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In thoughts that none will read,
In blood that leaves no stain,
Words spoken to the rain,
Devotion none will heed.
-Marya Zaturenska, “Strange Captivity”
―
Jacaerys has grown tall since Alicent last saw him. Perhaps it is only that he holds himself straighter.
Just now, he is eye-to-eye and toe-to-toe with his mother, hissing, “If Helaena has taken flight against us, she’s as much a traitor as the rest of them.” He looks, meaningfully, to Alicent. “As much a traitor as she is.”
Across the room, another woman clears her throat.
“Your Grace,” Mysaria starts.
Daemon’s Mysaria? Alicent wonders. The whore he wanted to install as Lady of Dragonstone? Twenty years ago, Rhaenyra drove both of them off the island; now, Mysaria grasps the queen by the arm, whispering to her as if they are…familiar.
Alicent does not like it, though she cannot say why.
Rhaenyra cuts through the air with her hand, silencing them both. “Who knows of this?”
Mysaria smiles, close-mouthed and sly. “I had her brought directly to you, my queen. Until the prince intercepted us just outside your chambers, we encountered no others.”
“And how did you know to expect her?” Jacaerys interjects. His jaw is set, tendons standing out along his slender neck. He is a far cry from the boy Alicent saw before Viserys’ death, who even at six-and-ten seemed like to hide beneath his mother’s skirts in times of trouble.
( War makes men of boys; men, or monsters. It was something Ser Criston told her once, about his time in the marches. When she asked what did it make of you? he only smiled.)
“I have friends in the city, my prince.” Mysaria dips her head. “It is at your mother’s urging that I maintain these connections.”
“Who are these friends ?” Jace asks. He spins toward Rhaenyra. “And how are we to know, Mother, that they’re friends of ours? Alicent is certainly no-”
“Enough,” Rhenyra barks. She pauses to massage her temples. Without meaning to, Alicent shifts a bit in her chair; when Jace’s head whips toward her, she forces herself to still.
Rhaenyra still has not looked her in the eye; but Alicent has not come to play the sheep-killing dog eager to earn back the affection of its master. She digs her jagged nails into the meat of her palm and waits.
Rhaenyra looks to Mysaria and her son in turn. “I would speak with her alone. See that no one disturbs us.”
She holds Jacearys’ gaze―both of them are stone-faced, and Alicent thinks that they have never looked so alike as they do now―until, finally, he nods.
Once the door thuds shut behind them, Rhaenyra finally turns and faces her fully. Alicent straightens her spine and rolls her shoulders back, though she stops short of preening outright. The full weight of Rhaenyra’s eyes on her, narrowed now to angry slits, makes her heart stutter in her chest.
Alicent clears her throat. She has rehearsed this dozens of times since she donned a hooded cloak and fled her guard under cover of night, mouthing the words to herself as she vomited in the belly of an unmarked merchant ship.
Before she can begin, Rhaenyra says, “Kneel.”
Alicent cannot help herself: She scoffs. “Rhaenyra-”
“Kneel,” Rhaenyra repeats. Commands, tilting her chin toward the floor with meaning.
Alicent nearly rolls her eyes at this play-acting; she imagines Jacaerys is not fooled, either. No doubt he remains just outside, one hand poised on the hilt of his sword.
After a moment, she does as she is told, sinking from the chair to the stone floor as her knees scream in protest. In the Sept, the younger novices have begun setting a pillow at the altar of the Mother when she comes to pray. She grows too old for this; old, and tired.
Still, she lowers her head, the picture of obeisance. She has had much practice in this, at least. It was only when she grew taller and less willing to bow her head in deference that Viserys truly cast her aside, save for nights he wished her company in his bed; and there was her father before him, gripping her roughly by the chin one minute and petting her hair the next, as she did her best to demure to him all the while.
Apparently satisfied, Rhaenyra continues: “State your purpose.”
Without lifting her head, Alicent answers, “It is as she told you. I come to plead for my daughter’s life, and that of my granddaughter. That you should spare rather than punish them for the crimes of my sons.”
She chances an outward glance and sees that Rhaenyra has begun to pace around her in a circle. Alicent watches her go in and out of sight, each loop bringing them closer to one another.
“And what of your sons, Alicent?”
What of them? They were little boys once. Bright-eyed, silver-haired babes that cooed in her arms. They grew in her and clung to her and loved her in those desolate years when she had no one else.
She shakes her head, banishing the thought. They are those children no longer, if they ever truly were.
“Aegon is badly injured.” Alicent swallows thickly. “And Aemond is…” the cause of it. “Reckless. He cares not for the devastation he causes.”
“Injured,” Rhaenyra says, moving ever closer, “but alive?”
Alicent nods. She bites back the automatic response she’d give to the maesters and attendants: Gods be good. “Alive, but crippled. Sunfyre as well, though they said he will not live long. Either way, his wing has been severed. He will not fly again; nor will Aegon.”
“Sunfyre was an adolescent dragon, hardly larger than my son’s; but there is still the matter of Vhagar.”
“I can surrender only myself, Rhaenyra,” Alicent snaps. For a moment, their eyes meet; Alicent is the first to look away, ducking her head again. “They say you’ve given riders to two nearly the size of Vhagar, anyhow.”
“So I have.”
There is more than a hint of pride in Rhaenyra’s voice.
The queen has come to a stop in front of her, nearly close enough to touch. Alicent keeps her eyes trained on her boots: Black leather, unscuffed and shiny. After the blockade, Larys said the most desperate smallfolk began boiling leather goods in their stew pots.
“Then even Aemond will not be foolhardy enough to challenge you.”
For now. Until he realizes where Alicent is gone. She knows that her sons will rally behind this new cause: She is only to be a prisoner if they hold the key to her shackles.
She tells herself that if the chaos buys Helaena a few days time it will be worth whatever follows and very nearly believes it.
Rhaenyra resumes her pacing.
“And Daeron? They tell me that he flies behind a Hightower host.”
Panic rises in her chest. She has thought of him, of course; she thinks of him every day. Her ink-and-paper son, whose face is a blur in all of her dreams. She had meant to spare him, years ago, by sending him away.
She concluded days ago that it must be the Wall. He would hold no lands; sire no children; pose no threat.
He would live.
But what comes out is, “Daeron is a boy of six-and-ten.”
“Jace is a boy,” Rhaenyra replies. Alicent knows without looking that she speaks through gritted teeth. “Luke was a boy. They’ve been shown no mercy for it.”
“Daeron was raised far from court, away from this ugliness―he does only what he thinks he must-”
“What I must do,” Rhaenyra interrupts, “is secure my claim. I cannot allow dragonriders who took up against me to live, Alicent. Certainly no children of yours.”
Impulsively, Alicent seizes the hem of her skirt. She crumples the fabric in both of her fists.
“We were children together. Do you remember when you said to me that- that you wanted to fly with me?” She casts her eyes upward, finding Rhaenyra’s gaze and holding it. “I was frightened then, a child. You were a dragon and I was only…a girl.” Slowly, so that Rhaenyra does not startle, she reaches up to take one of Rhaenyra’s hands in her own. “I am a girl no longer; but I remember every word you said to me that day.”
Alicent pauses, allowing her words to hang between them.
When they were children, she and Rhaenyra wanted nothing more than to read one another’s minds. They lit candles at the Crone’s altar for a fortnight so that she might make it so.
Then, as she grew older, Alicent prayed the opposite: That her friend would never know her mind, or the desires of her traitorous heart. How it stuttered in her chest each time Rhaenyra draped herself across her lap.
Kneeling in the sept until her shins bruised, praying Maiden, forgive me. Purify my desires. Maiden, forgive me. Purify-
There are thoughts she has never given voice to, not even within the walls of a sept. She was never a traitor, either, before tonight.
Perhaps the truth is that she was never much of anything. As a child, it often felt she existed solely because Rhaenyra’s light shone on her and made it so. Maybe it ought to have made her bitter; instead, the thought had been a comfort. She’d have remained blissfully in the illuminated sphere of Rhaenyra Targaryen for all her days, if her father had only allowed it.
She has been so many things since then: A queen in her own right, mother of princes and kings. And she has lived, in the most literal sense: Her heart beating stubbornly on, her blood flowing.
Save for those moments Rhaenyra deigned to gaze on her once again, it has not really been a life. She boarded the ship to Dragonstone fully prepared to offer it up―whatever paltry bit was left―in exchange for Helaena and Jahaera’s.
Quickly, near-imperceptibly, Rhaenyra’s tongue darts out to wet her lips. The sight of it sends a flush of heat from Alicent’s scalp to the soles of her feet.
The Maiden has purified neither of them. After all this time.
“On the night I wed your father, I half expected you to steal me away. Crash in on Syrax and abscond with me across the Narrow Sea, as you said you would.” Alicent reaches for Rhaenyra’s other hand, traveling the memory-worn path up the queen’s sleeve until she lands on the raised edge of a scar. The scar on her own arm sings. “You did not always want this , Rhaenyra. There was a time when neither of us aspired to power or glory or to anything other than-”
Without warning, Rhaenyra jerks her to her feet.
“What is this, Alicent?”
They are so close that each panting breath from Rhaenyra’s mouth warms Alicent’s lips.
“I came only to plead for my daughter,” Alicent repeats. Rhaenyra’s grip on her wrists tightens until she can feel the fine bones of them grinding together. “But I have loved you since I was a child, Rhaenyra; and I believe you loved me, too.”
Rhaenyra takes an abrupt step back, but does not release her. The firelight illuminates the flush that’s spread from her face down to her chest. Madly, Alicent almost thinks that she can see her heart pounding beneath her dress.
Softly, Alicent asks, “Would you deny it?”
Rhaenyra pulls her close again. This time, Alicent meets her in a kiss hard enough to bruise.
She tastes salt and realizes, distantly, that she is crying; she kisses across Rhaenyra’s face, a path from her lips to her eyes and back again, and finds that she is as well.
“I am sorry,” Alicent whispers, mindlessly. “I am sorry.”
Rhaenyra kisses her again, gulping the apology down.
―
Alicent wakes naked in an unfamiliar room and an unfamiliar bed, to the alien feeling of soft lips against the shell of her ear.
Rhaenyra , she thinks, still half-dreaming. It would not be the first time.
Of course, a moment later, she realizes. It is truly Rhaenyra, this time, peppering kisses across her shoulder and whispering words she cannot quite make out.
It is Rhaenyra asking, “Are you awake?” and smiling softly down at her when she says yes.
Alicent reaches for her―to brush her hair back from her eyes, as she’d done a thousand times and dreamt of doing a thousand more―and finds that her arm stops just short.
It is a nightmare, perhaps, the kind where Rhaenyra is forever just out of reach. She’s lived that nightmare for twenty years already.
Wake up, she wills herself. Wake up, you idiot, and you’ll find her right beside you.
Rhaenyra steps back, ducking behind the gauzy curtains that surround the bed and receding into the room until Alicent loses sight of her.
She reaches out again, almost flailing now. Still, something stops her.
Wake up. Gods, just wake up.
It is only the bite of cold steel around her ankles as she goes to stand that makes her realize she is already quite awake.
Awake, and in chains.