

Yet for a heartbeat he did not feel any of it.

They were walking toward him.

The light caught them, sliding over silver hair and bright, strange eyes. 

“My gods,” he whispered.

He did not know which god he meant. Perhaps all of them at once.

Perhaps none.

“Look at them.”

As if anyone in the hall could do anything else.

Aemma’s small hand found her mother’s again. Rhaenyra glanced down, just enough to catch the faint, steadying smile her daughter offered. A child’s courage, as if she, too, understood they were being weighed and measured.

Rhaenyra lifted her gaze to the throne.

“Your Grace,” she said, voice poised and sure, ringing against the stone. “Dragonstone returns to court.”

Aemon stepped forward first, as was his place.

He bowed low, every movement precise and deliberate, his small hand pressed over his heart in a gesture learned and perfected through quiet hours of imitation. The hall watched every inch of it. Lords who had once seen him as nothing more than a line in a letter now leaned forward. Weighing the measure of the boy who would one day rule them.

His voice, when it came, was calm and clear.

“Grandsire,” he said, lifting his head. “You honor us by your welcome.”

Viserys’s eyes glistened. He reached out without hesitation, his hand finding the boy’s cheek, thumb brushing lightly across the soft line of his jaw. “And you honor me, my boy,” he said, voice gone rough with warmth. “Look at you. Half-grown already.”

Before the King could say more, Aenar hurried to follow suit, his bow deeper than necessary, his grin too bright to hide. A ripple moved through the gallery; a few ladies smiled despite themselves.

“And we honor you, Grandsire!” he added, dimples flashing as he glanced up. “We’ve grown since last time, haven’t we?”

“That you have,” Viserys said, catching Aenar’s chin between his fingers and tilting his face toward the light. “Taller, bolder, and still smiling at trouble before it finds you.”

Before anyone could think to stop him, Aerion slipped free of Rhaenyra’s side and barreled forward on quick, eager feet.

He did not bow.

He simply flung his arms around his grandsire’s waist and held on.

“You smell like maester’s ink,” he declared, voice muffled against the king’s robes, “and lemoncakes.”

The court broke into delighted laughter, the sound bright as bells. Not all of it was simple amusement; some of it was the startled, helpless kind that escapes when decorum is knocked clean off its feet.

Viserys’s own laugh joined it, unguarded and radiant. He cupped the back of the boy’s head, fingers sinking into silver hair, the gesture both loving and fragile.

“That’s the scent of a life too long spent with quills and sweet teeth,” he said. “You’ve found me out, little storm.”

Little storm. Little heart. Little heirs of Dragonstone.

Aemma came last, skirts gathered delicately in her small hands, her curtsy a picture of grace born not of training but of temperament.

She felt eyes on her the way others felt draughts. Every look a touch between her shoulder blades.

“Grandsire,” she said sweetly. “We’ve missed you.”

Viserys bent, knees creaking beneath him as he cupped her face between both hands. Protocol strained and then snapped like an old thread. A king did not stoop for anyone.

He did for her. 

“And I you, little heart,” he whispered. “More than you’ll ever know.”

With no thought for ceremony, Viserys drew her close against his chest, pressing a kiss to her hair. Aemon and Aenar moved nearer, pulled as if by the same tide. Aerion, still clinging to the king’s robes, slid an arm around his sister’s waist, tugging her into the circle.

Viserys’s arms went around all four, gathering them tight.

Every watching lord and lady understood what had just been made plain without a word.

The king’s favor did not merely lean toward Dragonstone.

It wrapped its arms around it and held on.

Queen Alicent rose.

She glided forward with the grace of a woman long practiced in performance, each step measured, each smile honed by years of courtly expectation.

“Princess,” she said, inclining her head the barest degree. “It gladdens the court to see you returned.”

Rhaenyra inclined her head in kind, her smile all grace and steel. “Your Grace.”

Alicent’s gaze moved to the children and faltered.

Viserys had not released them.

He stood with one hand resting on Aemon’s shoulder, his other smoothing back Aemma’s curls, fingers lingering as if committing their warmth to memory. Aenar leaned against his side, laughing softly at something the king had whispered. Aerion still gripped his robes in both hands, face pressed close enough that the boy might as well have been carved from the king’s own ribs.

It was a tenderness he had never shown her own sons.

The court watched and saw devotion.

Alicent watched and saw choice.

It sickened her, that such radiance could live so easily in bodies so young. That the realm would look at them and think blessing. 

Especially Aerion.

He stood nearest, all silvered hair and bright, open eyes.

The little copy of her brother’s murderer, down to the cut of his jaw and the set of his mouth. As if the gods had taken Daemon’s face, softened it with childhood, and placed it back in her path just to see what she would do.

Clearly a bastard, whatever name they gave him.

The word sat on her tongue like a stone. 

“Your children have certainly grown,” she said at last, her tone smooth but colder than courtesy allowed. “It seems the sea air and Dragonstone’s fire agree with them. They are… most striking.”

Rhaenyra inclined her head, the motion fluid, unhurried. “I am grateful to hear it, Your Grace. Dragonstone is generous to its own.”

Alicent’s eyes flicked past the children then, to the line of armored figures standing sentinel along the walls. 

“You travel heavily these days,” Alicent observed, her smile small and precise. “Half the Keep whispers that Dragonstone has marched its own army through the gates. One might think Kingslanding no longer safe enough for its heirs.”

Conversation at the edges stuttered and stopped.

A chair creaked sharply as someone forgot themselves and shifted.

The nearest of the Emberguard turned his head a fraction, gaze sharpening beneath the shadow of his helm. Another’s throat bobbed in a hard swallow.

No one spoke, but the hall was suddenly full of ghosts.

Rhaenyra let the silence stretch until it thrummed.

Only then did she smile.

It was a small thing, bright at the edges, cold at the core.

“Half the Keep whispers many things,” she said, voice mild enough to draw blood. “They whispered once that a sworn brother of the Kingsguard would sooner die than raise steel against those he was oathbound to protect.”

Her gaze slid, toward the white cloaks.

Ser Harrold met her gaze evenly.

The rest shifted. 

“I have learned,” she said, eyes burning into Alicents, “that safety is not a matter of stone and song alone. It must be defended. Dragonstone is… determined that its heirs live long enough to repay the realm’s investment in them. The court may whisper as it pleases.”

Alicent’s answering smile did not reach her eyes. “Oh, it will.”

Alicent’s gaze drifted back to the children, searching for some crack in their composure, some hint of fidgeting or fear she could seize upon and call natural.

She found none.

Her eyes lingered on the eldest. The boy’s back was very straight, his hands still, his dragon-purple eyes fixed ahead.

“And you, young prince,” she said at last, her smile returning, polished and thin as a knife’s edge. “You stand very tall for your years. Tell me, does your mother teach you to bow, or only to soar?”

Aemon met her gaze without blinking. “She teaches me to stand,” he said, the words smooth but certain. “So that I need never fall.”

Rhaenyra’s lips curved, faint and dangerous. “Well answered, my son.”

Alicent’s smile held, but a tremor passed through it like light across a blade. “A noble sentiment. Pray wisdom finds you in the sept as easily as it does in the sky.”

Aemon tilted his head, considering her.

“It does, Your Grace,” he said, sincerity shining through the words. “Mother says there is wisdom in patience, too.”

Rhaenyra’s eyes flicked to him, just a fraction, and the corner of her mouth lifted in quiet amusement. “He learns quickly,” she said. “As do they all.”

“Indeed,” Alicent replied sharp as glass. 

The court’s silence deepened when Viserys lifted a trembling hand.

“Come forward, my children,” he said warmly, his voice echoing through the hall. “Let your niece and nephews see the family whole again.”

From the dais, the elder Targaryens moved as one: Prince Aegon, tall and golden-haired, his youth already edged with arrogance; Prince Aemond, pale and sharp, his composure deliberate; and Princess Helaena, soft-eyed and strange, her attention somewhere between earth and air.

Alicent’s expression was perfectly serene, but her eyes flicked between her children and Rhaenyra’s, gauging every contrast. 

Aegon bowed first, his smile charming and a touch performative. “Nephews, niece,” he said lightly, his tone walking the line between jest and civility. “The court sings of your beauty.”

Rhaenyra inclined her head in acknowledgment. “The court is ever generous in its song.”

Aemond followed more formally, his bow crisp, his gaze fixed on Aemon. “Nephew,” he said evenly, though there was a note of curiosity beneath the courtesy. “Your bearing does your mother honor.”

Aemon returned the bow, his own voice even but guileless. “That pleases me to hear.”

Helaena curtsied last, her braid threaded with emeralds and small charms shaped like wings. When she lifted her head, her eyes did not seem to rest on any one face but drifted over the children as though she saw something the rest of the court could not.

“They are bright as light on dragon scales,” she said dreamily, her voice carrying in the hush. “Beauty like that belongs to the gods first, before it ever belongs to men.”

Aemma curtsied back with innocent sweetness. “Then the gods must be kind to share.” 

Helaena’s gaze settled on her, distant and fond. “Or cruel to remind us they can take it back.”

Viserys eased himself back onto the throne, one hand gripping the carved dragon heads along its arms as though steadying both his body and the room.

“Enough of riddles,” he said at last, smiling wide enough to smooth the unease that had settled. “We are not gathered to talk poetry but to celebrate.”

His voice gathered strength as it carried through the hall. “My grandchildren, seven years of age in two moons.”

A swell of approval rippled through the courtiers.

“Their nameday shall be honored not with one feast, but seven,” Viserys declared, his tone warm with practiced grandeur. “Seven days for the Seven days and nights that bore them! Each dawn shall bring its own joy, tournaments, games, and music enough to make even the gods look down in envy.”

Aerion straightened, his grin flashing. “Will there be races, Grandsire?” he called before Rhaenyra could stay him. “With dragons?”

Viserys chuckled, entirely indulgent.

“Not in the city, my boy. The streets of King’s Landing are no place for wings of fire. We’d burn the taverns and frighten half the realm from its beds.”

The laughter deepened, easy and genuine this time. But it was Aemon who spoke next, his tone quiet, his eyes thoughtful as he lifted his gaze toward his grandsire.

“May there be one day for giving, Grandsire?” he asked softly. “For the people, I mean. So they might share in the joy, even those who have no gold for feasts.”

“For the people?” he repeated, almost in wonder.

Aemon nodded, small hands clasped neatly before him. “If the Gods are to bless the days, perhaps one could bless them back.”

“A fine future king,” Viserys declared.

Rhaenyra’s hand settled lightly on her son’s shoulder, her pride a quiet fire.

“Fire does run in our blood,” she said, her voice steady but her eyes bright with something softer, older.

Viserys smiled at her, radiant with love and triumph both. “It does, my daughter,” he said. “And with such heirs, the realm shall never dim.”

He turned to the court, his voice lifting like a benediction.

“Let it be known, this nameday shall mark the dawn of Dragonstone’s mercy! For seven days and seven nights, King’s Landing will feast and give. Food, coin, and comfort to all who seek the gates.”

The courtiers applauded, some for politics, others for faith, but all watched the boy with new, glittering interest.

Alicent’s pulse tightened.

She did not join the applause.

Her hands remained still upon her lap, the faint tremor in her fingers hidden by the folds of her gown.

It was too much...this worship, this rapture dressed as joy. The room bowed not to Viserys, not to crown or faith, but to her.

To Rhaenyra’s blood.

And to the story born of violence.

The great doors at the far end of the hall opened on a wash of sea-blue and silver.

House Velaryon entered as if the tide itself had decided to walk on stone. Corlys in dark, wave-patterned mail beneath his cloak, white hair bound back in a warrior’s tail; Rhaenys beside him, throat bare of jewels, wearing red and black without apology.

Their escort of knights and lesser kin fanned out behind like the froth of a breaking wave.

Laenor peeled away from his parents before the herald had even finished crying their names.

He cut across the hall at an easy half-jog, smile already curving when he saw the cluster of children on the lower steps of the dais.

He dropped a quick kiss to Aerion’s hair, adjusted Aemon’s cloak where it had bunched at the collar, tapped Aenar’s chin to make him stand taller, and smoothed Aemma’s curls where they frizzed around her ears. 

With one last squeeze to Aemon’s shoulder, he stepped back. 

He did not go to the king.

Instead he turned first toward Rhaenyra, the light catching on the dragonbone rings at her fingers.

Laenor bowed only as much as courtesy demanded, took her hand in both of his, and pressed his lips to her knuckles as if greeting a Queen yet to be crowned.

Whatever he said was lost beneath the hum of the hall, but Rhaenyra’s mouth softened into a true smile. 

Only then did he mount the final steps to Viserys, offering the deeper bow, the dutiful “Your Grace,” as if the order of things had not already been made plain.

Alicent felt heat climb the back of her neck.

Her gaze slid to Archmaester Vaegon who stood near the front of the lords, yet distant enough from all royal blood. 

Of course he said nothing.

No rebuke now. No soft, cutting reminder that the king must be honored before all others.

Because it was Rhaenyra. Because the hall had already decided which way the world tilted.

Vindication and fury tangled in Alicent’s chest. If the Archmaester would not name the breach, then it fell to her. It was her duty. Someone had to hold the line while the rest of them knelt to stories.

“Ser–” Alicent began, the word sharp on her tongue, ready to set him back in his place as consort.

The rest of the rebuke choked off.

Rhaenys Targaryen stood before the Iron Throne.

For the first time since her hand had struck the king’s face, she had come back to court.

The years had not gentled her. Silver hair braided back from a face lined by sea wind and battle-light. The space around her felt taut as a drawn bowstring, every courtier holding their breath to see if Viserys would flinch.

He did not.

Nor did she.

“Your Grace,” Rhaenys said, voice level, neither warm nor cold. She inclined her head by the bare measure duty demanded, nothing more.

Beside her, Corlys Velaryon bent his knee with a sailor’s easy grace, the great chain at his throat flashing in the torchlight. “We attend the king’s summons,” he said, measured, unreadable as deep water.

No apology.

No challenge.

Simply fact.

“Princess,” Viserys said at last, the word thick but steady. “Lord Corlys. Driftmark’s strength is… welcome in my hall.” His gaze slid, briefly, to the courtiers watching, then back to them. “We are kin yet, whatever storms have passed between us.”

Alicent felt something sour rise in her throat.

Kin yet.

As if Luthor, Humfrey, Malwyn had not burned in Rhaenys’ shadow. As if Gwayne had not bled into the sand to please this same king. As if a slap laid upon a sovereign’s face could be smoothed away with a single gracious welcome and a pretty phrase about storms.

She could see it, the subtle easing of shoulders, the almost-smiles, the quiet relief that no one would not have to choose between King and Sea Snake today.

Cowards, all of them.

“Grandmother!”

The shout cracked the moment open.

Aenar flew from the dais, heedless of decorum. Aemon was only a breath behind, checking Rhaenyra with a quick look before his feet carried him on. Aerion tumbled after them in a blur of small boots and tangled cloak. Even Aemma abandoned her careful stillness, skirts gathered in both fists as she ran, circlet slipping askew.

They swarmed Rhaenys and Corlys like tide around stone.

Rhaenys’ mouth, hard as cut coral a heartbeat before, softened at once when Aemma reached her.

Corlys laughed low and bright as Aerion wrapped himself around his leg. He bent without thinking, hands sure as any deckhand, and swung the boy up onto his hip, Aerion fitting there as if he had been made for that place.

Of course he does, Alicent thought, a bitter little spark under her breast. The Realm’s admiral, cradling Rhaenyra’s bastard as if there were no truer cargo.

Aemon and Aenar spoke over one another, faces alight, their grandfather’s free hand finding their shoulders as naturally as breath.

Around Alicent, the court melted.

The tension in the air thinned, turned warm, almost fond, courtiers already reshaping the story in their heads: not kinslayers and insult, not dragonfire on Hightower sons, but a family mended before the Iron Throne, grandparents and grandchildren reunited at last.

She watched it happen and felt only a cold, clean revulsion.

They forgot so easily.

They forgot when it was not their dead.

---

The council chamber still wore its old ghosts.

Today it held only a scatter of scrolls, a carafe of watered wine, and a small chest of carved driftwood that had not been there when Rhaenyra was a girl.

Viserys sat at the head, hand wrapped tight around the dragon-headed arm of his chair.

He looked shrunken in the high-backed seat, but his eyes were clear.

The joy that had lit him in the throne room still clung to him in tatters.

“There will be a hunt,” he said, more to the room than to any one of them, as if speaking the shape of it might make it real. “Three days hence. The princes and princess will ride out from the Kingswood lodge with me at their head. Boar, stag, hounds, banners in the trees. The realm remembers such days. They speak of them for years after.”

His gaze flicked to Rhaenyra, then to Rhaenys and Corlys. “I would have the bards sing of this visit as a return to plenty, not…” His voice thinned. “Not of bells ringing wrong.”

Rhaenys sat to his left, where her husband had once sat as Master of Ships.

Her posture was easy, but there was no softness in the line of her mouth.

“Venison and garlands will not unmake what these stones have seen,” she said, tone even, almost conversational. “You may call it celebration if you wish. The dead will attend, all the same.”

Viserys flinched, barely.

A small tightening at the corner of his eyes.

“The people must see more than ghosts,” he said. “They must see their king hale enough to ride, their heirs smiling beside him. They must see… family.”

“Family,” Rhaenys repeated, the word turned over like a coin between her teeth. “If that is what we are to be, then.” Her gaze drifted across the table, not quite meeting his. “A king, his queen, and the kin who have yet to decide whether your hall is safer than the sea.”

Corlys’ eyes gleamed, amusement tucked into the corners.

“Peace, wife,” he said mildly, the fondness in the address softening the rebuke. “The king asks for a pageant, not a penance.”

Viserys seized on that, grateful for the bridge.

“There will be more than a hunt,” he said quickly. “Feasts. Pageants. Tourneys in the yard for the smallfolk to gawk at, if they cannot afford the lists. We will show them joy, not fear. The details can be settled once Tarth gives his tallies.”

Rhaenys’ brows lifted, the barest arch.

“So you have not yet counted the cost of your joy,” she said. “Only promised it.”

Corlys chuckled under his breath. “That is what Hands are for,” he said. “To sweep the coin back into piles after dragons have blown it to the winds.”

At the far end of the table, Selwyn Tarth cleared his throat.

He had the look of a man who still half-expected to be sent back to home at any moment. 

“If I am to be the broom, Your Grace,” he said, blue-and-rose cloak shifting as he leaned in, “I should like to know whether I’m sweeping coin or cobwebs.”

A faint smile tugged at Viserys’ mouth.

“Coin,” he said. “There must be coin. The Seven Days will be spoken of for a generation. Seven feasts, seven days of games and gift-giving, one for each child’s nameday and one for the gods’ favor besides. I would have the streets remember light, not blood.”

Selwyn dipped his head in acknowledgment, quill already turning idle between his fingers in a habit that betrayed nerves more than disrespect.

“A grand undertaking, Your Grace,” he said at last. “But the cost of such perfection will not be small. The Crown’s coffers strain already. To divert so much gold, even for the heirs, may prove… unwise.”

Rhaenyra tilted her head, unreadable.

It was true.

The Crown bled slower these days, but it bled all the same. Every moon, a discreet purse of gold left the royal accounts, bound for Dragonstone under seal and silence. “A widow’s stipend,” they called it in the ledgers.

The price of Daemon’s exile, a king’s quiet apology wrapped in coin.

Since then, the gold had flowed faithfully, as relentless as tidewater.

No one spoke Laena’s name now, but she burned in the room all the same.

“Let it not be the Crown alone,” she said. “Dragonstone’s coffers are full enough to bear its share of the burden. These seven days are not a jest for the court, they are my children’s nameday. If coin must be spent so the realm remembers more than bells and blood, let some of it be mine.”

Corlys’ mouth curved, pleased in a way he did not bother to hide.

“Driftmark will not trail in Dragonstone’s wake,” he said. “Trade has fattened our holds more than once over. If we are to drown Kingslanding in feasts and largesse, let it be known that the Sea Snake helped pay for the tide.”

Selwyn’s brows rose, the faintest spark of humor lighting his sea-blue eyes.

“In that case, Your Grace,” he said to Viserys, “I may yet keep the Crownlands ledgers from dying of shock. If Dragonstone and Driftmark mean to quarrel over who loves the heirs most loudly, I will see the tallies reflect it.”

“A friendly quarrel,” Corlys replied at once, eyes bright. “One my grandchildren will profit from, whichever purse proves the deeper.”

Rhaenyra’s lips softened into the ghost of a smile.

“Let the city see,” she said, “that whatever else it doubts, its future is not starved of love or of gold.”

Rhaenys shifted, the sweep of her dark sleeve catching Rhaenyra’s eye.

“If we mean for the realm to remember more than bells and blood,” she said, “we will need more than coin and good intentions.”

Rhaenyra turned to her, grateful for the familiar, flinty steadiness.

“Then tell me,” she replied. “What does the realm need?”

“The sea,” Rhaenys said at once. “It begins there. The first sight that reaches a trader’s tongue and a sailor’s song is not the Iron Throne. It is the harbor. If these seven days are to mean something, let the masts and quays be dressed to match the halls.”

Her gaze slid to Corlys, who already looked as though he were planning sails in his head.

“We will have ships in from Spicetown, from the Vale, even from Pentos if the wind is kind,” she went on. “String lanterns along the quays, hang the Dragonstone and Driftmark banners where the smallfolk can touch them. Let there be braziers on the piers, singers on the fishmarket stairs, not only harpists in the Red Keep.”

Rhaenyra’s mind leapt with hers.

“And food,” she said. “If we are to drown Kingslanding in largesse, it cannot all be served on gold plates. Bread and fish in the lower streets, hot soup where the wind cuts worst along the Blackwater. I would have our colors there, with the ladles.”

Rhaenys inclined her head.

“Good. Then we will need casks enough to float a smaller town. Corlys, your warehouses.”

“You shall have them,” Corlys said, already half turned toward Selwyn. “Just keep the Crownlands ledgers from fainting, as you promised.”

Selwyn’s quill scratched across his parchment. His head nodding as he wrote. 

“We can divert grain from the last Myrish shipment to the city storehouses,” Selwyn said thoughtfully. “If we announce it as Dragonstones' and Driftmark's gift, the goodwill will cling to you even when the barrels are scraped bare.”

They were circling the problem together now, dragon and sea and ink, and for a moment it felt almost easy.

Rhaenyra could see it. Lantern light on water, banners rippling above crowded streets, her children’s names echoing from mouths that did not know Valyrian but knew the taste of wine and salt.

Viserys cleared his throat.

“And of course,” he said, forcing warmth back into his voice, “the palace itself must reflect such splendor. It would be poor hospitality otherwise. The… ah… decorations will be seen to.”

His fingers tightened slightly on the arm of his chair, as if he had just remembered he sat on it.

Rhaenyra turned toward him, that fragile almost-ease thinning.

“Then we should speak of them now,” she said. “The procession route, the banners, the dais in the throne room. Where the children will stand, what sigils will hang above their heads. It ought to be decided with care.”

Viserys shifted, eyes skimming past her to the far doors as though seeking an easier subject.

“The household will see to such things,” he said. “Alicent has always had a fine sense for ceremony. The septas and stewards know her wishes, and she knows mine. It is under her purview.”

The word fell like a cold drop into warm wine.

Rhaenys went still.

Corlys’ pleasant expression thinned.

Selwyn’s quill paused in mid-air.

For one fragile moment, Rhaenyra almost reached for patience. Almost reached for the old, familiar performance: smile, swallow, bleed in private.

The moment passed.

“No.”

Viserys blinked, as if he’d misheard. “What?”

Rhaenyra turned fully toward him, spine long, eyes narrowed. 

“No,” she repeated. “My children’s nameday is not a septa’s embroidery project to be handed down through your wife’s household. The procession route, the banners, the dais, the sigils above their heads… those will not be decided in some quiet corner where I am only told the result.”

Color climbed, slow and blotchy, up Viserys’ neck.

“Rhaenyra,” he began, warning and weary at once, “you mistake me. It is not an insult. The Queen has always—”

“The queen,” Rhaenyra said, “kept a man in her household who tried to buy my children’s deaths, and would have me believe she never once noticed what kind of creature she was feeding.”

Selwyn’s quill stopped altogether. His fingers flattened against the table as though he meant to hold the wood steady.

Rhaenyra did not look away from her father.

“If you wish her to choose the flowers for the tables, I will not quarrel. But the honors hung above my heirs’ heads will not be at her purview.”

Rhaenys’ eyes flicked to Viserys, dark and measuring.

Corlys’ rings clicked once against the table, an impatient note, as if to say: here it is at last, the thing everyone pretends not to see.

Viserys stared at his daughter, mouth working.

“You would have us at odds before the realm,” he said. “Over draperies.”

“This is not about draperies,” Rhaenyra replied. “It is about who is trusted to shape the image of my children before a court that once watched them bled in whispers. I will not smile from your side while my stepmother arranges which faces stand nearest my sons and calls it ceremony.”

Her hand lifted, palm up, weighing the room, weighing him.

“If this feast is to heal anything, let it begin with honesty,” she said. “You may keep Alicent’s counsel. You may love her, lean on her, share your griefs with her. That is your choice. But you will not expect me to make myself small to ease it. Those days are finished.”

His cheeks flushed, his hand tightened on the arm of the throne.

“I have borne enough division,” he said. “I will not have you stand before the court spitting venom at your stepmother while we celebrate your own children. If thanks are too bitter for you to speak, at least hold your tongue.”

Rhaenyra laughed.

It was a hard, bright sound, with nothing of mirth in it.

“Venom,” she said. “You think this is venom at my stepmother.”

She pushed back her chair and rose. The space between them seemed to tighten.

“This began with you,” she said.

Viserys’ fingers twitched.

“You married Alicent Hightower,” Rhaenyra said, “the girl who once poured my wine and braided my hair, and you made her my queen. You gave her my mother’s place, my mother’s rooms, my mother’s sept. You put Otto back at your side even after he used me like a rung on a ladder and tried to pull me down the moment his climb was done. You kept him close. You let him walk free after he killed Lord Lyonel. Not prisoner, not exile, not even a hostage in Harwin’s hall.”

Selwyn stared fixedly at the polished wood. There was no column in any ledger for this.

“You say you have borne enough division,” she said. “You are the one who bred it. You let a wife who resented me sit in judgment over every slight. You let her cut at me in the name of piety and courtesy and never once said, ‘Enough, she is my heir.’”

She drew a breath that trembled at the edge, then steadied. When she spoke again her voice had cooled, banked like coals.

“If that displeases you,” she finished, “then say it plain. Tell me I am unwelcome, and I will take my children and return to Dragonstone. I will not stay in a hall that asks me to pretend this never happened, so that you may sleep easier.”

Silence flooded in.

Corlys rose without haste, the Sea Snake choosing his side as openly as a banner raised in a gale.

Rhaenys stood with him. She did not bother to soften it.

Viserys looked smaller than his throne.

When he spoke at last, his voice had lost its royal polish.

“I will not send you away,” he said. “You are my heir. You have always been my heir. I never meant for you to doubt that.” His gaze flicked to Rhaenys and Corlys. “Nor do I wish Dragonstone or Driftmark gone from my side. The realm is already full of men who watch for cracks between us. I will not hand them a chasm.”

He drew a thin breath.

“Very well,” he said. “Let it be as you wish. You, and Rhaenys, and Lord Corlys will see to the processions and the honors. The sigils above the children, the routes, the guards, the image, as you put it. The queen may concern herself with her own concerns.”

His eyes searched her face, hungry for some small softening.

“I would have liked,” he said quietly, “to see you stand together. To have my daughter and my wife share a joy without drawing blood over old wounds. Perhaps that was foolish. Perhaps that was only an old man wanting something simple for once.”

Rhaenyra listened.

There had been a time when that would have undone her. When she would have reached, again, for some compromise that cost her and comforted him.

That time had passed.

“Your wishes have been plain my whole life,” she said. “That is precisely the problem.”

He flinched.

“Stay, Rhaenyra,” he said, the words heavy as rust. “Plan your children’s feasts as you see fit. Let this at least be something the realm looks at and believes in.”

She inclined her head, the respect owed a king and nothing more.

“I will stay,” she said. “For them.”

She did not say for you.

He heard the absence. It landed between them like a final stone dropped into a well with no bottom.

“I love you, Rhaenyra,” he said. The words came out thin and worn. “Do not doubt that. Not ever.”

Something flickered in her eyes. 

“My children are waiting,” she said, adjusting the fall of her sleeve as if setting armor. “We have much to plan.”

She turned toward the doors, toward Rhaenys and Corlys and Selwyn’s scattered parchments and all the work ahead, leaving his declaration of love behind her on the air like incense in an empty sept.

Rhaenys watched her go.

Only when the door was closed did she speak.

“Well done, Viserys,” she said.

There was no praise in it.

His head snapped toward her. “Do not start, Rhaenys,” he said, tiredness fraying into temper. “I have had enough for one day. I will not be lectured in my own hall about how I love my daughter.”

Her eyes narrowed, dark and very, very clear.

“You do not need a lecture,” she replied. “You need a mirror.”

His mouth opened, some protest rising, but she did not give him space to shape it.

“You should have just taken Alicent to your bed and left her a mistress,” Rhaenys said, each word clean as a knife laid on cloth. “At least then you would have ruined only one girl’s life at a time.”

The words hit the room like a slap.

Corlys actually inhaled, sharp and soft, as if he’d swallowed seawater. His hand tightened on the back of his chair.

Selwyn choked on nothing at all, half-coughed, then went utterly still, because there was nowhere polite to look when the King’s cousin said that to the King.

Viserys’ face twisted. “Can you not give me one moment’s peace?” he burst out. “One, Rhaenys. You strike me, you curse me, you find fault with every breath I take. Can you not stop carving me up and just be my cousin again. For once.”

“I would love to, Viserys,” Rhaenys said, “if you weren’t so fucking stubborn all of the time.”

Selwyn made a noise that might have been a strangled prayer.

Corlys’ mouth actually twitched, halfway to laughter he had the sense not to let out.

Viserys sagged back in his chair, rubbing a hand over his face as if he could wipe the last five minutes away.

“Fine,” he said hoarsely. “Fine. You’ve called me stubborn, blind, and worse besides. You’ve told me what a ruin I’ve made of things. What would you have me do then?” His eyes lifted to her, red-rimmed and raw. “Truly, Rhaenys. Tell me. What should I do?”

She studied him for a long, flat heartbeat.

“You really want that answer, Viserys?” she asked.

His jaw clenched. “Yes.”

“Good,” she said. “Then stop whining like a man who’s been beaten by the gods and start acting like the one who swung the hammer.”

She stepped closer to the table, fingers resting lightly on the wood.

“First,” Rhaenys said, “you will go to your daughter. Alone. No Kingsguard, no maesters, no Alicent hovering like a shadow. You will look her in the eye and say the words you choke on every time this court is watching: I failed you. Not once. Not by accident. Repeatedly. You will not lace it in excuses about grief or weariness or the weight of the crown. You will name what you did. You married her friend. You let your Hand and his blood gnaw at her. You let the realm think your silence meant doubt.”

Viserys swallowed, throat working.

“Second,” she went on, “you will prove to the court that naming her heir was not a story you tell yourself to sleep better at night. Call your lords. Stand her at your right hand and say it again, clear enough that even the slimiest bannerman in the back row hears it. Put your seal to decrees in her name. Make it so that crossing Rhaenyra Targaryen in this city feels as dangerous as crossing the Iron Throne itself.”

Corlys’ eyes glinted, approving and sharp.

“Third,” Rhaenys said, “you will set boundaries in your own bedchamber. Tell your queen, that she does not get to decide the shape of your daughter’s life. She may pray for the realm and choose her damned flowers, but she does not choose which faces stand nearest Rhaenyra’s children, which whispers are tolerated in these halls, or how far Otto Hightower’s fingers may creep back into power.”

Selwyn’s quill, which had been inching slowly away from his hand, stopped dead.

Rhaenys was one woman he would happily apprentice under.

“And for these seven days,” she finished, “you will stop asking your daughter to make herself small so you can pretend you did better than you did. Put her where the realm can see her: on the harbor, in the streets, on the dais. Say with your actions, not your sighs, that she is its future. Then”—her gaze sharpened, almost pitying—“stop demanding that she forgive you on a schedule that suits your conscience.”

Viserys stared at her, breathing a little too quickly, as if every sentence had landed like another blow.

“That,” Rhaenys said, voice cooling, “is what I would have you do, cousin. You asked for one honest answer. You have it.”

Viserys let out a sound that was half cough, half laugh, rough in his throat. “You make it sound so simple,” he said. “Leash my wife, bare my throat to my daughter’s anger. Alicent will make my life hell.”

He tried for humor and missed.

Corlys finally let his amusement breathe, low and bright. “You fought half the realm to put a crown on your wife’s head. Now you flinch every time you remember it cuts both ways.”

Selwyn stared at the table as if it were suddenly the most interesting object in the world. There was no column in any ledger for you married badly and now must live with it.

Rhaenys went on, merciless.

“Choose your hell, Viserys. The quiet one, where your daughter hates you until you die and the realm learns it by watching her eyes at your funeral. Or the loud one, where your wife sulks because you finally remembered you are king. Rhaenyra will not keep playing at happy families for you. That choice is already made. The only question left is whether you catch up to it.”

The breath went out of him in a slow, exhausted rush. For a moment he looked every year he carried, and then some.

---

The morning light that spilled into the Red Keep’s schoolroom was sharp and cold, filtered through panes of green and gold.

Everything gleamed. Desks set in perfect lines. Inkwells filled to the same thin mark. Candles shaved to matching height.

At the threshold, the Emberguard had been made to halt.

They stood in the corridor instead, red cloaks a drag of color against the stone, helms bare in deference to no god at all. The septas had clicked their tongues and crossed themselves when they arrived, whispering about steel and blood in the Maiden’s sight.

“Not in the classroom,” Septa Alayne had said at last, lips pinched. “The Queen’s children are not to be taught their letters under the shadow of Dragonstone’s blades.”

The compromise had been simple, and stupid.

The Emberguard kept their watch a dozen paces back, at the turn of the hall, close enough to appease Rhaenyra’s temper, far enough that the septas could pretend the room itself was still theirs.

“The Queen expects diligence,” said Septa Myria as the children filed in. “Diligence, humility, and order.”

Her tone left no doubt whose children she meant.

At the front sat Aegon, Helaena, and Aemond.
Aegon slouched, then straightened under a glance. Helaena rolled a carved beetle between her fingers, eyes far away. Aemond sat rigid, quill and inkwell aligned to the edge of his desk, blinking rarely.

Across from them, the Dragonstone heirs took their seats.

Aemon, eldest of the four, lowered himself gracefully into place.

Aenar came behind him, still tugging at a ribbon that refused to stay tied. When he smiled, and he often did, dimples broke the severity of the room like sunlight through stormclouds.

Aemma climbed into her chair very careful not to wrinkle the soft purple of her morning gown.

At the very end of the row, on a low stool that did not quite match the desks, Aerion settled himself with fierce importance. He was too young for the lesson and knew it; the septa had told him so twice that morning. But he had arrived clutching a slate nearly as large as his chest and announced that if Aemon and Aenar and Aemma were learning to be clever, he would not be the only fool in Dragonstone’s brood.

Now his feet swung above the floor, heels thudding softly against the stool’s leg.

Septa Alayne drew a slow breath, her fingers tightening around her seven pointed star.

“We begin,” she said briskly. “Remember that the Seven see all things, even thoughts unspoken.”

Across the aisle, however, the Dragonstone heirs merely exchanged glances.

They seemed almost amused, as if the gods were quaint visitors in their house.

“Start with the Seven Virtues,” said Septa Alayne. “We will hear each in turn.”

Aemond’s hand rose at once.

“Humility,” he said promptly, voice clear and precise. “To know one’s place before gods and king.”

“Very good,” Alayne replied. “And obedience?” Her gaze flicked to the Dragonstone side. “Prince Aemon?”

Aemon lifted his eyes, calm as still water. “To serve what is just,” he answered, “not only what is commanded.”

The septas exchanged quick, alarmed glances.

Myria, ever the gentler of the two, forced a smile. “That is… an interpretation. Yet obedience, dear prince, requires submission to authority, not argument with it.”

Aenar leaned back in his chair, idly twirling his quill between his fingers. 

He smiled then, slow and sharp, a flash of salt and flame beside his brother’s composure. “Even when the authority is wrong?”

Septa Alayne’s voice came cold and clipped.

“You would do well, young prince,” she said, “to guard your tongue.”

Aenar tilted his head, all innocence and insolence intertwined. “I am guarding it, Septa,” he said, his tone as bright as a wave cresting before it breaks. “That’s why I’m not saying more.”

The words hung there, half-jest, half-challenge.

Myria, finding her voice, said carefully, “It would serve you, my prince, to learn stillness. That smile of yours—” she hesitated, realizing how it sounded, “—it invites mischief. One day it may invite ruin.”

Aenar’s grin only widened. 

Aemon’s gaze flicked toward him, silent warning; Aenar only shrugged.

At the far end of the table, Aemma had been tracing circles on her parchment, the charcoal leaving faint halos where her thoughts had wandered. 

“And you, Princess?” the septa asked, voice cool and clipped. “Tell us of the Maiden’s virtue.”

There was expectation in the air.

Soft obedience, docile sweetness, the sort of answer that soothed men’s tempers and made mothers proud.

Aemma tilted her head slightly, thinking.

When she spoke, her voice was soft, lilting as a prayer, yet the words carried an unexpected weight.

“Kindness,” she said. “The Maiden’s virtue is kindness. She sees all, even what others would rather not, and she does not turn away.”

The light from the window caught her then, silver tangled in gold.

Such beauty at that age felt indecent.

There was no humility in it, no veil, no modesty.

Myria’s smile had grown taut. “A fair thought, Princess,” she said, her tone measured, brittle. “But the Maiden’s kindness lies also in modesty, in knowing when to lower her gaze before her betters."

Aemma tilted her head further, curls slipping over her shoulder.

The motion was innocent, yet the effect near unholy, as if the gods themselves had sculpted her too finely, then forgotten to temper it with frailty.

“If she lowers her gaze,” Aemma said after a pause, “how can she see who needs her kindness?”

Septa Alayne’s hand closed around her rosary until the beads creaked. “The Maiden is pure because she obeys,” she said coldly. “It is not her place to judge, only to serve.”

Across the table, Aenar stilled.

His sea-bright eyes darkened. Their mirth gone, fixed now on the septa with a quiet, unreadable focus.

“Then she serves poorly,” Aemon said in his sister’s defense, “if she turns her eyes from what is wrong.”

The septa’s head snapped toward him. “Prince Aemon—”

“My sister spoke no falsehood,” he interrupted quietly. “If the Maiden has eyes, then she is meant to use them.”

A small slate clicked against wood at the end of the table.

Aerion had stopped swinging his feet.

He frowned down at the faint chalk dust on his fingers, then lifted his gaze to Septa Alayne with the terrible, guileless honesty of the very young.

“If she sees bad things and just listens,” he said, “then she is not kind. She is a coward. The Fourteen never look away. They aren’t afraid to see.”

Silence dropped over the desks.

Helaena’s beetle went still between her fingers. Aegon’s jaw worked, as if he were swallowing a laugh and something sharper besides. Aenar’s mouth twitched, pride flickering through his anger.

Septa Alayne’s face blanched, then flushed a mottled rose. Her hand darted to the side of the desk and closed around the thin length of a switch-rod laid there with the ink and chalk.

The sound of it striking wood cracked through the room.

She brought it down flat on the edge of Aerion’s stool, a sharp, warning blow that sent his slate jumping and his whole body flinching back, eyes gone wide.

“Mind your tongue, boy,” she snapped. “You forget yourself. A child of your years does not speak so of the Maiden, nor of her servants. And you would do well not to drag foreign idols into a holy lesson. The so-called Fourteen are tales for dragonlords, not true gods of men.”

The rod lifted again, just enough that its shadow fell across Aerion’s small knuckles.

Three chairs scraped back at once.

Aemon was on his feet first, the movement so sudden his quill toppled and rolled, ink blotting across his page. Aenar rose beside him in a blur of blue and black, hand flat on the desk as if he meant to vault it. Aemma pushed up from her seat, curls jolting, her eyes gone bright and hard as cut glass.

All three glared at the septa.

“You will not raise your hand to my brother,” Aemon said. His voice was very calm. “Not for speaking truth.”

“Or for speaking at all,” Aenar added, sea-bright eyes gone dark. “He is a prince of Dragonstone.”

Aemma did not speak. She simply pushed her sleeves back, baring her wrists as if, in some not-so-distant future, those hands might curl around steel rather than chalk.

“No harm was done,” Septa Myria broke in, hands fluttering. “It is a common correction. Your princely uncles have had their knuckles rapped often enough.”

She looked to Aegon for rescue. “Why, you have felt the rod, and seem none the worse.”

Aegon flushed, then glared at his parchment.

“That may be so here,” Aemon said. He did not raise his voice. “We have never been struck in our lessons. Archmaester Vaegon says pain makes dull students, not clever ones.”

The name moved through the room like a draught of colder air.

A faint stir ran through the room at the name.

Vaegon. The Conciliator's son, scholar, one of the three men in living memory to wear a full chain of every metal the Citadel forged. 

“Archmaester Vaegon is your great-uncle,” Septa Myria said, her composure thinning. “His methods are… singular. The Citadel is not the sept. The Maiden teaches—”

“The Archmaester teaches us,” Aemon said, still very mild. “Letters, figures, histories, tongues. He has never needed a rod to make us listen.”

He regarded the switch-rod for a moment, then lifted his eyes back to the women before him.

“If you are so certain the Maiden approves of striking princes,” he went on, “perhaps we should send for him and ask whether the Citadel agrees. He has all the links they can give a man.”

Aerion perked up at that, hope brightening his small face. “We could ask him to come now,” he said eagerly. “He likes it when we bring him questions.”

The tension held.

Faith and fire staring each other down across a polished table.

At last, Septa Alayne exhaled, long and measured, as though she might still her own temper by force of will. “Your mother,” she said, her voice clipped, “has much to answer for.”

Aemma only smiled, small and serene. “She usually does.”

Myria’s voice hardened. “We will move on. Recite the Prayers of the Mother.”

As they began, the difference between the two broods became clear.

Alicent’s children intoned with rehearsed precision, voices stripped of warmth.

Rhaenyra’s children sang softly, their tones alive, unmeasured, natural.

When the prayers ended, Septa Alayne closed the book with a snap. “You will review these lines daily until your manners match your station. Especially you four.” Her gaze lingered on the Dragonstone four. 

The dismissal hung in the air.

As they filed from the room, Aenar leaned toward his sister and whispered, “They don’t like us much.”

The Emberguard were not waiting at the door as they would have been on Dragonstone. Court pages and a single Kingsguard lingered instead, bored and distracted, their eyes already sliding past the cluster of royal children.

Aemma’s fingers tightened around Aerion’s hand where he walked between them. Her smile was small and unbothered. “They don’t have to.”

Aegon’s voice came lazily from behind them. “They only think you’re strange.”

The Dragonstone four turned.

Aegon stood with his usual careless slouch, half-grinning as though the jab were harmless. “You talk back to septas. You sing instead of pray. You make them nervous.”

Aenar’s mouth quirked. “You sound nervous too.”

Aegon scoffed, though the sound rang thinner than he intended. “I just think you forget where you are. This isn’t Dragonstone.”

“Isn’t it?” Aemon asked mildly. “We brought our dragons.”

That silenced him for a breath.

Aemond, smaller but more solemn, stepped forward. “You shouldn’t speak to the septas like that,” he said, his voice careful, almost recited. “Mother says the gods favor those who obey.”

Aemma tilted her head, her tone kind but distant. “Then I think they love you very much.”

Her voice was too gentle to sting, and that made it worse.

Aemond blinked, uncertain if he’d been mocked.

He looked to his brother, but Aegon only frowned.

Helaena, quiet until then, looked between them all. “The gods listen to all sorts,” she murmured, half to herself. “Even dragons, if they whisper softly enough.”

“Dragons don’t whisper,” Aenar said. “They roar or burn.”

Aegon looked away, restless.

“You're so strange,” he muttered. “All of you.”

Aerion’s hand shot up like he was in lessons. “Thank you,” he said, bright as a spark.

Aegon’s mouth twisted.

He glanced toward the corridor ahead, dimly lit, half-forbidden, the way only a boy raised in the Red Keep could recognize.

Then his grin returned, brighter now, eager.

“Do you want to see something better than prayers?” he asked suddenly, voice lowering in conspiratorial promise.

Aenar’s brows rose. “Better than being scolded by septas? I’m listening.”

Aegon puffed up a little, pleased to have their attention. “There’s a place the servants don’t know,” he said. “Passageways beneath the walls, through the old stones.”

Aemond frowned, cautious even at his age. “We’re not supposed to—”

“Supposed to,” Aegon mocked lightly. “Do you always do as you’re told?”

Aenar grinned, delighted. “Never.”

That was all the invitation Aegon needed.

“Come, then,” he said, already starting down the corridor, glancing back with that mixture of challenge and pride. “I’ll show you how true princes walk their keep.”

They passed through a narrow servant’s arch, then behind a tapestry so old its threads had faded to ghosts. The air changed there.

Colder, damp, touched by the smell of dust and old stone. The torches burned lower.

“This way,” Aegon whispered, ducking into a gap in the wall. “It leads straight to the throne room. Or so the old maester says.”

They kept on.

Time blurred there, only their breathing and the sound of their shoes scraping over grit marked its passing. The passages twisted and forked, turning back upon themselves before narrowing again. Cobwebs hung like curtains; the air grew thicker, heavier, carrying the faint, sour scent of mold and something older still.

Aemon drew Aerion in close as they walked, his hand settling lightly at the smaller boy’s shoulder whenever the ground dipped or the stones turned treacherous, as if he could keep the dark itself from catching at him.

Helaena murmured to herself once or twice, strange little fragments of rhyme, but no one asked her to stop. Even Aenar’s usual brightness dimmed to a low, wary hum.

“How far do these go?” Aemma whispered.

“Farther than anyone remembers,” Aegon said, though his voice lacked its earlier confidence. “Maegor built them for war. Or murder.”

The word echoed too loudly.

They descended again.

The walls wept moisture now, slick against their fingertips.

Minutes stretched like hours.

Then, at last, the air began to change.

Warmer.

Fouler.

The silence broke under a faint, rising noise: laughter, the clatter of pots, a distant shout.

Aegon slowed. “Hear that?”

The others did.

When they emerged at last, blinking against the sudden brightness, it was not the throne room that greeted them.

It was the edge of Flea Bottom.

The narrow street beyond boiled with shouts and gutter steam. Cooked fat, dung, and rot tangled thick on the air. Smoke crawled from low chimneys. Barefoot children knifed between butchers and fishwives, shrieking in play or hunger...it was hard to tell which.

Somewhere close, a woman was singing a song that wasn’t fit for septas’ ears. Her voice cracked on a note and ended in laughter that wasn’t kind.

Aenar’s grin faltered. Aemma’s hand found Aemon’s without thought, and between one breath and the next the three of them shifted, so that Aerion stood ringed in silver heads and small, straight backs, a living barrier of dragon-blood between him and whatever might come.

Aegon turned a shade paler, his earlier bravado curdling. “This isn’t right,” he muttered. “It… it should’ve gone up.”

But Aemon’s gaze was fixed on the faces turning toward them.

The crowd had noticed.

Silver hair glimmered like a beacon, and fine embroidery caught the sun as though mocking the filth around them. 

“Look there,” a man said roughly. “Little lords come slumming.”

“Or they’ve lost their way,” a woman replied, her mouth curling around the words. “Best hope someone finds ’em before someone sells ’em.”

Aegon bristled. “They wouldn’t dare—”

“Quiet,” Aemma whispered sharply. Her voice carried no panic, only command. She reached for the chain around her neck and unclasped it.

The others watched, confused, as she slipped the necklace into her shoe and pressed it beneath her heel.

“Do the same,” she said softly. “All of you.”

Aenar blinked. “Why?”

“Because we shine,” she said, eyes still scanning the growing circle of gazes. “And they’re hungry.”

Aemon hesitated only a moment before obeying, drawing the silver pin from his collar and turning it in his fingers. He looked around, unsure, before Aemma reached back and lifted a curtain of her hair. “Here,” she said. “Clip it to the back of my dress. No one will see.”

He did as told, the pin catching briefly in the silk before vanishing beneath her golden and silver curls. Aenar, following her lead, slipped his own dragon pin beside it, fingers trembling as he fastened it near hers.

Aerion clutched at the little token at his throat, eyes beginning to shine.

“I like mine,” he whispered, voice catching.

Aenar knelt at once, bringing himself level with him. “You will still like it,” he said gently. “You just have to like it where no one can steal it.” His fingers worked quickly to free the clasp, then he tucked the small treasure into the inside of Aerion’s sleeve, smoothing the fabric over it. With his other hand he brushed a thumb beneath Aerion’s eye, catching the first hint of a tear. “There. Safe.”

Aerion sniffed and nodded.

“Good,” Aemma said quietly. “Now still.”

Across from them, Helaena struggled with the jewels braided into her pale hair, her hands shaking as the tiny clasps caught and tangled.

Tears pricked her eyes in frustration.

“Let me,” Aemma said, stepping close. Her fingers were quick, deft, tugging loose the pins until the gems fell softly into her palm. She closed Helaena’s hand around them. “Hide them,” she whispered. “Anywhere you can.”

Helaena nodded, wordless, slipping the jewels into the folds of her sleeve.

Aegon lingered longest. “They wouldn’t—”

Aemma turned to him, her voice lower now, almost kind. “They would.”

The certainty in her tone left no room for argument.

Aegon swallowed hard and did as she said.

“Come,” Aemon said quietly. “We go back. Now.”

“Do you know the way?” Aemond asked.

Aegon opened his mouth, then shut it again. “Yes,” he lied.

The air thickened the deeper they went, hot and sour.

Narrow passages spilled into crooked lanes, each one more crowded, more watchful. 

Aegon straightened his shoulders, trying to look princely again. “We should just ask the way,” he said, too loud. “Someone will take us back.”

“Someone will take something,” Aenar muttered.

Aemma shot him a look, warning, not disagreement.

But the whisper had already begun to move through the street like wind through tall grass.

“Silver hair…”
“Targaryens.”
“Dragon’s get.”
“Here?”

The words spread fast, from mouth to mouth, from stall to doorway. The shuffling and murmuring deepened, and eyes turned sharper, meaner.

A butcher looked up from his block, his cleaver catching the light. “What’s royal blood doing in Flea Bottom?” he said, half to himself.

A child giggled, pointing. “They look like coins!”

“Coin’s worth cutting,” someone replied.

Aegon’s color drained. He tried to laugh it off, but it sounded brittle. “We’re—we’re not—”

“Don’t speak,” Aemon hissed.

Aemma had already pulled her hood forward, though the silvery strands still escaped at her temples, catching every ray of light like a beacon.

Helaena’s hand trembled where it clutched her sleeve. “I don’t like it here,” she whispered. “It smells wrong.”

From the mouth of an alley, a tall woman stepped forward, her arms dusted with flour and her eyes keen. “Where’d you crawl from, little lords?” she asked, not unkindly, but not kindly either. “This ain’t your mother’s hall.”

Aegon’s chin lifted automatically. “We’re not lost,” he said. “We know our way.”

She barked a laugh. “Aye, I’ll wager you do. Straight down from the Red Keep.”

The press of bodies shifted again, closer this time. Aemon felt Aerion jostled at his side.

Without a word, Aemon bent and swept him up, settling Aerion on his hip as if he were much younger than his years. “Hold on,” he said quietly. Aerion obeyed at once, arms going tight around his brother’s neck, face turned in against his shoulder to hide the telltale gleam of his hair.

A boy darted close then, quick as a rat, and yanked at Aenar’s cloak before bolting away again. Aenar caught the fabric just in time, the clasp snapping free in his hand.

“Go,” Aemma whispered. “Now.”

They pushed through.

Aemon leading with Aerion clinging. Aemond right behind, Aegon clutching Helaena’s wrist. Aenar moving with Aemma, every glance over his shoulder meeting eyes that did not blink away.

Someone shouted, “They think they’re too high to bleed!”

Another voice answered, “Not too high if they’re down here!”

The words hit like stones.

A rock followed one, small, glancing off the wall beside them. Another skittered near Aegon’s boot.

Aemma’s breath caught. “Run.”

A pot tipped over.

Someone cursed.

The clatter of footsteps followed, uncertain whether to pursue or just watch.

The narrow lanes of Flea Bottom twisted on themselves, smoke and heat thick enough to choke.

“Faster!” Aegon gasped, his fine shoes slipping on the muck.

Aemma’s skirts tangled around her legs. Aenar grabbed her arm, hauling her forward. “Don’t fall!”

She didn’t answer, her gaze darting to the side.

To faces half-lit by gutter flame.

To eyes hollow with hunger.

The people weren’t chasing them now.

They were just watching. Staring. Some with curiosity, some with scorn, some with nothing at all.

A little girl stood barefoot in a puddle, holding a crust of bread so thin it broke in her hands. She stared at Aemma’s silks, at the pearl gleaming faintly at her shoe, and then lowered her gaze without a word.

Aemma’s chest burned. 

They turned a corner, and the noise behind them dimmed, only to be replaced by another, closer sound: a deep voice calling out, “Stop there!”

But the man who emerged from the shadow wasn’t armored. He was broad-shouldered, his hair gray at the temples, his coat patched and sweat-stained. He carried no weapon, only a weary kind of steadiness.

“Seven save us,” he muttered when he saw them. “You’re no older than my own boys.”

Aegon straightened, trying to reclaim dignity through fear. “We...we’re fine,” he said. “We just took a wrong turn.”

The man’s gaze swept over them, their embroidered sleeves, their clean hands, their shining hair.

“Aye,” he said quietly. “You turned wrong the moment you were born with that color on your heads.”

Aenar bristled. “We didn’t mean—”

“I know,” the man cut in. “You didn’t mean anything. You just are.”

He sighed, rubbing a hand across his face.

“Listen to me now. They won’t hurt you, not most of ’em. They’re not wicked... just hungry.”

The words hung heavy in the narrow space between them.

Aemma’s voice was soft. “They hate us.”

The man met her eyes, truly met them, and something in his gaze gentled.

“No, girl,” he said. “They hate what feeds you while their own starve. There’s a difference.”

Aemma didn’t answer. She only looked down, at the puddles reflecting her silks, at her golden hands that had never known hunger’s sting.

Aegon’s face was pale, unreadable.

Behind her, Aerion sniffled, his small fingers fisting in Aemon’s collar as he pressed his face harder into his brother’s shoulder.

The man’s eyes softened, just a fraction. “Come. This way before someone less tired spots you.”

He led them down a side lane so narrow they had to go one by one, his lantern held low. 

As they passed, they saw the lives they’d never seen before.

An old woman asleep against a wall, her fingers still curled around a cup; a child stirring a pot of soup that held more bone than broth; a man sitting in the dark, whispering names to no one.

Aemma slowed. “Do they live like this always?”

The man glanced back. “If we’re lucky.”

At last, he pushed open a warped door to what might once have been a tavern and ushered them inside. 

“Stay here,” he said gently, setting the lantern down on a cracked table. “I’ll find help. Someone who can get you back where you belong.”

“They’ll hurt you if they know,” Aemma said again, her voice soft but certain.

He gave a short laugh, more breath than sound. “No one’s looking to hurt an old fool like me. I’ve walked these streets longer than most’ve been breathing.”

He crouched slightly then, lowering himself to their level. The gesture was so instinctive, so familiar, that for a heartbeat it felt like a father soothing frightened children. He reached out, careful not to touch, only letting his hand hover in reassurance.

“Listen to me,” he said quietly. “You stay close together. Don’t speak to anyone till I come back, and if you hear shouting, hide.”

He paused at the threshold, looking at them one last time, frightened and clean amid the ruin.

“They’re not bad people,” he said softly, almost to himself. “Just empty too long.”

He stepped out into the noise again and was gone.

Aegon sank onto a broken stool, staring at his hands. “They looked at us like we were… wrong.”

Aemma knelt beside him, her voice quiet, trembling. “No. They looked at us like we’d never seen them before.”

And she was right.

Outside, the city murmured and moaned, the sound of a hundred thousand souls trying to live another day.

“It's filthy,” Aegon muttered, wiping his hands against his cloak as though he could scrub the smell from his skin. “How can anyone live like this?”

Aemond, still standing near the door, nodded stiffly. “They don’t try,” he said. “They wallow. You saw them. Begging, stealing, sleeping in the streets. Mother says Flea Bottom rots everything it touches.”

Aenar shot him a look sharp enough to cut. “They’re starving, not rotting.”

Aegon scoffed. “Starving? Then they should leave. Go anywhere else.”

“Where?” Aemon asked quietly. “There’s nowhere to go when you belong to nothing.”

Helaena’s arms came around herself, small and trembling, as if she could keep the city’s sorrow from seeping into her bones.

Aemma moved toward the window, a narrow crack in the wall where faint light crept through. She could see a woman ladling water into a child’s mouth from a cracked bowl. The child drank greedily. 

Aenar joined her, leaning close to see. “I didn’t think Kingslanding was like this.”

“It isn’t,” Aegon said, crossing his arms. “Not the part that matters.”

Aemon turned on him then, the calm in his voice thinning. “All of it matters. It’s the same city.”

He looked back toward the door, as if he could still see the streets beyond it. 

“Where are the bread lines?” Aemon asked, more to the room than to anyone in it. “On Dragonstone, Mother has the rations already prepared. The stewards know where to stand. People queue. They don’t have to fight for scraps.”

Aenar’s brow furrowed.

“And the cisterns,” he said slowly. “The ones Grandfather Corlys helped build by the harbor. Where the water is clean and cold. Why don’t they have those here?”

Aemma’s fingers tightened on the stone of the window ledge.

“There are gardens at Dragonstone,” she whispered. “Courtyards where the children play while the kitchen women dry herbs. Grass underfoot. Fountains. Places to sit in the shade.”

She searched the narrow slice of street below again: only mud, and refuse, and a single stunted tree trying to live in a crack of stone.

“Where do they go here?” she asked. “When they want to breathe? When they want to rest?”

Aerion had been very quiet, tucked against Aemon’s side on the pallet.

Now he spoke up in a small, bewildered voice. “Who brings them soup when it’s cold?” he asked. “Who tells them where to stand?”

No one answered him.

The only reply was the city itself, groaning and shifting beyond the walls, as if it were some great beast no one had ever thought to feed properly, only bleed.

When the man returned it was not Gold Cloaks at his heels but the Emberguard. 

“Seven save us,” the captain breathed. “Princess Aemma. Princes of Dragonstone.” His voice faltered with pure disbelief. “By the gods, what are you doing here?”

Aegon straightened instinctively, fear rising behind his defiance. “We were fine—”

Ser Corren cut him off, firm but not unkind. “You were far from fine, my prince.”

His gaze flicked to the shadows, scanning the narrow lanes, then back to the man with the lantern.

“You found them,” Corren said, his tone shifting to respect. “You’ve done more than most would dare.”

The man bowed his head again. “They’re children, ser. That’s all I saw.”

Corren reached to his belt, drawing a small leather pouch heavy with coin and pressing it into the man’s calloused hand.

“You’ll take this, and more when we reach the Keep. Princess Rhaenyra will see you properly thanked for your courage.”

The man looked down at the weight in his palm, startled. “I didn’t do it for coin.”

“I know,” Ser Corren said quietly. “That’s why you’ll have it.”

The man's eyes slid to Aemma and gentled. Kind, even when he had no reason to be. 

“Remember what I said,” he said at last, before walking away into the streets that raised him. “They’re not bad people.”

Ser Corren lingered a moment longer, scanning the darkness as if to make certain it would not swallow anyone else. Then he lifted a hand, and the Emberguards closed in.

“Form around them,” he ordered quietly.

The soldiers moved without hesitation, boots striking in perfect rhythm. Four slipped to the front, torches raised high; two more fell back to guard the rear. Their armor caught the torchlight in flashes of dull gold and red, the glow rippling like fire over the dragon-etched plates.

“Keep the little ones close,” Corren said, voice low but steady.

One of the guards, a younger man gently guided Helaena gently toward the center. Another placed a steadying hand at Aemond’s back when the boy stumbled on the uneven stones.

Aegon started to protest, but Corren’s hand on his shoulder stopped him cold. “Not another word, my prince,” he said softly. “You walk in the circle or not at all.”

Aegon’s jaw clenched, but he obeyed, drawing closer to the others. 

Another fell beside Aemon, matching his stride. Aerion had wound both arms tight around his brother’s neck.

“My prince,” the guard said quietly, never quite taking his eyes off the dark ahead, “if the little Prince grows too heavy, I can bear him for a time.”

Aemon’s grip tightened instinctively. 

“I can manage,” he began, then felt Aerion’s weight sag a little more against him, the boy’s cheek hot where it rested on his shoulder.

He drew a breath.

“Careful, then,” he said at last, voice solemn. “He doesn’t like to be jostled.”

The Emberguard nodded once, as if entrusted with some sacred charge. He shifted closer, and with a practiced motion eased Aerion from Aemon’s arms into his own, settling the boy against his chest as if he had carried dragonspawn all his life.

Aerion mumbled in protest, fingers catching briefly in Aemon’s sleeve.

“I’m here,” Aemon said, walking now at the guard’s side. “Right beside you.”

Only then did Aerion relax, his head drooping against the warm curve of the breastplate, while the Emberguards bore them all toward the light.

The smell didn’t leave Aemma’s nose. 

No matter how far they pulled away from it. 

When they reached the gates of the Red Keep, the gold of the ramparts caught the sunlight, blinding in its perfection. 

Aegon exhaled, relieved. “Finally,” he muttered. “The smell’s gone.”

But Aemma knew it hadn’t.

It clung to her, to the hem of her gown, to the edges of her breath, to the silver curl of her hair. 

Aenar touched her shoulder. “You’re quiet.”

“I’m listening,” she said softly.

“To what?” he asked.

Aemma’s gaze stayed fixed on the smoke curling up from the city below, the crooked roofs, the alleys they had fled through, the faint shimmer of heat rising from the streets.

“To their cries."

Aemon turned toward her, his expression unreadable, the calm of someone trying to understand something too vast for his age. “You can still hear them?” he asked at last.

Aemma nodded once. “It is all I hear.”

The gates of the Red Keep flew open before the Emberguard's announced anything. 

And then Rhaenyra was there.

She didn’t walk, she ran.

Her gown was a streak of black and red across the pale stone, her hair unbound, her crownless head gleaming in the torchlight.

Guards stumbled to clear her path as though even they feared the force of her fear.

A sound escaped her, ripped from a place no queen should ever have to show.

Aerion lurched upright in the Emberguard’s arms at the sight of her.

“Muna!” he cried, small hands scrabbling at breastplate and leather as he tried to throw himself forward. The guard barely had time to steady him before letting him go. Aerion hit the ground running, boots skidding on the stone as he flung himself into her reach.

She fell to her knees before them, gathering all four into her arms, heedless of the dirt, the smell, the watching courtiers.

“Gods, what were you thinking?” Her voice quaked between terror and fury, every word trembling beneath the weight of love that had curdled into panic.

She cupped their faces one by one, her thumbs tracing along their cheeks as if her touch alone could confirm they still lived. “Are you hurt? Tell me.”

Aemma tried to speak, but Rhaenyra silenced her with a shaking kiss to the forehead. “You’re safe, do you hear me? You’re safe, you’re safe.”

Her breath hitched; the words became a mantra, a desperate warding spell spoken into their skin.

“Muna,” Aenar choked.

“You will not do this to me again.”

Her breath still shook, but the words hardened, less a plea than a verdict. A promise spoken into their skin that sounded very close to a sentence.

“You could have vanished. Do you understand?” She looked between them, eyes glistening, wild with everything she dared not say aloud. 

“If they had taken you, I would have burned this realm to its bones,” she said. “And I still may, if anyone ever tries again.”

The thought was not a threat but a map, already drawn in the back of her mind.

Dragonfire poured down the hill, the sept spire breaking like a candle, the Red Keep turned to a great, black tooth jutting from a mouth of ash.

It would be easy. Obscenely easy.

Aemon met her gaze, calm but pale. “We’re safe, muna.”

Rhaenyra swallowed hard, her hand trembling as she brushed the mud from his cheek. “Safe,” she echoed, the word tasting like ash. Then, quieter, almost to herself: “You are my heart’s fire, ābra zaldrītsos. But even fire can be snuffed out if left in the dark.”

Behind them, a voice cut through the din, shrill, furious, unmistakable.

“What in the gods’ names have you done?”

The courtyard erupted.

Gold Cloaks barked orders to stable hands struggling to restrain the horses. Servants darted back and forth with buckets of water; the air stank of sweat, metal, and panic. Word was already spreading, echoing from guard to groom to courtier, like sparks on dry straw.

The Emberguards who had brought the children home stood firm in a protective half-circle. Opposite them, the Gold Cloaks lined the gates, pikes lowered but unsure whom they meant to defend.

And between them, white as bone and twice as cold, stood the Kingsguard. Their hands rested on sword hilts, the tension in their shoulders speaking louder than steel.

Three orders sworn to the same blood, yet every eye watched the other as if loyalty itself might turn traitor.

Ser Corren of the Emberguard stepped forward, bowing low.

“The heirs are returned unharmed,” he declared. “Found near the lower city. No blades were drawn against them.”

From the ranks of white cloaks, Ser Arryk Cargyll said. “How dare the Emberguard overstep their bounds.” He stepped forward into the torchlight, his white cloak dragging across the cobblestones like spilled ash. “The protection of the royal heirs falls to the Kingsguard, not to Dragonstone’s hirelings trampling through Flea Bottom as if they command the realm.”

Ser Corren of the Emberguard met his gaze without flinching.

“The protection of royal blood,” he said evenly, “falls to any sworn man with a sword.” He took one measured step forward. “I found them. I brought them home. Tell me, Ser, what did you do?”

The words cracked the silence like a whip.

A few of the Gold Cloaks shifted, poorly hiding their smirks; the Emberguards stood taller, the firelight glinting red along their plates.

Arryk's jaw tensed, his fingers flexing at his sword hilt. “You forget yourself,” he hissed.

“And you forget them,” Corren said, his tone still steady, though the edge of anger gleamed beneath it. “They’re children, not sigils.”

Through the rising tension swept Alicent Hightower.

Her hair was too neat, too precise, as though she had clawed at herself to stay composed. The nail beds were torn raw, half-mooned with blood where she’d pressed them into her palms.

“The city’s in uproar,” she spat, her voice slicing through the crowd. “Whispers in every market that the royal heirs were seen running through Flea Bottom like beggars. What possessed you?”

Viserys came limping after her, his breath ragged. 

“Seven hells,” he rasped, sweeping his gaze over the children, his grandchildren. “You could have been killed.”

But Alicent wasn’t looking at him.

Her eyes locked instead on her eldest son, fury narrowing them to slits.

“You,” she hissed. 

Aegon froze, color draining from his face. “Mother—”

“You led them,” she snapped. “You took your brother and sister into the filth of the city, do you grasp what danger you’ve caused?”

Aegon flinched visibly, the words cutting deeper than any slap could have.

His chest heaved, and for a heartbeat, the cocky ease he wore like armor crumbled.

“I only meant to show them,” he said at last, his voice rough with panic. “The tunnels, I thought they went to the throne room.” He swallowed, hands twisting against his sides. “I thought it would be—”

“Be what?” Alicent demanded. “A game? You endangered the royal line for adventure?”

Aegon’s breath came unevenly. The flush crept up his neck and into his face, his mouth twisting between anger and shame. He opened his hands helplessly. “I didn’t know!” 

Alicent’s jaw clenched. “You didn’t know? And yet you led them anyway?”

“I just wanted to show them,” he said, his voice breaking. “I thought it would be something fun.” He looked between her and the King, searching for something, forgiveness, perhaps, or just someone who remembered he was still a boy. “I never meant—”

“You never mean,” Alicent said coldly. “And still you find ways to shame us all.”

He blinked rapidly, his throat tight. “I’m sorry."

The words died uselessly in the air.

He turned, desperate for a place to look that wasn’t his mother’s face.

And saw them.

Rhaenyra, in the mud, her gown ruined, her hands shaking as they touched each of her children in turn, hair, cheek, pulse, breath.

Laenor appeared, running hard enough to stumble, his cloak askew. He fell to his knees beside them without a thought for the dirt or the audience, gathering them all into his arms. Rhaenyra met him halfway, their foreheads touching, a single unguarded heartbeat of gratitude passing between them.

Behind came his mother and father. 

Rhaenys had stepped in close, one hand braced between Laenor’s shoulder blades, steadying him as if he were still a boy pulled from a storm-tossed deck. Corlys stood at her side, broad and solid, his palm resting on Aenar’s back, drawing the boy subtly into the shelter of his frame.

They were all one shape on the quay.

Dagon black and red, sea-blue and silver, the Sea Snake and the Queen Who Never Was anchoring their line.

Aegon felt the sting in his eyes before he could stop it. His own family did not fit together like that. 

Rhaenyra looked up then, her gaze brushing over him. 

He hated her for it. Hated the calm in her eyes, the security in her touch, the simple certainty that her children would never doubt their worth. 

Alicent’s gaze followed her son’s.

The sight of them hit her like a thrown stone.

Rhaenyra’s and Laenor’s children held in a tight, instinctive ring of arms. Rhaenys’s hand on Aemma’s hair, Corlys a wall at their backs, Laenor bent low enough that Aenar could lean into him if he wished.

That was what the yard saw.

One house, one story.

It scraped something raw in her chest.

“This is their doing,” Alicent said, catching the pain and turning it sharply, the way one might turn a knife. “They dragged my son into it, their recklessness. You see what comes of it? The royal heirs of Dragonstone consorting with beggars and thieves, while my son is made the villain for following them?”

Aenar flinched; Aemma pressed closer to her mother. Rhaenyra rose slowly, gathering her children behind her, mud streaking the hem of her gown.

Aegon looked up, startled. “No—”

Alicent’s eyes turned to the Dragonstone heirs. “Of course. The heirs of flame. Always testing the limits of propriety and patience.”

“You will not name my children the problem in this keep,” Rhaenyra said.

There was no tremor now, only flat, cutting certainty.

Alicent ignored her. “It begins in the lessons,” she went on, each word colder. “Defiance dressed up as wit. Disrespect disguised as cleverness."

“They’re children,” Rhaenyra said. “Something you seem determined to beat out of everyone under your roof.”

“They’re royalty,” Alicent snapped. “Perhaps they thought this little escapade another jest, a way to mock their tutors, or prove themselves better. You even bring mercenary steel into every corner of this keep and still your children slip through the cracks. Perhaps if they’d spent more hours under the Maiden’s eye and fewer under your hirelings’, they’d know better than to run to the gutters.”

Aemon flinched at her tone but stood his ground. “We didn’t mock anyone,” he said, voice trembling but firm. “We were just following—”

“Following foolishness,” Alicent cut in. “And if your mother taught you better, you’d have known when to stop.”

Laenor moved.

His face, so often open, bright and patient, was drawn taut now. Every line carved sharp with disbelief. When he spoke, his voice was low, the kind that made men listen even when they wanted to look away.

“Careful, Your Grace,” he said. “You speak as though my children’s honor is something you can soil and wash clean again with words.”

Alicent turned, her chin lifting. “I speak as a mother whose son was humiliated by yours.”

Laenor let out a soft, incredulous laugh humorless, hollow.

“Humiliated?” His tone darkened. “Your son led them into the city. And now you would twist it so mine bear the stain?”

Alicent’s color rose, her composure cracking for the first time.

“You forget yourself,” she managed.

“No, my queen,” Laenor said, his voice dropping to a quiet, dangerous steadiness. “I remember exactly who I am.”

“Ah yes,” she said coolly, the words sliding like oil. "And I suppose your squires do too.”

No one laughed.

A few of the lesser knights stared at their boots as if the flagstones had grown fascinating. One of the older Velaryon guards went so still his hand twitched toward the hilt at his hip, then stopped there, fingers flexing once.

Laenor did not react. 

He only looked at her, and the quiet in his eyes was worse than any anger.

Heat crawled up the back of her neck. For a fleeting instant she knew she had gone too far. Then the moment passed, and she told herself it was only truth.

“Hold your tongue,” Rhaenyra told Alicent. “You do not have the standing to spit on a Velaryon and pretend it is piety.”

“I do not spit on House Velaryon,” Alicent said, her voice gone soft and poisonous. “I pity it. A storied house tied to a consort who cannot play the man where it matters, and to a daughter of kings who would have us all clap for the pretense.”

Rhaenys’ lips parted, something lethal on her tongue.

“You should not pity us, Your Grace,” Aenar said, beating his grandmother's attempted verbal dissection, all while wriggling out from under Rhaenyra’s hand. 

His voice was clear but a little too high, the way it always went when he was trying to sound older. He came to stand in front of Rhaenyra’s skirts and planted his feet wide, the way Laenor had shown him on the deck of Seafoam’s Grace.

“House Velaryon is not… sad,” he said, hunting for the word. “We have ships. We have the best ships. Kepa says no storm can swallow us. Grandsire is the Sea Snake. Everyone knows our banners.”

He pressed his palm over the silver seahorse on his doublet, fingers bunching the cloth.

“The sea does not pity us,” Aenar finished, shoulders squaring. “I think the sea likes us.”

The words were guileless, the kind only a child could speak without fear, and yet they landed like a challenge all the same.

“And what would you know of thought, child?”

In the distance, Syrax screamed.

Aenar startled, his mouth snapping shut.

His hand stayed where it was, palm pressed over the seahorse on his doublet. He swallowed hard and looked up at the queen with wide, wounded eyes. He looked less like the Tides’ Prince and more like a little boy who had brought a brave thought to the table and had it slapped from his hands.

Rhaenyra moved as if something inside her had slipped its leash.

Heat climbed her throat, sharp and metallic, the way it did just before Syrax loosed flame.

“Say another word to him,” Rhaenyra said, voice low and bright with fury, “and I will tear it out of your mouth. Not even the gods you cling to will be quick enough to stop me.”

“You dare—”

“I dared,” she cut in, taking another step, “when I let you stand with your skin unburned. Do not tempt me to regret that kindness.”

Syrax cried again, closer this time.

Rhaenyra’s gaze did not leave Alicent’s face. Her hands were empty, but every line of her body said otherwise.

Alicent’s eyes widened. “I merely pointed out that children ought not speak where they do not understand.”

A sound cut through the air.

Not quite a laugh. Something sharper, older.

“You have questioned my daughter,” Corlys said. His voice rolled across the hall like surf against stone, carrying easily, clear as a bell over water. “You have questioned my son. You have questioned our line, our honor, our place.”

He stepped to Rhaenyra’s side, close enough that the two of them read as one wall. The Sea Snake and his good-daughter. 

“Now you bare your teeth at my grandson. The Tides’ Prince. The heir’s heir of Driftmark.”

Alicent swallowed. “I—”

“You let your tongue run loose,” Rhaenys said moving to Rhaenyra’s other side. "The next time you itch to strike at what is ours, Queen Alicent, bite down. The taste of your own blood may yet teach you more wisdom than your septon ever has.”

Alicent felt the undertow drag her under.

She struggled.

Her spine tried to remember its steel. Her fingers tightened around the edge of her sleeve until the stitching bit into her skin.

“This is not about your house,” Alicent backtracked immediately. “It is about discipline. Decorum. What is owed to the throne.”

“Do not dress your spite in the language of duty, Your Grace. When you snap at us, you do not defend the throne.” Rhaenys eyes held Alicent’s, violet fire and unyielding. “You gnaw at its legs.”

Viserys saw the moment hanging in the air.

His wife’s hand clenched on her star, the Velaryons drawn tight around their heirs, the yard holding its breath.

Rhaenys’s voice from the council chamber rang in his ears. Act like a king, or the realm will find one elsewhere.

“You overstep, wife,” he said, and there was no softness in it.

Alicent stared at him, shocked that the rebuke had come at all, let alone here.

“I only meant—”

“I heard what you meant,” Viserys said. “The boy spoke well. Better than many lords. He defended his kin. That is a prince’s duty. And he will not be punished for it.”

He turned his head, looking to Aenar.

“Come here, little sea-dragon,” he said.

Aenar hesitated, then edged out from behind Rhaenyra’s skirts. Rhaenyra’s hand stayed on his shoulder, steady and warm, guiding him forward.

Viserys crouched with a faint, painful sound of knees protesting, bringing himself level with the boy.

“You are right,” he told him. “The sea does not pity your house. Nor does your king.”

Aenar’s brow furrowed. “Are you angry with me, grandsire?”

Viserys’ face twisted; for once, the answer cost him nothing at all.

“No,” he said. “Not with you. You spoke as a prince should. Head high. Heart fixed on your own.”

Aegon watched his father’s hand settle on Aenar’s shoulder, watched the way the realm seemed to lean in and soften around them.

A moment ago, his own mother had carved him open before all these same eyes; no gentle hand had followed, no word to catch the shame before it fell.

For Aenar there was a kindness cupped and offered like a sweet.

Some traitorous, younger part of Aegon wanted to step forward, to ask if anyone had ever thought he spoke well.

He stayed where he was.

No one was looking his way.

“My quarrel,” Viserys said, “is only with those who would shame a child for that.”

Alicent’s grip on her beads loosened by a hair. The humiliation in her eyes curdled into something colder.

Rhaenyra laid her hand over Aenar’s again, where it still rested over the seahorse.

“You did very well,” she said, voice pitched for him alone, though others heard it all the same. “Your kepa and grandsire will boast of you for days.”

Laenor let out a breath that shook a little at the edges. He brushed Aenar’s hair back from his face, thumb catching on a drying streak of mud.

Aenar’s chest lifted, small shoulders trying to sit taller under all that praise. He glanced, almost shyly, toward Rhaenys and Corlys.

Rhaenys’ expression softened by a fraction, something proud and fierce cutting through the murder in her gaze.

“I have seen grown men stammer like fools at court, little prince,” she said. “You did not. Hold on to that.”

Corlys gave him a sailor’s nod, not a courtly one.

“When you stand on a deck in a storm one day,” he said, “remember how you felt just now. The sea listens to those who do not flinch.”

Syrax cried out again, farther now, the sound rolling off stone like distant thunder.

Rhaenyra looked up to the sky, then back to Alicent.

“My dragon does not like raised voices,” she said. “Nor do my children. I suggest we all remember that the next time someone feels moved to insult them in a yard full of onlookers.”

She did not wait for reply.

“Come,” she told the children. “We will leave the queen to her prayers.”

As they moved away, Aenar slipped his hand into hers. Aemma pressed close on the other side. Aerion reached for Laenor. Aemon, drifted with them. 

Behind them, Rhaenys and Corlys fell into place, the living proof of everything Aenar had just said: ships, banners, a house that did not bow to pity.

Alicent watched them go, throat tight, the echo of Syrax’s cry still in the air.

For a wild instant, the urge rose in her to crook a finger at Aegon. To draw him to her side, plant him at her shoulder, show them all that he was still hers, still the son of a queen, still meant for their throne.

His eyes, when she glanced at him, were on the stones at his feet. His mouth had fallen into that slack, vacant line she had seen on Viserys too many times.

Alicent’s hand twitched.

She did not lift it. Instead she curled her fingers inward until the wooden beads bit into her skin. One cracked faintly under the pressure, a tiny sound swallowed by the murmur of the yard.

She told herself she did not need comfort. She told herself she did not need anyone.

And she would not be made to feel ashamed of it.

Notes:

Everything pretty is laid over something unhealed.

Chapter 27: Soft Crowns and Sharp Stones

The Red Keep only pretended to sleep.

By night it was breath and bones and listening stone.

Aemma moved through it like a ghost who had never learned to be afraid.

Her slippers whispered against the floor as she slipped from the chamber she shared near her brothers, one hand fisted in the edge of her blanket.

It dragged behind her in a pale little trail, soft as frostlight against the stone. The blue thread of its embroidery had been pulled and worried over the years, the tiny falcon and mountain and sky stitched by a girl’s uncertain hand long before Aemma was born.

Her grandmother’s hands. Her mother had told her that once, in a voice that went far away for a moment.

Aemma held it tighter on nights like this.

The Emberguard at the door pretended not to see her at first.

They had been told, very firmly, that the heirs were not to wander without escort.

But then she looked up.

Those eyes, moon-bright, the left just a shade lighter than the right.

She hitched the blanket higher around her shoulders like a tiny cloak and pressed a finger to her lips.

“Shh,” she breathed, voice soft and certain. “I’m going to chase away a bad dream.”

Even the most hardened Emberguard faltered.

They traded a helpless glance.

One of them, Ser Corren, muttered something under his breath about dragons coming in all sizes.

In the end they let her pass, shadowing her at a distance the way one might trail a candle in a drafty hall: close enough to catch, far enough not to startle.

The Keep at night unsettled most children. The ceilings seemed higher, the shadows longer, every carved dragon head suddenly watchful.

Aemma tilted her chin up at them as she walked, solemn as a tiny queen, as if reporting inspection. “We’re friends,” she told one stone beast quietly. “You can sleep.”

The torches spit soft sparks in answer.

She refused a sconce when a maid tried to offer one, palms lifting in tiny horror. “You’ll wake everyone,” she whispered. “I know the way.”

She did.

They had shown it to her once in daylight, where Grandsire’s solar sat high and crooked over the city, how many stairs, which turns.

She’d memorized it with the same care she gave her Valyrian letters. It felt important that she could find him alone if she needed to. Or if he did.

Tonight she did.

Her bad dream had been all bells and smoke, a crown falling from a high place and shattering like glass. She’d woken with the taste of ash in her mouth and an ache under her ribs that would not go away.

So she went to fix it.

Ser Harrold Westerling guarded the last bend before the solar. His white cloak was smudged with the day’s wear, his hair more silver than gold now, but his eyes were clear when they found her.

“Princess,” he said, surprised into softness. “You’re far from your bed.”

Aemma clasped her hands before her to keep from fidgeting.

In the crook of her elbow, half-hidden in the folds of her night-robe, she carried something pale and crumpled, a small bundle she’d insisted on holding herself. 

“I need to see Grandsire,” she said. “Please, Ser Harrold.”

“Does your mother know you’ve flown the coop?” There was a hint of dry amusement under the question.

Aemma hesitated just long enough to be honest, then shook her head. “If I tell her, she’ll be sad with me. I don’t want her sad.”

That stopped him.

“You’ve your mother’s eyes when you’re set on something,” he whispered, half to himself.

Aemma’s head tilted. “Did you know her then?”

“Aye,” he said, a smile tugging under his beard. “I stood guard when she was your age. She’d steal lemon cakes from the kitchens and bring them to the King’s study, thinking no one noticed.”

Her mouth curved in delight. “Did she get in trouble?”

“Always,” he said fondly. “And never enough to stop her.”

Aemma giggled, the sound bright and secret in the dim hall.

By rights, that should have been the end of it.

No one entered the King’s solar without word from within. Not pages, not lords, not princesses with bad dreams clutched in their arms. His post was to be the wall between that door and the world, even when the world was only a little girl in slippers.

He had broken that rule before.

He remembered Rhaenyra’s small hand slipping into his, sticky with sugar, the first time she’d come padding up the corridor after dark. He’d told her no, very properly, and then opened the door anyway.

Later, Viserys had caught his eye over her sleeping head and said only, “Thank you, Ser Harrold,” as if the words were a seal set on the breach.

After that, it had been an understanding between three people and no one else. The King’s peace was better kept when his daughter could reach him.

Now here stood the daughter’s daughter, with the same set to her jaw, the same storm gathering behind her eyes.

“One moment,” he said.

He cracked the solar door just wide enough to look in.

The old king was slumped in his chair by the window, the candlelight gilding ravines in his face.

He stepped back out.

Aemma hadn’t moved.

She had three guards at her back, Harrold saw now, the faint red of Emberguard cloaks just visible in the gloom where they lingered at a polite distance.

He knew most of those men by name. Had watched them drill in the yard with a seriousness that put some white cloaks to shame. Dragonstone’s pets, the court called them, but Harrold had seen the way they looked at the princes and princess.

That eased some of his worry. If the little princess was to go roaming the Keep at night, there were far worse hands to have at her back than theirs.

“Very well, Princess,” he said at last, his voice gentle. “Go on, then. I’ll keep watch. And mind the steps. Your mother would have my hide if you bruised a knee.”

She grinned and whispered as she passed, “I won’t tell if you don’t.”

He chuckled low. “Seven save me, you are her daughter.”

Her smile bloomed brighter, then gentled again as if the door itself reminded her to be careful. She slipped past him, small hand brushing the wood in passing like a promise.

Viserys had not meant to fall asleep in the chair.

Sleep came in fits now, when it came at all.

Snatches between pain and memory. Between Rhaenyra’s voice still ringing in these stones and the echo of his own. 

The solar still smelled faintly of last night’s storm: overturned wine, old ink, the sharp ghost of rage. His crown sat crooked on the table where he’d left it, its points catching stray threads of candlelight like a threat half-drawn.

So when the knock came...soft, bird-small...his heart jolted as if the doors might crash open again and bring fire with them.

They didn’t.

“Who’s there?” His voice was a dry rustle.

“It’s only me, Grandsire,” Aemma whispered.

He blinked, trying to clear the blur from his eyes, and the fire light caught her.

She was wrapped, as she so often was, in that Arryn-blue blanket. It had faded with the years to the color of sky just before dusk, but the falcon and mountain picked out along its border still held their shape.

And when she looked at him, the strange glimmer in her mismatched eyes seemed almost to bend the air.

Not with prophecy, not with demand.

Just with the simple certainty that he was hers.

“My heart,” he breathed, and the name made him younger. It cut clean across the hoarse edge left by last night’s shouting. “My sweet girl. The hour’s ill for wandering.”

She padded closer until she stood between his knees, as if she’d always known that was where the night would end. “I had a bad dream,” she said simply. “But I think it might be yours, not mine. So I brought it back.”

Viserys huffed a small, broken laugh. “Have you, now?” 

Aemma unfolded the thing in her hands.

It was a crooked crown fashioned from the Red Keep’s garden: woven sprigs of lavender and rosemary, a few stubborn sea-flowers from the pots the Velaryon maids had insisted upon. Crushed slightly from being hugged too hard.

“I made you a better one,” she said, a touch of shy pride in her voice. 

“You’d crown an old man twice?” he asked, somewhere between jest and ache. 

“You’re my King,” Aemma said, as if explaining something obvious. “And my Grandsire. You need soft things, too.”

He looked again at the metal circlet on the table, all sharp lines and history, then at the small, bent loop of lavender in her hands.

“Do I?” he asked quietly.

She only lifted the flower-crown with both hands and waited.

He bowed his head for her.

The falcon’s wing brushed the floor when she shifted. Her grandmother’s sigil, dragged along the dust of a world that had gone on without her.

Her small fingers were careful as she set it over his thinning hair. The stems snagged once; she muttered a tiny apology, then patted it into place with grave satisfaction, as if she were righting the whole realm with each adjustment.

“There,” she said. “Now it won’t hurt to remember.”

Viserys closed his eyes.

His Aemma would have wrapped this child in that blue every night and loved her fiercely. 

She would have stood in this very doorway, watching their granddaughter march across the room with a crown of flowers in hand, and laughed from the belly at the sight of him bowing to it.

She would have called him a foolish old man for crying and then pressed her thumb beneath his eye to wipe away the proof.

For once, when the pain rose, it did not close his throat.

It swelled there and settled lower, a heavy, living thing in his chest.

But he found himself thinking that there were worse pains than this. To be loved in the shape of what you lost, to see a long-ago promise breathing before you, wrapped in blue.

“You are too good to me,” he said hoarsely.

Aemma frowned at that, the fierce little line that marked her as Rhaenyra’s. “No,” she said. “I’m just yours.”

She glanced up at him, then leaned in closer, lowering her voice like a plotter at council. “You mustn’t be lonely up here,” she whispered. “Muna says lonely kings think themselves into sickness.”

“Does she now,” he managed, the corner of his mouth quirking.

Aemma nodded, the motion small and deliberate. Her fingers toyed with one of the lavender stems in his crown, eyes going far away for a moment.

“When we went down to the city,” she said softly, “before they found us again…the part with the smoke and the shouting…” Her voice faltered, but she pressed on. “There were so many people, Grandsire. They all looked so tired. One girl was sitting on the ground with no shoes. Her toes were black from the dirt.”

Viserys opened his eyes fully at that, a faint tremor of guilt passing through him like a draft through old stone.

“I wanted to give her mine,” Aemma whispered. “But the guard said we had to hurry, that it wasn’t safe. And we kept going but she was still there. I think she was crying.”

She bit her lip, small teeth worrying the skin. 

She drew a breath, a little sharper now. “On Dragonstone, Muna says no one should be barefoot on the cliffs. The rock will slice your feet if you’re not careful. So the stewards take counts. They make sure there are cloaks and boots and bread. If someone is hungry, they at least know who it is.” Her chin tipped up, stubborn and small. “Why is it not like that here?”

Viserys flinched, the question landing where years of council squabbles never had.

For a moment he could only look at her, this slight child with flowers in her hands, and see the city laid bare behind her eyes.

“I…” His tongue felt thick. “I do not know,” he said at last. “When I was a boy, Kingslanding was already like this. Streets full, bellies empty. I thought…” He swallowed. “I suppose I thought it was simply how a city is. That it could be no other way.”

Aemma stared at him, bewildered. “But Dragonstone is different now than when you were little."

The words hit harder than any maester’s diagnosis.

“Perhaps, I have not listened as I should,” he admitted, voice low. “I have sat in this room and read my ledgers and thought that was enough. Thought that if the ships sailed and the coffers filled, the rest would…sort itself.” His gaze dropped to the flower crown in his lap, stems trembling faintly with his hands. “Perhaps I have been lonely too long to hear what hearts are saying outside these walls.”

Her shoulders softened.

“It’s okay,” she said, with a certainty no maester had ever given him. “We all make mistakes.”

She shlyly hugged herself then confessed in a rush, “Last week I hit Aerion on accident.”

Viserys blinked. “You did?”

She nodded, her hair swishing violently. 

“He took my dragon book without asking and I snatched it back and my hand slipped.” Her small fingers curled in demonstration. “I made his lip bleed. He cried and I cried and Muna said we were both awful.” A faint, rueful smile touched her mouth. “But then we said sorry and I held the cloth on his lip.”

Viserys let out a breath he did not know he had been holding. “Your brother forgave you, just like that?” 

Aemma’s smile brightened, small and fierce. “Of course. He still follows me everywhere. Like a duckling.” She leaned closer, as if sharing a court secret. “We are lucky I did not knock out a tooth. He would have made our court paintings look very silly.”

A startled laugh escaped him, raw and real.

She grinned, then sobered again with that odd, old-tilted gravity that sometimes sat on her small face. “If the city is hurt,” she said, “you can still fix it. You’re the King.”

His throat tightened.

“I will try,” he whispered. “For them. For you.”

“For you, too,” Aemma said firmly. 

She patted the flower-crown on his head with solemn satisfaction. “And now you have a proper crown for thinking.”

Viserys closed his eyes again, not from weariness this time, but to keep the sudden sting there from falling down his cheeks in front of her.

“You truly are the realm’s heart,” he managed, voice roughened. “All its hurts, all its hopes, beating in one small chest. What is the realm to do with you, child?”

Aemma considered this gravely, then gave a tiny shrug. “Listen, I hope.”

The simple answer landed in him like a stone in a still pond, sending out rings he could almost see.

He drew a breath that scraped a little in his chest.

“If I am to listen,” he said slowly, “I must also act. Otherwise it is nothing but… noise.” His fingers brushed the edge of the flower-crown, as if to assure himself it was still there. “How do you think we should start, little heart? If it were your throne, your city, what would you do first?”

Her face lit, suddenly eager, as if he had handed her a puzzle she had been waiting to solve.

“Oh,” she said, “that part is easy.”

She settled more solidly on his knee, small hands describing invisible shapes in the air as she spoke. “I have so many things, Grandsire. Dresses I grew out of last moon. Toys I do not play with now because Aerion chews the ears.”

“You would give away your things,” he said, more statement than question.

“Yes,” Aemma replied at once. “I do not need ten dolls. Or the dresses that pinch, or the shoes that hurt my heel.”

He stared at her, the candlelight catching the pale of her throat, the serious set of her mouth.

“I have thought of ships and tariffs,” he said quietly. “Bridges and harbors. Grand works. Yet it never once occurred to me to begin with a child’s toy box.”

“That is because you are very tall,” Aemma told him, utterly matter-of-fact. “When you are tall, you forget what the floor looks like.” 

Something in him cracked at that, clean and sharp.

“How fortunate I am,” he whispered, “that you are generous.”

Viserys let out a breath that might have been a laugh and might have been a sob.

“Very well,” he said, drawing her gently against him, flower-crown shifting as he did. “Tomorrow, we shall begin with your dresses. And your dolls with chewed ears. A king and his grandchild, holding the cloth on the lip.”

She nodded, content for a heartbeat.

Then her gaze wandered to the shelves behind him, to the worn spines and rolled parchments, the stories that smelled of ink and dust and memory.

“Grandsire,” she asked, voice small and careful. “Will you read to me?”

He blinked, surprised. “Now?”

She nodded, curling her bare toes against the chair’s edge. “Just a little. My brothers always fall asleep before the end. I want to hear the ending.”

Viserys followed her glance to the old book resting open on the table. A history of dragons he had once read to Rhaenyra when she was small enough to sit on his knee. The page was still marked by a dried sprig of myrrh, brittle and forgotten.

He hesitated, then lifted the book. The leather creaked faintly, like an old man’s bones remembering joy.

“Very well,” he said softly. “But only a few pages, or the maesters will scold us both.”

Aemma grinned, victorious, and nestled closer. 

The Arryn-blue blanket hitched with her. A small, scratchy reminder pressing into his side.

He began to read. His voice was slow, roughened by age, but the rhythm came back to him; the rise and fall of dragons and dreamers, battles and songs.

Halfway through a sentence, her breathing changed.

He looked down. Her lashes fluttered once, then stilled. The tiniest sigh escaped her lips, warm against his wrist. The blanket shifted again with that exhale, one corner dragging in a soft, familiar scrape along his waist before settling, as if the elder Aemma were tucking them both in from some unseen place.

It took him a moment to realize she hadn’t wanted the story at all.

She’d wanted to stay.

Viserys closed the book without a sound. The candle beside them guttered low, throwing gentle light over her sleeping face and the crooked crown of flowers.

He leaned back in the chair, one hand still resting lightly on her shoulder, and whispered, “Very well, little heart. You may stay.”

The hour slipped by unnoticed. The King might have drifted somewhere between waking and memory, lulled by the weight of the child and the smell of crushed lavender. Every now and then she shifted in her sleep, and the blanket scraped softly against his side, a small, insistent rasp that kept dragging him back from the darker edges of thought.

Then came the faintest creak of hinges.

Viserys stirred, blinking toward the door.

Ser Harrold Westerling stood there, broad and careful, one hand on the latch. Beside him, three Emberguards peered in like curious cats, half sheepish, half charmed by the sight before them.

For a moment no one spoke.

At last, Ser Corren cleared his throat, his voice pitched low, deferent. “Your Grace,” he said, “shall I carry the little princess back to her chambers?”

Viserys’s hand tightened, almost unconsciously, over Aemma’s small shoulder.

The impulse startled him.

A lifetime of ceremony had trained every gesture to caution, but this was something older, rawer, the sudden, impossible need to keep her there, safe and warm and his.

He shook his head once, too quickly. “No,” he said. Then, softer, steadier: “No, leave her. She’s only just found sleep.”

The guards exchanged glances, unsure whether to bow or smile.

Ser Harrold, ever tactful, inclined his head. “As you wish, Your Grace.”

They began to withdraw. Before the door could close, Viserys looked up, his voice a quiet rasp. “Let her mother know she is well.”

“Yes, Your Grace.”

The door eased shut again. Silence returned, deeper now, almost sacred.

Viserys looked down at the tiny hand curled around the edge of his sleeve. Her breathing rose and fell against his chest, steady as the tide.

Viserys let out a breath that scraped out of him like sand from an old hourglass.

“She’s safe,” he said to no one at all. The words were for himself as much as her. “She’s safe, and she stays.”

The King leaned back once more, the weight of his years momentarily forgotten beneath the warmth of a sleeping child.

---

In the King’s solar, a faint warmth spread as the first light touched the table.

Aemma sat cross-legged in her grandsire’s chair, solemnly spooning porridge into her mouth as though attending council.

Viserys sat beside her, still in his robe, his flower-crown stubbornly perched a little askew.

When the door opened, they both turned.

Rhaenyra paused on the threshold.

Aenar stood straight at her side, her hand resting lightly on his small shoulder. Aemon peered around her skirts, fingers curled in the fabric, bright eyes flicking at once to the food. Then to the flower-crown. Then to Aemma with the sharp, assessing envy of a brother who had clearly been left out of an adventure.

On her hip, Aerion clung like a sleepy coal. His hair a silver tangle against her shoulder, thumb resting just shy of his mouth, one fist gripping the collar of her robe as if the night might still try to steal him.

This was not the room she had braced herself to walk into.

She had risen with the sick, metallic taste of last night still on her tongue.

All smoke and shouting and the echo of her own voice thrown back at her by stone. She had half expected to find the door barred, or opened onto a council already gathered without her. Viserys cloaked in crowns and stubbornness, the Hand hovering at his elbow.

Some quiet punishment already taking shape for her insolence, for the Emberguard, for setting the strength of House Velaryon so plainly at her back, turning the lord of the seas into a shield in front of the whole court and forcing her father to see where the tide had gone.

Instead she found this.

An old man in a worn robe, bare-headed save for wilted lavender and crushed rosemary.

Aemma’s porridge bowl was pulled close, as if it were some important scroll. She held the spoon with comical dignity, mimicking the way she had seen him hold quills in this very chair.

Every so often she glanced up to check that the crown was still in place, as if the fate of the realm depended on it not slipping over his ear.

Something tightened behind her ribs.

Aenar shifted under her hand, glancing up at her, as if to ask whether they were in trouble for finding their errant sister.

Aemon pressed closer to her leg, craning to see better.

Aerion made a small, unhappy noise at the unfamiliar stillness and burrowed his face into her neck. She smoothed a palm down his back out of habit more than thought.

The faintest smile tugged at her lips, though her throat felt thick with too many things she could not name.

She made herself speak.

“Forgive us,” she said softly, the words breaking the hush like sunlight through smoke. “We were told one small dragon went missing in the night.”

Her gaze flicked over Aemma’s shoulder to the flower-crown, then down to the porridge bowl, then back to Viserys’s face.

“Seems,” she added, a dry edge curling under the warmth, “she flew higher than I thought.”

Viserys looked up, and for a moment, he wasn’t the king or the father who had disappointed her a hundred times, just an old man, luminous with wonder. Caught between pride and disbelief.

Aemma swallowed a mouthful of porridge and lifted her chin.

“I wasn’t missing,” she corrected, indignant. “I was helping Grandsire chase away bad dreams.”

Aemon gasped, eyes wide. “You went alone?”

“I had the guards,” she said primly, as if that solved everything. “And Ser Harrold let me in because he knew I was brave.”

Rhaenyra’s eyes darted past her daughter to the door.

Ser Harrold stood there in his white cloak, doing a very poor impression of a man fascinated by a patch of stonework. Feeling her eyes on him, he looked up.

They were back in another corridor, another lifetime. A girl with lemon cakes hidden in her skirts, a knight who pretended not to see.

The corner of his mouth hitched. He gave her the smallest, most unrepentant wink.

Rhaenyra huffed out a breath that was almost a laugh, almost a curse, and let it go.

She crossed the room, the older boys trailing after her, both in their nightshirts, hair rumpled from sleep. Aerion bounced a little with each step, half awake now, blinking owlishly at the steaming bread and the bright pot of honey as if betrayed that breakfast had begun without him.

Rhaenyra bent to kiss the top of her daughter’s head, her free hand brushing a crumb from Aemma’s hair.

“I see,” she teased. “And did you catch the bad dreams?”

Aemma nodded vigorously. “All of them. Grandsire helped.”

Rhaenyra turned her gaze to Viserys, a mix of amusement and quiet ache in her eyes. “So I see,” she said. “A formidable pair.”

Viserys smiled, tired, but real. “We’ve decided to begin a new royal tradition,” he said. “Breakfast before sunrise. Lavender crowns optional.”

Aenar laughed and edged closer to the table. Aemon climbed up beside his sister, immediately reaching for the honey. Aerion scooted in next, elbows already on the bench, stretching both hands toward the bread with single-minded focus. He leaned his weight against Rhaenyra’s side without thinking, solid and warm, as the morning settled into something almost like peace.

Rhaenyra moved to pour her father’s wine herself. Her hands brushed his, and she stilled when she felt how warm they were. Not fever-warm, but living. Present.

“Keep it,” she said softly, nodding toward the wilted crown. “It suits you.”

Viserys touched the flowers, a faint wonder on his face. “Your daughter made it for me,” he said. “Said it wouldn’t hurt to remember.”

Rhaenyra’s smile trembled. “She’s right.”

The sunlight climbed higher, golden and clean. Aemma, spoon forgotten, straightened suddenly, her curls catching the light.

“Oh!” she exclaimed. “I almost forgot, Grandsire and I made a plan.”

Viserys arched a brow, amused. “A plan? So early in the morning?”

“The city, Grandsire,” Aemma said at once, as if he had prompted a lesson. “The girl with no shoes.”

Rhaenyra went still.

Aemon and Aenar traded a look.

Aerion, less interested in policy than in proving ownership, pressed closer to Rhaenyra and patted at her collar with his sticky hand, leaving a faint smear on the silk as he tried to straighten it. “You’re crumpled, muna,” he whispered to her, solemn as a maester, utterly sure this was the important part.

Aemma drew herself up in the chair, small back very straight.

“We are going to start with the things we have too many of,” she said, counting on her fingers. “My dresses that pinch. The ones I only wore once for paintings. The shoes that rub my heel. My dolls with chewed ears.” Her eyes slid to Aerion with grave accusation.

He blinked innocently but his smirk after was all Daemon. Crooked, conspiratorial, as if he’d just found a new way to set the world on fire and call it play.

She looked to her mother, suddenly anxious, as if awaiting judgment. “That is only the first step,” she said. “We will make a list of who is cold and who is hungry. On Dragonstone, we can't fix what we don't count. So we will count them.”

Viserys watched her, pride and shame and something like awe flickering across his lined face.

Rhaenyra’s throat worked.

“And who will oversee this grand accounting?” Viserys asked gently.

“I will,” Aemma said. “And Aemon and Aenar…”

She stopped there.

Aerion let out a small, scandalized huff, arms crossing tight over his chest as he glared at the table, lower lip jutting in outrage at the omission.

Aemma sighed, long-suffering in the way only an older sister could manage. “Maybe Aerion,” she amended. “We will help fold the clothes and choose the toys.” She paused, then added carefully, “If Muna says it is allowed.”

Rhaenyra looked from her daughter to her father. To the wilted lavender crown.

“It is more than allowed,” she said at last, her voice low but steady. “It is exactly what a princess of Dragonstone should do.”

Aemma’s face lit, bright as the morning. “Then it is a real plan.”

Viserys let out a slow breath.

“We will speak to the stewards today,” he said. “And to the Master of Coin. The Crown can afford to spare more than dolls, little heart. If we begin with your toys, perhaps my lords will remember they have coffers as well as titles.”

Rhaenyra’s mouth curved, wry and tender. “They will complain,” she said. “They always do.”

“They can complain while the children have shoes,” Aemma replied with fierce certainty.

Rhaenyra’s gaze caught her father’s. For the first time since the night before, the look between them was not a clash of steel, but something quieter.

“Your grandmother once spoke of such kindness,” Viserys said, looking toward her. “I had almost forgotten how it sounded aloud.”

Rhaenyra smiled faintly, eyes still on the light.

“Perhaps it’s time the city remembered, too.”

“Your Grace?”

A voice, careful and familiar.

Alicent stood on the threshold, hands folded neatly before her. She wore green silk despite the early hour, her hair arranged with care that spoke of long habit. Behind her, a maid hovered uncertainly, holding a tray meant for two.

The laughter faded.

Gentle as the dying ring of a bell.

Viserys blinked, surprised.

“Alicent,” he said, his tone kind but guarded. “You’re early.”

Her eyes swept the room once.

The sunlight spilling through the high windows, the half-eaten breakfast, the children perched like small birds around their grandsire. Then, for the briefest instant, her gaze caught on the far corner of the chamber, where the stone still bore a faint, darker stain.

The place where Ser Gwayne Hightower had fallen.

Her breath hitched so quietly it could have been a sigh.

She composed herself, eyes moving on, serene once more.

“I thought…” she began, then stopped, adjusting her voice to something softer. “I thought we were to break our fast together.”

Viserys looked momentarily abashed. “Ah. Yes. Of course. I had forgotten.”

Rhaenyra straightened slightly, her smile polite but measured. The boys went still, instinctively sensing the change in air. 

Aemma’s reaction was almost soundless.

Her spoon paused halfway to her mouth, porridge dripping back into the bowl. The soft, open curve of her shoulders sharpened.

“Your Grace,” Aemma said, and the title came out very correct, very careful. None of the bright chatter she had given Ser Harrold. None of the easy warmth she had lavished on the Emberguard at the door.

She did not hop down to curtsy.

She only dipped her head the barest fraction, eyes fixed on the rim of her bowl as if she could will herself invisible.

“Forgive us,” Rhaenyra said evenly. “We seem to have stolen your place this morning.”

Alicent’s gaze flickered to her, not sharp, but searching before settling again on Viserys. “It seems you’ve all had a lively start.”

Viserys reached up, belatedly touching the wilted crown as though remembering it for the first time. “Ah. The little Princess insists it suits me.”

Alicent’s lips curved, a smile perfectly practiced.

“It does,” she said. “You look... content.”

Rhaenyra watched her carefully.

There was no cruelty in Alicent’s voice, yet something beneath it trembled. Not envy, perhaps, but loss.

“Come,” Viserys said, eager to smooth the edges. “Join us. There’s enough for all.”

She hesitated only a moment before stepping forward. “If it please you.”

Alicent moved toward the table with the grace of habit, though her shoulders were drawn too straight.

Rhaenyra shifted to make space, her smile polite but distant, her children going still in that way children do when they sense a storm that hasn’t yet broken.

The Queen sat.

Silence stretched: not hostile, merely brittle.

At last, she folded her hands in her lap and said, lightly, “Quite the early hour for a council of such importance.” Her tone was warm enough, but the faintest edge of strain lingered beneath the softness. “Tell me, what great matters were discussed before sunrise?”

Aemma hesitated, her spoon halfway to her mouth. “It wasn’t this morning,” she said at last, her voice small but sure. “I came last night.”

Viserys looked up, startled.

Rhaenyra’s hand stilled on the table. 

Alicent’s lashes lowered for a heartbeat before she spoke. “You came here?” Her tone was mild, too mild, each word carefully placed. “At night?”

Aemma nodded, curls bouncing faintly. “I had a dream that wouldn’t stop. So I brought it here instead.”

The Queen’s gaze flicked briefly toward Viserys, then back to the child. “And His Grace was awake to receive you?”

Viserys felt the question like something sour on his tongue. “She found me easily enough,” he said, more briskly than he meant to. “The little one was… thoughtful company.”

Alicent’s eyes softened just slightly, but her posture did not. “Indeed,” she said. “Our dreams can be heavy things for children to carry alone.”

Aemma shifted under the attention. “He wasn’t alone,” she said, glancing up at her grandsire. “Not anymore.”

Alicent inclined her head, voice going almost tender. “Of course. Though, sweet one,” she went on, “you’re growing now. There are lessons to be learned with that.”

Aemma blinked. “Lessons?”

“It isn’t always proper,” Alicent said gently, each word wrapped in silk and wire, “for young ladies to seek out men after dark, even their kin. The gods teach us that a maiden’s virtue is a treasure to be guarded, not spent in thoughtless affection. The night is a testing hour. Shadows twist what is innocent until others cannot tell the difference.”

Her meaning slid out into the room like oil on water.

Very slowly, Rhaenyra set her cup down. The faint click of clay on wood sounded louder than any shout.

“Ser Harrold,” she said.

Her voice was not raised, but it carried. The Kingsguard at the door straightened at once.

“Yes, Princess?”

“Ser Corren.” Her gaze flicked past Harrold to where the Emberguard lingered just beyond, that flash of red cloak in the crack of the open door. “If you would be so good as to escort my children back to my solar.”

Aemma’s head jerked up. “Muna—”

Rhaenyra’s hand slid to her shoulder, gentle but unarguable. “You have done nothing wrong,” she said quietly, eyes never leaving Alicent’s face. “But I find I prefer to finish this particular conversation among adults.”

The words hung there, delicate as spun glass.

Harrold crossed the threshold, helm tucked under his arm, the lines around his eyes deepening as he took in the room.

“Aye, Princess.” His tone was respectful, but there was a note under it that said he had heard every word.

Ser Corren stepped in at his side, offering Aemma a small, steadying nod. “Come along, little dragons.”

Aemon slipped off his stool at once, grabbing Aerion’s hand. Aenar hesitated only long enough to meet his mother’s eyes; whatever he saw there made his shoulders square.

Aemma looked from Rhaenyra to Viserys, uncertainty warring with stubborn concern.

“Grandsire—”

Viserys reached for her small hand and pressed a kiss to her knuckles. “Go with them, my heart,” he said softly. “You’ve chased enough bad dreams for one night. Let us wrestle the rest.”

She searched his face, then Rhaenyra’s, and gave a tiny nod.

But instead of going straight to the door, Aemma turned on her heel and padded across the chamber to the low chair where she and Viserys had slept. The Arryn-blue blanket lay there in a crumpled heap, its falcon and mountain half-hidden in the folds. She scooped it up in both arms, the worn fabric dragging a little against the floor, and hugged it close to her chest. 

Only then did she rejoin her brothers, the edge of the blanket trailing like a small, private banner.

They passed Alicent in a small procession.

The heir’s heir, the sea’s son, the storm-born boy, and the Realm’s Heart wrapped in her grandmother’s sky.

When the door closed behind them, the solar seemed to exhale.

Rhaenyra folded her hands neatly on the table, every line of her body composed, every ember banked.

Only her eyes burned.

“You spoke very disrespectfully to my daughter,” she said. Her voice had gone cool, stripped of any softness. “Just now. In front of her brothers. In front of her grandsire.”

“Do not twist my words,” Alicent answered, too quick. “I did not shame her. I warned her.”

Rhaenyra’s brow lifted, slow as a blade being raised for the killing stroke. “Warned her,” she repeated. “By telling a six namedays girl that walking a corridor to comfort her grandsire might stain her virtue.”

Alicent’s jaw tightened. “You say it as if the world will not reach for her that way. As if the realm will not twist it.”

Rhaenyra leaned in slightly, hands still folded, her tone softening in that particular way that meant danger, not mercy. “Do not fasten your filth to my daughter and call it sense.”

“What is filthy,” Alicent shot back, “is raising her as if she were a boy and pretending the rules will vanish because you wish them gone. You let her wander the Keep, sit at men’s tables, creep into an old man’s bed in the dark. And you sit here outraged that I tell her the world will not forgive her for it.”

Viserys flinched.

A sick heat rose under his skin. Not only shame for all the ways he had failed this court, but something nearer to horror. To speak of Aemma at his bedside like that was to say, plain as daylight, that he might be a danger to her. That his nearness was a thing to be guarded against.

It made a stain of him in the telling.

Rhaenyra’s hand came down on the table.

Not a slap. A harsh, final sound.

A seal pressing into hot wax.

“Do not,” she said, each syllable edged, “ever speak of my daughter ‘creeping into an old man’s bed’ again.”

The words sat between them like a drawn blade.

“You will not set your sickness at my father’s feet. You will not paint him as a man who would look at his granddaughter as anything but his heart made flesh. You will not paint her as anything but a little girl who brought him flowers when he could not sleep.”

Viserys eyes darted to Rhaenyra with gratitude, raw and quiet, that she had stepped between him and this particular ugliness now.

Color climbed Alicent’s throat, an ugly blotched red beneath the green. 

“I tried to keep her from a blade she cannot yet see,” Alicent rushed on. “But of course I am the villain. Still. Always. I am the problem in this room because I spoke of the Seven and a girl’s good name.”

“You are not the villain because you spoke of the Seven,” she said. “You are the villain because you cannot keep your claws off my children when you do it.”

Alicent’s fingers twisted in her skirts. “Someone has to see clearly,” she snapped. “Someone has to remember there is a realm beyond Dragonstone’s walls.”

Viserys's hand tightened on the arm of his chair, tendons standing out sharp under thin skin.

“You will stop speaking about Aemma that way,” he said, looking at Alicent now and no one else. 

Alicent blinked. “I am only trying to make her see the danger, to make you see—”

“She is six,” Viserys said. The rasp in his voice roughened. “She wears flowers in her hair and drags her blanket when she is tired. She wanted to be by my side because I could not breathe for dreaming of ghosts. That is what happened.”

Alicent’s mouth opened, then closed again.

Viserys shook his head once. “I will not have my granddaughter made to feel dirty for loving her grandsire.” 

Alicent’s gaze flicked between them.

First to Rhaenyra, eyes blazing and unblinking, then to Viserys, fingers still white on the arm of his chair. For the first time, something like calculation wavered under the outrage.

Two dragons, for once, facing the same way.

Her throat worked as she swallowed.

She opened her mouth, closed it again.

The first words that wanted to come, sharp and defensive, died on her tongue when she saw the way Viserys was looking at her. 

“The teachings of the Seven on…” She faltered, forced herself to go on. “On maidenly conduct are very strict,” she said at last.

The words came slow, as if each one scraped on the way out. “Especially for girls.”

Silence pressed on the edges of the room. Alicent’s jaw flexed, the muscle jumping as she ground down on what she truly wanted to say.

“In my…concern,” she managed finally, the word tasting like ash, “I may have…spoken too harshly.”

Each pause was a visible swallow. Each concession a small, reluctant death in her eyes.

It was not quite an apology.

But it was as close as she could come without choking on it.

“See that it does not happen again,” Viserys said. 

Alicent’s fingers tightened on her skirts. “Of course,” she said. The agreement came quickly, but the way she said it sounded more like endure than obey. “It will not.”

That seemed to be the end of it.

When Alicent looked up again, there was something new behind the careful meekness. A familiar glint, desperation and opportunity.

“It is only…” She hesitated, letting the pause stretch just long enough to be felt. “It is only that such…incidents…would be easier to guard against, in the eyes of the court, if certain things were more firmly settled.”

Rhaenyra went very tense. 

Viserys frowned. “Settled?” he repeated, wary.

Alicent’s lashes dipped, demure. “Her place,” she said. “Her…future. The court gossips less when a girl’s path is clear.” Her voice smoothed into something almost soothing. “If Aemma were betrothed, properly, publicly, under the Seven and the law, there would be fewer…questions. Fewer eyes looking for fault in every kindness.”

She let the hook drift into the water.

“To a good match,” she added softly. “To a boy of her own house. To someone who could share the burden of what she is already being made, in the mouths of the smallfolk and the court.” 

Viserys stomach turned.

He knew where this went even before he asked, weary, “You mean Aegon.”

Alicent’s fingers tightened against one another, then eased, smoothing invisible creases in her skirts.

“He is your firstborn son,” she said. “She is your firstborn granddaughter. The court already whispers of matches for her, you know they do.”

Viserys’s mouth thinned.

He had heard the whispers.

Half his council could barely keep their teeth off the word betrothal whenever Aemma walked into a room.

“Aegon is… a complicated boy,” he said.

Alicent did not deny it. “He will be a fine man,” she said. “Gentle, dutiful. It would unite what time has frayed.”

Rhaenyra laughed.

It wasn’t bright or startled. It peeled out of her slowly, the kind of sound that made the hairs on the back of the neck rise.

It was a courtyard laugh, a mean-girl-at-court laugh.

Soft enough to be ladylike, cruel enough that it left bruises. It rolled over Alicent like someone had just whispered a very funny secret about her and made sure she knew it.

“Gentle,” Rhaenyra said. “Dutiful.”

Alicent’s head snapped toward her. “You think this a jest?”

“Oh, no,” Rhaenyra said. “I think it obscene.”

She turned her gaze fully on Alicent now, no courtly veil left in it. “You sit here wringing your hands over my daughter walking a corridor with flowers in her hair, and in the next breath you offer her as solution for your son.”

Alicent’s spine stiffened. “I offer her a match within her own blood. An uncle who would protect her. Provide stability.”

“A collar,” Rhaenyra said. “You offer her a collar. You want to hitch her like a pony to your boy’s cart so when he careens into a ditch, she’s the one still standing in the traces, smiling for the court.”

“Of course you would see it as such,” Alicent replied, sweetness turning brittle. “Is it familiar, Rhaenyra?”

The air seemed to thin.

Her gaze sharpened, cruelty gleaming under the pious green. “Uncles can be…very comforting to lonely Targaryen girls, can they not? Perhaps you simply wish your daughter to enjoy the same freedoms you took.”

Rhaenyra did not flinch.

Her mouth bared itself, more teeth than smile now, an expression that would have been ugly on anyone less beautiful.

“As comforting,” she said, “as a king whose marriage bed is still wet with his wife’s blood, and some girl is made to crawl across it to reach the crown.”

Alicent reeled as if Rhaenyra had struck her open-handed.

Her hand flew to her throat, fingers digging into the skin above her collar as though she could claw the memory back down. The green silk at her shoulders shivered with the force of her inhale. Color flooded her face, then drained too fast, leaving her blotched and pale all at once.

“Do not,” she whispered. The word scraped. “You know nothing of—”

Her voice broke, the rest swallowed before it could form. Her eyes shone, not with soft tears but with a raw, furious wetness, as if they had been forced open and held to a flame.

Across the table, Viserys flinched.

Not at Alicent’s pain.

At the picture Rhaenyra had just painted of him.

“Rhaenyra,” he said, hoarse. 

It did not sound like a king’s rebuke. It sounded like a man begging for the picture to stop being painted. 

He could not quite meet Alicent’s eyes.

Alicent saw that too.

She looked between them. The daughter who had just named her degradation aloud, and the husband who would not challenge the shape of it. 

Alicent dug her nails into the table, the wood making a horrible shrieking sound beneath them. 

“You have taken everything that was ever meant to steady me,” she said, low and shaking. “You sit in his councils, you walk his halls as if you already wear the crown, and I swallow it. I smile. I pray. Still, I am an afterthought in this house.”

Alicent dragged in a breath that sounded almost like a sob and managed to strangle it halfway.

“But now you would strip even this from me,” she went on. “You would tell me I, as Queen of the seven Kingdoms, cannot so much as open my mouth to arrange a beneficial match? That the supposed future of House Targaryen is beyond me?”

Rhaenyra’s gaze sharpened. The room seemed to tilt toward her.

“Supposed?” 

Rhaenyra rose.

The movement was not fast, but it had the inevitability of a tide coming in. Her chair scraped back the barest inch, enough to mark that this was no longer a conversation. It was sentencing.

“You just said ‘supposed’,” she said. Her voice stayed quiet, each syllable clear as cracked glass. 

Alicent’s mouth parted, some protest forming.

Rhaenyra did not let it live.

“There is nothing 'supposed' about my children.” she went on, each word gaining weight, “They are the future of this house. Written in law. Written in dragonfire. You may hate that. You may taste bile every time you say their titles. You may kneel at your bedside and whisper other names into your pillow. I do not care.”

“Rhaenyra,” Viserys breathed, worn and pleading.

A muscle jumped in Alicent’s cheek. “You think I wanted—”

“I think you wanted exactly what you have,” Rhaenyra cut in. “Rooms in my father’s Keep. A seat at his side. A crown that never sits right on your hair because you know you came to it on your knees.”

Viserys made a broken sound.

She still did not spare him a glance.

She held her there for one last second, pinned like an insect, then stepped back.

When she spoke again, her tone smoothed, almost light.

“And since we are suddenly so concerned with Aemma’s future,” she said, “hear me clearly, and hear it once.”

Her gaze speared Alicent, then slid to Viserys, pinning him in the same breath.

“There will be no talk of a match between my daughter and your son again,” she said. “Not in this room. Not in a sept. Not in some dark little corner where you think your whispers won’t reach me. Aemma is the blood of Dragonstone and Driftmark both. My blood. Laenor’s. The Princess Rhaenys’s. Lord Corlys’s. And above all, she is the King’s firstborn granddaughter.”

Her tone gentled, which only made the words hit harder.

“If there is to be any talk of where she lays her head, it will be between those four and the King himself,” she went on. “Not from a woman who would use her as plaster over the cracks in her own house. Not from the mouth that just tried to paint her as half-spoiled for walking a hallway with flowers.”

She let that sink in.

Only then did she let her attention drift away, as if the matter were as settled as the tide.

“I have preparations to see to,” she said. “At midday, my children will stand in the yard and give what we can spare to the people. Aemma has plans, and I mean for them to be fulfilled.”

She let that image hang.

The little girl Alicent had just tried to drag through the muck of her own shame, standing in the sun with her arms full of bread and toys, the city chanting her name.

“Pray on that, if you like,” Rhaenyra added quietly. “The Realm’s Heart, loved and unmarked by your poison.”

She turned.

It was not a flounce. It was precise. Her spine straightened, shoulders rolling back as if she were sliding fully into armor. Her hair followed a heartbeat later in a bright, silvery sweep, whipping across her back and over one shoulder in a clean, disdainful arc that sent a faint gust of her perfume across the table.

Alicent flinched as the ends of it brushed the air between them, as if even that felt like being dismissed.

The door closed behind Rhaenyra with a soft, final click.

Silence dropped in her wake. No dragons, no children, no witnesses. Just the King and his Queen and the shape of what had been said between them.

Alicent stared at the wood, her breath coming a little too fast.

“Viserys,” she said at last. 

He was still looking at the door, as if his eyes could follow his daughter down the corridor she’d taken. At the sound of his name his gaze dragged back to her, slow and heavy.

“You are the King,” Alicent said. The words came out hushed, but there was iron under them. “This is your house. Your line. You make the decisions for it. Not her.”

He winced, as if each noun struck a separate bruise.

“She speaks,” Alicent pressed on, “as though your word is already second to hers. As though she alone will shape what becomes of this family. Of your grandchildren.” Her hands curled tight in her lap. “You cannot let her bar you from your own blood. From your own granddaughter’s future.”

Viserys rubbed a hand over his face, crown tilting a fraction. “Alicent…”

“She has no right,” Alicent said, the tremor in her voice sharpening into something closer to anger. “To tell me I cannot even speak of matches. To say Aegon’s name is an offense. He is your son. Aemma is your granddaughter. You have every right to consider how best to bind this house together before you are gone.”

His eyes flickered, the word gone landing somewhere deep.

“You could name it,” she went on, softer now, coaxing. “Put it in writing. A betrothal, nothing more. Secure her place, secure his. Show the court this is not Rhaenyra’s private little kingdom to dole out as she pleases. Remind them the dragon on the banners is still your.”

The same mouth that had just draped sin over a child’s midnight visit to her grandsire was already fitting her for a collar. 

“Betrothals do not simply happen,” he said, and there was iron in it this time. “Especially not for princesses like Aemma.”

“She will understand, when she is older,” Alicent insisted. “They will grow together. Learn each other. It could be… gentle, Viserys. Softer than what we had.”

For a moment, weariness nearly made him yield.

The path she painted was so simple.

So clean.

One announcement at the hunt, one feast, and he could believe he had put out a fire that had not yet started.

Then he remembered the look on Aemma’s face when she set the flowers on his brow. The fierce, baffled hurt when she spoke of the girl with no shoes. The way she had said: listen, I hope.

“She will have enough weight on her shoulders without knowing that every smile she gives her uncle is a treaty." 

Alicent’s mouth thinned.

“She is already the most beautiful girl in the realm,” she said. “Already every lord with a son her age dreams of her hand. They whisper about it at feasts, they write of it in their letters. And yet you hesitate to bind her to her own kin, where at least her fate would serve her house.”

Silence pressed in again, heavy as winter sky.

At last, he shook his head, slow, as if it pained him.

“Not now,” he said. “Not like this. I will not answer your fear by taking Aemma’s future and turning it into a bandage for our failures.”

Alicent’s shoulders stiffened. “So you would rather wait,” she said. “Until the realm tears itself in half over them. Until it is too late to bind anything but ashes.”

“I would rather wait,” he said, “until the child herself knows what she is agreeing to. Until I can look her in the eye and tell her why. Not sit her on my knee and say, little heart, I bartered your hand for a quieter council chamber.”

His voice roughened. “We will speak of this another day. Not on the morning she made me a crown and thought it solved the world.”

Her jaw worked, fury and hurt choking together.

Alicent bowed her head. “As you wish, Your Grace,” she said. “For now.”

But this time, when the phrase settled, Viserys felt only tired anger where before there might have been only fog.

He straightened the crooked crown on his brow. If he could not be a good king in steel, he would at least remember what it felt like to be a good grandsire in lavender.

---

Rhaenyra called Queen’s Court nearly the second she left her father’s chambers.

She kept the summons to the ladies already in residence at Kingslanding.

No open summons to the city, no distant cousins riding in from the countryside.

This was for the women who had bothered to be near the pulse of power.

They gathered in her solar, a neat cluster of silks and rings and sharpened smiles. Aemma stood beside her chair, small and bright, hands tucked together.

Rhaenyra let the greetings roll through, then touched her daughter’s shoulder. “Princess Aemma has something to say.”

The child spoke her piece. It was short and earnest. Widows by the harbor. Children with no proper shoes. Thin stews and cold rooms. She said she would give her own coin, but could not do as much alone, and asked if they would help.

The ladies were already nodding, some out of genuine softness, some because it cost nothing to look kind before a princess. Rhaenyra did not wait for it to turn into vague promises and polite noises.

She stood.

“In truth, this is more than a single kindness,” she said. “The Realm’s Heart is my only daughter. She will need companions. Girls who know her, who serve with her, who will one day stand beside her when she sits a higher seat than this.”

The room sharpened.

Rhaenyra smiled, very mild. “So I will take the names of those young ladies from among your houses, here at court, today. Those present in the capital have priority. Others may petition later, of course, but it is only fair that those who stand with us now are chosen first.”

That settled it. The air changed from polite charity to quiet competition.

Pledges came quickly then. Coin, cloth, grain, oil. And with them, names.

“My eldest is twelve, Princess Rhaenyra, she would be honored to attend the little Princess.”

“My niece is fostered with us this season, she has a good mind for accounts.”

“My daughter is shy but diligent. If you would have her, she would give her whole heart to such service.”

Rhaenyra had a clerk note every gift, but it was Aemma who carefully wrote each girl’s name beneath a simple heading. Companions to the Realm’s Heart. The women saw that and understood exactly what list they were fighting to get their blood on.

Rhaenyra glanced over the page once, nodded, and closed the book.

“Now we make good on her words,” she said.

She did not send servants in her place.

She went down herself, with her children and her Emberguard at her back, taking the long stairs from her solar to lower yard.

As they walked, runners flew ahead to warn the stewards and open the gates. Carts and hand-barrows were already starting to roll in from the noble quarters, full of whatever the ladies could lay hands on quickly.

Bundles of old cloaks, children’s toys, sacks of barley, jars of lard, soap wrapped in linen.

By the time Rhaenyra set foot in the courtyard, the raw material of generosity was there, waiting to become something more than a pile.

That, she knew, was her work.

Rhaenyra scanned the space once, taking in the clutter, the gates, the watchful eyes of the smallfolk beginning to gather beyond the arch.

“Ser Davon,” she said, pointing to the western wall, “clothing there. Men nearer the stable, women in the middle, children nearest the gate. Use the benches. Lay it out. No heaps. Let them see what there is.”

He strode off at once, barking orders. Two red cloaks moved to start sorting the bundles by eye.

“Ser Myles, toys by the well. Nothing sharp. Line the children there when we open the gate. They step forward after food, not before.”

Another nod, another ripple of motion as a pile of carved knights and cloth dolls was redirected out of the way of hooves and boots.

“Hygiene goods along the inner stairs,” Rhaenyra went on. “Soaps, linen, combs, anything for washing or mending. Put a woman from the kitchens there to advise. I want them leaving cleaner, not confused.”

She caught the steward’s eye next. “Food parcels on tables in the middle. Bread, grain, whatever they’ve sent. We make up bundles. One per household. If the line thins and there is more, we begin again from the end.”

The man hesitated. “Your Grace, we may not have enough for—”

“We will have what we have,” she cut in, calm but final. “We will give it fairly. And we will remember which houses sent more.”

That moved him.

He bowed and hurried off, already snapping at boys to fetch more tables from the hall.

Lines began to appear where there had been nothing but a yard.

A path of air between clothing and food, a clear approach from the gate, space between the well and the stairs. The Emberguard acted as markers rather than barriers, forming living signposts for the crowd.

Rhaenyra adjusted what she didn’t like with small gestures. A table too near the horses was moved. A stack of boots was dragged out where shorter men could see it. She pulled a crate of apples to the front of the food line, knowing the sight of something fresh and bright would drag even the most wary closer.

“Children first,” she told the nearest knight. “Then the elderly. Families next. Lone men at the last. Anyone who shoves loses their place. You make that clear at the gate.”

He bowed, looking almost pleased at the simplicity of the order.

By the time the Red Keep’s main gate swung wider and the smallfolk began to file in, the courtyard no longer looked like a noblewoman’s whim. It looked like a plan.

Rhaenyra did not stand alone in the center of it.

Aemon walked at her right, jaw set.

He watched everything. The shuffling of lines, the way the Emberguard placed themselves, the flicker of gratitude or resentment on faces as parcels changed hands.

This, she thought, is his first true lesson in rule. Seeing what power looks like when it bends instead of burns.

Aenar drifted closer to the well, of course.

His gaze snagged on the toys. A chipped knight, a cloth dragon with mismatched button eyes, a wooden ship with one broken mast. His hands twitched.

“Go on,” Rhaenyra said quietly. “If you bring something of your own, you give it there. From your chest.”

He nodded and darted toward the keep, one of the younger Emberguard jogging after him to make sure the prince did not end up lost in his own corridors.

By the time Aenar returned, he carried a small armful of treasures. A carved kraken, a wooden horse painted in fading green, a dragon with the paint rubbed off its snout where he had held it too often.

He laid them on the table with care, then stayed there, handing each toy over himself when the children reached that part of the line.

He listened when they said their names.

He laughed once, startled and bright, when a little girl declared she would name the horse “Wings.”

He repeated the name later, rolling it on his tongue like an omen.

Aemma stood just ahead of the food tables, exactly where Rhaenyra had put her.

“This is your court,” her mother reminded her softly. “They are here because you asked.”

So Aemma straightened her thin shoulders and did as she’d been taught. Every time a family reached the front, she stepped forward and offered a parcel with both hands.

“For you,” she said. “From the Realm’s Heart.”

She did not rush.

She thanked them when they bowed.

When a woman tried to kneel, Aemma caught her arm gently and shook her head, cheeks flushing. “Please don’t. Just… eat well tonight.”

Her new companions flanked her.

Pale, nervous, jeweled girls suddenly put to work. They passed parcels, kept rough count, fetched more bread when the baskets ran low.

Their silks would smell of flour and sweat by the end of it, and they would not forget that feeling.

Aerion clung to Rhaenyra’s hand at first, overwhelmed by the noise, his four-year-old fingers knotting in her skirts.

But when a boy his size reached the toy table, eyes round as coins, Aerion hesitated, then tugged free.

He trotted over to Aenar, whispered something, and came back holding out a small carved sea-dragon he’d kept in his pocket.

“For you,” he told the boy, voice barely above a breath.

The boy stared, then grinned, balancing the dragon in both hands as if it were made of gold. Aerion scurried back, face hot and pleased.

Aemon, ever the careful one, ended up beside the clothing line, lifting heavier bundles that older men struggled with.

Adjusting cloaks around stooped shoulders, checking that boots were near the right size before he handed them over.

She saw him give his own gloves away, then flex his fingers and say nothing.

The lines had settled into a rhythm by then.

Bread into hands, thanks offered, names forgotten almost as soon as they were heard, replaced by the next pair of hungry eyes.

That was when the second procession arrived.

They came from the inner steps, not the main gate. First a pair of guards, then a slow-moving knot of servants wrestling trunks and chests between them. Behind came Viserys and his children, the king wrapped in his heavy cloak, the younger royals in green and gold softened by the low light.

The smallfolk parted almost by instinct, making space without being asked.

Most of what the servants carried was old finery. Gowns outgrown by Helaena, tunics Aegon had stained beyond what even the laundresses could bear, books with their gilding rubbed thin, toys that had not seen a royal hand in years. 

Viserys paused at the edge of the yard, as if winded by the walk down. His gaze swept the lines, the tables, the Emberguard. Then it found Rhaenyra.

“My girl,” he said, voice warm and thin. He crossed to her, shooing away the guards with a twitch of fingers that tried to be imperious. “Look at this. Feeding half the city and making it look like a feast day.”

She bowed her head just enough. “Only a fraction, Father. But it is a start.”

He leaned in and kissed her cheek, smelling of wine and old incense. The contact was light, almost boyish, nothing like the weight of his crown.

His hand tightened on her arm, pride and helplessness tangled in his eyes, then he let go and turned his attention to the trunks as if he had personally carried every one down the stairs.

The servants began to unpack them under the direction of the steward. 

Helaena barely waited for the lid to open.

She slipped from her place beside Viserys the moment she saw Aemma, trailing lace and loose curls. Whatever coolness lay between branches of the family did not seem to apply to her.

Aemma’s face brightened.

“Lena,” she breathed, relief softening every line of her shoulders.

They gravitated toward each other without thinking.

Helaena took over passing parcels to Aemma’s left, hands careful. Every so often she leaned in and whispered something that made Aemma stifle a laugh behind her teeth.

Rhaenyra caught snatches of it when they came closer. Little things.

The shape of a cloud that looked like a fish.

The way a child’s hair curled like a dragon’s tail.

Strange, sweet observations that made no sense unless you lived inside Helaena’s skull. Aemma listened as if handed bits of secret treasure.

Aegon hung back.

He stood near the newly opened toy chest at first, hands shoved into his sleeves, eyes roaming the crowd without much focus. He looked like a boy dragged to temple after a long night, too old to pout, too young to hide his boredom well.

Aenar spotted him.

The middle prince abandoned the toy table for a moment, stepped over a coil of rope, and caught his Uncle by the sleeve.

“Come help,” he said in High Valyrian, keeping his voice low enough that it would sound like courtly courtesy to any ears that did not know the language. “Or you will stand here like a useless statue until your feet rot.”

Aegon snorted. 

They ended up at the toy table together, two dragon princes passing out carved knights and patched cloth dolls. Within a few minutes they were in quiet competition over who could smuggle the worst High Valyrian swear into a perfectly polite sentence.

“Here, little one,” Aenar said gravely, pressing a wooden ship into a child’s hands. “May your days be as calm as a storm god’s backside.”

Aegon nearly choked trying not to laugh.

“And may your nights be blessed by the gentle breath of a three-headed sow,” he added to the next child, maintaining a solemn face.

Rhaenyra heard enough to know exactly who to blame.

This is Daemon’s fault, she thought darkly, watching her precious Aenar corrupt the sacred tongue with barnyard filth while the smallfolk nodded, pleased and none the wiser. 

She did not stop them, though.

The children receiving the toys heard royal voices and felt only kindness.

Aemond lingered.

He stood on Viserys’s other side, a little behind, as if grafted there. His eyes tracked everything with hawk’s focus, but he did not move to help. It was not cruelty. It was uncertainty, old habits, the part of him that had learned already that he lived on the edge of scenes, not at their center.

Aemon saw him.

The eldest Dragonstone Prince left the clothing line for a moment, flexing his bare fingers to warm them, and walked straight up to his uncle.

“Aemond,” he said quietly. “I could use another pair of hands.”

Aemond glanced instinctively to Viserys, as if seeking permission to leave his post.

Viserys, still watching Aemma and Helaena with soft, fogged eyes, waved vaguely. “Go, go. Help. That is what we are all doing, is it not?”

Aemon did not wait for more.

He simply reached out, not quite taking Aemond’s arm, but close enough that the invitation felt solid.

“There is a heap of boots with no pair and three grandmothers arguing over them,” he said, switching to Valyrian for privacy. “Come solve the puzzle.”

Aemond hesitated one more heartbeat, then nodded. The stiffness in his shoulders loosened by a fraction.

He followed Aemon to the clothing tables, where they fell into work together. In no time, Aemond was sorting shoes with frightening efficiency, matching sizes by eye, directing people to the right piles in a tone that brooked no argument but never tipped into cruelty. Aemon lifted and carried, made space, stepped in when voices rose too high.

The yard was still loud and hungry and imperfect.

The gifts were hand-me-downs and half measures, more gesture than cure. 

But still, it helped settle the ache in Aemma’s chest.

She had asked.

The realm had answered.

For a little while, that was enough.

And then Alicent arrived.

She came alone, or at least it felt that way. Her own guards lingered at the top of the inner steps, as if unsure how far to follow. Green silk, jewels at her throat, hair coiled neatly.

The sound in the courtyard shifted.

Not sharply.

Not at first.

It went thin.

Conversations broke. A child’s laugh cut off. The kind of silence that still had breath in it, like a lung held ready to shout.

People knew her.

The Queen whose sworn shield had paid to try and kill the Dragonstone babes in their beds.

The Queen whose sworn shield had raised a hand against the princess carrying her fourth child.

The Queen who spoke of the Seven and their mercy while standing beside a man who had tried to spill god-blood on royal stone.

Whispers sparked close to the front of the line and ran outward.

“That one.”

“The Green Queen.”

“Her dog went for the little dragons.”

“Baby-blood on her skirts, that one.”

Someone spat.

It hit the ground near Alicent’s slipper and spread in an ugly dark star on the stone.

Alicent stopped dead.

Her face emptied. Then the fury came, fast and bright behind her eyes. Her chin lifted a fraction. Her hands clenched in her skirts.

“Princess,” one of the Emberguard said quietly to Rhaenyra. “The mood…”

“I see it,” Rhaenyra answered.

She saw more than that.

She saw the way some of the women in the line shifted their parcels to one arm so the other was free, fingers curling white around rough cloth as if they were itching to strike. She saw a man in a dockworker’s vest take a single step forward, jaw working, as if something in him could not help it.

“BABY-KILLER!” someone screamed.

It broke the air.

“Seven damn you!” another voice hurled, raw with old fear. “You prayed while your dog hunted babes!”

“That was your knight!” a woman cried, voice cracking with fury. “Your white cloak, with the king’s sigil on his chest, you Hightower bitch!”

The sound climbed.

Yells, curses, overlapping, turning ugly around the edges.

“GREEN WHORE!”

“Faithless sow!”

“She spreads her legs for the crown and calls it piety!”

A stone clattered against the wall near Alicent’s shoulder, thrown from somewhere deep in the knot of bodies. Another gob of spit hit closer to her hem. A shriveled apple followed, then a strip of fish-gut someone had been carrying from the morning’s catch. It hit her sleeve and slid down, leaving a greasy smear on the fine green silk.

More hands twitched, reaching for anything that could be thrown. 

“You tried to kill the Dragonstone heirs!”

Aemon heard it.

He had moved closer to his mother’s shoulder, between Aenar and Aerion, his hand wrapped around Aemma’s wrist so she would not drift too close to the front. The insult should have rolled past like all the others, just noise against stone.

It did not.

He went very still.

“Dragonstone heirs,” Aenar muttered under his breath, bristling, but he said it with a kind of pride, a title, a banner. Aemon heard only the other words. 

Tried to kill.

He glanced up at his mother.

Rhaenyra’s jaw was clenched. Her gaze pinned on the crowd, on Alicent’s stiff figure in the doorway. The tendons in her neck stood out sharp against the line of her throat. She had heard it too, and did not deny it with so much as a flinch.

Aemon’s stomach turned.

“Stay close,” Rhaenyra said, not looking down at them, her hand reaching back to touch their shoulders in turn. It steadied Aenar. It steadied Aerion.

It did not steady him.

“Grandsire is here,” Aemon said softly.

Aenar followed his line of sight, but only for a second. The boy’s eyes slid back to the crowd, to the dragon banners snapping above. Aemon’s eyes stayed on the man in the crown.

Aemon slipped out from under his mother’s hand.

He moved with the same quiet he used in the library, when he did not wish to startle ink from page or scholar from thought. A small step. Then another. By the time Rhaenyra felt the absence under her palm, he was already beyond the first ring of Emberguard shields.

“Aemon,” Rhaenyra said, sharp enough that a few heads turned.

He looked back once.

“I will be right here, muna,” he said. “I just need to ask.”

There was something in his eyes she recognized too well. The same look he had when he stalked a question in Vaegon’s private library, when he followed a half-sentence in High Valyrian back to its root. He was not frightened.

He was hunting the truth.

A fresh stone struck the wall above Alicent’s head. The crowd roared again, ugly and loud. Syrax answered from above with a restless cry, wings shifting against the sky.

Rhaenyra’s pulse kicked hard enough to hurt.

“Aemon. Come back to me. Now.”

She did not raise her voice, but every scale in the air seemed to hear it. One of the nearer Gold Cloaks flinched. Aemma’s fingers tightened on her skirt. The words wanted to be an order. They came out as a plea dragged raw across old fear.

He felt it pull at him.

He almost obeyed.

Almost.

Aemon drew a breath that tasted of too many secrets. He turned away from her and kept walking, cutting a line through the bright armor.

The Emberguard shifted the instant he moved.

They did not think about it. Their bodies simply obeyed. Red cloaks swung in unison as they tightened around the prince, shields angling outward, a small, hard circle of steel with one small figure at its heart. There was nothing ceremonial in it. They stood the way men stand on a ship’s rail in a storm, ready to break before they let anything through.

Gold Cloaks further back made room less smoothly. Their line wavered, boots scraping stone. Some stared, uneasy, as the god-marked boy in black and red walked the length of the terrace like it was a hall in his own home, like the roar of the crowd and the dragons and the distant, ugly word baby-killer were only another set of facts to be examined.

Viserys stood near the inner steps.

Leaning more heavily than usual on his right leg. Sweat beaded at his temple and ran, unheeded, into the thinning hair at his brow. His eyes were not on the dragons or the Queen or even his heir. They jerked, small and frantic, over the screaming smallfolk.

They pushed harder against the Emberguard line, bodies pressed close, the heat of them carrying the sour tang of fear. The red cloaks did not let themselves be moved. They were a fixed line of Dragonstone iron, and the city broke around them like water around rock.

Viserys did not see Aemon at first.

“Grandsire,” Aemon said.

Viserys flinched as if someone had slipped a knife between his ribs.

He looked down and found his grandson at his elbow, face upturned. Those strange, bright eyes, fixed on him with an attention that felt too intense for his age. Like he was not only looking at his grandfather but through him, to the space where truth ought to be.

“Aemon,” Viserys said. His voice came out thin and frayed. “You should not be walking freely.”

His hand shook as he reached, fingers curling in the boy’s sleeve and dragging him close. The Kingsguard responded at once, white cloaks sweeping into motion. Blades and bodies formed a ring around the King, around the child, around the secret they both suddenly shared.

Aemon let himself be pulled in. He stood inside that shell of steel and silk and rank, and it felt less like protection and more like a cage.

“I just have a question,” he said.

He tasted the words first, as if they might burn his tongue.

“What are they talking about?” Aemon asked. “The man who shouted. He said the Queen tried to kill the Dragonstone heirs.”

His hands hung loose at his sides. His voice stayed calm, almost soft.

“Men shout foolish things when they are frightened,” he said. “They do not understand the weight of their words.”

Aemon did not blink.

“That is not an answer,” he replied.

Viserys did not see his grandson at all.

He saw Rhaenyra at seven, violet eyes steady, chin lifted, asking why her uncle had been exiled from court. He saw the girl who had once stared him down over a pyre and asked why dragons were only called upon to burn criminals and not those who betrayed the crown. Under that memory, something older stirred. Something that belonged not to any one child but to the blood in them. 

“A knight,” Viserys managed. His throat felt tight. “Ser Criston Cole. He betrayed us.”

His gaze passed over Aemon, away from the question, away from the boy. It snagged on the flash of green silk in the courtyard below, on the rigid line of Alicent’s shoulders as fruit and filth struck around her. “The city holds its anger, that is all.”

Aemon’s brow furrowed.

“Betrayal,” he said slowly, as if he were learning the word for the first time. “But he had your cloak. Your sword. They saw that.”

The smallfolk had not shouted Criston’s name.

They had shouted Queen.

Viserys swallowed.

“If I had known,” he whispered, the words dragged out of him, “I would have cut him down immediately. You must hear that. Whatever else is said, I would have protected you.”

His eyes shone. Whether with shame or fear or the ache of wanting to be believed, even he might not have known.

Aemon held his gaze for a long, measuring moment.

The world pressed in.

Below them, the crowd surged again, the sound rolling up the stone like a wave. “Whore,” someone screamed now, the insult snapping like a banner in a high wind. Alicent’s shoulders flinched as if struck. 

“Would the Queen?” Aemon asked.

“The Queen is many things,” Viserys said. His fingers twitched on the cane. “She fears what she does not understand.” He swallowed. “But she is still kin. She would not…”

The word harm stuck in his throat, dried and dead. “She prays for this family,” he finished weakly. “In her way.”

Viserys reached out, fingers trembling, as if he meant to lay a hand on the boy’s shoulder and pull him in close, tuck him against his chest, swear something, anything, that would mend what had cracked.

Aemon stepped back one pace.

Not far. Just enough that the hand closed on air.

They only stared at one another, king and god-marked boy, the roar of the courtyard held at the edge of hearing like the sea behind a door. 

Another stone struck somewhere below. Someone screamed a word Aemon did not catch. The dragons answered, restless shadows crossing the sky.

He inclined his head, a small, grave thing that felt too old for him, and turned away.

Aemma flinched.

Her hands tightened on the food parcel she was holding. The woman in front of her, face gaunt and drawn, looked between princess and queen and took an involuntary step back from the green figure on the steps, as though proximity might stain.

“Mother,” Aemma breathed.

Rhaenyra was already beside her.

“Look at me,” she said, low and sure, fingers closing gently around her daughter’s wrist. “Not them. You have done nothing wrong.”

“But they’re shouting,” Aemma whispered. “At a queen. At our queen. Will Grandsire be angry? Will they be punished?”

Rhaenyra wanted to say yes, and she wanted to say no, and both were wrong in different ways.

“They are frightened,” she said instead. “Fright and anger make men loud. That is not your burden to carry. You fed them. That is what they will remember when their bellies are full tonight.”

It was only half-true, but it soothed Aemma enough that the girl did not cry.

Across the yard, Alicent tried to move forward, then thought better of it when another stone bounced near her foot. Her face had gone oddly pale under the careful paints.

“How dare you,” she said, voice sharp and thin, cutting across the noise. “I have prayed for this city’s souls—”

Her words dissolved in fresh shouts.

“Pray for your own!”

“Pray for the babes you tried to bury!”

“For the princess’s blood on the floor!”

Rhaenyra felt the moment teeter.

One more stone. One more word. The wrong order from the wrong guard. It would tip from ugly noise into something she could no longer claim as anything but riot.

“Silence,” she said.

It was not a shout. It did not need to be. Her voice cut through the courtyard the way a cold wind cuts flesh.

Every Emberguard in sight straightened. So did half the smallfolk by reflex.

“This day is done,” Rhaenyra declared. “Those who have not yet eaten will receive food from my kitchens. You will go orderly to the gates. You will not throw stones near children.”

Her gaze swept the crowd, daring anyone to test the line between fury and treason.

Then she turned, deliberately, to her steward. “Have the remaining bread and grain sent to the septs and to the dock kitchens. In the name of Aemma Velaryon. The Realm's Heart. Quietly. Tonight.”

He bowed, already signaling to his assistants.

The lines began to unwind in uneasy knots. Some people slunk away, shame and rage wrestling on their faces. Others clutched their parcels as if afraid she might change her mind and snatch them back.

Viserys's face was pale, eyes darting over the spit on the stone and the retreating backs of the smallfolk who had just cursed his queen.

“They are frightened,” he said at last, voice hoarse, trying to make it sound like explanation instead of apology. “They did not mean—”

“They meant every word,” Alicent cut in.

She remained where she stood, flanked now by both her own guards and Rhaenyra’s red cloaks. Her eyes were bright, not with tears, but with a terrible, brittle kind of fury that had nowhere safe to go.

She took one step toward Rhaenyra, green silk whispering over the dirty stone.

“This is what you have sown,” she hissed, low and savage. “You set your golden children in the yard like little saints and let the city spit my name out with their bones. You turn them against their Queen and call it hunger. You teach them I am the monster in their stories and then feign surprise when they throw stones.”

Rhaenyra looked at her, at the spit and the scuff of a thrown rock, at the frightened set of Aemma’s shoulders and the raw anger that had poured out of people who had nothing but memories and thin bread.

“I called it hunger,” she said, very softly. “You let your knight hunt babes in their cradles and thought the realm would forget whose colors he wore.”

Alicent’s mouth curled, all prayer burnt away.

“You do not care for the poor,” she said. “You care that they cheer your name. You use my sins like coin, Rhaenyra. You spend them in front of them and buy their love while you salt my grave in advance.”

Viserys flinched. “Alicent, enough,” he rasped. “She is still my daughter.”

“She is your heir,” Alicent said without looking at him. “They have chosen already. Can you not see it? They will sing of the Realm’s Heart feeding their children and whisper of the Green Queen whose shadow tried to kill them in their sleep.”

Her gaze raked Rhaenyra one last time. “Enjoy their love while you have it. When they turn on you, they will remember how to throw stones.”

Green and red, with Viserys sagging between them like a man who had wandered into a quarrel between gods.

Rhaenyra stepped back.

“Aemma,” she said. “Your work here is finished. Go with Helaena and wash. You both did well.”

The girls obeyed, heads close, skirts brushing. Aerion trailed after them, toyless now but clinging to his sister’s sleeve. Aenar and Aegon drifted away from the toy table, their private game over, expressions sobered. Aemon clapped a hand to Aemond’s shoulder before they too turned toward the inner steps.

Viserys watched them go with a stricken sort of pride, as if he had seen the shape of a future he could not rule and could not stop.

The tables stood half-cleared, crumbs and crumpled cloth left for servants to gather. The yard slowly emptied, leaving only the memory of full baskets and shouted curses.

The day that had begun as Aemma’s first court among the poor ended as the day the smallfolk spat at their queen in the shadow of Dragonstone’s heirs.

It would not be forgotten.

Not by the people. Not by Alicent, who would lie awake hearing the word “baby-killer” hissed from a dozen throats. And not by Rhaenyra, who had felt her daughter’s hand shake in hers and knew that mercy, once loosed, did not choose its targets with any more gentleness than dragonfire.

---

Later, after the wash-water had gone cold and the servants had been dismissed, the castle felt too quiet.

Rhaenyra sat in a small family solar off the royal apartments, a room that belonged to no one and everyone.

Low couch, carved dragon toys on a shelf, a table with a half-finished cyvasse game.

Aemma sat beside her, hair damp, clean gown clinging to her shins. Aerion was in Rhaenyra’s lap, thumb in his mouth, eyes drowsy but stubbornly open. Aemon and Aenar shared the floor, backs against the couch, whispering to each other.

There was a knock at the door.

It opened before Rhaenyra could answer.

Viserys stood there, leaning heavier than he liked on the doorframe.

Behind him, three smaller shapes hovered.

Aegon, Helaena, Aemond, all in fresh clothes, hair still wet at the ends.

“They would not settle,” Viserys said, weary but trying for lightness. “Your little court has stirred the whole hive. I thought perhaps…” His eyes flicked to Aemma. “You might not mind the company.”

Rhaenyra read the rest in the set of his shoulders. Alicent must be in her own rooms, brittle and stung, in no mood to soothe shaken children. 

“Of course,” Rhaenyra said. “Come in.”

Helaena slipped past her father at once, gravitating to Aemma as if drawn on a string.

Aegon drifted after her, hands shoved into his sleeves.

Aemond hovered closest to Viserys, then edged inside, eyes flicking over the dragon toys and the familiar faces. 

The door closed.

Quiet settled over the room, thick as bath steam cooling on skin.

They sat, small knots of silk and damp hair. Aegon sprawled back and studied the ceiling as if it had offended him. Aemond stared at his own hands like they might confess something if he looked long enough. Helaena watched the window, gaze tracking some invisible pattern in the ribbons of smoke rising from the city.

Aenar was the one who finally cut through it.

“Muna,” he said, voice small but steady, the Valyrian word making it softer. “May we go to the Dragonpit?”

Rhaenyra looked down at him. His shoulders were squared like a boy trying very hard not to hunch. “Now?”

He nodded.

“My chest feels tight,” he admitted. “It is easier to breathe there. Vermax is… bigger than the shouting.” He swallowed, eyes dropping to the floor. “I want to tell him what we did.”

Aemon lifted his head at that, as if something in him had been waiting for permission. “I would like to go too,” he said. “I am used to seeing Vhaelyx every day. I have been away far too long.”

The last words carried a faint shame, as if neglecting a dragon were a sin close to neglecting a god.

Aemma straightened, discomfort easing a fraction.

“Vaerith has been flying over the keep more often,” she said. “She must be sulking. She hates when I smell of other people more than dragons.”

Aerion stirred against her, thumb still lodged in his mouth. “Arrax,” he mumbled, the name thick and fond. “I want to hug him. He misses me.”

Rhaenyra’s heart skipped at the word hug, picturing all four-year-old enthusiasm and far too many teeth.

She chose, wisely, to address that later.

Helaena’s gaze slipped from the window to Aemma, as if the thought had simply changed direction.

“Yes,” she said softly. “The dragons make the shouting smaller. Their shadows press it flat. I want to see how Dreamfyre softens the dreams with her breath.” Her fingers curled and uncurled in her lap, tracing shapes only she could see. “She makes them less sharp at the edges.”

Aegon shifted, restless energy sparking around him like static. “If everyone else is going,” he muttered, “I might as well. Better than sitting here listening to the Septa cluck about how the Seven love the meek.”

Rhaenyra felt Viserys’s tired gaze on her. He had sunk into a chair near the hearth, crown set aside on the table, hands slack in his lap. He did not speak, but the look he gave her was clear enough: Give them something else to remember when they dream tonight.

She nodded once.

“We will go,” she said. Her voice was quiet, but it settled the air like a hand on a skittish horse. “With keepers and Emberguard. You will all listen to me while we are there. And absolutely no rough play near the dragons. Is that understood?"

Aemon and Aenar nodded at once. Aerion copied them, wide-eyed. Helaena smiled at the floor, as if the pattern in the stone had just shifted into something pleasing.

Aemond had not said anything.

Rhaenyra’s gaze found him, standing a little apart, one hand bunched tight in the hem of his tunic. He looked as if he were trying to hold himself very still, in case the wrong movement made someone remember he was there.

“Will you come, Aemond?” she asked.

His shoulders twitched.

He swallowed, throat working hard. When he finally spoke, the words came thin but careful, as if he’d polished them first in his head.

“I would like to.”

It was the truth, and it cost him something to say it out loud.

Aegon snorted.

The sound was too sharp in the soft room, like a stone kicked down a quiet street. It wasn’t only mockery in it, there was the raw edge of the yard still under his skin, the bruise of hearing his mother cursed and having nowhere to put the hurt. But Aemond was easier to aim at than a crowd, and cruelty had always come more quickly to Aegon’s tongue than apology.

“You?” he said, turning on his brother with a twist of his mouth. “To the Dragonpit? To do what, stand under the smoke and pretend?”

He tipped his head, eyes narrowing.

“Perhaps if you stare hard enough this time, one will fall out of the sky and break its neck at your feet.”

Aemond flinched. His fingers clenched tighter in his tunic.

“Don’t say that,” Aemma said.

She didn’t shout. She just sat up straighter, voice cutting across the space between them with simple, startled certainty.

Aegon glanced at her, scoffing. “Why not? It’s true.”

“No, it isn’t.” Aemma’s chin lifted. Her damp hair clung to her cheeks, her eyes still pink at the rims from the smoke and shouting, but there was steel under it now. “My sister Rhaena doesn’t have a dragon yet either. She is still the blood of the dragon. So is Aemond.”

Aegon’s mouth twisted. 

“Lady Rhaena isn’t your sister,” he said. “She’s the daughter of Prince Daemon and Lady Laena. Not yours."

The words landed like a slap.

Aemma’s face went very still, the way a pond freezes before it cracks. Color rushed up her throat.

“She is my sister,” she said, voice sharper than anyone in the room had ever heard from her. “Rhaena sleeps in my bed when there’s a storm. Baela steals my ribbons and I let her. We share hair pins and dresses and secrets and all my best cakes.” Her lower lip trembled, but she held his gaze. “That makes them mine.”

Viserys blinked, caught off guard by the force of it.

Something soft and startled crossed his face. He had known, of course, that the children were close, but he had not quite understood that in Aemma’s heart, Daemon’s daughters were considered…

Sisters.

Aegon saw the way the others looked at her.

Aemon, faintly impressed; Helaena, faintly pleased, eyes bright as if she were watching some rare beetle click its wings; Aemond, stunned, and something small and sour in him reared up at once.

“You sound stupid,” Aegon snapped, the word coming too fast. “You just shout and grab everything like it’s yours. Next you’ll say the whole of Dragonstone is your ‘sister’ too. Maybe the smallfolk should have spit at—”

“Don’t talk about them,” Aemma cut across him, heat flashing under her skin. “You stood there and did nothing while they cursed your mother, and now you only find your words to bully your brother.”

“You’re crazy,” he shot back, louder, because everyone was listening now. “Like Maegor. Septa says he was mad in the head.”

Aemma’s spine straightened. Her hands curled in her skirts to stop them shaking.

“I’m not mad,” she said. “I don’t fall over chairs. At least I eat my dinner. You just sneak wine and then act sick.”

She hadn’t meant to say it like that.

The words flew out of her mouth sharp and bright and landed with a sound she could almost hear.

Aegon rocked back, color flooding his face, not only with anger but with the sudden, sharp knowledge that she had seen him. Really seen him. The hidden goblet behind the salt cellar. The way his hand shook when he poured. The way he went quiet when the jug came 'round again.

The silences at feasts. The second goblet. The third.

“Aemma Velaryon.”

Rhaenyra’s voice cut the air.

Aemma’s chin dipped a fraction. Her eyes were bright, her breathing too fast. Aegon’s hands had curled into fists at his sides, knuckles white, wine-flush standing high on his cheekbones.

Rhaenyra crossed the space between them in a few measured steps.

She set one hand lightly between Aemma’s shoulder blades, feeling the tiny tremor there. With the other, she reached out and touched Aegon’s forearm, just above the wrist, stopping herself from smoothing her thumb over the bone as she did with her own sons.

Aemma swallowed. “I did not mean—”

“You meant every word,” Rhaenyra said, not unkindly. “You only did not mean for them to bite so hard.”

Aemma’s eyes stung. “He called me mad.”

“And you answered to kill, not to heal.”

Aegon flinched at that, a quick, miserable twist of his mouth.

He stared at the floor.

Rhaenyra looked between them, her hand steady on Aemma’s back, fingers flexing once in a small, protective press.

“You are not mad, Aemma,” she said, tone softening. “You are angry. You are allowed to be angry when someone tries to take what is yours, or speak of the people you love as if they were trinkets to be claimed.”

Her gaze slid, pointed, to Aegon.

“But you are not allowed to use the sharpest things you know about your kin as weapons. Not you.” She gave Aemma’s shoulder the faintest squeeze. “You see too much already. Do not turn that sight cruel.”

Aemma’s lip trembled. “I just… everyone keeps saying we aren't sisters...and no one knows. No one sees.”

“And you do know,” Rhaenyra said, voice low. “You know which braid Rhaena pulls when she lies. You know Baela recites ship names when she is frightened so no one will notice her hands shaking.” Her smile flickered, sad and proud. “You know where they hide when they wish to cry without being seen.”

Aemma nodded, eyes blurring. “They tell me all their secrets.”

“Yes,” Rhaenyra said. “Because you have kept them safe.”

Her attention shifted to her half-brother. 

“Aegon,” she said.

There was shame there now, under the sulk, under the bravado. A child who had not expected his wine to be dragged into the light in front of everyone.

“You do not speak Maegor’s name over my child as if it were a jest,” she said, tone very calm and all the more dangerous for it. “Least of all while you clutch your own hurt to your chest like a toy and throw hers back in her face.”

“I wasn’t—”

“You were,” she cut in, but her tone lacked the sting she had used on lords twice his age.

His throat bobbed. The truth of it landed heavily. 

“If you wish to be a man one day,” Rhaenyra went on, “you cannot take that bitterness and spill it over your brother and your niece. You cannot punish Aemond because you are afraid. You cannot claw at Aemma because you are hurt.”

Aegon’s eyes smarted, sudden and hot. “I’m not afraid.” 

Rhaenyra only looked at him. 

Viserys had not spoken yet.

He sat with his hands braced on the arms of his chair, watching them as if the air had gone thin. Aegon’s flushed, furious face. Aemma with her chin lifted and her eyes wet. Aemon hovering like a young hawk, ready to punch above his size if someone gave him leave. Aemond still near the wall, hunched around his shame as if it were something precious. Helaena somewhere slightly aside, tracing little circles on her skirt and listening to things no one else could hear. Little Aerion’s eyes darting back and forth. 

His heirs. His hopes. 

Just this morning, Alicent had talked of the solution. Betroth the lines. Bind black and green with one neat knot. Aegon and Aemma, prince and princess, one wedding feast to soothe a kingdom.

Aegon, sharp and wounded, reaching for cruelty when cornered. Aemma, loyal and fierce and utterly unwilling to bow her head to anyone she thought unjust.

No, he thought, with a clarity that felt almost like pain.

Not those two.

Not ever.

“Apologies,” he said.

The word fell into the quiet like a stone into deep water.

Aegon glanced at him, thrown. “Father?”

“You two will apologize,” Viserys said. His voice was tired, but it did not waver. “You have both said things that were meant to wound, not to speak truth. That is beneath the blood you carry.”

He lifted a hand before either could protest. “Aegon, first.”

Aegon’s throat worked.

For a moment he looked very much just a boy. 

He turned to Aemond, not quite meeting his eye. “I should not have said what I did about the pit,” he forced out. “Or about a dragon falling out of the sky. It was cruel.”

Aemond blinked, fingers still twisted in his tunic.

“All right,” he said after a moment, voice small. It wasn’t quite forgiveness, but it was not refusal either.

Aegon dragged his gaze to Aemma. His cheeks were still blotched red. “You’re not mad...You just… shout a lot. And I should not have spoken of Lady Rhaena as if she were not your sister,” he said. The words seemed to scrape on the way out. “I was… angry. And unkind.”

Aemma’s chin shook, but she held his gaze. “You hurt me. But I accept it. If you mean it.”

Aegon swallowed again. “I do,” he said, and for once there was nothing slick in it.

Rhaenyra shifted her attention to her daughter. “Aemma.”

Aemma’s eyes dropped for the first time. “I should not have spoken of your wine,” she said to Aegon, the words thudding out like stones. “Or said I was kinder than you. I was trying to hurt you. That was wrong. I am sorry.”

Some of the hardness left Aegon’s shoulders.

“You are kinder than me,” he muttered, almost too low to hear. “That is half the trouble.”

Helaena gave a tiny huff of something that might have been a laugh.

Rhaenyra let the air loosen, just a fraction.

“Good,” she said. “You will quarrel again. That is the way of kin. But next time, you will remember how it felt to have words thrown like daggers. And you will choose better ones.”

She drew breath, then glanced around at all of them.

“We are still going to the Dragonpit,” she added. “All of us. Together. You will walk there as one group and you will stand there as one brood. The keepers and Emberguard will be with us. No racing, no trying to slip from sight.”

Aerion nodded so hard his damp curls bounced.

Aemon and Aenar both whispered assent. Helaena smiled faintly, eyes already distant, perhaps following some imagined path of dragonshadow over stone.

Aemond’s hand had loosened from his tunic. “I would still like to go,” he said, barely above a whisper.

Rhaenyra met his gaze and inclined her head as if he were twenty and asking for a command. “Then you will.”

“I will not come,” Viserys said, almost to himself, when Rhaenyra glanced his way. “Old bones and too many stairs. Go. Let the dragons take the taste of today from your mouths.”

They filed out in a loose cluster, quarrel cooling into something more bearable. Aemma and Helaena’s shoulders brushed. Aemon fell in step beside Aemond, saying something low that made the other boy huff a ghost of a laugh. Aegon trailed, hands in his sleeves, gaze fixed on some middle distance only he could see. Aenar and Aerion walked together, playfully bumping one another. 

Rhaenyra followed them to the door, feeling both older and steadier than she had that morning.

---

Alicent heard them before she saw them.

A low, rolling roar shook the stone, rattling the glass in the Queen’s solar. The ink in the pot by her elbow shivered; the maid pouring her wine flinched.

Alicent rose, the motion sharp enough to make the girl start, and crossed to the narrow window.

Outside, the sky over the Dragonpit was torn open with wings.

One dragon at first, black and red. Then another, green and gleaming. Gold, pale silver, the familiar blue of Dreamfyre, the molten sheen of Sunfyre. More, circling and climbing, a spinning crown of scale and fire.

For a mere second, it was beautiful.

Then her eyes adjusted, and she saw the riders.

Specks from this distance, but not faceless. She knew the shapes of them. The way Aemon sat a dragon’s neck as if he’d been born there. Aenar leaning forward, impatient. Aemma’s small body thrown back in a shout of unrestrained joy. Helaena, light as thistledown on Dreamfyre’s back. Aegon on Sunfyre, every line of him made for that saddle, whether he cared to admit it or not.

And lower, a little apart, Syrax.

Yellow scales catching the light. The dragon Rhaenyra had claimed as a girl now carrying three riders. A silver head that resembled Daemon far too closely, a small red-gold one clinging in front, and behind—

Alicent’s breath stalled.

Behind Rhaenyra, arms locked around the Princess's waist, sat Aemond.

From here he looked impossibly small. Pale hair whipped by the wind. No dragon of his own, balanced between Rhaenyra and the creature’s spine, one bad jolt away from open sky.

Her hand closed on the stone until her knuckles blanched.

“They fly,” Larys said behind her.

She had not heard him enter.

She almost never did.

He drifted around the edges of rooms like a shadow looking for somewhere to belong.

“They all fly,” he added, soft as dust. “That will be a tale for the taverns tonight.”

Alicent did not turn.

“My sons,” she said. The words came thin. “My daughter. In her sky.”

Syrax banked lazily, circling inside the broken dome. For a moment, Alicent’s vision fractured.

She saw Rhaenyra’s head bend, saw her arm move as if to point something out to the boys...

Or to shove one of them.

She would not, Alicent told herself. Not in daylight. Not with the city watching. Not with the other children there.

But in her mind she saw it anyway.

A casual tilt of the wrist, a dragon’s sudden roll, a pale boy’s body flung like a dropped doll. No need for poison. No dagger in the dark. Just gravity and hand, and the world would call it accident.

Her stomach lurched. Her nails scraped stone.

“They look well together,” Larys observed, stepping closer. “Like a tapestry come to life. The Blacks and the Greens, all woven on dragonback.”

“Do not call them that,” she snapped. “Not here.”

“Forgive me.” His tone shifted to something bland and agreeable. “Old words. New meanings.”

They’ve beaten her, the thought came, unbidden.

Viserys had told the story a hundred times of his little Rhaenyra, youngest rider in living memory.

Now her three whelps wheeled above the city at six years old, shattering that record in a single afternoon, turning even his favorite boast into another tale that belonged to them.

Hatred rose like bile. 

Syrax climbed a little higher.

Alicent’s heart climbed with her, lodged somewhere behind her teeth. 

“Your son rides with them,” Larys said. “That speaks of trust.”

“It speaks of carelessness,” Alicent whispered. “She has too many children to guard one more.”

Her skin prickled.

In the yard, they had shouted “baby-killer” at her.

Now Rhaenyra put Alicent’s own boy on her dragon and the city would say, See? See how generous she is. See how she embraces even the queen’s children. See how they all laugh together over your heads.

Alicent pressed her lips together until they hurt.

“The people will talk of this day,” Larys went on. “How the Realm’s Heart fed them. How the dragonspawn flew as one. How their laughter sounded over the city.”

“And they will forget how they cursed me,” Alicent said.

“For a while.” His cane clicked once against the tile as he shifted. “Memory is a fickle altar. It must be fed often.”

She crossed to the door first.

The maid still hovered there, wide-eyed.

Alicent lifted a hand.

The girl dipped a hasty curtsey and slipped out.

Alicent closed the door herself, thumb lingering on the latch before she turned the key in the lock. The soft click sounded too loud in the quiet.

Only then did she go to the chair by the hearth and sink into it more heavily than she meant to.

Her shoes pinched.

Her stockings scratched at her ankles.

The small discomforts roved together with the greater one in her chest. She bent, fingers moving with tight, impatient care as she unfastened each shoe and tugged it off, one, then the other.

Cool air kissed her sore skin. She set her bare feet nearer the fire, as if that were the only reason for the act.

Larys had followed her to the hearth, but he said nothing while she worked at the buckles.

“Tell me something worth hearing,” she said at last, staring into the flames. “Something that is not about how the city loves her.”

Only then did Larys move.

He watched her for a beat more, then lowered himself into the opposite chair with his usual slow, uneven grace, the fire painting strange shadows over his face.

“As you wish, Your Grace.” He folded his hands. “The Stepstones, then.”

Her fingers tightened on the arm of her chair. “What of them?”

“They are quiet,” he said conversationally. “No major raids in years. Shipping more reliable. Merchants content. All very dull, on the surface. One might almost forget there was a war there.”

“There was a war there,” Alicent said. “Years ago. The lords never cease reminding me how many coffers bled for Daemon’s vanity.”

“Oh, that part is over,” Larys agreed. “What remains is not war. It is…infrastructure.”

The word sat heavy, foreign and ugly, in the elegant room.

“Two thousand and four hundred of Rhaenyra’s Emberguard at last count. Sworn not to the Iron Throne, but to Dragonstone. Paid with Dragonstone’s coin.”

She thought of the red-cloaked men in the yard that morning, moving at Rhaenyra’s casual words, forming lines and order out of chaos.

“And here?” she asked. “How many in my capital?”

“Fifty men in red cloaks here solely for the heirs’ protection, another fifty folded quietly into the city itself. Enough to stiffen any line, if called upon.”

His gaze flicked toward the window, toward the distant specks of dragons.

“Dragonstone proper holds nearer five hundred Emberguard now,” he added mildly. “Not counting the newer recruits.”

Alicent’s pulse pounded in her ears.

Altogether, it was near three thousand men who would move when Rhaenyra lifted a hand. Red cloaks in the streets, red cloaks at the gates, red cloaks on the hill below the Red Keep. Her men. Her coin. Her word.

And understood that if the princess decided King’s Landing would not open its gates again, it would not.

“So she has enough to take the city."

He did not contradict her.

Dragons crossed and re-crossed, weaving lazy arcs. They looked almost playful from here, a clutch of bright children on the backs of monsters older than their line.

“They will kill my children."

It had become her mantra. 

The only truth she believed.  

Larys did not start. “Who?” he asked mildly. “The smallfolk? The dragons? The men in red?”

“Her,” Alicent said. Her throat ached. “Hers. Those ones in the sky. Today they share the wind. They laugh and call it sport. But when it comes...do you think she will spare them because they once shared a saddle?”

She could see it too clearly.

Sunfyre caught in Vhaelyx’s jaws; Dreamfyre wreathed in another dragon’s flame; Aemond flung from a height his mother could not even imagine.

Rhaenyra’s brood riding away from the wreckage, faces bright with righteous fire.

“Maegor murdered his own kin,” Alicent whispered. “Brother to brother, son to father, mother to child. He carved his line apart and they still wrote him into the histories and called it tragedy, not warning. And now they all play at his shadow as if it were a game.”

Larys tilted his head, listening as if to a song he already knew the tune of.

“And yet,” he observed, soft as ash, “today, she puts your son on her dragon’s back. She does not need to. It wins her nothing, immediately.”

“It wins her everything,” Alicent said. “It lets the city see Aemond trusting her. It lets Viserys see it. Lets you see it. So that if one day he falls, they will all say—” Her voice roughened. “‘Oh, alas, what a dreadful accident. How terrible that the boy who rode at her back slipped. How tragic that the princess who fed us could not save him.’”

The imagined words scraped her raw.

Her toes curled. 

Larys’s eyes flicked down, quick and hungry, then away.

He said nothing.

He never said anything about it. That was the bargain.

“Viserys does not know,” he added. 

Alicent heard nothing but the crackle of the fire and the distant roar of dragons.

Does not know what?

The numbers on the Stepstones.

The Emberguard tucked into his own city.

The way men drilled in red cloaks would answer Dragonstone’s whistle before his own.

He did not need to clarify.

She understood at once.

Viserys saw loaves in poor men’s hands and called it goodness. He saw his grandchildren in the sky and called it blessing. He would smile, soft and foolish, and tell her Rhaenyra was building bridges, not walls.

He did not see the army.

He did not see that the “princess’s men” he praised at court were not his.

Alicent felt the knowledge settle in her like a stone dropped into deep water. Cold, heavy, sinking slow.

Rhaenyra was not only bold, she was secretive.

Willing to build a second kingdom beneath his nose and let him coo over the banners.

And Alicent now held a truth he would choke on, if she placed it in his mouth at the right moment. A thing that could turn his gentle doubt into fear.

Fear of his heir.

Fear for his son.

The next time he looked at Rhaenyra with that dreamy, faraway fondness and said, She is my successor, she will be good for them, Alicent could say...

She keeps trained men that do not swear to you. She buys ships in her own name. She drills boys on rocks for war. When she smiles at the smallfolk, she does it with a private army at her back.

She could put the numbers in the hands of Oldtown, the High Septon, her father’s friends in the Reach.

Let the whisper pass.

The princess arms herself.

The princess fortifies.

The princess grows a spine that is not the Iron Throne’s.

And for the first time that day, Alicent felt something under her fear that was not only dread.

It was leverage.

She drew her feet a little closer to the fire, watching the light lick over her bare toes, and said, very quietly, “Is there anything else I should know, Lord Larys?”

He watched her for a moment, thumb stroking once along the crook of his cane.

“There is always more to know,” he said. 

Alicent did not flinch. “Then say it plainly.”

One corner of his mouth curled. 

“A witness,” he said. “Not numbers on paper. Not rumors from a dockside tavern. Someone the realm might believe, when the time comes.”

Her fingers tightened on the carved arm of the chair. “A witness to what?”

“To the princess forgetting herself,” he replied. “A servant who might, for instance, recall the Princess entering the rooms of Prince Daemon and Lady Laena at hours when proper wives are meant to sleep beside their own husbands. And leaving rather later than is seemly.”

The fire popped, spitting a little coal onto the hearthstone.

Alicent stared at it.

“Adultery,” she said.

“The word would not need to be spoken first by you,” Larys said mildly. “Only suggested. Laid in the right ears. A princess who feeds the poor, who rides dragons, who also cannot keep to her marriage bed…”

In her mind’s eye she saw Rhaenyra laughing in the clouds, Daemon’s hand on her back, Laena’s hair shining in the sun.

The easy closeness of them.

The way they made their own rules and called it freedom.

And Aegon, Aemond, Helaena below, forever measured against that wild, glowing picture.

“You would have a servant swear to this,” she said slowly. 

He shrugged, a small, boneless motion. “Some tongues can be loosened. Others…guided.”

Alicent’s stomach turned.

It was not that she doubted Rhaenyra stepped over lines. Rhaenyra had been born to stride past them. It was that this would make the private sin into public cudgel.

“A charge like that would stain the children,” she said.

“It would stain the succession,” Larys corrected gently. “If the realm believes the princess breaks her vows, it will more easily believe she breaks other bonds as well. Oaths. Promises. Peace.”

He let the next words fall like crumbs.

“And if, one day, your allies must argue that another branch of the dragon-tree is…safer…for the realm to sit upon…”

They would not need to say more legitimate.

Not aloud. The hint of adultery would do the work for them.

Alicent looked at the fire, at her bare feet in its glow, at the man across from her who collected truths and half-truths like knives.

She thought of Aegon, loose and laughing on Sunfyre.

Of Aemond clinging to Rhaenyra’s waist on Syrax.

Of Helaena tracing patterns in the air and calling them omens.

Of the word Maegor in her own mouth.

She thought of the word they had thrown at her in the yard: whore.

“Bring me someone of standing,” she said at last. Her voice had gone very calm. “Not some dockside girl with a story to sell.”

She pressed her heel harder into the cushion. 

Larys’s eyes brightened, just a fraction.

“As you wish, Your Grace,” he promised. “A blade from the very house that cannot look away when the realm begins to tally which colors their kin are claimed under.”

Notes:

Definitely an accidental post! But if you do see some misspellings or name switching please let me know!

Chapter 28: Where We Pretend This Is Not Already War

The music made a bright, glittering cage of great chamber. 

High above, the chandeliers burned like captured stars. Thousands of beeswax candles dripping slow rivers of gold.

The banners had been changed out for the week.

Not only the three-headed dragon of House Targaryen, nor the seahorse of House Velaryon, but new pennants stitched in love and pride.

For Aemon, a black dragon on a field of dusk, its wings rimmed in red.

For Aenar, a silver and green dragon rearing from blue waves.

For Aemma, a pale, radiant dragon coiled around a stylised heart.

They hung in three neat rows above the dais, swaying with every draft that slipped through the hall.

“Princess.”

Rhaenyra did not start.

She had grown up here; she could always feel a person at her back.

Lord Selwyn Tarth stood there with a fresh cup of wine, a man who had not yet learned how to make his eyes lie for him.

They were doing their best tonight, she thought, to learn.

“Will you accuse me of treason,” she asked, “if I admit I prefer the lighting on Dragonstone?”

The corners of his mouth twitched.

“No, Princess. Though I may suggest the royal masons knock down half the walls and let the sea in, if you continue in that vein.”

“That would solve the air.” She accepted the cup. “The courtiers we must drown one by one.”

“It might be kinder to let them stew.” Selwyn glanced down the room, where silk and jewels moved in carefully arranged patterns under the music. “They seem well-marinated.”

He said it lightly.

His gaze was not light.

The chamber was full to spilling.

Every great house with sense, and several without it, had sent envoys to the triplets’ name-day celebrations. A week of feasts and tourneys, of temple offerings and city processions, now narrowed down to this.

The last night, the last dance, the last chance to be seen on the right side of the room.

On one end of the hall, the Greens had arranged themselves like a painted panel.

Queen Alicent in deep emerald silk, her bodice jeweled with pale pearls that glinted whenever she moved.

Aegon lounged beside her chair, doublet half-laced and cup always in hand. His smile too loose and the wine sloshing too easily. 

Helaena sat straight-backed on her mother’s other flank, fingers busy rolling a small glass bead between them. She flinched when people stepped to close to her and kept her eyes mostly skyward. 

Aemond stood just off his mother’s shoulder, eyes roaming over the crowd aimlessly. Every so often his eyes snagged on the four children by Corlys’ chair and stayed there a beat too long.

On the other end, her side of the chamber burned like its own small sunrise.

Aemon, Aenar, Aemma, and little Aerion were the brightest points of it, all silk sashes and polished shoes, gathered at the feet of Lord Corlys, Princess Rhaenys, and Laenor as if their grandparents and father had arranged them like rare treasures for the realm to study.

Between them was the court.

Between them was the game.

“It is curious,” Selwyn said mildly, “how a hall can feel full and yet be split in two.”

“That implies there is a middle,” Rhaenyra said. “Look again.”

He did.

His brows drew together.

Alicent’s ladies stood in neat, green-trimmed rows.

Her own supporters, nobles who had grown used to riding the sea-road to Dragonstone, wore red and black in deliberate swathes.

Even their lesser vassals and petitioners seemed pulled toward one tide or the other, like chips of iron caught between two lodestones.

The music swelled.

No one danced across that invisible line.

Rhaenyra sipped her wine.

It tasted of apples and ash.

“There is a middle,” Selwyn said softly. “It used to be the realm itself. Now it is only the space where we pretend this isn’t already a war.”

Rhaenyra felt as if someone had struck her from inside, a small, precise blow that left no mark and took her breath all the same.

Her fingers clenched around the cup until the metal bit her palm.

“Tell me something plainly, my lord,” she said. “Do you believe I deserve to be heir?”

Selwyn’s head turned.

He did not rush to answer.

His gaze moved over her face as if he were committing it to memory, not as a courtier stores a favor, but as a man records a tide-mark before the storm wipes it clean.

“Yes,” he said. “I do.”

The word should have sat warm.

It didn’t. 

“But,” he went on, quieter, “I also think that if the realm ever accepts you, Princess, it will not be gently. Things will be broken to make room. Oaths, houses, perhaps whole pieces of this city. There are steps that, once taken, cannot be walked back.”

His eyes went again to the heirs of Dragonstone, to Aerion tugging at Aemon’s sleeve, to Aemma’s bright, mismatched gaze. 

“And when it is done,” Selwyn said, “no one will remember that you did not light the first spark. Only that the world on the other side of you is not the one they were promised.”

Aemma looked up just then, as if feeling her mother’s eyes.

Her hair caught the candlelight; all pale silver and faint gold, curls escaping the ribbon to cling to her cheeks. 

She broke into a smile so sudden and wide that Rhaenyra felt it land like an arrow.

Gods. She had not thought her heart had room left to ache.

“Thank you,” Rhaenyra said.

Selwyn glanced at her, faintly surprised. “For what, Princess?”

“For answering,” she replied. “And for not making it sound easy.”

A corner of his mouth lifted, sad and wry. “If it were easy, someone less than you would already have done it.”

She did not trust herself to answer that.

Rhaenyra set her cup aside before her fingers shook and stepped down from the banners. The hall bent around her without quite touching, courtiers peeling back in rustles of brocade and silk, eyes following her as if she were some bright sword thrown in the air.

She ignored them.

Her feet knew the way to her children.

Aemon saw her first. His small shoulders straightened, trying at once to stand taller.

Aenar pointed at her with all the subtlety of a crashing wave, nearly dropping the miniature ship Corlys had given him, its tiny silver sails winking under the chandeliers.

Aerion, flushed and grinning, tried to hide the sheer amount of sweets he had in front of him.

Laenor stood just behind them, one hand resting on the back of Aemon’s chair, the other loosely around Aenar’s shoulders to stop him colliding with a passing servant.

His eyes were on the children.

Not the watching court.

Aemma abandoned all decorum.

She jumped free of her seat and stood before Rhaenyra as soon as she was close enough.

“Muna,” she said, catching at Rhaenyra’s sleeve. “Look what Grandsire gave me.”

Rhaenyra bent to see.

Around Aemma’s neck lay a delicate chain of pale gold, the pendant a tiny shell worked in mother-of-pearl. Inside, she knew, was the faintest etching of a dragon, the craftsman’s art so fine it almost vanished if one blinked.

“It is very fine,” Rhaenyra said. “You must guard it. It was made for the Realm’s Heart.”

Aemma’s smile sharpened into something pleased and knowing.

“That’s me,” she said, with the confidence of someone who had already decided the world would agree.

“I had heard a rumor to that effect,” Rhaenyra replied, amused.

Laenor’s lips twitched. “I hear it shouted down corridors,” he added. “Mostly by you.”

Aemma’s grin only grew wider.

Aemon stepped closer, purple eyes intent, both hands wrapped around the hilt of his new sword. It was sized for him, blade blunted but beautifully made, the leather of the grip dyed a deep sea-blue, the pommel worked into the shape of a tiny dragon’s head.

“Grandsire says I must start holding it properly now,” he told her, voice serious. “So that when the time comes my hands already know what to do.”

“Your grandsire enjoyed far too many battles,” Corlys said dryly from his carved seat, though his gaze lingered on the boy with unhidden pride. “Remember there is more to a lord than cutting things in half, Aemon.”

Aemon considered this, then nodded once. “I can learn that too.”

On Rhaenyra’s other side, Aenar was nearly vibrating with contained excitement. He had already abandoned three attempts at standing still and now gave up altogether, thrusting his prize toward her.

“Muna, look,” he said. “He had another made for me.”

The ship cradled in his hands was a small marvel.

Varnished dark wood, sails of pale cloth stitched with the seahorse of Velaryon, tiny ropes and rigging clever enough to make even an old sailor smile.

“It is finer than the last,” Rhaenyra said, turning it gently so the candlelight caught the lines of the hull. “You will have to learn every part of it before your grandsire lets you near the real decks again.”

“I already know the names,” Aenar said quickly. “The mast, the keel, the bow, the stern. He says next voyage I may give commands. Real ones.”

“If your parents allow it,” Corlys said.

Laenor leaned down, tapping a finger against the tiny mast. “And if you remember that sailors are not pieces on a cyvasse board,” he said. “You shout at them and they’ll throw you over.”

“They would not dare,” Aenar scoffed.

“They might,” Laenor said, eyes dancing. “And then your Muna would have to fly out and fish you from the sea in front of the whole court. Think of the songs.”

Aenar’s laugh rang out, bright and unguarded.

It seemed louder than the hall, louder than the tension that sat between green and black.

Rhaenyra’s heart swelled so sharply she had to blink, once, twice, to keep the heat from spilling over. Laenor’s hand still rested on Aenar’s shoulder. Aemon’s fingers were tight on the hilt of his sword, but Laenor’s voice had gentled his grip without shaming him. Aerion was pressed against his side as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

They looked, all of them, so held.

“You have made them all very happy,” she said to Corlys and Rhaenys both, and now the words came from somewhere deeper than courtesy. “Thank you.”

“They made themselves joyous,” Rhaenys answered. “We only put steel, gold, and seawater in their reach.”

And kin who stand with them. 

Aenar tugged at her sleeve again, unable to stop the tide of his thoughts. “Lord Beesbury says there is a modelmaker in the merchant stalls who carves whole fleets,” he confided. “If we went to look, not to buy, I could see if mine is the best.”

“No more gifts tonight,” Rhaenys cut in, amusement warming her voice. “Else the court will think you can be bought with goldleaf sails and painted hulls.”

Aenar tilted his head, already hunting the angle. “What if I let them think it and then do what I want anyway?”

Corlys barked a laugh. “Seven save us,” he said. “The boy truly is a Velaryon.”

Aerion’s treats plate had grown even higher in the meantime.

Sweetmeats and sugared almonds were already stacked perilously, candied orange peels glistening like shards of sunset. He was in the midst of coaxing yet another platter from a long-suffering serving girl.

“It’s for sharing,” he was saying earnestly, though there was not a spare inch of space left. “In case Aemon gets hungry. Or Aenar. Or Muna. Or—”

“Aerion,” Rhaenys said, one brow climbing, “if you add another tart to that tower, it will fall and drown you.”

Aerion considered the wobbling stack, then grinned, all sticky teeth and mischief.

“Then I shall die a lord in his castle,” he declared. “Buried with all my treasures.”

Laenor laughed outright at that, reaching over to rescue a tottering plate before disaster.

“At least let your father hold one wall of it,” he said. “Else your castle will be in my lap.”

Corlys smirked, eyes flashing conspiratorially. “There are worse graves than sugar and pastry,” he said. “Let the boy fortify himself. A sailor must know his comforts.”

“A sailor must also know his greens,” Rhaenyra cut in, though her mouth curved despite herself. “Two more bites of the stewed cabbage on your plate, Aerion, or I will tell the cooks to send you nothing but boiled turnips for a moon.”

“Kepa,” Aerion appealed, scandalised. “Tell her turnips are cruel.”

Laenor winced theatrically. “On this, I cannot save you,” he said. “Your mother rules the vegetables. Obey her, or we all suffer.”

Aerion’s face twisted in horror. “Turnips are for punishing people.”

“Then eat your cabbage,” Rhaenyra said mildly.

He snatched up his fork with the air of a man marching to the headsman.

“Fine,” he growled. “But if I die of it, you must put honeycakes on my pyre.”

Laenor leaned in, lips brushing Aerion’s hair. “I will see to it myself,” he said.

Aerion beamed and, with great martyrdom, stabbed his cabbage.

Rhaenyra let herself breathe in the sound of them.

Her son’s grumbling, Aenar’s soft ship-noises as he tested how the little vessel might ride an imaginary wave, Aemon quietly mouthing the sword-parts again as if setting them in his bones, Aemma’s fingers turning her shell-pendant so it flashed, heart and dragon both.

For a handful of heartbeats, the hall felt almost kind.

Which was, of course, when it changed.

The music did not stop at once.

It shivered.

A wrong note, a falter in the pipes as someone at the far end of the room cried out. Too sharp, too real to belong to any song.

Dancers turned, laughter thinning.

The neat patterns of silk and brocade parted as people shifted to see what had broken the rhythm.

Rhaenyra felt, more than saw, the Emberguard react.

They had been scattered through the hall in their court guise, red cloaks blending with Targaryen colors, helms tucked beneath arms, hands empty.

At the first disturbance they moved as if pulled by the same string.

Cloaks swung back.

Fingers locked on spear-shafts and sword-hilts. In the space of a breath they were no longer ornament but wall. Closing in around the high table, then tightening in a ring that centred unerringly on her and the children.

“Stay close,” Laenor said under his breath, straightening, one hand coming to rest at the small of Rhaenyra’s back, the other slipping from Aenar’s shoulder to hover just behind Aemon.

The crowd peeled apart in ragged seams.

A man in Dragonstone livery forced his way through the opening.

Not with the polished glide of a courtier but with the clumsy, relentless drive of someone who had ridden too hard and then run harder.

His hair was plastered to his brow with sweat, his face grey beneath the flush, cloak darkened where salt and road-dust had soaked in.

He stumbled once on the polished floor. A lesser man would have fallen. He caught himself on a knee, pushed up again, and kept coming.

“Hold,” one of the Emberguard snapped, angling a sword to block his path.

“Let him through,” Rhaenyra said, voice cutting cleanly through the rising whispers. Her heart was already dropping, cold and heavy, to somewhere behind her ribs.

Dragonstone livery.

Daemon.

Laena.

The guard shifted, enough for the man to stagger into the circle.

He dropped to both knees this time, more collapse than ceremony, head bowed as he fought for breath. Sweat dripped from his jaw onto the stone. Up close, she could hear the ragged drag of air in his chest.

“Search him,” Rhaenys said crisply, standing now, every line of her gone hard and still.

Quick, practised hands checked belt, boots, sleeves. No steel. No hidden blade. Only a damp, salt-crumpled packet at his hip and the trembling of a man who had outrun his strength and fear both.

“Clear,” the guard said.

“Speak,” Rhaenys commanded.

He lifted his head.

His eyes went first to her, to the Princess of Dragonstone, then to Rhaenys beside her, to Laenor’s bloodless grip on the back of Aemon’s chair, to the ring of red cloaks and small, wide eyes just behind.

“Your Graces,” he managed hoarsely. “A message… from Dragonstone.”

The hall seemed to draw in around the words, sound thinning to a high, waiting hush.

“Concerning Prince Daemon and Lady Laena.”

The messenger fumbled at his belt with clumsy fingers, bringing out the salt-crumpled packet. The seal, black wax impressed with Dragonstone’s three-headed dragon, caught the candlelight.

Rhaenyra saw Rhaenys move before she thought to, hand shooting out with a speed that did not belong to court.

She all but tore it from his grasp.

Wax cracked under her thumb.

The parchment unfolded with a small, cruel sound. Rhaenyra was already stepping up to her side, close enough to feel the tight, contained tremor in Rhaenys’s arm.

“Mother?” Laenor’s voice, low behind them.

Rhaenys did not answer.

Her eyes tracked the lines once, twice, as if refusing to trust the first read. Color bled from her face until it matched the parchment.

Rhaenyra leaned in, breath held, catching only fragments where Rhaenys’s grip hadn’t crumpled the ink.

…taken early… …no time to send before… …labor will not stop… …child turned… won’t come… …maester says… breech…

The word seemed to swell on the page until it drowned everything else.

Rhaenys’s lips shaped it, barely sound at all. “Breech.”

Corlys had come to stand at her other side, one broad hand hovering uselessly at the small of her back.

“They cannot turn her,” Rhaenys went on, voice flat now, stripped of all its courtly precision. “Laena is in labor. It came on fast. The babe is wrong-way. They write that the pain is… already near a day.”

Rhaenyra did not remember deciding.

“We are going to her.”

Rhaenys’s head turned. Their eyes met. There was no argument there, only a terrible, shared understanding.

“Yes,” Rhaenys answered. “We are.”

She did not raise her voice, but her maid was already hovering at the edge of the Emberguard ring, white-faced.

Rhaenys crooked two fingers.

“You,” she said. “Go to my chambers. Gather my riding leathers and Princess Rhaenyra’s. Cloaks fit for the wind and nothing that catches on a saddle. Have them sent to the Dragonpit gate at once. You will tell the keepers that Meleys and Syrax are to be saddled and ready when we arrive.”

The girl bobbed a shaky curtsy and fled.

“Mother—” Laenor started.

Rhaenys closed her hand around the letter, crushing it smaller. “I will not sit in this hall while my daughter bleeds alone.” 

Rhaenyra’s stomach lurched at that choice of words, but there was no time to flinch from them.

She turned, fast, to Corlys and Laenor.

Aemon, Aenar, Aemma, Aerion.

Their faces were turned up to her like four different versions of the same question.

“Mind them,” she said, the command aimed at both men. Her voice wanted to shake; she did not let it. “All of them. Keep them close. Do not let them out of your sight, not for a breath, not while I am gone.”

“You have my word,” Corlys said at once. There was nothing of the genial grandsire in him now, only the Lord of the Tides. “They will not pass beyond my hand or Laenor’s.”

Laenor’s hand went iron hard on the back of the chair. “Go,” he said. “Bring her back. Both of them, if you can.”

Rhaenyra let her gaze rake the edge of the Emberguard ring until she found the faces she wanted.

“Ser Corren. Ser Myles.”

Both men stepped forward at once, fists crossing their chests.

“You will stay with my children,” Rhaenyra told them. “You do not leave them, not in this hall, not in their chambers, not anywhere. If the court moves, you move with them. If any man tries to part you from them for any reason, you plant your feet and remember I will ask you for every heartbeat I was gone.”

“Princess,” Ser Myles said, grave as a vow. “You have my life on it.”

Ser Corren’s jaw was tight. “Any hand that reaches for them will lose the fingers.” 

Rhaenyra forced herself to look down at the triplets and Aerion, to soften for them if only by an inch.

“I must go to Uncle Daemon and your Aunt Laena,” she said, and cursed herself for the way her voice almost caught on Laena’s name. “You will stay with your Kepa and Grandsire. Do as they say. I will return as fast as Syrax can carry me.”

Aemma’s hand found her shell-pendant and squeezed it. “You will bring them back,” she said. It was not a question, only a small, fierce decree.

Rhaenyra laid her palm briefly against her daughter’s cheek. “I will try with all I am.”

She turned back to Rhaenys.

“Come,” the Queen Who Never Was said.

They stepped out of the Emberguard circle together, red cloaks parting around them like a tide. The hall’s eyes followed, but Rhaenyra no longer felt caged by them.

All that mattered now was the wind, and the distance between this bright, choking ballroom and the dark stone where Laena labored, and the dragons waiting in between.

The corridors blurred.

Rhaenyra would not remember later how many doors they passed, which lords flattened themselves against stone to avoid being trampled, only the echo of her own footsteps and Rhaenys’s beside her, the thunder of Emberguard boots behind.

By the time they burst out into the night air near the Dragonpit gate, the wind felt like a mercy and a slap both.

The keepers had done as bidden.

Jumping back at the sight of them, hands full of tack and leather, eyes wide.

There was no time for modesty.

Rhaenys stripped her jewels as she walked, ripping clasps loose so pearls and rubies strewed the paving like fallen teeth.

Rhaenyra tore at her own laces, uncaring when silk gave way under her fingers.

They shed their court gowns in the shadow of the Pit, puddles of velvet and brocade left on the cold stone, and dragged on leather with the speed of soldiers pulling on armor after a horn.

“Leave them,” Rhaenys snapped when a maid hovered, torn between scooping up the discarded finery and fastening a buckle. “The rats can have them.”

Syrax’s roar rolled around the great pit as Rhaenyra ran up, answering the call she had not yet had breath to make.

Meleys was already on the upper ledge, scarlet hide bright even in the dark, saddle in place, head tossing with the old, impatient fury of a creature born to move.

When she shifted her weight, the air itself seemed to flinch aside, ready to be cut.

Rhaenys twisted before her Red Queen, reached out, and closed her gloved hand around Rhaenyra’s forearm.

“Do not fall behind,” she said. It was not unkind. It was an instruction.

“I will not,” Rhaenyra answered.

Rhaenys swung into the saddle with the ease of a woman who had been doing it since childhood. 

Rhaenyra did not have that luxury anymore.

Syrax crouched below, too large now for the simple stone steps of Rhaenyra’s girlhood. The Pitmen had built a rider’s platform for her. A narrow tongue of iron and oak that jutted out over the dragon’s shoulder, reachable by a steep run of steps and a ladder bolted into the wall. 

Her new saddle itself was fresh-worn, fitted to the breadth of a dragon grown heavier with every season. Thick ropes were knotted through brass rings along the spine, a web of handholds and tethers meant to keep a rider alive when the sky turned vicious. 

Rhaenyra set her palm to the rail, feeling it vibrate with the rumble in Syrax’s chest.

The dragon’s breath rolled up toward her, hot and damp, curling around her boots. From here, the sweep of Syrax’s neck and shoulders filled her vision, all molten gold and hard, living muscle.

She stepped to the edge of the platform and swung her leg over, catching one of the rope loops and hauling herself down into the saddle.

“Sōvēs ,” Rhaenys hissed, and Meleys leapt.

The Red Queen shot out of the Pit like an arrow loosed from a gods-made bow, wings snapping wide, catching the night and slicing it.

The speed of her made the air crack.

Syrax shrieked, offended at being second.

“Go,” Rhaenyra whispered through her teeth.

Syrax launched.

The force of it punched the breath from her lungs.

Kingslanding dropped away in a riot of torchlight and stone.

Wind tore at her hair, at the last scraps of silk caught at her wrists. Meleys was ahead, a red streak against the dark, but Syrax drove herself harder than Rhaenyra had ever felt, wings beating a furious rhythm, neck stretched long as if she, too, understood that somewhere across the water a woman screamed and would not stop.

They would speak later of red and gold blazing over Blackwater Bay.

Of dragons flying lower and faster than any sane rider should allow.

Of how the waves bucked beneath them and the ships in the harbor rocked in their wake.

In the moment, there was only Rhaenyra’s grip on the saddle, the burn of the wind cutting tears from the corners of her eyes, the sight of Meleys just ahead, never quite out of reach.

She did not gain on the Red Queen.

Of course she did not.

But as Dragonstone’s black shape rose to meet them, Syrax was still on Meleys’s tail, close enough that Rhaenyra could see the flicker of Rhaenys’s hair in the other saddle.

Close enough that no one would say later she had been left behind.

---

The dragons were gone long before the hall remembered how to breathe.

People had spilled out onto the nearest balconies to gape at the streaks of red and gold knifing across the sky.

The music crept in again, uncertain.

No one quite remembered their steps.

Rhaenyra’s place on the high table sat empty, the cushion still faintly indented where she had risen.

The Emberguard ring had tightened around the children and their grandsire instead, red cloaks a wall behind Corlys and Laenor.

Alicent watched all of it with her hands folded carefully on her lap.

The queen’s face was composed.

But her nail beds were torn. 

Aegon had sobered in the sudden storm of dragons. Aemond’s eyes tracked the Emberguard like a hawk’s.

“She leaves,” Hobert Hightower said at Alicent’s shoulder, “and the room forgets it has a king.”

Alicent’s lashes lowered just enough to hide the first flare of satisfaction and the guilt that followed on its heels.

“She leaves for a woman in childbirth,” she said quietly. “Not a crime.”

“No,” Hobert agreed. “The crime is that the court bows more deeply to her absence than to His Grace’s presence.”

She said nothing to that.

Across the hall, Selwyn Tarth (poor man) was already trying to coax the evening back onto its proper rails, speaking with the herald, soothing some offended lord who had been pushed by Rhaenys. 

The Hand’s eyes kept jumping to the empty chair, to the children, to the king.

Viserys, for his part, looked pale and bewildered on his throne. Like a man who had awoken in the middle of a play half-remembered.

Alicent took a breath.

“If something is to be done,” Hobert said softly, “it must be done before she returns to shout it down.”

His hand brushed his beard, the movement absent. “Vaemond Velaryon is ready.”

Alicent looked at him then. “You are sure?”

“I am sure he is vengeful,” Hobert replied. “Anger makes men truthful, or foolish. Either will serve.”

Her gaze slid to the great doors.

Two guards stood there, and between them, held a little back from the light, a tall, figure in dark blue velvet.

At his sides, two younger men. Barely more than boys, their silver hair twisted in the way many Velaryon's favored. 

Vaemond Velaryon and his sons. 

Exiled from Driftmark, stripped of his command, cast out by Corlys and Rhaenys after his apparent betrayal of the heirs of Dragonstone. 

And still a Velaryon, Alicent thought. Still Salt and Smoke. 

She had seen the way Meleys tore men apart.

Rhaenys had sat a dragon and called it justice, then slapped the King and called it responsibility.

Viserys had let it stand.

Somewhere in Oldtown, the candles still burned for them.

“Call the herald,” Alicent said.

Hobert’s smile was small and solemn, as if he were accepting a burden. “As you wish, Your Grace.”

He stepped away.

Moments later, the sharp crack of a staff on stone cut through the thin music.

“Silence in the hall!” the herald cried, voice ringing off the vaulted ceiling. “Her Grace, Alicent of House Hightower, Queen of the Seven Kingdoms, wishes to address the court.”

The music died at once.

Conversations strangled themselves mid-word.

Hundreds of eyes swung towards her. 

Aegon straightened a fraction, wine-daze thinning at the promise of spectacle.

Helaena had gone oddly twitchy, her eyes watering some.

Aemond’s eyes flicked from his mother to the empty chair at Rhaenyra’s side and then to the children, as if he already understood that whatever happened next would stain them, not him.

Alicent rose slowly, green silk falling in measured waves around her.

She felt the old training settle over her bones, chin high, shoulders even, voice pitched to reach the farthest corner of the throne room without needing to shout.

“My lords. My ladies.” She inclined her head, first toward Viserys, then toward the empty seat where Rhaenyra had sat. “This night was meant only for joy, for the celebration of the heirs’ name day. The gods, it seems, have other designs. We are reminded that life and death walk close beside one another.”

There were whispers at that, a few pious nods.

“You have all seen the haste with which Princess Rhaenys and Princess Rhaenyra departed,” Alicent went on. “You have heard the whispers, that Lady Laena labors, and that there is fear for her and the babe both. I will not add to the gossip with my own.” She laid a hand over her heart. “We shall pray for them instead.”

A chorus of agreement rolled through the crowd, if only out of habit.

Beside the throne, Hobert Hightower stepped back into view, clearing his throat.

“Your Grace,” he said, bowing. “If it please you and His Majesty… there is another matter. One that touches upon Driftmark. Upon fear. And upon the safety of those who do not have dragons to bear them away.”

Alicent turned her head as if just now noticing him. “Speak, Lord Hobert.”

Hobert inclined himself again to Viserys, making a show of deference.

“Not in my own name, Your Grace,” he said. “In that of a vassal who came to me on his knees, believing himself unsafe to seek justice from the very house whose favor he had lost.”

At his signal, the guards at the doors stepped aside.

Vaemond Velaryon walked into the light.

He had lost weight since she had last seen him.

The fine bones of his face looked sharper, as if the sea-wind had carved him down out of spite. His two sons shadowed him, one on each side.

Taller, broad-shouldered Monterys Velaryon with his jaw clenched tight.

Slighter Vaeron Velaryon with his gaze fixed on the floor. 

Corlys went rigid in his seat.

The Emberguard cinched their ring a fraction, enough that a few lords behind them had to shuffle back a step.

“Your Grace.” Vaemond stopped at the foot of the throne and bowed low, deeper to Viserys than he did to Alicent, but only just. “I thank you for granting me your ear.”

“We have not yet given it,” Selwyn replied on the other side of the dais.

Viserys blinked down at the man, confusion marring his expression. 

“I thought you… banished,” he said, squinting as if that might bring the memory closer. “Corlys did decree you stay from his kin.”

A hint of anger touched Vaemond’s expression.

“I was cast from Driftmark, Your Grace, that is true. But I am still of your realm. I sought Lord Hobert’s counsel in Oldtown, believing his house… unafraid of dragons.” His gaze flicked, just once, toward the doors where the night sky still glimmered faintly, as if he could see Meleys’ silhouette there.

Hobert folded his hands.

 “He came to me in fear,” he said gravely. “I told him if he would accuse a princess, he must do it before his king, not in shadows.”

A low ripple went through the hall at that word.

Accuse.

Alicent kept her expression calm, the very picture of reluctant duty.

“Lord Vaemond,” she said. “This is not a day for petty quarrels. If you would drag your family’s shame back into the light, be sure you do so for cause, not spite.”

“Shame, Your Grace,” Vaemond said, lifting his head, “is why I am here.”

His eyes snagged on the children clustered by Corlys’ chair.

Aemon stiffened under the weight of it.

Aenar clutched his ship tighter.

Aemma’s fingers clutched her pendant.

Aerion’s fork had frozen half-way to his mouth, forgotten cabbage swaying. 

Corlys did not merely rise, he lunged half out of his seat. One hand slamming down on the carved arm so hard the wood gave a protesting crack.

The other hand had already gone to the hilt of the short sword at his hip, fingers curling around it with the easy, thoughtless certainty of a man who had drawn steel on decks that pitched under his feet and in storms that swallowed lesser men whole.

“You will keep your eyes off my grandchildren,” he snarled.

The sound of it was not courtly at all. It was the deep, rough note of a man who had ordered men thrown overboard at night and not lost sleep for it.

Several courtiers nearest him recoiled back as if from a physical blow.

Two Emberguard shifted their stance without thinking, weapons tilting, not toward Corlys, but toward anyone foolish enough to step between him and Vaemond if steel cleared leather.

“Lord Corlys,” Selwyn said sharply. “Sit.”

Rhaenys was gone. Rhaenyra was gone.

The awareness of their absence pressed on the room like a thumb on a bruise.

Vaemond bowed his head a fraction in Corlys’ direction. “I mean no ill toward the little ones,” he lied. “But the realm does ask what blood runs in their veins.”

Laenor moved before the children even realized they had shrunk back.

He stepped around the chairs in a swift, ungraceful arc, planting himself between Vaemond’s gaze and the four of them.

Cloak flaring, one hand braced on the table, the other half-lifted as if he meant to push them farther behind him and simply hadn’t decided which child to touch first.

“Careful, Uncle,” he said, voice low and shaking. Up close, the tremor in it only made the words more dangerous. “Choose your words. That ‘realm’ you speak for is my children’s world. You stain it, you answer to me.”

Aemon’s hand had found the back of Laenor’s tunic in a tight, unconscious grip. Aenar’s ship pressed against Laenor’s hip now instead of his own chest. Aemma’s fists tight on Aerion’s sleeve.

Hobert cleared his throat again, drawing attention back to him before the room could tip one step further toward blood.

“Lord Vaemond came to me,” he said, “fearful on how to present the truth. He had seen what the Red Queen does in the name of justice. He had seen what became of men who question the Princess Rhaenys.”

“Fear,” Selwyn said sharply. “Of what?”

Vaemond drew in a breath.

His sons shifted at his sides, Monterys’ hand tightening briefly on Vaeron’s shoulder.

“Of losing Driftmark,” he said simply. “Of seeing it passed not to true Velaryon blood, but to children born of sin. Of oaths bent until they break.”

A hiss of indrawn breath ran through the room.

Alicent let her eyes widen just enough. “You speak of… adultery,” she said softly, as if tasting the word with distaste. “Of false heirs.”

“I speak of what men murmur in the training yards and on the city walls,” Vaemond replied. “Of a princess who lies with whom she pleases on Dragonstone and flies from this hall rather than answer for any of it.”

The accusation landed in the space Rhaenyra had left behind.

Laenor lurched forward only stopping because Ser Corren grabbed his arm. 

“You bastard,” he said, voice cracking under the weight of too many things at once. “You dare—”

“Prince-Consort Laenor.”

The voice that cut across his was not Hobert’s. It was quieter, and carried further.

Archmaester Vaegon had risen.

He did not shout. He simply stood, chain glinting faintly at his throat, the links of old Valyrian steel catching the candlelight like a second, subtler crown.

“Before this hall chokes on tavern gossips,” he said, “let us remember where we are.”

His gaze slid to Vaemond. “You name adultery and false issue in the king’s presence. You understand that in any realm worth the ink on its laws, such a charge is treason if it fails. Do you come with witnesses? Documents? A named paramour? Or only with what frightened men mutter into their cups?”

Color climbed Vaemond’s neck. “I come with my eyes,” he snapped. “And with the knowledge that Driftmark is not a bauble to be passed between the Princess, her uncle, and his wife—”

“Your eyes,” Vaegon interrupted, “have misread letters before.”

The hall stirred.

Vaegon did not look away from him. “It has not been so many risings since you were stripped of command and exiled from Driftmark for… what was it called in the decree?”

He glanced to Selwyn Tarth, who already had a parchment in hand. “Ah. Grave misjudgment concerning the safety of the royal issue.”

He let that sink in.

“You speak of fear of dragons,” Vaegon went on. “Others might remember more clearly the fear of knives in the dark.”

Hobert’s mouth thinned.

“Archmaester, his exile is known,” Hobert said. “That does not mean the whispers are nothing. The pattern around these births still troubles the realm.”

“A pattern,” Vaegon said, “is what men see when they join unrelated dots to suit the picture they wish to paint.”

He faced the hall now, not just Hobert.

“Let us speak of patterns, then. The triplets were conceived after a public wedding, born into a union blessed by the Faith and by this very throne. Their grandsire, Lord of Driftmark himself, who has more right than any of you to guard the name Velaryon, has raised no protest. Their blood woke dragons. They favor both their houses. Yet here you sit, squinting at them like tradesmen arguing over a dye lot. Either you are blind, or you are pretending to be, because it suits some quieter fear in you better than the truth.”

He tilted his head, considering Vaemond as if he were a puzzle in an illuminated manuscript.

“Against this, we have a banished second son of Driftmark walking into the hall of a Hightower to complain of dragons while still smelling of the sea he lost. Forgive me if I do not place these scales on the same arm of the balance.”

The first sound was a choked, unwilling snort from some minor Stormlands knight who recovered too late to hide it.

It cracked the silence.

A nervous titter followed from the Reachmen’s corner, quickly smothered behind gloved hands. One of the Redwyne lords coughed into his cup, shoulders shaking.

Others did not find it funny at all.

A cluster of Oldtown men in soft green and dove-grey shifted like a single, offended animal. 

Hobert’s gaze cooled. “You would have us ignore that three of my cousins died burned,” he said, voice still mild. “That the Red Queen has killed men who stood against your favored princess.”

“I would have you remember why those men sent coin to Dragonstone at all,” Vaegon replied. 

That drew a sharper stir, though the details were still buried in half-told tales. Assassins. Letters. Blood in the dark.

Alicent’s fingers locked together.

“Archmaester,” she said, tone cool but measured. “No one here seeks to strip the princess of her place.”

“You seek to open a door,” Vaegon said, meeting her gaze, “that once opened will never shut.”

He turned back to Vaemond, voice hardening into Valryian steel. 

“If you wish to dispute the succession of Driftmark when it falls vacant, the law gives you forms and courts and years in which to do it. What the law does not give you is license to stand here, on a child’s name day, while their mother rides to the bedside of a woman in peril, and piss your fear up against their cradle in the hope the king will mistake it for rain.”

A few people actually flinched.

Two young knights from the Crownlands turned to each other in perfect, mirrored disbelief, as if to confirm the words had truly been spoken aloud and not crawled out of their own thoughts.

Even some of the more jaded lords, the ones who’d seen battlefields and brothels enough to be unshockable. Blinked once, as if committing the phrase to memory for later retelling.

On the dais, Selwyn Tarth’s brows climbed, then smoothed.

Seven save us, he thought, not without a certain grim humor. If he were willing, I’d also ask the Archmaester to take me as his apprentice.

He did not smile.

Selwyn valued his life too much for that, but some quiet, hard part of him straightened. If nothing else, it was a relief to know that in a court so mired in cowardice, someone still knew how to draw blood with words alone.

Vaemond’s mouth worked once, as if he meant to swallow his own words back down.

Hobert saw it.

Alicent did too.

She felt the moment tipping away from her.

Felt Vaegon’s cool, merciless logic beginning to settle over the hall like snow.

If it hardened, this would be one more thing she had not quite done, one more warning swallowed for the sake of peace that was never offered to her.

She heard herself speak before sense could catch up.

“Then let the record show,” Alicent said, “that he is not alone in his concern.”

Every head turned back to her.

She did not look at Vaegon. She kept her chin high, the way her father had taught her when she was a girl walking into rooms full of men twice her age.

“I am the king’s wife,” Alicent went on, each word a step she could no longer step back from. “I sit beside him. I have given him heirs the realm does not question. I have watched, year on year, as whispers grow around the Princess and her actions on Dragonstone.”

She drew a breath that felt like swallowing broken glass. “I do not say the rumors are true. I say only that as queen consort, as mother to the king’s true and acknowledged sons, I cannot pretend I have never heard them. If Lord Vaemond stands here to ask that the bloodlines of the realm be seen in clear light, then… then my name stands beside his. In petition, not rebellion. In fear, not malice.”

There it was.

Spoken.

On the throne, Viserys stared at her.

For a moment he did not look like a king, or like the shambling invalid some at court had begun to imagine when they spoke of him in private. He looked like a man who had been struck from a direction he had not thought to guard.

“Alicent,” he said, and there was no title in it.

She turned then and met his eyes.

In them she saw confusion, yes, and the weary ache of a body that hurt more often than it did not. But beneath that, she saw hurt of a different kind.

Not pride wounded at being challenged in public, but something closer to betrayal.

“You place your name,” Viserys said slowly, “beside an accusation that my daughter is an adulteress. That my grandchildren are false. Before the whole court. On the night of their name day.”

His fingers twitched on the arm of the Iron Throne as if grasping for something that was not there.

Aegon shifted uneasily.

Helaena cried, tears streaking down her face.

Aemond’s eye flicked from his mother to his nephews and back again, as if trying to reconcile two stories at once.

Vaegon broke the silence.

“Your Grace,” he said gently, but there was steel under it. “The queen is seeking to undermine your heir in front of the entire court. Doing so intentionally when Princess Rhaenyra is unable to defend her name. I urge you to take this into account fully. For the sake of your grandchildren.”

His gaze flicked toward the children.

Selwyn cleared his throat, glancing between them. “We cannot,” he said carefully, “pretend this was not spoken. The queen’s words will be carried to every corner of the realm before the week is out. Whatever we decide, we must decide knowing that.”

Viserys let his eyes close. 

When he opened them again, they shone with a wetness that had nothing to do with age.

“I am not deaf,” he said. “I have heard every filthy jest ever made about my daughter’s bed. As if Aenar’s sea-marked eyes and Aemma’s own were not Velaryon writ plain as any banner. As if Aemon himself were not the very image of his grandmother’s father, Aemon Targaryen, reborn before my eyes.”

He drew a breath that shook.

“I thought…” His voice roughened. “I thought my wife would be the one person in this hall who did not repeat it before my face.”

Alicent’s throat worked. Whatever she had meant to say withered, and then...against her better sense, found another shape.

“I do not deny these children,” she said, the words coming too fast, too thin. “I have never denied that the triplets are as they seem. But that does not mean every child she has borne is beyond question—”

Her gaze slid, almost in spite of her, to the smallest of them.

Aerion sat half-turned in his chair, feet not quite touching the floor, hair a silver tangle where he had run jam-sticky fingers through them.

The line of his nose, the cut of his mouth, the tilt of his eyes when he frowned.

All of it was Daemon Targaryen. 

He felt her looking.

The boy’s fingers tightened around his fork.

His shoulders crept up a little, as if bracing for a scold he did not understand. Confusion and the first raw edge of shame chased each other across his face.

Beside him, Aemon went very still, spine straightening. Aenar edged closer to his brother until their sleeves brushed, ship hugged hard against his chest. Aemma’s hand flew to her shell-pendant and stayed there, as if she could press herself smaller behind it.

Children did not know the shape of the word bastard, but they knew when a room had turned on them.

On the far side of the hall, Aegon’s swagger sagged.

For once his smile did not know what shape to take. He stared at his little nephews and niece if someone had knocked a tray from his hands and told him to laugh about it.

Helaena hunched in on herself, lips moving soundlessly as she watched Aerion’s shoulders creep higher.  

“…blood on the tide, no body in the foam,” she whispered to no one, fingers crushing the little bead. “Gone, not gone, gone, not gone…”

“CEASE THIS FARCE AT ONCE.”

Viserys shouted, making even the most lax coutier straighten.

He drew himself a little straighter on the throne. 

“I will not stand by while you pick through my daughter’s womb child by child like a butcher at a stall,” he said. “When you question ONE, you cast shadow on all. You do not get to choose which of my grandchildren the vultures circle.”

Color burned high in Alicent’s cheeks.

There was no graceful answer to that.

“Lord Vaemond,” Viserys went on. “You have spoken your fear. You have done so in my hall, under my protection, which is more grace than your conduct has earned.” His gaze flicked to Hobert, then back. “You will be taken to chambers and kept there until I decide what is to be done with you. You will not leave the Red Keep. You will not speak of these charges again outside the king’s council.”

Vaemond opened his mouth, then shut it at the look in Vaegon’s eyes.

“As for the question you raise,” Viserys continued, voice thick but steadier, “it will be addressed when my heir stands before me, not behind dragon wings over the sea.” He turned his head, forcing himself to look at each child in turn. “Until that time, let it be known that any man who calls my daughter’s children false under my roof will lose their tongue.”

That last came out with a rasp of the old Targaryen temper.

No one missed it.

Vaegon inclined his head, accepting that as far as they would get tonight. Selwyn exhaled slowly, already counting the knots this had made in the realm’s tangled rope.

Hobert lowered his gaze, hiding the brief, frustrated glitter there.

Alicent held herself very straight, as if her spine were the only thing she had left to lean on. She had wanted the question spoken. She had it now. But she had not quite imagined what it would look like, hanging in the air between herself and her husband.

Vaemond should have bowed.

Any sensible man would have.

Instead, something in him snapped.

“House Velaryon is not a gilded ornament for your dragon princess,” he said, the words bursting out of him like a wound gone to rot. “It is blood you are squandering for her whims.”

The last word echoed, too naked.

A few people flinched as if he’d struck the throne itself.

Laenor stepped forward. 

Every trace of polite restraint burned away.

“My dragon princess,” he bit out, “is the only reason you still speak that name at all. It was her alliance that kept Driftmark at the center of the realm and put Velaryon blood in line for the throne.”

Venom flooded Vaemond’s face.

“Driftmark stood on its own long before she ever warmed its hearth,” he spat. “Your father bent knee to a crown that never cared for us until it wanted our sails and our gold. Two dragon whores draped in our name while the sea that built it is left to drown.”

That landed like a slap.

Corlys surged forward with a hissed curse, but Laenor was already moving, angling himself between Vaemond and his sire.

Between Vaemond and the children, as if his body alone could hold the line.

“You speak of bending?” Laenor laughed, a sharp, ugly sound that had nothing of humor in it. “Look at yourself, Uncle. A cast-off second son clinging to the edges of other men’s halls. You had command and lost it. You had a place and squandered it. You have no ship, no seat, no honor left that you did not piss away chasing shadows in Oldtown. All you have now are your bitter little stories.”

His lip curled.

“You are nothing but a jealous, empty man,” he said, each word a knife. “You will never be Lord of Driftmark. You will never be more than a cautionary tale my sons are taught so they know what failure smells like.”

The whole world seemed to fall into nothingness.

Something wild flickered across Vaemond’s face. Humiliation, rage, a lifetime of second-son resentment finding a single, disastrous path out.

He moved.

There was no bow, no more words.

Just the sudden, ugly lurch of a body breaking decorum. Vaemond surging forward, hand snatching for the dagger at his belt, shoulder dropped like a man going into a tackle on a rain-slick deck.

“Father, no!” Vaemond’s eldest son, Monterys Velaryon, cried, voice cracking, hand shooting out too late to catch him.

Chairs scraped. Someone shouted.

The children screamed.

The Emberguard moved.

Chairs went over with a crash as red cloaks surged inward, training shredding the last of the court’s pretense. Steel hissed free. Ser Corren vaulted the table rather than go around it; Ser Myles drove straight through a tangle of lords, muscling them aside with his shield.

“Aemon,” Corlys barked, or meant to.

It came out more like a roar.

He did not have to say more.

Hands seized small shoulders and waists. Aemon, Aenar, Aemma, and Aerion were snatched up so fast their feet left the floor.

One under each arm, one over a shoulder, another dragged bodily back behind a wall of mail.

Aemma’s pendant flew off her neck, the clasp breaking. Aenar’s ship went flying, skidding across the rushes to crack against a boot. Aerion’s fork clattered from nerveless fingers, streaking the air with a line of cabbage and gravy.

They screamed for their father.

Laenor did not hear them at first.

All his focus was on the glint of the dagger in Vaemond's hand.

He caught the first lunge with his instinct, not his eyes. His body turning, putting himself between the blade and the children without thought.

Steel flashed.

Pain hit like white fire.

The knife kissed across his face, quick and brutal, from cheekbone to the bridge of his nose.

Blood went in his eye in a hot sheet.

The world smeared red.

He still did not step back.

He grabbed for Vaemond's wrist, fingers digging in, the two of them locked chest to chest in an ugly, graceless grapple that had nothing of courtly training in it. Only the rough, desperate strength of men who had both fought on real decks with real blood underfoot.

"Guards!" someone shouted, far too late.

Vaemond snarled, teeth bared, and wrenched his arm down and in.

Laenor managed to drag the blade away from his heart.

It drove up instead, under his ribs.

The sound it made was small and wet.

Laenor's breath left him in a sharp, astonished grunt, more like someone who had been winded than a man stabbed.

He looked down, blinked at the hilt pressed between them, at Vaemond's hand still on it, then up again.

Across the chaos of bodies and cloaks and flashing steel, his children saw his eyes go wide.

And, stupidly, Laenor's first thought was that he should have stepped two paces to the left.

Farther from the children.

Somewhere they could not see the way his knees went out from under him.

Aemon twisted in Ser Corren's grip hard enough to bruise, trying to get back to him. Aenar was shrieking wordless, high and broken. Aemma's hands were fisted in the front of Ser Myles' cloak, nails digging through wool, her hair in her face.

Aerion's wail cracked on his own name for his father "Kepa!" until it was just sound.

Laenor reached for them.

His hand came away from his own side slick and red.

For one terrible, frozen moment, the triplets and Aerion watched their father sway, watched the color drain out of his face faster than the blood soaking his doublet, watched his knees buckle as if some unseen rope had been cut.

He fell.

The impact was not grand.

No thunder.

Just the dull, ugly thud of a body hitting stone and the clatter of his sword hilt against the floor.

Laenor lay on his side, one hand pressed to his ribs as if he could simply hold himself together by will. Blood seeped between his fingers in a slow, dark spill that turned quick and eager as his heartbeat hammered against the wound.

“Aid him!” someone shouted.

The Emberguard did not move toward him.

They moved for the children.

Aemon fought like a hooked fish, heels drumming against Corren’s greaves. “Let me go, let me go, he is hurt, he is hurt, I have to—”

“You look at me, my prince,” Corren said through his teeth, already turning his body to shield them. “Not at that. You look at me.”

Aenar was beyond words, sobs ripping his chest raw, shipless hands clawing at armor. Aemma twisted in Ser Myles’ hold, wild eyes fixed on the splash of color blooming beneath her father’s body. Aerion had gone almost limp with screaming, face blotched red and wet, small fists beating against the man’s side.

Laenor tried to rise.

His elbow slid in his own blood.

He managed to get half up, onto one knee, then faltered, breath sawing in and out in sharp, useless gasps. The wound under his ribs was pouring now.

Each heartbeat forced more red onto the pale floor.

Vaemond yanked at the dagger, trying to pull it free for another strike.

He did not get the chance.

Corlys hit him like a wave.

The Lord of the Tides came in from the side, shoulder slamming into Vaemond’s chest with enough force to snap the other man away from Laenor and send them both skidding. They crashed into a table; goblets toppled, wine and blood mingling in a sticky rain.

Vaemond wheezed as the air left him.

Corlys did not pause.

His fist, hardened by decades of rope and swordwork, smashed into Vaemond’s mouth.

Something cracked. Teeth, maybe. Bone.

“Bastard,” Corlys spat, voice shredded. “You treacherous whelp. You dare. MY SON. In front of my grandchildren.”

He reached for his own dagger.

“Lord Corlys, stand down!” one of the Kingsguard barked, finally forcing his way through the chaos, sword half raised.

“Let him,” Vaegon snapped, before sense could smother rage, then bit the word back. “No. Seize Vaemond. Take him alive.”

It was not mercy.

It was calculation.

Two white-cloaked knights and an Emberguard slammed into Vaemond together, dragging him out from under Corlys’ hands before the older man could close his fingers around steel. They pinned him facedown, knee in his back, arms wrenched behind him until the tendons screamed.

Vaemond thrashed. Blood from his split lip smeared on the floor. “He struck first, he placed himself between—”

“Silence,” one of the Kingsguard said, shoving his face harder into the stone.

Monterys Velaryon had come unstuck.

Vaemond’s eldest son stared at Laenor as if the world had shifted under his feet and refused to settle. His face had gone sheet-white beneath its sun-brown, lips trembling, eyes fixed on the blossoming pool of red.

“Lord, please—” he blurted, and it was not clear whether he spoke to Laenor, to Corlys, or to the gods. His hands hovered in the air, empty, useless. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. He was only meant to speak, I swear it, I swear—”

Beside him, Vaeron had not moved at all.

The younger son stood rooted where the guards had first left him, fingers locked around the back of a chair so tightly the knuckles showed white. His eyes were huge, unblinking, fixed on the dark widening stain under Laenor as if it were something crawling toward him.

Monterys hit the edge of a toppled chair and went down hard, scrambling up again with blood on his palms.

His gaze flicked to the children then.

Aemon thrashing, Aenar keening, Aemma clawing at Ser Myles, Aerion’s voice gone to a raw, breaking sob and something in Monterys’ face simply came apart.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered again, hoarse and wild, to them, to Laenor, to anyone who would hear it. “I didn’t want— I didn’t—”

Corlys staggered back a step from Vaemond, chest heaving, eyes wild. He looked as if he might tear free of the hands now gripping his shoulders and finish it bare-handed.

“Lord of the Tides,” Selwyn barked, the Hand’s voice cracking like a whip. “Your son. See to your son.”

The words cut through the roar in Corlys’ head.

He spun.

Laenor was on his back now.

Someone, Vaegon, he realized distantly, had rolled him.

Fingers pressed hard around the wound, trying to stem the flow. Blood soaked the Archmaester’s hands, his chain, the front of his robes.

It kept coming anyway, dark and determined, seeping between his fingers.

“Pressure,” Vaegon said, not looking up. His voice had gone very flat. “More linen. Now. Tear the tablecloth, I do not care. You there, keep his head turned. If he chokes on his own blood I will be very cross.”

It was the kind of sharp, dry instruction he had given a hundred times to apprentices over jars of leeches and jars of ink. It sounded obscene here.

Corlys dropped to his knees in the spill, heedless of his own boots, his own doublet. His hands went to Laenor’s shoulder, his face, as if he could hold him in place by palm alone.

“Laenor. Laenor, look at me,” he said, voice breaking. “Son. Boy. Look at me.”

Laenor’s eyes found him with an effort.

They were clouded at the edges already, the pupils blown wide from shock, but they tried to focus.

His mouth moved.

No sound came out at first. Then a wet cough, red on his lips.

“Sorry,” he whispered, or seemed to. It was barely breath at all.

“For what?” Corlys demanded, raw. “You have nothing to be sorry for. I should have killed him when he first set foot on my decks. Do not you dare take his folly onto yourself.”

Vaegon shifted his pressure, felt the slip in the pulse beneath his fingers. Too fast, then stumbling.

“Maesters!” he snapped over his shoulder, as if he were not one himself. “If any of you have ever done more than poultice a boil, relocate your feet next to me.”

He did not raise his voice. He did not need to. Men scrambled anyway.

On the other side of the human wall, the children strained against Emberguard arms, small bodies bucking like colts at the halter.

“Kepa!” Aerion sobbed, reaching with both hands toward the glimpse he had of Laenor’s boots. “Kepa, get up, get up, please get up, I will eat all the cabbage, I swear, just get up…” He said it like a bargain, as if the gods dealt in vegetables, as if swallowing every bite he had ever refused could somehow be traded back for this one moment before the knife went in.

Aemon had gone hoarse, voice gone rough and thick. “Let me go,” he rasped at Ser Corren. “He needs me. He needs us. Let me go.”

“Your duty is to live, my prince,” Corren told him, voice thickened with his own grief. “You do that, and let your grandsire see to your father.”

Aemon dragged in a ragged breath and swallowed the scream clawing at his throat. If living was all he was allowed to do, then he would live for this moment. He would remember every drop of blood on that floor and never forgive those who spilled it. 

Aenar had stopped sobbing in great ragged gulps and started making a thin keening noise that did not sound like it belonged to anything human. Aemma buried her face in Ser Myles’ shoulder, but her eyes found every gap between cloaks, every flash of red on stone.

She saw the way her father’s hand slipped from Corlys’ sleeve.

She saw it hit the floor with a soft, final sound.

Aemma screamed.

The sound tore straight through the hall, through the brittle shell of ceremony. The nearest torches jumped high in their brackets, flames stretching tall and thin, edges searing near-white as if something unseen had drawn a sharp breath through every fire at once.

A hairline crack whispered across the stone by her feet, thin as a quill stroke, as if the hall itself had flinched from her grief.

Viserys was moving before he knew he meant to.

For years, men had watched him rise slowly, carefully, as though the Iron Throne might tear something vital from him if he shifted too fast. Now he all but lurched down its steps, one hand scraping the jagged metal for balance, snagging his sleeve, drawing his own thin line of blood that he did not feel.

“Your Grace—” a Kingsguard started, reaching to steady him.

Viserys shook him off.

The movement jolted his crown loose.

It slid, caught for a heartbeat on his ear, then toppled.

Gold rang sharp against the steps as it bounced once, twice, and spun away down the stairs, coming to rest crookedly against a lower spike of the throne like some discarded bauble.

He did not look back at it.

Aegon was white to the lips.

Helaena had drawn her knees up on the chair and curled around herself, rocking in tiny, useless motions.

Aemond watched his father stumble past them without so much as a glance. Something dark and complicated flickering behind his eyes at the way the king’s arms were already reaching for Rhaenyra’s son.

Aerion’s broken “Kepa, Kepa, please—”

Aenar’s thin keening.

Aemon’s hoarse, furious “Let me go, let me go!”

Aemma sobbing so hard she hiccupped around the sound.

All along the walls, candles blazed.

Wax ran in sudden, fat tears.

Deep in the hot bones of Dragonstone, far below stone and sea and ceremony, an older fire seemed to turn over in its sleep and listen.

“Make way!” Viserys snarled, voice rough with more than age.

Courtiers stumbled aside on instinct, shocked into clearing a path they had not thought he could still demand. He pushed through them, almost shouldering one lord to the floor, and came up hard against the living wall of Emberguard around the children.

“Stand aside,” he barked.

Ser Corren turned, eyes wide, Aemon and Aenar clutched against his chest. Instinct warred with obedience. Then he dropped to one knee, bowing his head enough to let Viserys see past him.

Laenor on the floor.

Vaegon on his knees at his side, hands buried in blood.

Corlys bent over his son’s face, saying his name like a prayer and a command both.

Too much red. Far too much.

Viserys’ throat closed.

“Give him to me,” he said, and reached for the nearest child without thinking whose it was.

It was Aerion.

Ser Myles shifted just enough for the king to haul the boy into his arms. Aerion grabbed onto him like a drowning child clutching wreckage, legs wrapping around Viserys’ waist, little hands fisting in his cloak.

He was heavy.

Viserys’ back screamed protest.

He held tighter.

Aemon’s eyes met his over Corren’s shoulder, shiny with tears.

“Grandsire,” Aemon rasped. “Please. He… he’s—”

“I know,” Viserys said, and his voice broke on it. “I know, kessa, kessa. I see.”

He dragged his gaze away from them and back to the bleeding knot of men on the floor.

Vaemond was pinned facedown now, white cloaks and red cloaks both holding him there, arms wrenched behind his back. He still strained against them, chest heaving, blood from his ruined mouth smearing the stone.

Viserys’ vision went sharp and white at the edges.

“Take him,” he said.

No one moved.

He bared his teeth. “Take him. To the black cells. Chain him. Gag him. If he so much as looks at my kin again, I will see him fed to the first dragon I can coax from its lair.”

The Kingsguard did not hesitate a second time.

They hauled Vaemond up by his bound arms. He stumbled, crying out, boots slipping in wine and blood as they dragged him away.

Viserys shifted Aerion higher on his hip, the child’s tears soaking into the torn silk at his shoulder, and turned his head.

Hobert Hightower stood not far off, a little apart from the green-clad cluster. Hands folded, eyes lowered in a posture that might have passed for humility if Viserys had not just watched the man feed this fire.

“You,” Viserys said.

Hobert looked up. For the first time, he seemed unsure of the ground beneath his feet.

“Your Grace,” he began, mustering injured dignity. “What happened here is a tragedy, but I swear to you—”

“You brought him to me,” Viserys cut across, voice low and shaking. “You took a man banished for endangering royal blood and brought him here, on this night, to say aloud what cowards have been muttering in corners for years. Do not dare stand there and call yourself bystander.”

Hobert’s mouth fluttered. “I counselled him only that the law must be heard—”

“You counselled him to spit in my grandchildren’s faces,” Viserys snapped. “And now their father lies dying on my floor.”

Aerion sobbed against his neck at the word father.

Viserys closed his eyes briefly, steadied himself, then opened them again, sharper than before.

“Ser Willis. Ser Arryk,” he said. “Arrest Lord Hobert Hightower. Take him to the black cells. He does not leave them until I command it. He does not see his sister. He does not see Vaemond. If his brother in Oldtown wants him free, he can send me a petition.”

The green side of the hall took the words like a blow to the chest.

Hobert actually rocked back.

“Your Grace, this is—”

“Guards.” Viserys did not shout the word. He pushed it out like a command to a dragon. The white cloaks moved. Hobert flinched as hands closed on his arms, but he did not fight. Not here. Not now.

Viserys’ gaze swung to Alicent.

She was still by the throne, hands clasped, face pale beneath the green silk, eyes huge. When he looked at her, truly looked, he saw all of it tangled together. The frightened girl with a book, the queen with a knife of a father, the woman who had just let her eyes settle on Aerion as she spoke of “other children.”

“Queen Alicent,” he said.

Her chin lifted by instinct, as if bracing for a blow.

“You will go to your solar,” Viserys told her. “Now. You will bar the door behind you. You will not hold court. You will not summon counsel. You will not see Lord Hobert. You will not see Lord Vaemond. If you pray, the gods can hear you well enough through wood.”

She opened her mouth. “Viserys, I only meant—”

He tightened his hold on Aerion, feeling the small, frantic heartbeat hammering against his ribs, and cut across her.

“What you meant lies bleeding at my feet,” he said. “Go.”

His words hung there between them, heavy as chains.

Then Alicent dipped in something that wanted to be a curtsy and could not quite manage it, turned, and walked from the hall. The train of her gown dragged through the blood-slick rushes, leaving a faint smear of green on red.

Viserys watched her go only long enough to be sure she would not look back.

He turned again, stumbling the last few steps to the loose edge of the Emberguard circle, lowering himself with a hiss to sit on the cold stone floor among his grandchildren.

“Put them down,” he rasped.

Ser Corren and Ser Myles obeyed at once, lowering Aemon, Aenar, and Aemma into the ragged circle of his cloak. Aerion was still clinging to him. Viserys let him.

Aemma hit the stone on her knees and immediately reached for her throat. Her fingers found only bare skin and the sharp, broken ends of the chain. She twisted away from him, small hands scrabbling blindly over blood-slick rushes. “My heart,” she whispered, breath hitching. “Where is my heart—?”

He gathered them in as best he could with arms that were not made for holding four children, pulling them close so their faces were turned into him and not toward the red-soaked figure on the floor.

“Do not look,” he told them, voice rough and shaking and as gentle as he could make it. “Do not look, ñuha zaldrīzes. Your Kepa needs you to breathe. That is your task now. Breathe.”

Around them, the hall roiled with orders and sobbing and the hurried, hopeless work of men trying to hold a life in place as it slipped.

If anyone there had possessed the right words for it, they might have said it felt like a gaze laid over the scene from within every brazier and candle.

Not the king’s, nor the realm’s, but something older that had first sparked these children into being and was loath, now, to see them broken.

In the middle of it, the King of the Seven Kingdoms sat on the floor with blood on his hands and three grandchildren pressed to his ribs. A fourth wrapped around his neck, and for the first time in a long time, he felt very clearly what it meant to fail.

Not as a ruler, but as a father whose house was tearing itself apart in front of its children.

And somewhere, unseen, the fire watched and remembered their names.

---

The sea hit Dragonstone like a threat and a promise both.

By the time Meleys’s claws struck the black rock of the yard, the impact shuddered up through the stone, cracking the outer edge of the landing ground.

The Red Queen came in low and hard.

Rhaenys was already unstrapping herself before the dragon had fully stilled, every movement clipped and efficient.

Syrax dropped from the cloud-snarled sky a breath later, golden hide catching the last scraps of light.

Rhaenyra slid down too fast, boots catching, and hit her knees and hands roughly on the black stone.

The air here tasted of fire and something sourer under it.

Blood, her mind supplied.

Or fear.

“How long?” Rhaenys snapped. No greeting, no wasted courtesies. “Since that letter was sent.”

The steward waiting at the foot of the stairs flinched. “Almost half a day, Princess. The rider took a fresh horse in the Kingsroad village, and the ship had good wind but the channel, it was—”

“Half a day.” Rhaenys’ mouth thinned. “Then she has been in labor a day and a night already.”

Rhaenyra squeezed her eyes shut to stop the tears. 

“Where is Maester Geradys?” she asked.

“In the birthing chamber, Princess. With the midwives and the… Essosi healers.” His eyes flicked, uneasy, to Rhaenys. “They quarrel.”

“Good,” Rhaenys said. “If no one is shouting, they have given up.”

They did not walk.

They climbed the steps two at a time, Rhaenys a streak of dark leather and white hair, Rhaenyra half a step behind. 

The corridors of Dragonstone swallowed noise strangely, sound bouncing off the old volcanic stone and coming back distorted. The closer they drew to Laena’s chambers, the more those echoes turned specific.

A woman crying out, harsh and raw.

A second voice, lower, rhythmic.

Someone counting a breath, a push, a heartbeat.

Someone else swearing in a language that curled like smoke.

Baela and Rhaena were outside the door.

The twins sat on a bench beneath a smoking torch.

Small feet not reaching the floor, backs pressed together as if they had fused there.

A harried nurse hovered uselessly nearby with a cup of watered wine that neither child had touched.

Rhaena’s face was blotched, lashes clumped with dried tears. Baela’s was dry, jaw locked so tight it had to hurt. She stared at the opposite wall as if she meant to set it alight by will alone.

Both their heads snapped up when they saw the dragons’ riders come.

“Grandmother,” Baela said. The word came out on the tail-end of a held breath, more relief than greeting.

Rhaenys’ stride did not slow. She only veered just enough to put one hand on each small head as she passed, fingers brushing curls, a fleeting blessing, an anchor in motion.

Rhaenyra stopped.

It hit her then, harder than the wind off Syrax’s wings.

The sight of them. Laena’s girls. Daemon’s girls. The lives they had made together, impossibly, out of stolen time and stubborn want.

Baela’s nose, Daemon’s exactly, scrunched in furious worry. Rhaena’s wide, sea blue eyes, Laena’s softness stamped on a face that had learned already how to cry quietly.

Their hands were laced between their bodies so tightly their hands shook. As if unclasping them would let the door open and swallow their mother whole.

Rhaenyra knelt.

The stone bit through leather at once, a sharp little pain, welcome for being simple.

She took their joined hands in both of hers without prying them apart, wrapping their clenched fingers in her own.

“Ñuha riña,” she said softly. “My girls.”

Rhaena’s breath hitched. Baela’s throat worked, as if she were chewing back a sob and would rather bite through it than let it out.

“How long have you been sitting here?” Rhaenyra asked.

Rhaena’s eyes flicked to the door. “Since they said the babe would not turn,” she whispered. “Maester Geradys said Grandmother should be told. They sent the rider then.”

“That was… before the sun moved,” Baela added, voice rough. “They would not let us stay inside. They said it was no place for children.”

Her mouth twisted on the last word, as if it offended her.

Rhaenyra swallowed.

Before the sun moved. Hours and hours, then, with nothing but the sound of Laena’s pain bleeding through stone.

A cry came from within the chamber, long and ragged. It tore through the corridor and went straight down Rhaenyra’s spine. She had labored enough herself. She knew the tones by now. This was not the wild, cresting sound of a body doing what it must. This was the kind that came when the body had gone past must and into something crueler.

Rhaena flinched.

“Why are they hurting her?” Rhaena whispered. “She didn’t do anything bad.”

No one answered. Rhaenyra felt something go cold and still inside her. Laena had flown dragons and argued with gods and laughed in the faces of men who tried to tame her. 

Baela's chin lifted a fraction, like Daemon’s before he smiled at someone he meant to cut.

“Is Muna going to die?” Baela asked.

The question was small and plain and hopelessly large.

The nurse made a faint, strangled sound, as if she meant to scold her for the word and could not find the breath.

Rhaenyra’s throat closed.

Laena laughing in her arms, salt wind tangling their hair together.

Laena saying, You will not keep me from a dragon’s back with a babe in me, Rhaenyra, I was born in the saddle.

Daemon’s hand on both their waists, smug and softer than he would ever admit.

“I will not lie to you,” Rhaenyra said at last. The words scraped on the way out. “It is dangerous. The babe comes wrong. Your mother is tired, and the men in that room are not clever enough by half for what she is asking of them.”

Baela’s fingers spasmed in her grip.

Rhaenyra tightened her own, as if she could hold the girl’s anger steady instead of letting it splinter her.

“But,” she went on, forcing her voice to keep its shape, “your mother is Laena Velaryon. She has flown Vhagar through squalls that would drown fleets. She has ridden fire older than kings. She has not bent her head to anything she did not first choose. Not even to me. Not even to your father.”

A flicker, then, in Baela’s eyes.

A memory of Laena laughing.

Of Laena arguing with Daemon on the training yard.

Of Laena brushing their hair and saying, You are mine and the world will adjust.

“She is stubborn,” Rhaenyra said. “She will fight. Your grandmother and I will see that every man and woman in that chamber fights with her. That is what I can promise.”

Rhaena stared at her, tears starting fresh.

“Will you stay?” she whispered. “Last time you were here when Aemma was sick. You made the maester listen. Mama says you make people listen.”

Something inside Rhaenyra cracked at that, clean and deep.

“I will not leave this corridor,” she said. “Not while your mother fights. If they try to push me out, I will set Syrax in the yard and let her roar until every stone on this island shakes.”

Baela made a sound that was almost, almost a laugh.

Rhaenyra leaned forward and pressed her forehead briefly to their joined hands.

When she straightened, her eyes burned.

“Listen to me,” she said. “Whatever happens in that room, you are not alone. You have me. You have your Grandmother and Grandsire. You have your Kepa.”

Rhaenyra’s voice was shaking.

“You have four siblings in King’s Landing who will raise the Keep about your ears if I do not bring you word,” she added, softer. “Aemon would declare war on the maesters themselves for you. Aenar would steal every ship in the harbor. Aemma and Aerion would help.”

Rhaena gave a wet, hiccuping laugh at that image.

Baela’s shoulders eased by a fraction.

A soft rustle sounded behind them. Valaena Velaryon, Laena’s young cousin, had risen from the bench where she had been sitting with the nurse, hands folded tight around a cup of watered wine gone untouched. Her sea-pale eyes were red at the edges, but her back was very straight.

“Go on,” Rhaenyra said, nodding to the nurse first, then to Valaena. “Take them to the warm room down the hall. Let them wash their faces. Feed them something that is not fear.”

Valaena dipped her head, silver hair slipping over one shoulder.

“Come, little cousins,” she said gently. “We will not go far.”

Baela’s fingers tightened once, hard, around Rhaenyra’s.

“You will come back if something changes,” Baela said. It was not a plea. It was a command from a five-year-old who already understood that news was a weapon if held too long.

“I will come,” Rhaenyra said. “You have my word as Princess of Dragonstone.”

Baela nodded. She stood, dragging Rhaena up with her. Valaena stepped in on their other side, one hand light on Rhaena’s shoulder, and let the nurse herd them all away in a slow, reluctant shuffle.

Rhaenyra watched them until they turned the corner and vanished.

Only then did she let herself look at the door.

Laena was on the other side of that wood. The woman she loved. The woman Daemon loved. The center of so many of the futures she had allowed herself to imagine when she was foolish enough to believe they were owed time.

Rhaenyra set her hand to the stone beside the frame, feeling the faint tremor of motion within. Water in a shaken cup. Breath. Struggle.

“Hold, Laena,” she breathed, barely sound. “Hold, lēkia. We are here.”

Then she straightened, wiped her hands once on her leathers as if she could rub the ache from them, and pushed the birthing chamber door open.

Heat pressed at Rhaenyra’s face the instant she stepped inside. 

Someone had dragged in braziers to keep the air warm for the babe. The flames guttered, making the shadows twitch.

Laena lay in the center of it.

The great bed had been shoved against the wall to make room for a lower pallet, the kind used in the village houses for births. Sheets were already stained through to the straw beneath.

Laena’s hair clung to her temples in wet ropes.

Her shift was bunched around her hips, dark with old blood and fresh. Her hands were knotted in the linen, knuckles white. Sweat tracked down the long line of her throat.

Her eyes were open.

Rhaenyra saw only that. The dazed, furious brightness there, like a woman riding out a storm that would not break.

“Rhaenyra,” Laena rasped, voice wrecked. “You took your time.”

The attempt at a smile cracked at the edges.

Rhaenyra crossed the space between them without feeling the floor under her feet.

“Laena,” she breathed. She took her hand, ignoring the slick of sweat and whatever else stained her fingers, and squeezed. “I came as soon as I had the letter.”

“You always arrive at the last,” Laena said. There was a half-laugh in it that turned to a thin cry as a contraction caught her. Her back arched. The tendons in her neck stood out sharp.

“Not this time,” Rhaenyra said. “I’m here now.”

One of the foreign women moved forward. 

She was short and spare, hair plaited tight under a scarf the color of burnt copper. Her hands smelled of unfamiliar herbs, sharp and bitter, clinging to the air.

“The babe is turned,” she said in thick, careful Common. “Back to the world, feet first. Head stuck high. The labor is strong, but the way is wrong.”

Her companion, taller, darker, with bracelets that chimed softly when she moved, made a low, irritated sound at Geradys without needing words for it.

“We told him hours ago to let us turn the babe,” the taller woman said. “He pours poppy and prays instead.”

“I gave her milk of the poppy when the pains first grew cruel,” Maester Geradys snapped. “It is not a cattle-yard, to grab and wrench at random. The bones of the babe—”

“The bones of the mother,” Rhaenys cut in, voice sharp as cut glass.

Rhaenyra had not even heard her enter.

Now Rhaenys stood at the foot of the pallet. Her eyes skimmed over Laena’s body with the quick, assessing look of a woman who had lost too much blood once and never forgotten the taste.

“How bad?” she asked.

The shorter healer’s face pinched. “Her strength rises, falls, rises again. Too long. Like holding breath under water.”

“Where is Daemon?” Rhaenyra asked quietly.

A movement in the darkest corner of the chamber answered her.

He had folded himself into the shadows as if he belonged there.

For once, there was no deliberate poise in it. No lazy slouch, no mockery. He looked like something that had flown in through the window and forgotten how to be a man on landing.

Daemon’s hair hung loose, damp from some hurried wash that had not reached his face. There was dried blood at the corner of his mouth, where he had clearly bitten through his own lip. His hands, when he pushed off the wall, were clean but trembling.

He did not go to Laena’s side at once.

He came to Rhaenyra.

It was a strange, broken orbit.

Him drawn to the only other living center he recognized in the room, as if he would fall apart crossing the gap alone.

“Rhaenyra,” he said. Her name came out hoarse, rust scraped from old metal.

His eyes slid to Laena and stayed there, starving.

Rhaenyra put her free hand on his wrist. Not long. Just enough to make the ground feel slightly more solid beneath his feet.

“We will get her through it,” she said.

He gave a cracking laugh. “You and your dragons,” he said. “Always so sure the world can be bent to fit your want.”

“Did you marry me thinking otherwise?” Laena rasped from the pallet.

They both looked at her.

She was panting, chest heaving.

Her lips had gone pale around the edges from biting them. Already, purple shadows ringed her eyes.

“Do not speak as if I am gone,” she said. “I am still here. I can hear you skulking like widows at a wake.”

Daemon moved then, as if jerked on a string.

He dropped to his knees beside the pallet and took her other hand, the one not crushed in Rhaenyra’s.

“Laena,” he said. “Laena, look at me.”

She turned her head with effort.

When their eyes met, something in his face stripped bare. None of his usual armor fit here.

There was nowhere to hang it.

“You do not leave me now for some mewling babe who cannot even find the right way out.”

“If you wanted a wife who obeyed sense, you should have wed another,” Laena whispered. Her mouth twitched. “I warned you.”

A contraction knifed through her sentence.

It bent her in on herself, dragged a raw scream up from somewhere below words. Her fingers crushed both their hands, iron bands of bone and sinew.

The foreign women moved in at once.

“Breathe with her,” the shorter one ordered Rhaenyra. “In. Out. Let her hear it. Let her match you.”

Her knees sank in the soaked linen.

The heat rising from Laena’s body soaked through her leathers. She eased in behind Laena, bracing herself against the headboard, and drew Laena back against her chest.

Bone, blood, and breath.

“That is better,” the taller healer said, eyes narrowing with quick, professional satisfaction. “She needs holding. Not more poppy.”

Rhaenyra slid her arms around Laena’s torso, one across her breasts, the other under her ribs, anchoring her. She could feel every tremor. Every flutter of exhausted muscles.

“Lean on me,” Rhaenyra said into her ear. “Take what you need. I am not going anywhere.”

“You promise,” Laena said, voice thin. Always that, in the end. Always the child underneath the woman, asking if the world would stay.

“I promise,” Rhaenyra said.

Rhaenys moved to the foot of the pallet where Maester Geradys stood dithering.

“Let them try to turn the babe,” she told him.

He shook his head, jaw clenched. “At this stage, Princess, the risk is—”

“The risk is that she dies screaming while you wring your hands and quote books,” Rhaenys snapped. “If we do nothing, you have already told us the end. I will have action instead.”

“The cords,” the shorter healer said. “Bring linens. We will need to tie her legs when the babe shifts.”

Laena shuddered in Rhaenyra’s arms, a smaller tremor between the waves.

“Rhaenyra,” she whispered. “If I do not… if I cannot…”

“Stop,” Rhaenyra said, voice low with something close to panic. “Do not finish that sentence.”

“You will tell the girls I rode,” Laena said anyway, stubborn even at the edge. “Not that I lay and wept. You will tell them I chose.”

Rhaenyra pressed her forehead to Laena’s temple, eyes closed against the sting.

“You are not a tale in a septon’s mouth,” she said. “You are not a lesson. You will tell them yourself.”

Beyond them, Daemon made a strangled sound.

His hands had fisted in the linen at Laena’s side. No courtier’s veneer could cover him now. All that remained was the raw, animal fear of a man watching his heart dragged toward a precipice.

“Do it,” he said. The words scraped out half-broken. “Turn the babe.”

Maester Geradys looked from Daemon to Rhaenys, to Rhaenyra holding Laena like a shield and a lifeline both.

Three dragonriders. One woman between life and death.

“Very well,” he said, voice thin. “I wash my hands of this.”

“Wash them with soap,” the taller healer snapped. “Then hold the light where we tell you.”

They set to work.

Rhaenyra felt the chamber narrow until there was only Laena’s breath, loud and ragged against her own.

The foreign women moved to either side of Laena’s swollen belly. Their hands were firm, sure, tracing the curve of the babe inside with practised fingers.

“Here,” one said. “The head tucked wrong. Here, the back.”

Laena gasped as they pressed, her whole body tightening between Rhaenyra’s arms.

“Listen to my breathing,” Rhaenyra said into her hair. “In. Out. With me. Pretend we are on Syrax’s back. You ride the rise and fall. You do not let it throw you.”

“Syrax is smoother,” Laena gritted out, then cried out again as the shorter woman dug her fingers in deep and pushed.

Rhaenyra held her.

She felt every shake, every flinch as if it were her own.

Her own gut clenched in phantom echo, body remembering the white-hot agony of her own labors and knowing this was worse.

Much worse.

“Good,” the taller healer said. Sweat beaded her own brow now, as if she labored alongside Laena. “Again. When the next wave comes. Now we coax the babe. We tell it the way.”

A long, low moan built in Laena’s chest.

Climbing step by step into a thin, tearing yell as the next contraction crashed through her. Rhaenyra clamped her arms tighter, anchoring her against the force of it.

Daemon had one hand on Laena’s shin, thumb stroking an absent line back and forth as if that alone could tether her.

The other hand was braced on the pallet. 

Rhaenys leaned in, watching between Laena’s legs with a sailor’s grim focus, no room for modesty in her. “There,” she said sharply. “There, I think—”

The shorter healer’s face changed.

The flicker of hope in it was quick and dangerous.

“The babe moves,” she said. “It listens. Just a little more. Hold her now. When the wave peaks.”

Rhaenyra felt Laena’s muscles coil under her hands. Felt the next contraction building, a slow, monstrous tightening that dragged a fresh scream from Laena’s throat.

Laena threw her head back against Rhaenyra’s shoulder.

Her fingers clawed at Rhaenyra’s arms, seeking purchase, seeking an anchor as the healers pushed, pushed, hands buried deep against the hard swell of her belly, trying to spin the life inside her without breaking the body that held it.

“Hold, Laena,” Rhaenyra whispered, voice rough. “Hold. I have you. I have you.”

The scream broke.

Turned into a ragged, breathless sound. 

Laena sagged in Rhaenyra’s arms, suddenly too heavy.

For one terrible second, Rhaenyra could not feel her breathing at all.

The healers froze.

“Did she faint?” Daemon demanded. “Is that normal? Tell me that is normal.”

No one answered at once.

The taller woman pressed her ear against Laena’s chest, count flickering behind her eyes.

The shorter one’s hands stayed where they were on Laena’s belly, as if afraid that releasing the pressure would let something irreversible slip.

“Her heart beats,” the taller woman said at last, though there was a thin line of fear at the corner of her mouth. “Fast. Too fast. The babe…”

She shut her eyes, feeling along the curve of Laena’s abdomen with both palms, hunting some invisible landmark.

Her own breath had gone shallow.

“The babe is…” She swallowed. “It moves. But weak. Like a fish at the bottom of the net.”

Rhaenyra’s hands clenched reflexively.

That was when Laena’s eyes snapped open again.

They were wide and black, pupils swallowed near whole. She dragged in a breath that sounded like it had claws.

“Rhaenyra,” she said, barely more than air. “Tell my daughters—”

“Do not,” Rhaenyra said, voice breaking. “Do not put that on my tongue.”

Laena’s fingers found hers and clenched weakly.

“Tell my daughters I was trying to stay,” Laena rasped. “Tell Baela I was still fighting. Tell Rhaena I loved her more than the sky and the sea together. Tell them both…” Her fingers tightened, a ghost of old strength. “Tell them not to let their world burn for this.”

Daemon made a sound like a wounded animal being struck again. 

Rhaenyra swallowed the words like broken glass.

If Laena died, there would come a day when two girls looked up at her with their mother’s eyes and asked, What did she say?

And Rhaenyra would have to put this moment back on her tongue and hand it to them, sharp edge first.

Another contraction rolled over her. 

It took Laena like a wave takes a drowning swimmer, wrenching a scream from somewhere deep enough to strip the chamber bare.

Rhaenyra held her as it hit, as the healers pushed, as Rhaenys barked some order Rhaenyra did not hear, as Daemon cursed the gods in two languages, voice cracking on her name.

Laena's eyes slid up, past Rhaenyra’s shoulder, to the shuttered window where the sea-wind pushed faintly at the slats.

“Open it,” Laena rasped. “I cannot breathe in here. Open it, or I will.”

Daemon stiffened. “Laena—”

“I will not die on my back like a cow,” she said, sudden heat flaring in the words. “If they mean for me to go, I will go as I lived.”

Her hand tore free of Rhaenyra’s, scrabbling at the linen. She pushed with her heels, trying to lever herself up, hips sliding on the soaked sheets.

Pain ripped through her.

She choked on a scream and shoved harder anyway.

“Vhagar,” Laena gasped. “I want Vhagar. Do you hear? I will go to her.”

The foreign healers froze.

Then the taller one swore softly in her own tongue and lunged to catch Laena’s knees, pinning them before she could swing her legs off the pallet.

“Hold her,” she snapped. “If she stands, she tears herself and the babe both.”

Daemon grabbed for Laena’s shoulders, pressing her back. “You are not going anywhere,” he said, voice raw. “You will not leave our girls to wake to an empty saddle.”

Laena twisted against him with a strength that did not feel possible in that ravaged body. For a moment she nearly broke his grip. The cords stood out in his neck from the effort of holding her.

“Let me go,” she snarled. “I am Laena Velaryon. I was born in the sky. I will not end under linen.”

Rhaenyra slid her arms tighter around her from behind, locking herself into place like a second set of ropes.

“Fight here,” she said into Laena’s hair. “If you mean to defy the gods, do it on this pallet, not out there. You leave this room and you choose death. You stay, you give us something to drag you back from.”

A sound ripped out of Daemon at that.

“Listen to her, līria,” he said. “For once in your life, listen.”

Another contraction seized Laena mid-struggle.

The sound rose and rose and rose.

The world narrowed to Laena’s scream and the strain in Rhaenyra’s arms as she clung to her.

Vhagar howling outside like the labor had reached the sky, and the sense that something inside the room, inside Laena, inside the choice itself, had just tipped past the point where anyone could turn it back.

Notes:

Thank you for surviving this chapter with me 😌✨

I know, I know. Laena’s fate, the children watching, the hall on fire… we are absolutely not okay over here either.

While we all sit in this terrible little limbo together, tell me things in the comments:

Which of the four menaces (Aemon, Aenar, Aemma, Aerion) broke your heart the most this chapter?

Did any line/scene stick to your ribs?

Do you want to fight me in the parking lot (affectionate)?

Screams, essays, keysmashes and wild predictions are all welcome tributes. I read everything and it genuinely helps me keep going with this monster of a fic. 💌

Chapter 29: The Veil Has Thinned

The room they were herded into was too quiet.

The noise of the hall still lived in their bones. Shouting and steel and Laenor’s breath leaving him, over and over and over. 

Here, there was only the small crackle of a fire and the drag of four uneven breaths.

Ser Corren shut the door with careful hands, as if afraid a harsh sound might shatter what was left of the children. He took the post to the right of it, helm tucked under one arm. Ser Myles went to the window slit, fingers flexing once, twice, before he forced them flat against his thighs.

The others lined the far wall, red cloaks falling heavy from their shoulders.

Guard the heirs.

Corlys stood in the middle of the chamber and tested his lungs.

They did not want to work.

His hands looked wrong at the ends of his arms, as if they belonged to another man entirely. One who had not just held his son’s head while the light went out of his eyes.

They had tried to strip the day from him. Some poor page had fetched a basin and clean linen and stammered something about fresh clothes for him, for the children, for anyone who had been near… that.

That.

The word had no shape left that would fit in Corlys’s mouth.

He had dipped his fingers in the water and watched the clear surface cloud and bloom, pink fading to red as if the basin remembered being a sea. He dried his hands. The towel took the worst of it, but when he lifted his fingers to the firelight he could still see the dark crescents under his nails.

Laenor’s blood.

Stubborn thing.

Like the man who had carried it.

His son lay cooling on some table of oak or stone far below, and Corlys Velaryon, who had braved storms and corsairs and the Stepstones’ black reefs, sat here with four small faces watching him like he was the last post of a pier that had not yet been torn away.

“Sit,” he managed. The word dragged, rough and salt-burned. “You will make yourselves ill if you keep pacing.”

Only Aemon was standing.

He held himself as if the floor might give way. Stationed by the hearth, shoulders drawn too straight.

At Corlys’s voice, he moved.

Of course he did.

Duty had been sewn into his seams with every new doublet.

He crossed the rushes in four stiff steps and lowered himself between his siblings. The bench dipped under their combined weight, the old wood complaining in a tired creak.

They had chosen the same place without a word.

They always had, even in better days.

A circle of silver heads at the edge of a hall, or pressed together on a ship’s rail. Today, the sight hurt.

Aenar sat in the middle.

His boots hovered just above the rushes, toes pointed down like he had forgotten how to stand, how to run, how to climb rigging and chase spray. His hands lay on his knees, fingers spread wide as if braced for a blow.

He did not look at Corlys. Not at the fire. Not at his siblings.

His eyes fixed instead on the wreck at his feet.

The toy ship lay there on its side, close enough that one more careless step would crush what remained. Its hull had split clean through when it struck the stone. One mast leaned at a broken angle, sail torn, tiny ropes hanging loose as cut veins. A smear of red darkened the varnished deck where someone had trod on it during the scramble.

Laenor’s blood had found that too.

Aenar had not picked the ship up.

He had not spoken since they left the hall.

To his right, Aemma pressed so tightly against him it seemed she thought she could hide inside his ribs if she tried hard enough. Her fingers had nothing to cling to. Her little heart-shell, was gone from her throat. 

On Aenar’s other side, Aerion perched nearest the edge of the bench like a sparrow half-deciding on flight. His eyes were swollen, lashes clumped.

They looked wrong on that bench.

Larger somehow and smaller all at once.

As if the day had stretched them lengthwise and hollowed them from within, leaving the outlines of older children without the years that should have filled the space.

Corlys lowered himself into the chair opposite.

His knees complained. Battle, age, and the knowledge of what waited below had stiffened them into stone, but he forced them to bend.

For a long moment, no one spoke.

The fire gnawed at its logs.

Resin popped, sharp as distant sword blows. A section of wood crumbled and fell inward with a tired sigh, sending up a little rush of sparks.

Aemma flinched so hard her shoulder knocked against Aenar’s arm.

He did not startle.

He only swayed, then steadied again, eyes fixed on that ruined ship.

Corlys could hear the hall beneath them.

Not with his ears. With something older.

He saw, in a cruel bright flash, Laenor lifting these same children on his shoulders, one on each side and Aemma in his arms, their hands pulling at his hair as he roared about storms and heroes.

He had complained then, laughing, about ruined hair and aching back.

Corlys would have traded every ship he ever owned to hear that complaint again.

He knew he would have to speak.

There were rites for this, phrases men had used since the first sailor did not come home. He had said them over other sons, other husbands, other fathers.

They all fled him now.

In the end, it was not Corlys who broke the stillness.

It was Aemon.

His lips parted. For a moment nothing came, as if the air itself refused to be shaped into something that would make this real.

When the words finally arrived, they were small and terrible and perfectly clear.

“Is Kepa dead.”

Corlys shut his eyes.

He wanted to lie.

Tell them the realm was kind. Say it took gently and always gave back what it stole, if one prayed hard enough and threw in the right offerings. Say this was a story with some other ending. One where men rose from tables and wiped away blood and the children went to bed with only the good kind of tired in their bones.

He had lived too long to keep that fantasy. 

The realm did not bargain.

Steel did not listen.

And he would not give these children a prettier death than their father had been granted.

“Yes,” he said. The word scraped his tongue, tasting of salt and rust. “He is gone.”

Aerion made a sound so small it barely cleared his lips, as if something fragile had struck glass. A little hiccup of noise, clipped short as if he feared even his grief might count as misbehavior.

Aemma’s breath hitched and stayed there. It lodged high in her chest, making her look as though she were drowning on dry land. She stared at Corlys with eyes too bright, too wide.

Aenar still did not move.

His lashes did not tremble. His hands lay flat, fingers pressed into the velvet of his breeches until the tips blanched. Only the slow rise and fall of his chest gave him away, and even that looked practiced, like something he had to remember to do.

“But… but uncle Vaegon was there.” Aemon’s voice had gone rough from the shouting in the hall, from the way he had begged strangers and kin alike to fix this. “He is the best. He can heal.”

“Archmaester Vaegon did everything that could be done.” Corlys’s gaze slid down, to his own traitorous hands, to the dark crescents wedged under his nails. “There was too much blood. The knife was placed… ill.”

Not a sailor’s slice in a dockside quarrel. Not a soldier’s thrust traded fair on a field. A low cut, mean and crooked, driven where a man was softest.

He did not say:

I should have cut Vaemond’s throat the first time he swaggered on my deck and let the sharks judge his worth.

Aemma’s eyes followed his, down to the drying strip of red along his sleeve. A thin line of Laenor’s blood darkened the cuff.

“That is him,” she whispered. “On you.”

The words shook, but she forced them free, as if naming it might keep her from floating away.

“Yes,” Corlys said. “It is his.”

Aerion’s gaze fixed on the stain, then crept to Corlys’s fingers, to the faint stubborn pink that still clung to the beds of his nails where water could not reach.

“And it will not wash off,” Aerion said.

It was not accusation.

Only a bleak, breathless fact, like saying sky or sea.

Corlys saw the basin again, the clear water clouding the moment his hands went in. Pale pink at first, then redder, then dull, as if even the water had gone tired. He had scrubbed until the skin burned and the page boy looked sick. Still, under each nail, there had been that thin dark line.

“No,” he said softly. “Not for me.”

By the door, Ser Corren shifted his weight, fingers tightening on his spear. Ser Myles stared ahead, jaw set so hard a muscle ticked along the hinge, as if he too felt some ghost stain on his skin that no soap could touch.

For the children, at least, they had tried.

Small hands had been wiped with damp cloths, sticky fingers carefully cleaned. Aemma’s cheeks had been dabbed dry. Someone had changed their clothes with clumsy care, whispering apologies that were not truly for the spilled wine and torn seams.

“I told him I would eat the cabbage,” Aerion said suddenly.

The words burst out in a rush, too crowded to line up neatly, tumbling over one another as if they tripped on his tongue.

“I told Kepa… if he got up I’d eat all of it.” His small hands rose, palms spread, as if to show them the size of that promise. “All of it, I said. I didn’t.” His breath snagged, chest jerking. “I left it. I left it on the plate. So now he can’t—”

Whatever came next never found shape.

It folded in on itself, the way Aerion did.

He bent forward sharply, like someone had cut the strings holding him upright. His hands flew to his face and stayed there, fingers splayed, as if he could push the tears back in. 

The sound that slipped around his fingers crawled under Corlys’s ribs and lodged there.

A wounded animal trying very hard not to be loud.

“You did nothing wrong,” Corlys said.

The words felt useless as empty nets.

“I didn’t help him,” Aerion stuttered, voice muffled against his palms. “I didn’t help.”

To a four-year-old, it had been a vow. 

“I said I would,” Aerion choked. “I said I would and I lied and now he is dead. I could have… I should have…” He curled tighter, as if he could make himself so small he would disappear. “I was bad and now he is dead.”

Each small word landed heavy as cannon shot.

Corlys leaned forward, elbows on his knees, the front of his body bent as if to get closer to that small, collapsing shape.

“Listen to me, little storm,” he said, and his voice shook on the old endearment. “Your father did not die for want of cabbage. He did not leave you because you did not eat your greens. A bad man put a knife where no knife should go. That is the truth of it. All the cabbage in the realm would not have turned that blade aside.”

Aerion only sobbed harder at first, shoulders jumping under the weight of it, fingers clamped so tight over his face they left white marks along his cheeks.

“I should have helped,” he kept repeating, the words falling apart, losing shape until they were only sounds. “I should have helped, I should have helped…”

Four namedays, Corlys thought.

Four namedays, and already trying to bargain with a god who had never once kept his ledgers fair.

“You are a child,” Corlys said, soft. “Your work is to eat when you can, play when you may, and sleep when you are tired. Not to stop grown men with knives. That duty was mine and every man in that hall who had seen more summers than you.” His throat thickened. “We failed it. Not you.”

Aerion only cried harder, a small, miserable sound pressed into his palms.

Aemma looked from Aerion to Corlys, back again, as if she were watching two people drown and had only one hand to give.

“How could he do that? How could great-uncle—” she stopped herself, jaw clenching. Her mouth twisted, refusing to offer a murderer that name. “How could Vaemond become a kin-slayer?”

Corlys drew in a slow breath.

How to answer that, with four pairs of eyes on him and Laenor’s blood drying on his skin.

“He did not become one in a breath,” Corlys said at last. “Men do not wake one morning and find the gods have made them kin-slayers in their sleep. They walk to it. Step by step.”

He looked past Aemma for a moment, seeing a younger Vaemond on a deck washed clean of blood and politics.

Quick to learn, quicker to take offense.

Always looking at Driftmark as if it owed him something.

“Your great-uncle let anger steer him,” Corlys went on. “He told himself a story where he had been robbed, and he clung to it until it ate holes in him. Like rot in a hull no one tends. By the time the storm comes, the ship looks whole from the shore… but the first hard wave, and it breaks apart.”

Aemma’s throat bobbed.

“Is he sorry?” she whispered. “Now.”

Corlys thought of Vaemond’s face, pinioned against stone.

Of the blood already drying on his hands even then.

Of the way he had still tried to spit and bite, like a dog that did not yet know its neck was broken.

“I do not know,” he said, and let them hear the truth. 

His hand moved, almost of its own accord, reaching toward Aenar.

The boy was still so silent. Still so frozen. His eyes were fixed on nothing and everything, sea-blue and glassy.

“Aenar,” Corlys said quietly. “Lēkia. Look at me.”

Aenar flinched.

It was small, just a twitch at first. Then something inside him seemed to give way.

He shot up from the bench so fast the old wood scraped, past Corlys’s reaching hand, boots skidding on the rushes as he bolted for the door.

“Aenar,” Aemon’s voice cracked. “Don’t—”

The Emberguard moved as one.

Ser Corren let his spear clatter aside and dropped to his knees without thinking. His arms locked around Aenar’s middle just before the boy could slam himself full-force into the thick oak.

The impact drove the breath out of both of them.

Aenar jolted, then fought with a wild, blind fury that did not fit his narrow frame. He twisted, heels drumming the floor, fingers clawing at Corren’s bracers hard enough to leave red welts.

“Let me go!” he gasped, voice high and ragged, unrecognizable as the careful, steady boy Corlys knew. “Let me go, I have to go, I have to...he needs—Kepa needs—”

“What does he need?” Corlys asked, already halfway out of his chair.

He knew, of course.

Knew with a seafarer’s grim sense of tide and time that there was nothing Laenor Velaryon needed now but a shroud and salt stones over his eyes. But Aenar’s panic had a shape to it, and he would not bat it away without seeing it.

Aenar tore at Corren’s grip again, lungs dragging in desperate, hitching breaths.

“He will think we left him,” Aenar sobbed. “He will wake up and he will think we… we… do not care.”

Corlys’s chest pulsed with a pain that had nothing to do with age.

“Aenar,” he said, and there was a warning crack in it he had not intended, the kind that had made deckhands snap to for fifty years.

The boy flinched at the sound alone.

“I have to go to him,” Aenar insisted, gulping air between words. “He needs to see us, he needs to see we are still here, he does not like to be alone—”

“Aenar,” Corlys said, forcing his legs to move, crossing to them in three stiff, aching steps.

“No,” Aenar cried. The words tore out of him like something sharp. “We were there when they hurt him and we are not there now. He will think we ran away.”

Aerion’s sobbing hitched at Aenar’s words and changed key, a broken little sound. Aemma had gone sheet-white, one hand over her mouth.

Aemon was on his feet before he seemed to decide to be.

He crossed to them, each step too controlled, as if his own knees wanted to buckle and he was not permitting it. His hand landed on Aenar’s shoulder, small but firm.

“We did not run,” Aemon said, voice shaking but clear. “The guards took us away. They said we had to go so the maesters could work. We did not run, Aenar. You hear me?”

Aenar only panted, chest heaving against Corren’s arm.

“I did not say goodbye,” he managed. The words rasped his throat. “I did not tell him I was not cross about the ship, I did not tell him—”

His voice chopped off, strangled by its own weight.

“Lēkia,” the Sea Snake said again. 

Aenar’s head jerked, just enough.

His eyes met Corlys’s.

They were Laenor’s eyes, sea-bright and storm-dark, but something in them looked older than any mortal should carry.

“You told him,” Corlys said quietly. “Every day you have ever run to him on a dock, every time you begged another story at your bed, every time you fell asleep on his shoulder when he was reading. You told him, Aenar. He knew you were not cross. He knew you did not run.”

“You do not know,” Aenar whispered. “You cannot know.”

Corlys held that gaze, though it felt like looking into an open wound.

“I am a father,” he said. “I know.”

Aenar went rigid.

Corlys thought he would fight harder, tear free on stubbornness and panic alone and fling himself at the door until his bones broke.

Instead something in him let go.

Not cleanly. Not like sleep or swooning. A slow, awful unlatching, as if he had finally understood, in whatever narrow language the day had left him, that there was nowhere to run that did not end at the same table below.

His hands slipped from Corren’s bracers.

He made a raw, desperate sound, something caught between a sob and a curse, and shoved his face into the knight’s chest, as if he could hide inside the red wool.

Ser Corren held him.

One big hand rose, almost wary, then settled at the back of Aenar’s head. His fingers threaded once through the curl-mussed silver hair, not soothing so much as bracing, like a sailor steadying a boy on a heaving deck.

“I’m sorry,” he said into the crown of it, voice rough with things he would never name in a report. “I am so damned sorry, little prince.”

Corlys watched them, throat burning, and knew with a hard, sea-deep certainty that this was the shape of it now.

Not the song he had imagined for Laenor’s children. Not bright halls and easy laughter. This.

Aemma slid closer to Aerion, her small body curving to his like a breakwater around something already half-shattered. He leaned into her without looking, hands still clamped over his face, shoulders jerking in sharp, ugly little stutters that had nothing of courtly composure in them.

Good, Corlys thought, viciously. Let there be nothing pretty in this.

Aemon sat back down with perfect posture.

He scrubbed at his nose with the heel of his hand, the way Laenor always scolded him for, and then stared at the rushes until they blurred.

When he spoke at last, his voice sounded scraped out with a dull knife.

“What happens now?”

Aemon’s gaze fixed on him alone. Not on Ser Corren, still kneeling with Aenar locked against his chest. Not on the door or the window slit. Him. As if the whole world had narrowed to this room, this question.

“What happens now,” Aemon repeated, throat working, “to Vaemond. And Lord Hobert. And the Queen.”

The other three lifted their heads at that.

Four pairs of eyes, swollen and raw and waiting, as if he might speak a shape into the air and make it solid.

Corlys made himself breathe.

Once, twice.

Each inhale felt like drawing air past broken glass.

“I cannot speak for the whole realm,” he said. His voice sounded older than his bones, roughed by salt and smoke and too many unburied dead. “I cannot tell you what lords will choose, nor what songs the bards will dare to sing of this day.”

He leaned forward, elbows biting into his own thighs, so he could meet each pair of eyes in turn.

“But I can tell you what I will do. I will not rest while Vaemond draws breath outside a cell,” he said. “I will not sit easy while Hobert Hightower lies safe. I will not let your father’s blood dry on these stones and be walked over as if it were spilled wine. Something will be done. By my hand, if no other steps forward fast enough.”

The words did not comfort him.

They lit something in his chest he had been trying, very foolishly, to smother since the hall. 

It flared now, turned inward, and fixed its heat on the Red Keep above them.

A small, flat voice slid through the crack in his thoughts.

“But the Queen.”

Aenar did not lift his head from Corren’s chest, but he turned just enough that one eye showed, dark and too wide, watching Corlys as if the answer might decide the shape of the rest of his life.

“She sits beside the King,” Aenar went on, barely more than a breath. “She told them they could speak. She… she let it happen.”

Ser Corren’s hand tightened on his shoulder for a moment, as if he would take the question himself if he could.

Corlys held his grandson’s gaze and felt something in him stop yielding.

“If the Queen stands between us and justice,” he said, slow enough that every word sank in, “then the Queen will find she has set herself against more than she knows.”

His eyes darkened.

When he spoke again, there was sea in it.

“I will not see my son carved open to prove some lord’s point and my grandchildren left to live under the hand that raised the knife and the tongue that blessed it.”

He could feel it rising in him now. The old, cold thing that had nothing to do with fatherhood or husbandhood.

The part of him that had watched strange ports burn from his deck and counted profit in other men’s dead.

For a moment, he forgot himself.

Forgot the room.

Forgot the children who could hear every bit of his spite. 

“If they choose to stand with kin-slayers, then let them taste what it is to be hunted. In council. At sea. In their beds.” His eyes had gone very dark. “I will meet them in whispered corridors or in open streets, with dagger or with banner. It is all one to me now. Afterall, they spilled ours first.”

The last sentence landed with a weight that made the fire seem to draw back into itself.

Aemma’s hand had knotted in the fabric of her skirts, twisting until her knuckles blanched. Her gaze had crept up from Corlys’s clenched hands to his face, her eyes huge.

“With the King?” she asked.

The words came out thin and tight, like a string pulled too far.

“With… grandsire?”

The title seemed to hurt. 

The anger in Corlys did not vanish. It banked. Turned, looking for somewhere else to burn.

Viserys. Pale. Sweating. Hands shaking as he tried to keep hold of the illusion that he ruled anything in that hall.

Corlys slid his tongue along his teeth, tasting iron and old restraint.

“Your grandsire is still my liege,” he said slowly. “And your mother’s father. That has not changed.”

“It was his hall this happened in,” Aemon said, voice low. “His guards. His queen.” His fingers dug into his own knees. “He could have stopped it.”

“Yes.” The word cost. “He could have.”

The fire cracked. One of the logs slumped inward, sending up a brief spray of sparks.

“Will you stand against him too?” Aemma’s voice shook. She swallowed and tried again. “If he hides them. If he says it is over and we must forgive. Will you fight him too?”

Corlys looked at her.

Of all of them, she had cried the least. Her eyes were rimmed raw, but there was a hard, stunned clarity in them that frightened him more than Aenar’s wildness or Aerion’s wails. She had watched the hall very closely. She had seen who spoke and who stayed silent.

“Listen to me, Aemma,” he said.

He shifted forward, elbows on his knees, so she could see his face clearly by the firelight. So there could be no mistake, no half-heard word that might poison in later.

“I will go to the King,” he said. “I will stand before him. I will tell him, plainly, what was done under his roof. I will put your father’s blood in his hands and ask him what he means to do with it.”

His mouth curled, not quite a smile.

“I will remind him that before he was a king, he was a father.”

He let out a slow breath.

“If he remembers that,” Corlys said, “if he sets aside his fear and his comforts and the whispers in his bed, then he may yet stand with us. He may be grandsire. He may be King.”

“And if he does not?” Aenar asked.

His voice was soft, muffled against Ser Corren’s let-down cloak, but it cut clean through the room.

Corlys did not look away.

“Then he chooses,” he said. “And so do we.”

He did not dress it up.

He did not soften it with talk of petitions or pardons. They were old enough to know what choosing meant, in this world.

“Will you kill him?” Aerion’s question burst out, high and wavering. “Like Vaemond?”

Ser Myles stopped breathing. Corren’s hand stilled on Aenar’s hair.

Corlys closed his eyes briefly.

When he opened them, there was something colder in them than the children had ever seen.

“I have no wish to,” he said. “Your grandsire is not Vaemond. He did not take up the knife. He let it be taken, which is a different sin and one he will answer for in his own way.”

Aemma’s eyes filled again. She blinked hard, as if furious with them for daring.

“So he must choose,” she said quietly. “Us or her.”

Corlys’s jaw flexed.

“That choice was laid before him the day your mother was named his heir,” he said. “He has been pretending he could refuse it ever since. This…” His hand lifted, fingers splayed, as if he could gesture to the whole bloody day. “This has only stripped the pretense away.”

Aerion hiccuped and sniffed. “Will he choose us?” 

That was the cruellest question of all.

Corlys’s heart answered before his head did. It thought of Viserys’s face when he saw all the blood. 

“I do not know,” Corlys said, at last.

He could not lie for the realm and he would not start for a king.

“But whether he does or not,” he added, voice roughening, “you will not stand alone. Not while I draw breath. Not while there is a ship that will sail for my call or a sword that will rise at my name. That, I can swear.”

Silence settled in the wake of the words. 

Aemma tightened her arms around Aerion.

Aemon straightened, just a fraction, as if some part of him had heard a promise and was trying to grow up fast enough to stand beside it.

Aenar pressed closer to Ser Corren, fingers fisting in red cloth, but he did not look away.

“Muna Laena,” Aemma whispered suddenly. “No one told us if she is…” The word caught like a fishbone. She swallowed and tried again. “Is she dying too.”

The room seemed to tilt.

In the hall, there had been no time for anything but Laenor. Vaegon’s hands, the Kingsguard dragging Vaemond away, Viserys roaring orders, the queen’s green gown dragging through blood.

Laena’s fate and the babe’s hung somewhere over the water, balanced on the edge of a god’s hand.

He could not tell them that.

Not like that.

“She is fighting,” Corlys said. “The letter said the labor was hard, and the babe turned wrong. But your Muna and your Grandmother flew to her. Meleys and Syrax fly faster than any ship. If there is a way through, those three women will find it.”

“Women die,” Aenar said flatly. “On ships. In storms. In beds.”

He had been listening to sailors when he thought the adults did not notice.

He had heard the muttered tales of women who bled out in foreign ports, of babes wrapped in sailcloth and given to the deep.

Corlys felt something in him twist.

“Sometimes,” he said. “Not always.”

“Kepa will not wake,” Aenar said. His body shuddered against Ser Corren. “No matter how much we call. And we do not know if Muna Laena will, and Muna is gone, she flew away, and Grandmother is gone, and you will go too. You will sail. They will send you away.” The pitch of his voice lifted, edged with rising panic. “They always send you away.”

“You will leave us,” Aerion gulped from behind his hands. “There will be no one. They will put us in some tower with turnips and septons and we will never see the sea again.”

The Emberguard stared straight ahead. 

Corlys pushed himself up.

“Ser Corren,” he said quietly.

The knight moved at once. He loosened Aenar’s grip from his cloak finger by finger, speaking low into the boy’s hair, words too soft to catch. Then he rose with Aenar in his arms, careful as if he held spun glass, and carried him the few steps to the bench.

Aenar flinched when Corren tried to set him down, but the knight only tightened his hold for a second, steadying him, then eased him onto the wood between his brother and sister. One big hand stayed braced at Aenar’s back until he felt the boy’s weight settle, his feet finding the rushes.

Only then did Corren step away, though he did not go far. He took his place beside the door again, red cloak falling around him like a small, private curtain.

Corlys lowered himself to the floor in front of them.

The stone was hard under his knees, hard under his shins. He did not care. It put him at their height, made his face level with theirs.

“Listen closely,” Corlys said. “I am Lord of the Tides, it is true. Men have called me Sea Snake, Master of Driftmark, a dozen foolish names meant to make me sound larger than I am.”

He reached out and took Aemon’s hand.

The boy’s fingers were cold.

“Tonight,” Corlys said, “I am only your Grandsire. I swear to you, I will not leave you. Not while your mother is gone. Not while my son lies below.”

His throat closed on the last word. He forced it out anyway.

Aenar leaned forward, eyes blazing through the wet. “Not at all,” he said. “Say it.”

Corlys’s own eyes stung.

“Not at all,” he repeated. “Not until your mother stands in this keep again and tells me I may go. I will sleep where you sleep. Eat where you eat. If they try to send me away I will bar the door with my own body and you can watch me shame them.”

Aemma’s mouth trembled. “Even at night.” 

“Especially then,” Corlys said. 

Aerion launched himself off the bench.

He hit Corlys’s chest like a thrown bundle, arms going around his neck, legs around his waist. The impact drove a grunt from Corlys, but he caught him without thinking, big hands closing over a small back.

Little hands came next. Aemma slid off the bench and pressed against his side, fingers fisting in his sleeve. Aenar followed, knees hitting the stone so he could wrap his arms around Aerion and Corlys both. Aemon hesitated, then moved too, leaning in until Corlys could fold one arm around all three of them.

He smelled their hair.

Laenor as a boy had smelled of the same soap, the same salt, the same sweet trace of honey-cakes stolen from the kitchens.

Corlys blinked.

The room wavered. The fire blurred.

For the first time since the knife went in, tears broke free.

He bowed his head until his cheek rested against Aerion’s tangled hair.

“I will not sail from you,” he said, the words vibrating through all of them where their bodies pressed close. “Not today. Not tomorrow. Not until you tell me yourselves that you are ready for me to be gone.”

They clung to him like wreckage.

They did not know if Laena still fought. They did not know if the babe still turned beneath her ribs.

They knew only this small, hard thing, pressed into their bones in a room that smelled of smoke and salt:

Their father was dead.

Their mother was gone.

Their Grandsire stayed.

They clung to him until the weight of the day began to drag their small bodies downward.

Aerion’s legs slid from his waist, then clamped again, then finally sagged. Aemma’s grip on his sleeve weakened; Aenar’s head tipped against Corlys’s shoulder with a dull, exhausted thump. Even Aemon, who had not wept in some time, blinked slower and slower, as if each closing of his eyes took more effort to undo.

“Time for bed,” Corlys said at last, when their shivers had turned from grief to sheer spent flesh. “You are falling asleep sitting up.”

“I am not,” Aemon lied, his head bobbing.

“You are,” Corlys said brushing his hair back from his forehead. 

He stood, lifting Aerion with him, the boy still wrapped around his neck like a very damp, very stubborn limpet. Aemma’s hand slid into his free one without asking. Aenar and Aemon rose more slowly, as if some invisible weight had settled across their shoulders.

The Emberguard parted for them.

Red cloaks brushed the stone as they fell into a quiet escort, two ahead, two behind.

No one spoke as they walked the short passage to the chamber that had been made ready for the children, too quickly, too neatly. As if fresh sheets and stoked fires could make up the difference between this room and the one where their father ought to have been.

Four bedrolls lay at the foot, in case they refused the mattresses and insisted on some strange nest on the ground. The servants had not known what children do in the shadow of such a day.

Neither did Corlys.

A soft knock sounded at the door.

Before Corlys could answer, a grey-clad shape filled the threshold. Archmaester Vaegon leaned against the frame as if the stone were the only thing keeping him upright.

His chain was spattered dark in places where the blood had not quite come free. His hands were clean, but the skin at his wrists was rubbed raw, the way Corlys’s own palms were. His eyes looked older than they had that morning, deep-set and bruised with strain.

“Archmaester,” Corlys said. His voice came out rough. “Dream-wine. For them.”

Vaegon’s gaze moved at once to the bed.

He took in the four small shapes, the red rims of their eyes.

Some of the tension left his shoulders; something else settled there instead. 

“They are very young,” Vaegon said quietly.

“They are very broken,” Corlys answered. “And they will need their wits in days to come. Let them have one night without knives in it. A little, watered well.”

Vaegon stepped fully into the room, closing the door with his heel.

“I brought it before you sent for some,” he said. “I thought you might argue yourself into asking.”

He lifted the small tray he carried.

Four tiny cups, dark red liquid glinting within, a pitcher of water beading with condensation where it had been pulled up from a cool cellar.

“But before that,” Vaegon went on, his voice softening, “I have something for you.”

He set the tray on a chest and crossed to Corlys.

His hand came out from inside his sleeve and caught Corlys’s right hand, turning the palm upward. Something cold and hard slid into it, small enough to be hidden by his curled fingers.

Corlys looked down.

Laenor’s ring lay there. Silver worked in the pale blue of Driftmark’s tides, a tiny ship chased in dark metal along the band. It had always made his son’s hand look more like a lord’s and less like the boy who had once clung to his sleeve on the deck of the Sea Snake.

For a moment Corlys did not breathe. 

“He wore it at the end,” Vaegon said quietly. “They put it with his things. I thought it should come home.”

Corlys closed his fingers around the metal until it bit into his palm.

Vaegon’s other hand moved. From the inner fold of his robe he drew out a fine chain, its links gleaming like caught light. At the center of it hung a small gem, carved in the shape of an anchor, its facets dulled by age but stubborn in their steadiness.

The anchor swung once between them, a tiny piece of Old Valyria catching the lamplight.

“For Aenar,” Vaegon added in a whisper, to soft for the boy himself to hear. “When he is strong enough to wear it. Driftmark’s next lord should have more than a title to tie him to his line.”

Corlys stared at the little anchor.

Laenor’s ring burned in his fist.

“An anchor for a boy the sea will try to steal,” he managed, voice rough. “And a ring for a father who failed to keep his son.”

Corlys closed his fingers around the ring and anchor.

“Thank you.” 

Vaegon inclined his head once, sharply, as if anything more would crack the careful hold he had on himself.

Then he turned to the children.

“Princess. Princes.” His voice changed again, gentler, in a way no one outside these rooms could claim to have heard before. “May I come closer?”

Aemma blinked at him, then gave the smallest nod.

Vaegon came to the bedside and lowered himself onto the mattress edge. He did not reach for them at once. He let them look their fill first. The tired lines of his face, the way his chain lay heavy against his chest, the faint red mark at his throat where someone’s hand had caught him in the chaos below.

Then he lifted a hand and brushed a stray curl from Aemma’s cheek.

“You have been very brave,” he said to her. “Braver than any child ought to be asked to be.”

Her mouth trembled. She did not quite lean into the touch, but she did not pull away.

He turned to Aerion next, smoothing a hand over the boy’s hair, fingers lingering for a second at the nape of his neck.

“Your heart is too quick by half,” Vaegon said softly. “Try to let it rest now, hmm? Your Kepa would box my ears if I let you make yourself sick with it.”

Aerion sniffed, a wet, hiccuping sound. “You could not stop the blood,” he said, the words thick with sleep and grief. “No one could.”

“No,” Vaegon replied. “No one could. But I could make sure his ring found the right hand again. And I can give you a night where you do not have to watch it happen once more.”

He shifted his attention to Aenar, whose eyes were dark and blown wide, still fixed on some place far beyond the wall.

Vaegon reached out and rested his knuckles lightly against the boy’s shoulder, a touch so careful it could have been blown away by a breath.

“You are listening for every sound,” he said. “That is what men do on strange shores. You are not meant to be a man yet, Aenar. Let the walls keep watch tonight. Can you do that for me?”

Aenar swallowed once, then gave a tiny jerk of his chin that might have been a nod.

Last, Vaegon looked to Aemon.

“I will not tell you not to be angry,” he said. “I would be, in your place. But let the anger sleep a little while?” His mouth tugged, not quite a smile. “It will wake quickly enough again tomorrow.”

Aemon’s eyes burned.

“Will it really help,” he asked. “The wine.”

“It will not take your grief,” Vaegon said, and there was no lie in it. “Only soften the edge for a few hours. Like linen between a wound and the bandage.”

He poured water into each cup, thinning the wine until it went a gentle rose instead of deep red.

“Here,” he said, holding them out one by one. “Small sips. I have no wish to have your Muna fly back to find you snoring like old men.”

Aemon’s nose wrinkled at that, but his mouth quirked, just faintly. He took the cup.

Aemma accepted hers with solemn care. Aerion squinted suspiciously at the contents.

“Will it keep the bad dreams away,” Aerion asked, lip wobbling. “The ones where he falls and falls and never stops.”

“It will blur them,” Vaegon said. “Make them softer. Like seeing them through mist instead of clear glass.”

Aerion seemed to weigh this, then drank, making a face at the taste.

Aemma sipped and shuddered.

“If it gives me worse ones,” she said, “I shall tell Muna and she will set your hair alight.”

This time Vaegon did smile, worn though it was.

“She is welcome to try,” he said. “But I think she will find I have done you no harm tonight.”

Aenar took his cup last.

He drank it as if it were some bitter oath, then handed it back. Vaegon’s fingers closed briefly around his, a quick squeeze, before he let go.

When all four cups were empty, Vaegon rose.

He set the tray aside and drew the blankets a little higher over their legs, a small, domestic gesture that would have broken him outright if he thought about it too long.

His hand paused once more at Aemon’s head, a light touch, then at Aenar’s shoulder, then at Aemma’s brow, then at Aerion’s foot where it poked from under the coverlet.

“You are not alone,” he said softly, as much to Corlys as to them. “Not while I have breath. Sleep now, little ones.”

He straightened with a quiet sound of pain.

At the door, he looked back once.

The silver ring glinted where Corlys’s hand lay half closed on his knee.

Vaegon’s eyes lingered on it, then on the man who held it, and he inclined his head again in a small, weary salute.

“Call if their sleep turns ill,” he said. “I will be in the next chamber. I have no wish to be far from them tonight.”

He slipped out, his chain whispering softly in the dark, leaving Corlys to his vigil.

“Will you be here,” Aenar asked, “when we wake.”

“Yes,” Corlys said. “You may tie me to the chair if you doubt me.”

That earned him the softest breath through Aenar’s nose, what might, on another day, have become a proper laugh.

“I will know if you try to slip your knots,” Aenar replied groggily already succumbing to the wine. 

Corlys dragged a chair to the side of the bed.

It creaked under his weight, old wood protesting, but he settled into it with a sailor’s stubbornness. He let his hand rest on the coverlet, fingers splayed so that if any of the children reached for him in the dark, they would find him there.

“Close your eyes,” he said.

Aemon’s fluttered stubbornly. 

He fought them, lids lifting and falling, but the dream-wine stole up on him with gentle, inexorable hands. Aemma’s breathing evened first, her face smoothing, lashes soft against her cheeks. Aerion sprawled bonelessly, mouth falling open, one small foot hooking instinctively over Aemma’s ankle. Aenar lay stiff a little longer, eyes fixed on the canopy as if he could will it not to spin.

Silence spread, the deep, layered kind that comes only when all the small noises of wakefulness have ceased.

No sniffles, no half-swallowed sobs.

Only the soft rush of four children breathing in some hesitant unison, the low murmur of voices in the corridor beyond, the far-off echo of a night-tide beating itself out against Blackwater’s stones.

Corlys watched them until the lines of their faces eased.

Only then did he let his own head tip back against the chair.

He did not sleep.

But he let his eyes fall shut.

---

The black cells sat in the stone like an old infection.

The walls sweated.

Not with clean damp, but with a slow, greasy moisture that smelled of riverslime and old piss.

It slicked the rock in a thin sheen that never quite dried.

Rats owned the place.

They did not hide as they did in brighter cells. Here they padded bold along the rusted bars, bellies fat, whiskers twitching.

In one cell, Vaemond Velaryon lay awake.

The straw under him had mashed into a sour mat, black in places where other men had sweated and shit and bled. Every shift of his weight sent a puff of dust and old stink into his face, carrying echoes of men who had died here, breath by breath.

He had not closed his eyes since they dragged him down.

Every time his lids drooped, the hall was waiting.

The flash of steel.

The way Laenor’s body had jerked, like a puppet whose strings had been yanked. The wet sound after, that thick, obscene splatter as the dagger came back painted. 

For one bright, vicious second it had satisfied something in him.

A knife put where he thought it belonged.

A blow for what he had told himself was truth.

Then the sound had changed.

Not the roar of men at war.

Children.

And the satisfaction had curdled so fast it left a sour film on the back of his tongue.

Now there was only his own breath, harsh in the dark, and the clink of his chains when his hands twitched.

“You were right,” he told himself, over and over, till the words lost shape. “He is not true. He is…”

The word snagged.

Bastard. It had felt so easy on his tongue in the hall, earlier. Down here the stone seemed to spit it back at him. 

His eyes burned. The dark thickened at the edges until the rats’ eyes were all he could see, that dull red shine.

He blinked back, hard, once, twice.

Sleep took him in a mean, sideways grab.

He did not notice when the cold changed.

One moment, it was the dungeon’s honest misery. The next, it sharpened.

It grew a flavor.

The taste of the Stepstones when a storm was still too far to see, but every old scar on his body started to itch.

Vaemond opened his eyes.

He lay on his back.

Not on straw.

Wood.

It rocked under him, a slow, nauseous lift and fall that his body recognized before his mind did. A deck. But wrong. No creak of timbers, no slap of waves, no shout of men.

He turned his head.

The black cells were gone.

No ceiling.

No bars.

Above him stretched a sky pressed low as a hand over a mouth. It pulsed, very faintly, as if something huge and unseen shifted behind it.

He tried to lift his arm.

He couldn’t.

His wrists were lashed to the planks. So were his ankles. The ropes bit deep when he strained, already burning damp grooves into his skin. Each breath made them grind a little further in, like something chewing.

He listened.

Nothing.

Just his own breath, and under it a sound that was not a sound at all. The slow, colossal inhale of something that had not yet decided whether it meant to speak.

Or swallow.

“Good,” someone said. “You should not run from this.”

The voice came from everywhere.

From the waves that slapped the hull. From the air in his lungs. From the blood in his veins.

He twisted, straining against the ropes.

There was someone at the edge of his sight. At first he thought it was a man, tall and narrow, draped in black. Then the shape shifted, lengthening, splitting at the shoulders, unfurling into something with wings like torn sails and a long, long neck.

Scales and skin.

Shadow and bone.

Dragon, and not.

Human, and not.

It hurt to look, as if his eyes were not meant to take in that many shapes at once.

Its eyes were the only fixed thing. Twin slits of molten silver, rimmed in darkness, deep as the drop beyond the shelf of the world.

Vaemond’s throat closed.

“Dragon,” he tried. “My prince. Your Grace. Whoever sent you. You do not understand, I—”

“You know my name.”

Not a question.

Vaemond’s tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth.

Something moved.

Something behind his eyes.

It felt like a hand made of knives reaching into his skull and turning.

He gasped. The sky vanished.

Fire slammed into him.

Not heat on skin. Memory. A city that had never been his, burning white and gold in the heart of a volcano. Towers of pale stone alive with runes. Bridges of black glass.

His mind tried to skitter away. It found no purchase.

He saw an altar cut from obsidian, slick with offerings that steamed where they met it. Blood, and stranger things. He saw hands lay a child there, not wailing, only watching. Silver eyes open and unfrightened. Above, carved in the stone, a name written in a language men no longer knew how to speak without bleeding.

TYRAXES.

It burned.

The letters crawled over his vision, searing themselves there. He tried to squeeze his eyes shut. They clung to the dark inside his lids.

The hand inside his head twisted again.

The visions jumped.

Dragons screaming as mountains tore themselves apart. Ships swallowed whole in boiling seas. Men on their knees, faces pressed to black sand, chanting one name until their voices broke and their teeth cracked with cold.

TYRAXES.

He saw the Fourteen ringed in fire, each mountain a candle. At their center, something vast, coiled and sleeping.

Around its heart, three small lights flickered.

Silver hair. 

Triplets.

The lights flared when someone whispered their names. Aemon. Aenar. Aemma. The glow around them was the same color as the runes in his skull.

“Say it,” the not-dragon said.

Vaemond dragged in air like a drowning man.

He felt scaled.

“I… can not…”

The knives in his head dug in.

He screamed. It came out thin and pathetic to his own ears.

“Say it,” the voice repeated, almost bored.

The word tore free of Vaemond in a rush.

“Tyraxes,” he gasped. “Tyraxes.”

His ropes smoked where it touched them.

His skin did not.

That frightened him more.

“Good,” the god said, and those silver eyes narrowed, satisfied. “Now you know whose blood you named lie. Whose work you tried to unmake.”

“I did not,” Vaemond rasped. “I did not—”

The world lurched.

He saw Laenor.

On the beach at Driftmark, clothes soaked, hair in his eyes, laughing as Aenar and Aemon clung to his back. Aemma on his shoulders, small hands buried in his braids as she ordered the sea to obey them and the waves obligingly broke at their ankles.

He saw Laenor in some quiet corridor, kneeling to tie a bootlace, listening as Aerion babbled a story that went nowhere and everywhere. 

“Laenor Velaryon,” Tyraxes said, and there was a strange weight in it. Not affection, but regard.

The image jumped.

The hall again. The moment.

Aemma’s hands flying to her throat.

Aenar frozen, eyes huge.

Aemon, mouth open on a sound that would never leave his nightmares.

Aerion, just starting to scream. 

“You put the knife there,” Tyraxes said. The god’s voice had gone flat, like a calm sea that knew exactly what storm it was hiding. “You chose that place. That hour. Those witnesses.”

Pressure built in the air.

The ropes bit deeper into Vaemond’s wrists, his ankles. He could feel every strand now, every twisted fiber, as if the bindings had grown teeth.

“Do you want to know what they felt?” the god asked.

Vaemond tried to say no. Tried to say this was all nonsense, a fever dream, a trick of a guilty conscience.

His tongue would not shape the word.

The world dropped.

He fell chest-first into a body that was not his.

He was small. Too small. His legs dangled when he tried to brace. His lungs burned. The noise in the hall was a wall. Men shouting. The wet, horrible sound of something vital spilling.

His hands were on his own face. No. Not his. Aerion’s. Tiny hands, sticky with something that was not wine. He could feel the way they shook, the way he tried so hard to hold the sob in because someone had told him not to be loud in the presence of lords.

He felt the moment the knife went in. Not the pain. The knowledge.

The way the word Kepa tore itself out of a throat not made for it yet and shattered on stone.

Vaemond ripped free, gasping, back in his own skin, chest heaving.

“No,” he rasped. “No, I—”

The god dropped him into another body.

Aenar this time. Heart hammering against ribs too narrow to hold it. The obsession with the door. With getting to his father. The certainty that if he could just reach him, just show him his face, just say the right word, this would all un-happen.

The doors would open again. The blood would go back into the vein. The day would go back to being a feast.

The knowledge that it would not, growing and growing inside his bones like splinters, until something in his chest felt close to bursting.

He didn’t get to climb out.

He was inside another boy who tried very hard not to be a boy at all. Aemon’s spine locked stiff, jaw clenched so tight it ached. The way he catalogued every detail. The angle of the blade, the pattern of blood on the floor, the faces that turned away. And branded it into himself as a ledger he would spend the rest of his life balancing.

Another.

Aemma, the wild, bright terror of knowing something sacred had been broken, and the crushing, impossible child-thought that if she loved hard enough, begged sweet enough, the gods would put him back the way he was. 

Out again. Back into his own too-large limbs, the ropes burning his wrists. Vaemond sobbed, raw, wordless.

“Stop,” he croaked. “Please. Please.”

Silence.

He might have thought he had been obeyed, if not for the taste in his mouth. Cabbage. Cooked to softness. Buttered just enough. Laenor’s voice above him, laughing, cajoling. 

Aerion’s voice, small and fierce. 

It curdled into iron on his tongue.

“You killed a man who would have died for those children a hundred times,” Tyraxes said. 

The god stepped closer.

Whatever it wore now walked like a man, barefoot on the planks, but every stride brought the sea with it.

“The realm will decide what to call you,” Tyraxes added. “Kin-slayer. Traitor. Martyr in your own mind. That is their sport. I care nothing for their words. I care what you feel.”

The god knelt.

Its hand fell lightly on Vaemond’s belly. Just a touch. 

Fire went through him.

Not like dragonflame. Worse. This was slow, viscous, a hot tide under the skin, crawling along veins and nerves, searching. It found the place he had stabbed Laenor and made a home there.

Vaemond screamed without sound, every muscle rigid.

“You will not die from this,” Tyraxes said, almost kindly. “Men will cut your head from your shoulders or they will not. That is their part. I will not steal it. But until then, you will carry what you did in your flesh.”

The heat sank deep.

Settled.

Cooled to a dull, constant ache that pulsed with his heartbeat.

“You will piss blood,” the god said. “Every time you seek a latrine, you will remember where you put your knife. Every hunger will sit queasy in you. Every breath will tug at the wound you carved into another man.”

Vaemond sobbed, shaking his head helplessly.

“You will open your mouth in that hall,” Tyraxes went on, “and when you go to say bastard, your tongue will swell. Your teeth will ache as if they have bitten down on steel. Your lies will taste of rust. You may still speak them. Men often do. But you will not do it in comfort.”

Vaemond tried to twist away from that hand. He could not. The ropes held him, the deck held him, the sea held him.

The god’s eyes burned silver-bright.

“You wanted the world to watch,” Tyraxes said. “Very well. They will watch you fail to walk to your own execution without stumbling. They will watch you shiver and sweat and try not to groan when you sit. They will whisper that you lost your courage in a cell. Only you and I will know you are losing your guts in little spoonfuls, over and over, until there is nothing left in you that does not remember Laenor Velaryon.”

He lifted his hand.

Vaemond’s body fell through the deck, through the waves, through stone, down, down into the dark.

He hit his own cot with a jolt.

Chains clanked. His bladder spasmed. Pain flared low in his belly, white and vicious. Warmth spread under him with a wet, sticky chill.

He did not need light to know what color it was.

In the neighbouring cell, Hobert Hightower woke to the sound of someone retching.

He lay there, wrapped in two cloaks and his own sweat, and listened to Vaemond gag and choke and sob. A thin, sour smile tugged at his mouth.

“Fool,” he muttered. “You swung the knife yourself. You could have let a sellsword do it.”

His own stomach clenched.

He shifted, annoyed. The bench was too narrow, the stone too hard, his bones too soft for such indignity. His skin crawled. The straw stank of piss and mildew and old shit, as if the cell had been marinating in other men’s fear for years.

The sooner this little theatre was finished and the king remembered which way his bread was buttered, the better.

Then back to Oldtown. 

Back to clean sheets and incense and the cool quiet of the Starry Sept’s vaults. Back to real power, not this silly little pantomime of regret.

Something shifted in the dark.

A rat, he thought. Or some half-witted jailer. He did not bother to look up.

“What do you want,” he grunted. “I’ve told you, no more of that grey water you call stew—”

He stopped.

The itch under his skin had become a movement.

Not on him. In him.

As if a hundred tiny legs walked just beneath the surface of his flesh, skittering along veins, pausing only to hook in and tug. He slapped at his forearm, hard. His hand met only hot, damp skin and the thud of his own pulse.

“Lice,” he snapped. “You’ve lice in the straw down here, you useless little—”

He pushed himself upright, breath hissing, and the cell was gone.

He sat in a chair he knew too well, at a table he could have drawn with his eyes shut.

Beeswax candles burned low in polished silver stands, their light thick and buttery on the wood. Ledgers lay open in tidy stacks, corners aligned with the edge of the table, each page ruled in his own careful hand. The air smelled of ink and smoke and old paper. It wrapped around him like a familiar robe.

His heart steadied.

“Yes,” he said under his breath. “At last. Something sensible.”

“My lord.”

A clerk stood at his elbow.

Hobert could not place him. The man was thin and grey in the way stone is grey. Color leeched out, nothing soft left. 

“The accounts for Oldtown,” the clerk said. “It is time to balance them.”

“About time,” Hobert muttered, reaching for the nearest ledger. “Bring me the tithes from the Reach first. We’ll start with the fat entries.”

The cover felt right under his fingers. Green leather, the Hightower torch pressed in gold. Solid. Real. When he dragged it toward him, something tugged against the underside of the binding with a faint wet sound.

He frowned and opened it.

Not paper.

Skin.

The “pages” were thin, pale, almost translucent in places. When he lifted one, he saw veins in it, faint blue trees branching through the flesh. The edges had curled and browned, as if they’d been dried in a low, patient heat and pressed flat by force.

The numbers were written in a dark red that had gone dull around the edges. When his fingertip brushed a line, the ink flaked, leaving a rust-coloured smear.

“That is wrong,” Hobert said. His voice came out too fast. “This is some tasteless jest. Take it away.”

The clerk tilted his head.

The movement was small. The change in his eyes was not. The whites darkened, as if smoke were curling up inside his skull, pupils blooming until they swallowed almost all the colour.

“It is accurate,” he said.

Hobert looked down.

Not numbers.

Names.

Each neat line on the flayed page bore a name where there should have been figures. 

A boy from the dockside tenements. A girl from a river hamlet. A woman who cleaned the sept steps. A man who lost three fingers to a millstone and never worked again.

Some names pricked at his memory, faintly, like half-heard petitions. Most meant nothing to him at all.

At the far end of the column, where there should have been a total, there was only one word, written in a hand that was not his.

OWED.

He turned the page.

The flesh stuck to his fingers for an instant, then peeled away with a soft, obscene sound. More names. More skin. A page where the “paper” still had a faint whorl of a knuckle, a half-moon scar, a birthmark. 

The smell rose, finally, past the candle and ink.

Meat.

His lip curled. His throat tried to close on it.

“You kept your ledgers well,” a new voice said.

Hobert’s fingers froze on the damp, shivering page.

He turned.

A man sat on the table.

No. The longer Hobert looked, the less that word fit.

The shape had the rough arrangement of a man.

Head, shoulders, long limbs. But the joints were wrong. As if bone had been an afterthought and shadow the true skeleton. The body seemed poured rather than grown, darkness gathered up and convinced, for the moment, to hold roughly human lines.

The face was worse.

Features existed, but only because something had decided they should. The mouth was a cut that could have been a smile or a wound. The nose was a suggestion. The eyes were the only things that had weight.

They burned silver.

Behind the thing’s back, where a human spine should have ended, something uncoiled.

A tail, thick at the base and narrowing to a tapered point, banded in dark, wet-looking scales. It wrapped itself around the table leg with lazy possession. 

Hobert’s bowels clenched.

“What is this,” he yelped.

His mouth filled with the taste of ash.

The taste of long-burned offerings in a cold sept, of a thousand prayers gone up and never answered. It coated his tongue, pasted to the back of his teeth.

He gagged.

“You counted everything,” the thing said. “Tithes. Ships. Men. You weighed it all, down to the last copper. Impressive work. But you forgot to put some things in your books.”

He lifted a hand.

In his palm, light gathered.

No. Not light. A city. Tiny, perfect, balanced on his skin. Oldtown, rendered in miniature. The Starry Sept no bigger than Hobert’s thumbnail. The Hightower a sliver of bone-white stone. Little ships, black as pinheads, slid in and out of its toy harbour.

“Here,” the thing said. “Your legacy.”

He closed his fingers.

The city screamed.

Not in air. In Hobert’s head. A thousand thin voices at once, all rising from that little crushed thing in the god’s grasp. He heard cows low and then fall silent. He heard children cough on rot-sweet air. He heard the river choke on dead fish.

When Tyraxes opened his hand again, the miniature Oldtown still stood. Every tower in place. Every roof intact.

Only now the fields around it were grey.

The neat patchwork of crops had turned to a slick, mouldering smear. Trees stood stripped of leaves, black fingers clawing at the dead sky. The harbour stank of something he could smell even from here. Rot and oil and slow, creeping death.

“This is blasphemy,” Hobert managed. His tongue felt too big in his mouth. “You cannot touch the city. The Seven—”

“Are not here,” the thing said. “They have their temples. Their prayers. They have men in crystal crowns who speak for them and sleep very well. I have my blood in three small children who stood in your king’s hall and watched you nod while a knife walked toward their father.”

“Blood.” Hobert barked out something that wanted to be a laugh and came out a rasp. “You mean those dragonbrats? A brood of silver freaks with a whore for a mother.”

The air tightened.

He plunged on, because fear had never held his tongue where contempt lived.

“They sob over their father and the court weeps as if it is holy writ.” His eyes glinted. “Four pampered whelps got splashed with the same blood they’ve been eating from all their lives. Half the dockside brats in this city watch their fathers die and do not get a parade in the throne room for it.”

The silver eyes did not blink.

Hobert’s courage spoiled into something fouler.

“You are a sickness. An enemy of the Seven. When Viserys remembers who keeps his granaries full and his septs lit, he will scrub you and your little brood off this realm like mold off a wall.”

Tyraxes did not move.

The city in his palm turned, slow as a thought. The dead fields shone slick, as if something under the soil had begun to breathe.

“You are very foolish,” the creature said.

His gaze slid down, taking Hobert in the way one might regard a fat, interesting insect.

“You look at the Realm’s Heart and see a trinket. You look at the boy who will drown men at sea or save them with a word and see a stain on your parchment. You look at the boy who touch fire itself and never burn and find him wanting. You watch a four-year-old stand in his father’s blood and think of failure.”

His head angled, slow and reptile-clear.

“Remember you called my blood louse, Hobert Hightower.”

Hobert opened his mouth.

Nothing came out.

His tongue lay thick and heavy. The taste of ash flooded his throat, then curdled into something worse. Sour. Metallic. The taste of old blood caught in teeth.

“You would like to speak their names again,” Tyraxes said. “You will try.”

He tapped the ledger with one blackened nail.

“Try.”

Hobert dragged air into his lungs.

“Rhae—” he began.

Fire lanced through his jaw.

Not heat he could feel on the skin. Deeper. Inside the meat. His gums burst. Or felt as if they did. Nerves lit up like tinder. Every tooth in his head screamed. He tasted iron and rot and something soft giving way.

He clapped both hands to his mouth.

His lips came away wet.

No teeth lay on his tongue.

Yet the pain sat there, huge and bright, as if each one had been ripped out by the roots.

“There,” Tyraxes said. “Now you start to understand the distance between what you say and what happens.”

Hobert swallowed a groan and forced himself upright.

“This is nothing,” he spat. Or tried to. The words slurred, thick. “Pain is nothing. A test. The Seven—”

“Cannot hear you,” Tyraxes said. “Because every time you open your mouth to bless the Seven, your tongue will lock.”

Hobert’s jaw snapped shut.

He tried to pry it open. His teeth ground together. His tongue lay thick and useless behind them.

“Try,” Tyraxes said. “Say ‘The Father.’”

Hobert forced his jaw wider with both hands. “Th… th…” His tongue spasmed once, then went rigid. A hot taste flooded his mouth. Blood and something copper-bitterer than blood.

His vision spotted.

“Now,” Tyraxes said, “say my name.”

It slipped out easily.

“Tyraxes,” Hobert croaked.

The ache behind his teeth ebbed for a heartbeat.

“You will invoke me cleanly,” the god said. “And choke on every human god-name you try to use.”

Oldtown turned again in his palm.

The little Starry Sept flared bright.

For a moment Hobert felt relief. There, he thought. Proof. Sanctuary. The gods’ light.

Then he saw what burned.

Not candle glow, but a dull, greasy orange. Like tallow poured over something that did not wish to catch. Smoke crept out along the model’s streets, not in plumes but in low, crawling sheets. It hugged the ground, thick as spilled soup.

Tiny figures moved within it. Bent. Coughing. Some dropped. They did not rise.

“You boast of your granaries,” Tyraxes said. "So let your punishment speak that language.”

His hand descended.

He flattened his palm over the little city, fingers splayed. From beneath, a sound pressed out. Stifled. As if an entire town tried to breathe under a hand that would not lift.

“Every storehouse you ever filled,” he said, “you filled by shaving the plate of someone poorer. By taking tithe upon tithe until you convinced yourself the gods had meant their bread for you all along.”

Hobert’s gut clenched.

The crawling under his skin returned, sharper. As if something fat and soft had burst in his belly and begun to spread. Cold sweat broke along his spine.

“You will never feel full again,” Tyraxes said. “You will eat what they bring you in the black cells. You will lick the grease from the bowl. You will steal crumbs from other men’s plates. You will swallow until your gorge rises, and still your body will tell you you are starving.”

Hobert’s stomach cramped, savage, hungry and nauseated at once.

The itch under Hobert’s skin flared.

He clawed at his forearm.

Under his nails, the flesh felt thick. Doughy. He dug harder, panting, until his fingers came away slick.

“You spoke of my children,” Tyraxes said, almost thoughtful. “Called their grief a game. Called their mother a whore.”

The light in his eyes changed.

Not brighter. Colder. The colour of steel that has forgotten it was ever ore.

“The gods count outcomes,” Tyraxes said softly. “This is the shape of yours.”

The crawling under Hobert’s skin worsened.

He looked down.

His hands had gone pale. Not the ordinary pallor of men who lived indoors. Translucent. He could see the blue map of veins beneath, the faint shadow of bone. As he watched, dark spots bloomed along his fingers. Little circles of dead flesh, the colour of bruised fruit.

He clawed at them, panicked, and his nails left no marks, as if his own body were no longer entirely his.

“You will not die of it,” the god said. “Not quickly. Men will say you have taken ill from the damp. From the shock. They will say a hundred little things to avoid looking at the truth. That the Lord of Oldtown rots from the inside.”

Hobert’s chest tightened.

His heart thumped, slow and uneven, like a hammer striking damp wood. He sucked in air that did not seem to reach all the way.

“You will feel it with every breath,” Tyraxes went on. “Your lungs will fill with ghosts of your own grain. You will sweat and shiver and stink of sickness while you try to speak in pretty phrases about mercy and caution.”

The god’s eyes glittered.

Hobert clutched his hands to his chest.

The dark spots had spread, blooming up his wrists like some obscene flower. His fingers did tremble, he realized. Not the ordinary tremor of age. A juddering, jerking shake, as if some unseen hand had closed around his bones and would not let them still.

Hobert fell back into his cell.

He hit the stone with a groan, clutching his chest. His heart rattled on like a poorly tuned drum. His hands curled, then spasmed.

He could not feel the tips of his fingers.

The dark spots were still there.

Not dream. Not illusion.

His breath came harsh, rasping, heavy with a stink he could not quite name. Damp cloth that never dried. Old grain. The early, sour tang of something going bad.

“Guard,” he tried to shout.

It came out thin. His voice scraped his own throat, startlingly weak.

No one came.

Across the corridor, Vaemond whimpered in his sleep.

Far above, in a chamber hung with black, four children slept with dream-wine blunting the sharpest teeth of their grief.

Tyraxes filled the darkest corner like a bruise.

Not quite shape, not quite smoke.

Moonlight did what it could. Caught on Aemma’s lashes, traced the tight line of Aenar’s mouth, paled the soft rise of Aerion’s small chest where he sprawled boneless across the mattress.

His eldest son moved as if sensing him. 

His fingers twitched, as if closing around something he had held in a dream. His brow furrowed. Then his eyes opened, slow and heavy, the color of old amethyst in the failing light.

Aemon blinked at the beams. At the banked coals. At the dark.

His gaze caught.

The boy stilled, pupils widening, breath going shallow. There were no words for what he saw. His blood supplied one anyway, old as the first dragon that ever crawled out of a volcano and looked at the sky.

Mine.

Aemon pushed himself up on an elbow. The coverlet slid to his waist. His free hand crept forward, small and careful, as if reaching for the edge of a bed that might not be there. He did not look away from the shadow that was not a shadow.

“Please,” he whispered.

It could have been nothing more than air leaving a cracked heart. It was still a prayer.

Tyraxes let him come.

Skin met him first like stone held too long from the sun. 

The boy sucked in a breath.

Things crawled up his arm that his mind was still too small to hold. Wings cutting storms in half. A heartbeat the size of a keep that answered his own quick drum with one deliberate thud.

His eyes shone. He did not cry. The tears sat on his lashes, hot and stubborn, while he pressed his hand harder into the shadow.

Tyraxes let the boundary thin.

He felt Aemon’s pulse as clearly as his own, a quick bright flutter under fragile skin. Felt the raw places inside where love and terror had scraped bone.

Mine, he thought, with the clean, simple certainty of a predator scenting its cubs. My son. My fire in a smaller cage.

Possession curled in him like a fist.

Not with comfort. He was not kind. He had never pretended to be.

They were his. And men had put their hands on what belonged to him. 

Let them rot.

Aemon’s strength frayed. The dream-wine tugged like a tide. His hand slipped, fingers curling instinctively, trying to keep hold of a god.

The hand fell fully. 

He looked at them one by one.

Aemon, jaw set even in sleep. Aenar, fists knotted in the blanket, already learning to grind terror into silence. Aemma, the Realm’s Heart humming a soft sound as if singing blessings to him. Aerion, little storm, curled tight, cheeks blotched with salt.

He marked each of them deep.

Then he turned his sight downward, through stone and seep and black water, to where two men whimpered in their filth and still dared think the word bastard in the same world as these children.

Above: four hearts he would claim.

Below: two vessels he had filled with slow ruin.

It was not justice yet.

Justice would be slower. Longer. Generational, if need be.

But for a first night, with his boy’s hand still warm from touching him, it would do.

---

Corlys had meant to sit only until their breathing steadied.

He stayed as the first candle guttered.

Then the second.

His hand lay spread on the coverlet, fingers splayed between four small shapes so that if any of them reached in the dark, they would find him there. Flesh and bone. Something that had not yet been taken.

At some point in the long slide of hours, the air in the room shifted.

The door eased on its hinges and a shadow moved across the faint light from the hall.

The Emberguard in the room straightened. 

Corlys’s eyes not fully closed, opened slow at the whisper of wood and iron, as if surfacing from deep water.

Vaegon did not speak at once.

He stood just inside the threshold and looked.

Four children in one bed, stacked close as cargo someone had tried to lash out of the storm’s reach.

“You look like you are trying to outstare the Stranger,” Vaegon said quietly at last. “He has practice, you know.”

Corlys did not turn his head.

“I gave them my word,” he answered. The words were rough, rope-burned. “That I would be here when they woke. Every time. Until their mother returns.”

“So you did.” Vaegon stepped in and nudged the door shut with his heel. His chain gave a small, tired clink. “And you have kept it. They slept. Aemon woke once. You were here. That puts you far ahead of half the fathers I have treated in this keep.”

Corlys’s hand curled on the coverlet, then flattened again.

“I told them I would not leave,” he said. “Not at all.”

Vaegon regarded him, head tipped like a man studying a wound to see how deep it goes.

“You will not,” he said. “Not in any way that matters. You are not taking a ship. You are not slipping out a postern gate with packed trunks. You are walking three corridors to stand between them and a king who would rather keep his eyes shut.”

Corlys’s jaw tightened.

“If I go, and they wake—”

“We will be close enough,” Vaegon cut across him.

The scholar’s patience thinned, and the steel beneath the ink and vellum showed.

“Hobert is in chains,” he said, voice low. “Vaemond is in chains. Alicent is sitting with her slippers in your son’s blood and telling herself she did not understand how sharp the knives were. The King will sit a chair and pretend the realm has not watched all of this.”

He shifted his hand to the back of Corlys’s chair. Long fingers, ink-stained at the tips, tapped once against the wood.

“If you are not in that hall when the choices are laid,” Vaegon said, “you will have broken more than your word to four children.”

Corlys’s gaze lowered to the bed.

“If they wake afraid, they should not find me gone.”

“You should be where this began,” Vaegon answered. “In the hall. With the men who let it happen and the man who will decide what is to be done about it.”

He bent a little, bringing his eyes level with Corlys’s.

“They are sleeping,” he said. “Breaths even. No fever. No shock that the body cannot bear. I know the signs. These four… gods help them, they are still anchored. For now.”

His gaze flicked to the bed, softer than his words.

“What they need from you in this moment,” Vaegon added, “is not your eyes on them while they dream. It is your voice in that hall, while men who have never cared for Laenor decide what his life was worth.”

Corlys rubbed his eyes closed. 

He had told them not at all. The words sat in him like bad ballast, heavy and ill-placed. Yet what use was a grandsire who kept his promise to the letter and let cowards below twist the day into something clean? If he stayed in this chair while they weighed Laenor’s life like grain, he would be breaking it in a worse way.

When he opened them, he nodded once and pushed himself to his feet.

The chair rasped against stone. Aemon shifted at the sound, lashes fluttering, then sagged deeper into the tangle of limbs and blankets. Corlys bent over him and brushed his knuckles lightly across the boy’s hair, careful not to wake him fully.

“I will be here when you wake,” he whispered. 

He did not know if any of them heard, if some small part of their dreaming minds caught and clung to it.

He said it anyway, as much a promise to himself as to them.

Vaegon watched him straighten, watched the way his right hand closed around something in his palm. Laenor’s ring bit into the skin there, a cold circle of metal and memory.

“Good,” Vaegon said, the word simple and spare. “Now come swear the same to your king’s face. Let him hear, while the blood is still drying on his stones, what you intend to do if he falters.”

The corridor beyond the door was crowded red.

Twenty Emberguard stood there, cloaks heavy, spears grounded. Ser Corren and Ser Myles had shed some of the blood from their armor, but not all of it. It clung in dark seams along leather, crusted pale on mail. Both men came to attention as Corlys stepped out.

“You know your charge,” Corlys said.

“We do, my lord,” Ser Corren answered. “We do not yield this door. Not to queen, nor king, nor god come down in silk. Not unless you or the Princess say the word yourselves.”

Ser Myles’s jaw flexed. “They take that room, they will do it over our corpses.”

“That would be untidy,” Vaegon said. “Try to avoid dying. I may need you to drag someone to the black cells later.”

The flicker in Ser Myles’s eye said clearly he hoped he would be allowed more than dragging.

Corlys looked once more at the door.

“Guard them,” he said. “Guard them as if they were the last bit of Dragonstone left above the waves.”

The Emberguard shifted, a small, ripple-tightening of men who had sworn the same a hundred times in quieter oaths and now found it spoken aloud.

“Yes, my lord,” Corren said.

They went.

In the wake of the feast, the passage to the throne room smelled of spilled wine and cooling meat and a metal tang that no rushes could quite hide. Servants had scrubbed, changed cloths, set up new braziers. It was like plaster over a hole in a hull.

The closer they drew to the throne room, the more men in white they passed.

The Kingsguard did not look at Corlys.

They knew how tangled their failures were in this night and did not seem eager to measure themselves against his eyes. One younger knight swallowed and clenched his hand tighter on his sword-hilt. Behind him, an older brother touched his shoulder once in quiet warning.

At the final arch, Ser Harrold Westerling barred their way with a lifted hand.

“The king sits in council,” he said. “He—”

Vaegon brushed past him with the smooth rudeness of a man who had been ignoring kings since before this one could walk.

“Your king is about to decide whether he stands with men who stabbed his good-son in front of the court, or with the heirs he named and blessed,” Vaegon said. “He can sit through our entrance.”

Ser Harrold’s jaw worked, but he stepped aside. His gaze went at once to Corlys, apology and something like grief in it.

“The children,” he asked, low. “Are they…?”

“Sleeping,” Corlys said. “For now.”

Ser Harrold’s shoulders eased a fraction. “They should never have seen a blade drawn in that hall,” he said under his breath. “Not on their nameday. Not ever.”

“Then remember that when next you see a man draw it near my grandchildren,” Corlys replied.

Ser Harrold lowered his head. 

They entered.

Viserys had chosen the smaller audience chamber and left the Iron Throne looming in the next hall like a threat nobody wanted to name. He sat at a long table, back hunched, crown abandoned near his elbow as if its weight had finally tipped his head.

Opposite him, by the fire, Alicent stood.

She wore green like a declaration.

New silk, uncreased by any honest wear.

The seams sat true along her shoulders, the line of the bodice flawless. The lace at her cuffs had been fastened correctly this time, each tiny loop obedient, not a single hook misplaced.

Someone had taken great care with her.

Corlys saw that perfection and felt something cold settle behind his ribs.

Lord Beesbury hunched at the table, the page before him still blank.

The Hand Selwyn Tarth held the far wall.

His head tilted in that lazy way that invited underestimation. His eyes undid the invitation. They were narrowed, steady, taking the room apart piece by piece.

A knot of Tyrell men lingered by the wine, their roses-and-gold cloaks too bright for the room.

A Celtigar lord stood near the window like a pale gull waiting out a storm.

One Baratheon nephew slouched near the door.

The hall felt smaller for all of them, crowded not with bodies but with witnesses.

The murmuring thinned as Corlys and Vaegon stepped through the arch. Then it stopped.

Viserys lifted his head.

Corlys saw not a king but a man worn thin by his own evasions. Age had not come to him as snow comes to a mountain, clean and dignified. It clung like mildew in a damp room.

“Corlys,” Viserys said. “My friend. My… gods. I am so—”

“Do not.”

Viserys flinched, shoulders jerking before the sound had even fully left Corlys’s mouth.

“If apologies were worth anything,” Corlys said, “my son would be standing in this room. You had years to decide where you stood. You chose ease. My son paid in blood for your comfort.”

Viserys’s eyes dropped to his own sleeve.

Dried brown ringed the cuff, a faint, stiff tide line where he had knelt in Laenor’s blood as if prayer could turn the clock back on a slaughter. His fingers twitched toward it, as though he might smudge it away with his bare hand. The gesture looked almost childish.

A boy trying to wipe berry juice from his palm before his mother saw, not a king looking at the last proof of his failure.

“I did not see—” he began.

“You were told,” Corlys said.

The words landed harder than any shout.

“You were told until the air in this castle tasted of it. Rhaenys slapped you with it in this very hall. Vaegon placed the ledgers under your nose. Rhaenyra has cried it, screamed it, written it when you would not hear her voice.”

He took a step closer, the sea in him finally breaking the shore.

“Do not dare stand in the blood of my son and say you did not see.” 

“Lord Cor—” Alicent began.

Corlys turned his head.

There was nothing courtly in his look.

No deference to crown.

No softening for rank or sex.

It was raw, sea-deep hatred, old as shipwrecks.

Alicent felt it hit her like cold brine emptied over the head. It stole the breath from her throat. The words she had meant to say tangled, shriveled.

Her mouth snapped shut on them.

The silence that followed was not graceful obedience. It was retreat.

Viserys scrubbed a shaking hand over his face.

“Hobert and Vaemond are in the black cells,” he said. “They will stand trial for treason and attempted murder. I will see justice done. I swear it.”

“No,” Corlys said.

Viserys stared at him, as if he could not quite believe anyone would refuse his offering. 

“No?” he repeated, thin. “You… refuse justice?”

“I refuse that justice,” Corlys said. “No more soft wringing of hands. No more trials where you let clever tongues turn blood to dust and call it reason. The hall saw what happened. Half this castle watched Hobert Hightower nod when Vaemond rose. They watched him sit his fat hands in his lap while my son’s life poured out on the floor. They heard what was spat at my grandchildren.”

Lord Beesbury’s hands twisted in his lap until the knuckles blanched.

Selwyn, by contrast, was very still.

His head tipped a fraction more, the pin of the Hand catching a sliver of torchlight. His eyes did not linger anywhere for long. Flicking from Corlys to Vaegon to the king, the way a man might study the shifting pressure of waves before a ship capsizes.

He wasn’t nervous.

He was counting.

Measuring.

Weighing the crown against the threat of Driftmark walking out from beneath it.

“What would you have me do?” Viserys said. “Drag them up and cut their heads off without a word? Throw them to the dragons?”

“If you had thrown them to the dragons, they would at least be dead by now,” Vaegon interjected. “Instead they sit beneath us and compose pretty speeches to make you doubt what your own eyes saw.”

Corlys leaned forward, knuckles biting into the wood.

“I am not asking you,” he said. “I am telling you what must be done if you expect Driftmark to bend the knee to you another day.”

Selwyn’s eyes sharpened at that.

He had heard threats to the throne before.

This one was different.

This one had teeth.

“I would kill Vaemond myself,” he said. “Gladly. I have slit better men from stem to stern and slept sound. But I will not stain my hands with kin-slaying. I will not stand before my grandchildren and tell them their grandsire spilled blood of their blood because their king would not. That sin is yours, Viserys. Take it up at last, or admit you have no right to the chair that forged it.”

Sweat stood out along the king’s brow despite the cool of the chamber.

His fingers crept toward the dried-blood cuff at his wrist and froze there, as if afraid to touch the proof.

“It is a terrible thing,” he said slowly, “to order death. Oldtown—”

“Oldtown is a viper’s nest that has just bitten your line,” Vaegon cut in. His voice sharpened, all maester’s patience burning off and leaving only Targaryen iron. “They sent Otto to you and you let him sit at your ear until you forgot the sound of your own mind. When he fell, they sent Hobert.”

He took a step closer, chain whispering.

“This is not a request,” Vaegon said. “House Hightower has drawn steel on the heirs you named.”

Alicent’s head jerked. “That is not true.” 

Vaegon looked at her.

The green stones at her throat flashed with each sharp breath, pretty little beacons on a woman standing in the wreckage she helped build. Her eyes were ringed red, yes, but grief sat on her like a gown she had only just remembered to put on.

“How is it not?” 

“House Hightower did not command this,” she said. “House Hightower did not bid Vaemond to attack. We sought only… only truth spoken.”

“Do not insult us with this wide-eyed nonsense.”

He took a step toward her, chain ringing once.

Colour burned high in her cheeks.

“You sought company in your resentment. You have three sons and a daughter of your own, and you have never forgiven the gods that when they looked at your womb and Rhaenyra’s, it was hers they marked as holy. Do not stand here now and call that justice. It is jealousy, plain as a bruise.”

Her mouth opened.

Closed.

“I did not know he would draw steel,” she insisted. “I did not.”

“That is your defense?” Vaegon’s laugh was a short, ugly sound. “That you are blind in your own hall?”

Viserys rose his hands to cover his face. 

“Please.” The word came rough, tearing out of him. “Uncle. She is still the queen. There must be respect.”

“No,” Vaegon said. “She is not.”

The room seemed to tighten around the words.

“I bent my knee to you,” he went on, “not to every lord’s daughter you chose to lay a crown on.”

His lip curled, just slightly.

“I owe her nothing but a clear eye and a name for what she has done.”

The room sucked in a collective breath.

Alicent stared at him as if she had never seen him before, as if somehow this grey-robed dragon had transformed into the creature that had raised her eyes to the heavens and heard nothing back.

“You would see me punished,” she said. “For a crime I did not commit. For being… for being born to the wrong house.”

Corlys laughed then to keep from slamming Alicent’s face to stone. 

It was an ugly sound. 

“What are you suggesting,” Viserys asked warily.

“That House Hightower as it stands ceases to exist,” Vaegon said.

The room went very still.

“You cannot—” Alicent began.

“I can advise,” Vaegon went on, ignoring her. “That the Hightower lands and titles be forfeit to the crown for conspiracy against the named heirs. That every adult Hightower be commanded to Kingslanding to stand trial. Those cleared may be granted lesser holdings under new names. Those found complicit should meet the headsman or the Wall.”

He let his gaze rest on Alicent a heartbeat too long before turning to Viserys.

“Oldtown itself,” he said, “must be taken from them. Given to some house that does not treat your children’s lives as stepping stones. Or better yet—” his mouth curved, not kindly, “given in trust to the very child they tried to unmake. Let the Hightower’s Beacon and all its tithes be settled on Aerion Velaryon, under his mother’s regency, until he comes of age.”

Beesbury sucked in a sharp breath.

Someone at the back choked on it entirely.

Viserys gaped.

“You would wipe out one of the oldest houses in Westeros because of this night?”

“Because of what this night proves,” Vaegon replied.

For a long moment, no one moved.

Then Lord Beesbury rose, slowly, stiffly, as though the weight of his years had grown heavier just listening.

“There is no precedent,” he said, his voice brittle but clear. “Not for this. Titles have been split, lines trimmed. Not… cleared.”

His hands trembled slightly as he gripped the back of his chair.

“If the crown begins this...confiscating ancestral lands, ending great lines with the stroke of a quill, where does it end? What precedent do you set, Archmaester Vaegon? That a House may be punished not only for what it does, but what it fails to prevent?”

Selwyn shifted then.

He did not even raise his eyes immediately, he was watching the king, reading Viserys as carefully as one reads a map when lost. 

“The Lord Treasurer is right,” Selwyn said finally. “There is no precedent.”

He lifted his gaze to Vaegon.

“But perhaps it is time to create one.”

Alicent’s stomach turned. She had never liked the new Hand. There was something in that calm that made her want to claw at him just to see it crack, something in the quiet weight of him that made her teeth ache.

“I do not say I support it. But the realm is watching. If House Hightower plotted the death of trueborn heirs, if they spat on the blood of Old Valyria in pursuit of their own ambitions, then something must be done. Something louder than trials. Louder than prison cells.”

He turned to Viserys then, truly turned to him, his face unreadable, carved from granite and shadow.

“And if I refuse?” Viserys asked slowly. “If I say, Hobert and Vaemond will face justice, but I will not tear a great house up by the roots for the sins of a few branches. If I say: I will not put my queen on trial.”

Corlys’s hand tightened on the table-edge.

“Then you tell me where you stand,” he said. “Plainly. And I will know whether Driftmark has a place in your realm any longer.”

Viserys’s head snapped toward him.

“You threaten me with secession,” he said. “Tonight?”

Corlys pushed away from the table and straightened to his full height, old sea-bones remembering every deck they’d ridden.

“If I walk, Dragonstone walks with me. Rhaenyra is not blind. She will not sit her children under a roof that lets their killers plead their case.”

His hand flattened on the table.

“You know how that ends,” Corlys said. “You have seen enough painted tables to trace it. If you force this fight, you will fall. Perhaps not tomorrow, perhaps not with one blow, but piece by piece, until there is nothing left of you but songs about how a weak king lost his throne trying to spare the necks of men who murdered his own.”

No one spoke.

You could hear the fire spit. The faint scrape of Lord Beesbury’s quill as his hand shook over an empty page. Selwyn’s cloak whispering when his weight shifted, just once.

Viserys’s shoulders sagged.

“What… what would satisfy you?” he asked at last. His voice sounded dragged. “If not trials as I proposed. If not trust in my word. Tell me plainly, Corlys. Vaegon. What terms will you accept.”

Corlys and Vaegon exchanged a look.

It was not a long one. Men who had bled beside each other in a hundred quiet ways did not need much.

“First,” Vaegon said. “You will send for the High Septon.”

Viserys blinked. “To… here?”

“Yes,” Vaegon said. “Drag the Star of the Seven out of his comfortable nest and bring him to the city. Let him look on what his favored house has done and say which side the gods bless.”

Alicent’s fingers spasmed.

“You would humiliate the Faith,” she said. “Parade the High Septon like a prisoner because you are angry at my family?”

Vaegon ignored Alicent entirely. 

“You will ask him for two things,” he went on. “The first: to bless the setting aside of your Queen.”

Viserys stared at him as if he had been struck.

“She is my wife,” he said.

“And she may stay so,” Vaegon replied. “I care nothing for your marriage bed. Keep her in it until the Stranger pries you apart if you like. But she will no longer sit a Queen. She is to be a lady in chambers.”

His gaze flicked to Alicent, cool as a blade laid on skin.

“She has sat in rooms she was not fit for and set snakes at your daughter's throat,” he said. “That ends. The High Septon will bless it. Let the Seven themselves sign the order that she is a wife only, not a queen.”

Viserys’s hand shook where it gripped the table.

“And the second thing?” he asked, very quietly.

Corlys answered.

“You will put your succession in writing,” he said. “In your own hand. No more spoken oaths for lords to pretend they misheard. You will name Rhaenyra your heir, again, and her children after her. You will have Selwyn Tarth and every lord present witness it, and when the High Septon arrives you will set your signature beneath his blessing.”

He leaned in.

“You will make it plain that Aegon, Aemond, Helaena and Daeron stand behind her line. They may keep their titles if that soothes your conscience. But in law they will have no more claim to that throne than any other lord’s get. Any man who raises their names as rivals to my grandchildren will be a traitor beyond argument. No loopholes. No soft corners.”

“It would… it would break my family,” Viserys whispered. “To hear it so.”

“It will save their lives,” Vaegon said. “So when fools urge them to reach for a crown that is not theirs, they can point to your hand on the page and say no. You will do that much for them, if you have ever loved them at all.”

Viserys swallowed hard, eyes bright.

“And the Six Moons Accord?” he said, already knowing.

“Dead,” Corlys said. “As dead as my boy.”

The words landed like a strike to the throat. 

“The heirs are not safe in this city,” he went on. "They will not come for their pretty six moons each year to be stared at like threats and targets.”

He straightened.

“They will stay at Dragonstone and Driftmark,” he said. “With dragons and ships and men who know their names. When they are grown, and can carry steel, they may come to court as guests and players in your game. Not before.”

Viserys’s fingers spasmed on the table.

“Rhaenyra… will agree to this?” he asked.

“She will,” Vaegon said. “You let her husband die on her children’s name-day before their very eyes. When she comes, she will bring fire and blood. She will count payment in bodies, not apologies.”

Viserys dragged a hand over his face.

“And Hightower,” he said. “You would have me… decimate them.”

“Yes,” Vaegon said.

The word was simple.

It was not shouted.

It rang all the same.

“The Hightower lands and titles are forfeit,” he went on. "They will be commanded to Kingslanding within the moon to answer for conspiracy against your heirs. Any who do not come are traitors by default.”

Beesbury made a soft, terrified sound. Even Larys, in his quiet corner, went very still.

“And give it to Aerion,” Corlys added, unblinking. “You put his life on that table today. Let their tenants kneel to the child their plots tried to tarnish.”

Alicent jerked as if slapped.

“If any balm is owed,” she said, voice sharpening, “it should be to Aegon. He is your firstborn son. If Oldtown must be torn from my house, let it be given to him. Not to their boy. Not to them”

Vaegon turned to her, slow and deliberate. He regarded her the way one might a buzzing fly, irritating but beneath swatting.

“Aegon,” he said, voice clean as a cut, “is lucky to keep his name. His place. That is the mercy he gets. Not a city.”

Alicent stared at him, stunned.

As if the words, the truth, could not possibly be meant.

Her hands clenched at her sides.

Then she laughed, unhinged, enraged. “Very well,” she said. “If we are laying all truths bare, then let me offer one of my own.”

Selwyn’s head rose an inch.

Vaegon’s eyes narrowed.

"While this council tears its garments over conspiracies and dragons and the treason of my House,” she continued, voice trembling with fury, “perhaps someone should speak of the little empire Princess Rhaenyra has been harboring on the Stepstones.”

Beesbury jolted upright.

Alicent went on, breath catching, but refusing to stop now.

“Unsanctioned. Unchallenged. Nearly three thousand men, gathered over years, bound to her household banner, commanded in secret under the guise of 'protection.’”

She turned to Viserys now, cold and triumphant.

“You think your daughter has simply been waiting for the crown to come to her?”

Gasps bloomed like wildfire.

Vaegon tilted his head. Smiled, just barely.

“Your informant is incorrect, Lady Alicent.”

He let the pause breathe.

“It’s closer to five thousand.”

Five thousand.

Lord Beesbury jolted again, but this time, his mouth had fallen slightly open. His eyes fixed straight ahead, as if still calculating the enormity of it.

Vaegon wasn't done. 

“You want them dismissed? Then make this hall safe for your grandchildren. Make the roads clean, make the sea honest, make the daggers stop coming. Until then, leave Dragonstone its shield.”

Viserys sat very still.

His hand moved, slowly, to the edge of the table. Fingers white-knuckled on carved wood. His gaze swept the room, not with command, but with quiet devastation.

When he finally spoke, his voice was hoarse. Thin.

“Are there no kin in this kingdom… who do not sharpen blades against one another?”

Silence answered him.

He turned his eyes to Vaegon, not in defiance, but in weariness.

“I do not deny the truth of what you say. About the threats. About the danger. About… necessity. But five thousand swords under my daughter’s command, built in silence, beyond my sight. That is no shield. That is a challenge. To every lord who ever swore to the crown.”

He looked to Selwyn next, almost as if seeking help. He found none.

"If I say nothing,” Viserys went on, voice cracking, “then I appear weak. If I speak against Rhaenyra, I condemn my own blood. And if I punish Oldtown—” his gaze flicked to Alicent, “—then I sever half the kingdom.”

Corlys leaned forward.

His voice was quiet.

Too quiet.

“Then do nothing.”

Viserys looked up, startled.

But Corlys was no longer raging.

No longer pleading.

Just done.

“Close your eyes. Hold your tongue. Let the wind carry this moment away, as you’ve done so many others. Let justice rot in the dark. Let the wrongs go unanswered.”

He stood, slow and steady, and the Sea Snake filled the room.

“But if you do know this, Driftmark and Dragonstone will fly under their own banner. We will guard our own blood, raise our own laws, and answer to no one who lets daggers fly at children in his own hall and does not raise his voice.”

He stepped out from behind the table, each footfall quiet as surf before a storm.

“Lose your daughter. Lose her children.”

His eyes were dark with salt and legacy.

“But do not claim surprise, Viserys. Be happy with the choice you made.”

“Corlys,” Viserys said hoarsely.

No command. No royal decree.

Just a name. Just a man cracking.

All could see, in the taut lines of his face, the war between habit and horror. The part of him that had always chosen to look away tilting its head toward the door, toward Alicent’s empty chair and the memory of Otto’s soft voice. The part that had knelt in his good-son's blood and heard Aerion screaming fighting it tooth and nail.

At length, he nodded.

“Send for scribes,” he said, his voice raw. “Lord Beesbury, you will draw the writ of succession as Lord Corlys and Archmaester Vaegon have set out. Ser Selwyn, you will witness. Tomorrow, I will send ravens to the High Septon and to Oldtown. The summons will go out in my name. Every Hightower of age will come to stand before this throne.”

Viserys could already hear the ravens before they flew. The Reach in uproar, Oldtown’s bells tolling in fury instead of prayer, fields and fleets shifting in ways no quill could call back. A king who tore one of the realm’s oldest roots from the soil would not be easily forgiven.

He set his jaw anyway.

Then the world cracked.

“You cannot.”

Alicent’s voice tore through the chamber, raw enough that several men flinched as if struck. She lurched to her feet so fast the chair went skidding backward, slamming against the marble with a shriek.

“You cannot do this,” she said, louder. “Viserys. Viserys.”

Her hands were trembling, white-knuckled on the edge of the table. Color burned high in her cheeks, eyes blown wide.

“You would strip my house. You would drag every Hightower here to be… to be weighed like cattle? You would give Oldtown to her child?” Her gaze snapped to Corlys and Vaegon, then to Selwyn. 

The room shifted.

“Alicent.” Viserys’s voice frayed on her name. “It is decided.”

“No.” She rounded the table, skirts catching on the carved legs, nearly sending her sprawling. She caught herself and pushed on. There was nothing queenly left in it. Only a woman coming apart. “You cannot shame my sons for the rest of their lives to soothe theirs. You cannot let him—” She stabbed a shaking finger at Corlys. “—and him,” at Vaegon, “drag my family into the dark and call it justice.”

“Queen Alicent,” Selwyn said quietly. “The King has decided.”

“Let the king hear me,” she spat. “Let them all hear me.” Her eyes swept the gathered lords. “You will watch your king hand our city to a child that should never have drawn breath and you will call it right, because dragons told you so.”

It was almost a sound, the way the air tightened.

Vaegon’s expression did not move, but his gaze had gone glacial. Corlys’s jaw worked once, like a man fighting an urge to reach for steel.

“Every word you speak is another stone on the scale," Vaegon said. 

She whirled on him.

“You. This is you.” Her voice cracked. “You have poisoned him against us. Against me. My father was right about you. A viper in a maester’s chain. You and that… that witchery on Dragonstone. You have turned my husband into a stranger.”

Ser Harrold had already moved when she staggered toward Viserys, as if she might climb him and shake sense back into the man seated there. He caught her by the forearm, firm but not cruel.

“Your Grace,” he said. “Please.”

She tried to wrench free. When that failed, she struck at him, raw panic in the heel of her hand.

“Let me go! Viserys, look at me!” Her voice broke on his name. “You cannot do this. You cannot take everything from us because… because they are angry.”

She laughed then, a high, ugly sound that had nothing of mirth.

“Will you let them burn Oldtown as they burned my kin? Will you watch them feast on the bones and call it balance?” Her gaze snapped back to Viserys, wild and wet. “You are a fool if you think their hunger ends here.”

Viserys looked older than any man in the room. Older than the throne under him.

“It is done,” he said again.

It landed like ash.

Two more Kingsguard moved in at a nod from Ser Harrold, one taking Alicent’s other arm. When she realized they meant to hold her, real fear sparked in her eyes.

“Do not touch me,” she hissed. “I am your queen.”

Vaegon’s mouth curled, the ghost of a humorless smile.

“For the hour,” he said.

She thrashed then, truly. Nails raking at white cloaks, hair tumbling from its pins, silk tearing as she fought them like a trapped animal.

“You will not take my sons’ birthright,” she screamed. “You will not put her bastards over them and call it godly. The Seven will—”

“Maester,” Viserys said, and if there was any mercy in him, it was for the way his voice shook. “Bring her poppy.”

The old man at the edge of the room jumped as if woken from a dream and hurried forward, fumbling at his pouch. By the time he reached her, Alicent’s voice had gone hoarse but no less vicious.

“Look at you,” she rasped, staring up at Viserys as the cup was pressed into her shaking hands. “Letting them lead you by the nose. Letting them use your guilt like a leash. You think they will stop with my house? With Oldtown? They will gut the realm to feed their brood and leave you sitting in the bones.”

“Alicent,” Viserys said, almost whispering. “Drink.”

Her eyes met his then, and for one slivered instant there was something like naked, shattering hurt there. Then the maester’s hand tipped, some of the thick, bitter poppy spilling against her lips. She coughed, choked, swallowed more than she meant.

The fight went out of her in sharp, stuttering pieces.

Her knees buckled first. The Kingsguard bore most of her weight as she sagged between them, still trying to glare, but her eyes had begun to blur, lashes heavy.

“You will regret this,” she said thickly. “When the bells go dark and there are no prayers left for you. When… when…”

Her head lolled.

“Get her to her chambers,” Viserys said. “See that she… that she rests. No visitors without my word.”

The white cloaks bowed their heads. Between them, the queen’s body was already slackening, her green skirts whispering over the stone as they half-carried her from the hall.

The great doors closed behind her on a hush.

In the silence that followed, the scratch of Beesbury’s quill began again, desperate and unsteady, as if even the ink knew it was setting the realm on a road there would be no turning from.

---

The next morning, the world had the nerve to be beautiful.

The sky over Kingslanding stretched clear and bright, a hard blue bowl with not a cloud in sight. The sea beyond the walls glittered as if nothing had happened at all. The grass in the upper gardens shone a healthy green, heavy with dew.

Their father was dead.

The triplets walked between Corlys and Vaegon like a little procession, Aerion tucked close at Aenar’s side, silver head bowed.

No one had made them dress finely, not today.

Aemon wore a simple black doublet, his hair unbound around his face. Aenar’s tunic still had a loose thread at the cuff he kept worrying with his fingers. Aemma’s gown was plain, dark as night, her curls pulled back from her face so her features were bare and strange and solemn.

They had always been beautiful.

It was a fact of life.

The sky is blue.

The grass is green.

The children of Rhaenyra Targaryen are beautiful.

As if the gods had poured pearl and wildfire into mortal shape and left them gleaming for the world to see. 

But now they did not simply shine. They burned.

There was a new edge to them, the thin bright line where childhood gives way to knowing.

Aemon’s amethyst eyes did not just catch the light now. They cut through it, seeing who stared and why.

Aenar’s storm-dark gaze no longer floated past faces in careless blur. It weighed, measured, understood, and the loose thread at his wrist was the only childish thing left to fidget with.

In Aemma the change showed most of all. The soft, dreamy sweetness of a little girl had gone quiet inside her. What remained was a stillness that looked back at the world and knew it could hurt.

Even Aerion, only four and red-eyed, fingers knotted in Aenar’s, seemed touched by it. Some shimmer sat under his small, swollen face, as if grief had reached into each of them and washed away the last of their innocence, leaving veins of hard, bright gold in its place.

They passed beneath an arch of carved stone and the gardens opened before them, terraced and bright, fountains throwing thin music into the air.

Silence fell in their wake.

Not true silence.

The splashing of the fountains remained. The sea wind hissed in the leaves. Somewhere a bird insisted on singing as if the morning had not changed.

Yet among the people, something tightened.

Conversations died half-spoken.

Fans stilled.

Corlys slowed, just enough for the children to feel him there, a steadying weight at Aemon’s shoulder. On Aemma’s other side, Vaegon walked like a wall, his maester’s chain glinting at his throat, his expression carved in granite.

“They need air,” Corlys had said when he argued them out of the royal apartments. “They need sky, not candles.”

He had not said: They need to be seen.

Because they did. Because yesterday the realm had watched their father die for them, and if no one made a stand now, the story would curdle in the dark.

The lords and ladies of the court understood something of that too, it seemed.

No one approached.

No one dared call out. Yet as the children’s small party walked down the gravel path, people moved.

It began like a shiver.

A lady with grey in her hair, whose name Aemma did not know, bent with care until her bad knee touched stone. Her hand trembled against her skirts. The ring on her finger caught the morning. She bowed her head to the gravel at Aemma’s feet as if it were some altar.

“Heirs of Dragonstone,” she said, voice rough from years. “My condolences. My oath.”

Aemma stopped.

No one had told her what to do, not for this. There had been no lesson in how to walk through a garden and be someone else’s grief made flesh.

Her fingers twitched at her side. She almost reached for the shell that was not there, then caught herself and closed her hand on nothing instead.

“Rise,” she managed. The word came out small but steady.

The lady pushed up, breath hissing, and when she straightened her eyes were bright with more than age.

“For your father,” she said, more softly. “And for you.”

She stepped back. The path opened again.

They walked on.

Another knight went down on one knee. Then two in a row. A squire, overawed, dropped so hard his teeth clicked. A pair of Tyrell cousins traded a quick look. One folded gracefully, hand to heart, the other followed with less grace but equal conviction.

It spread.

Like the first ripple when stone hits water.

Some only bowed their heads where they stood. Others sank fully, cloaks pooling, skirts whispering over gravel. There was no horn blast, no shouted heraldry. Just one by one, as the children passed, the court of the Seven Kingdoms lowered itself along the path.

Aerion pressed closer to Aenar’s side until their shoulders touched.

His fingers had knotted so tight around his brother’s hand the knuckles blanched. He stared at the gravel, as if the sight of so many grown people folding in front of him might be too large to look at directly.

“Why are they doing that,” he whispered.

Aenar’s throat bobbed.

He did not know the answer that would be kind. He only knew the one that was true.

“Because they are afraid,” he said quietly. “Of what happens if they do not.”

Aerion swallowed.

“Of us?” The idea sat strangely on his tongue.

Aenar thought of yesterday.

Of blood on stone and the sound his own lungs had made when he realized his father’s chest would never rise again. Of the way the hall had watched. Some horrified. Some hungry. Of the way every gaze had turned to them and weighed their existence like coin.

“Of what we mean,” he said.

On Aemon’s other side, Corlys’s hand drifted almost without thought, fingers brushing the boy’s shoulder. Not a restraining touch. A point of balance.

“Keep your eyes up,” Corlys said low. “Let them see you see them.”

Aemon obeyed.

His spine straightened. His gaze lifted from the gravel and moved over the kneeling figures, over lowered heads and bowed necks and hands pressed to hearts.

There were men there who had laughed when he tumbled as a toddler. Women who had pressed sweetmeats into his hand at feasts. Boys he had raced in the yard, girls who had giggled behind their fans when he walked past with his hair braided and his doublet too finely stitched for his comfort.

Now they knelt.

The world had tilted and nobody had warned him.

He did not feel taller.

He felt hollow and too bright at the edges, like glass pulled from the furnace and set out in the cold.

“Do we… bow back?” Aerion whispered, frightened at the thought.

“No,” Vaegon said.

His voice carried just enough for the nearest kneeling lords to hear. A few flinched as if caught.

“You stand,” Vaegon added, more quietly for the children. “You keep walking. You let them remember who watched yesterday and did not move.”

Aemma glanced up at him.

“Is this… for us?” she asked. “For Kepa?”

Vaegon’s mouth tugged, not quite a smile, not quite pity.

“It is for themselves,” he said. “But you may use it. Later.”

They reached the first fountain.

Water leapt in the air, catching sunlight in a scattering of tiny rainbows. It should have been pretty. Aemma wanted to hate it for daring.

Aerion pressed his cheek to the stone, eyes half-closed.

“It feels wrong,” he said.

“What does,” Aemma asked already knowing the answer. 

“That it looks the same,” Aerion whispered. “Everything. Like nothing happened. Like he might come up the stairs with his hair all wet and a story about a fish that nearly ate him and we just… dreamed it.”

The words tripped, then slowed, as if he were feeling his way along them.

Aenar’s hand found the back of his neck. It rested there, thumb moving once against the soft skin.

“It will always look wrong now,” Aenar said.

He said it flat, because if he gave it any shape at all it would cut.

Aemon leaned his forearms on the wall.

His eyes traced the black mouth past the walls of the keep, the far mouth of the Blackwater, the hazy line where the Narrow Sea met the sky. 

“Will Muna be here today,” Aerion asked, small.

“Not today,” Vaegon said.

His hand brushed the boy’s hair once. “But soon. Riders are faster than ravens when the world gives them reason.”

“And when she comes…” Aemma started, then stopped. She did not know which fear to name first. That Muna would shatter when she saw the space where Laenor should be, or that she would not shatter at all.

That she would turn that grief outward like a blade.

Vaegon’s gaze went to the sky.

There was nothing yet, no dot, no gleam of sun on scale. He seemed to listen to something deeper than wind.

“When she comes,” he said, “the realm will feel it.”

Aemon’s fingers dug into the stone.

“Will the king keep his word?” He did not look back at the keep when he asked it.

“Yes,” Vaegon said. “Or he will discover what happens when he tries to wriggle away while men with longer memories than his watch.”

“So they will come,” Aenar said quietly. “The Hightowers.”

“They will,” Corlys replied. “Some defiantly, some trembling, some already planning to swear they knew nothing.”

“And Oldtown,” Aemma asked. “Will they hate us?”

Corlys looked at her.

“They will blame whoever the songs tell them to blame,” he said. “Some will curse your names. Some will bless them. It will not change what was done.”

Aemma turned that over.

“It was their choice,” she said at last. “Not ours.”

“Yes,” Vaegon said. “But men love to lay their ruin at someone else’s feet. Remember that.”

A breeze lifted Aemma’s hair.

The sky is blue.

The grass is green.

The heirs of Rhaenyra walked under the sun, and the realm bent its head.

From the colonnade at the garden’s edge, another group watched.

Aegon stood bare-headed in the light, one hand braced on the stone pillar. The usual slackness was gone from his face. His mouth was a thin, colorless line, fixed on the children below with a kind of hollow dread. 

Helaena hovered beside him, shoulders hunched. Her gaze kept snagging on the triplets and skittering away, as if to look full upon them hurt. 

Aemond stood a little ahead of them, thin shoulders drawn tight.

His eyes followed the four of them with a fierce, stricken focus, as if he were trying to carry every detail of them into memory as penance. 

All three of them looked as if they wanted to cross the garden, to say something, sorry, perhaps, or nothing at all, just stand near.

Aemon felt their eyes like extra weight on his shoulders. For a moment he half-expected Aemond to come striding down, chin high, some awkward, halting apology on his tongue.

The distance held.

Corlys did not look at the green children. Vaegon did, once, a brief hard glance that turned their way like a blade. Whatever he saw there made his jaw clench. 

The court watched.

The wind moved.

“Princess.”

The voice was not loud, but it carried. 

Aemma had to force herself not to flinch. 

Corlys’s hand came to rest at her shoulder, light but firm. Vaegon shifted a half step in front of them all, as natural as breathing. 

A boy stood on the gravel path.

He had placed himself squarely in it.

Hair dark as night, skin still holding the pallor of sunless winters. His clothes were good wool rather than court silk. At his throat a clasp shaped like a running direwolf. He could not have seen more than thirteen namedays, but his spine was straight as a spear haft, his shoulders set.

At his back stood a man broader than Corlys, built like something hewn from old stone.

His face was lined, weathered by wind and snow, his beard threaded with iron, his eyes the color of a winter sky. 

The North had stepped into their path.

“Lord Stark,” Corlys said, low, a warning and a greeting both, salt and storm in his voice.

The older man inclined his head by a fraction. 

His hand settled once, briefly, on the boy’s shoulder. The touch said what his silence did not.

Go on. You chose this. I stand with you.

The boy’s gaze flicked to her grandisre, then back to Aemma.

He looked as if the words had gone out of his head. She was used to that. Her muna had once laughed and said people never quite knew what to do when they found their own heart looking back at them from someone else’s face. Aemma had giggled then, pleased and flustered. 

She did not find it amusing anymore.

The boy swallowed and squared his shoulders, as if bracing himself against a wind only he could feel.

“Princess Aemma,” he said. “I… I have something of yours.”

Her own shoulders straightened on instinct, court training rising like a ghost. Chin up, back long, hands still. If her heart lurched, no one need see it.

But there, in his hands, lying across his palms, lay her necklace. 

It was clean now.

The gold links shone, mended with care.

The small pendant at its center, a piece of perfect pearl, still as pretty as ever. 

“I found it,” the boy said. “After. By the steps, near the blood.”

His voice did not shake on blood, but his brow furrowed some. “I thought it should be returned. I did not want… it seemed wrong, to leave it there.”

Aemma’s feet moved before she knew she meant them to.

Up close, there was more. 

There was nothing pretty about him the way there was about half the court, but something in him felt… solid.

As if when the world tilted, he would still be standing in the same place.

Around his nails the skin was reddened and raw, as if he had worked at that blood until the cold water bit him. 

The knowledge lodged deep.

“Thank you.” 

She held out her hands.

The boy laid the necklace across her palms with careful fingers.

She lifted the necklace and, with fingers that wanted to shake, brought it once more to her throat. Aemon stepped forward, without a word, and fastened the clasp at her nape.

The pendant fell back into its usual place.

The boy, Cregan Stark, she remembered suddenly, from the long litany of names called before the feast. He looked at her as if fixing the sight behind his eyes, as if he meant to carry it north over half a world of road and snow and set it down in Winterfell’s hall like a story that must be told correctly.

Her grief did not lessen.

It did not soften.

It lay where it had lain since last night, a stone in her chest, cold and immovable.

Yet with the necklace back where it belonged, something in her spine straightened, as if a thread had been drawn taut from her throat to the ground beneath her feet.

“Winter bows its head to you,” the Lord of Winterfell said then, his first words, quiet with iron under them. “My son wished to return what is yours. It is a small thing in the face of what was taken… but small things carried out of blood and chaos matter.”

He paused, studying her with those winter-pale eyes that missed very little.

“The North honors your father’s passing, Princess,” he went on. “A man who dies for his children is not lightly spoken of where I am from. Nor are the children who walk the next morning with their heads high.”

The words were plain, but they were not empty. They settled in the air like a cloak laid gently at her feet, an offered weight she could choose to lift.

His gaze moved over them one by one: Aemon, stone-still and sharp; Aenar, fingers tight around Aerion’s hand; Aerion himself, small and blotched with old tears; Aemma, necklace gleaming against the hollow of her throat. 

Aemma had to tip her head back to meet his gaze, looking up and up at the man who spoke to her as if she were grown.

It helped, strangely.

To be addressed not like something fragile that might shatter, but like a person who could understand the weight of debts and grief.

“You have my thanks,” she said. “And my mother’s, when I tell her.”

Then Lord Stark inclined his head again, and drew his son gently back, out of their path. The boy looked once more at Aemma, at her brothers. There was something fierce in his young face now, something like a promise only he knew he had made.

He followed his father away toward the shade.

Vaegon’s mouth twitched, his eyes sharpened as they followed the northern delegation. 

“We must go. The king would speak with you before the court. It will be brief. It will not be comfortable.”

“What must we do,” Aemon asked already preparing himself for his role. 

“Nothing you have not already done,” Vaegon said. “Stand. Listen. Remember. You do not need to speak unless you wish to. Your existence is accusation enough.”

The courtiers who had watched every word, every movement, now saw what the North had done and adjusted themselves in small, frantic ways.

One by one, others sank lower when the children passed.

Bows deepened.

Curtsies lengthened.

Allegiances, once whispered, stepped forward into daylight.

The sky was still blue. The grass was still green. Their father was still gone.

The heirs of Rhaenyra walked on, the Realm’s Heart with her necklace shining clean at her throat, and the realm chose where to set its knees.

Notes:

We’ve hit a new word-count high with this chapter, which feels fitting, because Tyraxes is in his “I am a God, fear me” era.

I’m especially curious what you think about:

how his choices reshape the board

How much you think Aemon understands

and whether you see him as cruel, protective, or something much stranger

Chapter 30: The Price of Being Seen

Notes:

40,000 hits. 🥺🖤

Thank you, truly. I never thought so many eyes would find my writing, let alone stay with it, and I’m kind of overwhelmed in the best way. Every hit feels like a small hand squeezed through the dark saying, I’m here. I’m reading. Keep going.

I’m so grateful for every single person who’s taken the time to read, to feel with me, and to leave a little mark of love on this story. You have no idea how much it means.

More soon. More ache. More fire. More trouble. 🖤

The bells of High Tide tolled slow and heavy.

Their sound rolled over Driftmark in tireless waves, sorrow folding into sorrow.

All of Driftmark had come.

Oarsmen with callused hands. Shipwrights with salt ground into the seams of their clothes. Cousins whose names no one bothered to untangle in the hush. People who did not mourn prettily. People whose grief sat in their throats like fishbones.

The noble guests in their dark finery looked strangely small among them, as if silk could shrink under the weight of a house’s loss.

At the front of the terrace, the water waited.

So did the stone, carved from pale rock.

Ropes lay coiled at either end, ready for the oarsmen who would guide the dead into the sea’s cold embrace.

Rhaenys stood nearest the center, her face set into something harder than marble.

No tear tracks. No tremor. Everything in her that could collapse had already been braced and locked into place.

Corlys was only a step away, close enough that his hand rested over hers, their fingers knit tight while he spoke in low tones to the captains.

He never turned fully from the sea.

Neither did she.

They faced it together, as if the water might still answer them.

Rhaenyra stood just behind, the children gathered around her like a small, stubborn fleet. She had placed them deliberately.

Close enough to be felt, far enough to grant dignity.

And yet, every so often, as if pulled by a tide they refused to name, one of them would glance back.

A quick, ruthless check. 

Corlys would break from murmured counsel just long enough to cross the stone and set a steadying hand at the crown of a child’s head, his thumb brushing hair from a brow with the same practiced care he once gave to lines and sails. Rhaenys would follow a heartbeat later, fingers finding a shoulder, an arm, the curve of a small back.

Touches that said I am here without daring to say I am not surviving this.

They did not linger.

They could not.

If Corlys’s eyes brightened, if his throat worked too hard against words, he would turn first. Angling his body toward the sea as though the horizon had summoned him. If Rhaenys’s mouth tightened, if her hands betrayed the faintest shake, she would step to his side, and their fingers would interlace again. 

Then, together, they would take one measured step away from the children.

Not to abandon them.

To pull their grief in close where it could not spill at small feet. 

Aemon held Rhaenyra’s right like a sworn sword, fingers hovering near the hilt of a practice blade he was not allowed to draw. Aenar pressed to her left, his broken ship tucked against his chest as if he meant to ram the world with it. Aemma stood before her, close enough that Rhaenyra could feel each fine shiver of her breath. Aerion clung to her free hand, thumb worrying the embroidered edge of her sleeve until the thread began to give.

Behind them, Baela and Rhaena stayed tucked in close, their joined hands caught in the back of Rhaenyra’s gown, using her like a mast in high wind.

Their pain was quieter than Aerion’s. Sharper than Aemma’s.

It sat in their eyes like wildfire.

The wind lifted strands of silver from every head and set them dancing. Bright, disobedient things in a day that demanded stillness.

Somewhere behind them, someone began a hymn to the Mother of Tides.

It started low, raw at the edges, more breath than melody. 

Laena did not sing.

The linen covering the central pale coffin hid Laenor from the world, but not from her.

She could see him too easily.

His crooked grin. The easy laughter. The way he had always looked like he’d stolen some private joke from the universe and meant to share it only with her.

Now that laughter had nowhere to go.

It pressed against the inside of her skull like a scream she could not afford to make.

Beside him, the smaller shape lay neatly, swaddled in cloth the soft blue of a calm bay.

Too small.

So small the mind refused to accept it as a body. It wanted to call it a bundle. A wrap. A mistake of cloth and empty air.

Laena’s hand rested on that tiny bundle, fingers splayed as if she might still warm it, coax a breath into it, force the world to yield back what it had stolen.

As if love could be an argument the gods were obliged to accept.

She had tried to die beside her babe.

Vhagar had waited, vast and terrible in the gloom. Laena had walked to her with bare feet and empty eyes, head tipped back, ready to choose flame over bleeding slow in a bed that smelled of iron and loss.

Rhaenyra had reached her first, arms banded around her waist.

Daemon’s grip had locked over her shoulders.

Rhaenys had wrapped herself around them both from behind, three sets of arms refusing to let go.

Laena had fought them like a drowning woman fights the hands that try to pull her to shore. Until her strength broke. Until the truth struck. If she burned, they burned with her.

Now Laena stood alive. 

Her breasts ached with milk that would never be taken. Not a poetic ache. Not a tragic symbol. A bodily, humiliating insistence.

Her throat burned with words she could not bear to say aloud. Promises and prayers and bargains offered to gods, to dragons, to the dark deep beneath Driftmark.

None of it answered.

Her skin was pale, lips parted on a breath that shook.

But she was breathing.

She was upright.

Her brother lay within cold stone.

Her babe beside him did not breathe at all.

And she still had to live. 

A small, broken sound slipped from somewhere at Rhaenyra’s side.

One moment Aemma was pressed against her mother’s hip, the next she was moving.

Pale hair streaming, little slippers whispering over stone, she crossed the space between the living and the dead as if it were nothing more than another stretch of corridor. She stopped just short of Laenor’s casket, hands curled at her sides. 

She only stood there, chin tipped up, as if the world might, out of pity, relent.

Let him sit up.

Laugh.

Push the shroud aside and say it was all some cruel jape, and the grown-ups could stop making their faces into stone.

“It is cold,” she said, voice thin with salt and air. “He will be cold.”

The words landed like a blow.

Laena flinched.

Not at the mention of cold, but at the simplicity of it. 

Aenar stepped up behind Aemma, almost on instinct.

His face had gone too controlled for his seven years, mouth pressed flat in a line that looked wrong on him, a line borrowed from men who had seen storms take brothers and had learned not to cry where others could see.

One of his hands hovered near Aemma’s shoulder, not quite touching, as if he did not know whether dragging her back or standing guard mattered more.

He chose guard.

“Father liked the sea,” Aenar said.

The words came out flat, scraped clean of anything but effort. They sounded practiced, and that was what made them unbearable. Like he had been repeating them inside his head so he wouldn’t fall apart. “He will not mind the cold.”

Aenar did not look at the shrouded casket when he said it.

He stared past it, out toward the dark line of the water instead, as if seeing spray hit a deck and his father’s boots standing sure on it. As if he could hold that image in place long enough, it would become the truth that mattered.

Aemon did not move at all.

He stayed where he was at Rhaenyra’s side. His eyes had gone distant and strange, as if he watched some echo only he could see.

Aerion broke first.

He tried to be brave.

He always did. 

For a time he managed only quiet hiccups, his little hand locked around Rhaenyra’s fingers so tightly they tingled. His face was scrunched into determination, as if he could force his tears back down by sheer will.

But when Aemma spoke of the cold and Aenar spoke of the sea, something inside the boy simply gave way.

He flung himself against his mother’s leg, sobbing into her gown, each breath a ragged, panicked gasp as if he expected the sea to reach for him next and drag him under by the ankles.

It was the sudden understanding that the world could take fathers.

And brothers.

And babies.

And there was nothing a child could do to stop it.

Rhaenyra’s hand found the back of his head instantly, fingers sinking into his hair, palm steadying the small shuddering heat of him. 

The hymn faltered.

Voices that had risen in slow, measured waves cracked or fell away entirely.

A few of the oarsmen looked away, blinking hard.

One of the captains muttered a prayer into his hands. The dragons above shifted restlessly, their shadows buckling over the terrace. As if even they could not quite bear the thin, keening note of that loss.

Baela’s hand had turned to bone in Rhaena's grip.

Rhaena had gone silent, tears tracking down her cheeks in steady, stunned lines, eyes fixed on the little blue bundle by Laenor’s side.

Her baby brother.

Her almost-brother.

Aerion’s sobs hitched, turned to harsh little gulps as he tried to drag air into his lungs. Somewhere under the storm of it, a new thing lodged and took root. A small, irrational vow.

No more name-days.

No more cakes, no more songs, no more nights where the hall shone and the world pretended it was safe.

Name-days were the day Kepa died.

Name-days were knives and blood and the moment the king’s crown fell and never quite found its place again.

He was four. He did not have the words for any of that.

He only pressed his face harder into Rhaenyra’s skirts and sobbed, “No more,” over and over, as if the gods might hear him and agree.

She gathered him in, lowering herself enough that his face found the hollow of her shoulder. When she lifted her gaze to the coffin, her eyes were not soft.

They were fire turned on the world.

Laena watched the children through a veil of grief. 

Her fingers tightened convulsively on the baby’s shroud.

Daemon’s hand closed more firmly over hers, anchoring her knuckles against the cloth, not to restrain but to keep her from breaking them on the stone.

“We will see him to the water,” he said quietly, words pitched so low only she could hear them, rough from smoke and too many unslept nights. “We will see them both there. You do not have to stand for all of it.”

Laena did not look at him.

“I must,” she said. Her voice came out hoarse but whole. “They are watching.”

Daemon followed her gaze, chest burning as he took in the six small faces she meant. 

“They are watching,” Laena repeated, softer. “They must see us stand.”

So she stayed where she was, hand on the little blue bundle, Daemon braced behind her like a dark prow against the storm. Ready to take brother and babe alike into its endless, indifferent arms.

At the far edge of the gathered crowd, apart from the press of Velaryon blue and Targaryen red, another little island had formed.

Viserys, his queen, and their brood of green-clad heirs stood beneath a sagging banner. Close enough to claim attendance, far enough that no one need brush a sleeve against theirs by accident.

No captain had come to clasp the king’s arm.

No driftwood widow had pressed a hand to Alicent’s and whispered a prayer.

Not a single Velaryon had crossed that strip of empty stone between them.

They remained because the rites demanded it, because even in a house cracked by blood there were forms to observe.

Not because they were wanted.

Viserys’s gaze did not linger on Laena, nor on Laenor’s covered form.

It kept dragging back to the children at Rhaenyra’s skirts. 

The king’s fingers twitched uselessly at his sides, as if some part of him still believed that if he stepped forward now...if he spoke the right words, he could knit this back together.

Alicent felt none of that useless yearning.

She felt the eyes.

They slid over her like broken shells, sharp and cutting.

Oarsmen who had once bowed their heads now looked through her as if she were fog off the sea.

Noblewomen who used to provide proper courtesies at court let their mouths curl. 

Even the smallfolk pressed along the terrace edges watched her with a hostility they did not bother to hide.

She could feel it crawling over her skin. The thought beat at her ribs. They want this to be my fault. Vaemond’s treachery. Laenor’s blood. The babe in blue. All knotted in their minds with Oldtown, with her house.

Corlys and Rhaenys did not look at her often, but when they did, it was worse.

The Lord of the Tides held himself like a man carved from reef-rock, but there was murder in the set of his jaw.

In the way his eyes went flat and cold whenever they passed over green.

Rhaenys did not bother to hide her scorn.

Her gaze touched Alicent the way a boot might touch something foul on a dock plank, brief and assessing. As if measuring how hard she would need to stomp to grind the life out of it.

Between them, husband and wife, there was a silent, simmering understanding. Violence pointed and aimed. 

Alicent could feel it like a storm building far out on the water. If this terrace were not full of witnesses and gods and coffins waiting for the deep...She had no doubt the Queen Who Never Was would have already blooded her for stepping foot on Velaryon stone.

At last the hymn thinned and went quiet.

Corlys stepped forward into the quiet. 

The captains fell back a pace without needing to be told, making room for him at the head. He rested both hands on the pale stone, fingers splaying as if he might feel the warmth of his son through it by stubbornness alone.

He did not.

The rock was cold.

“So,” he said, and his voice carried over the terrace, rough as waves dragging shingle. “They tell me I must speak.”

A faint, strained chuckle moved through the oarsmen, it died quickly. 

Corlys’s gaze went to the sea.

To the long curve of the horizon, where his life had once seemed to begin and end.

“I always thought it would be my son standing over me, not…” The word frayed; he swallowed it down. “A father is meant to speak of victories...”

He looked down.

For a moment his eyes closed, as if bracing against a wave.

“I thought,” he went on, quieter but somehow sharper, “that if I ever spoke over my son’s death, it would be because age or fever or sea had done its work on him.”

His hand tightened against the stone. The knuckles went white.

“Instead I stand here with a son stolen in his prime.” Corlys’s voice thinned, turned raw. 

He let his gaze find Rhaenyra.

The mask of lord and admiral slipped.

He bowed his head to her, not as king’s subject to king’s heir, but as father to the woman who had made a house with him. 

“He leaves behind a wife he cherished and defended with his last breath,” Corlys said. “He leaves behind four children who called him Father, and whom he loved as fiercely as any man of my blood. He leaves two nieces who adored him. He leaves a sister who shared his cradle. A mother who held him first. And a father who failed to keep him.”

The words broke off on the last.

The wind worried at the banners above them. Somewhere out in the air, a dragon answered with a low, aching rumble.

Corlys drew a breath through his teeth.

“Laenor Velaryon,” he said, tasting each syllable, “was not the heir I dreamed when I was a younger, more foolish man. He laughed too quickly. He spent coin too freely. He loved in ways I did not understand.”

A few of the captains stared at their boots, knowing too much, loving him anyway.

“But,” Corlys said, and the word cracked like a mast under strain, “he was brave. He was kind. He was soft where I was hard, and that softness made this house stronger, not weaker. He made Driftmark feel like home for those who had never known it as more than a port.”

He looked again to the sea.

“You were meant to die out there, boy,” he told the horizon, voice thick. “You were meant to go where no one could mark the place, so I could lie to myself and say you simply sailed too far and liked what you found.”

Laena’s shoulders shook once.

Rhaenys’s lips parted as if to speak, then closed.

“Instead,” Corlys whispered, “they put steel in a hall and left your blood on the floor.”

He said no names. 

Alicent still flinched. 

“For that, the sea will have its due,” Corlys said, voice steadying by sheer force. “Not from you. From those who thought to make a reef of my house.”

He let the threat hang there, quiet and absolute.

Then he bowed his head, pressing his brow to the coffin for the space of three slow heartbeats.

“Laenor,” he said, voice dropping to something that was not meant for the crowd at all, “you were my pride even when I did not know how to tell you so. You were my heart even when I buried that truth beneath charts and coin and glory. Go now to the Mother of Tides. Go with the knowledge that you were loved. That Driftmark honors you.”

When he straightened, his eyes shone.

Salt, on a man who had spent his life in the sea.

He turned, found the children again. Aemon’s too-still stare. Aenar’s set jaw. Aemma’s wet lashes. Aerion’s red, crumpled face pressed into Rhaenyra’s gown.

“Remember him as he laughed,” Corlys said, this time to them alone. “Remember him on the deck in the open sun. Remember that your father chose to stay for you, when every wind called him away. That is the measure of his love. Not how he died, but what he stayed for.”

Aerion hiccuped against Rhaenyra’s shoulder.

Aemma’s chin lifted a fraction, as if she were trying to see that version of her father standing beside the bier.

Corlys stepped back.

For a moment the space before the coffins stood empty, like a mouth that had forgotten its prayer.

Rhaenys moved.

She had not wept when they washed Laenor's body or when they swaddled the tiny, still form beside him.

She did not weep now.

Rhaenys walked to the smaller bundle with a queen’s bearing and a mother’s terrible care. The blue shroud seemed to glow against the pallor of the stone.

She rested her hand lightly on it, fingers splaying where Laena’s had been.

When she spoke, her voice was low and clear, the sound of deep water under moonlight.

“We did not give you a name,” she said. “The Stranger was quicker than our tongues.”

The admission rippled through the gathered crowd like a cold breeze.

“But I knew you,” Rhaenys went on. “From the first flutter in your mother’s belly. From the way she held her back and cursed the steps of Driftmark. From the way she smiled when she thought no one was watching, hand over the place you tucked yourself. Greedy as any dragon for her warmth.”

Laena’s face crumpled.

She bit down on a sob as if it were a bit of leather between her teeth.

Rhaenys did not look away.

“You were a promise,” she said to the little shroud. “Of chubby fists pulling at your grandsire’s beard, of small feet slapping on these stones, of another fierce little voice shouting that the sea belongs to us.”

Her fingers traced the edge of the cloth, gentle, as if soothing a restless babe.

“You will not have those years,” Rhaenys said. 

Her gaze flicked to Baela and Rhaena, then back.

“But you are not nothing,” she said, and there was steel in it now. “You are the child of Laena Velaryon and Daemon Targaryen. You are blood of the sea and blood of the dragon. You leave behind a mother whose heart is breaking, a father who would set the world on fire for a chance at one more breath from you, two sisters who will grow knowing that the sky is missing a star that should have been theirs.”

The twins watched her with huge eyes, knuckles white where they gripped each other’s hands.

“And if the gods have any wisdom at all, they will set you where the water is warm and the sky always clear. They will let you sit on your uncle’s shoulders when he walks the shore in whatever hall waits for sailors gone beyond our sight.”

Corlys’s head dipped at that, a small, jagged movement.

Rhaenys closed her eyes for a brief, fierce moment.

“You were loved,” she said. “Remember that, little one, if you remember nothing else. And if you cannot remember… then let us remember for you.”

She drew her hand back at last, fingers trembling as they left the blue.

The sea rolled on, patient and implacable, waiting to take son and babe alike.

Laena bowed her head over both, shoulders shaking now, the dam finally fracturing at the edges. Daemon’s arm came around her, not to hold her up, but to keep himself from breaking apart with her.

From the terrace edge, the dragons called, low and grieving.

The first rope moved.

Old Jory was the one who took it up, as he always had. His shoulders had gone broad and knotted with years tugging oars against the current, but his hands were still steady. He wrapped the salt-dark coil around his forearms, nodded once to Corlys, and began to walk backward toward the terrace edge.

Another oarsman mirrored him at the opposite corner.

The pale coffer shuddered. Stone grated softly against stone.

The sea leaned up to meet them, waves flattening against the cliff as if listening.

“Laenor Velaryon,” Corlys said again, this time the words thin and formal, made for the gods. “Son of Driftmark. Raised of the tide. We commit you now to the Mother of Tides and the Father Below. May the currents bear you to safe harbor.”

The oarsmen walked.

Ropes burned against their callused palms, the weight of the dead dragging them step by step toward the carved opening where the terrace jutted over open water. Beneath, the sea surged in its hollow, white foam slapping against the rock as if impatient.

Laena’s fingers dug into the smaller bundle.

Daemon’s hand bracketed hers and did not let go.

Behind them, the children watched.

Aemon’s lips had gone bloodless; his teeth worried the inside of his cheek. Aenar stared without blinking, his eyes tracking the slow slide of stone as if he could memorize the exact angle, the exact way his father left him. Aemma’s fingers clamped tight around the edge of the bier, small knuckles white as shell. Aerion sobbed raggedly into Rhaenyra’s shoulder, his little body jolting with every breath.

The coffer reached the lip.

For a moment it balanced there, half on stone, half on air, the ropes singing with strain.

Then the oarsmen stepped again.

Weight tipped.

Laenor fell.

The coffin dropped from sight, swallowed by sky, then struck the water with a sound like a single, heavy drumbeat. A spray of cold white leapt up, baptizing the underside of the terrace, then rained back down.

The pale stone blurred blue.

Then green.

Then gone.

Seasmoke overhead cried out, a sound torn long and low from some place older than words. Vaerith answered. High Tide’s bells kept tolling.

“Laenor of the Tides,” the captains intoned, voices rough and uneven. “Laenor returned.”

Rhaenys did not join them.

She stepped to the side, to where the smaller blue-swaddled bundle waited.

The oarsmen hesitated. Their hands, so sure on the larger weight, faltered now.

It felt wrong to put a coiled rope around something so small.

Rhaenys spared them.

“I will carry this one,” she said.

No one argued.

She slid her arms under the little body, lifting the bundle as if it weighed more than armor, more than a mast. She tucked him close against her breast, the way she had once carried Laena and Laenor both, small and squalling and furious at the brightness of the world.

Then she walked.

Each step toward the edge seemed to cost her a year.

Laena’s hand flew to her mouth.

Daemon stared fixedly at the horizon, jaw clenched so hard a vein pulsed in his temple.

Rhaenyra turned the children away, all but Aemma, who refused to let go of the stone until the last possible moment, fingers dragging over it as if it were skin.

On the final step, Rhaenys halted.

The sea threw spray up at her ankles, cold and insistent.

She drew in a breath that seemed to scrape her lungs.

“Little one,” she said, voice raw, “the sea will keep you better than we could.”

She bent, cradling the bundle once more, pressing her lips to the damp cloth. A kiss that tasted of salt upon salt.

Then she let go.

The blue dropped.

It barely made a sound when it struck the water. A small splash, quickly swallowed. The ocean took the child as it took all things, without care for rank or innocence.

Rhaenys’s hands stayed outstretched long after the bundle vanished.

Only when the last hint of color slipped beneath the waves did she draw them back, fingers curling slowly into fists, as if she could drag the whole sea with them.

“Laena,” she said without looking, “come away.”

Laena did not move.

Her eyes stayed on the place where brother and babe had gone under, as if she could still see them, as if she could dive after them on sheer will.

Daemon touched her shoulder.

“Come,” he said, a rough scrape of sound. “They are beyond our reach now.”

Laena’s breath hitched, once, twice.

She turned.

The expression on her face was a thing that would haunt every man and woman on that terrace for the rest of their days. There was nothing theatrical in it, no wailing for show. Only a hollow, flayed-out grief, something so stripped of defense it hardly looked human.

She walked back to the family and folded into Rhaenyra’s embrace as if her bones had gone out of her.

Rhaenyra held her with one arm, Aerion with the other, her own spine the only thing keeping any of them upright.

Behind them, the surf roared in and out, in and out.

At the far end of the terrace, Viserys swayed on his feet.

His eyes glistened. His lips moved soundlessly around the names of the dead. When Corlys’s men began ladling wine for the wake, he drifted a step as if to go to Laena, to Rhaenyra, to the children who were his by blood if not by any kindness he had managed to offer today.

Alicent caught his sleeve.

Her fingers looked delicate on the dark fabric, but the grip was iron.

“Not now,” she said, soft enough that only he and the son nearest them heard.

Aemond.

He stood just behind his father’s side, where he always did. Out of the way. Useful if someone needed a spare shoulder, otherwise invisible.

He had watched every moment.

He had watched Laenor’s coffer drop and sink.

He had watched the shrouded babe vanish like a stone.

He had watched Corlys Velaryon, Lord of the Tides, shake.

He had watched his mother be left on an island of empty space and green cloth, the whole of Driftmark pretending she had already vanished too.

Hatred rolled off the crowd in ugly, invisible waves.

Aegon had borne it with his usual armor of boredom and wine, eyes half-lidded, mouth set in a sulky line.

Helaena had floated somewhere else entirely, gaze fixed on the dragons overhead, fingers twining in the air as if braiding an invisible rope.

Aemond had taken it like a knife into his chest. 

He knew, suddenly and very clearly, that if the sea could choose, it would take him rather than any of the silver-haired children gathered around Rhaenyra.

Driftmark would not mourn.

They might cheer.

His fingers clenched at his sides.

Above, the dragons turned in slow, wide patterns.

Syrax flashed gold where the sun caught her wings. Meleys burned red. Caraxes cut a jagged path through the cloud, long and cruel. More terrifying than Aemond had thought possible. 

Farther out, near the line where sea met sky, something darker hunched by itself.

A black shape that did not wheel with the others.

Aemond’s eyes snagged on it.

It squatted on a jag of rock well off Driftmark’s shore, a lonely tooth of stone between the island and Dragonstone, where only madmen sailed close.

Heat crawled along his spine, sudden and inexplicable. It felt as if something out there had looked back.

His breath caught.

“…mond.”

His mother’s voice yanked him down hard.

Alicent’s hand tightened, dragging him behind her skirts as Corlys turned toward their little island of green. The Lord of the Tides inclined his head, a gesture barely this side of insult.

“My lord,” Viserys began, words already slurring at the edges with drink and grief.

Corlys did not let him finish.

“Your presence is noted, Your Grace,” he said. “As is all that came with it.”

The meaning sat there.

Viserys flinched.

Alicent’s mouth smiled. Her eyes did not.

When Corlys turned away again, it felt like exile.

The wake blurred.

He heard Vaemond’s name hissed like a curse more than once.

Vaemond’s sons were nowhere to be seen.

Cowards, Aegon had snorted earlier, under his breath. Brave enough to stab kin in a hall, not brave enough to stand at the edge when the sea takes him.

Aemond had not laughed at that. 

Vaemond’s daughter remained.

Valaena stood near one of the side pillars, shaking so hard the pearls at her throat clicked together. She kept trying to sink into the stone, to make herself smaller, palms damp where they worried the dark silk of her skirts. Every few breaths she would choke out another apology to whoever passed close enough to hear, as if the blood and the knife had been hers.

Aemond saw Rhaenyra cross to her.

The princess laid a hand on the girl’s shoulder, fingers steady, voice low enough that the words did not carry. The assurance showed in the way Valaena’s head bowed, in the way her ribs tried to catch a fuller breath and failed. She had been on Dragonstone attending to Laena’s children during her labors.

Untouched by the plotting that had dragged her father into ruin.

It did not matter.

Vaemond had shamed himself, and the stain clung to her all the same.

Aemond slipped away.

No one stopped him.

The guards at the terrace arch assumed he was headed for some quiet corner to sulk. His mother’s attention was nailed to the pulse in her own throat, to the way every passing look stripped another layer from it. His father was already halfway to drowning himself in wine deep enough that he would not feel the cold.

He passed through the cooler shadows of High Tide’s passages, the stone walls damp with the breath of the sea. The scent of salt and pitch clung to everything. 

Past the last carved arch, the world opened.

Wind hit him full in the face, sharp and clean.

The dragons had already begun to peel away from High Tide, each great shape turning toward its own chosen eyrie. Syrax glided back toward Dragonstone’s volcanic teeth. Meleys banked in a wide, regal arc, crimson wings scattering the last of the funeral smoke. Caraxes snapped his tail like a whip as he went, temper never entirely content with ceremony.

“Prince.”

The guard at the bottom of the path shifted, uncertain. “You ought to be within, with your family. The Lord of the Tides—”

“Has not spoken to me once today,” Aemond said, sharper than he had meant.

The man blinked.

Aemond drew a breath, smoothed his tone as he would smooth creased parchment.

“I only wish to walk,” he said. “The air inside smells of grief and wine. I will not go far.”

The guard hesitated.

“See that you are back before dark,” the man said at last. “These cliffs have sharp teeth.”

“So I have heard,” Aemond replied.

He stepped past him, onto the narrow strip of sand and rock where the skiffs rocked in their moorings.

He saw it then. So far off it could have been a trick of the eye.

A shape sliding along the surface of the sea, just beneath the chop, so large that for a moment he thought he watched a strip of reef he had never noticed before.

Then it broke the surface.

The dragon.

Its wings were scarred and tattered, edges ragged like torn sailcloth. Old wounds scored its flanks, pale lines against black scales. 

Something in his chest flared.

Not fear. Not exactly. Something wilder. Something that tasted like the air before a storm, all metal and promise.

“You are mad,” he told himself, very calmly, as his fingers found the nearest skiff’s mooring rope.

His knuckles whitened around the rough hemp.

He glanced back once, up the path.

No one stood there.

No one called his name.

Aemond exhaled.

He stepped into the skiff.

---

The wake moved like a slow sea.

Rhaenyra kept the children close. Not clustered like frightened chicks. Arrayed in the shape she had chosen, as deliberate as shields on a wall.

Laena barely seemed to know she was standing. Grief had hollowed her out and left her upright by habit alone. Every so often her eyes drifted, unfocused, to the place where the sea had taken what it was owed. Then she would blink and be back among candles and watching mouths.

Corlys and Rhaenys moved through it all as if they were the keep’s spine. Corlys received condolences with a sailor’s restraint. Rhaenys received them with an indifference that cut.

The first to come were the captains.

Men with hands like rope and faces browned by sun and salt. They did not know how to speak to royalty. They knew how to speak to Corlys. That was easier.

“My lord,” one of them began, voice thick. “He was… he was good to us.”

Corlys nodded once. It was a hard thing, that nod. A whole history locked inside it.

The captain’s gaze slid, uncertain, to the children. His eyes snagged on Aemon, then Aenar, then Aemma’s pale, quiet face. He looked away fast, as if really seeing them would break him in front of everyone.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and it sounded like the only words he owned.

Aemon surprised him.

He stepped forward half a pace, just enough to be seen, just enough to be counted. Because even at seven, Aemon understood counting was what lords did. Counting ships. Counting coin. Counting heirs.

“Thank you,” Aemon said. Clear. Polite. Perfect.

The captain blinked hard, bowed awkwardly, and backed away as if the hall belonged to the dead and he did not want to disturb them.

After that came the driftwood widows. Women in dark cloth with salt-cracked hands, the kind Driftmark ran on when men did not return from storms. They did not curtsy well. They did not care.

The nobles came last. 

That was the harder wave.

They arrived with the right black lace and the wrong eyes, speaking as if grief were a performance they had seen before and meant to review after. Hands reached, withdrew. Smiles tightened. Pity was offered like a coin and watched to see if it would be accepted.

A Reachwoman tried to touch Laena’s arm and recoiled at the feel of her, as if Laena’s grief had teeth.

“My lady,” she said, voice too sweet, “your strength is… admirable.”

Laena stared at her like she was looking through glass.

Baela answered instead, sharp as flint. “My mother doesn’t need your admiration,” she said, quiet and deadly. “She needs her brother back.”

Silence snapped tight around them. The Reachwoman’s smile froze.

Daemon’s mouth twitched, the smallest hint of pride.

Another lord approached Rhaenyra with the careful expression of a man stepping around a puddle he did not want to admit existed.

“Princess,” he began, glancing at Aerion like Aerion was an inconvenient detail, “our hearts are with you and yours. Such tragedy. Such… ill fortune.”

Ill fortune.

Rhaenyra’s eyes went colder by a degree. Aenar shifted at her side, breath quickening. Aemon lifted his chin higher, a silent dare.

“Thank you, my lord,” she said, voice measured. “Dragonstone and Driftmark will remember who stood with it.”

The lord flushed, uncertain whether he’d been blessed or threatened, and retreated quickly.

The children felt every exchange. Every gaze that lingered too long. Every voice that softened in that particular way, as if softness itself were payment.

They stood inside their grief and also outside it, learning what it meant to be heirs. It meant sorrow, and still being required to look beautiful holding it. It meant people speaking over the dead to make themselves feel properly moved.

Aemon’s restraint slipped for half a breath. Fury flashed bright behind his eyes.

Corlys saw it and called him close with a tilt of his head.

“You are doing well,” Corlys said under his breath.

Aemon’s jaw tightened. “I hate them.”

“I know,” Corlys replied. “Save it. Like good steel.”

Aemon swallowed hard and nodded once, accepting the lesson the way an heir accepts a crown.

Rhaena stood very still, face wet in quiet lines she did not wipe away. She refused to hide them. There was something stubborn in that, something that looked like Laena and Rhaenys both.

Baela wiped her cheeks with the heel of her hand and scowled at anyone who noticed.

Finally, Archmaester Vaegon approached.

He did not come like the others. There was no careful staging to his face, no practiced sorrow laid on like lace. He moved with the same absent-minded certainty he used when walking through stacks of books, like a man who had wandered into ceremony and found it inconvenient.

“Princess,” he said to Rhaenyra, voice even.

Then his gaze shifted to the children, and something in his expression changed. The softness was almost theoretical, as if he had read about tenderness and decided to attempt it anyway.

“You’re bearing it,” Vaegon said quietly. 

Baela’s eyes narrowed. “We’re standing,” she replied, as if that was all anyone ever wanted from them.

Vaegon considered her, unoffended. “Yes,” he said. “That is the problem.”

He crouched, not gracefully, with the careful stiffness of a man unused to lowering himself for anyone except a text on a low shelf. From his sleeve he produced a small folded square of cloth.

Aerion stared at it like it might bite.

Vaegon held it out anyway. “A handkerchief,” he said, as if explaining a tool. “Your nose is running. If you continue to wipe it on your mother’s gown, she will eventually have to burn the garment, and then you will have two tragedies in one day.”

Aerion froze.

Then, against his will, a tiny snort escaped him.

Rhaenyra’s mouth twitched, quickly suppressed. Her eyes slid to Vaegon with something like sharp gratitude.

Aerion took the cloth with both hands, solemn, as if accepting a knightly charge. He dabbed at his face too carefully, then looked up again, uncertain.

Vaegon nodded once. “Better.”

He straightened, chain settling against his chest with a soft metallic sigh, and turned toward the adults.

He went to Corlys first, because Corlys was easiest. Corlys understood bluntness. He had lived his whole life with the sea’s refusal to soften its edges.

“My lord,” Vaegon said.

Corlys’s eyes narrowed a fraction, then eased. “Archmaester.”

“I have nothing to offer you that is adequate,” Vaegon said at once.

Corlys barked a laugh that was mostly pain. “Good. I’ve had enough people trying to dress a knife wound with lace.”

Vaegon nodded, as if they had agreed on the weather, and moved on.

Daemon received only a glance. A ledger entry made without ink. Weapon present.

Then Laena.

Not because she demanded it. Laena looked like she had been emptied and left standing as proof that bodies could continue without permission. But Vaegon had always been drawn to the places the realm pretended not to look. To raw facts beneath ceremony.

“You’re still bleeding,” Vaegon said, flat as fact. “And you’re standing like stubbornness can stitch flesh.”

Laena’s expression flickered. Shock, then immediate anger, as if he had committed an indecency.

Aemma stiffened beside her. Rhaenyra’s head turned sharply.

Vaegon did not flinch.

“I’m fine.”

“You are not.”

The bluntness landed differently than pity. It did not demand performance. It simply refused the lie.

Vaegon exhaled through his nose. “Warm cloth first. Cold after. If you shake or burn with fever, someone is told at once.”

His gaze flicked to Rhaenyra only once, placing responsibility where it belonged.

“And you should not be left alone tonight,” he added.

Laena gave a short, bitter breath. “I won’t be. They won’t let me.”

“Good,” Vaegon said, as if he had just secured a treaty.

He moved on.

Rhaenys stood slightly apart, present without yielding an inch. Her posture was immaculate. Her grief sat behind her eyes like deep water held back by a wall.

Vaegon stopped in front of her and did not bow. Not out of disrespect. Out of family.

“You have not eaten,” he said.

Rhaenys’s lips parted, then closed again. A flicker of irritation. Because of course he would notice that first.

“And you,” she replied, voice smooth as cut glass, “have not learned when to keep your observations to yourself.”

Vaegon’s mouth tightened. “I am attempting comfort.”

Rhaenys stared at him.

“It is not going well,” he added.

Her eyes glistened, and she looked angrier at that than at anything else.

“You came,” she said, like an accusation.

“Yes.”

“You hate this.”

“Yes.”

“You hate… all of this.” Her hand made a small, dismissive sweep toward banners, Faith, nobles with hungry eyes.

Vaegon’s reply was immediate. Sharp. Simple. “You all are my kin.”

His hand lifted, hesitated, then he placed his fingertips against her sleeve near her wrist. Not an embrace. Not even close. A tether.

Rhaenys looked down at his hand as if it were a foreign object.

“Careful,” she said softly. “If anyone sees you touch me, they’ll assume you have feelings.”

Vaegon blinked once. “An unfortunate risk.”

Her hand lifted. Vaegon stilled, caught between courtesy and reflex, as if preparing for a blow he would neither dodge nor resent.

Instead, Rhaenys closed her fingers around his wrist.

She held him there, feeling the quiet proof of life beneath his skin. The pulse, the heat, the undeniable fact that someone was still standing beside her. Her thumb pressed once, just enough to register. Just enough to say stay.

For a breath, then another, neither of them moved.

Then her grip softened, sliding down until their palms met and their fingers threaded together. Not tightly, not possessively, but with the exhausted precision of two people borrowing strength they would never name.

“You should take the children away from this,” Vaegon said quietly.

“The rites—”

“Are complete,” Vaegon cut in. “What remains is performance.”

His gaze flicked toward the hovering lace and hunger, the Faith’s watchful ring, the endless procession of mouths shaping condolences like tools.

Rhaenys’s fingers tightened once, then released. She straightened, spine realigning, grief locking itself back into place behind her eyes.

Vaegon inclined his head. “I will remain.”

Rhaenys arched a brow. “To endure?”

“To observe,” he corrected. “And to make anyone who asks uncomfortable enough to regret it.”

That earned him a thin, dangerous smile.

“Come,” Rhaenys said.

Her hand touched Rhaenyra’s arm, then Laena’s, then swept gently toward the children. Less command than tide. The little fleet turned with it.

No one barred the way. They stepped aside and bowed their heads as the dead man’s kin passed.

At the bend of the corridor, green waited.

Viserys’s little island of a family had shifted inward. The king leaned more heavily on his cane than he had an hour before. Wine flushed his cheeks. Grief had dug purple shadows under his eyes.

He saw blue and silver approaching and straightened, a spark of desperate purpose animating him.

“Rhaenyra,” he began, already reaching a hand toward the pale heads at her skirts. “My grandchildren, I—”

A shadow cut across his path.

Daemon stepped in.

Not hurried. Not loud. Just there, sudden as a blade appearing in a hand that hadn’t moved.

He did not soften his face for a grieving king. He simply placed himself between Viserys and what remained. Between that reaching hand and six small heads still damp with salt and sorrow.

One arm angled back without looking, a quiet command written in muscle. Rhaenyra understood it instantly and drew the children tighter behind her skirts.

Daemon’s gaze stayed on Viserys.

“You will not touch them,” Daemon said, and it wasn’t a threat dressed up as courtesy. It was a line carved into stone.

Viserys blinked, thrown by the emergence of a version of his brother he had never seen before.

“I would speak with my daughter,” he tried again, softer. “With the children. They should know that I—”

“They know,” Daemon cut in.

His lip curled, very slightly.

“We will tend to our own comfort. You and yours have taken enough from it today. Stand aside.”

He did not wait for permission.

Corlys’s solid bulk. Rhaenys’s straight spine. Rhaenyra’s silver head bent protectively. Laena’s hollow-eyed focus.

Viserys watched them go with a look like a man watching a ship that had sailed without him.

By the time the children reached Laenor’s old room, their steps had begun to drag.

The door stood open.

Lanterns glowed low, wicks turned down so the light pooled instead of pricked. The room still smelled like him. Salt. Lemon oil. A faint bite of tar from the coiled lines he kept in the corner “for when the shore walls feel too tight.” Under it, warmth. The kind that clung to a space that had been laughed in.

Much had been left as it was. 

Only the bed was different.

The narrow sailor’s bed was gone.

In its place, two broad frames had been pushed together and dressed in quilts and wool and sea-blue linen until it became one wide thing, a harbor made of cloth. Its headboard sat beneath the window, so that anyone lying there would see the slice of night sky and the dark blink of water beyond.

“A true bunk for a little fleet,” Rhaenys said, very softly.

Baela stared at it, lower lip trembling. “It’s too big,” she whispered, like accusation. Like betrayal.

Laena moved before the word could land and stay lodged in her daughters’ throats. Three quick steps. One knee to the floor. Her hands found their faces, as careful as if touch could shatter.

“Your uncle would have wanted it,” she said, and the sentence tried to break on the way out. She swallowed, forced it whole. “He would want you to take up space. To sprawl. To steal the best pillow. To talk until you’re hoarse and the dawn creeps in and you swear you’ll never sleep again.”

Her thumbs pressed at their cheeks, holding them here.

“He would want you to have each other.”

Laena lifted her gaze, finding the four silver-haired children at the threshold, hovering like they were afraid to disturb the air.

“And so would I.”

Aemon’s fists were clenched at his sides. Aenar had his broken ship locked tight to his ribs as if it could keep him from splitting open. Aemma stood too straight, face pale and fixed. Aerion’s breath came in sharp little pulls, as if grief had hands and he was trying to pry them off his throat.

Rhaenyra crossed to them and knelt.

“My hearts,” she said, and the words went back to milk-warm nights and small bodies tucked into crooks of elbow. “Look at me.”

Aemon looked because he always looked, even when it hurt. Aenar looked because he did not know how not to. Aemma’s lashes lifted, wet and stubborn. Aerion took longer, jaw wobbling with effort, but he tipped his face up too.

Rhaenyra’s hands rose.

“You are mine,” she said.

One palm cupped Aemon’s jaw, gently insistent, refusing his retreat into hardness. One hand steadied Aenar’s shoulder through the cloth, grounding the tremor there. Her fingers brushed Aemma’s hairline. Her body angled close enough that Aerion could borrow her heat.

“You are mine, and you are not alone.”

Aemon’s mouth tightened. The grief in him was too big for his teeth to hold. “He’s gone.”

“Yes,” Rhaenyra said, and did not flinch away from it. “The realm will try to tell you what this means. It will try to make his death into a lesson for you. A warning. A leash.”

Her thumb stroked once along Aemon’s jaw. A small, mothering motion. A promise wrapped in tenderness.

“I will not allow it.”

Quiet. Absolute.

“You will not take his last moments and make them a chain around your throat,” she told him. 

Aemon swallowed so hard his throat moved like it hurt.

“You will grieve,” Rhaenyra said, softer only in shape. “But you will not be eaten.”

She turned her gaze to Aenar, and it sharpened because she could see the bargaining already beginning behind his eyes.

“And you,” she said, “do not you dare negotiate with the sea in your head. Do not tell yourself you could have loved him differently and kept him.”

Aenar flinched as if struck. Rage rose fast to cover the fear.

“I hate it,” he whispered. “I hate—”

“Aenar.”

Corlys’s voice came from the doorway.

“You still belong to the water,” Corlys said. His voice did not tremble, but his eyes did. “Do not let this day turn it into an enemy inside you. Driftmark would be lesser for it. Your father would be lesser for it.”

Aenar’s fingers loosened a fraction on the ship, as if the words had pried them open.

Rhaenyra shifted closer to Aerion.

She bracketed him with her knees and cupped his cheeks so he had to feel her. Had to see her. Had to breathe with her.

“And you,” she said, fierce affection tightening the corner of her mouth. “My brave, stubborn little storm.”

Aerion’s eyes filled again, shame bright in them.

“I’m scared,” he managed.

Rhaenyra leaned in until her forehead touched his.

“So am I,” she said.

Aerion blinked, startled by the honesty.

Rhaenyra let it stand. Let it mean. We do not lie to each other in this house.

“But do you know what we do when we’re scared?” she asked.

Aerion’s breath hitched. “What?”

“We hold,” Rhaenyra said. “We hold each other. We hold the line. We do not let the world take more than it is owed.”

She pulled him into her chest, firm enough that his ribs could borrow her steadiness. Not softness. Shelter.

Then she kissed Aemon’s brow. Quick. Certain. A blessing meant for battle. Aenar next. Aemma’s pale hair last, where her child-pride was cracking.

Aemma’s chin trembled.

Rhaenyra’s hand cradled the back of her head.

“You are allowed to fall,” she told her, low and precise. “Not in front of strangers. Not where they can pick at you. Here. Into me.”

Aemma’s breath broke.

Rhaenyra held her like a dragon holds its young. Not delicate, not uncertain, simply sure.

“Let it out,” she told her. “Let it burn through. I have you.”

Daemon had stood in the doorway the whole time, still as a drawn bow. Listening. Measuring. Keeping himself in check because this was not his kind of battlefield.

Now he stepped in, and the air changed. Not softer. Safer. Like a lock sliding into place.

“Aemon,” he said.

The boy’s head snapped up, instinct answering storm.

“You take the corner by the window,” Daemon went on, voice even. “Aenar beside you. You two have the sharpest elbows. If you bruise each other, do it where I don’t have to hear the complaints.”

It was dry enough that outrage flickered across both boys’ faces, and for a heartbeat they looked like children again. Alive. Capable of being offended by something small.

Baela and Rhaena drifted closer. Laena’s arms stayed around them like iron.

“You’ll sleep in the middle,” Laena told them, voice soft and hard all at once. “Where you can feel your siblings breathing on every side.”

Baela’s mouth trembled again. “Muna…”

“I know,” Laena said. Simple. Honest. “But you will.”

She kissed their foreheads like she was pressing them into the world.

Then she turned to Rhaenyra’s children and kissed them too, lips lingering a fraction longer than propriety.

“You are mine as much as the sea will allow,” she told them. “If the waves have objections, they can bring them to me.”

Aemon’s shoulders lowered. Aenar’s grip eased. Aerion sagged on a breath and pressed his face briefly into Laena’s neck before exhaustion dragged him back.

Daemon watched that. The way grief made them try to crawl into other bodies, as if warmth could argue with death.

He waited until their eyes found him.

Then his hand came down, touching each small head in turn.

“You are safe here,” Daemon said.

It did not sound like comfort. It sounded like consequence.

“You are safe because I am here,” he said. “If any hand reaches for you on this island with anything but respect, I will take it. I will take the arm. I will take the man.”

It was terrible. Protective. Clean in its violence.

And for the first time all day, the burden sat where it belonged.

On the adults.

Aemon lifted his chin a fraction. Aenar exhaled, slow and shaky. Baela leaned briefly against Daemon’s side like she was testing whether he was real, then drew back with a sniff and wiped her cheeks like she was angry they existed.

Aemma only watched Daemon the way she watched dragons.

“Muna says we shouldn’t ask questions we don’t want answered,” she said suddenly.

Rhaenyra’s eyes flicked to her, warning and love braided tight, but she did not stop her.

Aemma looked at Daemon. “Are you mad at the King?”

The room tightened.

Daemon held her gaze for a long moment, choosing language that would not slip and cut.

“Mad?” he repeated.

Aemma nodded. “He tried to touch us.”

Daemon’s jaw worked once.

“I am unimpressed by your grandsire,” he said.

Aemma blinked, not satisfied, processing.

“The King loves peace the way some men love wine,” Daemon went on. “Too much. At the wrong times. He drinks it until it makes him foolish.”

Aemma’s brow furrowed. “Is he bad?”

“No,” Daemon said. And the honesty of it was almost cruel. “He is weak.”

Aemma swallowed. “Will you hurt him?”

Daemon crouched, bringing himself down to her height so she did not have to look up into a shadow to ask for the shape of the world.

“No,” he said.

Aemma’s breath left her in a small, shaking exhale.

“I will not hurt him,” Daemon repeated, “because your mother would bleed for it, and I do not make her pay for other men’s failures.”

Aemma stared at him, then took his sleeve in her damp fingers and held on.

“Okay,” she said.

Not relief.

Trust.

Rhaenys watched them with eyes that had learned how quickly the world takes what it wants.

After a moment she straightened. “Corlys. The captains will be filling their cups twice over by now. Driftmark will splinter if we leave them alone too long with their rage.”

Corlys let out a breath that sounded older than his years. “Aye. The wake.”

He stepped to the bedside.

“For tonight,” he said, addressing the tangle of them, “this room is your harbor. No one enters without your mothers’ leave. If you wake and grief claws at your throat, you count the ships on that shelf.”

He nodded to Laenor’s driftwood fleet.

“Every one made by his hands,” Corlys said. “When you run out of numbers, you speak his name.”

Rhaenys followed, her kiss light on each brow, though her fingers lingered a heartbeat longer on Baela’s cheek, on Aemma’s hair.

“Sleep if you can,” she said. “Talk if you cannot. Hold on to each other.”

Then she looked at them all once more, as if engraving the sight into herself.

Laena, hollowed but standing. Rhaenyra, the axis. Daemon, dark and sharp at their flank.

“Come, husband,” Rhaenys said.

Corlys followed her out.

The wake’s voices swelled briefly as the door opened, then dulled again when it shut.

The room shrank to six sets of lungs, the faint chime of rigging from the harbor, and lantern flame licking soft at the air.

They undressed the children like it mattered. Fingers gentle on buttons, on ties, on stiff black cloth that suddenly felt obscene. Daemon tugged boots off without ceremony and stacked them in a neat row at the foot of the bed, as if order could keep the dark back.

Soon there was a tangle of small legs under quilts. Silver heads on shared pillows. Aemon by the window, Aenar beside him, Baela and Rhaena in the middle, Aemma pressed close, Aerion curled at the end like a small guard dog, one foot tucked under Aemon’s knee, one hand hooked tight in Aemma’s sleeve.

Rhaenyra stood a moment and looked at them.

Six stubborn points of light against a day that had tried to snuff them.

She bent and kissed each brow once more. Laena did the same from the other side. Daemon’s hand brushed the blanket at their feet, brief as a seal.

“We’ll be in the next room,” Rhaenyra told them. “If you need us, send a guard. Shout. Knock the walls down.”

“You’re allowed to wake us,” Laena added. “For anything. Even if it’s only that the dark feels too big.”

Aerion nodded solemnly, heavy-lidded.

“The dark is stupid,” he said.

“Very,” Daemon agreed.

A thin, tired thread of laughter tugged loose from almost all of them.

Rhaenyra let that sound be the last thing she carried out.

They stepped into the corridor as if they were stepping out of a storm.

Rhaenyra pulled the door almost closed. Left it open the width of a palm. Light seeped through. So did the sea, thin and steady, the sound of something endless continuing despite everything.

Behind them: the rustle of quilts, the soft, hiccuping breaths of children trying to sleep in a world that had rearranged itself around their loss.

They stood for a breath and listened.

Laena’s hand clenched once in her skirts, hard enough that the fabric creased.

“I cannot breathe in here,” she said, quietly, as if she were confessing a weakness.

Rhaenyra moved without thinking, already shifting her stance, already angling her body so if Laena swayed she would catch her. The command came after the instinct, as if her mouth was trailing behind her bones.

“Then we go to your chamber. Sit. You have been on your feet since dawn, Laena, and you have not eaten and—”

“Not a chamber,” Laena cut in.

Her eyes were on the nearest window, on the sliver of sea visible through it, dark and restless, the old faithful thing that had carried her whole life.

“I have stood in stone and smoke all day,” she went on, voice scraping. “I need the water.”

Daemon’s gaze flicked to her bare throat, to the faint flush along her collarbone where sweat beaded. He knew the map of her body well enough to hear pain in her breathing. He knew where grief had made new rooms.

“The cliff path is long,” Rhaenyra said, gentler but no less firm. “There are stairs. Sand. You are barely out of childbed, Laena. If your legs give under you—”

“Then let them,” Laena said.

There was iron in it. Not sense. Qill.

“I have already done the hardest thing my body will ever do. It can carry me to the sea.”

She turned that hollow, scorching gaze on Daemon, daring him to say no.

He didn’t.

He stepped in close instead, the hall lanterns catching the tired, uneven edges of him, the way grief had made him sharp around the mouth.

“If you are in pain,” he said, voice rough, “I will carry you.”

He glanced pointedly at her skirts, then at her feet as if already measuring the distance she meant to bleed across.

“Like a sack of barley over my shoulder, if you force me.”

The corner of Laena’s mouth twitched, barely a thing. A ghost passing through.

“You always did have a talent for romance.”

Daemon’s eyes warmed, quick and private, and then dimmed again as if he hated himself for it.

Rhaenyra let out a breath that might’ve been a laugh in another life. She reached for Laena’s hand and held it as if holding it could keep her stitched together.

“Come then,” she said, defeated and fond in the same breath. “Before I change my mind and have you both tied to the bedposts.”

Daemon’s mouth flickered. A glint, dark under the grief.

“Promises,” he muttered, and Laena made a sound that was almost a snort.

They moved together through the quieter passages of High Tide.

Servants flattened themselves to the walls as they passed, eyes dropping, mouths shaping hasty blessings. Someone started to speak, of the wake, of captains asking after their lord, of driftwood politics and hungry mouths.

Daemon looked at him.

Just looked.

The words fell dead in the man’s throat.

“The wake will not crack without us for a quarter hour,” Daemon said, and there was something flat and final in it that did not invite debate.

At the mouth of the tunnel, the world opened.

Wind hit them full in the face, sharp with brine.

The narrow strip of beach lay ahead, a scrawl of shingle and dark sand where the waves clawed at Driftmark’s bones. 

Rhaenyra hesitated on the last step. Her hand tightened on Laena’s arm. She was braced already, weight shifted, ready.

“Slowly,” she said. “If you fall, I will drag you back to bed by your braids.”

Laena’s lips pulled, faint and feral.

“I am not going to shatter.”

She stepped down.

Her bare feet sank into chill grit. Cold raced up through her arches, her calves, into the hot ache thudding in her hips. Pain, yes, but it was a clean pain. Honest. It belonged to her body and not to the place grief kept trying to hollow out.

She let out a breath she had not known she was holding.

“It hurts?” Rhaenyra asked at once, fear dressed up as practicality.

Laena glanced at her. Saw it.

“Yes,” she said, simply. “But it is a clean hurt. Not…”

Her hand hovered, helpless, over the flat place where the swell of her belly had so recently been. Over absence.

Rhaenyra’s face twisted and for a moment she said, too sharp, too desperate to control a world that would not be controlled...

“You shouldn’t—”

Laena stopped walking.

It was barely a halt, barely a thing, but it made the air change.

Rhaenyra swallowed the rest of it.

The correction was immediate. Not words. A softening. A thumb sweeping once over Laena’s knuckles like an apology that didn’t need to be spoken.

They walked.

Waves dragged and returned, dragged and returned, each one gnawing at the stone and leaving it standing anyway.

Daemon stayed close, a steady heat at Laena’s back, one hand extended as if he were already weighing the distance between her feet and his arms. Rhaenyra walked on Laena’s other side, matching her stride without realizing she was doing it. Breathing in time, like a mother with an infant, like a woman who had learned you could keep someone alive by sharing your rhythm.

Laena's body betrayed her again.

A warm drag at the swell of her breast, sudden and unmistakable, and the linen beneath her bodice began to spot dark. Not blood. Not the clean hurt of muscles stretched too far.

Milk.

She froze for half a breath, throat tightening with something close to humiliation, close to rage.

The fabric cooled quickly in the sea air, damp against her skin. Every step rubbed it. Every step said you made something and the gods snatched it away.

Rhaenyra noticed.

Of course she did. Her gaze flicked once, and her hand tightened on Laena’s as if she could transfer warmth through bone. She didn’t speak. She didn’t pity. She simply shifted closer, angling her body so the worst of the wind took her instead.

Daemon saw too, and his jaw flexed like he was biting down on a curse. His hand hovered for a moment behind Laena’s back, not touching, just there, a steady heat she could lean into if she dared.

Laena swallowed, hard. “Don’t,” she managed, voice scraping.

“I wasn’t going to say a word,” Daemon replied, rough and quiet.

Laena sniffed quietly.

Trying to hold back the burning in her eyes. Then, as if speaking to the sea, Laena said, “I meant to give birth here.”

Her voice was soft, but the wind carried it to both of them.

“On this shore,” she went on. “With the water close, so I could hear it between the pains. I told Laenor that, and he told me I meant to give birth to a fish.”

Rhaenyra’s fingers tightened around hers, sudden. She turned her face away for a heartbeat and blinked hard. When she looked back, her eyes were bright with the kind of grief that refuses to be pretty.

“He always wanted you to laugh,” she said. “Even when you were threatening to drown him for it.”

Daemon’s breath huffed out of him. A half-laugh. It surprised him enough that he went still after, as if waiting for the world to punish him for it.

“If you had birthed a fish,” he said, “I would have named it after Laenor.”

Laena’s shoulders shook.

Rhaenyra made a sound that was almost a sob.

“Gods,” she whispered, and her grip tightened again, as if she could keep all of them from slipping under.

Seasmoke screamed, mourning just as they did. 

“You should sit,” Rhaenyra said after a few more lengths of beach. Her calves burned; she could feel the strain in Laena’s grip, the tremor she tried to hide. “Here. On this rock. We can curse the Seven from a perfectly respectable seated position.”

Laena drew in a breath.

“No,” she said. “Not yet. If I stop, I do not know if I will move again.”

Her voice shook, but her feet kept going.

Daemon muttered, “Stubborn,” like it was a complaint, like it wasn’t also worship.

He lengthened his stride and stepped ahead of her, then turned and walked backward so he could see her face. So he could watch for the moment she went pale, for the moment her knees betrayed her. He looked ridiculous, a prince of the realm walking backward on wet sand like a boy trying not to frighten a wounded animal.

Laena’s eyes narrowed.

“You will fall.”

“Then you’ll have earned the right to mock me,” he said.

She stared at him as if deciding whether to be furious.

Instead she said, quieter, “Fine.”

It was almost nothing, an exhale into the wind.

Another wave rolled in, swirling cold around their ankles.

Laena stopped and faced it. Let it break against her shins.

The water tugged at her, tried to pull her forward, then slunk back in defeat.

She stood her ground anyway.

Daemon moved closer without speaking, close enough that she could feel his heat. Rhaenyra stepped in on the other side, their shoulders nearly touching, forming a small, fierce line against the sea.

And slowly, so slowly it might have been imagined, Laena’s breathing began to match theirs.

Three lungs finding the same rhythm.

Three hearts holding, holding, holding.

Quietly, without warning, Rhaenyra’s breath hitched.

It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t even a sob. It was a small betrayal in her chest, like her body had finally stopped obeying orders.

She stared out at the water.

The wind was sharp enough to sting. The spray kissed her lashes, cold and insistent.

Wet.

She thought it was the sea.

She thought it was the wind.

She lifted the back of her hand and wiped beneath her eye with an impatient swipe, as if annoyed by the inconvenience of it.

More wetness gathered immediately.

A line of it slid down her cheek.

“You are shaking,” Laena said softly, as if saying it too loudly might make it true in a way that could not be undone.

“I am not,” Rhaenyra lied.

Daemon’s mouth twitched without humor.

“Yes, you are,” he said, quiet. Not cruel. Not scolding. Just… certain. Like a man naming weather.

Rhaenyra swallowed. Her throat hurt with it.

The sea kept moving. The world kept daring her to keep standing.

“I can’t—” she began, and the sentence splintered, because she could not decide which thing she meant.

Her fingers tightened on Laena’s hand until her knuckles went white.

“They saw it,” she whispered.

The wind tried to steal it, but Daemon leaned in a fraction, and Laena’s grip anchored harder.

“They were there,” Rhaenyra went on, voice catching. “All four of them. They—” Her jaw clenched. 

Laena made a sound low in her throat, a wounded thing.

Daemon shut his eyes tightly. 

“I am meant to be… what?” she said, bitterly, and there were more tears in it. “Their mother. Their princess. Their shield. Their sky.” Her breath hitched. “And I do not know how to be in four places at once. I do not know how to hold four small worlds.”

She pressed her free hand to her own ribs as if she could keep herself together by force.

“I don’t know how to always be there,” she said, quieter, stripped down to the bone. “Not for all of them. Not like they need.”

Daemon moved.

He stepped behind Rhaenyra and drew her back against him, slow enough that she could refuse. His arm came around her middle, hand splayed over her belly, over the place where life began and grief kept trying to root.

His mouth brushed her hair once, not a kiss so much as a vow made wordless.

“You don’t have to be everywhere,” he said into her crown. “That is not what they need.”

Laena shifted closer and laid her palm against Rhaenyra’s cheek, thumb wiping the tear away with a gentleness that felt like blasphemy in the face of the day.

“They need you alive,” Laena said. “Not carved into pieces for each of them.”

Rhaenyra made a sound that might have been a sob.

“I should have—” she started, the old poison rising. 

Daemon’s hold tightened just enough to cut the thought off at the root.

“No,” he said, soft, and there was steel under it. “You will not do that. Not to yourself.”

A sound tore loose from Rhaenyra's chest and for a heartbeat even she didn’t know what it was. Then it broke again, breathy and wet and helpless, and she realized she was laughing.

Laughing.

Rhaenyra pressed her face briefly into Daemon’s chest as if ashamed of it, shoulders trembling, tears streaking unchecked down her cheeks.

“We are a mess,” she said, the words tangled up with a shaky, broken laugh. “Gods. Look at us. We are—” She sucked in a breath that hitched painfully. “We are standing on a beach crying into each other while the sea tries to steal our ankles.”

Another laugh slipped out, thin and hysterical and utterly human.

“We are supposed to be terrifying.”

Laena huffed something that might have been a laugh too, low and cracked, her hand tightening at Rhaenyra’s nape.

Daemon didn’t laugh.

“No,” he said, steady. “We are not a mess.”

His hand spread firm at her waist, anchoring her there, while his other came up to cup the back of Laena’s arm, drawing the line between them closed again.

“We are dragons,” he said.

Not poetic. Not loud.

Fact.

“And we have been gravely harmed.”

The words settled differently than comfort. They did not soften what hurt.

They named it.

Laena’s breath left her slow and shuddering. Her chin lifted a fraction, spine straightening as if something ancient had been reminded of itself.

Rhaenyra’s laugh faded, dissolving into a wet exhale. She nodded once, small and fierce, tears still spilling but no longer apologetic.

“Yes,” she whispered. “Yes. That.”

The sea surged again, cold and insistent. Rhaenyra watched the water claw at the shore the way one studies a weapon in use.

Gravely harmed.

Yes.

She lifted her hand and wiped her face once, deliberately, smearing tears and salt together.

When she looked back at them, her eyes were bright, but no longer wet in the same way.

“They have mistaken me.”

The wind caught her hair, snapping it back from her face like a banner.

“They took something from my children,” she said. “Something that does not belong to the world to take.” Her jaw set. “And for that, I will take everything from them.”

Laena inhaled sharply.

Daemon’s eyes darkened already thinking of blood. 

Rhaenyra’s gaze tracked out over the black water, past the rocks, past Driftmark itself, already moving beyond the horizon, beyond mercy.

Daemon’s hand stayed at Rhaenyra’s waist, steady as stone.

“I’ve folded more Emberguard into Kingslanding,” he said. Short. Final. “And the fourteen Gold Cloaks that are mine are already placed. They’ll obey any command you give, the moment you give it.”

Rhaenyra didn’t look away from the sea. 

“And?” she asked.

Daemon’s gaze flicked up toward the cliff path, toward the castle, toward the invisible line that led from Driftmark to the Red Keep. His eyes flashed.

“The grey worm has reared her head again,” he said, contempt like iron filings in his voice. “Fearful. Grasping. As always.”

Laena’s fingers tightened once around Rhaenyra’s hand.

“What does she want.”

“She says the Faith has begun to militarize,” he replied. “Quietly. Like a sickness you don’t feel until it’s in your bones.”

Rhaenyra turned her head at last, slow, deliberate.

“Militarize,” she repeated, tasting it.

“Yes.” Daemon’s voice stayed calm, which was how you knew it was serious. 

Laena’s brows drew together, the sea-wind lifting loose strands of her hair like silver wings.

“How many,” she asked.

Not who. Not why.

How many.

Daemon didn’t answer at once. His gaze slid back to the water, to the long black line of it stretching toward Kingslanding, as if counting shadows only he could see.

“Enough,” he said finally. “More than a prayer guard. Less than an army.” 

Laena’s throat worked once.

“Then we need to wed sooner rather than later,” she said.

Rhaenyra’s head snapped toward her. “Laena—”

“They are already trying to cast us as Valyrian heathens,” Laena cut in, and her voice was steady in the way storms are steady. Inevitable, gathering. Her gaze stayed fixed on the horizon, on the place where sky met water. “They will do it whether we hide or not. They will do it whether we whisper or stand tall.”

Rhaenyra’s hand tightened, reflexive. Her mouth opened, closed.

“Laena,” she tried again, throat thick. “We cannot… not while Laenor—”

Laena finally looked at her then.

Her eyes were bright, not with tears, but with something harder.

“Laenor told me,” she said.

The words landed quietly, and still they rang.

Laena finally turned her head, looking at Rhaenyra properly now. Her eyes were red and hollowed, but there was something steady sitting under the ruin.

“He told me,” Laena said. “About your great, wicked plan. Annulment, once you were queen. A pretty little decree to unmake a marriage that had already done its work, so you could take your true consorts as boldly as any dragon in a song. ‘The Realm’s delight with a lover on each arm,’ he said.” Her mouth twisted. “He laughed himself sick telling it.”

Color rose, sharp and quick, in Rhaenyra’s cheeks, right up to the tips of her ears, as if her body wanted to betray her completely.

“I—” she began, then stopped, then began again like a girl caught stealing a sweet. “It was not… I did not mean it to sound like a plan.”

Laena’s brows lifted.

Rhaenyra pressed on anyway, doomed by her own honesty.

“I was going to court you properly first,” she blurted, words tumbling over each other. “You deserved.... you deserve.... I was going to ask your leave, and then your hand, and do it in the right order instead of simply arriving with Daemon and a writ and… and assuming you would just… stand there and let me—”

She made a helpless gesture with her free hand, palm up, as if presenting the absurdity of herself for judgment.

“—collect you.”

Laena’s laugh broke out of her like something startled from a cage.

It was cracked, raw at the edges, but unmistakably a laugh.

“Oh, sweet Rhaenyra,” she said, shaking her head. “Only you would be planning to unmake law and custom and half the realm, and still fret about courtship etiquette.”

Rhaenyra’s mouth pulled into a small, wounded line.

“I am not some pirate come to steal you off your own deck,” she insisted. “I would at least announce myself.”

Laena’s eyes shone.

“You are exactly that,” she said. “You boarded long ago.”

Rhaenyra blinked, thrown. “I did?”

Laena tipped her chin toward her, gentle and merciless. “You did. With your soft mouth and your impossible eyes and that way you look at me like the world is kinder when I’m in it.”

Rhaenyra’s breath caught, small and stupid in her throat. Her lashes lowered as if she could hide behind them.

“That is not fair,” she muttered, quietly offended by being seen so clearly. “You make me sound—”

“Hopeless?” Laena offered.

Rhaenyra tried to glare.

It came out fond instead.

Daemon made a soft, derisive sound. “And what of me, then?” he asked. “Do I not get to be courted? Shall I not have sweet words and moonlit walks and scraps of poetry like some simpering knight?”

Rhaenyra turned her head toward him, still pink, still teary, and somehow that made her look even more like herself, too soft for the shape the realm kept trying to hammer her into.

She sniffed once, very dignifiedly, as if she were not standing on a beach with salt on her lashes and love in her throat.

“You,” she said, as if considering him with great seriousness, “are unbearable.”

Daemon’s mouth curved. “Thank you.”

Rhaenyra’s lips twitched, traitorous.

“I mean,” she went on, hurried now, because if she didn’t say it quickly she might lose the courage, “that you do not want to be courted. You want to be taken by the hair and told you’re magnificent.”

Daemon’s brows lifted, pleased and offended all at once. “Do I.”

Rhaenyra’s eyes flashed with something bright, almost playful, almost wicked. She lifted her chin as if daring him to deny it.

“Yes,” she said. “You do.”

Then, softer, because she couldn’t help herself, because she was built wrong in the most lovable way, she added:

“But… if you truly want poetry, I can try.”

Daemon leaned in, amused. “Go on, then.”

Rhaenyra’s gaze flicked away, thinking hard, earnest as a girl rehearsing lines behind a curtain.

Finally she said, solemnly, “You are… like a particularly ill-tempered star.”

Daemon stared.

Laena’s laugh burst free again.

Rhaenyra’s face went even redder.

“That is a compliment,” she insisted, mortified and stubborn in the same breath. “Stars are important.”

Daemon’s smile sharpened, delighted. “I’ll have it stitched on a banner.”

Rhaenyra’s chin lifted higher, stubborn and adorable and wholly serious about this ridiculous decree. “You are fortunate enough to end your days with the two most beautiful brides in the realm.”

Daemon stared at Rhaenyra as if she had struck him.

Not with cruelty.

With life.

Then his gaze slid to Laena, in the way he never allowed himself to be about anything except what he truly worshipped. His expression changed, the humor sinking into something quieter, deeper.

He inhaled once, slow. Measured.

“All right,” he said.

Rhaenyra narrowed her eyes. “All right what.”

Daemon didn’t look at her at first. He looked at Laena. Then back to Rhaenyra. Equal weight. No hierarchy. No cleverness.

“I will give you both a proper courtship,” he said.

The words landed heavier than any vow.

Rhaenyra blinked. Laena went very still.

“Neither of you had one,” Daemon went on, voice low and unadorned. “Not really. Things unfolded quickly and unfairly.”

The wind tugged at Laena’s hair. She swallowed hard.

“I don’t know how to do this prettily,” Daemon admitted. “But I can do it honestly.”

Rhaenyra let out a small, breathless laugh. “You want to court us.”

“Yes,” he said simply. “Both of you.”

Laena’s lips curved, soft and incredulous. “Together.”

Daemon nodded. “Together.”

Rhaenyra shook her head once, overwhelmed, eyes shining. “You realize this will be… noticed.”

“That’s the point,” Daemon said. “I want it seen.”

He looked between them again, fierce now, not threatening, but absolute.

“You deserve to be wanted out loud,” he said. “So I will do that.”

For a long moment, neither woman spoke.

Then Rhaenyra huffed a quiet laugh, rubbed at her cheek with the back of her hand, and said, very softly, “You are going to be terrible at this.”

Daemon’s mouth curved. “Probably.”

Laena laughed then and reached out, catching Rhaenyra’s hand between her own and Daemon’s sleeve.

“Terrible or not,” she said, eyes bright, “I think I’d like to see you try.

Rhaenyra’s breath caught.

“The realm will howl,” she said.

“The realm howls already,” Laena replied. “Let it strain its voice on something that gives us joy. My brother would haunt me if I let the rest of my life be mourning and nothing else.”

Daemon’s eyes darkened at that, something like grief and pride tangling there.

“When?” he asked. “The king will expect a full turning of black.”

Rhaenyra lifted her chin, hair whipping around her face.

“We will wait,” she said, “exactly as many moons as it took for my Father and Alicent to run from my mother’s pyre to their marriage bed.”

Laena sucked in a sharp breath.

“Rhaenyra,” Daemon said slowly, something like vicious satisfaction curling at the edges of his words, “that is obscenely poetic.”

“It is fair,” Laena said. “No more, no less. Let no one say we rushed indecently while the king himself set the measure. We will wait that long. Not a day longer.”

She looked between them again, sea wind painting her cheeks, grief hollowing her eyes, stubborn life burning on anyway.

“After that,” she said, softer now, “we wed in our own fashion. With our dragons watching. Laenor’s ghost can stand between us if he likes and laugh himself sick again. But we will do it. For us. For the children. For him.”

Rhaenyra’s vision blurred.

She had faced lords on their knees and dragons with their teeth bared with more composure than she felt at that moment, standing in the surf with Laena’s fingers locked in hers.

“Yes,” she said, the word almost a vow all by itself. “Whatever the realm says, whatever my father screams, yes.”

Daemon looked from one woman to the other, to the place where their hands were joined.

For all his sharpness, he knew when something sacred had already been spoken.

“Then so it shall be,” he said quietly. “The three of us, in the old way. Let the singers try to untangle it.”

Laena let out a shuddering breath.

The sea surged in, cold and indifferent, soaking their hems.

For the first time since the bells began to toll, she lifted their joined hands and let the water break against them, three shadows tangled together on the edge of the world.

“Good,” she said. “Let the realm choke on our happiness, when it comes. It owes us that much.”

---

The big bed creaked with every small shift. Aemon lay closest to the window, flat on his back, arms at his sides the way Aerion’s toy soldiers did when they had “died properly.” His eyes were open, pupils widened, watching the strip of sky beyond the glass as if it might rearrange itself and give him a different day.

Beside him, Aenar curled around his broken ship, thumb pressed into the splintered hull, as if he could hold it together by will alone.

Baela and Rhaena occupied the middle, knees and shoulders jammed together, twin knots of silence.

Aemma and Aerion had ended up at the foot, a tangle of small legs and damp cheeks, Aerion’s toes poking out from beneath the quilt like pale little barnacles.

For a while it was only their breathing and the distant shuffle of the wake down the hall. The faint chime of rigging from the harbor. 

Another sound bled in, thin at first, like something trying to scratch through glass.

Aerion sniffled and rolled against Aemma’s side. “What is that?” he whispered. “The bells sound… wrong.”

“That is not the bells,” Aemma said.

She pushed herself up on her elbows, hair falling over her face in a pale curtain. The sound came again, clearer this time. A low, dragging note that shivered in her teeth more than her ears. It rose, broke on the edge of a cry, then dropped into a rumble that had nothing to do with stone or sea.

Her stomach clenched.

“Seasmoke,” she breathed.

Aemon turned his head at once. Aenar jolted upright, ship forgotten for the span of a heartbeat. Baela froze halfway through scrubbing her sleeve over her eyes. Only Rhaena lay still, lashes wet but shut, as if she could keep the world out by sheer insistence.

“How do you know?” Aemon asked, voice hoarse from all the words he had swallowed on the terrace.

“I just do.” Aemma’s fingers curled in the blanket. “He sounds like he did when Kepa left on long voyages. Only worse.”

Another cry, closer now. The sound of a dragon that had circled until its own shadow made it dizzy.

Aemma’s hand went out blindly and landed on Rhaena’s arm.

“He is circling the island,” she whispered. “I can feel it. His heart hurts.”

Rhaena’s eyes snapped open.

For a moment they looked like Laena’s had on the shore. Hollowed and too wide, as if they had seen too much in one day and were not convinced there would be anything worth seeing tomorrow.

“Do not say that,” she said. It came out sharper than she meant, a little crack in her careful quiet. “He is a dragon. Dragons do not…” Her throat worked around the word. “They do not break.”

Baela shifted beside her. “Mother says dragons feel what we feel,” she said. “Only bigger. She says that is why we fly better together when we are happy.”

“She also says dragons can go mad when the world takes too much from them,” Aemon said.

The cry came again, frayed at the edges.

Rhaena flinched.

Aemma’s fingers tightened on her wrist. “Maybe you can help him,” she said. “He likes you.”

Rhaena actually laughed at that, a fine, cracked sound. “He likes Uncle,” she said. “He likes the sea. He likes showing off when the wind is high so he can splash whoever is watching. He does not…” She swallowed. “He does not belong to me.”

Rhaena’s hand twitched, remembering the feel of Laenor’s solid back, the rise and fall of Seasmoke’s muscles beneath them as he skimmed the waves, the spray leaping up like handfulls of stars.

Another call from outside. The window rattled as if under a great breath.

Aerion pushed himself upright with all the tragic dignity of a four-year-old whose world had come apart. “He’s lonely,” he decided. “The dragons are all lonely. The sea took father and the little baby and now the dragons think it will take them too.”

“That is not how the sea works,” Aemon said automatically.

“How do you know?” Aerion challenged. “Have you asked her?”

Aemon opened his mouth, then shut it again.

Baela rolled onto her side so she could see all of them, hair a wild silver snarl around her face. “He should not be alone,” she said. “Uncle would never leave him like that if he had a choice. If he were here, he would already be on the cliffs, talking nonsense at him.”

Seasmoke screamed again.

The sound scraped along the beams.

Rhaena’s fingers dug into the quilt.

Aemma watched the way her sister’s throat moved, the tremor in her jaw. Rhaena had been quiet through everything. Through the blood in the hall, through the babe in blue, through the long slow dropping of stone into sea. She had wrapped herself in silence as if it were a cloak that might hold her together.

The dragon’s voice was tearing that cloak down seam by seam.

“Maybe he is calling for Kepa,” Aemma said, very gently. “And no one is answering.”

Rhaena’s eyes filled so fast she had to scrunch them shut again. “He will call until his throat is raw and then he will stop,” she said. “That is what happens.”

“Or,” Aenar said, voice suddenly fierce, “someone could tell him.”

Aemon looked at him. “Tell him what?”

“That Kepa loved him,” Aenar said. “That he died fighting. That he did not leave because he wanted another ship. That we remember. That he has us now.”

He sounded as if he were reciting something Corlys had said and twisting it, reshaping it to fit the space a dragon left.

“That is a great many things to shout at a dragon,” Aemon said dryly.

“We do not have to shout,” Aemma said. “We have to go to him.”

Silence fell in a sudden, heavy drop.

The next wave hit the shore outside so hard the windowpane hummed.

Aemon stared at his sister. “We are not allowed,” he said. “Muna said this room is our harbor. That we are to stay. That no one enters without her leave.”

“She did not say we could not leave,” Aerion pointed out, betraying his allegiance to chaos without a flicker of shame.

Aemma gave him a solemn little nod. “Exactly.”

Baela’s mouth twitched, despite the day. “You are going to be a very difficult man when you grow up.” 

Aerion sniffed. “I do not want to grow up. Grownups die on name-days.”

A quiet groan escaped Aemon. “That is not how…”

“It happened once,” Aerion cut in. “That is enough.”

Rhaena’s hand had not left the quilt. Her knuckles had gone white. The dragon’s cries carved the silence between each line of talk. Closer now. Desperate.

“Rhaena,” Aemma said.

Her sister did not look at her.

“Do you not hear him?” Aemma pressed, low. “He feels like… like when Mother cannot breathe because the letters from Kingslanding come. All tight and wrong. I think his heart hurts so much he is choking on it.”

Rhaena’s eyes opened very slowly.

She looked at the ceiling for a long breath, as if weighing the stones above them, the promise of safety if she stayed very, very still.

Without looking at anyone at all, she threw the blanket back.

Cold air spilled over them.

Aenar shivered. Baela made a soft protesting sound that might have been a curse if she had been ten years older. Aerion immediately tucked his feet under Aemma’s thigh, as if she could be a quilt.

“You are right,” Rhaena said.

Her voice was soft, but the decision in it was hard.

“If I lie here, he will keep calling and calling, and I will hear him anyway. I would rather have the cold on my feet than inside my ribs.”

She swung her legs over the edge of the bed. The stone floor bit eagerly at her bare soles. Her whole body flinched, protesting, but she did not climb back up.

Baela swore properly under her breath this time and followed, muttering about fools and dragons with no sense.

Aemon sat up.

“This is a bad idea,” he announced to no one in particular.

“That is why you are coming,” Baela said.

He gave her a look that would have suited a much older man. “You think I am going to let you lot roam the cliffs alone at night?”

“Yes,” Aerion said promptly.

“No,” Aemon said, at the exact same time.

Aenar slid off the bed, ship still clutched in his hand. “If we go to the cliff path, we can see all the dragons,” he said. “Not just Seasmoke. They will know we are together.”

Aemma did not move.

For a moment her body wanted nothing more than to sink back into the familiar warmth, to curl around Aerion and pretend the sound outside was only storm and not loss given wings.

She thought of Seasmoke’s white head turning toward the empty terrace. Of Kepa's laugh when he had told her dragons did not sulk, they brooded, like handsome widowers in bad songs.

She rolled out from under the quilt.

Aerion seized her sleeve at once. “I am coming,” he said.

“You are staying,” Aemon countered.

Aerion lifted his chin, lower lip quivering with stubborn outrage. “Muna said we do everything together tonight,” he said. “You are not allowed to leave me alone with the dark. It is stupid.”

Aemon pinched the bridge of his nose. “One day I am going to have wrinkles, and it will be your fault.”

“You already have a crease,” Baela said cheerfully. “Right here.”

She poked his forehead.

He swatted her hand away, but the line of tension in his shoulders eased a fraction.

“All right,” he said. “We go. We are quick. We stay where the dragons know us. We do not go near the edge without a hand on the wall.”

Baela raised a brow. “Look at you, giving orders like a proper heir.”

“If we are going to be stupid,” Aemon said, “we will be stupid safely.”

They dressed in fragments. No one bothered with proper tunics or belts. Aenar pulled yesterday’s overshirt on over his nightclothes, mismatched sleeves flapping. Baela tugged her boots on without stockings, hissing as her heels caught. Rhaena knotted Laenor’s old wool scarf around her throat, far too big for her, trailing past her knees. Aemma tied her braid back with a ribbon she found under the pillow. Aerion simply wrapped himself in the end of the quilt and declared it a cape.

The room watched them. Laenor’s chair. His driftwood ships. The big bed, still warm from their bodies.

Aemma paused at the door and looked back.

“We are only fetching him some company,” she told the air, quiet. “We will not let him be left with nothing.”

The latch clicked softly as Aemon eased the door open.

The passage outside was dim, lanterns turned low. The noise of the wake had sunk into a thick, drunken murmur somewhere deeper in the hall, far enough that no one stood watch here. Corlys and Rhaenys had posted guards at the outer doors and the paths to the docks. No one had thought to bar the way to the dragons from the children who were born to walk among them.

Aemon stepped out first, head cocked.

He listened the way Vaegon had taught them to listen when they played hunting games in the Red Keep’s gardens. For creaks that meant armor, for the soft swish of skirts, for the sound of a breath that was not their own.

Only the sea answered.

He jerked his chin and moved. The others flowed around him, a small, silver-crowned shoal, feet whispering over stone.

In the main corridor they saw the shadow of a guard lean, the dip of his chin as he dozed standing up. Aemon pressed his back to the wall, heart thudding. Baela grinned at him like it was a game. Aerion nearly giggled and had to stuff his own fist into his mouth to stifle it.

Rhaena’s fingers brushed the wall as they slipped past, the stone cool and damp. It felt, faintly, like a heartbeat.

They took the narrow stair that servants used to carry fish from the boats to the kitchens. The air grew colder, wetter, each step down slick with the breath of the sea. Seasmoke’s cry cut through the rock again, so close now that Aemma felt it in the pit of her stomach.

The world opened with a rush of wind.

The night slapped them in the face, honest and sharp. Stars scattered themselves over the water. The moon sat low and bruised above the horizon, its reflection broken and remade with each wave.

Ahead, the narrow strip of shore ran out along the castle’s flank. Beyond it, where Driftmark’s bones jutted into the sea, the dragons had made their own court.

Seasmoke was the nearest.

He prowled so close to the tide-line that the foam licked at his claws, pale body half-wreathed in blown spray.

The ghost-curve of his neck rippled with every breath, steam pumping harshly from his nostrils into the cool air. He threw his head back again, and his cry tore at the sky like something trying to rip it open and climb through.

Just beyond him, huddled along the same reach of rock, the triplets’ dragons kept uneasy company.

Vhaelyx crouched with his talons dug deep into the stone, a dragon already grown into legend.  Black bulk hunched low, shoulders high as a watchtower, wings clamped tight to his sides as if he could hold himself together by force.

Vermax pressed up against his flank, smaller by a clear measure but still vast enough to make the rock groan beneath him, the lean, ship-breaker size of a war-dragon. His tail lashed in short, angry snaps at any wave that dared climb too high.

Vaerith lay stretched along the rock like a washed-up ribbon of dawn, pale gold dulled by night, long-bodied and broad-winged in the same mighty class as Vermax, her neck looped so her eyes never quite left Seasmoke’s restless path.

Closer in, too small for this much sorrow, Arrax fluttered nervously along the lower currents. His pale wings snapped and stuttered, claws skimming the spray as he made anxious, circling passes between the gathered dragons and the shore, chirring sharp little notes that sounded almost like questions.

They had all drawn nearer to one another than they usually did, pulled tight by something heavier than command.

The children stepped onto the sand.

Six small figures in the shadow of old fire, hearts hammering.

Aemma moved first. 

She slipped her hand from Aemon’s sleeve and walked forward as if she were stepping into a familiar room instead of toward a dragon whose scream could split rock. The wind caught at her funeral braids, tugging silver strands free, but her chin stayed high, her little jaw set.

Seasmoke noticed her at once.

His head swung, pale muzzle cutting through the spray. He huffed, a sharp blast of sea-wet air that sent sand skittering. Steam rolled from his nostrils. His eyes were wrong on him tonight, too wide, the pupils blown, as if grief could bruise a dragon.

Aemma did not stop.

When she was close enough that the heat off his scales brushed her face, she bowed her head a little, the way she did to Rhaenys before a lesson.

“Seasmoke,” she said, voice small but steady. “It is only me.”

He breathed in.

The sound was a low, shuddering drag. Salt. Ash. Child. Beneath it, something that smelled of Laenor. It made his great chest hitch. 

Aemma lifted a hand.

Her fingers trembled, but she laid them against the warm, damp scales of his nose. The texture made her think of river stones left too long in the sun. Seasmoke went very still. The steaming breath slowed. One huge eye blinked, the membrane sliding over it with a thick, wet sound.

“That’s it,” she whispered up to him. “You are not alone. We are here. We remember him too.”

Her other hand reached back, searching.

“Rhaena,” she said without looking around. “Come.”

Rhaena’s feet had rooted in the sand when Aemma stepped away. At the sound of her name she dragged in a sharp breath.

She moved anyway.

Every step felt like it might be the one that made Seasmoke snap. She had seen him take a sheep whole before a shepherd could shout. But his head stayed low, pressed to the level of Aemma’s thin arm, breath fanning hot and heavy over their faces.

Rhaena stopped beside her sister. 

“Hello,” she said, very softly. “You remember us, do you not? Aemma. Rhaena. We are Laenor’s girls too. He said so.”

Seasmoke snorted, the sound rough.

He leaned in.

His great muzzle pressed against both of them, a slow, heavy nudge that nearly shoved them off their feet. He breathed them in deeply, as if trying to drag them past his teeth and into the aching emptiness where his rider’s voice should have been.

Behind them, the others edged nearer by instinct.

Aenar came first, gaze flicking between Seasmoke’s teeth and Aemma’s small hand on his nose. Baela hovered by his shoulder, trying to look unimpressed and managing only terrified and stubborn. Aerion shuffled closer, cheeks still stiff with salt water.

Aemon stayed a little back, but his fingers had uncurled. He watched the way Seasmoke’s great sides heaved, the way the dragon seemed to breathe around a hurt too large for his ribs.

Aemma stroked the slick, warm scales, slow and careful.

“I think he is too sad,” she said at last, glancing up at Rhaena. “He knows we are his, but he is sad in his bones. Sad all the way through.”

Rhaena swallowed.

Her throat hurt.

Everything hurt.

“Being alone makes it worse,” Aemma added, as if explaining a sum. “When I am sad in my bones and I have no one, it feels like I will fall apart. When I am sad and you are there… it is still bad. But I do not break.”

She pressed her palm more firmly to Seasmoke’s muzzle.

“So we will not leave him.”

Seasmoke huffed again, a sound that might have been agreement. Or only pain.

He shifted enough that the side of his head brushed Rhaena’s shoulder, leaving her damp and streaked with sea. His nostrils flared, taking her scent again and again, as if some part of him was trying to decide.

Not yet.

No bright snap of bond, no sudden coiling of that strange, hot certainty.

Only a sad dragon breathing in the smell of children he loved and could not quite claim.

The triplets’ dragons drew nearer.

Vaerith slid down from her perch with a careful grace that belied her size, curling herself along Seasmoke’s flank like a gold ribbon laid beside pale silk. Vermax slunk up on the other side, shouldering against his kin, offering the rough comfort of contact in the only language he knew. Vhaelyx stayed slightly apart, black and watchful, but his tail tip flicked closer, coiling against Seasmoke’s.

On the lower currents, Arrax dipped lower, chirring, drawn as much by Aerion’s nearness as by the cluster of older dragons.

Every so often he gave a high, scolding cry, as if telling Seasmoke to come fly properly and leave off all this sulking.

No one on the sand saw the shadow move.

A neck uncoiled from the deep darkness, slick and terrible, eyes kindling that sickly, ancient green.

He hauled himself onto a knife of rock just off the outer shore, beyond the line where Seasmoke paced, a black wound between the children and Dragonstone.

He tasted the air.

Hatchling.

Hunger woke like a remembered song.

Aemond’s breath came fast and thin.

He had been outside all day.

Since the moment the household turned inward around sorrow and left the edges of Driftmark to the gulls and the wind and the things that did not care.

He had made a religion out of waiting.

Up and down the strand, again and again, a small dark figure against a pitiless grey sea. He threw stones to draw attention, not to strike. He whistled until his lips split. He spoke aloud, voice swallowed by surf, offering names and promises and challenges, as if any of those things could tempt an animal that had outlived politeness.

He was careful not to step too close.

Careful not to flinch.

Careful not to be afraid, because fear was a scent, and dragons knew scents.

He could feel his heart in his palms, in the soles of his feet, beating to the same slow, terrible rhythm as this large hungry beast. 

“You see me,” he said under his breath. The words were for him as much as the dragon. Maybe more. “You do.”

He lifted his chin.

“Ñuha zaldrīzes,” he said, the High Valyrian clumsy on his tongue, and very unsure if he was using the right words. 

My dragon.

Pupils narrowed to slits.

He did not move toward the boy.

He turned his head instead, massive jaw angling up, nostrils flaring as he tracked the pale flicker of Arrax’s wings over the shallows.

Little dragon. Small bones. Soft scales. Easy meat.

Arrax banked, pleased with his own courage, swooping nearer to the gathered dragons, letting out a bright, piping cry.

Cannibal’s muscles gathered.

On the sand, Aemma leaned her forehead for a moment against Seasmoke’s nose, eyes squeezed tight. Rhaena reached up to scratch gently at the edge of the pale dragon’s jaw. Aenar crept close enough that Seasmoke’s breath ruffled his hair. Aerion stared up in round-eyed awe, grief cracked slightly by wonder.

None of them saw the way the black dragon’s haunches bunched.

None of them saw the moment when curiosity and hunger knotted together behind those old green eyes.

Aemond did.

He watched Cannibal’s head tilt, watched the vast chest swell, saw the way the ridges along his spine rose like hackles.

His mouth went dry.

Cannibal opened his jaws.

Arrax, oblivious, gave one last pleased chirp and darted across the dark mouth of sea between the rocks and the shore, a pale scrap of dawn stitching the grief-heavy air.

The big black dragon moved.

Cannibal’s teeth closed on seawater and night, missing his tail by the length of a man’s arm. The impact still sent a wall of spray roaring up, drenching the sand, turning the air to salt and foam.

Arrax tumbled sideways, frantic, claws scrabbling for the air again.

His cry went high and thin, nothing like the proud screech he had used to impress the triplets earlier.

Aerion screamed with him.

High, panicked, the sound ripped right out of his chest.

“Make it stop,” he begged. “Please, Aemon, please, he will die.”

Aemond heard that too.

He will die.

The words slid under his ribs and lodged there, not as fear, but as permission.

Cannibal’s jaws opened again.

Arrax shrieked, little wings stuttering as he scrambled for height, spray tearing off him in frantic ribbons.

Aerion screamed like he was the one between those teeth. “He’s going to eat him!”

Vhaelyx moved first.

Black bulk uncoiled with a violence that made the rock crack, and then he hit Cannibal like a thrown cliff. The impact boomed through the shore. Water leapt. Blood hissed on hot scales.

Cannibal’s head snapped sideways, outraged, ancient, offended that anything dared touch him.

Vermax followed with a snarl that sounded too big for his young throat. Vaerith slid in like spilled light, teeth finding the soft hinge of joint. Seasmoke, grief-stripped and sudden, lunged into the surf and clamped down on Cannibal’s tail as if he could haul the whole nightmare back into the deep.

The sea boiled.

Fire licked and died in wet air.

Claws tore. Stone screamed.

On the sand, Aemon shoved Aerion behind him without thinking, his body going to shield before his mind could argue.

“Stay,” he snapped, as if a word could hold back dragons.

Aerion sobbed in jagged, helpless gulps. “Please. Please.”

Aemond ran.

His boots slid on wet stone as he came down from the rocks, cloak snapping behind him like a torn banner. He hit the sand hard enough that it splashed under his soles, and he grabbed the nearest silver-haired boy as if he could yank the whole battle into obedience by force.

His hand found Aemon’s shoulder.

He jerked him around.

“Call him off!” Aemond shouted, spitting salt. “Call Vhaelyx off. You’re killing him!”

Aemon’s eyes were bright with dragonfire and something far colder. “No.”

“He looked at me,” Aemond hissed, voice cracking on the truth of it. “He chose me.”

“He tried to eat Arrax.” Aemon stepped forward, jaw set. “That isn’t choosing. That’s hunting.”

“He is mine,” Aemond said. It came out ugly. Starved. Like a boy biting down on the only word that could keep him from vanishing. “Mine.”

Aemon’s mouth curled. “You don’t get to claim the monster that came for our blood.”

Something in Aemond snapped clean. 

He shoved.

Sand slid. Aemon stumbled back into Aerion. 

Aerion hit the ground hard.

The back of his skull struck stone with a dull, sick sound that stole the air from every mouth at once.

Aerion didn’t cry.

Not at first.

The sea kept moving.

The dragons kept fighting.

The world did not pause for a four-year-old’s skull.

Then the sound came. Ripped out of him, raw and wrong, an animal thing dragged up from somewhere deep and terrified.

Aemon went white.

Aemond went colder.

Above them, Cannibal screamed again.

And this time it didn’t sound like hunger.

It sounded like laughter.

“Aerion,” Aemma gasped, already moving.

She was moving before she knew she had moved, skirts snapping about her bare ankles as she darted toward her brothers. Baela and Rhaena only a half-step behind her, braids whipping. 

Aemon recovered fast.

He turned back on Aemond, teeth bared, grief and fear and simmering resentment that had been building since the terrace all braided together.

“You shoved him,” Aemon shouted. 

“He was in the way,” Aemond snapped. “You all are in the way. You will let him die, you do not understand, that dragon saw me, he is mine, and you are killing him.”

Aemon had pushed forward without noticing. “His teeth were near Arrax, you blind idiot, Vhaelyx saved him.”

“Shut up,” Aemond snarled.

He pushed Aemon again.

This time Aemon was ready.

He caught Aemond's wrist, jerked, and the two of them went down together in a tangle of elbows and knees and torn wool. Sand went up in a choking puff around them. Aemond’s shoulder hit the ground. Aemon’s knuckles cracked against his jaw. For a moment all the fine training in the yard vanished. There were no stances, no forms, only rage, only a blind, flailing need to make the other boy hurt the way everything inside hurt.

Behind them, the dragons raged.

Cannibal got his head free for a heartbeat and snapped at Vermax, teeth scoring a long red groove along the younger dragon’s side.

Vermax screamed, fire bursting from his mouth in a reflexive blast that scorched Cannibal’s chest. Vaerith let go of his leg to dart higher, shrieking, trying to lure the older dragon’s attention from the bleeding one.

Seasmoke’s claws dug deeper into Cannibal’s tail. He dragged, muscles bunching, hauling tons of enraged dragon back toward the deeper water where the others could roll him, drown him, tear him apart.

Vhaelyx’s teeth had found the thick ridge at Cannibal’s throat.

He hung on grimly, wings beating, as Cannibal thrashed.

The sea itself felt afraid.

Aemma reached the fighting boys and threw herself toward them, small hands grabbing for sleeves, for whatever she could get.

“Stop it,” she cried. “Stop, please, you are hurting each other, stop.”

She hooked her fingers in Aemond’s collar, trying to drag him back. Aemon’s fist drew back, ready to strike again. Aemond twisted, half trying to shrug her off, half trying to get at Aemon’s face.

His arm swept out.

The back of his hand caught Aemma square across the mouth and cheek.

The crack of it was sharp as a slapped oar on water.

Aemma staggered back half a step, hand flying to her mouth. She looked surprised more than hurt, as if the world had broken a rule it had always obeyed.

Then the pain arrived.

Blood welled at her lip. Her breath caught, thin and frantic. She made a small sound, more air than voice, and the sight of that little red line undid something in all of them at once.

“Aemma.” Rhaena’s voice split on her name.

Baela moved like a match struck. She shoved between Aemma and the boys, shoulders squared, eyes feral. “Don’t you touch her again.”

Aemond’s chest heaved.

Sand clung to his knees, his palms, his cheek where Aemon had hit him.

He tasted salt and humiliation and that awful, bright instant when Cannibal’s head had turned and the world had noticed him.

He could not unfeel it.

Above them the sea boiled with wingbeats and rage. Cannibal thrashed, black scales slick with spray, and the younger dragons clung to him like desperate stars trying to pin night to the earth. Arrax screamed again, small and shrill, a sound that made every bone in Aerion’s body flinch.

Aerion lay on his side where he’d fallen, blinking too slowly, mouth open as if he’d forgotten what breath was for. Aemma’s hands shook as she dropped to her knees beside him, ignoring the blood on her own mouth. She gathered his head into her lap with the solemn clumsiness of a child trying to be an adult.

“Stay with me,” she whispered, like she could order his skull back into safety.

Aemon’s attention snapped to Aerion and back to Aemond again, torn in half.

His face had gone bright-white with a kind of fury that wasn’t only anger. It was terror, and the knowledge that terror would never leave them now.

“You hit her,” he said.

Aemond got to his feet.

He did not look at Aemma. He could not. If he looked at her, he might see himself as they saw him.

A boy in green, unwanted on a shore that hated him, flailing for a place to stand.

So he looked past them instead.

He looked at Cannibal.

“You’re killing him,” he spat, voice breaking on the edge of worship. “You’re killing my dragon.”

Aemon’s laugh was ugly, a thing torn out of him. “Your dragon tried to eat Arrax.”

“Arrax is a hatchling,” Aemond snapped, as if that was proof of something rather than horror. “He would have lived. He would have learned. That’s how dragons are.”

“That’s how monsters are,” Baela shot back.

Aemond’s gaze flicked to her, contempt flashing. “You don’t get it.”

He looked at Aemon again, hatred narrowing his face into something too old for him.

“You have everything,” Aemond said. 

His voice went low, shaking with the truth of it.

“I have nothing.”

Aemon’s eyes flashed. “You have a father.”

“A father who won’t even stand with us,” Aemond hissed. “A mother who is hated. A hall that wants us drowned. A crown that looks at you and sees heirs—”

He jerked his chin toward the sand where Aerion lay.

“—and looks at me and sees a spare.”

The words landed like stones.

And then Cannibal screamed.

Not hunger now.

Rage. Offense. The sound of a god being denied.

The black dragon tore free of Seasmoke’s grip with a violent whip of his tail. Seasmoke stumbled, claws gouging rock. Vaerith shrieked and darted up. Vermax bled, bright and hot in the dark water. Vhaelyx held on, jaws locked at Cannibal’s throat ridge, wings beating hard enough to kick spray into a white storm.

Cannibal’s head snapped down toward the sand.

Toward the children.

Aemond felt it like a hand closing around his spine.

He stepped forward without thinking.

Not to protect them.

To be seen.

To be chosen.

“Ñuha zaldrīzes!” he shouted again, and the Valyrian came out clearer this time, sharpened by desperation and salt. “Look at me.”

Aemon grabbed his sleeve. “Are you mad?”

Aemond ripped himself free with a hard twist.

“Yes.

Yes, I am.”

Cannibal’s eyes found him.

That sick, ancient green pinned him in place. Aemond’s breath caught so hard it hurt. For one shining heartbeat he felt it. The vast attention of something old enough to make kings feel like insects.

You wanted to be seen, the moment seemed to say.

Aemond took another step.

Cannibal lunged.

Not fully onto the sand, too clever, too old for that. Just close enough that the wind of him knocked everyone backward, close enough that the air turned hot and rotten with old blood.

Aemon reacted on instinct.

He shoved Aemond back.

Not gentle. Not kind. A hard, furious shove meant to save him from teeth and fate.

Aemond stumbled, regained his footing, and in that stumble his hand found something half-buried in the wet sand.

Not a sword.

Not a pretty thing.

A rock. 

He lifted the rock.

Aemon saw it.

His eyes widened. “Drop that.”

“Don’t,” Aemma cried from the ground, voice small and terrified and furious. Blood still smeared at her mouth. Aerion whimpering in her lap.

Aemond’s grip tightened.

Aemon stepped forward, hands open now, trying to talk him down like you talk down a frightened animal.

“This isn’t you,” Aemon said, voice shaking. “This isn’t—”

“You don’t get to tell me what I am,” Aemond snapped.

Behind them Cannibal moved again, restless, circling the rock like an executioner pacing while children decide which one will scream first.

Arrax shrieked and fled higher, wings stuttering.

Aemond’s gaze flicked to Cannibal and back to Aemon.

He lifted the rock like a claim.

Aemon saw it coming and tightened, ready to throw himself forward, ready to take it.

He did not have to.

Aenar moved first.

He had no dagger. 

Only the thing he’d found days ago on Driftmark’s shore, a broken length of blackened iron, salt-cured and cruel, snapped from some forgotten hook or gaff and kept because it felt like the sea had chosen it.

And with no thought beyond Aemond Targaryen, who had shoved Aerion and struck Aemma, was about to crack Aemon’s skull open on Driftmark’s shore—

—Aenar’s arm whipped across Aemond’s face.

“Stop!” Rhaena screamed. “Stop, stop, stop—”

Aemma scrambled closer, one hand still cradling Aerion’s head, the other reaching for them, fingers grabbing at sleeves and hair and nothing solid.

“Please,” she begged, voice broken. “Please—”

A hot line of pain. A sudden wetness. The world going wrong on one side.

He screamed.

The sound was terrible because it was a child’s.

Aenar froze.

Sand stuck to his fingers. His breath came fast. His eyes stared, wide and unbelieving, at what he’d done, like the world had moved his hand for him and he’d only been forced to watch.

Aemond clapped both hands to his face, and blood poured through his fingers, dark in the moonlight.

Aemma made a sound that wasn’t a word.

Baela grabbed Rhaena and dragged her back as if the sand itself might bite. 

Aerion started to cry again, high and shaking, and the sound cut straight through dragon-roar and sea-surge like a knife.

Cannibal lifted his head.

He watched.

Not with concern.

Something ugly and possessive flared in that sickly green gaze.

Cannibal wrenched away with a howl that scraped the clouds. 

Vhaelyx screamed and surged forward, snapping at Cannibal’s jaw, trying to drive him back. The older dragon hissed, reared, offended by the audacity, and in that motion his shadow swallowed the children whole.

Aenar backed away from Aemond, shaking. 

Aemond's voice came out broken, half breath, half sob.

“My eye.”

Aemma grabbed him.

She pressed her small hand hard against the bleeding side of his face, trying to hold his head together the way she’d tried to hold Aerion’s.

Vhaelyx lunged after him, roaring, ready to give chase.

“Stop,” Aemon shouted, voice raw, the command ripped from his chest as much as from his throat. “Vhaelyx, to me. Now.”

The black dragon banked in mid-air, torn between the joy of the hunt and the call that had named him since he first cracked shell.

He chose.

With a furious lash of his tail he turned away from Cannibal’s retreating shape and came back toward the shore.

His landing shook the sand, kicked salt-streaked wind into the children’s faces.

He prowled in front of them, head low, chest heaving, eyes still fixed on the place in the dark where the older dragon had vanished.

Above, Vermax circled once, panting steam, then dropped back to the rock ledge, wings folding in short, savage jerks.

Vaerith slid onto a lower shelf, sides shuddering, pale hide streaked with Cannibal’s blood.

Arrax fluttered down like a leaf after a storm, claws scraping frantically for purchase until Aerions’s hands were suddenly there, pressed to his muzzle, voice spilling out in a stream of choked Valyrian.

Seasmoke dragged himself from the shallows.

He limped up the sand until he could plant himself behind them all, as if to shelter them with the curve of his jaw. His breath came in harsh, uneven bursts.

The roar of wings faded.

What remained was the sound of the sea and a different kind of screaming.

Aemond curled over his ruined eye.

Blood poured through his fingers, hot and slick, pattering darkly onto the sand. It had already soaked the collar of his green tunic, streaked his cheek, matted the pale hair at his temple.

On the higher paths, lantern lights jolted and swung.

Steel clinked.

Boots hammered stone.

Baela drew in as much air as her lungs would hold and screamed again, with all the force of a daughter of dragons.

“Guards! Here! Now!”

Notes:

Okay, babes, this is the calm hallway between two locked doors.

Before Oldtown’s message hits King’s Landing and everything starts moving like a guillotine, I needed to give Laenor and the babe a proper farewell. They deserved more than a quick cutaway. They deserved grief with teeth, love with ceremony

Now… hold my hand. Because from here on out, things get worse. (In the best way.)

AND, no one guessed Aemond’s dragon. I’m screaming.

How are we feeling: shocked? mad? obsessed? Drop your predictions, your rage, your “oh no baby what is you doing” in the comments 🐉

 
Chapter 30 yall!!!!