Chapter Text
I: The Bedchamber.
The facial hair had to go.
Before the accident, the rightful heir to the Iron Throne had sported a wispy mustache. He’d never minded what the court fools said, court fools were the mouthpieces for his grasping sister. The only man he had to resemble was his father, for this was a land where resemblance meant everything.
Until that sister decided it didn’t, and their father ruled in her favor. For better, and for so much worse , the big-bellied man of laughs and tourneys and feasts was king.
Weeks of recovery saw patches of silver-gold hair sprout on my sides and under my chin. Given a few more months, it’d be a fully-fledged beard. Mother loved it, “Your father’s beard made him look like a glutton, that was why he had it shorn. Yours is the fullness of Uthor and the hardness of Aegon.”
I wasn’t mother. I didn’t need to play the game.
I hated my hair. The silver-gold always shined in just the right way to make my face look paler than it was. Sure, next to the average smallfolk and their muddy hair, maybe we were the heirs to gods.
No, not gods. These were mortals whose dragons forged an empire built on slavery and supremacy.
I couldn’t take one look at myself in the mirror without being reminded of it. Amethyst eyes were always going to gaze back.
I had to keep the hair on top of my head uncovered and undyed, mother said. “In this day of strong boys, the realm needs true princes.”
She never insisted I had to keep the facial hair.
“Cut it all,” I told Beric.
“Yes, Your Grace.”
Beric was a stormlander from Nightsong. In recent years, father’s household was being filled with stormlanders. One of grandfather’s plots.
Seventy five year old Boremund was the antler poised to plunge into our groin. Steadfast and resolute and one of the closest friends to the grasper on Driftmark.
The Great Council should have ended her plots, they only inflamed them further.
“We must strengthen the marcher presence at court,” grandfather said with that cool timbre of his, when I had dared to loose my tongue. “Men must be reminded of the benefits of service, and no men have served us better than the marchers.”
Yeah, right. The Baratheons were not the Stormlands, not yet. Boremund was half a Velayron. None of his vassals were. He was swayed by the gold and glory he received from the slaughter on the Stepstones. His vassals had greater concerns, raids from Dorne, raids from those same Stepstones, raids from the Three Daughters, and border disputes.
None had a greater disdain for the stag in Storm’s End than the Carons of Nightsong.
They and the Tarlys had been fighting a border war for the better part of a century. This wasn’t some permanent affair, whenever the Vulture Kings would rear their long necks, the two sides would set aside their differences to go hunting… only for the wounds to reopen afterwards.
Boremund had married his son Borros to Lord Caron’s daughter. The maesters said it showcased a unity in the Stormlands.
Grandfather, as ever, disagreed.
“Boremund fears Royce’s influence. He sought to temper it with the vows of marriage. Boremund cannot give Royce what he wants. The crown can, and the crown will, and Lord Caron shall remember.”
It was rude to jump to conclusions in his presence. I owed him everything. “And what does Lord Royce want?”
He laid his hands together. “The same thing most men want, my prince. Power. The ability to sit on a dais while lesser men do your bidding. Boremund threw his lot in with the whores, and enforced it with his banners. Oaths made as lands are taken are not like to be maintained.”
“Will the Stormlands answer his call?”
“The question you should be asking, my prince, is what will make them?”
“What will make them answer his call?”
“The right course.”
“What course is that?”
“That is for you to decide. What is the right course?”
Mother turned to regard me for the first time during the lunch. It was moments like those that worried me. The moments that hinted at what was coming. “A war that protects their rights as lords.”
His face was unshifted. “Return to your studies, my prince. We will speak further.”
Wrong answer. I rose five octaves. “A war that protects their rights in succession!”
“And what rights may those be?”
“A younger son must come before an older daughter.”
His eyes scanned me. “You are too emotional. Return to your studies, my prince.”
“It’s the injury,” mother said lowly, almost a whisper.
He turned to her and said “It is unbecoming, and it will cease.”
If grandfather bade the sun and moon to cease their spinning, they would freeze in place.
As the Nightsonger worked, Arrec of Blackhaven, one of the court bards, played a ballad on a lute. It helped grandfather that I liked marchers. Next to the latest silk fashions spiraling out of the Black Walls of Volantis, they wore practical linens. As courtiers, those ‘practical’ linens were still going to be finely threaded and decorated with red dragons.
I couldn’t wear marcher surcoats unless I or mother could convince father to shift the trends. I might have, had mother not reminded me of my place. “You will not be outdone by boys of great strength.”
When they finished, there was a knock at the door. “Princess Helaena is without, Your Grace.” That was Ser Criston Cole’s disciplined baritone.
Helaena, ahh… her eyes weren’t amethysts, they were soft purples, the color of her orchid garden. Her hair wasn’t gold, it was a cream yellow, like the pastries she herself made for the children. Her face wasn’t pale and ghastly, it was rosy, even when she wept. She had all of father’s softened corners without his cowardice.
Mother never forbade me from smiling, least of all within the royal apartments. No person alive won as many from me as her, save when she and the children were together.
“She may enter.” I waved at the door, then looked around the room. “Give us the room.”
The Princess entered, the men bowed, the women curtseyed. Only at the motion of her hand did they rise, and finally take their leave.
The Princess was dressed in a grass-green nightgown trimmed with gold, done in the Oldtown style. Her hair was freshly brushed, kept in a loose braid.
The court fool mocked her for being fat, or so I was told by mother. I believed it. Father found Mushroom most amusing, and believed all that he said was in jest.
His was the first head I would be taking. Even the whore on Dragonstone had more decency. She managed a castle and all its fiefs. She had to be commended for her plotting skills. What did he manage, other than his throbbing ego? What was he capable of, other than boasting of who he had bedded?
In her youth, Helaena was shorter and stouter than the rest of father’s known children. Two births, the first of which she was far, far too young, had indeed left her plump.
She took my hand and gave it a gentle kiss. “Aegon.” Only then did she realize what I was missing. “The beard… you cut the beard…”
I didn’t ask her. I should have, as a courtesy. I read that in one of the books on marriage somewhere. I’d been given it to help with my marriage and read a few pages before putting it aside when I remembered who I was married to. I shoved that thought aside to take her hand in mine. “Did you like it?”
When she didn’t answer, scrunched up in thought, I took her hand and rubbed a circle into her wrist. “You may speak plainly.”
“I… yes, why, yes, I prefer this.”
There was that smile of hers. The one where her cheeks puff up.
The smile that made the coming Dance all the harder. The smile that kept me tethered when I was first thrown into this world not six months past. Or has it been six months?
I gestured to the pitcher. “A soft Arbor. May I get you anything else?” Before she could answer, I was to my feet, at the pitcher, and back with two goblets. “What brings you this late?”
“I…” she took the chair. “I just put Jaehaerys and Jaehaera to sleep. They wanted to hear the full story of King Lymond X Hightower.”
You two little adorable bundles kept her up, did you? Why, someone’s going to have to tickle you awake tomorrow. Helaena has a busy busy day, because of you, she’ll be working while tired. “They sleep soundly?”
“They do.”
I tipped my goblet at her. “And you?”
“I thought… the maesters have said I am hale enough…” she turned as red as one of the tomatoes she liked to carve.
“Hale enough? To ride Dreamfyre again?”
“To bear another babe,” she whispered, looking at my feet.
To think, this was the same woman that helped run the household of the Red Keep, who spent her days organizing tournaments and girls’ educations, and had given birth to the three most beautiful of babies, here, sheepishly shy at the mention of children.
There was a problem with that. “I won’t do it. I’m not laying with you.”
Her voice stalled in her throat. “Aegon?”
It was then I thought of the implications, and felt it prudent to clarify. “Or any other. You are my sister, and they are not my wife.”
She raised her eyes from the floor to look me over. A minute passed while she did so. She broke the silence by crossing over to me, taking my hands in her, and gazing into my eyes. “Are you well?”
Better than ever. “I’m not bedding you.” I didn’t break the handholding, even if it went counter to the point I was making. “It is no fault of yours. You are ten times the beauty of any other. It is because you are my sister. The Faith says brother shall not lay with sister.”
“We are not like others. The Doctrine-” I cut her monotone off.
“Helaena,” I cut deep.
“My love?” Same monotone.
“To the hells with the Doctrine.”
“I want to bear another perfect prince or princess.”
No, you don’t. I let go of her, I couldn’t let her instincts take over, and backed into my bed. I sat down on it while she stood still, frozen in place. “Do you, truly? Or-” I mouthed the rest of the words, “-has mother demanded it? I am not mother. I will not tell her.”
At that, her features softened, she stepped over to me, and practically clung to me when she sat down. “She has,” she said lowly, eyes far away.
“Mother cannot make you lay with anyone.”
“You used to-” I didn’t need to stop her thoughts, she did them herself.
“When was the last time I visited your bed?”
“Eight moons past.”
And this marks the first time since the accident. “Do you think I shun your bed willfully?”
“I do not know, Aegon. We used to lay together and talk of the day. You have not done so since… it. Yes-” she found some courage in there, “-yes, yes, I thought so.”
I squeezed her hand. I couldn’t just shove her in a septa’s robe. Little steps. “I will not do what mother wants of us. We have three beauties of our own now. That is enough.” Not to mention, she’d only given birth six months ago.
“I want a sister for Maelor!” she shouted, exhausted.
No, you don’t. “Mother wants a sister for Maelor. What do you want?”
At that, she turned to face me. “What do you want?” she asked, half-worried, half-distant.
Perhaps she didn’t believe me, perhaps she was tired from a day of work, perhaps this was the depression that came with living a life as a pawn in a giant board. If nothing else, she wasn’t lustful, if I refused her, I sensed she’d honor it. That was all I needed. For her to honor it. I’m not bedding my sister. I don’t care what the other Targaryens did, have done, or will do. It’s immoral. It’s wrong. “I want to sleep easily.”
“Oh…” she exhaled slowly, then laid a chubby hand on my shoulder. “What worries you?”
“Him.”
“Him…” she tasted the word on her lips, then she found the taste, “oh, oh, him.” She gave my cheek a chaste kiss. “He cannot get to us here.”
A chill fell upon me. “He can get to us anywhere.”
“He will not. I won’t let him.”
No. NO. I gripped her hands tightly and stared into her purple pearls. “No, you will never say that. No, he will kill you. He will kill you. He will.”
She took a deep, steadying, breath. “Let him come. Let him come now. I am waiting.” She hitched up her gown, there, around her inner thigh, sat a short scabbard. A Valyrian steel Myrish stiletto.
“I cannot sleep,” I finally admitted. It was why I ended up staring at my patches of hair to begin with.
“Let me help you,” she bade, taking my head in her hands. “Lay down, I’ll be gentle. Chest first?”
“Back,” the request was second nature by this point.
I went to the bed, shed my shirts, and laid down on my chest.
She began massaging my back.
When I first found out who I was, my days turned to a waking nightmare. I never said anything of what I knew nor did I reveal who I was.
The more I lived and breathed, the more I thought of them. The whore on Dragonstone would break the Great Council, but she was only half of it.
It was him.
Him.
I could not sleep for days. His face appeared every time I closed my eyes.
I pictured the knife slowly cutting open my boy’s throat.
I pictured the newborn crushed in a mob.
I pictured Helaena, used by his thugs. I saw them in the Keep. I saw the way they looked at her.
I pictured my girl, broken, surrounded by men that wanted her dead and men that were supposed to be loyal to her. One of them disposed of her.
All of it, with him smirking in the background.
The maesters thought I was going to be raving forever. Grandfather wanted me on the poppy. Mother wanted me locked up in a room until I stopped tossing and turning. Father wept, embraced me, told me I’d be better one day, and was pulled away by mother’s soft touch. The twins were too young to understand. The only ones who crossed the lines, who dared to appear, who defied mother and father and the maesters and the septons, were her and my second brother.
Aemond offered comfort, as much as a broody teenager could have. “Tell me who haunts your dreams, brother, and I will bring you his head.”
Even he bent his head when Helaena appeared. She was to be his queen one day.
I don’t remember how, I couldn’t, seeing her brought back the images of what would be done to her. One moment she was in front of me, the next, she was behind me, massaging my shoulder blades.
She spoke in a tongue I did not understand then. High Valyrian. The language of the royal court, the language that Viserys was trying to make the official language of all Lord Paramounts.
She massaged me from shoulder to heel, and for the first time since I was thrown into Westeros, I fell asleep.
Every day after, for weeks, she would give me those massages. Her fingers never strayed from their chaste path.
Women, mother warned, would use nakedness to achieve their wants. “Beware whores. Use them for your pleasure, but do not talk to them.”I believed her, it was how she became pregnant with all of us.
Not Helaena. She was pure and innocent.
Her delicate touch set my mind to thinking of her showing me her garden in the godswood. “Helaena, how is the garden?”
“It is wondrous. Did you know we had a few feathered visitors today?”
“Who? The white ravens?”
“Four golden cranes. Orwyle says they are migrating. Wait!”
I froze involuntarily. “What?”
Her hands went back to softly kneading circles into my upper back. “You should have seen Jaehaera feed them.”
“What do cranes eat?”
“Greenberries. She ran down to the kitchen, demanded a pouch of greenberries, came back, and tossed them in the air! The cranes went wild!”
The two of us started laughing.
I saw it in my mind’s eye, the tiny four year old chasing a crane around the garden, tossing little green berries at the massive golden cranes. If they were the same birds I’d seen from time to time, they were eight feet tall and walked with elegance… and between them comes running a four year old.
“Where was our little prince?”
“Playing with Osmera.”
Osmera Blount, Lord Bennard’s sister, here, like so many others, to wait on the Queen and the future Queen. As she liked throwing silvers to the smallfolk, she joined the future Queen’s retinue.
Helaena grazed a nerve on my lower back. I yelped and saw my grandfather again. All of this for Boremund.
She soothed the nerve, and my nerves, with a few deft touches around the nerve.
“Helly, can I confide in you?”
She sighed happily. “Of course, my love.”
“What do you think of Lord Boremund?”
“He is unyielding and quick to anger,” she answered, carefully weaving around the nerve.
“As one of them.”
“Oh,” she clicked her tongue, understanding, “you mean them. I think, when we are fit, we should fly to Storm’s End to meet his son Borros.”
So we’re on the same page. Curious. “Why?”
“Borros will be Lord soon. He likes feasts. He likes when his bannermen come and…”
“Suck his cock?”
“Tsk, tsk… mother would be upset. How could you utter such foul words with your wife?” she shrilled, matching mother’s tone and temper.
“You can tell her if you wish. You came here to bed me, I believe a cock is part of the requirement.”
Her hands shuddered.
Right, right. “My apologies. I did not mean to remind you of… the fool.”
She patted my back. “I don’t fear the fool. After your… after it… I began to dream of him, of him and Dreamfyre.”
“Then who?”
“No-one,” she lied through her teeth, “I was thinking of what mother said.”
I wasn’t the only one getting my nerves lowered. “What did mother say?”
“She had offered to buy… if I do not satisfy you… no, I shouldn’t tell you, it is not becoming of a knight.”
“May I loose an arrow into the dark?”
“Must you?”
Ah, but this is mother. “She wanted to reintroduce me to the Street of Silk.” I laughed into the pillow.
Her lack of an answer was an answer in it of itself.
I continued. “I believe I have discerned why. Before the accident, I used to enjoy them. Prince Aegon must have his serving girls to be Prince Aegon.”
“Yes…” she said, meekly, “you did.”
“No longer. The only touch I want is this,” I reached back and squeezed her fingers as they rested on my back. “This and no further.”
“About Boremund,” she was down by my right side, pressing and pressing, “the Stormlands are as strong as their storm lord. If you worry about him and them, I do not see reason to fear. Borros is more Caron than Elenda.”
“What if her aunt goes?”
“Then they may renew their oaths. Traitor’s oaths.”
“What do you advise?”
“As I said,” she reached up and ran her hands through my hair, “we should fly to Storm’s End. If Boremund can feast his banners into fealty and win their love with the blood of the Boneway, why not we?”
“You would fly into battle?” I didn’t believe it, I had to ask anyway.
“Never. You wouldn’t let me.”
I chuckled, and soon enough, so did she.
“I would go to Storm’s End, call a council of the banners, and help them attack the Boneway.”
“By helping them, you mean… give them gold.”
“I see it now, father removing himself from the throne to do it himself,” she stated, very, very seriously and not at all dripping with sarcasm.
“The chair’s too small for him,” I murmured.
The two of us snickered like teenagers, which, I was a few months no longer, twenty, and she still was, being eighteen. Before Westeros, I was but a few years older. Instead of flying dragons, I was driving tanks.
She used her royal voice to command me to roll onto my back. And so I did. She moved to the front side of my shoulders, careful to ignore my neck.
“Borros’ blood runs hotter than dragonflame. It would do us well to earn his friendship before…”
We shared a look. Him.
“By friendship, you imply his support,” I put forth, as she switched from my right shoulder to my left.
She shook her head. “No, friendship. He is a great fighter. We need more fighters and less readers.”
I nodded.
“You don’t wish to speak more of it,” she said, giving a reassuring cheek pinch.
No, not really.
Thinking of Boremund reminded me of another of them. “Jeyne Arryn,” I began, to see where she would take it.
“There is fighting in the Vale.”
“She has finally died?” I’d have heard of that.
“Mountain clansmen coming down to attack Heart’s Home.”
Cracks appeared on the egg known as the inside of my head. I didn’t know it then. “The High Septon…”
“Has remained silent,” she filled in for me.
“Has Lady Arryn put for a call for the Faithful?”
“To appear weak?” She turned her nose up, much like her mother did. “She is too honorable.”
A thought began brimming to the surface in my head. The Faith of the Seven. “Why don’t we send support?”
“Mother would never-”
“To the Others with mother.” I laced my fingers through her thicker ones. “We are dragonriders, we can fight.”
“I don’t know…” she said, tentatively, “...mother wants me to…”
“Bed me, yes, I know.” I didn’t put two and two together, that was why her nightgown cut so low. Her usual nightgowns were high-collared, with the little square of skin beneath her collar reserved for one of her gold-and-emerald necklaces.
I didn’t understand why the prince would ever stray from her, birth gave her a fullness in the chest that no smallfolk woman would ever have; what with all of them eating poorly and she eating like a princess. No wait, I knew why. Her chest permanently sagged and she had vein-like stretch marks crossing her lower stomach, both the product of having her get pregnant at thirteen and giving birth at fourteen.
I distanced myself from the thoughts of mother’s next plan in motion by returning to Helaena’s thick warm fingers. “But you won’t bed me, so no seed will quicken, so you will not be on bedrest for seven moons.”
The Queen was very keen on making sure her daughter had healthy terms and births. Considering we hadn’t had any miscarriages or stillbirths, she did well. On the other hand, she’d say there were only three children -two births- in four years of marriage, two of them twins. Maelor was around, Helaena was alive, and I wasn’t impotent.
“What is your plan?” she inquired as she kneaded my abdomen.
This was where months of reading paid off. “Go to the Gulltown Sept, receive the septon’s blessing to lead a campaign against the clans, lead a campaign against the clans. Do it all in the name of the Seven and holy Andalos…”
Andalos...
The egg made itself apparent by cracking open.
I may have sounded like the whore on Dragonstone trying to play up appearances to obfuscate her strong boys, but I did genuinely love the Seven.
Next to Helaena and Aemond, Eustace was the one who helped me most through my recovery.
The Faith of the Seven was the religion of fighting for justice, of protecting the innocent, the women, and the weak; and of donations to feed and build housing for the poor. Septs maintained hundreds of years of records, and were hives of intellectual discourse. Motherhouses were a shelter that welcomed anyone at all times.
All men were equal beneath the Seven’s eyes.
Even I, a descendant of tyrannical slavers, could amend.
I couldn’t tell Eustace that I hated the Valyrian pureblood supremacy, or dreamt of a world where there were no dragons and that all men were equal. Sunfyre was wonderful, but I didn’t deserve him. As the Smith would say, men earned what they worked. What work did I, let alone the prince, do to earn a nigh-immortal flying deathbringer?
I couldn’t tell him I’d have the Swords and Stars brought back in a heartbeat.
I could and did tell him I, just as the Seven taught, believed in the rights of commoners and lords. “The Great Council protected the rights of our bannermen. In a just world, my father would call Great Councils for all matters. What right do we have to make demands of them, when it is their sons who bleed for our wars?”
Septon Eustace, seeing something of a rising star in his midst, took me aside for half-day periods to educate me on the deeper theology of the Seven.
Theology I ate up.
When the Andals came, Oldtown, Gulltown, Lannisport, Storm’s End, Rosby, Tarth, and the Sandship all had their own High Septons. Each one took his own interpretation of the Seven-Pointed Star.
In addition to those we would now call the traditional High Septons, sects and heresies blossomed:
Many combined the old gods and Seven to form the Seven Gods, who had the Seven’s septons and the old gods’ decentralized structure.
Followers ‘sworn to the Stranger’ arose, swearing to root out all corruption.
Those who followed the Cult of the Mother viewed her as a primary aspect in a small pantheon, and tried to install their own High Septas.
Followers of the Smith would burn their material goods and live lives of poverty, claiming it brought them closer to the true tenants.
With the rise of the Seven great Kingdoms, the High Septons waned until only Gulltown and Oldtown remained.
The two High Septons would go on to spend centuries fighting -oftentimes brutal- religious wars with one another.
As legends went, the Gardener wife of an Arryn King invited the two High Septons to a theological debate, to mend the schism. Oldtown won, and with that, all the lands south of the Neck barring the tree-huggers in Blackwood Vale would follow the lead of Oldtown.
Andalos.
Why, it was all so clear.
I sat up, grabbed her, and pulled her into a hug. A tight hug befitting a wonderful companion.
“Helaena, thank you.”
“What did I do?”
she muffled into my shoulder, not all too bothered by the smothering. In fact, based on her tenor, she seemed to like it.
“I know how we will defeat them.” I let her free of the embrace, so that I could gaze into her orchids.
She took my hands in hers, I let her. “How? How? I thought… them.”
“I will do the one thing they never thought of, and it’s all thanks to you. A septon-blessed war.”
He'd already done his warring on the Stepstones, and gotten away with it.
I would do him better.
A crusade.
A crusade for Andalos.