Chapter Text
Helaena first hears the whispers at her father’s court when she is just a child. A little girl with her head in the clouds and her hands buried to her wrists in the dirt. She is mad. She is simple. She is stupid.
She is a freak. That is what her brother thinks. He says she is strange, that she is an idiot, that he does not want to marry her.
Unhappiness makes him vicious. Fear makes him unkind. And war will make him cruel if it sinks its claws into him.
Perhaps the whispers are right. Perhaps her brother is right. Perhaps one day he will pin her to the wall and flay her open to confirm his fears and their hatred.
But until that day, she will cleave to the truths she knows: she is a girl, she is the blood of the dragon, and she is a dreamer.
***
She can feel them, the things that dart and crawl and creep across the walls, underneath her bed, in the shadows of her father’s castle. They are darting through her hair. They are crawling between her teeth. They are creeping in her veins.
Things are moving in the walls, she opens her mouth to say. But her mother’s back is turned and her brothers are fighting over a toy that neither of them really wants to play with. They are destined to hate each other. They are destined to fight over things much bigger and much more important than a toy soldier and his little toy sword.
(When they are old enough to understand what it means to be Targaryens, when they start to understand that war gets men’s blood up like almost nothing else, they will fight over a crown that does not belong to either of them. But that is not for many years yet.
First, one brother must lose an eye. And the other must lose his mind.)
***
She hears them still. The things that move in the walls. Only, now that she is older, she knows that they are not things. They are eyes. They are all-powerful, all-knowing, and they are everywhere. They feed the Weaver. The White Worm. Lady Misery with hair of midnight and the Mother’s smile.
Her little spiders hover at the door of Aegon’s rooms when Helaena visits him. They listen as he kisses her, as his fingers graze the valley between her breasts, as he spends himself inside of her with a gasp so loud she thinks he will choke on it one day.
They are watching from the floorboards of Father’s rooms as Mother makes him drink Milk of the Poppy. He is here, clinging to life with trembling fingers and grief for a memory and acceptance that there is no punishment he will not suffer for forgiveness from a ghost bearing his true love’s name.
They are peering through the tapestries in the library when Aemond goes to visit a dragon with the face of a girl. He thinks himself clever. He thinks himself careful. He is clumsy with desire, blundering through lingering looks and words of steel and he thinks that it will save them.
(It will not save them. Fate is a fickle mistress. She spins the wheel of time, She weaves and waits, and in the end they are all of them slaves to Her designs. Even boys with one eye and girls with fire in their hearts.)
***
She does not know how to feel as Ser Criston Cole places the Conqueror’s iron-and-ruby crown on her older brother’s head. She does not feel relief or joy or sorrow. Her veins are ice, her stomach full of brambles, her throat singing with the buzzing of bees.
This is dread, she thinks as she hears the crowd cheer, as she hears the splitting of rock and the snapping of bone, as she hears the hissing of blood upon the walls, as she hears a dragon’s song and the delighted laughter of Fate Herself.
The Stranger is coming for House Targaryen.
***
It is a rare day indeed when her husband looks in on her. Rarer still when she looks in on him. The children are napping. Little Jaehaerys and little Jaehaera curled together with hands clasped tight, as if they could not bear the thought of being parted even in sleep. And their youngest, Maelor, bundle of energy and chaos that he is, had thrown himself onto his bed and been asleep within moments. She sees the way her husband looks at them when he thinks she is not watching. He looks at their children in the same way that their mother looked at Rhaenyra when Lucerys took their brother’s eye out. Like they are his deliverance and his penance and his destruction.
He loves his children. But there is a thin line between love and hate and she knows better than anyone which side he tends to favor.
“Wife,” Aegon says in greeting. When the silence has grown too loud. He was never very good at silences. Not like Aemond.
“Husband,” Helaena says. It feels strange to say, even now. Especially now. He has been inside of her. He has brought her pain and pleasure and he is trying to make things right, in his own way.
Dragons of blood and bone on a field of white ash.
“I can’t remember the last time you came to my rooms of your own accord,” he says. He is staring out the window. He is too close to the edge, hovering in safety and peering out at the long fall. She wonders if he feels as she does: a calling, a restlessness, a sense of inevitability. She thinks it is their lot as Targaryens, as dragonriders, as Gods amongst men. The higher they fly, the farther they have to fall.
“Where is Aemond?” she says. It is not what she meant to say, but the words are laid between them as if someone else had spoken them with her lips. A gauntlet thrown. A sword unsheathed. He turns and the look on his face is enough. Their brother courts danger like he courts the dragon-girl: with abandon, without regard for the consequences, with violence singing in his veins and hope burning in his heart.
“I’ve sent him to Dragonstone to treat with our dear sister. You’ve just missed him.”
Missed. Miss. Missing.
He has gone with the Conqueror’s sword and the Conqueror’s dream in his heart, even if he does not know it yet.
“He’s going for her,” she says, thinking of a girl with dark hair and dark eyes and a heart of beaten gold. Her older brother does not have to ask which "her" she is referring to.
“He is,” Aegon says.
There is a cup in his hand and a jug of wine half empty on his table. He drinks his fill and when he is done, the pout on his lips turns playful and his eyes turn soft.
He is almost nice when he is drunk. He is almost kind as he plucks at her skin, as he wraps her hair in his fist, as he fucks her like it is the last thing he hopes he ever does. He is odd tonight. In truth, he has been odd since the Conqueror’s crown first graced his brow, but she will never tell him so.
With a growl that skitters along her skin, he flips them so she is on top. The movement is fluid, practiced, and she tries not to wonder how many whores he has had to fuck to make it look so effortless. She rides him to her peak, and when he finds the bundle of nerves buried like a secret amongst her curls, she tumbles over the edge. He cants his hips into hers harder, faster until he follows her with a cry and a word that she cannot hear.
Their eyes meet and it feels like the last day of autumn. When the world holds its breath until spring. When the cold and the dark and the others come to cover the earth in a winter that will last forever. It feels like goodbye.
He is holding her hips. Just holding. Thumbs caressing delicate bones wrapped in skin, his mouth curled in a smile that is not mean or vicious or cruel. She hasn’t cried in front of him since she was just a slip of a girl, but tears well in her eyes and suddenly, that is all she wants to do.
She must make some small noise. His hands still. His expression twists into something pinched and ugly and angry. She clambers off of him, wrapping her arms around herself like it will stop the hurt spreading like poison in her veins. He does not look at her as he stumbles across the bed. He says nothing as he falls in a tangled heap of limbs and skin and fury. He is asleep within moments. All she can hear are his snores and the slow, painful thudding of her pulse in her ears. All she can feel is the feverish warmth of his come at the apex of her thighs.
It is not until she is tucked between the sheets of her own bed, the moonlight stretching long-fingered and silent and impatient across her floor, that she realizes he was saying her name as he spilled himself inside of her.
He has never done that before.
She is shaking and she does not know why. Her fingers tremble against the shells of her ears and her breath shuddering out of her chest sounds too much like a death rattle. She is afraid and she does not know why.
The song of ice and fire. The prince that was promised. Dragons of blood and bone on a field of white ash, she opens her mouth to say. But there is no one to hear. No one to tell but the spiders hiding in the walls.
Helaena closes her mouth and dreams of a boy with violet eyes and hair as black as midnight and a bastard’s blood in his veins.
***
The Black Queen. That is what they are calling her. How quickly the lords and ladies of the Seven Kingdoms bow before the opinions of the masses. Those cravens swore obeisance to her in the sight of Gods and men and their chosen king and dare to call her a liar and a whore and a would-be usurper.
The words grow sharper every day. The insults that were lies come closer to the truth with each passing hour until even she has started to believe them.
Her father divided the realm by naming her his heir and right now, she feels like she is the only person trying to hold it together. All she has had since Rhaenys announced the death of Viserys and the coronation of her drunken cunt of a half-brother is grief. Grief from her husband. Grief from her supposed allies. Grief from the Gods who saw fit to take her little girl as recompense for some slight against them. She wonders in the dead of night, when the wind reaches a fever pitch and the darkness feels almost alive, which of her sins cost her Visenya.
She thinks of Ser Harwin Strong. Her sworn shield. Her protector. Her dark knight. She married Laenor Velaryon as her father bid her but it was Ser Harwin who joined her more often than not in her marriage bed. It was Ser Harwin who gave her four beautiful children. It was Ser Harwin who helped her secure her succession and by extension, her father’s.
She thinks of her uncle. She thinks of a brothel and a kiss and her fingers gripping a softening cock. She thinks of the man clinging to a shred of honor in the face of her eagerness. She thinks of his fingers wrapping around her throat and his breath soft and sweet and warm on her lips. She thinks of the darkening edges of her vision and her new-found joy in realizing that her father never shared the Conqueror’s dream with the man who was his heir for nine years. She and her Uncle Daemon have always known how to hurt each other. With lips, with hands, with words. She laughs in his face, disbelief and certainty of her course pounding in her blood. His eyes are as black as midnight. She wonders if there had not been a group of people standing just outside the door if they would have learned a new way to hurt each other. She wonders if he would have been man enough. Her uncle does so love his audiences, but not in this, never in this. His fingers loosen, his expression twists, and a door slams shut behind his eyes.
She thinks of Alicent, hair as red as blood in the firelight, eyes burning with the Mother’s fury, and the Conqueror’s dream wielded in her hand. She thinks of a girl in a blue dress who could not or would not forsake the love of her only living father to ask for the things she really wanted. She thinks of soft smiles and gentle fingers in her hair and a stupid lie that burned the fraying remnants of their friendship to ash.
There is a debt to be paid.
Which of her debts demanded her daughter’s life? And which of her debts will claim the lives of her other children? It is a cold fear that has taken up residence in her heart to the exclusion of little else. It is a black void inside of her, spurned and spun and growing inside of her the more she has to watch them leave.
Luke and Jace and Rhaenys left with the gold and pink dawn, carrying letters and reminders of oaths and the shadow of the Stranger on their dragon’s wings. Daemon is readying himself to leave for the Riverlands, remorse and rage and darkness brewing like a storm in his lavender eyes. Only an hour ago, he had kissed her and he had fucked her and he had left without a word beyond, “My Queen” whispered into her hair. And her daughter, the only daughter left to her, gone before the break of day. It was the hour of the wolf when she had watched Silverfyre, a white and silver shadow, breaking away from the cliffs of the Dragonmont, her daughter a stain of black tucked between her wings. She has not told anyone that her daughter is gone. Not the Sea Snake, not Daemon, not her sons.
The knowledge sits with all the breadth of a mountain on her chest, slowly crushing the breath from her body, slowly pounding her to dust and ash.
For perhaps the first time in her life, Rhaenyra understands her father as she never has before. Children can be a terrible burden, she thinks, imagining the faces of her half-siblings. Imagining the face of her childhood friend when her father denied her fury in one breath and proclaimed his love and support for Rhaenyra in the next. It had gladdened her heart to see it then, all those years ago. Now that she understands, now that she has lost one daughter to the Gods, and another to the unending North, she knows she has wronged Alicent as much as Alicent has wronged her.
There is a debt to be paid.
Rhaenyra Targaryen stares at the crumpled sheet in her hand and wonders when her due will come.
***.
Vhagar alights on the dunes of Dragonstone at mid-morning. The storm clamors at his back and his grandfather’s voice calls out to him from the shore.
His pulse is thudding in his ears, his gut churning with dread. He is so close. Close enough to see his elder sister’s banners flying from the ramparts. The three-headed red dragon on a black field quartered by the moon-and-falcon sigil of her mother’s house and the Velaryon’s silver seahorse on a field of sea green. It is…something, he supposes, thinking of his own brother’s three-headed dragon of gold on a black field.
Otto Hightower is a blur on the horizon that Aemond is tempted to ignore or worse. All that flying and his anger has not abated. He is still half-frozen from sitting in his saddle for so long, but there is an ember in his heart stirring to life at the sight of the man who came here of his own accord without his king’s permission. Duty and honor and loyalty are all Otto Hightower talks about anymore, but all they are is a means of brow-beating his daughter and her unruly sons into doing what he wishes. They are not words that he lives by, words that he cleaves to like Mother cleaves to her Seven-Pointed-Star, only weapons with which to force the people he claims to love into submission.
Aemond looks back over his shoulder at the castle etched against the bright blue morning. The calm before the storm. He thinks of her there, face pointed towards the sky, eyelashes fluttering against the pale ivory of her cheek, lips parted in a smile. He can see the golden flash of Syrax’s wings and the long-necked shadow of the Blood Wrym in the distance and growing closer by the second.
“Good morrow, Grandson!” Otto says. Aemond’s fingers tighten on the pommel of his ancestor’s sword. Otto Hightower smiles at the sight; vicious, cruel, assured of his course, bolstered by the idea of a dragon of his own at his back. He speaks as if he has not betrayed his king, his own blood. He speaks as if he is glad. “I had not thought to meet you here. We have much to discuss!”
The song of war clamors in his veins. Behind him, Vhagar’s lows are sweet and sad and desperate. A warning and a plea and a bid for assurance. The cloying scent of blood and ash and death hangs in the air. His nose is burning. Bile and fear cling like a film in his throat.
He only lost the one eye. How could he have been so blind?
He has not felt so helpless since he was a mere boy of ten and two. Missing an eye and looking to his father to demand the cost. The only thing his father demands is the name of the person who told him that his sister’s children were bastards. He thought he knew true fear when he approached Vhagar for the first time. He thought he knew fear when he climbed the ropes cast over her neck, when he clambered into the saddle that was over a century old, when he clung on for dear life and prayed to the Warrior for strength enough not to let go. Then he meets his mother’s eyes and realizes that what he knows of fear could not fill a thimble.
He learned two things that day: there is no justice in the world but what one makes for oneself and a dragon claimed is a fair exchange for an eye.
(He does not learn until much later that it is one thing to claim a dragon. It is quite another to keep it.)
His grandfather’s eyes are shining with mirth, with righteousness, with hunger. And Aemond realizes then that Otto Hightower has always been a snake wearing a man’s face. That he wants nothing so much as to call the tides of war to their shores, no matter the cost. No matter the price. Aemond’s fingers tighten on the pommel of the Conqueror’s sword, of his own brother’s sword, and wonders how he alone can hope to break the swell.
Not alone, he thinks, glancing over his shoulder once more. Hope is a thing of white-hot pain behind his ribs, a dagger lodged in his chest, a star alight and burning and guiding him home.
***
News of Vhagar’s descent had spread through the halls of Dragonstone like dragon fire. She is hard to miss, after all, the size of a small mountain staring up at the black castle with a daring that almost makes Rhaenyra smile.
“Fuck!” Daemon gasps out. “FUCK!”
It is only he and Corlys and Rhaenyra in the room with the painted table. He and Corlys burned and bled in war together and Rhaenyra…well, she has seen him at his worst and she is still standing here, isn’t she? She knows what he is, who he is. She has always known.
With a sweep of his arm, he scatters iron pieces with a roar of fury. They clang and clatter as they burst across the stone floor. She does not envy the servant that will be made to find them all.
“What is our standing?” she asks.
“Vermax, Arrax, and Meleys are gone,” Colys says. She pretends not to notice the pain in his eyes when he mentions his wife’s dragon. She cannot imagine what he must be feeling. He was steeped in a war of his own before he came to Dragonstone. Maester Gerardys assures her that his wounds will heal, though he will never be as he once was. She would rather have him here with her, imperfect and not-quite-whole, than not at all. That there is another voice in her circle of advisors calling for caution, calling for honor, is a thing of comfort.
“What could he possibly hope to gain by coming here now?
“With Vhagar, he could turn Dragonstone into another Harrenhal. He could kill you and end this mummer’s war before it truly begins.”
“If Aemond wanted to turn Dragonstone into Harrenhal, he would have done it already. He has come under his grandfather’s banners of peace. I just cannot fathom why.”
“Are you considering hearing him out, Your Grace?”
“I am.”
“You will not!” Daemon bites out, his voice a growl. If he means to scare her into submission, that girl is long dead and buried, if she ever existed at all. He may still be her uncle, but she is a queen now. She is the Queen. “He will feed you to his dragon the first chance he gets.”
“That would be hard to do with Syrax and Caraxes there.”
“You underestimate how massive that hoary old bitch is. I’ve flown with her. I should know.”
The mention of his late wife, the Lady Laena, is not a direct one. But the memory of her swells and settles between them like a burning bridge. He says that they were happy enough. He says that they were content. But she knows he loved her, even if he will not say so. Even if he will not admit it to himself because it feels too much like betrayal. She sees it every time he looks at his girls. She knows because it is the same way she looks at her own children with their father’s hair and his eyes and his smile.
“Now, perhaps if Moondancer, Silverfyre, and Tyraxes flew with us, it might be more of a fair fight.”
“Moondancer would be a fair ally, but Tyraxes is barely big enough for Joff to ride, let alone fly into battle.”
“And what of Silverfyre? You would command my daughter to fly to battle with you but not your own?”
“Silverfyre cannot fly with us if she is not here.”
“What?”
It is one word. One little word, but it brings with it the memory of his fingers on her throat, of her darkening vision, and her lungs full of a promise that she was never meant to keep.
Dreams didn’t make us kings. Dragons did.
For a moment, she considers lying. She considers telling them that Vaerra flew ahead of Jace to the Eyrie to soften her lady mother’s cousin to their cause. She opens her mouth, but the words turn to fire and blood and smoke in her mouth.
“Vaerra asked me to send her to Winterfell instead of Jace. It was her wish to treat with Lord Stark herself, to present her own hand in marriage. I gave her leave. She took to the skies during the night while the castle was still asleep.”
Rhaenyra does not know what she expects-shouting, disappointment, fury enough to shake the dragon towers down around their heads-only that it is not the mutual guffaws of approval from Corlys and her husband.
“You Targaryens are all mad. She’s of the blood, to be sure, to hatch such a plan,” Corlys says with a fondly exasperated smile.
Daemon hums, grinning like a child presented with a mountain of gifts on their name day. “She’ll do you proud, Your Grace, of that I have no doubt. It is a rare man indeed who could deny a Targaryen woman set on getting what she wants.”
Her laughter tumbles out of her like an accident. Like a secret. Daemon meets her eyes and she feels all of a sudden just like the eighteen year-old who had snuck out of the Red Keep at his behest, footsteps door-mouse quiet as she tiptoed past Balerion’s looming skull. She feels like the girl who’d taken his hand and let him lead her through the city streets festering in the shadow of her father’s castle. She feels light as air and as tempered as dragonglass.
This is a dangerous thing, she thinks, reminded sharply of the reason she had risked everything to marry him. She loved him as a girl. She loves him as a woman, as his wife, as the mother of his children. And she thinks she will go on loving him until they are both withered and gray.
Daemon smiles again, hanging his head for a moment before straightening again. A daisy poking through the late winter snows. The first sign of spring. Of new beginnings and a fresh start.
“If I can trust in your daughter’s mad schemes, then as your husband, I should be able to trust yours as well, Your Grace. Let us treat with your wretch of a brother if you so wish.”
***
Aemond is alone when they land. It has only been a few weeks since last they saw each other, but he seems to have grown. He is of a height with her husband now. And they are both watching each other with the same dark look in their eyes. The same cruel smile.
“Nephew.”
“Uncle," Aemond says with a bow of his head. It is as close to acknowledging the gold and silver crown on her head as he will ever get. "And my dear sister.”
“Why have you come? Your oaf of a brother couldn’t trust your dear grandfather to deliver his terms, so he had to send you tumbling after him?”
"Our brother is the king,” Aemond says. It sounds like less of a statement of fact than the punchline of a very bad joke. Mirth shimmers in his violet eye. Amusement lingers in the corners of his lips.
“Yes, perhaps if you say it enough, it might become true.”
“Enough!” Rhaenyra says. She is done with this farce. In truth, she has been done with it since she watched her daughter burn. Since her husband placed a crown on her head. Since her children flew off to win a war before it had even truly begun. “Tell me, why have you come, brother?”
She cannot remember the last time she called him brother. She would be surprised if she ever has. She has had little enough reason to acknowledge Alicent’s children as her kin. There was a time when she would have done almost anything for a brother or a sister. Someone with her mother’s eyes and her father’s smile and her love of mischief. Someone to adore and cherish and whisper secrets to. Now here he is in the flesh, a little brother all her own, but she has no claim to him. No claim to the hatred in his eyes or the cruel tilt of his lips. No claim to him as her flesh and blood. And she feels…not sad exactly. Wistful, perhaps, of the things that could have been. If Alicent and Otto Hightower had not driven a wedge between them. If she had not allowed them to drive a wedge between herself and Aegon and Helaena, between herself and Aemond and little Daeron.
They raised her siblings to hatred. They whispered treason and poison in their ears and she has known no peace ever since.
Aemond is silent as he glances behind her. For a moment, she wonders if he is looking at her husband, but that is not quite right. His eye is as distant as the incoming storm on the horizon. Promising lashing rain and lightning and a death knell masked as thunder. He looks at Dragonstone like he is searching for something, like he wants to prise apart the halls of their ancestors to find a hidden gem inside.
She remembers her husband’s words.
He could turn Dragonstone into another Harrenhal.
She had not thought it possible before, but looking at him now, Rhaenyra wonders if he has come to do just that. If the hunger in his gaze is hunger for war, hunger for blood, or hunger for fire.
“King Aegon sent me as an envoy to discuss his terms, nothing more.”
“As my husband has said, your grandfather has already-,”
“My grandfather is a fool,” Aemond says. “And now he is a prisoner on his own ship because of me. He left the capital without the King’s knowledge, without the King’s permission, and without the most vital of the King’s peace terms.”
“And what is that?”
“A proposal between myself and your daughter. A way to mend the broken bridge between our families.”
Daemon's laughter is soft, almost sweet, almost a sigh.
Daemon draws Dark Sister.
Daemon swings. And is met with the clang of Valyrian steel on Valyrian steel. The metal sings, a song for the ages.
A song of ice, she thinks, watching her little brother wield Blackfyre in Aegon’s name.
And fire, she thinks, watching her husband bearing down with a feral smile and a mad glint in his eyes.
“You’re too late. She’s gone to Winterfell to give herself to the honorable Lord Cregan Stark. She understands her duty. She understands what she has to do to protect her family.”
Her brother’s face twists. For a moment, he looks almost…but that can’t be right. It can’t be.
“So call her back! She’s no use to anyone in that frozen hellscape, least of all herself. Call her back and give her a choice.”
“Why? Do you think she would pick you?” Daemon is mocking him. Daemon is circling him, Dark Sister flashing black and red in the fading sunlight. “You are a second son with nothing to offer her. Lord Stark has a title. He has an army. He has a castle.”
Each insult is punctuated with the swing of his sword. Aemond is being driven back towards the shore, towards the waves and the raging storm. She believed once that whatever soul her brother claimed to have died with him the night he lost his eye. She sees now that she was wrong. She sees now that he is just a boy, little older than Jace. He is little more than a child playing at war.
“I have as much to offer Vaerra as you had to offer my sister and look where that got you.”
Daemon tilts his head and smiles. He has never looked so much like a dragon as he does in this moment, lavender eyes almost black with rage, his muscles coiled as he stalks his nephew like he is about to unhinge his jaw and devour him whole.
“I should take your other eye for such insolence," Daemon says. "Tell me, how long have you lusted after my wife’s daughter? How long have you looked at her and wished she were yours?”
Aemond pales.
“I haven’t-,” he says. Tries to say, but Daemon cuts him off with a laugh as mad as the look in his eyes. Whatever grip her brother believes he has on the conversation turns to dust in his hands.
“Don’t lie to me, boy. I know the look,” Daemon says. And for a moment, he looks like he is seeing ghosts. “Did you touch her? Did you fuck her?”
“Daemon! Stop!” Rhaenyra says. It is all spinning out of her control, out of her brother’s control, out of Daemon’s control. He is like a shark smelling blood in the water for the first time.
“I never touched her!” Aemond says. But she can see the lie written clear as day on his face. Daemon smiles when he sees it too.
“Your cunt mother and your cunt grandfather poisoned my brother and placed the Conqueror’s crown on the head of that miserable, drunken idiot you call brother. And now you come here to steal Vaerra away. You stand before me and claim such noble intentions when you have already ruined her,” Daemon is saying. There is something not entirely human looking out of his eyes. He is the blood of the dragon and across the beach, the Blood Wyrm himself lowers his head for a charge.
Daemon kicks out with his leg and sends Aemond sprawling.
Caraxes rears. Vhagar unleashes a stream of fire and rage into the sky.
“Uncle, I did not come to fight you,” Aemond says, scrambling through the sand to reach the sword. He takes it in hand and flips himself in time to parry her husband’s blow.
“I don’t care what you came here to do. If you think we’re going to sell our daughter to you after you ruined her, then you’re more of a fool than your grandfather ever was.”
Our daughter. Our daughter. Our daughter.
It clamors in her blood like a chant. Like a battle cry. Like a song etched into her marrow and bones. She will love little Visenya till the end of her days. She vowed to make things right for her. She vowed to make the Greens answer for the murder of her daughter. Well, here is her answer. Here is the favorite son of her childhood friend. Here is the man who took Vaerra’s maidenhead. He is at her husband’s mercy and by extension, her mercy.
They say that the curse of the kinslayer is absolute. They say that the stain never leaves your soul. How would it taste for her dragon to feed on his body? How would it feel to claim his soul?
“You give her too little credit. She is a woman grown. She can make the choice herself.”
Aemond kicks out with his leg, sweeping Daemon’s feet out from under him. He goes down with a shout and a laugh.
Aemond retreats. Death looks out of Daemon’s skull. Death smiles. Death charges and swings. And across the beach, Caraxes does the same. It is a short battle, if it can be called that.
Vhagar’s mouth is wrapped around the Blood Wyrm’s throat. And Dark Sister is pressed hard enough to Aemond’s neck that she can see his blood well along the edge of the blade.
“You say she is a woman grown. She is but six and ten. She is a girl. She is a child. And you ruined her!” Daemon is shouting. She has never seen him so incensed. So lost to his rage. She thinks that it is not only his nephew that he is angry with.
Aemond stares up at her husband and dares to smile. There is blood in his mouth, coating his teeth. There is cold acceptance in his violet eye and cold emptiness in the sapphire lodged into the socket where his other eye once laid. His eyepatch is half-buried in the sand beside him, abandoned, forgotten in the scuffle. His eye slips from her husband and meets hers. His words, when they come, are soft. Gentle.
“Kill me if you must, but don’t let her do this! Don’t let her sell herself like a common whore to further your own ends. She deserves more than that. She deserves better than that!”
Rhaenyra is frozen in shock as the roar of dragons fills the air, as lightning streaks across the clouds, as thunder rolls and the sky cracks open. Rain pours down so thick that her brother and her husband, locked together as they are, are only blurs on the horizon. Shadows. Ghosts.
The Stranger rakes a hand down her spine.
“Stop!” she shouts. Loud enough to shake the dragons from their wrath. Loud enough to shake the heavens. Loud enough to shake the ground beneath their feet.
Rhaenyra thinks of a daughter who resigned herself to a lifetime in the cold just to help her. She thinks of her sons sent to treat with lords and ladies that they have never met to further her own claim. She thinks of a father who named her the heir out of love, who fought for her till the last, who sat about a table rotting before their very eyes and pleaded for an end to the madness.
Maybe she is a fool. Maybe she is weak, just like her father was. Maybe she is not the one to carry the Conqueror’s dream, to bear the prince that was promised who will save the world from the cold and the darkness.
And maybe there are things more important than dreams, more important than oaths and promises, more important than the stories one tells oneself to endure the agony that is this brief mortal life.
There is a debt to be paid, she thinks. And I am ready to pay it.