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mirrorwitches) wrote2023-07-12 12:33 pm
mirrorwitches) wrote2023-07-12 12:33 pm
(hotd) no democracy, chapter five
NO DEMOCRACY, CHAPTER FIVE
🐉masterpost🐉
Queen and prince and prince consort and lady sit on the hill above the Kingsroad and watch the sun glint silver off the two parallel false rivers: the shore of the Gods Eye and the steady flow of the spears of Queen Rhaenyra’s first great progress winding around it.
It’s a carefully orchestrated show, a royal progress. The crown’s might must be precisely coordinated to achieve the most impressive display. Arriving at Harrenhal, Daemon insisted they wanted both strains of her martial prowess—the men-at-arms she can command and the dragons—to descend on this most famed of keeps, most formidable of the vanquished, at once. But dragons are much faster.
Setting out from King’s Landing there was an initial sense of freedom. No longer the looming press of close-set crowded buildings or the labyrinthine corridors of the Red Keep. Open fields of wheat flowing away in either direction under a blue expanse of sky, sky open to the wings of their mounts. Fly they did, the four of them—Daemon, Rhaenyra, Laena and Laenor—and sometimes Rhaenys too, but to the great snake of the baggage train they must return. They could not alight at their destination in advance—quite safe, they’d be, with four dragons, with Vhagar alone, really—but lacking in a certain majesty. The fiction of diplomacy ripped away, if they landed amidst the black towers of Harren’s halls with nothing but fire made flesh, ironically more threatening, balder in its force than when accompanied by these other, more burdensome proofs of power. Often they stay with the relentless stream of humanity, family, councilors, courtiers, servants, knights, while the dragons range wide overhead, going to unknown ends before drawing the night in with the them as the march halts for the evening, coming with the bats and the dark, calling to each other so the horses whicker nervously and, every night, no matter how common the sight must be by now, the encampment taking shape shudders to a standstill in erecting their tents and lighting their fires to watch the dragons return from across the many waters to their riders.
Close to their destination, the last distance to be traversed in the course of the morning precise from the view of the five ruined sooty teeth thrusting upward from across the lake they will wind around, they awake and fly ahead, circling over the keep—the vast darkness of the towers, the marks of Balerion’s flame swallowing the sunlight, the hall where is brother was made a king like the ribs of some colossal beast—its immensity turned minute on dragonback, as the Conqueror knew. Rhaenyra claims she saw Alicent’s fiery head darting out one of the lower windows as she craned her neck to look up at the source of the winged shadows that passed across her window, the future Lady of Harrenhal having gone ahead several weeks before to get her future seat in order to greet its queen, her father-in-law left behind in the capital as Hand to see to the running of the realm and her husband remaining there with his father as standing Commander of the City Watch while all living Targaryens showed themselves to their subjects. The unknown inhabitants frozen with their gazes skyward amidst the tumbled stones were like ants to Daemon’s eye, but how well he knows that the sight of love is sharper.
Having made those stones tremble in remembered horror, they then flew to this outcrop to wait for the rest of the progress to catch up, dragonflesh steaming in the cool morning air, in order to time it perfectly so that as they shake the foundations of Harren’s seat when each mounted dragon alights on one of the five towers the reverberations drown out the thus redundant brassy announcements of the heralds.
Tumbled stone from some longer vanished fort of the First Men sits strewn about this lonely promontory, now convenient seats for Targaryens asses as they bide their time. Daemon lowers himself onto one, and Rhaenyra plops herself on his knee.
He doesn’t stiffen up as he did the first time she did this in front of others, one night in her chambers with the queen’s little circle, her cousins that sit on their own ruined slab, Laenor’s lover, Alicent and Harwin, where she’d laughed and said, “They all know,” and Daemon had flushed anyway, an embarrassing bright spark in his chest at the way she claimed him when she could, with the same unselfconscious as she had sat on his lap as a little girl. Laenor had just rolled his eyes and smiled, and Laena and Joffrey and Harwin had laughed, and Alicent had looked a little awkward but smiled too as Rhaenyra swayed drunkenly on her new perch, and Daemon’s hands came up to keep her from toppling off, as one arm wraps around her now just for the pleasure of it as with the other hand he unhooks his drinking flask from his belt and unplugs it, holds it to her lips so she can drink gratefully as he rubs at the back of her neck under her coiled braid, feeling that warm flush again at being seen with her as something more than just her uncle, even just to their cousins.
“I miss this,” Rhaenyra says when she's had her fill and handed the nearly empty flask back to him, his spoiled baby. “Flying. Poor Syrax has been so neglected.”
“It's far better than just flying over Blackwater Bay for the untold time,” Laena agrees. “To see new things, new places.”
On this hillside, the wind echoing eerily off the stones when it can make its way around the great bulk of four dragons, the steam off their forms mingling with the last of the morning mists they burn away with their heat, the prince consort lays his head in his sister’s lap.
“If you marry the Sealord’s son, you’ll get to see new things. Braavos! Daemon’s been, he's told me about it. He says it's fascinating,” Rhaenyra says in a tone of forced cheerfulness.
Corlys may have achieved a triumph and made his eldest prince consort, but he still has a beautiful, unwed daughter, six-and-ten, of Targaryen blood on her mother’s side and of pure Valyrian lineage on his, the rider of the oldest and largest dragon in the world. She needs to be married off. The Lord of the Tides, a prince of the seas, has begun negotiations with the Sealord of Braavos to wed Laena to his son, pursuing the making of his own kingdom of the waves, one that will bring him his own immortality without making him a breaker of faith. From what Daemon’s gathered, Laena is ambivalent.
“One new place. I will go to my husband, and there I will stay,” Laena counters, strained. “I do want to see it. But not if it means—is it an interesting city, cousin, this possible new home of mine?”
Laena seems to bully a return to her usual high spirits with all the considerable force of her strong will, aiming a brilliant smile in Daemon’s direction.
“It is. It's better than the Vale, certainly. But I doubt if I would have wanted to go there any more than I did Runestone.”
“You'll have Vhagar,” Rhaenyra tries again. “You could see all of Essos!”
“My husband might have something to say to that.”
“Husbands can be quite manageable.”
“Quite, wife,” Laenor mumbles, from under the arm he's thrown across his eye to block out the sun, still groggy from his late night dicing and carousing with the Velaryon men-at-arms.
“You have Vhagar. He can try to stop you if he likes.”
“And who stops you from taking to Syrax whenever you like?”
“Duty,” Rhaenyra says. “To the Seven Kingdoms.”
“Exactly.”
“What is a Sealord’s son to that?”
“Exactly. I have Vhagar, and yet—” Laena cuts herself off, and pulls hard enough on her brother’s fingers as she toys with them that he yelps.
Rhaenyra chews on her cheek, looking at her cousin with love and concern. “You don’t have to, Laena. You know that. I know it’s what your father wishes, and I know how that counts for you, believe me, I do, but no one can make you, not as long as I live.”
“I know, Rhaenyra. I do,” Laena responds with a more honest smile, clearly a brave effort, a bit watery. “But what else is there? To remain your lady forever? Never to marry or have children?”
“If you like. You know I would prefer that, having you all to myself.”
“Quite so, wife,” Laenor says, removing his arm from his face and trying to catch his sister’s eye. He is not ambivalent about the prospect of his sister’s marriage: he hates it.
“But not never, of course, if that’s what you want. Perhaps you’ll fall in love.”
“With some dashing hedge night? Some petty lord’s son?” Laena gazed away to where the mists still rend themselves about the jagged heights of Harrenhal’s towers. “A free choice, indulged by my queen. It didn’t work out so well for Rhaena.”
Rhaena Targaryen, Laena’s kin on both sides. Queen in West and East, brother’s loving wife, uncle’s unwilling bride, married for love of her husband’s sister, the widow of Harrenhal. Jaehaerys said she died the day their brother Aegon fell on the shore of this lake, to which she’d only returned to take up residence as one of its uneasy ghosts.
Rhaenyra surges up from Daemon’s lap and hauls Laena to her feet by the hands, Laenor saying, “Ow, fuck, Rhaenyra,” when his cushion is thus withdrawn and his head finds stone for a pillow with a thunk as Laena rises gratefully and starts to giggles as Rhaenyra trips them into a dance, spins them around, cavorting her out of her gloom.
“You’ll be lady of one of the great cities of the world! You’ll have Vhagar, and I have Syrax, and you’ll fly to visit me and I’ll fly to visit you and we’ll fly together to Driftmark to play in the surf together as we did as children.You won’t be cast out. The queen’s cousin, beloved aunt to a host of Targaryen princesses and princes, we’ll go together to the Dragonmont to pick out eggs for your babes—”
Laena halts so suddenly only their inborn grace and strong young legs stop them from falling to the earth.
“Oh, Rhaenyra. You can’t!”
“What? Why not?” Rhaenyra laughs, out of breath.
“Vhagar with me in Braavos is bad enough, risk enough. Perhaps one of my children will claim her. Vhagar in the hand of another power…but she will be outnumbered by your Targaryen dragonlings—”
“You’re a Targaryen!”
“On my mother’s side. And I am a Velaryon also. I am of the sea, the Sealady, that’s fitting—” she squeezes their still joined hands “—my children will be their father’s, Braavosi too, and for the sake of the Targaryens and Velaryons both, the last embers of Old Valyria—”
Laena and Rhaenyra blink their shining eyes at each other. “Oh,” his niece says in a small voice.
Caraxes raises his head. Daemon isn’t looking at him but he senses it, in a way he couldn’t explain, just as when he faced the Crabfeeder’s army in his last mad drive he had sensed Caraxes above the cloud cover waiting to descend even before he scythed down and doused them in flame, even before he gives one of his strange lonely trills and they all turn their heads to see Daemon’s mother’s dragon swooping low over the head of the progress, which has reached the gates of Harrenhal at last.
“It’s time,” Laena says, bringing their entwined hands up to her mouth and pressing a kiss to Rhaenyra’s knuckles before she moves swiftly over the grass to his father’s dragon, and Daemon watches as the slim form of her current rider takes shape in the black pool of her ancient eye as it opens and knows her.
-
That night after the feasting is done—even the enormity of a royal progress swallowed by the great ruined hall, dwarfed between the ceiling of stars crafted by no lesser artisan than the Black Dread—when Daemon comes to the queen’s chambers, she and Harrenhal’s lady sit giggling on the edge of the bed, a laughter delirious with being held back for so long. In the ceremonial welcome in the courtyard, Alicent playing the great lady and offering her queen her bread and salt, their lips had twitched at the absurdity, the nagging sense of playacting in their mothers’ clothes.
“I can go,” Daemon offers. He’d seen the way Rhaenyra had barely held herself back from flinging her arms around Alicent’s neck after their much lamented fortnight’s separation, aided to dignity only by the fact it was at least not four years, but now she’s given in, sitting behind her with her head hooked over Alicent’s shoulder, arms around her waist as they laugh. “If you wish to do Lady Strong the honor of having her as your bedmate for the night…”
Both their faces go red, in Rhaenyra’s case redder than her adventures with Mysaria might have let one believe. Then again, he supposes it is exactly that which has stripped from her the innocence with which she once sighed proudly Daemon, around the age of ten, that she had the most beautiful girl in the realm for a bedmate.
“No, no, come in,” Rhaenyra insists.
“Oh! But I didn’t get to tell you…” Alicent starts to say.
Rhaenyra separates them so she can look into her friend’s face. “Tell me what? Nevermind, Daemon, leave.”
Alicent darts her eyes at Daemon.
“Very well,” Daemon agrees. On his way up he’d spied the Velaryon siblings slipping out a gate along with Joffrey Lonmouth, clearly in route to slum it among the soldiers camping amidst the ruins. He’d just join their drinking and gaming alone if she wished to swap secrets with Alicent rather than join him. She’d earned the lads’ undying loyalty with her willingness to at least attempt to match her husband drink for drink on the nights whenever she eagerly joined him in his taste for the charms of rough, masculine company. “You seem well, Lady Strong, so I trust the ghosts have not proven too hungry.”
“Yes, is it haunted after all?” Rhaenyra asks, distracted by her typical desire for ghoulish tales.
“I’ve found them very congenial hosts, thus far,” Alicent says with a laugh, and his niece’s eyes ping between them, a small pout on her lips as she picks up a secret current. “They bear my residence in their domain quite peaceably. Then again, for now it is only temporary. I suppose he can stay. You’ll tell him anyway.”
“Not if you ask me not to!”
“He’ll know soon regardless, along with everyone else.” Alicent takes a breath. “I’m with child. A few months along. I knew toward the beginning of the progress, but I waited in case I lost the babe early, like the last time.” Daemon had not known of this. He looks at Rhaenyra, whose face is very still. Alicent bites her lip. “I didn’t want you to be upset…”
“Why would I be upset?”
“I know you were last time, because you feel such pressure, naturally…”
“Are you upset?”
“Why would I be upset?”
“You were last time!”
“Things are different now.”
“So you’re happy?”
“What are you talking about, Rhaenyra?” Alicent huffs, exasperated.
“Are you happy? You couldn’t be happy last time, but —are you happy about it, now?”
“Of course I am.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because!” Alicent splutters. “You are baffling sometimes. Of course I am. I will give my husband a child. An heir.”
“Your husband. So you are happy for your husband’s sake, not your own?”
“Our marriage will be blessed with a child. Children are gifts from the gods.”
“How would we know? Neither of us had younger siblings. Or much experience with babies generally. You almost dropped the youngest Lady Wylde’s youngest.”
“It was heavier than I expected! And from such a small woman…”
“Harwin’s children will be even larger,” Rhaenyra says darkly.
Alicent blanches a bit but says stoutly, “I am happy, Rhaenyra. Would you not be?”
“Now, maybe. I must provide my realm with heirs. My heirs. I am the queen. This is my duty.”
“Yes, of course! Of course you want children!”
“Do I?” Rhaenyra says obnoxiously. “Why? Do you?”
“You just said it!”
“That I need heirs. Like my father.”
“Do you?”
“What?”
“Want children?”
“Do you?” Rhaenyra whirls around and whips at Daemon.
“Yes,” Daemon answers without even having to think about it.
Rhaenyra is brought up short by the firmness of his answer. “Why? I mean, you don’t…”
“Need heirs? No, but you do. And I live to serve.”
“That’s not want. That’s duty.”
“One can want a duty. You wanted to be queen, yes?”
“What’s wrong with duty? Where does want have to come into it?” Alicent says somewhat hysterically.
“Rhaenyra has these quaint notions.”
“So you just want to serve the realm. Like my mother.”
“Is that not enough?”
“I asked a question first.”
“The continuation of the Targaryen line. That’s what I want.”
“Not a want. A need.”
“But don’t you want that too?” Alicent says.
“Yes,” she agrees. “But that doesn’t help you.”
“Thanks for the concern,” Alicent sniffs. “But I don’t need help.”
“You said yes so quickly, uncle. Yes, you want children. I’ve never thought about it before. Want doesn’t come into it.”
“Well, I know. I was not able to have children. At least not…”
“Legitimate children. I can’t help you with that, sadly.”
“Targaryen children,” he corrects. “Not really. I would never be allowed to give any bastard child of mine an egg, as you well know. And I wonder if Rhea had borne any child of mine, if they would have…”
“Really?” Alicent says in disgust. “Why bother to reproduce at all if you can’t give it one of your eggs, that’s what you think?”
“See,” Rhaenyra says. “That doesn’t help Alicent either.”
“I don’t need help!” Alicent bursts out. “Gods, you’re in an odd mood. This is why I was scared to tell you.”
“Oh, poor Alicent, I’m sorry, because you knew I’d be just horrible—”
“No, I just know—it’s difficult for you—”
“I’m sorry,” Rhaenyra says, pulling her back into a tight embrace. “I just want you to be happy, and if you are, I’m happy, even if you don’t know why—”
“I am, I am—”
Daemon watches Alicent’s face over Rhaenyra’s shoulder as she repeats this in bewildered tones. Where does want have to come into it? Or happiness, for that matter. The second you were asked to think about either of those things, by this wonderful, maddening girl—
When Alicent has left, Rhaenyra stares moodily out the window at the pinpricks of light, cookfires amidst the black stone that swallows the black even of night.
“I wouldn’t have to think about it,” she says to Daemon’s reflection as he comes up behind her, the reflected fires swimming over his face, rising and falling in the glass.
“Think about what?”
“Whether I want it. And how it doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me.”
“Yes. Which is funny. We wouldn’t even be having this conversation if I’d been betrothed to you like I wanted as a child. You would have gotten a child on me without either of us ever thinking twice about it. Part of me wants that. Not to have to choose.”
“To have children or not.”
“Which is no choice at all. It’s no choice, even if I want it. Even if I want Targaryen babies. We mounted up to fly to Harrenhal this morning and when Syrax launched into the air I nearly started crying at how much I wanted it, our baby, and choosing an egg for her together—”
“Her?”
“I want a girl,” Rhaenyra says. “I know I should want a boy, first—but I want a girl.” I want: easy, so easy. “And then I almost started crying about how awful it was that Laena wouldn’t know that. Can you imagine it, having children who don’t—of course you can. It must be awful to have a child and know they’ll never know—what it is like—”
“Alicent is right. Most people do it.”
“But not many who’ve known.”
“Jaehaerys didn’t allow most of his girls dragons.” Saera, weeping in his arms. She’d stumbled away from her brother’s dragon after her one and only time in the air, away from her brother’s son, and she’d struggled in his embrace for a moment when he caught up to her before giving in and burying her face in his chest, and then they’d fucked right there on the ground, for the very last time on a hill outside the Black Walls, in the protective curve of Caraxes’ wing.
“It’s leaving Laena’s children—my children’s cousins—” our baby, Rhaenyra said to Daemon, and beloved aunt to a host of Targaryen princesses and princes, she said to Laena, with no contradiction in her mind “—defenseless. I shouldn’t allow it, fuck the realm—”
Once he claimed Caraxes, a dragon turned out to be no more defense than a dagger. But it might have helped Saera escape the motherhouse, where her father had the body he declared a ruin scoured by leering old women. Daemon only ever met Saera at all because he had a dragon. It didn’t save his mother from her death. It is the only reason Rhaenyra is now queen.
“Rhaenyra—”
“I’m so stupid.”
“You aren’t. You’re right. It is awful. Unnatural.” A child of his not to know what it was to be more, to have this other body, so much greater than its own fragile, bounded one. To not be a dragon.
“Still. I am the realm. I am for the use of the realm, but at least I am it. I want it, even though it terrifies me. I wanted the throne even if it meant giving you up. I want you, even if it was never possible for me to want anything else. I’m at peace with most of that. But this…royal wombs. I hated it. I wanted to run from the room. Because I knew that I too would end up there, and maybe I knew that I would not always hate all of it. But I would regret that girl—wild, free. I would give her up. I’d kill her. And that was even before my mother died. It feels like I should fight where she couldn’t. You want children?” Rhaenyra asks again.
He puts his hands on Rhaenyra’s shoulders, runs his thumb over the elegant bone beneath the soft skin. “Viserys told me—if you were my sister, I would marry you, and you would give me children. He told me that what married people did to beget children felt good. That was why there were so many children in the world, children like baby Aegon. Then he said he’d show me what married people did, and how good it felt. I lost track somewhere in there. I knew all about giving your brother babies. That’s how we’d had little Aegon, that’s how I was a big brother. I thought, if we did what married people do, and if you gave your brother babies—I thought I would give him babies. I asked at the fucking dinner table, I said it was taking a long time, when would I give him a baby? Everyone laughed, and I cried when I realized I never would, that baby Aegon was dead but there would be no more, but I wanted there to be, I wanted it so much. He laughed too, but he was furious. That night—he laughed some more, he mocked me, what a little fool I was, he said here, you have this little cock, brother, don’t be a fool, a little cock, see it, there will be no babies—”
Daemon gives her his want, and it’s something horrible. Rhaenyra lets out a deep breath and relaxes under his palms.
She turns around. “The ingredients I brought from King’s Landing for moon tea are almost gone. I can get more easily enough, but I thought—perhaps I wouldn’t. You imagined killing me,” she whispers. “This might. This might kill me.”
“I never could have.” He doesn’t have to say it, but he needs to. Shouldn’t he have fought it? He could only imagine it, and not for long. How much more often had he imagined not killing her, of making more life in her. “I wanted to be free of you. I thought that’s what I wanted, sometimes. But I want this.”
He would kill for his family. He might die for his family. But Daemon was not to do this, to make more life. Your little cock, and Daemon transformed to a barren, dead thing, as his brother wanted, and there was Aemma, Rhaenyra, fecund, alive, too alive, as his brother wanted, breeding more aliveness in them until they were dead. How Viserys would hate it, his dead thing putting new life in his girl, how terrified Daemon was, of making her a dead thing like him, how he couldn’t stop wanting it.
Rhaenyra nods. “Me too. But I want you to force me.”
It is Daemon’s turn to wonder. “Why?”
“I want it. I know it might kill me. I want it and yet it is my destiny, so how can I know if I want it? It doesn’t matter either way, because I still want it. So I want you to take what you want. I want you to make me take what I want. I want more dragons. I want my children to rule after me. I understand my father after all. I am brave enough to take on the risk for myself. And you will don your armor to defend them. You will be willing to die for it, when I command you.” Then she smiles sweetly at him and spits in his face. “I don’t want children,” she says fiercely. “I won’t have them, uncle.”
Daemon slowly wipes her from his face and seizes her by the hair with his wet hand, gives her head a chiding shake as she smirks. “What about the realm? What about House Targaryen?”
Rhaenyra shrugs, laughs. “What concern is that of mine?”
“You’re a perfect little idiot, aren’t you? It doesn’t matter what you fucking want. I’m disappointed. You are young, but I thought you would know your duty. But that’s what your uncle is for. To save you from yourself.”
He drags her back over to the bed and throws her on it.
“How fucking dare you! I’m your queen!”
“Yes. A foolish little girl made queen, and in need of some guidance. In need of a firm hand. I’m responsible for you.”
“Because my father is dead, you think you’re my father now?”
“That’s right. Daddy is going to show you what you’re good for.”
She fights to get up but he hauls her across his knee and flips up her nightgown. He brings his hand down hard on first one asscheek, then the other. She freezes in surprise. Daemon watches the blood rise to the surface of her skin with satisfaction. “A selfish fucking brat. This is what every man on that council longs to do, haul you across their knees and spank you to tears. But that’s my fucking job. So say your lesson after me: I’m going to take my breeding like a good girl.”
Rhaenyra seals her lips. “I…” Daemon says with another slap. “I know it hurts. I can keep going. I can make it so you can’t sit for a fucking week. I…”
Smack. “I,” Rhaenyra grits out.
Smack. “Am.”
Smack. “Going.”
Smack. “To.”
Smack. “Take.”
Smack. “My.”
Smack. “Breeding.”
Smack. “Like.”
Smack. “A.”
Smack. “Good.”
Smack. “Girl.”
While she’s still whimpering he ascertains from the wetness of her cunt pooling against his thigh that although this will hurt, he’ll have no problem getting into her. The competing heats: the tense band of her cunt immolating his cock, the marks from his hand radiating from her smarting ass searing his thighs. She lets out a guttural cry.
“No, no, no. You’ll kill me, you’ll kill me.”
Daemon starts to go soft. “Fuck, fuck.” He pulls out and screws his fingers into her, holds her open with a hand on her ass so his grip shows white in the red, rubs his dick back into service against the fading marks as he finds that sweet spot within her that makes her start to thrash.
“Don’t say that,” he says.
“You’ll kill me, and you’re too much of a coward to face it, daddy—”
That’s right. “I’m your father now. I don’t fucking care.” He fucks into her again. The silver flow of her hair rocks back and forth with his thrusts.
“He shouldn’t have been a fucking coward. He shouldn’t have been fucking weak. He should have come to my room and handled it himself. I know he thought about it,” she wrenches out on a sob. “Fuck. I know he did. I knew it.”
Her traitorous cunt tightens around him as her moans grown pained. “I know,” Daemon says. “I know, it’s alright.”
“It didn’t matter if he wasn’t there, he was there the whole time, breeding me, as you would have if you killed him, taken me to wife—my king, my king, please,” she gasps suddenly, and this time he’s grateful for the break as he stops and starts to withdraw. But Rhaenyra reaches back and grabs him by the hip, moves her hand back and rolls him into another thrust with a fistful of his ass. “No, please, just—why?”
Daemon moves in her slowly, kisses her on the ear. “Your mother was so beautiful, pregnant with you. I wanted to kiss her again. You were so beautiful. I don’t know much more about babies, they sent me away from you—I came back for your first birthday and I swear me and your mother spent hours counting your every eyelash. I want that, a baby I won’t be sent away from, I want to make a baby with my baby—”
He pulls out of her just long enough to flip her over, and she hisses as her ass makes contact with the sheets but widens her legs, and as he slides back in she says, “I like it when you’re inside me, nice and safe,” kissing his neck, his shoulder, everything she can reach of his scars. “It’s mine, your perfect cock, I’ll keep it safe—”
“It’s yours. My cock will give you a baby, my nice cock, your good friend, and you take such good care of it, that’s how I know. Can you be my big girl? My brave girl? You’ll always be my baby and I’ll take care of you, but I’ll need you to take care of our baby, the one I’m going to put in you, fuck, you’ll look beautiful. Our own world, a family, that’s what I want, I only know what it’s like because of you, and you’ll give it to me—”
“Yes, yes, I’m so glad you’re not my father, Daemon, fuck—uncle, I’m so glad you won’t be our baby’s father, not really, do you know what I mean—”
Just as his brother had wanted. He will and won't. As he is and is not hers. He will not father kings, but he will be the queen’s beloved uncle, always—
She tries to shove a pillow under her ass after and yelps, so Daemon carefully tilts her hips up to slide it under her with more gentleness. She hooks her hands under her knees and pulls them toward her chest. It’s a heady sight, the puffy lips of her cunt after taking him, the way she clenches her pussy to hold in his come. He puts his thumb to her clit and rubs at her and realizes why the maesters say that a woman reaching her release is said to help her conceive, as he watches the frantic spasms of her orgasm suck more of his spunk up into her womb. As he moves up to hold her she says in a tiny, shamed voice, “Can you get me the ingredients for my moon tea from the bag, uncle?” She smiles weakly. “I’m such—such a silly baby, but—”
He nods and then stops. He pushes her closed, lowered knees apart and with one hand parts her cunt and with the other starts to scoop what’s left of his come from her hole. It shines on his fingers as he holds them up to her mouth. She sucks it off his fingers with a little wheezing moan. He returns to this shattered vessel and draws forth another offering. He holds himself over Rhaenyra. She breathes heavily and slides her fingers along his to gather up the milky essence into her own hand and then she slathers it over his chest, right on his nipple, closes her eyes and feeds. Again and again they do this. “A little more, I know you have a little more for me,” he says and she pushes, her pelvic floor flexes and her pussy flutters to give him back what he gave her, so he can nourish her of himself, her lips wrapped in hungry desperate sucks at his breast.
-
By night they explore the ruins of Harrenhal together.
In the Widow’s Tower, the rustling of bats in the eaves, above the rotted wood of Rhaena’s lonely bed. Rhaenyra slides out of her white gown, fringed now in dust. When she emerges from it she is naked save for her necklace and a little stoppered vial in her hand.
“There is a woman here—she’s said to be a woods witch. Alicent says she’s wise with potions, at least. Gave her something that took away her morning sickness entirely. She also said she’s known to be Lyonel Strong’s bastard from before his marriage. Alicent’s good-sister, then. Anyway, she made me this.” Before Daemon can stop her she knocks back its contents into her waiting idiot throat. A bastard woods witch, for fuck’s sake. “It will put me to sleep for several hours. As if I was dead. I’ll be dead. And then I’ll be alive again. And while I’m dead, you are going to fuck a baby into me,” she murmurs dreamily, swaying in place, eyes already drifting shut. “Right here,” she says, touching her stomach just below her ribs. “I will carry her right here, right below my heart. Safe.”
Then she falls backwards onto the decayed mattress.
She looks dead. As dead as when he used to imagine killing her and being free of her, of this unbearable love that makes his heart thunder with terror—this might kill me—even as he pushes into her body, still warm with how recently she’d departed it. What a joke. He’d keep her body around. He’d search every book in every library in the world for the archaic Valyrian magic to preserve her like this, for the unholy blood ritual that could call her back to this beloved body so she might animate it again.
He places his open palm between her breasts as he fucks her, and he can almost feel the thud of her heart through the thinness of the skin there. He wishes, sometimes, he could have her that completely. Safe below his heart. He wishes he could eat her right up.
After he comes it frightens him. He lays his head over her heart and listens to its strong unceasing beat against his ear for hours, and he never sleeps once until she begins to stir, so he can watch the miracle transpire.
“But it didn’t,” he whispers as she’s waking back up, hard again for her as she blinks her eyes open and smiles at him, as she opens her arms to him and he crawls into them, into her. “I was alive, you’re alive—”
🐉masterpost🐉
Queen and prince and prince consort and lady sit on the hill above the Kingsroad and watch the sun glint silver off the two parallel false rivers: the shore of the Gods Eye and the steady flow of the spears of Queen Rhaenyra’s first great progress winding around it.
It’s a carefully orchestrated show, a royal progress. The crown’s might must be precisely coordinated to achieve the most impressive display. Arriving at Harrenhal, Daemon insisted they wanted both strains of her martial prowess—the men-at-arms she can command and the dragons—to descend on this most famed of keeps, most formidable of the vanquished, at once. But dragons are much faster.
Setting out from King’s Landing there was an initial sense of freedom. No longer the looming press of close-set crowded buildings or the labyrinthine corridors of the Red Keep. Open fields of wheat flowing away in either direction under a blue expanse of sky, sky open to the wings of their mounts. Fly they did, the four of them—Daemon, Rhaenyra, Laena and Laenor—and sometimes Rhaenys too, but to the great snake of the baggage train they must return. They could not alight at their destination in advance—quite safe, they’d be, with four dragons, with Vhagar alone, really—but lacking in a certain majesty. The fiction of diplomacy ripped away, if they landed amidst the black towers of Harren’s halls with nothing but fire made flesh, ironically more threatening, balder in its force than when accompanied by these other, more burdensome proofs of power. Often they stay with the relentless stream of humanity, family, councilors, courtiers, servants, knights, while the dragons range wide overhead, going to unknown ends before drawing the night in with the them as the march halts for the evening, coming with the bats and the dark, calling to each other so the horses whicker nervously and, every night, no matter how common the sight must be by now, the encampment taking shape shudders to a standstill in erecting their tents and lighting their fires to watch the dragons return from across the many waters to their riders.
Close to their destination, the last distance to be traversed in the course of the morning precise from the view of the five ruined sooty teeth thrusting upward from across the lake they will wind around, they awake and fly ahead, circling over the keep—the vast darkness of the towers, the marks of Balerion’s flame swallowing the sunlight, the hall where is brother was made a king like the ribs of some colossal beast—its immensity turned minute on dragonback, as the Conqueror knew. Rhaenyra claims she saw Alicent’s fiery head darting out one of the lower windows as she craned her neck to look up at the source of the winged shadows that passed across her window, the future Lady of Harrenhal having gone ahead several weeks before to get her future seat in order to greet its queen, her father-in-law left behind in the capital as Hand to see to the running of the realm and her husband remaining there with his father as standing Commander of the City Watch while all living Targaryens showed themselves to their subjects. The unknown inhabitants frozen with their gazes skyward amidst the tumbled stones were like ants to Daemon’s eye, but how well he knows that the sight of love is sharper.
Having made those stones tremble in remembered horror, they then flew to this outcrop to wait for the rest of the progress to catch up, dragonflesh steaming in the cool morning air, in order to time it perfectly so that as they shake the foundations of Harren’s seat when each mounted dragon alights on one of the five towers the reverberations drown out the thus redundant brassy announcements of the heralds.
Tumbled stone from some longer vanished fort of the First Men sits strewn about this lonely promontory, now convenient seats for Targaryens asses as they bide their time. Daemon lowers himself onto one, and Rhaenyra plops herself on his knee.
He doesn’t stiffen up as he did the first time she did this in front of others, one night in her chambers with the queen’s little circle, her cousins that sit on their own ruined slab, Laenor’s lover, Alicent and Harwin, where she’d laughed and said, “They all know,” and Daemon had flushed anyway, an embarrassing bright spark in his chest at the way she claimed him when she could, with the same unselfconscious as she had sat on his lap as a little girl. Laenor had just rolled his eyes and smiled, and Laena and Joffrey and Harwin had laughed, and Alicent had looked a little awkward but smiled too as Rhaenyra swayed drunkenly on her new perch, and Daemon’s hands came up to keep her from toppling off, as one arm wraps around her now just for the pleasure of it as with the other hand he unhooks his drinking flask from his belt and unplugs it, holds it to her lips so she can drink gratefully as he rubs at the back of her neck under her coiled braid, feeling that warm flush again at being seen with her as something more than just her uncle, even just to their cousins.
“I miss this,” Rhaenyra says when she's had her fill and handed the nearly empty flask back to him, his spoiled baby. “Flying. Poor Syrax has been so neglected.”
“It's far better than just flying over Blackwater Bay for the untold time,” Laena agrees. “To see new things, new places.”
On this hillside, the wind echoing eerily off the stones when it can make its way around the great bulk of four dragons, the steam off their forms mingling with the last of the morning mists they burn away with their heat, the prince consort lays his head in his sister’s lap.
“If you marry the Sealord’s son, you’ll get to see new things. Braavos! Daemon’s been, he's told me about it. He says it's fascinating,” Rhaenyra says in a tone of forced cheerfulness.
Corlys may have achieved a triumph and made his eldest prince consort, but he still has a beautiful, unwed daughter, six-and-ten, of Targaryen blood on her mother’s side and of pure Valyrian lineage on his, the rider of the oldest and largest dragon in the world. She needs to be married off. The Lord of the Tides, a prince of the seas, has begun negotiations with the Sealord of Braavos to wed Laena to his son, pursuing the making of his own kingdom of the waves, one that will bring him his own immortality without making him a breaker of faith. From what Daemon’s gathered, Laena is ambivalent.
“One new place. I will go to my husband, and there I will stay,” Laena counters, strained. “I do want to see it. But not if it means—is it an interesting city, cousin, this possible new home of mine?”
Laena seems to bully a return to her usual high spirits with all the considerable force of her strong will, aiming a brilliant smile in Daemon’s direction.
“It is. It's better than the Vale, certainly. But I doubt if I would have wanted to go there any more than I did Runestone.”
“You'll have Vhagar,” Rhaenyra tries again. “You could see all of Essos!”
“My husband might have something to say to that.”
“Husbands can be quite manageable.”
“Quite, wife,” Laenor mumbles, from under the arm he's thrown across his eye to block out the sun, still groggy from his late night dicing and carousing with the Velaryon men-at-arms.
“You have Vhagar. He can try to stop you if he likes.”
“And who stops you from taking to Syrax whenever you like?”
“Duty,” Rhaenyra says. “To the Seven Kingdoms.”
“Exactly.”
“What is a Sealord’s son to that?”
“Exactly. I have Vhagar, and yet—” Laena cuts herself off, and pulls hard enough on her brother’s fingers as she toys with them that he yelps.
Rhaenyra chews on her cheek, looking at her cousin with love and concern. “You don’t have to, Laena. You know that. I know it’s what your father wishes, and I know how that counts for you, believe me, I do, but no one can make you, not as long as I live.”
“I know, Rhaenyra. I do,” Laena responds with a more honest smile, clearly a brave effort, a bit watery. “But what else is there? To remain your lady forever? Never to marry or have children?”
“If you like. You know I would prefer that, having you all to myself.”
“Quite so, wife,” Laenor says, removing his arm from his face and trying to catch his sister’s eye. He is not ambivalent about the prospect of his sister’s marriage: he hates it.
“But not never, of course, if that’s what you want. Perhaps you’ll fall in love.”
“With some dashing hedge night? Some petty lord’s son?” Laena gazed away to where the mists still rend themselves about the jagged heights of Harrenhal’s towers. “A free choice, indulged by my queen. It didn’t work out so well for Rhaena.”
Rhaena Targaryen, Laena’s kin on both sides. Queen in West and East, brother’s loving wife, uncle’s unwilling bride, married for love of her husband’s sister, the widow of Harrenhal. Jaehaerys said she died the day their brother Aegon fell on the shore of this lake, to which she’d only returned to take up residence as one of its uneasy ghosts.
Rhaenyra surges up from Daemon’s lap and hauls Laena to her feet by the hands, Laenor saying, “Ow, fuck, Rhaenyra,” when his cushion is thus withdrawn and his head finds stone for a pillow with a thunk as Laena rises gratefully and starts to giggles as Rhaenyra trips them into a dance, spins them around, cavorting her out of her gloom.
“You’ll be lady of one of the great cities of the world! You’ll have Vhagar, and I have Syrax, and you’ll fly to visit me and I’ll fly to visit you and we’ll fly together to Driftmark to play in the surf together as we did as children.You won’t be cast out. The queen’s cousin, beloved aunt to a host of Targaryen princesses and princes, we’ll go together to the Dragonmont to pick out eggs for your babes—”
Laena halts so suddenly only their inborn grace and strong young legs stop them from falling to the earth.
“Oh, Rhaenyra. You can’t!”
“What? Why not?” Rhaenyra laughs, out of breath.
“Vhagar with me in Braavos is bad enough, risk enough. Perhaps one of my children will claim her. Vhagar in the hand of another power…but she will be outnumbered by your Targaryen dragonlings—”
“You’re a Targaryen!”
“On my mother’s side. And I am a Velaryon also. I am of the sea, the Sealady, that’s fitting—” she squeezes their still joined hands “—my children will be their father’s, Braavosi too, and for the sake of the Targaryens and Velaryons both, the last embers of Old Valyria—”
Laena and Rhaenyra blink their shining eyes at each other. “Oh,” his niece says in a small voice.
Caraxes raises his head. Daemon isn’t looking at him but he senses it, in a way he couldn’t explain, just as when he faced the Crabfeeder’s army in his last mad drive he had sensed Caraxes above the cloud cover waiting to descend even before he scythed down and doused them in flame, even before he gives one of his strange lonely trills and they all turn their heads to see Daemon’s mother’s dragon swooping low over the head of the progress, which has reached the gates of Harrenhal at last.
“It’s time,” Laena says, bringing their entwined hands up to her mouth and pressing a kiss to Rhaenyra’s knuckles before she moves swiftly over the grass to his father’s dragon, and Daemon watches as the slim form of her current rider takes shape in the black pool of her ancient eye as it opens and knows her.
-
That night after the feasting is done—even the enormity of a royal progress swallowed by the great ruined hall, dwarfed between the ceiling of stars crafted by no lesser artisan than the Black Dread—when Daemon comes to the queen’s chambers, she and Harrenhal’s lady sit giggling on the edge of the bed, a laughter delirious with being held back for so long. In the ceremonial welcome in the courtyard, Alicent playing the great lady and offering her queen her bread and salt, their lips had twitched at the absurdity, the nagging sense of playacting in their mothers’ clothes.
“I can go,” Daemon offers. He’d seen the way Rhaenyra had barely held herself back from flinging her arms around Alicent’s neck after their much lamented fortnight’s separation, aided to dignity only by the fact it was at least not four years, but now she’s given in, sitting behind her with her head hooked over Alicent’s shoulder, arms around her waist as they laugh. “If you wish to do Lady Strong the honor of having her as your bedmate for the night…”
Both their faces go red, in Rhaenyra’s case redder than her adventures with Mysaria might have let one believe. Then again, he supposes it is exactly that which has stripped from her the innocence with which she once sighed proudly Daemon, around the age of ten, that she had the most beautiful girl in the realm for a bedmate.
“No, no, come in,” Rhaenyra insists.
“Oh! But I didn’t get to tell you…” Alicent starts to say.
Rhaenyra separates them so she can look into her friend’s face. “Tell me what? Nevermind, Daemon, leave.”
Alicent darts her eyes at Daemon.
“Very well,” Daemon agrees. On his way up he’d spied the Velaryon siblings slipping out a gate along with Joffrey Lonmouth, clearly in route to slum it among the soldiers camping amidst the ruins. He’d just join their drinking and gaming alone if she wished to swap secrets with Alicent rather than join him. She’d earned the lads’ undying loyalty with her willingness to at least attempt to match her husband drink for drink on the nights whenever she eagerly joined him in his taste for the charms of rough, masculine company. “You seem well, Lady Strong, so I trust the ghosts have not proven too hungry.”
“Yes, is it haunted after all?” Rhaenyra asks, distracted by her typical desire for ghoulish tales.
“I’ve found them very congenial hosts, thus far,” Alicent says with a laugh, and his niece’s eyes ping between them, a small pout on her lips as she picks up a secret current. “They bear my residence in their domain quite peaceably. Then again, for now it is only temporary. I suppose he can stay. You’ll tell him anyway.”
“Not if you ask me not to!”
“He’ll know soon regardless, along with everyone else.” Alicent takes a breath. “I’m with child. A few months along. I knew toward the beginning of the progress, but I waited in case I lost the babe early, like the last time.” Daemon had not known of this. He looks at Rhaenyra, whose face is very still. Alicent bites her lip. “I didn’t want you to be upset…”
“Why would I be upset?”
“I know you were last time, because you feel such pressure, naturally…”
“Are you upset?”
“Why would I be upset?”
“You were last time!”
“Things are different now.”
“So you’re happy?”
“What are you talking about, Rhaenyra?” Alicent huffs, exasperated.
“Are you happy? You couldn’t be happy last time, but —are you happy about it, now?”
“Of course I am.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because!” Alicent splutters. “You are baffling sometimes. Of course I am. I will give my husband a child. An heir.”
“Your husband. So you are happy for your husband’s sake, not your own?”
“Our marriage will be blessed with a child. Children are gifts from the gods.”
“How would we know? Neither of us had younger siblings. Or much experience with babies generally. You almost dropped the youngest Lady Wylde’s youngest.”
“It was heavier than I expected! And from such a small woman…”
“Harwin’s children will be even larger,” Rhaenyra says darkly.
Alicent blanches a bit but says stoutly, “I am happy, Rhaenyra. Would you not be?”
“Now, maybe. I must provide my realm with heirs. My heirs. I am the queen. This is my duty.”
“Yes, of course! Of course you want children!”
“Do I?” Rhaenyra says obnoxiously. “Why? Do you?”
“You just said it!”
“That I need heirs. Like my father.”
“Do you?”
“What?”
“Want children?”
“Do you?” Rhaenyra whirls around and whips at Daemon.
“Yes,” Daemon answers without even having to think about it.
Rhaenyra is brought up short by the firmness of his answer. “Why? I mean, you don’t…”
“Need heirs? No, but you do. And I live to serve.”
“That’s not want. That’s duty.”
“One can want a duty. You wanted to be queen, yes?”
“What’s wrong with duty? Where does want have to come into it?” Alicent says somewhat hysterically.
“Rhaenyra has these quaint notions.”
“So you just want to serve the realm. Like my mother.”
“Is that not enough?”
“I asked a question first.”
“The continuation of the Targaryen line. That’s what I want.”
“Not a want. A need.”
“But don’t you want that too?” Alicent says.
“Yes,” she agrees. “But that doesn’t help you.”
“Thanks for the concern,” Alicent sniffs. “But I don’t need help.”
“You said yes so quickly, uncle. Yes, you want children. I’ve never thought about it before. Want doesn’t come into it.”
“Well, I know. I was not able to have children. At least not…”
“Legitimate children. I can’t help you with that, sadly.”
“Targaryen children,” he corrects. “Not really. I would never be allowed to give any bastard child of mine an egg, as you well know. And I wonder if Rhea had borne any child of mine, if they would have…”
“Really?” Alicent says in disgust. “Why bother to reproduce at all if you can’t give it one of your eggs, that’s what you think?”
“See,” Rhaenyra says. “That doesn’t help Alicent either.”
“I don’t need help!” Alicent bursts out. “Gods, you’re in an odd mood. This is why I was scared to tell you.”
“Oh, poor Alicent, I’m sorry, because you knew I’d be just horrible—”
“No, I just know—it’s difficult for you—”
“I’m sorry,” Rhaenyra says, pulling her back into a tight embrace. “I just want you to be happy, and if you are, I’m happy, even if you don’t know why—”
“I am, I am—”
Daemon watches Alicent’s face over Rhaenyra’s shoulder as she repeats this in bewildered tones. Where does want have to come into it? Or happiness, for that matter. The second you were asked to think about either of those things, by this wonderful, maddening girl—
When Alicent has left, Rhaenyra stares moodily out the window at the pinpricks of light, cookfires amidst the black stone that swallows the black even of night.
“I wouldn’t have to think about it,” she says to Daemon’s reflection as he comes up behind her, the reflected fires swimming over his face, rising and falling in the glass.
“Think about what?”
“Whether I want it. And how it doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me.”
“Yes. Which is funny. We wouldn’t even be having this conversation if I’d been betrothed to you like I wanted as a child. You would have gotten a child on me without either of us ever thinking twice about it. Part of me wants that. Not to have to choose.”
“To have children or not.”
“Which is no choice at all. It’s no choice, even if I want it. Even if I want Targaryen babies. We mounted up to fly to Harrenhal this morning and when Syrax launched into the air I nearly started crying at how much I wanted it, our baby, and choosing an egg for her together—”
“Her?”
“I want a girl,” Rhaenyra says. “I know I should want a boy, first—but I want a girl.” I want: easy, so easy. “And then I almost started crying about how awful it was that Laena wouldn’t know that. Can you imagine it, having children who don’t—of course you can. It must be awful to have a child and know they’ll never know—what it is like—”
“Alicent is right. Most people do it.”
“But not many who’ve known.”
“Jaehaerys didn’t allow most of his girls dragons.” Saera, weeping in his arms. She’d stumbled away from her brother’s dragon after her one and only time in the air, away from her brother’s son, and she’d struggled in his embrace for a moment when he caught up to her before giving in and burying her face in his chest, and then they’d fucked right there on the ground, for the very last time on a hill outside the Black Walls, in the protective curve of Caraxes’ wing.
“It’s leaving Laena’s children—my children’s cousins—” our baby, Rhaenyra said to Daemon, and beloved aunt to a host of Targaryen princesses and princes, she said to Laena, with no contradiction in her mind “—defenseless. I shouldn’t allow it, fuck the realm—”
Once he claimed Caraxes, a dragon turned out to be no more defense than a dagger. But it might have helped Saera escape the motherhouse, where her father had the body he declared a ruin scoured by leering old women. Daemon only ever met Saera at all because he had a dragon. It didn’t save his mother from her death. It is the only reason Rhaenyra is now queen.
“Rhaenyra—”
“I’m so stupid.”
“You aren’t. You’re right. It is awful. Unnatural.” A child of his not to know what it was to be more, to have this other body, so much greater than its own fragile, bounded one. To not be a dragon.
“Still. I am the realm. I am for the use of the realm, but at least I am it. I want it, even though it terrifies me. I wanted the throne even if it meant giving you up. I want you, even if it was never possible for me to want anything else. I’m at peace with most of that. But this…royal wombs. I hated it. I wanted to run from the room. Because I knew that I too would end up there, and maybe I knew that I would not always hate all of it. But I would regret that girl—wild, free. I would give her up. I’d kill her. And that was even before my mother died. It feels like I should fight where she couldn’t. You want children?” Rhaenyra asks again.
He puts his hands on Rhaenyra’s shoulders, runs his thumb over the elegant bone beneath the soft skin. “Viserys told me—if you were my sister, I would marry you, and you would give me children. He told me that what married people did to beget children felt good. That was why there were so many children in the world, children like baby Aegon. Then he said he’d show me what married people did, and how good it felt. I lost track somewhere in there. I knew all about giving your brother babies. That’s how we’d had little Aegon, that’s how I was a big brother. I thought, if we did what married people do, and if you gave your brother babies—I thought I would give him babies. I asked at the fucking dinner table, I said it was taking a long time, when would I give him a baby? Everyone laughed, and I cried when I realized I never would, that baby Aegon was dead but there would be no more, but I wanted there to be, I wanted it so much. He laughed too, but he was furious. That night—he laughed some more, he mocked me, what a little fool I was, he said here, you have this little cock, brother, don’t be a fool, a little cock, see it, there will be no babies—”
Daemon gives her his want, and it’s something horrible. Rhaenyra lets out a deep breath and relaxes under his palms.
She turns around. “The ingredients I brought from King’s Landing for moon tea are almost gone. I can get more easily enough, but I thought—perhaps I wouldn’t. You imagined killing me,” she whispers. “This might. This might kill me.”
“I never could have.” He doesn’t have to say it, but he needs to. Shouldn’t he have fought it? He could only imagine it, and not for long. How much more often had he imagined not killing her, of making more life in her. “I wanted to be free of you. I thought that’s what I wanted, sometimes. But I want this.”
He would kill for his family. He might die for his family. But Daemon was not to do this, to make more life. Your little cock, and Daemon transformed to a barren, dead thing, as his brother wanted, and there was Aemma, Rhaenyra, fecund, alive, too alive, as his brother wanted, breeding more aliveness in them until they were dead. How Viserys would hate it, his dead thing putting new life in his girl, how terrified Daemon was, of making her a dead thing like him, how he couldn’t stop wanting it.
Rhaenyra nods. “Me too. But I want you to force me.”
It is Daemon’s turn to wonder. “Why?”
“I want it. I know it might kill me. I want it and yet it is my destiny, so how can I know if I want it? It doesn’t matter either way, because I still want it. So I want you to take what you want. I want you to make me take what I want. I want more dragons. I want my children to rule after me. I understand my father after all. I am brave enough to take on the risk for myself. And you will don your armor to defend them. You will be willing to die for it, when I command you.” Then she smiles sweetly at him and spits in his face. “I don’t want children,” she says fiercely. “I won’t have them, uncle.”
Daemon slowly wipes her from his face and seizes her by the hair with his wet hand, gives her head a chiding shake as she smirks. “What about the realm? What about House Targaryen?”
Rhaenyra shrugs, laughs. “What concern is that of mine?”
“You’re a perfect little idiot, aren’t you? It doesn’t matter what you fucking want. I’m disappointed. You are young, but I thought you would know your duty. But that’s what your uncle is for. To save you from yourself.”
He drags her back over to the bed and throws her on it.
“How fucking dare you! I’m your queen!”
“Yes. A foolish little girl made queen, and in need of some guidance. In need of a firm hand. I’m responsible for you.”
“Because my father is dead, you think you’re my father now?”
“That’s right. Daddy is going to show you what you’re good for.”
She fights to get up but he hauls her across his knee and flips up her nightgown. He brings his hand down hard on first one asscheek, then the other. She freezes in surprise. Daemon watches the blood rise to the surface of her skin with satisfaction. “A selfish fucking brat. This is what every man on that council longs to do, haul you across their knees and spank you to tears. But that’s my fucking job. So say your lesson after me: I’m going to take my breeding like a good girl.”
Rhaenyra seals her lips. “I…” Daemon says with another slap. “I know it hurts. I can keep going. I can make it so you can’t sit for a fucking week. I…”
Smack. “I,” Rhaenyra grits out.
Smack. “Am.”
Smack. “Going.”
Smack. “To.”
Smack. “Take.”
Smack. “My.”
Smack. “Breeding.”
Smack. “Like.”
Smack. “A.”
Smack. “Good.”
Smack. “Girl.”
While she’s still whimpering he ascertains from the wetness of her cunt pooling against his thigh that although this will hurt, he’ll have no problem getting into her. The competing heats: the tense band of her cunt immolating his cock, the marks from his hand radiating from her smarting ass searing his thighs. She lets out a guttural cry.
“No, no, no. You’ll kill me, you’ll kill me.”
Daemon starts to go soft. “Fuck, fuck.” He pulls out and screws his fingers into her, holds her open with a hand on her ass so his grip shows white in the red, rubs his dick back into service against the fading marks as he finds that sweet spot within her that makes her start to thrash.
“Don’t say that,” he says.
“You’ll kill me, and you’re too much of a coward to face it, daddy—”
That’s right. “I’m your father now. I don’t fucking care.” He fucks into her again. The silver flow of her hair rocks back and forth with his thrusts.
“He shouldn’t have been a fucking coward. He shouldn’t have been fucking weak. He should have come to my room and handled it himself. I know he thought about it,” she wrenches out on a sob. “Fuck. I know he did. I knew it.”
Her traitorous cunt tightens around him as her moans grown pained. “I know,” Daemon says. “I know, it’s alright.”
“It didn’t matter if he wasn’t there, he was there the whole time, breeding me, as you would have if you killed him, taken me to wife—my king, my king, please,” she gasps suddenly, and this time he’s grateful for the break as he stops and starts to withdraw. But Rhaenyra reaches back and grabs him by the hip, moves her hand back and rolls him into another thrust with a fistful of his ass. “No, please, just—why?”
Daemon moves in her slowly, kisses her on the ear. “Your mother was so beautiful, pregnant with you. I wanted to kiss her again. You were so beautiful. I don’t know much more about babies, they sent me away from you—I came back for your first birthday and I swear me and your mother spent hours counting your every eyelash. I want that, a baby I won’t be sent away from, I want to make a baby with my baby—”
He pulls out of her just long enough to flip her over, and she hisses as her ass makes contact with the sheets but widens her legs, and as he slides back in she says, “I like it when you’re inside me, nice and safe,” kissing his neck, his shoulder, everything she can reach of his scars. “It’s mine, your perfect cock, I’ll keep it safe—”
“It’s yours. My cock will give you a baby, my nice cock, your good friend, and you take such good care of it, that’s how I know. Can you be my big girl? My brave girl? You’ll always be my baby and I’ll take care of you, but I’ll need you to take care of our baby, the one I’m going to put in you, fuck, you’ll look beautiful. Our own world, a family, that’s what I want, I only know what it’s like because of you, and you’ll give it to me—”
“Yes, yes, I’m so glad you’re not my father, Daemon, fuck—uncle, I’m so glad you won’t be our baby’s father, not really, do you know what I mean—”
Just as his brother had wanted. He will and won't. As he is and is not hers. He will not father kings, but he will be the queen’s beloved uncle, always—
She tries to shove a pillow under her ass after and yelps, so Daemon carefully tilts her hips up to slide it under her with more gentleness. She hooks her hands under her knees and pulls them toward her chest. It’s a heady sight, the puffy lips of her cunt after taking him, the way she clenches her pussy to hold in his come. He puts his thumb to her clit and rubs at her and realizes why the maesters say that a woman reaching her release is said to help her conceive, as he watches the frantic spasms of her orgasm suck more of his spunk up into her womb. As he moves up to hold her she says in a tiny, shamed voice, “Can you get me the ingredients for my moon tea from the bag, uncle?” She smiles weakly. “I’m such—such a silly baby, but—”
He nods and then stops. He pushes her closed, lowered knees apart and with one hand parts her cunt and with the other starts to scoop what’s left of his come from her hole. It shines on his fingers as he holds them up to her mouth. She sucks it off his fingers with a little wheezing moan. He returns to this shattered vessel and draws forth another offering. He holds himself over Rhaenyra. She breathes heavily and slides her fingers along his to gather up the milky essence into her own hand and then she slathers it over his chest, right on his nipple, closes her eyes and feeds. Again and again they do this. “A little more, I know you have a little more for me,” he says and she pushes, her pelvic floor flexes and her pussy flutters to give him back what he gave her, so he can nourish her of himself, her lips wrapped in hungry desperate sucks at his breast.
-
By night they explore the ruins of Harrenhal together.
In the Widow’s Tower, the rustling of bats in the eaves, above the rotted wood of Rhaena’s lonely bed. Rhaenyra slides out of her white gown, fringed now in dust. When she emerges from it she is naked save for her necklace and a little stoppered vial in her hand.
“There is a woman here—she’s said to be a woods witch. Alicent says she’s wise with potions, at least. Gave her something that took away her morning sickness entirely. She also said she’s known to be Lyonel Strong’s bastard from before his marriage. Alicent’s good-sister, then. Anyway, she made me this.” Before Daemon can stop her she knocks back its contents into her waiting idiot throat. A bastard woods witch, for fuck’s sake. “It will put me to sleep for several hours. As if I was dead. I’ll be dead. And then I’ll be alive again. And while I’m dead, you are going to fuck a baby into me,” she murmurs dreamily, swaying in place, eyes already drifting shut. “Right here,” she says, touching her stomach just below her ribs. “I will carry her right here, right below my heart. Safe.”
Then she falls backwards onto the decayed mattress.
She looks dead. As dead as when he used to imagine killing her and being free of her, of this unbearable love that makes his heart thunder with terror—this might kill me—even as he pushes into her body, still warm with how recently she’d departed it. What a joke. He’d keep her body around. He’d search every book in every library in the world for the archaic Valyrian magic to preserve her like this, for the unholy blood ritual that could call her back to this beloved body so she might animate it again.
He places his open palm between her breasts as he fucks her, and he can almost feel the thud of her heart through the thinness of the skin there. He wishes, sometimes, he could have her that completely. Safe below his heart. He wishes he could eat her right up.
After he comes it frightens him. He lays his head over her heart and listens to its strong unceasing beat against his ear for hours, and he never sleeps once until she begins to stir, so he can watch the miracle transpire.
“But it didn’t,” he whispers as she’s waking back up, hard again for her as she blinks her eyes open and smiles at him, as she opens her arms to him and he crawls into them, into her. “I was alive, you’re alive—”