Chapter Text
The thing about being an omega princess was that nobody quite knew what to do with you.
Rhaenyra had worked this out the way she worked most things out — by watching, and listening, and being underestimated enough that people said things in front of her they'd have kept quiet otherwise.
She'd presented eight months ago, three days before her eighth nameday, and the way the adults had reacted told her more about her situation than any conversation they'd actually tried to have with her.
Her mother had held her and said it's alright, sweetling, it's natural, it doesn't change anything. Which meant it changed something.
Her father had looked at her with an expression she couldn't fully read, love in it, certainly, her father loved her, she'd never doubted that, but something else too. Something tired. He'd said you're still my daughter and I am still your father and nothing that matters has changed. Which was, she'd noticed, a different thing entirely from nothing has changed.
Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen. Omega. Presented in her eighth year.
And underneath that, unwritten but understood by everyone who read it: therefore not quite what we needed.
Because the realm needed an alpha. Specifically, the realm needed her mother to produce one, a son, strong-blooded and Targaryen-proud, who would one day sit the Iron Throne and continue the dynasty in the way dynasties were supposed to continue. This was not a cruel fact. It was simply the shape of the world she'd been born into, the same as winter following autumn and the tide following the moon. Alpha sons inherited. Omega daughters were married off to alphas who needed the alliance more than the girl.
She understood this. She was eight, not stupid.
What she also understood,because she was eight and had ears and spent a great deal of time being invisible in window seats,was that her parents were trying again. Her mother was with child. The fourth attempt, the fourth hope, the fourth time the entire court would hold its breath and wait and try to hide the fact of its waiting.
Three times before. Two sons lost, one before anyone outside the birthing chamber had known to count them. One daughter, whose name Rhaenyra had been told once and never again.
She tried not to think about the weight of that number.
"You're doing it wrong," she said.
Alicent Hightower did not look up. She was cross-legged on the flat root , the good one, curved up like a ship's prow, with three flowers lined up in front of her and a fourth in her hand, working at it with a stick in a way that was either botanical study or murder, depending on your perspective.
"I'm not doing anything wrong."
"You're destroying them."
"I'm studying them." Now she looked up, briefly, with the expression she used when Rhaenyra was being annoying. It was a patient expression, which made it worse. "Septa says the only way to truly understand a structure is to—"
"Septa smells like old cheese and has hair growing out of her ears."
"She smells like her medicinals."
"Those are the same thing."
Alicent made a small sound that wasn't quite a laugh and went back to her flower. "You smell like dragon," she said, as an observation, not a complaint.
"I went to see Syrax this morning."
"I know. You have a mark on your sleeve."
Rhaenyra looked at her sleeve. There was, in fact, a small singed patch near the cuff, black-edged, roughly the size of a large coin. She looked at it with the expression of someone who had expected it to be there and was pleased to have that expectation confirmed.
"She breathed fire at me."
Alicent set down her stick. "On purpose?"
"Yes. I asked her to."
The look she got for this was different from the patience-look. This was the I cannot believe what I am hearing look, which Alicent had developed specifically for Rhaenyra-related situations and which she deployed with some regularity.
"You asked your dragon," she said, "to breathe fire. At you."
"At my hand, specifically. I held it out and she-"
"Why."
"To see if she would."
"Why."
"Because I wanted to know!" Rhaenyra pulled her sleeve back to show the unblemished skin underneath,not even pink, not even warm. "She didn't hurt me. She knew not to. She can feel it, I think, the difference between me and something that isn't me. She just,she'd never done it at me before and I wanted to see."
Alicent stared at her for a moment longer, then reached over and took her arm, turning it in that practical way she had, checking the sleeve and then the skin underneath with the same focused attention she'd been giving the flowers. Rhaenyra let her.
Alicent did this sometimes, checked things, verified things, made sure with her own eyes. She found it less annoying than when other people did it.
"You're not burned," Alicent said, releasing her.
"I know."
"You could have been."
"I wasn't."
"That's not the same as couldn't have been."
"Syrax would never actually hurt me." Rhaenyra said it with the particular certainty that lived between herself and her dragon, in the place where words weren't quite adequate but the thing itself was completely solid. "We're bonded. She knows me better than anyone knows me. Better than I know myself, maybe."
Alicent looked at her for a moment with an expression Rhaenyra couldn't catalogue. "I believe you," she said, simply, and went back to her flower.
That was the thing about Alicent. She said I believe you and meant it, full stop, no qualification.
They'd been proper friends - the real kind, not the court kind - for almost two years.
Rhaenyra remembered the exact day she'd decided. Not the first day they'd met, which had been stiff and ceremonial and involved being presented to each other in one of her father's smaller receiving chambers while Lord Otto Hightower and the King talked about whatever important men talked about when daughters were meant to be seen decoratively and not heard.
She'd decided six weeks after Alicent had arrived at court, in this godswood, on a day when Rhaenyra had been in one of her moods - the kind her nurses walked carefully around and her father sighed at - and had come here to be alone. She'd found Alicent already sitting in front of the heart tree, reading, straight-backed and quiet.
This is my place, Rhaenyra had said.
I know, Alicent had said, without looking up. I'll go if you want.
No resentment in it. No performance. Just a genuine offer, take it or leave it.
Rhaenyra had said no, stay before she'd decided to mean it, and that had been that.
"Which one's your favourite," she said now, dropping onto the root beside Alicent and peering at the dissected flowers.
"I don't have favourites. I'm studying them equally."
"That's not how favourites work. You have a favourite food."
"Food is different."
"You always take two vanilla cakes when you think no one's watching and then look very composed when someone offers you one officially so you don't seem greedy."
Silence.
"I don't look that composed," Alicent said, with dignity.
"You absolutely do. Your face goes like—" Rhaenyra arranged her features into a precise impression of serene, slightly bored disinterest — the face of someone who had definitely not just eaten two vanilla cakes in private and would never dream of wanting a third.
Alicent looked at it. "I look like that a little bit," she admitted.
"You look like that exactly."
"Fine." A pause. "Don't tell anyone."
"Father," Rhaenyra intoned, in her deepest most ceremonial voice, "I bring urgent news regarding the Hightower girl and the vanilla cakes. The matter is of grave importance to the realm—"
"Rhaenyra—"
"An alpha heir we may not have, but we have evidence of cake theft, and I feel strongly that this takes priority—"
"Stop," Alicent said, losing the battle with her own face, the composed look cracking open into something real and bright. "You're awful."
"I'm the king's daughter." Rhaenyra leaned back against the weirwood trunk, pleased with herself. "I'm exactly as awful as I'm supposed to be."
"That is not how that works."
"The old gods don't mind," Rhaenyra told the weirwood face, conversationally. The carved red eyes stared back with their usual ancient indifference. "They've seen worse."
"They've certainly seen worse than you," Alicent said, which was a specific kind of insult, and Rhaenyra kicked her ankle for it.
The afternoon had its particular quality by then - later, softer, the light going amber through the leaves. They'd been here two hours at least. Long enough that someone was probably looking for them somewhere, a thought Rhaenyra filed away with the other thoughts she chose not to act on.
"My mother's showing more now," she said, after a while. Not planned. It just came out.
Alicent didn't make a thing of it. "I noticed," she said. "She looked well at supper last night."
"She looked tired."
"Both can be true."
Rhaenyra pulled at a loose thread on her sleeve. "I was in her solar yesterday. In the window seat. She didn't know I was there." She paused. "Lady Fell was there. Said she was looking tired. My mother's lady said she was well. And then there was this — silence. The kind where everyone's saying something with their face that they're not saying with their mouths."
Alicent was quiet for a moment. "My father talked to yours last week," she said carefully. "I wasn't supposed to hear but I was on the stairs." She picked up her stick again, not to study anything, just to have something to do with her hands. "He said — he said the realm needs certainty. That's the word he used. Certainty. And that an omega heir, without a confirmed alpha sibling—"
"Makes people nervous," Rhaenyra finished.
"Yes."
"I know." She said it flatly, not as a complaint, just a fact. "I've known since I presented. That's why everyone made those faces. Because an omega daughter is fine as a daughter but she's not — I'm not what they needed me to be. So now my mother has to try again and again until—" she stopped.
"You are what you are," Alicent said. "That's not a bad thing.
"I know it's not." Rhaenyra glanced at her. "I don't want to be an alpha. I just want my mother to not have to keep—" She stopped again.
Alicent reached over and pressed her hand over Rhaenyra's for a moment. Warm, quick, matter of fact. Not making it into more than it was.
"This one might be different," she said.
"Maybe."
They left it there. Both of them old enough to know that maybe was the most honest thing you could say about it.
The afternoon continued. A bird landed on the weirwood's high branches and left again. Somewhere beyond the walls the city made its constant noise, indifferent to everything happening inside the Red Keep.
Rhaenyra had a sharp nose. She'd always had one — sharper than most, her mother said, and since her presentation the maester had explained it was partly omega nature, the heightened senses that came with it. She had a whole private catalogue of smells: the cold metal of the Blackwater at night, the layered heat of the kitchens before feast days, the ink-and-old-wool smell of the maester's tower. The godswood smelled like permanence to her, like something older than language.
Alicent smelled like clean linen and parchment and the particular Hightower soap her servants brought up from Oldtown — something floral and faintly warm. Rhaenyra had known this the way she knew the smell of any room she spent a lot of time in.
But.
She noticed it gradually, which was how you noticed things that crept in rather than arrived. Like weather changing before you could see clouds. A warmth in the air that hadn't been there before, underneath everything else, underneath the godswood's permanence and the soap and the parchment. Something that made her think — and this was strange, she knew it was strange — of sunlit stone.
The Red Keep's walls in late summer, the way they released the stored heat of the day long after the sun had moved on. Something slow and accumulated and fundamental.
She turned to look at Alicent without meaning to. slight colour to her face that Rhaenyra had half-noticed and attributed to the afternoon warmth, except that they were in shade, and had been for a while.
"You smell different," Rhaenyra said.
Alicent paused mid-pattern. "What?"
"You smell—" she frowned, trying to locate better words. "Different. Like — there's something underneath. Warm. Like sun on stone, sort of. I don't know how to explain it."
Alicent straightened slightly, a small involuntary movement, and for a moment her expression had something uncertain in it that Rhaenyra didn't often see there. "I can't smell anything."
"You wouldn't smell yourself." This was something Rhaenyra had heard — in one of those adult conversations held too near a window seat — and which had stuck. "Everyone else can smell you better than you can smell yourself. That's how it works, I think."
"How what works."
"I don't — I don't know exactly." Rhaenyra chewed the inside of her cheek. "My nurse talked to me a bit. Before I presented and after. About — about how it would feel, and what I'd notice about other people." She paused. "I think I might be noticing something."
Alicent had gone very still. She was staring at the pattern she'd been drawing in the dirt, not seeing it. "Noticing what, specifically."
"I don't know. Noticing you. Differently." Rhaenyra turned more fully to face her, crossing her legs. "Does it feel different? Being here today? Do you feel different?"
A pause. Long enough that Rhaenyra knew the answer before she heard it.
"Warm," Alicent said, quietly. "I've been warm all afternoon. Not — not like weather. Different. Here." She touched her sternum briefly, then let her hand drop as though she hadn't meant to do that. "And sort of — I keep wanting to sit differently. Closer to—" She stopped.
"Closer to what?"
Alicent looked at her. Then away. "Nothing. I don't know."
But she'd moved slightly closer over the past hour without either of them commenting on it. Rhaenyra, now paying attention, noticed this. They were already sitting near each other — they always did — but Alicent was more toward her than usual, her shoulder almost touching Rhaenyra's, and she hadn't moved away.
"Ali." Rhaenyra said it carefully. "I think — I think maybe you're starting to—"
Alicent wasn't listening anymore.
Or — she was, probably, somewhere underneath, but her eyes had gone to Rhaenyra's neck and stayed there, and her face had gone the colour of the inside of a rose, and whatever Rhaenyra had been about to say died somewhere between her mouth and the air because Alicent was looking at her like that and it was making it very difficult to remember words.
"Ali."
Nothing. Alicent's hands, which were always doing something — the stick, the flowers, the notes — had gone still in her lap. Her breathing had changed. Rhaenyra could hear it, slightly too quick, slightly too shallow, like she'd been running.
"Alicent."
"You smell—" Alicent said, and stopped. Started again. "Why do you smell like that."
"Like what?"
"Like—" she shook her head, a small frustrated movement, like someone trying to find a word in a language they only half spoke. "I don't have — I can't explain it. Good. You smell really, really good. Why do you smell like that right now."
Rhaenyra's heart had started doing something strange. Fast and weirdly loud, like it was trying to get her attention. "I don't think I smell different," she said. "I think you do. I think that's what's happening."
But Alicent didn't seem very interested in that theory. She had leaned forward, just slightly, almost without seeming to notice she'd done it. Her eyes were still on Rhaenyra's neck. There was something in the quality of her attention that was completely new -not Alicent-studying-something, which was focused and clinical and involved the stick, but something else. Something that had more heat in it.
"Ali, are you-"
Alicent moved.
Not fast. Not alarming, not exactly, it was more of a slow inevitable thing, like water finding a slope. She leaned in close, closer than normal, and pressed her nose into the curve of Rhaenyra's neck just below her jaw, and inhaled.
Rhaenyra's whole body went very still.
It wasn't frightening. That was the strange thing, the thing she'd think about later, she'd been startled, yes, her shoulders had jumped, but she hadn't pulled away, and nothing in her wanted to pull away, and that probably meant something she didn't have the right words for yet. Alicent's nose was cold against her skin. The rest of her radiated heat.
She breathed in again, slow and deliberate, and made a small sound low in her throat that Rhaenyra had never heard from her before.
"Alicent," Rhaenyra said, and her voice came out very quiet. "What are you doing."
"I don't know," Alicent said. Against her neck, the words were more breath than sound. "I know I should probably-" A pause. "I can't think properly. Everything is just -you. Your smell. I can't think past it."
"That sounds like the presenting thing," Rhaenyra said, mostly because she had to say something, because if she didn't say something she was going to just sit here and let whatever this was keep happening and she wasn't sure that was a good idea. Her nurse's voice was somewhere at the back of her head, distant and unconvincing. Be careful of your neck, little one.
"Probably," Alicent agreed, in the tone of someone who knows they should care about information and currently doesn't.
Alicent drew back just enough to look at Rhaenyra properly, and up close Rhaenyra could see how flushed she was — cheeks, throat, the tips of her ears. Her eyes were slightly glassy, unfocused in a way that wasn't quite Alicent, or was too much Alicent, or was some version of Alicent that had been underneath all along and was only now finding its way out.
She looked at Rhaenyra's neck the way she usually looked at problems she was working out. Focused. Intent. Like she'd already decided something and was just confirming the details.
One hand came up and touched the side of Rhaenyra's neck. Two fingers, light, right where her pulse was strongest.
"I can feel it," Alicent said, very quietly. "Your heartbeat."
"I can feel it too," Rhaenyra said. It's going extremely fast, she did not add.
"It's going fast."
"I know."
"Are you scared?"
"No." It was true. Confusion, yes. The warm foggy quality of the air between them, yes. But not scared. "Are you?"
Alicent looked at her. Something moved through her expression — there and gone. "I feel like I'm supposed to do something," she said. "I don't know what. I just - there's something. Here." She pressed her free hand against her sternum, brief and distracted, then brought it back.
Both hands at Rhaenyra's neck now, careful and terrifyingly gentle, tilting her head slightly to one side. "Is this alright?"
It was a very Alicent question. Even now, half-gone and flushed rose-red, she asked.
"I don't know what you're going to do," Rhaenyra said honestly.
"Neither do I," Alicent said.
And then she bit her.
It was quick - a sharp bright spike of pain, there and gone, teeth at the side of her neck, held for one long impossible second - and Rhaenyra screamed. Not because it hurt badly, though it did hurt, but because it was sudden and shocking and her body reacted before her mind could catch up, and the scream was out in the air before she could stop it.
Everything happened at once.
The guards at the gate - the ones Rhaenyra spent considerable energy pretending weren't there - came through at a dead run, hands on their swords, and then stopped when they found no visible threat, just two girls on a root, one with a hand to her neck and one frozen rigid with an expression like someone who had just woken up in the middle of doing something without knowing they'd started.
"Your Grace." Ser Lorent, she knew his voice. He was already stepping between them. "Are you hurt?"
"I'm fine," Rhaenyra said.
He reached for her arm, not unkindly. "We need to--"
"I said I'm fine--"
But she was already being moved, Ser Lorent's bulk between her and Alicent, and two other guards flanking Alicent from either side, and Alicent wasn't fighting them, she'd gone completely still, the glassy quality gone, leaving behind something rawer. She was staring at Rhaenyra over Ser Lorent's shoulder with a face Rhaenyra had never seen before. White. Stricken. Eyes very wide and very bright.
"I didn't mean to," Alicent said. It came out small. Barely any sound to it.
"I know," Rhaenyra said.
"Rhae, I don't know what I—"
"I know." She tried to hold Alicent's gaze past the guard's shoulder. It's alright. I know you. She tried to put it all in her face.
Whether it landed she didn't know, because then they were moving her through the gate and the godswood was getting smaller and the weirwood's red eyes disappeared between the trees and the warmth in the air thinned out and became ordinary King's Landing afternoon air again, cooler and louder and full of the smell of the city, and Rhaenyra kept her hand pressed flat against the side of her neck and thought, very clearly, underneath all the noise:
She's an alpha. Alicent is an alpha.
And she marked me.
The maester's name was Gerardys and he had, in Rhaenyra's experience, two modes: the brisk efficient mode he used for ordinary things, and a careful measured mode he used for things that required delicacy. He was in the second mode now, which she didn't like, because it meant everyone in the room knew this was one of the delicate things.
Her mother was sitting beside her on the bed. Not performing composure — actually composed, which was different, which meant her hands were still and her face was still and she was watching Gerardys work with the particular quality of attention that Rhaenyra had learned to read as I am managing several things at once and none of them are you, specifically, but you are one of them.
Gerardys turned her chin with two fingers, tilting her head to the side to examine the mark in the last of the evening light.
"Does this hurt?" he asked.
"No."
"When I press here-"
"A bit. Not much."
He made the sound he made when he was thinking, a low neutral hm, and reached for his lamp, bringing it closer. Rhaenyra sat very still. She was good at sitting still for the maester, had learned early that the fastest way through any examination was compliance and silence, that fidgeting only extended things.
"The skin is barely broken," he said, after a moment. He set the lamp down and reached for his kit. "Two points of contact, here and here." He indicated without touching. "Minor bleeding, already stopped. No tearing." He looked at her directly, which he didn't always do. "I've seen worse from a dog bite."
"It wasn't a-" Rhaenyra started.
"I know what it was, Your Grace." He said it without inflection, not unkind. He unstoppered a small jar and she caught the sharp herbal smell of it a moment before the cloth touched her neck - a brief sting, already fading. "I'm telling you that physically, medically, this is minor. You'll have a small bruise for a few days. The marks will be gone within the week."
Gone, Rhaenyra thought. She didn't know how she felt about that word.
"Is there any risk of-" her mother began.
"No." Gerardys was already replacing the stopper. "An involuntary first-presentation mark, at this age, between children - there's no bond formed. The biology requires significantly more than this for anything lasting to take hold. She's perfectly safe." He looked at Queen Aemma directly. "Physically."
Her mother held his gaze for a moment. Some conversation happened in that pause that Rhaenyra was not part of and could not fully read, the kind adults had in front of children when they thought the important parts were going over the children's heads.
They weren't going over her head.
"Thank you, Gerardys," her mother said. "That will be all."
He bowed and gathered his kit and left, pulling the door softly closed, and then it was just the two of them in the room with the evening coming in through the window and the candles doing their quiet work and the Red Keep making its nighttime sounds around them.
Her mother did not immediately speak.
This was something Rhaenyra had always respected about her - she didn't fill silences to manage them. She let them be what they were. She sat with her hands in her lap and looked at Rhaenyra's neck with an expression that had several things in it and kept only the ones appropriate to the surface.
"Sweetling," she said, finally. "Did she hurt you."
"No." Then, more honestly: "For a second. But it wasn't - it wasn't like she meant to hurt me."
"I know she didn't mean to." Her mother's voice was very even. "That isn't what I asked."
Rhaenyra thought about the question properly. Did it hurt. The sharp bright spike of it, there and gone. Less than the time she'd fallen from the fence near the stables. Less than the time a sparring partner had caught her across the knuckles with a wooden sword. Less, even, than Syrax's fire on her sleeve this morning, which had barely touched her and hadn't left a mark.
"It was more like - startling," she said. "I didn't know she was going to. And then she did and I-" She paused. "I screamed because it surprised me. Not because it hurt badly."
Her mother was quiet for a moment. Her hands, Rhaenyra noticed, had tightened slightly in her lap. "Were you frightened?"
"Everyone keeps asking me that."
"Because it matters."
"No," Rhaenyra said. And then, because her mother would know if she was performing rather than answering: "I don't know why but no. It was confusing more than frightening. Everything felt - there was a smell. I told you about omega senses when I presented, how I can smell things differently, and today Alicent smelled.." she stopped, tried to find the right shape for it. "Warm. Like something you want to be near. And then it got stronger and then she was..." she touched her own neck without meaning to. "She wasn't quite herself. Or she was too much herself. I don't know how to explain it."
Her mother reached over and took her hand. Held it between both of hers, her rings cool against Rhaenyra's skin. She looked at Rhaenyra steadily.
"You know what it means," she said. "What the mark means."
"Gerardys said it won't last. That nothing is-"
"I know what Gerardys said." Her mother's voice was still gentle. "I'm asking what you know."
Rhaenyra looked at their joined hands. She did know. Her nurse had told her, and she had read things, and she had heard things from window seats and doorways, the accumulated unofficial education of a girl who paid attention. A marking was a claiming. Voluntary, between adults who had decided, it was a beginning. An intention. You are mine and I am yours and here is the evidence of it on your skin.
Involuntary, between children who didn't understand what was happening, it was still a marking. Still left its trace, even if the physical mark faded. The books talked about it in ways she'd only half understood: something about recognition, about the deep animal part of the biology that didn't care much about age or intention, that simply registered this alpha, this omega, this.
"I know," she said.
Her mother squeezed her hand. "Alright," she said softly. "Alright."
Outside the window the city made its constant noise. Somewhere below, she could hear the distant clang of the watch changing in the courtyard.
"Is she in trouble?" Rhaenyra asked.
Her mother was quiet for a moment too long.
"She didn't know what she was doing," Rhaenyra said, faster now. "She wasn't - it wasn't like she decided to. She looked horrified after. She kept saying she didn't mean to. She didn't mean to, Mother, you have to-"
"I know, sweetling." Her mother said it firmly but not harshly. "I believe you."
"Then she shouldn't be punished for it. It was the presenting. Gerardys said so."
"Gerardys said a great deal of things." Her mother looked at her for a moment with an expression that was tired around the edges in a way she didn't usually let show. "What happens now is between your father and Lord Hightower. It is not in my hands."
Which meant, Rhaenyra knew, that it was not going to be simple.
"Father will be angry," she said.
"Your father loves you very much."
"That's not a no."
Her mother smiled, briefly and ruefully, which was as much as she was going to give her on that particular subject. She reached up and brushed the hair back from Rhaenyra's face with one hand, a gesture so familiar that Rhaenyra felt it somewhere behind her sternum, warm and aching at once.
"You should sleep," she said.
Otto Hightower came to the king's solar two hours after sunset.
He came prepared, as he came to most things - the conversation already mapped, the likely responses already anticipated and countered, the emotional weather already read. Viserys was not a difficult man to predict. He led with his heart, which made him, in Otto's estimation, a good father and a manageable king, and tonight both of those things were going to be relevant.
He found him at the model.
He was always at the model, these days. The great reconstruction of Old Valyria that he'd been building for years, intricate and enormous, taking up most of the long table along the solar's eastern wall. Otto had his own feelings about the model, none of which he expressed. A king who spent his evenings playing with clay and stone was not, generally, a king who was paying sufficient attention to the business of the realm. But it kept him calm, and a calm Viserys was a workable Viserys, so.
Tonight he was not calm.
He looked up when Otto entered and the expression on his face was one Otto had seen before, controlled anger, the kind that was hot underneath and cold on the surface, the kind that meant he'd had time to think and the thinking had made it worse rather than better.
"Your Grace," Otto said, bowing. "I came as soon as I was able."
"Your daughter," Viserys said, setting down his tools with a deliberateness that was itself a kind of anger, "put a bite mark on my daughter's neck."
"I know, Your Grace. I am-"
"She is eight years old, Otto."
"I know."
"My daughter." He said it like each word was a separate thing he was placing down carefully so as not to drop it. "My eight year old omega daughter was marked by a presenting alpha in my own godswood while my guards stood outside the gate."
"Yes." Otto kept his hands still and his voice level. "Your Grace, I want you to know that my reaction to this evening has been one of genuine horror. What Alicent did–"
"What Alicent did," Viserys said, "was mark my heir."
"What Alicent did was present," Otto said, carefully but firmly. "For the first time, today, without warning, without preparation. The maester I spoke to before coming here Gerardys confirmed it, Your Grace, I didn't trust my own household maester on this, I wanted yours , he confirmed that first presentation in an alpha is not a controlled event. The instinct is overwhelming. Particularly toward an omega who is already bonded to them in some way." A pause. "The girls have been inseparable for two years. In alpha-omega terms, that proximity creates—"
"I know what it creates," Viserys said sharply. "I am not ignorant of how this works."
"No. Of course not." Otto let the air settle for a moment. "Then you understand that Alicent did not choose this. That she was, in the truest sense, not herself."
Viserys looked at him. He had his father Baelon's eyes, grey and direct, and when he used them properly they were harder to manage than most people expected. "And does that change the mark on my daughter's neck."
"No," Otto said. "It doesn't. And I'm not suggesting it should change how you feel about it. What I'm asking is that your response to it account for the full picture." He paused, then: "Rhaenyra is unharmed. Gerardys confirmed no lasting physical injury. The mark will fade within the week." Another pause, shorter. "And Alicent is an alpha."
The room went quiet.
Outside, the city. Inside, the candles, the model of a dead civilisation, two men standing on opposite sides of what had just changed.
Viserys turned away. He moved to the window, stood with his hands behind his back, looking out at nothing. Otto waited. This was part of it too — knowing when to press and when to give the silence room to do its work.
"She'll stay in her chambers," he said finally. "Alicent. A week, at minimum. I want Rhaenyra to have distance from this... from her... until things are settled."
"That is entirely reasonable."
"After that." He turned from the window. His face had done the work of composing itself back into the king's face, the one that had made a decision and moved on from the feeling of it. "We discuss what their contact looks like going forward. What supervision means. Whether it continues at all."
"Yes, Your Grace."
He bowed and left, and in the corridor outside he walked slowly, hands clasped behind his back, thinking about what a nine year old alpha daughter was worth in the right hands and the right circumstances, and how much patience a thing like that required, and how much he had.
A great deal, as it turned out.
He had always had a great deal of patience.
In her chambers, two floors down and across the keep from Rhaenyra's, Alicent sat on the edge of her bed and looked at her hands.
She had looked at them for a long time. They didn't look different. They were the same hands, ink-stained at the right forefinger, the left thumbnail bitten short, a small scar on her palm from a cooking lesson she'd convinced someone to let her join. Her hands.
But they'd done something tonight she hadn't told them to do. Or she had told them, some part of her had, some part that had been in charge for those strange thick minutes in the godswood when everything had been Rhaenyra's smell and Rhaenyra's neck and an instinct so overwhelming that she'd followed it right off the edge of herself without noticing she'd moved.
And then she'd come back. Suddenly and completely, the way you came back from a dream, one second she was somewhere else and the next she was fully herself again, with Rhaenyra's voice saying I know in a careful tone and guards on either side of her and the taste of—
She pressed her hands flat against her thighs.
She had bitten her. She had bitten Rhaenyra. There was no version of that sentence that could be made better by thinking about it more carefully, and she had spent the last two hours thinking about it as carefully as she possibly could, turning it over from every angle, and it remained, from every angle, a terrible thing she had done.
The fact that she hadn't meant to was not as comforting as it probably should have been. She was nine years old and she understood cause and effect, and the cause was her and the effect was a mark on Rhaenyra's neck, and that was true regardless of the circumstances surrounding it.
There was a knock at her door.
She already knew it was her father before it opened. She knew his knock, two precise raps, evenly spaced, the knock of someone who considered even courtesy to be a thing worth doing correctly.
He came in and looked at her and she looked at him, and in the brief moment before anything was said she tried to read the room the way he'd taught her to. His face was composed. That meant either everything was fine or nothing was fine but he'd decided what to do about it, which in practice looked the same.
"Are you well?" he asked.
"Yes."
"Physically."
"Yes."
He pulled the chair from her writing desk and sat in it with the upright ease of someone whose back never hurt and whose movements were never uncertain. He looked at her for a moment. "You presented today," he said.
"I know."
"As an alpha."
"I—" she stopped. She had understood this, intellectually, since Gerardys had come and examined her and used that word with his professional flatness. But hearing her father say it was a different thing. "Yes. I think so."
"There is no think so," he said, not unkindly. "Gerardys confirmed it. You are an alpha." A pause. "Do you understand what that means?"
"Some of it."
"It means that what happened today in the godswood was a first presentation response." He said it without looking away from her. "It means that what you did to the princess was not a choice you made consciously, and that Gerardys has explained as much to the king." A pause. "It does not mean that it had no consequences."
"I know," Alicent said. "Is she.."
"Physically unharmed." Her father said it before she could finish asking, which she was grateful for. "Gerardys confirmed it. The mark is minor."
She let out a breath she'd been holding for two hours.
"However," her father continued, and she braced herself in the small internal way she'd learned to brace for her father's howevers. "What you did carries weight regardless of how it happened. A marking is not nothing. The king understands the circumstances, but he is angry, and he is entitled to be." He paused. "You will remain in your chambers for the coming week. You will not seek contact with Princess Rhaenyra. You will cause no further incident of any kind."
"I wasn't trying to cause an incident-"
"I know," he said. "Alicent." Something shifted, slightly, in his voice. Not warmth, exactly, but something adjacent to it, something that was what warmth became after years of being pressed into a particular shape. "What you are now changes things. For you and for this family. I want you to understand that I am not angry with you for what you are." A pause. "I am asking you to be patient while I think carefully about what it means."
She looked at him. There were things in that sentence she didn't know how to unfold yet. She was nine and tired and her hands still felt like someone else's and Rhaenyra was two floors away with a mark on her neck that Alicent had put there.
"Is she angry with me?" she asked. "Rhaenyra."
Her father considered this as though it were a reasonable question, which she supposed meant he'd already thought about it. "From what I understand," he said carefully, "no."
Alicent looked at her hands again.
"Go to sleep," her father said, standing. "Things will be clearer in the morning."
This was something he said regularly. She had not yet found it to be reliably true, but she appreciated the intent.
After he left she lay down on her bed without getting under the covers and looked at the ceiling and thought about the godswood. About the way the air had felt, thick and warm and full of Rhaenyra, all of it Rhaenyra, the smell of her so present that everything else had gone grey and distant and unimportant.
She had never wanted anything the way she'd wanted to be close to her in that moment. It had been so big it hadn't felt like wanting. It had felt like needing, like breathing, like something her body had simply decided was necessary and had stopped consulting her about.
And then she'd bitten her. And it had felt right, for one single terrible second, in a way that nothing had ever felt before. Right and correct and finished, like a word finding its sentence.
And then she'd come back and Rhaenyra had been looking at her with her hand pressed to her neck and her eyes very wide, and the rightness had become the worst feeling Alicent had ever had.
She pressed her face into her pillow.
Alpha, her father had said.