(hotd) price of blue

[mirrorwitches]

Title: price of blue
Fandom: House of the Dragon
Pairing(s): Alicent Rhaenyra
Rating: Explicit
Length: 9.1k, 1/1
Tags: The Dance of Dragons | Aegon II v. Rhaenyra Targaryen Era, “Queen in Chains” Era, Dubious Consent, Rape/Non-con Elements, Past Rape/Non-con

Summary: “Make her beautiful for me,” the queen ordered. “Dress her in blue.”

Content Warnings: the tags (extremely dubious consent; past rape/non-con in the form of references to Alicent’s, you know, life; active desire deeply buried under layers of repression) as well as the brief appropriation of medieval sexological (excuse the oxymoron) conceptions of the bodies of women (or "women") who fuck women.

And when you think of beauty I'll be there
Alone behind the eye of your electric stare
Reflections in your mirror I’ve become
Alone with you, the price of blue
Alone with you, the price of blue

So you can keep to yourself
With the bеst of everything
And I can wander thе wreck
Amazed and shivering
But who wouldn't take something
For nothing
For nothing and run
Two pages into one

And when you find your wisdom, I'll be gone
The comfort of the proof of what was wrong
So look me in the eye as long as you can stand
Alone with you, the price of blue
Alone with you, the price of blue

("Price of Blue," Flock of Dimes)

“Make her beautiful for me,” the queen ordered. “Dress her in blue.”

“Your Grace…?” Talya trailed off in confusion.

Rhaenyra gazed out the window. The sky was blue, but not the blue she wanted. When, in the heavens’ gradations of blue, would that shade appear? In the evening, after the sun had completely set. An iridescent blue so dark it appeared black, or a black so full it was blue. Aglitter with the reflected silver pulse of stars not yet visible on its inky blue bed. Beyond the jostling red-brick roofs of the city she can just glimpse the flash of morning sunlight on the Blackwater. That would be an even better swatch for comparison with the exact hue that lives only in her memory: the sea at night mirroring the sky above with a murmuring shimmer. That was what Alicent had been clothed in, a moonless sea seen by the far glow of lamplight thrown unto its heaving chill glimmer up to the whitecap crests of her collarbones.

If she could get at the waves past the press of her city—on Dragonstone, her eyes drunk that shroud every evening, clear to the horizon—they could not help at this hour, anymore than would the soft blue wash of the sky on the heels of a dawn gray with the clinging mists of a night of intermittent downpours shredded to tatters by the hot disk of a sun torn free of cloud. If she were to point to the sky above the roofs she would have to explain There, that blue that is almost white, that is the color of the gown the little traitor wore the day she dressed me with tender hands for my investiture and knelt with the rest and damned herself twenty years hence, she must wait until night fell to say There, that blue so green too that in dim light it is almost black, that is what the little hypocrite wore when my father announced he would wed her and damned her twenty years hence.

Her attention was drawn back by the handmaiden shifting in place uneasily, which alerted her to how far it had flown. She had not been prone to such fancy for a long time. As a girl, there had been a period where her imagination was disturbed by these reveries of those who were not where or as they ought to be. She had mastered them, time showing her its merciful aspect in gradually accustoming her to the deafening, tauntingly precise emptinesses of the Red Keep’s halls, and even then, she had mastered herself far enough that it manifested as the restless moodiness and petulant rages that drove her father wild, that the many persons observing her did not know that there was an era when Rhaenyra—There, that blue so green too that in dim light it is almost black, that is what the little liar wore when she knelt with me in the sept and told me I should speak to the gods to draw my mother close—kept up a brisk stream of conversation in her mind, starting from when speaking to the gods proved unsatisfactory but speaking with Alicent of the gods wasn’t, so she went straight to the source, with her dead mother, her vanished uncle, her vague father, her destroyed friend.

They were fascinating companions, and she had been holding one such intercourse with her inward Alicent Hightower on whether or not she should join the hunt for her brother’s name day her stepmother came, red in the morning, to the godswood to summon her. She lost the habit, learned to live with the silence. She struggled again on return, out of practice, six years of picking up the thread of her broken conversations with Daemon away from here, and to more absences, many more.

Dead father.

Departed husband.

Departed husband.

Dead lover.

Dead cousin.

Dead cousin.

Dead daughter.

Dead son.

Dead son.

Dead son.

She alit with the flare of temper that was of late only ever banked, never doused, but managed to smother it so a mere sigh huffed from her nostrils, not a roar of licking flame from her lips to scorch Talya, whose mistress—Rhaenyra knew perfectly well who her true mistress was and had from the moment Lady Misery had presented the woman to her with a sly smile upon her taking possession of the royal quarters once more, her smile as she said that perhaps Queen Rhaenyra, so righteously resolute in punishing the traitorous multitude that infested her keep, would like to reward the lowly handmaiden who nearly alone among its inhabitants had faithfully served the cause of the rightful heir to the Seven Kingdoms, a risky faith to commit herself to so steadfastly, to be sure, no less a deed than spying on the traitor queen herself, as Her Grace was doubtless familiar with, with the opportunity to serve Her Grace further, and she had smiled too, thanking Mysaria and agreeing to accept this Talya into her sevice, and that smile had been almost genuine, at the honesty and elegance with which her spymistress informed her she had spied on one queen and would on another and she simply did Rhaenyra the honor of her version of frank dealing—would not need any further instructions explicated. But Mysaria’s work began when night fell, and Rhaenyra wanted Alicent ready by then.

“Dowager Queen Alicent is of course to whom I refer. Yes,” Rhaenyra hurried on, though Talya was too well-trained to interrupt, “this means I want her transferred from where she has thus far passed her arrest to chambers befitting her station. Bathed, dressed, her beauty restored if her late conditions of living have managed to mar it, and brought to me at the feast this evening. See that this is done.”

“Yes, Your Grace. As you will. It is just…as a traitor, condemned by your own lips to…will it be…”

“The Queensguard on watch will know to permit you. They will escort the Dowager Queen to her new quarters once you let them know they are prepared to receive her.”

“At once, Your Grace.”

Did Rhaenyra imagine that there was disapproval in her oiled tones of compliance, in the acquiescent dip of her curtsy? Some misliked that Alicent had ever been removed from the queen’s chambers to begin with, that Rhaenyra had ordered an anointed queen be kept in one of the windowless but dry and comfortable cells for highborn prisoners on the second level of Maegor’s dungeons, a vastly more humble appointment than any she had ever known. Princess Helaena, owing to her fragile health and fractured spirit, was allowed to continue residing in her chambers, as there seemed little risk any craft would seek to liberate her from them. Now there are those who will cluck at a woman’s weakness in restoring Alicent to her previous state, at least as far as functional hearths and fine bed linens go.

Queen Rhaenyra did not need to justify herself. Is that not one reason to become queen, to cease having to justify oneself? Rhaenyra Targaryen had certainly never been in the habit, except perhaps to the obliging interlocutors that thronged her brain. Yet she found herself not infrequently doing so anyway, debasing her majesty with explanations. Whatever pleas for understanding of his orders her father felt it necessary to make and trouble he experienced when those under his command felt the bite of the bit and tried for their head, his word was law.

“She is still queen,” Rhaenyra was saying, halting Talya with her hand upon the doorknob. “She was my father’s queen, and so she will always be. Even after his death. She was my father’s wife, the mother of mine own blood. Regardless of where she may rest her head, crowned or uncrowned, be the pillow soft or hard. Wherever she might be.”

Alicent was right here. Somewhere below her feet. Rhaenyra had said it all before, or near enough, when the Queen in Chains came on her knees before the throne and Rhaenyra clenched a bloody fist as she granted her sorry life.

It was not a discovery, her sentimentality. Rhaenyra was very sentimental. It was not a revelation to Alicent either. A scrap of parchment had been temptation enough for a woman who had married her uncle. Sentimentality had not, traditionally, made the accounts of the vilest vices a monarch could use his power to indulge, but the dangers were becoming plain in the second Targaryen century.

-

“What is the meaning of this?” Alicent demanded.

The girls who filled the copper tub with ewers of hot water did not dignify this absurdity with a reply. It was the height of ridiculousness for a woman who stank of months of nothing more than one of those ewers of markedly tepid water and a rough cloth to clean her body to pretend she was too proud for a bath that blurred the air with scouring heat and scented it with fragrant herbs.

“A bath, Your Grace,” Talya murmured from where she stood apart observing her underlings, stroking her chatelaine’s belt with its bristling keys with an enraging smugness and nodding in approval as the last drops of bath water joined the rest of the steaming surface that made Alicent’s sour skin itch with longing to sink beneath it.

Alicent rolled eyes still smarting with the now unfamiliar radiance of late afternoon, gritted her teeth against whatever unconsidered response threatens to erupt from her tongue. When Ser Bentley opened the door to her cell and Talya filled the entrance instead of one of the expected ever-changing serving girls bearing food or laundered clothes, or empty handed to bear away chamber pot and dirtied ones, she had humiliated herself more than enough for one day, swearing on the gods that she would personally guarantee Talya’s traitorous skull would be the first on a spike when Aemond reclaimed the city, and when that appeared to move her not at all, with pathetic pleas for enough pity for one she’d once deceived by a grotesque pretense at service to at least inform Alicent how her daughter was. “So I can see. To what purpose?”

“The Queen wishes it.”

“That is also obvious, but as she has not demonstrated much regard for my comfort these past months, I wonder to what end she shows such a change in concern.”

No response. The knot of dread that had formed low in her stomach when the course of her dull, dreary days was disturbed—hearing the creak of the door hinges at an unexpected hour, neither morning or dusk, and tearing her eyes from where they contemplated the dance of her candle’s flame in the subterranean gloom, pulse picking up as she turned over to her other side to see who it was, thinking Rhaenyra even if the very same instant, not even a heartbeat’s difference, told her it was not she, and that had enraged her even before her sluggish thoughts made sense of what she saw, with who it was and what it meant for her to be the one to escort Alicent from her place of confinement, and of course in a way she was right, no will save Rhaenyra’s could move her from there, not in the absence of the roar of Vhagar’s return, the clash of Ser Criston’s men in the yard and halls beyond, and this is what had her springing to her feet and spitting like an alewife, that here Rhaenyra was, her will, and she didn’t even have the decency to accompany it with her presence, she didn’t need to attend to Alicent anymore, not ever again, that is what made anger precede fear—thrust its way up her sternum to break apart in an acid flood upon the teeth once more barricaded against her body’s attempt to eject it.

Her hands curled into fists and she let her uncut nails bite into the meat of her palms to steady her. If she was to die at this sunset, it was nothing less than she had expected. All die, and for her as for anyone else, the only question was when, and how. She had nothing else for occupation these past months but to strengthen herself for this inevitability. Few people received as much time to do as thorough an accounting of the soul as Alicent had been granted, space to live inside so unambiguous a consequence its originating sin was practically demanded. She had determined her greatest sin must be pride. It was her pride that presumed to reject her father’s wisdom. In her pride she thought she could spare Rhaenyra the will of the gods’ judgment and brought it down upon her and her family instead. So be it. She would submit meekly in the knowledge her children had lived this long and the hope they might yet escape.

She wondered if Rhaenyra maintained the honor to look upon what she ordered. Had she with Alicent’s father, when her husband removed his head? She knew this much about how Otto Hightower died only from the one maid particularly prone to chat when it was her turn in the weekly rotation, an especially pretty one that Rhaenyra’s Queensguard universally indulged no matter how assiduously they followed their orders and snapped at any of the others who gave in to Alicent’s requests for news, but reporting gossip heard secondhand she had not been able to provide much detail. Alicent herself had not been there. When she had been dragged before Rhaenyra on the Iron Throne the princess informed the Dowager Queen that Lord Hightower had paid for his treasons with his life, and fallen silent after no greater elaboration to observe Alicent’s reaction, her own features arranged in stony lines that betrayed no hint of her satisfaction.

It has not been a struggle to foil any wish Rhaenyra had to watch Alicent break. She did not have to bite back a scream of horror or resist crumpling into a heap of stained skirts. She could not feel it. She could not believe in her father’s death. It was not real.

All she said was, “Can I see him?” A flicker of surprise on Rhaenyra’s face. “I need to see him,” Alicent asserted. Silence. “How do I know he is dead, if I don’t see him?”

Rhaenyra didn’t laugh at the absurdity of the idea she might have kept Otto Hightower alive and only told Alicent he was dead to torment her. Of needing to witness the inevitability they had fought to forestall, that their lives would be forfeit if Rhaenyra ever ascended that throne. So she did, and so they were. Of course her father was dead. Her father could not be dead. She only said, “My father was burned to ash months before I took this city. After you crowned your son you burned him and certainly did not wait for his family to gather to see him to the gods.”

“I cannot believe it,” Alicent said flatly. She had overseen the silent sisters washing Viserys and wrapping him in his shroud. She could not believe it then, either. It was still her husband, not his body, even this body that had been so long in dying, that she had cared for.

“I could not believe it either. That my father was dead. Until my son died. Then I believed it. Although I never saw his body either. I believed it.”

Otto Hightower had already been decently buried beneath the floor of the keep’s sept by the time his daughter was spared to come to believe it.

A hand brushed her shoulder. Alicent jumped and realized the maid servants had finished filling the bath, and one had come over to begin disrobing her. Talya had disappeared. Before none would think about touching the queen without her permission. Now they have been granted permission by another.

The morning of her wedding, after the day Rhaenyra called Alicent a whore and then fell silent upon understanding there was nothing she could do to stop what was to come and kept silence for two months, the door to Alicent’s chambers opened as she readied to bathe and dress and admitted Rhaenyra. The silence was not broken by a knock asking for entry, as Rhaenyra was a princess and Alicent was for a few hours yet still merely Lady Hightower. Neither was it broken by words. Rhaenyra undressed Alicent. She gently scrubbed a wet cloth down Alicent’s spine, her legs, across her knees and ankles and feet. In the morning she prepared Alicent’s body carefully for her father to occupy that night. The rust around Alicent’s nails tinted the water, but by the time Rhaenyra had laced her into the ivory gown she had torn fresh blood to be wiped away, one fingertip at a time, until the handkerchief Rhaenyra tucked into her own bodice was speckled scarlet.

-

The stilted laughter ceased, with an audible sigh of gratitude for the excuse, when the doors at the end of the hall opened.

A sparse wartime feast. The short table seated by her small council and lords too feeble from age to join the fighting or with sons to take the field in their stead, and the wives and mothers left behind.

At the sight of Alicent Hightower in cerulean silk and golden chains the silence thickened.

Her hair was always so much redder than in Rhaenyra’s memory. Redder by the light of the sun or flame. Her arms from the shoulders down were bare save for where her loose curls rippled across them, but for the chains around her wrists whose excess spilled tinkling to her elbows as she raised her hands so the shining links did not tangle about her feet where they connected to twinned gilt anklets.

Rhaenyra could not have instructed better. Is that not a reason to become queen, that one might express her desire in the most glancing command, its full shape shadowy to herself, and wait for it to be granted form so she could know its entirety?

Her father’s second queen had always been beautiful. Long before she was a queen, Hand’s daughter and princess’ lady had been beautiful. Rhaenyra had a beautiful friend. She had known this, and early. She could imagine what everyone must have believed. Any princess in possession of her pride, and Rhaenyra was undoubtedly one, must surely be jealous of another beauty ever blooming at her side to throw her into the shade. It was not so: one could only be jealous of a thing that was one’s own if insecure in one’s grasp on it, and Alicent’s beauty was Rhaenyra’s, not a thing foreign to herself, and she was prey to no doubts on that score. For years, daily, morning to night, the sight of Alicent was Rhaenyra’s to delight in. Who had greater claim? Who saw it so frequently, so closely?

She had not known further action was needed to secure her claim. Or rather she had known, even if she could not name them as such even as she made them, those clumsy, naive, frustrated attempts to secure her prerogatives. Rhaenyra does not know whether she or Alicent had been correct: Alicent, convinced a kiss was a fiendish seizure of another’s right, that allowing Rhaenyra’s tongue entry to her mouth was to assist in the usurpation of another’s place, or if not, if that much might be allowed, that it at least foretold a yet more unspeakable theft, and it was her duty to vigorously resist collusion with such plunder; or Rhaenyra, who captured that mouth with a laugh, unaware it was any momentous breech, not capable of fathoming it could be an assertion to any deeper ownership, and later feeling that any actions borne of her proprietary hungers must have been pointless, their result illusory, and therefore they might as well.

Perhaps they were both right, as she thinks she was right both when she realized there was nothing she could do to stop the enthronement she was not endowed with the attributes to enact, a lack of possession that sealed further dispossessions, there was a piece of the equation missing that meant Rhaenyra, when she took Alicent’s mouth, did not prefigure the acquisition of her cunt, and through it body and soul, and earlier, the belief that prompted the bold assertion to welcome her lips declared, was no conquest at all but simply the privilege granted by the title she already had to body and soul and always had, the years, the days and nights that filled them, crafted of mornings, afternoons, evenings, and midnights, the shared infancy and girlhood they built, the endless conversation, a constant attention.

Viserys sat the Iron Throne. He required heirs to sit it after him. He sat the throne as he named his firstborn daughter his heir. He married Alicent Hightower to beget more—no: he married her because a king’s desire could make a beautiful girl a beautiful queen, a beauty now authorized to demand the pleasured gaze of her subjects as an extracted levy the lowest could pay with the luck of a glimpse. Stableboys and handmaidens, lords and ladies, princes and princesses. A queen’s beauty became common property, open to the sight of all, and exclusive, available to the touch of one, her king. That crowning sheen of sheer animal luxury, sleek as the hide of a swift sand steed, further diademed with sapphires. The upraised graceful arm banded with beat gold. The throat collared with rubies. Beneath, the arc of her belly, an enchantment cast recurrently like the phantasmic feast that can never be consumed which a sorceress conjures to bait a famished man in the tale.

Tasteless, Alicent’s voice scoffed in her head as her feet walked the length of the hushed room toward Rhaenyra, even the susurrus of her velvet silver-blue slippers against stone drowned out by the clank of the flanking knights’ armor.

Yes, that’s the point. Not a single taste have I had, Rhaenyra thought as she watched Alicent come on until she was halfway up the table and an initial suspicion became conviction: there were no undergarments beneath the Lysene-style gown that clung at the breasts and waist and flowed everywhere else, only one skein of transparent fabric folded and refolded back on itself. Her form discerned through water as if she rested on a seabed and one peered down at her through the depths and though the water was very clear it was somehow heavy with an obscuring blueness that tossed so ceaselessly it was not certain whether the sandy undulations beneath were skin or seafloor, the billowing ringlets seaweed or siren’s strands.

I should say you’ve had more than enough tastes. In Rhaenyra’s mind’s vision Alicent’s lip curled, while in front of her eyes she stumbled slightly on her shackles before continuing to shuffle forward.

Not this one. Alicent thought Rhaenyra had gorged on every last craving. That there was no difference, no gradation: all equally repulsive in the fact of their satiation. Her gluttonies were distinct. Only one who found her nourishment in a sweeping revulsion so unrelenting it admitted no degree could fail to differentiate. Only one who had denied herself the taste of any and therefore remained convinced they were all the same and further denied herself the corresponding connoisseurship of a developed palate of disgusts could make such an error.

She had lain in Harwin’s arms in the full flower of her youth and known in his ardor the wrenching force of her own fresh beauty. She had told Daemon she carried his first son and was finally able to revel at the dark thrill of ownership mixed with his joy.

She had borne Criston Cole back into the sheets of her childhood bed and felt him shake beneath her as she exalted in the power at service between her aching thighs.

Rhaenyra had experienced each too keenly to ever confuse them.

One remained ever unsampled.

I meant, given the circumstances,, the ghostly, lashing version of the furiously silent Alicent that came to a stop by her chair sniffed.

She starved for a realm, and her city starved with her.

A king’s desire could make a beautiful girl a beautiful queen. Rhaneyra sat the Iron Throne despite her father’s queen’s efforts to prevent it. She’d sat at her king’s side with her downcast lashes and pretty lips that twitched into a pleasant smile at the correct cues, parted them occasionally to preach pieties, proffer politesse. You will make a fine queen. She spewed poison in private, scolded and scorned and shamed. Who spoke these lies to you?

Alicent waited silently for the queen’s pleasure, a silence that was the only defiance remaining. Rhaenyra watched her lords. The silence hung so thick above the table her scarred fingers flexed in their gloves as if to pet its nap. They looked at the queen in chains, for she was beautiful. She was more beautiful than Rhaenyra; the queen had commanded her rendered thus. To be looked upon. There was fear in Alicent’s eyes, at their hungry looking. They hungered over their meager portions, but would not be further fed. Rhaenyra remembered, that was all. Alicent was made to be presented to the sight of those not allowed to touch. She did not have to learn this. The princess had known, once, when she marched proudly through the Red Keep with her beautiful friend at her side.

“She proposed once to make Prince Aegon her usurper’s cupbearer. Now Queen Alicent shall pour our wine.”

Freer laughter. Their queen has granted them permission to leer their fill. A queen to gawp at once more.

None dared try to touch.

-

Alicent stood in the middle of her late husband the king’s bedchamber with her head held high. She fastened her focus upon a rare stretch of wall blank of painting or tapestry and locked her knees against tremors of relief, so much more violent than those she had similarly battled as she made her labored, mincing steps around the table that they threatened to pitch her into an unwilling sprawl of supplication at Rhaenyra’s feet. She kept her head erect despite this, and in defiance of the hectic hammering of her heart that attempted to fold her in two at the waist. Otto Hightower’s daughter did not shame herself before his murderer.

Rhaenyra circled Alicent slowly in the ridiculous garb she’d adopted. Doublet and breeches close-fitted, boots and gloves gleaming.

The earlier tremors as her body registered its reprieve, begun when the doors to the Queen’s Ballroom swung wide and Alicent followed the path the candlelit table laid for her eyes past the lords who would not kneel for Aegon to Rhaenyra seated at their head, would have sunk her to her knees that time if not for the grip of the escorting White Cloaks on each elbow keeping her upright. Her terror had not abated when she was gowned as befitted a dancing slut more than a queen, nor when she realized they were not leaving Maegor’s Holdfast for the Great Hall: perhaps Rhaenyra intended to have her ignominiously garroted in some inconspicuous chamber, and no surprise she would add whatever humiliations her habituated baseness could devise to Alicent’s end.

But as every eye at this feast swiveled in her direction, she’d felt sure enough that Rhaenyra had a different torment in store for her. That was when the new fear—that only started to ebb from her when the drinking ended without her being defiled amidst the stripped chicken bones, continued when she was marched not to the rooms of whichever lord was to enjoy her first but to her former marital bed, and finally washed out entirely when Rhaenyra entered shortly thereafter—began.

Relief that she was not to die that night, only disgraced, gave way to relief that if she was to be disgraced, it seemed it would be by Rhaenyra alone rather than by many men. She did not know if her gratitude was sinful: was being used as a whore to gratify many men’s paired lusts for revenge and crude bodily satisfaction more or less disgusting than being prey to the monstrous lusts of one degraded woman? Alicent would have no one to consult on the question. Her repeated requests to be sent a septa to pray with sometimes had all been ignored. Rightly or wrongly, grateful she was. Rhaenyra had never frightened Alicent on her own behalf.

For her children, yes, of what her former friend might do to the girl who must suffer for bearing children of pure, untainted lineage, the boys whose first breaths made them more fit to ascend the throne she grasped for in the view of everyone but a father made a fool to fondness, and at the last, even he, with the clarity of death’s breath on his cheek carrying the whisper he was to pass out of this world and beyond the ability to shape it, had finally understood. All those years ago to break the spell Rhaenyra had cast upon her Alicent’s father had thundered To secure her claim, she’ll have to put your children to the sword. She’ll have no choice.

He’d said nothing of putting Alicent to the sword. Perhaps he had known it wouldn’t have the same effect, or, correct as ever, maybe he had guessed what Alicent had not been convinced of until those doors opened on the feast. Rhaenyra would not kill her. She intended for Alicent to live. To watch. To endure. Her children’s deaths, and her own dishonor.

What would her father think? Her gaze grazed the edge of one of the lascivious paintings that Viserys had not permitted her to meddle with and which there had not been time to waste on once these rooms were briefly Aegon’s, and flinched away. He would be sickened at the thought of his daughter, a woman of House Hightower, wife and mother of kings, transformed into a concubine for such a creature. For Rhaenyra would choose whatever shamed him most, which must mean that this would insult her father even more than being passed about as a reward for loyalty.

(Once Alicent had stood outside the door to this room and listened as her son in one of his drunken rages promised that when he got his hands on that old whore he would throw the doors of the Red Keep wide and let every man in King’s Landing line up to have a go at her in sight of the Iron Throne she had presumed to think she had a right to sit upon before he fed her to Sunfyre, and when she entered she saw Aemond there as the expected recipient for Aegon’s seething but to her surprise her father formed a second member of his audience and although she said nothing, no reproach, he had, escorting her back to her own rooms, said that it was only natural, after everything, for the boy’s mind to turn ugly with vengeance, her father’s own quite unnecessary reprimand: Alicent’s son’s son was dead because of her.)

Would he want her to fight? Argella Durrandon had told her besiegers they would win only bones and blood and ashes, but the histories said they won a woman, in her flesh entire, to hand over to Orys Baratheon. So Rhaenyra’s men securing the keep had won Alicent for their so-called queen. She did not destroy herself to make the victory hollow. She did not fight so they had no choice but to destroy her. Argella Durrandon had let the blood of the vanquished Storm Kings pass into her husband’s line. Her father was dead too. Had she really thought the man who dared to defy the dragons rather than yield would prefer she submit to his blood breeding scions for the house that had undone him? Had she not cared? Had she, a loyal knight’s blade at her throat as the gates were smashed in, decided she wanted to live? It was different for Alicent. She had already brought forth the blood of her father’s doom. Her children existed. Her father would wish her to live for them, for vengeance. His child, her children, could be his vengeance. Had Argella told herself the same thing?

She shivered in her wisps of silk, gooseflesh dimpling her bared arms, as Rhaenyra continued her unnervingly silent perusal. She’d not said a single word since entering the room and dismissing the guards who had delivered Alicent hither.

“Well?” Alicent asked, voice rasping from months of disuse, when Rhaenyra reached a point in the cycle where she was paused at her prisoner’s back. “Are you going to get on with it?”

“Get on with what?”

Whatever further mortifications you have brought me here to inflict. “Whatever perversities you seek to subject me to for your own clearly lewd tastes in retribution.”

The room was so silent Alicent could hear the creak of Rhaenyra’s leather trod on the plush carpet and her own throat’s nervous swallow as she came back around to face Alicent, a few feet away. Their eyes met. “Perversities?”

Alicent’s nostrils flared at the flat surprise in the word, as Rhaenyra cocked her head, brow creased in an infuriating antomime of confusion.

“It’s exceedingly tedious, you know,” she snapped. “This farce. It’s always been your way, venturing the boldest outrages without a hint of shame and then daring to act as it is those who object to your transgressions against decency that commit the offense.”

“Why should any implicate themselves when you are so eager to groundlessly accuse them with your fancies? Why deny you that pleasure?”

“It has never been pleasure, I assure you, to be the one who must put a name to filth, and that is what is at stake, not fancy.”

“Pleasure or not, I have no practice for such naming, as you say. I am quite at a loss as to what perversities could occur between two queens.”

“You are no queen. My daughter and I are the only ones with any claim to that title in this keep.”

“And yet here I am. And there you are. I am the one that commands in this keep.”

“You command in this room, perhaps,” Alicent shot back. “You command a woman you bound in chains. A meager dominion. There’s an entire realm that seeks to shake you off.”

“Half of one, anyway,” Rhaenyra replied. “Yes. What a paltry kingdom. One chained queen.”

Then she stared at Alicent again. Every inch of her was open to Rhaenyra’s steady perusal, from head to toe. The silence went on and on until again Alicent was the one who broke. “As you say, my life is yours now. It has been since you took this keep. I am your captive, and yours to do with as you will for as long as you can manage to hold it.”

“Ah, yes. These…perversities.”

Alicent flushed. Rhaenyra dressed Alicent like a minstrel’s strumpet and paraded her before the treasonous lords for their crude amusement, but made Alicent be the one to speak what everyone was supposed to ignore. Did she really imagine it was only Alicent who noticed, just because Alicent was the only one who could even come close to articulating what she saw without fear of obliteration? The whispers of the princess’ irregular conduct on everyone’s lips may have not reached the queen’s ears, but whispered in private she knew they were. So they would be now. Queen Rhaenyra had the Dowager Queen taken to her private chambers and kept her there, and—to—

You need to do it, for me to name it. I did not name it first, I did not. You dared it. You did. You dare it.

“You act like you can’t imagine any perversity when your very being is a perversity. You presume to sit on your father’s throne, wear the greatest blade of his you manage to possess at your waist, sleep in his bed, to step into his place. You delude yourself into believing you will ever sit it comfortably, that the realm will accept you if you destroy his sons and you attempt to make yourself feel it by using your ill-gotten power to humiliate his wife.”

“It seems you feel I’ve done that. What more is left to do?”

“You ordered me here.”

This is what you have won. This much. Don’t pretend it’s not what you have won, that it’s not what you’ve wanted. Me beneath you.

Rhaenyra ordered. Alicent chained and confined, fed and watered, freed and transported, washed and dressed. Alicent to fill her cup, and her Queensguard to deliver Alicent to her chambers. She stood before Alicent with her hair bound back from the strong angles of her face in a tight braid, the crown of her father and grandfather awkward on her slender brow, gloved hand squeezing the hilt of the dagger that had carved the covered scar on her forearm, and played at being king, and pretended she did not.

“My father’s loyal queen.”

“Your father’s queen in the king’s chambers. How would you have me tend you, Rhaenyra?”

That toast had been in the end nothing but more mockery, but Alicent had truly thought Rhaenyra was at last letting herself see what she had always sought to escape. This room. What it meant to be a wife in it. What she had never submitted to, and never would. She made a sick jest of it all. She resisted her marriage and scorned her marriage bed and fled to Dragonstone rather than endure the mildest of repercussions for her own actions and killed one husband to choose another that suited her better and stayed away to leave Alicent the charge of watching her father die. Alicent knew Rhaenyra did not require her to wash her aching body, wrap her wounds in gauze, mop her sweaty brow; that despite her insulting performance of innocence, she knew and knew Alicent knew, and would step forward as she did now, lifting hand from pommel to the delicate strap of Alicent’s gown to slide it down her shoulder and bared one breast to the air and her sight.

Rhaenyra acted as if it was Alicent with the degraded mind, but since the day she listened from the shadows of this room as her father informed Viserys that Rhaenyra had been seen coupling with her uncle in a pleasure house, Alicent’s imagination had been forced to expand to encompass hers. She never wished to feel the shock that ripped through her body that morning again, to be made a fool of when her naive belief Rhaenyra endured similar restraints on hers was masterfully played upon. Rhaenyra had done something she could not have imagined. Her shoes sank into the mud at the gate as her father pleaded with her that she must imagine what Rhaenyra might do. And she had. So it was not so strange, that Alicent was not shocked. A woman who dared to take precedence over her brothers, to disregard her father’s last wish, to sit the Iron Throne: she might do anything.

Her exposed nipple puckered as both draft and gaze caressed it. Alicent’s jaw worked as she fought the urge to cover herself like a blushing maiden. She had not done so even when she was a blushing maiden, not least because she had been given no cause to blush. After their initial bedding Viserys had always allowed her to wear her nightgown for modesty’s sake.

“That’s it?” Rhaenyra’s actual words penetrated her reverie with a harsh jangle. Alicent focused on her again where she stood feasting on that one pebbled breast with its tightening peak. “No tirade about how disgusting I am?”

She sounded almost disappointed.

“I have made so many to that exact theme, every last one to wasted breath. If they had any effect we would not be standing here now.”

“Not the exact same theme, surely,” Rhaenyra murmured as her hand came up again. Alicent jolted in place when the sticky tease of the leather thumb swiped over her nipple as the rest of her breast filled the clammy leather palm. “An old and unique theme. A singular Alicent Hightower harangue. I was good, then. It had an effect, it worked. We never spoke of it again.”

How early and how intimately Alicent had known what Rhaenyra might dare. How hard she had tried to forget it, to spare herself from attempting to imagine.

“So you see how I might have formed hopes.” Rhaenyra had spread her legs for the begetting of bastards, but never again had she tried…perhaps even she could not imagine it, until she dared to sit a throne. “Why I kept wasting my breath. It all comes to the same thing anyway. You have continued to be a spoiled child who delights in thinking she shocks.”

“I thought I succeeded. No honor, or duty, or sacrifice. You seemed quite shocked. But I suppose you didn’t seem shocked then. Is that why you think I did it?”

Rhaenyra’s pink face had pulled back from hers, looking very pleased with herself, and even more pleased upon taking in Alicent’s pink cheeks and laughing lips.

“A child who believes she should get exactly what she wants and do exactly as she likes, heedlessly pursuing every desire and whim with no regard for anything beyond immediate gratification. It is the same now as it was then. It has always been the same thing.”

“I must be very disappointed, if scandalizing you is my only wish,” Rhaenyra said. As they were speaking she had continued that rhythmic slide of leather across flesh. She was wrong. Alicent was shuddering with the shock of it. “I must be devastated that this new evidence of my whims and the offenses they offer to decency is accompanied by no fresh admonishment. What does that leave, hm? Nothing about how my first lord husband must have infected me with his perverse taste? That is a theme you have some familiarity with, to ground yourself. I cede it is not totally remarkable, but still, nothing about what kind of woman could de—”

Alicent had self-control, that was all. She threw her head back and stared back at Rhaenyra under her lashes even as breath whistled through fastened lips and her knees wobbled. It left desire, a different desire. She was not shocked by Rhaenyra’s audacity in wanting, of which shock was merely one Alicent could tonight refuse to provide. She wouldn’t give her that pleasure. She had but once. Now they see you as you are. The same wine-warm breath that gusted across Alicent’s cheek in that smug hiss as Rhaenyra triumphed at grappling Alicent down into the mud hit her nose from where Rhaenyra had pressed close.

“You are no woman. Such lusts forfeit any claim you have to that state, and certainly any to the crown you debase and the seat you defile.”

Rhaenyra cocked her head so the short huff of laughter that greeted this—Alicent spoke her scorn calmly, but that was the point, that there was no winning—tickles Alicent’s lips. “I thought I could not be a queen because I am a woman. Now you inform me I am no woman at all, and this is why I cannot be queen.”

“You are not queen, and still less are you a king, and despite the show you put on tonight not a single man there thinks of you as one.”

“Do you feel yourself a queen?” Rhaenyra asked.

She had worked on Alicent’s flesh: her nipple was stiff between the insistent demand of Rhaenyra’s fingers, the blood drawn forth to make it hard, an alteration she became more acutely aware of when with her other hand Rhaenyra slid the other strap of Alicent’s gown from her shoulder to strip her to the waist in one heartbeat, and almost farther; the gown was so flowing that it proved its intended indignity further by nearly slithering down her body to pool at her ankles with nothing more than the flick of a wrist, saved only by the swell of her hips arresting it. Even after Rhaenyra stepped back to fondle Alicent with eyes alone the one point of contact still made itself known as it throbbed forward, altered, in contrast to its opposite still slightly concave as it slowly rose in its velvety bed. Drafts and gazes could not do this like touch, transforming the flesh so utterly.

Alicent had been a queen in this room, and now surely Rhaenyra sought to uncrown her in it with this insult. As queen she submitted to the will of her king. An honor, an honor Viserys had paid in kind. He could command her. She bore his pleasures, indulged to the ultimate end of transforming her body with the bearing of his children. He had not asked for her thoughts, but neither had he often required great energy expended in pretense. Rhaenyra commanded her and Alicent must submit but the very act of command only confirmed further she was no king, as she disgraced Alicent as he never had, for no reason or purpose, inserting a finger in the gap between Alicent’s naked hip and where the silk tenaciously fought for her modesty and, after a suspended moment of seeming hesitation, tugged the waist wide so it rippled over her buttocks and down her legs like water as it surrendered.

It was not some trick of warping time in this strange interlude: Rhaenyra had hesitated just now, for she hesitated still with Alicent’s entire form revealed to her to do with as she would. She had elected not to kill her. Rhaenyra had Vaemond Velaryon’s head with nothing more than a dip of her chin, the night she had offered up that tribute that had so moved Alicent. She’d had Alicent’s father executed with some unseen yet similar order, a dismissive wave of her hand. She paid assassins to butcher Alicent’s grandson. It was not enough. It would never be enough. It was not merely taunt, but hard truth. She would never be secure on the throne her father had sat peaceably. All she’d dared to order, only to hesitate before this.

“As much as you do,” Alicent said.

“Get on the bed,” Rhaenyra commanded. “On your hands and knees.”

Hesitance here was a luxury she’d long ago forgone. Alicent stepped free of the gown and turned her back to Rhaenyra to obey. Rhaenyra ruled a starving city as her husband hunted Alicent’s son across a desolation strewn with corpses. She degraded herself by indulgence in such hollow command. One queen. She could at least not grant Rhaenyra the gift of enjoying any sense of novel humiliation.

But it was new. Rhaenyra’s father had never requested any kind of lecherous posing. Immaturely lurid. If you really want to fuck like a king, I should be in a nightgown that goes to my knees. She had never been on hands and knees, and had not guessed it would display her intimate parts so brazenly. The air was crisp—Rhaenyra had not ordered the hearth stirred and it slumbered, producing only a faint heat, as it had when Viserys’ fevers were not accompanied by chills, when he burned so hot he could not stand having the room brought to a boil to drive the fevers out, and what point, it had settled in his bones—and Alicent felt the point where it bit at her fiery blush of embarrassment, although her face turned to the headboard was cool, rigid. She heard the rasp of leather sliding over skin. Then Rhaenyra’s hand, even hotter than that beneath it, impossibly hot. That must be why the room was cold.

Her hot hand examined what was revealed. A sick flutter in Alicent’s stomach as Rhaenyra took her leisure mapping what was now hers by feel, running a thumb around Alicent’s entrance. She did not go inside, but Alicent knew she would. This, too, was hers. For as long as she held this city. Until Aemond returned. So the very inside of Alicent was already hers, even as the searing touch shifted down to pet patiently at the bundle of nerves crowning the sex she explored. Alicent swallowed and lowered her head. Watched her knuckles bulge as they gripped the coverlet under her palms. Her body jerked as if struck. Forward, then back. She wanted to deny Rhaenyra this, evidence of how she worked on Alicent’s body, made her demands of it, and Alicent answered. It opened easily to two of Rhaenyra’s fingers. Just the pads stroking around that breached gateway at first, then up to the firm swell of the first knuckle. A slight stinging strain, but she went soft as warmed wax as she rocked with the melting blaze of those fingers, clenching on each withdrawal, relaxing with each press back in. That lulling rhythm, letting her body be rocked by the other body demanding of it. Her knees slipped precariously against the sheets as she shook.

Rhaenyra grabbed her hip to hold her up and still for her other hand working within Alicent. No longer tentative. She had always believed she could order the world to her will. Whatever awkwardness Alicent thought she’d perceived and spitefully gloried in as Rhaenyra stared down that table at her earlier in the evening had vanished. She could not say doubt was not natural to Rhaenyra. Once, Alicent had known her fears and insecurities only too well. Yet though she trembled the while she had permitted Alicent to dress her in raiment and braided the fine filaments of gold and silver that grew from her own skull into a shining crown. She dared to stand before those lords and expect them to kneel for her. A slip of a girl. Because she wanted it. She had ordered Alicent here, and she knew why. Waking up the morning after her wedding, Viserys had the gall to look surprised when he saw Alicent abed beside him, as if he couldn’t fathom how she’d gotten there.

She could hear noisy breathing behind her and craned her head back over her shoulder. Rhaenyra’s eyes were shut. Her head had fallen back so the quiver of her throat above the high collar of her jacket was bared. Hectic spots of color on her cheekbones, a few strands of hair worked free from her plait with the exertions of her churning arm plastered damply to its sharp downward curve. You have brought me peace, Alicent, Viserys had once murmured to her in one of his rare tender moods, across the expanse of his miniature Valyria, in the days when she’d still wondered what she provided him, why he’d married her. Their couplings were workmanlike. There was no passion, no reason for the court to titter about how the king could not seem to leave his new bride’s bed. The groan he gave as he sheathed himself inside her. He’d found some peace within her. It was as if Rhaenyra too searched for something in her cunt. Her eyes opened to meet Alicent’s.

A moan cut startlingly through the muted crackle of their breaths. Her fingers twitched within and pushed deeper, toward some further ingress. She panted and bit her lips raw, lids again shuttered tight to lock in fever. As if her fingers really were pleasured, as if the act of seeking induced the incredible convulsion that wracked through her and produced an obscene grunt as her hand stilled and she gasped as if winded.

The next moan was frustrated. Rhaenyra had not found release, or whatever she sought. She withdrew her hand from Alicent’s body; it felt the twinge of use, the intruding air again tickling where the flesh had been agitated to an itching burn. A rustle as Rhaenyra fumbled with the fastenings of her trousers, and Alicent whipped her head around to sink herself into the dark varnish of the headboard once more in the instant before the pink-gold flash of revealed skin gaping through the undone clasp resolved into a whole. The mattress dipped beneath her as Rhaenyra climbed atop the bed with Alicent. She had remained in place even when the anchoring hand was drawn away from her hip, but now it returned.

When Rhaenyra touched her sex to Alicent’s she wonders for a wild moment if it was true what they said of women with these unnatural lusts: that this was because their very bodies were unnatural, that the seat of their pleasure meant to aid in conception was capable of penetrating the orifices of real women to satisfy those lusts. She had never noticed such a thing on Rhaenyra’s form when they bathed together as girls…but the last time she saw Rhaenyra nude they were girls.

Perhaps it had developed through the pursuit of such lusts since then, or the aggravation of the ones Alicent knew she’d indulged had developed it, but, no, and also yes; she is not a girl and that is the source of that thickness, that result that ground against Alicent’s buttocks where both hands held her immobilized by crushing grips at the hips, then down for that outward thrust to slide between where she had stretched Alicent’s lower lips. The fattened generative parts of a woman who has borne many children. This throbbing bulge of ripened flesh rubbed against where Alicent too has swelled. Not inside but against Rhaenyra reached a final paroxysm with the aid of a queen’s body and Alicent finally believed her husband and father were dead.