Chapter Text
The sky was all soft with stars above Oldtown.
Being hoisted above others by right of birth meant being served the delights of night at close range. No off-gassing of oils trapped in the shaft of animal fur, no reverberation of the pain and pleasure found at the hour of ghosts, nor press of another unwanted. Quiet clung to the thick walls of the Hightower like pulp in a womb before the bleed, even the servants hushed as brown mice. Calm was ubiquitous here in the castle of its own right. Covetest over the throne became thin when elevated so far overhead the squabbling of sovereignty and those who experience the sufferance behest the whisperings of unrest.
Daeron watches as the tip of his boots eclipse the monotony of gashes embedded into the dark stone. He’s mindful to leave just enough space between his hurried footing so that he doesn’t look every bit the small boy always felt as the route traversed lead to the hermetic chambers holding his Grandsire, fresh on arrival.
If orchestrated away from the gardens, where he’s always embraced the forebear, something must be amiss; and yet if the King were dead, he’d have long known. By gloom-laden expression on the faces of those who flit around the turret, untrained and unpaid to keep the angle of mouth, tilt of eyebrow, crease of forehead fixed into place– or by dream itself.
But to greet in private chambers was different. He’d said a show of uniting was good for the spirit of the keep. It had made Daeron jealous as a boy, when he’d become inconsolable over the image of being left behind as his older brothers, undeserving as they were, got to be greeted amongst the flowers.
He comes when there is a matter of importance that must be cloistered from all who are not so blessed to be woven with green, as ravens cannot be trusted once the Realm’s paroxysm turns swift and hysterical when witch-kissed, treason-touched, death-debauched. The patriarch has said to be a bird is to be close to the Gods, both by flight and in sweet servitude to the realm. Man will always grope the skies for a caress of holiness, to whatever end. The assault of tricky fingers unto what does not belong could mean the end.
And when he misses his grandchildren, the ones, the only ones, who bear the sigil of a solitary dragon wrapped round the column of the Hightower, stitched to secrecy into the underside of their garments.
Focus mustn’t fall on anything aside from the meticulous nature of ritual. Vision wanes into a most macilent machination at soft, thrumming licks of the urge he bears. Every abnormality avoided is a reward captured in devout, open hands, even if for a moment. The perfect falling of stitched leather before a dip in the cold ground brings the promise of prosperity to his house– both of Hightower and Targaryen. It buys a strong heartbeat for the ever-growing chamber of Tessarion’s chest. It rids his Mother of worry that may wound her insides, make black of her mind. It reinforces the city’s stronghold, the careful spell of what he’s doing, recording, avoiding, will slip into the sure steel of the gate as if being whispered to by a faerie.
Without this performance of passion, the beast’s cerulean scales would flatten in great synchronicity, inbuilt armor pulling back to become mealy and necrotic before she could even rouse to understand that her yolk had alas ran out. It was he who was killing her. Tie that bound them under and over by rib snapping under tension none could withstand, driving Daeron to dig his knees into dirt at the impact of loss. His mother’s innards would grind themselves against nothing until the space between life and spine was infinitesimal blood matter within the mud that filled from the cradle of hip to the inverse cradle of lung. She would smile as it was happening, mind going first. Boy-made Doll Mother. The soldering of the Oldtown barbican would rot at last and feed the ground with a snowing of rust that would proceed a deeper shade to give back come melt, borne from the throats of his family tree. Predation was in his blood, he had long heard.
But obediently mangled thoughts were the reason they still drew breath.
This was not without great effort. Many a night he spent numbing the feelings of dread through these acts of service until mist-making hours. Daeron was astute enough to know he would be chastised for the mourning blacks beneath his eyes.
He isn’t able to make out who's who in his Grandsire’s guard anymore. Their faces are swallowed by swaths of up-kept armor and he is no longer a child peering into visor upon visor of sallet and running through his internal categorization of warm bodies from below eyeline.
The men, all hand selected by Otto Hightower, flanking the corridor like narrow, dew-licked tapestries. A most dispirited lot, despite the ritualistic preening to select who would rise above their born title of scum sucker, lackwit, plebeian to live out the rest of their days as astute curs in service of the Hightowers. Listening to a seneschal’s one-man referendum about the selection was akin to pulling his arm from mud whilst the downpour still torrential.
The soft sigh of iron upon iron as they remember to awaken themselves in the presence of either warmth of hair or lack thereof reminds him of a kitten bell jingling around. The desire to stop, count them all, rearrange them by height, width, posture, make right– it is inescapable. Revulsion paws at his belly and the sour thicket of sweat under silvered corpus meets him without pleasantry.
It’s as foul as it is fitting. He is inexorably moving towards the day’s great tragedy.
Daeron had never walked in on Otto conversing with anyone. No wry-making conversation performed for pleasantries sake, no cleaning of cuticle or inking of parchment in the company of staff, and certainly no moment of respite shared with any ghost.
Once, a mousy little wet nurse had made her way into the den as Grandsire was taking to his meal. She was an intoning thing, chapping his ear about warming flesh of a tumid breast that wouldn’t leak for days. A maester known to be astute in the ways of a woman’s giving body was called, as well as the poor thing escorted back to her room by Otto’s own valet. She would want for nothing on the mend. Milled wheat with stovetop-simmered buttermilk and globs of sticky, melting brown sugar, thick, glazed cuts of pork shoulder, marbled and precious, and spiced cabbage were fed in plenty. The bottoms of her feet were un-swaddled twice daily as fat swipes of citrus oil were laid down the center of her instep as to ward off any further infection or illness. At dusk, sheet sets were replaced, new linen toasty and crisp from sitting in a stone cylinder that held the heat of coals tucked under a hidden grate. Baskets of ravenous kittens with velveteen emerald bows would be left outside her door around the hour that conceded to the smothering of candle flames– as to encourage the stagnant milk that got her into this state remain flowing, even as sleep took on. After she’d been there for a fortnight, on the mend and fattening, rumors among those of her rank began to dance. The fit Ser Gwayne had taken to her, wanting the wet-chested girl to be his unflowered bride. Her back was made to ribbons soon after the babe was off the teat.
It was never to be unknown that the spell of solitude was an inalterable veracity once at the ingress of ashlar.
The ogive, thick and tormented with age, split down the center as it was opened one some steward or other. Otto was inclined to the drawing of thick, jeweled velvet over the windows to absorb any and all moonlight or that of its lover. The only illumination came from the gash of fireplace and tops of a ridiculous amount of molted candlesticks, setting the scene of an ever benevolent landlord.
“Come, before the tea tempers.” The familiar vibrato fell into the curve of Daeron’s diaphragm and made its home in the bouquet of tissue and tendon.
His blood awakened at the command— he must move now, and with great responsibility. The light over his back had disappeared, and it was not unlike being enveloped by a misty forest.
“Tired boy. You cling to the befouling of your mind.” It was the most delicate lashing he’d faced from a superior in a long while. He needed it, the softness, the saccharinity. It was enough to illuminate the dwelling.
His innards loosened, deference replacing ravenous want to be sick into his own hands, “Yes, Grandsire.”
“Don’t lacerate our joining with shortness of speech,” he spoke as he made for the younger to follow him into an early sup. “My journey was wholly spent anticipating my children’s voices.”
Otto often called them his children– never making even a furred ear twitch. It was as mundane as feeling his own pulse at the soft of his wrist.
And so Daeron tips his sweet Grandsire’s head to the side with the knuckles of his first two fingers and cranes himself, last remnants of the boy he still is, over the gargantuan chair that near mirrored the size of the beast it was made from, hoisted knee upon resting wrist, gristle of tendon smothered under supple calf skin meeting that of its mothers fathers fathers father, ribs unhooking to widen around the progenitor as pure, summer-ripened pomegranate molasses falls into a well of darkness. He speaks of the family, which act as a vanguard to all, but particularly as a measure both mandatory as it is procrastinatory, before a weighted somberness overtook the rejoining.
The commiseration, shoddily threaded through the both of them using one spool, and commenced the cradling of cheeks in tender, wise hands and the tops of heads that would not remain un-inhaled, un-kissed after the excitement of arrival begins to let down its anchors. Forlorn relief smooths itself over the chafe of tour from the capital in sweeping, sleepy waves. He follows the descent with what is easier depicted by way of tightly bound scroll, but not in its entirety– the acumen of those who train him in combat, recountment of his histories, his progress in languages, trades, music. Politicking, and map-reading, map-making, the herbs used for coagulating the bleeding of an open wound. Daeron was given an heir’s education. An abundance in all that whet both body and mind. None was lost to creed or caste here, as all could request information from the citadel if they wished. A timely process seldom used outside that of healing and prayer, but all things were to flourish in Oldtown.
“I trust your uncle is keeping you from slovenliness then,” placing a gnawed cherry pit into demitasse with darkened fingertips. Daeron stares at it then, focusing until he can feel his eyes cross over the mutated, bloodied seed. The headless body ahead of him dissipates into the grain of darkness. No answer to be heard over faint little pants pouring from him. Something about civilizing him against the powers that be. It soaks into the congealment of spit and fruitlet juice at the bottom of the bowl, forming its own syrup.
“Daeron,” Parlance shifting in a way that made his jaw lock onto nothing but a wish for thick cuts of rope. He is not good at being spoken to with inspective intent. She says he moves his nose like a bunny rabbit.
Humming, coming to, “Yes, yes, Grandsire. He is invaluable to all that guide me, my uncle. He preserves me from sin.” And it is enough to please him.
It’s here, pinning him in place, making his fingers curl inward below the table. There have been times when he seeks permission to submit. Near the end of a muddy ruck in the training yard, after commune with those whose houses he cannot place, in gloaming hours; permission to fall into himself and begin the repetition anew– a prayer. He is often granted the capitulation by a curt nod, the slow blink of a cat, but he wouldn’t think to ask for such upon Grandsire’s advent. It would bring into question the purpose of Ormund’s ordained prevalence in his life, and he would not like to be suspected of poor prince-handling. The candle’s flame is growing low with its feed dissipating, a beast’s dulled teeth.
“How is it there? The Red Keep, I mean,” He can tell it is not the conversational enrichment the other cares for. It’s in the way of his unperturbed motions, slow and clanking all the same, waving knobbed hand through the air. A scream wells behind the nodules of flesh pillow on the sides of his throat. Misstep, and misstep more. I surrender.
“She asks,” rushes from him in boyish clamour.
It’s all that needs be said for Otto to return to the room and back to him. It was always the best feeling.
“Grey,” he is all silken again, and his clothed fingers pull the wine from the center of his bottom lip. "Droll without you and your sister."
"We miss you deeply, and pray for you often."
“Fervent babes, you both. As you may sense within,” finger aiming ever-true at the centre of Daeron’s doublet, “I wish not for yet another departure of our home. I tire of the cesspit, and that very King who lies within, his longness in death and how it further manipulates the dark winds that roil at his heels.”
Do not go. I am afraid, not she; she who is bathed in milk at your behest, nursed sugared, plum-muddled laudanum at any moment found capable of producing a lonesome thought, she suckles the fur she imagines me to have each night. I am the sick one. I am sicker. Do not make me leave this room. Let me crawl under your desk for just a moment. It's inconsequential, truly, and besides, I love you. Purify me under your protection, strengthen my knees for better to seek forgiveness, your holy will is my purpose.
Instead, “And the King?”
“Gods be just, he has turned vacuous of mind and the smell of the man,” His neck bent in a lack of will to continue as his boney fingers built a small Sept atop blanketed lap. The open ended sentiment of miasmic festering made Daeron eyes flick to the taunting entombment of voided window under his brow.
It wasn’t unlike Grandsire to air his grievances here, even if they were about the King, his waste-of-a-good-birthing-bed brother, or spiderly daughter and long-ago named heir. The cold relinquishment of such a life chosen served only to whittle abhor into his mind at the thought of going anywhere near the populace of such a place. In younger years, Daeron had spent much time wondering if the bedecked walls were magic-tricked. He knows now that Oldtown is, in every way it can be, a kingdom unto its own. The open secret of the Reach. The thought of leaving his barbican of babehood frightened him more than any ignominy. What good could severing the branch that held him so lovingly upon the family tree do him? What sufferance would follow such a treasonous act?
The tower of Oldtown hulls over the cliffside of its cove, land around it having collapsed, at the matrix of the Andals throwing its holy light from Blackcrown to the Three Towers. It is salvation on water: the only place in the Realm where the seven pointed star is found carved into every doorway, impressed into the palm of each new babe brought into its glow, anoints the head of every rapist and murderer before execution. The city a spoil of a thousand years war.
There was little the information could tug from his heart, already sewn with tenderness for those who bore the blood of his blood as he saw it, as Grandsire and his uncle saw it. The King’s sick and slow-moving cruor had been refused by both Daeron and his bipartite in all but colouring, surname, and haunt. “May the stranger take him in comforting embrace.” And yet he knew what would follow his words. The thread pulled dirty.
“In true, your presence may guide him to the redemptive choice. Have faith. You are a litany of refinement in the luskish wake of your brothers, venerable and befit to your title of Targaryen Prince,” he went on, “And you look every bit your mother, which I play on his heart opening to.”
There was no way for Daeron to make sense of the words, muddling together like the cherry syrup had fermented in quick with the purpose of finding his mind. It’s as if he’s been unborn and the conversation happening on the other side of life is one he cannot make out. He tries again and once more. It’s not right, the order of things, but he doesn’t know how to unstring them to restring them and make right. Performing ritual would help, but he’s slack on the move. He made her milk with cherries before. When they’re in season. He’s sure this must be how she feels as the spoonful of lactescence kiss her belly– grasping at that of a silvered fish through the air.
His uncle’s voice swam past his ear. Undrownable and untiring. God made you a rightful heir.
There are four frayed filaments in the fabric that spans his ring finger and thumb. He tamps his spine into the back of the chair in measure to not fall forward and shove his hand into the fireplace to singe off the error.
“Naedezhda is bounden to join us. I know you do not wish to hear it, but it is the sensible choice,” he continues, as if Daeron could take it. “There is none more adequate in keeping her safe. You are her sworn sword in all but title already, and have been all your lives. She will need you there as she needs you here.”
“Jest so,” There is no response, only observation for a long moment. His vision is being blotted out by the enormity of the statement.
“It is more than apparent who your mother is when you get like this. Your bouts of fit intimately similar.”
“You torture me,” he is out of the chair and backing away with little and less distance being put between them as his cheeks flood with blood, replacing the phantom milk. “What is the purpose of bringing her into such uncertainty? Such danger? She has not the mind to traverse even the wood outside the walls. It has been tried! The most horror she has yet to witness has come from the pricking of her own finger upon a needle.”
Swarms of protesting thought had come to dance at the forefront of his skull. The head of the Seven Kingdoms leaches honor from its congregation of noble rank like stale life from his fathers fingers– a winter welcome would be had. They could not love Viserys’ children he’d hidden within the walls of another keep like a curse. She will not be taken in by those who bloat the halls. Madness, above all else, is most unforgivable in a Targaryen.
The embarrassment of twinlet spawned wrong would envelop all routes of gossip, moments of queer nature painting themselves into the traveling of word… yet there would be nothing he could do. He’s just a princeling. Last born and banished from the masculine display of virility: feasts and hunts, tourneys and swordplay in the courtyard. His true Father could not, would not rouse at the dishonorable words spoken in the language of glances and pursed lips, an exercise in masochism.
In the worst of his dreams, quotidian violence pulls her bodice open through the slick pull of dagger, a bloodied hand buried into her face, turning it over like a trinket for purchase. The unidentifiable man, amalgamation of evil, cannot read her; untrained in the way she communicates by whisper and whimper, by wail, by the impression of teeth marks, by the deaf smallfolk, brought into the Hightower home by suggestion of maester to train her in the language of sign when words wouldn’t come to. Madness’ promise meets prophecy in a holy war only he is capable of constructing in half-sleeps and days without, and she is stolen away by vow or Stranger, and he is cleaved in two.
She is his. In every way that cannot be defined past birth. There is no Mother, no Maiden, and certainly no Crone. There are only the two of them, circling each other in the wetness of gut– around and around and around. A display of barbarity for the realm to see what the joining of dragon and saint-blood has wrought. It was this way from conception and it will be this way unto cinders.
“Lour all you wish. It is done. He is long in the undoing, yes, but the stranger is making its way to the city gates. You must accompany, side by side, as to give your Father the courage to face what no man may escape. His hours are thin,” His Ser Grandsire let on with only countenance, worsened in the waning flame and consuming drapery, that he was a child still. It was not displayed with anger or disappointment, only fact.
Without the wish of someone who cared to grow into a competent son, he interjected, “I am capable to aid in his transition, that is truism, but I cannot allow her to leave the Tower, Oldtown. If she is to be used as ruse for whimsical demand, it is a lucky thought. She is here little and less these days, I swear it. She looks only for docile pleasure–”
Stop. The word falls in his mind like a stone.
“My son,” Daeron's shoulder is cupped in as much tepidity as an orphaned kettle, and still he drinks in the touch that abandons reason for the Sun. “No more of it. Let us make the world a gentler place.”
Daeron nods in a way that distracts from the pushing of his frame into sire-touch. He struggles with the want to rip all of the buttons from the others frock and rest his cheek into sturdy chest, smothering fear that threatens to abandon his body and eat its way through him and to the open air, but he cannot, will not. There is no room for repose at a time so dire, and he is the Hightower’s heir.
The guards appear nothing more than empty helmets on pikes as he walks by on the exit and he’s glad for the absence of souls around him. His eyes lull over the practice of bypassing divots set in stone. The iron-brown trail from Otto’s last visit has been rubbed raw from the ground, undetectable at last.
The bottoms of his feet have since been annulled from the pain of mistake (one of which he cannot remember now and was lost by mid-punishment) and the puffy scar tissue grew pale as trout, but the way the leather cupped his foot with a hair more restraint upon a lean forward stopped desire’s momentum to pivot and let the dust pull him down until he was kissing the veined ankles of his Grandsire, peppered with pleading to rethink the choice of migration.
It isn’t very far between here and her, but a moment’s rest is found behind a small passage. Night-cooled wall meets the bridge of his nose. Behind purpled, blued, green eyelid, he is holding her head between hands, but there are shards of her skull fragmented across him from shoulder to shoulder, and when he loosens his grip to collect them, tipping her head into one palm, the slippage of her skin allows a great bleed to open from her left eye. He can’t stop it. There are too many bits of her that need repair and he hasn’t the skill or the limbs adequate.
Seed shells crack under his heel. Try as the tower staff might, and have in hundreds of years past, the birds make homes atop the tower. Determined and awful in their motive to keep here, their bitter nests and eager beaks are sworn to be protected, put into binding by an ancestor with a penchant for cooing. They are free to breed and raise young that either grow big and merciless or fall from the wrong side of their hardened dwelling and into the abyss of brine below. Uncowed by the odds, they continue to be drawn to the risk. He thought them to be the loveliest creatures of all.
She looked all of a rejected babe in the tub. Rash of too many boiling pots of water tipped over the rolled edge of tub, leaving her skin damask and pinked. Sunken down into the wide belly of the copper hulk, she was focusing on resting her little chin atop the milky waters. The thicket of fragrant slip floating above all couldn’t have aided her cause any less than a horse could have in naval battle. Thought of crawling into oiled-wet encircled his head. She hadn’t known he was there.
Her hands make the words for her, I want to see him. He was gallant in my dream.
“He will come to you tomorrow,” the water carries the murmur of response. “He couldn’t bear it tonight. The arrival was later than expected, and I suspect the road was weary-making.”
He laments me an angel. He does, he does, and her fingers dip and spin under the bath like an ill lamphrey. This is known, but she misses their elder. Lower lip dips below the surface in a hidden pout. He steadies the floundering by submerging his hands and encircling her wrists with his fingers. Flesh prisoner.
“Things are weighing crown-heavy on Grandsire,” quietly.
It is only because he misses her. From July to June. She often talks of the dead. It’s nothing to be afraid of, and less to make note of.
“He wishes to say,” and it was her turn to hum. “You are missed at his side.”
No, she signs along with the movement for can’t. He doesn’t know what spurs her to cease conversation whenever she pleases, but when she does, there isn’t any contest to be had. All that can be done to negate an episode is done.
Nobody particularly enjoys the dosing, the tamping of her person, but it’s particularly unenjoyable for different reasons entirely when she has bypassed the threshold for words. The only person who pushes her and seems to enjoy the spectacle it causes is the Lord Ormund. He calls her “girl”, “hagseed”, “creature”, and lets her throw her weight against his torso before her sharp little canine teeth seek purchase of something mealy under perfumed brocade. Jealously makes the underside of his tongue grow sodden.
When his arm was broken four years past (the result of a poorly fated win in a race to the top of the tower) and strung up in bruise coloured silks, there came the realization that he could not sign to her if he wished to heal with the correct anatomical alignment. The lamest movement would cause fire to lick from wrist unto elbow and back again. It may be the same for her. Wrists trembling, wooden fingers.
He missed it so that he attempted to create another language, a code communication through whistle, but it never picked up. She’d flatten her palms over her ears and whine, or try to pinch his tongue through his teeth. Though she can hear perfectly well, albeit selectively, to speak to her in the way of hands is much like the welcoming feeling of returning somewhere safe after feeling like an intruder, though he wasn’t sure why, so he just likened it to being in the sept while it was empty. Prayer is also speaking without speaking.
Catholicon was pleas that were not his own of wanting to stay in Oldtown and in their families chambers, for now and for forever. It all fully unfurled as he flexed the circlet of fingers still around her wrists. It was the best scenario that could not happen, and so he tried tricking himself into chiding her non-response.
“And what would you do here? Unprotected by me,” he’s not talking to her. Knows his words float in the waterlogged air above her and cascade to the floor with each empty blink. She is too far gone this evening. “And useless and alone.” It is hard to stop when he knows he can speak freely. There is great catharsis of hurting the part severed, and in some long-reaching way, himself. Dosage aligning with frenzied, potent licks of satisfaction when he can use her numbed form as near-cadaver for the bloodletting of his own frustration. She cannot truly comprehend him, or anything in this state, but he fears the words will cloy around the pink of cartilage and whisper to her in the night of his sweet-hearted cruelty as the milk loosens around her. He already wants to suckle the near-translucent mangle of cartilage to absolve himself of the foible.
She was a prey animal, as he’d once heard their Grandsire say. All but a spring-born thing, despite the nature of their birth. He lowers himself to kneel from the stool and brings cheek to the lip of vessel that holds her.
"Fussier than a flea," She whispers. The words bring him little worry as her nine fingers emerge and begin their webbing of paths he isn't privy to in the sleeves, hem, embroidery of his doublet. “As lower animal functions dominate.”
Her mind is addled with trepidation, the maesters say. Contradicted with hysteria.
But where do you start and I stop? You are half of me, after all. Green into gold into green. Half of me.
“Shall we sleep?”
Half until the hour of the nightingale, the push of her knee into his lower belly rouses him. The fullness of bladder can’t be ignored, but his body refuses to leave so he rocks his hip back a fraction for relief.
Finding her face, he must tell her.
“You’re to come with me,” he funnels into the impression of aural hidden beneath white hair, chin resting in the small bit of hollow beneath her cheekbone. “To The Red Keep. I have to show you something.” The last part was a lie, at least in the moment, but she’s easy to lie to. There wasn’t anything he thought worth seeing in the conurbation of filth worth risking her allayed routine for. Here, she stays soft of mind and body, sleepy enough for his harsh words to dissipate into smoke against her sternum, cushioned enough by her still-babyfat to allow for him to slumber in the crook of her during the night like wax into sailors' ears upon sirened shores.
“You were gallant in my dream. My steed. You were thick and strong under me,” she wisps, hardly legible at all.
The thick of sleep nearly befell him again, but slow fingers crawled to her face, gauging the dampness of cheek to find none. Pre-somnial milk aborts any tears if she were to have comprehended what he had said, but it was unlikely. Even if it were to be different, even if sobs were to be thrown to the foundation of black stone, she would remember it not by morning.
Was I gentle? He cannot tell if the thought makes it aloud. Hair is pulled into his mouth upon yawn and he doesn’t know the origin of it. It doesn’t matter.
The beacon over their shared bed hums in ancient unrest, wisps of green flickering in and out of the hardened, unmoving throat.
God made you a rightful heir.