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When Rhaenyra first lays with Laenor, she prays that her womb will remain untainted by a child. She has done enough of her duty: married a man who does not desire her, allowed him into her bed.
Let it be enough for now, she prays. Let the realm have no further reminder of my womanhood. Let them forget that I have a womb.
But the gods have other plans for the realm’s heir. The gods give Rhaenyra Harwin Strong, and Harwin Strong gives Rhaenyra his seed.
Her belly soon swells.
When Rhaenyra’s nursemaids nod and smile, confirming that the swelling is a babe and nothing worse, Rhaenyra weeps.
Oh, what has she done but sentence a babe to a life of bastardy and ridicule? How could she be so careless? Oh, what has she done but succumb to the singularly female sentence of motherhood. Her body will make a fool of her for all the realm to see. Her tits will swell and leak. Her stomach will expand and grow heavy as a rock. Her hips will purple with marks where the skin stretches. She will have to climb onto a table and bare her cunt to a room full of people so that she may squeeze out a squealing heir.
Already, all the realm knows that she is a woman. They already whisper that this makes her soft, malleable, unfit, or overly emotional. Now, they will say that she is pregnant as well. And everyone knows pregnant women are weak and wobbly and prone to tears.
There’s a deep indignity in all this. One men—kings—would never need face.
Rhaenyra wishes her womb could consume the child. That the acid in her belly would burn the babe away and leave her clean and alone inside her own skin.
She knows it will not. The child shall belong to her, just as the crown too shall. She will be a mother and a Queen. A Mother Queen. Not a Queen Mother, the difference is paramount.
She will not give away her life and titles to care for the baby that stirs in her belly.
It is not fair. I was made heir before I was made a mother, Rhaenyra thinks. The crown comes first.
She forgets the truth. She will always be a woman first.
She lays in her baby blue bath and watches the swell of her belly bob above the water.
With one finger, Rhaenyra traces the steep curve of the bump.
She wonders what is inside her. She wonders if she will—if she can—love it. She wonders if the baby will be blood of the dragon, as she is. Can a bastard be of anything but bastard blood?
Rhaenyra wonders if she shall die on the birthing bed, as her mother did. And should she live, she wonders if she will be a good mother to it. She wants to be…she wants to want to be…
She wishes she wanted it as much as she wants the crown.
She labors bravely for a day and a night. Teeth gritted, fists balled. She bleeds and thinks of her mother. Rhaenyra’s mother prepared her for this pain, but still, the sheer agony of it takes her breath away.
The babe—black of hair and brown of eye—comes in a burst of blood and screams.
Rhaenyra’s little son is granted a traditional Velaryon name, Jacaerys, for his father’s House. The irony in this is almost cruel. Jacaerys does not have the dark skin of his father, nor does he have his father’s pale hair. The boy looks as common as they come. The boy looks like Harwin Strong.
The realm sniggers at this in the shadows. But the boy is a prince, whether they like it or not. Their gossip is of no consequence.
Still, Rhaenyra weeps in her castle on high. She feels weighed by the men of the realm—weighed and found wanting.
She hates the sagging skin of her belly and the smell of the milk that dribbles from her aching tits and the wails of the infant. She hates the babe because he is a boy. He is everything she shall never be, and everything her father ever wished for.
She hates that she has the capacity to create a cock, to create maleness within her body, and yet she is still a woman. She hates the babe for screaming so loudly—calling all the realm to witness her womanness.
I am the heir to the Iron Throne, she thinks at her son in his little cradle, and I command you to be quiet.
But what do babies know of inheritances and crowns and commands? He cries and cries, and she cries and cries and they mirror each other’s melancholy.
Harwin comes to Rhaenyra’s chambers when he can, but it is not enough. She wants to shake him. Do you know how difficult this is? Do you see what we’ve done? It will ruin me.
The babe bawls on and on. The little lad only quiets when she holds him. She only quiets when she holds him.
Rhaenrya paces her bower and presses Jace to her breast. She watches her orange fire burn low and blue.
She thinks of how she resented Alicent and her hoard of screaming, snotty children. She thinks of how she used to wish that Alicent could figure out how to just quiet her babies. As if it were that simple.
Rhaenyra had been too harsh, she knows that now. But it’s too late to reopen those old wounds. She has enough wounds now to tend to. Her nipples crack and bleed. Her cunt is bruised and torn up. Her hunger never ebbs. Her head is always pounding. Her feet are painfully puffy. She shits blood sometimes. Sleep is thin and her bed sheets smell like sweat and tears.
She wishes that she’d wanted to be a mother. Maybe then, this would all be easier. She is jealous of women who want this. There is a tenderness to them that she fears she shall never be capable of.
The moment Viserys named her heir, she traded in her tenderness for a bad temper.
Rhaenyra’s father grows sicker, and Rhaenrya grows up alongside her baby boy. He gets bigger, and she gets taller.
She brings the babe to see Viserys.
Jace squirms in the old man’s thin arms. His pale, baby-fat limbs seem stronger than Viserys’ withered, scarecrow stature.
“He’s a strapping lad, daughter,” Viserys says proudly. “You’ve done well. He shall make a fine king one day. A fighter. And you’re a good mother. Your own mother would be proud. As am I.”
Rhaenyra cannot always be confident in her father’s words, but she must believe him in this. His praise protects her from accusations of bastardy and sin. She must believe him. Her legitimacy depends on it.
“Thank you, Father,” Rhaenyra replies.
Later, as she leaves his royal chamber, she cries. Her salty tears splash down across Jace’s face. Were he of true Velaryon blood, perhaps her tears would remind Jace of the salt in the sea.
Instead, the baby blinks through her tears, but he does not cry himself.
Tenderly, Rhaenyra smudges the wetness away.
Love comes slowly, rising inside her like a tide. Growing as the boy grows.
She begins to rock him in her arms. She begins to laugh when he crawls about her carpet. She begins to feel hate for those who look at him a little too long and whisper the word bastard.
She tells them that this is treason. That she shall have their tongues.
If Rhaenyra does not defend her boy, nobody shall.
Alicent looks down her nose at Jace, but says nothing of his common looks or his strange strength.
Rhaenyra sees suspicion in the queen’s frown all the same.
“Boys are harder than girls,” Alicent says, watching Jace scoot across the flagstones in front of the fire. “I pray you have a daughter one day.”
Rhaenyra observes her old friend, who is not much of a friend anymore.
Alicent smirks a little and sips her dark wine.
“My mother told me the birth pain was all the same. Cock or not,” Rhaenrya says in a chilly voice.
Queen Alicent shrugs and pours more wine into her cold steel cup. “I was not speaking simply about birthing, Princess.”
“I…I don’t understand—”
“You will.”
She labors a second time, and births a second bastard.
This one comes more easily.
“A girl?” Rhaenyra asks, peering at the squealing bundle between her legs.
The nursemaid shakes her head. “Another boy.”
Rhaenyra feels a sharp pain of disappointment. Baby boys belong to the realm—to the titles they’ll inherit and the legacies they’ll uphold and the lords they will one day command.
A little girl would have been all her own. ‘Tis the order of things.
“Clean him,” Rhaenyra commands.
This babe is smaller and quieter. Prince Lucerys Velaryon, they call him. He is slow to hold his head up, slow to make babbling sounds, and slow to crawl on his own.
He is a good baby, and he loves her from the beginning. He does not cry, he coos. He doesn’t mash his fists against her face or bite her tits. He gurgles and snuggles and smells of sweet honey.
Rhaenyra loves him more easily because he is less needy than her first boy.
It’s easier to love that which loves you back.
Still, the hours are long. Rhaenyra is often exhausted. She feeds the babe at her breast because the wetnurse’s milk makes Luke break out in hives. She attends her father’s council meetings and tries not to listen for her son’s distant cries. She watches Harwin in the training yard and is careful not to linger around him for too long.
She may yet decide where her loyalties lie: motherhood, or queenship. But for now, Rhaenyra strives to balance them both.
It seems an impossible task.
A woman ruler has never existed before. Shall she rule as men historically have—all cock measuring, violence, and flexing muscle? Shall she rule in the way a woman would…whatever way that might be?
“Brown of hair,” Queen Alicent says when Rhaenrya presents Luke to her after weeks and weeks. “Just like his elder brother. How interesting.”
“Is it interesting that siblings should resemble each other?” Rhaenrya asks tightly, holding her stomach.
Alicent sighs and hands the babe back to his mother. “I suppose not.”
Rhaenyra cradles Lucerys against her belly. The sack of her flesh has not deflated yet. It’s doughy and soft and she’s sure it will never be flat and firm as it once was. Her body is truly a woman’s now. Hips, tits, rump. She wants to hate the floppy, yielding thing it’s become. She hides her form in ill-fitting dresses with high necklines. She does not allow her handmaidens to tie her hair into elaborate knots. She wears no jewelry.
She sometimes looks at tapestries of her old self—collarbones like branches jutting from a flat chest. Girlish, thin ankles. Hips as straight as the trunk of a tree. Stomach flat as a straight shield and as stiff as iron. She misses that body—it’s boyishness. How easily she could disguise herself as a lad and slip into the city.
But that body is still her body. Her skin is the same skin. Her bones are the same bones. That body was not something she slipped in and out of, like armor. Perhaps, if she could do so now, she would. Slip on a suit of boyishness to attend court. Step out of boyishness and into womanhood when returning to Harwin.
Instead, she has settled for this stasis—not quite woman, not quite man. All heir.
Rhaenrya fears all three roles at once. Not being enough. Being too much.
Jace and Lucerys grow quickly. Jace reminds her of Daemon—hot-tempered and opinionated. Luke reminds her of Viserys—steady and sweet.
Jace and Luke stay up late and squeal when they should be sleeping.
Jace and Luke yank at each other's dark, wayward hair.
Jace and Luke gather around her skirts and cling to her like dew drops cling to tall grass. Hanging from her until they grow too big and drop off into the world on their own.
Jace and Luke hold hands when they visit the King in his incense-scented chambers.
“They love you,” Viserys observes, hunched and ill in his lonesome bed. “As do I, dear daughter.”
“They love you, too,” Rhaenyra assures her father. “Say it, boys. Tell your grandsire you love him.”
When they all leave Viserys’ chambers, Jace asks her what is wrong with the king. Why does he keep his rooms dark? Why is his skin grey and flaky?
Rhaenyra tells her son that he is too young to understand such things. In truth, she hopes Viserys will heal and that she will never have to explain such things. She wants to protect her sons from this sadness.
Harwin smiles when he watches the boys muck around the yard together. “Shall we make another?”
Rhaenyra sees no reason not to.
King Viserys has never spoken of the suspect coloring of her children. Her husband seems comfortable enough with the arrangement as it is now. Alicent has been kept at bay. Rhaenyra wants to keep Harwin happy. And children are not all tortures. She’s starting to like them well enough.
She nods at Harwin and imagines how the third child might look—dark of eye and dark of hair. She realizes that she has never imagined a child of her own that looks like her. She has imagined only small Strongs. She wants more of him. More him, less her.
That night, they lay together in her bed. Harwin kisses Rhaenyra and peels the clothes off her body with his big hard hands. She sprawls beneath him, holds onto his broad shoulders, and breathes deeply.
Her sheets no longer smell of midnight terrors and tears.
Harwin’s strong seed quickens, as she knew it would. It always does.
The realm, once again, whispers of Rhaenyra’s womb and her motherly hysteria and her leaky tits and her womanhood.
Things have changed, though. Rhaenyra no longer fantasizes about a flat chest and narrow hips and ripping the womb from her gut. Her womb has grown her children, who she loves. And she cannot blame her boys for reminding the realm that she is a woman. Besides, without the fruit of her womb, who would she have? Just a dying father? Only a secret lover? Uncle Daemon…wherever he is these days? No, her womb has given her a legacy to defend. Heirs. A line.
In truth, with or without children, she is still a woman. Her legitimacy as heir is still in the hands of men. They will never treat her as an equal. They would still whisper that woman is a synonym for weakness.
Ironic, really. She’s never once known a weak woman. She does not know if such a woman even exists.
I shall let their tongues wag, Rhaenyra thinks as she watches her boys play in the Dragonpit. I will be their ruler one day, no matter what they say. I will be the queen, wearing the crown of their kings. Any who draw swords against me for this may die upon them.
The pregnancy is easy. Rhaenyra is accustomed to all this now.
Daily, the men at court whisper in her wake. They snigger when she turns her back. With sly voices, they ask her when the babe will be born. She imagines burning them all.
Nightly, she sinks into hot baths and traces her fingers over the hump of her belly. She is excited to meet the little life inside. She closes her eyes and listens to her children giggle in the next room.
Finally, she thinks. I am finally getting good at this.
Her metamorphosis from a bad mother to a good one finally feels complete. What was she so scared of? This is the simplest thing she has ever done.
And she’s been thinking less and less about the crown of late.
She labors a third time, and births a third bastard.
This time, the pain is expected. This does not make it any easier. There’s blood and yells and Rhaenyra vomits onto herself with the last push.
The nursemaids clean her sick and cut the thick, thready cord that connects the baby to her belly.
“And?” Rhaenyra asks, keeping her eyes closed.
The nursemaid blows out a heavy breath. “Another boy, Princess.”
“Healthy?”
“Healthy as a horse, Princess!”
“And his hair? Tell me the color—”
“Brown, Princess.”
Rhaenyra nods and smiles.
Queen Alicent expects to see this third babe before the blood has even been cleaned from him. She expects to see this third babe before the child even has a name.
Stubborn as her father before her, Rhaenyra walks to Alicent’s chambers with the freshly born baby in her arms. She leaves a trail of red blood through the red halls of the Red Keep. Red on red on red.
In the queen’s quiet chambers, Laenor blurts that this third boy will be called Prince Joffrey Velaryon.
Alicent tilts her amber head and her dark eyes dance with all sorts of devilry. “That is an unusual name for a Valyrian.”
Rhaenyra knows that this is the name of Laenor’s favorite knight and companion, Ser Joffrey Lonmouth, but she smiles stiffly and says nothing.
King Viserys smiles too, but his smile is simple and fond and blind above all. “A fine name. And I do believe the babe has his father’s nose.”
Laenor blushes like an embarrassed fucking fool.
Rhaenrya glances anxiously at her baby boy—pale skin, dark curls of hair, narrow nose. The very opposite of his father.
Even the birds singing outside sound suspicious.
Rhaenyra takes Joffrey to meet his brothers, and the boys crowd around the baby curiously.
“He is small,” Luke chirps in his boyish voice.
“Mother, look! We chose a dragon egg for the baby,” Jace says seriously. “I let Luke choose.”
“Ah, that looks like the perfect one,” Rhaenyra sighs placatingly. She does not have the energy to say anything else.
She is exhausted, but satisfied with her efforts today. Her tits are full and aching and her feet hurt from climbing to and from Alicent’s chamber and her cunt is in ruins. Her skin is clammy with cold sweat. But it was all worth it. She is here now, and her children are happy and her baby is healthy and Alicent has been staved off once more and her father has turned his kingly cheek away from her sins and her worries can wait for tomorrow—
“Another boy I heard,” Ser Harwin says gently, his warm eyes sweeping Rhaenyra up and down as he steps forward.
He helps her down into her seat and Rhaenyra lets herself melt into the settee. “Indeed. Here, hold him.”
She watches Harwin cradle the new baby and she grins.
Once, she had feared that her children would change her. They have. They have made her happier.
Again, the realm whispers about Rhaenyra’s bastards, her body, and her womanliness.
From her castle on high, the whispers sound like whistles in the wind. Easily ignored. Meaningless. Viserys’ steady, deliberate blindness turns these barbed words into ash. He may be a dying man, but he is still the king of the realm. He wields a power she shall inherit. A power her sons will inherit. And she shall give it to them gladly, for Rhaenyra loves her sons. She has shepherded them from her center and out into court. They may be bastards, but they will still uphold the honor of House Targaryen. They must.
But it is still too soon for all that.
For now, Rhaenyra must remind herself that they are just boys. She must guard them as a dragon guards her eggs. All love and passion, expecting nothing in return from her offspring but life.
So, finally alone inside her own skin, Rhaenyra sinks down into a freshly drawn bath. She closes her eyes and listens to her sons squabbling with Harwin in the next room.
Rhaenrya traces the flat line of her empty belly.
Let the men of the realm whisper, she thinks. Because one day I will die and all that will be left of me is the children I leave behind.
‘Tis a nice thought.