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mirrorwitches) wrote2023-07-12 11:54 pm
mirrorwitches) wrote2023-07-12 11:54 pm
(hotd) unwanted consequences, chapter five
UNWANTED CONSEQUENCES, CHAPTER FIVE
🐉masterpost🐉
Daemon comes in that place where his seed can find no root, uselessly, wasteful, with a strange muffled cry into Rhaenyra’s neck.
Already boneless from her own shattering orgasm—when he’d released her hands to let her rub at her clit it had taken only moments—she watches as he gets up after and walks to the washbasin, wets a cloth. She wonders in an empty daze if he will leave again. But he returns to the bed and puts the cloth to her legs, and she widens them so he can clean her off, very gently, once again the perverse child, in this warped infancy.
“If you’re up to it,” he says, hand still moving over her most intimate parts, “Get dressed and meet me in your chambers. We’ve put off speaking to the steward for three days because of our nonsense, and before we resume, let’s take care of it. And then…” —he looks up from the evidence of how he's wrecked her to meet her eyes and there is something serious and searching and sad in his expression for just one moment—“then, Rhaenyra, you’re going to tell me what’s the matter with you.”
No one in the last four years had ever noticed when Rhaenyra was unhappy. No, that wasn’t true. Her unhappiness had been a shadow self, a presence in the room no one could ignore. Viserys and Alicent had both tried their best, and when that became impossible they had done their best to manage it. They wanted her to stop being unhappy because it was so exhausting, so inconvenient. They had asked what’s the matter with you so many times and in so many different ways but she’d known they didn’t want to actually hear the answer. And now Daemon demanded.
“And what if I don’t want to tell you?” Rhaenyra says sullenly.
“Then I will pin you down and tickle you until you yield like I did when you were five.”
Rhaenyra tries very hard not to smile at that, but loses the fight, and Daemon tickles her side in a little preview of what torture he can inflict. She wriggles away and is piqued when she forfeits her dignity further by giggling. Having so weakened her, almost so quickly she wonders if she imagines it, her uncle leans forward and kisses her forehead before he rises again.
Comestupid and wrung out, she watches Daemon clean himself off, fascinated by the vulnerability of seeing him slide a cloth over his soft cock. His eyes dart up to meet hers and he seems almost embarrassed at encountering her dazed gaze, sharpened slightly by curiosity. She sprawls across the bed in protest as he dresses, but when he leaves her with a parting, “Meet me in your solar in a half-hour,” she gets up.
-
That evening the last light of day drains away over the waves to the west, and Rhaenyra watches it from her window. She does not think of Daenys who from Dragonstone must have dreamed again, this time of Valyria lost, or Visenya scheming to put her second son on the throne, or Rhaena feeding her husband to Dreamfyre. She must come closer and think of the dead who she cannot shroud in legend. The ones close enough to touch, the ones who never made their homes here but who died in the birthing bed in the Red Keep and whose ghostly breath seems to chill her neck.
Daemon comes up to stand beside her, ducks his head a little to meet her eyes. She’d always liked that as a child, the way he would crouch down or pick her up so they were at eye level. She worries he’s doing permanent damage to his neck now, from the way he always contorts his spine to capture her gaze with his own. He reaches out to brush her cheek with one finger. She swallows.
“I’m scared,” she whispers. Easy enough to start. She only has to echo him.
He nods.
“My mother—” her throat seems to close up. “Your mother.”
A minute shudder ripples down Daemon’s frame. His hand squeezes the empty air at his thigh, as if he wishes to put his hand to Dark Sister’s hilt. But she is propped against the wall, and Daemon is unarmed, only in his nightshirt. And what enemy is there to slay?
“The childbed frightens you,” Daemon says, as if it were really that easy. Rhaenyra feels a spike of frustration.
“I told you this. And you said I couldn’t let fear hold me back from the best things in life. That I couldn’t let what happened to my mother stop me from knowing the joys of children—”
“Children,” Daemon says incredulously, as if Rhaenyra is being absurd. “I was thinking about marriage. Yours and mine, specifically.”
Rhaenyra gawps at him, mystified. There is a surge of satisfaction, that Daemon should view having her as his wife in such a light, and also frustration that he’d apparently not really heard a thing she’d said in that conversation, and so now she has to try and make him see, again.
“Marriage is one of the best things in life?”
“Has it not been?” Daemon quips, picking up her cup of wine from the windowsill, fiddling with it, taking a sip, putting it down, picking it up again, handing it to her, all so rapidly she can barely track the movements. Irony drips from the words, and Rhaenyra is somehow shocked to realize she’s hurt his feelings.
“Being with you—” Rhaenyra chokes out, unable to finish under the weight of the emotion behind the words. She takes a swig of wine that only further agitates her stomach. Being with Daemon constantly, days on dragonback, nights in their bed—all of it has been the happiest time of her life. But it has not looked anything like what she had imagined marriage would be. She wants to be with him, always, and marriage was simply the means to that end. She realizes she still thinks of marriage as a cage. It was just one she’d walked into willingly. “Marriage is a cage.”
“A cage,” her husband says flatly.
“Yes,” she insists. Has it not been the best thing in life? And isn’t it a cage? “Marriage—isn’t the point of it children?”
“Not for my first marriage, it wasn’t,” he mutters.
“And you hated it! Wasn’t that part of why? It was no true marriage. Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“I wanted you,” Daemon says, very quietly.
Her uncle speaks aloud her most secret thoughts again. Yes, just so, exactly. Except: “I said marriage is a death sentence for women and you wanted me so badly you could only think of marrying me anyway? What does that mean?”
“You also said my wife was lucky I hadn’t put a child in her.”
“Yes, and you hated her. I recall you saying something about her womb being hostile to life.” Gods, if only Rhaenyra could be sure hers was the same.
“You think I only wanted you for a broodmare?” Daemon asks, reaching out to touch her cheek again. Rhaenyra moves away, to sit on the edge of the bed.
“Not only. My father loved my mother.” That is what is so unbearable about it. Daemon’s love for her has never been in question.
“My brother—”
“Do you want children?” she interrupts. The question comes as a surprise. It isn’t one Rhaenyra has ever thought to ask herself—want didn’t enter into it. Of course Daemon wants heirs, wants sons, no matter what he says. What man did not? But perhaps children were something else, something distinct.
Daemon gives an airy, dismissive wave of his hand. “Irritating creatures.”
Rhaenyra is offended. Most of the time she’d known Daemon, she’d been a child! “I’m sorry I was so irritating.”
“I wasn’t referring to you.”
“What other children have you ever spent time with, Daemon?”
“You’re different,” Daemon says with what seems to her unearned confidence. “Superior in intelligence and interest even as an infant. It’s too much to hope for such a miracle to happen again.”
“Surely you’d feel differently about your own children.”
“One of yours? Perhaps the odds are better.”
“My mother said there was no love like it. That there was nothing that compared to it.”
“The child in question was you, so that will hardly change my mind.”
“She said that about one of the dead ones,” she snaps.
“Ah, Aemma,” Daemon murmurs, almost too softly for her to hear. Rhaenyra forgives him much for that. “I jest—well, not really. I cannot imagine any love could possibly—”
He cuts himself off.
“Perhaps it’s different for men,” she says icily.
“Don’t condemn me for my brother’s failings,” he says with equal chill, taking a step towards where she sits on the bed. “Viserys never appreciated a damn thing he was blessed with. Not your mother, not you. He kept your mother pregnant constantly chasing his idiotic dreams, when—”
“Because he didn’t appreciate you?”
An ugly twist of Daemon’s mouth. “Yes. I suppose if I’d been an heir anyone could contemplate without horror your mother might yet live.”
She wonders if men can truly be so different from one another. Daemon has been different from all other men to her, and yet—
If her mother had been made to produce heirs until it killed her, it was because someone had made her. She has known this. Her mind turns to Alicent in King’s Landing, pregnant with Rhaenyra’s third sibling, with a wrenching pang before she manages to stop herself.
“So you’d refrain from taking your marital rights for my sake? Do you plan on installing your whore here again?”
“I thought we’d agreed you’d be my whore.”
“Be serious.”
Daemon rolls his eyes. “I am. It’s called creativity. Something else Viserys has never appreciated.”
The horrible thing about hope is that eventually it can spur you to jump. She is terrified to know, but she has to know, because she hopes—that she can trust Daemon with this, with everything.
“I don’t want to,” she cries. “I don’t want children. I don’t want you to get me pregnant.”
Another step towards her. “Alright.”
Again Rhaenyra can only stare at him in amazement. “Alright? That’s it?”
“As you say, there are some practicalities to attend to—”
“So, you won’t? You’ll let everyone say that you’re less than a man? Again? You won’t fuck your wife? You won’t get a child on me?”
“I would.”
“Of course.” Rhaenyra flinches. But it was just as she expected, wasn't it. She hopes she sounds practical, adult.
“I am not a good man, Rhaenyra.” Swiftly he closes the remaining space between them, moves on top of her, pins her to the bed with her arms above her head. “And you are my wife. Made to heed me. Made to bear my children. And I want it. Little niece, little Targaryen wife, heavy with the child I’ve fucked into you. I could—” he pushes her thighs apart “—do this. I’m bigger than you. And you’d let me, wouldn’t you? You adore me. You’re so hungry for it.”
Rhaenyra flushes in humiliation, but she can feel her thighs fall further apart. With his free hand he guides other guides his cock to her entrance, tracing it over her opening as she shudders. “I could be in your cunt right now and you couldn’t stop it. I could make you wild with it—” a small keening noise from her lips confirms this “—forget your fears with your pleasure. Your reason might come back after I’ve made you come, you might push at my chest, scratch at my eyes—”
“Fuck you,” she snarls weakly, closer to a sob, although she doesn’t do anything else.
“But you wouldn’t be able to do anything. I’d pump you nice and full, again and again until my seed took.”
He pushes the head of his cock inside her and like before her body seizes up, tries to force him out, but this time he grits his teeth and works himself deeper with small stuttering movements she can’t resist.
“That’s what you’ve always wanted,” Rhaenyra says, miserable, pleased to finally know and have it done with.
“Yes. It kept my nights warm when I fled here instead of the Vale. I should have stolen you away with me, kept you as my concubine, gotten an army of bastards on you to storm my brother’s gates. What could you do about it?” He kisses her hard. “Stupid little girl, stupid little starstruck niece. Gods, I’m hard enough to hammer nails, thinking of your little face wet and hot with tears against mine, wailing your curses against my neck, biting my cheek bloody. You’d forgive me eventually. You always do. I’ve gotten what I always wanted. You’re mine. You can curse and shout and try to stab me on the stairs all you like, but you’re mine, forever.”
Rhaenyra hates herself for feeling a thrill of satisfaction at his words. I’ve gotten what I always wanted. You’re mine. So they wanted the same thing. That was good at least. Daemon flatters her, though. She only moans, her hands clawing his back the only protest she can muster, one that also attempts to draw him closer.
Then nothing but the air is covering her. Daemon has jerked away and is sitting at the end of the bed, head in his hands.
“But I can’t.”
“What? Why the fuck not?” Rhaenyra says, inexplicably enraged.
“You put your hand in mine,” Daemon says.
“What?” she repeats stupidly.
“When you were a child—it wasn’t the first time we’d met. I held you the day you were born. But I was sent away to the Vale, and then I came back, so it was the first time you remembered. And you put your hand in mine. You were so pleased to meet your uncle.”
“I don’t remember,” Rhaenyra says. She doesn’t remember not knowing Daemon. Her uncle goes on as if he hasn’t heard her.
“I was banished. I stole your brother’s egg to goad you. I was gone for four years. I left you mysterious instructions on how to navigate the secret passages of the Red Keep and like an idiot you followed them. And then you found me cloaked and hooded on the other end and you laughed. And you put your hand in mine.”
Rhaenyra scrambles to her feet to stand before him, heart pounding. Daemon lowers his hands and looks up with her, eyes almost bewildered.
She slaps him hard across the face.
“See? Just like that,” Daemon says with a crazed laugh, hissing as his hand flies up to touch his reddening cheek.
Chest heaving, she tries it on. “If you ever try to force me…” she pauses. “I couldn’t have done anything. I could have screamed for my guards. Then what? Told them my husband, their prince, wanted to have his way with me? Ha! Told my father? He wouldn’t do anything. The embarrassment, the hassle. He’d tell me I’d brought it on myself by insisting on marrying you. So I just have to trust you.”
She laughs with delight.
Daemon is smiling too. “Yes. You were right. It is a cage. Exactly what I’ve always wanted—for someone who can’t get away from me.”
Yes, just so, exactly.
She takes his hand in hers.
Her uncle looks down at it, throat moving. He turns her hand over in his, traces the vein in her wrist.
“Your father believed I wouldn’t make you happy. I told him he could think whatever he liked of me, but that being allowed to marry you was the great gift of my life and I would prove that I was conscious of it.”
“My father would want you to give me children.” She rubs her own thumb against his.
He looks at her oddly. “I don’t expect to earn any favors from him for it. What would he know about making you happy? He was content to marry you off to some Lannister cunt. I don’t agree with how Viserys manages…”
“You and me?”
“…his women.” Daemon strokes his thumb over her new sword callous, already a little harder than this morning; it throbs, but doesn’t hurt, precisely. “My mother…” Rhaenyra looks down at her uncle’s bowed head as he lowers it to her hand and sets his lips gently where his thumb had been. “I remember that loss. And Aemma—I adored your mother. I have no eagerness to rush to risk your life that way.”
Rhaenyra realizes she has never heard Daemon speak of her grandmother, although her father does often enough. She remembers the way his laughter had resembled a rictus when her father laughed at how much Daemon took after her, the day he’d returned with his crown.
“It is. A risk, I mean.” It’s a relief to hear someone admit it.
“Your mother was right. It is a battlefield. But not one where there’s a fair fight.”
“But Daemon, I—how?”
Her uncle pulls her down to his lap, and Rhaenyra goes easily. He touches her cheek again and she pushes her face into it like a cat until he cups it in his palm.
“You must have an heir eventually. To secure your claim.” The way he says this soothes her. Very practically, in the same brisk tone as when he’d said they must fix the guardhall roof. “Visenya recognized it. But she waited till the time was right.”
“How did she do it? I mean, she did not often share Aegon’s bed…”
“Not an option, hm?” With a wicked gleam in his eye Daemon kisses her shoulder where her nightgown has slid off it. “Though that was not Rhaenys’ case, and she still bore her brother only one child. They did things differently in Old Valyria. There is probably knowledge we’ve lost. However…”
He’s giving her a look she might almost describe as bashful.
“What?”
“It’s knowledge that others may have.” He clears his throat. “As you noticed, I have no children, and, as I said, this is because, mm, my previous choice of female company tended to be…”
“Women who knew how not to be inconvenienced.”
“And there is one such woman in particular, who I have reason to believe may—”
Rhaenyra jerks back in his arms, stopping him from trying to placate her with another kiss to her collarbone with a finger at his chin, tilting his head up so he’s forced to meet her enraged eyes. “So it was a lie.”
She remembers his lover well, much gossiped about in King’s Landing but first seen by her on that bridge. She had been beautiful, confident, and alluring, and she’d been Daemon’s lover for years. Rhaenyra wants to bite something.
Daemon doesn’t look ashamed. “I got bored waiting for Viserys to come evict me. I thought maybe I could make it true later…”
“You wanted to have children with her?”
“That army I was dreaming of building, remember?” Daemon says playfully, and he’s the one who nips at her shoulder, like a puppy. But he had made no attempt to storm his brother's gates. She wonders which is the truth: children as irritating inconveniences, or something he’d dreamed about, planned for. It occurs to her that Daemon might be giving up or putting off something for her, some treasured wish. Part of her wants to push him on this, before one of those teasing snatches of family lore darts through her mind.
You were made for battles, and I was made for this. Viserys and Daemon and Aegon, that’s three. As soon as I am well, let’s make another. I want to give you twenty sons. An army of your own!
Alyssa had never gotten well. That Aegon had died in the cradle. There were only the two.
Daemon had offered her a sword.
“But?”
“Apparently Mysaria had ensured that was never a possibility.” At Rhaenyra’s questioning noise, he goes on: “Yes, we don’t want anything so permanent. But Mysaria may have something that might suit your purposes better. And I trust her discretion. This isn’t something we want to go to the maesters with.”
This is true enough. She can’t imagine what the realm would make of that kind of rumor. “Hm,” she grumbles.
“Don’t be jealous. Mysaria wouldn’t have me again even if I wanted her.”
She has too much pride to beg Daemon to confirm he doesn’t want her, and anyway the banked excitement that has been slowly building finally bursts. “You mean it? You’re serious?”
“Yes, Rhaenyra.” His eyes search hers, almost pleadingly. “I have never wanted you in my bed unwillingly. I’ll seek Mysaria out—”
“We will,” Rhaenyra insists.
“Oh, very well—”
Squirming in relief on his lap, both Rhaenyra and her uncle become aware at the same time that something is amiss. They feel a suspicious wetness and look down and see the small shadowy stains dotting her nightdress at the same moment.
Rhaenyra leaps to her feet again, with an embarrassed “Oh!” Then, a giddy, “Oh!” followed by a gust of wild laughter as what this means overtakes any shame.
When she looks back up at Daemon, she is surprised to see a stark hunger on his face as he gazes at the spreading patch of blood, nearly black in this light. He reels her back toward him by a hand knotted in the hem of her garment. He puts his hand between her legs and withdraws it with Rhaenyra’s blood shining on his first two fingers. He brings the digits to his face slowly, and Rhaenyra watches, spellbound, as his tongue darts out to taste the jeweled droplets, dark and shining as garnets.
“Daemon!” she says, startled.
The first great smear of blood across the sheets comes from the speed with which Daemon throws her down on the mattress and then pulls her back across them until her hips are sprawled open at the edge of the bed, open to his mouth. His large hand rests over her stomach, so distended and tender with her monthly blood, its warmth soothing—she hates to prove those who titter about a woman’s unreasonableness at this cycle of the moon right, but she is more prone to tears then, perhaps that explains the last few days—aching with its wonderful emptiness as her womb pulses around nothing. Every pass of her uncle’s tongue between her folds draws forth another wash of blood: bright and new, scarlet, ruby, Targaryen fucking red, and then dark, viscous, fleshy, as she comes hard, the red-black of wasted tissue, of a failed child, and Rhaenyra is laughing up at the moon-dappled ceiling as she hauls her uncle up by the hair to see her blood coating his mouth, his chin, in his teeth. Is this what his boy might see, when his lord returned to his tent, when they saw each other through the smoke and ash of the battlefield? Another slick of red wetness onto the sheets, another stain, mixed with her arousal, his saliva.
“You’ll do it. Anything I say.” Fuck what they all say. He will not give her a child: what is kneeling to her, against that? She doesn’t wait for him to answer. “Put your cock in me,” she demands. “But don’t come inside me. Don’t come until I say.”
He fucks her blood diagonally across the bed. Gushes it out of her with every thrust of his hips up into her as she rides him, down her thighs, onto his cock, slashing the linens crimson. She raises herself off him after she comes the second time to see his hard cock red, far redder than it would have been with the maidenhead he’d failed to take. Red on her hips, on his thighs, in their white-silver pubic hair. A red hand-print has made it onto the pillow somehow. It looks like they’ve butchered a carcass in their marital bed. Like they’ve drained a stag down to its last drop of heart’s blood. Like a body slit open.
Rhaenyra slides down his marked body and sheathes him with her mouth.
🐉masterpost🐉
Daemon comes in that place where his seed can find no root, uselessly, wasteful, with a strange muffled cry into Rhaenyra’s neck.
Already boneless from her own shattering orgasm—when he’d released her hands to let her rub at her clit it had taken only moments—she watches as he gets up after and walks to the washbasin, wets a cloth. She wonders in an empty daze if he will leave again. But he returns to the bed and puts the cloth to her legs, and she widens them so he can clean her off, very gently, once again the perverse child, in this warped infancy.
“If you’re up to it,” he says, hand still moving over her most intimate parts, “Get dressed and meet me in your chambers. We’ve put off speaking to the steward for three days because of our nonsense, and before we resume, let’s take care of it. And then…” —he looks up from the evidence of how he's wrecked her to meet her eyes and there is something serious and searching and sad in his expression for just one moment—“then, Rhaenyra, you’re going to tell me what’s the matter with you.”
No one in the last four years had ever noticed when Rhaenyra was unhappy. No, that wasn’t true. Her unhappiness had been a shadow self, a presence in the room no one could ignore. Viserys and Alicent had both tried their best, and when that became impossible they had done their best to manage it. They wanted her to stop being unhappy because it was so exhausting, so inconvenient. They had asked what’s the matter with you so many times and in so many different ways but she’d known they didn’t want to actually hear the answer. And now Daemon demanded.
“And what if I don’t want to tell you?” Rhaenyra says sullenly.
“Then I will pin you down and tickle you until you yield like I did when you were five.”
Rhaenyra tries very hard not to smile at that, but loses the fight, and Daemon tickles her side in a little preview of what torture he can inflict. She wriggles away and is piqued when she forfeits her dignity further by giggling. Having so weakened her, almost so quickly she wonders if she imagines it, her uncle leans forward and kisses her forehead before he rises again.
Comestupid and wrung out, she watches Daemon clean himself off, fascinated by the vulnerability of seeing him slide a cloth over his soft cock. His eyes dart up to meet hers and he seems almost embarrassed at encountering her dazed gaze, sharpened slightly by curiosity. She sprawls across the bed in protest as he dresses, but when he leaves her with a parting, “Meet me in your solar in a half-hour,” she gets up.
-
That evening the last light of day drains away over the waves to the west, and Rhaenyra watches it from her window. She does not think of Daenys who from Dragonstone must have dreamed again, this time of Valyria lost, or Visenya scheming to put her second son on the throne, or Rhaena feeding her husband to Dreamfyre. She must come closer and think of the dead who she cannot shroud in legend. The ones close enough to touch, the ones who never made their homes here but who died in the birthing bed in the Red Keep and whose ghostly breath seems to chill her neck.
Daemon comes up to stand beside her, ducks his head a little to meet her eyes. She’d always liked that as a child, the way he would crouch down or pick her up so they were at eye level. She worries he’s doing permanent damage to his neck now, from the way he always contorts his spine to capture her gaze with his own. He reaches out to brush her cheek with one finger. She swallows.
“I’m scared,” she whispers. Easy enough to start. She only has to echo him.
He nods.
“My mother—” her throat seems to close up. “Your mother.”
A minute shudder ripples down Daemon’s frame. His hand squeezes the empty air at his thigh, as if he wishes to put his hand to Dark Sister’s hilt. But she is propped against the wall, and Daemon is unarmed, only in his nightshirt. And what enemy is there to slay?
“The childbed frightens you,” Daemon says, as if it were really that easy. Rhaenyra feels a spike of frustration.
“I told you this. And you said I couldn’t let fear hold me back from the best things in life. That I couldn’t let what happened to my mother stop me from knowing the joys of children—”
“Children,” Daemon says incredulously, as if Rhaenyra is being absurd. “I was thinking about marriage. Yours and mine, specifically.”
Rhaenyra gawps at him, mystified. There is a surge of satisfaction, that Daemon should view having her as his wife in such a light, and also frustration that he’d apparently not really heard a thing she’d said in that conversation, and so now she has to try and make him see, again.
“Marriage is one of the best things in life?”
“Has it not been?” Daemon quips, picking up her cup of wine from the windowsill, fiddling with it, taking a sip, putting it down, picking it up again, handing it to her, all so rapidly she can barely track the movements. Irony drips from the words, and Rhaenyra is somehow shocked to realize she’s hurt his feelings.
“Being with you—” Rhaenyra chokes out, unable to finish under the weight of the emotion behind the words. She takes a swig of wine that only further agitates her stomach. Being with Daemon constantly, days on dragonback, nights in their bed—all of it has been the happiest time of her life. But it has not looked anything like what she had imagined marriage would be. She wants to be with him, always, and marriage was simply the means to that end. She realizes she still thinks of marriage as a cage. It was just one she’d walked into willingly. “Marriage is a cage.”
“A cage,” her husband says flatly.
“Yes,” she insists. Has it not been the best thing in life? And isn’t it a cage? “Marriage—isn’t the point of it children?”
“Not for my first marriage, it wasn’t,” he mutters.
“And you hated it! Wasn’t that part of why? It was no true marriage. Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“I wanted you,” Daemon says, very quietly.
Her uncle speaks aloud her most secret thoughts again. Yes, just so, exactly. Except: “I said marriage is a death sentence for women and you wanted me so badly you could only think of marrying me anyway? What does that mean?”
“You also said my wife was lucky I hadn’t put a child in her.”
“Yes, and you hated her. I recall you saying something about her womb being hostile to life.” Gods, if only Rhaenyra could be sure hers was the same.
“You think I only wanted you for a broodmare?” Daemon asks, reaching out to touch her cheek again. Rhaenyra moves away, to sit on the edge of the bed.
“Not only. My father loved my mother.” That is what is so unbearable about it. Daemon’s love for her has never been in question.
“My brother—”
“Do you want children?” she interrupts. The question comes as a surprise. It isn’t one Rhaenyra has ever thought to ask herself—want didn’t enter into it. Of course Daemon wants heirs, wants sons, no matter what he says. What man did not? But perhaps children were something else, something distinct.
Daemon gives an airy, dismissive wave of his hand. “Irritating creatures.”
Rhaenyra is offended. Most of the time she’d known Daemon, she’d been a child! “I’m sorry I was so irritating.”
“I wasn’t referring to you.”
“What other children have you ever spent time with, Daemon?”
“You’re different,” Daemon says with what seems to her unearned confidence. “Superior in intelligence and interest even as an infant. It’s too much to hope for such a miracle to happen again.”
“Surely you’d feel differently about your own children.”
“One of yours? Perhaps the odds are better.”
“My mother said there was no love like it. That there was nothing that compared to it.”
“The child in question was you, so that will hardly change my mind.”
“She said that about one of the dead ones,” she snaps.
“Ah, Aemma,” Daemon murmurs, almost too softly for her to hear. Rhaenyra forgives him much for that. “I jest—well, not really. I cannot imagine any love could possibly—”
He cuts himself off.
“Perhaps it’s different for men,” she says icily.
“Don’t condemn me for my brother’s failings,” he says with equal chill, taking a step towards where she sits on the bed. “Viserys never appreciated a damn thing he was blessed with. Not your mother, not you. He kept your mother pregnant constantly chasing his idiotic dreams, when—”
“Because he didn’t appreciate you?”
An ugly twist of Daemon’s mouth. “Yes. I suppose if I’d been an heir anyone could contemplate without horror your mother might yet live.”
She wonders if men can truly be so different from one another. Daemon has been different from all other men to her, and yet—
If her mother had been made to produce heirs until it killed her, it was because someone had made her. She has known this. Her mind turns to Alicent in King’s Landing, pregnant with Rhaenyra’s third sibling, with a wrenching pang before she manages to stop herself.
“So you’d refrain from taking your marital rights for my sake? Do you plan on installing your whore here again?”
“I thought we’d agreed you’d be my whore.”
“Be serious.”
Daemon rolls his eyes. “I am. It’s called creativity. Something else Viserys has never appreciated.”
The horrible thing about hope is that eventually it can spur you to jump. She is terrified to know, but she has to know, because she hopes—that she can trust Daemon with this, with everything.
“I don’t want to,” she cries. “I don’t want children. I don’t want you to get me pregnant.”
Another step towards her. “Alright.”
Again Rhaenyra can only stare at him in amazement. “Alright? That’s it?”
“As you say, there are some practicalities to attend to—”
“So, you won’t? You’ll let everyone say that you’re less than a man? Again? You won’t fuck your wife? You won’t get a child on me?”
“I would.”
“Of course.” Rhaenyra flinches. But it was just as she expected, wasn't it. She hopes she sounds practical, adult.
“I am not a good man, Rhaenyra.” Swiftly he closes the remaining space between them, moves on top of her, pins her to the bed with her arms above her head. “And you are my wife. Made to heed me. Made to bear my children. And I want it. Little niece, little Targaryen wife, heavy with the child I’ve fucked into you. I could—” he pushes her thighs apart “—do this. I’m bigger than you. And you’d let me, wouldn’t you? You adore me. You’re so hungry for it.”
Rhaenyra flushes in humiliation, but she can feel her thighs fall further apart. With his free hand he guides other guides his cock to her entrance, tracing it over her opening as she shudders. “I could be in your cunt right now and you couldn’t stop it. I could make you wild with it—” a small keening noise from her lips confirms this “—forget your fears with your pleasure. Your reason might come back after I’ve made you come, you might push at my chest, scratch at my eyes—”
“Fuck you,” she snarls weakly, closer to a sob, although she doesn’t do anything else.
“But you wouldn’t be able to do anything. I’d pump you nice and full, again and again until my seed took.”
He pushes the head of his cock inside her and like before her body seizes up, tries to force him out, but this time he grits his teeth and works himself deeper with small stuttering movements she can’t resist.
“That’s what you’ve always wanted,” Rhaenyra says, miserable, pleased to finally know and have it done with.
“Yes. It kept my nights warm when I fled here instead of the Vale. I should have stolen you away with me, kept you as my concubine, gotten an army of bastards on you to storm my brother’s gates. What could you do about it?” He kisses her hard. “Stupid little girl, stupid little starstruck niece. Gods, I’m hard enough to hammer nails, thinking of your little face wet and hot with tears against mine, wailing your curses against my neck, biting my cheek bloody. You’d forgive me eventually. You always do. I’ve gotten what I always wanted. You’re mine. You can curse and shout and try to stab me on the stairs all you like, but you’re mine, forever.”
Rhaenyra hates herself for feeling a thrill of satisfaction at his words. I’ve gotten what I always wanted. You’re mine. So they wanted the same thing. That was good at least. Daemon flatters her, though. She only moans, her hands clawing his back the only protest she can muster, one that also attempts to draw him closer.
Then nothing but the air is covering her. Daemon has jerked away and is sitting at the end of the bed, head in his hands.
“But I can’t.”
“What? Why the fuck not?” Rhaenyra says, inexplicably enraged.
“You put your hand in mine,” Daemon says.
“What?” she repeats stupidly.
“When you were a child—it wasn’t the first time we’d met. I held you the day you were born. But I was sent away to the Vale, and then I came back, so it was the first time you remembered. And you put your hand in mine. You were so pleased to meet your uncle.”
“I don’t remember,” Rhaenyra says. She doesn’t remember not knowing Daemon. Her uncle goes on as if he hasn’t heard her.
“I was banished. I stole your brother’s egg to goad you. I was gone for four years. I left you mysterious instructions on how to navigate the secret passages of the Red Keep and like an idiot you followed them. And then you found me cloaked and hooded on the other end and you laughed. And you put your hand in mine.”
Rhaenyra scrambles to her feet to stand before him, heart pounding. Daemon lowers his hands and looks up with her, eyes almost bewildered.
She slaps him hard across the face.
“See? Just like that,” Daemon says with a crazed laugh, hissing as his hand flies up to touch his reddening cheek.
Chest heaving, she tries it on. “If you ever try to force me…” she pauses. “I couldn’t have done anything. I could have screamed for my guards. Then what? Told them my husband, their prince, wanted to have his way with me? Ha! Told my father? He wouldn’t do anything. The embarrassment, the hassle. He’d tell me I’d brought it on myself by insisting on marrying you. So I just have to trust you.”
She laughs with delight.
Daemon is smiling too. “Yes. You were right. It is a cage. Exactly what I’ve always wanted—for someone who can’t get away from me.”
Yes, just so, exactly.
She takes his hand in hers.
Her uncle looks down at it, throat moving. He turns her hand over in his, traces the vein in her wrist.
“Your father believed I wouldn’t make you happy. I told him he could think whatever he liked of me, but that being allowed to marry you was the great gift of my life and I would prove that I was conscious of it.”
“My father would want you to give me children.” She rubs her own thumb against his.
He looks at her oddly. “I don’t expect to earn any favors from him for it. What would he know about making you happy? He was content to marry you off to some Lannister cunt. I don’t agree with how Viserys manages…”
“You and me?”
“…his women.” Daemon strokes his thumb over her new sword callous, already a little harder than this morning; it throbs, but doesn’t hurt, precisely. “My mother…” Rhaenyra looks down at her uncle’s bowed head as he lowers it to her hand and sets his lips gently where his thumb had been. “I remember that loss. And Aemma—I adored your mother. I have no eagerness to rush to risk your life that way.”
Rhaenyra realizes she has never heard Daemon speak of her grandmother, although her father does often enough. She remembers the way his laughter had resembled a rictus when her father laughed at how much Daemon took after her, the day he’d returned with his crown.
“It is. A risk, I mean.” It’s a relief to hear someone admit it.
“Your mother was right. It is a battlefield. But not one where there’s a fair fight.”
“But Daemon, I—how?”
Her uncle pulls her down to his lap, and Rhaenyra goes easily. He touches her cheek again and she pushes her face into it like a cat until he cups it in his palm.
“You must have an heir eventually. To secure your claim.” The way he says this soothes her. Very practically, in the same brisk tone as when he’d said they must fix the guardhall roof. “Visenya recognized it. But she waited till the time was right.”
“How did she do it? I mean, she did not often share Aegon’s bed…”
“Not an option, hm?” With a wicked gleam in his eye Daemon kisses her shoulder where her nightgown has slid off it. “Though that was not Rhaenys’ case, and she still bore her brother only one child. They did things differently in Old Valyria. There is probably knowledge we’ve lost. However…”
He’s giving her a look she might almost describe as bashful.
“What?”
“It’s knowledge that others may have.” He clears his throat. “As you noticed, I have no children, and, as I said, this is because, mm, my previous choice of female company tended to be…”
“Women who knew how not to be inconvenienced.”
“And there is one such woman in particular, who I have reason to believe may—”
Rhaenyra jerks back in his arms, stopping him from trying to placate her with another kiss to her collarbone with a finger at his chin, tilting his head up so he’s forced to meet her enraged eyes. “So it was a lie.”
She remembers his lover well, much gossiped about in King’s Landing but first seen by her on that bridge. She had been beautiful, confident, and alluring, and she’d been Daemon’s lover for years. Rhaenyra wants to bite something.
Daemon doesn’t look ashamed. “I got bored waiting for Viserys to come evict me. I thought maybe I could make it true later…”
“You wanted to have children with her?”
“That army I was dreaming of building, remember?” Daemon says playfully, and he’s the one who nips at her shoulder, like a puppy. But he had made no attempt to storm his brother's gates. She wonders which is the truth: children as irritating inconveniences, or something he’d dreamed about, planned for. It occurs to her that Daemon might be giving up or putting off something for her, some treasured wish. Part of her wants to push him on this, before one of those teasing snatches of family lore darts through her mind.
You were made for battles, and I was made for this. Viserys and Daemon and Aegon, that’s three. As soon as I am well, let’s make another. I want to give you twenty sons. An army of your own!
Alyssa had never gotten well. That Aegon had died in the cradle. There were only the two.
Daemon had offered her a sword.
“But?”
“Apparently Mysaria had ensured that was never a possibility.” At Rhaenyra’s questioning noise, he goes on: “Yes, we don’t want anything so permanent. But Mysaria may have something that might suit your purposes better. And I trust her discretion. This isn’t something we want to go to the maesters with.”
This is true enough. She can’t imagine what the realm would make of that kind of rumor. “Hm,” she grumbles.
“Don’t be jealous. Mysaria wouldn’t have me again even if I wanted her.”
She has too much pride to beg Daemon to confirm he doesn’t want her, and anyway the banked excitement that has been slowly building finally bursts. “You mean it? You’re serious?”
“Yes, Rhaenyra.” His eyes search hers, almost pleadingly. “I have never wanted you in my bed unwillingly. I’ll seek Mysaria out—”
“We will,” Rhaenyra insists.
“Oh, very well—”
Squirming in relief on his lap, both Rhaenyra and her uncle become aware at the same time that something is amiss. They feel a suspicious wetness and look down and see the small shadowy stains dotting her nightdress at the same moment.
Rhaenyra leaps to her feet again, with an embarrassed “Oh!” Then, a giddy, “Oh!” followed by a gust of wild laughter as what this means overtakes any shame.
When she looks back up at Daemon, she is surprised to see a stark hunger on his face as he gazes at the spreading patch of blood, nearly black in this light. He reels her back toward him by a hand knotted in the hem of her garment. He puts his hand between her legs and withdraws it with Rhaenyra’s blood shining on his first two fingers. He brings the digits to his face slowly, and Rhaenyra watches, spellbound, as his tongue darts out to taste the jeweled droplets, dark and shining as garnets.
“Daemon!” she says, startled.
The first great smear of blood across the sheets comes from the speed with which Daemon throws her down on the mattress and then pulls her back across them until her hips are sprawled open at the edge of the bed, open to his mouth. His large hand rests over her stomach, so distended and tender with her monthly blood, its warmth soothing—she hates to prove those who titter about a woman’s unreasonableness at this cycle of the moon right, but she is more prone to tears then, perhaps that explains the last few days—aching with its wonderful emptiness as her womb pulses around nothing. Every pass of her uncle’s tongue between her folds draws forth another wash of blood: bright and new, scarlet, ruby, Targaryen fucking red, and then dark, viscous, fleshy, as she comes hard, the red-black of wasted tissue, of a failed child, and Rhaenyra is laughing up at the moon-dappled ceiling as she hauls her uncle up by the hair to see her blood coating his mouth, his chin, in his teeth. Is this what his boy might see, when his lord returned to his tent, when they saw each other through the smoke and ash of the battlefield? Another slick of red wetness onto the sheets, another stain, mixed with her arousal, his saliva.
“You’ll do it. Anything I say.” Fuck what they all say. He will not give her a child: what is kneeling to her, against that? She doesn’t wait for him to answer. “Put your cock in me,” she demands. “But don’t come inside me. Don’t come until I say.”
He fucks her blood diagonally across the bed. Gushes it out of her with every thrust of his hips up into her as she rides him, down her thighs, onto his cock, slashing the linens crimson. She raises herself off him after she comes the second time to see his hard cock red, far redder than it would have been with the maidenhead he’d failed to take. Red on her hips, on his thighs, in their white-silver pubic hair. A red hand-print has made it onto the pillow somehow. It looks like they’ve butchered a carcass in their marital bed. Like they’ve drained a stag down to its last drop of heart’s blood. Like a body slit open.
Rhaenyra slides down his marked body and sheathes him with her mouth.