Reader who is Rhaenyra's Daughter time travels with her dragon to a different era...
Traveling to another time had never been something you imagined,ย least of all a time, forward, into a future where dark-haired Targaryens are more common and dragons were the stuff of dusty songs.
So when one appeared in the skies above Ashford Meadow, living and furious and real, with a young woman astride its neck,ย the world below went very still.
You didn't understand it yourself. One moment you had been locked in battle above Honeyywine River, fire and smoke and your uncle Daeron's dragon screaming through salt-heavy winds. Then the sky twisted, and everything familiar was gone.
Now there was green country beneath you. Rolling hills. Pavilions stitched with colour. A tourney ground.
You circled once, then twice, your heart hammering against your ribs. The people below were no bigger than insects, but you could see them pointing, stumbling backward, shielding their eyes against the sun to stare up at you. Knights in gleaming plate stood frozen mid-stride. Horses reared and screamed in their paddocks.
For a long while you simply hovered, your dragon's wings beating slow and thunderous, casting a shadow across the field like a storm cloud. Your gaze swept over the encampment below, banners snapping in the wind, hundreds of them, houses you recognized and houses you did not.
Among the sea of colour, one sigil leapt out at you. The three-headed dragon. Red on black.
The decision was made before you fully thought it through. You leaned forward, pressed your palm against the scaled neck beneath you, and whispered the command.
Your dragon descended in a slow, deliberate spiral, the downdraft flattening the grass in great rippling waves, scattering loose pennants and sending squires diving behind barrels.
The beast touched down at the edge of the tourney ground with a shuddering impact that you felt in your teeth.
Dust billowed outward. As your dragon folded its wings with a leathery crack and swung its horned head from side to side, surveying the gaping crowd with amber, slitted eyes.
You dismounted, your boots hit solid earth, and the silence that greeted you was deafening.
In the stands, the smallfolk had erupted,ย some screaming, some weeping, and some shoving past one another in a blind rush to flee. Others stood rooted, mouths agape, unable to reconcile what their eyes were showing them.
A girl in a fine gown, the Lady who is the tournament is held for, you guessed from the seat of honour she occupied,ย had risen to her feet with both hands pressed over her mouth, her face drained of all colour.
You straightened, and brushed the windswept hair from your face, before swallowing hard.
Your voice died in your throat.
Before you stood a cluster of knights, several of whom had begun removing their helms. And what you saw beneath those helms made the ground feel unsteady under your feet.
Silver hair. More of a Targaryen silver hair, on an older man with deep-set, weary eyes, and on a boy who looked no older than you, slim and almost pretty.
Beside them stood a broader man, dark-haired and strong-jawed, whose mismatched eyes, one dark, one blue, studied you with an unsettling calm.
Three-headed dragons adorned their armour.
The shout came from behind you, high and eager and utterly fearless. You spun to find a small bald-headed boy practically vibrating with excitement, his eyes wide as saucers, apparently unbothered by the fact that a living dragon sat steaming not twenty feet away.
Despite the terror and the confusion and the creeping certainty that something had gone horribly, impossibly wrong,ย you almost smiled.
"Partially," you said. You clasped your hands in front of you to keep them from trembling. "Yes. My mother is the rightful Queen, Rhaenyra Targaryen. And my father is..." A familiar tightness crept into your chest. You forced the words out, quieter now. "Laenor Velaryon."
The silence that followed was different from the first. Heavier. You braced yourself for the looks , the knowing glances, the curled lips, the barely concealed contempt. The same looks you had endured your entire life.
Baseborn. Strong. Not a true dragon.
"Are you aware of what you're saying?" The handsome young Targaryen,ย the silver-haired one near your age,ย stepped forward, his brow furrowed. "That's impossible. Rhaenyra Targaryen has been dead for over a hundred years."
The words hit you like cold water.
Now that explains why everyone and everything is different.
"...A hundred years," you repeated, barely above a whisper.
"Why is it impossible?" you managed, though your voice had gone thin and strange. "Who are you people?"
The dark-haired man with the mismatched eyes stepped forward then. He moved with the easy authority of someone accustomed to command, but there was a gentleness in his bearing,ย something measured and patient in the way he regarded you, that loosened the knot in your chest by a fraction.
He reminded you, painfully and without warning, of your mother, his aura even matches hers in a way.
"I believe it would be better to have this conversation in private," he said. His voice was low, steady, careful as if he were approaching a wounded animal. "Don't you think so, my lady?"
You held his gaze for a moment. Then you nodded.
"Yes. Of course." You glanced back over your shoulder at your dragon, who had lowered its great head to the ground and was watching the scattered crowd with predatory disinterest.
"But I need someone to watch over my dragon while I'm gone. She doesn't take kindly to strangers, and I won't have her harmed or harming anyone."
Your eyes swept the assembled knights. Most of them looked as though they would rather face a charging destrier blindfolded than stand within a hundred yards of the beast.
Then your gaze landed on one man, and stopped.
He was enormous, as he stood a full head above every other knight on the field, perhaps moreย broad-shouldered and thick-armed, with a plain, honest face that was somehow all the more striking for its lack of refinement.
He wasn't beautiful the way the silver-haired prince was beautiful. He was something else entirely. Something solid and real, like a castle wall you could lean against and know it would hold.
Ser Duncan is every maiden's dream in your time.
Heat crept unbidden into your cheeks.
You lifted your chin and pointed directly at him.
"You, Ser. You'll look after my dragon."
Then he stared at the dragon.
"My lady," He faltered, and you watched the exact moment his sense of duty collided with his sense of self-preservation. He swallowed thickly, his throat bobbing above the collar of his worn armour.
"I would be honoured, truly, but there is... a matter. A rather pressing matter."
"More pressing than a dragon?"
He let out a breath that was almost a laugh, strained, exhausted, and edged with the particular despair of a man whose day had already gone badly before a mythical creature descended from the sky.
"My lady, I am to stand trial. A trial of seven." He gestured vaguely behind him, as though the entire catastrophe could be summed up with a wave of his hand.
"Prince Aerion has accused me of attacking his royal person, and the matter is to be settled by combat. Seven against seven. I have been trying to find men willing to fight for me, and-" He broke off, glancing at the dragon again.
"Well. It has not gone well."
You blinked in confusion.
"A trial of seven," you repeated slowly. "Over what?"
Ser Duncan's jaw tightened. Even in his obvious distress, there was something deeply admirable about the way he held himself,ย straight-backed, unyielding, like an oak that refused to bend even as the storm stripped it bare. You had to tilt your head back to look at him properly.
"He was hurting a girl," Duncan said, simply and without embellishment. "A puppeteer. I stopped him."
"You stopped a prince from hurting a girl and you're the one on trial?"
"That is the shape of it, my lady, yes."
You stared at him for a long moment. Then you turned on your heel and marched directly toward the cluster of Targaryen knights with a sudden, sharp purpose that made several squires throw themselves out of your path.
"Which one of you is Aerion?"
The silver-haired prince, the one near your age, the one who had called Rhaenyra's death impossible with the casual ease of reciting a lesson, stepped forward.
Up close, he was even more striking than you had initially registered. Sharp-featured and elegant, with the kind of face that belonged on a coin or a statue.
He looked you over with open interest. Orย more than interest. Appraisal. The kind of look that said he was deciding whether you were worthy of his attention and had, for the moment, concluded that you were.
"I am Prince Aerion Targaryen," he said, and the title rolled off his tongue like honey over a knife's edge. "Called Brightflame."
Brightflame. Of course he had a self-given epithet. You knew the type.
You'd grown up surrounded by men who named their swords and expected the world to kneel for the privilege of being cut by them.
But you needed something from this one, and you had not survived the politics of your mother's court without learning when to wield steel and when to wield something softer.
You clasped your hands in front of you. Softened your expression.
Let your eyes go wide, not falsely so, but with the particular earnestness that came naturally to you when you allowed it, the same look that had once convinced your mother to let you ride your dragon over Dragonstone unsupervised at the age of twelve.
"Prince Aerion," you said, and you pitched your voice low and warm, like you were sharing a secret with him. "I find myself in a very strange and frightening situation, as you can imagine. I am far from everything I know, surrounded by strangers, and I am in desperate need of counsel from my own blood."
You stepped closer, just close enough that he could see the way the afternoon light caught in your eyes.
"But I'm told there's a trial that must take place first, and that it would occupy the very people I need to speak with." You let a breath of helplessness creep into your tone. "Ser Duncan explained what happened. That you were..." You paused, as though searching for the most diplomatic phrasing. "...that there was an altercation with a girl?"
Aerion's expression flickered, not with guilt, certainly not, but with the faintest surprise that you had addressed it so directly, and so gently.
"The hedge knight laid hands on a prince of the blood," he said, though there was a fraction less venom in it than there ought to have been. His eyes had not left yours. "The law is clear."
"Oh, I'm sure it is," you agreed, nodding in false agreement.
"And I'm sure you are entirely within your rights, my prince. Onlyโ" You bit your lip. Looked down, then back up through your lashes. "I would consider it a tremendous personal kindness if you might see your way to setting the matter aside? Just this once?"
You held his gaze and did not blink. You let every ounce of sweetness you possess radiate outward like warmth from a hearth.
Tilting your head slightly to the left, because your mother had once told you that you looked particularly appealing when you did that, and you were not above using every weapon in your arsenal.
You always got what you wanted from anyone when you did that thing with your eyes and expression especially from your brother, Jacaerys.
"It would mean so much to me," you added, softly. "Truly."
Aerion's mouth opened. His brow creased. Something was happening behind his eyes a war, brief and vicious, between his cruelty and his vanity, and for one terrible moment you thought cruelty would win.
Then he straightened. Waved a hand with a carelessness so studied it could only be deliberate.
"The hedge knight's crimes are forgiven," he announced, in the tone of a man granting a pardon from the Iron Throne itself. "I declare the matter settled. He is innocent of all charges."
The silence that followed was not the stunned silence of a dragon's arrival. It was the bewildered, slack-jawed silence of two hundred people who had just watched the most notoriously vicious prince in the Seven Kingdoms fold like a wet napkin because a girl looked at him nicely.
Ser Duncan, behind you, made a sound like he'd been punched in the stomach.
Maekar, who did everything in his powers to have his son change his mind the night before, is now trying not to pop a vein that a girl just got his son wrapped around her finger.
But it was the small bald boy, Aegon,ย whose reaction you would remember for the rest of your life, however long or short or temporally displaced that life turned out to be.
He was now standing to Duncan's left. His mouth was open so wide you could have fit an apple in it. He looked from Aerion to you, then back to Aerion, then back to you, then at Aerion again.
Aerion ignored him with the practised ease of an older brother who had been ignoring his youngest sibling since birth.
"He threw my cat down a well!" Egg sputtered, pointing at Aerion with the desperate energy of a man trying to explain to a maester that yes, the wound really was that bad.
"He... you โ" He turned to Ser Duncan, arms spread wide. "He broke Tanselle's fingers! He was going to hurt her! You saw it! Everyone saw it! And now he just โ because she โ" He gestured wildly at you. "Because she looked at him?!"
"Aegon," said the dark-haired prince, Baelor,ย in a tone of measured calm that suggested he, too, could not quite believe what had just happened but had decided to accept it before Aerion changed his mind. "Perhaps we should not question the outcome."
Egg's mouth snapped shut. But his eyes, those wide, outraged, magnificently indignant eyes, continued to scream.
You turned back to Aerion and gifted him with your most radiant smile. The kind of smile that could launch ships. Or, apparently, overturn judicial proceedings.
"Thank you, Prince Aerion," you said, and you meant it, mostly. You reached out and touched his arm,ย briefly, barely a brush of fingers against his vambrace. "That was truly noble of you. I won't forget this kindness."
Aerion's ears turned pink.
The most feared young prince in Westeros, the boy who tortured people for sport and set cats on fire for entertainment, was blushing to the tips of his ears like a squire who had just received his first favour from a lady at a tourney.
"It was nothing," he said, in a voice that cracked on the second word, before clearing his throat and adding, with an admirable if unconvincing attempt at his usual drawl, "I am generous by nature."
Egg looked at him in disbelief.
"Thank you, my lady." Duncan says, nodding his head in gratitude.
Now, you are the one blushing.
You were about to suggest that the promised private conversation could now take place,ย your mind was already spinning with questions, each more terrifying than the last , when you noticed something on the ground behind the cluster of Targaryen men.
Specifically, you noticed a person on the ground.
He was lying flat on his back in the dirt, arms at his sides, eyes closed, with the serene and deliberate stillness of a man who had made a conscious decision to be elsewhere in spirit even if his body had not yet received the message.
His gold hair fanned out around his head like a halo. His mouth was set in a firm, purposeful line. He was breathing, but only barely, as though even that concession to the living world was being made under protest.
He looked, for all intents and purposes, like a very clean, very well-dressed corpse.
"Is he..." You pointed. "Is that man alright?"
Maekar glanced down. His unamused expression did not change, which told you everything you needed to know about how frequently this occurred.
"He's pretending to be dead so he doesn't fight." Aegon explains.
You then turn to Baelor, before walking over to him and linking your arm with his.
"Now, my kind prince, can we kindly have our private conversation?"
