(hotd) wife, mistress, queen, chapter one

[mirrorwitches]

WIFE, MISTRESS, QUEEN CHAPTER ONE

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“Where are we going, uncle?”

Usually this question would be spoken by Rhaenar with excitement. His uncle had sent a note to his chambers that instructed him to dress and meet him at the gate and now they passed through it out into the city and the promise of adventure. But it comes dull, frayed, the light pitch of his voice roughened with unshed tears—he’d wanted to unloose it, when Alicent visited him after the funeral with some other ladies of the court to pay her respects, but he’d had to let her do it for him, wan but pretty in her mourning dress, hair still windtossed and smelling of smoke from the breezes off the Blackwater that scraped the headland raw and tangled Syrax’s smoke in its curls. He’d yearned to press his face into her soft lap and soak its black wool with the flood barely held behind the weakening levee of his lids and feel her gentle fingers in his hair but they were not yet wed and could not be alone, not since she flowered, in anything but stolen moments. Is that why men wed, to weep?

(Men might, but kings wed so their queens might weep for them. The queen was the king’s other body and did the things it might not but yet must do: the first and most fundamental, to create new kings within itself, carry them and bring them forth, first, most fundamental, last and total, for it could end all other things; the beauty, for it could be beautiful, food for poets and focus for love; the mercy, for it could be wracked by the tender pangs of pity a king of course would never naturally suffer for the king must be unyielding to his enemies, but a queen could be moved to tears of sorrow by the remorse of the traitor, she could weep before the throne and the king could enact her mercy. On the hillside today Rhaenar had observed his father’s face of shattered stone as he watched his queen burn, for there was none to weep for him now, and none to weep to, if he ever did.)

Should the king’s city not weep? The king was the realm and the realm was the king and his capital is its heart and the king's heart is broken. As Daemon does not answer and sweeps stonily ahead into the night the city seizes in a frenzied gaiety around them. Their queen is dead and men play at dice on street corners and knives flash cold and sharp at an accusation of a cheat. Women scream gossip at each other from open windows as they bring in the laundry waving above Rhaenar’s head from their ends of the line strung between their apartments. Children run by with their sticks chasing after a hoop.

(The queen was dead and her son could not weep for her. A daughter might have, as Alicent so fittingly did, for Alicent would be his queen. This had been a matter of unspoken understanding for as long as Rhaenar could recall, made official when they were two-and-ten. Already she wept for him. He hadn’t been able to stop a few tears seeping through the cracks to the great pressure of his grief was making proliferate more rapidly, little cracks all over, and the ones always there and poorly sealed widening now at a steadier pace. Alicent saw them well in his eyes and so did the delicately sniffling ladies about her, they rustled and murmured. Really it was touching how much the prince had loved his lady mother, such a praiseworthy queen, what sweetness of nature, who had of course doted on him, her only son, her only living child—any other whispers of the queen’s many lost babes leading to a perhaps too clinging attachment to the prince were silenced for the day, as were any about its possible ill-effects, being currently made evident in the tears he now shed. For this day it was good, a sign of a fineness of feeling that was not at all unbecoming in a prince, or at least understandable. Rhaenar did not know how he he knew what he knew: that everything had profoundly to do with time, that allowances had been made for the cracks out of which too much seemed to spill, tears, laughter, affections, to be patched up, but as time went on they had been made less, and would be made less, and were made today only because of time, that of his quickly vanishing but as yet still present youth, the immediacy and depth of bereavement.)

Any other night and Rhaenar would leap at this thrilling glimpse at the world outside the walls of the Keep where he spends his days studying in lessons and the training in the yard and bearing cups at council, at his uncle finally showing him the domain he had made his own with such notoriety on reaching his manhood. On this one he puts his head down and follows in his uncle’s long strides. He'd initially leapt at Daemon’s summons, grateful for any diversion from replaying the sight of his mother aflame on her bier on the back of his eyelids as he failed to find sleep, and he'd thought…

(The future queen wept for her future king. But if the prince might let a few tears pool at his lower lids before before applying enough caulk to blink them back the Lady Alicent could only permit herself two hard sobs into a handkerchief, of the dignified kind that a consoling, heavy-palmed pat to her shoulder administered by Lady Beesbury was considered adequate to soothe. Alicent raised her swollen face from the embroidered cloth and looked searchingly at Rhaenar with her wide, wet eyes and swallowed any remaining tears into the dark damp of her throat. Even a daughter could not wail, and that’s what Rhaenar wanted.)

His hand feels for the pendant of the gift that Daemon had given him four days ago and that he has secretly worn under his clothes ever since. He doesn't know what he thought. Or he could not say what he thought, because he did not know how to think it. The necklace must think it, the gift of it and the wearing of it. His uncle calls him sweetling, sometimes, like his parents did only when he was very small, when they are alone. He should have found such a gift galling. A mockery. Daemon dealt death with a blade and dared drape a prince’s neck in fripperies. Rhaenar unbuttoned the top buttons of his doublet and turned around so he might. Daemon should have laughed. Geviye. The throne room was immense with how alone they were.

(He startled them all when he burst to his feet and paced to the window, leaving the women to rustle and murmur behind him, thinking but not speaking of his well-known sulks, his fits of pique. He contradicted his elders, glowered from corners, stormed from feasts to the Dragonpit and launched himself into the sky and away from his duties. A difficult age. How charming he had been as a child, and still was on occasion. He had been at the tourney two days past, squire for his uncle, enjoying the adulation of the crowd. They screamed for the Prince of the City and they screamed for Rhaenar when he handed Daemon his lance, then again louder when he waved at them, bowed in the direction of Alicent in the royal box. They remembered when Viserys came to the throne and they remembered his son as he was then, a beautiful child, House Targaryen’s bright hope, with his bright hair and bright laughter, the way they went wild when he waved at the coronation crowds from his mother’s arms. The Realm’s Delight.)

It is only once they are forced to walk close together by the small, twisting byways of Flea Bottom that Daemon answers him: “Your father wants me to make you a man.”

(A fine moniker for the time being—a son and heir delighted by his mere existence, and the realm’s delight was a promise he would delight further by the acquisition of qualities that would grant him a new one: the Brave, the Councilor. As of yet the crowd still roared for him, for nothing, for a bright smile. At least Daemon puts on a show for them, his father had murmured at the meeting of the small council from which he’d fled to mope in the godswood with Alicent. It’s not ruling, tourneys, they know nothing of the hard work of ruling the realm, nor does Daemon, but he can put on a show. Rhaenar didn't even do that yet, he’d declined to enter the lists to Viserys’ frustration, he was competent enough at arms if not brilliant, his embarrassing childhood declarations—I’m Visenya!—had long ago become embarrassing to him as well for another reason, that he clearly could not aspire to the legendary prowess of the Conqueror's wife. He knew at four-and-ten, on the heels of a growth spurt, rangily muscled, he would be instantly knocked into the dirt by one of the accomplished tourney knights that had all been drawn to the capital like moths to flame, his new height that meant he now had to look down at Alicent and had to contemplate the wrongness of no longer having to look up at Daemon would not exempt him from humiliation.

“What?” When Rhaenar stops short Daemon grasps him by the elbow and pulls him into a doorway. In the one directly opposite across the narrow street a woman stands calling out to every man that passes. Rhaenar stares blankly at her, mind whirring, and when she feels the weight of it on her she meets it with her own bold glance, seals it with a wink.

“By which he means—”

“I know what he means.”

(If only he could be alone with Alicent. Four days ago they had managed it, snuck away to meet in the godswood, and Rhaenar had sprawled sullenly with his head in her lap, reporting the preparations for the tourney, his father’s irritation at his refusal to participate as a contender, it was not unusual, not shameful, to not make a dazzling showing in one’s first boyhood effort in a tourney, and it was in fact the mark of a man to enter anyway, to demur was another sign of his vanity, but Rhaenar couldn’t, not for this tourney to celebrate the excitement of a new prince’s birth. With another prince the succession could be secure as it was now not, Daemon would not do his duty in his marriage and also what problems it might make if he did, and although of course Prince Rhaenar would soon wed the Lady Alicent and surely have children of his own in short order consider King Jaehaerys, who could ever have foreseen that a man with thirteen offspring of his loins and two strong sons grown into warriors would be succeeded by a grandson? One could not ever have enough sons. Viserys had an heir but one could not ever make their house strong enough with sons.)

“Do you? I did not at first, I'll admit. Then again it’s Viserys. He circled around it for quite a while. So perhaps you can relieve us from euphemism—”

“To fuck a woman,” Rhaenar says roughly. “My father asked you? He asked you that?”

His father hates Daemon’s life. It disgusts him that his brother has taken up with some Lysene dancing girl and spurns the Red Keep to hold court with her in a brothel. They are, Rhaenar has realized, in a doorway to a brothel in the Street of Silk.

(So Rhaenar had said to her, yanking the grass that brushed his palms up out of the ground by the fistful and pulling apart the blades with restless fingers until they were sticky with sap like they might be with the treacle of the cake he wished to cram into his mouth, marked with tiny cuts that stung like the wind that would slice at them through his gloves as the churn and heave of the Narrow Sea flashed beneath his golden girl’s wings as she carried two riders over it and away. Alicent’s hair tickled his brow as she bent over him and tried to capture his eye, frowning, forehead wrinkled, the curl of the exact shade of the ember in the heart of the ash as it flamed back to life danced in the corner of his vision as his gaze evaded hers would be first saltblown with seaspray then inundated with the scents of the famed gardens of Lys, as would his, long enough to trap hyacinth and honeysuckle and heliotrope in its strands—because when he was ten or so and his hair began its usual creep past his collarbones and they as usual went to cut it he had cried and cried until Daemon, his own hair curling at his shoulders, had said, That’s how the dragonlords wore it in Old Valyria, the men and women both, I don’t intend to cut mine anymore simply because these Westerosi lords do so and Rhaenar stopped crying and his father had thrown up his hands and sighed, Fine, as you like, and his uncle had been true to his word and not cut his hair since and neither had his nephew—that’s what he thought and then said when she asked, You want your father to have another son? Rhaenar thought and spoke this nonsense as he always did, the realm’s delight not promise but prophecy, a commitment to delight, to his own way.)

“For everything there is a time. As a prince your father learned the delights of the flesh as is fitting for a young man of healthy appetite. He feels it is past time for you to do the same.”

Daemon pushes him gently through the doorway.

“Delights of the flesh,” Rhaenar huffs. That is what assails him once Daemon comes in the door behind him and his vision adjusts to the fleshy chaos in the relative brightness that confronts them. A multitude of bodies writhe together in the large common room of this pleasure house in seemingly infinite combinations, in twos and threes and more. A group of Daemon’s Gold Cloaks are singing a bawdy song and leering at the show. They break off into cheers—The Prince of the City!—that rise above the moans when they catch sight of their commander, and just abruptly fall silent in confused curiosity when they notice Rhaenar beside him. “How does he know I haven’t already experienced them?”

“Cousin Laenor doesn't count.”

Rhaenar flushes. “We don't do that anymore.” They’d fumbled together beneath the sheets when the heir to the Tides shared his cousin the prince’s bed in the summer at Driftmark. It’s different for you, Laenor had said that last time, miserably. I only want to go to bed with boys, the thought of lying with a girl repulses me—

“Good. Those delights were part of the problem. Not too much of one, mind. For everything there is a time, including screwing about with boys. But that time, your father was clear, must now be over.”

(Alicent saw through him. But even as the sun sank toward the horizon on the day of his mother’s funeral while Rhaenar stared out the window at the shadows swallowing the alleyways of King’s Landing and ignored the courtiers at his back trying to offer their condolences to at least one Targaryen, for the king was far too devastated by his grief to receive anyone and who knew where the fuck Daemon was, longing to be alone with her—for Alicent could weep when they were alone, for him, for his mother, perhaps for herself, as he wanted to cry for his mother and himself and her too—he did not know if he could meet it.)

“I—with Alicent—everyone was so angry! Including Father,” Rhaenar sputters in indignation. It was two years ago, right after the announcement of their betrothal and just before Lady Hightower died, and it hadn’t gone as far as with Laenor. At least as far as anyone else knew, thankfully. For only one kiss—at least it was only the one kiss—caught by Alicent’s mother there had been lectures, tears, being kept totally apart for three agonizing months that did the job very well: they’d never risked it again. He knew the reasons as they had been explained to him, that Alicent was to be his wife, but until that day her virtue was to be beyond reproach. It didn’t make any sense to him then, and made less now his father apparently wanted Daemon to use his more typically lamented avuncular influence to guide Rhaenar through fucking a whore.

Daemon nods in recognition at his men but makes no sign he would welcome being approached, and weaves towards the back of the room where he throws himself in a chair at a table in a dim corner. Both overwhelmed and numb, Rhaenar follows to sit across from him. The fucking has resumed, but the guests that fringe the heaving mass are quieter, watching Daemon and Rhaenar, an appraising murmur rippling around the circle. Rhaenar grinds his teeth together and looks down as one finger mindlessly fiddles with a ring on the opposite hand.

“Not your wife,” his uncle scoffs, after a serving girl has brought them two goblets and a pitcher of wine and departed. “You aren’t supposed to like your wife that much. You are supposed to be fucking your way through the Street of Silk. You are supposed to be dreading the day they drag you to the sept to wed that prim, pious little virgin.”

Rhaenar says: “Everyone wishes you’d go and like your wife a good deal more.” Then: “My father always says my mother made a man of him.” And: “My father loved my mother.”

He throws back the wine, drains it to the dregs, and ignoring Daemon’s skeptical raised brow, unimpressed by this boyish bravado, pours himself another glass. The burn in his throat and the heady rush to his brain don't quite distract from the tears that have sprang to his eyes once more.

(The day of the tourney he had been late to Daemon’s tent—too late to sneak Alicent back to the encampment as he usually did and have her peek from behind its raised silk door at the various lordlings and hedge knights and squires hurrying about and have her entertain them by reciting which had gotten whose daughter pregnant, which one had gambled away his patrimony and had to try to reclaim it on the tourney circuit, while Rhaenar helped Daemon into his armor, his uncle sometimes adding details that made Alicent blush to the roots of her hair, like which of Lord Wyle’s sons had a taste for selecting a strong Gold Cloak to join he and his chosen whore for the evening in bed, but then last time Alicent had said in that arch voice she used when she knew something you didn't and was pretending she was still deciding whether or not to enlighten you, “Hm, I don't see the youngest of Lord Wylde’s sons, and today was supposed to be his very first tourney,” because with twelve of them, Lord Wylde’s sons always seemed to provide a good amount of her bulletins’ contents, and Daemon had sniggered and responded in a similar sly tone that implied this mysterious absence was no mystery at all to him, “No, he's already been to the maester this morning and not for any broken bones,” but before Rhaenar really wanted to wring their necks Alicent had said matter-of-factly, “Yes, he was abed with a serving maid early this morning and spent on her face, and some got into her eye and it was quite painful, and they were both still rather drunk from the night before and seemed to actually fear that he may have blinded her, and so he went with her to the maester,” while both Daemon and Rhaenar gawped at her, going a shade of red he hadn’t known was possible and insisting stoutly, “It’s sordid, but I thought it was quite sweet he was so concerned that he went with her to the maester, missing his first tourney for some scullery wench, I mean, it’s honorable,” over Daemon’s braying laughter—because Rhaenar was in his mother’s chambers during the early part of her labor and was reluctant to tear himself away.)

“Loved, yes. Liking is a different matter. One doesn’t like women.”

“What the fuck are you talking about? They’re the same thing.”

“They really aren’t,” Daemon says wryly. “For example, I haven’t liked my brother in at least a decade. Fortunately it isn’t relevant.”

What if he wanted it to be relevant? Clearly it was relevant to some things. What was the right amount of liking women?

Rhaenar ignores this. “Isn’t that why you brought me here? Because you certainly didn’t bring me here for love.”

“I thought they were the same thing.”

“I loved my mother. And I liked her.” He doesn’t care if this condemns him.

“Yes. Sometimes one gets lucky.”

Daemon’s mouth is hard, but his eyes above it are soft. Rhaenar flinches away from it and the sight of the lascivious revelry that greets him in exchange instantly if slightly belatedly transmutes his grief to rage. With relief he brings his own back to his uncle blazing with fury rather than pathetic with desolation: “You don’t know what love is. My mother is dead. Today was her funeral, and you disrespect her memory by bring me to an orgy—”

“Shouldn’t a dutiful son pay his respects at his mother’s wake?”

Rhaenar jerks to his feet. Daemon’s hand whips out to grip his wrist and hold him fast. His uncle leans toward him and says, “This philosophizing does not matter. There is neither love nor liking to be found here. At least if you do it right.” His eyes are now as hard as his mouth, with a mean, encrusting glitter. “Your father said you clung too much to the skirts of your mother. He thought getting you up another set of skirts might help unlatch—”

“My father didn’t say that. He didn’t tell you to do this, tonight of all nights.” He doesn’t try to shake off Daemon’s restraining hand, but neither does he sit down.

“No, he would never be so crass as to say it. And this request for some assistance in shaping you into a king was made six moons ago. I didn’t wish for your mother’s death to provide the perfect opportunity, but let’s say I have a natural sense for poetic timing.”

(He’d been with her that morning when her pains started, panicking at her first groan and making to rise from where he sat beside her until she grasped his wrist, chafed his hand between her palms, smiled at him and whispered, “It’s alright, there’s no rush. Stay with me awhile, they are far apart as yet, it will be a bit...” By the time the first bell rang out to call everyone to the tourney ground, the others had been summoned, the midwives and nurses and maesters, and his mother’s face was snarled in agony. Her waters had burst and in them had been blood and Rhaenar saw the worried expressions all around him as they tried to shoo the prince out. But he hadn’t left until the final bell tolled and his mother with an attempt at a smile said, “Before night falls perhaps you will have that sister of yours,” and when the door slammed shut behind him he heard her howl and it chased him through the halls and down the stairs and across the courtyards. At first he couldn’t focus, so late Daemon was already mostly armored although one look at his nephew’s face and he didn’t even tease, but Rhaenar allowed himself to be distracted by the clash of sword against shield and the screams of horses and the cheers of the crowd and the bitter tang of the brains of the knight splattered against the wall, to be caught up in the show. It was too far away to really meet Alicent’s eye when Daemon sent her brother’s horse down squealing with her brother beneath it, but he could track her head moving restlessly as she craned to see if Gwayne would drag himself out, her hand at her mouth, and it was certainly too far away to see from her face if she was as surprised as he by the unknown handsome Dornishman who unseated Daemon in turn but he met her twisting in his direction to try to determine the same thing.)

Before Rhaenar can respond his uncle breaks their interlocked gazes to address the figure that has come to stand at his shoulder. A slight girl with very fair hair in one of the thin, sleeveless gowns that is seemingly the only garment any of the women who remain clothed in this place seem to wear. Another example of this previously unknown, purportedly entirely distinct breed of women it is for some reason important he become acquainted with. A whore. Everyone understood the fucking of whores had something to do with the shaping of sons into kings, so obviously no one had bothered to explain it to Rhaenar, and so obvious such an odd statement didn't need to be explained, and seemed suddenly to make perfect sense to one who had always known the wedding of wives made men of fathers.

“Yes?” he snaps.

“Apologies for my boldness, my prince,” the girl says, appearing unperturbed by his clear irritation. “My mistress has sent me to attend to you.”

“Why did she not come to attend to me herself?” Daemon drawls as he shifts his attention away from Rhaenar, who observes him relax and let a little of his tense, coiled energy drain away as he looks the girl up and down with a small smile.

“She said you asked her to put all this on, and she did not quite yet feel up to dealing with your morose mood for yet another evening on top of it. Apologies again, my prince. I do not mean to offend or take liberties, merely report faithfully what was said to me.”

His uncle snorts. “I see. Simply a very pretty mouthpiece for offensive liberties. It's Lily, yes? You are to put me in a better mood for Mysaria, is that it?”

“Yes, my prince. And so I gather.”

Daemon leans back and considers her from under heavy lids. Rhaenar senses the flicker of his never truly broken regard, cast from the corner of his eye. He rubs his forefinger with his thumb and then opens his palm in his nephew’s direction. “How would you do it? For as you can see, I have another prince here with me tonight, whose mood is quite low, and who is unfamiliar with how such a one as you might improve it.”

The girl follows Daemon’s gesturing hand with her body and dips in a short curtsy. Her attention, like that of everyone else he's trying to ignore and who attempt to ignore their curiosity about him in turn so they can give the Prince of the City the wake he’s asked for, has only ever been half on Daemon. Another prince in his uncle’s squalid meantime principality.

“I can show him, my prince.”

(They willed themselves to be distracted. Threw themselves into the blood spilt out here, on the tourney ground. Perhaps if Rhaenar could have been alone with her Alicent would have, could have, wept for him, wept for herself, wept for him the weeping he would like to do for her. For Alicent likes tourneys. She can be squeamish, she doesn't like blood, and she gets nervous at the attention the royal box receives, being put on display as the Hand’s daughter, the prince’s betrothed. But her excitement at the show gets the better of her, her interest in pageantry and personalities, and when her anxiety still thrums through her and finds an outlet in the shredding of the skin around her nails Rhaenar encases her slim fingers tightly in his, so the flow from her agitated pulse throbs then ebbs, staunched in this anchoring hold. Did his mother like tourneys? Had she once? The panoply the day of her death was for her but she was not there. It honored her labors and she was too busy submitting to them to observe the honoring. Alicent will be queen. The ladies throng her in their blacks and murmur of it. The queen is dead. All those dead babes, and only the one prince. But soon he too shall wed even if that sweet lady will, alas, not be here to see it. They speak of it as elsewhere Silent Sisters pour Aemma’s ashes into an urn and set in the crypt. There will be a new queen. It is lucky how well Lady Alicent and Prince Rhaenar like each other. How enthusiastically they will set to their duty of producing more princes. Yes. How Rhaenar anticipates it, longs for it. He pictures it as an endless whispering under the sheets with Alicent in the dark. Alone, together. Her soft, giggling lips now rightfully his to kiss and receive secrets from. He shall have Alicent forever, as he wants.)

What is Rhaenar being shown? What this Lily does to improve his uncle’s mood or how his uncle's mood is improved? The whore slides into his lap. His hand goes to her hip, spanning her thin waist to curve over the swell of her buttock. She kisses him, her fingers splayed over his skull, burying themselves in his hair, toying with the strands. The pink flash of their tongues entangling. Hoots of approval from the crowd. The Prince of the City, every woman here his for the taking. Rhaenar shifts in his seat, gulps more wine, stronger than he’s used to and already making his head fuzzy. The girl leans back but their mouths do not break contact and he pushes forward, digging his hand into the give of her thighs. He pulls back, goes lazy, and she pushes forward to rub her breasts against his chest. She plucks one hand from her waist and with a practiced movement releases one small breast from her gown and guides Daemon through cupping it, giggling as she skips her lips over his cheek, down his throat. The hand needs no further instruction; the thumb swipes across her nipple, once, twice, until she gasps, from the way he's teased her or from the shock of air on her other breast as in the same moment he slides her other strap from her shoulder.

They part. His uncle turns toward him, his expression still cold above the long melt of his body beneath Lily’s wriggling, shapely form. Rhaenar had believed for a moment that Daemon had even forgotten he was there. But—no. This is for him. This is for his men that watch. Daemon knows how to put on a show. “Now,” Daemon says, kissing her ear, eyes on Rhaenar, “you should cheer my nephew up. His mother is dead, you know.”

Lily rises gracefully in one elegant unfolding. “I cannot truly comfort such a loss, my prince,” she murmurs, coming around the table toward him, focus on him but perhaps addressing Daemon, or both of them, “but pleasure can at least offer a distraction from grief.”

Then her hips and her white-gold curls and her bared breasts are in his lap. The men cheer. Rhaenar’s hands fly to her hips like his uncle’s had, although he didn’t need to be shown this. Where else would they be? Where else could they want to be? Her mouth is hot, her tongue teasing against his. He did not need to be shown this either, apparently: he cups her breast without any guidance, panting as its silky weight fills his palm and her tongue presses a sigh past his lips. He thinks of Alicent, the way her breasts rise against her gowns. His eyes are screwed shut, and he feels his red face go redder as across his lids dances, over and over, the breadth of his uncle’s hands with their broad blunt nails against her milky skin, the sword callous on his thumb against the rosy peaks of her nipples, the way she gasped. Her back had arched, her pale hair had rippled down her spine. The men roar. His back arches, and then she’s stumbling away from him. The men’s raucous approval doesn’t cease. Around the buzzing whine in his head he hears their assessment of the situation; take her to a room, show her what’s what, take her for a good hard ride, there’s a lad.

“Sorry,” he whispers. “I’m sorry, I—”

(He must go into the air on Syrax. If more than three days elapse landbound his muscles tighten, his skin itches, his teeth ache, he snaps at everyone, becomes unbearable to himself and others. He must take flight even if it is considered odd by everyone, indulgent, a frivolity to mount a beast of war not to subdue kingdoms but for the sheer pleasure of it, as that devotee of delight Rhaenys had so loved, much more than Aegon or Visenya who devoted themselves only to duty and lay waste to the Dorne with Balerion and Vhagar after Meraxes was shot down out of the azure over the desert. Out of some overwhelming, incommunicable need, as that his grandmother surely felt flying Meleys with a newborn Daemon strapped to her chest, the same urge driving her to ascend the skies even as she yet bled between her legs. Alyssa had taken her babe with her just as she had when he still dwelt within her body and now even with their recent separation binding them together in this joy, the wind on his face for the first time. Rhaenar wants to take Alicent with him. He coaxes, cajoles, hectors and harries, to no avail. It is too terrifying to contemplate, it would not be proper. But she waits for him. He descends from the skies, restored, and beams to see her there waiting to accompany him back to keep and mother, who he must visit where she is too ill and exhausted to leave her chambers.)

Rhaenar’s eyes had snapped open for one long moment, to take in the frenzy all around and Lily’s beat of surprise smoothing out to unruffled professional placidity once more. He closes them, his empty hands occupying themselves instinctively, twisting the ring on his thumb around and around on his thumb until the knuckle is swollen. A bubble of quiet around the three of them before he hears the clink of coin passed from Daemon’s hand to Lily’s and her feet padding, after which the silence drawing in upon him and his uncle alone thickens, deepens, softens, a muffling downy silence.

“My mother is dead,” Rhaenar says, voice cracking. A burble of acidic laughter. “Her wake. You—you liked her, and you would think, just one night—”

“For one fucking night, you think it all might cease.” He turns back to his uncle and braves meeting his eye. Daemon’s face is bleak. “I know. I just needed to know if you could.”

“If I could what?”

(The king is not there. His father sees to the business of his kingdom by day and spends the evenings with his wife. The third to last time Rhaenar saw his mother he went to her in her room, though he knew he was expected in the Small Council—an honorable position, king’s cupbearer, one that marked a boy out as being groomed for rule, by putting him at the center of things in a privileged position to observe it done by others, a clear sign Viserys would have him officially invested as Prince of Dragonstone very soon. He couldn’t leave his mother to pass her days alone, dragonless even if she was well enough for such a thing or not as resistant to the thought as Alicent, unable to even stir to the gardens, now. Everyone spoke of the new prince she was expected to bear but no one appeared to consider the clear pain that wreathed her features, all apparently content with the assurance its end would be one and the same with the fulfillment of the king’s hopes, or the grinding dullness, of being trapped in this room by pain, of pain. Mother felt his pity. She could tell he did not wish to be there, sensed that he had to pause to steal a steeling breath and a squeeze of Alicent’s hand before crossing the threshold. She was surprised he came, as his father was when he received the answer for the question of his son’s tardiness. Who would choose to be here? She said what she always did. Rhaenar would serve the realm in the saddle, on the battlefield, but this was the queen’s battlefield, and there she served, as Lady Alicent would one day serve. That almost last time he had indulged in his usual fancies. Rhaenar would rather his wife ride to battle and glory with him. He would take her with him so the sight of her could keep the men’s spirits up. She would be his queen, yes, but Visenya had been Aegon’s and often with him and even when not with him ruling the realm in his stead, and he would have Alicent to run things capably if he had to be absent, as Rhaenys too had let off her flights of fancy to sit the throne and reign with her sister. Alicent smiled at him and his mother did not bother to protest but also smiled, tiredly, and told him to wash off the stink of dragon.)

“Be a son.”

(Perhaps Alicent could weep if they were alone. Maybe then Rhaenar could weep. He could meet it that far, to weep with her. He did not know if he could meet it with words. He would not have to, now, at least for one night the death of his mother destroyed all words. Words gathered around it, pressed in at the edges of that consuming blackness, for it could not just exist, that smothering weight, he must explain it to himself, make sense of the fact his mother was no longer in the world. It was the will of the gods, ill luck: they were insufficient. Alicent knew when the words were insufficient, she could always tell. I wish for my father to have another son. He responded with nonsense that was not nonsense. He did wish to ride with Alicent on dragonback, away. To see wonders. The evening purpled and he wanted to see his mother and he went to her and she was about to have her bath but since she had to wait for it to cool Rhaenar sat with her for the second to last time and told her this much truth. He hoped it was a sister. He would like a sister and she should be named Visenya and he had already chosen a fitting egg for her, one that looked like to hatch a dragon that would grow as fearsome as the famed creature that lived the conquest and yet lived now. An awful truth. Sweat shone on his mother’s forehead. All this for a girl. He knew its selfishness by his mother’s wry laugh as she repeated the name as if to herself. He should not wish for it, this agony for only a girl, but he did, he wanted a sister, he thought a sister named Visenya was a fine thing to want. One could want that. He knew how it would be taken, this answer Alicent might make better sense of, the truth that would placate her. Of course he did not want a brother, a brother that like his uncle in the eyes of many would be held as a more suitable option, a better heir. His brother lived slightly less than two hours. All this, for a boy.)

I will never be a son. He was his mother’s son and so he must burn her. He could not bear to burn her. It was not what he meant to say. It was nonsense, let Alicent try to make sense of that. At least it was only to Daemon. I will never be the son my father wants, is that what he meant to say? Is that what Daemon had understood? Had he understood? It’s on the tip of his tongue now: I am his son. It a truth. An awful truth. He is his father’s son. He must be a king’s son. His stomach roils. The wine, the heat of the room, the smell of sex. He is his father’s son, and it is not enough. It was not enough to spare his mother. Is this what being a son is? The men’s cheerful shouts of encouragement wash over him. Let sweet Lily show you a good time. Learn to please the Hand’s daughter, yeah! Her precious high tower is no match for our Lil here, heh?

“Maybe he could have been. Baelon. If only he hadn’t shat himself to death before night fell. He could have been anything.” Rhaenar sways to his feet with a another sour giggle. “The heir for a day—”

The words emerge thin, don't carry. The guests closest have turned to watch, and the room has stilled, ever alert to the princes at its periphery, waiting to see what they will do. “The perfect heir.” There, finally it's coming clear. He raises his glass, so fast and clumsily the remaining dregs slosh over the rim. “The heir for—”

A screech as Daemon pushes his chair back and stands. He slings his arm around Rhaenar’s neck and raises his own cup high.

The air of King’s Landing hits his brain as Daemon hauls him back out into the street as soon as the adulation for his toast—these men perceive, only slightly more dimly than the heirs themselves, how the balance wobbles, could fall either way, that his uncle is a good bet, that the death of Rhaenar’s tiny brother means the odds haven't shifted, even with the ambiguous development of the introduction of his nephew into their midst—dies away. It should sober him but merely tips him headlong into the building delirium that the crushing weight of the warning arm on his shoulder, bracketing his throat, had held at bay: “Did I answer your question?” Rhaenar slurs as the walls of the close-packed buildings tilt dizzily around him. “Well? Can I? Did I pass your test?”

“Rhaenar…”

Fuck him. He tries to stalk away furiously but immediately trips, Daemon catching him just before he sprawls on hands and knees into the filth of the gutter. He props him against the wall and sets his body between Rhaenar and the still somehow countless eyes that see everything here even at this time of night. Watching, weighing, waiting. Rhaenar paws at his neck and can’t make his clumsy fingers manage the buttons, until Daemon, deft as he had been baring Lily to the waist, slides the bone from fabric with a soft rasp. Both his uncle’s hands go to the wall on either side of Rhaenar’s head as he gets his fist around the steel pendant. Daemon looks down at him with burning eyes. He opens his mouth. Nothing emerges.

If he knew how to ask for it, he would know what he wanted. If he knew what he wanted he would know how to ask.

One tear spills down his cheek, then another. He dashes at them with the heel of one hand, and clings for dear life to his uncle’s gift.

“Oh, sweetling,” Daemon murmurs. Rhaenar buries his head in his uncle's chest as he has not done since he was very tiny, around the time he'd announced he'd marry Daemon someday—Targaryens married their uncles, and marriage was very important, and Daemon was important. He'd only said it once. He instantly tries to pull back, aware of the show, but Daemon’s palm is heavy on the back of his skull, pressing him into the leather between Rhaenar’s cheek and his heart. Quietly, so quietly he's speaking only to himself, above Rhaenar’s head he says, “Fuck.” More audibly: “Let’s get you back to your Alicent, hm?”

A huddled black form waits for him in his chambers: Alicent grown tired in her vigil, slumped over in a chair in her funeral gown. She jerks awake and to her feet at his light footstep on the rug. The hearthlight sparks off her wet cheeks.

“I'm sorry,” she sobs, “Rhaenar, I'm so sorry—”

He throws himself into her arms, weeping with how alone they are.