Chapter Text
Rhaenyra opens her eyes to the dark, only the shaped edges of the stone ceiling beyond the canopied bed visible as her eyes struggle to adjust to the lack of light.
One heartbeat spans the silence of the room, and then—
Two heartbeats.
She sucks in a breath, desperate and haggard, and then throws herself to the side of the bed, her body shuddering as she violently heaves over the side of it. Acid and bile splatters against the stone ground through her rapid gasps. Even when she eventually feels as though she cannot possibly have anything left to expel, she continues to heave, spittle flying from her mouth, fire clawing at her throat from the inside out. Her chest burns and somehow she breathes through the pain, and yet she cannot breathe, cannot feel the air in her lungs. Her fingers dig and clutch at the edge of the bedding beneath her, clinging as if she’ll tip over and to the ground if she lets go.
Fire is flickering in front of her, it’s flame bright and searing in its heat, and there’s a pain in her chest that’s getting worse with every dragging breath she heaves. It’s deep and stabbing and she cannot breathe.
Someone is in front of her, appearing as if from nowhere. They touch her arms, pulling rough and bruising. They tug her up from where she lies upon a precipice, making her sit straight even as she heaves nothing but the air left in her throat. She can hear their voice through the haze of fog in her ears, as if she is beneath the waters of High Tide, and she thinks of Laenor when he was near enough to just barely hear through the crashing waves as he coached their son on how to float on his back in the water, and Jacaerys laughing as he continued to sink with every attempt, Laenor laughing and holding him close, keeping him safe from the more dangerous depths that Luke—that Viserys had—even Jace, sinking too deep, too far—no—
Her eyes clear when she feels the touch of a cloth against her mouth. It’s wet, and she focuses on the feeling as it swipes against her mouth, her chin, wiping the sick from her face. Criston Cole, she recognizes now, his eyes looking at her as he swipes the cloth down along her neck and between her breasts where her nightdress spills open, wet and speckled with her visceral grief. She should be horrified, the traitorous hate-filled knight so close to her, touching her, but she cannot bring herself to move. She cannot bring herself to care, her mind spinning into nothing.
Yet she can hear him, now, his voice breaking through the fog.
“Princess,” she can hear, and his voice soft in the dark, cracking with what sounds to be worry, perhaps even despair. “Princess, you’re ill. I’ll summon a maester.”
He leaves her on the edge of her bed, and she stares at the cold stone beneath her feet. The room is dark, but there’s a smudge of light slipping through the wood of the shutters on her window, creating smooth shafts of light that lengthen across her childhood chambers. It is the shape of that light that tells her it is early morning, yet too early, perhaps, for most of the Red Keep to have arisen. The shape of the bed, of the chest and the table and the armoire all tell her she’s in the Red Keep, the shape of it all too different from Dragonstone, and too similar to that which she knew as a child, to be anything else.
It’s hours later, or perhaps no more than a moment, when the maester hurriedly shuffles into the room, his chains clinking together as he moves towards her. A servant follows behind with a lit lantern in her hand, and another comes in with clean sheets. They open the window, letting in the early morning light. Ser Criston, her sworn knight and member of her father’s kingsguard, walks to the end of her bed and looks at her, his face pinched. Worried, the way he once would have been, before everything.
The room smells of sickness, and she is made to stand and move away from the mess on the floor. One of the servants splashes the stone floor with a bucket of water, and proceeds to silently clean the mess she’d left.
The maester touches her face, her throat. She is covered in sweat, making her nightdress stick and cling to her skin. Her skin is hot to the touch, burning with fever. The maester clucks his tongue, and she closes her eyes when he holds her wrist, when he counts the beats of her heart, when he quietly mutters instructions about rest and soothing teas and medicines he’ll have made to cure her fever and nausea. She swallows back the bile in her throat, and finally, the maester leaves. Ser Criston leaves to take up his post in the hall by the door, and within a few short moments, servants mingle within her rooms to draw her a cold bath and fill the room with light.
They draw up her soiled nightgown, and she steps into the basin. Her skin pebbles in the cold, but she doesn’t hesitate to sink her body beneath the water until she can feel the cold ache seep into and beneath her skin. She sinks until her mouth is covered by the water, and then slides lower, lower, until she is completely covered by it.
Her thoughts race.
She should be dead. She’d been stabbed and set alight by dragon fire. She’d seen the deaths of five of her children, and all three of the men who she’d loved in her life. In the end of it all, she’d only had Baela, Rhaena and little Aegon left, and they were broken—broken like her. Aegon had been small, just a child still, and already grieving his father and all four of his brothers, older and younger alike. Even his little hatchling had succumbed to an exhausted death. The grief was an unrelenting weight on his shoulders, and yet he’d been forced by his uncle to watch her burn and she knew no more.
She should be dead.
None of it feels as though it was real, and yet everything spins around her even now, shaking as if she could fall right through walls.
She should be dead.
Her children are dead.
Yet she somehow knows with a certainty that belongs to her body instead of her mind that it is not so much that her children are dead as that they have yet to be born.
She surges up above the water, sucking in a cold breath. She lifts a hand, fragile and pale, and presses her closed fist against her still flat stomach, sculpted by the gift of youth and inexperienced in the battles of childbirth. She drags her hands up, remembering and recognizing her body. Her breasts are small, a child’s peaks rather than the milk-filled breasts she’d had after six pregnancies, and her curves are pointed still, sharp and unsmoothed and filled in by the weight she’d gained with each child she’d borne.
“This body has yet to know the birth of a child,” she says, as if to acknowledge the reality of it.
One of the servants next to the bath looks startled, and the girl asks, her voice full of nervous hesitancy, “Is that what worries you so, Princess? If you’ll forgive me for saying so, you have good hips for it. I don’t believe you’ll have much difficulty. Birthing a babe, that is, Princess.”
Rhaenyra had managed it six times in the past, so she knows the girl is right, despite looking to be hardly older than four-and-ten herself. She knows it in her bones and soul now. She’ll have no problems birthing her sons, though it’s a fresh stabbing pain that strikes her when she remembers the pain of birthing Visenya. Her sweet, sweet babe. Her only daughter borne of her own body; the grief nearly drowning her even as it was swallowed whole by the death of Luke so quickly afterward. Of all the deaths that followed, one by one, each a fatal stabbing wound in her heart.
She had been forced to madness by the grief and loss. Truly, by the time her brother had had her burned, they’d both been clinging to what small piece of sanity was left to them for the sake of their last children, and even that was taken from her before the end. She tips her head back, resting it on the rim of the basin. Their war had taken everything from her, from the men she loved and the children she’d had with them, from those who had chosen to take up arms in her name—even from her brothers and her sister, even from Alicent.
Yet none of it has happened, not yet, despite the fact that it has.
It is a throbbing pain in her temples, aching like the drumbeats of war, a band stretched around her head, squeezing with the impossibility of it. Her body shakes, her fingers grasping at the edges of the basin. No, it hasn’t happened, but it will, and that makes it no less than real than if it was already in the past. Her wet hands scramble at the copper edge of the bath to brace her weight, and she quickly lifts herself from the cold water, naked and dripping as the woman next to her rushes to stand as well, tugging at a soft cloth to pat at the excess of water clinging to her, followed by an even softer robe to wrap her body as she dries more fully.
Time has been turned back, somehow. A dream, a gift from the Gods, or a mistake in which she woke after death.
Her children are dead, but they are not.
Luke, Jace, Joffrey, Aegon, Viserys, and Visenya. Her children, hers.
They are not dead.
She allows her maidservants to dress her in a simple dress of deep, royal purple, golden strings sliding through the bodice and golden dragons sewn and threaded through the skirt in a repeated pattern of flight. Syrax was as dead as her children, in the end, and she has to breathe through the remembered pain as she struggles to breathe yet again.
Syrax. Joffrey. Her sweet, brave boy, dead before his time, like his brothers before him.
The pain is a gaping wound in her chest, and she finds herself pressing against the stone wall, hands shaking. Her babe. She bites her lip and pushes herself off the wall, ignoring the concerned looks of her maidservants. In truth, she should wait for the maester or one of his assistants to come back with whatever tonic they’ve designed for her before she departs her chambers, but the sickness she carries isn’t due to any illness a maester can cure. Who, she wondered, could experience such grief, anguish and despair without succumbing to it? Without losing their ability to breathe? To burn with the pain of it?
Who could blame her for going mad?
Ser Criston stands at attention and begins to follow just behind her when she leaves her chambers. The halls are lit well enough, and the walk to the nursery isn’t so long. Another knight guards the entrance but doesn’t stop her from pushing through the large door. She’s the princess, still, not yet called Maegor with Tits as she fights a vicious battle with her own brother for the throne.
“Rhaenyra,” she hears, and feels a hand touch her arm. She looks up to see her Ser Criston looking at her, confusion marring his face.
He had betrayed her, hated her worse than anything she could have done to deserve such, and he played a terrible part in the ruin of her family. She turns away from him, looking instead at the soft crib centered in her brother’s nursery room. “I’m fine, Ser Criston,” she says, her voice soft as a dream. “I only wish to see my brother.”
Aegon is in his bed, curled around his own golden dragon’s egg, still hot to the touch in a way no non-Targaryen child would allow. She runs her fingers down the ridges of the egg that will hatch the dragon that will set her aflame. She then presses her knuckles gently against the softness of her baby brother’s unblemished, unburnt cheek. His hair is a wild mess in his crib, sweaty and sticking to his forehead from the heat of Sunfyre’s egg. She shouldn’t do it, but she steadies herself and reaches into the crib, sliding her hands under Aegon’s armpits to lift him up, holding him close and clutching him to her chest as he squirms. She lets her body rock him in a way natural to all mothers, and his squirming tapers off quickly as he readjusts to his sister’s warmth and movement, easily falling back into sleep, one arm stretched out to sleepily clutch at the collar of her dress.
She can feel her eyes sting with tears, and she presses her face against his top of his head, just breathing.
She has no children of her own anymore.
They’re all dead.
(They’re not dead.)
They’re all dead because of her, and because of the boy in her arms.
She rocks, and she rocks, and she rocks.
Eventually, Aegon stirs, blinking slowly as he makes a soft, whining noise of discontent. He rubs his face against her chest like he isn’t sure about waking before he pulls back, rubbing instead at his cheeks and eyes with his small fists as if to rid himself of the last dregs of sleepiness. All of Rhaenyra’s children had done the same each time they’d found themselves waking up from a good, sound sleep. She had always treasured those moments of peace and soft gentleness with them, eager to put aside whatever work the day held to instead watch her children sleep, and wake up in her arms.
She thinks that she’ll treasure this moment too.
Aegon looks around the nursery for a moment, curious to wake up outside his crib, she thinks, and then he looks at her. It seems to take him a moment to realize that she isn’t someone he knows – though perhaps he recognizes her, at least. He blinks slowly and continues to stare at her. It’s a short moment before he draws his hand up, pressing his little fist against his own mouth and chin, drooling as teething babes always do. His eyes stay riveted to her, and she smiles at him, and whispers, “Sȳz tubis, valonqar.” He takes his slobber-covered hand and reaches up to grab at her hair, soft and silver-blonde like his own.
She can feel more than see Ser Criston shuffle his feet behind them, as though stopping himself from reaching forward to grab Aegon’s fist, protecting her from the evils of a curious child.
“Ser Criston,” she says, and the knight straightens up. “Would you send for a nursemaid?”
It doesn’t take long for the nursemaid to arrive, and it takes even less time for the woman to clean Aegon up and have him dressed for the day in a small white tunic with a finely stitched red-and-gold tabard made of expensive cloth over the top of it, with simple dark brais and white stockings underneath, looking to be a true Targaryen prince, if perhaps an overly warm one. She’d nearly forgotten Aegon wouldn’t yet be dressed in the fine green fabrics Alicent had come to prefer.
“Thank you,” Rhaenyra says to the nursemaid as she picks Aegon back up the moment he’s finished being dressed. He seems content to be in her arms, easily clinging to her neck with his chubby little arms, resting his head on her shoulder. “Will you let the Queen know that I’ve brought him down to break our fasts with the King?”
The nursemaid’s eyes widen, and she stumbles over her words. “Of course, Princess. I’ll give the Queen your message.”
Rhaenyra is nearly out of the room before she sees a small, wooden dragon sitting atop a shelf. It’s painted black, and she thinks it might have been made after the image of Balerion, though its long, carved neck reminds her more of Caraxes. She nods to it, and Ser Criston takes it from the shelf, easily giving it to Aegon when the boy reaches for it possessively, grabbing and clutching it against his chest as though someone might steal it away from him if he doesn’t protect it.
“A fine dragon,” Rhaenyra murmurs against his hair, just above his ear to be sure he can hear her voice, “but your own will be golden, like mine. Beautiful and golden and dangerous, for dragons are not toys or pets, little brother. I think we forgot that before. We must be careful not to take them for granted again.”
He looks at her, not understanding her words, but pleased, she thinks, to have her undivided attention. He lifts the dragon suddenly, and she must quickly rear her head back to avoid being hit in the face with the toy. She laughs, a broken sound of delight and grief, even as Ser Criston lurches forward before halting himself, yet again. It’s meaningless, of course. He can’t protect her from a heart that’s already been ripped in pieces, and when her brother was old enough to cause her such pain, her loyal knight didn’t wish to protect her at all.
He hadn’t even been able to protect her brother from the same fate.
She walks through the courtyard to reach the small feasting hall where the breakfast for Aegon’s second nameday has been set up. It’s early yet, and not many people other than the servants are about, but she receives many stares from those that are nonetheless, lord, lady and servant alike. She wonders if they’re curious about the fact that she’s holding her brother, or if it’s shock that she knows how to hold a child at all? Perhaps they’re baffled that she’s seemingly let go of her anger, which had previously clung to her like smoke clings to a fire put out by the rain.
She’d been a tempestuous child, hurt and betrayed and angry, and the hurt had been enough to make her cling to the anger long past when she should have given it up. The truth is that she hadn’t wanted to give it up. Her hurt and anger were all she’d had, and she’d cradled them in her arms the way she’s cradling Aegon now. Even now, knowing all that she knows, she can still feel the sting of betrayal churning in her stomach if she thinks of it, of her father marrying her best friend.
She had loved them. She’d been a stupid, idiotic fool of a little girl, and she’d loved them, and neither of them had thought of her. Neither had cared about her, not even enough to tell her before making the announcement. Even now, it would be easy, so easy, to fall back into that anguish and despair.
But her children died for that anger, for that pain she’d refused to let go.
She runs her fingers through Aegon’s hair, listening patiently as he raises his dragon again, making sounds that aren’t quite words, but could be, if she listened closely enough. She smiles and says, “Yes, I see him. Ziry iksos nykeā nēdenka zaldrīzes, iksos ziry daor?”
Aegon repeats, “Zaldrīzes!” as he looks at her with big, wide eyes. A familiar word, then. Perhaps her father had taught him.
She smiles again, this time laughing just a bit, and says, “Kessa, valonqar. Zaldrīzes. Dragon.”
The King and Queen arrive then, followed by a party of guards and servants. Rhaenyra turns to face them when they enter the room, hefting Aegon up in her arms to ensure he’s secure. Her father seems confused if perhaps pleased when he catches sight of her, his eyes darting down to where she’s holding her brother. Alicent is at his side and looks surprised, and something like joy, or perhaps hope, flashes in her expression before a soft, unreadable smile takes its place. Wary then, as if she thinks she’ll be stung as soon as she reaches for the bowl of honey set before her.
Rhaenyra swallows, and shakily presses a kiss against Aegon’s hair, turning her eyes away from her old friend.
Breathe, she tells herself. Breathe.
“My daughter and my son!” Her father calls out, his voice both surprised and gleeful as he spreads his arms. “Up early today, I see.”
Likely he’d expected to have to force her to make an appearance, and indeed, the first time around, she’d been forced into exactly that.
“Rhaenyra,” Alicent says next with a soft, hesitant smile. She steps forward and Rhaenyra forces herself to look at her best friend again. The woman—girl—who had replaced her mother and named Rhaenyra a whore undeserving of the throne in her own home, who had raised her children to hate and fear their older sister to the point of assuring mutual destruction for both sides of House Targaryen, black and green. Alicent was the cause of everything, in the end, the center of both sides of the conflict. “Thank you for bringing Aegon. I can take him now.”
“It’s alright,” Rhaenyra says quickly, making no move to put her brother down. She runs a hand through his hair again, even as he leans away from her, reaching forward to grab at a handful of grapes on the table that are still attached to the broken vine. She takes care to pull a grape away from the clutch and offer it to him. He grabs it eagerly, stuffing it into his mouth and chewing. “Mo’,” he says, after a moment, mumbling the way children his age do when their mouths are full. Rhaenyra hums and tells him, “Finish what’s in your mouth, volonqar, and then you can have another if you’d like.”
Her father has paused in the motion of sitting down at the head of the table, looking as if he wants to say something – his eyes wide and near-startled by something, though Rhaenyra can’t guess what that might be – when the other lords and ladies who’d been invited begin to filter into the room. Lord Beesbury is there, who stops to tell Rhaenyra, “Good morning, Princess, you’re looking well,” and Lord Tyland, immediately snaking his way through the crowd to make a valiant attempt at talking politics with her father, who has turned away from Rhaenyra to exasperatedly wave the second-born Lannister off.
Her father was never one to discuss matters of political import when there’s feasting and favorable conversation to be had instead.
She recognizes most of them despite their younger appearances, if not all, but it’s when Lord Lyonel Strong tips his head in a short acknowledgement and a polite, “I hope your morning has been well, Princess Rhaenyra,” that Rhaenyra feels her heart stop, for just a moment.
He has Joffrey’s eyes, she thinks. Luke’s eyes. Jace’s eyes.
He doesn’t look like Harwin, in truth. The similarities are enough that one couldn’t deny the relation, but truly, it’s just his eyes that are—
Breathe.
She clutches Aegon a bit closer, only for him to squirm against the tightness and swiftly demand to be put down. She averts her gaze to her brother, allowing him to slide down and drop to the floor, his little wooden dragon still in his grasp. He lifts it up, as if it were flying, and has an appreciative audience quickly made up of the various visiting lords and ladies in the room, all cooing sweetly at the boy they’ve come to celebrate. Rhaenyra swallows and turns her body, clearing her throat.
Lord Lyonel, having been watching Aegon, turns back to her easily enough at her cue, and she asks, “Will your sons be attending the hunt, my lord?”
She knows they will. She remembers that much.
“Yes, Princess. Both of them, though only Harwin will be participating in the actual hunt.”
There’s so much she never truly knew about Harwin. He became her sworn sword, as durable and as skilled with the sword as he was a talented lover. He willingly met her in secret often enough to give her three beautiful, brave, and kind, brown-haired, brown-eyed sons, but they had had to be careful. Will have to be careful. Stealing broken moments, forcing each other to stay quiet even as he braced himself around her, his hips sliding against hers, his cock filling her deep with her thighs wrapped around his waist, his hands running down her skin whenever they weren’t holding her up, leaving traces of his desire and reverence upon her body. Her stomach is clenching in on itself, and she swallows back bile.
He’d loved her and he’d died for it, and their children had died for it.
“Is Ser Harwin fond of hunting?” she asks, but she can hardly hear her own voice.
He was the father of her children. He was kind, and handsome, and loyal. Strong, as though the Gods had crafted him for his house themselves.
Lord Lyonel has Harwin’s eyes. He has Jacaerys’ eyes. And Luke’s. And Joffrey’s. He’ll be her children’s grandfather, even if he’ll never be able to acknowledge it.
She squeezes her eyes shut, the ricochet of a drumbeat pounding against her skull, then opens them again as her balance falters. The room is blurring in front of her eyes, colors smudging into a background of nothingness, yet she can still see Lyonel Strong’s face, even as his polite expression twists into alarm. She feels the world tip beneath her feet, her entire body dizzy with it, and she feels herself sliding, slipping, falling—
She’s pressed into a chair, someone’s hand on her shoulder, her back. There’s noise, blurred and impossible to hear.
Breathe. Breathe. Fuck, breathe.
She breathes.
Forces herself to. Clutches at the arm of the chair, at the forearm of whoever is touching her, anchoring her.
One breath.
Two.
She closes her eyes. Harwin. Harwin.
She’d loved him, and lived a life with him, and without him. She’d carried his children, and yet had hidden and denied him those children she’d borne him thrice over. It had been a secret that had burned inside of them both until it finally led Harwin to his death, a fire at Harrenhal that had been no accident. Gods be good, he’d died in a fire just as she had. Somehow, years apart, they’d burned together in an attempt to protect their children, their boys, and they had failed.
They’d been set up to fail from the very beginning and she’d only realized it when it was too late.
She wants to see him. She wants—she wants Harwin.
She wants his love, his strength and conviction.
His smile, hidden beneath his messy brown curls.
For her, for their boys.
She wants to see him.
She opens her eyes again. There are multiple faces peering down at her, concern etched into their expressions. Lord Lyonel is the closet, bent at the knees despite his older age, and his mouth is moving. She focuses on him, and suddenly, she can hear the words. “-for a maester, princess. Breathe deeply. There, good.”
Her fingers are digging into his sleeve, clutching at him without care for the bruises she’s likely leaving on his skin. She forces herself to let go, and focuses on breathing, slowly and deeply. The room is still blurred, the noises muffled, even as her fingernails dig into the wooden arms of the chair she’s been pressed to sit on.
She blinks from one moment to the next, and Lord Lyonel is no longer next to her. Instead, the maester is in front of her, bald and blue-eyed, nothing like the man who is her lover’s father. There are upset and concerned murmurs from around the room, the anxiety palpable, and she looks up to see that her father is now next to her, his face pinched and his hands wringing together like a father, rather than a king. Alicent is holding Aegon in her arms, fidgeting and hovering behind her husband. Aegon’s dragon toy has been left on the ground, abandoned for the moment.
Rhaenyra looks at the maester. He’s the same one who had come to her rooms that morning and his words are soft, if chastising, as he explains to the king that Rhaenyra had been sick through the night and should not have forced herself to come to the breakfast feast when in poor health.
“I have to recommend the princess stay behind from the hunt, Your Grace,” the maester says, shaking his head. “She needs rest.”
“No,” Rhaenyra interrupts. “I will rest in the tent when we arrive in the Kingswood, father, but I do not wish to miss my brother’s name day celebrations.”
She isn’t sick, after all. Staying behind—resting will not help her get better. She wonders if there is anything that can cure the grief of a child’s death, and she is grieving many, and for an entire life yet unlived, as inevitable as a storm passing over Shipbreaker’s Bay.
“Of course,” her father says shortly, voice gentle, “but only if you’re truly feeling well enough, Rhaenyra. I won’t have you sacrificing your health for a simple hunt.”
She smiles through the dizziness she still feels and agrees, and when she rides with her father, Aegon and Alicent in the carriage later that day, she eagerly accepts Aegon back into her lap, holding him close. He rests his head on her shoulder again, yawning with the need for a nap, one hand’s fingers tangled in the silver chain she wears around her neck.
“You’re… good with him,” Alicent says, in the silence of the carriage. She sounds unsure.
“Babes his age just want comfort,” Rhaenyra says, softly, rubbing his back in a gentle, soothing pattern as he drifts off to sleep. Then she smiles wryly, thinking of the dress covered in mashed grape that she’d had to change out of before the carriage ride, “And anything that will make them as sticky as possible, of course.”
Her father laughs, making Aegon blink awake again, lifting his head, before giving into the call of sleep yet again. Despite his laugh, her father seems taken aback. “Well, you’ll make a wonderful mother, Rhaenyra,” and then, with a smile, “hopefully sooner rather than later. I wish to be a grandfather, and to see you with heirs of your own.”
“I want them,” Rhaenyra finds herself saying, and her conviction must surprise her father and Alicent yet again. “I do. I promise. I just—have to find the right man to be their father.”
It’s as much a promise to herself as it is to the others in the carriage. She wants Harwin. She wants the life they should have had, together with Jace, Luke and Joffrey. She doesn’t know yet what she’ll do about her Aegon, Viserys and Visenya, but she knows in her heart that she needs her first three sons back first. She’ll think about her uncle and the babes they’d had together when she can afford to.
The truth is, she’d brave the heat of dragon fire again for each of her children if that’s what was asked of her.
“Rhaenyra…” Alicent trails off, hesitantly, but says nothing else, just twisting to look out the carriage window awkwardly instead. She’s heavily pregnant, little Helaena growing inside of her.
Rhaenyra doesn’t know what possesses her to say it. She had been humiliated and rejected once already. Still, she hesitantly offers to her old friend, “Perhaps we might betroth our children after they’re born.”
Jacaerys and Helaena. King and Queen.
It would have been a wonderful solution she’d thought once, the combination of their blood and their claims. Alicent had spat in her face when she’d rejected the proposal out of hand, refusing to let her daughter be wed to a bastard. Common features, Alicent had said of her boys. As though any of Rhaenyra’s children could truly be described as common when the beauty of Old Valyria shined through them as the sun shines through the trees on a bright summer day.
Luke especially had been as lovely as any Targaryen before him, and still, he’d been the first of her children to die in the war that had ripped both Rhaenyra and Alicent apart.
Alicent stares at her in shock, even while her father exclaims, “What a wonderful idea, Rhaenyra!”
“Perhaps,” Alicent adds, voice hesitant but hopeful, sweet in the way she was before she married the king, when she was just Rhaenyra’s friend and lady, “we could betroth Aegon and your daughter, if you have one.”
It would be a possible solution; Aegon would eventually sit on the throne with his wife, if also forced to wait for Rhaenyra to do so first. Perhaps that would be enough for the Hightowers, though she doubted it. Otto would not settle for his grandson being King Consort. In any case, Rhaenyra knows she will not have a daughter for many years. Alicent, of course, has no reason to think such, and so Rhaenyra just smiles and says, “Yes. I would like that as well. Aegon is a sweet boy.”
And he is, truly. He is warm, and sweet, and soft, even now sleeping in her lap the same way she used to hold her own Aegon and Viserys, and Joffrey, Luke and Jace before them. She hopes that perhaps he will stay sweet this time. If she can keep him from the poison that pollutes the Red Keep like rats in the walls, mayhap he will stay the sweet boy in her arms forever.
It isn’t much longer before they arrive at the royal camp. The fanfare rises as Rhaenyra is the one to step out of the carriage, the sleeping child in her arms being the one celebrated by the hunt and the surrounding festivities, and he is also the one who is jostled from his sleep suddenly by the roar of noise. Whining softly, he tries to hide his face in her neck before eventually, taking peeks out at the crowd and the surrounding forest, gazing about in naked curiosity and wonder at all the brightly-colored tents and tables set up, and the men and ladies clapping all in celebration of him.
She’d been resentful of the pageantry, last time. This time, she tugs Aegon closer to her chest, protecting him from the vultures that would pick at the bones of them both if it got them closer to the throne. These people never loved Aegon more than they loved her. They didn’t want him in replacement of her, not truly. They were simply eager to use them both for their own ends, for their own grasps at power, influence, gold, and the chance at gaining a dragon’s blood, seed and womb for themselves.
They didn’t care about who she was, but they didn’t care about who Aegon was either.
She ends up giving her brother to their father once he sits down next to the Hand, and she nearly laughs at her father’s own look of surprise at suddenly having a squirming, curious two-year-old child in his lap. The Hightower family are all eager for their moment with the little prince, and in any case, surprise or no, the king is eager to show off his son. Rhaenyra, meanwhile, has something to do.
Slipping away from the royal tent and beginning to walk through the main lane of the camp settings, she looks around warily at each of the tents that have erected, dozens of houses all turning up for the royal hunt. There’s Baratheon, Darklyn, Mooton, Massey, Bracken—settled, she notes, well away from House Blackwood’s own grouping and with House Tully set firmly up between them. There are no Velaryons present, of course, but she spots House Celtigar’s sigil, and even a rather small contingent of men sporting the sigil of House Manderly. She has yet to spot anyone of House Strong, nor their sigil; the blue, red and green rivers on a white background which signifies them as the Lords of Harrenhal.
Meandering around the many tents as she searches for it amidst the crowd of people who’ve arrived, she is intercepted shortly enough by Lord Jason Lannister, offering her wine and a dragon pit in exchange for a princess as a wife. Having already dealt with his advances several times over, and his betrayals after, she smiles blandly rather than drinking the wine, and informs him with an air of apology, “I am already betrothed, Lord Lannister.”
She then watches him sputter and choke on his wine, careful not to laugh. She might have, were she truly seven-and-ten, but Lord Lannister is half the reason the smallfolk had turned against her and her desperate attempt to recoup the royal coffers through taxing—a mistake, she knows now, but her only option, or so she’d believed at the time. Been led to believe.
No amount of gold in the treasury had been worth what it cost her in the end, and if she must smile and make nice with the Lannisters to avoid such a fate, she will.
“To whom?” he demands, impolite and with wine dripping down his doublet.
“The betrothal has yet to be announced,” she tells him. “Perhaps it will be after my brother’s nameday festivities have finished. Good day, Lord Lannister.”
She leaves. She may not be betrothed, but she is certainly promised in her heart, if not entirely in truth, and she believes that she may well be betrothed by the end of this hunt, if she can just find the man who will be taking the title.
Harwin will not reject her. He had not before, and she had offered him far less than she intends to offer him now. She had had nothing to offer him before, nothing but herself and a secret that would eventually lead him to his death. Despite that, he had said yes and then given her his love and three beautiful boys he had never been allowed to claim. This time, she will offer him a wife and children who will take his name. She will offer him the right to hold her in public, to offer affection where others might see. She will offer him the position of King Consort upon her ascension to the throne.
She will not abide hiding in the dark. Not this time.
Eventually, the sun rising high in the sky to denote the late morning, Rhaenyra stumbles upon Harwin. He is in the midst of a conversation with several men, all of them standing behind a table with spears, knives and even a particularly large axe laid out upon it, or being brandished by one of the men. There are cloths and oils laid out along the table, and it occurs to her that they are cleaning the weapons—preparing them, perhaps, for the hunt. One of the men lets out a particularly loud guffaw, and Rhaenyra glances at him before looking back at Harwin.
Harwin is arranging arrows, sharp-tipped with finely attached feathers, but he’s also rolling his eyes at the man next to him, his mouth quirking up into a soft grin. Rhaenyra takes a mindless step toward him, and another, and another. She’s nearly there, nearly right in front of him, when her hands begin to shake, and she casts her eyes about desperately for something, anything, to help her know how to do this.
How does she make him fall in love with her?
There’s a singular dog tied to a rope, which is in turn wrapped around one of the table’s legs. He’s lying on his stomach just within the shade provided by the table itself and she thinks he’s likely a hunting dog, though an old one. A pet now, perhaps, or otherwise this is likely to be his last hunt, and he’ll be lucky to do much more than sniff out a rabbit. Still, his tongue is hanging out of his mouth as he pants in the building heat of the day, and he lifts his ears eagerly when she steps close and bends down at the knees to reach forward and scratch at the fur between his tall, floppy ears. His tail whips back and forth with speed, smacking into the table, once, twice.
The men’s voices had quieted as she approached, but they’re silent now, as if her presence has shocked them into stopping their conversation entirely.
She doesn’t look at them. She doesn’t look at Harwin. Not yet. Instead, heart beating recklessly fast in her chest, she keeps her eyes on the dog, who seems happy with the attention he’s being given even if it’s nothing more than a way for her to stall. She allows herself a moment, then reminds herself to breathe, and stands back up, looking directly into Harwin’s eyes.
They’re stunningly familiar, from the soft brown color to the very shape of them, and she finds herself frozen in her staring. Even the way his brow furrows with confusion is a fond memory that reaches to take hold of her. For all that he’s younger than she remembers him last, he already has wrinkles on his forehead from the way he furrows his brow all the time. Jacaerys had, past childhood, inherited the habit. Luke and Baela had often made of him for it.
Rhaenyra laughs, just a short sound that’s nearly punched out of her in its rapidity. She clamps her mouth shut, but she cannot stop her smile at the memory of her children, happy and carefree before everything had changed.
“Ser Harwin,” she says, finally, and she thinks one of the men with Harwin has said something, but she can’t for the life of her focus on anything but him, the way his hair is short and curling around his neck and ears, the way his jaw is covered in soft, dark shadow, as if he had shaved recently but not so recently that his beard hasn’t already started to grow in again. She has run her hands along that jaw more times than she can remember, soft and yet chiseled beneath her touch.
He had dragged that jaw along her skin as he’d kissed her, and she’d had the marks that beard had left on her skin reminding her of his touch for days afterward.
Harwin’s deep voice sounds from above her, tall as he is. “Princess,” he says, voice soft and gentle despite his build. Perhaps one would assume Harwin to be gruff, what with his height and the breadth of his shoulders, but they would be wrong. Despite his clear strength, there is no man so gentle as Harwin. She knows it intimately.
He lowers his head in a short gesture of respect, much the same way his father had done that very morning. “I see Lord Orys has caught your attention.”
He’s looking at her, too, and somehow his eyes are already filled with fondness for her. For her, even if it is just because she is his princess and future queen, rather than because she is his lover and future wife. She wonders if she’d have even been able to recognize that soft fondness if she didn’t already know him. If she hadn’t already spent years with him—spent years falling in love with him.
She thought she’d be lost, but somehow, she isn’t. It’s Harwin. She knows Harwin, even if that wouldn’t make sense to anyone else.
With that realization, it’s as if the world has suddenly sharpened and gained back color that she hadn’t realized had faded. She had missed him. Gods, but she had missed him and now he was here, right in front of her. She feels as though she can breathe again, instead of gasping for air. She can’t help the laugh that escapes her but this time, she doesn’t bother to try and stop it, her devastating bout of anxiety gone. The dog, standing up on all four legs after her, nudges her hand with his nose and starts to lick at her fingers in a hopeful request for her attention. She rubs a hand over his head, rubbing gently between his ears, but she keeps her eyes on Harwin as she asks through a grin, “You named him Lord Orys?”
“I wasn’t the one to name him, Princess, but it’s a fine enough name for a hunting dog, I should think.”
Heart fluttering in her chest, she asks, “Would you walk with me, ser? I should like to explore the camp, but I shouldn’t like to get lost, and you seem an able enough companion.”
He raises an eyebrow—maybe because it would be quite the feat to get lost within the relatively small camp, or maybe because there are many more reasonable chaperones and potential walking companions present, including several members of her father’s Kingsguard whom she has so far managed to evade—and she holds back a comment and teasing laugh both about the way his brow furrows in confusion. He nods shortly, putting arrow he’d been holding back down on the table in front of him. “Of course, Princess. I would be honored.”
He is one of the only men who could say such a thing so easily and have her believe he means the words.
The other men at the table give communicative glances towards each other, but say nothing as Harwin nods to them, giving them a curt order to continue preparing for the hunt. He comes around the table and, though she can sense the slightest hesitation in his step, follows her lead as they begin to walk. They stay next to each other, not close enough to touch, but close enough to court idea of it and even brush up against one another when several young children run past them, one of them holding a wooden sword aloft as he yells.
She grins at the sight.
“What house are those boys from, do you think?”
Harwin pauses, and then says, “Piper, by the look of them. They’re young though and I didn’t see a sigil, so I could be wrong. House Smallwood, perhaps.”
Rhaenyra takes a wide step ahead to get in front of Harwin, spinning so that she’s facing him, though she continues walking—backwards, with her hands behind her back. She can’t keep the smile off her face, and she asks Harwin, whose mouth has quirked up at the corner in amusement, “And do you think they’ll fare well in the hunt, the little Lords Piper or Smallwood?”
“I’m afraid not,” Harwin says, laughing. “Wooden swords don’t do much during a hunt.”
“No?” Rhaenyra grins. “A Valyrian steel sword would do better, I imagine.”
Harwin laughs louder, and says, “Better than a wooden one, certainly, but a sword wouldn’t be many men’s first choice in weaponry during a hunt, Princess. Spears and bows are far more likely to bring down prey.”
Rhaenyra slows her feet, and stops. Harwin stops as well, still watching her with that soft, quirked smile and his wrinkled brow.
“Prey.” Rhaenyra says the word slowly, stretching it out. She swallows, her eyes meeting his and locking on them. With a rapid increase in the speed of her heartbeat, she asks, “And what does a man prefer to hunt, Ser Harwin?”
His eyes widen, just a fraction. She feels heat bloom in her lower abdomen, spreading quickly throughout her body until she’s sure even her pale cheeks have gone red with it. She knows that she’s acting… forward. She knows. It’s the giddiness of being a girl, unmarried and eager for courtship swelling inside her the way it had when she truly was seven-and-ten, giggling with the innocence of it all. If Alicent were to overhear Rhaenyra now, she’d be scandalized enough with her behavior for the whole of the court, and there are dozens of lords, ladies, knights and servants alike all around them, in their tents and walking the ground as she is, taking advantage of the day.
Harwin clears his throat, and answers, “Ah, the best prizes would be stag and boar, though many will be most pleased with rabbit and doe. Pheasant is common, though bird hunting requires… a different skill set.”
“And what of a dragon? Does that require a different skill set as well?”
He looks at her steadily, his eyes never leaving hers. There are people all around them, moving about, but all she can see is him. Finally, after a long, anxiety-ridden moment, he says, “I shouldn’t think a man would dare attempt it. Surely dragons are the ones to do the hunting.”
“Of course,” Rhaenyra says, tongue wetting her bottom lip as she finally breaks their eye contact. She spins around to begin walking again, face flushed, heart still beating rapidly in her chest. After she hears him begin to follow her, she glances at him and says with a certain amount of pride, “I’ve killed a boar before, you know.”
There’s hardly a pause before, “A boar, princess? Did you shoot it?”
She hums, and then glances at him as she replies, “No. Its arrival was quite a surprise and all I had on me was a dagger. I think I’d stabbed it near twenty times before it finally died. I suppose my kingsguard at the time may have managed a few strikes upon it as well, but the killing blow was certainly mine.”
Harwin looks at her, his eyes narrowed, but his head is nodding as though in agreement with her story, “Quite the huntress you are then, Princess. A boar is a worthy kill. They are particularly vicious animals.”
She huffs wryly. “Hardly, compared to a dragon, but thank you, nonetheless. I was drenched in its blood afterward. It took days for the red to wash out—even from my hair.”
“I could well imagine that,” he says, and she has to bite her lip when his gaze falls on her hair with something akin to admiration before he glances away again, ever respectful.
They spend the rest of their walk making a game out of identifying all the House sigils they can see, and guessing in quiet voices what that particular house will manage to catch or kill during the hunt, if anything at all. She asks him what he had liked to do at Harrenhal, before he travelled to King’s Landing with his father. It’s a question she had never asked him before. In spite of the years that they had spent together, their time together had been far too short, stolen moments and publicly pretending nonchalance and ignorance. When they had had time to indulge in simple conversation, they had always avoided the truth that, eventually, he would have to return to the Riverlands as his father’s heir to Harrenhal. Eventually, he would have to take a wife and give her trueborn children that would call him father and bear his name.
They would have been children, his children, but they would not have been Rhaenyra’s. She would have been unable to claim them, nor treat them as her own. She would have been unable to hold them when they cried, nor play with them as they laughed, nor sing them sweet lullabies when it was time for them to sleep. It was an ache in her heart that she’d never wished to dwell upon, knowing well that it was the stabbing wound she already inflicted upon Harwin each and every day.
She laughs uproariously through his story of being forced to attend pretend ladies’ teas with his sisters, badgered into wearing a silken pink robe and bonnet for the occasion. It reminds her of one of the rare times when he had been able to take off his armor and gold cloak in her personal chambers and play the roaring monster on all-fours, bearing the brunt of Jace and Luke’s practice swords as they played a game of knights and heroes.
She must turn away from him for a moment and breathe through the ache of the memory, her eyes closed tightly.
“Princess,” he says after a moment, voice hesitant, “my father had mentioned that you were unwell this morning. Are you—” He stops, and then when she opens her eyes and looks back at him, he finishes with, “I can accompany you back to the king’s tent, if you should need to rest.”
She isn’t sure how long their walk had already lasted, though it hardly felt like any time had passed at all. Still, it was probably time to return to her father. The guards might be sent out to search for her if she did not make an appearance in the King’s tent soon.
She sighs in defeat and says, “Yes, please do.”
Somehow, the walk to her father’s tent seems much shorter than walking away from it had. Harwin walks her there, and the closer they get, the more the surrounding gathered lords, ladies and knights begin to stare and whisper as they pass. Rhaenyra keeps her head high, well trained in such things, and Harwin—well, she’d half-think that Harwin doesn’t even notice the attention on them, if not for the way his neck is tense, and his fist is clenched by his side. Harwin likely isn’t used to such scrutiny, and people love to jump to conclusions. She pauses for a half a step, and then continues walking, considering that she may have actually made a mistake earlier, when she’d lied to Jason Lannister—she supposes it’s possible that he’d gone directly to her father in order to complain about her mystery betrothal.
If he had, this crowd of onlookers may indeed be hungry for gossip and rumor. She wants to curse, for here she is, dragging Harwin into the belly of the beast all over again.
Despite the uncomfortable interest of the people around them, Harwin walks her all the way to the entrance before he says, “I’ll be here, if you have need of another walk and desire the company.” He smiles at her, charming without hardly trying, and her breath catches again. She must stare at him for too long, for his smile falters, and he says, “I hope you find a comfortable place to rest, Princess,” before casting his eyes to the people watching and listening in.
She doesn’t particularly care who overhears her as she says, “Rhaenyra.”
He blinks. “Princess?”
“Rhaenyra,” she repeats. “I’d have you call me by my name, ser.”
To his credit, he doesn’t make her say it again. His mouth curves into a gentle smile, and he simply repeats, “Rhaenyra then.”
“I’ll take you up on your offer… Harwin. I promise.”
He didn’t offer her the same intimacy of using his name, but from the still-present smile on his face, she doesn’t think he minds.