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Chapter Text

It could not be said for certain that Visenya Targaryen was a dreamer.

She did not see the future barreling towards her family faster than their dragons came diving from the skies; she did not see the past—all the things that once were, all the lives that lit up and burnt out just as quickly. She did not see the present, either, all the happenings across the sea and through the realms, all the truths that had not yet spread to all the little birds in King's Landing.

No, Visenya only ever dreamed of a could have been world. A might have been life. A life she already lost the chance to live, a peace that would not reign, blood that would not stay burning in the veins of dragons.

She dreamt of what could never be.

She tore her heart in half wanting for it.

A real dream? A wish? She did not know the answer.

But she did know that, in her dreams, there lived a king in a crown of moonstones and steel. Legs sprawled open on her father's throne, a smile sharp enough to cut her deeper than any sword ever could, teeth white behind the curl of his thin, grinning mouth. Pale amethyst eyes dancing-dancing behind thick lashes. Trembling with energy only barely contained, arms strong and legs long and hands so big they could span her waist. Soft silver waves curling around the edges of his ears and falling over the edges of a crown of Valyrian steel. Dark Sister laying across his knees as if she had never known another wielder. The throne did not cut him, though he tossed his limbs about carelessly as anything, as if the blood of gods and dragons was so thick in his veins that even the throne dared not try to spill it.

In her dreams, her moonstone king noticed her gaze. His smile turned soft, his gaze went warm, and he raised his hand to beckon when he called for her—and she went to him, ever faithful, climbed the steps of the throne with no care for how the lords recoiled at her hubris. For how they spit and squirmed at the sight of her joining him in his seat, climbing to his heights.

In her dreams, he tossed the blade aside as if it meant nothing to him anymore, hooked his fingers around her hips as he hauled her into his lap, and pressed kisses to her temple as she settled. The throne did not cut her, though she squirmed about and kicked her legs, slung her arms, and lolled her head, distracting them both by peppering kisses to his throat. The jagged points of the swords their ancestors twisted and melted and warped never dared breach her skin. His blood was her blood was their blood, the gods and monsters of him just as wicked in her, and mayhap even the throne knew the truth of it all—her silver king would melt it down to nothing if he ever saw so much as a scratch on her skin.

In those dreams, he woke her with kisses and sent her back to sleep with them. He played with her fingers at the dinner table, never thinking of releasing her hand. He called her his heart and his soul and his queen and his lovely,  sweet dragon  and  little love  and  darling girl  and  wicked creature . He never raised a hand to her that she did not ask him to raise, hardly ever raised his voice, and he groveled so prettily when she flinched from his anger that she, honestly, would not mind if he yelled more often.

Love me a little before you go,  he said in those dreams. Whenever she left their bed in the mornings or his side during the day, whining and petulant and soft for her, pulling her back to drown her in his kisses.  Love me a little, darling thing, to tide me over until I can hold you again.

More often than not, Visenya woke weeping.

She did not get to press her fingers to her moonstone boy's pulse just to feel the way it leaped when she murmured his name, did not get to bite open his lip and watch him stain her skin with his beautifully bloody mouth, did not get to fall asleep with his heartbeat against her cheek and his rumbling voice lilting to her in Valyrian. She would never wake to his lips on her brow, her cheeks, the tip of her nose, each of her eyelids; her children would not have the precise shade of his eyes or the crooked grin he wore so very well. She would never see him fly on a dragon the same color as the ocean when it goes too still. He would never be crowned, never take Dark Sister for his own, never see the skies, never cloak her in a sept and say the words beneath the heart tree and cut open her lip with dragon glass. He would never laugh, never sing, never dance, never kiss her and touch her and hold her and love her.

He would never know her name.

She did not get to belong to the clever young king with his silver curls and moonstone crown because, in the real world, in this real life, in this tangible existence of waking thought, he died before he lived.

Baelon Targaryen died before he became hers. He died before he brought fire, before he spilled blood, before he got the chance to become a dragon.

Visenya came into the world screaming as if her lungs meant to burst from her throat, and her parents' hearts eased at the sight of her. Tufts of wild silver curls and eyes of such a dark, vivid purple that they looked like drops of wine. Human flesh, smooth and unmarred save for the birthmark on the back of her thigh; no scales, tails, wings, or claws. Ten fingers, ten toes, no teeth, body flushed red with fury that the world was not already collapsing in on itself to bow to her every thoughtless whim.

Baelon and Visenya, racing each other to be born, both ever impatient, both loathe to lose, both ever eager to be the center of attention—but she won. She won the race, won the game, slid from Aemma Arryn hale and healthy, and snatched the victory from her brother's fingertips.

Not three hours later, her father carved her mother into pieces to save a babe who died anyway. If he came more quickly from the womb, who knew? Perhaps Baelon would have grown up alone without her; perhaps he would have spent all his life dreaming of a golden queen with a circlet of dragonglass, waking with her name on his lips and his cheeks wet with his own tears.

Visenya killed her brother when she won the race to join the world of the living. No one ever  said  so, ever laid the blame at her feet, but she saw it in her father's eyes when he looked at her. That broken, wistful look as he imagined the boy she was not, the boy who should have existed right beside her.

I killed your son,  she sometimes wanted to say. With arms flung wide, perhaps, her teeth bared just to watch the way his face would crumple. She wanted him to break, for him to throw it all back to her so she could finally feel the noose either loosen or finish snapping her neck.  I killed your son, and you killed my mother. May the gods damn us both for our bloody, kin-slaying hands.

But she never said it, even when it tripped on her tongue and banged at the cage of her teeth to be let out. He was a broken man already, her father, broken by time and choice and karmic sorts of justice, and she need not grind the pieces left of him into dust just to soothe her own hurts.

Perhaps because she never said it, her father was the one who reminded her what it was to be a dragon.

Laenor called Lucerys her name-day present, though he was born a bare few weeks  after  her name-day. She'd been hoping desperately for a Lucer a  in the months leading up to his birth, but the disappointment of another nephew fled her when she first saw him. Her fingers wrapped around the edge of the bassinet, peering curiously down at the little thing inside. The tufted brown curls, the dark eyes peeping up at her when he peeled them open. She could see Jace in his face, a little, though she didn't remember Jace when he was this small—only as he was now, red-cheeked and laughing and eternally willing to follow her wherever she led him.

Viserys stood beside her, one hand on her head, the other stroking lightly over the babe's soft curls.

She did not know where Alicent was, nor Aegon, Aemond, or little Helaena; her father was usually without them, and, at the time, she thought nothing of it.

Her hatchling coiled around her neck like a particularly pointy scarf—a long thing with scales of jet black and curving horns the same color as white sand in the moonlight. Rhaenyra named him Vyper before Visenya learned to speak, which suited him. Skinny and vicious and shockingly quick, eyes of an acidic green that matched the tinge to the edge of his fire. He lifted his head from the hollow of her throat, peered down at the babe, and she clucked her tongue in low warning just as his jaw began to unhinge.

Vyper withdrew back into his loop around her neck, but the sulky way he did it and the longing gaze he shot at her new nephew did not go unnoticed by the king.

"He really must be sent to the pit, dearest," he said, but there was little heat left behind it. It was an old argument between them now, one that he was clearly losing his energy to fight. All attempts to pry Vyper from her had been met with screaming, shrieking, and launched projectiles, usually accompanied by the dragon keepers being dive-bombed from above or having their faces blasted with flames. Viserys gave into her each time, as he usually gave in to her whims—perhaps the guilt over murdering her mother—but it did not stop him from trying to change her mind.

"Was I this small once?" she asked idly, still looking at Lucerys as if the king hadn't spoken. He laughed as if it hurt to remember the answer. Perhaps it did. He allowed her to change the subject anyway.

"Smaller," he said, softly. "Much smaller. The maesters say it is common with twins."

"Were Aemond and Aegon small, then?"

To his credit, Viserys seemed to realize the question was a trap, but he had no way of knowing how. "I…yes, the boys were both small. Aemond more than Aegon."

"Why does Aemond get to live?" she asked, the subject change so sharp that her father physically jerked away from her. She turned to look up at him, lips pursed and eyes hard. "They were small. He was born sickly. So, why is he alive when Baelon is dead?"

"Who told you Aemond was born sickly?" he countered, eyes narrow.

The twins were born just shy of two years in her wake; she remembered naught of life before them, though she often daydreamed of life after them. Perhaps they would choke on their pie at dinner; perhaps they would fall on their swords when their mother allowed them to begin training; perhaps an illness would come and sweep them both away, and she would never need to hear their whining little voices again. She and Jacaerys and Helaena and new little Lucerys could roam the palace unhindered, never haunted by living ghosts or the walking threat the princes posed to Rhaenyra.

"Visenya?"

Rhaenyra told her, of course. When Visenya came crawling into her bed in the dead of night, weeping from a dream of Baelon tucking a rose behind her ear, demanding to know how it was fair that Aegon got to keep Aemond. That they got to be born together and grow together, that they got to keep the other half of themselves when hers died before she was old enough to say his name.

It is not  fair,  Nyra.

Oh, sweet girl, life never is.

Visenya blinked up at him and lied so well he never thought to wonder, though she couldn't really say why she felt the need to fib. "One of the boys' nurses."

Viserys looked back at Lucerys, heaving a sigh that made him seem much older than he was. "Aemond is too much a dragon already to let a little thing like an early birth harm him."

A jest, really. A lightly spoken attempt at humor.

"Baelon would have been a dragon if he'd gotten the chance to be," she snapped back, too harsh, too rough. Bristling at a slight that had not been there, she subsided at the vaguely hurt look Viserys gave her.

"Yes, well," Viserys said, clearing his throat. His hand dropped her head; her shoulder relaxed immediately when the contact ended. He took a step away from her and Lucerys with a forced, cheerful smile. "You will just have to be dragon enough for you both, won't you?"

Visenya watched him leave with dark eyes, then turned back to the babe with drawn brows and a pouted mouth.

Dragon enough for them both.

The babe shifted, and Visenya tucked her finger into his little hand without thinking. "Dragon enough for me," she murmured, and he looked at her with such trust that her heart ached. Dragon enough for Baelon. What do you think, little thing?"

To be a dragon, oh, oh, to be a dragon at  all . To be something, to be her own, to be remembered, to be known. Did she have enough fire for that in this life? Enough of the chaos and the bloodlust, enough greed and desperation? Did she have that wicked, covetous monster inside her, the one that keened for the sort of freedom that could only be found in the skies so high above the world that everything became nothing but white and blue and forever?

The egg she and Jace chose for Lucerys rocked with a scraping noise that sounded, for a moment, like a war cry from forgotten times. Vyper's head slithered up, his eyes fixed on it, and he hissed from deep within his throat. It might have been rage. It might have been excitement. She sometimes found it difficult to tell the difference with him, but she liked the sound of it regardless. The threat in the song, the dance with the danger.

She came from the blood of gods and dragons, kings and queens and conquerors. The first of her name razed the kingdoms to their knees, wielded Dark Sister before any man laid his claim to her, hatched Vhagar from an egg, and took to the skies on her great back. The first Visenya only ever knelt for one man, and, even then, not because she thought him her better. The first Visenya knelt for the love she bore her brother, knelt because she loved him more than she loved herself.

But her brother-king-husband died before he got the chance to be any of the three, and who was to say she needed to bow to any man at all? Who was to say that she could not be more than even the first of her name had been, that she could not become so much a dragon that, one day, when Targaryens called their children Visenya, they would be named for  her  instead?

The egg rocked again.

Vyper sang louder.

She would never wear a crown.

She wore one before, in her dreams, a version of herself she would never be. A version of herself she did not want to be, not really, not without Baelon to make the trade fair, and she did not mind the loss of it. It was for Rhaenyra in this life, thrones and crowns and ruling, duty and honor and expectations, and Visenya would kneel for her. Bow her head for her; let her sister be the queen. Remain instead ever faithful beside her.

No…no, this Visenya would never be a queen.

But she could be  something.  She could be a wildfire trapped in flesh, couldn't she? A sword yanked from the sheathe? A tide coming to wash away all those men with the hubris to dare challenge the sea, a dragon come to carve history and fate into her chosen design?

She could be everything she never dared wish to be in that other life.

She could be everything her brother would never get to be in this one.

She could be all of it at once.

Lucerys's egg rocked faster and faster, the soft sound of claws ringing from the inside as the hatchling scrabbled for purchase. Vyper's wings spread wide as he rose on his back legs, his head weaving in a pattern she could not follow as he hissed his strange sone. She did not even notice that his claws were digging into her shoulder hard enough to drag blood or that one of his wingtips was tangled up in her hair.

"They say," she said to the babe, voice soft and eyes warm as she tapped her finger to his nose, "that we are closer to gods than we are to men. Perhaps it is time someone proved it."

The babe cooed softly at the sound of her voice and, with a scream so loud the glass of the window cracked, his dragon hatched.

Chapter Text

The next morning, Jacaerys pointed out the major flaw in her great dreams and dramatic ramblings of fire and blood and dragons and fate—with all the sweet, genuine wisdom of a boy who had only just turned four.

“Visenya,” he said, ruddy cheeks squished up as he pursed his lips. “You are seven.”

Visenya paused and turned an imperious gaze down upon him. She stood on his bed, bare feet planted against the mattress as she wielded a broken mop handle as a makeshift sword to battle enemies that were passing themselves off, rather successfully actually, as the particularly overstuffed pillows he slept with—the feathers floating about in the air and clinging to both her silver hair and his brown curls lent a certain weight to the disguise.

Jace, meanwhile, lay in a position not unlike a starfish on his rug, watching her with the intense reverence an ordinary little boy reserved only for sweets and very big dogs. He looked more like Rhaenyra in this light than he ever did any other time, the warm golden glow coming through the window casting just enough shadow on his child-soft face to give him the vague look of his mother’s delicately sharp features.

“I know how old I am,” she said, indignant.

Jace pursed his lips up as he shoved himself into a sitting position; his hair went tumbling into his eyes, and he blew it away with an impatient burst of air. “So…how does one become a dragon when they are seven? How does one become a dragon at all? What does it  mean  to be a dragon?”

Visenya opened her mouth. Closed it. Jumped a little on the bed before letting her legs collapse under her and falling to her knees on the mattress. Her face twisted in her thought, something like a scowl pulling at her mouth.

Vyper perched precariously on one of the bed posts, trying to catch a beam of light in his mouth, but he stopped his game to turn an assessing look towards her. When she did not cry, bleed, or scream, he once again turned his hunting prowess towards the sunbeams; it gave the distinct impression of a weary mother hearing one of her children fall and reluctantly checking on them before returning to her own dealings.

Visenya was not  fond  of Vyper behaving as if she needed him to mother her, considering he did not have  thumbs  and often required her help  opening doors . She told him this frequently, often while opening said doors, and he always looked at her with a sort of  whatever you say, dear  look that oozed an amount of patronization she once thought could only be managed by her father.

She gave him a withering look, which he ignored, but her mind quickly returned to Jace’s innocent, life-derailing question.

“It means to be like our ancestors were,” she said, firm as she could, enthusing it with as much confidence as she could force into the syllables, but the twitch of his eyes said he heard the undercurrent of doubt. “It means to…to burn and bleed and  fly , to crush our enemies and live up to our name.”

Jace considered this for, she felt, not long enough before saying, “You have a bedtime, Enya.” She lobbed her mop handle at him, and he rolled out of the way with a yelp that morphed quickly into a giggling sort of laugh. He popped up to his feet, cheeks scrunching around his smile, and leaped to join her on the bed; he landed on the very edge of the mattress, balanced precariously on his knees with his hands gripping the sheets as he grinned at her. “Dragons do not have bedtimes.”

“I will have Vyper burn you,” she warned him with a haughty sniff. Jace ignored her—he always did whenever she threatened to hurt him. He knew very well that the danger was never in what she said she would do but rather in what she did without warning him. She swallowed, frowned, worked her jaw around the words as she tried to figure out how to explain to a four-year-old what exactly she meant—how to explain to him that she did not know either, really, the part of her that was once a woman grown and the part still a child wrestling back and forth, except that it was what she wanted. What she needed. “We are more gods than men, they say. I want…I want to only be a god.”

“One day,” Jace said, and he laid his little head on her thigh and smiled cheekily up at her. “One day, you will be a god. For now? Enya, you are seven.”

Much would change over the course of Visenya Targaryen’s life. Her body. Her mind. Her heart, her dreams, her loyalty. Who she was. What she was. What she needed. What she wanted. What she believed, what she knew, what she felt.

One thing, though, that never changed—one thing that, from the beginning to the end of this life, from one end to the other, would  always  stay the same?

Gods, she fucking hated when Jace was right.

She flicked him right between those puppy dog eyes, scowling at the peal of infectious laughter he gave in response. “You,” she said, flatly, “are an insufferable little brat.”

“I find myself glad that  my  aunt never speaks to me in such a manner,” came a familiar, amused voice, and Visenya lifted her gaze from Jace’s smile to glower at her sister.

Rhaenyra stood in the doorway, hair mostly loose instead of in its usual complicated heap of braids—that, along with the vague paleness to her face and the tightness around her eyes, was the only sign of how recently she’d been thrashing and howling through her labor pains.

“Your aunt is also your good-sister,” she reminded her with great dignity, thrashing her legs to send Jace rolling out of her lap. “It is very different. She  must  be kind to you.”

“Should my  heart- sister not be kind to me then?” Jace demanded, and Visenya turned to grab a pillow suitable for smacking a crown prince across the face. Neither of them paid any mind to the way Rhaenyra started, the way her eyes widened and then went soft as the children fell into a shrieking scuffle.

It was a well-known but rarely acknowledged fact amongst the court that, at age fifteen, Rhaenyra Targaryen laid claim to her baby sister with all the tact and pragmaticism of a rabid wolf.

Small, skinny, red-faced, smeared with her own tears—she stalked into the nursery with fists clenched so tight her hands shook, hair tangled from three days of neglect, eyes wild with her grief and her fury. Rage brought her barreling into the room to see her sister for the first time, rage that her mother was murdered for a boy who did not love and a girl of no use to anyone, but it was wonder that halted her at the side of Visenya’s bassinet.

It was joy so sweet it turned to agony at seeing her mother’s eyes again, even if they were only in a babe’s face. It was the wonderful, miserable joy of seeing the little thing in the bassinet and feeling her blood sing in her veins, the dragon inside her lifting its head to cry out,  ours, this one is ours.

Their mother was gone, both of them girls lost and adrift, and Rhaenyra channeled all her grief and pain and heartbreak into filling shoes that Aemma left empty. Rhaenyra sang her to sleep at night and soothed her when she wept, pressed kisses to her cheeks and bounced her in her lap, cuddled and crooned to her and loved her.  Sweet girl,  she called her, though no one else alive would ever think of calling Visenya anything like  sweet .  Lovely, beautiful girl.

Visenya never had a mother, not in either life, but she had a Nyra in this one. She thought it must be the same thing.

Jace, her ever-present shadow since he learned how to walk and of the opinion that Visenya could do nothing wrong in her life, thought the same. He called her his sister regardless of the company, always with the same airy disregard for any sidelong looks he was given, always with the simple surety of a boy who knew his own heart and did not care for the technicalities of the blood it pumped through his veins. She knew it wasn’t right, really, that she was not his sister and should not let him claim her so, but she never corrected him. She liked the way he claimed her, the way he wanted to claim her; she liked to pretend he  was  her little brother, to live in the sweet lie of pretending.

And was he  not  everything a little brother should be? Jace teased her and mocked her and pulled her hair when she annoyed him; Jace got red-faced when she mimicked him and wept when she shoved him and screamed when she dropped frogs down the back of his trousers. He followed her everywhere and took what she said as the gods’ holy truth even when she was lying just to see what she could get him to believe. He came to  her  to check the underneath of his bed for monsters and leaped into  her  bed every time he had a nightmare. What else was a little brother if it was not Jace?

Against her will, she thought of the twins.

Giggling Aegon with his big, innocent eyes and his chubby cheeks.

Solemn, sullen Aemond with his ready scowl and uneven freckles.

Alicent kept their nursery on the other side of the palace, and the boys had little to do with Jace and Visenya. They sat quietly beside their mother at every meal and clung close together on the few occasions Viserys insisted they be brought together to play. Aegon sometimes dared venture toward Jace, but he drew away from him quickly when his mother’s eyes came around again—kicked puppies, her brothers, as if they were waiting for a punishment she did not know was coming.

Sometimes, she hated them for not being her brothers, for not being to her what Jace chose to be. Other times, she hated them just for existing and imagined drowning them in the tub. All the time, she avoided speaking to them, looking at them—Aemond especially, him with a face that ripped her soul to pieces. It felt like a betrayal to Rhaenyra, almost, each time she caught herself regarding them as anything more than strangers who happened to share her father.

She got along better with Helaena. She  liked  Helaena, a wispy little girl who often spoke in riddles and hated to be touched and liked spiders better than she liked most people. Helaena liked Visenya, too, because Visenya liked to listen to her riddles and always remembered to ask before she touched her and did not mind helping her catch bugs in jars, even when it meant getting covered in mud from crawling beneath a tree stump.

She often found herself hoping the babe in Alicent’s belly was a girl. She just had better luck with her sisters.

“You should always be kind to each other,” Rhaenyra said, diplomatically, and Visenya paused in her pillow assault for just long enough to be pleased that Rhaenyra didn’t correct Jace for calling her his sister, either. “Now, come along, both of you. We are to break our fast with His Grace this morning.”

Jace scrambled to obey even as Visenya brought the pillow down on his turned back again, but she turned miserable, wheedling eyes to her sister and did not move from the bed. “Oh, Nyra,  must  we?” she whined, but Rhaenyra did not bother answering—she only flicked her fingers in a bid for Visenya to come.

She loved her father. In her own way. Even though he always looked at her in search of the mother he took away from her and the brother she didn’t get to keep, even though he always told her she looked like her mother as if he hadn’t killed her (as if it was not his fault that she had no mother to look like), even though he lived in a fantasy world where their family was happy and his daughters unbroken and no one whispered about his grandsons’ too-brown hair and too-white skin. Even though, even when she dreamt of a Viserys who got to keep the son he wanted, he still looked through her to all the things she wasn’t.

To Viserys, Visenya was not a person. Only ghosts and regrets sewed up inside a little girl’s skin.

Visenya clenched her jaw. Admitted to herself that, most times, she did not love her father.

“Visenya,” Rhaenyra said, fingers crooking, and Visenya slithered from the bed with a long-suffering sigh. Vyper launched himself from the bedpost and landed in a clutter on her shoulder to coil himself loosely around her; he nuzzled at her cheek as he landed, a gentle comfort that she turned into with a smile.

Rhaenyra reached out for her when she got close, took her chin between her fingers, and tilted her face into the light. Her lips quirked thoughtfully, fingers tapping as she tilted Visenya’s face a little this way and then a little to the other, and then she raised her other hand and ran it haphazardly through the neat braid that her nurse had forced upon her that morning. Her fingernails caught, pulling pieces of hair free, and then her other came up to twist the flyaway pieces this way and that until Visenya somewhat resembled someone who’d been yanked backward through a thistle patch.

Nyra’s hands were always warm on her skin, always soft. Visenya tilted into them with a sigh.

A few moments later, Rhaenyra pulled away to examine her handiwork before turning away in satisfaction. “Now you do not look so like Mother,” she chirped, and Visenya’s heart swelled painfully in her chest. Nyra paused, studied her over her shoulder for a moment, then smiled and extended a hand for Visenya to take. “Though, you do look a bit like me.”

*&*&*

Rhaenyra’s well-meaning attempt did absolutely nothing, which she should have expected. Messy hair did nothing to hide that her mother’s features were now her own: her bowed mouth, the soft cut of her jaw, and the sweep of her lashes when she blinked.

“Oh, my Visenya,” Viserys said, brightening at the sight of her, and she huddled closer to Rhaenyra’s leg. “You look more and more like your mother each day.”

You look more and more like you are rotting from the inside out,  she thought back irritably, but the king could not read minds. He saw only her sweet, forced smile as she peeped at him from behind Rhaenyra’s skirts.

“Yes,” said the queen through a tight-lipped smile. She patted absently at her swollen belly, fingers strumming as if she meant to send a tapped-out message to the little dragonet swimming about inside her. “She does, doesn’t she?”

“I think you look like Visenya,” Jace murmured, and, sometimes, she loved him so much that she would have clawed at the moon until her fingers were bloody just to bring it down from the sky if he asked it of her.

Rhaenyra planted a hand on each of their backs and urged them forward, ignoring Visenya’s dragging feet. She slid reluctantly into the seat across from Helaena and Aegon, careful to keep from brushing against Aemond accidentally and struggling not to frown when he went tense. Instead, she turned her attention to Vyper, her wicked beast sliding down her torso to curl into her lap like a cat and peering at her plate in disgruntlement.

“We will go to the gardens for a squirrel later,” she muttered to him.

Vyper chittered his pleasure, but his eyes still fixed with barely contained disgust on the bits of fruit on her plate.

“You let him eat squirrels from the gardens?”

She startled at the sound of Aemond’s voice. He flinched when she turned to look at him, quickly returning to his plate as if her eyes would burn him.

They could not. She’d tried.

“I do not  let  him,” she said, hesitantly hopeful that it would strike him back to talking. Annoyed with herself for wanting him to. “He is a dragon. He does what he wishes.”

“Sunfyre, too,” Aegon piped, beaming at her with a missing front tooth. His gaze swung to their brother, unbearably smug and vaguely nasty in a way that made her wiggle in place.

“Is that what you’ve named him?” she ventured. She’d heard of Aegon’s golden hatchling, though she hadn’t seen it. Alicent immediately sent his dragon to the pit, terrified of even the smallest creatures.

Terror was not the word. Discomfort. Revulsion. Contempt.

Visenya often daydreamed of sending Vyper to hide in her stepmother’s bed.

Aemond returned to his plate and stabbed a bit of melon with his fork hard enough that she thought it might crack the table.

“We named Lucerys’s Arrax,” Jace piped, beaming a little. Spilling over himself with excitement to talk about his brother’s early hatching, but Visenya only hummed. She named Arrax, really, though Jace’s feedback was loud in her ear all the while; he still hadn’t really learned the names of the Valyrian gods.

“God of the law,” Helaena said, frowning at her plate. “God of the law, the letter of the law, but what does it matter when the storms come?”

“What?” Visenya asked, but Aegon distracted her when he leaned forward to fix his wide, faux-curious eyes on Aemond.

“That’s right,” he said, a touch too gleeful. “Even little Lucerys has a dragon now.”

Aemond’s jaw was so tense she thought his teeth would splinter. Alicent glanced at her children, and Aegon turned his wicked little smile down to his plate.

Visenya turned her head to the side, peering at Aemond. Whatever prompted him to speak to her had clearly been shattered by the reminder that he had no dragon.

Not that he needed another. Jace’s Vermax was always fluttering about the pit, green and ill-tempered. Visenya’s Vyper was never far from her side. Aegon’s Sunfyre must have been a blade in the ribs, his twin brother claiming a dragon while Aemond’s egg lay cold and dead. Even the babe now always had Arrax laid across his bassinet. The Keep was overrun with hatchlings, living and fire-breathing reminders of what he did not have.

Helaena did not mind so much, though she was as dragonless as he.  Some dreams are for now and others for later,  she always said, soft and dreamy. Aemond…Aemond cared. Aemond coveted.

In another life, Visenya coveted. Baelon’s egg hatched for him, a great blue beast, but Vyper didn’t hatch for the soft, besotted girl she was when she had Baelon. Only the heartbroken, bloody babe she was without him. She knew what it was to watch your brother claim a dragon, to watch them grow together, to watch them take flight with both feet pasted to the ground no matter how you screamed for it.

I understand,  she might have said if he would only talk to her.  I know you; I do.

But Aemond never talked to her. Aemond looked at her like he hated her a little, and that was when he bothered to look at all.

“You can feed him if you’d like,” she said, and both Aemond and Vyper whipped their heads to look at her as if she had gone mad. She thought she might have, too, but the way Aemond’s pale eyes flickered shyly down to her lap and then back to her face made her too hopeful.

Vyper sank his claws into her leg, gentle but firm, as if to remind her that he hadn’t agreed. She ran her fingers down the spines on his back in a please, and he made a huffing sound that was not unlike the one she made when Rhaenyra told her to put something away.

“You want— me  to feed him?” Aemond asked, and she gestured to one of the sausage links on his plate.

“He likes sausage,” she said with a nod. “If…if you wish. He will not bite you.”

Aemond frowned a little. It put a furrow between his brows. “Are you certain?”

Vyper looked up at her. She had the distinct feeling that, if he had eyebrows, they would be raised to ask her the same question.

“He will not,” she said, sounding surer than she felt. “You are my brother, are you not?”

Aemond hesitated for another long moment, then plucked the sausage from his plate and held it gingerly out towards her lap. His hand was shaking slightly, and the other was gripping the armrest of his chair so tightly that his knuckles were white.

Vyper rustled his wings, darted his head out, and snatched the link from Aemond’s hand. She winced when he jolted, thinking with horror that Vyper had taken off his fingertips with the sausage, but Aemond did not seem hurt. He only watched with wide eyes as Vyper threw his head back and swallowed it whole.

And then, to her brief but utter delight, he laughed. He smiled at her, laughter bubbling from his throat, his eyes shining and his silver hair swinging into his eyes, and he looked so like her dreams of Baelon did that it knocked the air from her chest in a painful rush.

It was her turn to whip away from him. Her turn to glare down at her plate, pretend he did not exist, tense up when she felt his eyes lingering with confused hurt on the side of her head.

It was not his fault, no, no, she knew that, but it was her turn to hate him a little.

Chapter Text

Visenya did  know  that her feelings towards her brothers were twisted. She was not in denial about the ridiculousness of it all, the hypocrisy of her heart.

She hated them, one moment. Hated Aegon for getting to keep Aemond and Aemond for surviving when Baelon died. Hated Aegon for being the firstborn son and Aemond for daring to prance his way through life wearing a face that should not belong to him. She hated them both for what they stood for, little boys with royal blood and pretty faces, little boys with their vile mother and conniving grandfather, little boys that so many in the realm wished to steal her sister's throne. She liked imagining how Aegon's eyes would pop if she wrapped both hands around his throat and squeezed; she wanted to see how Aemond's heart would break if she stole the egg he pretended he did not keep and smashed it to bits against the floor.

The next moment, oh, she wanted to make them smile. She wanted them to laugh, to talk to her, to run after her just the way Jace did. She wanted to be their sister the way Rhaenyra was her sister, to braid their hair and tease them and tickle them and have them run to her when they bloodied their knees.

They noticed her hatred, though she did not know if they noticed her uncontrollable, sporadic fits of fondness. Just the same way she noticed that Aegon flinched when she looked at him for too long, that Aemond looked at her as if his dreams could only be deemed pleasant if they showed him her violent death. It was only fair that they hated her as she hated them, she supposed, and so she did not resent them for it.

Much.

They were blood, Visenya and her brothers. They were not family, even if sometimes she wished they could be.

Perhaps that was why it shocked both her and Aegon so much when it changed.

Rhaenyra's gift to her, when she turned nine, was finally allowing her to learn the sword, though she had to follow several conditions.

First, she must never go into the training yard with her brothers and Jacaerys. Her sister did not trust Ser Cole with her and would not have trusted him with Jace either if she could have thought of a way out of it; Visenya only knew that because the walls of the Keep were so very thin…and thinner still when one's ear is pressed against the crack in the door.

Second, she must only ever learn from Laenor or Ser Harwin— never  from the master-at-arms or any of the Kingsguard, as they would be obliged to violate the third condition.

Third, her father and stepmother could not find out under any circumstances. Viserys would think it too dangerous for his precious youngest daughter, not ladylike at all. Alicent would use the same excuse but, in reality, only hated anything that brought Visenya any joy.

Visenya agreed to these without worry, as none inconvenienced her in any significant way. Jace often sparred with her in her secret lessons, so she still got to whack him about without going to the training yard. She liked Harwin and Laenor and did not like Ser Cole. None of it was a very great loss.

The fourth and final condition, though—well. Visenya had to make more of an effort with Viserys because he was a sickly man who would die sooner rather than later. Rhaenyra did not say this, of course, but Visenya could read between the lines. This condition alone stalled her for a moment, though she eventually accepted it with the bleakness of someone sentenced to the Wall.

Because of this condition, she went in search of her father—her face purposefully smeared with dirt and her hair tangled to mask her resemblance to Aemma—and found Aegon standing amid his model instead.

Visenya did like the model. The one bond between her and her father, other than the camaraderie that came from being responsible for the deaths of the loves of their lives, blossomed from her love of Valyria, of the stories he could tell and the histories he could teach her. She wanted to know it all in this life, wanted it laid out bright and shining before her, and it frustrated her to no end that so little survived the Doom.

Part of her, a secret part that she did not even share with Jace, dreamed of seeing Valyria, of roaming the blackened land in search of secrets left behind, but the rest of her knew better; Jaehaerys forbade them from seeking their homeland in his time, and her father was not the sort of man who would undo such a thing.

Visenya knew well how protective Viserys was over the model.

And so, she knew just how bad it was that half a dozen stone buildings lay in shattered pieces at Aegon's feet.

"Oh, dear," she observed, eyebrows crawling high. "You've certainly fucked up a good bit, haven't you?"

Aegon's head snapped up at the sound of her voice, little face whipping around to her as she hovered in the doorway. His pale violet eyes widened to the point she half-expected them to come popping from his head as they did in her daydreams of strangling him to death, a ruby red flush traveling from his frizzy hairline down past his collar, his chest heaving so hard and so quickly that she thought he was being a dramatic little twit for a moment—until he realized he genuinely could not seem to breathe. "I did not mean to!" he wailed, utterly distraught. "It was an accident, Visenya, I did not mean to—"

"Yes, yes," she said—with no small amount of alarm. She edges her way carefully into the room, tiptoeing uneasily around and through the mess of plaster and stone towards him as he stood hyperventilating in the fragments of their father's life's work. "I know you did not do it on purpose, it is alright."

She rocked on her heels for a moment before she reached for him, thinking at a loss that she should hold him the same way she held Jace when he cried, but he flinched so violently from her raised hands that she immediately stumbled a step back. Something crunched beneath her foot, a bit of stone turning to powder, and she winced before regarding him warily again.

It was not a subtle flinch, nor even the "I am a pampered prince who expects everyone to bend themselves backward to fit into my demands" sort of movement that one might expect from a seven-year-old prince of the realm throwing a hells-worthy tantrum. His body curved in on itself automatically, folding in as he threw his arms up around his head as if she meant to brain him with a mallet and he needed to defend himself.

"I am  sorry,"  he shrieked, voice gone so high that she winced, and then he was sobbing. Real sobs, big ones, that rattled through his frail little chest and sent his whole body shaking like a leaf in the wind, tears pouring down his red cheeks and snot already beginning to leak from his nose. "I did not mean to do it, I only tripped, I did not mean it, I did not—"

As she usually did when faced with a problem that did not have a readily apparent solution, she asked herself a simple question: What would Rhaenyra do?

Visenya did not know what Rhaenyra would do. Luke was only two now, his tantrums, fits, and mischief hardly worth worrying about, and Jace only cried whenever he had nightmares about turning into a caterpillar. Rhaenyra never needed to interact with anything like a screaming, panicking child who cowered whenever she reached for him.

Terribly inconvenient. Things tended to take a sharp left turn when she trusted her own instincts.

"Aegon," she said, doing her best impression of an adult. She thought she did rather well for a very worried nine-year-old who would much rather be anywhere else in the world than where she currently was at that exact moment. "Aegon, look at me, won't you? May I touch you?"

Aegon's only response came in the form of louder crying, but he did not flinch away from her when she reached for him again. Visenya wrapped her fingers very gingerly around his shoulders, turning him in place to face her; even with only two years between them, he was over a head shorter, and she had to bend herself into a half-crouch to look him in the eye.

"I need you to breathe," she said, as gently as she could, "because if you die of air deprivation with me in the room, your mother will almost certainly think I murdered you, and that will be very inconvenient for me."

Aegon hiccupped a little laugh through his tears, which pleased her. She had not been joking, really, but perhaps it was best that he thought so.

"Look," she said, grabbing one of his hands—vaguely sticky, he was  always  vaguely sticky, she did not understand it—and guiding it up to her chest. She covered his fingers with her own, pressing firmly down. "Breathe with me, brother. In"—she sucked in a deep breath, held it for a moment— "and out again." She released in a long, slow rush, waited for a moment, and then repeated herself.

It took four more times before he seemed to register what she meant, then two more before he started trying to copy her. She did not know how long they stood there for, eyes locked, Aegon struggling to follow along with her breath as his entire body kept trembling in her hold.

"Do you know, when we were babes, I used to call you Egg," she told him.

"Egg," he repeated, sputtering a little, brows drawing as his slobs slowly faded.

"Egg," she confirmed. "Rhaenyra says I could not say your name, but I think you probably just looked like an egg. Bald, you know. Round."

"I did not look like an egg!" he said, indignant, and his annoyance seemed to chase away the last of his panic. They remained there, his hand pressed to her chest, as he scowled at her with a still-wet face and his hair stuck with sweat to his forehead. "Or—no more than any other babe!"

Her lips quirked, and she released his hand. Straightened and reached down to brush his hair carefully away from his brow. "Do you want to tell me what happened now?"

Aegon shifted for a moment, eyes flicking away from her, left and then right and then back, and then he passed his sleeve roughly over his wet face. "The nurse said I was to wait here for Mother and Father," he said—this woman, Visenya thought, was near certainly going to be fired when Alicent discovered she had left her son alone among fragile objects—with a tremble in his voice. "I was waiting, I  was , only I was looking at the model, and I tripped, but I did not mean to knock anything over!"

"I know," she said quickly before he could work himself up into another frenzy. "I know. Of course, you did not. It is alright. I have broken a dozen pieces of this model."

He squinted, but a bit of hope came into his face. "Really?"

No.

"Yes," she assured him. "Father will not be cross forever, even if he huffs and puffs. After all, it is only stone." A thought struck her, and she frowned down at him. Squinted at his legs. "You did not cut yourself, did you? The edges are sharp, surely."

"Father," Aegon repeated strangely, distantly, and then he blinked and shook his head. "No, I did not c—"

The door swung open, and Visenya sprang to her full height. She whirled to face her father and stepmother just as the king's eyes dropped to the broken stone all over the floor; her eyes turned next to the queen, whose gaze was fixed on the disaster. Something strange passed over her face, too fast for Visenya to name it, and then ice passed over her features as she began to pick at the skin around the edge of her thumb.

Oh,  she thought.  She is going to kill him. Well, some boys get far less than seven years. I do commend him for making it this far.

Aegon made a sound, something like a whimper, and it lodged immediately into her heart like a splinter. She hated him a little more for that whimper. That blasted emotionally manipulative, pitiful little noise that sank claws into her skin and gnawed at her ribs and whined,  oh, but Visenya, look at his sad little face.

"Father," she said, wishing Aegon dead so fiercely that it surprised her he did not combust. Her father was, again, not a mind reader, but she imagined he would have a good bit of alarm at the state of her head now if he was—she had never cursed herself so viciously in all her nine years of life. "It was an accident; I am so sorry—"

She burst into tears.

To date, it was her very best party trick. Rhaenyra had long since developed an immunity to it, as well an uncanny ability to sense when the tears were real or false, but Laenor crumbled at the sight like sandcastles met with the rough waves that came just after a storm; he would let Visenya and Jace do whatever in the world they wished, so long as Visenya's eyes welled up when she grabbed onto his hand.

She could do it on cue, though she did hate when it was her only option; she was not a girl who much liked to cry, except for the gravest of reasons.

Her father, who had never once seen her cry to her knowledge, had none of his eldest daughter's immunity or even his good-son's experience with such a thing, and the quickness with which he crumbled was a testament to the fact that he was a very, very weak man when it came to Visenya.

"Oh, darling," he said, papery hands on either side of her face, his thin mouth pressing down on her forehead. She froze in place, forcing her limbs not to move, commanding herself not to squirm frantically out of his grasp. "Oh, do not cry, do not cry—it is only stone! I will commission replacements; it is nothing to fret over. I loathe to see you so upset."

Alicent's gaze flicked to the bits of marble and plaster all over the floor. To Aegon's wet, flushed face. Back to weeping Visenya, slowing to a sniffle as she allowed herself to be held.

Visenya peered at Aegon beneath Viserys's chin and rolled her eyes at the open-mouthed shock on his face.

"Are you sure you are not cross, Father?" she wheedled, rubbing her eyes and then wringing her hands fretfully when he drew away from her. Her eyes welled back up but did not spill over, another trick she took pride in. "I know how important it is—"

"Nonsense, dearest," he said, warmly, and she softened a little. He really was taking the destruction of part of his proudest achievement rather well. "Nonsense! It can be fixed; it is of no trouble. Now, why were you in this dusty old place, anyway? Is there something you need of me?"

"I only wanted to look," she said, miserably. "I know I am not meant to be here alone, Father, but Aegon's nurse said it was quite alright if we waited here for you and Her Grace, so I thought…"

"It is fine, darling," he insisted again, though a pinched look came about his eyes at the mention of the nurse, and she allowed herself to slip fully from her fake upset to smile up at him. "Truly, do not worry yourself."

"Accidents happen," Alicent said, still squinting suspiciously at her son. Aegon squirmed a little under his mother's eyes, feet shuffling in the dust, and Visenya sighed as she recognized the need to get them both out of the room before their entire ruse fell apart because of her little twat of a brother.

"May I go to visit Vyper, Father?" she said, and he ran a hand over her head. Thumbed a bit of dirt off her face.

"So like Aemma," he murmured, and all the good feeling he'd won from her blipped from existence. Her smile flickered, trying to flee her face, but she forced it still. "Of course, darling, though we must speak about putting him into the Pit.

Vyper, like all dragons who came from cradle eggs, grew strangely. Small as a cat for ages, able to loop around her neck or perch atop her head, but he grew alongside her. He grew as she did, his own legs lengthening with hers, his wingspan growing as her arms grew longer, his fire heating as her hair began to tumble further down her back. Too big to roam the halls of the palace now or lay in her lap like a pampered pet, but he was perfectly content killing deer in the wood and generally wreaking havoc on any stray hunter who made the mistake of crossing into his path.

But that was not an argument she meant to have with the king again.

"May Aegon come with me?" she cut in, and the pure bafflement that immediately crossed his face confused her for a moment.

"Pardon?" he said, and then his gaze landed on the boy at her side. "Oh! Yes, Aegon. How are you, my boy?"

He hadn't remembered his son was in the room, she realized. He'd forgotten his presence completely the moment she started crying.

Aegon froze under the weight of their father's attention, and, to her surprise, he twitched a little toward her as if huddling against her side would make the situation less painfully awkward. "I am well, Father," he squeaked.

"You wish him to go with you?" Viserys said, uncertainly, and she nodded.

"I think—" Alicent began.

"Can he, Father?" she said, reaching blindly for Aegon's hand. Interlacing their fingers, turning her eyes wide and hopeful.

"I…do not see why not."

She fled immediately, planting a kiss on Viserys's cheek and dipping a half-hearted curtsey to her stepmother. She yanked Aegon along behind her without giving him the chance to speak. She did not  trust  him to speak. He did not have a backbone yet, not enough to lie to the faces of the king and queen.

"You lied for me," he said when they gained enough distance that she slowed down. It allowed him to walk beside her instead of stumbling behind her, and she immediately regretted it. He looked at her too sweetly, too reverently.

"Hush," she said, scowling. Glancing over her shoulder to check how far the guard who'd followed them from outside the model room was, she said, "I will never do it again."

"But you did it this time."

"Never  again."

"Why did you this time?"

"I pity you, you little worm."

"I thought you hated me—Aemond and me."

I hate you,  she thought.

You are a threat just by existing,  she thought.

Aemond breaks my heart each time I see his face,  she thought.

You are my brothers,  she thought.  Mine. I can never, even when I try.

"I never said I hated you," she said, lamely.

Aegon gave her a look.

"Sometimes I hate you," she allowed. "But that is because you are awful, and your voice grates me, and you are always  moist  for some reason—"

"But you lied for me." A smile built across his face; she realized she still had his hand in hers and dropped it like it scalded. "You lied for me so I would not get into trouble."

She turned and jabbed him in the chest with the tip of her finger, eyes narrowed. "I lied for you so your mother would not hit you."

He recoiled from that, looking down at his feet as if they were of great interest. "I never said she hit me."

She gave him a look.

He faltered, lips twisting, and then glared. "You have never cared before."

Visenya jerked, blinked. "I did not…Egg, I did not know."

Aegon processed that, and, for a moment, she thought they would speak about his mother. About how often she hit the boys, how often she hit Helaena. About how he felt, how often he had fits like that one ( Baelon did, too,  came a thought, a memory that struck her from nowhere, and her heart squeezed,  he'd have fits just like that one when he worried) . About if he wanted her to lure his mother into the woods and let Vyper turn her into nothing but embers.

Instead, he pointed at her face and grinned so wide she saw all his teeth. "You called me Egg!"

She turned on her heel and walked away from him without another word. He gave chase, though, scrambling after her with a delighted little laugh.

"You do not have me at all, do you?" he chirped, grabbing for her wrist. "You care about me, even—"

She scoffed, but the sudden uncertainty that flickered across his face softened her against her will. Visenya scowled at him, sighed, shoved his head gently. "You are my brother. I care for you. Sometimes. I cannot be expected to give a damn all of the time, that is far too much effort."

He whooped his delight, and she watched him with a fond sort of exasperation as he bounced around her. Her heart swelled a little at the simple joy written across his face, and she allowed him to remain stuck to her side as she collected Jace from the nursery. He pranced the whole way to the gardens, giggling like mad, and, when she sang for Vyper and he came barreling from the skies, he shrieked his delight. She lazed against Vyper—too small for a flight, but soon…soon—and watched the boys play knights, heckling them and throwing acorns at their heads, and her heart went fuller every moment that Aegon and Jace chased each other about as if there was no tension between them at all.

Aemond was missing, but…well, one out of two was not bad, was it?

"You care about me," Aegon said again when the nurses came to collect their wayward charges. Jace slept with his head in her lap, and she paused in her attempt to braid his short hair to scowl up at her little brother, who stood above her.

"I am going to poison you if you keep saying that," she said, hotly, and he laughed right in her face.

(Years from that day, when Aegon Targaryen died choking on blood and bile, Visenya Targaryen remembered well that pleasant afternoon. She remembered Aegon's sweet little smile, the sound of his laughter, the way he clung to her hand even after they left his mother behind. She would remember it all, that sweet memory held so close to her heart, and her fingers would bleed when she crushed an empty glass vial in the too-tight grip of her fingers.)

Chapter Text

“Can I touch you today?”

Helaena blinked thoughtfully at the question, sitting cross-legged on the floor with hands cupped to hold a strange bug. She did not raise her head to look at the doorway, where Visenya stood waiting for a reply, but the older girl did not take it personally. People often thought Helaena did not pay attention to them just because she did not look; they were wrong.

She seemed much older and much younger than her six years, Helaena. Curls brushed out to the point that they puffed, freckles on her little nose, bright purple eyes that she kept fixed on her beg as she considered the question. “Yes,” she decided, finally, flipping her hand to allow it to scuttle over to the other side.

“Where did you find that one?” she asked, leaving her position to take up a station on the floor beside Helaena. She hooked her chin over Helaena’s shoulder, peering down at the thing in her fingers: black and green in turns as the light flashed, too many legs, strange twisting horns. She wrinkled her nose at it and turned her attention to braiding a lock of Helaena’s hair.

Helaena did not often allow Visenya to braid her hair, uncomfortable with the feeling of fingers on her scalp and annoyed by the tugging. She accepted that, though it soothed her to play her fingers in the soft curls, to weave something solid and hers into her sister. Rhaenyra often did the same for Visenya, sitting at her dressing table as Visenya sat on the floor between her knees, humming Valyrian lullabies.

Like Aemma once did for her.

“In Balerion’s shadow,” Helaena answered.

“You are not supposed to play near the skulls.”

Helaena snorted, a distinctly Visenya-like affectation. “When have  you  ever cared for ‘supposed to’?”

Visenya bit back her smile, tugging fondly at the half-done braid. “You have me there, I suppose.”

“I dreamt last night,” Helaena said, allowing her new pet to crawl from one hand to the other. She dreamt every night, really, but she only ever told Visenya about the ones that didn’t bleed.

That was how she described it when Visenya asked her about the dreams that made her wake screaming strange words and crying out in terror, pulling at her hair and moaning as if she knew the dead would soon rise from their graves.  They bleed,  she said with helplessly spread hands.  They  bleed , Enya.

She tried sometimes to talk about them, but the words never came out right. She spoke in riddles that twisted in on themselves, telling snippets of a story to which Visenya did not know the beginning, and they both left the conversations more frustrated than anything.

“What did you dream of, heltus?”

“The children I will one day bear.”

Visenya gave Baelon a daughter born twisted and sickly and scaled, and she gave him four sons in the years after that dragon birth—four boys, healthy and hale and as arrogant as princes always are. Baelon’s spitting image, most of them, except for the flash of her smile or the flicker of her eyes. Silver-haired, violet-eyed, handsome and charming from the first to the last. Dragon riders all, their eggs hatching in the cradle—except for her thirdborn boy, who knelt to Silverwing and had her bow her great head to him in turn.

She woke knowing their names, but she forgot them again by the time her eyes opened. Sometimes, she could feel herself forgetting, and, on those mornings, she bit her tongue until it bled to keep herself from screaming.

It was easy enough with Nyra and the boys for her to pack away her dream life and live in the moment. To be a carefree girl again, giggling and mocking and audacious. It was not so easy with Helaena, with her eyes that saw too much and her tongue that always seemed to tangle the thread of the tales she tried to tell.

It was not so easy with Helaena. Visenya’s dreams bled, too.

“We are too young yet to worry ourselves with children.”

“Never too young for women to worry,” Helaena said in the tone of one parroting something oft-repeated, and Visenya’s mouth twisted ruefully. Alicent, no doubt, and, for once, she did not blame her. She was not  wrong . “Do you not worry, Visenya? After what happened to your mother?”

A genuine question spoken softly, as if Helaena was not certain she was supposed to ask it. Visenya cast a gentle look at her, hummed a lilting tune under her breath as she finished one small braid and moved on to another.

“What happened to my mother will not happen to me,” she said, firm, unyielding. She had no intention for children in this life, no intention to take a husband—it felt like a betrayal to a dead man who never grew up. “And it will not happen to you either.”

“You do not decide that.”

“I will not let it.”

“What choice do you have?”

“I always have a choice,” Visenya said, all the confidence in the world in her voice. “I will never let anything happen to you, heltar. I love you too well.”

(The gods laughed, but only Helaena heard them.)

“Love and gods all drown in black waters,” Helaena said, reaching over to give Visenya’s leg a consoling little pat.

“My love knows how to swim,” Visenya said, cheekily, and Helaena smiled joylessly at her bug.

“It cannot swim without legs.”

“Fish do.”

Helaena paused, brows furrowing. “I suppose they do, don’t they?”

After several silent minutes, Visenya paused in her braiding, her face twisting in sudden thought. “Helaena?” she said, and her sister hummed. “Who told you what happened to my mother?”

“Sometimes,” Helaena said, quietly, “my dreams bleed with her blood.”

Visenya froze, fingers almost numb in her sister’s hair as she forced a laugh. It came out shaky, and she could not swallow past the sudden knot in her throat. “Heltus—”

She startled when the door opened, whole body lurching, but Helaena only sighed as the sudden sound reminded her bug it could fly; it took flight from her hand with an angry buzzing sound, and the girls both swiveled their heads to watch it disappear out the window.

Aemond, meanwhile, froze in the doorway at the realization that two of his sisters were in the room instead of one, and his face gave a sharp spasm.

Visenya wondered what would happen if she shoved her thumbs into his eyes and pushed until they popped.

In the weeks since the incident with their father’s model, Visenya made immense progress with Aegon. At her best estimate, she only fantasized about his death once or twice every time she spoke to him now, and being near him felt less and less like a betrayal to Rhaenyra.  Of course, you may spend time with him,  Rhaenyra said, even as she blanched her distaste,  though, I admit, I do not know why you wish to.

In a private part of herself that she never acknowledged because that would mean admitting that her sister had faults, Visenya thought Rhaenyra’s animosity towards a pair of seven-year-old boys seemed unnecessary. She was four and twenty, a woman well grown, and their brothers still had mouths full of milk teeth.

But Rhaenyra did no wrong, not in Visenya’s eyes, and so she would never address that thought or—gods  forbid —speak it aloud.

But Aegon…Aegon was  easy.  Aegon liked to laugh, run, and play pranks. He wanted to be cuddled and have his hair pet like a pampered cat, for everyone to be smiling. He and Jace were growing quite close, as little boys often do when their only other option is a girl—though sometimes they snapped at each other so ruthlessly that she did not know what to do with it.

Aegon’s mean streak was as big as he was, sometimes. It had almost always been aimed at Aemond before, cruel little tricks and japes about his lack of a dragon, but all his time of late was spent clambering all over Visenya and, therefore, attached by the hip to Jace. She thought Aemond should be  grateful  for Aegon’s redirected attention, but he only seemed more furious with her than usual.

“Aemond,” Helaena said, pleased. “I found a new beetle. You missed it.”

“A travesty,” Visenya said, trying for a commiserating smile, and he shot her a look so poisonous that she looked expectantly down at her arms with the assumption that her skin would be flayed straight off.

“Green blood,” Helaena said, softly, and Visenya scowled.

I am not stealing your brother,  she tried to convey with her mind.  I am not; he is still more yours than mine, and you are my brother, too. There is nothing to be jealous of, you foul little shit; learn to  share.

But Aemond could not read minds any more than their father could; he only glared back at her, then looked to their sister. His face softened immediately, which Visenya told herself did not offend her in the slightest.

“I like the braids, Hel,” he said. There were seven, neat and pretty now, though she knew it would not be ten minutes before her sister started tugging them out.

“Visenya did them,” she chirped back, and Visenya wished there was a way she could capture the look on his face in a portrait and keep it on her person at all times.

When several minutes passed with Aemond still hovering awkwardly in the doorway, she huffed a sigh. He was not coming into Helaena’s room, not with her still here.

“I will see you at dinner, heltus,” she said, planting a fast kiss on her sister’s forehead as she stood. Helaena hummed in answer, a smile curving about her mouth.

Aemond did not speak until she slid past him into the hall, and his tone dripped fury despite how quietly he spoke. “Do not call her that.”

She paused to take a very deep breath before she turned around, arms crossed defensively over her chest. He tried to stare her down, but his minuscule stature ruined the effect. His fists bunched up at his side, and one of his feet scuffed angrily at the stone.

“Why?” she asked, bluntly.

He stepped further into the hall, glancing over his shoulder to ensure Helaena was not paying attention. Grudgingly, she appreciated that. Helaena hated it when people fought.

“She isn’t a  beetle,”  he answered, trembling in all his moral outrage. He puffed up like a pissed-off bird, and she wondered if feathers would pop out of his tunic if she smacked him.

“No, she is not a beetle,” she explained, and even she would admit that her tone was patronizing. “I  call  her beetle. That is, rather, how pet names work.”

“You are calling her a bug,” he snapped. “You are calling her small and strange and—”

Oh. Well, his fury rather made sense when she looked at it like that.

“I call her beetle because she likes beetles,” she cut in, considerably kinder this time. “I am not mocking her for being different, Aemond. I would not do that.”

He scoffed, rolling his eyes up towards the ceiling. She had always thought he had Aegon’s eyes, that pale amethyst color, but she noticed differently when he turned them back to her. Pale amethyst, yes, but darker than Aegon’s.

Baelon’s eyes, Baelon’s face, Baelon’s voice. All of Aemond was stolen straight from her dead brother, and it hurt so much to look at him that she jerked her eyes to somewhere just left of his head.

“I know how people look at her,” he said. Baelon would have done this for her. Baelon would have accosted someone in the hallway if he’d thought they’d insulted her, whether they really had or not; Baelon would have snarled and spat and bristled for her like Aemond was doing for Helaena, would have torn the world apart for slighting her. “I know—”

“I am not  people,”  Visenya snapped, too cold, too cruel whenever she was trying so hard to make peace with her father’s sons. She still could not look at him. “I am  her   sister. ”

Aemond jerked as if she’d struck him, and it startled her enough that she glanced at his face. His rage flickered, slipped away from him momentarily, and he looked  hurt.  She didn’t know why, for a second, didn’t understand what had made his fury slip, and then she heard her own words.

Her sister,  she’d said. Not  your sister.  Claiming Helaena without claiming him.

That wasn’t what she’d meant at all.

“Aemond—”

“Fine,” he snapped, and it was his turn to avoid looking at her. “Fine.”

She started to reach for his arm when he turned his back on her, then thought better of it. She just stood there instead, watching as he stalked into Helaena’s room without looking back.

Visenya sighed, digging her nails into her palms, then raised her clenched fists to press into her eyes when she felt them start to sting.

Chapter Text

The night before her first flight, intruders woke her twice.

Firstly, Aegon, who did not deign to speak to her before crawling into her bed and shoving cold feet against her bare shins. “Get out,” she moaned when he immediately began yanking at her blankets and bullying her over to give him more room. “You have your own bed, twat. Go to it, and get out of mine.” He did not obey her, even shushed her before almost instantly falling asleep when his head hit her pillow.

He snored something dreadful.

Visenya thought about how easy it would be to smother him, then grudgingly curled her arm around him and closed her eyes.

 Second by Jace, who stood at the side of her bed with his face contorted in fury. “He is in my  spot,”  he hissed, going so far as to stomp his foot. He came crawling into her bed after a nightmare at least once a fortnight, no matter how she complained about it, and he always coiled himself up along her left side; she hadn’t realized it had gone so far that he thought to claim a spot in  her bed  as his own. “Vi- senya!”

“Stop squawking,” she groaned, yanking her blankets over her head. “For gods’  sake , arsehole, just come around the other side.”

He did, though granted, he muttered nastily under his breath the whole time. She turned over to glare hatefully at the ceiling, pressing her shoulder into Aegon’s sleeping back. He flipped over immediately, squirming under her arm and butting his head onto her shoulder. Jace squirreled under the blankets on her other side and wiggled his way in to do the same.

“What was it this time?”

Jace’s nightmares tended towards silly things, though they terrified him deeply. His teeth falling from his mouth; his mother’s mind being switched with the queen’s, so they were in each other’s bodies; turning into a caterpillar and then having to metamorphosize into a butterfly. She expected something similar, but the long hesitation before he answered piqued her interest.

One of his arms snaked around her waist to hug her even closer. “You fell,” he murmured in a small voice. He suddenly seemed much younger than he was, as if he were Lucerys’ age instead of eight. I watched you fall, and you hit the  ground.”

“Me too,” piped another too-little voice, Aegon apparently woken by Jacaerys’s dramatic entrance after all, though his eyes stayed shut.

Visenya tried to pretend that it did not melt her to know that they so feared losing her that it sent them scrambling down the halls in the dark of night to assure themselves she was alright. It did not make her insides warm and soft, did not make her eyes well up, did not build a knot in her throat. Her face did not split in a shaky, watery smile as she turned to press a kiss first to Jace’s forehead and then to Aegon’s.

“He will not drop me,” she whispered. “He would never drop me, and I would never fall.”

“Promise?” Aegon murmured, fingers curling around her wrist.

“Promise.”

They accepted it just that easily, and not long passed before they were both sleeping peacefully against her sides. It took her longer to fall asleep, her eyes on the ceiling, her fingers combing gently through their hair, trying to still her mind and control the fondness still swelling in her chest.

She dreamt of Baelon’s first flight, her feet planted on the ground and her head thrown back to watch him spiral through the air, so happy for him and heartbroken for herself that she could not even tell why she wept. The way he looked when he dismounted, hair windblown and face pink, his eyes wild as he ran from his dragon’s side, past the dragon keepers, past their father, past Rhaenyra and Daemon, to fling his arms around her waist and bury his face against her throat.  As soon as she is big enough,  he swore, shaking with the adrenaline.  As soon as she is big enough, sweet dragon, I will give you the skies with my own hands.

Rhaenyra’s voice woke her, though she could not translate the words through her sleep-wearied mind for the life of her. It took her a moment to disentangle herself from the stirring boys and pull her numbed, tingling arms from beneath their heads, but then she shoved herself into a sitting position while rubbing the sleep from her eyes.

Lucerys immediately ripped from his mother’s hands with a cry, scrambling up onto the bed and slamming into her chest with such force that she fell back into the pile she just fought her way out of. “I dreamt you fell and  died,”  he wailed, soft little hands planted on her cheeks, his tiny face pressed so close to hers that her eyes crossed a little as she smiled ruefully back at him.

“That seems to be a trend among the princes of the Keep.”

“You are only missing one,” Rhaenyra agreed, voice tinged with amusement as she perched at the foot of the bed, and Visenya pulled a face.

“I imagine he dreamt it as well,” she said, struggling to sit back up without spilling Lucerys from her lap. She kissed his blushing cheek to make him giggle, curling her arms around him tighter. “I am sure he was devastated to wake up and remember I am still alive.”

“Aemond would be furious if you got a dragon rider’s death before he even gets a dragon,” Aegon croaked, pulling one of her pillows over his head with a groan and burrowing deeper into the mattress. It seemed, for a moment, that he would drift back off to sleep, but then his body tensed and he shot upright. “I need to leave.”

“Tell her I came asking for you early this morning,” she called after him as he flailed out of the bed and shot for the door. He shrunk in on himself a little as he passed Rhaenyra, shying a little further away from the bed than he needed. He did not look at their sister directly even as he mumbled a greeting. “Tell her I was nervous.”

He waved a hand over his shoulder in acknowledgment but did not turn around. “I know; I know; I will see you for the flight!”

Rhaenyra watched him go with her nose only half wrinkled. Visenya liked to pretend it was an improvement, but Nyra only hid it better now than before. “Lying to the queen?”

“Yes,” said Visenya. Rhaenyra raised a quizzical brow, but Visenya offered no further information.

Visenya lied for Aegon so often now that she did not bother counting. She lied about where he was, why he was there, what he did, why he did it. She lied about what he said; she claimed mischief and chaos in which she had no part. He lied; she lied; they did it so well now that sometimes even she forgot when they were telling the truth.  Make it my fault,  she insisted over and over again.  Whatever you say, whatever you have done, brother, make it my fault.

Anything to avoid his mother’s hand cracking down on his face when he upset her—or worse, his grandfather, who used an old cane across the back of the boy’s thighs any time he did anything that might upset the king. They never spoke about  why  his mother and grandfather wanted him to appear perfect in front of their father, both because Visenya did not particularly want to have the conversation and because she was unsure if Aegon yet knew of the storm forever building on the horizon. If he yet knew that his family wanted to use him to steal their sister’s throne.

He claimed they were not nearly so fierce on Aemond (clever, quiet, studious, determined,  perfect  Aemond) and insisted they never laid hands on Helaena.  I just need to be good,  he insisted when she tried to bring it up—jaw jutted obstinately in a way that made him look like Rhaenyra.

She did not know how to explain to him that, sometimes, it did not seem like he had done much at all when they hit him. He did not want to hear it, so eventually, she stopped making him.

But she never stopped lying for him, even if it meant turning her gaze away from the curiosity in Nyra’s eyes.

“Boys,” Rhaenyra said, clucking her tongue. “Out; your nurse is outside. Visenya needs to ready herself.”

Lucerys’s face warped immediately, eyes welling and cheeks blushing as his mouth yanked into a pout. “Can I stay?” he whined out, tone soft and wheedling, the picture of a soft young prince. Combined with the wild head of soft dark curls and how he coiled arms around Visenya’s neck and nuzzled close like an obstinate monkey, it painted a persuasive picture. “I will close my eyes as she changes! I will face the wall! I will—”

Before Rhaenyra could say no and send him to weeping, Visenya sang out, “Lu.” She peppered a dozen small kisses on his forehead, then smacked one to the tip of his nose to make him giggle. “Go with Jace, Lu. Make sure he gets there in time to see me fly; you know he is always late.”

Jace burrowed deeper into her pillows and grunted in offense.

“Enya,” Lucerys huffed.

“Please?” she said, bumping their noses together. “Do it for me, won’t you?”

Luke agreed with a long-suffering sigh, then spilled sideways out of her lap to clamber onto Jacaerys’s back. “Up!” he demanded. “Up, Jace, up, up, up!”

Jace groaned again, then rolled sideways to pop onto his feet with Luke clinging to his back. He caught him by the legs, bounced him higher to avoid the boniness of all his little limbs digging into his back, and then scowled at her when he noticed the grin on her face. She turned her face away, biting back the laugh.

She would tease him for how quickly he crumbled for Luke, but there was no point in hypocrisy. She could not blame Jacaerys for how he catered to his little brother; she did it, too, just as Rhaenyra and Laenor did despite their best attempts to treat the boys equally. Sweet, giggling Lucerys, who saw no wrong in the world and no malice in anyone’s heart, who loved so deep and with all his soul.

“Good luck,” Jace said, nudging her a little, and then the boys were gone, pausing only to allow Rhaenyra to plant kisses on their heads.

Rhaenyra turned to look at her, head tilting to the side. Quiet for a long moment, she took a few steps forward and ran a fond hand over her head. “Mother helped me ready the morning of my first flight,” Nyra said, almost absently, and Visenya felt her face flicker. She drew her knees up to her chest, arms wrapped around them just on this side of too tight, chin digging into her kneecap as she avoided her sister’s eyes. Rhaenyra faltered with a sigh. “I…am sorry. I should not have—I know you do not wish to talk about her.”

It hurt her, Visenya knew, how averse she was to any mention of Aemma. How she avoided mentioning her, how she flinched away from the topic. She hated hurting Nyra, hated putting that look on her face, but it was…she could not help the way her soul twisted away from her mother’s name.

“You were a person in your own right before Mother died,” she tried to explain. It was not that she did not  wish  to talk about her mother, really; she wanted to know things, to hear the stories, to find some sort of connection to the woman who brought her into life. She wanted to  miss  her mother without resenting her, to  want  her mother, but it was not so simple. Nothing was so simple as that. “When people see you—when  Father  sees you, he sees  you , Nyra. When he sees me, he only sees Mother. And I do not…I do not wish to only ever be a stand-in for a woman I never knew.”

Rhaenyra’s face softened, and she sat beside her on the bed. Visenya ducked into her immediately, squirming under her arm just the way Aegon and Jace squirmed under hers, and she went loose as the weight immediately lifted away from her shoulders. “You have Mother’s face, but—oh, sweet girl, you are not very much like her.”

Visenya blinked. “Father says—”

“Father is a man,” Rhaenyra said, scornfully, and Visenya laughed. “Men are foolish. You are…you are not Mother, Visenya. He will see that one day.”

Visenya sat for a moment, head on Rhaenyra’s chest, and then a grin built on her mouth. “Today, perhaps; Mother never rode a dragon.”

They never looked so like sisters as they did when Rhaenyra smiled back at her, the sun through the window turning their silver hair to haloes, purple eyes blazing bright as Nyra interlaced their fingers.

“Have you seen the leathers?” she asked, gesturing with a hand, and Visenya’s hand snapped to follow the movement. The neat pile of cloth on her dressing table went unnoticed until then, and only Nyra’s fingers wrapped around hers kept her from leaping from the bed towards them. “I had them made for you a few weeks ago.”

Visenya squirmed a little more forcefully, and Rhaenyra released her with a laugh.

They were finely made things, her first set of riding leathers. Soft leather of such a deep black that she might very well disappear into Vyper’s scales—leggings, so odd after all her years only being allowed to run about in silk and skirts. A pair of well-made, heavy boots. A long-sleeved tunic that ended at the middle of her thigh. Rhaenyra helped her fasten the belt, fiddling with the silver chains longer than Visenya thought necessary.

“To chain yourself to the saddle,” Rhaenyra explained when she pulled a face, and then she scowled at the wicked gleam that lit into Visenya’s eyes. “Which you  will  do, Visenya.”

“Uncle never chains himself.” Sulky, eyes hooded, jaw jutted obstinately.

She did not know this Daemon, having met him only twice (that she remembered). He wrote her letters once or twice a year, stiltedly polite things of awkward small talk, and he sent her a dagger for her last name day—a fine thing of Valyrian steel, rubies set into the silver of the pommel, dragons etched along the edge of the hilt. Viserys tried to take it from her as soon as he saw the sheath at her hip, outraged at the thought of his brother arming his child, but Rhaenyra soothed the anger until he grudgingly allowed her to keep it.

Visenya knew him in that other life, she thought. He was one of the memories that still slipped away from her, but she could feel it in her chest at the sound of his name. A kick, a comfort, something going easy in her shoulders. Daemon was safe; Daemon was home, somehow.

“ Daemon  is a man grown,” Rhaenyra said, crossly. “He has strength enough to forego chains and the madness to wish to do so, but  you  are eleven. Your first flight is always the roughest, sweet girl; you will chain yourself, or there will be no flight.”

Rhaenyra always said his name with a strange little lilt at the end of the word. It niggled at something in Visenya’s head, tugged at the threads, but she never could put a name to it.

“Yes, Nyra,” she muttered, grudgingly, and her sister relaxed. She settled into the chair before the vanity, patted the floor between her knees with one of her feet, and stared expectantly at Visenya.

Grumbling the whole way, she settled herself between Rhaenyra’s knees and closed her eyes. The leathers meant her sister would not chide her when she crossed her legs, so she did.

She maintained her annoyance until Rhaenyra started to sing in soft Valyrian, some ancient lullaby that Aemma once sang for her—of a hatchling clawing free and tumbling into the outstretched hands of some long dead dragon lord. The tension all left her shoulders at the first pass of the brush, and she was humming along by the time Rhaenyra began to section off her curls; she never could manage to stay angry with Rhaenyra, especially when she turned her pretty voice to a song.

Visenya tilted into it with a sigh, gave herself over to her sister’s song and her sister’s hands, let her eyes hood and her mind drift away to a soft daydream of what it would be like to finally give herself over to the skies on Vyper’s wings. To something even warmer, to the days someday when the boys were older and could be beside her: Arrax and Vermax and Sunfyre and Vyper, Lucerys and Jacaerys and Aegon and her. Vyper would be big enough, then—Helaena could ride with her if she still had no dragon, as Visenya rode with Nyra when she was younger. Perhaps Rhaenyra and Laenor could even be convinced to come along and watch over all the young dragons.

They could be a family in truth, if only in the skies where the rest of Westeros could not reach them.

Aemond,  said a voice in her head.  What of Aemond?

She shoved it aside.

“There,” Nyra said after some minutes. “Look into the mirror.”

She obeyed, bouncing to her feet and bounding to the mirror as Rhaenyra followed.

“You are growing too quickly,” Nyra said, softly, hands curling around her shoulders. “You were just a babe, and then I blinked, and now you mean to fly.”

Visenya was nowhere near grown, but the leathers made her look far older than she was: thirteen, perhaps, rather than eleven. The clothes were tight, though comfortable, and she could see the vague ripples of muscles beneath them when she tensed—left over from lessons with Harwin and Laenor, the marked beginning of something. The braid tight against her scalp finished somewhere near the small of her back, swinging gently when she turned her head; a rope of silver like a tail, intricately done, her sister’s brand on her.

Rhaenyra’s hands squeezed a little, warm eyes looking at her reflection in the mirror over her head—she dared, suddenly, like she so rarely did, to squeeze her eyes shut and pretend that Rhaenyra was her mother in truth instead of just her silly heart.

“Thank you, Nyra.”

Her sister leaned down and pressed her cheek to Visenya’s temple, grinning at her in their reflection. “Of course, sweet girl.”

“No,” Visenya said, fiercer this time, and she reached blindly for Rhaenyra’s hand. Squeezed, swallowed, tried again. “Nyra.  Thank  you.”

For not hating her, for not blaming her for the deaths of their mother and brother. For caring for her when she could have just as easily turned her back and left it to nurses and nannies and servants. For holding her when she had nightmares, for braiding her hair, for singing to her. For claiming her and making Visenya hers when she did not need to do anything of the sort. For being there, for always being there, for loving her. For  loving  her.

Thank you,  she said again with her eyes.  I do not know what I would do in this world without you.

She did not know if she would be able to exist in this world without her, really, if—if she could have survived it, the ache of missing Baelon, of wanting Baelon, of needing Baelon, without Rhaenyra and her boys and the family they’d all made together being there to soothe away the ache of the hurt.

Rhaenyra’s smile faded for a moment, face crumpling before it strengthened. With reddened eyes, she pressed a hard kiss to the top of Visenya’s head. “Nothing I have done,” she whispered, hotly, “is something you  ever  need to thank me for. I have done it for the love I hold for you, and I have given that love freely. It is your right, sweet girl; the part of my heart that you hold is your  due .”

Visenya had many birthrights as a Targaryen princess. A right to wealth and prestige and dragon wings, a right to the world if she wished it to be hers, a right to godhood and wickedness and blood and flames. She had a right to all those things, and she would keep hold of those rights with all the strength in every limb because they were  hers,  and the weight of her blood  made  them hers.

But this right, this right that Nyra gave her so willingly—she would throw all the others aside without pause if that was the cost of keeping it.

“I love you, too,” she whispered, blinking rapidly to dispel the sudden tears in her eyes. “I do; I do, Nyra—”

“I know,” she assured her, and Visenya spun around in her arms to lock her arms around her waist and bury her face against her shoulder. Rhaenyra hugged her back just as fiercely, mouth pressed to the top of her head. “Now, are you ready?”

Visenya drew away, wiped the tears impatiently from her eyes, and smiled wickedly.

*&*&*

“I know you do not care for the saddle,” she murmured, fingers splayed wide on either side of Vyper’s face as he gently pressed his brow against her own. “But I am afraid those spikes of yours would run me straight through otherwise.”

He huffed unhappily, and she gently pulled at his head to keep his attention when he started to whip his head over his shoulder again—the keepers were saddling him up, which they had so far been incapable of managing. Apparently, he bit off one of their hands when they tricked him near the pit for a fitting.

“That was not your fault,” she assured him, stroking gently at his scales and rising on her tiptoes to press a soft kiss to the smooth, smaller scales just above the slits of his nose. “They should not have been touching you without your leave, no? Dreadfully uncouth. I am so very proud you only took a hand; you might have burned them.”

Vyper preened and cooed his pleasure, which sent a wafting breath of smoke and burnt meat into her face. She wrinkled her nose against it, shaking her head, and then laughed when he looked vaguely offended at her response.

“Nyra made me promise to chain myself to your saddle,” she confided, and he snorted. It sparked a little, and she jerked her head to the side to avoid losing eyebrows. “I know, dōnos hōzalbos; I know. You would never let me fall. You would catch me, wouldn’t you?”

Yes,  he said with a blow blink of those big, violently green eyes, with a rustle of his wings, with a lash of his tail so sudden that one of the keepers was swept flat on their back when it caught the back of their knees.  Yes, I would catch you.

“I would say the same,” she murmured, “but I am afraid you weight considerably more than me, and I am not the one with wings.”

Excuses, excuses,  he said with a flash of his teeth, with the curl of his tongue as he laved it out against her wrist.

Her father called her name, and she cast a look towards him.

His entire second family was gathered awkwardly around him to watch her first flight: Alicent, her lips in a thin line, picking nervously at her fingers and looking at Vyper as if she expected him to fly into a rage; Helaena ignoring them all and examining something in her cupped hands; Aemond, clung to his mother’s side, glaring murderously down at his feet as if he could drill a hole straight through the ground with his mind; Aegon, bouncing on his heels, hands shoved into his pocket, staring at her.

Rhaenyra watched from beside Viserys, one of her arms looped through his. Lucerys balanced on her hip, giggling when Laenor reached out to chuck his chin. Jace stood in front of her, fingers shoved anxiously into his mouth, so clearly still terrified that it almost annoyed her; she promised him already she would not fall.

Viserys called her name again, and she looked reluctantly at his face. She avoided him throughout the day, scurrying about the Keep like a spy—anything to keep him from ruining the day she’d been waiting for so long with his whispers of her mother’s name.

The king only beamed, though, so much pride in his face that a wave of guilt nearly knocked her off his feet; Vyper distracted her, nudging her firmly with his head and lashing his tail again, and she came back into focus to see the dragon keepers drawing quickly away from him.

“Ready?” she asked in a low murmur, and Vyper sang back—a growling purr from deep in his throat. It made her blood sing, everything suddenly slipping into place with a click, and she realized just how  real  it all was.

Here was  her  dragon—hers, hers, hers, all hers and no one else’s; he chose her, and she chose him in this life; she was enough for him in this life—bowing his head for her, chirruping as she made her way from his side to the rigging carefully secured to his chest and sides.

Here were her own hands wrapping around the rope, sending her scaling upwards to the gentle dip of his back.

Here was the saddle, smooth leather with a strong chain—which she obediently attached to the chain of her belt without even a yell from Nyra.

Here was Vyper underneath her, his muscles roiling and writhing, his head twitching back and forth as he cooed his impatience.

One of the keepers called out to her, starting talking—directions, probably, the same things they told her a thousand times, the same rules they told her from the sidelines in both lives. Guidance and direction, but she was not to be directed anymore, was she? No, she was a dragon rider…or would be, in a moment. She was everything now. She was halfway a god, halfway a dragon herself, and all her blood burned delicious in her veins as she reached out to curl her fingers around one of Vyper’s long, delicate spikes and press herself closer to the long line of his neck.

“Sōvēs, Vyper,” she begged, as if none of them were speaking, as if the keepers were not calling even louder for her, and he paused as if to make sure she meant it. “Sōvēs; sōvēs; sōvēs,  kostilus —”

The  please  did it, she thought, because that was when her entire body lurched inside out. Her stomach and heart fought to see which would make it into her throat first; her whole body vibrated at a frequency she did not think mortal men could survive as her dragon did as she bid and  flew.

She had been in the air before—with Rhaenyra in this life, with Baelon and Laena in the other—but…oh, this was not the same.

This is home,  she thought, delirious, as he climbed higher and higher, his wings stretched wide.  This is home; I am home; this is what I meant for. Gods, gods, gods, please, do not make me go down again.

“Hepās,” she screeched through an exhilarated laugh, and Vyper obeyed her as if they’d done it a thousand times before—climbed even higher before he coasted. She peered down with a delighted shout to see King’s Landing spread out before them, smaller and smaller, and her family nothing but vague dots somewhere behind them. “Hepās, Vyper!”

How did the others ever come down? How did they throw themselves into the skies, feel the clouds against their skin, feel the power beneath them that answered only to them, and bring themselves back  down?  How did they feel this, the way her heart beat along to the strikes of his wings, the way her blood flowed with the wind cutting around them, the way she could only breathe when he did and not a moment before, and  stop?  How did they lock their dragons underground and trap them there when they knew this was how it felt to be in the air?

“Never, never,” she swore aloud, and she  wept.  It did not shame her for once; her heart was so full, and her soul was gone so mad with it. “I will never take this from you. I will not; I will not, Vyper. I swear it.”

Perhaps he meant to show her what it meant to him that she never caged him, that she fought to give him this freedom to fly with no chains for all his life. Perhaps it was only because he thought it would be funny to see how she reacted. Perhaps it was only because he was a dragon and did as he wished.

Whatever the reason, one or two or three or all, he screamed his joy and  dove.

She screamed then, though it tore out of her mouth as it never sounded. She screamed and screamed and screamed as he plummeted towards the ground with his wings pressed to his side, and she thought—she was sure, suddenly, that Jace and Aegon and Luke were dreamers all, that they saw her death in the night, and she all but made her peace with it just as Vyper snapped his wings open and shot right back up into the air.

“I hate you!” she screeched, braid whipping into her mouth. She spat it out and slapped at his neck with a weak hand, but she giggled into her other palm frantically as she did. “I hate you, foul creature; dreadful beast, I do; I do!”

He screeched back, so alive, so happy, and, oh, had there even been such a gift as the dragons were?

It was supposed to be a short flight. She was meant to land him soon, but she could not bear it—would not. She would fly until they were both sore and aching with it, until the stars came out; she would bid him so high that she could drag one down to bring home for Lule. She would fly until she grew wings, and then she would take a turn so he could rest his own.

First, though—oh, first?

“Vyper!” she yelled over the wind, over the sound of his wings, over the whisk of the clouds past them, over the thrash of his tail, over the roaring of her blood in her ears and the pounding of her heart. “Vyper, Vyper,  dracarys!”

(On the ground, Aemond Targaryen craned his head back to keep eyes fixed on his sister as her dragon wreathed them both in flames; he clutched his mother’s hand in his, fingers interlaced as Visenya came spiraling through the fire like a specter from the dark, and he thought of his dreams the night before—the dreams where she fell and fell and fell, splattered red across the ground, and the way he woke sweating and gasping for air he could not find. He thought of his dreams, and he watched her fly as if she had never been meant to exist on the ground, and, for the first time since he woke…he started to breathe again.)

Chapter Text

Remembering childbirth differed greatly from watching it.

Visenya  remembered  giving birth: the feeling of her insides molting, screaming for them to "get it out", the sweat on her face, the dryness of her mouth, the way her chest seemed to cave in on itself with every breath. She remembered it all, but it muted itself between dreaming and waking. She remembered feeling the pain, but she did not  feel  it; she knew she'd done it, knew it hurt so badly that she wanted to die to stop it, but she knew it as one knows that is on the other side of frosted glass. Muted. Fuzzy. Diluted.

Rhaenyra's rapid, panting breaths, the groans that came from so deep in her belly, the sweat soaking her bloodless face, the white-knuckled grip she had on Visenya's hand (she privately worried that all the bones in her fingers would break), the way she  howled  through a clenched jaw so the sound filtered through her clenched teeth instead of ringing out high and panicking—it differed harshly from her dreams. Worse, so much worse. She could have done without seeing this for a few more years yet.

But Nyra would hear nothing of that; she said the suitors would swarm in the next few years and that Visenya needed to prepare herself for all that was yet to come for her. The pain and fluids, the blood and danger. The war of the birthing bed, Visenya becoming the only sort of soldier that women were allowed to be.

She flexed her fingers, felt the warps of callouses from the grip of a sword hilt, and her chest constricted around a shaky breath.

"And push!"

Rhaenyra obeyed with another clenched-off scream, and the  squelching— Visenya might vomit, really, how did Rhaenyra do this? How had Aemma done this through so many dead babes, how had the queen borne this? How had  she  done this in that other life?

"And again," crooned one of the midwives.

"I c—I can't," Rhaenyra gasped, but she did it anyway. What else could she do?

Visenya's wicked, fearful mind granted her an image of Rhaenyra pinned to the bed by four cold-eyed people with no faces but jagged smiles, a maester cutting her stomach apart to drag the babe screaming from her womb, and she clung tighter to her sister's hand.  You are not allowed to leave me,  she thought, furiously, as if just the force of her own mind would keep Rhaenyra anchored to the world.  I will go mad without you; I will lose myself without you; you are not allowed to die.

Rhaenyra cried out louder, half a sob, and then she bowed forward as the squelching somehow got  louder . Visenya missed Jace, suddenly, desperately; she wanted to be outside with him and Lucerys; she wanted to be anywhere but here; she wanted—

"The head!"

Rhaenyra might have laughed, or she might have started to weep; Visenya could not exactly describe the sound, but her terror fled her as the younger midwife grinned up at them from her place between Nyra's knees. "The head?" she repeated, leaning forward to look, and it was only when she remembered  what  and  who  the head was coming from that she leaned hastily backward. 

Nyra ignored her excitement to keep trying to force the child out of her, and, with a frankly horrifying slick sound, it slipped free; the midwife laughed as she caught the wet babe in her arms, beaming brightly.

"A boy, Princess! Praise the Mother!"

Visenya's wistful dreams of a tiny niece with a head of dark curls and a crooked smile drained away, and she let out a glum little sigh that turned quickly into a smile. Another little boy, another little creature to torment and protect, to watch grow into something gangling and flaming and real; another Jace, another Luke, another piece of Nyra spat out and grown into its own entity.

She turned to see how her sister felt about a third son, but Rhaenyra had forgotten everyone else existed. She dropped Visenya's hand and reached out blindly for her now screaming child with an incredulous, giggling smile—still breathless and trembling and sweaty, eyes near black with residual pain. Still, Visenya strongly suspected anyone who got in between the new babe and his mother would soon find themselves with her sister's teeth buried deep in their carotid artery.

Oh, how she loved her sister.

"Healthy?" Rhaenyra demanded, bringing him close to her chest, peering down at him with a relieved sort of ecstasy, an anxious sort of terror.

"Kicking like a goat, Princess."

Visenya extended a hand cautiously, much like one uncertain if a dog would bite, but Rhaenyra voiced no objection to her touching her finger to the baby's little nose. To be fair, though, enamored and distracted as she was with her son, she also did not seem to really register the movement. "Jace's nose," Visenya murmured approvingly, and then she withdrew her hand to allow Rhaenyra to fuss with the blanket and bury her nose against her newborn's head; she wept a little, fell into half-mad giggles, and then went to crying again.

His hands were so very small. Stuck up into the air, his weird little fingers.

Ours,  murmured the dragon of her, the pale starlit creature inside her with its eyes of ice and granite, claws curling around her ribs and smoke filling her lungs as it cooed its delight at the sight of Nyra's bowed lips on the baby's face.  This one is ours.

Visenya wondered if Nyra felt this way when she first saw Visenya in her bassinet, but, even as the thought struck her, she knew differently. Rhaenyra took on the mantle of a dead woman and shouldered the burden and the responsibilities of it, even knowing it was something she'd need to do lonesome; Visenya could only ever nudge herself close to the burden, press herself against the edge of it. At most, she took a bite of the weight, but it was Rhaenyra's burden until she decided to lay it down.

And when it came to her children, both the ones she bore and the one she chose, Rhaenyra Targaryen would never lay the weight down.

"You did so well," Visenya whispered, and Nyra smiled dazedly back. "You did…so, so well, Nyra. He is beautiful."

"Thank you, sweetness," Rhaenyra whispered in answer, one of her hands raising to blindly pat at Visenya's nearest limb (it landed somewhere near her elbow) before coming down to clutch at the babe again.

They curled together for a moment—Rhaenyra around the babe, Visenya around Rhaenyra—and basked in it: this new babe, this new dragon come home to them, this new little thing to love with all the ferocity that Aemma Arryn's daughters kept burning in their chests.

But then the door cracked open, and Visenya watched with a sharp foreboding as their easy peace shattered.

"Princess?" squeaked the woman—a servant or one of Rhaenyra's ladies? Visenya did not know for certain, never able to keep straight the names and faces of the women her sister surrounded herself with—and both Rhaenyra and Visenya turned towards her with consternated looks. "The queen has… requested  that the child be brought to her." A long pause, a guilty look, an apologetic grimace. "Immediately."

Visenya tasted ashes, and she thought, if only for a moment, that she could truly spit fire from her mouth. She thought she could burn the palace down, turn the queen to ash, tear apart everything and everyone who dared demand her sister leave this bed, this pocket of comfort and love, to attend to  Alicent Hightower's  fucking wishes.

Rhaenyra's face showed the same rage for only the briefest of moments. A flash of it in her hard eyes and the way her jaw jutted, a twisting in her mouth that spoke of things with jagged fangs that tear and rip, but then she simply went cold.

"Why?" she asked, and her voice only shook slightly. 

When no answer came, Nyra's eyes flicked back down. Her face twisting once more before settling again into that cold mask, she adjusted her grip on the babe and tried to stand.

Visenya yelped and lurched forward to help the midwife raise her sister up onto her shaking legs; Rhaenyra groaned when she reached her full height, clutching the babe closer. "I will take him myself."

"You should remain abed, Princess—"

" Yes,  I should," Rhaenyra snapped back, voice a snarl. "Help me dress."

She staggered when she walked, babe clutched close to her chest as she panted. The servants converged with reaching hands, and Visenya hunkered closer to her sister with a seething urging to bare her teeth and hiss to startle them backward. Rhaenyra did not release the baby nor move to help them with the dress, so the girl with the queen's message gently prodded, "Princess…your dress?"

Hands reached for the babe when Rhaenyra started to tilt forward, but identical sounds of fury tore from both sisters' throats. Rhaenyra's passed for lingering pain, but Visenya's could be confused for nothing but outrage with how low and nasty a noise came free as she slid forward to take hold of her new nephew.

Heavier than he looked, this strange little thing, face all scrunched up and streaked with bloody fluids. "Hello," she whispered. "I am your…"

His what? His aunt by blood, yes, his mother's little sister, but the word fit wrong around her shoulders. Nyra raised her, loved her, and held her. She was more a mother to her than anything; she was more a mother to her than even Aemma would have been. A sister, then, felt closer to the truth, closer to the blood and bond both, because Jace called her sister and Lu called her sister and, when Nyra jested that she wished for a daughter, Laenor waved his hand and laughed,  do we not have one of those already?

But that was not right either, really. They'd carved a gap into their family for her, a place for her to fit, but she felt the press of it on the edges of her. The roughness of wood cut with uncertain hands, the bite of something she had to crush herself into because it did not grow along with her. Not a sister, not an aunt, less than one and more than the other.

"I am your Enya," she decided after a moment that felt like millions of years but must have only lasted a second. Enya, like Jace called her when he was too sleepy to form all the sounds of her name, like Lucerys cried whenever he pricked himself on the thorns in the gardens and ran to her to make it better, like Aegon wailed when nightmares woke him, like Helaena whispered through cupped hands as they shared secrets in the dark. "I am your Enya, and  you  are everything."

One of the women crept forward with an uncertain smile, and Visenya regarded her suspiciously. She assumed the woman meant to take the baby away from her, and she could not allow it. Nyra gave  her  the baby, trusted  her  to hold him close; they would not be allowed to take him from her.

"The cord, Princess," she whispered in explanation, and Visenya watched with a mix of disgust and fascination as they tied off the rope of bloody tubing and snipped the excess away. He wailed louder in her arms, hands flicking up and around as he screeched, and Rhaenyra craned her head around the servants to shush him gently.

But then her face contorted, several little pained noises pulling from her mouth as she crumpled in on herself. "Oh, it's  coming."

"The afterbirth!"

Fluids. Squelching. Her sister's discomfort, her sister's pain, and Visenya looked down at the child with eyebrows furrowed and lips pursed. "You creatures are such trouble."

He blinked up at her, and she touched his little nose again. They stayed like that, his little mouth open in his surprise, her fingertip touched to the little button of his face until Rhaenyra staggered away from the handmaidens with hands spread to take her son.

Visenya pressed herself up against her side to help her steady herself, only flinching a little against the exhausted weight of a fully grown woman, and murmured, " May she burn for this ."

Rhaenyra flicked a look towards her when she heard the dark, nasty tone of her voice, but her only chiding came in the form of a gently clucked tongue. Visenya set her jaw defiantly against the warning and glowered when Rhaenyra pursed her lips. 

She  meant  it after all. She wanted to burn Alicent for this—for sinking her claws into places where they were not wanted, dragging her trembling sister from the childbed with the blood still dripping from between her legs—the babe not even dry. She prayed for it in her head as they staggered together towards the door. Over and over and over again.

Laenor's arrival, when it came, did little to assuage her ire. He came swinging through the doors, arms flung out to grasp the frame, eyes sparkling and smile bright as the sun; it flickered a bit at the black wrath on her face, but it only took it a moment to spark back to life.

Visenya loved her good-brother well; she did. Loved him for being the closest thing she had to a father in this life, really, the one who read to her and ruffled her hair and taught her to swim. But sometimes— sometimes,  she wished so desperately to slam his head through a wall for never being what Nyra needed him to be.

Where were you,  she demanded with the flames in her eyes.  Where were you as she screamed and brought this babe into the world? Where were you when she brought the others? Where were you, Laenor? Why was no one there to hold her hand but me? 

Through all five of her births, Baelon stayed beside her. Making not a complaint as she crushed his fingers in hers, kissing at her temples, stroking the hair away from her face, whispering sweet praises into her skin— you are so strong, little love; you are doing so very well; come now, sweet dragon, it's almost over— even as he glowered darkly at the midwives.

He did not have the madness of their bloodline, her moonstone king, her silver boy, except when it came to her. When it came to their children later, but for  her . She drove him mad with it, filled his soul with it, blood and flames and fury, because she belonged to him just as much as he belonged to her.

Visenya never feared becoming her mother in that other life because Baelon would not allow it, would never choose a babe from her womb over the heartbeat in her own chest. If the childbed claimed her, Baelon would have slaughtered every one of those who failed to save her; if the childbed claimed her, Baelon could not even have abided the babe that killed her.

I would have held her head beneath the water,  he told her when she wept that she wished to take their daughter's face. Gentle eyes, fingers tender on her cheeks, so sweetly earnest with it that it broke her heart to pieces. Baffled that she would expect him to do anything else, incredulous at the concept of loving and raising and keeping anything that took her from him.  I would have watched her life fade, and I would have buried her nameless.

Weeks passed in that other life before she spoke to him again, but she now mourned that unwavering loyalty. Mourned having a man who loved her more than he cared for what her womb could give him, having a man who would choose her again and again, having a man who would give her the heads of any who dared suggest he put an unborn babe before her. A rare thing, a love like that, a love so sweet it could only be fated, and she  ached  in the absence of it.

What she would not give to let Rhaenyra have a husband who could love her half so well as that.

"A boy," Laenor chirped, taking up position on Rhaenyra's other side, peeping down at the new prince with a fond excitement. "I've just heard."

Nyra's mouth twisted slightly, and her nostrils flared before she sighed a tired, rueful, "Yes."

"Well done," he said, pleased, and paused in place for a moment as the princesses kept shuffling right past him—the servants in an anxious flutter behind them. "Where are you going?"

"She wants to see him," said Rhaenyra.

"The bitch queen of Westeros."

Laenor did not speak Valyrian fluently—or, at least, had never spoken it to an extent that indicated fluency in her presence—but he understood that.  The bitch queen of Westeros,  he mouthed with lips twitching in a half smile, and then his face flickered as he processed what they'd said. " Now?"

Rhaenyra clearly saw no need to restate the obvious, but she shot a look down at Visenya.  "Watch your tongue; the walls have ears." 

Visenya pressed her lips obediently shut, though she sulked a bit as she did it. She knew she should not say such things in public, but she had long since stopped worrying about what anyone outside of her blood thought of her. She made no secret of her distaste for her stepmother, and Alicent did little to hide her own dislike of Visenya.

And, she thought ruefully, it did not matter how careful a watch she kept on her tongue; Alicent would still be a cunt when she took her eyes off of it again.

"I'm coming with you," Laenor announced, and Visenya shot him an exasperated look as he finally hustled forward.

"I should hope so," the sisters muttered together.

Laenor reached for the babe with a murmured offer, but Rhaenyra lurched backward, her head shaking. "No; she'll get no such satisfaction from me."

He blew a breath from his nose and fluttered his eyes closed as if to ask a higher being for some sort of patience. "Just take my arm, at the least," he said, then glanced over at Visenya, still propping her up on her other side. "For Enya's sake, if nothing else."

"I am more than alright," Visenya objected, but Rhaenyra winced at the reminder of how heavily she leaned on her little sister. Laenor took her other arm, her weight shifting further onto her husband, and Visenya grudgingly admitted (to herself, never aloud) that perhaps he had a point. The slight weight taken off her did wonders.

"Was it terribly painful?" he ventured not three steps later.

The look Rhaenyra gave him could have curdled milk.

The one Visenya sent him could have boiled water.

"Oh,  gods,"  Rhaenyra moaned, and Visenya did not realize why for a moment—until they stepped into the greedy grasp of the Keep, until she registered the chatter growing louder, until she saw just how many people spread out before them, until she remembered all the damn stairs.

She and Laenor pressed closer protectively, and Visenya pretended not to notice Rhaenyra's savage wince every time she put weight on her legs. The fewer people saw her like this, the better she would feel about the whole thing later.

"I took a lance through the shoulder once," Laenor said, helpfully, and Visenya capped her fury only by reminding herself that, in his own way, he was trying to distract Rhaenyra from the indignities.

"Do you know how many times I have heard that story during our lessons?" she murmured, voice pitched low so Laenor could not hear, and Rhaenyra's lips twitched around a half-smile. "You'd think it was still in him, the way he goes on about it."

"What was that?" said Laenor, suspiciously.

"Our deepest sympathies," drawled Rhaenyra, and the three of them paused for half a blink as the mass of servants and nobles began to raise in a titter at the sight of them.

"I am glad," said Laenor, grimly, "I am not a woman."

“Lucky you,” said Visenya drily. Without letting go of Rhaenyra, he somehow managed to raise his hand high enough to give her braid a firm, annoying yank.

They made it to the foot of the stairs before Rhaenyra halted, sucking in deep breaths that shook down through the rest of her body. Laenor bent around her, trying to see her face through the curtain of sweat-soaked hair; his expression twisted into one of deep concern. "What is it? What is it?"

"Perhaps she has a foot cramp," Visenya suggested, widening her eyes in exaggerated bafflement. "The child who just, not ten minutes ago, clawed its way from her body cannot possibly have anything at all to do with her discomfort."

"Enya, darling," Laenor said, exasperated. "Do you remember when we agreed that there is a time and place for the snark?"

"No," she said. "I cannot say that I do."

"Fuck," said Rhaenyra, tilting her head back to stare up the stairs, and Visenya started. Her sister rarely cursed in front of her children or sister, and she usually delighted in it; this, somehow, did not feel so much a victory as usual. "Walk…Walk!"

"What could she possibly want?" Laenor asked as they began the slow climb up the stairs. Each one seemed to get a little more difficult, and Rhaenyra's winces got more defined with each labored step. Her breathing grew heavier, and more and more of her weight slipped against Visenya or Laenor. "I thought we were  past  this."

His tone grew harder as he found his outrage, and her annoyance with him dissipated with a soft sigh. Sometimes, she forgot that even the men she loved were still only  men : foolish and blind to all the things that did not affect them. Laenor, sweet and well-meaning as her good-brother was…his baffled fury at Alicent's petty vindictiveness only served to remind her.

Visenya and Rhaenyra, after all, never thought they were past anything.

She began to fret that Rhaenyra might fall into herself just as they reached the first landing, and Lord Caswell's kind voice halted them.

Visenya did not like most people, but she held a particular fondness for Lord Caswell because of an incident with pilfered sweets, a torn tapestry, and a small kitchen fire. She found that fondness difficult to find as the misbalanced trio—quartet, she supposed, if one counted the babe—struggled for the next set of stairs.

"Princesses, Ser Laenor; it is a privilege to be among the amongst the first to congratulate you."

"Thank you, Lord Caswell," Rhaenyra managed, and Visenya forced a half smile in his direction. Laenor did not even bother with that.

"If I may be of any service—"

"The day may yet come, my lord," Rhaenyra said without turning, and they made it only halfway up the next set of stairs before she rapidly shook her head and bent with a groan. Her arms shook around the babe, and Visenya nearly reached for him until she remembered her own earlier thought about Rhaenyra biting out throats.

"We are turning back, all right?" Laenor said, anxiety bleeding further into his voice as he reached out to hold her up. Visenya really did love him, this man who loved her sister with as much of his heart as he could give her. " She  can come to us, all right?"

Rhaenyra rallied, dragged herself up to her full height, and clutched Laenor's arm. "No. Not unless you wish to carry me down those fucking stairs."

They looked at each other for a long moment, a silent argument that Visenya did not understand; Rhaenyra won, as she usually did, and Laenor bent with a sigh to gather her skirts in his hand before they were off again.

"This is absurd," he muttered as a parting argument, and Rhaenyra answered with a pained little hum.

"Almost there," she mumbled as they neared the end of the hallway, and Rhaenyra laughed shakily. "I hope he gets birthing fluids on her dress."

Rhaenyra turned her head to grant her a half-smile, half-grimace, and Ser Criston Cole slithered from the shadows in front of the chamber door. "Princesses," he said in that lilting voice she dreamed of silencing. She knew where the vocal cords rested; Harwin quizzed her anatomy during their lessons.

She knew nothing of the past between Rhaenyra and Cole, but she knew something rippled through them when they locked eyes. A tension. A fury. An old wound that never quite scabbed over, the blood refusing to clot. Visenya did not know where it began, but Rhaenyra looked at him as if her skin crawled at the sight. That was enough for her; she could hate a man with nothing to go on but her sister's sneer.

She did know something of the past between Laenor and Cole—though, she was not meant to know anything of the sort. But Laenor's eyes clung to pretty knights, not pretty maids,  not  her lovely sister, and the whispers still rang through the halls of the way Laenor howled himself hoarse over the corpse of the man Cole murdered at his wedding feast.

She thought nothing of wiggling the arm wrapped around Rhaenyra's back around until she could give Laenor's wrist a subtle squeeze.

May you burn with her,  she thought, gazing back at him, and she hoped he saw the cold ire in her eyes.

He stepped aside, and Visenya followed her sister and good-brother into the room.

The queen turned her head—she stood in the window, one of her girls fussing with her dress, and, with the light playing on her face, Visenya almost understood how Rhaenyra could have stumbled into heart-sickness over the doe-eyed Hightower girl the queen once was—at the sound of their entrance, and her eyes widened. "Rhaenyra!" she said, as if shocked, as if  scandalized.  "You should be resting after your labors."

So she could see the babe alone, she meant. So she could call him a bastard aloud, make snide comments about the dark of his hair, whisper her bile into Viserys's ear without his daughters there to protest.

I see you, bitch,  Visenya thought, glowering darkly.

"I have no doubt you would prefer that, Your Grace," said Rhaenyra, considerably more diplomatically, with a forced smile that looked little like a smile at all.

"You must sit," said Alicent, so very fucking gracious all of a sudden. Visenya half closed her eyes and allowed herself to imagine what she'd look like hanging from a noose. "Talya, fetch a cushion for the princess."

"There's no need," Rhaenyra said, voice stiff.

"Nonsense." Alicent dismissed her servants with flicked hands and then strode towards them. Visenya tensed, pressing more firmly against Rhaenyra's side as the servant laid a pillow down. Their fingers tangled when Visenya perched on the arm of the seat, and Rhaenyra's clutter of rings dug into her just enough to hurt as she sank reluctantly down into the seat.

She tensed further when Viserys's voice cried, "What happy news this morning!"

Rhaenyra glanced up at her as their father entered, and Visenya pasted a crooked grin on her mouth in silent assurance. She reached out with fingers that only shook a little, combing Nyra's hair gently back from her face, and her sister tilted into the touch with a small sigh just as Visenya always leaned into hers.

"Indeed, Your Grace," Laenor answered, his hand landing on the back of Visenya's neck and squeezing a little. It settled her more than she cared to admit.

"Where is he? Where is my grandson?" Viserys sang, eager like a child set before a table of seats. More fondness struck her than usual at the sight of his soft excitement, her heart softening at the love on his face when Laenor reached to take the babe from Rhaenyra and place him into the king's arms.

"A fine prince," Viserys declared, after a moment. "Sturdy."

Visenya's head turned towards the queen just as Alicent's lips tightened. She could read the thought in her eyes when her eyes drifted towards the baby in her husband's arms, the nasty little word hiding itself in the dark of her pupils, the barb of it jabbing at Rhaenyra and the child.  Sturdy,  mocked those eyes,  or strong?

"You will make a fearsome knight," Viserys murmured to the babe, and it struck her suddenly how  old  he looked. His face softened in on itself, hair so thin she could see large patches of a spotted scalp, wrinkles like canyons carved into his too-pale face. He bounced the babe gently, cooing. "Yes, you will."

"Does the babe have a name yet?" Alicent asked, those words still stinging in her eyes, and Visenya gnawed pettily at the inside of her own cheek.

Monterys,  Rhaenyra said last she asked, another Velaryon name pasted on Strong boys, but she rolled her shoulders and shook her head a little. "We haven't spoken—"

"Joffrey," Laenor interrupted, and Visenya froze in place. "He'll be called Joffrey."

A long, fraught beat.

"Unusual name for a Velaryon," said the queen, eyes burning even hotter.

Rhaenyra gave a fake smile and cut her eyes down, and Visenya wondered if the older princess was biting her tongue hard enough to taste blood, too.

"I do believe he has his father's nose," Viserys said, obliviously, and Laenor laughed with such evident awkwardness that she wanted to give him a swift kick in the shin.  Pretend better, idiot,  she thought furiously, but Alicent was already looking at him with that bit-into-a-lemon expression.

"Jace's nose," Visenya murmured to distract, and Viserys smiled at her. "I think he has Jace's nose."

Rhaenyra looked to Laenor.

"If you don't mind, Your Grace," he said, taking his cue, "your daughter has exerted herself heroically and should rest."

Rhaenyra rose to her feet and reached out for the babe, but Alicent slithered right between her and the king to grab onto him instead.

Morghūljās,   screamed something inside her, something bloody and burning, and she growled under her breath at the sight of Hightower claws tangling themselves in her nephew's blankets.  Die; die; die; he is ours; he does not belong to you.

The queen drifted away, cooing down at Joffrey, and Rhaenyra's head turned to Visenya. She read the plea in her sister's eyes, squeezed her hand firmly once more in silent promise, and followed after Laenor and their queen as the king shuffled towards her sister.

Bleeding, pale, exhausted from childbirth—for once, it was Nyra who looked more like their mother; Visenya escaped notice with nary a sideways glance from Viserys.

Alicent passed the babe back to Laenor, finally, and leaned in with a falsely sympathetic, poisonous little smile just as Visenya arrived to curl two of her fingers into one of the loops of Laenor's belt. "Do keep trying, Ser Laenor. Soon or late, you may get one who looks like you."

"Perhaps you might keep trying as well, Your Grace," Visenya shot back when Laenor's face shuttered over, her voice going low. She smiled sweetly up at her stepmother. "Soon or late, you may get one whose name Father remembers."

Cruel, perhaps. Too cruel to the brother and sister she loved, even too cruel to the one who hated her, certainly too cruel to the brother sent away to Oldtown that she barely knew. But, oh, the look on Alicent's face. The way she jerked, the flicker of fury, the moment her mask slipped just enough to tell Visenya that her knife slid perfectly accurately into the mark.

Something inside her purred when the queen glared down at her. Silent, jaw working, because what was she to say? Run to Viserys and whine to him about the cruel words of a girl of twelve?

Visenya smiled. Alicent turned and scurried back to her husband.

Laenor looked down at her with his brow cocked, and she braced herself for a chiding. But his lips quirked into a smirk instead, and he leaned down to press a kiss to her brow as he murmured,  "the bitch queen of Westeros."

Visenya tugged at the belt loop and beamed back. 

"Mind your tongues," Rhaenyra murmured as she joined them, her arm slipping into Visenya's. But her lips twitched at the corners and she whispered, lowly,  "the cunt queen, more like."

They had yet to make it seven steps from the room before the argument began.

"You don't…think to consult me before you name my child?" Rhaenyra asked, and the smart thing, of course, would be for Laenor to accept the reprimand and move on. The matter was done and settled, too late to change; the easiest course would be to allow her to have her fury without complaint.

She told him this with her eyes, desperately.

Naturally, instead, he asked, with a great deal of exasperation, "He's  our  child, is he not?"

"Only one of us is bleeding."

There is no argument against that,  Visenya said, reaching around Rhaenyra to jab him in the small of the back.  Let it go, fool.

"I deserve some say in the affairs of my own family."

"You haven't seemed so interested in our affairs of late."

True, if a little too cold. Laenor left more lately, growing ever fonder of Qarl with the passing days, but none could say he did not love his boys. None could say he was not loyal to Nyra.

Not that Visenya would be defending him aloud. As far as she was concerned, he'd made his mess and now could figure it out all on his own. She would not earn Rhaenyra's annoyance, not today, when she had already watched her sister go through so much.

Laenor stopped to look incredulously after her, but Rhaenyra kept on walking. Visenya went with her, her loyalties and heart firm, but she cast a sheepish glance over a shoulder at Laenor as they did.

Her eyes caught instead on the trail of blood along the floor.

*&*&*

The moment they returned to Rhaenyra's chambers, she scurried for Jacaerys and Lucerys—together as they always were, playing and telling tales of dragons to make each other giggle. They shifted when they noticed her, creating space for her to fill without any hesitation. Lu slid into her as he always did, tiny head of curls pressing insistently into her ribs until she obediently ran her fingers through them with a hum.

She looked to Harwin, who stood up with his eyes fixed on Rhaenyra. Shining with too much emotion, overflowing with it, bursting out of him. He never could really keep it from his face: the intensity of the feelings of his chest. Seeing her with his son in her arms clearly did not make doing so any easier.

Visenya narrowed her eyes at him, but he gave no mind to anything in the room except her sister.

"Mother!" Jace chirped, and his fingers wrapped around Visenya's wrist to force her into following as he burst towards the egg warmer. "Look!"

He lifted the lid, and there it was—Joffrey's someday mount, gods willing, hidden behind overlapping scales of bronze and gold. Would it hatch for him as theirs had, come for him as Vyper and Vermax and Arrax came for them? Hatch to him in his cradle, be born to him? Would he claim another hatchling, like Aegon and Sunfyre? Would a dragon already grown be called for him, just as Helaena called Dreamfyre?

You matter regardless,  she thought to the babe, who paid no mind to any of them.

"We picked an egg for the baby," Lucerys explained, and she tugged fondly on his ear as Rhaenyra gave a warm  ahh  of approval.

Harwin came forward to take Rhaenyra's arm, face soft and molten, and Rhaenyra turned a warm look up towards his face before letting her eyes skip back to her children.

Visenya, magnanimously, pretended not to notice.

"That looks like the perfect one," Nyra assured the boys.

"I let Luke choose!"

"Thank you, Jace," Lucerys said, obediently, when Visenya tugged a little more firmly on his ear.

"Not every day an egg—" Harwin began, but Visenya's attention diverted quickly when Luke's little hands stretched outwards for the egg.

Jace tried to swat him away, and she hissed furiously at him to be still; neither of them moved quickly enough, and he yanked his singed fingers back towards himself with a muffled yelp before shoving them into his mouth with a pitiful, wounded sound.

"Make it better, Enya?" he said, sweetly. He proffered her his hand, and—she did not have  favorites.  She loved Jace just as she loved Lu just as she would now love Joffrey and would someday love any babes who came after him, but…but there was always something about Lucerys. Sweet, mischievous Lucerys, always reaching for her, always hiding behind her skirts, always crawling into her bed; gentle, lovely Lucerys, always wanting her attention, always wanting her tickles, always wanting her to dote on him and hold him close.

She loved her sister's boys, but… but. 

But if Jace asked her to kill for him, asked her to spill blood and rend flesh and burn cities down, she would demand a reason. She would ask him why before she did as he bid, even if his answer did not really matter.

Lucerys would not even need to ask. Lucerys would need only turn those big brown eyes towards whoever hurt him, raise a hand towards them, and she would turn the realm to ashes.

Visenya had favorites, even if she would not admit it to herself.

She sighed, but she took his still-wet fingers and pressed them to her lips in a firm kiss.

"There, bykys jaes," she murmured, and he flashed dimples at the affectionate murmur.  Little god, little god,  she used to croon to his bassinet, and the words still rolled easy from her mouth in place of his name—no matter how Jacaerys and Aegon teased.

Lucerys's head turned, following Jace's gaze, and she watched with a keen eye as Laenor laid Joffrey carefully in the crook of Harwin's giant arms. She studied his face, her sister's knight, her sister's heart—he looked so like Jace and Luke in this light. Dark curls a tumble around his face, the curve of his smile beneath the poof of beard, the dark of his red-rimmed eyes.

"Father," said Lucerys, bright and eager, a pampered little thing who had gotten each of his wishes granted for all his life. Visenya, still watching Harwin, noticed the way his shoulders twitched just for a moment. The urge to look up, the urge to answer. She wondered just how badly it broke his heart, hearing his sons cry another man their father. "Please, may I hold Joffrey?"

"No. No. No," Laenor said immediately, and Jace reached out to catch his little brother about the shoulders when he proceeded to try to snatch the babe from Harwin anyway. Harwin gently redirected his little hand, and Laenor slid forward to run interference. "Back to the Dragonpit with you two—you  three."

" Ha!"  cried Jace, face brightening at the immediate consternation that contorted Visenya's face, giggling as her head whipped around to glare daggers at her good-brother.

" Me?"  she squawked in disbelief, lunging to the side in an attempt to escape his grasp; she failed, and he swept her up and towards the door right along with his sons. "No, but I have—I have a  sword   lesson , Laenor! Lēkȳs, you cannot— Nyra! Harwin!"

Nyra only huffed a laugh, and Harwin glanced at her with a quirk of his lips. "Not today, Princess," he said, not unkindly, and her eyes flicked to the brown-haired babe with Jacaerys's nose grizzling gently in the big man's arms. "We will resume tomorrow if it pleases you."

She understood then. Laenor ushering the children out, leaving with them—giving Rhaenyra and Harwin time. Just a moment. Just a blip. Never enough.

"The things I do for you,"  she said with as much dignity as she could manage with her head half caught in the crook of Laenor's elbow, and Nyra's laugh rang loud and bright.

"Before they send out a search party!" Laenor insisted, and Visenya glumly allowed herself to be ushered forward. He tugged her braid gently, bumping her with his hip, and she granted him a reluctant half-smile just as the boys took hold of her wrists and yanked her along with them.

She tossed a look over her shoulder, though. One last look at her exhausted sister, who was turning her face up towards Harwin with the beginnings of a playful grin tugging at her mouth. One last look at Harwin, bouncing his son in his arms and looking at Rhaenyra as if she held the moon in her eyes.

"I am to command Vermax today," Jace told her as soon as Laenor bundled them all into the carriage meant to take them to the pit. He disappeared immediately afterward, no doubt in search of Qarl, and Visenya stuck her tongue out at him through the window; he made a crude gesture back to her, then blew a kiss that she pretended to wave away. "I am getting so  close,  Enya! I can feel it. I will be able to fly with you soon."

Jace so hated watching from the ground.

"You will get there," she assured him, gently. "You will, and we will fly together."

"And  me!"  squawked Luke, and she laughed.

"Someday," she assured him, and the pulse of guilt near wiped her off her feet.

Vyper could hold Lucerys and Visenya both upon his saddle, now—he grew quickly, faster than any of the other young dragons, though no one would listen to her insistences that his size came from never being chained beneath the earth. She could bring Lu into the air with her whenever she liked.

Except that it would mean sharing Vyper, only hers just as she only belonged to him. Sharing the skies that they  owned,  the two of them, commanded of their own will and wrath as soon as his talons left the ground. Sharing the feral madness that fell over her every time he took her so high that she could feel her soul turning into something new and all its own.

Some things, Visenya could not give. Did not want to give. Even to Lucerys.

"Will you come inside this time, Enya?" Luke asked hopefully, and she pulled a face.

"I will be outside," she said. "Vyper and I will wait for you."

She never entered that vile place if she could help it. Visenya could not abide the air, stale with the smell of smoke and half-melted chains, and she had no stomach for the sound of shackles rattling and the discontented growls of dragons trapped in holes beneath the ground. No, dragons were not meant for places like that, and Visenya was more dragon than most.

Dragon enough for us both,  she thought to Baelon's ghost. 

No answer came. It never did.

The dragon keepers regarded her much as she imagined one regards a half-rabid opossum inhabiting an attic, and she saluted them with a mocking bow as her nephews scurried to disappear into the pit with them—followed soon after by two silver-haired boys, one of which had a scowl already carved deep into his face. She did not know why he put himself through the pain of chasing the other boys into the pit each day, but a part of her admired him for it.

A larger part thought him an idiot.

Vyper landed almost as soon as the last of the keepers disappeared, the wind from his wings whipping her hair into a flurry as he hit the ground. He always knew when she wanted him, whether because he felt her heart calling or always kept his eyes fixed on the Keep for her to come home to him. So big now, so different from the little thing she remembered, but he dipped his head to nudge at her just the same as he did when they were both small.

She let the gentle touch tip her over into the grass, lazing on her back and gaping up at him as if he shoved her most violently. "Oh, betrayal," she moaned, tossing her hands over her eyes. "You cruel, wicked beast! You wound me! You attack me at my weakest!"

Silly thing,  he said fondly, with the slow blink of his eyes and the way his head tilted to the left, and he pressed his snout into her stomach just hard enough to send her into a fit of wheezing giggles.

More dragon than girl,  Rhaenyra said sometimes, laughing, but she always had a look in her eyes like she thought her a little mad for the way she and Vyper blended.

Visenya did not know how the others were any other way, how Rhaenyra could not read Syrax's body and Laenor could not feel Seasmoke's moods. She read Vyper's body as one reads a book, the twitching of his eyes and nostrils, the way his tongue flicked.  Of course , she knew his heart—it belonged to her. She knew his soul, for it belonged to her, and she knew  him , for  he  belonged to her. Why should that not extend to his mind, his thoughts, even if she knew it was not so much words but feelings that he thought with?

"Joffrey," she whispered to him after he grew bored of tossing her about, and she started a new game of clambering all over him, petting at his spikes and all the sensitive creases of his wings until his eyes slitted with a pleased purring noise. "The new babe's name is Joffrey. He is ours."

Vyper grumbled.

"Joffrey," she repeated, proffering him her hands, hoping she still smelt of the babe. "The babe. Ours. Ours, Vyper."

He blinked once, a slow affirmative, and she knew he understood her. That did not necessarily mean it mattered to him, but—small steps, slow and sure. His head lifted, flicked back to the pit, and he hissed.

Vyper granted her just enough time to get out of range of his wings before he fled into the skies and the trees and the wild, before the keepers could begin their general attempts of hassling him into behaving more like a horse. She sighed after him, then brightened when she saw Jace and Luke rushing out with Aegon just behind them.

"How did it go?" she asked anxiously, then paused uncertainly when giggles began spilling out between the fingers Lucerys clapped to his mouth. Her first thought was that Jace's session went poorly and he embarrassed himself, forcing the vindictiveness of all little brothers to rear its head in Luke—but Jace's own face reddened with his laughter, and he beamed back at her.

"Not this time," he admitted, but his smile grew. "Aemond's went better than mine did."

A shudder of foreboding went down her spine, and she narrowed her eyes. "Aemond?"

Aegon threw his arm around her shoulder—he grew more and more gangly with every passing day, the little shit, and stood at a height with her already even at ten—with a flourish, pressed their cheeks together, looked their nephews right in the eyes, and  oinked.

Nyra's boys fell apart, giggling so hard tears went streaming down their cheeks, and she drew stiffly from Aegon's grasp and turned incredulous eyes towards him.

"We found him a dragon," Aegon explained with that wickedly vindictive little sneer in his voice that she so hated to hear, the cruel flash of his eyes brighter than she'd seen in ages even as he reached out to gently tug a lead from her hair. Sweet for her just now, her affectionate little brother, but the knot in her belly said he had not been nearly so sweet to Aemond in the pit. "As fierce as the Black Dread."

" The Pink Dread!"  howled Luke, then broke into squealing when Aegon darted forward to tickle his ribs as the two of them set to oinking again.

Jace reached out to ruffle Luke's hair, shoved at Aegon's shoulder, but his smile dropped at whatever he saw on her face. He paused beside his brother and Aegon, hand half-raised, and his eyes went wider as her jaw clenched so hard her teeth ached.

"Tell me you did not give him a pig," she bit out through clenched teeth, and, at the sound of the outraged tremble in her voice, the other boys quieted, too. "Tell me you did not do something so needlessly  cruel  and  wicked  as that. Tell me you are not such  spiteful, spoiled little brats  as that. Tell me you did not."

Three sets of sulky, guilty eyes blinked back at her.

"It was only a jape, Enya," Aegon muttered, though he looked more and more uncertain with every passing moment. "He is such a shit all the time; we were only  jesting."

"What is the  matter  with you?" she snarled.

She remembered the feeling of Baelon in flight. Watching from window ledges, leaned as far out as she could get, head craned back as he passed overhead; watching from the ground, arms curled around her middle, blinking tears from her eyes and telling herself they came from pollen. Watching him corkscrew through the air, watching him scream his joy, watching, watching,  wanting.  Gods, she remembered wanting so badly that her very bones ached with it, her blood burning in her veins, something in her chest that had no name screaming with a grief she could not put into words. She remembered the fury, remembered envying him so viciously that she hated him just for a moment; she remembered weeping over an egg gone cold and hard as stone. It stayed inside her still, a thorn lodged in deep, even now with Vyper who loved her so, even when Baelon never purposefully made her feel badly for it.

And yes, Aemond was a little shit, a pompous little thing who thought himself better than everyone else, a vile creature who never had a kind word for her—or any word for her, really—and never so much as faked a smile in her direction, but she  knew  his hurt. She knew it. She felt it in that other life,  drowned  in it even with her brother giving her all the love in the world to make up for it, and his gave him a  pig.

"Where is he?" she demanded, and, for a moment, she wanted to strike them. Clap Jace about his ears and smack Aegon in his lip, grab Luke by the ear and throw him to the dirt. She did not, no, would never, but  gods.  For a moment.

Aegon pointed silently into the pit, and she—Visenya Targaryen could not say for certain that she was a dream, but she knew without so much as a flicker of doubt that her little brother meant to do something monumentally, unbelievably stupid. She knew it fiercely; she knew it immediately; she knew it with such iron-clad certainty that she did not spare a moment to think about it before she shoved past the boys and stalked into the pit.

She remembered why she hated the place so much within the first ten seconds, but she barreled on anyway. Through the torchlight and empty space, the dirt beneath her feet tainted with the wrongness of the place's existence.

A pig with wings regarded her and then dismissed her, which felt a little pointed.

No Aemond here, not with his pig, but…not outside with the others, which meant he was still—

"You fucking idiot," she groaned, and she considered leaving. She did. She thought about it for a long moment, fists clenching and unclenching; she  wanted  to leave, really, as she stood there remembering what a little cunt he was.

Visenya delved into the tunnels.

It was so dark here, with no torches to light her path and no sun in sight; how cruel it was, keeping creatures made of wind and fire so deep beneath the earth that they did not have a glimpse of the sky. Wind shipped from somewhere and nowhere, tugging at her skin and hair, carrying with it the stale smell of burnt fur and stale breath and smoke. Dragons stirring and snarling from deep inside their caves, upset at the intruders she and her fool of a brother made.

She knew them by song, the dragons of King's Landing. Knew Syrax's sweet call, whistling out through her nose in a spoiled complaint; Seasmoke's grumbling snorts, never having forgotten the freedom he held before Laenor moved to King's Landing; Arrax and Vermax singing to each other, the curious chirrups of young dragons; Sunfyre's mournful singing, calling for Aegon as he always did the moment his rider left his sight.

Her soul ached with the sin of it, but she forgot the hurt and anger when she heard the low rumble of a crackle.

She did not know how to describe a crackle to one who did not hear it, and most did not. Good ears and a quick head were needed for it, the keepers said, and Visenya had both. She could hear the sound that came from a dragon's depths, the boiling in its throat and chest; a storm rolling in, a nightmare beginning, a last breath turning to a scream.

Syrax and Seamoke and Arrax and Vermax and Sunfyre, but where was Dreamfyre's song?

She understood, suddenly, how Alicent felt when Helaena went missing from her nursery. Understood the way the queen wept and wailed and tore at Criston Cole's arms when he held her back from the pit, the way she screamed at the sight of one of Helaena's dolls abandoned forgotten in the dirt at the mouth of the door. The  fear . The  panic. 

But Helaena, even young as she was—so fucking small then, but she sang to Dreamfyre as Dreamfyre sang to her, and she came from the pit with ash on her face and a dragon to her name—went into the pit in search of a dragon with its soul free to meet hers.

None here were free to bow head to Aemond.

She ran. Followed the sound, the dull road of it in the distance getting louder and louder as she went; her hand against the wall to guide her, only a prayer keeping her from tripping on something she could not see in the dark.  I do not know the way,  she thought to nothing, thought to no one,  do not let me lose my way.

Visenya found him in the mouth of Dreamfyre's cavern. His face open with the awe of it as the wind of her cry whipped his hair from his face; illuminated by the flames building in their sister's dragon's throat but not moving to run from it.  Baelon,  said her heart with no mind for the logic in her head,  Baelon, we will lose him again.  No time to call his name, no time to tell him to run, and so she kept going-going-going until she slammed into his side and sent them both careening hard to the right and into the dirt—right as the flames seared forward to engulf the space where he'd been standing. She felt it lick against her back, so fucking hot she cried out, and she smelled her hair burning; they hit the ground so hard her bones jolted, all the breath leaving her in a rush as his elbow jammed into her belly. Their foreheads smacked together, and one of her knees accidentally jerked enough that it rammed into his ribs.

She did not care, though. Could not care when she was far too busy trying to disentangle their limbs without releasing her grip on Aemond, Aemond, Aemond with Baelon's face and voice and eyes; it would be like losing him all over again. Her last look at Baelon's face, her last piece of him, ripped away from her when it was all she had left—

"What—get  off!"  he snarled, thrashing about to throw her off, but his hands were shaking so badly that it did little. She could not tell in the darkness whether he bled, whether the fire had burned him, and the anxiety tightened her chest enough to make her wheeze as she hooked her fingers into his arm to drag him (or perhaps he dragged her, fast as he bolted once he got his feet under him) back the way they came.

"Are you hurt?" she demanded as they stumbled, but their panting breaths and the echo of their footsteps as they fled were the only responses. "Are you  hurt?"  she said again, tightening her grip, and he grunted impatiently and attempted to free himself from her too-tight hold. She deemed them far enough away to escape danger, though, and so she pressed closer instead: trying to see in the dark, poking at him in search of wounds that might not exist as he shoved at her hands with a stream of bleated expletives.

"Get  off!"  he hissed, and her patience snapped.

Visenya reached for his hair— straighter than Baelon's,  soothed a voice in her head,  his curled more than this does— with a mud-stained hand, knotting it around her fingers, and  yanked  his head back to force him to look up into her eyes. "Fight me  later,"  she said, pretending that her voice did not shake so hard that it cracked right down the middle. "Are you  hurt , valonqus? Did she burn you?"

(Aemond Targaryen spent all of his ten years stoking the fires of his outrage, keeping vigilant watch over the fires lit with fury and hate. He watched her grow alongside her dragon; he watched her with Rhaenyra, who loved her like a mother even as she regarded the rest of her siblings as one looks at a peculiar, foul insect they are debating squashing; he watched her with their father, who lit with joy at the sight of her and doted upon her so fiercely. He watched her love their nephews with all the ferocity of a dragon born into a girl's flesh; he watched her ire towards Aegon fade away to nothing when faced with the charm that always seemed to come so easily to him; he watched her accept Helaena exactly as she came without ever pausing to question. He  watched  her all his life, his sister who loved every other twisted, wretched creature in their family but looked at him as if to show him kindness would take her a step too far over the line, and those fires  never  left him.

And yet, now he stood in the dark of the pit she had always disdained entering, stood in the dark of this place she had always refused to visit even at the desperate pleading of all the other boys—but she'd come here for him. She'd come inside this place for him, and now she clutched him close as if she cared, fingers wound in his hair like she so often did when bringing the bastards and Aegon to heel; she'd come here for  him , and now she stood calling him  little brother  in a terrified, shaking voice that he had never once heard come from her mouth, and now—now, to his horror, he found that the fires were not there at all.)

Aemond went perilously still, looking up at her with his eyes owlishly wide, so suddenly quiet that it panicked her even more. She released his hair to begin patting him all over again, fingers brushing over his limbs, but he grabbed for her wrists with his still-shaking hands.

"I am not burnt," he said in a strange voice, and all the weight lifted from her shoulders. She sagged forward with a choked sound of relief, cupping the back of his neck with one hand and leaning down to press their brows together. Her eyes squeezed shut as she inhaled, holding the breath inside her aching chest before releasing it in a slow exhale—and then she took him by the shoulders and shoved him into the wall.

"Are you stupid?"  she snarled, and her ire only grew when he blinked uncomprehendingly. "Are you  stupid?"

"No!" he yelped, furious on his own behalf just that quickly, and whatever brief placidity that came over him vanished. "I was  fine—"

"You almost  died!"  she shrieked. "You—Dreamfyre is  claimed,  you little fool! She would have burnt you alive; she would have  killed you!"

"I was not trying to—"

"Do not lie to me!"

"They gave me a pig!" he snarled, and his voice cracked this time. "Aegon, and Jacaerys, and Lucerys—they gave me a  pig,  Visenya."

"Mittītsos," she said, crossly. "Little  fool.  Fool of a boy, so you decide to  die?  How will you ever rub their noses in it if you die nosing about dragons not yours?"

Aemond's chest puffed up, face reddening in his anger, and he bared his teeth. "I am sure that is easy enough to say," he snapped, "when your dragon came to you in the cradle! You lecture me for wanting my birthright, for trying to claim it, but you do not  understand.  You cannot understand when it was  handed  to you for  nothing."

He dared?

He  dared  act as if someone handed this life to her? As if she did not earn it? As if she did not  deserve  Vyper and the skies and the fire as  payment  for the horrors she knew before she ever learned to understand them?

"I paid my price," she said, withdrawing from him. Glowering at him. "I  paid  it. I paid it in blood."

"What blood have you ever spilled?" he shot back, dismissively. Voice high and mocking as he waved a hand contemptuously. "What blood did  you  pay?"

"My mother's," she said, voice cold enough to redden his cheeks and put frost on the tips of his eyelashes, and Aemond flinched back. "My mother's blood, when Father carved her into pieces to save my brother, my other—my other  half  of me.  His  blood when he died before he ever heard himself named. Their blood paid my price. What blood do you think will pay yours?"

Aemond opened his mouth, but whatever he meant to say faded as he swallowed and dropped his eyes from her face. Words snatched from his foul little mouth, silent for once, but she found that it gave her no satisfaction to see it.

"It is not fair," she said softly. "I know it is not fair. I know how it chafes to see us with the thing you want most;  I know.  I would crack your egg open and give you your dragon myself, if I could, but I cannot. No one can."

"Would you?" he said with a condescending little twist to his mouth, and she clenched her jaw.

"Yes," she said, simply. "But, as it is, you will have to claim a dragon. And you  will , but this…this is not the way, valonqus."

"You do not know that I will," he muttered, eyes drifting to his feet, and she reached for his hair and pulled his gaze back up to hers.

"Our father rode Balerion," she said, quietly, softly, fire and blood and starlight. "Our grandfather rode Vhagar and our grandmother saddled the Red Queen. Trace it back to the beginning, Aemond, and we come from the Conqueror. We came from Balerion's true rider, from Meraxes's rider. We  are  dragons; we are gods; we are the blood of kings and queens. You are of the blood; you have the fire. Your birthright will  come."

"Dragons and gods and the blood of kings," he said, quietly, softly, fire and blood and starlight, and he ran his gaze curiously over her face. "Why did you come for me?"

She had no chance to reply before the dragon keepers found them singed and filthy, before they dragged him off to his mother and packed her off to Rhaenyra, but she thought that might be for the best—she had no answer she knew how to give him.

Chapter Text

"You are so frightfully dramatic," Laenor said with a snort, and Visenya buried her face deeper into the cushion with an indignant noise. Her entire body ached with a bone-deep sort of soreness; her thigh was still smarting from the smack he'd laid across it with the flat of the practice blade, and the dull headache throbbing in her temples threatened to worsen into agony with every pulse of her heart; she did not think it dramatic to take refuge on her sister's sofa. "I did not run you so hard as that."

"Harwin never makes me swing fire pokers," she mumbled without raising her head. 

"Wooden swords do not build your arm strength," Laenor said, dismissively. "And Harwin does not because he knows I do it. You might give up the practice if it bothers you so."

"You are cruel," she moaned in answer, groaning as she used her arms to shove herself up. "A cruel, wicked, vindictive monster, and I wish Nyra never would have—" She finally looked towards him and froze when she noticed a fat, leatherbound book dangling from his fingertips. "What is that?"

"You must not," he said, sternly, "tell your sister."

Pain and soreness forgotten, she scrambled to her feet and dashed across the room to where he stood beside the other sofa. He immediately raised his arm, keeping the book out of her reach even as she rose onto the tips of her toes and stretched her arms to their limit, trying to snag it from him. "What is it?"

"Swear to me that you will not tell your sister," Laenor said, stretching his arm even further out of reach when she gave a frantic little hop and started yanking at his shoulder. "I will not have her cross with me because you cannot keep your lips together."

"What is it, Laenor?" she demanded again, lunging for it once more, and he hissed when she stomped on his foot. "Show it to me!"

"You must swear," he crooned, dancing backward. "I promised the boys I would attend their lesson today, and I am already late; swear it to me quickly, hāedus, or I shan't give it to you!"

"I swear I will not tell Nyra!" she cried, and he swung his arm down with a laugh and allowed her to yank it greedily from his grasp. He tugged her braid as she twisted to the side and fell backward onto the couch, dragging the book up to her face to examine it and leaving her legs dangling loosely over the arm. "Will you not tell me what it is now?"

It was old; she knew that much from the worn leather of the binding, the feel of the paper, the smell—she adored the smell of old books, voracious for them in this life as she hadn't been in the first one. When she opened it, though, she knew it was more than old; the faded ink curled itself into the shape of High Valyrian.

"Where did you get this?" she asked, near reverently, drawing it close to her chest in case he tried to take it away. "Nyra forbade me from reading of the blood rituals; she says I am too young."

Perhaps she would be correct if Visenya was any other girl of twelve, a child in all ways instead of only parts, but such was not her lot in life. Her mind twisted in on itself, little girl and woman grown warring for purchase, things she should not know mixed with things she still could not remember. Such a text would be too complicated for her to translate if she did not have another lifetime's memories of speaking Valyrian with Baelon; such a text would be too…much for her if she did not have the steadiness of someone who remembered birth and death and blood in truth.

Valyrian blood rituals, after all, were not kept to slitting the bellies of goats or the palms of soldiers or even the throats of virgin maidens. Dark magic, twisted magic of flame and fear. Children broken, men tortured, women brutalized. Even those that hadn't required death and soul-corroding sorts of sin were not anything fit for a child's eyes, rooted in sex and shadow and secrets.

Really, now that she thought about it, giving her the book was very irresponsible on Laenor's part. He knew nothing of the complexities of her head; to him, she was only a girl of twelve.

"I wrote to Laena," Laenor said, almost sheepish, and he pointed at her threateningly. "You swore to me, so you must not tell your sister; I will not have her cross with me. If she discovers you have it, you must say you found it on your own somehow."

"Are you teaching a child to lie, lēkȳs?"

"You already know how to lie, Enya," he answered, drily. "Better than most men and women grown, I suspect. You need no lessons from me."

"Slander," she muttered, beginning to carefully turn the pages, and then she grinned at him. "Thank you."

"Anything for our Enya, of course," he said, smile dimpling as he dipped into a bow with a weaving flourish of his arm. He paused when he drew out of it, then stared at her thoughtfully for a moment. Looking at her with vague concern, lips pursing and eyes narrowing, he ventured, "You must not try to replicate any of them. They tell you so little of the process that you will accomplish nothing anyway, and—"

"You should have extracted more promises before you gave it to me," she said, burrowing deeper into the couch and burying her nose into the book. "As it is now in my hands, you have no bargaining power. Furthermore, I am considering your giving it to me as volunteering yourself for any and all experiments; I do thank you for your service."

"You cannot have my blood, Enya," Laenor said, in the tone of one who has little hope of being heeded, and he tapped her leg in farewell before turning to head for the door. 

Visenya grinned at the book and, without looking up, called, "We all must sleep sometime, lēkȳs."

*&*&*

Laenor got no chance to attend the boys' lesson; by the time he left, Harwin Strong and Criston Cole had already ended it.

*&*&*

When Harwin came to say goodbye, she stood waiting in the doorway. Nyra and the boys remained inside their rooms, but Visenya knew that goodbye would not be meant for her. However much she loved him, the hulking man who taught her the sword and loved her sister so well, she did not belong there for his farewell to his heart and his sons. She was not his daughter (however much she wished she would have been, a dark-haired girl from Nyra and Harwin, a dark-haired girl without a dead woman’s face and a king’s mournful eyes watching her every step) nor the princess he served.

She would say her farewells alone in the hall, back pressed to the door as her fingers played anxiously with the end of her braid—shorter than it had been, thanks to Dreamfyre and Aemond.

“You mustn’t get so angry, Princess,” she greeted him in a rumbling drawl, not so very unlike his own. She tilted her head back to look up at him, eyebrows raised as she tapped her foot, and he clasped obedient hands behind his back to let her finish.

(Mind your temper, my Princess, Harwin chided, his foot settled gently between her shoulders as she squirmed viciously against the floor on her belly; her practice sword skittered even further away from her desperate, groping fingers as she cursed him up, down, sideways, backward, forward, and diagonally.)

“Your anger makes you foolish, Princess.”

(You would not have made such a mistake if you did not let wrath cloud your judgment, Harwin told her, lifting her up by the waist to set her atop the table, dropping to his knees to unlace her boot. Warm palms wrapped around her swelling ankle as he eased her foot into moving, his brow furrowed with worry as she whined about the pain and complained that she would not have twisted it at all if it weren’t for his blasted mind games.)

“You must keep yourself in check, Princess.”

(Mind your head as much as you mind your body, Harwin warned, guiding her elbow into the proper position, nudging at her feet to adjust her stance. Your breathing, your mind; if they squirrel their way into your head, you have already lost half of the battle.)

“Princess Visenya,” he greeting, dipping into a short bow before straightening. The corner of his lips curled behind his beard, and she scowled at him. “That is sound advice for a little thing like you. Remind ne, who was it that gave it to you?”

“I do not recall,” she lied, crossing her arms across her chest. “Thought if someone had given you the same advice, perhaps you would not have turned Ser Cole’s face to pulp this morning. No?”

“Perhaps,” suggested Harwin, “if someone gave Cole that same advice, he would not have deserved to have his face pulped.” He raised an eyebrow at her and gave the underside of her chin a light tap with his pointer finger. “No?”

She strangled her laugh before it made it more than halfway from her mouth, utterly outraged that he would dare to jest at such a moment. He softened at the sound and sank gracefully down to one knee so that they stood eye to eye; she had hated it when he did that in the beginning of their lessons, hated how small and young it made her feel that he needed cut himself in half to be on her level, but she did not mind it anymore.

Visenya realized long ago that Harwin never meant to make her feel small, young, lesser—not the way other men did when they stooped condescendingly to speak to children. He only wanted to look her in the eye because, to Harwin, she was worth lowering himself. He thought her a person, a real person.

Not a vapid little princess with too much fire and not enough leash on her tongue. Not a ghost, a walking mirror, Aemma Arryn born again. Not a little girl too young and foolish to be told anything, even the things she could see clear as day.

“Nyra will not tell me why,” she said, scuffing at the stones with her toe and fiddling with a stray thread hanging from her sleeve. “She’s told Jacaerys and Lucerys not to tell me anything, either.”

She could not tell if she meant to keep Visenya from getting upset or getting angry, but, either way, it was not working.

Harwin hummed. “That is your sister’s decision.”

“Funny that it only affects me.”

They looked at each other for a long beat, neither of them blinking, and, just as she knew he would, he sighed. “Your brother went too far this morning,” he said, and she did not have to ask which of them he meant. Aemon was a wicked, vicious, little thing, yes—he was petulant and bitter and rotten with envy. But he was neat at the sword already, skilled in a way Aegon did not match. Controlled and precise even for a boy of fourteen, much less one of ten; Aemond would not have gone further than he needed to go. “Prince Aegon.”

Ah, she usually so loved being right, but this confirmation came with a twist in her gut.

“Perhaps you should have hit him instead.”

Harwin hesitated; Visenya gaped.

“Fourteen Flames,” she cried. “Did you hit him?”

“Of course, I did not hit him,” he said, but the tone of his voice implied that he would have, near certainly, if only her brother were not a prince of the blood. “I only...” He trailed off, considered. Searching for the word before sighing. “I stepped in. And Ser Cole—he favors your brothers. He said something that he should not have said.”

As close to the truth as he would dare go, but Visenya knew with a twist in her gut.

“Ser Harwin Strong,” she murmured, letting her scowl fade into a frown. “Knight in shining armor.”

“For your sister and her boys?” he whispered, lowly, as if it were a secret that he trusted her to keep. “Always.”

Sometimes, in moments like these, it no longer felt so baffling to her why Rhaenyra would risk so much just for the love she held for her Ser Strong. Sometimes, she understood quite well how her sister could love him enough to brave the whispers that came from three strong sons.

“I will not miss you,” she said abruptly, face going fierce as her fists balled up in her skirts. He jerked a little at that, lips parting, a vague expression of hurt coming over his features, but she barreled right on anyway. “After all, I hardly know you. My sister’s sworn sword, the Commander of the City Watch—a secondborn daughter of the king would have no cause to know you, no reason to miss you. It is not as if you taught me the sword.”

Understanding flashed across his face, and he softened so clearly it made her ill.

“It would be inappropriate for a princess to learn the sword,” she said, rocking up and then back down again. “His Grace would never give leave for something silly as that, and to do so without his leave would be cause enough for punishment. So, I have no reason to miss you. I will not…I will not even notice that you are gone. I will not feel your absence in the halls, and I will not miss you.” Her voice shook, cracked, and she turned her eyes away as if it would hide the tears welling and the red rims of her eyelids from him. “I will not miss you.”

“I would never expect you to miss me, strangers that we are,” he told her solemnly, and then he reached gently out and took her hand. He should not be touching her in public, even empty as the hall was; people would whisper even more than they already did about him, accuse him of growing too close to both princesses instead of one. “And I will not tell you to keep up with your drills and not to grow careless. I will not tell you to keep your feet light and take advantage of any who underestimate you for being so small. I will not tell you that I am so very proud of how far you have come, nor that I think you are far too clever for your own good.” He squeezed her hand, and she squeezed back when he smiled. “I will not tell you that I shall miss you and your sister very, very much.”

“That,” she whispered, horrified at the wobble of her voice and the knot in her throat, “is an awful lot of things not to tell me, ser.”

“I suppose,” he said softly, “that it is a good thing I did not have to say them.”

She was not thinking when she flung her arms around his neck and buried her face against his shoulder with a choked noise. He went still for several heartbeats, clearly shocked, but then one of his arms wrapped around her; the other hand came up to run gently over her braid as he hugged her back.

Do not leave, she thought. They are safe with you; I am safe with you. Do not leave us.

“I know you cannot be their father,” she said instead, voice pitched so low against his ear that someone standing just beside them would not have been able to hear her. He went tense in her grasp, a shuddering breath rocking through him. “I know you cannot…be their father, but they are lucky that you are. They are blessed that you are, no matter what the world thinks.”

Gods know how often I have wished you were mine.

He did not answer, of course, could not answer, but, when Harwin Strong drew away from her, his eyes were red.

She moved away from the door to let him pass, shaking her head silently when he looked at her if he expected her to follow him. Not her place. Not her place.

Visenya waited outside instead, keeping watch for the rats and birds of the Keep as Harwin took a few minutes with the woman he could not love and the sons he could not have. She waited, pretending her cheeks were not wet, pretending her heart did not ache, pretending she felt nothing at all.

He did not stop to speak to her afterward, but she did not take it personally. His eyes were wet, his cheeks hollowed as he gnawed on them, shoulders shaking. A man having pieces of himself torn away from him. Not her place.

When Jace came bolting into the hall, though, with his face all twisted up—that was her place. Jace was her place. She reached for him on instinct, their fingers interlocking like a well-worn puzzle board, and he squeezed so hard that she would have flinched if she was anyone else in the world. He tipped his head against hers, and she raised their clasped hands to her mouth.

Rhaenyra came after him, eyes red-rimmed, hands shaking around Joffrey in her arms. “We will exchange letters by raven,” she said, shakily. “Won’t that be fun?”

“Is Harwin Strong my father?” Jace asked, almost calmly. Visenya turned a look of great interest down towards her feet, and Rhaenyra snapped a panicked look after Harwin. She turned back to her son just as he spun to face her, something trembling in his voice. “Am I a bastard?”

What does it matter? Visenya thought. You are mine. You are ours. You are a dragon; you are a god. What does it matter what anyone else thinks?

Rhaenyra threw a look over her shoulder to make sure Luke hadn’t heard, then ran her fingers through Jace’s hair and cupped his face. “You are a Targaryen,” she said fiercely. “That is all that matters.”

She kissed his forehead, firm, and then pushed him gently back into the chambers with Lucerys. Visenya let his fingers slip wordlessly from her own, curled an arm around Rhaenyra’s waist as her nephew ducked into the door.

“What happens now, Nyra?” she murmured. Her sister pressed her cheek to the top of her head with a deep, unhappy sigh.

“I fear we’ll have to flee the storm, hāedus.”

*&*&*

She’d never seen Viserys angry with Rhaenyra before, in this life—though, in the other, Viserys always seemed to be cross with Rhaenyra.

That Rhaenyra disappeared on the morn of her wedding to some rich little lord (not Laenor, no, not in that life) to marry Daemon instead; that Rhaenyra had no throne and no crown to keep her mind fixed on duties and inheritances. She cared nothing for expectations because she was the dragon; she was the blood; she was above everything else in the world. That Nyra came home once or twice a year with gifts for Visenya and Baelon, speaking dreamily of all the places she saw and the adventures she had.

Though, even though she lived so freely in that life, that Nyra still felt lesser to her, somehow. Smaller. Muted, diluted. Shadowed,

Visenya would spend hours watching the skies for Nyra to come home in that other life. Only a sister in that life, no kind of mother—Visenya had no mother in that life—but she loved her still. Loved her something fierce, the Realm’s Delight with her dancing smile, and Nyra loved her, too.

In that life, though, Rhaenyra never tried to take Visenya with her. Baelon and Visenya would not be separated, not for anything in the world, and Viserys would never let his precious heir go anywhere with his wayward brother and daughter.

In this life, though, Baelon wasn’t the favored—Nyra was. In this life, Nyra tried.

Visenya did not know what was said between the king and the princess when Rhaenyra asked leave to bring her to Dragonstone. She did not know what happened in that room, but she did know that Rhaenyra would not look their father in the face. That Viserys spoke to her in short, clipped sentences.

“I will write,” Jace said into her neck, arms locked around her. Lucerys tried (again) to squirm his way between them, prying at Jace’s arms and growing louder with his fury when his brother refused to let him have Visenya. “I will write, Enya; you will answer.”

It was an order, and it made her smile. “As the little prince demands, of course.”

“I have never been without you before,” he said, and she would not cry. She already cried in Nyra’s arms when her sister came to tell her that the king would not release her—would not let his living portrait of the wife he murdered out of his grasp. Would not let her go with her sister, with those who chose her and she chose in return. “I do not know how to be without you.”

In another life, where Rhaenyra never married Laenor and so never fell in love with Harwin Strong, Jacaerys didn’t exist. Visenya lived a lifetime without him, knew well what it was to be without Jace.

But she did not want to do it again. He was hers, Jace; her best friend and her shadow, who loved her with all the single-minded devotion a child of nine could muster. Who was there both when she needed him and when she didn’t even want him there at all, who forgave her for her snideness and the days when she was cruel. Jace, who trusted her, who she could never stay angry with, who loved her, who she loved.

“You are never without me,” she whispered.

“Jacaerys!” Luke shrieked, loud enough to burst eardrums, and Jace unlatched his arms so she could finally sweep him into her grip.

“I want you to come with me,” he said tearfully, and she buries her face into his curls to inhale that strange spicy-warm smell he always had about him. “I do not want you to stay, Enya! What if I have a nightmare?”

“Jace’s bed works just as well for bad dreams.”

“I do not want Jace!” he wailed—Jace sputtered—and she bit her lip in the hope that the bite of pain would distract her from how badly she wanted to be going with him, too. “It is not fair! What if you forget about us?”

As if she ever could.

“Hush now, bykys jaes,” she crooned. “No need for all this. We will write, and we will see each other whenever we can. I will never forget you, and I will always, always love you.”

“Promise?”

Jace’s voice, not Luke’s, which surprised her. She looked up, met his eye, and for once—for once, Jace’s face made her think of Baelon. The ferocity in his eyes, the demand, the expectation that the world bend to his will just that very minute. She forgot, sometimes, that he would one day be a king; she remembered it then.

“I promise,” she said.

(Visenya Targaryen made and broke many promises in the years before and after the Dance of Dragons, but that one—that one, she never broke.)

She kissed Luke’s head, a touch too rough, then urged them back towards Nyra even as Laenor drew her in. He did not speak; his arm wrapped around her shoulders, and he pressed a soft kiss to her brow. Tugged her braid one last time before pushing her gently towards her sister.

Rhaenyra looked at her, and she looked at Rhaenyra, and there were so many things to say. There wasn’t time to say them, and her tongue would not move because she could not speak without crying, so she simply tossed herself into her sister’s arms instead.

Rhaenyra held her, much as Visenya had held Luke, and she pressed her shaking face into her chest.

You will come back, she thought, trying to force the message into her. You will; I trust you; I love you. I know you will come back for me. I will stay; I will watch; I will listen for all the things they do not want you to hear. I forgive you for leaving now. I forgive you for leaving then. I understand; I love you.

“I wish you were my mother,” she croaked out, so low she thought Rhaenyra might not hear, so quiet it was certain no one else would. She had never said it aloud before. Never said the words, dared to whisper her wish even to the stars.

But Nyra heard, Nyra made a sound like a keen, Nyra buried her face into Visenya’s hair and whispered, “Dōnos hāedus, so do I.”

That (sweet little sister, so do I, a shared wish, a shared secret, something between them for no one else, a truth shared in the quiet) snapped her thin self-control, and, when Nyra let her go, Visenya wept. Even though she’d sworn she wouldn’t, even though she’d hung on for so long—tears slipped down her cheeks, her whole body shaking as she turned on her heel and fled back to Viserys and Alicent and the children.

She had almost forgotten about them, her father and his second family. They had all received perfunctory goodbyes from Rhaenyra and the boys—except for Aegon, who still had the boys’ hero worship solely for being their oldest, most well-known male relative who was not a decrepit old man, and so got more sincere farewells. Viserys had held the baby for a moment, still avoiding Rhaenyra’s eyes, and Alicent had watched it all with the sort of barely repressed delight that spoke of worse things to come.

They watched her as she rejoined them with tears in her eyes and shaking hands. Viserys reached out to pat her shoulder, and she yanked away from him so violently that he recoiled. She could not stand the sudden kicked puppy way he eyed her, so she turned her head away from him completely.

Helaena smiled at her, warm, gentle; Visenya would have liked to hold her hand if only to have something to anchor her to the world, but Hel had declared already that it was not a day for touching. She would not be yet another to snap her sister's boundaries underfoot for her own comfort.

Aegon craned towards her, trying to catch her attention, and she turned her face away.

She did not forgive him. Not for the pig, not for letting Ser Cole goad him into being so rough with Jacaerys. Harwin would not have gotten involved if Aegon kept control of himself; he would still be in the Keep, teaching her the sword and doting on the boys and protecting Rhaenyra. Rhaenyra would not be leaving, the boys would not be leaving—leaving her here, here with none but Aegon and Helaena for company, with Aemond who had returned to looking at her with naught but poison in his eyes since the day in the pit, with the queen who looked at her with an even more twisted expression since Joffrey’s birth, with her father who thought he loved her but only loved what he saw in her face.

Aemond looked back at her, brows furrowed. “I have never seen you cry before,” he whispered; it was not the first thing he said to her since the day in the flames, but it was close. He sounded mystified by it, as if he had not known she could feel things at all.

“Gods willing,” she muttered, rubbing unhappily at her eyes, “you never will again.”

(The gods were not willing, and neither was he.)

When she drew her hands away from her tears, she had to watch them leave. Her sister with her boys and her quiet husband disappearing, going away from her, and she squeezed her eyes shut again so she could pretend they were still there.

(In Harrenhal and Pentos, Harwin Strong and Laena Velaryon fell screaming to the flames.)

Chapter Text

"I heard you weeping last night," Helaena said, leaning further over the ship's side. They stood together, arms and heads dangling as they watched the water; Vyper swam alongside them, a smear of black scale and threat that the crew watched with unsettled murmurs and fearful eyes. Viserys would not hear of Visenya flying to Driftmark, insisting she take the voyage with the rest of the family, but he could not keep her sweet beast from following her.

Visenya hummed so she would not have to answer.

She  had  been crying, teeth clenched into her pillow to muffle the sound; she'd wept every night since the news came from Harrenhal—that Harwin Strong died trying to save his lord father's life, that the big man with the wild curls turned himself to ashes being someone else's knight in shining armor. Smiling, gentle Harwin with his big hands and his bigger heart, who would never again sink to his knee to look her in the eye or dote on his boys who could not be his boys or kiss her sister when they thought the shadows were too thick for anyone to see.

"Enya?"

Visenya liked to lie; she was  good  at lying and had taught Aegon everything he knew on the subject, but she usually tried not to lie to Helaena.

"Yes," she said. "Yes."

"You do not know this Laena."

This  Laena, she said. Sometimes Visenya thought Helaena knew that her dreams were of another world, another life.

And it was true enough. Visenya did not remember ever meeting the Laena of this life. She remembered the  other , the little girl her father wed, the one who bore him no children because he never really seemed to see her as anything but the little girl she'd been on their wedding day, the one who teased her and loved her and had helped Rhaenyra ready her on her wedding day, the one who took her to the skies on Vhagar's great back when she was naught but a little girl with a broken heart and a cold egg. Stepmother but more of a sister, more of a friend; a girl eternal, laughing and proud and good.

This Laena, who threw herself to dragon fire before letting herself become just another Targaryen woman taken by the childbed? Visenya knew nothing of her.

She thought she would have liked to.

"I cry for something else, heltus. "

" Because you are cross with Aegon?"

" I am not cross with him anymore, "  she murmured, and she only had to convince herself a little. He apologized enough, certainly, over and over again ( They will not be my playthings forever,  he'd said before that first stammered apology, but he clammed right up when she pressed him on what in the seven hells that even meant), and she'd mostly forgiven him.

It was not his fault, after all. Ser Cole's for aiming children's ire at each other, for stoking the flames between them, for goading and prodding; Alicent's for giving him such a leash to do it. But not Aegon's. Not really.

And what did any of it matter when their Harwin Strong was dead?

"Good, "  said Helaena, satisfied, as if she could hear Visenya's thoughts. "Nothing is his fault yet. "

" Yet? "  prompted Visenya, but Helaena only shrugged.

"It is bloody when I dream of him."

“Yes,” Visenya sighed. She stretched her hand out, fingers spread wide, and waited for Helaena to decide if she wanted to take it. When her little sister only shook her head, Visenya let it fall back to dangling over the ship's side. "My dreams are rough waters here of late, as well."

She dreamt more often of bad times now, unlike before when they granted her only sweetness and kisses. Of how she sometimes chafed beneath the way Baelon treated her—like glass, like smoke, like she would shatter and disperse if he put even the lightest of weights onto her shoulders. Of the days he drank himself into a stupor when he left the council chambers, came back to her with blood on his knuckles and ghosts in his eyes. Of the weeks after their first son was born, when he did not know how to share her attention, when he envied and snapped and snarled, when he shied away from touching their babe and would not hold him even when she begged. Of the nights he woke screaming from nightmares he would not speak of, dragging her close and touching her all over as if to assure himself she still lived.

Had he dreamed of this life as she dreamed of that one? Did he dream of another, one she knew nothing of? What did he see to make him wake howling, to make him wake reaching for her as if he expected to find nothing but empty space?

"Mother asked Father to wed you to Aegon, "  Helaena said, and Visenya tensed.

Marry  him? Aegon? Her Aegon, her little brother? Marry him, the one they meant to use to wrest her sister's crown from her head and her thrown from out beneath her? Not in this life. Not in another. Not in  any.  She would flee first, to Dragonstone or Valyria, to the Free Cities or the Shadow Lands.

"Father would not allow it, "  Helaena added, picking at a bit of splintered wood. "It would not do to mix your mother's blood with mine."

She said it with the tone of one parroting something often said within their hearing, and Visenya's lips thinned. Rather more dishonorable to cut her mother open, to rip her into pieces, and then remarry a child not a full year later, no?

That, after all, was a staple in both lives—though she much preferred Laena to Alicent.

"I cannot imagine anything worse, "  she drawled, tipping her head into the wind, the salt spray of it. She liked the sea, the boat (she liked that Aemond got dreadfully seasick the first hour of their voyage, turned Hightower green from head to foot, and had yet to remove his head from a bucket), the crash of the waves, and the sound of the gulls.

Helaena picked a little faster.

"Heltus? "  she prompted, a coil of something beginning to wind around her heart.

Helaena looked up and fixed tired eyes on her.

"Oh, "  she whispered, a bolt of electricity through every limb as she realized, and her heart shattered in her chest. Hel, her sweet beetle, with her soft voice and strange dreams and twisting riddles—sworn off at hardly nine, freedom stolen, her future tied into a neat little bow. " Oh,  heltus."

To wed Helaena to  Aegon —mischievous, spoiled, selfish Aegon, who never spared their sister a moment of his time or so much as a kind word? It seemed cruel, even for Alicent, when Aemond doted on his little sister with all the love in his shriveled little heart, when he listened attentively to her ramblings and never,  never  made her cry.

"It will not be so bad, "  Helaena said in a tiny voice. "Mother says we need not wed until I turn fifteen. She says…she says she will make sure he is kind."

Aegon was never kind when he was not getting what he wanted, and he did not want Helaena.

"I will do it for you, "  Visenya said, not realizing she  was going to  say the words until they tripped from her mouth. Foreboding in her bones, an anxious ache that cried a warning and spoke of terrible things to come—not in any life so quickly became  yes, in this life, if you ask it of me, if this is what you need of me, if this will make you happy, if this will keep you safe  when faced with a little sister's haunted eyes .  "I will go to Father, Helaena; I will speak to your mother. I will— "

" It would not change anything. Not really, "  Helaena said, flicking her words away like gnats buzzing about her ears. "Not enough to matter, anyway. No. No."

Visenya worked her jaw, lips twisting angrily; she twisted one of her rings about her finger, fast, fast, faster. "Why not Aemond? "  she burst out, though she hadn't meant to voice it. "He would be…he would be better for you. "

Why either of them, really—Alicent loathed the Targaryen  practice of wedding  within the family. She made no secret of it, thin lips and flashing eyes. Visenya always thought Helaena would be wedded off to some rich, simpering lord in the Reach or one of the silly heirs of the Crownland lords.

"Aegon is the eldest, "  Helaena answered.

Rhaenyra  was the eldest.  The boys were both younger children, set to inherit nothing but the name and the gold that came with being of the blood, no lands  and no  titles and no—oh, unless.  Unless one was the firstborn son, unless one would inherit the throne were it not for his elder sisters standing in the way.

"Ah, "  she murmured. Looked at Helaena, down to Vyper, towards the horizon that was beginning to give way to the cragged lines of Driftmark. "You know what I would do for you, don't you, heltus?"

Die. Live. Kill. Burn.

Anything.

(Not enough.)

Helaena reached out and interlocked their fingers.  Laid  her head against Visenya's shoulder  with a sigh . Visenya pressed her cheek against the top of her head ,  squeezed her hand.

"Hand turns loom, "  Helaena said, so softly. "Spool of green, spool of black. Dragons of flesh weaving dragons of thread."

*&*&*

She could not name the feeling in her chest during Laena's funeral, but it was something like guilt.  She thought she should feel  more  for the woman who had been her  stepmother-sister-friend , but she did not.  Visenya never knew this woman; there was no telling how much she'd changed from the one she remembered.  The Laena she knew died old and gray , died  without ever having been a mother.

She thought she should feel more , too,  for the pretty little girls with Laena's eyes, but she didn't.  Visenya didn't know them, these girls who never existed in that other life; her heart tugged her towards them, the call of all little girls with dead mothers, but it was not the same. Her mother died before she ever got the chance to love her; they looked as if someone had just torn their hearts, still beating, from their chests.

And Daemon…Daemon with his unreadable face and dark eyes. Nothing stirred for him, this Daemon she'd never loved. She knew him only from letters, from the dagger she always kept at her thigh or waist, but she did not  know  him. She did not wish to seek him out,  to comfort him, to  hold his hand, as she would have in that other life; looking at the slightly manic look in his eyes, she did not think he would welcome any such attempt.

But she felt for Jace, who had yet to let go of her hand since they crashed into each other's arms on the beach as she stepped off the ship. Jace, who'd whispered,  he is dead, he is gone  into her ear as if he hadn't been able to speak the words until he felt her holding him up.

She felt for Luke, who stood curled beneath his mother's arm with a shattered look on his sweet little face.  Eyes red, lip  swollen from how he gnawed at it when he stressed.

She felt for Rhaenyra, trembling in her shoulders, face worn down and eyes storming with a grief none but her would ever dare name. Losing Harwin, losing Laena—she could see the weight on her sister's shoulders, pushing her down, yanking her to her knees even as she struggled to stay upright.

And Laenor…he stood with blank eyes fixed on his sister's coffin, his hands trembling at his sides, something dark and nameless growing in his gaze.

I lost Baelon,  she would have said if he would've understood.  I know what it is to lose someone. I understand. I know what it is to have half of you torn away, to have it burned to ashes in front of you. Lēkȳs, lēkȳs, I know.

He would not understand if she said it, so she did not say it—but she pressed her shoulder against his side and reached with her free hand to hook her pinky into his. None of them looked away from the box that held Laena Velaryon's corpse, but, after a long moment, Laenor inhaled a shaking breath and twisted his wrist to clasp her hand.

Visenya tried to listen to Vaemond Velaryon, but the words flowed through her ears and back out of them again. He had a pleasant voice, rich and carrying, but too much else in the world nipped at her senses for her to add him to it.

The anchor of Jace's hand in hers, clammy and too tight.

The sound of Vhagar's mourning keens in the distance, a monster's grief, a goddess's anguish.

The tug in her chest pulling her to Vyper, who splashed happily in the waves just off the shore with no mind for the funeral.

The tremble of  Laenor's shoulder  pressed  against her, his hand going  tight  and tighter around hers with every word his uncle spoke—to the point she winced and bit at her lip to keep from hissing at the pain in her fingers.

The thought of Harwin Strong.

Of Harwin guiding her elbow up, of the way he offered her his hand every time he knocked her to the ground, of how he whooped his pride each time she blocked his blade or danced out of the way. Of how he looked at his sons with all the love in the world in his eyes, as if he did not know what to do with all the feeling inside him, as if he could not function beneath the weight of his heart and the strength of his pride. Of the way he looked at Rhaenyra—gods, the way he looked at Rhaenyra.

Harwin Strong, who died trying to save his father, who died because he was so damned  good.

She knew a Laena Velaryon, once. She'd loved that Laena. She loved her still. She grieved that Laena, that she did not exist in this life and now certainly never would.

But she knew  this  Harwin. She loved  this  Harwin.  She grieved him, her friend, he r— n ot her father . Not  her father. Not her  father,  because the gods were not kind, and the gods were not fair, and, in each life, they gave her to Viserys instead of a man who knew how to love a daughter with a  too sharp  tongue and uncertain eyes.

If the gods were kind, she would be allowed to weep for him . She would be allowed to   mourn  him.

If the gods were kind,  muttered a voice in her head,  they would both still live.

She snapped to attention when she felt the mood shift.  Rhaenyra  went  tense, and Viserys's eyes flickered over his daughters and grandsons , and then— laughter .   Daemon chuckling like a madman, his shoulders shaking through frantic little giggles.

And she knew, even if she had not heard the words themselves —she knew by  the dark look on Jace's face, the fury flickering in Rhaenyra's eyes.

"He is a second son, "  she murmured into Jace's ear, "and you will be his king. Let it slide off your back like water."

He nodded once, sharply.  Older  already than when he left King's Landing, his shoulders curling inwards.  She could see the weight of who he would one day be settling onto his shoulders, the shadow of a crown already pressing indentions against his brow.

When she raised her head, Aegon looked at her with cheeks puffed out to blow a long-suffering breath. A grin tilted at the corner of his mouth, waiting for her to join him in the complaint of it—that they had to spend their time at a funeral, that they were being inconvenienced by a woman dead. 

His grin faltered when she only looked at him as if he was mad, and she turned away with a disbelieving little huff of air.

Laena's coffin crashed into the water below, down to the arms of her ancestors, down to the deep, and she thought again of the other Laena. The one before, the sea dragon, the queen, proud and funny and bold,  who  taught her to swim in that life just as Laenor taught her in this one, who gifted her a netting of pearls to wear in her hair the day she was wed.

Laena, who knew herself,  who  loved herself, who knew Visenya and  loved  Visenya, who whispered  you are your own person outside of him, you know,  in that gently fierce way she had about her. She wasted that message on the Visenya of that life, the meek and starry-eyed, who never wanted to own herself when she could let Baelon have her instead.

This Visenya, the one she was, the one who only had herself to belong to…oh, she loved that Laena all the more for trying anyway.

Who had this Laena been before the babe signed her death into fate? Just as wicked, just as proud? Just as beautiful, just as kind? Just as much of a dragon?

She would never know in this life, and it broke her heart a little.

Visenya stayed with Jace afterward as the mourners milled and drank and spoke. People who knew her, people who loved her, and she felt like a fraud in someone else's place.  Why was  she  here, someone who knew nothing of this Laena , someone who  never laid these eyes on her face?

As they huddled together against the wall with hands still locked between them, she murmured, "When I die, let it only be those I love watching me burn. "

" You are not allowed to die before me, "  Jace answered, almost absently.

"Is that a  decree,  Your Grace? "  she snorted, half a jest, half a jab to make him bristle.

"Yes, "  he said, simply. Tired, old, too old for a boy of nine. His thumb passed soothingly over her knuckles. She glanced down at their hands with a frown, not used to him being the one to offer her comfort, but he startled her out of it again. "I have missed you. "

" I have missed you, too, "  she murmured.

Neither of them said the unspoken , which was that they  would have gladly traded a little more time apart for his father to still be alive.  Would have traded years to save the life of Harwin Strong.

Rhaenyra broke her from the thought, arriving with worry-drawn brows and unease written on her face. "Have you seen your father? "  she murmured to Jacaerys, and Visenya—she'd watched him disappear towards the beach, but she said nothing. Rhaenyra could not…she could not understand this loss, and Visenya did not mean to shatter his solitude.

Jace shook his head, and an expression passed over Nyra's face that Visenya couldn't name. She looked over her shoulder to Baela and Rhaena, puddled together with wet faces and haunted eyes, and then curved her fingers around the bases of Jace and Visenya's necks.

She leaned into the touch like a cat; Jacaerys only tilted his gaze up.

"Your little cousins have lost their mother, "  Rhaenyra murmured. "They could use a kind word."

Jace has lost a father,  Visenya thought, stilling her nuzzling to cast a sulky glance at her sister.  He lost his father, Nyra; let him stay here with me where he does not have to pretend that he did not. Let him stay with me; I lost him, too.

"I have an equal claim to sympathy, "  Jace said, too loud, too bold, too clearly, and Visenya looked at him with eyes gone wide with alarm.  It was one thing for her to think it, for him to think it, for  any  of them to think it, and quite another to say it aloud when any passerby might hear.  Another  thing to test the gods and goad fate, to dangle the carrot under the queen's nose.

"Jace, "  Rhaenyra warned, eyes clouding  over , and her hand dropped from his face.

"We should be at Harrenhal mourning Lord Lyonel and Ser Harwin, "  he said in a voice she'd never heard  from him before . She did not like it, the coldness, the waspish rage, but she could not fix grief. She could smooth over his bad dreams and kiss Luke's skinned knees, but she could not give them their father back. She could not make it so they were allowed to acknowledge that they lost him in the first place.

Rhaenyra's gaze jerked around to check for lingering eyes and ears, then fixed fiercely back to her sulky son. "It would not be appropriate, "  she said in the tone of one rehashing a well-worn argument, and she sank to her knees to take Jace by the shoulder.

Visenya blinked, and, behind her eyelids, Harwin dropped to his knee in the hall to whisper a goodbye.

"The Velaryons are our kin, and the Strongs are not, "  Rhaenyra said, then leaned closer to force Jace to meet her eye when he looked away. " Look  at me. Do you understand?"

They were not kin,  Visenya thought,  but they were family. They were family, Nyra.

Jace did not answer; he only tugged gently at his mother's grip until she released him. Visenya hovered  for a moment  when Rhaenyra pushed him gently by the back of his head towards the girls, her eyes searching her sister's face.

Nyra looked elsewhere, attention gone,  and  so Visenya let Jace pull her after him.

The  girls looked up at them with wide eyes  when they first approached , and Jace hovered awkwardl y— s lipped  a little behind Visenya, like they were babes again, waiting for her to lead him, expecting her to make all the scary jumps first. He went  as  far as to tighten his grip when she pulled her hand from his, though her exasperated look quelled him.

Visenya nudged him gently towards Baela—who reached for his hand after a long, thoughtful moment; he gaped down at it as he took it, such a  boy  in his shock—and sank slowly  down  between the girls on the bench.

They looked of Laena.  So  much of Laena, the exact hue of her hair and her paled darkness to their skin, the deep purple of her eyes and the bow of her mouth. Daemon was little in their faces, except for the ghost of him in Baela's jaw, a flash of him in Rhaena's nose.  Your mother raised me once,  she wanted to say.  Your mother stepped into my mother's shoes, and they fit her ill, but she wore them as best she could; she kissed my tears away as often as she ever kissed yours.

But she hadn't, had she? Their mother hadn't. Their Laena was not hers. She had no claim to her. No right to grieve her. 

"I am so sorry, "  she whispered,  and she proffered  her hands just as she would to Helaena.  Fingers spread and resting  on her own knees, waiting for them to take as they saw fit.  They both took the offer, warm fingers slipping into hers, and Rhaena's head dipped slowly to her shoulder as if she thought Visenya would startle if she went too quickly. "I am so very sorry for what you have lost."

They stayed like that, all four of them silent. Three of them mourning parents; Visenya mourning the ghost of a woman she no longer knew, mourning a man she could not call father.

Rhaenys shattered the silence between them.

The Queen Who Never Was, the Queen Who Should Have Been—Visenya admired her in this life and the other. She who rode Meleys and kept her chin held high even with her birthright stolen  from her hands . They had never been close in either life, never had reason to be close, but that did not matter. Rhaenys never lost her pride to any man, never let herself be twisted by all that had been denied to her, and Visenya would always bow her head to the strength of that.

They locked eyes only  for a moment ; Visenya dipped her head slightly, a silent word, and Rhaenys's dipped back.

She slipped from the girls, pulling Jace  with her  towards the firepit to  give them a moment  alone.  "I don't  want  Mother to be gone! "  Rhaena cried behind them, and she and Baela rushed for a grandmother's comfort --what was it like, she wondered, to have a grandmother? —and something snapped inside Visenya that she hadn't realized was still intact.

"I don't want him to be gone, "  Jace whispered as they huddled close to the fire, and she took his hand again. "I will…never see his face again. I will never hear his voice. What if I forget him, Enya? "

"I know, "  she murmured. She leaned in, kissed  his  temple lingeringly, and   curled an arm around  him  as  he  cuddled himself close to her chest. "I know. I fear the same thing."

Do you dream of him, Jace?  Visenya started to ask, words pooling on her tongue, and then she swallowed them  down . Bitter-bitter-bitter-tasting those words, and she cut her eyes down.  Will you still get to see him when you sleep? Will you remind me of the sound of his laugh when the memory has fled me?

She felt him tense in her arms, the arm he wrapped around her middle squeezing and fingers digging into her side, and she raised her head.

Aemond stood awkwardly on the other side of the flames, looking at the goals with feigned interest and then  flicking his eyes up  to Jace's face  uncertainty .   It was not a look she'd ever seen on him before, something strange  and soft  and almost sympathetic, and it gave her more than a moment's pause.

His mouth twitched into an almost smile, something weak and questioning. He scanned Jace's face again as if he thought he would find some  sort of  signal there, then looked at her and her bafflement with a hesitant flick of his eyes. His lips parted around the beginning of something, then closed again when Jace's eyes darkened.

Aemond looked away, half  a nod and half a shake; a  wounded look flashed across his face ( her sister,  she'd said once, and he'd looked just the same way) that reminded her so much of a kicked puppy that her stomach kicked when he turned to leave.

"Has he  done  something? "  she muttered, and Jace looked at her as if she said she wanted him to drain the ocean with a bottomless cup.

"You're the one always saying he's a twat, "  he said very slowly. Enunciating each syllable as if he spoke to a dullard, and she would hit him for it if his father and grandfather hadn't just burned to death. "What does it matter?"

He  was  a twat, an awful little shite, but it was  different  when she did it. When she was the one to snap and sneer, the one to turn her back, the one to wish him harm. It was different because Visenya had a reason,  no matter that even  she understood that her reasons were twisted and wrong and not really Aemond's fault at all.

She  did not have any  plan in mind when she darted out a step to catch Aemond's arm.  She did not know what she meant to say or  even  why it bothered her so that he fled from Jace's hard look without so much  as  a snarl or glower.  She could not think of any real reason why the uncertain sympathy on Aemond's face softened her, why it burnt in her blood to see Jace disregard it, why it suddenly mattered to her that Aemond knew that  she  knew he'd tried, just not, to build something like a bridge , and it  was not his fault that the construction crumbled.

When he turned to look at her with his startled eyes, Visenya froze.  She stood there with her fingers curled around his arm, looking at him with parted lips, trying to put all the feelings  and all the thoughts   and all the  uncertainties into words.

She could not.

It seemed , though,  that he did not need her to do it.  He looked back at her as if he knew her, as if he saw his sister instead of an enemy, and his fingers brushed hers against his bicep as he nodded once. She did not know if he understood  all the things  she meant to say, all the feelings she tried to shove at him with her gaze that he'd stirred up just by standing beside a firepit, but she hoped he did.

Visenya released him, satisfied that the message was given as well as it could be, and then turned back to Jace. Her nephew looked at her as if he thought her mad, but he asked her no questions; she gave him no answers.

With Aemond's leaving came Lucerys, who squirmed his way under her arm and smashed his face into her ribs without hesitation. He trembled like a lamb, shuddering through each breath, and she pressed her lips to the top of his sweet head. "Bykys jaes, "  she murmured, and Jace reached to grab onto his little brother's hand.

The sun crept slowly lower, and, somewhere in the skies above them, Vyper began to sing.

Rhaenyra came back to them with wild eyes, half out of breath, trembling in the tips of her fingers  with a newfound energy .  Visenya recognized it with a bolt of displeasure; Jacaerys and Lucerys's startled eyes had never seen their mother this way before, but Visenya knew exactly what it meant.

Daemon's Rhaenyra.

Their father just died, Nyra,  she thought unhappily,  and his wife's body had not yet hit the seabed. Must you? Can you not wait? Please, Nyra, can you not wait?

"See the boys to bed for me, will you, sweet girl? "  she said because, much like their father and brothers, Nyra could not read minds either.

"But, Mother— "  Jace piped.

"Go to bed, "  Rhaenyra  said, firmly , and then she was gone— gone  the way Daemon had gone.

Visenya would follow her sister through anything, but her chest  went tight  as she ushered the boys to obey their mother. This Daemon was not the one of the other life, the one who learned to love her sister even without the offer of the throne; this Daemon…the energy about him did not fit right, settled ill on his shoulders—a bitterness, a grief, an odd difference. 

Five children between them, dead parents not yet cold, as Daemon and Rhaenyra disappeared to the beach.

I hope you know what you are doing,  she thought, worriedly, as she pulled the boys with her.  Gods, Nyra, I hope you know.

*&*&*

Jace and Luke started out in their  own  beds, but they found their way back to hers before  they fell  asleep.  She felt more settled than she had since they left King's Landing, her sister's boys curled against either side of her, but sleep would not come to her. 

For once, she did not wish to dream of Baelo n— t o  lose herself in him, to let herself be happy in her dreams with his kisses and his laughter. The grief in her chest, the sorrow, the pain…it was her own . Her  own to feel, to ache with  it , and she had no right to flee and forget it in her silver boy's arms.

She did not particularly wish to stay awake either, mourning Harwin  and  thinking of the Laena who was once her own and worrying over Rhaenyra and Daemon, but she had little other option.

Outside, over the mourning song Vhagar sang to the stars and the sea, Vyper chirruped aloud as if to remind her he was there.

My monster,  she thought fondly, and she wiggled carefully out from between the boys. She did not bother with her leathers, though she paused long enough to trade her night slippers for the thick boots.  She passed a hand over the chains in her bag ,  but  she  did not take them along; she'd foregone them as soon as Nyra was not there to force them upon her, trusting her own legs and Vyper's sure wings to keep her in the saddle.

She hadn't fallen yet.

Sneaking through the halls was much easier than the halls of the Keep.  It was too busy  a time  for the guards to  be paying any sort of  close attention, and  the  grief fogged every hall and darkened every shadow.   No servant  or  guard  or noble still awake thought to pay any mind to the slip of a girl in a nightgown weaving her way out towards the beach.

She found Vyper lounged out in the sands as if he'd been waiting for her longer than any eternity, but his head did not  turn towards her at first .   He  was looking a little way  down the beach, those burning green eyes fixed on the soaked, shivering man on his knees in the surf.

Laenor's head did not lift when she joined him.  He  stared out over the water  instead,  face twisted into something dark and broken. "He has been watching me for hours, "  he said ,  lowly. His voice rasped, coming out hoarse and aching, and she winced at the sound of it.   "If I leave, he only follows. Seasmoke left me when I bid him, but your Vyper—your Vyper will not go."

" He feels my hurts, "  Visenya answered, and Laenor tilted his head to look towards her. She lifted a shoulder in an almost apologetic  sort of  shrug and bit at the inside of her cheek. "He knows I hurt for you, Laenor."

I worry for you,  she thought.  I fear for you.

"You should be abed, hāedus, "  he murmured.

"As should you. "

" I do not know if I will ever find sleep again, "  Laenor  said with a laugh . It shook through him, hysterical and half a sob, and he curled tighter into himself.  The waves lapped at him, soaking through his clothes, and he trembled so hard from the cold that she could hear  the chattering of his teeth .  How long had he been out on the beach, soaked to the bone in the wind, shuddering in the night chill? "When we were children, we would come to the beach when we could not sleep. Laena and I. She would always run into the waves, disappear into the water like some kind of siren. I was always…trying to catch her. Trying to find her in the water. Always one step behind her."

He tilted his head backward, eyes squeezing shut, and his throat bobbed when he swallowed.  She could not tell if  the wetness on his cheeks came  from tears or sea spray.

"I would call to her, "  he rasped. "Up to my thighs in seawater, hands cupped around my mouth; I would call her and call her and  call  her until my throat was hoarse, and then she would take pity. She would come to surface again. "  He smiled. It did not look like a smile. "She would tackle me into the foam, drag me under the water, and Mother would tear into us when we came home because our clothes would be ruined with sand and salt. I'd blame her, of course, say it was all Laena's fault, but she never believed me because I could not stop laughing. I was always laughing when Laena was with me. My Laena."

My Laenor,  Laena used to sing in that other life, bursting through the door at breakfast with her face glowing and a letter pressed to her chest. Spinning in her joy, giggling like a girl as Visenya and Baelon watched her with delighted eyes.  My Laenor is  coming to visit ; we must watch the skies and listen  for  Seasmoke's song.

Visenya reached out and curled her fingers around his shoulder. One of his hands came up to wrap around her wrist, too tight, too hard, but she did not flinch.

"She's gone beneath the water again, "  he croaked.  " I have been…I have been calling for hours. I have been calling, but she has not come back to surface. She is never going to come back to surface. She is not…she is not coming home to me. "

" Lēkȳs, "  Visenya murmured, startled to find her eyes welling. Her heart broke in her chest for him, shattered pieces that she could not fix, and she leaned down to wrap her arms around his neck. Trying to force warmth into his bones with her own heat, pressing her cheek to his temple. "Brother, you will freeze if you stay out here. "

" Let me freeze then, "  he mumbled. "She burned. It is only right. "

" She would not wish it so, "  Visenya said, tightening her grip. "She would not wish you any harm. Not her Laenor."

Laenor made a broken noise, tension leaking from his body as a sob ripped from his mouth again. "The gods are cruel, "  he wept. Broken man, broken boy, and Visenya could do nothing but hold him. "They take, they take, they  take."

She could not say how long they stayed that way, Laenor on his knees as Visenya clung to his neck, Laenor weeping as Visenya rocked him like a child. Her father, her brother, her friend. He mumbled to himself through the sobs, half-memories of his sister that turned to curses for the gods that took to her that turned to prayer that they might give her back. Give her back, give her back, give—

(— him back, give him  back , give him back,  Visenya once screamed as she knelt on a cold stone floor, one of her sons trying to pull her away, another begging her to look towards him; blood on her lips, on her hands, on her skirts, beneath her nails, beneath her tongue.)

She jerked from the memory even as it slipped from her grasp again, uncertain  as to  why her heart pounded in her chest, and her mouth felt too dry to swallow.

"You should not be out of bed, "  Laenor said, and she loosened her grip a little when she realized his spine-rattling cries had turned to almost stifled sniffles. He looked only exhausted now, curled in on himself with the weight of a man of thrice his years. "It is late, Enya. "

" Sleep will not come to me, either, "  she answered. "I only mean to fly for a short while."

An almost smile ghosted his lips. "So you always say. "

" Will you go back inside, Laenor? "  she asked , voice soft.  "I am sure Qarl worries for you."

Laenor stirred a little. Passed a hand over his face and swallowed.  " Qarl, "  he said, roughly,  and  then rubbed his face more vigorously. "Yes, Qarl, I will…I will seek him out. Yes. "  When she made to draw away, though, he caught her wrist again. The look on his face strayed vaguely towards guilt, and he frowned when she cocked her head. "I am sorry."

Visenya blinked. “For?”

"It is not your duty to comfort me. "  He squeezed her hand, and she squeezed back.   " You are…I  forget, sometimes,  that you are but a child still.  You are so old in the soul that it is easy to forget. My grief is not a weight you need take upon your shoulders."

Her face twisted in bafflement, and she shook her head. "I do not mind the— "

" You do not mind it, I know, "  he said, gently. "Sometimes, I think you love so deeply that you would take the weight of the world on yourself with a smile. But that does not mean we should offer it—that I should. "

" Grief is not meant to be held alone."

Laenor released her hand, and she withdrew it slowly. "No, it is not. "  He rose slowly, still shivering, his bones creaking from how long he'd been still, and then glanced down towards her. Passed a fond hand over  the top of  her head and touched a hard kiss to her brow. "When your grief is too heavy, hāedus, write to me. I will help you hold it, as you've helped me hold mine tonight."

I lost him, Laenor,  whispered the little girl trapped in her head, the one who so rarely got to speak before the woman's hands wrapped too tight around her throat.  They took him away from me.

"I will, "  she said, though she doubted she would, and she nudged him gently. "You will go to Qarl? "

" I will go to Qarl, "  he said through a sigh, then turned a firm look towards her. "Be in bed before sunrise. "

" Yes, Father, "  she drawled, rolling her eyes, but the mocking tone she meant to convey did not come across. It got stuck somewhere in the back of her throat and refused to dislodge itself even as the words kept moving, and the look Laenor gave her was so unbearably affectionate that she averted her eyes. "I will see you come morning."

Laenor kissed her brow once more, then turned on unsteady legs to start back up the beach. She watched him for a moment, lips pursed, then turned herself to dart back towards Vyper.

"Dōnos hōzalbos, "  she sang when she reached him, her sweet monster, her pretty beast.   " I have missed you so.

He swept a wing towards her, and she only  just  managed to squeeze her eyes shut before the sand  came spilling  down over her head , down her  dress, clinging grittily to her damp skin.

"You are cross, I take it, "  she said  drily , spitting sand from her mouth, and he huffed. "I wanted to fly here with you, hōzalbos. I did! It is not my fault."

He spit a small ribbon of fire, which she did not flinch away from, and then heaved an even greater sigh.

"Thank you for watching Laenor for me, sweetling, "  she murmured. He cocked his head, lowered his great neck so their eyes were level, and she stroked her hands along the underside of his jaw fondly. Touched a flurry of kisses to the hot scales of his snout. "We can fly now if you are done being wroth. Fly with me, Vyper?"

Well, if you insist,  said the way he sniffed before swinging his head away from her, but the pleased quiver that passed through his body when she scampered for his rigging betrayed his delight. The sand clung to her every step, fighting her and trying to suck her boots down, and she stuck her tongue out at him when he made a sound distinctly like a snicker.

" Quickly, "  she requested when she settled herself firmly in the saddle, her fingers tangling loosely in the ropes, ducking herself down close to his neck. "So quickly I cannot hear my thoughts anymore, Vyper. "

I can go quickly,  the whip of his tail, the hiss from his chest, said.

She never really grew used to flying, no matter how  many times  she and Vyper fled for the skies. One never grew used to the weightless feeling, the sheer power of the beast beneath her, the headiness of knowing that he gave her that power so freely only for the love he bore the very soul of her, the way the wind screamed her name and her blood clawed its way to the surface of her skin as if it only just remembered it belonged there.

She felt no fear in the skies—over what Rhaenyra meant to do on the beach with their uncle, over the decisions she would make and what they might mean for her boys, over a succession still years away and the whispers that followed in the steps of her sister and her sons. 

She did not grieve in the skies—for Harwin Strong, for her friend who was not her father, for the man she lost too soon and too far away; for Baelon, who died so young and lived only in her dreams; for a dead mother she never knew, never missed, never got the chance to learn to love; for the sons she lost before they were ever real; for the idea of a father when the one she knew never loved her for true in either life.

Nothing existed except her heart pounding in her throat  and  her soul singing in Vyper's wings and her laugh spilling from her mouth as she spilled her joy  and  her pain and her anger into the rip of the wind until she could not hear it, could not feel it, could not even remember what it felt like in her chest.

Vyper liked the ocean here; she could feel his curious delight thrumming in her veins, but she could see it, too, in the way he dipped so close to the waves. He kept tilting his body at strange angles to let the tips of his wings drag through the caps of the waves, letting himself drift so low that his legs dragged through the rush of the water.

She lolled her head back and threw her arms out wide, opening her mouth even wider to swallow the salt  and the stars and  the night and the freedom.

It spoke to the way they loved each other, how fierce and thick the bond lay between them, that her body moved before her mind knew what he meant to do; she gulped in air, filling her lungs with it, and hooked her hands more firmly into the ropes just as he flung himself beneath the water with a feral screech of joy.

It felt like how she imagined getting run over by a cart would feel at first. The water hit her hard, the force of it trying to yank her from the saddle as he cut through the deep like a knife through sun-softened butter. 

For a moment, unease flickered in her chest.

Her gods were of flame and sky, not seafoam and salt.  There  would be no heaven for her, no hell she could find  if she lost hold of Vyper here and drowned beneath the waves .  Her gods could not see her; her gods could not find her.       

But the moment passed as quickly as it came, for Vyper would not lose her and she would never let herself be lost; she clawed her way down as close to his neck as she could and let herself feel it: the chill of the water, the pressure of it constricting around her chest and her temples, all of her senses fleeing until she was only Visenya-Vyper, Vyper-Visenya floating in the dark.

It spoke to the way they loved each other, how fierce and thick the bond lay between them, that he burst through the surface just as her lungs began to burn so badly she thought she would die , and they  were barreling back up through the sky, fast, faster, faster, faster, and she did not even have to do more than think  dracarys  before he bathed them both in green-tinged fire.

A heat like no mortal— I am not mortal,  she thought with a feral, hiccupping laugh,  I am a god, I am a dragon, I am all there ever has been— should ever know whipped over them, dusting her face and singing the end of her skirt. Her dress dried immediately against her skin in the heat  of it , and her hair puffed into a dried-out mess of frizz around her face.

If the warmth of his flame finally broke her again and set her weeping into her hands, no one was there to see her fall apart but Vyper. 

Another hour passed before their frantic flight turned slow and lazy , their  path  drifting  inwards to take them along the beaches and  the  grassy plains, and her lazily scanning eyes spotted a speck of movement scrambling madly across a small hill.

"Down, "  she murmured, gesturing towards it off instinct more than anything. It looked like nothing this far above, but she trusted the pulse of her gut more than her eyes. "Do you see?"

He saw , of course,  his eyes so much better than her own, and did not dignify her silly question with a response as he banked to descend on it.

And, promptly, scared the shit out of none other than Aemond Targaryen, who had not been prepared in the slightest for a dragon black as pitch and the bones of the damned to land directly in his path, lower its head down to the sand to look him in the eye, and snort a stream of smoke into his face.

The strangled shriek that pulled from his throat and the way he crashed backward onto his ass would have made her laugh if she was not so busy crawling down Vyper's side and stomping through the sand to stand imperiously over his wild-eyed, pale form.

"Why are you out of bed? "  she demanded, and he looked up at her as if he would very much like to aim a kick to her face.

Vyper's face snaked up to hover over the top of her head, looking down at her brother with an unimpressed air, and the sight of teeth peeking through his curled lip clearly made the little prince decide that kicking her anywhere would be folly.

" Why are  you  out of bed? "  he replied, a weak response, and she raised a disdainful eyebrow and waved an explanatory hand up towards the dragon.

Stupid little beast,  said Vyper's low snort and the way his head moved as if he was considering poking Aemond in the belly with his nose. She reached up with her hand and shoved his face to warn him back, and he grumbled an unhappy nose.

"I asked you first, anyway, "  she said, and then—she hesitated for a moment, then thought of the barely hidden hurt on his face when Jacaerys's undisguised scorn sent him away—stuck a hand out to help him to his feet. He looked at it as if he thought it would bite him, and she rolled her eyes. "Take my hand; for the gods' sake, I  am not going to  hit you."

He scowled, but he took it.

Her eyes scanned him as she dragged him upright: bedraggled and shifty-eyed, still wearing his funeral clothes, his fingers twisting nervously in his cloak.

His eyes flickered over her: her hair a mess around her face, still more than liberally covered in sand, in a nightgown and clunky boots.

Vhagar cried somewhere not so very far away, cried for the rider she burnt, cried for what she lost, cried in the voice of a creature too old and too tired for the world to keep holding onto her, and Aemond's face snapped towards it with a wild longing that struck her like a knife to the gut.

"No, "  she said, head already shaking, her chest constricting as she lost her breath. "No, Aemond! She is too old and too big; her rider is barely  cold!  You cannot— "

" She is Valyria, "  he answered, fire in his eyes , and he  bit so savagely into his lip that blood dripped down his chin.   She reached without thinking to rub it away, but  the way his face jerked only  made her smear it across his chin.  "She is more of Valyria than  either  of us, Visenya. She is all that made us great. "

" She will  burn  you alive! "  she hissed back , and she  would not admit why it terrified her so, tiny Aemond not even of a height with her going to a creature bigger than the world itself, Aemond putting himself at risk again, Aemond flinging himself into danger just to have what should have been his already. "This is  madness."

" What do you care? "  he answered, simple, quick, easy, and he believed it.  She  saw it in his eyes that he believed it.  If  someone asked her before the day in the pit , she would have believed it, too .  "You do not even look at me if you can help it! What do you care if she burns me alive?"

She ignored him; much like in the pit, she had no answer  to give .

"Why does it have to be  her? "   She sank her teeth into the inside of her cheek, gnawing until she tasted blood. "Silverwing and Vermithor nest on Dragonstone, and the wild dragons roam there still. Syrax lays clutches as often as Rhaenyra gives birth—I will  steal  you an egg if she will not give you one."

She meant it.

Gods, she hated that she meant it.

"I want  her. "   Petulant. A toddler stamping his foot. Like Aegon when he wanted her piece of cake at dinner, and she would not let him take it.

Visenya switched tactics. 

"What of the girls? It is their mother's funeral, valonqus; it is disrespectful to even think of doing this now. Wait a few months, even a few weeks, and I will fly you back to Vhagar myself if you still wish it. I swear it."

After Rhaena had claimed her already, gods willing, she would take him to Dragonstone instead. He could pick an egg from a clutch or a hatchling the Cannibal hadn't yet swallowed, and she would hustle him home before anyone noticed they were gone.

"I do not care about Laena Velaryon, "  he scoffed. Vile, callous, blasted little boy. "I do not care about respecting her daughters. "

" It does not need to be Vhagar, "  she pleaded  and, sensing  her growing distress, Vyper made an unhappy growling noise and lashed his tail. Aemond glanced up at him ,  then looked defiantly back at her, apparently no longer frightened of what her dragon might do.

"We are dragons, "  he said, and she closed her eyes. 

"We are dragons, "  she rasped. Her head tilted back when she swallowed. "We are the blood of kings. "

" With Vhagar, I will be a god, "  he said. Reverent at the mention, a feral madness, a coin flipping through the air, and she could not tell if it was his finally flying or hers finally coming down; something inside her grabbed  for  it anyway, desperate to keep it from hitting the ground. "I will be a  god,  and that is what I want."

One day, you will be a god,  she thought, sick to her stomach , wishing  beyond anything that she could go back to the beginning and force his egg to hatch so they would not be standing on this beach.   For now, can you not just be ten?

But she knew he could not. The temptation too great, the chance too close, the hope too bright in his soul; there would be no leaving here with Aemond unless she dragged him by the ear to his mother's chambers, and she could not. She could not when she would do this same thing in his place.

In that other life, Visenya had no dragon but Baelon. That was enough for her, then, but in this life…in this life, had Vyper not come to her, Aemond would not be standing here because she would have been reaching for the Queen of Dragons' rigging before Laena's coffin hit the water.

Aemond's face was not Baelon's when she opened her eyes; it was her  own  twisted mirror image.

"Well, then, "  she said, quietly, and the coin slipped from the tips of her fingers. She felt it spinning on its edge at their feet, and she knew it was  his —felt it in her bones. Still, she clenched her jaw and said, "lead the way."

The coin stopped spinning.

It fell flat to its side.

It landed well,  she told herself, then beseeched gods she could only hope heard her:  please, let it have landed well.

(Madness and greatness look much the same from only one eye.)

"I do not want you to come with me, "  he said because the little brat could not just take the victory when she granted it to him, and she jammed her finger into his chest.

"I go with you, "  she said flatly, "or I will have Vyper pick you up and drop you into the sea."

Aemond sputtered, eyes squinting. "Is this some twisted desire to watch me die? I am not going to die. I am going to  claim  her."

She almost believed him at the wildness in his eyes,  the  madness  in him ,  the  blood and flames.   A little boy, still , but Laena hadn't been much more than a girl when Vhagar bowed her head to her then.

No more dead brothers,  she begged, and, this time, she turned the prayer to any of the gods who might listen. To the Seven, to the old gods of the North, to the Drowned God that ruled the ironborn, to the strangely foreign gods across the sea who had never  paid a thought towards  a dragon girl with a patchwork heart. To her own gods,  to  beings of flame with wings from their backs, to the bloody creatures who once bound her blood to dragons.

(It did not matter to whom she prayed—they never were very fond of her.)

"I followed you into dragon fire once, "  she said, smacking him gently on the cheek , and he  scowled when she waggled her finger in her face.   "I will  not  do it again."

*&*&*

" I am going to have to do it again, "  she said in dismay , not so  very long afterward  when  they found themselves laid out in the grass watching the she-dragon in her coil.  She'd finally gone silent, great eyes closed in what Visenya doubted was really sleep.

"Fuck, "  answered Aemond.

She'd  forgotten  how big Vhagar really was. Dreams did not do it justice: the immense sweep of her wings, the heavy jut of her neck, her head the size of the fucking Keep. Too big, too old, too much, how did the world handle it? How did the gods allow it, a creature like this, immense as she was?

How in all the hells was tiny Aemond meant to  ride  her?

"We can still turn around, "  she murmured, half-heartedly. "I will never tell a soul we came; I swear it."

She turned to look at him, but he was already skidding down the hill.

Visenya cursed beneath her breath the whole way down as she scrambled after him, wishing the gods killed him at birth, wishing they killed  her  at birth, wishing Baelon lived so he could beat sense into their brother, wishing she could whack Aemond with a stick, wishing Vyper would land instead of circling in the air because he would not come closer to the grieving she-dragon than necessary.

"You have to wait here, "  Aemond said at the base of the hill, and she glowered at him. He crossed his arms over his chest and tried to fix her with a stern look; the height difference made it rather embarrassing for him to even attempt such a thing, but she felt gracious enough not to mention that bit. "She will certainly burn us if  you  come, too."

A stranger with another dragon's claim singed into her soul? He was right.

Cunt.

"You have five minutes, and then we are going back."

Aemond flicked his fingers dismissively, started forward again, and she darted a hand out to catch his hair. He hissed between his teeth when she tugged, twisting around to glare at her under his lashes, and she looked back at him fiercely.

"Be  careful , valonqus, "  she pleaded, and he blinked.

"I will, "  he said, his accent all wrong, but it pleased something in her that one of the younger ones was finally taking an interest in the old language. She'd noticed his nose in old books more since she yelled at him in the pit, but she hadn't thought…

Visenya stomped on the kernel of satisfaction in her stomach  ruthlessly , then slid her fingers from his hair and let him continue his way to the dragon that could very well be his death.

Vyper startled her for the first time in years  when he landed behind her .  Silent as a ghost when he wanted to be, and he looked like a nervous child being so close to Vhagar.  One of his wings shifted, and she took the offer: burrowed her way underneath it, cocooning herself in  the heat and safety of him .  

Her eyes squeezed shut.

She waited for the screams.

She heard the low snarl of warning rumbling from a too-big throat; would she even need to bite him, chew him, or could she swallow him whole after she burnt him to cinders?

She heard the crackling sound of fire being called, and she felt the cry rolling in her throat, his name and a scream trapped in her mouth—she could not let it out, no, could not draw attention to herself and her dragon on the hill. She would burn him for certain then, kill him for certain, and so Visenya shoved the butt of her hand into her mouth and  bit.  Blood filled her mouth, hot and salty and burning, and—

"Dohaeras! Dohaeras, Vhagar! Lykiri! "  Aemond cried. "Lykiri! Lykiri."

The fire faded.

Silence for a moment, except for the great beast's breath, except for Vyper's nervous rustling, except for the sound of her heart and her dragon's pounding in her ears, and then—

A  rumbling purr .  Vhagar's purr ,  and Visenya snapped her teeth out of her hand and threw herself out of the cocoon of Vyper's wing so quickly that she  near  gave herself whiplash.

He was climbing her rigging.

He was—he was climbing her  rigging.

"He did it, "  she said, dumbly. A terrified, relieved little giggle spilled out of her mouth, and she clapped her bloody hand over her lips to try to stifle it. "He did it."

What,  said the anxious kneading of Vyper's claws and the way he turned his eyes down at her,  the fuck.

"Pikās, "  she said, and then she  went scrambling  onto the saddle just as Vhagar began to rise  up  with fluttering wings, Aemond but a speck clinging to her back.  “Pikās, Vyper, follow, pikās, pikās!”

You are mad,  said the anxious trill in his croon, but she could not let Aemond go to the skies alone.  He had no  chains  on his  first flight,  dear gods , was  this how Rhaenyra felt when she tried to forego them? She needed be there to catch him if he slipped, to watch over him; she could not leave him  alone.

" Kostilus, hōzalbos, "  she begged as Vhagar shook herself off and began to run, as she took  off  with Aemond still clinging to her saddle, and Vyper moaned unhappily.

But he did as  he always did  when she told him what she needed.

He gave it to her.

They did not get as close as she wanted, but she knew it was for the best; gods knew how Vhagar might react to an eager young dragon pressing in too close. They were close enough to see, close enough to dive if Aemond went spilling from his dragon's back, and that would have to be enough.

"Do not fall, "  she begged when the force of the wind and the speed of her great body hurtling to the sky sent his legs flying up. His hands scrabbled frantically at ropes and centuries of old rigging that Vhagar would not allow the keepers to remove, his body half off the saddle as he tried to hold on. "Do not fall; do not fall."

He caught at the  horn of the saddle  and dragged himself close, and Visenya caught herself beaming just as Vhagar tucked her wings and sent her giant body hurtling back towards the earth.

"You did that to me our first flight, "  she said, and, to her delight, they drifted just close enough that she could hear Aemond's garbled screams of exhilarated terror as Vhagar pulled herself sharply from the dive and began climbing again. "Wicked, the both of you."

Vyper huffed and shook himself to  try to  punish her; it only  succeeded in making  her laugh, and they whipped after Vhagar and Aemond again.

Over the sea, her wings and great tail dipping through the water; over the island, and she could hear him  laughing.  Like he was that little boy again, sat at the dinner table with Vyper eating sausage from his fingertips, and she screamed his name into the wind so loudly that it hurt in her throat and  her  chest.  He heard her, though, his head whipping around with wide eyes, and she threw her arms out with a  howl. 

He beamed back at her, spilling over with open joy, his delight so infectious that it ate away at the edges of her—took her grief and her anger and her hurt, shoved them down so deep, filled her up instead with a mad sort of pride, a destructive kind of ecstasy—and took a better hold of the reins; whatever he cried to Vhagar over the wind of her wings sent her swooping higher.

Visenya did not know how long they stayed in the air: Aemond and Vhagar learning each other, Visenya and Vyper keeping careful watch from just far enough away.  Hours, maybe, or minutes, or  days-months-years-forever ; too long and not long enough.

But she knew that when they landed—when they landed, she forgot to hate him.

Vyper fled almost before  she took  her hands off his scales, still  nervy  at Vhagar's nearness, but Visenya did not fear her.  The she-beast, hulking and monstrous and old as she was, was her brother's dragon now, a claimed dragon with her soul bound up to his; she ducked right under her great head and clambered over the edge of her wing in her haste to reach Aemond as he leaped from the rigging.

"What— "  he started, but she already had him.

Both hands cupping his face as she smiled so wide it hurt her cheeks, she pressed a smacking kiss to his brow before pressing their foreheads together. "I am so damned proud of you, "  she said, eyes glowing with it as his hands slowly raised to curl hesitant fingers around her wrist. 

The relief might have killed her as she held his wind-reddened face between her hands; her heart still pounded so hard in her chest that she could taste her own heartbeat. He lived, little fool, little idiot, lived and rode the biggest dragon left to the world; alive and bold and brash and brave and so  fucking  dumb, but he did it.  He'd   done it,  done what the other her never did, done it on his own.  Still breathing, unburnt, unbroken.

No dead brothers. Not tonight, not any other.

Aemond stared back at her, his grip so tight on her wrists ; his  eyes were round as saucers, lips parted in a little O. When he spoke, it came out in halting stutters, broken Valyrian that rolled rough and unpracticed from his tongue.  "Visenya, "  he said, " we are gods."

" Valonqus, mittītsos, "  she answered in a song, " we are dragons; we are the blood of kings and queens and conquerors."

(What had he ever wanted except for someone to see him? To see  him , the second-born son, the fourth-born child; not the heir, not the favored, not anything at all? To be  proud  of him? What had he ever wanted from  her  except for her to look at him, just look without flinching, just look without turning away—and now she was, with her face shining, with her hands so soft on his face, with her pride spilling out of her like water spilling from a too-small glass , and he  would give most anything in the world if he could live forever in that feeling.)

Vhagar rumbled a low noise, one Visenya recognized from long ago flights with—

The memory of Laena shook her from her sweet happiness , and she  remembered that Aemond's dragon came from her death, that her daughters would wake to find their mother's dragon already taken, and she winced as she let go of his face.

"We need to go back, "  she said, and he blinked as if waking from a deep sleep. "Aemond—come, come, back to bed. "

" How am I supposed to sleep after that? "  he sputtered, but he obeyed her and let himself be ushered  along  into the tunnels that would take them back where they belonged.

" The same we all sleep, "  she drawled. "Eyes closed and head on the pillow. "

" I flew, "  he reminded her, as if she'd missed it.

"I was there, "  she said, as if he was  a little bit  daft.

"On a dragon. "

" What else would you have flown on? "

" She is  my  dragon. "

" Walk,  mittītsos."

They hadn't yet made it very far  at all  when she heard Lucerys's sleepily whined " Jace,  what are we doing? "  and knew they were too late for sneaking . Too  late for getting back before the girls woke, too late for breaking the news gently over breakfast where no fists could be thrown and sharp tongues would be curbed by mothers' and grandmother's watching eyes.

" Please,  do not speak, "  she said, desperately, but Aemond's delighted, bubbling foolishness faded  away  into nothing. He shoved past her in his eagerness to throw himself into their nephews '  and cousins' line of sight, spring in his step that had never before been present, arrogance seeping from every pore.

"It's him! "  cried one of the girls. Visenya could not see which in the dark, and she was too busy scrambling after Aemond with a curse  to try  to figure it out.

"It's me, "  he agreed, face splitting in a smirk , and he  shook Visenya off when she grabbed  for  his elbow.

"Vhagar is my  mother's  dragon. "

" Your mother's dead, "  Aemond sneered, the giggling little boy with the glowing face and the sweet smile disappeared; the poisonous little creature had returned and swallowed him whole. "And Vhagar has a new rider now. "

" Aemond! "  Visenya hissed, jabbing him in the ribs; her bubbling fondness and pride faded from her just that quickly.  They were little girls, Baela and Rhaena—younger than all  of them  except Luke, who was  only  barely any younger.  Little girls with their mother barely dead and now their last remnant of her taken away, and here he stood with teeth bared to bloody their hearts even further. "For gods' sake—to  bed , all of you! "

" She was mine to claim! "  Rhaena hissed.

That is not how it works,  Visenya thought, indignantly, but she let the words pass; she saw no winning in arguing with grieving little girls.

Aemond was not so kind. 

"Then you should've claimed her! Maybe your cousins can find you a pig to ride. "  The poison in his voice, the pure loathing that sparked at the word…the vindictiveness in  the way  his lips peeled back around his smile. She knew the pig prank hurt him, of course,  of course,  but she did not realize how much until then. Until she saw that look on his face. "It would suit you."

Rhaena leaped for Aemond with a scream that pulled from deep in her belly, and Visenya knew the sound of grief lashing out better than she knew her own name. " Listen— "   she tried, but neither  of them  paid her any mind; Aemond shoved Rhaena away from him too hard, too quickly, and she hit the ground with a pained little yelp.

Visenya knew that look on Baela's face when she lunged for him , too .  The rage that blackened vision and twisted her mouth into a hissing sort of snarl, and she looked every inch Laena Velaryon's daughter when she hauled her fist back and punched Aemond across the face. 

Aemond cried out when he fell, hitting the ground with a bone-rattling  thud , and Visenya  realized quite suddenly  that her fondness for that other Laena did not extend to another Laena's daughter.  Not when her little brother lay sprawled on the ground , not when  Baelon's face looked up at them through Aemond's grimace.

She wanted, for a moment, for Baela to bleed for putting her hands on her brother.

She wanted to  make  her bleed.

But Visenya stilled instead, calmed herself with a shaky breath, and turned on them snarling.

" That is  enough, "   she seethed, stepping in front of Aemond; the look on her face , whatever it was,  was enough that Baela quailed a little and took three steps back.  "You think beating him will give your sister a dragon? You think it will make Vhagar unclaimed?   Go  back  to  bed ."

Jace shot her a look, a betrayed  sort of  heat that made her shift on her feet for the briefest of heartbeats even as she assured herself she had nothing to feel guilty about, but he edged forward a little. Her shoulders relaxed for a moment; they would  listen  to Jace, of course, and everything would be—

Aemond  gained his feet again , lips peeled back as he lunged past her, and his fist cracked across Baela's face.

"Come at me again and I'll feed you to my dragon!"

Things went downhill very quickly after that.

Visenya tried to move forward , tried to  reach out, but then Jace was on him, and her arms…they would not move.  She could not raise a hand to Jacaerys, would never, could never, would take her own hands off at the wrist or her arms at the shoulder before she ever even thought of it—but how could she raise a hand to Aemond, either? A cruel little shit, yes, yes, but a dragon claimed could not be undone, and cruel words were not meant to be met with four-five-four-five- four  sets of fists.

Jace hit the ground, and Lucerys jumped forward with a cry, and she  heard  the sickeningly wet crunch of his nose breaking when Aemond hit him, and she did not care if they broke every gods-damned bone in her little brother's arms after that.

Her limbs unlocked with a pop only she could hear, and she scrabbled frantically through the dirt to Lu.

"Make it better, Enya, "  he wailed as soon as she touched his face, his little body crashing into her arms.  "Make it  better."

" I cannot, "  she said, brokenly. She thumbed at  his  wet cheeks, tried in vain to wipe away the blood pouring from her nose, and pressed her lips to  his  forehead with a strangled noise. "Lu, Lu, I cannot, oh,  why  didn't you all just stay in your beds? "

" Why didn't  he? "   Luke cried back, face contorting in a new burst of rage; he ripped from her arms in the time it took her to blink, little legs pumping as he flung himself back into the fray.

Aemond—Aemond, quick as a snake in the training yard, smooth in his movements and at home in his limbs in a way not many boys of ten could ever claim— Aemond,  five years older, two heads taller, so much stronger—Aemond caught her little god around the throat.

Her eyes locked there, on Aemond's fingers around Luke's throat, on Aemond's knuckles red with the same blood that stained Lucerys's face, and she watched with a distant sort of burning inside her when he scrabbled through the dirt for a rock.

She watched as he raised it.

"Aemond, "  she said, and her voice did not shake even when his dirty, bloody face flicked towards her. A different boy than the one she chased through the skies; a different girl than the one who laughed his name into the wind. "If you bring that rock anywhere near him, you will not live to ride her again."

No more dead brothers, but she would do it for Lu.

She would do anything for Lu.

( Always them ,  Aemond thought, the blackness in his chest growing  only  darker.  It is always them  instead of me . )

The rock stayed in the air, but Aemond turned to lock his eyes with Luke's as he hissed, "you will die screaming in flames, just as your father did.  Bastards."

Screaming,  she thought in an echo, the words rippling through her.  Screaming in flames.

Warm arms around her in the hall, hands on her elbows as he guided her sword, his laugh, his smile, his kindness so thick she could drown in it; his hands lifting her up high when she was still a little girl, balancing her on his shoulders as she squealed and tugged at his curls; thick fingers tapping at the underside of her chin to guide her attention back towards him; his cloak wrapped around her when she woke from falling asleep on one of Nyra's sofas.

My princess,  he called her, and,  when Harwin said it, it did not seem so terrible a thing to be.

Luke, struggling, legs kicking, cried, "my father's still alive!"

Somehow, in the time since she learned of Harwin's death, she never once considered that he would have been frightened of the fire that came to take him. Frightened of the pain the flames promised, frightened of  the way  the smoke choked the air from his lungs. Frightened of death.

If they make you afraid, they have already won,  he told her once, but fire was not battle. It ate regardless. It burned  on  whether one kept their chin high or wept to gods who did not deign to answer. Fire did not care if it devoured the brave or the cowardly.

But Harwin would have cared.

Harwin would not have wanted to die afraid.

Aemond lowered the rock and turned mockingly to Jace, eyes glittering maliciously as he asked, "he doesn't know, does he?  Lord Strong."

He  loved a dragon ,  she thought,  desperately.  He fathered three. Vyper singed his beard not a full year ago and he did not so much as flinch.  Harwin did not fear fire. He did not die afraid. Gods, please, do not let him have died afraid.

" Aemond, "  she said, but it rasped from her swollen throat as a whisper not even she could hear.

The second time, his attention shifted towards her.

Uncertainty flickered across his face when their eyes met, and his grip around Luke's throat loosened. Their nephew fell from the air to the dirt at his feet, coughing and rubbing at his throat in his scramble, and Visenya loosed a trembling breath.

For a third time, she said, " Aemond."

( Why are your eyes wet?  he started to ask.  Who has hurt you, Visenya? I do not see any blood.)

He took half a step towards her.

Her head turned at the sound of the knife coming from Jace's waist-sheathe, and she swallowed the knot in her throat enough to cry out. She found her feet and jerked forward, trying to slide between the brother of her blood and the brother of her heart, begging, "No; no, Jacaerys; put the knife away!"

Jacaerys, not for the first time in their lives, not for the last, paid her no mind. He shoved past her for Aemond with a shout, and Luke's yowls were loud enough to make her ears ache; the girls huddled in a cowering tremble of hair and limbs.  Aemond jerked, scrabbled for the rock again, and  she— she did not know what to do.  She did not know how to stop it when her limbs were locked up again, everything moving too slowly and too fast. Jace hit the ground as Aemond raised the rock, and she howled their names so loudly that she could taste blood in the back of her throat.

Aemond looked at her again. The rock wavered.

Visenya turned to look and found Jace's hands empty.

He flung a handful of dirt—she  taught  him that trick, she did, and he'd called her a foul cheat while he spat grass and sand out into his hands—and Luke split past her, a blur of curls and blood. She lunged for him, the tips of her fingers only just barely brushing his back, too slow, too slow, and she screamed just as the knife came down across Aemond's face.

No more dead brothers,  she tried to pray, but she could not speak through his blood in her mouth.

Chapter Text

Visenya had never seen so much blood before in this life. Red and thick and garishly bright against the stone, muddying the dirt, soaking Aemond’s clothes, spattering Luke’s front, the arc of it splashing hot and coppery against her face; the smell of it soaking metallic and wicked in the air, pulling into her lungs so deeply that she did not know if she would ever get it out; the taste of it on her tongue, staining her teeth, dripping down her throat even as she spat it out. Spilling fast and heavy through the gaps of Aemond’s fingers as he clutched at his eye with an animalistic scream that sent every hair on her body standing straight on end.

The bite on her hand, those perfect imprints of her teeth, pulsed.

“Get away from him,” she choked, hardly on her feet before she fell over herself again, scrabbling through the dirt and dark in a crouched sort of crawl. A rodent skittering through the shadows, only barely daring to enter torchlight. “Move away, move away!”

Aemond moaned an unrecognizable answer through his sobbing shrieks, curling into himself even smaller even as he tried to shift his body further away from Lucerys—who stood wide-eyed and slack-jawed over him, the knife falling from his shaking grip—and she realized with a hitch of her breath that he thought she meant to warn him away from Luke. That he thought she could look at him like this and turn her fury on him even still for screaming cruel words and putting too-rough hands on their sister’s boys.

“No, not you,” Visenya said, stumbling forward in her haste. She clawed past Luke, hooking fingers into the collar of his shirt and yanking him away from Aemond—it startled him from his daze, and he spun on his feel to throw himself with a frightened cry into Jace’s waiting arms. She propelled herself forward with the same motion, hitting her knees again in the dirt beside her brother. “Not you, Aemond, oh, oh; I am sorry; I am sorry; I am sorry.”

“Do not touch me!” he shrieked when her hands curled around his shoulders. She flinched away from his rage, from the terror pouring from him, but she did not pull away. Her hands curled tighter as she bent herself over him, trying her best to hide him from the others’ view with the shield of her back. “Get away from me; get away—”

She wondered briefly why her eyes stung so very badly, then realized a strong breeze would put her over the edge of bursting into tears.

“Lykiri, valonqus,” she whispered shakily. There was so much blood; too much blood, too much—how much could one boy’s body hold? How much already soaked the ground? “Lykiri, lykiri; forgive me, forgive me; I have you; they will not hurt you.”

And they would not, not again, because she would not let any of them close. A cruel little fool, her baby brother, who spoke treason and disrespected Laena, who had deserved to get taken down a few pegs—she would not deny that—but this? This, the blood, his hands over his eye, the smell, the way he wept through his howls? No, he did not deserve this. He did not deserve to be maimed, to be scarred, to die for it.

“Promise me?” he asked her in a shaking, strained voice, and she tangled the fingers of one hand into his mess of bloody hair. His body spasmed through another scream, and he twisted his head into her lap; his whole body trembled like glass on a table’s edge during a quake, and she bent herself even further over him.

(He hated himself for needing someone to hold him, but it hurt, it hurt so badly—flames splitting through his face, his skull cracking open beneath the pressure, his brain spilling out between his fingers. It hurt so much worse than any other pain he knew, and he wanted his mother, wanted his mother to wrap her arms around him until the pain went away, but he would take his sister instead; he would believe her if she swore to keep them all away because he did not have the strength left to doubt her. Because her hands stayed lowered and her blade did not unsheathe even when he held the stone over the heads of her precious bastard boys. Because he could taste how she feared for him, feel it in the gentleness of her hands against his skin, feel it in the way she tried in vain to wipe at the blood, feel it in the press of her mouth against his temple. Because he needed her, just then, he needed her, and he would remember to hate her and that she did not really love him when it all ended. For now, he needed. For now, he would let himself pretend.)

“I promise,” she swore, nodding too fast. “I promise; I promise—no, no, Aemond, do not let go; you must keep pressure—”

“I cannot see!” he cried back, terrified, a little boy again, her little fool hiding his face in her skirts, and she pressed her face into his filthy hair. “Visenya, I cannot see!”

She raised her head at a loss, locked panicked eyes with Jace—he gaped back at her, hands fluttering over Luke’s back as if he did not know where to rest them; his little brother’s face remained buried in his ribs, arms locked around his waist. “Get someone,” she demanded, eyes wild, voice crazed. “He needs a maester, his eye is—Jacaerys!”

Jace stared back, stricken, silent, frozen, as if he could not hear a word from her mouth. She opened her mouth to scream his name again, set already to shout and rage for as long as it took to snap him from his stupor, but she needn’t have bothered—she got only to “Jaca—” before the heavy sound of clanking armor silenced her.

Ser Harrold’s outrage slid over their space like a storm coming in, his fury enough to cow them, and she’d never heard him so angry—not when she dyed his white cloak bright pink, not when she filled his sheathe with paste, not when she accidentally headbutted him in the nose—as when he snarled, “cease this at once!”

It is already over, she thought incredulously. It is over; come, come, take him; save him; I will not lose another. I cannot see Baelon’s face on the pyre again, I cannot watch him burn again, do not make me; do not, do not make me—

“He needs a maester, ser,” she rasped, and she wiped in frustration at the tears beginning to slip down her cheeks. She didn’t know she was crying until she heard the choke in her voice, realized the wetness was more than blood. “His eye—the blade hit his eye—"

“Get away!” he ordered her, one hand falling for his sword, and she stared in silent bafflement for a beat. Until she realized her face and hands and clothes dripped with Aemond’s blood, that it was no secret that the knife Daemon sent her never left her side, that it would not be so foolish at all to assume that the princeling’s weeping sister was the one who painted her wrath across his face.

“It was not her,” Aemond said, and she made some strange noise in her throat that mixed a hum with a breath. “It wasn’t her; it was not—”

“Lykiri, lykiri, do not talk,” she murmured, running a trembling hand through his hair, and she turned panicked eyes up to the knight as he approached. “There is so much blood, ser; there is too much blood!”

Will he be alright, will he survive, will he ever see again? Visenya’s eyes asked, little girl searching for assurances, but Laenor was not the only one who so oft forgot that the spiteful, clever young princess was not already a woman grown. Ser Harrold did not so much as glance her way.

He hit his knee and leaned over them with hands outstretched; Visenya had to consciously unlatch each of her fingers from Aemond, her limbs resisting the idea of leaving him even to lean back enough that the knight could see her brother’s face. Aemond cried out when he felt her move, the hand not grasping his eye thrashing blindly backwards in search, and she took it without thinking.

Looked down at their bloody, interlocked fingers.

(Another boy’s hand, another prince’s blood, another life ending, another her screaming, someone saying Father, someone saying Mother, someone saying please.)

She sunk her teeth back into the wound on her hand, opened the wound and let her mouth fill with her own blood instead of his, and the memory snapped from the tips of her fingers like fish fleeing the feet of children playing in shallow waters.

“My prince, my prince; let me see,” Ser Harrold crooned, sliding his armored hand beneath Aemond, pulling him gently to turn his prince towards him. She looked to him, the adult, the one meant to be in charge, the one they should be able to rest this burden on, the one meant to make it all better, and she watched instead as the horror dawned in his eyes. Watched his mouth twist around a shaking, “gods be good.”

(The gods are not good, but, oh, they were laughing.)

*&*&*

“I did not mean it,” Luke whispered, pressed practically beneath her skin, both arms wound tight around her neck as he stood between her parted legs. She knelt on the stone, knees aching with the cold of it, but she could not bring herself to disentangle from him enough to stand. The blood from Luke’s nose and Aemond’s eye soaked them both and, even as she held her little god, she could not make herself look away from her little brother across the room. Sitting white-knuckled in his seat, jaw clenched, wincing with each pass of the needle through the flesh of his face. “I did not; he was going to kill Jace. I did not mean it; I did not mean it.”

“I know, bykys jaes,” she murmured from outside herself. Her hand passed absently over his curls. “I know, but you did it. You will have to live with that.”

“Enya!” Jace blurted, aghast, when Lucerys whimpered. He stood hovering over them, a knight stood sentry even with his blade abandoned in a pool of dragon’s blood, and she twisted her neck just enough to glare up at him.

“What?” she snapped, helpless, hopeless, helpless, hopeless. “What else am I to say? I cannot—” Her voice trembled, the knot reforming in her throat, and she cut her eyes back towards Aemond. “I cannot make this better, Jacaerys.”

A scraped knee, a nightmare, a thorn in a finger, but not this. Not this.

“He had the rock,” Jace said, but his voice cracked. “He had—he could have—”

No, she thought. No, no, no. Aemond wouldn’t have brought the rock down, no matter how he puffed and threatened. He would not have crossed that line.

Doubt flickered in her chest, but she shoved it away.

“And you pulled a knife,” she fired back. “Too far already and you dragged it even further—idiots, you and Aemond both! This never should have happened; it wouldn’t have happened if any of you had listened to me, if any of you used your heads—oh, Lu, do not cry!” Her attention snapped from Jace to Luke when he began to weep, her arms winding tighter around him. “Do not cry, bykys jaes, I am not angry with you; come here.”

Was she angry with him? She did not know. She could not tell.

She knew anger. She lived with anger in her blood, in her bones, the beat of it thrumming in her heart; never a day passed when Visenya did not wake choking on anger like bile in her throat, but she could not find the source of it now. Angry at Jace for pulling a knife, angry at Aemond for pressing his hands to open wounds, angry at Baela and Rhaena for their own anger, angry at herself for freezing. Angry with Rhaenyra, angry with the queen, angry with the whole damned world for dragging the boys into fights they still barely understood—but, had it been anyone else in the world holding a stone over Jace’s head, would she have hesitated? Would she have done just as Luke did? Would she regret it if she did?

If he was anyone but your brother, whispered a voice in her head, anyone but a boy with Baelon’s face, you would have caved in his skull with the same rock he raised to Jacaerys.

If it was anyone but Lucerys who cut him, said a different voice, a colder voice, anyone but your little god who took a blade to his face, you would have spilled blood enough to bathe in it

Lucerys only shook harder, so Visenya held him tighter. She prayed to wake up.

But nightmares did not always wait for sleep.

“He picked up the rock first,” Jace said, weakly. “He called us bastards.”

“You cannot look me in the eye and tell me he deserved to lose his eye for a slight,” she whispered back. No heat remained in her voice, only an exhausted sort of ache. “I do not care how cruelly he spoke; I do not care how—an eye, Jace.”

She burrowed her face back into Luke, but, after a long moment, Jace’s hand landed on her shoulder. When she raised her head, he offered it to her without a word. Visenya stared, furious in a blinding way that made her mouth go dry, but one of her hands unwound from Luke on its own accord and found its way to his.

Because he was Jace, and she was Visenya, and they would forgive each other anything whether they were sorry for it or not. Damn him for knowing that. Damn him for not doubting it.

“How could you allow such a thing to happen?” Viserys demanded, face contorted, his knuckles white as he grasped his cane. In front of the throne, the cast of the torchlight and his own haggard face made him look more a king of dead things and rotten places than seven living realms. “I will have answers.”

“The princes and princess were supposed to be in bed, my king,” Ser Harrold answered, stiff-backed, and Visenya felt a squirm of guilt run down her back. Our wayward charge, the knights of the Kingsguard often called her, but there had never needed be consequences for her wandering before; nothing so terrible had ever happened when she slipped her leash.

But then her eyes spotted the smear of Aemond’s blood staining his white cloak, and guilt turned to nausea. She tried to look away; her head would not move.

“Who had the watch?”

Over Aemond? There was only ever one answer to that.

“The young prince was attacked by his own cousins, Your Grace,” Ser Cole defended, and she managed to drag her hazy eyes away from Ser Harrold’s cloak to shoot him a disgusted look.

“You swore oaths,” Viserys snarled, spittle flying in specks from his mouth, clutching at his cane, his fury so strange to a girl who only ever saw him soft and grieving, “to protect and defend my blood.”

“I’m very sorry, Your Grace,” Ser Harrold answered, helpless, guilty.

“The Kingsguard has never had to defend princes from princes, Your Grace,” quipped Ser Cole, snarky and irreverent, and she hated him more then than in all the years before.

“That is no answer!” shouted her father, lunging suddenly forward to bare teeth in the Dornishman’s face. Eyes wild, the muscle in his throat corded with how tightly he clenched his jaw. She wondered, briefly, a throwaway thought gone as quickly as it came, if he looked something like this when he was still young and fierce and a dragon.

“It will heal,” came Alicent’s anxious voice. She crouched low beside her son, eyes growing wider and more stricken with each pass of the needle through. Fingertips a bloody mess already, her lips swollen from her worried biting. Pale like a ghost except for the spots of blotching red on her cheeks. “Will it not, maester?”

His eye, Visenya thought, incredulous, is in a bowl, you foolish bitch.

And yet, even as she thought it, her heart ached. For once, for once, part of her felt for the kneeling queen as the room turned in on itself to hear the answer. Felt for the mother in Alicent, the one who brought Aemond from her body and raised him for ten long years and now looked at him with the face she so loved gashed straight throat. Felt for the scared woman looking at her son, at her maimed little boy soaked in his own blood and his own tears and his own terror, and wanting so desperately to make it better. For the woman who could not do anything at all.

“The flesh will heal,” Maester Kelvyn ventured, hesitantly. A room full of dragons with the smell of blood still thick in the air…she could not blame him for not wishing to be the bearer of such news. He reached out to touch at the stitching, and Aemond flinched away from it with a strangled noise. “But the eye is lost, Your Grace.”

Viserys loosed a mournful breath, but the queen—her face twisted in fury, in an agony unknowable, and it was a devil in silks who rose to turn on Aegon.

Aegon stood beside Helaena (broken heart in her eyes, trembling in every limb, wringing her skirts in her hands, and Visenya wanted to hold her but knew better than to try with all the blood on her hands) with his eyes fixed on Aemond. He looked faintly sick at the sight, something flickering in his brow as it furrowed, and he jolted into himself when his mother’s fury came crashing down over his head.

“Where were you?” she snarled.

“Me?” squeaked Aegon.

Him? Visenya thought.

Alicent’s hand cracked down hard enough that the sound echoed, and Aegon’s face snapped to the side with the force of it. Not a sound left his mouth beyond a muffled grunt, and it rocked him back a step before he recovered.

Visenya peeled Lucerys’s arms from her neck and passed him off to Jace with an incoherent mumble, all her brief empathy gone between one blink and the next. All the many directions of her anger came yanking back together, tilting and twisting, the thin little threads that led to every damned body in the world twining into a rope of it as she stood.

“What was that for?” Aegon cried, clutching the side of his face with one hand. Aemond’s elder only by minutes, a boy afraid just like Aemond, a boy trembling just like Aemond, a boy who had done nothing except be in his bed where he was meant to be, a child.  

“That was nothing compared to the abuse your brother suffered while you were abed, you fool!” Alicent hissed, the veins in her temples pulsing as she grabbed onto his wrists too tightly. Sneering around the words.

(All you have in the world is each other, Alicent told them, over and over again, Aegon and Aemond, told even little Daeron on those so blessed weeks Viserys and Otto gave her leave to take the children to Oldtown. This life might take everything else from you, but it does not matter so long as your brothers and your sister—your true sister—remain to you. Swear it to me, little loves, that you will always hold together. That you will keep each other safe, no matter what it takes. No matter what it costs.)

“He was not even there,” Visenya hissed. The queen’s head whipped around, eyes going even sharper when they landed on her stepdaughter with her bloody nightgown, her filthy face, her bitten open her hand. “I was. If you wish to strike someone, Your Grace, strike me.”

The two little words hung heavy in the air between them, a challenge put onto the table that Alicent could not pick up. Visenya was not Aegon, who loved his mother and took her blows as his due; she would bury her teeth in the queen’s wrist until bone cracked between her teeth and marrow filled her mouth. Visenya was not Aegon, whose bruises Viserys either did not care to notice or did not care to investigate.

The king would never suffer his wife putting a bruise on Aemma’s precious face, and everyone in the room damn well knew it.

No matter, she thought, eyes flicking briefly towards Aemond, how much I deserve it.

When Alicent stared back at her silently, chest heaving, Visenya pulled her teeth back in a rough approximation of a smile. “If you will not strike me, Your Grace, I would suggest you lower your hand.”

It was too far, perhaps, even for her, to push at the boundaries of disrespecting the queen. Visenya played with the line when it came to Alicent, edging as close as she could with sharp words and smug looks and little inconveniences, but even a king’s beloved daughter could only do so much. To give her an order here, in Lord Corlys’s hall, with so many eyes on them, with the king’s eyes on her? To put herself between her stepmother and her brother?

Too far.

And, yet, Viserys said not a word, and Alicent’s mouth closed around nothing.

Visenya the Audacious, Laenor would call her when he heard of it. Perhaps he would laugh even as Rhaenyra chided her for a fool.

The queen’s hands clutched at Aegon’s forearms, knuckles white as she gripped his sleeves; he stood twitching, staring at his feet with a nervous spasm beginning in his jaw. The three of them were still stood in silence, tension building to a storm, when the doors flung open again.

“What is the meaning of this?” Lord Corlys demanded, voice a booming echo, and Visenya knew him well. Her stepmother’s father in that other life, her husband’s master of ships until death came to take him; Visenya knew his voice and his temper and his clever head, and she knew, suddenly, that it was not over yet. The pain, the blood, the price already paid—none of it was over.

“Baela!” Rhaenys cried, the crowds parting to let the Queen Who Never Was sweep through with her husband stalking murderously in her wake. “Rhaena! What happened?”

She dropped to her granddaughters’ level, sweeping them against her breast as they fell whimpering into her arms, and Visenya averted her eyes. She knew, really, that it had been a terrible night for Laena and Daemon’s girls: Baela’s cheekbone swollen and tender from Aemond’s fist, Rhaena’s legs scraped and bloody from how hard she’d fallen to the stone, their mother lost to them, the dragon Rhaena thought would be hers already gone to another rider. But it did not make it easy to watch Rhaenys dote on them, cooing over their wounds and pressing kisses to their tears, when Alicent seemed more concerned with striking the son who hadn’t been present than comforting the one without an eye. When Rhaenyra was still not there to comfort her own sons, to comfort Visenya.

Perhaps her sister, unlike her father and brothers, could read minds. The door swung again to let the princess through, her hair mussed and face bloodless as she shot into the room. Daemon prowled inside behind her, his eyes innocent and face serene, and Visenya’s insides roiled unhappily. She did not like to see them together, did not like what it could mean, but she had no time to worry herself with it. “Jace!” Rhaenyra called. “Visenya—Luke!”

She rushed for them, cutting through the room nimbly, and Jace passed his little brother towards her. Lucerys, holding his bloody nose again, began to cry with weak little sounds as Rhaenyra dropped to her knees and reached for him with a murmured, “show me, show me.”

The Daemon she loved, the Daemon who she and Baelon saw as more a father than Viserys ever was, the one who taught them to sing to dragons and wiped away their tears—oh, that Daemon broke to pieces for his daughters. She could not remember the names of his girls, their faces, their hearts, but she felt in her soul how she’d loved them in that life. She knew in her soul how Daemon had loved them, his daughters so dear, and he would not have slipped unseen through the crowds when his girls were bloodied and weeping.

And yet, Rhaenys held her granddaughters with their father nowhere in sight.

Oh, he is different, she knew then, a terrible unspoken fear that she hadn’t dared voice confirmed, and dread filled her so full that her hands shook. He is not the man I knew. He is as lost to me as Baelon, as Laena, as my boys.

“Who did this?” Rhaenyra demanded, voice trembling as the dragon of her coiled, and Visenya’s last hope that any of this might be resolved with calm, level heads drained from her.

“They attacked me!” Aemond defended immediately, twisting in his chair to glare his indignation at their sister.

You mocked their dead mother and told Rhaena to ride a pig, Visenya thought, but the words did not come.

“He attacked Baela!” Jace shouted back.

He only pushed Rhaena when she charged him, and Baela punched him in the face before he ever raised a hand to her, Visenya thought, but her tongue would not move.

“He broke Luke’s nose!” one of the girls piped over Rhaenys’s shoulder, and then the thin threads of control that held the silence snapped beneath the weight of children’s ire.

They broke into shouting, snippets of the story dripping in venom but never the whole thing told plain, accusations screamed out from too-open mouths, and she did not know—to defend Aemond would be to throw Luke into the flames, would mean offering Luke up, and she could not find it in herself. She could not betray Jace and Luke, no matter that they had taken things too far, and yet. Yet, to defend them would mean abandoning Aemond, who said things he should not have said and did things he never should have done, who had not deserved to lose an eye for any of it, who paid his blood price in spades already, and what was she supposed to do? What was she meant to say?

Brother by blood, by bone, by marrow; brother by heart, by choice, by intention.

How did she choose when neither were right and neither were wrong, when all Aemond wanted was a dragon and all their nephews wanted was to keep each other safe?

She could not. She did not know how. She stood frozen instead, trembling as she bit savagely on the inside of her cheeks, twisting her rings about her fingers on one hand with the pad of her thumb and clutching Nyra’s skirt in her other fist. Words filled her mouth but would not come, and she wished, gods, she wished beyond anything that Aemond had listened when she begged him leave Vhagar be.

“He stole my mother’s dragon!” Rhaena shrieked, and that—that, Visenya found, she could answer.

“You cannot steal a dragon,” she snapped. “He should not have gone to her tonight; I will not deny that, but he is no thief. You disrespect our blood by speaking as if they are slaves to be bartered, and you disrespect Vhagar by suggesting she is so weak-willed as to be taken against her will by a boy of ten. My brother chose and was chosen in turn.”

As all riders are, added the contemptuously disgusted look she tossed Rhaena’s way, and, though it went unspoken, the younger girl’s wrathfully contorting face said she heard it anyway.

“He was going to kill Jace!” Luke cried, and it was as if none of them heard her at all—except for Aemond, who stared at her with his single eye wide.

From forehead to cheek, straight through his eye. Bloody and swollen to the point it looked as if it might burst, faintly wet looking as if he was oozing all the pain and emotion out of the wound itself. He would never see from it again. Not ever. It was forever, this loss; it was always. Her little brother maimed and wounded, and it—just because he survived the wound did not mean he would survive the healing. Would they lose him to infection now, to pus and fevers and hallucinations?

And then, with a wave of guilt strong enough to buckle her knees, she thought, at least he does not look so like Baelon anymore.

She hated herself for thinking it. She hated herself for letting it matter.

“Enough,” Viserys growled, too quiet under the cacophony.

“See!” Aemond cried, pointing to her triumphantly. “I didn’t do anything!”

“That is not what I said,” Visenya cried, mouth agape. “Not at all—"

“Enough!” Viserys shouted, voice rising, but not a single head turned.

“It should be my son telling the tale!” Alicent screeched over her husband, jabbing at her chest with a bloody finger. Crazed eyes and frizzing hair, eyes red and swollen.

“He called us—” Jace began.

Visenya’s heart stopped beating.

“Silence!” Viserys screamed, and it worked—finally. Silence falling down upon them all, every set of wide eyes in the room turning to fix on the king as the room went quiet. The tension only thickened in the sudden peace, too thick, pressing in on each of her senses, and she knew even before Jace leaned into his mother with his lips pressed thin.

“He called us bastards,” Jace whispered, the words another blade sharpened, and Visenya swallowed the knot in her throat.

Rhaenyra’s eyes hardened, burned, froze over again, and it was not her sister who turned to watch their father hobble his way towards their little brother. A goddess gone wrathful, smoke pooling on her tongue, Balerion and Vhagar both rising from her shadow to wrap clawed hands around her shoulders.

He lost his eye tonight, Rhaenyra, she thought. She wound her fingers through her sister’s, and Nyra glanced down at her obliviously. Ire cooling for a moment as she squeezed Visenya’s hand in silent comfort; comfort, when Visenya did not look for comfort in her sister’s face, when Visenya did not need anyone to hold her bloody hands, when all she needed from Nyra was the assurance that she would not demand Aemond’s tongue. That is enough. An eye is more than enough.

“Aemond,” Viserys wheezed, puffed up in his indignation, imperious as he looked down his nose, and why would he not comfort him? Why did he not hold him close, his second boy with his bleeding face and tear-stained sleeves? Why did he say his name as if unfamiliar with the way it fit in his mouth? Where was his worry for his brutalized boy, where was the gentleness he would have showered upon Aemma Arryn’s girls if they were the ones with torn, bleeding faces? “I will have the truth of what happened. Now.”

Aemond locked up in every limb, looking up at the king with his remaining eye wide and his lips parting soundlessly. Fear, almost, except not fear at all.

“What else is there to hear?” Alicent snapped, edging forward as if to put herself between her husband and her son. Visenya’s insides recoiled at the sound of her bitter voice; the hate in her, the rage of her, it did not abate in the slightest. She had no love for Alicent Hightower, no forgiveness for the things she’d done and the person she’d been and the choices she’d made—but relief swelled in her chest, anyway. Relief that someone spoke up when she could not make her own tongue move. “Your son has been maimed. Her son is responsible.”

Visenya did not like the dripped poison around the words her son, and she shifted without thinking to hide Luke from the queen’s view. She did not realize she couldn’t breathe for a moment, and then she noticed all at once. Her breath came too fast, too much, not enough, not enough air in her lungs—

“It was a regrettable accident,” Rhaenyra said, and Visenya heard the faint tremble in her voice where anyone else in the world might have missed it altogether. Visenya saw the way her eyes flickered over Aemond’s face, the way her lips thinned before she looked away again.

An accident, Visenya thought, and that…Luke did not mean to take the eye. He never meant to maim permanently, never meant to take something that Aemond would not be able to get back again, but he lifted a blade and took it to Aemond’s face. An accident implied an action made with no intention, with no malice, and Lucerys did it with all the intention and all the wrath in the world. For Jace, yes, of course, for Jace, for the girls after Aemond struck them, for the girls after the slights Aemond spit their way, but did it matter why? Could it be called an accident when, even still, Lucerys had not so much as mumbled “I am sorry”?

“Accident?” Alicent scoffed, and something inside Visenya died a little of the same when she realized she and the queen were of a mind. “The Prince Lucerys brought a blade to the ambush! He meant to kill my son!”

“No,” Visenya choked, but her throat swelled with her own panic. Her voice would not rise above a whisper. “No; that is not what happened; no one meant to kill anyone—”

“It was my sons who were attacked and forced to defend themselves,” Rhaenyra snarled, her hand going tighter on Luke’s shoulder as she took a fierce step forward. Visenya might have called it a lunge if she had the presence of mind to call it anything; as it was, she could only shift herself even further in front of Luke and tug on Nyra’s sleeve.

“The girls hit him first, Nyra,” she whispered, desperately. “They hit him first.”

If Rhaenyra heard her, she did not care.

“Vile insults were levied against them.”

“Nyra,” Visenya moaned, yanking more frantically at her arm.

“What insults?” asked Viserys, eyes brighter than they’d been in months, and was he truly so stupid? Was he truly so blind as that, so blind that he did not know what his queen whispered about the boys’ dark hair? What other insults would Aemond dare spit save the ones he heard from his mother’s simpering mouth?

Otto Hightower shifted when every gaze in the room turned for Rhaenyra; his strange, too-seeing eyes flickered over her sister, his mouth thin, and, for once, she wished he would speak. Spit your poison, she begged him silently, pour your honey in Father’s ear, down his throat until he chokes, if only it will make it all stop.

“An eye is enough,” Visenya begged, pulling at Rhaenyra’s arm even harder, trying fiercely to make her sister look at her as the silence lingered on. “Nyra, Nyra, sister, please, an eye is enough; do not do this now. Speak to Father later, please; he is our brother still, and he has paid blood enough tonight—”

“The legitimacy of my sons’ birth was put loudly to question,” Rhaenyra said, going so far as to tug her arm a little from Visenya’s grasp.

A strangled, fractured moan pulled from her throat, and she gagged on the bile rising from her belly. Treason of the highest sort to call the heir’s heir a bastard, to accuse the heir of adultery; treason, treason, when he already lost an eye, when Viserys cared so little for his sons—she could not watch him lose his tongue, no, no—

“What?” Viserys said, brow furrowed into a canyon. She’d always thought him a fool, really, but she’d never thought him stupid; she thought it then, if only in a disgusted, irritable half-thought.

“He called us bastards,” Jace said, voice low and somber, but the sound of it rang so loud in the silence that her ears ached at the echo of it.

The blood drained from the queen’s face, and Aemond’s mouth twisted around a bastardized mix of a smirk and a snarl. As if he wanted to laugh and scream all at once, looking suddenly so much older than he was, looking so much younger, looking as if exhaustion sapped every ounce of strength left to his bones, looking as if he had never been so awake.

“My sons are in line to inherit the Iron Throne, Your Grace,” Rhaenyra barreled on ruthlessly. It all reminded Visenya, absurdly, of the time Aegon drove his boot into a hornet’s nest in the gardens; Aemond had done it now, stomped ruthlessly through the whole of it, and now hell came to life with it. Viserys looked back at his eldest daughter with that shock still written across his face, and Visenya swiped angrily at the fresh tears on her face. “This is the highest of treasons. Prince Aemond must be sharply questioned, so we might learn where he heard such slanders.”

Aemond’s head popped around his chair again, gaping at Rhaenyra as if he could not quite believe the words leaving her tongue; the baffled, gobsmacked expression on his face would have made her laugh any other night.

She does not mean it, Visenya thought, sure down to her bones even in the midst of her petrified anxiety. She cannot mean it. It is only a bluff, only a trick to incite the queen. She would not hurt him. Rhaenyra would never.

 (Do I mean it? Rhaenyra wondered, lips still curled around the words, but her son’s blood slick on her hands gave her all the answer she needed.)

“Over an insult?” Alicent demanded incredulously, and Visenya thought watching dragons battle must look something like this. Monsters clashing, tearing each other limb from limb—mothers poised in front of their sons, ready to claw out eyes in their defense. “My son has lost an eye.”

(Visenya would learn, someday, that it looked like nothing of the sort.)

She looked to her sister, and she saw it in her face. Written plain and bold and unashamed across her burning eyes and her twisted mouth—Rhaenyra Targaryen did not care that their little brother lost his eye. Rhaenyra would not have cared if he lost both because her son’s nose still wept blood, her sons still winced from their bruises, her sons’ cheeks still dripped with shed tears; Aemond cried bastard, cried a truth not a soul alive should ever dare to speak, and Nyra would not abide someone putting her boys at risk.

Certainly not one of their little brothers, pretty princes that the Iron Throne’s heir had never been able to stomach.

She did not mean it, Visenya thought again, stomach clenching. She does not want him put to the blade, but, oh, she will not stop it. She will not stop it.

Viserys leaned down over Aemond, face carved from marble and dragon bones. “You tell me, boy.” Boy, she said in her mind, turning the word over and over again, boy, boy, what about little one, what about dearest, what about darling? That is what you called Baelon, that is what you call me, that is what you call Rhaenyra; boy, boy, boy, what about son? “Where did you hear this lie?”

Aemond fixed his eye down on his lap. His hands shook. She did not think anyone else noticed.

“The insult was training yard bluster,” Alicent interjected quickly through a scoff, and Visenya’s blood burned. “The lot of boys—it was nothing.”

“Aemond,” Viserys said. “I asked you a question.”

Aemond’s eye raised, reluctantly, but he still did not speak.

“Where is Ser Laenor, I wonder?” Alicent said, and the panic in her voice did little to hide itself. Visenya could see the fear beginning in her stepmother’s twitching fingers, in the wild way her eyes snapped about in search of some way out. “The boys’ father? Perhaps he might have something to say in the matter.”

Laenor was in no condition to be saying anything, if he was still of the mind he was when she saw him on the beach.

“Yes; where is Ser Laenor?” Viserys asked, head raising up expectantly.

With Qarl, if the gods had any mercy.

“I do not know, Your Grace,” Nyra lied. “I could not find sleep. I had gone out to walk.”

Visenya looked to Daemon without thinking and found a smirk playing at his mouth. Amusement flickering in his eyes, something like mirth in the crinkle of his nose, and her fists clenched. His eyes landed on her, met her gaze, and his head tilted curiously to the side at whatever he found in her face.

“Entertaining his young squires, I would venture,” said Alicent nastily, and Visenya’s feet carried her a step forward before Rhaenyra’s tightening grip jerked her back into her place.

Laenor was—was good, damn them all. Good and kind and trying, trying so very hard to be whatever his family needed him to be, and there was nothing in the world wrong with him that Visenya could find except for his big-hearted foolishness. Except for the way he turned loathing in on himself instead of out at the world. Damn the queen for spitting her poison when he could not defend himself, damn Ser Criston for snickering at his feet, damn them both, damn them all for it.

He is a better man than you, she thought, and she could not say who she aimed it towards.

“Aemond,” Viserys said again, though softer. “Look at me. Your king demands an answer.”

You are his father, Visenya begged silently. His father, his father, pretend it is me with my eye gouged out and be his father instead of his king.

“Who spoke these lies to you?”

The silence lasted so long that she could not stand it, Aemond’s eye flicking to his mother and then quickly back to their father when the king glanced towards his wife. Rhaenyra’s call for questioning filled the quiet, a bluff that—that would not pay off, no, no, because the queen stood trembling but silent, the queen did not step forward to take the blame and save her son, and she did not even realize she was going to speak until she heard her own voice hissing, “we all know who spoke them, Father!”

“It was Aegon,” Aemond blurted.

(Aemond Targaryen would throw most anyone in the world into the fire to save his mother—even Aegon. Even himself.)

“Me?” Aegon said, all the color and life leaving his face, and Visenya’s jaw hung slack as she sputtered a soundless protest.

An aborted sound came from Visenya’s mouth, the beginning of a shouted…something, anything, the truth, the truth of it, that Aemond lied to protect his mother and they all damn well knew it. But Rhaenyra grabbed onto her shoulder, squeezing hard enough that Visenya yelped and near buckled at the knees, and her sister did not say a word when Visenya turned pleading eyes towards her.

Viserys leaned heavily on his cane—snap, she commanded it spitefully, break under the weight, send him crashing—as he staggered slowly around the chair and towards his son. “And you, boy? Where did you hear such calumnies?”

Aegon stood with his back forced straight as a ramrod, shaking in every limb, his eyes fixed straight ahead. She tried to move towards him, tried to go to him, but Rhaenyra pulled her back again.

“Aegon!” Viserys yelled, and Aegon flinched. His eyes squeezed shut, mouth twisting in that way it did when he neared panicking, and, in her desperation to fling herself between her brother and their father, Visenya reached without thinking to try to claw Rhaenyra’s hand from her shoulder. No matter how she pried at her fingers and fought her grip, Nyra did not let go. “Tell me the truth of it!”

“He did not do anything,” she hissed beneath her breath. “He did not call them bastards; he did not even say it to Aemond—Rhaenyra.” Her sister watched silently, and, in a last attempt, Visenya cried, “Egg!”

Aegon’s eyes opened.

For a moment, as they looked at each other, she thought he would tell the truth. That he would admit that Alicent whispered the words to her boys, that she spread the rumors through the Keep.

“We know, Father,” he whispered, shifting his eyes slowly to the king. “Everyone knows. Just look at them.”

A cold fury passed over her father’s face, but it turned to pain. Ferocity into exhaustion as he turned slowly to drag his disgusted gaze over his family.

“This interminable infighting must cease!” he snarled, head whipped to Aegon and then to his wife, to Rhaenyra and then, to her indignation, to Visenya herself. This infighting? This infighting, when he wed his daughter’s childhood companion and whelped four children on her that he could not be bothered to love, when he pretended he did not see all the gaps between them, when he never once addressed it? “All of you! We are family!”

Aemond and Visenya both looked at him with the same expressions of incredulous disgust.

(We are kin, Aemond thought, that—)

—is not the same thing, Visenya’s heart muttered.

“Now make your apologies and show good will to one another. Your father, your grandsire, your king demands it!” He jabbed his cane into the ground to emphasize his point, hard enough that she waited for the floor to crack and the ground to splinter.

Apologies? Good will?

But no punishment, then, for the words. He would not have Aemond’s tongue, nor Aegon’s; they would be alright, her baby brothers, as alright as could be expected, and…why had she been so afraid? What had Viserys ever done to make her think him man enough to—

Something in her head wrenched, and she remembered.

Hardly eleven, hiding her face in Baelon’s neck as he held her. Screaming, screaming, screaming, as men on her father’s orders held a young boy down and took his hands from his wrists. The boy threw a rock in the courtyard trying to knock over a bucket perched on the wall, and it flew wide. It hit Baelon hard in the side of his head, sent him crumbling, and Viserys…Viserys took the hands that threw the stone.

This is not that life, she reminded herself even as she slumped against Rhaenyra’s side for fear that, if she did not, she would collapse altogether. This is not that life, the life where he would maim to protect his favored, where he loved Baelon enough to rip apart the world. Not that life. Not this father.

“That is insufficient!” Alicent snarled to Viserys’s back, and Visenya peeled her face away from Nyra’s ribs. “Aemond has been damaged permanently, my king. ‘Good will’ cannot make him whole.”

Visenya did not much like the phrasing of that, the implication that Aemond was broken beyond repair and no longer worth what he was before. A piece of fine dishware shattered on the ground; a window cracked from a flung stone. Things would be different now, harder now, but it did not make him less.

“I know, Alicent,” Viserys said, as if speaking to an unruly child, and Visenya, despite her dislike for her stepmother, found she did not much care for that either. “But I cannot restore his eye.”

“No,” spat Alicent, “because it’s been taken.”

“What,” demanded the king, “would you have me do?”

Visenya knew before Alicent said it. Knew it, felt it in the bones of her, heard the words before they sounded, and the queen’s lips kept forming their shape even as she threw up another desperate prayer for the gods to make it all stop.

“There is a debt to be paid.”

Viserys gazed back at her, blankly confused, expectant. Rhaenyra went still in every muscle, a wave of tension rippling through her back. Visenya reached blindly back to interlace her fingers with Luke’s.

“I shall have one of her son’s eyes in return.”

A scandalized titter raised from the crowd, but Visenya could not hear it over the rush of blood roaring in her ears. Her hand released Rhaenyra’s, both hands fumbling behind her to push Luke further behind her back, and looked with wide eyes to her father.

“My dear wife—”

“He is your son, Viserys. Your blood—”

“Do not allow your temper to guide your judgment,” he said in a low tone, approaching his wife as one would approach a frightened animal.

“If the King will not seek justice, the Queen will,” Alicent fired back, chin jutting imperiously, so fucking smug as she threw her hot eyes towards where Luke still stood trembling behind Rhaenyra and Visenya. “Ser Criston, bring me the eye of Lucerys Velaryon.”

Even Ser Cole did not seem to know what to do with that.

“He can choose which eye to keep,” Alicent added, graciously spiteful. “A privilege he did not grant my son.”

“You will do no such thing.” Rhaenyra’s voice was deadly, a hiss that drew from somewhere in her chest that would never appear in any anatomy book, that no maester would ever be able to find.

“I will take his first,” Visenya said, lowly, bared teeth and wild eyes, and the walls themselves rattled hard enough to make the crowd cry as Vyper swooped so close outside that his tail and legs dragged over the roof.

Her little god’s hands fisted in her skirt, his face pressing hard into her back with a strangled whimper, and Visenya patted at his side best she could from the awkward angle, best she could without taking her eyes from the knight.

Do not worry, she thought. Do not worry, bykys jaes. I will burn us all alive before I let his hands so much as touch your face.

(They would say in the years after that the purple of Aemma Arryn’s daughters’ eyes turned to flame and the silver of their hair to scale, that their shadows cast by firelight warped and twisted until they turned to dark dragons flickering over the wall.

Some would say the war started with spilled blood and dead princes, but the ones who were on Driftmark that night knew the truth of it—the war started with a prince’s lost eye; the war started with a sister’s call for blood and a mother’s thirst for vengeance and a father’s turned away face.)

“Stay your hand,” Viserys ordered, head snapping towards Cole.

“No, no, you are sworn to me!” Alicent growled, a petulant child denied dessert.

Visenya looked to Ser Cole, and she knew. Were it not for all the eyes on them, were it just children and the queen and Rhaenyra in the room to bear witness, he would carve out both eyes and slit Luke’s throat for good measure if Alicent asked it of him.

You love her to madness, Visenya thought. You’ll serve her to death. I hope your gods damn you for it.

“As your protector, my Queen,” Cole answered, eyes dropping shamefully from her face.

“Alicent, this matter is finished,” Viserys said, slowly, firmly, exaggerating each syllable as he approached his wife and hovered in her face. “Do you understand?”

For a single, mad moment, Visenya thought she would strike him.

Alicent’s eyes dropped, and Viserys turned his back.

Aemond’s eye found her again, then dropped to somewhere around her waist; she urged Lucerys back behind her with a shifted arm and a quiet murmur. You did not deserve this, she tried to say without speaking when Aemond’s betrayed gaze raised back to her face, but neither does he, little brother.

“Let it be known,” Viserys boomed, “anyone whose tongue dares to question the birth of Princess Rhaenyra’s sons should have it removed.”

This life and this father after all, Visenya thought, drily, and she looked with lingering eyes to Jace’s dark curls.

“Thank you, Father,” Rhaenyra said, small and sweet, favored daughter preening in her sunlight, and Visenya felt a pulse of unnamed emotion. A flurry of something, a fierce yank in her insides, and she’d just started to say her sister’s name whenever the queen tore the blade from Viserys’ belt and flew.

Viserys shouted, Ser Harrold and Ser Cole bellowed as they lunged, but Visenya did not hear a word of it. She jumped forward on instinct, tried to throw herself in front of Rhaenyra and the boys, but Nyra flung her backwards with a swept arm that near knocked the air from her chest. She slammed into Jace, still hanging onto Luke with one hand as they tumbled in a pile of screaming limbs.

When Alicent raised the blade, Nyra caught it.

Visenya lunged forward with a cry as the women went staggering forward, wrestling with outstretched arms: the queen trying viciously to bring it down, Rhaenyra struggling to keep it in the air. Little hands held her back, Jace and Luke clinging to her skirts, Luke’s shrieks loud enough to rival her own.

“You’ve gone too far,” Rhaenyra said, broken words through clenched teeth,

“I?” shrieked the queen, and she must have gone mad at the sight of her maimed son. That was the only explanation for the look on her face, the twisted rage lurking there, the poison spilling out of her. “What have I done but what was expected of me? Forever upholding the kingdom, the family, the law—while you flout it all to do as you please!”

The knife flickered in the air, and Visenya saw it happen behind her eyelids. The blade burying itself into Rhaenyra’s chest, her sister dying split open on these floors, the only mother she ever knew lost to her.

“Where is duty? Where is sacrifice? It’s trampled under your pretty foot again!”

“Release the blade, Alicent!” Otto Hightower called, but Visenya did not turn to look at her father’s Hand.

“And now you take my son’s eye, and to even that, you feel entitled—”

“Exhausting, wasn’t it? Hiding beneath the cloak of your own righteousness. But now they see you as you are.”

Rhaenyra shoved her back just as Alicent tried to bring the knife down harder, and Visenya heard the slice of flesh as the queen went stumbling back towards her husband. She went flying, tearing her way out of Luke and Jace’s arms, a throng of limbs and tears and panic as she ducked past Lord Corlys and pressed into Nyra’s side.

“Nyra, Nyra, Nyra—”

Rhaenyra held her with one arm, but she held the other a little way away from her body. Lord Corlys leaned in with a murmur, one hand glancing briefly off Visenya’s back as he checked on his good-daughter’s bleeding arm; the room went quiet yet again as the heir to the throne’s blood spattered against the floor.

The knife clattered from Alicent’s hand.

Aemond rose then. Slow steps, careful, the muscles rippling all through his body as he struggled with each lurching movement. “Do not mourn me, Mother,” he said, voice shaking, a bitter sort of sweetness as he reached for her. “It was a fair exchange. I may have lost an eye, but I gained a dragon.”

It should not have been an exchange, she thought, but her attention dragged away from him. The boys were whimpering, Jace’s hand fisted in her skirt so tight the fabric was ripping; Nyra’s hand fluttered over her hair, trying to soothe her as she crooned.

“This proceeding is at an end,” Viserys rasped, and he looked at his wife as if he had never seen her before in all his days. Ser Cole thrashed against the other guards—why were they holding him? What had the cunt done, when she was so distracted by Nyra and Alicent that she hadn’t seen a thing?

And Daemon—Daemon came to them then. Prowling through the crowd that parted for him like water, his eyes on Rhaenyra. His eyes on her boys.

He looked at Rhaenyra like a meal. Like an offering. Like a crown on a pillow waiting for him to pick it up.

Visenya knew then, though she would not recognize it for some time yet. She knew then that something would soon happen to Laenor Velaryon. She did not know when, did not know what, did not know if Nyra would know, but the heart inside her heart knew the truth of it.

When Daemon smiled at her, soft and assessing, she did not smile back.

She looked back to the queen instead, holding Aemond close as he rested his head on her shoulder.

One day, she thought, looking her stepmother in the eyes even as the queen gazed right through her, I am going to kill you. I am going to be the last face you see in this life.

(Visenya Targaryen kept half of that promise.)

Chapter Text

Visenya behaved herself for exactly three days after they returned to the Keep.

She did not flinch away from Viserys when he reached papery hands out to finger her hair and stroke at the soft skin of her cheeks; she did not smear her face with dirt in an attempt to mask her mother’s ghost; she did not eat quickly enough to make herself sick in order to flee the room as quickly as she could. She went to him in the evenings when he asked it of her, not an excuse to be heard; she read to him without so much as an eye roll or a huff of air. When he said she looked of Aemma, she smiled and murmured her thanks. When he looked at her with that funny way he had that meant he’d lost himself in a dream of the life he could’ve had if she’d died in Baelon’s stead, she only turned her face away.

She flew each day as she always did, but she obeyed her father’s command to land before the sun dipped below the horizon instead of staying in the air until the moon inched towards its peak. She attended her lessons, which flustered her tutors; she never took to learning at tables, far more likely to squirrel herself away in a dark nook with her own choice of text than to sit quietly while a septa quizzed her on the sigils of houses she cared naught for. What did the words of House Tully matter when she could glut herself on the whispers of blood magic and the tales of dragon riders long dead? But she did it anyway without complaint, kept her lip uncurled and her tongue dulled, replied to their questions in the common tongue rather than in High Valyrian and did not allow the siren song of the sunlight coming through the windows to pull her from her seat.

She ate neatly, napkin in her lap and elbows far from the table. She clipped every foul word from her sentences and softened each sound to mush in her mouth, gushing sweet and simple to anyone who approached her. She embroidered with the other young noble ladies—who did not know what to do with themselves when the flighty princess sat down in their midst as if she’d done it a thousand times. It turned quickly to the usual affair of batting eyelashes and simpering; every noble girl wished to befriend the princess, so notorious for having little use for those outside her blood, though the twist of their faces and the sheen in their eyes told her they did not like her very much at all.

That was alright. She did not like them either.

Except for Brigit Ironsmith, the thirdborn daughter of a small Northern house sent down south to ward with a distant relative in hope that she would be taken to wife by a man of higher class and heavier purse than her own family; she had a jaggedly sharp tongue and a clever mind and the bluest, clearest eyes Visenya had ever seen in a girl’s face. Speaking with Brigit brought a heat to her cheeks and her belly, but she found herself admitting that it might be nice, for once, to have something like a friend.

After those—grating, mortifying, annoying, terrible—three days, she tried again to go to Aemond.

She tried the night he lost his eye; Alicent chased her away when she tried to see him on the ship; the guards at the door when they returned informed her that the queen ordered her not to be given entry to the prince’s rooms.

It might have infuriated her if she did not understand it. Aemond lost an eye; Aemond had been maimed, and Visenya had been there. No matter that she grabbed for Luke, no matter how many times she screamed for them to stop—in Alicent’s eyes, she was as guilty as Rhaenyra and her sons.

“I wish to visit Aemond,” she announced at breakfast, laying her fork and knife neatly over her plate. Her father looked up with a faint confusion, as if he did not remember how his daughter knew an Aemond or why she should wish to see him; Alicent froze halfway through cutting a piece of fruit, face contorting as if she’d bitten into a lemon.

Aegon—who woke screaming from nightmares since Driftmark, who crawled into her bed near every night tugging anxiously at his own hair and muttering I should have been there, Enya, he should not have been without me; he is mine to look after, and I am his; Mother is right—jerked in his seat, face turning eagerly towards his mother as his lips worked around the newfound hope.

To Alicent Hightower, Aegon being abed was as much a crime as Visenya’s inaction; Aemond’s bar remained barred just as heavily for him as it was to Visenya.

Helaena raised her eyes far more slowly, still chewing with neat little clicks of her jaw. She alone felt no touch of guilt for their brother’s lost eye, though she fretted constantly over his pain and the maesters’ care and whether he knew why she had not been back to visit him again.

Alicent took her only daughter to visit Aemond only once for a few moments when they first arrived back to the Keep, then hauled her from the room and declared her too sensitive to be faced with such stressors.

When no one answered, she said again, “I wish to see Aemond.”

“He is not well enough for visitors,” said the queen. She did not look to her children or her husband.

“He has visitors,” Visenya said, rocking back in her seat and crossing her arms over her chest. Her jaw locked stubbornly, eyes narrowing. “You see him. Ser Criston sees him. Otto Hightower sees him. You bring seven septons into his rooms every morning.”

“His mother, his mentor, his grandfather, and godly men to pray for his health,” the queen replied, the words clipped and cold.

“His sister,” Visenya countered immediately. “His sisters. His brother. We have as much right to see him as—”

(When she closed her eyes, Alicent could still see Visenya that night. Bloody dress, bloody hair, bloody face. Clinging to Rhaenyra’s hand, whispering into her sister’s ear. Hiding Lucerys Velaryon behind her even as her eyes flitted away from Aemond as if looking at him pained her.)

Alicent’s hands slapped down on the table hard enough that the dishes trembled in their places, and Visenya startled enough that the words died in her mouth. “No,” the queen said in a low tone, and she looked down the table with eyes so hot that it might have frightened Visenya if she was anyone else at all. She was Visenya, though, raised a princess loved and pampered who never need fear a living soul, and so it only pissed her off. “No, you do not. I am his mother, and, if I say he is not well enough for visitors, he is not well enough. You will stay well away from his rooms until I decide you may see him.”

When the hells freeze over and the Wall melts into a summer warm sea went unspoken.

Visenya turned beseechingly to the king. “Father, please.”

Alicent’s head whipped around to turn her glare on her husband.

Viserys, caught between his wife’s fury and his daughter’s pleading eyes, hesitated for a long moment. “If your stepmother says he is not ready for visitors, darling, then it may better for you all—”

Her chair hit the ground with a clatter when she left the table, and she did not turn around when Viserys called her name. She could feel her face turning blotchy red from her own rage, her back so stiff it would snap with a too hard smack, her eyes fixed straight ahead and gone blackened with her frustration. Rhaenyra would have chided her for the look on her face if she had been there.

But Rhaenyra was not. Alicent’s wrath came down on Visenya alone while her sister and her boys were on Dragonstone, while her sister and her boys got to play at happy family, and any gladness she might have felt for their escape died quickly under the choking weight of her envy.

Aegon and Helaena caught her on the stairs—Helaena’s hand fisted in the back of Aegon’s shirt to keep him from getting too far ahead of her with his much longer legs; one of his hands wrapped around her elbow to haul her more quickly along with him. Seeing them together surprised her a little, as Aegon had little use for Helaena and Helaena had little use for people in general, but the shock faded as quickly as it came.

Friends, her brother and sister were not. But they were a united front in this.

“You might’ve kept it up for longer than three days before you accosted her over breakfast,” Aegon said, falling into step on Visenya’s left. She turned a hot look on him, but the snappish retort died in her throat at the sight.

Gangly Aegon with his pinched, pallid face and his mass of frizzy white curls, his lips bitten to a mess and his bloody-tipped fingers twitching anxiously, guilty eyes with half-moon stamps of purple that marked how little sleep he’d found since that night.

“I might’ve,” she agreed, “but it would not have worked.”

Helaena frowned, but, though trying to endear themselves to the queen by behaving opposite of themselves had been her idea, she did not argue. “Perhaps it was a bad idea. Mother has too much blood in her ears for that.”

“It was worth a try,” Aegon granted, giving Helaena’s arm an absent pat. The words did not come with so much as a mean look—though he did seem to realize he was still grasping Helaena’s elbow at that same moment and dropped it as if his palms were burnt—and Visenya reached up to give his hair an approving tug for the small kindness. “Must we give it up now, then?”

Nausea hit her like an anvil, and she looked down at her feet with a twisted grimace as they reached the bottom of the stairs. “I have…an idea. I’ll need a few days.”

“Ghosts can’t hurt you,” Helaena assured her. She stepped closer, patting at Visenya’s shoulder, and she reached up to wind their fingers together with a bemused huff of air. “They do not have hands anymore.”

“I am not worried about their hands, heltus,” she murmured, darkly, and she pressed her lips gently to her sister’s knuckles. “It is their voices that concern me.”

Aegon, quota for silently bearing his sisters met for the day, heaved a great, suffering sigh and shook his head in vaguely disgusted bafflement. “You two,” he said, waving a hand as if to encompass the whole of their heads and hearts and their selves with one fell sweep, “are so damn weird.”

The sisters looked back at him with wide, owlish expressions and, almost as if they’d planned it, blinked in the very same moment.

*&*&*

Nightfall found Visenya creeping quiet through the halls with a satchel banging against her thigh. She’d stuffed it full with spare candles nicked from the sept and fat pieces of chalk stolen from her septas; the bag itself she pilfered from one of the dragon keepers what felt like eons ago.

Every flicker of shadow in her peripheral made her think of ghosts, so she squeezed her eyes shut and pushed forward blind. She did not really need her feet to find her way, after all—she knew well the path to find what had been her childhood rooms in that other life.

There were other entrances to the tunnels, of course—seven that she remembered, half a dozen others that she’d forgotten except for a vaguely unsettled feeling that said they were there somewhere, surely a score more than she still had no memory of finding. She could avoid her old rooms and all the ghosts they held altogether were it not for the fact that she feared her ability to orient herself without the easy familiarity of her usual entrance.

It was one thing to remember running through the dark with only a half-burnt torch and Baelon’s easy laughter to guide her; it was another thing altogether to creep into the darkness alone, when these feet had never walked the paths and these doors had been shut for more years than even Viserys had been alive. Who was to say who else walked the tunnels in this life, what they left behind when they left, what they took with them? Who was to say paths she once took were not now barred with crumbled stone, that rooms she once knew were not made anew, that doors she once opened were not barred with locks too heavy to break?

Baelon’s old rooms were for nothing but storage now, after all, crates heaped high against the walls and old furniture piled haphazardly in corners. A broken dresser and a pile of discarded tapestries barred the entrance he so often used to creep on light feet into her rooms and her bed and her open arms. How much else would be changed when she went searching for old doorways?

She did not even know for certain if Aemond’s room had an entrance. Most rooms in the Holdfast did, but still others had false doors that would not open or trick doors that led only to more tunnels that looped and twisted and doubled until you’d lost any hope of finding your way back. She and Baelon never marked out the pathways and where they led, so she could not even search her memories to hazard a guess. They memorized the route to each other’s rooms and the way into the city; there was little need to worry about anything else when the tunnels themselves worked perfectly well for whatever they needed.

When she slipped into her old rooms, though, it was still a bedroom. Dusty and meant for guests, granted, but…familiar, still, like slipping on gloves found forgotten in the back of a drawer. Something twisted tight in her gut the longer she hovered in the doorway, her eyes drifting slowly over empty windowsills (pretty shells she and Laena scavenged from the shore, a carved wooden dragon Daemon sent her from Essos) and bare walls (tapestries strung up to cover every inch of bare stone, dragons twisting through air and around each other and bursting from the mouths of volcanoes that belched lava towards their wings) and the empty desk shoved against the wall (beneath the window she would stare out of as she waited for her sister to come back again, scattered with letters from Nyra and Daemon, cluttered with vases she filled with the bouquets Baelon used to bring her from the gardens).

It took more effort than she thought it would take to step inside.

Baelon kissed her for the first time here. Thirteen, still children, but she’d known for years by then that she loved him like she’d never love another. It took him longer—took a fib about a lordling boy and a fit of jealous rage that turned his whole face purple—to know it as she did, to know that the way their souls sang came from more than that they came to life together, but it had him just as fiercely as it ever had her.

They slept here most every night until they were wed. Baelon would sneak through the wall with his finger over his lips, slip into her bed, and tuck his face into her neck. I do not know how to sleep without you, he always said, tracing pictures on her stomach with his fingertips, lips against her shoulder so she felt more than saw it when he smiled. But then I do not know how to be awake without you, either.

She knew it would not be there.

She checked the headboard anyway.

Baelon carved their names there the night before they were wed. Visenya could see him when she closed her eyes, sprawled out on his belly with her sheets all tangled up around his bare hips (because he could wait fifteen years but gods forbid he wait a single night more to get between her legs), the muscles in his shoulders rolling as he used his fancy, pretty dagger to cut her name and then his own into the wood. So whoever sleeps here next remembers we were here first, he said, smug and snickering, and she put a pillow over her face to muffle her giggles.

Smooth wood greeted her when she ran her hand over the board, and the absurd notion that she should take the dagger Daemon gifted her and put them back where they belong hit her so hard that she had to let out all her breath.

Visenya looked away instead.

Her Baelon was dead. Her Baelon had been dead for twelve years now, for all of this life, and they shared no nights or kisses in this bed. It would be a lie to pretend he made any sort of mark on this version of the world, any sort of mark on anything but her.

“We were here first,” Visenya murmured to his ghost, and she turned her back to the bed to focus her attention on the wall.

The bricks stared back at her, and she realized with dismay that she did not even almost remember which it was. She’d marked it with a smear of ink in that other life, and it had become muscle memory so quickly that she never bothered to count it out.

She raised her arm tentatively and pushed at a brick with her fingertips.

It did not move.

Muscle memory, apparently, did not always carry over from dreams.

Why would it?

That would be far too easy.

She thought about leaving. Helaena and Aegon would not question if she said her idea bore no fruit, and no one knew she’d come here. Who would ever know but her?

Visenya swallowed. Turned on her heel. Made it three steps to the door.

It was not her; it wasn’t her, it was not—

She stopped.

I cannot see. Visenya, I cannot see!

She squeezed her eyes shut.

Promise me?

She turned around and started from the top.

Systematically pressing at each brick in the row before dropping to the next (over and over and over) was tedious work. She usually tried to avoid tedious tasks, anything that left her mind too still or her thoughts too unfocused, because she drifted to places where she would rather not go, but there was no real way to make pressing bricks interesting. It did not take long for her eyes to glaze over and her head to go wandering.

Baelon did this in his own room when they were ten and Viserys ordered guards at their doors to keep them from crawling into each other’s beds. Silly and young and soft-faced, no certainties that there even was a door hidden in his wall, but he knew that sleeping alone was no acceptable outcome.

They were always in the tunnels after that. They played tag in the in the dark with torches held over their heads or candles clutched too tight in their hands, startled rats skittering at their feet and spiderwebs catching in their hair as they jumped over bits of rubble and crawled over piles of stone where the walls caved in. Sometimes, they found abandoned crates or little treasures tucked into crevices or corners, and they would spend hours inventing stories—the tarnished locket with the broken clasp belonged to a lady who ran from a marriage to a too-cruel, too-old man, and the golden curl of hair tucked away inside it came from the head of the lowborn lover who waited outside the city for his lady to find her way to him; the crate of books in a too-strange language, so old that their paper turned to dust when they tried to turn the pages, held all the secrets of the monsters and magic that lay Beyond-the-Wall; the knife with the snapped blade and the dragon inscribed on the hilt belonged to Saera Targaryen, accidentally left behind as she fled the Keep to find her way across the sea.

(Maegor gifted that blade to Aenys in their youth—a visit with Visenya to King’s Landing for his estranged brother’s name-day, still a boy, still a babe, a missing front tooth and dimples in his cheeks when he smiled so shy and pressed it into his brother’s opened hand; to keep you safe, Aenys, Aenys.

It passed to Aegon the Uncrowned in the years afterwards—still a boy, still a babe, chubby cheeks and freckles on his nose, sitting on his father’s knee as Aenys pressed the sheathed knife into his young son’s hand with a laughed out to keep you safe, Aegon, Aegon.

It went to Viserys the very last time he ever saw his elder brother—still a boy, really, still a babe, gangling in his youth, the tip of his nose as red as the rims of his welling eyes as the Uncrowned King cupped the back of his neck, pushed their foreheads together, and pressed the blade into his baby brother’s shaking hand. To keep you safe, Viserys, Viserys.

The blade came back to Maegor again when the servants brought him his nephew’s belongings, so few years of life packed into so few boxes, and the king they called the Cruel lifted it from amidst the clothes and books and trinkets; he turned it around in his hands, pressed his lips to the flat of the blade, and, when he turned with a howl to bury it in the stone of the wall, the metal snapped in half beneath all the weight of a mad dragon’s heart.

To keep you safe, he said when he threw it to the floor in the tunnels he made, the tunnels he christened with the blood of their builders, and even he did not know to which of his ghosts he spoke.)

Sometimes, she would quench the light of her candle and bolt from Baelon’s side with laughter tinkling from her throat; she hid in the shadows with her hand clapped over her nose and mouth to muffle the sound of her breathing, trembling excitement at the frantic way he searched for her. He would curse when he found her, his eyes wild with the anxious imaginings of losing her forever in the darkness, and she would fling her arms around his neck and press kisses to his cheeks—did I frighten you, brother? Visenya would ask, giggling, and he would nip her jaw reproachfully and murmur, losing you is the only thing that frightens me.

They got older, eventually, and realized that the tunnels were the only place they were ever truly alone, that there were no guards outside the door or chaperones keeping both eyes on where Baelon’s hand landed on her body. They forgot about tag and stories after that, started playing different sorts of games instead.

A flush raced for her cheeks, and she shook her head rapidly to clear the thought away. Those memories started recently, one of the locks in her head undoing with a heavy clunk as soon as her body started changing without her leave.

She did not mind reliving most things, truly, but she could do without repeating the mortifying ordeals of having septas explain to her about blood and breasts and virtue. You mustn’t weep, the women chided, it may pain you the first few times, but men do not like it when you weep.

It took more willpower than she would like to admit to keep from grabbing all the other girls in the Keep by the shoulders, to keep herself from saying it does not have to hurt, for the love of the gods, it does not, they do not have to hurt you, do not let them tell you there is no other way.

She shoved aside the memory of Baelon’s mouth on her skin, his fingers tugging at her laces as he mouthed at the column of her throat—she put it aside with a squeeze of her eyes and a fierce shake of her head.

She twisted her ankle once tripping over a jagged bit of stone, and he carried her back. His hands tucked under her knees as she clung to his back, her face burrowed into his neck as she inhaled the soft, smoky smell of him. You must watch where you are going, he said, and she tugged his earlobe between her teeth with a sigh; his jaw clacked shut.

He fell in another time, straight through the floor, and she laughed herself sick at the sight of him—flat on his back, hair turned a drab gray with dust, his eyes gone huge with disbelief, mouth opened in a dramatic O of shock. Stop laughing, he cried, laughter spilling from his own mouth as he jumped to scramble up over the edge, give me your hand, Visenya!

They caught their sons once. All four of them come tumbling through the wall, snickering with all the joy of children who believe they have a secret. Her good boys that she held and loved and raised, her sweet boys who ran to her with scraped knees and hurt fingers, her gentle boys who hid their faces in her skirts when they were afraid, her perfect boys who came running for her bed when they had a nightmare. Her boys, whose faces she could see when she closed her eyes but whose names she could not remember—her boys, her boys, her lovely, perfect boys who called her Mother, but what did she call them?

A ragged noise pulled from her throat, and she slammed her hand down on the next brick harder than necessary.

There were reasons she did not like to let her mind wander.

She remembered things that hurt when her mind wandered. Like her daughter’s corpse warm and damp in her arms, golden scales and an almost tail. Like the bitter taste of the moon tea Baelon brought her each time they laid together because he had nightmares where she died screaming just like their mother; like the sound of the maester’s blood gurgling from his throat when years passed without her belly swelling and he urged Baelon to set her aside for a girl who might give him heirs—burn his corpse, Baelon said after, blood on his hands and his face and his mouth, and he smiled, and mark, my lords, that I shall take the next tongue to speak his name. Like the way Baelon screamed when Viserys died, his head in her lap and his mouth to her thigh, moaning like a broken man. Like the look on Nyra’s face when her daughter reached for Vermithor’s reins and came away burning. Like watching a crown put on her son’s head when blood still darkened the skin beneath her nails—

Visenya pushed her hand against the brick directly to the right of the first, and the bricks skidded against each other as the doorway gaped open for her.

“I bet you’re laughing at me,” she said aloud to nothing, because Baelon’s ghost was always with her but she felt him so strongly in the room that she almost expected to hear him call her name. “I bet anything you’re laughing up a storm.”

He did not answer until she lit the first candle with shaking fingers and took a step inside.

It felt like stepping out midair, like the floor fell away from beneath her feet; her organs swooped dangerously low, breath catching in her throat with a strangled choke. She could hear him, almost, if she strained her ears and squeezed her eyes shut. Laughing from the darkness, that bubbling giggle from when he was a boy, and some foolish, hopeless part of her thought that, if she only opened her eyes, he would be coming around the corner with a torch in hand.

Find him, murmured something small inside her, something a little bit mad that she did her best to brick up tight, something that had been broken since she was barely any older than a babe and realized that Baelon was not coming back to her in this life. He is in the dark; he is waiting for you; find him.

Baelon is dead, she answered it, fierce, and she swallowed past the sob in her throat and went on in her search.

Things were not as she remembered them, exactly. A path she followed a hundred times was caved in now, impassable unless she wished to try to squeeze through a hole smaller than her hips. She stumbled upon several doorways that would not budge when she shoved at them, barred by something on the other side. Remnants of someone else’s presence littered the place, too: an abandoned, doused torch left on the floor, a smear of paint on one of the walls marking someone’s way. The feeling of being more alone than she had ever been in all her life…that had never taken her before, even in the tunnels.

But the air was the same, stale and stifling, and the roughness of the stone beneath her hands as she inched her way carefully through the dark.

You look a ghost, Baelon’s voice murmured in her ear, and the hair on the back of her neck stood on end. The way the candlelight plays on your face here.

“Shall I say ‘boo’, brother?” she mumbled, unthinkingly. The very same thing she’d said then, spinning on bare feet to grin at him, pursing her lips around a fake scowl when he snatched for her waist. “Will you weep and wail and run away?”

I am not frightened of ghosts, he’d said, snapping his teeth next to her ear, hauling her close and closer as she flung an arm around his neck and desperately twisted the other back to keep the candle from burning him. Giggling as he kissed at her face, squealing at him that he would set his hair alight if he was not careful. Say ‘boo’ all you like, little love; I would never run from you.

She fell quickly into a method as she pressed further into the maze. Each turn marked with chalk, singing beneath her breath to remember which pathways she took—an old trick Laena once taught her, songs always sticking better to mind than words alone. Every door checked and marked, even though she knew she was still too far from the boys’ rooms for any of them to bear fruit.

Visenya found Helaena’s room not so very long after she started—slipping through the wall into a dark, cramped space, scrabbling in the darkness until her nails caught a latch, tumbling out of her sister’s wardrobe with a bleated “fuck”, a heavy thud, and the ruffling of skirts and child as she hurried to right the candle before it set her sister’s rooms afire.

Even through it all, though, her beetle did not wake. Cocooned in her blankets like one of the butterflies she so loved, hair mussed around her face as she whipped it back and forth. Brows drawn, lips peeled back, cheeks wet with tears nearly dry. Half words slipped from her mouth, muttered ramblings of storms and seas, black gravestones and green-faced corpses and six-fingered babes.

Her hands itched to hold her through her nightmares, but night only lasted so long and the days would give her no chance to go searching. She tucked the blankets up tighter around her instead, stroked her hair back from her face, brushed a kiss to her forehead before squirming her way back through the wardrobe into the tunnels.

It took her three nights.

She did not sleep except for a snatched hour here and a few stolen minutes there, but no one noticed. Once Visenya returned to her usual ways of fleeing anyone with any sort of authority over her and spending all her time in the air with Vyper, Alicent’s sharp gaze subsided; comforted, Visenya supposed, by the fact that her stepdaughter seemed to have given up on her brother.

And yet, each night after her maids left, Visenya crept alone into the dark of Maegor’s tunnels. She did not know how to find the boys’ hall, which paths would take her there or which would take her too far, which ended in dead ends and crumbled stone and the bones of those who had lost their way long ago.

Don’t look, Baelon’s voice soothed, the ghost of a ghost’s memory. The first time they found a dead man in the tunnels, his hand pulling her face against his shoulder before she saw anything more than a skeletal hand laying limp. Don’t look, sweet dragon.

Visenya was not afraid of corpses in either life, but she…found she still did not much wish to get lost in the dark with them without Baelon to hide her face and kiss her eyelids when she squeezed them shut.

But she would to find Aemond. She would if it meant she could bring Aegon and Helaena their brother, if it meant she could settle the anxious madness that took hold of them all when Alicent forbade them from entering.

She found a dozen studies, a score of empty bedrooms meant for more important guests. She found storage rooms and pantries and empty rooms with nothing but wide-open windows; she found more than one pair of servants pressing close together for a moment alone.

Each night, she went first to Helaena’s room before she began the search; each night, she went first to Helaena’s room before she ended it. Over and over, until she knew the path, until she could run it with no candle to light her way, until it would take her only a thought and three minutes to get to her sister in the dark.

(She drew the routes for her nephews in the years to come—in case you ever need flee, she said, sternly, as Jace and Luke both jested of planting spoiled eggs in her rooms; in case you must run to keep yourself safe—with detail enough to make architects weep. Daemon would find Luke’s copies in his desk, the loops of every tunnel and the neat labels she made of each room, and his fingers would still over Helaena’s.)

On the third night, she wiggled through an entryway half blocked by a chest and a rumpled tapestry and only realized it was Aegon asleep in the bed when he sat up and screeched.

“It’s me!” she yelped, hurrying to set the candle on his night table, looking with panicked eyes at the door. “Hush, hush, before the guards hear you—”

“What the fuck?” he said, still far too loud. He seemed to realize it, though, and dropped his voice low when he said again, “Visenya, what the fuck? Did you crawl from the wall?”

Crisis averted, she developed awareness enough to register that he was clutching his blankets over his chest like a scandalized maiden; an older sister before she was anything, she paused long enough to snicker before saying, “Maegor’s tunnels, Egg—I thought I’d be searching for another week. I have been looking for ages!”

“Is this what you’ve been doing?” he demanded, and she yelped when he swung his legs out of bed; he apparently slept naked in his own rooms, and she got an eyeful of blindingly pale thighs before she spun around to face the wall with her mortification painted all over her face.

“Yes! Put on your clothes!”

“Well, I’m sorry,” he snapped, though he had grace enough to sound vaguely embarrassed. “I was not aware you would be crawling from the brickwork!”

“Stop griping!” she moaned, rolling her eyes, and then she laughed. “Get dressed and wait for me; I have to fetch Helaena.”

“Helaena?” he repeated, and she could hear his distaste. “Why Helaena?”

“Aemond’s only two doors down from you,” she said, slowly, so his feeble little mind could put all the pieces into place. “If I’ve found yours, then either the next one or the one after—”

“Will be his,” he said, slowly, and then, far more brightly, “oh!”

“Clothes,” she insisted again, and he did not have a chance to ask any further questions before Visenya went nosing back into the tunnels.

Helaena sat waiting for her when she fell from the wardrobe, hair braided neat down her back and hands folded in her lap; she did not so much as startle at the sight of Visenya crawling from amidst her dresses. She rose while Visenya was still crouched, shocked, on the floor and scurried hurriedly over to the older princess.

“The ghosts did not hurt you?” she asked, offering her hand, and Visenya smiled half-heartedly when she took it.

“Only cut open old wounds.”

Their fingers stayed interlocked all the way through the tunnels, though Helaena seemed at ease in the dark. Sometimes she even tugged a little at Visenya’s hand, as if she knew the turn already.

When they found their way back to Aegon’s room, their brother stood bouncing impatiently in the mouth of the doorway. His hair stood straight up in some places and hung lank in others; a bit of drool clung dry to his cheek from his sleep. “You took ages,” he informed them crossly.

Visenya made a gesture that told him where, exactly, he could stick his impatience.

Aegon pulled a face back at her and then, with a haughty sniff and a tilt of his head, stalked past them into the darkness.

“That brings you to the city, Egg,” Visenya called without turning, and he skidded to a stop. “Unless you think we may find him holed away in Flea Bottom?”

(Aegon Targaryen was only a boy of ten, but he would not yet be eleven when he followed that tunnel to its end and lost whoever it was he might have been.)

“I,” he said with great dignity, “was only testing if you knew that.”

Visenya stuck out her free hand, lips twitching as Helaena failed miserably at stifling her giggles, and Aegon took it with a grudging, nasty mumble.

Aemond’s door, thankfully, was of the easy sort. No tricks or levers, only rough stone that the three of them threw themselves against until the brick gave way with a scraping of stone. He slept through their unceremonious entrance, which she was grateful for—it took them a moment to disentangle before they hurried to his bedside.

He looked so very small in his blankets. So very soft, with his smoothed out brow and his twitching mouth, making strange little sounds that might have been words.

“Well,” said Aegon. “Wake him.”

Visenya turned on him with a sputter. “Why must I do it?” she demanded. “I found him; it is your turn to do something.”

“You’re the eldest,” Helaena said, sidling over to tuck herself somewhere behind Aegon’s back. Using their brother as a shield; Visenya approved. “And—oh, Enya, he bites when people wake him.”

Aegon snapped his teeth for dramatic effect, nodding vigorously. They looked, for a moment, like something of a matched set: Helaena on tiptoes to peep over his shoulder, soft and apologetic, as Aegon glanced at their little sister with a twisted mouth and vague approval on his face.

“I wish none of you had ever been born.”

Helaena and Aegon did not bother answering; they both knew it for a lie.

(The day would come, not so very many years from then, when it wouldn’t be.)

She did not wake him gently. Visenya had never been and would never be particularly gentle with Aemond, except in matters of grave emergencies; rather, she slid onto his bed, smacked a hand over his mouth to muffle any screamed, and leaned directly into his face to snarl “quiet” as soon as his single eye popped open wife in panic. He did try to bite her, teeth closing on her palm, but the bandage covering the bite mark on her palm seemed to disorient him for the second it took his eye to focus on her.

“Alright, valonqus?” she said, voice kinder than she meant it to be, and his brow furrowed in such clear confusion that she might have laughed if her eyes were not lingering on the line of enflamed, salve-slicked stiches that cut across his face. One of her brows cocked when he only continued to stare and, then, slowly, he nodded.

She pulled her hand away from his mouth and settled back to sit on her ankles.

“Where did you come from?” he asked, struggling up onto his elbows and squinting at her. She lifted a shoulder, falsely careless, and he wrinkled his nose. “Did you climb through the wall?”

“That is what I said!” Aegon whisper-shouted triumphantly, and Aemond startled all over again. His head whipped around immediately, entire body lurching to the side, but all the tension flowed out of him immediately at the sight of Helaena and Aegon huddled close to his bed. “It is downright creepy, is it not?”

“Who was it that snuck you in?” she demanded, indignantly, arms crossing over her chest with a huff. “I seem to recall that I am the one who spent three nights in a row crawling through cobwebs and waltzing with rats looking for his doorway. Next time, I will fetch Helaena, and you can roll about bored and naked in your bed instead—”

“He sleeps naked?” asked Helaena, horrified.

“It is comfortable,” Aegon hissed back, the black look he sent her nothing short of murderous, but then he and Helaena seemed to realize at the same moment that they were in Aemond’s room, that Aemond was awake, and their mother was not there to stop them.

They moved in the same moment, tripping over their own feet and shoving at each other’s arms in their eagerness to join Visenya on the mattress; she yelped when Helaena’s hand smacked her upside the head. Aemond struggled to sit up straight, face creasing with a stricken sort of alarm as he hunched back against the headboard.

“Does it hurt?” Aegon asked, curiously. “It looks…well, to be honest with you, brother, it looks awful, but I have heard women like scars—”

“Has Mother brought you any books?” Helaena asked, reaching out to interlace her fingers with Aemond’s. “She swore to me that she would when we left that day, but she would not tell me—”

“—you might have told me you were going after Vhagar; I would have come with you—"

“—have you had any fevers—”

“—I should have been with you—”

“—do you know when Mother will let—”

“—Mother was right—”

“—I will not let him go anywhere near you, Aem; not ever again, I swear it—”

Visenya realized suddenly that it would have been best to bring Helaena and Aegon separately the first time; Aemond’s eye flicked frantically between the two of them, thumbs tapping nervously at his palms in his lap, and she did not even have to think before she reached out for Aegon’s hair.

He yipped when she yanked, twisting backwards as she used her handhold in his frizz to haul him towards her until he half splayed across her lap. Helaena quieted into a soft giggle, and Visenya grinned down at his expression of betrayal.

“You can speak more slowly,” she said, mildly, and it was a testament to the strangeness of the past days that Aemond shot her a look almost pained in its gratitude. “He is not going anywhere.”

“Not that I am not pleased to see you,” Aemond said—his eye stayed on Helaena when he said it, but Visenya and Aegon gave no outwards signs of offense—slowly, “but is there a reason you came through the wall in the middle of the night instead of…oh, I do not know, through the door at a decent hour?”

“Many,” Visenya said, airily, sneaking her other hand into Aegon’s hair; as soon as he realized her fingers were working to twist it into a braid, he attempted to flee, but she dragged him back so harshly that he yelped. “Most of them are some variation of ‘your mother would not let us in’, even though we behaved ourselves for ages.”

“Acted like damned saints,” Aegon agreed, glumly.

“Three days,” said Helaena. “They struggled mightily before they succumbed.”

“Visenya succumbed,” Aegon countered. “I could have managed forever.”

“You are a lying little cunt, and everyone here knows it,” Visenya cried, outraged, and then paused to inhale. “Anyway. The door was not an option. Hence, the wall.”

“No,” Aemond said, his head shaking. “Mother said…”

He stopped, lips pursing, but it was not hard to guess what his mother said. That Helaena was too sensitive and easily upset to be made to look at the tattered wreck of his face, that it would be cruel to ask it of her no matter how she loved him. That Aegon did not understand the severity of what happened, that duty and family did not mean to him what they should mean.

That Visenya did not wish to see him at all.

Visenya focused her attention on Aegon’s hair. If she didn’t, she feared she would do something foolish.

“She is cross that Aegon was not with you,” Helaena explained, “and she thought I was upset when we left that day because of your eye, but I was not. I do not care about your eye, Aemond; I was only upset that you looked so sad.”

“And Visenya—well, you know. She hates her,” Aegon added, almost as an afterthought.

“With the fury of a thousand suns,” Visenya agreed.

She blames me. She knows I could have stopped it. She knows I did not.

“So, it was—Mother would not let you in?” Aemond asked, and the look on his face made her want to tear the world apart. The hesitant hope, the uncertain flicker in his eye as he looked slowly between the three of them. She wanted to burn and kick and bite and scream over the cruelty of it, that the queen thought to tell him that his siblings did not care and to make him feel unloved—and worse, worse that he believed her.

Perhaps if you’d ever given him a reason not to believe her, a snide little voice in her head suggested, and she threw it into a dark corner of her mind, stuffed it into a box, locked it up as tight as she could.

“No,” Helaena said, shaking her head. “I tried, and Aegon tried, and Visenya tried every few—”

“How are you?” Visenya interrupted, because she would rather die than have him know just how ferociously she had been trying to get to him these past few days. Much had changed these past few weeks, and she was willing now to let him understand how she cared for him, that she even loved him in her own twisted, hateful way, but she could not bear to let him know the extent. “Your…your eye?”

“Well,” he said, “I do not have one. So, there is that.”

“But no fevers,” she said, biting her tongue to keep from snapping at him for the quip, biting her tongue to keep from snorting a laugh. “No infections, no—"

“No,” he said, and he allowed Helaena to take his hand with a soft glance towards her. “No, the maesters say the wound was clean. That I am lucky in that.”

(Lucky, he thought, venom in the back of his throat, lucky.)

Visenya finished Aegon’s hair and pushed him gently from her lap, then settled quietly back to watch the three of them.

Aegon babbled a mile a minute, snippets of stories broken off by unconnected thoughts, everything smashing into each other and then dribbling back again; Aemond did not seem to know what to do with so much undivided attention from his brother, with the way Aegon kept patting at his arm and pressing their knees together, but his lips kept twitching into soft smiles and his eye gleamed bright.

Aemond’s quiet delight kept her from rolling her eyes and telling him to calm himself, though the chatter frayed at her nerves quickly. That, and that she did not know what was going on inside Aegon’s strange little head. He loved to tease their brother, to pick and pull and nag and hurt, dig his finger into bruises and bite at closed wounds—but Aemond was his brother, his twin, and he loved him. She knew that with a surety that never really wavered, even when Aegon did not seem to know it himself.

Learning of his brother’s eye, the blame of it placed on his shoulder, being locked away from him—it changed something in him that she did not know how to address. The guilt on the edge of his pupils, the self-loathing bubbling behind his teeth…she did not know how to fix it except to let him throw himself into chatter, except not to tease him for how he kept looking at Aemond as if to check he was still there.

“I am not going to need chains for Sunfyre soon,” he said during one twisting tale about one of his flights from the past few days, bright and excited, and Visenya made a noise. He looked at her, affronted. “I am getting better!”

“You are,” she said, careful to keep her voice neutral. “But I would sooner let you try to fly upside down in a storm than take your chains away.”

“Chains?” Aemond repeated, uncertainly.

“To hold you to the saddle,” she explained quickly, because a spasm passed over Aegon’s face that made it clear he was struggling with the urge to shoot a barb that Aemond would knot that if he’d had a dragon when the rest of them did. “Would have been easier on your flight, no? You attach them to your belt or around your legs, and you fasten them to hooks on the saddle.”

“Visenya doesn’t,” Aegon muttered.

“Visenya does not need them,” Helaena answered.

“I do not either!”

“I am better than you are,” Visenya said, gentle despite her quirked lips.

She did not boast.

It was simple fact that Visenya and Vyper knew each other in a way that most riders took decades and lifetimes to find. Visenya never needed to fear falling; Vyper would send himself crashing through the earth and into hell itself before he ever let her hit the ground. She could feel his wings like another set of limbs aflutter on her own back and knew his heart like she knew a song stuck in the back of her throat, loved him like a piece of herself and lost herself in him so deeply that to lose him would kill her. Already the keepers whispered when they thought she could not hear—anxious murmurs that her sweet monster might well go bad when the Stranger took her, twist until he broke and rot until he decomposed, lay waste to the world that took her away until some mad soul managed to send a bolt deep enough beneath his scales that he was free to find her in whatever came after.

“Only because you are older,” Aegon muttered, and Helaena looked to Aemond with the twisted up sort of expression siblings have, the ones that relay messages and shares thoughts and says a thousand words in a moment.

“Most never stop using their chains,” she said, dismissing Aegon with a flick of her fingers. “Nyra still does on long flights. Laena always did.”

Aemond paused to look at her with his brow furrowed, and her stomach tightened when she realized he was going to ask how she knew that—Helaena saved her, though, when she started to murmur to Aemond.

She did not babble like Aegon, not a desperate pouring of words and anecdotes; Helaena had questions, wanted to know things. How different were things without his eye, what changed, would he need anything? Would he walk with a cane, would he still need to blink when his stitches came out? What was it like to see nothing at all?

He answered her questions in the tone of someone trying not to throw up, every word wrenching from beneath his tongue as if he used pliers to drag it out. She understood it in a way. He had always been the graceful one, the nimble one, quick and sure on his feet—to have to tell them now that he kept bumping into walls, that the maesters made him practice reaching for things now because he could not stop missing, that it was difficult to read like he had always loved and writing was enough to drive him mad?

She did not speak as they pressed closer and closer to Aemond. Helaena tucked herself under his arm, head on his chest to hear his heartbeat; Aegon laid his head on his brother’s shin, one hand curled around his ankle. Visenya balanced on the edge of the mattress, watching.

You do not belong here, observed a different little voice. You are half of what they are to each other; you are hateful and spiteful; you are the reason his eye is gone in the first place. Leave them be, leave them here, let them have each other.

She should, but she could not take her eyes off them. Could not stop assuring herself that Aemond was alright and beathing, half-smiling even when he seemed a thousand miles away.

It was only when Helaena fell asleep curled into Aemond’s shoulder—when Aegon’s head began to loll, eyes fluttering before he jerked back awake with a mumble, that she moved.

“To bed,” she murmured. “You can come back tomorrow.”

“Promise?” he mumbled, letting her peel him gently away from Aemond and onto his feet.

“Yes,” she answered, sending him through the door, and then she turned back for Helaena.

Aemond watched her as she studied their sister, trying to figure out if there was a way to carry her so she would not have to wake her from what seemed to be, for once, peaceful dreams, and she almost did not hear him when he asked, “what happened to your hand?”

She looked to him, jerked her eyes away—not because he looked like Baelon but because the shame of it nearly killed her when his attention focused on her alone. If she had been louder, faster, made them listen—

She tugged off the bandage and offered him her palm.

Aemond leaned forward to study the wound, the perfect imprints of her teeth, and then looked back up at her. “Did you do that to yourself?”

“When you climbed the rigging,” she started, then paused and started again. “When she started to call the fire.”

“You bit yourself?” he guessed, when she stopped again, in the tone of one who found it rather foolish, and her mouth twisted.

“If I’d screamed, she would’ve burned you for certain,” she said, finally. She locked her jaw, cut her eyes to him before turning back to Helaena. “So, I didn’t let myself scream.”

Aemond thought about that, for a very long moment. It was only when she finally admitted to herself that she was not going to be able to carry Helaena, when she started to reach for her to wake her, that he blurted, “if it had been Aegon in the tunnels, what would you have done?”

Every limb in her body locked up.

“If it had been Aegon,” he repeated in a shaking voice, like he already regretted asking. “If it had been Jacaerys or Lucerys, or—or anyone but me, what would you have—"

“It was Jace on the ground,” she said, so suddenly young, and she had been a woman grown once, a queen, but she did not feel it then. She only felt like a child who made a choice she must live with, faced with a boy who wanted to know why, who had always deserved the answers that she did not know how to give him. “You had your hands around Luke’s throat, a rock over Jace’s head, and I didn’t—I still did not—and I reached for him, Aemond, I swear that I did as soon as I saw the knife, but I missed. I missed, and I am sorry. I am so sorry.”

“You did not cut out my eye, Visenya,” he said, softly, and he looked down at Helaena. Brushed a bit of hair from her face. His jaw worked around something, and he swallowed. “I do not need your apologies. I just want to know.”

“It was not because of you,” she said after several pregnant beats. “It was not—it was not because of you, Aemond. It was because of them, because I cannot—I cannot hurt them. I cannot raise hands to them. If it had been anyone else in that damned tunnel, anyone else in the world but Nyra’s boys—”

“But it was not,” he interrupted, sharply. “It was her boys. It was me. And you have always picked—”

“Why do I always have to choose?” she snapped, then tensed and snapped her head to the door. The guards did not come, though, so she turned back to him and lowered her voice to a broken whisper. “Why is every always trying to make me choose? Between boys like my brothers and the boys who are my brothers? Why can I not just love them and love you, too?”

“Love me?” he said, voice twisting into something almost like a laugh. “You cannot even look at me. Before the eye, even, you have never looked at me—"

Something in his voice snapped her straight through, and she was tired of pretending.

“You have his face,” she said, in the shaking voice of a girl who had seen war, seen death and blood and bones, who woke screaming and fell back asleep knowing it would only happen again. A truth never told, a secret always kept, but she handed it to the brother who had never seemed care whether she lived or die; she did it without second thought. She did it without much of a first thought, in truth. “You have his…his face, and his voice, his eyes and his mouth and his—”

She broke off, swallowed. Squeezed her eyes shut for a moment.

“Looking at you,” she said, slowly, “is like reaching into barely healed wounds and carving them open.”

Aemond blanched, eye squinting, mouth opening. “Visenya—”

“Helaena’s dreams are bloody,” she said, eyes welling, face burning. “Helaena’s dreams bleed, but mine glow. My dreams are fire and light because, every night, my Baelon is alive. He is alive and well and happy. I know him like I know myself; I can touch him, I can hold him, and then I wake again—I wake up, and he is dead. He has always been dead, and no one else—no one else mourns him. No one mourns him but Father, and he only mourns the idea of Aemma’s son. I wake up grieving someone who has never existed, and then you look at me with his eyes, you speak to me with his voice, and you wear his face.”

Aemond looked at her as if she had grown a second head, as if she had gone right and spitting mad, and maybe he was right. He was right, probably. “Those are only dreams.”

“Dreams,” she said, and she laughed. “Dreams. It will be another nine years before Father dies; I have lived through it before. Do you think I speak Valyrian so well because I practice? Do you think I found these tunnels by chance just when I needed them?”

He did not believe her. She could see it in his eye, the way he looked at her, the way he cut through everything she said with an incredulous, “you hate me because I look like a boy in your dreams?”

“Yes,” she snapped, fists clenching. “I hate you because you are his echo. I hate you because you were born second and sickly, just like he was, and he is dead but you clung on. I hate you because Aegon gets to keep you, and I did not get to keep him. I hate you because you look at me as if you wish I was dead; I hate you because you called our nephews bastards and laid it on our brother instead of telling the truth of it. I hate you for being your mother’s lapdog and wanting to put our damned brother in that stupid fucking throne. I hate you for it.”

She leaned out and flicked him, right between his eye and the empty socket of the other. He jerked back sputtering.

“And I love you,” she said, voice breaking. “I love you because you are my brother all on your own, and you are a cruel little fool—but you are mine. I love you. I love you, and I would take this all from you if I could. I would rip my eye from my head with my bare fingers to give you back yours. I would burn and bleed and, if I could go back, I would put myself in front of that blade before I ever let it touch you. “I can hate you and love you all at once, mittītsos.”

(Did she mean it? She looked as if she meant it, sounded as if she did; the tears said she meant it and the way her face crumpled when she looked to him, but Mother…Mother always said that his half-sisters were pretty, petty liars. But what if she wasn’t? What if it was the truth that she loved him, that it was not her eagerness to see him hurt that stilled him to a spectator but her reluctance to hurt the others? What if she meant it when she said he was just as much hers as the others were?”

“Hate me and love me,” he murmured, bitter, “but you did not choose me. They had me on the ground, four of them, and you did not—"

“I did not choose them,” she said, and she pressed the butts of her palms too hard into her eyes until bursts of light popped behind her eyelids. “You called them bastards and put a rock about their heads, you—you could have killed them, Aemond, and I did not—and I tried to grab him, I tried to—I am sorry. I am sorry, little brother, I am, but I cannot. I cannot choose them over you; I cannot choose you over them. I can only love you and love them, too; I can only protect you both as best I can and take myself aside when I cannot protect you from each other. Can that not be enough? Can that not please be enough?”

(I want you to love me like Aegon, he thought, looking at his red-faced sister and then down to the one still sleeping in his bed. I want you to love me like Helaena, like Jacaerys and Lucerys and Rhaenyra. I want you to love me regardless, I want you to love me more than you have ever hated me, I want you to choose. I want you to choose them or me, hate me or love me, me or a dead boy who never existed. Choose. Choose. Choose me. No one ever chooses me.)

“But we all must choose, Visenya,” he said, almost exasperated, almost angry. Ten years old, a child still, but even the children in the dragon’s house knew already what lay over the horizon; even they knew that their father’s death would bring only one sort of end. “Before it is done, we will all choose. Even you.”

Yes, she thought, reaching out over Helaena to grab for his hand, yes, yes, yes, but Father still lives. I do not need lose anyone, I do not need to lose my family, not—

Voice shaking, she croaked, “Not yet.”

He hesitated, tongue darting out to wet at his lips, and his eye searched her face for something. Something, something, something, she wished she knew what so she could give it to him. “If it had been anyone else, except Rhaenyra’s boys?”

Visenya looked at him, throat swollen in its dryness, and leaned further over the bed to touch their foreheads together. His fingers tightened around hers, and she said, helpless, “Aemond, I would have gifted you their ashes.”

“Not yet, then,” he agreed in a soft, uncertain voice. (Maybe Mother was right, maybe his sisters were only pretty liars, but he would take this lie in both of his hands. He would take her love and her hate and her mad dragon dreams because she was finally looking at him, looking at him like she did not mind what she saw, and he could bite back the hate for the bastards. He could hold his tongue so long as not choosing yet kept meaning that she was not choosing them either.) “Not yet.”

Chapter Text

“I do so love the rain,” Helaena said, almost wistfully. Her embroidery lay forgotten in her lap, golden spiders weaving webs across pale blue cloth; the needle spun idly in her fingers as she turned her eyes towards the window with a sigh. “I should like to fly in it, I think.”

Visenya liked to fly in soft summer showers, in a misting sort of rain, but she did not like to fly in storms such as the one screeching outside just then. When the winds howled and the water threatened to turn to hail and lightning clung like a threat to every breath she took…no, even she did not seek out Vyper’s saddle during storms like this.

“It can be dangerous,” Visenya said absently. She laid on her belly on the rug beside Helaena’s settee, chin propped on her hand as she frowned down at one of the puzzle boards Otto commissioned for Helaena’s last name-day. It was a strange thing, made of wood but with glass sliding pieces, the brightly colored beads inside rolling about in a different direction each time a piece was moved. Helaena claimed that the beads would roll out of the little holes on the side of the board if the sliding pieces were moved into the correct places, but Visenya suspected her sister was playing her for a fool. “Lightning and such, you know.”

“That is what Mother says.” Visenya’s lips thinned, and Helaena laughed beneath her breath. “Agreeing with her will not kill you, you know.”

“It might,” Visenya said, sliding a piece up and another to the left, scowling harder when the blue bead only skidded further away from the hole. “You do not know for certain. I could be allergic.”

“To being agreeable?”

“To your mother.”

Helaena kicked out lightly with her foot, bumping Visenya’s shoulder, and she grinned.

“Have you figured the board out?”

“Have you figured the board out,” Visenya mimicked in a grumble, pulling a face and then rolling around to starfish dramatically across the rug and glare at the ceiling. “No. I am not convinced it is possible to figure the board out. You and your grandfather have concocted an elaborate scheme”—Helaena held her hand out, and Visenya passed her the board without turning her head or pausing her rant— “to inconvenience me and make me feel a fool; it is rather petty, actually, but I figured out the ruse so quickly that I do not even think it is worth it to be angry with you.”

Something pinged off Visenya’s cheek.

She turned her head.

The red bead sat bright and smug upon the rug beside her face.

“Oh,” Visenya said, rather put out. She snatched it up, twisted onto her belly and then up onto her knees, and slid over to the settee to prop her elbows on the cushions beside Helaena, who was rolling the other beads about in her palm and grinning. “Well. I cannot be good at everything, I suppose.”

“Most things, even,” Helaena murmured, and Visenya rolled her eyes.

“Oh, just show me how you—”

Their heads both swiveled around when the door opened, and the queen looked back at them from the doorway. Visenya half-rose automatically, ready to be sent away to her lessons or her own rooms so the queen might spend her time with her daughter.

But Alicent Hightower did not speak. She did not send her away.

She stood there. Green dress rumpled, hair a bit disheveled, lip swollen from her teeth nibbling at it. Her fingers picking-picking-picking at each other around a crumpled piece of paper clutched in her hand. Looking at them both and, then, head turning, looking only at Visenya.

“Mother?” said Helaena, but the queen did not look at her.

“Visenya,” she said, voice trembling a little. She swallowed, reached up to touch at her hair, took a few steps forward. Visenya tensed at the approach, edging backwards a little; suspicion narrowed her eyes and unease crossed her arms across her chest, but she could not say what caused the ice to flood her veins. What forced her heart to pound and the ringing to start up in her ears. “We—I have been looking for you.”

“Is everything alright, Your Grace?” Visenya said; it seemed, oddly, like her voice came from somewhere outside herself. Like she could take a step back if she wished and see herself from the outside, on her knees on her sister’s rug. “Is it—has something happened?”

(I am not the one she will wish to see, she hissed not an hour ago, clutching at her chest with one hand and pressing the knuckles of her other clenched fist into the table as Viserys looked blankly back at her. Husband, surely you should take her the news yourself.

Best it come from another woman, he answered, voice hard, his anger towards his brother and daughter deafening his already closed ears and blinding already blurry vision when it came to the vitriol between his wife and daughter. You are the only mother she knows. Make haste, Alicent; I would have her told before the servants begin to whisper of it.

She would take the news better from their whispers than from my mouth, she said, desperately.

But kings—husbands—fathers so rarely listen. Make haste, he said again. And tell her…tell her I am sorry.)

“Oh, Visenya,” the queen said and, for once, for once, for perhaps the first and only time in all her life, there was something like kindness in her shaking voice when she breathed, “I am so very sorry.”

Visenya would never allow herself to weep before the Hightower queen.

But the gods themselves could not have stopped the screaming.

*&*&*

The news about Laenor changed the energy in the Keep.

Viserys thundered and raged when he thought no one could hear, driven half to madness by his brother’s audacity and so wroth over Nyra’s decision that he almost reminded Visenya of who he was in that other life. Alicent grew nervous, which Visenya only knew because the queen’s hands were always bloody and it became more common to find her tucked up into some dark corner whispering with her father—more common, too, to find Larys Strong somewhere nearby with his beady eyes and snarling little smirk.

Visenya loathed Larys Strong with a fury that she could not name, a woman’s intuition in her stomach that sent her skin crawling and her spine stretching uncomfortably in her back. He unsettled her, made her twitch; her body moved without her leave when he came anywhere near Helaena, orienting itself between him and her sister without second thought.

Harwin’s brother, she often tried to tell herself, trying to convince herself it was only foolishness, but her heart always hissed back, but he is not Harwin.

Alicent’s distraction released Aemond from his rooms, at the least, though the maesters followed him like newly acquired shadows. Fussing over bandages and stitches and salves, trying to teach him to walk and write and read properly with only one eye. Even when they were not, he wandered his way back to his mother in the sept and spent his time whispering prayers that the rest of the siblings did not bother with learning.

Helaena sought him out as much as she could, eager to help in his recovery, showing him new bugs and whispering to him of riddles even she did not understand; Aegon went looking for him only in short bursts, unsure how to behave but quickly chafing under the kindness he showered their brother with originally.

Visenya avoided him as if he had the plague, which she doubted he noticed with how desperately he was also avoiding her. They had not spoken since that night except for in awkward snatches, the uncertainty between them thick enough to be a third person standing with a hand wrapped around each of their throats.

But, then, Visenya had little time for any of her family in the first few weeks after the news came about Laenor.

They had little for her.

Helaena held her hand sometimes, when she could stomach the touch and tears. Aegon was…Aegon. Aemond looked at her like a peculiar sort of creature he read about once but could not recall what the text said. Alicent eyed her with vague discomfort and Viserys with a distant sympathy tinged with frustration—he never took it well when faced with Visenya’s sadness, her face too similar to Aemma’s, her tears too close to her mother’s. None of them really understood why it hit her so hard.

They did not lose Harwin Strong. They did not have to bite their tongues through the loss of it, through the grief of it, all to hide from the court that they had any reason to cry; the only mother they knew did not leave them behind and take boys they called their brothers with her. A woman they once knew and once loved did not sink beneath the waves before their eyes, and they did not watch all while wondering which version of her they were allowed to grieve.

Laenor did not teach them to swim. Laenor never perched them atop his shoulders when they were babes who wished to feel tall; Laenor never twirled them beneath his arm in an impromptu dance without any music playing for no reason at all except that he wished to see them smile. He never whacked their elbows during a sword lesson when they dropped them too low, never tied hair ribbons about his wrists to help teach them to tie their laces, never brushed sugar over their gums when they were babes weeping over losing a milk tooth. He never snuck them into the kitchens in the dead of night after they woke him with teary-eyes and tales of bad dreams, never lifted them up onto the counter with gentle hands, never told them stories of the sea through mouthfuls of pilfered cake until their sobs turned to giggles and let me have me another bite, lēkȳs. Laenor did not call them darling, did not call them dear girl, did not call them daughter. They never looked at him with all the misplaced anger in the world and thought you silly fucking fool, and they were not coming to the world-ending realization that Laenor Velaryon would never be a fool for them again.

They did not lose Laenor, their good-brother, their heart-brother, their father as best as a father could be, a man who loved them as fierce as he loved any one of his sons, a man they loved just as desperately. They did not have to feel the twist in their chest, the nauseous sort of guilt as grief met with gratitude because at least—at least they were finally allowed to cry for something.

She went everywhere in a stumble, her eyes swollen and her voice hoarse, fingers smeared up with the ink from Nyra’s letters. The ones she read until they fell apart in her fingers, the ones she held until the paper ripped, the ones she gripped until they crinkled, the ones she burned in her hearth until they were nothing but ashes. The ones she did not answer.

How could she? The words she wanted to say, the answers she wanted to give—did you know what he meant to do, did you let him do it, do you see who he is now, how could you let this happen, how could you marry him? What have you done, Nyra, Nyra, what are you doing? I need you, I need someone, no one understands, no one here is his family, no one here is mourning, come back, come home, come back; I need you, I need Jace, I need Lu, I need Laenor, Nyra, Nyra, I need Laenor, I need him to tell me it will be alright, I need him to take my grief as he promised he would. I will never forgive you for this, mandȳs, I have already forgiven you, I love you, I hate you, I miss you, Nyra, Nyra—were not acceptable. They could not be put to paper, could not be said aloud, because beady eyes read letters sent by royal hands and pricked ears listened in the walls for royal whispers, and, oh, she was angry, drowning in the betrayal of it, but the traitors who meant to steal her sister’s throne would not be allowed to know it.

She needed—oh, she needed someone to hold her more than she needed anything, and it surprised no one more than her when someone else figured that out.

“Shut up,” Aegon said fiercely, clambering through the tunnel entrance—she had one to this life’s room, too, which he found near immediately in the days after she opened him up to the maze inside the palace. He never focused on anything in his life so much as he did on finding every possible route through the Keep; she thought his voraciousness mostly came from a desire to get places without accidentally stumbling across his mother. “Shut up.”

“What?” she said, shooting upright and rubbing frantically at her face as if it would hide the face that she had been weeping since her maids left. It did little beyond smearing snot and tears across her face, sweat-dampened hair sticking to her temples and down her cheeks. “I did not say anything!”

“But you will,” he said, pouncing onto her bed with his chest puffed out and his jaw set, doing his best impression of someone in control of the situation. They both she could pick him up by the scruff of the neck and toss him if she really wished to do so, and she long ago developed the infallible ability to send him groveling and squirming with a sharp look and well-placed sneer, but she allowed him to maintain the charade if only because of how perplexing she found this entire interaction. “You are going to tell me that you are alright, that I mustn’t worry myself over you, that I should go back to bed, and you will be lying—so just shut up, Enya.”

Her mouth, already parting around the words I am alright, you mustn’t worry yourself, go back to bed, clicked shut just as Aegon reached out to grasp her face between his hands. He leaned forward, their faces startlingly close together, near enough that her eyes tried to cross and his features went blurry, and he scowled.

“I do not care about Laenor Velaryon,” he said bluntly. She tried to jerk away automatically, stomach flipping and ribs tightening into a vice around her heart, but he dug his fingers into her cheeks and did not let her go. “He is nothing to me but a face in the halls; I did not know him, I did not love him, and I do not care that he is dead. But I care—I care that it hurt you to lose him. I care that you weep when we both know how you hate to cry; I care that you move about as if you are the one who died. I care that you are grieving. I do not care about him, but I care about that.”

She stared. Her throat worked when she tried to swallow, lips twisting on her face as she struggled not to cry. He looked back at her with his big eyes so close to the same shade as her own, with his twitchy little face, and his scowl changed to something flat and fierce and unforgiving. It struck her, suddenly, in a way that it did not often strike her, that Aegon was just as much a dragon as any of them.

“I would fix it for you,” he whispered, almost sweetly. “If I could fix it, I would. The same way you are always trying to fix things for me, but I do not know how. I am so sorry that I do not know how.”

She tried to say something, though even she did not know what, but all that came from her mouth was a keening, choked sob.

“You are always the strong one,” he said, and he let go of her face. His arms curled around her instead, her baby brother tugging at her until, too shocked to do anything else, she allowed him to pull her into his frail chest. Bones like a bird, she thought, deliriously, ear pressed to his ribs, skull thrumming with the sound of his heartbeat. “You are always holding onto us, holding onto me. I can hold you this time, Enya.”

And she—she did not know what to do with this.

Nyra held her after nightmares, Laenor held her when she cried, but Visenya held Helaena, held Aegon. She comforted them when they crawled into her bed, she pressed salves to the welts across the back of Aegon’s legs when his grandfather caught hold of him, she brushed away Helaena’s tears when she wept. Visenya did not reach for comfort, only ever offered it; she did not lay any of her weight across their shoulders, only took the yoke of theirs upon herself even when her spine threatened to snap; she did not wet their skin with her tears, only ever caught theirs on her fingertips. Who else would hold them if she did not? Who else would comfort them, who else would tell them they were loved?

“Egg,” she croaked.

“It is my turn,” he said, insistent. “Let it be my turn.”

(In the years to come, when Aegon went tripping down a dark path she could not follow, when he came home reeking of wine and whores and unforgivable sorts of sin, this would be why she never shut her door. This night would be why she washed his face of vomit and sweat and tears, why she washed his hair with gentle hands, why she changed his clothes to something clean. This night would be why she let him hide his face in her lap, why she sang to him when he wept and blubbered and vomited on her shoes. This night would be why she forgave him and forgave him and forgave him—for every cruel word, for every bit of snark, for every cold shoulder and snarled insult, for the treason she knew he did not fight. This night would be why she had to carve her own heart from her chest with twisted fingers, her soul from her throat with tattered nails, before she could ever turn her back on him. This night would be why she loved him, even when she killed him.)

And she wept.

She buried her face in his neck, bunched her fists into his shirt, and she wept. For Harwin, for Laenor, for Baelon, for Laena, for all those she lost from one life to the next. She wept for Aemond’s lost eye, for the misery awaiting Helaena and Aegon in their marriage bed. She wept for how she missed Rhaenyra and the boys, like missing arms and legs, and she wept because she loved them. She loved them, damn her, damn her, she was a fool for it, but she loved them all and knew it would only hurt all the more for it when what was coming finally came.

Aegon did not know what to do, did not know how to comfort. The stroking touches up and down her back were awkward, and his panicked murmurings in her ear bordered on nonsensical. But, still, he did not let go. Even when she soaked his shirt through with tears, even when the wetness from her face wiped off against his neck, even when her fingers dug into the spaces between his ribs so hard that it must have hurt.

He didn’t let go.

And when it was over, when she finally quieted to sniffles and shaky breathing, he still did not. He wiggled instead, situating himself properly so they could fall back onto her pillows, hugging her more tightly.

“Thank you,” she whispered eventually, head on his chest, bird bones and rabbit’s heartbeat.

“I did not do anything,” he answered in that strange little tone, gone shy and uncertain. His mother’s voice nasty in his ear, his grandfather’s breath on the back of his neck, more than like. “I did not…it was nothing.”

“Aegon,” she said, softly, because she…could not remember, suddenly, if she ever told him the same as she told Jace and Lu. She squeezed his hand, hugged him tighter as she sat up to wipe her face. Kissed his forehead. Felt the shift as his weight slumped against her, felt the yoke back upon her shoulders, but that was alright. It belonged there. She did not know how to be without it. “Egg, you are everything.”

Chapter Text

“He’s a bit of a fool, your brother,” Brigit murmured in her ear, and Visenya’s lips twitched around a grin. Brigit did not particularly want to watch Aegon prance about with his wooden sword and had made no secret of this when Visenya first insisted they spend an hour or two on the dais—she had a distaste for Visenya’s little brother—but she brightened considerably the first time he tripped over his own feet and quickly grew enamored watching him make a fool of himself. “The big one, I mean, of course.”

“They are of an age,” Visenya answered, reaching without thinking to fiddle with one of the charms hanging from Brigit’s bracelet. “Not ten minutes apart.”

Brigit refused to call the princes by name, but it came only as a targeted response to Visenya’s inability to keep track of the Ironsmith brood. In her defense, Brigit had two older sisters and four elder brothers, as well as two younger sisters, a younger brother, and a babe still growing in her mother’s belly. Keeping track of all of them by name and trait and convoluted family anecdote would be a feat for anyone.

“The big one is a head taller than the little one,” she said, flipping her wrist to allow Visenya more room with her fiddling and flicking the fingers of her other hand as if to ward away the pesky bug that was the reminder of how twins’ births worked. “Tell me, is it common for you dragons to be so pointy?”

Visenya did not have much in the way of friends in either life. Her brothers, her sisters, her nephews and nieces, Laena—family, always, but never someone unlike her, someone not bound to her by blood. She chafed at the hold of the noble girls who clung to her only to raise their standing, hated that she could never trust them, hated that they only ever wanted what she had to offer.

Brigit took one look at Visenya’s mangled embroidery and said “you’re quite shit at that, did you know?” Brigit with her sharp tongue and her rolling eyes, clever mind and secret smile, thick dark curls chopped at her chin and eyes blue as the ocean in late summer. Brigit with her bubbling laugh and her hands that waved when she spoke and her words so honest that sometimes Visenya wished she would lie.

She liked her.

What a novelty it was.

“You should not speak so about princes,” Visenya teased. Aegon whacked at his straw dummy with a garble battle cry, setting Brigit giggling just before she tucked her face into Visenya’s shoulder in an attempt to hide her mean-spirited glee. She rolled her eyes, affection softening her scoff when she tipped her head a little to the side.

Ser Cole stood watching over his charge, frowning a little but seemingly resigned to his fate; she sometimes wondered if the knight ever missed Jacaerys and Lucerys, if only for a bit of variety. Jace’s skills, while nothing to write home about, were passable, and Lucerys’s ineptitude at least could be blamed on the clumsiness of barely being out of babehood. Aegon, the only prince remaining to show up for lessons with their nephews gone and their brother sidelines, had no such excuses and none of Aemond’s skill.

Though, she would grant him, none of the others were quite so brutal.

“He cannot hear me,” Brigit said, pulling her face from Visenya’s neck. Inexplicably, the loss of the touch pulled a frown to her face, but it faded just as quickly when Brigit blinked those big blue eyes and wrinkled her nose up. “And what would he do, even if he could? You will protect me from his wrath, I am sure.”

“What shall I do against the big one?” Visemya drawled, with a look just this side of too fond. “I am but a girl, and he is, indeed, rather pointy.”

“You are pointy enough to face him,” Brigit said with sheer, then paused. Studied her for a long moment, enough to heat up her cheeks and make her shift on her feet, before adding, “Or prickly, I suppose, is a better word.”

“I am not prickly!” Visenya gasped, in a rather prickly tone. “I do not think you understand the meaning of the word, which is a wonder considering your aunt.”

The family who took Brigit to ward were not really her aunt and uncle, more some twisted approximation of cousin (third twice removed, or second thrice removed, or perhaps fourth once removed, Visenya never could remember), but Brigit’s mother and “aunt” grew up close as sisters when they were girls. They meant to keep her in the capital until she grew old enough to make a match that would raise her family’s station, and, being as they would be the ones to make it for her, her aunt and uncle’s as well. Visenya did not particularly like either of them, but she particularly detested the aunt’s power-hungry eyes and simpering smile and how poorly it hid the acid stewing behind every word she spoke.

She encouraged Brigit often and frantically to do whatever she must to keep the princess’s favor, and Brigit in turn mimicked the lectures in high voices to make Visenya laugh.

But I would be your friend regardless, she said suddenly, not three nights before, turning anxiously to grab Visenya’s hand. I would be your friend if you were no one at all, even if they did not wish me to do so. You know that, don’t you?

Nyra would say that Visenya should take everything Brigit said with a heavy degree of suspicion, but Alicent’s betrayal when they were girls long ago trapped her sister in an eternal flinch…and Visenya still refused to speak to her sister, ignoring her letters even as she wrote letters enough to Jace to hobble the ravens, so what Nyra thought did not really matter.

Visenya wanted to believe her, so she would until Brigit gave her a reason she shouldn’t.

(Be careful with your heart, Nyra would say if she could say anything, if she knew big blue eyes called her little sister down the same path that soft auburn curls once enticed her own feet to follow. Be careful, oh, be careful; this world is not kind to girls who dare love each other too well. This world drags them apart kicking and screaming and still grasping for each other, this world sends men with greedy hands and wicked tongues and vile minds to pry your hands apart. Do not let them break you upon the rocks, do not leave your heart unguarded; sweet girl, little sister, do not forget that she will not be yours forever.)

“Enya,” Aegon called brightly, and she turned her attention back towards him. “Look!”

He spun his sword about in his hand, a trick Aemond often showed off with and Visenya herself always delighted in even when Harwin and Laenor called it silly and foolish and no use at all—clumsily done, his fingers unsure with the spin and the balance of the wooden sword not quite right, but do it he did.

She clapped for him, a little patronizingly; he did not seem to notice.

“Enya,” Brigit repeated, and Visenya hummed in automatic answer. It sounded nice on Brigit’s tongue, even if she did not say it quite right. The bite of possession did not ring in it like it did when one of the boys howled it, the sharpness did not snap in the heart of the word in that way that made it hers. Brigit said it soft and slurring, snowflakes on eyelashes. “Do all your family call you that?”

“Nyra’s boys,” she murmured absently. “Aegon. Helaena, sometimes. Laenor...Laenor used to call me by it.”

“The other brothers do not?”

“Aemond is my only other,” she said, brow furrowing, thinking inexplicably that Brigit meant Baelon, and then paused. “Oh, you mean—I do not know what Daeron calls me. He may not call me anything. I only met him a few times before they sent him away.”

“That is sad,” Brigit said, and perhaps it would’ve been if she knew him. Perhaps she would miss him with the same deep ache with which she missed Jace and Luke, wishing and longing and wanting, but she never did. Her memories of Daeron were blurred, vague things: their father’s hair and his mother’s eyes, the soft burbles of a babe and little fingers wrapping around her own. She never held him that she could remember; he was not yet even weaned when Alicent sent him away to the Hightowers.

“Sad,” she echoed and tilted her face into the sun. Soaking in the heat, letting it seep down into her bones through her skin, basking it in as Vyper did when he laid himself out on the sand. “I do not think so, really. I have kin enough without him.”

“Speaking of your kin,” said Brigit. “You said the little one is not yet allowed back in the yard, yes?”

“His mother is afraid he’ll hurt himself,” Visenya answered without opening her eyes.

She doubted Aemond responded well to the news, but she could not say for certain. Things remained awkward between them even with so much of the animosity dissipated; they locked gazed long enough to exchange a grin, now and again, but they did not speak. It felt too much like wrapping bare fingers around a bundle of raw nerves.

She kept waiting for him to come to her with Baelon’s name on his lips, questions and accusations, but he did not. He acted as if the conversation never happened at all.

“Did your stepmother think to tell him that?”

Visenya’s eyes snapped open quick enough that the ends of her eyelashes smoked.

Sure enough, there strode Aemond. His face turned stubbornly towards the practice swords, fists clenched up at his sides and jaw already twisted into that damned stubborn tilt. He lurched a bit when he walked, unsteady in a way she doubted any who did not know him before would note; he wore the patch about his eye still, hiding the mess of the wound to keep from startling the girls of court.

His mother bid him wear it; every glance at it made Visenya feel as if she swallowed bile.

She watched him in baffled horror as he reached a hand out for one of the swords, and the wicked little creature in the back of her mind—the one who always thought the worst—granted her an image of Aegon’s unskilled flailing ripping the wound of their brother’s eye open wide again.

Months had passed since Driftmark. Long enough for the twins to turn eleven, for her to reach thirteen right on the edge of their heels, long enough for the world to speed up faster-faster-faster beneath her feet—but not long enough for his eye to heal fully. Not long enough for the terror of watching the knife go into his eye to have faded from mind and heart.

“Oh, no,” she said, brokenly, and Brigit’s fingers twined with hers. Visenya would have reacted as if jolted by lightning any other morning, but her attention remained firmly on her brothers. “Oh, no, no, no.”

“My prince,” Ser Cole said, lips parting around a stressed little laughing noise, and Aemond tilted his fierce little face up towards him. “Her Grace has—”

“I am more than well,” Aemond said back, heels digging into the dirt as he pushed his shoulders back. His good eye narrowed something fierce. “I have been away from the yard for months now, Cole. I will fall even further behind should I stay away.”

“How long does it take to recover from losing an eye?” Brigit murmured, and Visenya tongued at her bloody lip—wondered, distantly, when she bit it.

Something like a year, perhaps, the maesters said. His body needed to acclimate to the lack of visual from one side; his other eye needed to come to terms with doing twice the work. He would need to learn how to walk, how to write, how to fight all over again. Would it help him to go back to the field, or would it only put him in unnecessary danger of reopening the wound? Was the chance for infection gone now with how long it had been?

Physically, anyway.

Mentally, she did not know if he ever really would.

“Not five months,” Visenya answered, finally.

Ser Criston did not seem to know how long it took either, standing uncertainly with his hand on the back of his neck—torn between the desire to snatch his star pupil back into his grasp and the itch to obey his queen, no doubt.

For once, she found herself hopeful he might listen to the part of him that had its head shoved up Alicent’s ass.

But he did not get the chance; Aegon, noticing the disruption, wandered over on springing feet to investigate the arrival of his brother.

“Can cripples even wield blades properly?” he asked, loud enough for it to carry over the yard, the almost oblivious-almost curious tone of his voice doing nothing to hide the sting of a mean-spirited jape. Tinged with the cruelty he carried with him everywhere, biting at his tongue and pressing to his teeth to get out at the world, and she flinched from the snarl of it. From the message tucked up inside it, the splinter he knew damned well would slide directly beneath their brother’s nail: you have a dragon now, but you’re still just a little less than all the rest of us, aren’t you, brother?

Aemond, born to his brother’s shadow and all the cruelty that stewed there, eleven years of living with Aegon’s needles pricking at his skin under his belt, knew the sting of it better than Visenya ever would. He did not flinch.

He hit him.

Visenya made it halfway across the yard before Brigit’s scrabbling hold and planted feet managed to yank her to a stop. “You cannot jump between them, can you?” she hissed in exasperation, though the alarmed look she sent towards the thrashing mess of prince said that she certainly thought someone should.

And. Well.

Visenya watched her brothers train often, especially in the days when Jacaerys and Lucerys still lived in the Keep. She would sit on the ledge of the dais in those days, legs dangling and forgotten book open across her knees as she craned forward to catch more glimpses of the singing blades beneath them; Laenor would stand beside her, calling to his sons with one hand bunched up in the back of her gown, ignoring each of her attempts to dislodge him. You do not pay attention, he complained when she tried, you will lean too far forward and fall, and how will you do anything with all the bones in your ankles shattered?

Harwin encouraged her voyeurism, quizzing her each evening on the mistakes the princes made and the mistakes they did not, asking what she learned from the advice the knights gave their squires. You will learn from them without them ever knowing it, he said, one big hand on her forehead holding her at arm’s length as she tried to swing her too-short arms with their too-small fists at his shins. Are you quite done yet, my princess?

She watched less now with the boys gone, with Aemond away, with Harwin and Laenor both turned to ash, but she did still watch.

Aegon left himself wide open with every swing, too focused on show and swagger for any sort of meaningful speed. He liked to think himself fearsome and boast of his skills, but the lessons did not reach to his heart. He did not take them into himself the way Visenya and Aemond took them in, did not practice as he should.

Sloppy, Harwin always called him, overconfident.

You could put him on his ass if you ever needed, Laenor would say, an absent pat to her head and a funny twist on his mouth. That is all that matters, darling.

Aemond did not struggle with overconfidence. Light on his feet, careful with it, precise in his movements. Boys his age did not usually have such skill—boys several years his elder often did not have anything of the sort, either. Even unhoned, even with half the effort and a fourth of the focus, Aemond could grow into someone dangerous, but he wished to be honed. He wished to be sharpened and shaped and made into a blade, turned to a soldier so that Cole might smile upon him and Otto Hightower might pass a fond hand over his head.

More than that, he seemed to like it.

That always struck her more than anything when she watched the princes spar. Jace, Luke, Aegon…the song of it held no appeal to them, not really. They did not wish to learn the steps to the dance of it, but Aemond did. He wanted to know it so well he could tune his heartbeat to it, the same way Visenya wanted to know it so well that, with eardrums ripped from her skill, she would still be able to hear the melody.

Still, he stood a head shorter than her. Younger, smaller, would underestimate her because she wore skirts and his mother told him proper girls would never think of touching a blade. She could have laid him out before he lost his eye easily enough.

She could put herself between them. Really, Ser Cole should have already stepped in, but he watched the boys with the twisted up nausea of a man commanded to shove his hands between two rabid, fighting dogs. She would lose the blade afterwards when Viserys found out, lose the steadiness it gave all the breaking apart parts of her; there would be no more sneaking off to empty halls to practice her drills while longing for Laenor and Harwin as deep as Aemond longed for his eye, but she could.

Aegon’s leg reared up, slamming into the side of Aemond’s knee and sending their brother crashing off him; he came to his feet spitting and red-faced, snatching his practice sword from the dirt with a snarl. Visenya pressed against Brigit’s hold, but her friend did not let go, even when Aemond snatched his own blade from the rack, even when Aegon went darting immediately into their brother’s blind spot and laid the flat of his blade across his ass.

Aemond’s face darkened with an awful mix of fury and shame, chest heaving with every breath. She could see his knuckles going white with the grip he had on the sword, his one eye going unrecognizably black, and she flinched back when he lunged forward.

Aegon slipped immediately back into his blind spot.

Again.

And again.

Into the blind side, into the darkness only their brother could see, to whack his wooden blade against the back of his head or lay it across the backs of his thighs or slam it too hard into the knuckles of his sword hand.

Aemond did not…move the same as he did before, even when only walking. His feet lurched a little at each step, not quite sure whether the ground beneath them would be solid; he still turned his blind side towards sudden sounds; his once graceful hands turned stumbling and clumsy, reaching too far or too close when he grabbed for something, his pretty handwriting gone sloppy as Aegon’s or Lucerys’s. The difference between his fighting before and his fighting now, though…it felt like something to mourn.

Too slow, she thought at him, never a critique she aimed at him before but one that paralyzed her now. Oh, little fool, you are moving far too slow.

It would be even easier to lay him out now, muttered something bitter in her head, and she slapped it back to the recesses of her mind. An awful thing to—to look at her little brother being batted around as Aegon took advantage of his lost eye and Ser Cole did not intercede, and to even think such a thing—

Sometimes, she thought perhaps Alicent’s dislike of her did not seem so unwarranted after all, thought perhaps it had nothing to do with her wearing her mother’s face and having such an unshakeable place in her sister’s heart; sometimes, she thought perhaps her stepmother sensed the wickedness of her long before she ever found it in herself.

“My princes,” Ser Cole said, shifting on his feet. She watched him with hot eyes, chest tightening with every moment that passed without him grabbing onto one of the boys. Harwin would have; Harwin did, never mind that Aegon and Jacaerys were princes. “I do believe that is enough.”

“Visenya?” Brigit said again, but Visenya could not look away from her brothers.

“My princes,” Ser Cole attempted more loudly, but neither of the boys so much as glanced his way. He took another step forward with half-raised hands, but he stopped stricken before he grabbed for them. Could, she wondered, the man even shit without express order?

“Come then, brother,” Aegon yelped joyously, dodging eagerly aside when Aemond swung for him. Delighted to be the quick one, for once, ecstatic to be nimble to Aemond’s clumsy prodding. “You wanted back on the field so badly; you must earn it! If you had both eyes, you would see that I am only trying to help!”

Something odd struck her about Aegon then. A redness to his lips, too bright, that she had not noticed from the dais.

“Hit me, Aemond,” Aemond insisted, and he laughed—an ugly noise, loud and croaking, one that made her flinch. “Hit me again! You did it once!”

“This is wrong of him,” Brigit murmured after another frozen moment.

“No,” Visenya said, shaking her head, face twisted with troubled upset as she clutched tighter to Brigit’s arm. “No, no, I do not know why he is—"

She crept closer, Brigit following at her side this time instead of attempting to hold her back, until she could see every flicker of their faces and hear every thwap of too-vicious strikes that Aegon laid upon their brother. Until she could stare at Aegon and wonder again at the too-red color of his mouth.

She could not find Egg here, the boy who crawled weeping into her bed after Driftmark, the one who blamed himself and wanted his brother, the one who fell asleep with his head on Aemond’s thigh and his fingers curled loose and possessive about his ankle. Where did he go, what vile little shit did he leave behind in his place? When could she trade him back?

(It was the first time she watched a wine-stained Aegon fall so easily into cruelty; it was not the last.)

“Careful, brother,” Aegon sang, dancing back again. “You would not want to lose the other eye!” Even as he said it, he raised the wooden sword and knocked their brother lightly on the unscarred half of his face. Aemond’s sword came up too slow, his face gone bloodless and almost green.

(Visenya dreamt of Baelon. Aemond woke screaming from nightmares of Rhaenyra slitting the throats of his mother and Helaena on the steps of the throne, of his half-sister carving the remaining eye from his face. In his dreams, Visenya watched him blinded with a smile on her lips and her hand bunched up in Rhaenyra’s velvet skirts.)

“Aegon!”

It surprised her how shrilly the word came from her mouth until she realized another voice had also screamed her brother’s name in the same moment. She’d started towards the boys again, resigned that it would simply have to be the end of her time with the sword and already grieving the loss, but she froze immediately at the whirl of silken green wrath that appeared in their midst.

Queen Alicent Hightower stalked into the yard, face so contorted in her rage that she almost looked like someone else entirely, and Visenya had never been so grateful to see the cold-hearted bitch in her entire life.

Criston Cole’s attempts might have done nothing, but Alicent’s voice froze her boys in place in less time than it took to blink. “Mother!” they chorused together, guilty voices as they shrank back from her; trying to claw each other’s throats out only a moment before, but now they stood with shoulders pressed together, trying to hide their wooden swords behind their backs as if she would forget all about it if the weapons were out of sight.

Even Aemond, for once, looked rather petrified.

She wondered if he had ever truly disobeyed his mother before, beyond entering the pit.

“Go to my solar,” Alicent said, head swiveling around to Aegon, pinning him with a look that wilted him down to two inches tall. “Wait for me there.”

Aegon’s eyes flashed quickly about the training yard, searching for something to haul him from trouble, looking for a lie to tell or a tale to spin; they brightened for a moment when they landed on Visenya, then darkened again when she shook her head at him incredulously. “Mother, he started it!”

“Go,” Alicent said, voice lowering into a snarling sort of hiss, “and wait for me there.”

Aegon hesitated. Wet hit lips, swallowed. “Yes, Mother.”

He ducked his head when he passed her, eyes fixed on his feet. Part of her wanted to yell, wanted to shove him, wanted to demand to know what the fuck that was, but she could not bring herself to do it when he glanced up at her. They both knew he would have bruises beneath his doublet and on the backs of his legs when she saw him next, that either his mother or grandfather would beat him blue for behaving so wretchedly in front of the court. He flickered a smile across his mouth, false and cheerless, and she knew the red suddenly. Knew it for wine, and she had only a moment to be baffled at seeing it on the lips of her eleven-year-old little brother before he disappeared.

Alicent spun on Aemond then, clutching him by the shoulders for a moment before her fingers went to fluttering up around his head and down his sides. She turned him to the left and then to the right, poking at imagined bruises, searching for wounds that did not exist for her to find. Aegon did not hurt him physically, not really (though, she suspected his ass would be smarting something terrible from the slap with the flat of the blade; Jace always whined of the soreness when she did it to him) anyway. Just his pride. His heart.

“You were told not to come to the yard with your brother.”

“I know, Mother,” he answered, obediently going still so she could examine him, allowing her to loll his limbs in every direction. Visenya remembered doing something similar in the pit when she checked him for burns, and he near bit her damned head off; she tried not to be bitter about the double standard, but it did not work. “But—”

“You are not well enough,” Alicent said, apparently satisfied that her second-born would not bleed out. She cupped the unscarred side of his face in one hand, grabbed his bicep with the other as she frowned severely down at him. “You must not put yourself through this yet.”

“Mother—”

“What if you reopen the wound, darling?” she interrupted, thumb stroking at the skin beneath his remaining eye. “You cannot yet walk correctly; you might walk into a sword!”

“They are wooden, Mother!” he objected. “And I only stumble, really; it is not as if I cannot see anything—”

“You are not ready,” the queen barreled on, petting at his hair, as if he had not even spoken. “You are not ready, not well enough, to be back playing with the sword again. You disobeyed me, Aemond—”

Aemond winced a little, a brief flash of guilt—the part of him that so preened at being mummy’s favorite boy writhing in agony at her disapproval no doubt—before his face steeled over. “It has been months, Mother,” he said, almost a snap but not quite, dancing at the edge of a snarl; the dragon fire in him burned bright, but she had never seen it come so close as this to sparking in Alicent’s direction. “You say I am not well enough to ride, not well enough to spar, not well enough to fly—”

“You are not!” the queen snapped, hand falling away from his face, and they must have forgotten they were still stood in the middle of the yard. She could not think of any other reason that they would be having something this near an argument without noting her presence, without lowering their voices to avoid the pricked ears of the lords and ladies forever drifting about in the Keep. “Do not let me hear you so much as think of flying again; I will not see you on that beast’s back so soon after—”

Aemond hadn’t flown? In the months since Driftmark, had Alicent really not let him fly? Visenya heard Vhagar crying at night, noticed how sour Aemond looked each time she and Aegon came stumbling to breakfast in leathers with windswept hair and wind-chapped lips, but she…well, she thought he flew on his own. That he thought of it as something private to be held close, something he did when no one could see.

Not at all? For months after finally being given the sky, after finally claiming a dragon? Months away from her, kept from her side and her saddle after only one flight? Land-locked?

“Are you alright?” Brigit murmured, and Visenya snapped back into herself enough to realize that the strange, tortured keening noise she heard came from her own throat.

“Yes,” she muttered, swallowing past her dry mouth. “I only…I did not know she still hadn’t let him fly.”

“Is that bad?” Brigit asked, but Visenya shook her head without answering.

She could not explain it to Brigit, who knew naught of the skies. She could not tell her how it hooked into the skin and pulled at the flesh, how it sang in the soul. How just looking up at the blue sometimes made the ground feel too solid under her feet and the air too thick in her lungs; the lack of wings on her own back felt a curse if she thought of it for too long, and she only ever really felt as if her heart really beat whenever she came so close to the heavens that her the stars near cut open the flesh of her reaching arms.

Brigit would not be able to grasp that even the thought of losing it, of having it taken from her, of being trapped aground and kept from Vyper, made her feel sick through to her bones. That it hurt worse than her bittersweet dreams did, in its own way; that she would sooner take her eye than give up flying, that it would not really be a choice.

“Mother, you must allow me something!” he ground out, fists clenching up in the sides of his pants. “I am going mad with only maesters and masses; I cannot keep sitting still! I will fall further behind the longer I wait to—”

“You are half-blind!” Alicent thundered, and Aemond jerked backwards. She grabbed him by both arms, shaking him a little as she crouched to meet his eye, and Visenya took a half step forward at the sight; Brigit’s fingers tangling tighter into hers brought her back to herself, reminded her that she could do nothing about the way the queen chose to speak to her son. “You will always be behind, Aemond! There is no catching up from that!”

That—that was not fair. Yes, he lacked an eye, and yes, of course, he would be at a disadvantage. He would have to learn to handle the blind spot, how to guard the blind side, but he could do it. She could not think of any by name off hand, but he would hardly be the first to learn to fight with pieces missing. Laenor spoke so often of sailors with no hands and no feet, missing eyes and missing ears.

“It is not impossible, Your Grace,” Ser Cole piped, but his jaw clicked with how speedily he snapped his mouth shut when she swung her furious gaze towards him.

“Mother,” Aemond pleaded.

“You shall not come back to the yard,” Alicent insisted. “You may work with the maesters and attend the septons’ services, but I will not hear anything of you with a blade in hand or that beast beneath you—”

“For how long, Mother?”

“A year at the least—”

“A year—”

“It is a year, and you may wait until your eye grows back!” spit Alicent hotly, and the whole yard sucked in a breath that they did not release. Harsh words, harsher still from a mother’s mouth, and even Alicent knew it; she blanched and straightened, face coloring as her eyes flicked about from one wide-eyed face to the next. Visenya almost pitied her when she saw the way the queen wilted in place, hands wringing and cheeks hollowing around how she gnawed at the flesh—she knew well how it felt to say things in anger and have it cut back towards you.

Almost pitied but not quite. Her heart could not truly soften towards Alicent, not really, not when she could still see Nyra’s blood spattered on the floor and hear Luke’s screams when the queen called for his eye.

Aemond jerked backwards, face contorting in a bone-deep sort of pain, and she might have thought Alicent struck him if she hadn’t seen the entire exchange; she almost wished she had hit him, if only because she thought it would have been less painful to watch and less painful for him for him altogether.

“Aemond, darling,” Alicent began, but, for the first time Visenya could ever remember, he turned his back on his mother and left her to raise trembling fingers up towards her mouth alone.

“Your family,” Brigit said, shaking her head, and, not for the first or last time in her life, Visenya Targaryen left someone who loved her staring baffled at her back and chased after her brother.

*&*&*

Aemond, at first, did not want to be found.

She checked the library first. He could often be found in the very far corner with the wide window, tucked up in an armchair he’d dragged into the sunlight, nose burrowed into a book or scribbling frantic notes on a piece of parchment with his lip bitten between his teeth, but the armchair remained empty across the room where it belonged. When she snuck into the library at night, she sometimes saw him squirreled away in a corner with a candle—though they never spoke or acknowledged each other—but she could not find him among any of the aisles either.

The godswood, then, for he read curled up amongst the roots almost as often as he read in the library and he sometimes ran his drills alone when he thought no one could see. She found only empty branches and leaves blowing in the wind.

She slipped into the kitchens behind a serving girl, thinking perhaps he went looking for lemon cakes and fruit juice to drown his sorrows, but the only silver head in the place proved to be a cook who looked very alarmed to find a princess poking about in his cooking knives; she nearly asked him which of her relatives got his mother with child, then thought perhaps it would be best not to ask questions to which she was not prepared to hear the answer. They regarded each other in silence for several long beats before he proffered her a biscuit; she accepted his offering with a blink and a nod, then slipped from the kitchens again without ever speaking a word.

Visenya went to his rooms eventually, after growing frustrated picking through all the nooks and crannies of the Keep. She picked his lock with Daemon’s dagger and busied herself picking through his belongings to keep herself from growing bored; he had a language primer on his bedside table, margins cluttered up with cramped notes.

She flipped through it while she waited, laid out on her stomach, tracing his looping handwriting with her pointer finger. It…comforted her, actually, his handwriting. He did not write like Baelon did, did not spike his letters and jam all his words together so close that one almost could not tell the difference. She stared at it in half a trance, trying to memorize it, trying to instill it into herself.

Another difference between them. Another thing to use to anchor herself in this life and this place when Aemond smiled unexpectedly. When he laughed too bright and, for a moment, putting a knife in her throat just to get back to Baelon again did not seem like such a terrible thing to consider.

“Why are you here?” he asked, displeasure thick in his voice, the very moment he opened the door.

“Your conjugations are terrible,” she muttered in answer, then slowly raised her eyes from the primer to appraise him. His hand stayed wrapped around the door handle, his brows drawn as he examined the lock. “I saw what happened in the yard.”

His eye shot up, and he wilted backwards as if he thought she meant to pile onto all the cruelty he’d already faced. “You were there?” he asked in a defeated voice, then shook his head fiercely as if to deny he asked the question. It did not surprise her to find that he did not notice her, being as he got his ass kicked and then yelled at by his mother. “So?”

“I got you something,” she answered, flicking her fingers towards his bedside table. A book sat in his primer’s place, nicked from a library shelf. He regarded her suspiciously for a moment, still scowling, but curiosity won out in the end; he lasted only a few seconds before he started edging across the room.

“What is this?” He frowned down at the cover, but his eye brightened as he ran soft fingers over the kraken emblazoned across the cover. She thought that probably should have given him more of a clue.

“A book,” she said, turning a page in the primer. “You read them.” She sighed when he glared at her, burrowed her nose deeper into the primer as she examined his clumsy translations—anything to avoid meeting his eye. “It is about sailors.”

“Sailors.”

“Sailors,” she repeated, cutting her eyes up. Her lips quirked. “Dangerous profession, you know. Storms and sea monsters and sharks. Pirates! Some of the chapters are on pirates, actually. There’s a famous one who claimed to take a mermaid to wife—”

“Why did you give me a book on sailors?” he interrupted, impatient little git, and she flipped another page. He translated a few words of the passage wrong, but she had nothing she could use to correct it.

“Dangerous profession,” she repeated, after staying silent for exactly forty seconds just to punish him for interrupting her. She counted them out in her head, nice and slow. “They lose things all the time. Legs. Hands.”

Aemond said nothing. She did not look at him.

“They fight well,” she continued, clearing her throat. Her cheeks blistered with the awkwardness of his gaze on her face, and she twisted the rings on her fingers. “Even though they lose things, they fight well anyway.” She looked up finally, jutted her jaw. “If they can fight on boats, you can damn well manage solid ground.”

He stared, eye blown wide. She hated that stupid patch, the dark of it marring his face so much more than any scar could. Like he felt shame for it, like he thought he needed to hide it when he should never be ashamed of his eye. When he should never feel shame for what he went through.

“Eyes?” he asked quietly, looking back at the book.

Her tongue twisted inside her mouth, rebelling against the idea of answering, but the words came anyway. “I marked those chapters,” she muttered, and his face flickered. Softened almost in a way that nearly made her sick, and she narrowed her eyes as if to dare him to comment.

Aemond opened the book, almost reverent, but his expression quickly contorted in horror. “You bent the pages?”

“I just told you I marked them.”

“You are not meant to bend the pages!” he snapped, and she bit at her knuckles to keep from laughing in his face. “It is—oh, you will ruin it.”

“How do you mark your place, then?”

“Bits of ribbon,” he cried. “A leaf! A sock! Anything but bending the pages.”

She rolled her eyes, tossed his primer onto his pillow as she sat up. “If you do not want it,” she said, sticking her hand out, “then give it back.”

He took a quick step backwards, cradling it protectively against his chest as if she might snatch it from him. “I did not say that.”

“Then stop griping, mittītsos,” she huffed, but a grin looped onto her mouth. “Gods, you would check a gift horse’s teeth, wouldn’t you?”

“I am not little or a fool,” he muttered, relaxing a little when she made no further move to take it from him. His head cocked. “Why were you reading about sailors, anyway?”

Her grin faded, and she cleared her throat when she turned to peer out the window. “Laenor read it to me.”

Her and Jace and Luke—still so little he hadn’t any idea what was going on. The three of them piled up in bed, tangled limbs and messy hair and squished cheeks as Laenor sat on the edge. Clambering over his arms and peering over his shoulders at the pictures as he threw his voice and changed his accent and made shapes with his fingers.

Take me to sea with you, lēkȳs, Visenya had cried, and he had blown a raspberry on her cheek and told her, I fear the sea would bore you terribly, sweetling; there is far too much of the sky in you.

“I am sorry he is dead,” Aemond said.

“Thank you foy lying,” she answered, drily.

He did not bother arguing, being as they both knew the truth of it, but he did awkwardly raise up the book and swallow. “Thank you.”

She hummed an answer, said, “Hel said reading has gotten easier?”

He nodded, still clinging to it with both hands. “It is—not as difficult as it was.”

She hummed again, glanced over her shoulder to the window. Looked at the stars singing above, the moon calling her name so sweetly, open space and open air, and she asked unthinkingly, “Fly with me?”

Aemond looked at her with something like betrayal in his face, as if she had grabbed him by the throat and squeezed. “You were in the yard,” he said, voice tight, the anger-hurt-anger enough to make it tremble. “You heard everything. You know I cannot.”

“Your mother said you cannot,” she allowed, then shrugged one shoulder. “But your mother said many things today that she should not have said, so, frankly, fuck your mother.”

She thought he would snarl at her for speaking so flippantly of the queen. She expected an insult and for waspish, angry Aemond to rip his way out of this strange, wounded boy who was so oddly new to her—and he did scowl, his face gone sharp and feral when he warned, “mind your tongue when you speak of my mother.”

“My apologies,” she lied. “No more talk of your mother tonight, valonqus.”

(Any other day, he would not have allowed a slight to his mother to pass him so easily. But today…today, Alicent hurt him. Alicent cut him down deeper than he thought one could go, when she had always been the one to soothe his hurts, but Visenya looked at him now with bright eyes, smiling her strange, crooked smile like she knew secrets he did not know—a smile never aimed at him before, not really, one always reserved for Helaena and the other boys. Visenya brought him a book and told him it did not matter what anyone said, that he could learn to wield a sword just fine. And now she was asking him to the skies with her as so often did with the others, asking him into the skies that meant so much to her, the skies that were her refuge and her playground and her favorite place in all the world, because he was the company she wanted.  He could grant her one insult for that, surely, if it meant she did not look away and leave? He would ask the Mother’s forgiveness tomorrow, feel the guilt of it tomorrow, but tonight, he could…he could, couldn’t he?)

“Besides,” he burst out suddenly, all in a rush, “that is a little far, even for Targaryens.” He hesitated for a moment, swallowed, smiled uncertainly. He looked a little queasy, if she was honest. “No?”

She took a moment to stare before her jaw unhinged. “Did you just make a joke?”

He crossed his arms, too defensive. An embarrassed flush started in his cheeks. “I make jokes.”

Visenya made a dubious noise. He sputtered at the sound of it, though really he did not have the right to look so very offended, but he settled when she started to giggle into her hands. Smiled a little wider even, quietly pleased with himself, some of the tension leaving his shoulders as he studied her.

She quieted after a moment, her eyes softening as she said again, “Fly with me.”

“You?” he said, looking down at the book again. No bristling, though, which she took as progress. “Or you and Aegon?”

Visenya’s face twisted, teeth half baring and eyes burning when she scowled. “Not today. Fuck him, too.”

Aemond snorted, then flushed as if he hadn’t meant to. “I don’t have leathers, still.”

She cocked her head. “You can use my old chains. The rest hardly matters.”

“I don’t have—"

“Aemond,” she said, exasperated, and she fixed him with a look.

“I have not flown,” he burst out, tossing the book onto the bedside table with a clatter. He flung himself down hard on the edge of the bed, fists clenching up on the sheets as he half-bent over his knees; something pained crossed his face, and, though his sudden closeness startled her, she did not make a sound. “I have not even—I have not even seen her. Mother said it was not safe, so I have not since…since that night. What if she does not—what if she has changed—"

“Dragons do not change their minds,” she interrupted, and she reached out. Slipped her fingers gentle into his hair and buried them deep; for the first time, he did not pull away or snarl when she tugged it at the root. He let her pull him, tipped into the touch like the others boys always did, went loose and easy as she pulled his eye to meet hers. “You are hers now. She is yours. It does not matter how long you are apart or how far you find yourself; it is forever. Until her fire goes our and your blood dries up.”

(She called him hers that night she came tripping through the wall, said it with tears in her eyes and her breath coming too fast, and something in him murmured, dragons do not change their minds, but what of dragon-girls?)

“Is that why you and Vyper go so well?” he asked, searching her face. “Because he has been yours twice?”

She slipped her hand from his hair (she did not notice the mournful sigh that spilled unbidden from his mouth, and he thanked the gods for it) and laughed. Of course, of course, when he finally found the urge to ask her about that other life, it would be to ask about dragons.

“No,” she said, soft. “No, he did not hatch for me in that life.”

He still did not believe her; she could see in his face. Not really. Not that her dreams were more than dreams, but it softened her a little that he pretended.

She wanted to tell him that she understood him, that she had understood his pain all these years, all the longing and the covet and the need. That it had all been hers once. But that was not a conversation to have when he still did not really believe her, when he thought her a half-mad liar. It was for when he did, for when he knew it for truth, for when he would listen instead of spiking up in fury at any attempt of laying claim to what he saw as his burden alone.

“Who was your dragon then?”

“Baelon was,” she said, and she looked back towards him. “He was the only one I needed.”

Would she trade Vyper for Baelon? She did not know, could not know. She did not want to think about it, really. Felt desperate suddenly to flee the room and change the subject before the question ate her alive from the inside out. It felt a betrayal to both of them to consider it, to even think that she might give Vyper up—to think that she might not wish to make the trade even to bring her heart back to her—

“Fly with me,” she said again, quietly, firmly.

Aemond looked down at his lap for several long moments, then raised his eye. His eye landed on the book on his nightstand. It had fallen open when he tossed it, one of the marked chapters now on display.

He looked to her.

Swallowed.

And he nodded.

Chapter Text

Ten seconds after they slipped into the tunnels, she started regretting her invitation.

Aemond stumbled when he walked. Wavered, flickered a bit, not sure yet how to navigate with one eye and half his depth perception. He did so in daylight on terrain he knew like the freckles spattering his nose, so she could not imagine it would be easier for him to find his way through the tunnels on uneven ground with no light but the candle she snatched from his bedside table. Even Aegon still grabbed onto her hand to let him guide him through the tunnels, and he took to the passages like fish took to the water.

And yet, when her hand automatically reached for his, he reacted as if she spit in his face.

“I do not need you to hold my hand!” he snarled, his face gone purple as their father’s did when he got too deep into his cups. “I am not a child, Visenya!”

“I did not say you were a child!” she snapped, but she made a great show of slowly dropping her hand back down to her side. “I only wanted to help. You do not always need to be such a cunt about everything—”

“Your septa should wash out your mouth with lye,” he informed her with a sulking expression, and she gestured impatiently for him to follow after her. “You are a princess, you know.”

“And you a prince,” she said flatly, shooting a spiteful look over her shoulder. “It does not make you any less of a cunt.”

She timed her spite perfectly as it happened, and she got to watch with not an insignificant amount of smug delight when he tripped over a piece of stone that she had stepped nearly over. He would have face planted, but she stepped quickly to steady him; he teetered for a moment more even after he caught hold of her arm, a startled, yelping “fuck!” pulling from his mouth.

“Septon Eustace should wash out your mouth with lye,” she deadpanned after an acceptable beat (six and a half seconds). “You are a prince, you know.”

“I hate you,” he said, mouth twisted up as if he’d bitten into something sour. That, though, was probably a bad comparison; he had a taste for the too-sour lemon tarts the kitchens always served with dinner. Mouth twisted as if he’d just heard someone experience joy? That seemed like it would properly disgust him. “From the deepest, most genuine depths of my soul—I hate you. Have I ever told you that before?”

“You might have,” she said, and she could not say which of them was more surprised by the ghost of a smile that threatened to turn up the corners of her mouth. “I tend not to listen when you are the one speaking. It all sounds like wind in tall grass to me.”

“Y—”

She blew out a long, ghostly breath that did indeed sound a good bit like a breeze rustling tall grass, a smirk growing wider on her lips, and the furious spasm that passed over his face looked not unlike someone attempting not to vomit.

(He would rather die than let her see how badly he wanted to grin back.)

She held out her hand less expectantly and raised an eyebrow when he turned a look of disgust down on it. “It is darker than Vyper’s scales, and you do not know where we are going. Let me help.”

“I do not need you,” he said as if nothing mattered more than her knowing it, but he raised his hand to hover near hers.

“I know,” she said, and her smile only wavered a little.

Aemond grasped her hand like he thought it might bite him, keeping his grip loose enough that no more than a twitch would get him out of her hold. His wrist remained twisted at a strange angle so that a gap always remained between the soft skin of their palms. It struck her almost funny how uncomfortable it made him to touch her.

So she told herself anyway, to distract from how her insides twinged unhappily.

“Helaena holds your hand all the time,” she reminded him, tugging him with her as she pushed forward into the dark, and he huffed.

“That is not the same.”

“Is it not?”

Why shouldn’t it be? Because he shared all his blood with Helaena and only half with her? Because Helaena knew how to be kind and gentle and soft and good, and Visenya only ever lashed out with a too-sharp tongue? Because Helaena looked at him without her chest twisting until she found it hard to breathe, and sometimes Visenya could not even handle glancing at the side of his face?”

“She holds mine.”

“That is the same thing.”

“No,” he said icily, “it is not.”

Visenya held Nyra’s hand and Helaena’s, held Jace’s and Luke’s and Aegon’s, held Brigit’s, held Laenor’s and Harwin’s and even her father’s. She held Daemon’s in that other life, held Laena’s, held Baelon’s more times than anyone alive would be able to count. Her boys, Nyra’s children, a dozen other people she still did not remember. Never once has she made the distinction between who held and who was held; she never saw it as a transaction or trade, as Aemond seemed to see it. Only fingers interlaced, comfort given and taken, something solid and real.

“You are an odd boy,” she said and then, before he could bristle, added, “I do not like being in the tunnels. I am holding yours as much as you are holding mine.”

Truth chased with a lie. The tunnels…she loved and hated them in equal measure, indecisive knots tied into her belly. Bitterness from loss chased by the sweet of memories before it turned to sour grief again. Like Aemond’s voice, like Aemond’s face.

She did not hate them so much as to need someone to hold her, though.

“You use them all the time,” he said, and he seemed almost shocked when she clucked her tongue and guided him carefully around a hole in the floor. “You and Aegon.”

(He envied Aegon sometimes—all the time, always, with every breath he took in and beat of his heart and pump of his blood through his veins, he envied—for how easily he tripped his way into Visenya’s affection. She once hated him with just as much viciousness as she ever turned on Aemond; he remembered that, no matter how many years passed since it left her. Aegon brushed the vitriol away, slipped right into her, stole her affection and her laughter. Aegon went scrambling for Visenya’s bed when he woke yelping from nightmares, went weeping for her kisses to his bruises when Grandfather fetched the cane. Aegon never needed to doubt his welcome wherever Visenya happened to be because Visenya loved him as well as she loved Rhaenyra’s bastard boys. He was just as much her little brother, but she did not call his name across crowded rooms.

(He envied Visenya sometimes—all the time, always, with every breath he let out and in the moment between every heartbeat and with every blink of his eye, he envied—for how easily she found herself in Aegon’s good graces. Aegon’s mean streak lashed out hard and often, but it never seemed to claw for Visenya. Visenya got sweetness and kindness, got his laughter and soft smiles, never needed to worry about good moments going bad so quickly that she couldn’t figure out what had changed. Visenya never reached for her brother and got venom in his answer, never had him tell her that she would never be enough, that she would always be less a Targaryen, that she was unworthy and broken and wrong. Aegon saw Visenya as his whole world, loved her as well as he loved Sunfyre. More his brother than Visenya was his sister, born mere minutes after him, his twin, his half, but Aegon’s face did not split in a smile at the sight of him.)

“I cannot speak for Aegon,” she said, though she could and often did. “I use them when they are convenient. That does not mean I like them.”

“Why not?”

She started to lie out of sheer habit, then paused and looked at him appraisingly. “You will not believe me,” she answered, and his eye rolled. “What? You will not. I am no fool; I see in your face that you think I am mad.”

“Your dreams, then?” he drawled, almost pitying. “About Baelon?”

Hearing Aemond say his name jarred her. She did not like when Aemond said most things, being as he said them all in Baelon’s voice, but she found she especially did not like the sound of Baelon’s name. His name in his voice, spoken careless and disconnected, a sharp reminder that the boy who used it now did not know him and never would and near certainly never wished to.

“We played in the tunnels,” she said distantly. Her eyes unfocused, throat working around a knot when she swallowed. Ghostly fingers brushed at the back of her neck. “He found them when we were ten.”

A hand over her mouth, a finger to his lips. A smile as she blinked up at him. Father cannot keep me away, he gloated when he took his palm away, hair tumbling into his eyes, flushed cheeks and shy smile. The most beautiful thing she’d ever seen, she’d thought then; part of her still thought it. Nothing could keep me away from you.

“I believe,” he said diplomatically, more Otto Hightower’s grandson than she’d ever seen, “that you have very realistic dreams.”

“But not that they were ever real.”

“They cannot be real,” he said as if speaking to a very small child. “He died. You cannot know that he would look like me.”

“You look like him,” she corrected immediately, voice hot, and then bit into the side of her cheek unhappily. A small, rational part of her recognized the absurdity; they had the same face, it made no difference whether one looked like the other or the other looked like the one. It mattered no more than her holding his hand or her holding his, and yet the fury made her teeth ache.

“I,” Aemond said, disdainfully, “look like him. It does not matter. You cannot know anything that will happen, and you can’t have found these tunnels—”

“How did I—”

“I do not know,” he snarled, and the frustration in his voice surprised her until she saw the look on his face. The mulish unhappiness, set jaw and flared nostrils, a clever boy used to figuring out the puzzle before anyone else had finished piecing together the edges; he did not know what to do with himself when he did not have the answers. “I do not know, but it cannot be dreams.”

“Do you not believe in dragon dreams?”

Daenys, Daenys, she thought, bitterly. Your dreams saved your family, but I lose mine each time I wake.

“Dreaming up a pretend life where out dead brother is alive is not a dragon dream!” he hissed beneath his breath, but he obeyed without even noticing when she tugged him down a branching passageway. “Those involve dragons, Visenya, and you are no dreamer!”

Our dead brother.

The thought, somehow, hadn’t ever crossed her mind. Aemond’s brother, Aegon’s, Helaena’s, even Daeron’s; he never met them, never knew them, but they belonged to Baelon just as much as they belonged to her. What would he think of them? Of Aegon’s snarky rambles and mean-spirited humor and the soft kindness that came so unexpectedly? Of Helaena’s bugs and twisting riddles and her clever fingers that could make such fine things? What would he think of Aemond, snarky little twit wearing Baelon’s face and with the envy in his chest burning so bright it blazed?

What would Aemond think of Baelon?

“Maybe it is only magic,” she said after a too-long beat. “I do not know why, Aemond. I only know it is real. Was real. Could have been real.”

If only, if only.

“Or maybe you are mad,” he said, almost hopefully, and then—when she swung burning, outraged eyes on him—hurried to add, “well, it would drive me mad having a whole other life in my head!”

“It is…” she started, then paused. “It is like Father’s model.”

Aemond closed his good eye as if to ask a higher being for strength, then let out a low gust of air and said, tiredly, “what?”

“Before he started, what did he have?” He opened his mouth, but she waved him away; it was a rhetorical question. “He had written accounts of what it was like, a few old drawings, and an empty room. But he knew before he found the stonemasons to build it. He saw it in his head. That is how it was when I was very young.”

“An empty room?” he asked, with the implication that her skull was also nothing but empty space and a few stray cobwebs.

“Knowing,” she said with a sharp look, and he rolled his eye. “I knew—things. I woke up knowing things. Not solid things; shapes of thoughts, outlines of moments. Nothing was real. I’d eat grapes, and I would think how Baelon hated grapes, but I couldn’t remember how I knew it. But I grew older, and I started waking with memories. Real ones. Solid ones. Buildings in the model. Every night when I dream, I get more buildings to place. The model only gets bigger.”

Except, sometimes, the figures slipped from her fingers and shattered to dust on the ground.

Her children’s names, on the tip of her tongue when she woke but gone before she could free them from her mouth.

Baelon’s death, the source of so many nightmares, turned to smoke before her eyes opened. Blade or poison or illness? An accident, murder? Why were her hands always red when he stopped breathing in her lap? She saw no wound; from where did the blood come?

Her own death, the coldness of it, the feeling of her soul sloughing her body, her last breath crawling up the back of her throat like a long-legged spider—she woke forcing that memory from herself, clawing it from her mind. She could not carry her own ghost along with Baelon’s. Her shoulders could not take that weight, too.

Little things, sometimes. The song Laena sang to comfort her that first night after Viserys sent Baelon away to the Stepstones. Which of her sons it was that sneezed the moment he smelled roses. Whether it had been Baelon’s ideas or her own to wed thrice instead of once. What Baelon said that one afternoon that made Nyra laugh so hard that wine came out of her nose, which of Rhaenyra’s daughters always tripped over her own feet. How old she was the first time—

“Laena carved her name into Vhagar’s saddle after her first flight,” she said abruptly. “Did you notice it?”

Aemond paused for a long moment. “No.”

“Look for it,” she said, a fierce order. “Look for it. And if it’s there—I could not know about it unless I’d flown with her before, and you know I have not. Not in this life.”

“And if it is not there?”

It would be there, she knew with a surety that did not flicker. This Laena…was not her Laena, no, she knew that, but she could not have changed so much as that. Not so much that she would not have wanted to brand her name on the world and their heritage, not so much that she would not have wanted to make sure that any rider that came after knew that Vhagar chose her first.

“If it is not there,” she agreed, “then I suppose they are only dreams, and I am very lucky to have found the tunnels when I did.”

He dipped his head, a grudging allowance, and she squeezed his fingers firmly in her own before she pulled him along again—her steps and heart growing lighter as they slipped through a branched off pathway and moonlight spilled silver and sweet over their upturned voices, the song of the cliffs and the Rush calling their names with the wind.

Eager as they both were at the smell of fresh air and the promise of open skies, neither noticed that his wrist untwisted, that their palms pressed flush, that he’d stopped holding her hand and they’d started holding each other’s.

*&*&*

Their next problem came when Vyper landed gracefully on the cliffs in front of them, the beat of his wings dousing the candle and sending their hair flying back from their faces, bits of the cliffs tumbling away as he hooked his claws deep into the earth to anchor himself to the edge. His head snaked a bit before he lowered it down to hers, a gentle chirrup from the back of his throat as she raised a hand to scratch at the scales beneath his jaw.

With each passing day, more and more of her father’s petitioners came to complain of the young dragon who had, for some reason, taken a liking to sweeping down low over the city, weaving over rooftops, screeching and crackling without ever really calling the fire; he never hurt anyone, never burned anything, never snatched a child like she knew he sometimes considered—though, her father complained increasingly that the Crown could not afford to keep reimbursing farmers and shepherds for stray livestock that Vyper decided were of better use in his belly. A terror to the anyone who was not her, petulant and vicious as Visenya herself—The Black Nuisance, Aegon had taken to calling him, which always sent her giggling.

He was an asshole, her Vyper. She loved him more than life.

“Hello, sweetling,” she crooned, tracing shapes over the small scales beside his mouth, stretching up onto her toes to smooth her palms over his brow. “I missed you.”

What is that thing with you, said the flicker of his eyes towards Aemond, the low rumble of his chest and curl of his lip—an offer but not quite yet a threat.

“You know him,” she said, unimpressed. “We flew with him and Vhagar. He fed you a sausage once.”

“Oh,” said Aemond, voice strange. Surprised, almost soft. “You remember?”

“Of course,” she murmured, and she grinned. “I thought he would eat your fingers.”

If that is still an option, said the way Vyper’s wings rustled, his claws digging more firmly into the cliffside. Aemond rocked on his heels uncertainly, slipped a step to the right so he stood behind her—just enough so he could deny it being purposeful if she mentioned it, she imagined.

“No,” she said, clucking her tongue disapprovingly. “We have talked about this. The answer is always no.”

Vyper puffed a ring of smoke into her face.

“You speak to him as if he is a person,” Aemond observed. His fingers curled into the back of her gown, so light she almost did not notice. “As if you can understand him.”

“He is better than any person,” Visenya answered. Vyper made a rolling, trilling noise in the back of his throat, and she mimicked it; they bounced the note back and forth for a moment, a singing coo that wrapped her in warmth, and then it faded into the wind as he lashed out his tongue to curl it around her wrist. She glanced over at Aemond, took in the open wonder on his face, the nerves and dripping, eager curiosity. “I can feel him in my head, in my heart. What he feels—when he’s angry, hungry, sad. It is not…speaking or words. Not exactly. It is when he moved. The way he moves. I know what he is thinking.”

“Is that how it is for every rider?” he asked, and she heard the unspoken will it be that way for me?

“I do not think so,” she said, and she groped for his hand again. He let her without complaint this time, though a perplexed purse came to his lips; it turned to barely concealed delight when she guided his hand slowly to the curve of Vyper’s neck. Vyper tittered a little, not unhappy but not quite pleased either, but he did not protest when Aemond started to stroke his scales. “A little for Aegon, I think, but not for Rhaenyra, Helaena, or Jacaerys.” Not for Laenor. “I do not know about the others.”

“Is that why he heeds your commands so well?” Aemond prodded, prowling full circle back to the question he’d posed in his rooms. “Because you feel him, and he feels what you say?”

“Dragons do not do what you say,” she said, lips contorting in distaste at the idea. “They do what they wish, and, if you are lucky and they love you well, they will do what you want.”

“What is the difference?” he said, dismissive.

She took a step back, flicked her fingers towards him, and said, “dracarys.”

Aemond shrieked, jumped backwards so quickly his limbs turned a blur, and hit the ground with arms over his head. She crossed her arms over her chest and watched him with some interest.

An entire minute passed before his head poked up from his arms.

Vyper looked down at him, unimpressed.

“They will do what you say if you want it,” she informed him as he rose slowly to his feet. None of the blood remained in his face, and his hands shook so hard that she could see the tremble. Guilt twinged at her belly, but it dissipated at the wide-eyed fascination growing in his eye. “But, if there is a difference between your mouth and your mind, a dragon will follow your wants before they ever follow your orders. You must say what you want and want what you say, or you should not bother saying anything at all.”

“The dragon keepers never said that,” he said, raising his hand again. He hesitated, looked at her, and then laid his hand on Vyper’s neck again only when she dipped her head. “In the lessons. They never said anything about that at all.”

She shrugged. “My lessons are better.”

“Your teaching style could use a rework,” he said, drily, but it seemed he’d started breathing again so she didn’t know what he was complaining about. “Now what? Vhagar cannot land here.”

“Well,” she said, and her eyes flicked to Vyper’s saddle.

This bit of her plan had several flaws. When she and Aegon snuck out to fly, she had to leave him waiting on the cliffs and let Sunfyre out herself; the keepers made it sound a great fuss, but she never found it very difficult. She and Vyper followed him to collect Aegon; Sunfyre deposited him on the cliffs when they were done, and she brought Sunfyre back with few the wiser.

It would be far easier for Aegon to simply ride along with her, but Vyper refused to let him in the saddle. He dug in his claws and settled his wings and made various off-putting, consternated noises until Visenya alone sat astride him. Dragons, after all, do what their riders want, not what their riders say, and she hated to share.

But Aemond looked so pitiful in the training yard, in his room clutching his pirate book, and he looked so sick with longing when she said she would take him flying.

“On Vyper?” said Aemond faintly. “With you.”

“He will not harm you.”

Vyper tittered a little louder than necessary.

“You will not,” she told him, crossly, then remembered. Aemond watched with his eye wide, fingers loosening in her dress, as she rose onto her tiptoes to press her mouth to Vyper’s scaled cheek. “He is mine,” she crooned, “and so he is yours. Our blood and our fire. A dragon like us. Ours, Vyper.”

Just as she said for Jacaerys and Lucerys, for Aegon and Helaena; just as she would say for little Joffrey when next she saw him. A ritual of her own invention, one that stilled Vyper’s fury when they neared him because he knew they were hers and his and theirs.

Vyper considered Aemond for another long moment, then grudgingly rustled his wings in agreement.

“What did you say?” he asked her worriedly. “You spoke too quickly; I could not tell.”

“There,” she said, satisfied, as if he hadn’t spoken because, when she thought about it, it was not really any of his business, was it? “It will be fine now. Up you go.”

“Are you going to push me off when we get into the sky?” he asked, because, of course, every murderer first took their victims through long jaunts in secret, abandoned tunnels that let out over sheer cliffs just to push them off a dragon.

“If I was going to kill you,” she said in a tone that a stranger might have called loving, “I would not put this much effort into it.”

Strangely, that seemed to make him feel better, and he moved a little more quickly when she urged him to take hold of the rigging and climb up Vyper’s side. She followed immediately, more than a little nervous that he would fall to his death (a sprained ankle, more like, Visenya Targaryen was nothing if not dramatic).

Vyper allowed them to clamber over him, standing, if not still, then at least patiently. Aemond settled into the saddle awkwardly, cursing a bit under his breath as he tried to manage his legs and arms; Visenya never bothered with a two-person saddle, since she never allowed anyone else to fly with her, or even one of the more comfortable ones that the rest of her family preferred. Vyper’s saddle, Rhaenyra had told her more than once, was little more than a thin sheet of leather preventing Visenya from cutting her legs, but she preferred it that way. It let her be closer to him.

“Fasten your chains,” she instructed, squirming her way in behind him with a grunt. They were far too close for comfort, and she had to stretch her arms awkwardly around his waist to grip the saddle horn and the ropes. When he looked at her blankly, she showed him how to attach the chain and belt to the saddle. “Vhagar’s saddle will look different than his, but the premise is the same.”

“Are you quite sure—”

“Never bother asking if I am sure about anything, valonqus,” she said, loftily. “The answer is either yes, which means you are an idiot for asking, or, if it is no, I am only going to lie to you anyway.”

He bleated out a distinctly goat-like laugh, more a bleeding out of anxiety than anything. “That does not make me feel any better.”

“You rode the queen of dragons without chains, and you are afraid of my little beast?”

Vyper huffed an offended noise, and she patted his side consolingly.

“I am not afraid,” he said, twisting to scowl at her indignantly. “If anything, I should be frightened of you. I have watched you fly; you are stark raving once you get in the air.”

She opened her mouth to inform him that, actually, she was adventurous. Daring. An innovator. Only someone revolutionary would fly upside down without chains or try to do a handstand midair—a failed experiment that might have ended in her death if Vyper did not have such fast reflexes, and he now landed himself without order every time she considered trying again—or corkscrew through fire or—

A grin curled at the edges of her mouth and, rather smugly, she asked, “you watch me when I fly?”

“Fuck,” he bit out after a moment of silence (furious from him, delighted from her), his face flushed bright red as he turned back around, “off.”

She was still giggling, her forehead pressed to his shoulder blade, when Vyper cocked his head to the side. As if he’d heard a sound he didn’t recognize.

He gave them no warning before he launched himself off the side of the cliff.

She could admit to herself alone that she had fully expected him to refuse again. Visenya did not like to share, did not really want to have to give up part of this feeling to Aemond, did not want to have part of the one thing that only belonged to her given to someone else.

It rather annoyed her to find that she wanted to give her brother the skies again just a bit more.

It was not so very different being two in the air instead of one, except that she could not lose herself completely. She could not give herself over to the fire and the air, could not Vyper become her blood and her soul and her mind, could not let herself spill into cloud and mist and song. Part of her stayed firm and herself: the part that hooked her legs more firmly beside Aemond’s, the part that wrapped an arm around his waist to anchor him further, the part that used her other hand to gather his hair up in her fingers because if it went into her mouth one more time—

“Where is she?” she yelled over the wind, into Aemond’s ear. She did not know where Vhagar had been nesting, though she knew she was far too big to bed down with the other dragons; she slept close enough for the denizens of the Keep to hear her crying at night, but that still could have been miles away.

He turned his head to look at her, uncertain, face more open than she had ever seen, and she—could not imagine having to learn it all. Having to reach ten years with no dragon then be tossed into the deep end with nothing to keep him afloat. In one life, she had none, and, in this life, she had Vyper for always, and she did not know how she might have handled something in between.

(She had thought, once, to venture into the Dragonmount, to ask the unclaimed dragons, to offer herself up and see if any of them could love her, but Baelon stopped her. Baelon caught her hand, Baelon hit his knees, Baelon looked at her with eyes turned black with his own fear and begged her not to go near any of them. And she loved him so much that she let a piece of her dreams die, a piece of her heart die, a piece of her soul, all to keep him from crying.)

“Close your eye,” she told him, gently. “Close your eye, and feel her. She is in your head, but she is not you; you’ll know the difference. Feel her. Where is she?”

She thought she understood how big Vhagar was after that flight on Driftmark, after the flights in her dreams, but she didn’t. Visenya was starting to suspect that it wasn’t possible to understand, to conceptualize just how fucking massive she was, because even though she knew in her head that Vhagar was bigger than the world could hold, it still surprised her when Aemond’s brow furrowed. When he pointed up just as the sky went out.

The moon and the stars and the glow that the sky itself has—gone, all of it, the three of them thrown into shadow as she threw her head back to see. Vhagar blotted out the heavens, the light, the hope, passed over them with her gargantuan head turned down to look. Eyes fixed on them, checking to make sure her little rider was where he wanted to be.

“Mother, Maiden, and the other fucking five,” she croaked.

“Blasphemous,” he mumbled, but his voice shook around a barely stifled sob—rapture on his face, reverence, the face of a boy starved. A Targaryen who would jump from the cliffs without screaming because at least, for a moment, he would feel the wind in his hair again. “They will damn you.”

He got more holier-than-thou with every passing day since his mother started dragging him into the sept with her and filling his rooms with septons. Losing himself in gods that did not belong to them. She wondered if he even remembered facing her down in the sand, telling her he wanted to be a god, with that feral look on his face that made him look so much like her.

“The gods of this land built their hells out of fire,” she said, eyes still turned up, and she felt a little reverent herself. Vhagar was the oldest being left in this world, except perhaps the Cannibal. She saw the Conquest, let Baelon’s namesake upon her back as well as Visenya’s, everything that gave their family their power. The closest thing to Valyria they had left, though she’d been hatched on Dragonstone. “And there is not a fire in any world that can burn a dragon. They do not have anything that can hold me.”

(Daemon told her that once. In another life, in a life where she called him kepus and went running for his arms with every skinned knee, in a life where he stood more of a father in her eyes than an uncle, in a life where he held her hand when her father’s body burned and she never saw him without one of his children clambering onto his shoulders. In a life where she loved him, trusted him, never thought to fear him. A life where he belonged to Nyra before he belonged to himself.)

“You should not dare the gods.”

“I do not believe in gods.”

She was lying to herself as well as him. Baelon never believed in gods, never had the patience or the time to bother with them (I’ll worship you if I must worship something, he liked to snark, lips to her neck, laughing when she smacked him, and you can worship me, and we’ll be the gods of us because that’s the only thing that matters, anyway) but she always leaned into Valyria’s gods. Into twisted up dragon gods and goddesses, gods of blood and air and fire, gods of power and music and flames. Part of her still did. Part of her thought, sometimes, she could hear them mocking her; part of her still prayed at night, eyes on the stars.

The other part of her, the twisted-up part, the part of her that never existed with Baelon, the part of her that went a little bit mad when her brother’s last breath left him, the part of her she nurtured because it was something new and all her own, ran its fingers over her ribs like an empty cup over prison bars and whispered, you are a god, show them all your fire, break them on your teeth.

“They believe in you.”

(They did, it was true. The gods believed in Visenya the same way Targaryens believed in dragons. A real creature, a dangerous one even when leashed, a being made of smoke and shadow and memories she was not meant to have kept. One to be appropriately wary of, even as they were enamored by it—by her—by what she would become when the sea foam turned pink with blood and the skies turned gray with ashes and the only kind words she could find came from blood-bathed ghosts.)

But Visenya knew nothing of gods and their beliefs, only of her own, so she did not answer him. She only smiled, all teeth, and bid Vyper follow the monster that won her namesake a crown.

*&*&*

A dragon’s mind could not be compared to a person’s; she knew that as well as anyone. A dragon did not think linearly, did not feel in solids. A dragon’s mind was of flame and smoke, each feeling an ember and each thought a spark. Disjointed, bits and pieces of broken glass reflecting light, a puzzle of snags and pieces that no man alive could put together.

And yet, when Aemond went running, Visenya thought she could Vhagar’s. Though she could see the oozing calm spreading through the old dragon’s body, the relief as she lowered her great head to the ground to watch her little rider’s mad dash towards her.

“Be careful!” she called, still on Vyper’s back but half risen in case she needed to hurry down. Aemond paused, halfway done squirreling up the rigging—he looked so damned small up against her side, a speck of fair skin and silver hair, that streak of ink black across his face.

“Be careful,” he mimicked—she thought he was trying to mock her voice, too, but he had to shout so loudly to be heard from Vhagar’s back that it did not quite carry over—and she scowled. “I am not an idiot, Visenya.”

Vhagar’s great head swung towards them, and Vyper went stiff as boards. “Easy,” she crooned, hand on his neck, even as her own heart lodged somewhere in her throat. “Easy, lovely, she will not hurt us. Aemond does not want her to hurt us.”

The second, unspoken question was whether Vhagar wanted to hurt them, and whether Aemond yet had a strong enough bond with her for his wants to halt her—she did not allow herself to think too closely on that one.

(Vhagar was old, far too old in bones and heart, and had the weight of too many dead brethren and dead riders on her soul to care much about a barely-grown whelp of a hatchling with not-quite-right eyes and the slim slip of a girl on its back. Only the name roused her interest for a moment. The name of a girl once, so long ago, just yesterday, who laid hands on a dragon egg and whispered stories to the dragonet inside until it clawed its way from the shell to reach her; the name of a girl more warrior than queen and more dragon than women, a rabid she-wolf with a half-mad son and hot coals for eyes, a queen of men who rode the queen of dragons. Vhagar cared nothing for the girl her little rider held so dear to his heart, but she still cared much for the name.)

“Are your chains fastened?” she yelled when he had been settled on the saddle for a moment, and then yelped and ducked low against Vyper’s when Vhagar began to move. Rustling the aches from her joints and the dust from her scales, the ground beneath them shaking as if the earth meant to break apart, trees felled with a half-hearted sweep of tail as the muscles rippled slow through her haunches and legs, her wings slowly rising to flap.

Vyper hissed a little louder with every flap of her wings; by the time she took to the air, it had become a keening wail in the back of his throat.

“His chains had better be fastened, or I will kill him,” she muttered, and Vyper twisted his head to look at her. Is that really what you are concerned about, the slow blink of his eyes, the ripple of his mouth demanded, and she shrugged. “With her, Vyper.”

He sounded distinctly human when he sighed.

They caught up quickly once they got in the air. Vhagar had size, but she moved slower than any other dragon; Vyper could outrace Caraxes with a half second head start and a bit of luck. She sometimes dared to dream that, someday, he might manage to best even Meleys, but it was a half-hearted hope. Vyper’s fear left him in favor of loose eagerness soon as the clouds misted against their faces, chirruping his pleasure at being in the air with her.

And Visenya…did not believe in gods, really, other than herself, but she saw something holy when she looked to Aemond. Something holy about his arms thrown out so wide, his head flung back, his mouth opened in the middle of a laugh or a scream or a sob. Something holy in the sheer joy he seemed to feel at flinging himself into the skies again.

Something sacred in that, though her first thought remained he looks so like Baelon did, her second was finally, he looks like Aemond, and that is enough.

They flew alongside each other, slow and lazy and drifting, for approximately ten minutes before Visenya started to itch. They were so very high, and the wind currents were just right for diving; the stars were so bright, the clouds hardly doing anything to blot out the light, and she could not help herself.

“Race you!” she shouted over the wind. His head lolled to look at her, and she pretended not to notice his red-rimmed eye, the cherry tip of his nose, the wetness of his cheeks as he passed the back of his hand over his face. “I will even give you a head start.”

“I do not need one!” he objected, goofy sort of grin on his face, all smug arrogance and boyhood, and so she shrugged and listened to him—ducked down low over Vyper’s neck and urged him forward with a pealing laugh, head twisted to watch Aemond’s face contort when they surged forward to leave him behind.

(Her hair a whipped-up mess around her face, her smile wide enough to crinkle up her eyes, her nose wrinkled up, her eyes gleaming bright as the stars above them—he would never forget that sight, not for the rest of his life, not if he lived a hundred years and more.)

(He would see her turned back just the same way not so very many years from then, rain soaking her to the bone and eyes gone wild with a cornered animal’s terror, and she would not be smiling when she watched him give chase. No, she would look at him as if she did not know him at all, blood on her mouth and her leathers torn, and he would never forget that, either.)

But, as it was, they knew little and less of the things to come; they knew nothing of stags and storms and dragons, of what really happened when gods’ coins landed wrong, of what it really meant for dragons to obey their riders’ wants instead of their words.

“Foul!” he cried, (she assumed, reading the shape of his mouth, but she was getting so far ahead she was not sure) and she watched his hands flap in the air for a moment before Vhagar began to move a little faster.

As it was, they were children playing in the skies with creatures meant for war, too fool to be fearful of all the things to come. As it was, she cared only for winning, and all that mattered to him was catching up.

“Leave him in the dust,” she said, and she was still laughing when she turned around. Still laughing when she half rose in the saddle, stretching her hands out far to play with ribbons made of wind; their speed tore her voice away, but it did not matter. Vyper would always hear her. “Make him work for it, sweet.” And Vyper, strange Vyper with his bright eyes and his wicked heart, shot forward so fast that she near went flying off the saddle.

As it was, even if just for a night, they shone so brightly and purely that even the gods shaded their eyes to see it.

*&*&*

(Helaena woke crying with her mouth full of blood.)

*&*&*

Morning light leaked over the horizon by the time they came stumbling back through the tunnels, their fingers once again interlaced; Aemond made no protest this time, even pressed his elbow against hers. His eye drooped every few minutes, as if sheer will alone kept him awake, and she giggled beneath her breath each time she had to nudge him alert.

“I saw her name,” he said eventually, reluctantly, unhappily. He so hated being wrong; it had always annoyed her before, but she found that the thought rang with fondness. She hummed and waited for him to finish the question ringing in his voice. “What was different in that life, then?”

She suspected he still searched for an alternative answer in his head, trying to trip her up so he could rationalize it away. Soothing himself with thoughts of she could still be mad; I only have to prove it.

“When they cut apart my mother, Baelon clung onto life,” she said softly. The first difference. The biggest difference. The most important of them all. “His egg hatched; mine turned to stone. Father married Laena Velaryon in the months after, not your mother.”

“What of Daemon?”

“After Rhea Royce’s death, He stole Nyra from her wedding,” Visenya answered, and a smile curved her lips. “Not—not Laenor. Some Lannister lordling, I think. Laenor wed a girl from the Reach.” She thought so anyway; she cared little for Laenor’s doings in that life. He meant too little to me in that life, she thought, fool that I was, Laenor was nothing to me at all. “He lived long, though. Died old and fat and happy.”

“My mother?” Aemond ventured.

“Gone from court by the time I could walk,” she answered with a shrug. For a moment, she thought she smelled smoke. “I do not know what happened to her afterwards.”

That felt like a lie, but she could not remember why it would be.

“What else changed?” he prompted, slowing almost to a stop.

She rolled her eyes with a huff, opened her mouth to snap fucking everything, what is it you want from me, before she remembered her resolve towards kindness. Before she remembered he seemed to be trying, too. “I do not know, Aemond. What is it you want to know?”

“Were you still Father’s favorite?”

She tried to laugh, but it came out as a mean bark. “You think I am Father’s favorite?”

(What kind of question was that to ask him? Voice full of surprised derision, as if she found the thought ridiculous—as if Viserys would not bend his knee to her if she asked. As if he would not offer her the world on a platter, as if he did not soften each time she entered the room, as if his heart did not break in his eyes each time she so desperately ripped herself away from him.

Aemond would give most anything for some sort of softness from Viserys; part of him hated her for spurning it. Part of him hated himself for envying her, hated himself for wanting it for his own.)

“I am not his favorite,” she said before he could answer, and her voice took on a strange, lilting quality. It carried in the tunnels, bouncing off the walls, echoing through, and she grinned. In the candlelight, it made her look skeletal. “I am his haunting. I am a walking reminder that he cut apart his wife, his great love, and he thinks doting on me will earn him her forgiveness. He does not love me, Aemond. He never even wanted me.” I am not a son, Visenya thought. Rhaenyra and I will never be sons. “I am a way to soothe his guilt.”

(He wanted to scoff, but he found he could not. She believed it too strongly; he could see it on her face. A wishful sort of hurt, a longing sort of ache, black bitterness like the sort he so often saw when he looked in the mirror. He could not find it in himself to call her foolish, to cry her a fool for scorning the affection that the king did not offer to his younger children even in quarters. It came from a poisoned well, perhaps, Viserys’s love, but you died from thirst just as easily, and Viserys had only given Aemond empty cups all his life.)

Nyra used to tell that she thought too poorly of their father, that she was more to him than that, but Nyra was not here to refute her. Nyra was on Dragonstone with her boys and her murdering husband and his daughters, and her letters came just as often but a little shorter each time. It was her own fault, Visenya who could not put ink to paper without wanting to demand answers, without wanting to scream and cry and rage that Laenor was good. Laenor had tried, silly as he was, and he had not deserved to die that way; he had not deserved to die at all.

“You are not your mother’s ghost,” he told her suddenly. He tugged her hand, their near-crawl finally turning to stillness as she turned to look at him. Curious and unsure, the both of them, and he swallowed. Tilted his head up, jaw jutted, eyes burning as he added, fiercely, “and I am not Baelon’s.”

She started to protest. It was not the same; it was different. Her father latched to her, but—he killed her mother. He never saw her as Visenya, only Aemma’s ghost, only a mirror of a woman he loved. Loved her in a vague idea of daughterhood, but he did not know her. He did not want to know her. He did not want her, not really. It was not the same, not the same as the bone deep screaming inside her when Aemond looked at her with Baelon’s eyes, when Baelon’s voice came back to her from Aemond’s mouth—

Oh, she thought. Oh.

“I am not my mother’s ghost,” she said, and she squeezed his hand, “and you are not Baelon’s.”

It was not enough, she knew, but she could not offer him anything but this yet. An admittance of her guilt, an unspoken promise to try. And she could try, would try. To change the way she thought, to see him as Aemond, to make whole all the things she broke. She could put Baelon away if only to save her sanity and Aemond’s both.”

(I want you to choose, he thought again, because it wasn’t enough, the acknowledgement wasn’t nearly enough. I want you choose, hate me or love me, me or a dead boy who never existed. Choose. Choose. Choose me. No one ever chooses me.)

“Do you think she should forgive him? Your mother?”

It snapped her from her darkening thoughts, and she could tell he wanted to ask something else. This question was a distraction, a concession, but she did not press; she suspected it would not be anything she wanted to hear.

“I hope she’s claimed the ghost of Balerion wherever she is,” Visenya answered, after a too long moment, and Aemond looked at her a bit like he’d never seen her before. “And, when he dies and asks her for forgiveness—when he hits his knees and begs her for it, I hope she fucking burns him.”

Chapter Text

When the raven arrived, Visenya had Aemond flat on his back with the dulled end of a wooden sword pressed to the hollow of his throat.

“You are cheating!” he complained. Sprawled out on the dusty floor with his hair a mussed, sweaty mess around his face; she offered to braid it before they began, but his impatience to begin would not allow such a thing. The sapphire in the empty socket of his eye gleamed unhappily up at her amidst the mangled mess of raised scar tissue—she wore his patch about her wrist, the band twisted in on itself to form a makeshift bracelet. She stole it soon as they were alone, as she always did; he stopped bothering to complain about the theft months ago.

Visenya liked the sapphire, though she’d never told him that and never would. It made him look older, fiercer, less a boy maimed by someone else and more like one capable of ripping through a throat with his bare teeth. Less like someone she needed to protect like she protected everyone else, more like someone whose legs she could sweep when he got distracted because she hated losing and he, unlike Jacaerys, would not gripe about bruising his hip on the stone.

“Cheating is a concept for fools,” she answered, drawing the blade away and offering him her hand. He clasped her forearm and let her haul him up to his feet, though he ducked away when she reached with a laugh to try to fix his hair. “There is winning, and there is dying.”

“We are using wooden swords!”

It is steel, far as you are concerned, Harwin told her when they first began their lessons, when she said the very same thing. It will kill you, maim you, bleed you dry. Every time you cross blades, be it practice or battle, you must treat it as life or death. You must treat it as if winning is the only way you will survive it.

“Details,” she said, waving her hand.

“Spoken like a cheater.”

She made to smack him, but he danced backwards before her hand made contact. Dropped into his stance with his back to the window, low and easy, good eye flickering excitedly when he raised his practice sword.

“The sun is up,” she reminded him, tilting her head to the shadow he threw on the floor, and he scowled.

“Once more.”

“The sun is up.”

“Once more.”

She narrowed her eyes, pursed her lips to hide her smile. “When your mother births a cow, you are not to blame me.”

“She did birth a cow,” he answered, smug. “Two minutes before me, roundabouts.”

For someone who called her a cheater, he certainly did not seem to have any qualms about swinging on her when she still stood snickering and out of her stance.

She never intended for Aemond to discover that she knew anything of the sword, exactly. But a few weeks after their first late night flight—two years, she thought, but it feels like yesterday. Two years, but it might have been a lifetime ago—he raised a stick and challenged her to spar. She meant to let him win, she did, but he got that smug little light in his eye, and she could not help herself. It would not do to let him think he was better than her at something.

Visenya suspected his utter delight and subsequent (immediate, mind, still on his ass in the grass) demand that she train with him had less to do with wanting to practice with her and more to do with the fact that Ser Cole never had time for the princes first thing in the morning, but she did not mind it.

She’d woken near every morning since that day to Aemond demanding she drill with him. His hand slapping lightly at her cheek or a pillow whacking across her back, her name hissed through his teeth until she roused already griping. With stolen practice swords, they crept through the tunnels into an old bedroom long abandoned, or they dared venture out onto the cliffs—sometimes, on her least favorite mornings, they stayed in the narrowest tunnel they could find because Aemond insisted they needed practice defending themselves in tight spaces.

They were far more well-matched now than when they started. Aemond grew surer by the day in his feet and newly gangling limbs, relearning his once natural-born grace even only having one eye and suffering through the strange beginnings of puberty, but, two years his elder, she still stood half a head taller and had far less qualms about crushing honor and chivalry under her heel.

(Aemond’s sapphire traced back to her dirty fighting, though Helaena chose the jewel for him and he would deny until his deathbed that Visenya had anything to do with any decision he’d ever made. If you were not my brother, she’d said, tapping her finger to the empty pit of his eye, I would get my fingers into the socket, and what would you do then?

You are a dishonorable harpy, he informed her, squawking, clapping a hand over his scar. No man of honor would think to—

And when you fight men without honor? she said, curling an arm around his shoulder and planting an obnoxiously smacking kiss to his temple. She did not notice the sudden redness in his face, the whiteness of his pressed thin mouth, the shy look in his eye when he latched his gaze to the floor. When you fight men who see no shame in doing whatever they must, will your nobility save you? Will it keep you alive? Is it a shield that defends against them, a sword that will cut them down? They will live, and you will die, and where does your honor matter there, valonqus?)

She learned Criston Cole’s tricks through him, sifting through the man’s lessons in search of bits to keep and bigger chunks to toss aside in favor of older teachings from Harwin, and practicing with him allowed her to rinse the dust and rust from the skills Laenor and Harwin beat into her limbs.

Admittedly, she would have participated in these exercises for the joy of getting to beat the shit out of Aemond, but it pleased her to have a genuine reason.

She called a halt after dispatching him again to the ground, a duty she performed faithfully each morning because he would keep at it until his bones showed through his hands and no more sweat remained in his body. Visenya admired the determination, would have gladly kept along with him for at least a few more hours yet, but no one could know about these spars of theirs—he needed to be cleaned up and with his breath back in his lungs before his morning trip to the sept with his mother.

She scorned the false gods he’d taken for his own and felt nothing but vitriol—or, on her kindest days, a vague apathy—for Alicent, but their unspoken rules forbid her from making any comment on either topic.

“Did Ser Strong teach you to fight like a common born lowlife?” he asked from his tangle on the ground, and she kicked him lightly in the ribs with the side of her boot. “Or did you pick that up on your own?”

“Common sense,” she said, shrugging.

Baelon sparring in the yard, flinging dirt into one of their nephew’s eyes to keep him off him, yanking out a handful of Daemon’s hair, riding into a tourney with his mare in heat. Clever, irreverent Baelon, who cared nothing for how he won so long as he stood alone in victory at the end of it, so long as he got to come loping back to her like a satisfied hound with someone else’s blood on his hands.

“Will you fly this morning?”

Visenya yanked him back up onto his feet. “I fly every morning.”

He made that strange little humming sound he always made when he thought something he did not mean to say, the twisted little mm from the back of his throat that made her want to pinch the sensitive skin on the back of his arm until it praised a dark, bloody purple.

“You could come with me,” she reminded him, as she did every morning, unwinding his eyepatch from her wrist and dropping it into his expectantly outstretched hand.

(As he did every morning, Aemond snuck a look at her from beneath his lashes, a look she never noticed, a look she would not understand even if she did. His sister with her braid coming undone and tendrils of soft silver curls stuck to her temples and the back of her neck with sweat, her chest rising and falling too fast as she caught her breath, one hand wrapped easily around the wooden sword. Embers in her eyes, as there always were, a fire waiting to catch light soon as someone stepped on the wrong side of her temper, and the eternally bloody red of her quirked mouth. Some smoke and mist being of silver and ashes, like one of the creatures in the ghost stories his and Aegon’s nurse used to tell, ghostly figures from the wood who lured men from the path with beckoning hands and too-sharp smiles. When he thought of Valyria—of a home unknown to him, a land that belonged to him and called to him and left him so starved with the want for belonging that he sometimes thought he would scream from it—he thought first of Vhagar, thought first of dragons, but he thought second of Visenya.)

“You are naught but a devil sent to tempt me away from my faith,” he accused, and she laughed.

“Go and find your mother, pup.”

His face twisted in rage at the word, but he did not have the time to pick a fight; he obeyed her while muttering nastily beneath his breath, but obey her he did. She waited a few minutes after he left, slipping the wooden swords under the dresser they’d shoved against the wall, undoing her braid and then fixing it into something neater, before she slipped from the room to go in search of Vyper.

So went near every morning, the past two years in the Keep. The routine had an ease to it now, one that settled well on Visenya’s shoulders and in which she found a certain sort of contentment—a sort, anyway, because, even with years having passed, she still caught herself turning with the expectation that Jace and Luke would soon be scrambling along in her wake or that Nyra would curl an arm around her shoulders from behind.

She sparred with Aemond each morning until the sun rose, then left him to his mother and his false idols to go to her dragon. Sometimes Aegon joined her on Sunfyre, racing each other over the length of the city or betting on which of them could dive closest to the ground before fear drove them to call their dragon back up—that happened little and less, though, his drinking worsening and the subsequent hangovers leaving him dead to the world for more and more of the morning. On the very best mornings, she caught Helaena before the septas did, and her little sister followed her on Dreamfyre. Flights with Helaena had a lazy, soft quality to them; Hel did not want to perform stunts or whirl upside down or race through the currents, only to tilt her face into the sun and hum old riding songs that they learned together from one of Viserys’s old books.

Her beetle never seemed happier than when they were alone in the sky with none but their dragons for company, and Visenya was never happier than when Helaena smiled over at her like all the world made sense.

She spent her afternoons in lessons until she grew bored and fled the room when the septa turned her back—often, she did not show up at all, and Viserys and Alicent no longer seemed to have the energy to send anyone to wrangle her. She found Brigit when they were done, often enticing her from her own lessons with beckoning hands and a sly smile; they;d taken to lounging in the godswood, tucked up small in giant roots, Visenya’s hair spilling a river of silver over Brigit’s lap and her fingers stretched out to touch at the ends of Brigit’s soft curls. They spoke of everything and nothing at all: Brigit’s family and the letters they sent her, Brigit’s dreams and the false ones Visenya invented to keep from speaking of Baelon, of dragons and wolves and the North, all the dark worries that came with being the sister of a boy whose mother wished him to be king and the anxious ponderings of a girl meant for nothing but marrying well enough to appease a too-large family from a too-small House with too-big ambitions. They jested often of running away on dragonback to spent the rest of their lives as mummers or poets, but Brigit never asked her genuinely and so Visenya never found herself forced to decide if she meant it.

(Alicent watched them occasionally, though they never noticed. Two girls in a tangle beneath the tree, too distracted by the softness of each other and the warmth of limbs wrapped around limbs to pay any notice to a green queen lurking in the windows of the Keep. She watched the way Visenya turned her face into the meat of Brigit’s thigh when she laughed, the way Brigit stroked her fingers over the smooth skin of the princess’s cheekbones even when nothing needed to be swept away, the way they bent their heads so close together when they whispered that one might think they were brushing their mouths against each other’s skin. A queen but a girl once, once, once, so long ago, just yesterday, and she watched and thought of a girl with eyes like Visenya’s, a girl who once looked up at her with the glow of the sun on her face as she spoke of the world and cake and forever.

Be careful with your heart, she thought but never said, as she watched wine-dark eyes and fine silver curls pull another dutiful girl down the same road that a lazy smile and pale braids once enticed her own feet to follow. Be careful, oh, be careful; this world is not kind to girls who dare love each other too well. The world drags them apart kicking and screaming and still grasping for each other; this world sends men with greedy hands and wicked tongues and vile minds to pry your hands apart. History will forgive a dragon girl’s sins, but you no more have wings than I ever did. Fool girl, dutiful girl, do not forget that she will not be yours forever.

Alicent watched, and she picked her nailbeds until all ten of them bled.)

Her evenings found her at dinner with Viserys and Alicent, the four children cluttered up on one side of the table. Her hand tensed further around her fork with every mention of how she looked like her mother—of how he looked like Rhaenyra, too, lately, her father’s wistfulness for his eldest daughter finally beginning to outweigh his ire now that she and Daemon had sequestered themselves on Dragonstone for so long. Once the agitation bled into her face, Aemond would knock their knees together beneath the table or Aegon would wrap her fingers around her wrist—if Helaena sat beside her, she hummed and poked at her arm. It settled her until enough time passed for her to leave the table.

Some evenings, she lounged in Helaena’s rooms until she grew tired enough to return to her own. They sang softly to each other as she read and Helaena embroidered; Helaena brought out tiny jars or intricate little cages filled with beetles and centipedes and spiders, and Visenya let them crawl across her knuckles and the tips of her fingers. She tried to help Helaena with her growing collection of puzzle boxes and boards, pretended to be wrathful when her little sister grew tired of her mistakes and banished her to the other side of the sofa. They tried to unravel the riddles that the winds whispered into Hel’s ears, wiping away the tinge of red left behind from bloody dreams. They danced when the mood struck them, hands clasped as they laughed into the silence, spinning in circles around Hel’s bed.

Some evenings, she cajoled Aegon into putting the bottle away. She pulled him into an evening flight or wove his hair into braids or simply sat with him as he rambled drunkenly about nothing; she did not know where he got the wine, how he always seemed to replace it when she smashed or hid his bottles, why his mother seemed incapable of doing anything about it except berating him when she found him drunk. Thirteen years old, hardly more than an infant, baby fat still clinging to his cheeks and his belly, voice still cracking through changes; they should not be losing him to the pits of Flea Bottom, and, yet, sometimes she went to him and found empty rooms with an opened tunnel door.

Some evenings, she found Aemond in the library, crawled into one of the softer armchairs and bid him red to her. Visenya’s interest in books halted with Old Valyria and dragons, magic and folktales and the histories of their kin, but Aemond’s went further into old philosophies and books of battle strategy. When his chosen text held tales that she had no interest in, he followed her request without complaint; when he read anything of interest, he told her to find her own damned book and stop interrupting him.

He was a right little cunt, her baby brother, but she loved him a little more every time he told her to fuck off with that little ghost of a grin at the corners of his mouth.

At night, she followed her dreams home to Baelon. Sometimes, sleep brought good dreams, sweet dreams, dreams of days where they did little but laugh and trade kisses in the light of morning. Sometimes, she woke weeping and dry heaving without any memory of what caused her upset.

A system. A routine. Her life flowed the same each day, for the most part, but she hadn’t yet made it outside before she found it disrupted.

A letter in a servant’s hand. Thick paper. Nyra’s seal, dark red wax.

Rhaenyra wrote her often. Rhaenyra wrote her weekly, though Visenya never answered, though she must have noticed that letters came for Jacaerys and Lucerys and never for her. The letters shortened each week, even beginning to frost over with her sister’s frustration, but they came ever faithfully. It did not surprise her to get a letter from Nyra so much as it did to receive one only two days after the last.

It did not surprise her so much to get a letter so soon after the last so much as it did to tear it open and read the words: come home, sweet girl.

Targaryens had a complicated relationship with the idea of home.

Home meant Valyria, really, a place of blood and magic and fire, a place where dragons filled the air and every eye gleamed purple, a place where they were meant and right and magic. A place where they were not kings, no, no, but they belonged; she would trade a hundred kings and queens and crowns in her bloodline if only to feel something like belonging. A place that still sang to the blood of those of them who grew quiet enough to listen. Visenya could hear the song in this life, though Baelon’s music drowned it from her ears in the other; it sung to Aemond now, sung to her father in its own way, and she thought it sang to Daemon. It called for Aerea, the princess who came back twisted and wrong on Balerion’s back, the one who caused Jaehaerys to forbid all those who came after her from ever going home again.

Without Valyria, dragonback came closest. A different sort of home, one they could not keep forever, one that broke them even as it put them together because they still knew they would need to land again. A home so often denied to so many of them, younger sons and forgotten daughters, because spreading dragons too far from the throne posed a risk of upstarts and civil war.

Because dragonback did not come with guarantees, they could only claim Dragonstone—she supposed anyway. She never went in this life, spent only a handful of weeks there in the other; she and Baelon never took up residence there as would have been their right. They were so young when Viserys died, still content to roam the Keep and stick their noses where they did not belong instead of taking up the duties of lord and lady of their ancestral seat. But…it was close to home, Dragonstone. Close to home, with the crash of the waves and the call of the dragon glass, with the wild dragons and the clutches in the volcano; closest to Valyria, as it had been, as it should still be.

And yet, when Nyra called her home, they both knew she did not mean Dragonstone.

Come home, sweet girl, Rhaenyra said, but she meant come back to me.

Home might be a twisted thing for Targaryens, after all, but Visenya never found it complicated. Love might be complicated, and loyalty, and life with its choices and turns, but never home. She knew where home was. She knew who home was.

I, she thought, bitter in a way she rarely allowed herself, am not the one who left.

She stood in the hall, paper clutched white-knuckled in her hand, and she tried to swallow the hot knot of her throat. The anger still held her, anger that Laenor’s blood slicked the hands of the man who held her sister at night, anger that her sister wed him, anger that she might have asked—no, no, but she must know. Nyra must know it could not be a coincidence. Nyra must know Daemon did it, must know that he cut down the boys’ father, cut down Laenor with his wide smile and soft heart.

She told herself rage stung her eyes instead of tears. She told herself that her knees trembled with outrage rather than the urge to collapse. She told herself that she poured her fury into the letter when she brought it to her face, that the smell of Nyra’s perfume still clung to the pages did not soothe something aching inside her.

But when she turned on her heel, abandoning her morning flight, and went in search of her father—well. She could not lie to herself about that.

*&*&*

Viserys’s own letter laid across his lap when she arrived. A good day for him, his eyes mostly clear when he raised his head to look at her, his cane leaned against his chair, the bandages wrapping the remainder of his hand still fresh instead of soaked with blood-tinged yellow pus.

(For a moment, when he looked to the opening door, he saw Aemma walking towards him. Aemma, hardly any older than when they wed, with her soft mouth and bright eyes, her nose twisted up as if thinking—but then he remembered Aemma never let her braid get so messy, Aemma never had cause to wear riding leathers, Aemma never wore a knife at her hip and looked at him as if she stood on the edge of bolting. Only Visenya.)

“Assaulted on both fronts,” he said before she even spoke, a nasty mutter before he turned back to his letter. “Jaehaerys always said—"

She bit her tongue, as she always did, instead of asking what exactly the Old King’s daughters did to cause him such heartache. Did little Daenerys give him such stress before the Shivers took her? Were Alyssa and Daella such vexes before the childbed killed them both? Did pious Maegelle torment him from the sept, cloaked in her habit and muttering her prayers? Could they call Viserra such a monster, truly, for being everything the realm would have rejoiced to see in a son—ambitious and high-spirited and proud? Had Gael driven him to madness, sweet and gentle as Daemon once said in that other life?

She would grant that Saera might drive a man mad, but she also held an unbearable fondness for the aunt she never knew. Bold, brash Saera with her snarling and refusal to be anything except herself, who brought three boys into her bed with no care for propriety, who threw in her father’s face that Aegon wed two women with none to speak against it. If she were only born a boy…

But she hadn’t been, so her father slew her lover before her eyes, trapped her in the sept to be caned and shaved and abused as punishment for daring.

Sometimes, late at night, when Visenya allowed herself to daydream about flying into the horizon where none could make her choose between one side of her family or the other, she thought about Saera. Saera, who fled across the Narrow Sea, who built her own kingdom in the pleasure houses of Volantis, who sent her bastard sons to walk into the Great Council with their grandfather’s face and mother’s audacity.

She wished she could have seen the look on the old man’s face when his bastard grandsons threw their claims down, too.

(Perhaps none of it would have happened at all—the deaths of the Old King’s children, the deaths of the dragons, the death of them all—if Jaehaerys saw his children as his children rather than his daughters and his sons.)

Visenya said none of this, though. Even she knew better than to pick a fight when she wanted something.

“The Old King had far more daughters than you do, Father,” she said, lips quirking as she trailed across the room. Viserys watched her come, but she came only close enough to him to bend over the model. Reached out to trace her fingers over a building added since the last time she visited, then flicked her nail against one of the ones Aegon broke all those years ago. “Rather more fronts to be assaulted on, I imagine.”

“I suppose so.” He cocked his head, examined her with suspicious eyes. He twisted his mouth up, and a part of her recoiled from the realization that she often did the same. “And, yet, I do not think he would trade his troubles from his daughters for the troubles from mine.”

“Pity,” she said. “We keep things interesting, my sisters and I.”

He snorted a laugh that turned to a cough, and she finally raised her eyes enough to look at him fully. The infection crept slow up the side of his face, the weeping sore of it reaching greedy fingers out for his eye. Sometimes she caught Aemond looking at the slow-growing threat with someone odd on his face, like he could not decide if he thought it justice; she never asked him for fear they would not agree on the matter.

“She wrote to you as well, then?”

“She wishes for me to visit.”

“A month,” he said, and it took immense effort to keep the surprise from her face. “She wishes you to stay a month now and another towards the year’s end. Every year, in fact. A standing arrangement.”

Too long a moment passed before she ventured, “two months a year is not so long.”

“And how long will you be gone,” he asked with a snort, “before you write to tell me that you do not wish to return home?”

This is not home, not really, she thought. This Keep, this castle, is not home. It has not been home since Nyra left, since the boys went away. You are not my home.

“I would not stay away forever.”

She would never, after all. Not forever when Helaena and the twins still lived here in the Keep, when they would be watching for the windows for her to come home again.

“Perhaps,” he said. He lifted the letter, squinted a bit as he read aloud, “each year until a proper match is found for Visenya, she says.”

Visenya’s eyebrows raised, and she tilted her head. “You have not told her.”

“I thought to leave that to you.”

Viserys still did not know of the black rift between his eldest daughters in the wake of Laenor’s death, it seemed. Strangely, it surprised her. She did not know why, exactly, given that her father rarely noticed any of the goings on in their family, but she had thought he would know that the letters she sent away to Dragonstone were for Jacaerys’s eyes and not Rhaenyra’s.

Visenya nodded slowly. “I will tell her during my visit then.”

“She asked leave to bring you with her, once. I refused her.”

“I was a child then.”

“And you are not now?”

Have I ever, she wondered, truly been a child to you? Have I not always been a dead woman’s ghost?

“You named Rhaenyra heir at fifteen,” she countered. “You married Her Grace when she was of the same age; Mother had lost a babe and already grown heavy with another. Were they children, Father?”

The truth, as they both knew it, could only be yes.

His answer, as they both knew he would give it, could only be, “No, I suppose they were not.”

“I will come back, Father,” she said when he fell silent again. “You will hardly know I am gone.”

He looked at her with dark eyes, and she felt the nausea of it wash over her—the darkness of his look, the pressure at her shoulders, the tearing of her skin and the rearranging of her bones. Felt it, like she always did, when his thoughts slid towards a life where Baelon lived and she died in his place.

You killed my mother, she thought, so tired, so old even in her young skin, and she tilted her head to the side, and I killed your son. May the gods damn us both for our bloody, kin-slaying hands.

“A month, Visenya,” he murmured. “Not a day more. Not a minute more.”

She took a step closer, bent down, and pressed a kiss to her father’s rotting cheek. “Tell me about Valyria, Father?”

Pity and a sense of duty, repaying a favor; she settled down beside him to listen to him tell her the same tales he always told, to look at the model that she knew better than the backs of her hands, to pretend not to flinch when he touched her arm.

(Pity and a sense of duty, repaying a favor; Viserys knew it, but he took it anyway. Took an afternoon spent with the daughter he did not understand, the one he did not know; a daughter brimmed up with resentments for this life and another he did not remember. One who saw right through his skin to the heart of him and did not hold any love for what she found there.

A daughter who, even with all the things she understood and the extra life she once lived, thought wrong of him each time she thought he wished her dead in Baelon’s place. No, he would not wish for Visenya’s absence, would never wish her anything but life and joy. He only ever wished Baelon lived to grow up beside her—only ever thought, with a surety that he did not understand, that there was something deeply wrong in the fact that no grinning boy stood beside her.)

*&*&*

“I must tell you something,” she said that night, slipping on light feet into Aemond’s room. He closed his book with a resounding thwack and took off his patch before she had time to reach over and snatch it off his face. She tossed herself onto the bed, stretched out over his legs— “get your feet off my sheets,” he complained, “you must stop walking barefoot in the tunnels, you heathen”—and reached for the book with a lazy hand.

He narrowed his eye at her.

She rolled her eyes and stretched her legs out to dangle them further off the side of his bed.

“You have read it already,” he said, and she hummed when she saw it. An old thing, well-thumbed, one of the many tellings of the Conquest that she had read been reading voraciously ever since she remembered how.

“I never tire of the Conquest,” she said, wistfully. “What it must have been like to see it.”

“What must you tell me?”

Visenya and Aemond built their relationship through trial and error. It tipped often into fury before they found their balance, kicking-screaming-spitting fights where she spewed poison about his mother’s black soul and he raged about their sister’s bastard boys and loose legs, weeks where they refused to speak to each other after he called her mad for her dreams and she called him a half-blooded cunt.

Now, they had rules—unspoken but never unfelt, rules that maintained their careful peace.

Visenya said nothing of his mother within his hearing, not a quip or an insult or even an eye-roll; she never called her a cunt or pulled a face when he mentioned her, never so much as wrinkled her nose. Aemond never spoke of Rhaenyra in front of her, not a sneer or a cruel name, and he never, ever brought up the boys—be it to call them bastards or otherwise.

They rarely spoke of their father; their feelings differed so greatly on the subject that even to attempt to broach it risked the collapse of everything they built. Aemond remained as she had been in her first life—thirsty for approval, raging over its absence, longing for Viserys’s eye, wistful for what a father would be, hurt at being invisible, jealous wickedly over the love Rhaenyra and Visenya took for granted. Visenya walked with apathy instead in this life, her anger towards her father a flame that she stoked and fed and tended with care so that it would neither die nor grow hot enough to melt the ice she cultivated inside her chest. Aemond still thought her lucky to be favored, and she still thought him a fool for not seeing it as nothing but a cheap bribe; they both found it easier to stay silent on the matter of Viserys, lest they were observing which bit of him most recently succumbed to the rot.

The third rule, they never broke. Not even by mistake. The third rule demanded still tongues and pretend obliviousness, tiptoeing on light feet around any mention of the Throne and who would make it their seat when death came calling for the king. The third rule held hostage the entirety of the Keep, not only Visenya and Aemond—a pressure laying over every shoulder, a darkness in the corner of every eye, a threat of what would come if Hightower eyes did not stop gazing towards what did not belong to them.

They spoke of other things instead. Of dragons and flight, of Valyria and their ancestors long dead, of swordplay and soldiers and songs. He practiced his Valyrian, and she laid with closed eyes at the foot of his bed as he did it—corrected his pronunciation occasionally, clicking her tongue when he mixed up his vocabulary. They worried together over Helaena’s rapidly approaching marriage, despaired of Aegon’s drunkenness, debated whether he could fly without chains yet (his hatred of her beating him at anything left him desperate to forego them). In some of his rare good moods, he let her weave braids into his hair and even granted her an entire fifteen minutes before he ripped them out. Once, she let him try to braid hers and then forced him to brush out the knotted mess afterwards while he griped and muttered at her back.

She found Aemond easier sometimes than Aegon or Helaena, even than Jace and Luke. Visenya did not have to worry about Aemond the same way she did for them, did not have to fret and over and bite her cheeks bloody over all the things that might happen and could happen still. None of Aegon’s drinking or his terrible luck to be a firstborn son; none of Helaena’s dreams or the encroaching threat of her marriage and what it would mean for a girl like her; none of the frantic worry for Rhaenyra’s boys and their dark hair. No, she did not need to worry about Aemond, old in his bones, cranky and snooty and rude, his mother’s dearest treasure.

It was nice, that’s all, to not have the weight of his choices and his duty offloaded onto her shoulders. Aemond had near as little choice in his future as she did; as a second son, he would be bartered off to strengthen alliances as surely as she would, and he knew his duty as well as she knew her own. She could be a petulant older sister instead, pinch his cheeks and pull his hair and tease him when his voice cracked.

“You are not allowed to be cross with me,” she warned.

His eye narrowed again.

“Why would I be cross?”

“Because you are a right little dick,” she said with a fond pat to his leg; he jerked his knees and wiggled to jostle her about, then scowled when she only laughed. “Promise me that you will not be cross.”

“You have never cared when I am angry with you.”

Yes, but he would be angry for a month. She would have no way to fix it while away on Dragonstone, and he would stay here stewing in his outrage and bitterness until she came home again; she did not even want to think of the venom he would have stored up by the time she returned to King’s Landing. Not to mention that it would happen twice a year for the foreseeable future, and she could not stand to have come so far with him only to be dragged backwards again.

“Promise me,” she insisted.

(Promise me, he had begged her, sprawled in her lap with blood pouring from his face and spilling thick and choking down his throat each time he dared open his mouth; promise me, she asked him now in his rooms, sprawled in his bed with her head on his legs and her hair spilling soft across his lap and her eyes so earnest on his face. He found he did not much appreciate the similarities.)

“I swear it,” he said.

“I am going to Dragonstone.”

Whatever passed over his face, she could not name it.

“What?”

(Running back to Jacaerys and Lucerys, snarled the nasty voice in his head, the one that sneered whenever his mother said Aegon would be king and raged at Luke the Beloved who stole his eye and wanted to burn the world down around himself if only it would allow him his due. Running back to the whore, running to them and leaving the rest of us behind, leaving me behind because I will never matter the same as—)

“A month,” she said quickly. “No more than that. I will come back.”

“Why should I care?” he snarled before the words were all the way from her mouth. “Stay gone if that’s what you’d like; it is no business of mine.”

Brutal, vicious, meant to cut her, but Visenya only blinked. She looked down at his hands, at his long fingers clutching at his book with such force that his knuckles turned white, and then up to the splotchy pink blotches rising on his cheeks and the sides of his throat. She watched his eye shoot down to his lap so it would not meet hers, the tension in the way his shoulders straightened, the bloodless press of his lips into a thin slit.

(Liar, liar, liar, Alicent Hightower’s sons were all liars, and Aemond Targaryen would always be the worst of the three.)

“Your face twitches when you lie, valonqus.” She meant it as a jest, a spiteful dig at him for attempting to hurt her feelings, but it came out almost apologetic. Soft and something like fond as she raised a hand to touch her fingers right to where the muscles jumped guiltily in his cheek.

(A devil come to tempt him, didn’t he call her just that morning? He thought it again just then, gone still as stone and struggling to breathe through the sudden swelling in his throat, trying to force his heart into beating when all his blood seemed to be turning to something like fire and something ice. I am ill, he thought, trying to justify himself why all his focus fixed on her fingers on his face as soon as they touched there, why the thought of her leaving him behind made him want to tear all the furniture in the room into splinters, why he suddenly could think of nothing but how badly he wanted to brush that errant curl away from her cheek. I am mad; she has driven me mad.)

“I am not lying,” he said, and she watched in fascination as the muscles jumped beneath her fingers. “Stay gone forever for all I care. I wish you a pleasant life with Rhaenyra and her ba—”

“Aemond,” she warned sharply, hand dropping from his face. He turned his face towards the window. “I am not leaving. Not forever. It is no different than when the rest of you go to Oldtown with your mother.”

“That is not the same!” She sat up with a huff, and his face screwed up and then smoothed out again just that quickly. “Helaena asked you to come with us every time Mother takes us to Oldtown!”

“Oh, yes, because I am sure your mother in her infinite grace—”

“Visenya,” he warned, and she set her jaw mulishly.

“It is only a month, Aemond.”

“And how long will you be gone before you write to say that you are not—”

“Oh, that is what Father—”

“Then he’s right, isn’t he—”

“I would not leave you!” He faltered in his anger, face turning briefly owlish, and she scowled at him. “You think I would abandon Helaena when she will be wed not three years from now? You think I would leave forever with Aegon turning to a drunkard in front of our eyes? You think I would have you take care of them both by yourself?”

(Then stay, cried the little boy who still lived inside his skin.)

“A month.”

She nodded. “A month now, a month towards the end of the year. Every year until I am wed.”

“Forever then,” he muttered, but his shoulders rolled as the tension dissipated. Anger and hurt fading into something more annoyed than anything. “No man alive is mad enough to wed you.”

Part of her, still foolish and young and resentful, still naive and wishful, hoped for him to be right. The rest of her knew better than to think she could have a life of her own; the rest of her was not a child anymore.

“Every man is mad enough to wed a girl with dragon blood,” she said with a flick of her fingers, and she laid her head back on his legs. He shifted his knee beneath her cheek when she turned to face him, one of his hands half sliding across the cover of his book. “Who would not trade sanity to give their sons a chance at the sky?”

“Smart men.”

“Let me know if ever you find one.”

“Do Aegon and Hel know yet?”

“I will tell them tomorrow.” His fingers strummed against the book, his knee shifting again, and she tilted her face up higher to study him. “You will look after them while I am away?”

“You know that I will.”

“Aegon as much as Helaena, Aem,” she said, softly, and he made a mulish mm sound from behind his teeth. “Do not let him get himself into trouble.”

“He is trouble.”

“Our trouble,” she said. “You must—”

“You know,” he said again, almost exasperated but not quite, “that I will.”

She half smiled at him, one end of her mouth tugging up, then curled a hand around the back of his leg.

“Tell me about Baelon,” he said abruptly, and her brows rose.

He asked her sometimes to tell him of that other life but only when they were so deep into the night that they could not think of anything else to say to each other. She thought he delighted more in being a part of one of her secrets, in being the one she allowed to know, in having a perceived honor, more than he ever really cared to know about a brother long dead-never alive.

(He would deny it if she ever asked, but that did sum up his feelings on the subject rather tidily.)

“What about him?”

“Anything,” he said, which really meant how we are different, Visenya, tell me how we are different. Aemond always wanted to hear about the ways they were different, always found one even in stories where, to her, they did not seem so dissimilar at all.

She did not usually find it difficult to give him what he wanted, though. They shared a face and a love for the sword, a certain cleverness and a joy in flying, but they were not the same in much else. Baelon always wore an easy, crooked smile and his laughter came easy as anything; Aemond’s smiles were rarely more than thin grins and his laugh had to be dug out of him with picks like ore too deep beneath the earth’s surface. Baelon thought little of any land’s gods, while Aemond gave himself over to his mother’s idols. Baelon took the throne for duty and a misplaced obligation towards a mother long dead, and Aemond’s eyes clung greedy to the Iron Throne and their father’s faltering hold on its arms. Baelon read only when forced, and Aemond could not be pried from the library. They preferred different foods and different music, dressed themselves in different colors and wore their hair in different fashions, wrote differently and walked differently.

(Loved her differently, for Baelon loved her with all he is and was and ever will be and Aemond could only ever love her until she pushed too hard at the walls he built around them both. Baelon put her heart above himself, above their family, above the realm; Baelon belonged to her, and Aemond would always be his mother’s son before being anything else to anyone at all.)

She kept the variances like a ticked list in her head, something to rattle off to herself whenever she slipped back into thinking of Aemond as nothing but Baelon’s echo, but she only ever really needed one anymore.

“Visenya,” he prompted, bouncing his legs beneath her head again.

Baelon called her Visenya when they argued, mostly, or when he needed to convey something he deemed a serious enough to warrant the abandonment of the names he gave her instead. Sweet dragon and little love, darling and sweet one, wicked creature and beloved, pretty girl and beauty, my heart and my soul and treasure.

Aemond, naturally, called her none of those things, but he did not call her Enya like the other boys and Helaena, either. He did not ever call her ‘Senya as Laena and Rhaenyra’s children called her in that ever live; he never called her Vis like Laenor used to do when she said something that made him feel particularly fond. No, Aemond only ever called her Visenya. Just her, just Visenya, as she was. Never shortened, never sweetened, never cut down.

Strangely, she thought she preferred it.

“He hated to read,” she said finally, and Aemond’s face contorted. The unpleasant expression made her smile, and she turned her face to press her cheek more firmly into his leg. “Never much cared for anything he could find, even the books about Valyria.”

“No?”

She shrugged. “It drove Father mad that he cared so little for our histories, but he…well, he did not dream of it the way you and I do.”

(You and I, thought Aemond, pleased in a bone-deep way that would have made more sense to him if he was any older than thirteen, if he yet understood why he always looked for her face first in crowds and flushed hot when her skin brushed his and still could not stop looking at that stray lock of hair. You and I, me and you, something for us and not for him, something you give me that he never got, something I give you that he never did.)

“Strange for a king.”

She laughed at that. “My Baelon was strange for any man, much less a king.”

“Tell me about you,” he said, which did not shock her. When he found himself in a mood to hear about another life, he always asked four questions.

She hardly remembered the days when his questions made her want to bite and claw, when they made her lonesome and angry. She took something like comfort from it now, speaking her memories aloud to someone who believed her (even his weak arguments came to a grinding halt after Cregan Stark took back the North just the way Visenya said he would) instead of being trapped in her head.

“I had,” she said, then stopped.

She always found it more difficult to tell him about that other version of her than anything else. Sometimes, that girl-woman-mother-queen seemed like a different creature entirely, so removed from her that she could not fathom how they could be the same.

That Visenya, Other Visenya, content and soft and happy, who saw little of the world and claimed no dragon to carry her, who thought Baelon all she needed. She had been happy in that quiet, domestic life, Visenya knew; she dreamed of herself each night, walked those steps, and she knew she never really wanted more than that—at least not enough to fight for it.

And yet—and yet, she knew herself too well to imagine herself capable of being happy in such an arrangement in this life. Landlocked and citybound and a wife-mother-wife-mother-wife-wife-mother-wife; too much of her ached for wind and flames and something new, too much of her wanted, too much of her craved.

I used all my wanting up on him in that life, she thought, almost rueful, and now I do not know how to get it out of me.

“I had a circlet,” she said, startling back into herself when he made an impatient noise, “that I wore. Laena had it made for me when I was very young, I think.” She raised a hand to gesture a path along her brow. “It was not an ornate thing. A golden band. A bit of dragonglass just here.” She taped the center of her forehead. “Like a pearl, almost.”

“You could have it made again.”

“No,” she said, softly. She could not have her circlet remade anymore than she could carve her name and Baelon’s back into the headboard, any more than she could put Baelon’s bracelets back around her wrists, anymore than she could bring her brother back to her life. It would only be a cheap mimicry, a ghost of a ghost, and she thought it better to leave her memories as memories instead of forcing them into something tangible. She thought she would go mad if she did not. “It would not be the same. And I prefer silver in this life.”

She waggled her fingers to draw his attention to the silver rings she’d taken to wearing, twisting bands without stones cluttering up each finger.

“Tell me about a dragon,” he said, and she grinned.

“Basilisk.” She remembered him as a hatchling, sprawled along her son’s bassinet with his irreverent golden eyes fixed curiously on her; she remembered him in his early youth, wings too big for his body and horns comically large on his head; she remembered him grown with a prince on his back, head dipped down regally to bare his teeth playfully in her direction. She remembered his name but never his rider’s, and it only broke her heart when she let herself think on it too long. “Green as Vyper’s eyes, but his flames burned blue. His eyes were gold as coins. His tail…it could curl around things, and he could move it around differently than the other dragons could. The keepers said the bones in his tail were different.”

“Prehensile,” Aemond said, absently, which sounded right, and then, “who did he hatch for?”

“My son.” 

Aemond asked her exactly one question about her sons when he first discovered they’d existed, but he never asked her another.

(He could not bear the look on her face, the wrenching openness of her face, like her ribs were caving in and piercing through her heart. He could not bear the way her voice shook, the way it shattered, the way she curled so small into herself. I do not remember, she told him thickly, and he never knew what to do with his sisters when they cried. I can never remember them. Their names, their voices. I—I wake, and they are gone. He could not bear it and so he never asked her about her children, never asked about the lordling Viserys married her off to in order to make them.)

“What did you dream about last night?”

She always hesitated before she answered this one, never certain whether to be honest—though she always ended up telling him the truth regardless.

“I think I died last night,” she said, distantly, and his legs jerked beneath her head. She didn’t look at him, only smiled a false smile up towards the ceiling. “It—happens, sometimes. I dream my death, but I wake up and I do not remember. I just feel the cold in my throat. Feel my heart going numb.”

“Old age?”

“No.” Her smile became a thoughtful frown. “I smell the blood.”

“You’ll die of old age in this life,” Aemond said instead of addressing that, but she could not blame him. A boy of thirteen could not be expected to comfort his sister over dreaming of her own death; she doubted men grown would have any idea what to say. “A cranky old woman, more wrinkle than skin.”

“And you a cranky old man?” She turned her face to grin at him, delighted in how he scowled down at her. “Will you walk with a cane and gripe of your joints?”

“I want to die a dragonrider’s death,” he said, loftily, “with fire and blood and smoke.”

“You can do that,” she drawled, “and still be a cranky old man.”

He reached out and flicked her, right between the eyes, but she saw the upward twitch in the corner of his mouth whenever she crossed them at him. “You will come back.”

“I will come back.”

One of his hands raised slowly, as if fearing to startle something wild, and he used a single finger to hook a curl away from her face and behind her ear.

*&*&*

(Helaena and Aegon took it rather well the next morning, but, then, they were not Aemond. They lived all their lives with Visenya’s affection tossed easy about their shoulders, not like Aemond who had just recently come into hold with it, not like Aemond who still feared it disappearing. Helaena knew from her dreams that Visenya would not go away forever, not yet, and Aegon—Aegon simply never considered that his Enya would leave him.)

*&*&*

Brigit, decidedly, did not take the news well.

That could be blamed on the fact that Visenya forgot to be tactful about telling her, more than like, too distracted by the Northern girl drawing patterns up her arm with her fingertips as they coiled together in the godswood. One moment, she laid with her head tucked against Brigit’s shoulder, eyes hooded with lazy contentment, listening to her rambles and responding with soft murmurs of her own; the next, Brigit leapt to her feet so quickly that Visenya tumbled to the dirt with a yelp.

I, she thought with resignation, have said more than I meant to say.

“You mean to leave me?” she wailed. “Here, by myself? What am I to do, with you gone for gods know how long—”

“Only a month,” she objects, shoving herself up onto her hands. She fixed her face into something contrite, an expression deeply unfamiliar to her except in Brigit’s presence, and swallowed a touch too hard when she noticed that Brigit’s wrath sent an angry pink flush from her brow to the bare hint of her chest visible from the cut of her gown. “It will not be so very long—you can come with me if you wish!”

“They will never let me leave; you know that.” She threw herself back down amongst the roots, shoved nastily at Visenya when she reached out for her and then immediately changed her mind; her head butted obnoxiously against the princess’s collarbone before her face buried against her shoulder, and she clutched for her hand with a death grip. “A new boy has come courting. An awful little wretch with the reddest damned hair I have ever seen.”

“Symon,” said Visenya, darkly, eyes narrowing. “Yes, I know him. You cannot marry him. You are worth threescore of him.”

“I will not have a choice if you are not here to scare him off! Auntie has threatened to send me home if she catches me speaking sharply to a suitor again!”

Visenya took a great deal of enjoyment in chattering to the boys who came courting Brigit—much more enjoyment than she ever got from chasing off her own. She met them with wide smiles and unblinking, unsettling eyes as she told them all about the funny ways that ladies in Valyria used to punish the men who took away their favorite maids and ladies-in-waiting. One of my great-great-great-great—oh, you get the point; she once fed a man his own genitals, can you believe? Visenya would ask, laughing faintly without breaking eye contact, and it would not be so long before they gave their most solemn regrets to Brigit’s aunt and uncle and got the fuck away from the sharp-eyed Northern girl with the prickly dragon forever coiled about her shoulders.

Once, when a particularly persistent little lord persevered anyway, Visenya simply took his chin in her fingers and said, quite sweetly, you cannot have her. She did not know why exactly it worked so well, but he left Brigit well enough alone after that.

(She held the Doom in her eyes, is why. A besotted fool he might have been but even the most foolish men know better than to reach for what a dragon has claimed their own.)

“I will set the twins at him,” she said with a wave of her hand. “They will handle things while I am away.”

“Your brothers?”

“The little one is more adept at physical torment, but the big one is more than capable of tearing him into pieces emotionally. It is really whichever you prefer.”

“Visenya,” Brigit cried. “This is not a time for jests.”

It hadn’t been a jest. Aemond would love a task that involved breaking someone’s kneecaps with a stick, and Aegon would delight in having someone new to turn his wine-fed callousness against. It would give them a task to keep them busy while she visited Rhaenyra; it might even help to keep them out of trouble—but, if Brigit insisted, she supposed they would try something else.

Visenya cupped her friend’s face gently in her hands and leaned in to press their foreheads together. “If I come back to find you betrothed, I will eat him.”

Brigit scoffed. One of her hands raised to loop loose fingers around Visenya’s wrist, her thumb stroking absently at the back of her hand. “You cannot have Vyper eat everyone who inconveniences you.”

“I said I would eat him,” Visenya said, one brow raised, voice half-amused. “Whole. I will devour his flesh and mix his blood into my wine, and I will fashion you a crown out of his ribcage.”

“You are quite mad.”

(It worried Brigit sometimes—the way her heart raced when Visenya looked at her like that. Blood promise on her lips, wild eyes and wolfish smile. Worried over how she liked how mad her princess could be, worried over how far Visenya might be willing to go if Brigit ever asked it of her. Your family tames dragons, Brigit thought, affection pulsing in tune with her breath, but I am pleased enough with leaving you wild.)

“Only for you,” she said, a lie but a loving one, her eyes soft and her face gentle. Visenya rarely looked at anyone so gently as she did Brigit. “You will not be wed until you wish; I swear it to you.”

“They will separate us if I am wed.” Visenya turned her face into dark curls, inhaled the pine and soap scent of her. She cast a glance to make sure they still sat alone in the godswood before she coiled her arms around her; none would think two girls entangled strange, sweet childhood friend, but she doubted any could see the look on her face and think anything innocent. “They will send me away.”

“I will eat them, too.” She brushed a kiss to Brigit’s forehead, which the other girl allowed after a moment of hesitation. Bosom friends kissed foreheads, kissed hands and cheeks, didn’t they? They can kiss lips, too, Visenya thought but did not say, drawing a formless shape on Brigit’s neck with the tip of her finger. Lips and necks and chests and legs. I am friend enough to kiss anything at all, if you wish it of me. “A month is not so long. They cannot have you wed in a month just because I am away.”

Brigit made a doubtful noise.

“They cannot,” Visenya insisted. “It is too fast. You needn’t worry. They will not take you from me, zoklā-ābrā.”

“Will you ever tell me what that means?”

Wolf woman. Visenya’s wolf woman with her fierce eyes and mess of hair, with the lilt to her voice that spoke of ice and winters never-ending, with the way she bared her teeth when she laughed and glowed like something priceless in the moonlight.

I am not a Stark, Brigit would laugh if ever she told her. We are not all wolves.

“No.”

“You are a proper bitch, sometimes, Visenya, do you know—”

“A proper bitch,” Visenya agreed, nuzzling in close. “Now tell me you will miss me and apologize for getting cross.”

“I’ll miss you,” Brigit agreed, still sulking. “But the day I apologize to you is when we are both dead.”

*&*&*

The Bloodwyrm met her in the air above Dragonstone, his trilling little roar sending a wave of tension through her spine until she saw that his saddle held no rider. Only Caraxes, curious over the newcomers, come to whirl around the black dragon and the girl upon his back.

Vyper did not like him.

She felt the ripple of it through his body as he tilted his head to look at the beast cutting through the skies beside them, a bloody knife through the clouds. Distaste and then outrage when Caraxes whipped closer, his oddly long neck slithering too close to Vyper’s belly for comfort before he darted away again—a sulking, childish dislike flickering through his chest. She could not sense the source of it, though, if it came from her feelings for his rider or a genuine wrath on Vyper’s part.

“You need not hate him,” she laughed into the wind. “It is not his fault that his rider is a murdering—”

Something crashed into them from below and sent Vyper into a spin so quickly that she might have been flung from the saddle if her hands had not been wrapped loosely about the horn of the saddle; she only barely tightened her grip enough in time. Vyper screeched his displeasure, blew a petulant bolt of flame at nothing, but he made no move to pounce upon their attacker.

Vyper would never harm the tiny green dragon that just purposefully crashed into his belly because to hurt her would be to hurt the ruddy-faced boy with the head of wind-swept, wild curls who perched on her back. Vyper belonged to Visenya, shared her heart and soul and everything, felt what she felt and loved what she loved.

Vyper would die before he ever hurt Jace.

“Arghūs!” he shouted over the wind, beaming so wide the wind yanked his cheeks into something silly. They spoke about this when he still lived in King’s Landing, heads bent together as they murmured—playing hunt in the air, playing at chase, playing-playing-playing but most importantly together. In the air together, in the air at all—she knew, of course, that Jace flew, that he took to the air on Vermax in his eleventh year just as she took to the air with Vyper during hers, but knowing did not match seeing. Seeing him with longer hair, taller and bigger and laughing, looking so at home on dragonback. “Hunt, Enya! Arghūs!”

“Arghūs!” she screamed back, and she would not admit even to herself that her laughter held half of a sob “Arghūs!”

(Caraxes lost interest in the strange dragon with the too-knowing eyes and the whelp on his back, and he banked to fly further out to sea.)

They did not play at tag for long—more complicated than it looked, given the size difference between Vyper and Vermax—before they went diving for the bridge, but more than enough time passed for her to remember what a cunt Vermax could be. Ill-tempered and a sore loser and loud, biting at Vyper’s wing and glowering darkly at them even with her rider giggling atop her.

Vyper hardly settled atop the bridge before she scrambled down onto the stone, and Jace leapt from Vermax’s back when she still hovered several feet in the air. She did not even notice their dragons flinging themselves back into the air to torment each other, too busy crashing into him.

“I missed you,” they said together. “I missed you; I missed you.”

“You are so tall, little brother!” she cried, touching his cheeks—the baby fat still there but rapidly melting away, the first hints of Harwin’s jawline and Rhaenyra’s angular cheekbones peeping through—and scowling when she saw he now stood hardly an inch away from being of a height with her. “Why are you so tall? When did you get so tall?”

“If you did not wait two years to visit, you would know!” he shrieked, but no heated words could burn her when he flung his arms around her even tighter. “I have missed you, Enya, do not stay away so long again—”

“You could have come to visit whenever—”

“You would not answer Mother’s letters—”

“I did not wish to—”

“Stop bickering!” bellowed a different voice, and Visenya’s head whipped around to see a blur of bouncing curls and big eyes bounding down the bridge towards them. “She has been here five minutes, Jace, and you are already bickering!”

“He must have seen us in the air,” Jace muttered. “We have been watching from the windows.”

“Lu!” she sang. She started to drop to her knees and then realized with horror as he approached that the top of his head came to somewhere in the middle of her ribcage now. “Bykys jaes, you have gotten so big!”

Luke crashed into her chest so hard that she staggered and only kept her feet because of Jace’s hurried hand on her back, but she did not even squeak. She curled her arms around him, shoved her face into his hair, marveled at how solid he stood now, at how much could change in little boys in only two years. “I missed you, Enya; you have missed so much. Joffrey is so big now, and Daemon is teaching us the sword—”

“I missed you, too,” she said, peppering kisses all over the top of his giggling head. “I have missed you so terribly; the Keep is not the same with just Helaena and the twins for company.”

Luke’s smile turned to a frown, face screwing up. “Is—is Aemond alright? I wrote to him, once, to say sorry, to ask, but he never—”

That outraged her a little, that Aemond had not answered, that for all the resentment and festering hatred forever building in his chest he had turned his back on an outstretched hand. Aemond never said a word to her about Luke writing him a letter.

(Most likely because it lay in ashes in his mother’s hearth, but neither Aemond or Visenya would ever know that.)

“He’s Aemond,” she said, brushing at his cheek, and she stretched her arm to let Jace press back into her side, yanked them both in close. “He is an annoying little shit, but he is fine. Aegon and Helaena, too.”

“Does he give you—”

Visenya could hear Jace speaking. She heard the burble of his voice and could still feel him pressed into her side; she could hear Lucerys, too, cuddled into her chest with his arms latched greedily around her as if he did not ever mean to let go. She could hear them, and she wanted to listen, but another person walked briskly down the bridge towards them.

A woman with Visenya’s eyes, hair braided into a crown, in a gown of red and black, looking more uncertain that Visenya has ever seen her.

“Rytsas,” said the woman when she reached them, almost shyly, the hello ringing between them like a call to war. Her eyes searched Visenya’s face, soaked her in, down her body and up again, as if examining armor for chinks.

(She stood so tall now, her baby sister, all the softness fled her face and the uncertainty of childhood freed from her shoulders. A woman grown now, or near enough, with the knife still at her hip and something guarded in her face that she recognized, that she knew, but that had never been turned towards her before. All grown up, her sweet girl, her baby sister, standing on the bridge hanging onto Jace and Luke like she thought they might fly away, and she missed so much. Two years of life she knew nothing about, gods forgive her for not knowing where to first settle her eyes.)

Visenya looked back at her, standing so close but somehow even further away than when they were so many miles apart, and she wanted…she wanted to go to her, but she could not move. She could not even speak for a moment. Tried to say hello, tried to say I missed you, tried to say I am so angry, tried to say there is so much to say, tried to say I love you, regardless, forever, no matter what.

She managed nothing more than a trembling, “Rhaenyra.”

Chapter Text

They readied her a simple room. More blankets than she needed piled up on the bed, soft fur pelts that near swallowed her hand when she ran her palm over them, and a hearth already burning bright. (“Because your feet freeze at night,” Jace informed her, as if he did not recall that he only knew that because he had always come crawling into her bed uninvited.) A wide window overlooking the beaches, curtains tied back to keep them from even partially hiding the view. (“Because you like looking for Vyper when he flies at night,” Luke said, still pressed so close to her side that his words came out muffled against her ribs, making loud noises of indignant discontent every time she tried to take her hand from his hair.”) A little bookcase with shelves half full of familiar titles even if they were not her own copies, things she’d read once and then twice and then a third time over just to be certain she missed nothing important. (“I know there are probably books you prefer to them now,” Nyra said apologetically, hands clasped behind her back as she shimmed on her feet like a much younger girl, “but I fetched all the ones I could remember.”)

A simple, simple room but no less dear to her for it. It warmed her down deep, a rushing ooze of affection spilling from the cuts in her heart, and it only froze over again when the door swung open behind them.

You should not leave us for so long, Visenya used to gripe when he came dripping back to King’s Landing with his flood of daughters and his tide of sons and his storm of her sister. She would toss herself blindly towards him, trusting always that he would catch her because never once in all her life did Daemon prove the assumption wrong, and he would spin her with a laugh. He called her littlest niece, called her dragonfly, tugged at her curls and kissed her forehead. Kepus could mean uncle, true enough, but it meant father just as well, and Daemon stood more as a father than Viserys ever did in that other life. I miss you so when you are away.

In this life, when his bright eyes blinked at her from the doorway, she wondered how quickly she needed to move to put the knife at her hip through his throat. Daemon has always been lightning quick, wicked fierce and ruthlessly vicious even when only sparring, and even Baelon always struggled to put him down when they sparred. One needs a plan with Daemon, he used to say as she kissed at all the bruises, or he will bury you too deep for the dogs to find your grave. But he would not expect any such thing from her, though. Not the niece he barely knew, the one who looked like her mother and loved her sister and had little else about her that might interest him; not a girl with no real reason to want to him dead.

You do not have gills, Laenor’s ghost laughed from a memory, and she found herself five years old all over again. Hair braided back from her face, wearing nothing but a flimsy nightgown pasted wet to her skin, spitting out water as he fished her out and held her over the surface. Dancing eyes and wide-wide smile, mocking her so gently as she squawked and screeched and flailed her legs. How furious she’d been, she the girl who remembered knowing how to swim but could not for the life of her remember how to do it. That means you must hold your breath, Vis; did you not know?

Daemon’s brows and lips both twitched as they gazed at each in silence, and the blade burned hot at her side. Rhaenyra would never forgive her, but she did not know if it mattered. Looking at Daemon, Visenya started to fear she might never forgive Rhaenyra.

The air left her lungs in a pained rush when Rhaena and Baela peeped out from behind his back. They looked even more of Laena than when they were younger, somehow: the pretty shade of Rhaena’s eyes, the way Baela’s curls framed her face, the soft brown of their skin, the uncertain purse to their mouths as they looked at her. Visenya knew that expression; Laena always looked at them just so when she caught them at something she found particularly maddening, when she could not decide whether to scream or laugh or first her hands into their hair and crack their skulls together like a pair of cymbals.

She did that once. One hand in Baelon's hair and the other in Visenya's curls, cracking their foreheads together with a solid thud that made their teeth rattle. They could not have been more than eight. Laena froze afterwards, horrified at herself, babbling apologies as she cupped their faces, but the disbelieving little Os of their mouths and the gobsmacked way they clutched their foreheads soon sent her into a fit of laughter so strong that a snort pulled from her throat. That snort sent them both to tears in their giggling, the brief moment of pain forgotten as they spilled into her lap.

Visenya started to tell them how alike they liked, but she stopped with the words caught between her teeth. You are not your mother's ghost, Aemond's damnable voice muttered, and I am not Baelon's.

They are not Laena's, she thought, and she really had no cause to know their mother's face so well as she did, so, instead, she offered an uncertain, "hello."

They looked back at her owlishly, brows drawing, and Baela fisted a hand tightly in the fabric of her father's doublet.

She could not blame them for their coolness. She might have held their hands at Laena’s funeral, but they next saw her stood beside the boy who took her dragon; she still called them children when they raged and stood frozen as everything happened after. She would not like her much, either.

“I came to offer my greetings,” Daemon murmured, and his grin widened at whatever he saw on her face. When she did not answer, he tilted his head and prompted, “have you none to give?”

“Daemon,” she clipped out, tone frozen over. Her nails dug a little too hard into Luke, and he mumbled a discontent noise.

The grin spread even more, familiar crinkles at the corners of his eyes and a faint, pleased redness at his cheekbones. “Enya.”

“Visenya,” she bit out, barely stopping herself from hissing like a cornered cat. “Visenya.”

Rhaenyra shifted on her feet, a flicker passing over her face for a moment as if she wanted to chide her for her rudeness the same way she did in Visenya’s childhood. A faint narrowing of her eyes, a cluck of her tongue, a tutted hāedus, a brush of her hand over her shoulder—Visenya remembered it well. As a girl, she always heeded it; her sister’s disapproval sent her groveling faster than any threat of punishment from her septas or disappointment from her father or anger from Alicent.

Their eyes locked.

Rhaenyra looked away first.

“You wound me,” he drawled, pale gaze lingering on his wife before they flicked back towards her. She did not know why he felt the need to tug at her nerves and poke at her bruises, but she wished dearly that he died in the cradle or fell screaming when at war. “Have you no grace for your favorite uncle?”

(She never struck him as particularly interesting as a child, his young niece, and he thought little of her beyond a passing inclination to keep in her good graces; Rhaenyra loved her little sister ever dearly, and so he sent letters and trinkets and a knife he could see still gleaming at the girl’s hip. Well-cared for, it looked like, which pleased him; it annoyed him dreadfully when fools let good blades go dull.

Call her here, he said, and Rhaenyra laughed something vicious, an animal wounded and aching. Looked at him like she thought him mad, thought him cruel, thought him a fool to think Visenya would ever come to Dragonstone when she would not even answer a letter. Call her back to you.

He saw something flickering in her at Driftmark, the sparks of a flame not yet quite caught, and it blazed behind her eyes now. Deep behind them, deep inside her, lacing her veins and spilling with her breath, the flame so bright and hot it burned a bloody blue.

It sang to him, and he knew the song of it better than he knew the sound of his name; oh, yes, Daemon Targaryen knew rage and wrath and fury and all the anger held by a young dragon who thought itself wronged. He always did love playing with fire.)

“It will be your room whenever you come to stay,” Rhaenyra cut in, smashing the strange tension to pieces. Both their heads snapped back around to face her; clever hounds who heard their names called in the distance. “Just down the hall from the boys’ rooms, as you were in the Keep.”

“I did not write,” Visenya said. “How did you know I was coming?”

“We did not,” said Jace. He flung himself onto her bed and bounced experimentally. Testing the mattress, she suspected, for when he came slithering in beside her again even though they were both far too old for such things now. “Mother had the servants ready it soon as we arrived.”

Visenya’s mouth twisted around words that did not come.

“When the halls are mine, there will always be a place for you,” answered her sister, haughtily imperious in the way only one who would someday be a queen could ever be. Her smile wavered unevenly, though, her eyes so damnably hopeful that it made her want to sink her teeth into her own arm and bite until she tasted blood.

There will always be a home for you here if you would only stop running from it, another Visenya once said to another Rhaenyra, clutching hands with their father’s ashes still hot in the wind and the crown not yet settled upon their brother’s head.

*&*&*

Jace and Luke took it upon themselves to show her every inch of the island and ever damned corner of the corner, it seemed like. They had a list that they checked after each destination, dark heads bent together as they whispered to each other, and they would not let her see it; it did not seem to make much sense, being as they often went in circles or had to double back, but the gesture touched her. She did not complain.

First, their bedrooms—she teared up a bit, though she would not admit it, because they both saved her letters. Jace kept his in a little pine box on his desk, Luke’s in a haphazard pile on his bedside table.

The throne of Dragonstone, imposingly cold in the room, which Jace pranced towards and seated himself upon. “It will be mine when Mother is crowned,” he explained, and he did look something like a king with his ankle balanced on his knee and his arms opened wide. He ruined the effect with a smile, wide and boyish and dimpled.

The Painted Table, which she would have liked to look at for much longer than the boys allowed her; she ran her fingers slow along the whorls and gleam of it, danced her fingers light across the Wall before dragging them south again. Her touch hovered over Dorne, a fond smile gracing her face—it drove Aegon and his sisters mad, she knew, to have them so bold and unbroken, to have them still thriving spitefully independently, but she held nothing but admiration for a country people who stared into the maw of dragons and only their threw arms wide in a dare.

Dragons, Baelon once deemed them, the highest respect a Targaryen could grant. Wingless, yes, of sand instead of flame, but dragons all the same. War will no more take them than it will ever take us.

He offered them a marriage instead, passing along seven kingdoms to their son even as the nobility wailed and threw their tantrums over a Dornish queen. Their boy found his joy at the end of it all, no matter how wroth his betrothal made him in the beginning; as bad his father, as lovelorn as any ballad’s hero, from the very moment his future wife first graced him with one of her smiles.

Joffrey’s nursey, where they found him in the process of commissioning a truly astonishingly high tower with painted blocks of wood; he smiled to see his brothers, then went shy at the sight of her and tucked himself sweetly behind Jace’s leg—peeped at her from behind him, then tucked himself away again. Her heart broke to see that he did not know her, but she comforted herself with the knowledge that she would win him in the end as she won Rhaenyra’s boys and her own brothers and sisters.

A thousand dusty rooms, it seemed, bedrooms and studies and offices and storages, every nook exposed and every cabinet thrown open, every cranny deemed either “a proper hiding place” or “the sort of place that only a rotten cheat would ever think to use.” Rhaena seemed to be the rotten cheat in question, both Jace and Luke apparently stewing over a string of losses in some sort of hiding game.

The library, from which Jace strong-armed her away after only a peek through the doors.

The Dragonmont—Caraxes and Syrax, Arrax and Vermax, Moondancer, Vermithor and Silverwing. The wild dragons nested somewhere not far from there, she knew, but they did not venture close; fearful, if she had to guess, that whatever magic bent their brethren’s heads would bend their own. She wanted to venture inside, something feral inside her crying to hear Silverwing’s song again, but the guards who escorted them grew impatient and worrisome of what three troublesome children might get up to in dragon tunnels.

The beaches, where they explained Daemon often trained them at their swordplay. “If we can do it well in sand, we will do it even better on solid ground,” said Jace with a grin, while Luke gave the miserable sigh of a boy not particularly good at it on any sort of ground. Jace gathered seashells while they were there, apparently attempting to be secretive about it if the way he kept sneaking them into his pockets stood as any indication.

The tour, technically, ended after that, but Visenya and Luke followed after Jace to Baela’s rooms. He dumped his pockets of seashells all over her desk without meeting Visenya’s delighted eyes, then darted from the room before either she or Luke could comment; they darted after him, dipping in to tease him until he shoved at their shoulders, and then the three of them chased each other down the halls with laughter so bright she could almost forget they were ever apart.

*&*&*

She passed most of her time with Jace and Luke, both because she found herself desperate to spend as much time with them as she could and because it seemed the best excuse to avoid Rhaenyra. Staying out of her sister’s grasp proved more difficult than it sounded, when Rhaenyra technically stood as her host and often explicitly sought her out.

She made excuses when Nyra managed to corner her, which often were not even lies.

“I am spending time with Joff,” she would say, and he would at that moment be climbing up her leg in an attempt to procure a ride on her shoulders, and Nyra could hardly interfere.

She quickly grew just as fond of Joffrey as his brothers, big-cheeked and wide-eyed and with Luke’s curls instead of Jace’s. He could not say her name quite yet, but it turned to a slurred, lilted “Enya” and so she could not say she minded. Rhaenyra named his dragon Tyraxes, a pretty little thing that gleamed bronze, not yet breathing fire; they went everywhere together, much as she and Vyper did at their age.

“Do not let them take him from you,” she whispered to him with a wing, stroking a finger along the little thing’s spines. He cooed happily, and Joffrey laughed, looking up at her with shining eyes; she won him easily as anything once he realized the great black beast in the skies came at her call and watched her put Jacaerys on his ass. “There is nothing that matters so much as your dragon.”

“Nothing,” repeated little Joffrey, and he beamed up at her.

He would never forget it.

(How it would haunt her.)

“Jace and I are going for a flight,” she would say, and Jace would be using her shoulder as a steadying handhold as he hopped around attempting to yank on his boots. Nyra could say nothing about it.

She found flying with Jace…odd. She and Vyper were well-versed in being respectful to dragons far bigger and older than him, what with how often they flew with Vhagar and Dreamfyre. Sunfyre might have been smaller than Vyper, but he had a generally good nature; he and Aegon cleaved tight together, far closer than either Aemond or Helaena or Rhaenyra were to their dragons, and Aegon’s love for Visenya meant Sunfyre loved Vyper just the same. They had no fight in flying together.

The same rules did not apply to Vermax.

This could be blamed on Vermax being a bitch. Visenya knew it when they first met her in the air upon her arrival, and she knew it with every flight they took. She snapped at Vyper’s wings and tail, lunging at his underbelly, hitting him in the flank with bolts of flame without warning; she did not seem to care how much bigger Vyper was compared to her—and all the other young dragons, though no one would listen to her when she argued that perhaps it had something to do with Vyper never being trapped in a hole in the ground—or how much faster.

She did not listen to Jace, either. Not well, anyway, not yet; not quite meshed together as they would, still thinking themselves as two beings instead of one, two minds and two souls and two sets of dreams instead of one split into two vessels.

“I am going to Luke’s archery lesson,” she would explain, and Luke would be prattling on about the different sorts of bows; Nyra could not protest.

Visenya suggested the archery lessons. She told him she thought it would do him good to try his hand more extensively at something other than swordplay, but the truth of it was that she thought Lucerys would face few threats greater to him than Aemond. She loved her little brother and did not believe he would ever come for Luke’s life, but she did worry over whether he might someday come for his eye—and, well, Aemond no longer had much depth perception and would never be a threat at longer ranges. Better to shoot him in the leg and run than let him get in close enough to carve up Luke’s sweet face.

He had an innate knack for it that she did not expect. It took him only a few days before he could hit the targets the majority of the time, often within a few inches of each other; she thought most of what little issue he had came from the lack of strength in his arms. He certainly outshot her; she could hardly hit the target, but he already spoke of how low Arrax would need to fly for him to hit things from dragonback.

It did him good, she thought, to be good at something. To be better than something at Jace, better than the girls—though Baela had a liking for the crossbow.

“Do you think he could shoot an apple from my head, yet?” Jace asked her.

“Go ahead and let him try,” answered Visenya drily. “He has taken one boy’s eye already; why not another?”

Rhaenyra came to her and came to her and came to her, and Visenya shied sharply away; so the month passed, days picking by like sand in a too-small hourglass, and the canyon between the sisters grew only wider.

*&*&*

Some afternoons, when all lessons and training were finished early, when duties were handled and responsibilities attended, when nothing else important needed to be done, Daemon and Rhaenyra rounded up their children and brought them down to the beaches.

Vyper joined them when it happened. He sometimes barreled down from the skies, other times slithered out of the sea like some great serpent; she somehow always ended up covered in sand from his wings either way, though she did not begrudge him for it. She laid against his side, sat in the curve of his tail, or stretched herself out along the length of his neck to bask in the sunlight like a cat sprawled on a windowsill.

“What are you doing?” Lucerys asked.

Visenya looked towards from her position half laid in Vyper’s mouth, attempting to remove a bit of a stag’s femur—she thought, anyway, but the possibility always stood that he had consumed a child or a fisherman—from between two of his teeth before the phantom feeling in her mouth drove her mad. He kept making hissing sounds in his throat to dissuade her, his jaw twitching threateningly, but they both knew he would not bite her. She did not know why he bothered pretending.

“He has a bone stuck in his teeth,” Visenya answered, scowling. She pressed one foot gingerly down inside his mouth to get a better angle, and he made an indignant snarling noise. She wiggled her fingers harder, using her nails to try to catch at it; she found her grip, heaved with a grunt, and tumbled backwards into the sand with a yelp when it flew loose with no warning. Vyper remained with his mouth open for a moment, closed it, opened it again, and then sulkily flared his nostrils down at her. She grinned at him, ass aching from the force of her fall. “You are welcome. Ungrateful cunt.”

He hissed.

She stuck out her tongue.

“How did you know?’ Luke asked.

“What do you mean?” Visenya examined the bone, too broken to tell how long it might have once been, trying to recall what exactly a deer’s leg bone looked like in comparison to a person’s bone, and then glanced up at Luke with pursed lips. “Does this look human to you?”

“How did you know about the bone?” Luke said, impatiently. He laid sprawled in the sand letting Joffrey bury his legs, but he sat up to blink at her. He ignored her question, which she thought might be for the best; better not to think about it. She tossed the deer-or-human’s leg unceremoniously into the sea.

“The same way you know when Arrax has something wrong.”

“I do not know,” he said, as if she needed to keep up with the conversation. “Why do you think I am asking?”

“I…I felt it,” she said, faintly baffled, as if asking him a question. Vyper nudged at her, concerned she still hadn’t stood, and she obediently bounced to her feet and ran a hand up the side of his neck with a smile. “I felt it in my mouth. Do you not feel it when Arrax hurts?”

(Daemon, a few paces down the beach with Rhaenyra, watched his younger niece with a fascinated look ever-growing on his face. She grew more and more interesting, Viserys’s strange second daughter.)

Jace derailed their conversation when he came spilling down the beach with his face so bloodless that she thought, at first, something awful happened. He froze on the sand, going from his fastest spring to a complete standstill. He looked with an anguished expression towards his mother and Daemon, then bolted for Visenya instead.

“You must come with me,” he said in one long breath. He looked much younger suddenly, a child of Luke’s age again in his panic.

“What’s happened?”

“Baela wants Mother,” he explained, twisting his hands together anxiously, fiddling with the signet ring he’d taken to wearing on his thumb, “but she does not want Daemon, but Mother is with Daemon, so—”

“Jace,” she said, alarm growing, “what has happened?”

“Nothing has—well, something has—except, it’s more—no one’s hurt, exactly—”

“Jacaerys.”

“She’s bleeding,” he hissed with a furtive look back towards his mother.

Visenya inhaled, very deeply, pushing herself away from Vyper. Luke watched them, idly, from the ground with Joffrey crawling all over his legs. He did not seem concerned.

(He had been placed in charge of Joffrey this beach afternoon, because his turn came after Rhaena’s and she had done it last time. His job was to let Joffrey cover his feet in sand, to build tiny sandcastles, to hold Joff’s hand if he wanted to walk towards the ocean, and, occasionally, make him drink water from the skin and sit in the shade so he did not burn. It was easy work, less taxing than running after the others and trying desperately to keep up with the schemes they were always cooking. He had a job, today. Whatever the other three had gotten up to on the other side of the dunes was not his concern, and whatever scraped knee or bloody nose Baela had gotten did not fall under his responsibilities, thank you very much.)

“If she is hurt—” hissed Visenya, and Jace made a loud sound of disbelief, as if she was very slow on the uptake.

“No, Enya,” he groaned, and he waved his hands around in a vague gesture that, somehow, perfectly conveyed a prepubescent boy’s understanding of moon’s blood. “She does not hurt; it is only bleeding. Her—her woman’s place.”

He paused, frowned, leaned forward conspiratorially and with a great deal of anxiety.

“She did not fall, Enya, so I do not know how it happened."

She put a hand over her face so he would not notice the effort it took to keep from cackling.

“Now, please, will you just come with me?”

Visenya looked uncertainly towards Daemon, but she could not bring herself to go towards them. The maids told her father the very moment they found that her first moon’s blood arrived; a princess’s blood, after all, was the whole fucking realm’s business. She had not been forced to see the information reach his ears, though, or, gods forbid, discuss it with him. She could not in good conscience send Baela’s father tramping after her. The guilt of it would never let her sleep soundly again.

“Alright, alright,” she agreed, finally, with a huff of air. “Luke, stay here.”

“I did not,” said Luke, with great dignity, as Joffrey shoved two sand-covered hands into his hair, “plan to do anything else.”

“You too,” she told Vyper, when she started to follow Jace and he rose to stand. He looked almost offended, but she was already following Jace down the beach. He took a twisting path, bouncing from sand pile to sand pile, so much nervous energy that she was not sure if he even remembered where they were going, and then he flung himself suddenly sideways behind a pile of rocks.

Hidden perfectly from their parents down the beach, which was, probably, why they had been there in the first place.

Baela sat on one of the rocks, holding her sister’s hand so hard that Rhaena’s face twisted with the pain of it, and they both seemed to be hyperventilating. Baela’s free hand fisted in her skirt, keeping it pulled up, the ends of it wet with seawater, and Visenya could see the blood on her legs.

“Go back down the beach, Jace,” she said, though hesitantly, and he hopped from foot to foot like an anxious bird. Pale face, ringing hands. “She is alright,” she added, and the tension immediately drained from his shoulders. Trusting her word, just that simply, and he shot away from them so quickly that the sand clouded in his wake.

“Why are you here?” snarled Baela nastily, her head flying up at the sound of her voice. Tear-streaked face, wild eyes. “I want Rhaenyra!”

Visenya, in this moment, also desperately wanted Rhaenyra. This had to be similar to walking into a dragon’s mouth; these girls had been steadfastly pretending she did not exist for a fortnight and a half, and here she came traipsing into a life-altering, terrifying event as if they did not consistently make it clear that they wanted nothing to do with her.

“Second best option,” she said, apologetically. She edged closer; Rhaena muttered beneath her breath, furiously. “Rhaenyra was with your father, and Jace said you did not want him. Are you alright?”

“No!” Rhaena screeched. “She is dying!”

“There is blood,” Baela said, slowly, shaking, “so there is a babe, and I am going to die.”

“Baela,” Visenya said, horrified, and the realization that Jace had not come running because Baela was frightened of her first moon’s blood but because they did not know about moon’s blood at all hit her in the side of the head. Horrendously, she nearly laughed, though she did not find it funny. She did not know what else to do in the face of it. “There is no babe; you are not dying.”

“I am bleeding like Mother!” she insisted, tears welling in her eyes, and Visenya froze. She did not know what to say, what to do, how to—she did not have living daughters or younger sisters in that other life. She had never been on this side of this conversation. “I am bleeding the way Mother did, and I am going to keep bleeding until I die.”

“Baela, Baela, no,” she said gently, sinking down to her knees in the sand beside them. “It is only moon’s blood. All women bleed for a few days every moon. You are not dying; you are only getting older. It is normal; have your septas not told you?”

Baela stared at her in wide-eyed silence. Her grip on Rhaena’s hand did not loosen, but the tension in her shoulders eased a little. She blinked, then swallowed, and her breathing slowed a little.

“No one has ever said anything about moon’s blood,” Rhaena said suspiciously, eyes narrowed into thin little slits of accusation. “What is it for?”

“Well,” she ventured, though uncertain, “you are ten. You are young yet for this to happen. I imagine they thought they had more time before they needed discuss it with you.” Fuck them for it; she would truly give up most comforts to not have to be the one doing it. “It means…it only means you are old enough that you could get a babe in your belly now.”

Baela. “I am old enough—”

“No,” she stressed immediately. “No. Your body thinks you are old enough, but you are nowhere near it. Do not let anyone tell you otherwise.”

“Every moon?” Rhaena said, looking down at her sister. Their panic seemed to fade, now joined in the horror of discovery. Visenya remembered that feeling. Laena had to hide her giggles behind her hand the entire conversation as Visenya paced the room with her eyebrows drawn so close they met in the middle.

“It stops when you are with child, but it comes back again afterwards.”

“Forever?” said Rhaena in horror.

“Until we die?” cried Baela.

“Until you reach fifty years or so,” Visenya said feebly.

“This is one of the most terrible things to ever happen to me,” Baela said to herself, and she dropped her head to Rhaena’s shoulder and hid her face in her sister’s neck. Rhaena curled her arms around her protectively. “My standard for terrible things is so high, you know, but this has beaten most of them.”

Visenya, once again, had to try very hard not to burst into giggles.

“Will you walk back to the castle with me?” The girls looked at her, unhappily, and she tried for a smile. “You need to get cleaned up, if you do not want Daemon—"

Baela shuddered at the mention. “Yes. Yes, alright.”

*&*&*

An hour later, Baela laid curled into a little ball in her bed, looking as small as Visenya had ever seen a girl look. Rhaena took a post beside her, a staunch guard, and Visenya hovered awkwardly nearby trying to determine when she was allowed to leave.

She answered their questions. She sent the maids for cloths. She warned her about backaches and cramping stomachs, assured her all that she could, and made sure Rhaena would not be blindsided when her own time came. What else could she did? Did it not end her responsibility?

“I want my mother,” Baela said, shakily, into the quiet of the room, and Visenya halted with one foot raised to step out the door.

But girls with dead mothers did not abandon each other in times like these, no matter how she would like to do it; she turned around and slunk to sit on the edge of the bed. “She would be proud of you.”

“You do not know that,” Baela said, though without any heat in it. “You did not know her.”

“I knew Laenor.” Excuses, lies, but she did not think a pair of ten-year-olds would think too hard on her reasoning. “He loved your mother very much. He spoke of her often.”

He used to call to her, she thought. Up to his knees in ocean water.

“She would be proud of you for being brave,” she said quietly, “because she knows how hard it is to be brave when you are frightened. She would tell you that it is alright to be frightened; everyone is afraid sometimes. She would tell that you will be alright. She would tell you that she loves you—”

“Until the moon falls down, and the sea dries up,” Baela and Rhaena said together, softly mourning little whispers, and Visenya swallowed.

Until the sun goes dark, and the stars come down on us like rain, she finished in her head, silent, silent, remembering, Laena’s quiet voice against her hair, Visenya’s head in her lap, Baelon’s head on her shoulder.

“That does sound like something Mother would say,” Rhaena said softly.

“Yes,” Baela mumbled, low enough that Visenya thought she only meant Rhaena to hear it, “and then she would tell us about Meraxes and the sirens.”

Visenya spoke without thinking. Without meaning to. Without even realizing she was going to speak until she heard her voice say, “They say sailors are a superstitious breed of man.”

Baela and Rhaena turned wide eyes towards her.

“Every man is superstitious when you get down to the bones of them,” she continued, twisting the rings on her fingers, “but sailors are more superstitious the most. A sailor will tell you that a ship’s figurehead calms the most treacherous seas. A sailor will tell you that a boat’s name must never be changed, or the gods will take their favor away. A sailor will tell you that seabirds carry the souls of the dead. A sailor—a sailor will tell you that women bring storms and plague and shipwreck; a sailor will tell you that women at sea bring death.”

Baela sat up; Rhaena edged closer.

“But when a woman needs flee fast and far, how else is she to do it? How else is she to escape whatever it is that chases her? Sometimes, a woman’s only choice is the sea. Sometimes, a woman’s only choice is a ship. Sometimes, a woman’s only choice is a sailor.”

If she closed her eyes, she could see Laena still. Sitting beside Visenya’s bed, watching her indulgently as she wiggled around in her blankets and eagerly tried to rush ahead to all her favorite parts. Laena never let her, though. The story always went the same way.

“In the days before me, before you, old days, ancient days, some women stowed away in the depths of the ship, they made themselves shadow, ghosts that haunt the ship at night. Some women cut their hair and bound their chests and set their voices down low, and they looked so much like men that no one would notice the difference. Some women found brave sailors, smart sailors, and they needed no lies or tricks to secure their place aboard; many women found greedy sailors who would risk anything for gold. Some women still do.

“Women do not bring storms or plague or shipwreck, after all; women do not bring death. The sea kills and takes and destroys as it wills, never mind if you are man or woman, person or beast. The sea cares nothing for the petty hate mankind spouts. There is nothing to a sailor’s superstitions, no matter what they tell you, and the stowaways, the pretenders, the lucky, the extorted often made it to the end of their voyage.

“And, just as often, they didn’t.”

Laena, she used to say, oh, Laena, you take so long to get to the good part.

“Sometimes, sailors found their stowaways. Sometimes, sailors saw through disguises. Sometimes, storms came, and the sea raged, and those clever sailors grew too afraid to be clever anymore; sometimes, storms came, and the sea howled, and those greedy sailors blamed the girls who paid their way aboard.

“Sailors are more superstitious than most; a sailor will tell you there is only one way to appease the gods and the sea when a woman find herself aboard. A sailor will tell you they have no other choice. A woman brings death, but her death might still ward it away.

“So, the sailors took the stowaways, the pretenders, the lucky, the extorted, and they tied their ankles together. Chains and rope and whatever they had, weights to bring them sinking down and down and down, and the women screamed and fought with everything they had. But the sailors were many, and the women were few, and the sailors slit their throats.”

Visenya touched one side of her neck with a single finger and drew it sharp across to the other side.

“Their blood soaked through the boards of the ships, covered the hands of the sailors, fell in buckets into the sea. But before they died—before, any sailor will tell you, it must be before because the sea does not forgive unless it swallows the woman’s last heartbeat—the sailors flung them over the side. Into the water, into the sea, and they sank down and down and down. They drowned on blood and water.

“The women always screamed when the sailors fell upon them, but, one day, one woman—one girl did not scream. She prayed, instead, and the girl did not worship the gods of the sailors. She did not worship the gods of her mother and her father. She worshipped the gods she found herself, the gods she saw in her dreams; fickle gods, wrathful gods, spiteful gods. She prayed, and, as they slit her throat, as they threw her to the water, she called out for Meraxes.

“A sailor will tell you that women at sea bring death, but a sailor will never tell you that the sea is a woman.

“Meraxes kills and takes and destroys as she wills, never mind if you are man or woman, person or beast. Meraxes cares nothing for the petty hate mankind spouts. Meraxes is wrathful and ruthless and ever-changing; Meraxes is as unpredictable as the storms she calls for her brother to send from the sky, the storms she feeds and strengthens with her winds and seawater. Meraxes is callous and cold and unforgiving. Meraxes takes so much life that she did not notice the women who died at the sailor’s hands; the blood of stowaways and pretenders, of the lucky and extorted, combined barely to droplets when compared to the rest of the blood that has been spilled in her seas.

“Many called out for Meraxes in their last moments, their most frightened moments, and she ignored them more often than she did not, but this one piqued her interest. This one drew her ear, her eyes, her interest. This one was not the same.

“The woman did not ask to be spared.”

Tell me what she prayed for, Laena, Visenya would beg, eyes shining, no matter how many times she heard it. Tell me, tell me.

When Visenya stopped, Baela and Rhaena leaned forward. “What did she pray for, Visenya?” Baela asked, voice so quiet. Little girls, suddenly, the little girls they were, and she smiled.

“Meraxes, she prayed, in her last moments, in her last heartbeats, as she drowned on blood and seawater, I have swum in your seas. I have weathered your storms. I have worshipped at your altars. Meraxes, my blood adds to the salt in your waters; Meraxes, this sacrifice is mine, not theirs.

“Meraxes, she prayed, the sailors tell me that women at sea bring death. Meraxes, make it true.

“Meraxes kills and takes and destroys as she wills, never mind if you are man or woman, person or beast. Meraxes cares nothing for the petty hate mankind spouts; Meraxes is the sea and the sea is Meraxes. Meraxes is wrathful and ruthless and ever-changing, but she listened to the girl’s final prayer. She tasted the girl’s blood, the sacrifice made in her name on the only altar that mattered, and her cold heart began to beat.”

She should have killed all the sailors and saved the girl, Baelon used to say, but Visenya liked the next bit better. She would not have changed it.

“I can make you death, Meraxes said to the girl. I can make you salt and sea and sorrow.

“Make me death, the girl said, and I will make them pay for it.

“Meraxes sang a song of death and life, of sea and sky, of changing and becoming. Meraxes sang a song that pulled on the strings of the stars, that called for borrowed bits of power: for Shrykos’s changings and Aegerax’s hold on strange creatures, Tessarion’s music and Vhagar’s bloodthirst. They granted it to her; even among the gods, few dare defy Meraxes.

“The weights fell away from the girl, and the bindings slipped free; her legs fused together, a tail black as night, dolphin meets serpent meets something new. Webbing grew between her fingers, and darkness ate up all the color in her eyes. Her teeth loosened and fell away, and jagged, sharp things grew in their place; teeth for biting, teeth for tearing, teeth for eating whole. The slit across her throat, that wound that killed the girl, the blow the sailors struck, ceased bleeding; the water rushed through it, gills of a new kind, gills of a different kind, and, beneath the water, Death breathed.

“I am hungry, she said. Why am I so hungry?

“Sing, then, said Meraxes, and so Death sang.

The sailors heard. The sailors listened.

One by one, the sailors leapt into the sea.

“Eat, then,” said Meraxes, and so Death ate.

The sailors saw. The sailors screamed.

One by one, the sailors died.

And when it was over, when blood filled the waters, Meraxes swallowed their empty ship whole.

“What am I? asked Death.

“Who were you? asked Meraxes.

“My mother called me Siren, Death answered.

“Then, said Meraxes, you are sirens.

“And Meraxes reached out across her seas, from one end to the other, all of her and all of it, and she wrapped her magic and her power and fickle-wrathful-spitefulness around the bones and corpses of stowaways and pretenders and the lucky and the extorted. She pulled again on the threads of power, yanked again for borrowed pieces, and again the gods granted it—no more, they warned her, no more, and so Meraxes knew she had only one chance. She poured herself, her magic, her wrath, her hunger into them; she buried the rage at the heart of Siren’s prayer into the very soul of the magic.

“Across her seas, from one end to the other, all of her and all of it, the bones and corpses knit themselves together again. The stowaways, the pretenders, the lucky, the extorted. Across her seas, the sirens woke; across her seas, the sirens swam; across her seas, the sirens sang.

“My sisters sing, said Siren. I hear them; we are many. We are—Meraxes, we are hungry.

“You will always be hungry, Meraxes answered. But there will always be sailors.”

“The sailors always scream when the sirens upon them, but some—some fool men dare call out for Meraxes.

“Meraxes kills and takes and destroys as she wills, never mind if you are man or woman, person or beast. Meraxes cares nothing for the petty hate mankind spouts. Meraxes is wrathful and ruthless and ever-changing; Meraxes is as unpredictable as the storms she calls for her brother to send from the sky, the storms she feeds and strengthens with her winds and seawater. Meraxes is callous and cold and unforgiving. Meraxes made the sirens from salt and sea and sorrow.

“Meraxes hears the sailors screaming, the sirens singing, and she only ever smiles.”

Tell me again, Laena, Visenya used to say. The nurses used to exchange disapproving looks behind Laena’s back, thinking it inappropriate to tell such young children such a bloody story, but Laena never cared. Baelon and Visenya certainly never minded. One more time, one more time.

“That’s how Mother used to tell it,” Baela said, voice shaking a little. She and Rhaena huddled close together. “That’s how—Father never tells it right. How did—did Uncle Laenor used to—”

Laenor tried only once, and Visenya waved him off. He never told it right, either.

“Yes,” she said anyway. “He used to tell it all the time.”

For several long minutes, they sat in silence. The girls seemed to be thinking very hard about something, their eyes locked in silent communication; Visenya lost herself in half-memories, half-grief for a woman she knew once. A woman she lost but never lost.

Rhaena finally peered over at her. “You have not apologized, still. You have been here ages now, and you have not apologized.”

Visenya did not need to ask for what. “I am not sorry.”

Baela tensed in the bed, and Rhaena glared at her.

“He did not do it the way he should have,” she admitted, raising a shoulder. “He should have waited. It was not kind, the way he did it, or the way he spoke to you after. I can apologize for that. I do apologize for that. My little brother is a horse’s ass, and I am very sorry he is the way that he is.”

“He is a cunt,” muttered Baela, ever Daemon’s daughter.

“He would have gone with me or without me,” Visenya continued, softly, “and I could not have let him go alone any more than you could have left Baela on the beach today, Rhaena. It is not in me.”

 “Does he love her, at least?” Rhaena asked, searching her face with her sad, solemn eyes, and Visenya thought about it. She thought about it for several long seconds, looking down at her lap with her cheek bitten between her teeth, and then she hummed.

“He does. He worships her a little, I think.”

“Alright,” Rhaena sighed. “Alright.”

*&*&*

Her last night on Dragonstone, she let the maids dress her for dinner. Red like blood and the inside of a heart, and they bombed her hair with oils that smelled sweeter than the ones she normally used. She even let them do her braiding for her, a webbing of them over the rest of her loose hair.

Nyra smiled to see her, and she forced one back. It felt wrong on her face, and if the way her sister’s face fell indicated anything, it looked wrong, too.

“You look nice,” said Rhaena softly when Visenya sank down in the chair across from her. She and Baela did not smile when she looked at them, but they did not scowl either.

“Why?” asked Jace.

“Do not be such a boy,” Baela answered in disgust, and her lips tilted into a grin when Visenya smiled at her.

“It is my last night,” she said with a shrug. “I thought to dress for it.”

“You do not look like you,” Lucerys deemed, finally, with a firm nod of his head. As if what looked like her began and ended with his deciding opinion. “But pretty. When will you be back?”

She did not know if she would be. Visenya adored being with the boys again, but the pained awkwardness with Nyra stood to drive her mad. She could barely breathe through all the words that needed to be said but could not be, the threat of the conversation hanging fat and bloated over their heads like an ill-made waterskin fit to burst. Nyra hadn’t asked why Visenya did not answer her letters (when would she have?) and what was she to say if she did? What could be said that would make it better, what could Nyra do to fix it? She could not bring Laenor to life. She could not make herself less married to the one who killed him.

She could take another lover, suggested a voice in her head, one that sounded suspiciously like Aemond. Then Daemon will die in suspicious, fiery circumstances like the others.

She would have smacked him for saying anything of the sort, but no one else could hear her thoughts. A smile fought valiantly to make its way to her mouth.

“Enya?”

She startled. “What?”

“When will you be back?” Luke asked again. The servants arrived in a rush of sound and movement, and they all leaned backwards to allow their plates and glasses to be filled. Chicken and potatoes and some strange mix of vegetables that made her a little nauseous to look at. “Mother said two months a year, but she did not say when the next one would be.”

“I am supposed to return towards the end of the year,” she said finally, then grinned. “Will you miss me, bykys jaes?”

“Of course,” Luke said, and Daemon laughed. She cut her eyes towards him, scowling already.

“Little god,” he repeated in explanation. “It has struck me as funny this past month. Quite a name for little Lucerys.”

“She has called him that since Arrax hatched,” Nyra interjected before Visenya’s bristling turned to expletives. “Ran into my rooms shrieking that I must come see the dragon, saying ‘we are gods, Lucerys and I.’ A girl gone mad, I called her, but he has been her little god ever since.”

“I,” said Luke, “am special. Jace is only ever Jace.”

“I defy description,” deadpanned Jace, and Visenya’s laugh came so suddenly that she snorted.

“And Helaena,” Rhaenyra said, as if her sons never spoke, eyes growing distant. “Helaena was…bug, was it?”

Visenya’s spine went stiff, her shoulders straightening. “Beetle,” she said, quiet, a little hoarse, unreasonably displeased at any mention being made of her sister in Daemon’s company. “I call Helaena beetle.”

“That one is a bit mad, is she not?” Daemon asked, offhandedly, and Visenya’s fork made an eye-wateringly harsh scraping sound against the bottom of her plate when she dragged it with force through a pile of potatoes. When she lifted it again, the tines bent a little.

“Daemon,” Rhaenyra snapped, and he flung a hand up in mocking surrender.

Daemon had been flickering her ears and tugging her hair like a childhood bully since she arrived, trying to goad her into snapping, trying to make her wince. He came like the wind and left before she could catch her bearings, materializing wherever she happened to be with a snide comment that made her tongue bleed from how fiercely she had to bite it. Daemon, Daemon, Daemon, always where she least wanted him to be.

Her own fault, really, for not being able to hide the fury in her eyes when she looked at him. Daemon loved a mystery, loved a question, loved surprised, and he knew no other way to search for answers except prodding the bear into biting his hand.

“Helaena is not mad,” Jace said loyally, his fingers curling around hers under the table. “She is only different. She was always kind to us.”

“She gave me a spider once,” Lucerys added, as if it was of grave importance. Perhaps it was.

“How big was the spider?” asked Baela with interest, even as Rhaena pulled a disgusted face and mimed gagging; Rhaenyra quelled her with a look. Luke estimated with his hands, vastly misrepresenting the spider’s size, but she did not embarrass him in front of his sisters by volunteering that information.

“A sweet little thing,” Rhaenyra agreed. Always more willing to offer Helaena a split second of kindness or a half-hearted smile than the boys, perhaps because she liked her more or perhaps because she knew Helaena alone stood as no threat to her; either way, she never bothered hiding the preference.

Visenya stared blankly down at her plate. She could not make herself eat, though the smell made her mouth water. The knots in her stomach yanked too tight, all of a sudden, a nauseous sort of anxiety coming from nowhere. Something is wrong, she thought. Something is wrong here.

“Her brothers are not so sweet, I have heard,” said Daemon. She could feel his eyes burning into the side of her head, and she tightened her fingers around Jace’s so hard that he winced. “She is to marry one of them. Which one was it again?”

“Aegon,” Visenya gritter through her teeth.

“Not One-Eye?”

The joints in Jace’s fingers popped in her grip, and he made a strangled yelping noise that he hid with a feigned coughing fit.

She looked slowly up from her plate, face carefully blank, and smiled at her uncle even though she wanted to press her thumbs until his eyes until something gave with a wet pop. “Has Father said nothing of it?”

Daemon’s smile flickered. An innocent question, anyone else might think, but she could tell he knew it for the spiteful barb she intended. Viserys had not spoken to his brother since word came of Nyra’s unpermitted wedding; he still sometimes fell into black rages if someone mentioned Daemon at the wrong moment on.

“No,” he said, coolly. “He has not.”

“Strange, that,” said Visenya.

“What of your marriage, Visenya?” Rhaenyra asked, grasping in vain for anything to dissipate the black energy building between her uncle and sister, and Visenya’s face tilted towards her. Nyra smiled at her, stiff. “You are near the age I was when Laenor and I were wed.”

Her eyes slid to Daemon’s hand resting across the table when Nyra voices Laenor’s name, and she tapped her thumb at the handle of her fork with suddenly itching hands, itching fingers, itching-itching-itching. He strummed his fingers suddenly, three quick raps of each finger to the wood, and blinked slowly at her when she glanced up at his face.

“Can you imagine Enya married?” Lu whispered across her to Jace, who immediately widened his eyes and blew out his cheek in exaggerated disbelief.

“If Viserys is clever,” Daemon mused aloud, eyes going hazy as he looked into the middle distance, apparently deciding the danger of her burying the fork in his hand was passed, “he will try for Dorne or the Starks. He might yet ease things with the Dornish through a wedding, and Cregan Stark is—”

“To be married to Arra Norrey,” Visenya snapped, though she knew well his lady would be dead soon, leaving the winter lord a morose widow with a quiet son until Alysanne Blackwood carved his heart from his chest and ate it whole. She hoped they found their way to each other in this life; he loved her so well in the other. “And it matters not if Father is clever. It is not his decision.”

(Few things surprised Daemon in this life he built with Rhaenyra. Treachery, treason, worry, secrets, whispers, but so few surprised. But she surprised him, his little niece with her unchecked rage and her strange dragon and her too-old eyes. The little princess with the fire in her blood so hot she could not keep it inside her veins. He delighted in it, to a point.)

“Has Father offered you the choice of them?” Nyra asked. Her hair swept over her shoulder and nearly into her food when she tilted her head, and her eyes brightened.

She swore to Viserys that she would tell Nyra of what they decided of her future, but she found the words would not come. Her sister would be furious with her for it, and it would only be another argument on top of the one already brewing between them.

She could hardly lie, though. She made the decision; she must live with it.

“He…offered it, yes,” she said, haltingly.

How desperate, she thought suddenly, the thought striking her in a way it hadn’t before, he must be for me to love him.

A peace treaty to quell his headstrong daughter, to tamp down her fire before it consumed the men he put in her path, before she set her teeth into the lordling boys and spit them out again. A choice on a platter, all the men in the realm for her to pick up and put down again, so long as she picked one with noble blood in the end.

Have your pick, Viserys said, soft, gentle, sure she would beam and rejoice. I trust you to make your choice well. I offered the same to your sister once; you shall have a better mind for it than she did, I should think.

“Oh, sweet girl.” It broke her heart a little to see Rhaenyra’s pure-hearted excitement, her face split wide in her smile, the relief that her little sister would not be damned to an unhappy life wed to whoever Viserys and Alicent deemed a good match. “That is wonderful. Have you given it any thought? Perhaps I shall write to Father, and we might plan you a tour.”

“He offered it to me, Rhaenyra,” she said, and she swallowed. “I did not take it.”

Daemon laughed.

(He so loved surprises.)

Rhaenyra’s face went blank, lips parting, and she smoothed the napkin in her lap. Tucked her hair back behind her ears. Looked at Visenya, steely, steady. “If it is not Father’s, Visenya, and it is not yours—”

“My future queen’s, of course,” she drawled, and she tipped her head to Rhaenyra almost mockingly. “Long may she reign.”

The room went still. She did not think the air even moved through the windows. The children exchanged wide-eyed glances, and Rhaenyra pressed her hands flat against the table. Visenya watched them shake.

“Finish your dinner,” her sister said, “and then to bed with all of you.”

“Mother—” piped Jace, but the look she gave him sent him quiet again.

“Now,” she said, stiffly, and then she rose, turned on her heel, and stalked from the room.

She did not say anything, but Visenya knew her sister as well as she knew herself.

She followed.

*&*&*

The tremble of outrage in Rhaenyra’s hands only worsened when they arrived in her solar. Visenya darted immediately to position herself behind one of the red velvet couches, a makeshift shield between her and her sister’s rage; Daemon prowled in behind her with bright, delighted eyes, but he only went prancing across the room to pour himself a generous helping of something golden and pungently alcoholic.

“What,” said Rhaenyra, first pressing her knuckles to her cheeks and then clasping her hands together before her face and then crossing her arms behind her back entirely in several rapid-fire attempts to make them go still, “have you done?”

She grinned, almost cheeky. It died as soon as Rhaenyra’s burning eyes landed on her face. “I gave you my hand.”

It belonged to Viserys all her life, his to trade and sell away, and he offered it back to her in an oh-so grand gesture of falsely paternal affection. Any other daughter would rejoice for it, she knew, would have wept and sang and danced—she knew more than most just how dear a thing he offered her. She knew, she did, she understood the chance she spurned, knew the miracle she turned away, knew anyone could rightly call her a fool for it, but it did not matter.

Nyra had more of a use for it than she ever would.

“I did not ask for your hand,” raged Rhaenyra, red-faced, wild-eyed. Her hands came back around, fists clenching at her sides, and then she started fiddling anxiously with her rings in a way that made Visenya’s heart squeeze. “I do not want it. You will tell Father that you have changed your mind—”

“I will not.”

Rhaenyra’s eyes blazed hotter, a strangled hissing noise ripping from the depths of her throat, and Daemon threw back the contents of his glass with a stifled, choked snort. “You’ve a chance for happiness, a love match, happiness—even a friend, Visenya, a friend in place of a stranger. You’ve a chance to choose in place of being someone’s chosen, and you would squander it?”

If she squinted, she could see Rhaenyra as a girl. Smaller, younger, more foolish and less all at once; wide-eyed, obstinate, grieving, afraid. Her sister at fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, a child to those who looked close enough to see but a woman to everyone else in the world who never bothered. Take what I lost, said the ghost trying so desperately to scream through her sister’s anger, you must take the chance you’ve been given, taken the hope you’ve been offered, I lost it and look at all that has happened because of it, take it, take it, run with it, fly with it, be free with it, this is everything I have never dared to hope for you, take it, take it, take it.

“My choice does no one any good.” She tried to keep her voice gently, but it came out more exasperated than anything. “I am more like to make a good match at your discretion than my own. And—Rhaenyra, love? Friendship?” She laughed, a bitterly barked sound. “The flesh behind my ears is dried, and it is has been years now since the moon still lived in my eyes. I have long put aside any wish for either; they are of no use to anyone.”

To you, she meant, and she thought they both knew it.

“There is a use to your happiness, your safety, your satis—”

“I will not be happy when Alicent Hightower rips your crown from your head!” Nyra recoiled from that, braid whipping like a snake’s death throes when she turned her face sharply away. Daemon peered down at his glass, then set it neatly back in its place and took up the bottle instead. “Houses will swear to you for my hand. They will pledge you their soldiers, their gold, and their honor for the chance to give their sons dragons. You would waste that opportunity, so I might have a man who kisses me softly?”

Rhaenyra loosed the unholy shriek Visenya had been waiting for since she first made any mention of her marriage at all.

Daemon opened his mouth, regarded his wife, then took another swig of his bottle instead.

“I have three sons. Two daughters. There is no telling what children are still yet to come—”

(The babe in her belly, a secret still even from his mother and father, sang a silent song.)

Ten silver-haired children, each as beautiful as the last, each laughing and bold, and her eldest daughter would die chasing dragons bigger and hotter than her. She could not remember their names anymore than her own sons’, but she knew their faces when she closed her eyes. She loved them so well in that life, her nieces and nephews.

“—their hands will be more than sufficient for any alliances I need make.”

“Any children from him,” Visenya said, “will be hardly more than babes when Father dies. Joffrey will be naught but a boy—”

“Father has many—”

“He is like to be dead before Lucerys is of an age with me, and you would know it if you did not close your eyes and turn your face away!” Visenya shot back hotly. Rhaenyra and Daemon both twitched a movement, but she barreled on before either could speak. “Jacaerys and Lucerys will need be wed to Daemon’s daughters if you wish to keep the Velaryons beside you. The five of them are not sufficient, and you know it as well as I do.”

“You think my cousin would abandon us?” Daemon cut in. He did not sound so much offended as derisive, lilting the words with hooded eyes and a sharp sneer.

“Rhaenys Targaryen would never abandon her queen, but I cannot imagine she holds any such loyalty to the man who killed her son.” Rhaenyra sucked in a sharp breath, loud in the sudden silence, and Visenya swung to face her sister. “He killed her only son, his babe killed her only daughter, and you wed him before Laenor’s ashes cooled. If you do not give their granddaughters the thrones, Driftwood and Iron both, they will not keep with you.”

Rhaenyra stared at her, and Visenya felt a chill at how similar she looked now to the way she looked at Driftmark. Bared teeth, wild eyes, half a moment away from falling off the cliff edge of a murder. Not the same, not quite—no matter how wroth she made her, Visenya would never be in any danger from Rhaenyra.

“You believe that poison? You, Visenya? You, who knows me best?”

How dare she? How dare she lash out at her with the guilt, with the hurt, as if she did not speak truth? How dare she look at her with those eyes so full of betrayal, as if Visenya broke the faith between them, as if she took someone dear away, as if she cut Nyra down past her heart and not the other way around? How dare she lie to her now that they stood together, now that no one could hear but them and the bastard she dared take to her bed?

How dare it work? How dare the queasy beginnings of shame start up in her belly, how dare her eyes threaten to drop, how dare her heart cry out? How dare part of her want to apologize, beg forgiveness, forgive and forget and do anything at all so Rhaenyra would stroke her hair and tell her everything would be alright?

“I know you,” Visenya said softly. Her voice quavered more than she liked, but she had no hope of steadying it. If she did not let it shake, she would weep, and she would not cry here with Daemon’s eyes on her and Nyra’s anger on her skin like oil. “I know you. I love you. I do, Rhaenyra, I love you well, better than I love anyone, but I am not blind.”

She wished herself blind, wished herself blind and stupid and ignorant and naïve, but she knew. She could not take away the knowing.

“I was there,” she rasped, “when you went to the beaches with him before Laena’s body hit the seabed. You came back with sand in your hair and stuck beneath your nails, Rhaenyra; I was not blind to that, either. I was there when he looked at us after Aemond lost his eye, the look on his face, and I knew when they told me Laenor was dead. I knew. I knew it did not matter what Father said, what anyone said, I knew how he died, I knew why he died, and I love you so fucking well that—that—” Her voice cracked, and she swallowed. Passed her hand over her face and cursed when her fingers came away wet. “I love you so well that I bit my tongue, no matter how I loved him, no matter what he was to me. I bit my tongue until I damn near choked on the blood, and I defended you every time anyone dared to suggest it—”

Tell me a story, lēkȳs, she would say at night, and he would kiss her brow and say, once there was a princess who never wished to go to sleep.

“You think I would let him lay a hand on Laenor? I did not love him, no, not…not the way a wife should, but he was dear to me. I would not wed the man who killed him, and, if you knew me half so well as I thought you did, you would know that!”

I do not like the green bits, she would say at dinner, and he would wink one eye and say, if you finish them all, I will let you help oil Seasmoke’s saddle.

“Liar,” Visenya spat through clenched teeth. “You are not a fool, sister, and neither am I. Do not play at being stupid. You are lying to me or yourself, but you are lying all the same.”

I do not wish to marry any lordling boy, she would say with a sulk, and he would hook their littlest fingers together and say, when your wedding day comes, we shall run away to the sea where none will ever find us.

Rhaenyra let out a hysterical sounding giggle, her face flashing through too many emotions for Visenya to track. “Is this why you have not spoken to me? Years now, all because the snakes in the Keep have poisoned you against me? Because of Laenor?”

I wish you were my father, she once said, and he touched her cheek with the backs of his fingers and answered, is there any reason I cannot be?

“He taught me to swim,” she answered helplessly. “He read to me when I could not sleep. He and Harwin taught me the sword. He was silly and foolish and I hated him, sometimes, for not being what we needed, but he was good. He was a good man, a good father, and he did not deserve to die just so Daemon might find his way to your bed! The boys did not deserve to lose their father, Rhaenys and Corlys did not deserve to lose their son, I did not—” She broke off, looked down at her feet. Crossed her arms over her chest in a hopeless defense, huddled into herself. “I did not deserve to lose him, either. I cannot forgive that. I cannot forget it. I cannot pretend it did not happen; it is not so simple!”

When your grief is too heavy, hāedus, write to me. I will help you hold it, as you've helped me hold mine tonight, he said, but ghosts could not answer her letters nor hold the weight.

“We did not—”

“Stop lying!” It left her throat a scream, one that ached with the rawness of it, and, somewhere in the distance, somewhere in the darkness of the night, Vyper screamed in answer. Daemon’s head snapped towards the window at the sound of it, something disconcerted in the look on his face. Her own face shook, cracking at the edges, lips trembling. “Stop lying to me, Rhaenyra. Enough with it. Please.”

“But I am—I am not lying,” Rhaenyra said, hands pressing to her cheeks, and she wept—silent tears and shaking shoulders, and it took all she was and ever would be to remain planted behind the couch instead of throwing herself into her sister’s arms. “I only want things to be the way they were before!”

“Laenor is buried,” she said, hopeless. “You cannot fix that.”

They stared at each other, breaking hard. Rhaenyra still shook, blotchy red face and wet cheeks; Visenya’s vision blurred through the water in her eyes, lip swollen from how viciously she caught it in her teeth, the insides of her cheeks torn to ribbons.

Rhaenyra’s face smoothed out, and she inhaled once, long and slow and measured. “Dig him up, then,” she said, as if she thought it simple, as if she thought it obvious, as if she thought it sane. She spun on her heel, ignoring Daemon’s alarmed call of her name as he shot to his feet, and disappeared through the door of her study; something cracked through the open door, something splintered, and then Rhaenyra returned with furious eyes and a paper fisted in her hand. “Bury me in his stead if it will take that damned look off your face.”

“Rhaenyra,” Daemon barked, but Visenya was already reaching and Rhaenyra was already letting go.

She read it once.

Twice.

Her knees started to shake when she read it a third time, and she could not hold her own weight by the time she reached the end of it; she tried to catch herself on the back of the couch, but she crumbled too quickly. She felt the ache in her legs when they hit the stone, but only distantly. Only like a dream.

She managed only halfway through the fourth reading before her breath started coming far too fast and her vision blurred too much to keep trying.

“He left,” she laughed through broken glass and venom clotting the back of her throat. “He is not dead. He left.”

Rhaenyra looked silently back.

“The boys?”

His boys. Laenor’s boys, no matter from where their blood stemmed, no matter their dark curls and the dark of their eyes and the pale of their skin. Laenor’s boys, who called him father, who had known him all their lives, who fell asleep on his shoulder and threw themselves giggling into his arms. His sons, by his heart if not by his blood, and he—he left them?

“He could not be himself here,” Rhaenyra said, gently, as if she thought it a defense. “We found a chance for us both to find happiness. Would you have him turn his back on the chance?’

“Yes!” Visenya cried. “Yes, I would have him turn his back on it! I would have him keep his oaths and raise his children! He has parents, nieces, a wife. He has children. I would have him do his damned duty to his family, Rhaenyra!” She froze, face twisting in on itself, and then hissed, “he left Seasmoke.”

She could grant that, perhaps, a father found it easier to leave his children than a mother would—or at, least, Laenor would find it easier to leave behind boys only his in name. Leave her, certainly, of course, she was not his daughter, not his blood, not his responsibility—it was only kindness, wasn’t it, a kind man showing compassion to a girl so desperate for something like a father, her own fault for reading love from it, her own fault for thinking it real, her own fault for thinking herself anything more than his unwanted wife’s little sister.

But his dragon?

She thought of Vyper, that bone-deep binding between them. She knew his heart and felt his pain and could read every blink of his eyes, she loved him like a piece of herself. Her soul extended, red strings of connection twined to a rope that would not snap and would not break and would not burn. The only thing she loved that she knew would never leave her.

To leave him would kill her.

She would not. Could not. Not for Rhaenyra, not her sister’s boys, not her brothers or Helaena.

She did not know if she could have done it for her own sons.

And yet—and yet Laenor did it for want of a man?

“I kept the letter,” Rhaenyra murmured. The tears no longer fell, but she still shook when she took a step towards Visenya. Stopped with a hand hovering, as if she did not know if she would welcome the comfort. “I mean to show the boys when they are older.”

Visenya looked down at the paper, the familiar whorls of Laenor’s writing.

“Burn it,” she croaked. “Better to let them think he is dead than have them know he did not love them enough to stay.”

“Is grieving him truly easier than hating him?” Daemon pondered with a hum.

Visenya looked at him, and she thought of that other life. Thought of Daemon’s arms around her at Viserys’s funeral, his lips to her temple. I have you, he’d promised, even as he shook. It is going to be alright, dragonfly. Thought of Baelon’s hand in hers at Daemon’s funeral, holding her up at she wept.

Looked at him now, his eyes on her cold, lip curled around a smirking sneer.

“Yes,” she answered.

He hummed as if he did not agree, then cut a sharp look to Rhaenyra. Smug, almost, oozing with it. “Will that finally sway you? You should have burned it years ago. It will be our heads if the crowned cunt’s spies were to find it.”

Visenya stumbled to her feet; she let the paper fall to the couch cushions, drawing her hand away as if it burned her. “Rhaenys?” she asked.

Rhaenyra hesitated.

“Her son lives, and she does not know?” Visenya snarled.

She understood even as the words left her mouth, but it did not make it any easier. No mother deserved such grief, but certainly Rhaenys did not—no siblings and parents long dead, spurned at the Great Council for no cause but her sex, her daughter dead, her grandsons bastards, her granddaughters the issue of the man she blamed for the deaths of her children. Rhaenys faced more in her life than any woman should have needed to face, and something ached inside her to know that they could not ease the burden of it.

Whatever Rhaenyra might have answered lost itself to the clatter outside the door.

They stilled, the three of them; their eyes slid to the door, lids slitted. More like dragons than riders, for a moment, the way the beasts went so still and quiet right before they lunged in the hunt; something reptilian about their pupils, about the way their mouths all parted. Daemon wrapped a hand around Dark Sister as he stood, a deep-chested groaning rumble coming from his throat, and Rhaenyra called a steely, “Who goes?”

(His mother named him Pieter, but she had been sick for long that he could not remember the last time she spoke it without falling into a coughing fit. His father lived, far as he knew, but he might as well have been dead for all the good it ever did him. His sister lived with them now, she and her newborn son—her husband thought the boy’s eyes too dark to come from his seed and so had smashed Tia’s hands with a hammer. A seamstress, once, gold sent home faithfully every fortnight, a bit of silver to help buy their mother new clothes, but she could hardly wrap her fingers around a fork anymore, never mind thread a needle.

His gold fed them, his silver patched their shoes, his copper kept a roof above their head. A servant boy makes only so much—often, they were hungry; often, they were cold; often, they were afraid—but they made due with it. Love will keep us, his sister sometimes said, bouncing her son gently upon her knee.

Lord Corlys Velaryon might keep us if I send him word that his son yet lives, he thought to himself, sudden, sudden, Her Grace the Queen might keep us if I bring her word of the princess’s adultery. We need not be hungry. We need not be cold. We need not be afraid anymore.

He thought to run. He might make it around the corner and through a door before the prince could get a look at the boy who stood too close to a doorway when buried secrets dug their way to open air.

But he was not stupid, young Pieter. Too kind-hearted for his own good, perhaps, and sometimes with a mouth faster than his mind, but not stupid. The Rogue Prince would find him if he ran, hunt him like a rat through the halls laughing all the while, and he would lose his only chance at begging the princess’s mercy.)

The door creaked open, and a boy slipped neatly through it.

“My apologies, princess,” he said with a bow, face blank—too blank, she thought, foolish boy, we can tell you are hiding something—and voice only vaguely unsteady. “I brought water for your basin, but I tripped over my own feet; it will not happen again.”

The jar hanging limply from his hand held nothing, and a puddle seeped steadily under the door at his feet; his shoes already dripped with it, the cheap thing water-logged. His eyes, she noticed, were very wide and very, very blue. A thatch of messy brown hair that stuck up every which way; he noticed her looking and tucked a bit of it nervously behind his ear. A tiny white scar alongside the left side of his mouth, forcing his lips to pull up in half an eternal grin.

They would cast Rhaenyra’s marriage down if the realm found that Laenor lived; her vows to Daemon reduced to nothing, their years together nothing more than congress between adulterers, any children they might yet have named bastards. The whispers of Rhaenyra’s being a whore and an adulterer would turn to shouts, then screams, and the crown would be pressed on Aegon’s brow so quickly that their necks would snap long before they were hung for the treason. Five souls alive now knew that Laenor Velaryon still lived—four would never speak because of all they stood to lose, and Visenya would never betray her sister.

Five souls. There could not be six.

He might have heard nothing.

He might have heard everything.

“Just how long,” asked Daemon, deadly quiet, “have you been stood outside our door, boy?”

The boy looked from Daemon to Rhaenyra and then to Visenya; he focused on her, perhaps because she was the youngest, perhaps because she was the closest, perhaps because she still could not look away from the pretty blue shade of his eyes.

“I did not hear anything,” he pleaded—foolish boy, she thought, heart sinking, nothing else in the world would leave us surer that you had. “I did not hear a word; even if I had, I would not tell. Not a soul, not ever. Princess, I swear it, I swear it on my life, I swear it to the Seven, the old gods—I will swear it to whichever gods you—”

(We need not be hungry, part of him whispered. We need not be cold. We need not be afraid.)

Five souls.

Not six.

Daemon moved, but Visenya was closer.

She melted across the distance between them, dagger easy in her hand as she jerked it up (it sang to taste blood after all these years hardly more than a pretty decoration at her hip, sang-sang-sang the Valyrian song of war and blood, and her ears heard nothing but her heart sang with it) through the side of his neck. Like a kebob, she thought, distantly pleasant, as the knife slid easy through the delicate skin at the column of his throat and poked through the other side again, the chicken ones Helaena likes so much, with the peppers.

Those blue, blue eyes fixed on her still. Wide. Surprised. A wet sound pulled from somewhere inside him, red and sucking; it came from his lips, or maybe the hole the blade made for itself. Blood spilled form his mouth, down his chin; she did not realize how dark a man’s death blood would be. She did not realize she would be able to taste the smell of it, iron and copper and salt. She watched it flow over her hand and down her wrist, lips parted and breath quick.

“You were an awful liar, but you had the prettiest eyes I have ever seen on a common boy,” she told him, and then she yanked.

Her dagger came free with a fascinatingly slick sound, as if the flesh of him still tried to cling to it. The blood sprayed soon as she did, on her face, her dress, in her mouth, gushing from the wound in his neck down his body and spilling thick over the floor; he folded in on himself still gurgling, drowning in it, eyes bulging and limbs flinging askew as one hand raised feebly to grasp at his neck in an attempt to stop the blood.

The way his final, wet breath sounded did not scare her.

The cooing little laugh that came from her own throat, bemused and a little incredulous, soft and lightly mocking, when she looked down at his corpse sprawled at her feet? That did, a little.

(Daemon knew that laugh. Viserys vomited the first time he killed a man, but Daemon laughed that same laugh; he woke screaming later that night, a boy unused to the nightmares that came with taking a life, but he laughed in the moment. He felt the same rapture that shone out from her face as she stood there with her bloody blade still held in hand.

He cocked his head and watched as she turned to look to Rhaenyra. Eyes gleaming like a cat laying a mouse at the door, a dog returning to its master with a rabbit clamped between slavering jaws. Are you proud of me? Visenya’s look said as she searched her sister’s face. I have brought you a gift; I have brought you a life. Are you proud of me? Have I pleased you? I only wanted to please you.

Yes.

He knew that look, too.)

“Visenya,” Rhaenyra whispered, a hand raising to her brow. Stricken, horrified, relieved all at once.

Daemon gave her a brisk nod of approval, which made her stand a little straighter despite herself, then took another swig of his bottle. Upon realizing it was empty, he tossed it impatiently back to the table and did not even seem to notice when it cracked.

“It is nothing, Nyra,” she said, softly.

“Killing a man is not—it is not nothing.”

It seemed an awful lot like nothing to her. No difficulty in killing, at least this time; no difficulty in deciding to do it, no difficulty in the actual doing. Even looking at him now did nothing to her. Rhaenyra could not afford to let him live, and so Visenya did not let him. She could feel no guilt over something done for her sister, no horror, only a vague acceptance that she did it and would, without any doubt, need do it again before all was said and done.

She found she did not mind the thought; that scared her, too.

“It is nothing if it is for you.” Rhaenyra stilled, blinked big eyes. Her hand fell back down to her side. Visenya shrugged and tried for a smile as she wiped her blade on a clean bit of her gown; she winced when a bit of blood dripped stinging into her eye. “This is…this is the least of what I would do for you.”

*&*&*

Visenya scrubbed at the blood on her face and her arms until the washcloth stained the brownish-red of drying blood and her skin turned an aching pink from the force. She shoved her hair away from her face with one hand, used the other to try vainly at wiping the mess at her hairline, and she only paused when the door opened to allow Rhaenyra to slip inside.

She should feel awkward, she thought, stood here in the middle of the room with a bloody washcloth pressed to her head and wearing nothing but her underclothes, but any chance of her caring about something so trivial as that faded when Rhaenyra said, “the mess is handled.”

The mess, the mess, the mess. A mess the dragons made and then had to clean up again, a mess handled, a mess put away, a mess buried down deep, a peasant, a servant, a person, a boy. A son, a brother, a father, a friend? Something. Now nothing.

Be sorry, she begged herself, but her heart did not listen.

“Is Daemon with you?”

“He is the one handling the mess,” Nyra said, gingerly edging her way towards Visenya. She took a strange way of it, making as if to walk forward but edging a little to the right with every step, keeping her eyes turned towards the window instead of looking at Visenya. As if approaching an animal like to bolt, as if she could not move straight towards her because she would startle and flee, as if she must trick her into allowing her close.

It reminded her of Helaena, suddenly, in a way that made it hard to breathe. Helaena creeping on light feet, jar clutched in her hands, ambling slowly as if she had not a care in the world—Helaena spinning, so suddenly, lunging, tumbling to her knees and ripping the skin to bloody ribbons more than once in her reckless haste, popping back to her feet with something strange and many-legged caught in her jars.

“Naturally,” Visenya muttered.

It gladdened her to know that Daemon would not soon come following Rhaenyra to her rooms. She had things she must say, apologies she need make, and she would not be able to make them with that smug cunt grinning at her over her sister’s shoulder.

Rhaenyra took three quick steps towards her and finally swung her head around to face her. She looked soft in her nightclothes, loose hair and the faint smell of the perfumes she used in her bathwater still clouding in the air around her when she moved. Younger. More like the girl who peered down at a babe who killed her brother and her mother and decided she could love her anyway.

(In another life, Rhaenyra Targaryen looked down at a babe with her mother’s eyes and her mother’s mouth and could not overcome the grief of it; in another life, she left Visenya to nannies and septas and nurses, cut her baby sister from her heart. Just another silver-haired child of her father’s, just another dragonet with hardly any use.

In another life, Alicent Hightower’s obeyed her father’s word and took faithful charge over her husband’s infant daughter; in another life, she took Visenya into her arms and into her heart, let her stepdaughter call her Mother in her lisping, strange little voice, and she loved her. Oh, it shocked no one more than Alicent that she loved her.)

Rhaenyra reached for the rag, and Visenya allowed it. Curled her hands around the edge of the basin and looked solemnly at her sister as she began to wipe the rag gently at the blood still speckling her face.

“I have never killed anyone,” Rhaenyra confessed.

It is easy, she thought. Nyra, I do not think it is supposed to be so easy.

She never killed anyone in that other life, either. Not herself, anyway. She never needed to do the killing, only press her lips to Baelon’s ear and watch as he tore them apart for her, only call for one of the thousands at their command and demand a blood price.

Care that he is dead, she begged herself. Feel badly. Weep.

Her heart scoffed.

“Queens do not do their own killing anymore,” she said softly.

Rhaenyra dipped the rag back into the basin, pursed her lips strangely at the pink tinge of the water. “I killed a boar once. During the twins’ second name-day hunt. I came back blood-soaked, and Father looked at me as if…”

She trailed away, but Visenya could imagine.

She could see in Rhaenyra’s eyes that her sister expected her to walk to talk about the boy and the death and the blood and blade. Cry, perhaps, but Visenya could not find any need to cry no matter how desperately she searched for it. She did not know him, the boy with the blue-blue eyes and the soft, shocked mouth; they did not share a name, and his blood did not flow in her veins. What did he matter to her?

“Did he have a family?”

Rhaenyra blinked, surprised. “I do not know; if he does, they will be cared for.”

The least we could do after killing him, she thought, but the answer settled something inside her.

“Father is worse than when you left, Rhaenyra,” she said instead.

Rhaenyra allowed the subject change, though her eyes narrowed for a fraction of an instant before she said, “he has many years left.”

Six. Seven, perhaps. She and Baelon were not far into their second decade when he succumbed the first time, and Viserys sickened far more quickly in this life. Losing pieces of himself that she expected him to keep for a year or more, crumbling like sandcastles too close to the waves; the Iron Throne intended to kill him swift and brutal this time, it seemed.

But she could not force Rhaenyra to accept that anymore than she could bring the moon from the sky.

“You should come home,” she murmured, and Rhaenyra dropped the cloth to begin working at the stains on her arm. “Staying here does your claim little good. The lords are getting greener each year with Otto Hightower speaking as Father’s voice, and Alicent is stripping us from the very walls in favor the Seven and their star. I fear what will happen if you are not in the city when Father dies, mandȳs.”

“The lords swore to me,” Rhaenyra said, not dismissive in her tone but still not listening, and Visenya bit at the inside of her cheek until the taste of her blood mixed with the servant boy’s on her tongue. “They knelt for me and called me heir. You needn’t worry, sweet girl.”

“I am not the little girl you left behind in King’s Landing,” she answered, reproachfully, voice unintentionally sharp, and Rhaenyra twitched through a half-aborted flinch. She softened, reached out to curl gentle fingers around her sister’s wrist. “I do not need the assurances you would give a child, Nyra. I watch the snakes spill their venom in the Keep, I watch Father wasting away, I watch Alicent—I know as well as you what the dangers are.”

Better than you, it seems, she thought but did not say.

“They swore their oaths to me,” Rhaenyra said again.

“Has no man ever broken an oath?”

“Trust me,” said Rhaenyra, and so Visenya sighed and let the matter die between them. “You could always stay here, you know. There are no snakes here with us.”

She allowed herself to want it for a moment. A life roaming Dragonstone with Jacaerys back beside her where he belonged, with Lucerys scrambling in their wake, with the girls singing laughter at their side. A life with Rhaenyra beside her again, running to her sister whenever she wished.

Only for a moment.

“I cannot leave them behind,” she said quietly. Her fingers drew away from Rhaenyra’s wrist, and she watched the rag go still on her arm. Her sister did not look up, studying her skin without looking to her face, as it to pretend she did not hear would mean Visenya never spoke.

(The way you left me, Rhaenyra heard, and her throat closed around nothing.)

“No one watches over them except for me. They do not have you the way I did, and Father does not even acknowledge them most days. And Alicent…”

“She did not have a loving family when we were girls,” Rhaenyra said, almost defensive. “And she was…she was so very young when she grew heavy with the boys. It is not easy for her.”

“I pity her for it,” she agreed, but her lip curled around a sneer. “It must be very difficult for her, I am sure, condemning Helaena to a marriage she knows will never make her happy, treating Aemond as if he is a man grown with a man’s responsibilities instead of hardly more than a boy, letting her father lay his cane on Aegon—”

“Otto Hightower canes him?” Rhaenyra interrupted, abruptly, head snapping up.

Visenya cast her an appraising look, a little taken aback by the faint horror on her sister’s face. “Not so often anymore. I think he fears when Aegon realizes he is stronger than him, now.”

It seemed more that Otto had given up on beating any sense into him, but she, for some reason, could not fathom saying that to her sister.

“You never told me that.” Rhaenyra sat back, cast a look over Visenya for any remaining remnants of blood, and then let the rag fall limply back into the basin when she found none. Visenya looked down at it, watching impassively as the blood-tinged water dragged it down below the surface.

“Why would I?” Nyra frowned at her, and Visenya shrugged. “You have always known his mother hits him; you saw the bruises when we were children. You never cared to say anything about that.”

“A mother’s hand is different than a grandfather’s cane.” Visenya cocked an eyebrow silently, and Rhaenyra set her jaw. “Many mother discipline their children in such a way, Visenya; it is not uncommon. She may be hard on him—”

“They hurt him,” Visenya said, no room in her voice for any argument, and Rhaenyra faltered. Her hands fluttered uncertainly, fingers twitching as she reached to twist at rings that were not present on her fingers. “Perhaps Otto’s way hurts more, perhaps the bruises he leaves take longer to heal, but they hurt him. You know that. You have always known it. Knowing they do it differently than you thought they did does not make it any different.”

(It is easy for you to hate her, Nyra thought, frustrated, stricken, hurting, when you have never thought that you would die to hear her laugh. You have never known her hair passing through your fingers or her smile against your cheek or her fingers wrapped around your own. It easy for you to hate her when you do not know how easy she is to love.)

“They are not my children,” said Rhaenyra, and Visenya could hear in the tone that Rhaenyra had been telling herself just that for years. A justification or an excuse, something to comfort herself from the knowledge that she would not do anything and did not really wish to, either. “It is not my place to say how she should…”

“That,” said Visenya, softly, “is not what you would have said if they struck me.”

Rhaenyra’s hackles snapped up, and she met her gaze with blazing eyes. “You are mine.”

“No more than they are,” she fired back, jaw jutting stubbornly. “They are our brothers, our sister—”

“Half.”

“Not to me!” Visenya snapped. “They are not half of anything to me.”

“Do they call us their sisters?” Nyra scoffed mockingly, flipping one hand in the air as if to wave any argument away. “Whole and true, is that what they say?”

“That is what they say of me,” Visenya said coolly. “They call you half and less than half because you have given them no reason to call you anything else!”

Rhaenyra jerked away from that, then opened her mouth. She stopped, though, the furrow in her brow deepening, and then made a soft sighing sound from somewhere deep inside herself. “Perhaps you are right, but I do not…I do not believe it ever could have gone another way.”

(In another life, Rhaenyra Targaryen left her heart open to the Green children, to Aegon and Helaena and Aemond and even little Daeron. Fond hands in their hair when they darted past her, sweets snuck into their soft little palms, tickles against their ribs, kisses to their cheeks, presents on their name-days, rides on Syrax when they were still too little to fly alone. Her hand in Helaena’s when the time came for her to claim Dreamfyre, a new egg for Aemond from Syrax’s first clutch that hatched into a dragonet green and bronze and burning. Aegon clinging to her as she let him choose an egg for the babe in her belly that would someday become Jacaerys. High Valyrian lullabies that turned to laughing conversations as the years passed, her laughing cheers from the dais during their sword practice, butterflies embroidered by Helaena on the hem of all her dresses.

Otto and Alicent Hightower could shout and hiss all they liked, could pull their hair and stomp their feet, but Aegon Targaryen and his brothers would bare their throats for a blade before they tried to take their Nyra’s crown.)

“We will never know,” Visenya said in return. “They are poisoned to you now.”

Rhaenyra straightened briskly, signaling an end to the conversation. “I believe that is all of it.”

Will it always, she wondered, be so simple to clean away the blood I spill for you?

“Stay with me?” she blurted. Nyra paused with a wide-eyed blink, and Visenya pretended not to feel the burning beginning in her cheeks. “Like—like when I was younger. Since it is to be my last night.”

Rhaenyra did not speak, but her smile answered well enough.

Visenya changed into nightclothes as Rhaenyra busied herself pulling back the blankets, and then the sisters burrowed beneath the covers, shoulders pressed together and silver hair spilling back of their pillows. Tangled up legs, little fingers linking in the space between them as Rhaenyra pulled the sheet over their heads so they were alone and encased and safe from the world.

“Daemon will be waiting for me,” Nyra laughed after a moment, and Visenya snickered a mean-spirited sound that earned her a baleful look. “If you know now that he did not—”

It did not matter. She knew it at the sight of the letter and knew it still now; it did not matter if Laenor lived, if his blood did not slick Daemon’s hands, because it would have. She knew that deeply, knew it true, that Daemon would have cut Laenor down if he did not agree to flee, that Laenor’s life said nothing about Daemon’s mercy and everything about Rhaenyra’s. It might make it easier to play nice and smile, but it did not change the feeling in her chest. She did not trust him, his hands or his head or his heart, and she did not like him.

She did not bother trying to explain it.

“It does not make him any less of an ass,” Visenya said with a great deal of dignity.

She understood now that Daemon and Rhaenyra would always find their way back to each other, any life yanking them into each other’s orbit until it consumed one or both; she might have thought it romantic if she still lived in that other life. But this Daemon…he stood only as a gnarled approximation of her Daemon, a dragon gone half mad with the covet, and she wished Nyra could see it. She wished Nyra could see the throne and the crown and the power gleaming in the black pit of their uncle’s eye because it grew brighter every damned time he looked at her.

Nyra’s mouth twisted into a faint smirk. “I will not deny it.”

“A self-aware ass’s wife.”

Rhaenyra flicked her in the temple, and she yelped a laugh even as she twisted onto her side to face her sister. Rhaenyra followed suit, her nose wrinkling in thought. Both of them cast in shadows, their eyes only just barely adjusted to the dark enough to see each other’s features—the blink of wine-dark eyes and the flash of white toothed smiles.

“Who would you have chosen?” Rhaenyra murmured into the shadows, and Visenya pressed her cheek harder into her pillow. “You have given me the choice of your match. I would have you tell me what your choice would have been, should you have given yourself leave to make it.”

“So, you might choose them for me regardless?”

“Your hand is mine now,” said Rhaenyra with a cool sniff. “What I choose to do with it is my own prerogative.”

“You need not worry about me, Nyra.”

“I am always going to worry about you.”

“I would not choose.”

“The truth, Visenya.” Visenya huffed, and Rhaenyra raised her free hand to tuck a bit of her hair behind her ear. “You look to the left when you lie.”

She thought, for a moment, to tell her about Baelon. To tell her that her choice never changed from that life to this one, that she would choose him now and choose him then, always and always and always, but she could not choose him. Dead boys could not marry, and their world took no pity on living girls with their hearts lost on ghosts.

She could not say for certain why she did not.

Visenya offered a different truth instead, interlacing their fingers fully between them.

“Her name is Brigit.”

In their shadowed cave of blankets and warmth, she could hear the very moment Rhaenyra stopped breathing.

“She is good,” said Visenya, softly. Her voice only trembled a little. “She is clever. She makes me laugh, and she treats me no differently for being the daughter of a king. She is…she is kind, in her way. Perhaps no one else would call it kind, but I do.” She halted for a second, laughed to herself. “I am not kind. I know I am not kind. I never have been, really. But I want so badly to be kind to her.” She cut her eyes back up and searched her sister’s face. “Could you choose her for me, Nyra?”

“No,” came a soft, broken whisper.

Visenya smiled, bright and false, and squeezed her hand as hard as she could without snapping bone. “It does not matter then. Marry me off to some upstart young lord with soldiers aplenty or a decrepit grandfather flush with his dead ancestor’s gold. Give me away. Hold an auction, if you wish, and the highest bidder may crawl into my bed. It is all the same to me.”

Rhaenyra propped herself up on her elbow. It sent the sheets spilling back down, their heads reappearing in the room as their secret place dissipated; she curled a hand around Visenya’s neck and pressed a kiss against her forehead. As if she could love her so well that nothing would ever hurt her again, as if she could beat back the world with bare hands and feet until only they existed in whatever remained. Just them, free to do as they pleased.

“I am so sorry,” she said against her brow, “that I cannot give you anything more than this.”

Her eyes stung when she blinked, and she swallowed the knot in her throat. Better than comfort, better than questions. Nyra did not ask why or when or what, did not warn her of dangers of which she already knew. None knew better than Rhaenyra how easy it could be to forget about risk when someone sweet and soft looked at you with warm eyes, and so she took it in her stride.

“I am sorry,” Visenya whispered back. The words did not stick in her throat the same way they always did; they slipped away from her, out of her, like they knew she could bear to keep them. “For believing…for not—I am sorry, Rhaenyra.”

“I knew your name before anyone else did,” Nyra laughed, and Visenya sat up enough to burrow herself against her sister’s chest like a child again—Nyra’s hands and Nyra’s soft kiss to the top of her head, salt and smoke smell, softness and home. Home, home, home again. “I took you from your bassinet, and I called you my own. I would forgive you anything, sweet girl.”

The chasm between them, the gasping black wound that grew so deep and wide over the years, closed just that simply. Ground rushing together, cliffsides reaching jagged, greedy hands out for each other, crevice sealing with fresh earth that smelled of spring and summer. The scar tissue of the breakage bloomed with bloody roses.

*&*&*

(In a little house with patches in the roof, a young woman whose brother called her Tia but the rest of the world called Katia watched over her sleeping mother. Curled into a wooden chair, chewing anxiously at the end of a messy brown braid; she wore gloves on her hands, but they did little to hide the crooked twist of once-shattered fingers. When the old woman woke, choking already on the cough in her chest, she reached anxiously out to feel at her burning forehead. “Rest, Mother; you must rest if you ever wish to get well again.”

“Where is Pieter?” asked her mother, insistent, pleading, and Katia cast an anxious look to the open window, to the castle in the distance, to the still-empty road. Her hands ached—they always ached, but this felt different. Deeper, pulsing, her heartbeat thrumming through each of the scars she could not see. Across the room, her son stirred in his makeshift bassinet, and she held her breath until he settled.

“Pieter will be home soon,” she said, squeezing at her mother’s hand, forcing a smile. “Do not worry. He will not be long now.”

“I had a terrible dream,” the old woman said in a sigh, already drifting away again, lucidity and consciousness already freeing her. Goosebumps rose on Katia’s arms, a chill that rushed its way up and then down her spine again. “The dragons ate him whole.”)

*&*&*

She crept from bed before the sun rose, disentangling herself carefully from Rhaenyra’s loose hold. She dressed quick, quiet, stuffing what little she meant to take into her bag, braiding her hair with nimble fingers even as she shoved her feet into her boots.

She looked down at Rhaenyra, sleeping peacefully with one arm still outstretched towards Visenya’s side of the bed. She looks like a child, she thought, almost amused.

Unbidden, from somewhere else, a mournful voice sighed, she looks like Aegon.

Gnawing at her cheek, she kissed her sister’s forehead and slid out the door.

*&*&*

She stopped in Jace’s room, waking him with a well-placed jab in the ribs. He woke yelping, blinking blearily, and then propped himself up onto his elbows to regard her sleepily. Drool clung to the side of his face, his hair flattened on one side. His voice came out a raspy, half-asleep croak when he asked, “You are leaving then?”

Visenya hummed.

“Come back.” He laid back down, twisted himself further into the nest of his blankets and tucked his head half under one of his pillows. Consciousness had already half fled him when he mumbled, “you are ours as much as theirs. They cannot keep you forever.”

She pressed a kiss to his forehead and left him sleeping there.

*&*&*

She stopped again in Luke’s room and jostled at his shoulder until he woke. He sat up with a groggy croak, rubbing the sleep from his eyes and snuffling a bit like a curious piglet, and then frowned at the sight of her stood beside his bed in riding gear. He blinked for a moment, thinking, and then stuck out a hand. “Give me something.”

Her lips pursed to hide a smile. “Why?”

“You have to come back if I have something of yours,” he said impatiently, and he crooked his fingers expectantly when she did not move. “Give me something, so I know you will not stay gone forever.”

She did not know what to say to that, so she twisted one of the rings from her finger and dropped it into his outstretched hand. He raised it closer to his face to peer at it, a simple band of overlapping silver strands, and then slid it onto his thumb with a pleased nod.

“That will do,” he said, and he threw an arm around her neck to yank her into an embrace. She near toppled into his bed with the force of it, had to catch herself with a hand on the wall, and she chuckled even as she tucked her face into his hair. “I love you, Enya.”

“I love you, bykys jaes.”

*&*&*

She crept on light feet into Joffrey’s nursery and gazed at him for a long moment. He slept peaceful, slept sweet, his little face open as if nothing in the world could ever go wrong, one tiny hand fisted around a toy Caraxes and the other resting peaceful on Tyraxes’s back.

His hatchling watched her, sprawled out along his rider’s side, one gleaming golden eye regarding her suspiciously. “Look after him for me. He is mine, too,” she said gently, and he raised his head as if in utter disbelief that she would dare order him, another rider’s dragon, beholden to none but himself and the boy asleep in the bed—she stroked a single finger beneath his chin, and his eyes slitted as a purring chuff rumbled from his throat. “Yes?”

Tyraxes gave an acknowledging chirrup, and she smiled.

*&*&*

She hesitated outside the girls’ doors, rocking uncertainly on her feet with her hands pulled into tight fists. You tell it the same way Mother did, Rhaena said, but stories and almost-softness did not promise forgiveness. She did not know if they would welcome her should she open the door, did not know if they would want her, and so she bit at her lip and turned away,

(They would have. They would tell her so next she visited, matching narrow-eyed glares and hands planted firm on their hips, and she would grin at them with bright eyes when they grabbed onto her hands.

I’ve two sisters by blood, she would say after that day, and two by their will and mine.)

*&*&*

Daemon waited for her in the halls, sat upon a windowsill with Dark Sister leaned on the wall beside the window and his face turned towards the moon. Visenya stilled for a moment, slipping further into the shadows as if it might stop him from seeing her, but his face turned towards her almost immediately. He blinked once in the slow way of a lazing cat, then crooked a finger to call her towards him.

“I may not wish you dead, but I still find your presence repulsive,” she snapped. “We need not pass our time together.”

He smiled the same way he always did when she spoke their mother tongue, an almost indulgent look. She knew he adored it even if everything else about her irked him; she spoke it easy, spoke it well, spoke it like a girl who knew it so well that her tongue had to be trained not to fall into the song of it. Part of her wanted to stop speaking it in his earshot out of spite, but part of her could not bear it.

Daemon spoke it so prettily, and so much time had passed since she spoke with someone without being their teacher, too. Aemond hadn’t yet come far enough for it to be a song between them when they spoke.

“So much rage in such a tiny little thing.”

She hated when people called her little.

“Go fuck yourself, Daemon,” she answered sweetly.

The bastard laughed, and she joined him reluctantly at the window. He drew one knee back closer to his chest, his arm balanced atop it as he watched her, and she balanced herself with crossed arms pressed to the stone and leaned out as much as she could without climbing onto the sill to join him. The breeze caught at her hair and face, sea salt and ashes, and her eyes hooded with a pleased hum.

“Your sister will be furious when she wakes and finds you gone.”

“She will recover,” Visenya answered softly. “It is easier if I do not have to say my goodbyes. I will be back soon enough.”

“I told her you would leave in silence.”

“You think you know me so well as to guess at that?”

She wished she could tell herself that he spoke lies to needle her, but she knew he did not. Why else would he be waiting in the halls, if not to earn the satisfaction of proving himself right?

“It is what I would do,” he answered, and she pulled a face at the comparison.

“You would do the most dramatic thing you could think to do,” she corrected, which made him snicker, and then she scowled at him. “I am nothing like you.”

“No?” he asked. He leaned forward suddenly, hand snaking out towards her. She jerked back when she felt it against her hip, recoiled from him and his touch and the sudden unwelcome flashes of days when Daemon’s hands were a welcome comfort; he only snatched her dagger from its sheathe, though, pulling it towards himself and studying it with a keen eye. Looking for any blood she missed, if she had to guess. “Is it not dramatic to disappear into the night without a word to your sister?”

Fucker.

“There is nothing you would do for your sister that I would not do for my brother,” he added when she glared. “We are the same in that.”

This was about the dead boy, then. He had an interest in her now that she’d killed for her sister, now that she’d proved herself as someone who would. Amassing pieces, planning his moves in this game they played.

I am not sorry, whispered a part of her, the part that she could not kill, the part that still wanted to think of him as someone she could trust, someone who loved her, someone she could love. Uncle, it frightens me that I am not sorry.

“We are different in what they would do for us.” He leaned his head back against the stone and cocked his crow. She smiled crookedly. “Rhaenyra never sent me away.”

Daemon’s gaze darkened, but he grinned right back. “That is true. She only left you behind.”

She did not flinch, but it was a close thing. Her face twitched a little, and she could only hope he did not notice even as his eyes lingered on hers with smug satisfaction. Another point for him in this strange game they’d been playing since her arrival; she did not care for it, this innate knowledge that she was somehow losing and still did not entirely understand the rules.

“You brought your sword,” she said to change the subject, and she glanced towards Dark Sister. A gorgeous sword, as it had always been; she remembered the gleam of it, the way he cradled it in his palms when Daemon passed it to him after his crowning. “Do enemies oft await you in my sister’s halls?”

He did not take the bait. “Visenya’s sword,” he said, inclining his head, “as I waited for her namesake.”

“I have her name,” she agreed in a song. Something like mischief lit in her chest, and she found herself grinning. “Should I not have her sword?”

(That is Aemma’s look, he thought, almost surprised with it. Aemma’s smile.

But Daemon was not Viserys. Never once for the rest of his life would those words leave his lips.)

“It will go to my son after me,” he said with so much soft amusement, as if watching a child trying to grasp light beams in her palms. “And his son after him.”

“You’ve only daughters.”

“As of yet.”

Visenya rolled her eyes, waved her hand as if to drive the gnat of the words away.

“Do you wish for it?” he asked after a minute of silence.

She dragged her eyes over it again, humming to herself. Thought of Baelon, a typhoon in the making, spinning in the yard with that wild look of bloodlust on his face; thought of her eldest son, hands white-knuckling the hilt after his coronation, and the burn in his eyes when he pressed it into his younger brother’s hands.

He gave it to him for…something, something important, but she not remember what.

It could not be Baelon’s in this life. Could not be their son’s.

“Her name, her sword.” She looked towards the night sky, loosed a long breath. “It would only be fair.”

“I am not certain she would agree.”

(Queen Visenya Targaryen, who conquered and burned and lived a life so vicious, would not fucking care for a man daring to speak to her wishes, and she would be something near fond of the strange little princess with the hungry hands and hungrier heart.)

“She is dead. I am not.”

He made a funny little sound that reminded her of Aemond, somehow, just a little. “When I am dead, then, you may take it from my corpse.”

Visenya did not know if Daemon believed himself capable of death, so the offer held little weight. He no doubt intended to die well after passing the sword to his unborn son, and it would do her no good then.

She thought about it, though, for a moment, and then said, “I would rather take it from you living.”

He barked a laugh, then drifted into some deep thought that he did not design to share with her. Her dagger spun lazily between his fingers, slowly speeding up until it turned to a blur of flashing steel; she watched it, struggling to keep the discontent from showing on her face.

“The Old King passed Dark Sister to me before he died,” he said distantly. “Perhaps it would do well to pass it off to another second son.”

She laughed despite herself, a shocked blurt of a thing. “I will never be a son.”

Would that I was, she thought, a sudden too hot flash of bitterness. It would have saved us all if I was a son.

“Are you not?” he mused. The blade went still in his hand, point turned towards her, but she did not flinch. “An heir born ahead of you. A life in their shadow. What does it matter what is between your legs? A second son all the same. We are alike in that, too.”

“I do not resent her shadow.”

And she did not, truly. She never wished for what Rhaenyra would have, for thrones or crowns or power; she had never even wanted the fraction given to her as Baelon’s wife. She cared nothing for the smallfolk, no patience for the lords, no wish for any of it. She wanted only Baelon in that life, and in this one…she wished for her family to be safe, to be whole, and she wished for all the things she hadn’t had in that first life. Adventure and knowledge and a name to her own, a godhood granted to her by her own flame and steel instead of one slid into by proximity to a silver-haired dragon king.

“You live in it all the same.”

“I will not spend my life trying to claw my way out of it.”

“Is that what I have done?”

“Perhaps I only mean the general nature of second sons,” she suggested, chewing at the skin on the side of her cheek, then shrugged when he only kept watching her with that strangely indulgent, expectant expression. “You married his heir to spite him.”

Daemon’s face opened for a moment, lips pursing around an incredulous half-laugh as he turned his face away from her to peer into the night. “Is that what I did?”

“It worked, did it not?” she asked him softly, and she leaned further over the windowsill. Further, further, until only a brush of his hand over her back would have sent her toppling down to the rocky beach below. “He certainly sees you now, uncle.”

“You think you know me.” He spun the dagger again, faster, faster, and she strummed her fingers against the windowsill to keep from reaching for it. It is mine, you gave it to me, you’ve no right to take it back again. “You do not. You think you know what drives me.” The knife went still for a second time, this time with the hilt balanced on the very tips of his fingers. “But you’ve not the faintest idea.”

“Do I not?” she murmured, lidded eyes. She bit too hard at her cheek, and the blood stained at her tongue when she darted it out to wet her dry lips. “The same thing that drives us all. We are dragons.”

“Fire and blood,” drawled Daemon. He tossed the dagger up and caught it on its descent.

Once.

Twice.

He tossed it a third time, and her nails dug into the stone when she said, “Too much blood will put the fire out if you are careless.”

The blade nearly slipped from his fingers when he grabbed for the hilt, a graceless fumbling that made her lips quirk, and a too long moment passed before he asked, “did your father tell you that?”

It would be kind to say, he whispered it to me when Aemond lost his eye, he told me when the word came that death took Laenor away, he told me when you ran away here with Nyra, he told me, he told me, he told me when—

It would be honest to say, you told me in another life, a life where you were father and uncle both, a life where I loved you, a life where I trusted you, you said Grandfather told it to you and Father when you were boys, you said it to me standing over the body of a woman Baelon killed for me, you said it and laughed like you thought yourself a fool—

No one ever made the mistake of calling Visenya kind, and no one who knew her would call her honest. But she could be cruel when she wished to be. She could be ever so cruel, and so she thought of all the things that would unnerve him the most, that would burrow deep into his heart.

She thought of what would cut him down deep, down to the bone, notches in his femur like a notch in a belt or a bedpost, and she smiled.

“No, uncle,” she said, a cruel, cruel liar. “Yours did.”

The look on his face defied description, and it did not matter how many points he’d managed to score against her. She suspected they were at a drawn now.

She snaked a hand out and tugged her dagger gently from his limp fingers.

“And just how,” Daemon said in a voice that…oh, it did not tremble, but she thought it took more effort than he wanted to keep it steady, “would he have told you that?”

Visenya spun the dagger in her own hand.

Once.

Twice.

On the third, she slipped it back into its sheath.

“I will see you at the end of the year,” she said, almost kind, almost sweet, and she brushed a hand over his shoulder when she left him by the window.

(Daemon Targaryen watched her go, the hair on the back of his neck standing on end and his mouth nearly too dry to swallow, and thought, with some discomfort, that he might need to reevaluate his stance on surprises.)

*&*&*

He woke when she curled a hand around his shoulder, sitting up with a start, but the alarm on his face smoothed out to something like peace when he recognized her. His lips tugged up into an almost smile; one hand rubbed the sleep from his eye, then dropped to hover over hers on his shoulder. He faltered, then dropped it back to his blankets; she drew her own hand away with a sound almost like a giggle.

“You are home.”

No, she thought. Yes. Part of me.

“Did you miss me?”

Aemond blinked and—sleepy, startled, not quite awake, the only way he would ever be so honest with his softness—murmured, “yes.”

Chapter Text

“You are angry.”

“I am not angry,” Visenya answered hotly, tearing her fingers so furiously through her hair that the knots made objectional ripping sounds, strands tearing from her scalp and tangling around her clawed hands.

“You are angry,” Brigit repeated, exasperated, cross, fond, and her hands shot out to catch Visenya’s wrists. Warm palms, a harpist’s callouses on her finger tips, blunt nails digging gently into the delicate skin protecting the maze of veins in her inner wrists. Visenya spent a considerable amount of her time thinking about Brigit’s air, the pretty way they twisted in the air when she told a story, the soft drag of them over her skin when she touched her, the way she imagined they would look sliding up her thighs— “Is it with me?”

Visenya’s eyes snapped away from the reflection of Brigit’s hands and up towards her face. “Why would I be angry with you?” Brigit shrugged, let go of her wrists, and curled her hands around the high back of her vanity chair instead; she leaned down to rest her chin gently atop Visenya’s ahead.

“I am leaving.”

Visenya’s eye twitched, the muscles jumping frantically until she banished it with a too-hard press of her fingers that left dancing spots of bright light behind when she blinked. “That is hardly your fault.”

“I would be angry with you if you were leaving me.”

Liar, she thought, fondly.

“Then you are irrational and stupid,” she answered primly, tilting her head. Brigit smiled. “A child. A toddling babe with no mind of which to speak.”

“Bitch,” Brigit sighed warmly, and she twisted a finger into one of Visenya’s damp curls to tug it. Visenya swallowed to hide the way her breath caught. “We still have until the end of the year.”

“I know.” Brigit cut her a doubtful look, so Visenya groped behind her until she caught the hand that was not tangled up in her hair. Squeezed. “I am not angry with you. We will find you a husband in the Crownlands before year’s end, that is all. And then I will kill him.”

“Visenya,” Brigit scoffed, but her face softened.

“I will burn him,” Visenya said, twisting suddenly in her chair and rising up onto her knees. It put her a few inches taller, forced her friend to tilt her head back to meet her eyes, and Visenya took her turn to grip the back of the chair with one hand and curl a lock of hair around her finger with the other. “I will do it the old-fashioned way so I might see the fear in his eyes. Firewood, oil, flint and stone. I will bring you back to King’s Landing on dragonback, the realm’s prettiest widow.”

“And when they make me remarry?”

“I would burn them, too, if you gave me the leave. Your family cannot make you marry if they are all ashes and bones.”

“I am starting to think that offering to bring me the heads of my father and mother is your way of flirting.”

An impassive face, a cocked brow, but Visenya recognized the gleam in her eyes.

She smirked. “I am starting to think it is working.”

Visenya thought Baelon would forgive her Brigit. He would not wish her to spend a life alone, closed away from the world and unfeeling, never knowing love and light, only because she lived without him. A possessive thing, her Baelon, but not cruel. Not to her. Never to her. He would forgive her when her time came and she found him in what came after because Baelon would forgive her anything.

She held far less certainty that he would forgive Brigit, but Visenya would worry about that when they were all dead.

She did not know what to call it anyway, this thing between the two of them. Did not know what to name it, how to explain it, except that sometimes she thought about sinking her teeth into Brigit’s throat until she tasted blood, about leaving scars in the imprint of her tongue and teeth so that no one would ever be able to look at her again without knowing someone already owned her. Visenya already owned her, had owned her practically since they first met, would always own her even if her fucking mother dragged her from her arms.

Brigit’s games in King’s Landing were done, Lady Ironsmith said. Nineteen now, a woman well grown, who should have been wed and pregnant twice over already; she would find a husband by the end of the year, or they would wed her to Lord Ryswell—an ancient bastard old enough to be Brigit’s great-grandfather and with three wives dead in the ground already to boot. He was no Southron lord, as they had hoped for her, but he had gold and lands enough to settle her and give her family the social boost they so craved.

Visenya would burn Ryswell, too, if Brigit granted her the leave. She daydreamed about it often, ever since Brigit came weeping to her over being sent away. House Ironsmith and House Ryswell were not so important, really, in the vastness of the North. Brigit could not leave if no family existed to make her, if no old lecher lived to wed.

Dragons did not release what belonged to them easily, and Visenya knew better than to think herself any different. They might rip Brigit out of her hands, but she would leave stained with handprint bruises and with ashes in her hair.

“The feast starts in an hour,” Brigit murmured instead of answering. “You are still in your dayclothes.”

“Would you like me to take them off?”

Brigit’s eyes hooded, and Visenya watched with fascination as her throat worked anxiously when she swallowed.

She understood how hounds felt when they caught a scent but could not yet give chase. The trembling anticipation, every one of her muscles poised to spring, pupils dilated, her mouth watering. Collar too tight around her throat, the leash choking her as she strained against it, trying so desperately to follow the scent and sound.

“You are courting scandal,” Brigit accused softly.

Visenya tugged at the lock of hair a little harder than Brigit had tugged at her own, bit at her cheek to keep from whining like chastised pup at the way her northern girl’s head lolled so obediently to follow it. “Brigit, I am courting you.”

Say hunt, she begged in a thought, set me loose, unclip the leash.

Brigit, though, held a firmer grip on herself than Visenya did, and she knew caution with the intimacy of a lover. Brigit feared all the things Visenya chose to ignore, the things that might happen if they were ever caught in such a tangle that it could not be played off as silly girlhood closeness. Brigit’s fears kept them both locked in a standstill, both wanting but only Visenya ever trying to have, only Visenya ever straining her head for kisses she knew Brigit would not give, only Visenya ever daring to brush her mouth to soft skin that Brigit swiftly pulled away, only Visenya ever admitting aloud that they were anything more than a princess and a girl she took a liking to when they were children.

“You are avoiding the topic at hand,” she said, breezily, and Visenya slumped back to sit on her calves with a mournful sigh. The invisible leash loosened enough to give slack, the hand that held it easing but not letting go; the weight of it never disappeared. “You are angry. Why?”

Visenya pursed her lips. “Alicent sent me away.”

“Why?”

“I am temperamental and argumentative, and I do not objey direction as a girl of my standing should. I am hot-headed and foul-mouthed, and I do not know my place.”

Brigit winced. “Oh, Sen, what did you do?”

“I only,” Visenya started, then stopped. Set her jaw mulishly, crossed her arms, glared at something in the middle distance. “I only wanted to braid her hair, Brigit.”

On the morning she wed Baelon, Laena and Rhaenyra washed her hair in place of her maids. She could hear them laughing to each other in Valyrian over her head, hear herself squealing when Laena dunked her unceremoniously under the water in the middle of her attempt o scrub down her own arms. Warm fingers massaging at her scalp, Laena’ exasperated close your eyes, ‘Senya, the oils will blind you, Rhaenyra’s idle the purple bottle or the blue, which do you think smells better? Laena wrung the water from her hair afterwards, Rhaenyra fingering at the end and mourning aloud that her own never curled the same way. Mocking her complaints when their fingers tugged on knots, mimicking her in shrill voices and laughing when she cried out her offense.

Helaena sat in the tub with her arms wrapped around her knees as her maids washed out her hair. Silent. Methodical. Unsmiling. Their eyes cutting far more often to the queen and her needlework in the chair across the room than the quiet princess curled in on herself in the tub, bubbles sliding unnoticed down her arm and her eyes fixed blankly on something no one else could see.

Laena and Rhaenyra dress her for her wedding. They spent weeks on that dress, though Visenya requested only that they leave her collarbones bare—a frowned upon cut at court, especially for women old enough to marry, but Baelon’s eyes lingered when she wore such things. She liked the way he tugged her into the shadows just to press his mouth to the jut of the bone, the strain in his voice when he asked if she meant to drive him mad. A pretty thing, though, her wedding dress. A gorgeous thing, pale white silk and Myrrish lace flowing over every inch of her like water, golden dragons embroidered small and delicate along the hem and the low cut of the neckline. It took them near forty-five minutes to do up all the tiny buttons down the back, Rhaenyra mumbling nasty curses all the while. Baelon will kill us when he finds he must undo so many, Laena jested, only to burst out giggling when Visenya flushed bright red and mutely shook her head. Oh, ‘Senya, he will not bother, will he? That is alright; silk tears easily enough.

(Rhaenyra’s doing, Baelon deemed it soon as they stumbled into their bedchamber, his fingers dancing lightly down her spine. I’ve not the patience for this tonight, little love. Will you be terribly cross with me?

He did not wait for her answer.

She did not mind.)

The maids dressed Helaena. Silk, just as Visenya’s had once been, but the sleeves fell to her wrists, the neckline crawling up high enough to choke. A plain thing besides that, except for the seven-pointed stars embroidered along the skirts. Alicent’s work, a mother’s right to her daughter’s dress, a queen’s choice as a princess obeyed with hardly a whisper.

She should have lace laid over the silk, Visenya thought, bitter. They could make it look like spiderwebs and fashion spiders from emeralds and silver thread.

But Visenya had no part in her sister’s dress. Visenya would not have been part of the dress even if asked because she thought she might put a blade through her heart if only it would give Helaena more time.

Rhaenyra braided her hair on the morning of her wedding. It took hours, it seemed to her, sitting quietly in the chair as she combed and perfumed and then twisted it up and up and up ever so slowly. Ropes of braided silver weaving into each other and out again, a crown of them around her head, a future queen’s hair, and then Laena secured it with pins and a netting of softly gleaming pearls. Corlys gave it to Rhaenys once, a gift her mother passed to her, and neither Laenor or Laena had any daughters of their own; she gave it to Visenya instead, just as she had given her the circlet of gold and dragonglass that she wore every other day of her life.

On the morning of Helaena’s wedding, the maids bathed her and dressed and then made to braid her hair, and Visenya snapped.

She could have handled it better, perhaps: asked every so sweetly or offered to help instead of demanding she be allowed to do it herself. But she could not make herself, could not keep the poison from leaking into her voice, because it was wrong. Wrong, all of it, the maids, the dress, the silence.

Helaena should be in a dress she helped design, pins like butterflies tucked into hair left mostly loose because she preferred it that way. Helaena should be smiling and blushing bright red, hiding her mouth behind her hands when she laughed, lowering her voice into a whisper as she anxiously asked what was to come, what to expect. Her sisters should be fluttering around her, clever fingers doing up buttons and knowing eyes shining in the mirror, scandalizing her with married tales and mimicking crude gestures with their hands as she squealed with scandalized delight.

Rhaenyra remained on King’s Landing, pleading the lateness of her pregnancy and a reluctance to leave behind baby Aegon—not long for his second name-day, which she thought well old enough for a flight or voyage from Dragonstone, but no one asked her. Even if she had come to the city for the wedding, she could not imagine Nyra dancing about and laughing with Helaena as she did for Visenya in that other life. She doubted Rhaenyra even would have come into the room at all, be it her own choice or Alicent’s.

But Visenya was there. Visenya was there, and she could not fix her sister’s dress or make her groom into someone she might wish to marry; she could not stop the wedding, she could not make this a day of joy, she could not give her any more time.

But she could do her hair. Not in whatever style Alicent wished, no doubt a twisted tower of braids in homage to a Valyrian bloodline—a sharp reminder to every onlooker that her children were of the blood and, unlike Rhaenyra’s, every damn one looked it. Helaena did not like such updos; she only ever let simple braids stay in, the ones that hung like tails to her waist and were so thin that they near hid themselves in the mass of the rest of the hair. She complained the more complicated ones hurt her scalp, that it drove her mad the way they pinched.

Alicent drove her immediately from the room when she tried, which surprised her less than the fact that she’d been allowed to stay as long as she had before her stepmother reached the end of her tether. Alicent did not want her there at all; she felt the heat from her stepmother’s skin, the burn of poison eyes, from the moment she entered the room.

Visenya did not particularly want to watch her baby sister pampered and prettied for a wedding she dreaded, either. A little girl still in Visenya’s eyes, eyes cloudy with dark thoughts. A lamb with a farmer’s blade creeping closer to its throat, a butterfly struggling to free itself as the pin crept closer, a snow-white kitten held by the scruff over the river below.

“I am sorry,” Brigit said, and Visenya forced a careless shrug.

“I will see her at the feast. I will speak to them both then.”

“Oh, yes, the big one. How is he?”

Last Visenya saw, Aegon was attempting to make an escape from a window as Aemond grabbed his ankles and dragged him bodily towards the stairs.

“Better than I expected.” She cut her a look, cocked a brow. “Aemond is a head taller than him now.”

“The Prince Aegon will always be the big one to me,” Brigit said, steadfast in her loyalty, and she pressed a hand to her heart. Her smile faded a little, but she leaned down to touch her lips to Visenya’s brow. Soft, fast, hardly there, but Visenya preened. “We need to ready.”

Visenya turned glum eyes to the gown laid out on the bed and made a snarling sound somewhere deep in her throat.

*&*&*

They were late, of course. Visenya rarely arrived on time for anything; she liked to blame it on the summer heat, especially when Aemond was near enough to huff and say it is spring, Visenya.

She would not admit it even under threat of hot coals being shoved down her throat, but Alicent did well.

The hall looked…nice. Targaryen banners hanging from the walls, three-headed dragon grinning down at her when she cut rueful eyes towards them; the gleam of fat white candles stamped with the seven-pointed star; music playing loud and cheerful over the burble of conversation sounding from the two long tables alongside the dance floor and all the little clusters of partygoers flitting about the edges of the room. Green ribbons wound around the scarlet flowers of the centerpieces, a cheeky flash of Hightower color that made Visenya seethe—which she was self-absorbed enough to imagine was at least partially the point—and every napkin folded into swans or flowers or stars and then tied with ribbon black as jet.

And people. People everywhere. People all over, in silk and lace and ribbons, so many jewels clustered onto their persons that it blinded her for a moment.

Near every noble family attended the ceremony in the Grand Sept, but only the highest of the highborn were allowed to take part in the feast before it. The most noble houses, those with strong allegiances to the royal family, the ones with sons and daughters that might prove worthy of betrothal; the ones with power, the ones with sway, as well as some of their cannier vassals.

The sort of people Rhaenyra should be courting, making alliances and deals, deepening bonds and working towards securing alliances, instead of still dreaming on Dragonstone. She would not listen to Visenya’s pleadings, though, only waved her off with the humming surety of the lords’ oaths settled around her shoulders.

As if no man ever broke a vow and no woman ever died for it.

“What are you planning?” Brigit murmured as they were announced, and Visenya’s eyes went skipping around the room. Searching for familiar faces and those she did not know, finding the ones in the room whose loyalties were already sure and those who still might be swayed. Her northern girl’s arm twisted through hers, tightened to try to catch her attention.

“Nothing,” she lied, pushing the words through the side of her mouth. A fake smile plastered itself across her face.

“Lie to the world if you must, but do not lie to me,” Brigit said with a pinch to her arm that made her wince. “You are trying. I can tell. It does not suit your face.”

Trying, Brigit called it whenever Visenya bothered. Whenever she spoke sweet or spoke polite, when she attended her lessons or curbed her tongue or dressed herself neat with no smell of dragon to be found. Trying, trying, trying to be what she should have been, trying to be what her father wished her to be, trying to be what the realm expected of a princess.

It did not happen often.

Brigit looked so pretty it hurt, sage green dress clinging tight to the narrow nip of her waist, hair loose and dark around her face. All big eyes and red mouth and soft skin. If the gods were fair, Visenya would have been born a man, would have already taken Brigit for her own, wedded and bedded and kept.

But, then, if she were a man, Brigit could not love her.

She supposed the gods were never fair, especially when they played with hearts.

“Nothing yet,” she amended, and they slipped apart. “Nothing until I speak with Egg and Hel.”

“I will find you later,” Brigit said, eyes half-narrowed. “Oh, Visenya—behave.”

She dipped her head in silent agreement to at least make an attempt at obeying, as she usually obeyed Brigit—a dog on a lead, she thought with deep resignation, woof fucking woof—and turned to dart her way towards the head table.

Viserys at the center, Alicent to his right and Helaena on his left. Both looked nauseous, though the queen’s face colored a much paler shade of green than her daughter’s cheeks did. Viserys himself seemed to be having a good day, luckily enough—he spoke jollily to Alicent even as she picked her nails bloody instead of responding, tapping his remaining hand to the beat of the music. Aegon sat beside his Helaena, not drunk but well on the way there if the red of his mouth and the glaze of his eyes said anything; he and Helaena both leaned as far away from each other in their chairs as they could, but, when her shaking hands could not unpick the ribbon holding her napkin together, he reached without speaking and did it for her. Daeron sat on his other side, quiet and still as a mouse, looking more uncomfortable than she ever saw a boy of eleven look; he looked similar when he arrived the night before, though she caught only a glimpse of him in the hall before his mother swept him away. Aemond sat beside his mouth, looking blankly at his plate and thrumming his fingers so quickly that she thought his fingertips might bruise.

“You are late,” he muttered when she slipped into the open seat beside him, and she rolled her eyes and waved him away. “Father was asking for you.”

She peered down the table, found Viserys looking at her, and flashed him a guileless smile. He regarded her for a moment, then sighed as he looked away, and she leaned back into her chair.

“I had to give a maester directions; he was looking for you.” Aemond glanced her way, cocked a brow. He did not ask, and they both knew he would not bother, but she grinned and went on anyway. “He thinks they have finally found a way to pry the stick from your ass.”

“One of these days,” he drawled, “I am going to sprinkle crushed glass into your wine.”

“Do you promise?”

Aemond hid his grin by raising his wine to his mouth. “You are dressed like a person.”

Visenya could translate that into you look nice because, as Aegon put it, she spoke fluent Aemond—and also, she knew she looked nice. Targaryen red silk, a bodice overlaid in black lace. A trio of braids woven along her scalp, the remaining curls tied back away from her face. She did not usually care much for her appearance, but the gown Alicent sent her for the wedding was blindingly green. She would not be caught dead in Hightower colors, so having the gown made acted both as a distraction from her baby sister’s sale and as a pleasant way to tell her stepmother to go fuck herself.

She swooned against his shoulder, batted her lashes. “My silver-tongued prince, do you woo all the women with such grace?”

He dipped his head down enough that his mouth hovered near her ear and murmured, quite sweetly, “drown yourself.”

She laughed as she straightened herself back into her chair, and he did not hide his grin a second time.

“You look like a person, too,” she told him, waving her hand towards the black formalwear he wore. It did not look so very different from the entirely black ensemble he wore most every other day, in truth, but he’d braided the bit of hair he always tied back—an unexpected touch.

“Aemond, darling,” said Alicent, and her brother’s attention snapped to his mother.

Do this for me, Aemond, the Hightower queen sang so often. Bear it for me, Aemond. Shoulder this for me, Aemond. Listen to me, Aemond; hear me, Aemond; take this on for me, Aemond. Be my ears and my hands and my eyes and my confidant, Aemond. Do you not love me enough for that? Have I not always been there for you? Can you be what I need you to be, Aemond? You must take care of us, Aemond. You must not let me down, not the way your brother does. Promise me that you will not let me down.

Visenya could not always tell which was meant to be the child, which the protector and which the protected. Sometimes, it seemed, neither could Aemond. So desperate for her pride, for her to give him that fond look that Aegon never earned, that he would rather die than admit failure. That he would be whatever she needed, regardless of what he wanted, so that he did not disappoint her.

She did not bother listening to whatever Alicent thought she needed of him; she only sat down so she could tug at Aemond’s pigtails a bit, after all, and had more pressing matters to concern herself with than his mother.

Helaena raised her head as if she sensed Visenya’s gaze. She forced a smile for her little sister, looking unhappily at the pile of braids atop her head. Hel kept raising her head to touch at it, fingers fidgeting as if it took all her control to keep from ripping them out.

“Walk with me?” she mouthed, gesturing. Helaena scanned her face and then mumbled something to Aegon, who rolled his eyes and muttered something in reply that, for a moment, made their sister’s lips twitch; she looked to her mother then, but Alicent had her head dipped towards a mulishly unhappy looking Aemond and paid her daughter no mind.

Visenya rose when Helaena did, and she met her sister at the edge of the room. Fewer people hovered here: a handful of shy wallflowers, a few taking breaks from the dancing, a rough dozen pairs or trios walking loops around the room either to catch a moment of conversation with each other or to try to sober themselves up a big. A duo of Westerland boys—she could not for the life of her remember their names—materialized from the ether to offer congratulations, but Helaena’s half-hearted thanks and Visenya’s burning eyes sent them quickly on their way.

The sisters turned to look at each other.

“I am sorry,” they burst out in the same breath.

“What are you apologizing for?” they demanded, again together.

“This morning!” they cried in unison, and Visenya held both hands above to force them to stop.

“Let me,” she said, tone pleading, and Helaena gave a begrudging nod. “I did not handle your mother well this morning, and I am sorry for it. I should have bitten my tongue so she would let me stay. It is…it is not right that you spent all morning with only handmaidens. It is supposed to be family, heltus. I should have been there for you today, and I was not.”

“No,” Helaena objected. “No, I should have spoken my mind when Mother made you leave. It is my wedding day”—she said this with a brittle smile that broke Visenya’s heart— “and it should have been my decision. I should have said I wanted you to stay with me, but I did not. I do not know why I—but I did not. I do not want you to be angry with me.”

“I am not angry with you,” Visenya said with a recoil. “Helaena, I do not think I could ever be angry with you.”

(So right and ever so wrong, all at once.)

Helaena flung her arms around her, a gesture uncharacteristic enough that Visenya startled for a moment before hugging her back. A desperate, clinging sort of embrace that Helaena never sought out, really, even as a young girl, but Helaena the bride seemed to crave it in the way Aegon craved his wine. She tightened her grip around Visenya’s middle and pressed her face into her shoulder, and so Visenya clutched her right back.

“My hair looks ridiculous,” Helaena mumbled. “It hurts my head.”

“You look very pretty.”

“I look like a tea cake, Visenya.”

Visenya snorted, and Helaena’s light giggle settled something prowling inside her. “When Aegon falls down the steps of the Sept and knocks himself unconscious, they will have to reschedule the wedding anyway. I will do your hair for the next one.”

“The stars bleed snakes, Enya,” Helaena informed her, jerking back, and Visenya blanched. Her little sister frowned back at her, insistent and reproachful, as if Visenya should be able to put everything together from those four strange words.

“Elaborate?” Visenya asked without much hope.

Helaena stomped her foot.

“Alright,” sighed Visenya. Helaena’s riddled oddities often could be ignored, but the frightened look in her beetle’s eyes said that this one could not be; she offered her sister her arm. “Let us walk, then.”

They began a slow circuit around the room, and Visenya made guesses. She rattled off every house with a snake for a sigil as Helaena shook her head impatiently; she guessed at people she knew would betray Rhaenyra if given the chance, then all those she thought might betray the Hightowers for Rhaenyra. She listed every Hightower she could think of because many snakes were green, and she checked twice if Helaena meant Aemond.

He sometimes flicked his tongue in a vaguely reptilian way when he thought.

The stars, she assumed, had something to do with the sept. The mention of it triggered the memory in Helaena’s head, and stars plastered every damn inch of the thing.

“Stars do not bleed, and neither do septs,” she muttered after two turns around the room, and Helaena shot her a petulant look that turned Visenya immediately contrite.

Helaena could not help the way her dreams came about or how they manifested when she tried to speak them aloud. She could not more untwist the knots of it than Visenya could dive into her head and look at the dream on her own; often, even she could not say what her riddles meant. She spoke it the way she could speak it, and nothing else could be done except ignore it or spend the time picking it apart.

“The stars,” Helaena said, throwing her free arm up high and clenching a fist, “bleed snakes.” She brought it crashing down, hard, so fast that a whistling sound came from the air.

She thought, almost idly, that it looked a bit like a dragon diving, and then an audible clicking sound came from somewhere in the deepest recesses of her mind.

He hissed at me when he first hatched, Rhaenyra told her once. Like a snake about to strike. That is why I called him Vyper.

“Hel,” she said, “are you talking about Vyper?”

Helaena sagged; half of her weight suddenly draped over Visenya’s arm. She grunted but did not collapse beneath the suddenness. Her sister’s head hung for a moment, eyes squeezing shut as she exhaled, and then she raised it with palpable belief.

“You do not mean to do it,” she whispered. “You do not mean to, Visenya, I know you do not mean it. You only want it to stop, and he does—he does not understand. He loves you so, he is—he is only trying to help.”

Sometimes, Helaena’s dreams came true. Visenya knew it since they were children, since Helaena began mourning broken toys days before Aegon broke them, since she woke one morning and darted through the halls to find an empty wardrobe in which a stray cat left her kittens. Sometimes, Helaena knew things she could not know, saw things she could not see. Sometimes, she tried to explain them, and the words twisted into knots in her mouth no matter how she tried to speak simply.

Tessarion blessed you, Visenya told her once.

Helaena, curled into the fetal position on her bed, dried tears on her cheeks as she stared listlessly out her window, answered, I would have preferred damnation.

“What does he do, heltus?” Visenya rasped.

Helaena hesitated. “He—he makes it stop, Visenya.”

(In another life, Visenya watched her brother and sister married. She watched Aegon drunk and miserable, she watched Helaena’s tears pouring silent down her cheeks; she watched and watched and watched as they bound their lives together without any wish to do so, and she only wanted it to stop. She only wanted it to stop, for them all to leave the sept and never enter it again; she wanted it to end, wanted it to be over, wanted them to not have to do this. She wanted the earth to shake or the heavens to open up, so long as it saved them.

She had never wanted anything so badly except for Baelon, but Vyper could not give her the Baelon she wanted anymore than he could feed all the hungry in the world or drain the oceans or turn the sky green.

But this thing she wanted, this thing that made her soul shake, this thing upsetting her so much that their conjoined heart wept—this, he could give her.

So, Vyper made the earth shake.

So, Vyper made the heavens open.

So, Vyper made it stop.

Like she wanted. Like she asked him with her heart, even if she did not ask with her head.

She crawled her way from beneath the rubble, weeping, shaking, already crying out for her brothers and sister, stumbling over corpses. Daeron’s small head crushed to pulp beneath a chunk of broken roof, recognizable only by a few chunks of bloodstained silver hair and the Hightower ring gleaming on his finger. Aemond collapsed halfway towards the altar, a flung piece of jagged glass embedded through his throat, his eye glazed and empty. Helaena sprawled across the steps, neck broken, a trickle of blood leaking from her opened mouth; she survived the collapse of the ceiling but not the backwards tumble down the stairs when Aegon shoved her in a frantic, last-ditch effort to save his baby sister from the rubble that buried him.

Visenya could not even find his body.

Hundreds still screamed beneath the stone, a thousand souls dying, but she could only hear Vyper’s gentle crooning from his place perched atop the rocks. A girl of no more than fifteen lay impaled beneath one giant talon, but he did not seem to notice with how expectantly he watched her. Waiting for her pride, for her gratitude, for her to call him sweet beast and stroke the scales between his eyes.)

But, this was not that life.

“I will be careful,” she tried.

“It is better,” Helaena assured her. “You do not really want to watch it, anyway.”

“I want to be there for you.”

“You will be,” Helaena said, easily, and she tapped light fingers to her chest. “Here. Where you always are.”

“But not in the sept.”

“But not in the sept.”

Visenya grabbed Helaena’s hand and raised it to her mouth, touched a soft kiss to her sister’s knuckles. “I love you, beetle.”

“I know,” said Helaena, simple, easy, with a smile wide and uninhibited, and then she blinked. “Will you tell me what is to happen tonight?”

Visenya winced, wrinkled her nose. “Did your mother not speak with you?”

Helaena looked at her as one does a puppy who cannot learn to sit—as though she thought her a bit of an idiot but loved her fiercely anyway. “Is there anything to know beyond not moving or weeping?”

“Oh, Alicent,” Visenya said, mournfully, and then tucked Helaena closer to her and began, “do remember I am not supposed to be aware of any of this myself…”

*&*&*

A short time later, she guided Helaena lovingly back to her chair. She still gaped down at her hands, which Visenya used as a practical demonstration by curling one of her hands into an O and guiding the pointer finger of Hel’s other hand into it. The fascinated horror might have been funny on another day, but just now it only made her hopelessly angry with no place to aim it.

She could not very well attack Viserys or the queen, so she turned on Aegon instead.

Visenya grabbed for Aegon’s wrist, jerked it up over his head, and jammed one of her rings down his pinkie finger.

“What?” he said, as if tired of her antics. He squinted at the ring, twisted his mouth in distaste, then huffed when she did not release his hand. “Why?”

With a broad, happy smile that would fool anyone watching, she put her mouth against his ear. “Every time you touch her tonight, you are to look at that ring and remember that I have spent months on Dragonstone with nothing to do with my time but allow Daemon Targaryen to show me all the different ways to castrate a man.”

The amateur, Daemon said in her head, will tell you there is only two, but I am no amateur.

Aegon opened his mouth, and she pinched at the delicate skin on the back of his neck until he squealed like a piglet and smacked at her hand.

“I am not asking you to enjoy it, but I am telling you that, if you cause her any more pain than is strictly necessary, I am going to carve your cock into pieces and feed them to you.”

“You would not kill me,” he said, indignant, so sure of her love for him that he did not even have to pause in consideration. “We both know you will not.”

“You can live without a cock.”

“Do not jest about that,” he hissed.

“I am not jesting,” she said, and, to drive in the point, she pinched him again.

“Stop that!”

“I am sorry this is happening,” she said, almost gentle, and he faltered. “I am. I know you no more wished for this than Helaena, but you are the one who knows what is coming. She is the one who will be hurt if you are not careful, so you are the one responsible for keeping her—”

“I do not want to hurt her, Enya.”

“Good,” she said, and she planted a smacking kiss to the top of his head that he immediately attempted to wipe away with an annoyed grumble. “The ring is also a good luck charm. Do not lose it, or your bloodline will be cursed.”

“We have the same bloodline,” he answered crossly, and he grabbed for his butterknife to ward her away when she made to pinch at his neck for a third time.

Visenya cast a glance down the table to Aemond, who hadn’t moved since she left her seat. He sat glowering at his plate, muscle spasming in his jaw, and his mother turned a look on him every few moments that he pretended not to see.

Another night, she would have inserted herself into his business without a second thought. It always interested her when Alicent demanded something that made even Aemond dig in his heels, but she more pressing business for once,

She turned her gaze from him just in time to bat away Aegon’s butter knife, then looked to Daeron. He sat with his hands wringing in his lap, gaping at them with the kind of clueless confusion that only ever came from children raised alone watching the interactions of children raised together.

She did not think it humane to raise children without siblings. Daeron would turn out strange in the head if Alicent did not let him stay in the city long enough for Visenya to enlist the other three into fixing him.

“Daeron,” she said, a touch too loud, a touch too bright. A breach of etiquette, but Alicent’s hands and thoughts distracted her too much for any notice, and Viserys seemed to have lost his good day somewhere in his potatoes; he seemed stuck in half a doze, mumbling beneath his breath.

The gods seemed keen to kill him slow in this life, and Visenya could not decide how she felt about it.

Daeron’s head snapped up like a startled deer, and it struck her suddenly how much he looked like his mother. Targaryen silver to Alicent’s wavy hair, Alicent’s big brown eyes peering out over Alicent’s fine nose and soft mouth. Dimples in both cheeks when he offered her a very uncertain smile, a triangular trio of small, dark moles on his left cheekbone.

He pointed to himself as if to ensure she did not mean any of the other various Daerons at the table, and she pressed her lips together to keep from laughing when she nodded.

The way his face lit up felt a little like looking directly into the sun.

She gestured towards the dance floor, and he scrambled from his chair so quickly that both he and it would have gone tumbling sideways if Aegon did not dart an arm out to steady it. He shot their littlest brother an exasperated look, pointed his butterknife threateningly at her once more, and then returned to drinking his way through the feast’s entire supply of wine.

“Do you know me?” she asked him when they made it to the front of the table. He offered her his elbow with a flourish, and every muscle in her face gave an amused twitch before she rearranged her expression into one of somber gratitude. He, absurdly, reminded her of a puppy walking on their back legs. “You were so little when you left.”

Hardly weaned, even, when Alicent sent him away. A squalling babe, one she hardly ever saw, one she did not think she even held. Born just barely after Luke; the two of them shared a wetnurse, despite both Alicent and Rhaenyra’s complaints.

It is only right that he be sent to ward, Viserys and Otto both said often. She remembered that in the days before his birth, in the weeks after. They said it to each other, to the children, to the queen; they said it often and loudly and with little room for argument even if Alicent dared. It is only right that a thirdborn son is raised by his mother’s house.

She recalled the day Daeron left as one of the few times she ever felt something like sympathy for her stepmother—watching Alicent holding him, kissing his forehead, whispering into his hair before she passed him to the nurse. Bloody hands, bloody lips, wet eyes. Aemond clinging to her leg in an attempt to comfort, Aegon and Helaena watching solemnly from a few steps away, Rhaenyra holding Jace by the hand and Luke in her arms as Visenya hugged her around the waist. Viserys and Otto watching, perfectly impassive.

You are to put him into the arms of Gwayne Hightower, Alicent had said, so very fierce, and the wetnurse quailed. Alicent reached to fuss with Daeron’s blankets, bit at her lip, looked up again. Almost a dragon herself when she said, Ser Gwayne Hightower—no other, do you understand me?

Otto wanted to wait until Daeron turned six, she remembered, but Alicent said no. Alicent thought it better to send him away before he was old enough to miss what he left behind; Alicent thought it better to let him grow up with no memory of any life but his life in Oldtown, raised by his uncle and waiting patiently for the visits from his mother and siblings every few years when the king granted leave.

She claimed, anyway. Visenya thought it more likely that the queen thought she would miss a babe freshly born less than a boy she knew and loved and raised for six years of his life.

“You are Princess Visenya. My half-sister,” he answered brightly. She half expected a tail to erupt from his pants and start wagging frantically.

“Enya, if you would like. The others all call me Enya, save Aemond.”

“What does Aemond call you?”

“A pain in his arse, mostly.” Daeron laughed, a delighted burbling sound that made her smile truer than she could ever remember it being. Strange, strange, strange to have someone so warm and light come scampering into their midst; stranger still for him to be Alicent Hightower’s son. “I would prefer if you did not call me that, though, valonqus.”

His mouth twisted around an uncertain look, a flicker of anxiety that made him look painfully like Aegon. “I do not know that word.”

No, she did not imagine those in Oldtown would have bothered teaching him much more than he needed to command Tessarion.

“Valonqar,” she said, and she tapped him lightly in the center of his brow. He jolted, then smiled. “Valonqus. When I say it for you, it means little brother.”

“And I would call you my—my what?”

“Mandia,” she said, touching her chest. “Mandȳs.”

“Mandȳs,” Daeron lilted, and she nodded. “Would you like to dance, mandȳs?”

She made it halfway through the first song before the guilt began to gnaw at her. He was so…excited. Excited to be in King’s Landing, excited to be with his family, excited that she looked at him and spoke to him and asked him to dance. Exciting to be dancing with his mandȳs, which it seemed was all he would ever be calling her, especially since no one at the dinner table had really seemed to notice his presence with the rest of the excitement.

She needed a dance partner, is all. She could not pull Aegon onto the floor drunk, and, anyway, dancing with her while his bride-to-be stayed behind would cause whispers she did not care to hear. Aemond did not dance unless forced, and he would notice the moment she started trying to maneuver them about—start asking questions about why she wanted to get near Elmo Tully and his wide, what she wanted from Lord Amberly, and then he would figure it out on his own because of his inconvenient habit of thinking things over logically.

And then he would fuck everything up on purpose because of his general cunty nature, so she could not very well ask him.

Daeron caused no whispers; people only offered her conspiratorial grins at the sight of a girl humoring her little boy of a brother with a dance. Daeron had never danced like this with so many people around, and so he took little notice when she slid them into strange placements. Daeron, at a whopping eleven years of age, knew little about how the cards fell in the realm, and he would think nothing of her speaking to Lord Brune.

“You must fly with me in the morning,” she said when a partner change sent her spinning back into Daeron’s grasp. The lady who left him beamed at her over his head, even went so far as to wink, and, really, she found it all unnecessarily patronizing. He was eleven, not four. “You have had your first flight, yes?”

Daeron looked at her as if she had promised him his own palace built upon a cloud. “Yes—Yes, I have. I can fly with you? You will let me?”

She suspected Daeron did not have many companions in Oldtown, at least not ones anywhere near his equal, and she doubted the twins and Helaena offered him much in the way of it during their rare visits. 

“I fly every morning,” she answered. “You can come with me whenever you like until you leave again.”

The partners switched again, Daeron’s radiantly delighted face disappearing into the circle, and Visenya’s guilt abated. A flight with no ulterior motives more than made up for a round of slightly manipulative dancing, surely.

Her attention refocused on the rest of the dancers, a writhing mass of skirts and skin and perfume. All pawns on the board, yes, minor players that held little interest on their own, but even pawns could take a king—and if Rhaenyra refused to play in these early stages of the game, Visenya would do it for her.

Her sister had never been a queen before, after all, but Visenya had. She knew the steps to start the dance, even if Rhaenyra deafened herself to the music playing.

The Valemen were a wild card that she could not predict; she doubted anyone could. Vale blood ran through Rhaenyra and Visenya’s veins by grace of Aemma Arryn, but Rhea Royce’s murder-not-a-murder and Daemon’s subsequent attempt to claim Runestone for himself left the entire region embittered to him. The blood relation might well mean nothing in the face of Daemon’s actions; Rhea, after all, belonged more to the Vale than Aemma Arryn’s daughters ever would.

They loved their Lady Jeyne, though, the one they called the Maiden, and most would keep to her command. Perhaps not the Royces, but nothing could be done for that. She could not turn back time to make Daemon anything but what he is, no matter how she would like to do so. And Lady Jeyne…well, if whispers and rumors and complaints could be believed, she made her mind and kept it made, and Visenya did not think she could do much to sway her. Lady Jeyne had no sons for her to set her sights upon, and she had no leave to offer her anything else on Rhaenyra’s behalf; she would keep with Rhaenyra for being her kin and a fellow woman in danger from her kinsmen, or she would keep for the sake of whatever Rhaenyra offered when the time came, but Visenya could do nothing to tilt the scales.

She kept careful watch over her tongue with Valemen for just that reason. Better not to agitate them by pushing and probing when she could instead ply them with smiles and send them on their way with nothing but a sense of warmth and sweetness from the princess’s younger sister. It would not do much when the time came, more than like, but it could hardly hurt.

The Westermen, as well, could not be swayed by any doing of Visenya’s. Their houses were primarily run by traditional men, most of them old. The Westerlands’ lords held no love for Rhaenyra because of her womanhood, which could not be changed, and would not support her only because of what lay between her legs. Alicent and Otto clearly knew that; a disproportionate number of them swarmed the hall: heads of Lannister gold every other man, old Humphrey Leffort, a pair of Reyne boys trying their luck at every unattended maiden they found.

She bothered little with the Westermen.

The Reach would be an even enough split. Rhaenyra would have the numbers—the Caswells, the Merryweathers, the Beesburys, the Tarlys—but the large, powerful houses would bend their knees to Aegon. The Peaks, the Redwynes, the Hightowers.

When she landed across from a man from the Reach, she smiled and laughed and let herself be twisted this way and that. She made careful notes of those lords with shrewd eyes, the ones who watched her careful, the ones who made easy mention of their handsome young sons still unwed. The ones who made offers only she would hear, offers to a sister not there.

If her nails dug a touch too hard into a Hightower boy’s arm, if her tongue grew a little too sharp, if some of the boys left her a little dazed and looking unsure…well, she could hardly be blamed.

She hated the color green.

The Stormlands had no certainties to offer. The Baratheons were kin to Rhaenyra and Jacaerys through her, but Borros Barathon cared little for kin or honor. She remembered that from an entirely differently life; Baelon hated him mindlessly, often muttering that he would like to kick the illiterate old fuck in the face until he swallowed his teeth. She could win him with a vow to wed his son, certainly, but the boy called Florian in that life lived as a girl called Floris in this one. Four daughters left Visenya’s hands tied.

His vassals might yet be swayed, though. She suspected many minor houses would break their oaths to their lieges if the time came that Aegon and Rhaenyra stood on opposing ends of the board.

Where will you be? asked a snide voice in her head. Which side of the board? Beside which of your sisters?

She ignored it.

She found Lord Buckler to be a kind man, solemn eyed with a soft smile, and he chattered to her nervously about his ill wife. Nothing series, the maesters said, but he only left her side after she threw one of her slippers at his head.

His love for his wife had already won her fondness when he murmured, almost conspiratorially, “My lady wife and I have four daughters, you know. My Elizabetta, my eldest—I should like her to be the Lady of Bronzegate when the Stranger comes for me.”

“A…progressive view, my lord,” she said, studying him intently, and he laughed self-deprecatingly.

“I am not so young as I once was,” he admitted, “but I have not lost my faculties yet. I love him well, but he is a fool; to name him heir to the stables would be folly, much less of Bronzegate.”

“You do not look a day over thirty, my lord,” she said, diplomatically.

“You lie well, princess,” he said brightly, and she barked a laugh that startled the people on either side of them.

Bronzegate, at least. With its strange little lord with his odd mustache, with his wife he loved so madly, with his brood of clever daughters and a single, foolish son who once spent every gold dragon on his person to purchase a horse that turned out to be a donkey.

Most of the other vassals gave her little to work with. They were too busy complimenting her dress and her hair and asking after any news of her betrothal because, oh, surely, she would be wed soon, given that her sisters were both now married, and had she met their son? At the least, she developed a distrust for the Swanns—one of them curled his lip when she slithered Rhaenyra into the conversation, offered her a bitter smile and a throwaway comment that he did not have nearly the same closeness with his own sister.

Daeron returned to her breathless, his hair curling more at the ends from sweat, face red and smile wide. He bounced onto the balls of his feet, then rolled forward on his toes as he grabbed her hand. Searching her face, hopeful, hopeful.

“Another?” she asked, amused.

“Yes.”

Cregan Stark’s dark head moved across the hall behind the dancers, avoiding them like the plague; she knew him without the sight of his face, knew the slope of his shoulders and the cut of his hair and the uncomfortable way he twitched in his formalwear. A dear friend to her and Baelon both once Baelon got over his cultivated dislike of the man—he spoke to me too sweetly on our name-day, she thought, a ghost of a memory, Baelon thought him audacious—and Baelon’s master of laws for a time.

She never even thought to concern herself with the Northmen. They said the Starks never forgot an oath, which might have been true; she herself put little faith in any grand assumptions based only a man’s name. But Cregan never forgot an oath, and his Northmen would walk bold into hell so long as he led them.

She danced with the Manderly boys anyway. The Northmen always made her laugh.

The Rivermen were her best bet for any sort of headway. They would lose the Brackens when the Blackwoods followed Rhaenyra, but that could not be helped. The Tullys were the real prize—that old bastard Grover and his perpetually exhausted looking son, Elmo.

Grover would be pointless. Old, set in his ways. Nothing to be done.

But he also had one foot in the Stranger’s mouth, as she thought the saying went, so she thought it more than likely that he would be burning merrily in the river before very long.

Unlike his father, Elmo Tully seemed the swayable sort.

When Kermit Tully slid into the space before her, she beamed a smile and asked, “Settle a matter for me, my lord—can babies swim from the womb?”

The smile it startled out of him made him look far prettier than any man had any right to be. Something about the dark red curls falling in a neat tumble around his face and tucked behind his ears, the strength in his stubbled jaw, the quirked corners of his plush mouth. She found she did not mind the shade of green in his eyes nearly so much as she minded the Hightower green that haunted her every step.

“Do you know, princess, I am not sure. I have never seen such a thing.”

“Dreadfully disappointing,” she sighed, careful not to lose the charming, false smile as they moved their way through the steps of the dance. A curtsey here, a spin here, two steps back, a step forward, their palms hovering an inch apart. She found the whole thing very droll. Baelon used to grab onto her and whirl her about, pull her as close as he could get and keep her there; the nobles would scatter when their king brought their queen to the floor, knowing better than to think he would keep to the steps. She loved dancing in that life. “I read it in a book once; I thought if anyone might know, it is the future heir to Riverrun.”

“May I ask why you are plotting to throw babies into deep water?”

It surprised her to find truth in her smile, and she let the pads of her fingers touch his even though they were not meant to touch at this part of the dance. “Some things are better left to the imagination.”

“I must disagree; the imagination simply does not compete,” he said airily, head dipping down closer than it should, and the smile on his mouth curved conspiratorially. I’ve a secret, said that smile, keep it for me, won’t you? “For example, when I imagined the black dragon’s princess, I came up with no image as radiant as my princess looks tonight.”

She raised an eyebrow. “I did not take you for a flirt, my lord.”

He laughed, and she did not know men could sound like that. She’d never known a man with a sweetness like that, not like the spun sugar of Kermit Tully’s laugh.

“Is that what the people call me then? The black dragon’s princess?”

“So the smallfolk call you,” he confirmed, and he lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “Among the nobility, I have found it more often to be the Blacks’ dragon. What a difference it makes, the placement of one letter.”

Visenya mimicked his shrug, but her smile faded into something more wary. He had clever eyes, this Tully boy, and an unchecked boldness to so plainly call the conversation to the matter of the succession. She was worse than a man, so distracted by his pretty face that she did not notice anything going on behind it. “I have made no secret of my loyalties, my lord.”

“You are flushing out ours, though.” He twisted his wrist to gesture towards the other dancers. “Using the little one was clever, but I would suggest being more careful with your partners next time you play such a trick. Someone might notice how you linger with the men whose loyalties remain unspoken.”

“I do not know what you mean,” she answered tightly.

“I think that you do,” he said, jovial enough. “And you need not worry. We will keep, regardless of my grandfather’s wishes. My family swore to your sister, and we are not oathbreakers. When she calls, we will answer.” He paused, tilted his head consideringly. “The Vances, though—do not place any faith in the Vances.”

“So little faith in your bannermen?”

“I have the utmost faith in the Rivermen,” he answered easily. “As a whole.”

Visenya pursed her lips, regarded him suspiciously. “You are presumptuous, my lord.”

“And you too obvious. Any would see what you are doing if they looked closely.”

“I am but a girl, dancing at my sister and brother’s wedding feast. A second-born daughter,” she countered. “No one looks too closely at a girl like that.”

“I did,” he said, lightly. “Foolish is the man who turns his back on a dragon.”

“Fire burns a man no matter which way he faces.”

“Have you any fire?” he asked with interest. “You seem more bark than bite to me, princess.”

“You do not seem worth staining my teeth,” she shot back, though she suspected she would quite like to sink her teeth into Kermit Tully. Anger or attraction, she did not know, but she would like the urge to dissipate. “You are impudent and too familiar.”

Kermit smiled. “Do you take issue with it?”

A muscle worked in Visenya’s jaw, eye twitching for a moment, and then she sighed. Cut a look up at him, allowed her mouth to curve into a genuine, if rueful, smile. “I cannot decide how I feel about you, Kermit Tully.”

“You should kiss me,” he suggested, eyes dancing. “I’ve found that women tend to like me more after they have kissed me.”

“Perhaps when fish fly, my lord.”

Kermit leaned in far too close, considering the amount of people around, and smiled like a cat who’d gotten cream when he murmured, “Princess, I hate to tell you, but there is such a thing as flying fish.”

The song changed again before she could respond, Daeron returned to her as they came full circle, and Kermit Tully left her there fuming as he ducked away to rejoin his father.

(Aemma Arryn’s daughters always did have a penchant for the men from the Riverlands.)

“That is Lord Elmo Tully’s son, yes?” Daeron asked. “Is he a friend of yours?”

“I only just met him,” Visenya admitted, eyes still narrowed after him. “He is…I do not know. Another dance, valonqus, or are you done?”

Chapter Text

She collapsed back into her chair with an exhausted groan, pins and needles shooting through her feet and up through her calves when her weight finally left them. Aemond looked at her with quiet contempt for a long moment; he had yet to move from his spot in the two hours she and Daeron danced, but her business was handled well enough that she felt free to badger him about the business with his mother.

It must be something sickening because she could imagine him ignoring Alicent and her continuous little looks and whispers for any other reason; she considered herself a bit of an expert on Aemond and his quirks at this point, and she would quite like to know what made him so tense. Helaena, perhaps, on the dance floor with one of her Hightower cousins and looking happier than she had all night; Aegon, looking well on his way to blacking out; something else entirely.

“Tell me, brother lovely—” she began, but a cleared throat waylaid her.

The Celtigar boy—could she call him a boy, several years her elder? — faced her with a shaky smile fixed upon his face. How strange seeing Valyrian features outside of her own kin, one so similar to her own without any mixing of their blood to blame. The slashes of his cheekbones and the sloping nose, his close-cropped silver hair—though his eyes were a soft golden-brown.

“If you have come to beg a dance, my lord,” she said, feet crying out in anguish at the thought, “I am terribly sorry but I must decline for fear of laming myself.”

Aemond snorted under his brother, and she slipped her fork from her place setting so she could jab him in the thigh. His expression did not change beyond a tightness to his mouth, but he reached stealthily beneath the table and pinched the outside of her thigh with enough force to bruise until she tapped frantically at the back of his wrist in surrender.

“Only a turn about a room, princess,” he assured her, and he swept into a bow so low that he seemed like to topple over. “I am—”

“Clement Celtigar,” Aemond provided in a low drawl, and he flicked her a look. “Lord Bartimos’s only child.”

The interruption along with the tone made him sound like a proper arsehole, but she saw it for the help he meant it to be. A gentle reminder of one of the changes he noticed in her stories. The boy standing before her had a little sister with rosy cheeks and a squeaking laugh in that other life.

“My Lord Clement—”

“The Princess Rhaenyra suggested I speak with you,” he blurted, and their eyes met with deliberate intensity. The words died on her tongue, and she studied him with a renewed, quiet interest. “If you are amenable, princess.”

“When my sister speaks, you do not inter—” Aemond cut in immediately, bristling like a cat dunked in a bucket, but she silenced him with a hand laid on his forearm.

“It is alright, Aem.”

“Visenya,” he sputtered, but she stood and moved on aching feet to take Clement’s arm.

She always thought Rhaenyra would warn her before sending a suitor, and the Celtigars never crossed her mind as an option. Odd, that, when they were one of the three remaining Valyrian houses and a decent enough alliance to make. Still, she…well, she still thought of Clement as a little boy who tore her skirt and screamed when Baelon broke his nose; whoever he became in that life or this one, she knew nothing of it. One did not think of marrying a boy they remembered like that.

“Call me Monty,” he said after a moment of silence. He looked everywhere but her face as they began to circle the room, eyes flicking up to the ceiling and then down to the floor, shifting to the side to peer at the other people. His free hand fluttered about as if he did not know what to do with it, smoothing his doublet and then fussing at his hair and then dusting away a nonexistent piece of lint on his sleeve. “My friends—well, my mother calls me Monty. I do not have many friends, but, if I did, I would ask that they call me Monty, and I…I should like us to be friends, I think.”

He sounded doubtful even as he said it.

Visenya blinked. “Alright. Monty. You may call me Enya, if you like.”

“The princes called you Enya,” he said with a slow nod. He chewed on the inside of his cheek, she noticed, just as she did when she grew anxious. “The Princes Jacaerys, Lucerys, and Joffrey, I mean. Prince Jacaerys said you were much like their sister, so I—I suppose I should not call you, Enya, then.”

“Being as my sister sent you to court me,” she guessed, mouth twisting in amusement when his face went bloodless and then a ferocious, glowing red in a matter of seconds. “That is rather different than being your sister.”

“You are a Targaryen,” he said, almost absently. “It is not so different for you, I suppose.”

He seemed shocked when she laughed, but she could not help it. The solemnity in his face tickled her, his big-eyed somberness and quiet nervousness.

“Call me Visenya, at the least. Or you can call me Sen, if you like. ‘Senya, if you do not.”

Vis, she started to say, but she could not quite make herself.

“Senya,” Monty repeated. “Senya. Yes, I like that.”

“I am glad,” she said, for lack of anything better to say, and they fell again into awkward silence.

Monty opened his mouth repeatedly, but the words seemed to die in his mouth. His free hand fluttered down to his thigh, playing a strange rhythm against his leg, and his face remained flushed. He almost looked feverish, as if he grew nearer to passing out with each moment that ticked by.

“Would you like to step into the hall for some air?” she suggested, and his entire body sagged in relief.

“If you are amenable to the idea, princess, it would—yes, please.”

She raised a hand, flicking her fingers in the air until Ser Westerling’s gaze came sliding over her, and then angled her head towards the door. His usual expression did not waver, but his eyes narrowed a fragment at the sight of Monty on her arm and did not widen again as he made to follow them out into the hall.

Monty relaxed almost as soon as they gained enough distance from the feast that the music quieted, and she touched his forearm. “Ser Harrold does not listen,” she said, gently. “Or, if he does, he does not speak the things he hears. There is no need to worry.”

“I am not always so twitchy,” he apologized, speaking in a low murmur regardless of her assurances. As if afraid Ser Harrold had the ears of a bat and could eavesdrop from fifteen feet behind them. “I had this conversation with your sister. It was no easier for me then. But I am usually not so…I am usually a much better conversationalist.”

He paused.

“Well. Better than I am tonight, anyway.”

He smiled when she laughed. She liked this smile, this first one not tinted by nausea; it made him look significantly less like a cowering terrier than before. Almost handsome.

“Your sister sent me as a suitor.”

“I gathered,” Visenya said with a slow nod, and she bit at the inside of her cheek.

Monty regarded her for a moment, and she gazed expectantly back. He inhaled deeply, and she glanced down to find his hands shaking; he let all the air from his chest in one long rush, then swallowed and said, “She believes that we might be…content in a marriage together. She believes we might have a marriage as…well-suited as her first.”

Visenya would certainly not call their marriage well-suited. Friends, yes, even close companions in some times. They laughed at each other’s jokes, most of the time, and liked the same sort of things, but, really, Laenor’s preference for—

Oh, Rhaenyra.

Lovely, dear, wonderful Rhaenyra, who could not give her Brigit to wife. Who could not give her anything more than a man she did not really want, who could not give her joy, but who could give her the path of loopholes that she and Laenor danced upon in their own day. How long had she been digging through the noble boys, searching for one of proper standing, looking for a boy whose eyes followed pretty squires and whose family’s knees would not bend to Aegon?

Monty did not seem to be breathing.

“You are too young to be one of Laenor’s boys,” she said with curiosity. “How ever did she find you?”

Monty’s eyes closed, and relief bled onto his face. Terror she hadn’t recognized fled him, the fear leaving him in such a rush that she flinched a little at the sudden sharpness in his face, the sudden clarity. A different man stood with her now than the frightened boy from before, someone still clearly nervous but not shaking like a startled goat either.

How frightening it must be to tell the truth to a stranger, she thought, when all your life you’ve lied to the world.

“I do not know,” he admitted miserably. “She called my father to Dragonstone to discuss something I am not party to, and she…materialized in the hall when I was alone. There was a very confusing metaphor about geese.”

“I am familiar with the waterfowl metaphor,” Visenya said with a grim nod of solidarity

“The general idea, from my understanding, is that, being as I prefer goose and you duck, we might…come to a mutually beneficial arrangement.”

“I find I am more concerned with the attractiveness of the feathers rather than the bird to which they are attached.”

He did not seem to hear her. “I know you would undoubtedly prefer a different marriage, as would I, but…well, your sister says you like to read. I am something of a scholar myself, though I admit I have not done much research on the ways of the old country. She says you like to ride, and I am very fond of horses—I am aware she most likely meant the dragon, but I am hoping you will be willing to compromise with me on the matter, being as I neither have a way to obtain one nor any desire to do so. I am not a swordsman myself, though Prince Jacaerys confided that you are something of a warrior; I would not ask you to halt the practice. I play the piano, not very well, but…”

His arm slipped from hers, and he took two rapid steps away while pressing the butts of his palms into his eyes. An almost maniacal laugh slipped from his mouth, incredulously anxious, and she squinted at him.

“I sound as if I am auctioning myself off at sale.”

She examined Monty Celtigar, and she allowed herself a moment to think about it. A husband who would never wish to touch her, who would come to her bed once or twice a year in an attempt to sire an heir, who would take men into his own. A nervous, rambling husband who liked to read and ride and would let her practice at the sword all she wished, who played the piano without much skill, who would not judge her for taking other men or even women into her bed.

I could be happy, she thought.

(In another life, Visenya wed Clement Celtigar. He visited her bed three times a year, never more and never less, always with a squire boy to help things along, always pretending he did not know that Visenya used them to sate Vyper’s endless hunger soon as the sun rose.

These visits gave them a girl for each of the Old King’s daughters and a girl for her mother, too, and Monty let her name them with nary a peep of objection. She raised them fierce, her dragon girls. She raised them strong. She raised them wicked, raised them bloody, raised them to sink in their teeth and tear. She raised them so war would not break them the way it broke her; she raised them to want, to take, to have.

She raised them to be dragons, and so dragons they were.

When their last was born, their final babe, a boy she allowed Monty to name for his father, she watched Daenerys look down upon him in his bassinet. She watched her eldest daughter, her own spitting image, as fierce and as mad and as blood hungry as she ever was.

He will be lord, she said.

In another life, still bleeding from childbirth, Visenya Targaryen looked into her daughter’s eyes, and she knew, then, in a way she never knew before, what it meant to fear that one’s son will die by the hands of a sister; she knew, then, how Alicent Hightower could believe throwing the realm into war would be safer for her boys than relying on a dragon girl’s mercy.

Where, said Daenerys, beautiful face twisting into something ugly, is the fairness in that?)

But, then, she thought of Brigit.

Visenya cared nothing for what kind of bird found its way to her plate, but Brigit could not stomach even the thought of a goose. Rhaenyra would allow Visenya years of freedom yet if she asked it, but Brigit’s mother would force her to marry before year’s end. Brigit would, most likely, not stumble into an arrangement like this, no matter how much she might like to do so.

Gods, Rhaenyra would spit fire, but did Visenya not swear only that morning that they would find Brigit a husband? It would be selfish—as if that has ever stopped you before, snarked something in her head, and she shoved it away—of her to keep Monty, to take Monty for her own, when Brigit faced marriage to the half-rotted corpse of a man in the North.

“Have you a goose, Monty?”

He paused, something strangely calculating in his eyes when he looked at her, and his jaw clenched. “I did.”

He did not elaborate, but, having known him only a half hour or so, she did not think it her place to press him on the matter. She took his hand in hers and squeezed, and he looked down at their clasped palms. He squeezed back, soft and then harder, and grinned at her with considerably less terror than before.

“I have a duck,” she said, voice dropping low. “She must find a husband by the end of the year, or her family intends to marry her to Lord Ryswell.”

Monty’s lips parted, his brow furrowing, and he blurted an incredulous, “He is still living?”

She and Clement Celtigar might very well find themselves very good friends by the end of this.

“Your duck,” Monty prompted. “What is her name?”

Visenya stilled for a moment, searching his face for any sign of…she did not know, exactly, but she did not find it. “Ironsmith.”

“A house from the North, yes? A smaller one?”

“It is.” She swallowed. “I know we have only just met, but I would ask you a favor.”

“Anything, princess.” Strangely, she believed him. He held a certain openness in his face, this Monty Celtigar, a quiet sincerity.

“I do believe this arrangement would benefit her more than it would me.” He blinked, and she barreled on frantically before he could reply. Words running together into one great rush, her hand wringing into her skirts, her eyes fixed on his face as if she could force him with her gaze to agree. “She reads less than I do, but she does love to read; she so loves to ride…horses, naturally, not dragons. She does not play the piano, but she is a beautiful harpist; she plays beautifully, Monty, and she sings so sweetly—”

“Yes.”

Visenya’s closed her still-open mouth with a click of her teeth. “Yes?”

“Yes.”

“That is…all? You will meet her?”

He frowned, faint bafflement crossing his face. “Did you wish for me to say something else?”

“I do not—no!” she said, taking a quick step back so she could flap her hands about anxiously without slapping him. Ser Westerling made a noise behind them that might have been a chuckle, but she did not turn to find out. “I have only just met you! How am I supposed to guess at what you may say or do?”

“Your sister sent me here in search of an arrangement that would benefit us both, and it seems to me that having your…duck safely wed and out of Ryswell’s grasp will benefit you greatly. This arrangement may well turn out better for us both than our own marriage would.” When she cocked a brow, he smiled sheepishly and scratched at the back of his neck. “I do not think I am fit to be wed to a girl who rides dragons; I would bore you terribly, and I do believe I find you and your kin more than a bit frightening.”

(He could not name it, exactly, except that those of Targaryen blood looked strangely at those who did not belong to them. Not…disdain, exactly, not the contempt so many of the upper nobility felt towards the lower, the lower towards the smallfolk, but a vaguely curious apathy. As if everyone else in the world did not exist in the same way that they existed, as if they were only observing a squirrel searching for nuts in the foliage, as if they were half-convinced that the people they spoke to were not truly real.)

“Frightening?” she said with a laugh. “Us?”

“I will take your alternative arrangement if she is amenable,” he said, tipping his head. “I am serving my future queen and aiding her sister, as well as myself; my intentions in coming here are fulfilled in either instance.”

She feared, if she tried to make a sound, she would burst into laughter; she feared, if she tried to speak, she would burst into tears. Both, perhaps, at once, but…Brigit woke howling from nightmares of men atop her and within her, their hands yanking at her skin and their babes growing in her belly. Woke weeping, still feeling their tongues on her throat; woke gagging, sobbing. Visenya could not comfort her when she could not stop it, but now here a nervous boy stood with his soft brown eyes, telling her that her northern girl would not have to be afraid.

“Then we—we can go back into the hall, and you will meet her.”

“Alright,” said Monty, and he looked almost indulgent as she turned on her heel and began hauling him back the way they came. Ser Westerling chuckled merrily under his breath as she went bouncing past him, but she could not find a part of her to care.

Monty followed cheerfully behind her, their hands still clasped, seemingly perfectly pleased to be led. Brigit would appreciate that. Another pretty silver hound on her leash, though this one would be of very different use than Visenya.

Brigit came darting from her seat towards the hall entrance as soon as they entered. Big worried eyes, her eyebrows drawn close together, a frown marring her pretty face. “I have been looking for you.”

Visenya ignored her, being as a matter of greater importance existed at the moment, and released Monty to grab hold of Brigit’s arm and pull her further away from the revelers. Brigit allowed it with little more than a huff, and Visenya reeled her in just enough that she might whisper into her ear and still have it appear to passersby that she only meant to make herself heard over the music.

“Rhaenyra sent Clement Celtigar here for me,” she murmured. Brigit’s face did not change, but her eyes flashed hot for half a second; jealousy stuffed quickly behind a mask of polite interest. Visenya preened to see it, unable to help herself.

“Very kind of her,” Brigit said with a stiff nod, and she dipped a curtsey to Monty instead of allowing her to finish her explanation. “It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance, my lord. I am Brigit Ironsmith of the North, and I do so hate to be rude, but I really must speak with—”

“I,” said Monty in a blurt, “like goose.”

Visenya turned very slowly towards him, mouth agape. Monty made a frantic gesture with his hand in return, eyes very wide and face flushed a red so bright that it glowed.

Brigit blinked once, then turned towards Visenya with a puzzled look. “Did your sister send you someone simple?” she murmured lowly, and Visenya swallowed her laugh.

“She sent me a man she knows will do me as well as Laenor Velaryon did her.”

Brigit looked blankly back at her for a moment before her face opened in wide understanding. Her gaze snapped back around to Monty, her head cocked, her eyes bright in curious excitement. “Oh. Oh. That is wonderful, Sen. Truly.”

Sincerity. No resentment or jealousy, only a quiet joy that Visenya might find some sort of freedom, only a very faint longing that no one else would see because no one else spent a chunk of their childhood gazing moonily at Brigit’s face. What Brigit would not give for this, the quiet hope of a husband who might be her companion and nothing more.

“She is good to me, my sister,” Visenya agreed with a crooked smile. Pleased hound bounding back to their master’s feet to lay the stick thrown. “But I do think it a gift that might suit your needs better.”

Monty cleared his throat when she lashed one hand back to swat him, then offered his hand. “Would you care to dance, my lady?”

Brigit looked at his hand. She looked to Visenya. She looked back to his hand. She opened her mouth, and, when a strangled noise came out of it, snapped it shut again. Swallowed, looked back to Visenya. “Princess Rhaenyra—”

“Will get over it,” Visenya said, cheerfully. “I’ve done worse things than pawning one of my suitors off onto you.”

“She says you play the harp,” Monty piped, helpfully. “I play the piano, though not particularly well.”

He really did need to stop following up with that part.

“I have always wanted to learn to play piano,” Brigit said, faintly, and she very slowly put her hand into his.

“I will teach you,” Monty offered. “If you’d like.”

“Yes,” said Brigit. “And yes, my lord, I would like to dance.”

Monty smiled, that same bright smile from earlier, but, when he turned to guide her to the dance floor, Brigit’s eyes widened and she spun back around. “What is it?” Visenya said, half  expecting Brigit to have suddenly changed her mind and become furious with her for even suggesting such a thing, but her northern girl only started to shake her head.

“It is the little one,” she said and then gestured impatiently towards the wall.

Visenya followed the gesture and nearly gasped aloud when she caught sight of Aemond. He looked positively miserable, not unusual considering the festivities: his eye thrown towards the ceiling, his arms clasped behind his back, a muscle jumping anxiously in his cheek. Speaking to what appeared to be a girl but may have been a sentient curtain. Visenya had never seen so large a puff of skirts. Too large. She could not tell where the skirts ended and the body began.

“Is he talking to a woman?” Visenya asked, fascinated. “I did not know he knew how to do that.”

“He is speaking to—” Brigit started.

“Margaery Sunglass,” Monty piped, and he frowned. “I know her. Her house is another of Dragonstone’s vassals. I…do not like her very much.”

Brigit’s face lit up, as if he’d just hung the moon in the sky. “Gods, neither do I, she is so—"

“Focus, please, darling,” Visenya said, absently, still studying the Sunglass girl’s back and her monstrous mass of skirts. Someone could lose a child in them; she glanced at the table to make sure Daeron remained visible. Something strange coiled in her belly, a heated discomfort that made her shift on her feet. “Why does it matter?”

Margaery shifted, allowing Visenya a look at her face, and her question answered itself.

She looked up at Aemond with eyes blown so wide that Visenya could see the whites of them even this far across the room, her attention fixed on the patch. Tracing up and down his scar, doing nothing to try to hide her horror. As if gazing at a circus attraction instead of a prince of the realm. When Aemond spoke, she answered so shortly that her mouth barely moved, and, oh gods, Aemond.

What she’d taken for discomfort revealed itself for a deep self-consciousness the longer she looked at him, the biting sort of shame that she hadn’t seen since they were children. His feet shifting about uncertainly, his shoulders tense, his throat working too hard when he swallowed, wilting down until he seemed half his size.

(He never needed the self-consciousness with Visenya, she who stole his eyepatch but only because she found it silly that he ever wore it, who looked at his whole face instead of just the scars, who never flinched even when his sapphire was out and the gaping, empty pit of the socket was glared back at her.)

Aemond’s eye flicked over Margaery’s head to the table, and Visenya followed his pleading gaze to his mother. Alicent, who could not have possibly seen Margaery’s face from her angle, only made a go-on gesture with her fingers and turned back to fussing with the blankets in Viserys’s lap.

She supposed this answered the question of what the queen wanted him of him.

“Go dance,” she said, with a flutter of her fingers, and Brigit and Monty exchanged a glance that she found far too familiar for people who had only known each other seven minutes. “I will see you later in the night.”

“Do not do anything foolish, Visenya,” Brigit said, warningly.

“Me?” asked Visenya, with a wide, innocent smile. “Have I ever?”

“I fear I have made a mistake,” Brigit said to Monty, but Visenya barely heard the words. She went darting towards her brother, instead, slithering through the crowd with her eyes fixed fiercely on the Sunglass girl.

Aemond’s head snapped down towards her when she materialized at his side, her arm slipping through his as if they stood in such a way all the time. The bafflement on his face and the way he half pulled away until she squeezed at his bicep did not help sell it, but, being as Margaery still seemed to be avoiding looking directly into his face, she did not think it would much matter.

“I’ve been looking for you,” she lied, then smiled wolfishly down at Margarary. They were of a height, Margaery perhaps even a little taller than her, but she shrank down small at whatever she saw crossing Visenya’s face. “Who’s this, then?”

“Margaery Sunglass,” Margaery answered before Aemond could answer, and she dipped into a low curtsey that, admittedly, Visenya found more than a bit impressive considering that her skirts could hold several small people. “If I may say, princess, I do love your gown. It is a beautiful color.”

“And yours,” said Visenya, allowing her eyes to trail up and down with a slow deliberateness, “is very big.”

Margaery’s smile disappeared, and Visenya’s lit up her face. Aemond attempted to hide his laugh by coughing into his shoulder, then tensed up when it drew Margaery’s gaze back towards him. Even more brutal this close up, the way her eyes only focused on his patch, the way her face went queasy and her lips pursed—

Visenya allowed herself a moment to imagine fisting her hands in Margaery’s pretty copper hair and tearing.

“I hope I am not interrupting.”

“You are not,” muttered Aemond.

“I was only just telling the prince that I am not feeling well,” Margaery squeaked out, and Visenya’s brows shot up. Not only a craven cowering from his eye, then, but a lying fool. “Too much wine, I think. I could not possibly dance without falling over.”

What right did this girl have, some unknown daughter of a house she hardly remembered existed, some unwanted spawn of a lord sworn to their sister, to act as if to dance with a prince would be any burden? To act as if a monster had staggered from the woods to terrorize her instead of a handsome, clever young man with a scar asking her to dance? Twelve of her would not equal one half of Aemond’s worth, and Visenya’s nails dug into his arm so sharply that he grunted.

Visenya allowed genuine surprise to seep through her face—Aemond never danced at these things—and then murmured without much attempt to hide it, “when I told you to be kind to the simple girls, I did not mean you had to ask them to the floor with you.”

Margaery’s mouth popped open, blinking furiously as if she was sure she could not have possibly heard her correctly. “Pardon, princess?”

Visenya smiled coolly without answered and then turned her head to look at Aemond. He stared down at her, brows to his hairline, his lips parted in baffled surprise but twitching at the corners in a conflicted desire to smile. “Why ever would you bother speaking to this bitch for so long? She is not worth the breath or bother.”

His lips twisted reluctantly. “Mother.”

Visenya rolled her eyes.

“I hate to leave so soon, my lady, but I do need to borrow my brother. Especially since you are…not feeling well.” She reached out to grab her hand, waited for her to offer a hesitant smile before she crushed it so hard in her grip that she yelped. “It was such a pleasure to meet you.”

She did not give Aemond time to speak again, only slid her arm down to grab his wrist and then forcibly hauled him with her when she turned to walk out of the hall.

“There was hardly the need for that,” he hissed.

“She is a bitch,” Visenya said, as if she found it obvious, because she did. “I am bitchier, and bless your mother for giving me the practice. Come now, before Her Grace sees I’ve kidnapped you and has me skinned alive.”

“You were rude,” he said, indignant, “and House Sunglass is—”

“As irrelevant as all the others,” she snarled back. “She is lucky that I do not blacken her eyes for looking at you the way that she did.”

She would deserve it. Visenya could not get the look of her out of her head, the way her face contorted at the sight of him. Like an animal to be shied from, some feral dog mangled beyond recognition. She would deserve blackened eyes, a broken jaw, for Visenya to cut up her stupid, pretty face—

“You did not have to interfere,” he said, quietly, and Visenya cut him an annoyed look. “I did not need a rescue.”

“You wanted one. That is enough for me.”

He did not seem to have anything else to say as Visenya tugged him from the hall. She did not know where she meant to bring him or what she intended except to find her way out of the crowds; she forgot even to fetch Ser Westerling, which she would undoubtedly hear about when he noticed, because he’d been very clear in his instructions not to go anywhere without him. Royal weddings and assassinations or some such garbage. Seething as she was, she would not have minded an assassin. She could rip out their throat; perhaps it would make her feel less like vibrating out of her own skin.

They stalked quick and quiet through the halls, her fingers still wrapped loose around his wrist; she hardly noticed she still had hold of him until he paused at a window and forced her to a stop, too. His eye lingered oddly on her fingers on his skin, and she released him with a wince and hauled herself to perch on the window ledge.

Aemond still did not speak, but he did press his hands to the stone and lean forward to let the wind and moonlight kiss at his face.

She did like the storming expression growing on his face. Visenya could always tell when one of his foul moods approached—moods in which he would not speak to her, snapped when she teased him, turned on the world with the rabid ferocity of a man who thought it turned on him first. Maybe it has, but Visenya hadn’t, and she always resented the lash of his temper.

The look on his face meant arguments and insults and things they could not take back even though they pretended never to have said to them aloud, meant three days when she would ignore him or he would ignore her until one managed to appease the other with mumbled words that never, not even once, contained anything like “I am sorry” but might, if one squinted, be considered an apology anyway.

Trying to chase off his tantrum before it began notoriously never went well, but she tried anyway. Never let it be said that Visenya learned from her mistakes.

“Noble girls are fools,” she said, legs dangling loosely, and he cut her a look. Annoyed to hear her address it, embarrassed she saw it, relieved she cut in before it got any worse, angry with himself for being relieved. She knew his face as well as her own, it seemed to her sometimes. “She is more foolish than most.”

“Being frightened of a mutilated face does not make her a fool, Visenya.”

“Spurning a prince asking her to dance because of a little scar makes her a fool.”

“A little scar,” he repeated with a scoff. “You have seen me without the patch, Visenya. You know it is not…you know it is…”

She did not know what vile word he meant to use, but she knew it did not fit.

“I have seen you without the patch, and I have seen you without your sapphire. It has never frightened me.”

“You are not so easily frightened as court girls.”

“That says more about them than it does about me, valonqus.”

“Perhaps,” he allowed, but he said it the same way he said perhaps she flew better than him. Not because he agreed but because he did not want to have the discussion.

“Scars make a man look roguish, anyway,” she said, litghtly, nudging his shoulder with hers, and his eye rolled. “It does not take away from your pretty face.”

He snorted. “I am not pretty. Men are not pretty.”

“You would be even prettier if you smiled more.”

Aemond lolled his head towards her. She did not know what she expected, but the smile shocked her. Not the usual quirk of his lips, not the mean-spirited smirk from when he fought with Aegon, not the soft look he reserved for Helaena and his mother. Not even the mocking one he gave her when he teased her, holding a book over her head to make her jump or poking fun at the way she poured syrup on her eggs.

His cheeks scrunching around a full smile, his thin lips parting around the pretty white of his teeth, his eye gleaming brightly out at her. His cheeks dimpled when he smiled; she hadn’t known that. Sixteen years old, her baby brother, and she never noticed his dimples.

A funny feeling filled her chest, like her lungs couldn’t catch enough air. A dryness in her mouth when she tried to swallow.

Baelon didn’t have dimples.

“Well?” he prompted, after another moment of her only staring at him.

She did not consciously decide to press her fingers to the divot in his cheek, but her hand moved anyway. His smile fell away slowly, eye scanning her face quizzically as it faded, and it surprised her as much as him when her own voice sighed, “You are beautiful.”

“Men are not beautiful,” he rasped. Something shook in his voice, something almost shy as a pink stain began spread sudden across his fine cheekbones. A flush his pale skin could not hide.

“Dragons are.”

His ears turned pink when he blushed, a soft flush along the delicate edge of the arches. She did not know that before either. Her hand flexed, resisting the urge to trace the shell with one of her fingers just to see what might happen. If it would turn him redder, make that pink travel down the column of his throat; the breeze rustled his hair, and she tucked it back behind his ear without thinking.

“Right,” he croaked, and the shake of his voice startled her back into herself. She pulled her hand away, her own cheeks flushing as she fisted it back into her lap, looking with great interest up to the arch at the top of the window “Well.”

(In his daydreams, he always knew what to say.

He knew the right words, how to make his voice purr, how to sound suave and grown, knew how to make a woman—her, her, always her, he could not fool himself—preen under his attention. He knew what to do. Who to be. His heart did not pound, his face did not burn, his teeth did not fit wrongly in his mouth.

He remembered, standing there in the window with the feeling of her fingerprints burnt into his cheek, that they were only daydreams. He remembered that she twisted him into knots, that he knew nothing of women or charm, that he could not pretend that he did.

He did not know what to do with the sudden knowledge of what it sounded like to hear her call him beautiful. With the sudden twisting in his chest like something might snap, with the sudden frantic urge to curl his fingers into her hips and bury his face into her throat and tell her he would do anything she wished if she would only say it again.)

What, asked a little voice in her head, the fuck was that.

Visenya did not know, and, anyway, how dare it ask her to evaluate her own actions? It worked, which mattered far more than where it came from. Aemond’s black mood seemed to be gone. Replaced by vague embarrassment and uncertainty, yes, but she found that far better than unmitigated hatred for any living being around him.

“You should go soon,” she ventured, grabbing out with both hands for a subject change. “The procession to the sept will be starting any minute.”

“Just me?” he asked, head cocked. “Are you not?”

“Helaena’s told me not to go,” she admitted and then shot him a grin. “She thinks I’ll burst into flames in the presence of your gods.” When he did not smile, only stared hard back at her, she sighed. “She had a dream.”

She considered, for a moment, going anyway. She had never lost control of Vyper, not the way Helaena seemed to think she would in the sept; perhaps with the warning known in advance, she would be able to keep him at bay, as she had always done.

Better, though, to be safe.

“You believe that?” His blush faded away, and she pretended the twinge in her belly could be anything but disappointment.

“She needs someone to believe her, for once,” she answered, indignantly, and Aemond grunted to cede the point. “Besides, I do not much want to watch it, anyway. I will deal with your mother’s rage in the morning.”

“Good luck with that,” he answered, almost snickering, and she rolled her eyes. “What happened with Clement Celtigar?”

(Why were you beaming like that when you came back, he wanted to know, why were you holding his hand, what did he say, what did he do, what is he that he made you so happy so quickly, tell me so I can be it, too.)

“Monty? Nothing. We only spoke for a moment.”

“Monty?” Aemond repeated, half-snorting in incredulity. “You’ve known the boy not even an hour, and you are calling him Monty?”

Older than you, she thought, but she restrained herself from rolling her eyes.

Visenya shrugged. “He said to call him Monty. He is...I do not know. Kind enough. I introduced him to Brigit.”

Aemond looked not unlike he smelled something rancid at the sound of Brigit’s name. The girls often joked about his unmitigated hatred of her, which he did not care for, and Visenya usually found it funny.

His unexplained hatred for her was a joke between the girls, one he did not particularly care for, and Visenya usually found it funny. The faces and the scowling and the way he refused to so much as look her in the eye, scurrying out of every room at the sight of her. She thought he most likely found her pretty and did not know what to do with it, odd little Aemond who might not have ever even spoken to a woman outside his sisters for all she knew.

Except for fucking Margaery Sunglass.

“I imagine he did not come looking to be introduced to the third daughter of an irrelevant Northern house.”

“She has to find a husband by the end of the year or her parents will wed her off to Lord Ryswell,” Visenya answered with a tight smile, rolling her shoulders and attempting to look as casual as possible about it. If the way Aemond’s mouth twisted indicated anything, she did not do a passable job. “I may as well do my part to help her avoid that, no?”

“Visenya the Kind,” he murmured. “Arranging marriages for her dearest companions.”

“I suppose we will see how it turns out,” she said. “But I am certainly not going to marry him.”

Aemond’s nose did a funny little twitch. “His house is Valyrian.”

Visenya rolled her eyes. “Their people do not even acknowledge them as their lords. I’ve heard Lord Bartimos’s tax collectors come back without their heads more often than they come back with any gold.”

“I imagine having a dragon at their beck and call would help that matter significantly.”

“You marry him, then,” she countered, shoving at his shoulder, and his lips twitched.

“You are a child.” His eye closed, head falling forward for a moment. Hand scrubbing over the lower half of his face as he sighed.

“We should go for a flight,” she murmured, even knowing he would not. “Tonight, when everything is over. Spend a few hours not having to think about…” She gestured vaguely in the air, trying to encompass the entirety of all the terrible things that had happened and would still happen into the motion, and Aemond hummed.

“Tomorrow.” Aemond never came to her rooms after dark anymore, did not even like her being in his, and usually did whatever he could to make sure they were never alone together once the sun went down. Something about virtue and the Maiden and reputation, all that silly garbage his mother poured into his head, as if to be alone with her after dark would be the same as selling her to a brothel.  “I need to go before Mother sees I am gone. She will be angry enough when word gets back to her about…”

About the pretty girl too afraid to dance with him, about Visenya’s teeth snapping, about Aemond not stopping her.

“Go,” she said, tilting her head. “I have things to do, anyway. If you speak to either of them again, tell them…”

She trailed away, but Aemond nodded like he knew what she meant, anyway.

*&*&*

That night, Visenya flew.

She pressed Vyper to take her far and farther from King’s Landing, as if getting him as far away as possible would do anything more than her lack of attendance would do. She did not go back until she could be certain that the procession and ceremony would be done, that the court would be returned and once again thrown into their reveling—until she knew for certain that the bedding ceremony had passed, too, for good measure.

She did not go looking for Margaery Sunglass’s room. She always took the same route through the tunnels, and she certainly made no note of where the hundreds of nobles would be housed while visiting the city. She knew nothing about where House Sunglass had been placed, and she certainly did not know they were one of the few overflow houses allowed to stay in the Holdfast.

Coincidence alone put Margaery’s rooms along the path she took back to her own, and coincidence alone caused Visenya to be paying enough attention to her surroundings that she recognized the raised voice filtering through the wall.

Or the act of bored gods, putting her in the path just as Margaery began to vent aloud.

It would be smarter to go on, but she stilled instead. Her head cocked, and she swiveled on her foot to peep through the tiny gap in the wall that gave the only clue that an entrance existed. Margaery sat at the vanity table, pretty face twisted up in a scowl as a woman who looked to be her mother drew the pins from her hair.

“She called me simple,” she seethed, and Visenya’s lips twitched. “She mocked my dress, and she hurt my hand—look, it is bruised!”

Whoops, she thought, unrepentant.

“You insulted her brother,” answered Lady Sunglass reproachfully, and she yanked a touch too hard on one of her pins. Margaery yelped and drew away, only for her mother to grip her by the shoulder and yank her back into place. “You are lucky she only spoke sharply and bruised your hand; we are here another week still, and she might make your life very difficult if she wishes it. You should have danced with the prince; I do not know what you were thinking. Your sisters would never have been—”

“My sisters married young, handsome men! You did not see him up close, Mother. The scar is…he is deformed. You cannot expect me—”

“He is a Targaryen prince,” hissed her mother, smacking her upside the back of the head none too gently. “The king’s son and, it seems, dear to Princess Visenya—who is well loved to the heir to the throne. You might have made a royal match if you were not such a little fool, worrying more about his face than that he is a prince.”

“He is a prince on one side, mayhaps,” muttered Margaery bitterly, “but the other half is of no worth to anyone.”

That rose Lady Sunglass into another fit of outrage, but Visenya heard nothing of her sharp words. She rocked back onto her heels, looking down at her feet with a blank expression, and her jaw clenched so tightly that she heard something crack.

*&*&*

That night, Aemond came to her rooms.

She would like to say that he came as she slept, but, in truth, sleep would not come to her. She gave up on any hope of it once the hour of the owl began to slip into the wolf. Too much feeling remaining in her limbs, her insides rolling unhappily, antsy and unhappy and grieving. She sat against her headboard instead, legs laid out in front of her, her eyes half-closed in thought as she ran her fingers in idle patterns over a throw pillow in her lap.

“I thought the gods would damn you if we were alone together at night,” she teased at the sound of the tunnel opening, but her smile disappeared when she turned to see the look on his face.

Eye patch abandoned back in his room, his hair sticking out every which way as if he rolled out of bed without bothering to run his fingers through it, wearing nightclothes unlaced at his chest. Barefoot, which alarmed her in a way not easily described—Aemond did not even forego shoes in his own rooms, much less when rushing through the filth of the tunnels. His face a pale green, a color so sickly it made her nauseous, and his chest heaving from how quickly he had rushed to her rooms.

The sight might have made her laugh if her first thought was anything but Helaena killed herself.

“What is it?” she demanded, swinging her legs over the side of the bed. Her hands fisted in the blankets, her breath struggling to pass through her suddenly swollen throat. “What has happened?”

“I can hear her weeping,” he answered, voice trembling-cracking-breaking like a child’s. “My rooms are too close to his; I can hear her weeping through the walls. I can hear her, Visenya; please, do not make me go back.”

Oh.

Oh, gods.

“Fuck, Aem,” she whispered, her own face going bloodless, and she raised an anxious hand to her face. Pushed at her cheek, pressing the flesh further between her teeth as she bit down at the already mangled scar tissue. “Of course, you may stay.”

(He should have gone to the library to sleep in an armchair. He should have demanded the servants show him to one of the hundreds of empty bedrooms in the Keep. He should have gone to his mother’s solar and slept on her settee like a child fleeing monsters beneath the bed.

But he could not bear it, being alone in some dark corner, and he could not stomach the resigned way he knew his mother would say that it could not helped. Certainly, he could not imagine remaining awake in his own bed, listening to Helaena’s quiet sobs through the walls, every inch of him trembling with the urge to go and to fix it when he could not fix anything. When he could not save her.

The others all went running to Visenya when they were children, crawling into her bed with their nightmares and tales of monsters. He never did the same, never once; surely, he could trade all those nights for this one. Surely, he could have her comfort as a man grown instead.

If only just the once.)

“I will sleep on the floor,” he said, shoulders relaxing and face smoothing out. He tugged at the tunnel door until the black maw of the entrance sealed itself shut in his wake, then edged further into her room. “I will be gone by morning, I swear.”

“I do not care,” she said with a wave of her hand, and she slid over to make more room in the bed. “Do not be ridiculous; you are not sleeping on the stone.”

“You have a rug,” he defended, rocking awkwardly back on his heels.

The look she sent him could have withered crops.

“I am not getting into your bed.”

“I promise not to take your maidenhead, valonqus.”

Aemond’s face bloomed with patched of blotchy red, a blush she knew significantly more than the pretty pink dusting from before. These tomato-colored spatters popped in little patches every time she found a chink in his armor with her teasing and poked at the exposed flesh until it bruised.

“I am not a maiden,” he hissed, and the raised-brow look of doubt she gave in response caused the blotches to flare even more brightly. He spun on his heel, palms flying to the wall to begin touching for the right one, and she groaned. “For Seven’s—I should not have come here.”

“Oh, do not be so—I will put pillows between us!”

“That is not the point! If the guard were to see me in your bed, even if he was to hear me—”

“They will think you are Aegon and let it be,” she said without thinking, then winced when Aemond spun back around to gape at her. “Do not overreact.”

A fool’s hope; of all the things he did well, Aemond overreacted best of all.

“Why,” he whispered furiously, “is Aegon in your rooms at night?”

More often every passing year, Aegon dove so deeply into his cups that he could hardly stand and then went staggering through the tunnels until he found his way to her rooms. He draped himself over her shoulders without a thought for the fact that he was a man grown now and significantly taller than her; he cried his woes and heartbreak into her hair as she stroked his spine and cooed nonsense in response. She cleaned him up and changed his clothes, gave him a bucket for the vomiting, and then she put him to bed and watched to be sure he did not choke in his sleep.

It makes me feel little again, he said when she complained. Like we are still children, and you can scare all my nightmares away.

“He comes here when he is drunk, every so often,” she answered defensively, averting her gaze guiltily when he sputtered. “I clean him up and put him to bed. Sometimes he passes out, and I have to call the guards to lift him off the floor. It is nothing. They think I call each time he comes to me, and they are too afraid Father will punish them to say anything about it.”

“That is not your duty.” If she were less exhausted and more willing for a fight, she would point out that most of the things his mother demanded of him when it came to their brother were certainly not his duty, but he seemed resigned enough to it when it came to himself. “It is inappropriate for him to come to you in the night, and it is just as ghastly that you allow it. The mess he makes of himself is not your responsibility.”

“He is my brother,” she said, softly. “He will always be my duty.”

“If someone found him in your bed, sister…”

He only ever called her sister when he wanted her to soften and listen to him without argument, when he wanted to pluck at her heartstrings. She did not know why he insisted on trying it. She could not think of a time when it worked.

“I would be ruined,” she agreed with cheer, waving her hand flippantly. “And what of it? Any number of men would wed me anyway. Sons who ride dragons are worth more than a maiden for a wife; I will be an efficient broodmare whether people think I am Aegon’s whore or not.”

“I wish you would not speak that way,” he muttered, eye dropping away from her. His nostrils flared when he huffed a tired breath, scrubbing one hand fiercely over his face. “As if you are breeding stock.”

“And I wish I was not fated to be breeding stock,” she drawled, “but wishes very rarely come true.”

Aemond flinched a little, clenching his jaw and shutting his eye as if asking a higher being for strength, then stalked to the bed and yanked her pillow from behind her back. She yelped, lunged to reclaim it, but he darted backwards too quickly.

He looked at her witheringly when a blade slipped from the pillowcase, but she did not think he would blame her if he knew.

When she relented to training with Daemon and the others on Dragonstone, she did not know exactly how mad the Rogue Prince was when it came to the blade. Baelon made comments, occasionally, and Daemon’s sons were often bruised and battered—but none of that prepared for her Daemon Targaryen to pounce from dark corners to drag her to the ground by her hair as an exercise in vigilance. It did not cross her mind that he might spend three hours skipping about her rooms while explaining how every day objects could be used to kill a man or that he would demonstrate by cackling, smashing a mirror, and holding a shard of glass to her throat. A fully grown man dropping from hidden nooks in the ceiling or landings of staircases like some kind of demented, rabid bat swooping from above did not occur to her as something to be concerned about.

She did not believe any terror in the world could match the horror of waking up with Daemon Targaryen leering over her, Dark Sister’s point held over her sternum as he crooned nonsensically about foolish little nieces and silly little hatchlings and I could have cut you into enough pieces to give all your brothers and sisters a keepsake, if I wanted.

On the same hand, though, she doubted she would ever again know the satisfaction that came from seeing the look on his face three nights later when she woke just as he approached her bed and buried a knife so deep into his fucking thigh that she heard it scrape bone.

Rhaenyra banned him from the children’s rooms at night after that, but the lesson did not leave them. Lucerys and Rhaena even took to setting traps at the entrances of their rooms in case Daemon intended for the rule to lull them into a false sense of security.

Aemond stalked to the rug laid crookedly out in front of her unlit hearth, dropped the pillow unceremoniously onto the ground, and laid stiffly down. She covered her eyes and counted slowly to ten, then set her teeth into the scar on her palm just hard enough to make the muscle ache.

She made it ten minutes, stewing furiously, before she snapped, “get in the bed if you are staying, Aemond.”

“I will not.”

“You will wake with an ache in your neck.”

“There is no chance in all the hells,” he answered, “that I am going to find sleep tonight anyway.”

Angry. Grieving. Too many things inside him to make his mind settle, just like her. She would hazard that at least a small part of him now devoted itself to seething over her perceived foolishness.

You hold grudges closer to your heart than mothers hold their babes, he told her once, and yet you grant all the grace in the world to the one fool who has never once deserved it.

The truth of it, as she thought Aemond knew even if he never said it aloud, is that they all granted Aegon more grace than they would another any other man alive. How could they not? Cruel and foolish as he was, she did not think it possible to love him with any less than the whole of the heart.

She made it a further eight minutes before she said, “for the gods’ sake, I am not going to sleep either. You may as well come sit with me if you are not going to go back to bed.”

“It is improper.”

“Your presence here is incriminating in and of itself, mittītsos! The guards will not make any special distinction upon finding you on the floor!” He scowled up at her, and she huffed back. “Now get in the damned bed.”

Aemond muttered nastily beneath his breath from the moment he sat up to the moment he perched himself awkwardly on the very edge of her mattress. He sat so straight that she suspected his spine could be used as a ruler, his hands white-knuckling his knees as he stared straight ahead at the wall, and the sight of him looking so painfully uncomfortable nearly sent her into a fit of exhausted giggling.

“Sit against the headboard.”

“I am content with where I am.”

“Aemond,” she said, exasperated, and she reached out to grab onto his arm. It tensed the moment he felt her palm lay across it, the muscle firm and unyielding beneath her grip; she forgot, sometimes, how strong he was despite his leanness. She tugged at it. He did not budge. “I am serious.”

“As am—”

“Please.” He stiffened even more, if it was possible, and went so still that she thought of the statues in the sept. He cut her a suspicious look through a narrowed eye, swallowed hard. “You are making me antsy. Come here, valonqus.”

Aemond’s jaw worked furiously, hands flexing hard enough that the veins bulged and the tendons rolled, but then he swung his legs up onto the mattress and slid back against the headboard in one swift movement. He crossed his arms, though, hunkered into himself so their elbows did not even brush.

(Please, she said, sat against her headboard with her lower lip pulled between her teeth and her brow furrowed in that way that made him want to reach out and rub it smooth with the pad of his thumb. Loose silver hair and big eyes, her lip swollen when it popped back out from her mouth, looking so achingly pretty. Looking so strange, the way she always did in moonlight, with the night’s glow casting shadows on her face and seemingly setting her pale skin glowing from the inside out. Like a dream of mist and smoke. Come here, valonqus.

He had dreams that started this way, sometimes. Visenya in her rooms, moonlit and soft. Visenya saying please, Visenya bidding him to bed. She never called him little brother in those dreams, though—she called him Aemond, called him beloved, called him dearest, called him love.

Sometimes, she smiled that lazy, hungry smile, and she called him valzȳrys; sometimes, most rarely, she looked up at him with lidded eyes and called him Your Grace. Those were the best of—the worst of the dreams because he woke from them wanting so badly that he thought he would die from it, wanting so badly he hurt, wanting so badly that not even the iron of his will and his muttered prayers could keep his hands above his blankets.

He had dreams that started this way, and, knowing that, to allow even the smallest pieces of their skin to brush seemed folly. He struggled enough already with the liberality of her touches and her embraces and her cheek kisses, with her peculiar habit of tangling her fingers into the hair of those nearest to her, with the way her nose wrinkled when she laughed, with the way her perfume lingered in his rooms when she left them.

Aemond ignored it, of course, of course, he ignored it, but each day left the mask a little thinner. Harder and harder to ignore the intricate knots his stomach tied itself into before it dropped itself to his feet, to pretend the hollow-aching-needing feeling in his chest could be anything but the puppyish, boyish longing he knew it to be, to not tilt himself into her in such a way that even she in her blindness would not be able to misconstrue the way he looked at her.)

Aemond relaxed slowly as they sat in silence, until eventually their shoulders brushed and he did not bother jerking away. The anger simmering on the surface of his skin dissipated, for the most part, and she loosed a low breath of relief. Aemond’s anger had a presence, a third person with grabbing hands and gleaming teeth that meant to eat the world whole, and she never liked the feeling of it settling on her skin.

“What did she say? Ironsmith.”

Visenya considered. They did not get much of a chance to speak after the procession left, but she seemed hopeful in a hesitant way. He read her favorite book, and he seemed kind. Neither of them had known him long enough to know any more of him, yet. “She likes him, I think.”

“Monty,” he said in the tone someone else would use to say dog shit, lips curling around it and dripping with disdain. “I cannot imagine his disappointment. From wooing a Targaryen princess to being shunted off on an Ironsmith…”

She rolled her eyes. “How did it go in the sept?”

Quiet for a long moment. “It could have been worse.”

The implication being that it could have been much, much better, but she feared what his answer would be if she asked. “And what did Her Grace say of my absence?”

“Daeron told her you were feverish and vomiting in your rooms,” Aemond answered, and the fondness in his voice surprised her. “Very convincing, too, the devil. He will be a clever little liar, soon enough; you and Aegon will be novices in comparison.”

“Good boy,” Visenya said, pleased. “I knew I liked him.”

Aemond hummed, head falling back against the headboard with a quiet thunk. She turned her head to look at him more fully, her eyes running curiously from his half-closed eye to the jut of his throat when he swallowed.

You cannot save her from this, whispered the dragon in the room with them, hissing and spitting and mourning in its own way. You never could have saved her.

Aemond heard it, too; she knew because, in a half-hearted attempt to silence it, he murmured, “tell me about Baelon.”

“He would sing to himself when he washed his hair.” She grinned, a too soft smile than should be gracing her face in this new life. “Nonsense songs. They would get stuck in my head for days, and, right when I got them out, I would catch him singing another.”

“Tell me about you.”

“I kept Vyper’s egg after it turned to stone. I could never make myself get rid of it, could not…even knowing it would never hatch, I could not let it go.”

“I keep mine in a chest beneath my bed,” Aemond murmured, absently, and she knocked their shoulders gently together. “It is purple, you know. Purple and silver. It would have been…a gorgeous thing, I think.”

I know, she thought. I picked the eggs for you both.

“I am sure it would have been.”

“Tell me about a dragon.”

“When Aegon the Younger’s egg hatches, he will call it Stormcloud. Deep gray, needle teeth. Quick as lightning. The first time he tries for a flight, he’s going to get thrown on his ass.”

“Tell me what you dreamt of last night.”

A sunny summer afternoon when Baelon laid her on the table in his council room and buried his head between her legs, but no life existed in which she offered that information to her little brother.

“Nothing you want to hear about,” she said instead. “You tell me something for once. Something I do not know already.”

(She only ever avoided the question when she had dreamt of her sons or husband, he knew. She never told him so, but they were the only things she never spoke about when he asked her of that other life. Her sons for the pain of it, her husband because…he did not really know, in truth. She did not speak about her marriage, about whether she found happiness with the man or only cold distance. How long they were wed, what his name had been, if she loved him or loathed him, outlived him or watched him die. He thought of asking, sometimes, but he feared he would go looking for him if she answered—this man who never touched her in this life but owned her in another. He worried he would not be able to stop himself from choking the light from the bastard’s eyes.

So, he did not ask.)

“Something you do not know?” he said, half-heartedly. “And here I thought you knew everything.” When she answered only with a baleful, expectant look, he murmured, “Mother had me lock Aegon in his rooms last night; she worried he would not return if he made it out of the Keep.”

She could picture him sat unsleeping at their brother’s bedside, unblinking. Waiting. Fiddling with his fingers, working the muscles in his jaw.

“Say what you mean.”

Aemond did not have to ask her what she meant, which probably said more about them both than either of them would have liked. He looked down into his lap, his eye fixed on his fingers thrumming against his thighs. “A part of me wishes that he would have disappeared.”

The words came out hesitant, as if he expected her to turn on him with teeth and nails, but his face held no uncertainties. Nothing unsure. Visenya hummed and tilted her head back to gaze up at her ceiling.

Otto and Alicent’s attention would shift to Aemond instead if Aegon fled. More trouble, that. Any lord would find it easier to throw their lot behind Aemond, cunning and competent and a gifted swordman, than they would to back a drunken, whoring, sulking boy. Even Aemond’s quick temper and black moods would not seem so terrible compared to Aegon’s unreliable nature and fickle cruelty.

But they would have wed Helaena and Aemond.

Helaena with a husband who adored her, though Aemond never gave Visenya any inclination that he desired her. A husband who accepted her eccentricities and would never touch her without permission. A husband who would never resent her. A husband who would give her butterflies and beetles, who would sit quietly as she spoke of her dreams, who would love her in the same unwaveringly loyal way that Aemond loved her now.

Aegon would be happy, too, wouldn’t he? Filthy and wreaking havoc wherever he ended up, no doubt, but happier that way than as a prince. Happy in his mayhem and debauchery, roaming wild, leaving wine and gold and women in his wake. Free of his mother, of responsibilities, of pressure and whispers.

“A part of me wishes the same,” she admitted in a hushed voice, and Aemond’s face went through the funny little twitch it always did when she agreed with him unexpectedly. “For Hel’s sake, at least. She would be happier married to you.”

His mmm noise sounded strange, and she did not recognize the funny shape that took to his mouth. Strange; she thought she knew all of Aemond’s faces now. What does that one mean, baby brother? Visenya wondered, ignoring the itch to trace her fingers over the contortion of his lips until she memorized the shape of it, so she would know it easy as breathing if ever she saw it again. What are you thinking in your foolish head?

He would not answer even if she asked, so she dropped her head to his shoulder and pretended not to have seen it at all.

“I think about it,” she said, and she could not explain that, either. Why it suddenly seemed vital that he know; why she felt as if she would never have another chance to tell him. The words bubbled in her throat, boiling hot and hissing, pressing at the back of her tongue with enough force to gag her and struggling to flit out from the spaces between her teeth. “Leaving. Not coming back.”

How strange to speak it aloud. She hardly ever admitted to herself that her daydreams of running away were anything but a wistful desire to see her ancestors’ homeland, that they were a half-formed wish for a life with no brothers and no sisters and no kingdoms at all. A life with her and Vyper, skies stretched out endless in front of them, their shoulders empty of anyone’s weight.

Freedom to do as she wished and make choices she would regret. A girl before a princess, a woman before a wife, a person before a chess piece. Belonging to no one and having no one belong to her. Nothing alive with the power to force her back to the ground.

She never had it before. Freedom. Not really.

“I think about it,” Aemond murmured, and she twisted her head to look up at him. He did not look back, too busy gazing at his hands. “Sometimes.”

If Aemond truly thought of leaving, he did not do it for want of freedom or peace. If Aemond thought of leaving, he thought himself the Conqueror, thought himself a bringer of fire and blood. A conquering god on Vhagar’s back, a throne taken for his own far away, no brothers or sisters or mothers or fathers to tell him to sit back and stand down and know his place as a fourth-born child and a secondborn son.

The surge of affection took her by surprise.

Silly, foolish, lovely, perfect Aemond who still did not know that all a crown could ever be weight. Who still could not see the throne for a trap and power for a folly, that kings never sat easily in their gilded chairs, that the smugness of being above all the rest so quickly turned to exhaustion in the face of what it meant to look down on all those below and know they were yours. Your responsibility, your burden, your duty.

(Visenya never did know all that she thought she knew; she never did see all that she thought she saw.

If she did, she would know that Aemond only ever thought of leaving to conquer when he beat her at a spar. When he had her pinned underneath him or sprawled at his feet, her eyes spitting purple flames as she bared her teeth up at him in a joyless approximation of a smile—that smile, all threat, like she wanted to tear his spine out through the back of his throat; that smile, the one that made his head go fuzzy and his mouth go dry with a thirst he knew no water or wine would ever be able to sate—and, for a moment, she looked at him like she saw him as Aemond. Not little brother, baby brother. Not little fool, silly boy. Not a child wet behind the ears but a dragon and an equal.

That smile like she hated him and wanted to eat him alive, and he would let her, he would, he would tip his head back and break his ribs apart and let her feast if only she swore to never let it leave her face. It never lasted long before slipping back into that softened affection, well-meaning and unintentional belittlement that made him chafe, that made him rabid, that made him want to grab her by the hair and shake her until she saw him for a man grown and not a boy of ten.

He did not because even if he did, even if he carved the reminder into her skin with a blade, it would not matter. When she looked at him, Visenya still saw her baby brother begging her for a promise, weeping in her lap with his face ripped open; she still saw a little fool running headlong into a dragon’s mouth with no one behind him to notice or care except the sister who could hardly bear to look him in the eye. It did not matter what he did, what he said, how long it had been.

But, when she looked up at him like that, so furious over losing, so spitting mad in her loss that she forgot to soften herself for him, he thought he knew how to fix it. How to make her see a man and a dragon and a prince and someone just the same as her. She would see him as he was, see him in truth, if he took hold of the world and bent it to his will and then offered it to her on a platter made of gold.

Aegon the Conqueror took two sisters to wife and six kingdoms to rule, but Aemond thought him a fool. Six kingdoms amounted to nothing when compared to the size of the world, and, for all the time he spent longing for Visenya, he never once wished for anything like a Rhaenys.)

“We could,” she whispered instead of pressing him into telling her more. She did not particularly want to hear about his bloody daydreams of razing country sides and subjugating the masses. “We could take Helaena and Aegon, and we could leave tonight. Somewhere else. Anywhere else.”

“What of Rhaenyra and her b—boys?”

With the twins gone, no threat would remain to her sister. The rooks knocked from the corners of the board without a drop of bloodshed. Daeron could not wage war on his own, young as he still was, and even his own brothers and sisters forgot him more often than they did not; loved as he might be in Oldtown, he hadn’t the strength to declare himself a king. With Nyra crowned, her boys would be safe as any could ever hope to be.

Her family would be safe, and she would never need to make her choice.

“No.”

The pleased sound Aemond made tugged a smile to her lips, though she rolled her eyes at his obvious smugness.

“And where will we go?”

“Wherever you wish.”

He snorted, and she did not know which of them it surprised more when he dropped his cheek to press against the top of her head. “It is my choice then?”

“Do not pretend,” she said softly, “that you would come with me if I did not let you have your pick of it.”

He hummed, ceding the point, and then sighed out, “Valyria then.”

Visenya made a noise. A longing thing, a girl displaced, someone who remembered home but no longer knew how to get there. Her heart called for Valyria, beat for it; sometimes, if her mind drifted as they flew, she caught Vyper banking as if to take her there. She wanted it even when she did not think she had enough left inside her to want anything at all.

Dragons did not belong in Westeros, winged or wingless, and they all felt it even when they pretended that they did not. They claimed it, named it theirs, but it would never be, not really, not so long as their hearts pulsed to a song that this land could not sing.

“Then we will go to Valyria.”

“They could not brave it.”

The darkness, the unknown, the monsters that came home in little Aerea’s skin. Valyria remained a mystery to them now, overrun with dark creatures and dark magics, a battle that her ancestors did not dare to fight, a war that would need to be waved if they ever wished to return. Aegon, certainly, had no stomach for such a thing, though she suspected Helaena might surprise the all if given half a chance.

It pleased her in a strange way, the quiet implication that they could brave it. That would find their footing, would fit their way easily into the land that spat them out and did not yet seem to want them back again. That they were the same in this as they were the same in so much else.

“We would brave it for them,” she said, then raised a hand to draw a lazy horizon in the air. Half-closed her eyes as if it would help her see the volcanoes. “Besides, we are only dreaming, Aem. We are allowed to pretend.”

(She did not notice the way his eye flicked towards her, the way his face crumbled for a moment in a sweet sort of pain, the way his throat worked when he swallowed.)

“It is a pretty dream,” he relented, and she could hear the wistfulness even if she did not turn to see it on his face. He raised a hand and added to her invisible picture, a sharp swipe of his fingers for two dragons sweeping low and then a flurry of imagined stars in their pretend sky.

“Yes,” she said in a sign. “Will you swear not to wake me from it?”

She would never have it, her imagined life of freedom—neither the one she dreamed alone or with Helaena and the boys beside her. For a thousand reasons. For one reason, really, because what drove her except her blood? What kept her here except her family? She could not go without knowing they were safe, and they would never be safe.

Why not? prodded Daemon’s voice in her head, cold fingers wrapped around her spine. Why not?

Because Aegon would leave, because Helaena would leave if the boys left with them, but Aemond would not. Aemond would not leave his mother or the distant chance of taking the throne; he would not abandon the weight Alicent pressed down on his shoulders or give up the justice he thought the Greens sought. He would not let go of the blackened rage that took hold of him at the mention of Rhaenyra and her boys. He might be pleased enough to dream of it, to whisper it with her, but he would not come with her even if she dropped to her knees and begged it of him.

Aemond would be a threat to Rhaenyra so long as his ears stayed clogged with the honeyed glass his mother and grandfather spilled, and so Visenya could not go. Visenya would wed for her sister and go to the childbed for her sister and—she feared more and more with each passing year—go to war for her sister. She would spend the rest of her life looking past the horizon and wondering what she might have done, who she might have been, if her father satisfied himself with two daughters and did not go grasping for sons.

I want to be a god, she said so long ago, a little girl oblivious to all that would come. The ache of wanting it still filled her to bursting, but she knew better now. Godhood belonged to queens, not their wayward little sisters; godhood would belong to Rhaenyra, and she would slit her own throat at the foot of her sister’s altar just as the Valyrian maidens used to do in Balerion’s name.

It would stay a dream until the longing turned it to a nightmare, and she could do nothing but watch it slip further from her hands—but, for now, it remained a dream. A good dream. A soft dream. She would like to stay in it, at least for a while.

“Swear you will not wake me,” she said, voice trembling a little despite her attempts to steady it. She tucked her head more firmly against his shoulder, stared straight ahead. “Let us keep dreaming, Aemond. We do not need to wake from it yet.”

(I would give almost anything, he thought, turning his head just enough that his nose buried into her hair; no matter how many perfumes and oils she used in her hair, she always smelled a little like smoke, a little like flames, a little like ashes, if it meant we never needed leave it.)

“Not until I must,” he agreed finally, and he snorted a huffing sort of laugh when she reached without looking to hook their little fingers together. If she held on longer than she needed, if she kept the rest of her fingers carefully tucked against her palm so he would not see the residual blood beneath her nails, that was no one’s business but her own. “We will live in it until we cannot anymore.”

Chapter Text

As a child, she swore never to wed. Never to bear children. Not in a life without Baelon to cut open her lip, Baelon to cloak her, Baelon to press her into the bed on her wedding light. Not in a life where her sons would not be her clever boys with their crooked smiles, where her daughters would never be the little dragon girl she lost before she ever had her.

Never, never, she always sang, silly little girl with a grown woman’s memories. Thinking she knew anything at all. Thinking that her heart belonging to a boy who died before he grew to be a man would change anything. Thinking she had a choice.

She stood a woman grown again now, little girl packed away for a second time, and she knew better than to think she would ever escape that fate. The shackles that fit around every woman’s wrists bore her name before her birth, and, in this life, they would not be the pretty golden bracelets Baelon gave her. Iron, instead, cold and too tight.

Viserys’s half-choice offered the best she ever could have hoped for: this one or that one instead of yes or no. It did not matter if she wished to wed so long as the man who claimed her fattened her up with his sons in the end.

She gave even that half-choice to Rhaenyra, though, and she mourned for it even if she did not regret it.

How spoiled that other life made her. A husband who loved her past the point of a obsession, who never strayed even when the opportunities flung themselves down at his feet, who loved her and wanted her and never hurt her, who thought her precious and perfect no matter what fool thing she did or cruel thing she said, who listened when she spoke and never forgot what no meant no matter how rarely she said it. That life gave her no choices, either, really, but what had it ever mattered to her? She would have chosen Baelon if anyone ever asked—a hundred times, a thousand, over and over again.

But no one ever asked, she thought, wincing when a particularly savage bite at the inside of her cheek drew a spurt of blood. Why would they? My answer never mattered then either.

That Visenya, Other Visenya, spoiled and thoughtless and content with being forgotten, would recoil from the thought, but that did not take the truth from it.

“Why have you crossed out Cregan Stark?” Helaena asked, only interested in an idle sense. Her eyes drifted to Visenya’s paper only for a moment before flicking back to her embroidery again, fingers plucking carefully over the half-finished image of a butterfly—blue, blue, blue.

“Vyper hates the cold,” she said, one truth to hide another.

She knew Cregan Stark better than she knew anyone outside her family, perhaps. He did not know her in this life, but she called him friend, once. She did not doubt she would call him such again.

She met him on their fifteenth nameday, dark eyes and sharp smile looking up at her beneath long lashes, speaking to her brother but only looking at her—Baelon lasted only moments before his jealous hand clutched at hers, his voice gone dark and muttered as he pulled her away. She met him for a second time at Baelon’s coronation, his smile blunted only a little, older in his bones if hardly changed in the face, and he bowed down deep and called her Your Grace in that rumbling Northern brogue. She met him a third time at her son’s wedding, and he asked her for a dance: just the one, not more and not less, with a curl to his mouth like he could feel her husband seething and knew exactly how hard he could pull a dragon’s tail before his hands came away burnt.

When Rhaenys died, she left stern orders to send for Cregan, but it took several years before the wolf lord could be cajoled into leaving the North in his son’s capable hands and taking her place. He brought one of his daughters with him, his youngest and dearest, all sharp angles and bared teeth and Blackwood eyes; all but feral, Cregan called her grimly with fondness in his eyes, and he hoped the city might civilize her where the snow and ice of his lands failed.

Within three days of arrival, little Raya Stark put her fist into the face of Visenya’s youngest son. He fell, just that quickly, fell so hard that the ground broke apart beneath his feet; as bad as his father, as bad as his brothers, from the moment she looked at him with his bleeding nose and blackened eyes and laughed in his face.

Visenya knew Cregan because he called her friend, once. He called Baelon friend. They trusted him, called him their companion, and never once did she doubt his loyalty to his king and the realm. She knew Cregan Stark, and she knew wedding him would be worthless.

He would follow Rhaenyra. He might huff and puff, certainly; he might quibble and snarl and squirm about trying to get something in return, but, in the end, offered the world or nothing at all, he would keep to his oaths and follow his queen wherever she led him.

Why waste her hand on a man who would swear regardless?

Because he would be kind to you, muttered a voice in her head. Because he is strong, but he is gentle. Because he is clever, and he is brave. Because he is a wolf in the north, and he has no fear of the dragons roaming the south. Because he is Cregan, and you could be happy as his wife.

Selfish, that little voice that sounded so much like her own. Her happiness no longer mattered, if it ever did at all.

“It is not cold in Dorne, but you have crossed out Qyle Martell.”

“A babe in swaddling clothes,” Visenya cried, draping herself over Helaena’s side with a wide-eyed, faux-horror that made her sister snort. An exaggeration but not by much; the boy could not have reached more than five years of age.

Were Aliandra Martell the head of Dorne, Visenya would leap with clawed hands and an opened mouth at the chance. Brash, impulsive, the sort of girl far more interested in the fun of the journey than what tragedy might befall her at the end of it—Aliandra could be swayed into most anything if one made grand promises or made it sound like a game. To secure Dorne for Rhaenyra would be monumental, might even be enough, but Qoren Martell held years of life in him yet.

Not rash like his daughter. Not so impulsive, not nearly so bold. Clever, Cautious. A shrewd man with too solid a head on his shoulders to throw the last independent country on the continent into the business of House Targaryen, especially as they devoured their own tail. He would laugh in their faces if they tried to secure a betrothal to him or his son, and he would slit his own throat before he took a dragon princess into the heart of Dorne when war seemed like to break out the moment Viserys sighed his death rattle.

“More years until you need bed him,” Helaena said, rolling her shoulder to situate Visenya in such a way that she would not interfere with her work, simultaneously sly and innocent.

“Such check, Helaena!” Visenya said, face splitting with her smile. “Wherever did you learn that?”

“My sister is awfully improper,” Helaena answered primly, and Visenya planted a laughing kiss to her knuckles.

“Do not be rude, Helaena!” Daeron cried from somewhere behind them. Visenya popped up onto her elbows and peered over the back of the couch, paling at the sight of him turning an unornamented pine box over in his hands.

“Daring, do not open that,” she said, twisting to kneel and then leaning over the back of the couch towards him. Helaena cast a look over her shoulder, faintly bemused.

“It is alright; he only filled it with candies this year. I solved it ages ago.”

“Have you solved mine?”

Helaena shot her a black look that looked strangely fitting on her soft, pretty face. “No.”

Every year before Helaena’s nameday, Visenya and the twins went into the city—Visenya and Aegon bouncing in front, Aemond following behind with his eye fixed on them as if he expected them to blip out of existence the moment he blinked. They wandered aimlessly for most of the afternoon, investigating markets and various little shops; Aemond confiscated both Aegon and Visenya’s coinpurses within the first hour; something shiny enticed Aegon down a dark alleyway; something shinier drew Visenya down the street. In general, they had a pleasant enough time on these excursions, and, at the end of each afternoon, they always visited the same shop.

(Aegon found it, years ago, and came home with a crooked smile—before every adventure into the city returned him drunk and slurring, before he lost himself so completely to the fear and the pressure. I’ve an idea for Lae’s nameday, he said, corralling Aemond and Visenya both into a nook beneath the stairs, can you two twats manage to keep it a secret?)

Visenya did not entirely understand how it managed to stay in business, as she never once saw another customer, but it remained ever faithfully. The clerk—always a thin man with a thick moustache and not a single hair on his head—pretended not to know who they were, though none of them wore hoods, and his wife—a plump woman with a baby perpetually attached to her hip and the toddlers from the years before tangled up in her skirts—greeted them with frantic politeness as if to make up for her husband’s poor humor. Visenya and the boys greeted them in turn, even Aegon polite as could be, and then dumped their spoils from the day all over the counter.

Within a fortnight, three puzzle boxes would be delivered to the Keep.

Aegon ordered his to be plain and inconspicuous, filled either with the hard candies Helaena liked to suck on as she embroidered or some combination of oddities that nearly always scandalized his mother—though, to Visenya’s knowledge, Alicent never took even the most inappropriate of the objects away.

Aemond’s boxes always came with delicate silver keys to unlock them if they proved too difficult—though Helaena told him each year that she would let the prize inside rot away to dust before she ever cheated—and had a butterfly carved into the wood somewhere in its depths; the prize itself varied year by year, sometimes jewelry or the pretty shells Helaena liked to collect or bits of strange looking rock.

Visenya filled her boxes with moths pressed between tiny, delicate panes of glass or chunks of amber holding trapped bugs, silken ribbons wrapped around dried flowers and jeweled combs in the shape of moths or centipedes, scraps of poems and pretty pebbles. One year, being as she ordered the box itself to be as simple as could be, she gave the puzzle maker a single, snow-white mouse to use as Helaena’s prize.

Helaena liked puzzles, likes riddles she could untwist because they came from outside her own head; she found them as soothing as Visenya found them frustrating, and she solved them with the same focus that Aemond turned on the sword and Aegon to whoring.

Make it difficult enough that you could not solve it, Visenya said this year, and the clerk cocked an eyebrow but did not challenge her. He never did. She appreciated that.

“What is it?” Daeron asked.

He stuck his fingers into the little notches on the sides, trying to entice the pieces into sliding even though they did not budge a bit no matter how he strained and scratched. It did not seem to occur to him that he could be pushing them in the wrong direction.

“It is a puzzle box,” Helaena said.

“You can solve it, valonqus; I believe in you,” Visenya said somberly, twisting back around onto the couch and falling again against Helaena’s side; her sister looked down at her only long enough for their gazes to lock, and then they both hunched into each other in an attempt to stifle their giggles.

Helaena laughed little and less since the wedding; the sound of it near shocked her into silence.

She spent most of her evenings in Helaena’s solar now, partially from a need to check on her and partially because married women had so much more space; the two of them curled together on the same settee even when all the other couches sat empty, and she embroidered as Visenya read. They spoke of little bits of nothing, doling out gossip and lightly spoken quips, and she made a nuisance of herself as Helaena packed away the plush animals she made for the orphaned children in the city. Sometimes, Daeron came along with her, buzzing pleasantly about in his sisters’ space like a pollen-drunk honeybee, poking his nose into things and loudly offering his unsolicited opinion whenever they paused to take a breath.

Helaena claimed she did not much mind being wed. Aegon had hardly stepped foot in the Keep in the fortnight since the wedding, much less gone sniffing into her rooms—he burrowed into Flea Bottom as if he never meant to leave it, whoring drunkenly with no regard for his new wife or the steadily heating tempers of his mother, brother, and elder sister. He has not been cruel to me, Helaena said when asked, waving a dismissive hand, and that is more already than any of us expected of him, is it not?

But her laugh came more rarely now. Her smile did not shine so brightly. Something inside her dimmed, shaded where it always shone uninhibited, white dove with feathers turned gray from filthy water, and Visenya did not know how to fix it. She did not know if she could.

“Why have you made a list anyway?” Helaena prompted, and Visenya returned her attention to the paper with a hmph of displeasure.

“I did not. Rhaenyra wishes me to pick a handful of them, and she intends to choose the best of the lot.”

“Is she not meant to choose for you?”

“That,” muttered Visenya, “was my understanding, yes.”

She did not know what she expected when she wrote to tell Nyra that she passed Monty off to Brigit like a gaudy necklace gifted by a half-blind, elderly aunt. A bit of chiding, perhaps, and then another letters with a name and a date a few weeks later. Visenya belonged to Rhaenyra now, it would be Rhaenyra’s choice, so she did not quite grasp why her sister did not simply choose one and let it be done.

But she suspected Nyra might decide more for Visenya’s sake than her own, so perhaps it would be for the best if she narrowed the list down beforehand.

“Read it to us, then,” Helaena said briskly, setting her embroidery neatly aside and twisting to face Visenya completely. She drew her knees up under her skirts like a little girl, the tips of her bare toes peeking out from her dress, her arms wrapping around her bent legs as she looked at Visenya with playfully glimmering eyes. “Daring and I shall help.”

“Help?” repeated Daeron, materializing immediately in front of them. The puzzle box hung loose and forgotten in his hand, the offer of being included too sweet a temptation, and the way his face brightened when she stuck her tongue out at him could have blinded her. “How are we to help?”

“By making judgmental faces or noises of approval,” Helaena said knowledgably, her smile twitching at the withering look Visenya sent her way. “Go on, Enya. Read it to us.”

Visenya suspected that would be a bad idea.

But Helaena so rarely smiled anymore.

“Benjicot Blackwood,” she sighed.

Helaena’s mouth twisted as if she bit into something sour; after a covert flick of his eyes to gauge Helaena’s response, Daeron’s did the same.

“He’s naught but a boy! You said you’ve no wish for a husband in swaddling clothes.”

“More time until I need bed him,” she shot back, but she chewed on the inside of her cheek. The Blackwoods would follow Rhaenyra anyway; the matter stood much the same as Cregan Stark, save the Blackwoods tempted her more. The Riverlands stood far closer to home than the North, and a moldable, malleable boy who would one day be lord of a greatly respected house would not make the worst of husbands.

“I sparred with him,” Daeron added brightly, clearly pleased to have something of worth to add to the discussion. “Aemond says he will be good someday, but he is still too impulsive. I am to aim for his ankles whenever possible.”

“I taught him that trick,” Visenya muttered.

“Next name,” Helaena demanded imperiously, going so far as to snap her fingers. “If you wish for a husband from the Riverlands, put Kermit Tully out of his misery.”

“But I have such fun watching him watch me,” answered Visenya with a waggle of her eyebrows, and she swept into a fake swoon that sent her sprawling across Helaena’s lap. One of her elbows smacked into Daeron’s head, and he batted it away with a squeal of pain; Helaena brushed her hair from her face, laughing, then flicked her cheek. “Besides, I have circled his name already. Rhaenyra will choose him, or she will not.”

Grover Tully, one foot in the grave, would be dead within the next two years—she would wager, anyway. She cared so little for House Tully in that other life that their lords and heirs hardly registered to her; she could not remember for the life of her when Grover died. Elmo Tully would take his place, though, and he seemed likely to follow Rhaenyra—more so if Visenya married his son.

Cheeky Kermit Tully, who already intended to follow her sister to war and believed whole-heartedly that his pinched-face father would decide the same, with his deep red curls and bright green eyes and a mouth whores would envy.

“I do not like Kermit Tully,” said Daeron in a voice that brokered no argument. He crossed his arms petulantly when Visenya raised a brow at him, his jaw jutting fierce.

“Daring,” Helaena said. “You have never spoken to Kermit Tully.”

“Well,” he started, then stopped and heaved a great sigh. Visenya already knew what he meant to say before he said it, her face opening in delight that she tried to mask behind a politely curious, innocent expression. The resigned way he looked at her told her she failed. “Well, I have not, but Aemond says—”

“Well, if Aemond says!” Visenya sang back immediately, voice gone high in gentle mocking, and Daeron’s face flushed bright red. Helaena reached out to pat his head in gentle comfort, her other hand pressed to her mouth as if it did anything to hide the shine in her eyes. “If Aemond says the sky is green, it must be so! If Aemond says men can breathe beneath the water, they must be able! If Aemond says that the sun sets in the morning and rises at night, that simply must be the gods’ honest truth!”

If Aemond told Daeron to jump from the roof of the Holdfast, she strongly suspected he would not even bother asking questions before taking a swan dive off the edge. She would find it ridiculous if it did not strike her as so strangely sweet: the way he scuttled about in Aemond’s shadow as if the lack of light felt better to him than any sunlight, the way Aemond watched him with such bafflement but never sent him away. Aemond did not know how to behave around brothers who loved him openly, and Daeron knew nothing of being around his brothers much at all; it made a strange dynamic, but Visenya did not resent their newfound closeness.

She did, however, delight in being a dick about it.

“Go on; read the next name!” Helaena rushed to say as Daeron’s face went mulish.

Visenya’s laughter did not halt until her eyes landed on the next name on the list, then trailed away with an awkward swallow. “Renly Sunglass,” she said, face carefully blank, and Helaena’s giddy laughter trailed away.

Daeron looked back and forth between them, face squished up with a child’s interest, and Visenya looked to Helaena—whose tongue’s tip peeped out from between her lips when she sucked her teeth and said, “well, he will not do.”

“He will not do at all,” Visenya agreed, desperately wishing to change the subject. She squirmed her way out of Helaena’s side, situating herself back in her previous spot and attempting to fabricate an unconcerned air. “There’s a few other boys from the Stormlands, though, and any of them might do.”

“Renly Sunglass left the night of the wedding, you know,” Helaena interrupted, eyes fixed intently on Visenya’s face. She took sudden interest in the curl pattern of Daeron’s hair, reached out to stroke her fingers through it as his attention once again drifted towards the puzzle box. “He and his entire House.”

“Awfully rude,” Visenya murmured. She forced her gaze up towards Helaena’s again, found her sister’s eyes narrowed and burrowing into her face as if she could read her thoughts.

“I imagine they were blind to the implications of such rudeness,” Helaena answered, meaningfully, utterly unimpressed. “Much as some are often blind to the consequences that could befall them if their actions were ever discovered.”

Damn her dreams to hell.

“What?” said Daeron. Neither of them spared him a glance.

“Some know all about consequences,” Visenya answered, mulish, defensive. She did not often find herself on this end of a chiding when it came to her siblings, and Helaena’s disapproval chafed to the point of making her teeth ache. “Some think them worth it.”

A beat passed.

“Perhaps they were,” Helaena allowed. The smile that touched sudden to her mouth…it belonged more on Visenya’s face than her little sister’s. Something cold and unforgiving, something almost hungry. “Words should have consequences as well as actions.”

Not angry with her over what she did, then, but for the rashness. The risk she took with herself.

Sweet Helaena with her soft voice and her dreamy riddles, with her bugs and beetles and butterflies, with her shy smiles and breathy laugh and the uncomfortable way she wilted when someone gazed for too long at her face, who did not like to be touched and could not stomach the smell of blood. Sometimes, she seemed to have little of the dragon in her, but to believe so would be folly.

Fire and blood dribbled from her teeth, just the same as the rest of them.

Visenya made a soft sound in the back of her throat, dipped her head in quiet acceptance, and Helaena settled back against the arm of the chair with an air of satisfaction. Daeron peered at them curiously but not for more than a moment.

“Now, tell me,” Hel said, plucking the paper from Visenya’s lax fingers and leaning down to let Daeron look at it, “who in the name of the Seven is Symon, and why have you crossed him out so many times? I cannot even make his surname out!”

*&*&*

The first mistake she made that morning came in not paying attention at the breakfast table. Aegon’s empty place setting caught her focus instead, her stomach twisting into anxious, nauseous knots. He hadn’t even come to her rooms since the wedding—she suspected Aemond caught hold of him—so she had nothing left to comfort her about his absences, only the nagging worry that, rather than being safe on her floor, he would be found dead somewhere in the city’s ditches.

“Oh! He is on the list!” Daeron chirruped in delight, and Helaena’s hand snapped to Visenya’s thigh beneath the table, tapping at a rate so rapid that she startled back into herself with a jolt. With some bafflement, she realized bacon filled her mouth the point of overflowing, and she gave a dry, pained swallow before looking towards her littlest brother with squinted eyes. “Robert Rowan, yes? You wrote his name, did you not, Visenya?”

“List?” Aemond repeated, suspiciously. “What list?”

He thought it a list of targets, she could tell from the look on his face. People who vexed her, people she meant to wreak havoc upon by vandalizing their horses or stealing their left shoes or having their clothes dyed in various bright, clashing shades of green and pink when they sent them away to be washed. Aemond always grew paranoid about such things—if she did have a list, after all, he would rarely leave it, and he no doubt remembered the horror of finding that she enlisted Brigit to embroider each of his eyepatches with daisies.

A pulse of dread struck through her stomach at the thought of telling Aemond, though she knew the ruse would not last very long at all. Aemond found out most of her secrets eventually, sooner or later, whether she meant to say it or not. Visenya often forgot to hide things from Aemond, especially just after spars when they laid sweating and panting beside each other on the floor or in the early evenings after a flight when they lazed in the grass beneath the shade of their dragons’ wings.

But he would be so damn annoying about this once he discovered Rhaenyra’s intentions, spouting his concerns and chattering his opinions and poisoning the whole useless game of it with his generally sour nature, and she did not wish to listen to his griping while also endeavoring to sell herself off like a mare at sale.

Helaena could always be trusted to keep Visenya’s secrets, especially when she thought it would suit their brothers better to remain obliviousness, but the thought that Daeron would not understand the unspoken rule of never sharing information given to him by his siblings without permission hadn’t occurred to her.

Growing up in Oldtown ruined him.

Aemond’s annoyances did not worry her nearly so much as Alicent, though. Alicent need not know anything about Rhaenyra’s arrangements until the dust settled, until things moved far along enough that she had not a chance to weasel her way into places she did not belong.

“Rhaenyra’s sent me a list of men I should consider,” Visenya said, shooting Daeron a black look. He, silly little fool never before exposed to the threat of an elder sister’s rage, smiled obliviously back. “And I should like to change the subject, if you do not mind, Daring.”

Aemond’s face shuttered for a moment. He blinked, lips parting, and his voice came out strangled when he said, “pardon?”

“I helped,” Daeron said, pleased as a pig in shit, his focus snapping entirely to Aemond just that quickly. Balancing a squirrel’s heart on the tip of a hound’s nose would only leave them half so focused. “She chose four: Kermit Tully, Robert Rowan, Allard Royce, and…oh, I cannot remember.”

Allard Royce’s name drew Alicent away from her fluttering over Viserys, helping him eat and wiping at his mouth when liquids and bits dribbled from the side. Hardly present and only barely understandable when he did speak, eyes clouded with the tonics the maesters poured down his throat and body half-shriveled to nothing. A bad day; a worse day, if not the worst she ever saw of him.

The rot touched at the corner of his eye now.

“What’s this about Allard Royce?” Alicent said with interest, one delicate brow arching.

Visenya froze. It seemed her best option, though it could not make her invisible to her stepmother’s cool gaze or make the question disappear. Only her eyes moved, turning a look so wrathful upon her littlest brother that it shocked her when he did not keel over dead.

Alicent…she could make things so difficult if she wished to do. She reigned as Queen of the Seven Kingdoms so long as Viserys lived, power and influence flowing from her proximity to Viserys—and House Hightower’s power lent credence to everything she said and every whim she wished to see through

A few whispered words, a few tugged strings, and who knew what might happen? Rhaenyra did not hold the same sway at court as Alicent—which, much as she loathed to admit it, Visenya could not blame on anyone but her sister—and negotiations would be difficult enough without the Green bitch slithering around with her forked tongue and slitted pupils.

“Visenya is going to marry him,” Daeron said, knowledgably, and Aemond’s knee jerked into the underside of the table with such force that several dishes moved a little to the left.

“Are you alright?” Visenya asked, frowning, and he made a vague gesture with his hand and lunged for his goblet. He took a long pull—and kept drinking, taking such large, rapid swallows of his water that she thought, for half a moment, that he might drown himself. She waited for a moment and, when he did not halt, turned back to Daeron. “And there is no marriage, Daring! She is beginning to consider arrangements, and she wished me to have some voice in it. She had me pick a few men that I might prefer over the others, if possible, that is all.”

“And you choose Allard Royce as one of these men?” Alicent persisted, eyes slightly narrowed, and Visenya blinked innocently.

“I find him quite fetching, Your Grace.”

She did not…dislike his face, she supposed. Dark-haired and dark-eyed, broad shoulders and thick arms and a bush of a beard—she itched just thinking of it—that suited his face quite nicely. His face held little worth to her, though. The tension between Runestone and House Targaryen would only serve to make everything more difficult if Rhaenyra ever needed call upon the Valemen; the Royces stood second only to the Arryns, and, if they chose to break with Rhaenyra, many lesser houses might well follow suit.

And, thus, Allard Royce, heir to Runestone, despite the fact that she did not much imagine he would agree to the match. The Royces held no love for dragon riders, these days.