huraedrurys

The seamstresses worked in silence, which was, Aelys had come to understand, the only kind of silence her mother ever truly enjoyed. Perhaps the silence of prayer as well. Though, if Aelys were honest, she no longer believed those prayers brought Queen Alicent much comfort. Not these past few years, at least.

She stood on the low fitting stool in the solar, arms lifted, while two women moved around her with pins held between their lips and bolts of cloth draped over their forearms — deep green silk, a paler shade beneath it for the underlayer, both finer than anything Aelys had been fitted for before. The elder of the two, Mella, had pinned half the ladies of the court in her time and had the particular gift of saying nothing at all while somehow conveying an opinion about everything; the younger, whose name Aelys had never quite caught and was now too embarrassed to ask after three fittings, worked with her tongue caught between her teeth in concentration and startled if anyone spoke to her directly. Aelys liked her for it. It made her feel, standing there pinned and half-dressed, as though at least one person in the room was thinking only of the silk and not of what the silk was for.

Her mother sat in the chair by the window, half in the autumn light and half out of it, watching the proceedings with the particular stillness she reserved for things she considered important.

Aelys had grown up watching that stillness settle a little deeper into her mother with each passing year, the way frost settles deeper into a field with every winter that follows the first, until she could no longer clearly recall the woman her mother must once have been beneath it. Time had taken things from Alicent, the way it took things from everyone, but it seemed to Aelys that it had taken more from her mother than it took from most. It had taken her laughter first — that had always been the easiest thing to lose, quick to go missing and, Aelys suspected, rarely mourned by anyone who did not love her closely enough to notice its absence. It had taken, more slowly, the unguarded gentleness of her hands, the instinct to comfort a scraped knee or a bad dream before first weighing what the comfort might cost her later, until even her tenderness had learned to calculate. What remained, most days, was harder for Aelys to put a kind name to. Faith, certainly — sharpened rather than dulled by every grief it had been made to survive. And beneath the faith, something colder, something that flared brightest not when her mother was at peace but when she had been wounded, as though old griefs were easier to carry lit than banked.

It should have made loving her the harder, all that hollowing. For the greater part of Aelys's life, it had not. She had loved her mother with all the fierce and simple devotion children give the one who is always there, never stopping to wonder what lay beneath, or whether such fierceness was worthy of the love it won. That had ended two years past. Aelys did not let herself think often of the night it ended, and had never once spoken of it aloud to anyone, least of all to Alicent — the night she had understood, with the particular, irreversible clarity of a child seeing a parent for the first time as merely a person. What her mother did in Ser Criston Cole's arms, and what it meant that the same woman who preached duty and prayer at her every day of her life had apparently decided those words did not bind her quite the same way they bound everyone else. Aelys had not confronted her. She had not wept, or accused, or asked any of the questions. She had only, quietly and without announcement, stopped reaching for her, and had gone on not reaching for her since. Alicent had noticed — Alicent noticed everything — and had tried, for a time, clumsily, to close the distance again, with small kindnesses Aelys accepted with perfect courtesy and did not return in kind. Eventually even the trying had stopped, worn down by its own lack of answer, and what remained between them now was something neither warm nor unkind. Correct. Dutiful. The particular, exhausting civility of two people who loved each other and had simply run out of a shared language to prove it in. Aelys did not think her mother had stopped loving her. She thought, if anything, Alicent loved her a great deal, and had simply never learned what a mother was meant to do with a daughter who had built a wall and left no door anywhere in it.

Alicent had always cared how her children presented themselves — Aelys could not remember a single feast where her mother had not inspected her hem and her hair before allowing her out the door — but this was different, and had been different from the moment the seamstresses were summoned three days past with instructions about necklines and Myrish lace that went well beyond the ordinary business of a growing girl needing larger gowns. 

"Higher on the left shoulder," Alicent said, not moving from her chair. "The seam sits wrong."

Mella adjusted it without comment.

"Turn," Alicent said. Aelys turned. "Again." She turned once more, arms lifted, and offered nothing further, because there was nothing in the instruction that required an answer, and she had learned there was very little her mother said to her these days that did.

"You are nearly a woman grown now," Alicent said, when the seamstresses had moved on to the underskirt. "It is right that your gowns should say so." A pause, even and instructive, the tone of a woman reciting a lesson she had recited to herself so many times it had worn smooth in the telling. "You must be perfect, Aelys. Not merely presentable. Perfect. No loose thread, no crooked hem, no hair out of place. You are a Targaryen princess, and princesses are permitted a great many things ordinary women are not, but they are never permitted to be less than beautiful when the realm is looking — and the realm is always looking, whether you can see it looking or not. It is not vanity I ask of you. It is armor. Wear it well."

"Yes, Mother," Aelys said.

Alicent's needle paused. Whatever answer she had expected, it had not been so ready an assent. For the space of a heartbeat she only looked at her daughter, as though searching for something more to follow. When nothing came, she lowered her eyes once more to the gown. The needle found the cloth again, steady as ever.

Aelys had made her peace with the rest of it a long while ago, or had told herself she had. She was a princess of House Targaryen, and she had known since before she had words for knowing it that she would never marry for love; love was a luxury spent on daughters of lesser houses, not on her. Duty had always stood ahead of desire in the order of things she had been raised to expect, the way morning stood ahead of afternoon — an unchangeable sequence rather than a choice anyone made anew each day. She was older now, old enough that marriage had stopped being some distant shape on the horizon of her life and become instead a thing discussed, plainly, in rooms she was made to stand in. She did not resent that others would decide the shape of her future. That had always been the way of princesses. What she resented, if she was honest with herself in the quiet hours when honesty cost nothing, was how little she still allowed herself to hope—that whoever eventually claimed her hand, whatever alliance her marriage was meant to secure, might at least be a man she could respect. Someone she might come to call a friend, in time, rather than merely a husband. She had watched, closer than anyone in this castle knew, what became of a marriage that never had that friendship to begin with, and she wanted, more than she let herself want most things, not to become her mother and father over again under some new pairing of names. 

Mella, kneeling at the hem, kept her eyes carefully on her pins.

The door opened without a knock, which meant only one person could be entering it.

"Lord Hightower," Mella murmured, dipping her head as she gathered a length of green silk out of his path.

Otto Hightower came in the way he always came into rooms, without hurry, taking in everything before he had said a single word. His gaze moved over the gowns, over Aelys standing pinned and half-finished on the stool, over his daughter seated by the window with her needlework abandoned in her lap.

"I was told I would find Aegon here," he said, glancing about the solar as though the King's son might yet materialize from behind a bolt of silk. "It appears I was told wrong."

"He is wherever he usually is at this hour," Alicent said, not looking up. "I could not say where, nor do I think it matters."

"No," Otto agreed. There was disappointment in the word, though little heat."I did not imagine you could." He settled into the chair across from hers without waiting to be asked, folding his hands, the picture of a man arranging himself for a conversation he had already had a dozen times before in his own head. "It would serve His Grace well to devote half so much care to the names of his small council as he does to the vintners and wine sellers of Flea Bottom."

"He is young yet!"

"Youth is not a flaw, Alicent. It is a season, and every season passes in its time."Otto said it without malice, the way he delivered most unwelcome truths. "I only hope his passes swiftly enough that none of us are left waiting on it overlong." He glanced toward Aelys again, and something in his face eased, fractionally, the way it rarely did for anyone else in this family. "How does our princess fare, buried under all that lace?"

"Well enough, Grandsire," Aelys said. "Though I confess I would rather be reading than standing."

"A fine instinct. Most ladies of this court would say the opposite." His mouth curved slightly. "Your brother, now — I do not believe Aegon has read a book through to its ending since he was breeched. I have often wondered whether he simply cannot, or has only never found the patience to discover that he can. I confess I no longer trouble myself to guess which." He shook his head, the closest he came to open disgust.

"Father," Alicent said. It was a warning, though a gentle one. Aelys thought it less for his grandsire's sake than for everyone else's.

"I say nothing, you do not think for yourself." Otto did not raise his voice, did not so much as shift in his chair, and that, Aelys had learned long ago, was precisely how he delivered the remarks he most wanted remembered. "It is a curious thing, regardless, how quickly this court decides what to make of a boy. I was in the training yard yesterday when the master-at-arms was praising Prince Jacaerys to anyone who cared to listen — courteous to the stable hands, patient at his letters, already carrying himself, the man said, more like a king in waiting than most grown lords manage on their best day. High praise, for one so young." A pause, mild as anything, though his eyes had not moved from his daughter's face. "Strange, is it not, how readily a court hands its respect to whichever boy troubles himself to earn it."

Something in Alicent's hands went very still over her needlework. When she answered, her voice had not changed at all, which was, Aelys thought, the more telling thing about it. "Boys are easy enough to praise before they have had the chance to disappoint anyone."

Aelys understood what had passed between them. Otto had offered his insult as though it were merely an observation; Alicent had answered as though she had heard nothing at all. Both pretended. Both were practiced at it. But Aelys knew her mother well enough to see the hurt beneath the composure.

Aelys found, somewhat to her own private surprise, that she did not mind watching her mother struggle to hold that particular fire in check. Jace deserved every kind word the yard had to spare him and had earned it the plain, unglamorous way — by being decent to people who had no cause to expect decency from a prince. It cost her grandsire nothing to say so; she understood well enough that he had not gone looking for that praise out of any love for Jace, only because it was a blade shaped conveniently to his hand, and that the true target of it was sitting six feet away with her needle stilled in her lap. But a blade did not much care what had sharpened it, and Aelys decided, watching her mother's composure hold by the barest of threads, that the conversation could stand a little more kindling.

"That reminds me," she said, guileless as a child half-listening to grown talk while a hem was pinned around her, "is Aegon's pride much recovered? I heard he crossed swords with Lucerys in the training yard Tuesday last, only in jest, and came away with a split lip and a bruised wrist for his trouble — from Luce, who is still years from manhood, no less. Ser Criston had to step in and end it himself before it went further, I'm told, since Aegon didn't seem able to manage the boy on his own." She let a small, sympathetic frown settle over her face, the very picture of a dutiful sister's concern. "I do hope it did not wound his pride worse than his wrist."

The elder seamstress's needle paused for the length of a heartbeat before resuming, with the particular care of a woman memorizing something to repeat later over supper in the servants' hall.

Alicent's expression did not change, not exactly, but something in the set of her shoulders went rigid in a way it had not been a moment before, and when she spoke it was to Aelys rather than to her father, her voice pitched with the careful lightness of a woman declining to make a scene in front of hired hands. "That is not a fit thing to gossip about, Aelys."

"I did not mean it as gossip, Mother. Only concern." Aelys kept her eyes wide and her voice sweet, and did not look at her grandfather at all, though she could feel, without needing to see it, the shape of his amusement settling into the room like warmth off a hearth.

Otto did not laugh — Otto rarely troubled himself to laugh outright at anything — but something in the corner of his mouth deepened, and when Aelys finally allowed herself a glance at him, she found him watching her with an expression she had seen him wear only once or twice before, always after some small council maneuver no one else in the room had understood he was playing for.

There was no warmth in it, not exactly. Otto's approval was rarely a warm thing. It was something quieter, more difficult to earn: recognition. 

He gave the smallest nod.

It was nothing. It was everything.

Aelys had learned long ago that from her grandsire, such gestures were worth more than praise spoken too freely. He did not flatter. He measured. And for one brief moment, she had been measured and found pleasing.

She felt something in her chest she was careful not to let reach her face — a small, private, not entirely clean sort of pleasure, the particular pleasure of a girl whose cleverness had been noticed by someone whose good opinion was not easily purchased.

He studied her a moment longer, something calculating moving behind the warmth, the way he studied most things he had already decided were worth keeping. 

"You have more of my wit in you than any of my other grandchildren, Aelys, and twice the sense of most of them combined." A pause, and something almost regretful crept into his voice. "A pity you were not born a boy. That mind of yours would have made a formidable Hand, in time. As it stands, it will mostly go toward running a household and smiling prettily at whichever lord we eventually settle on you."

For a moment, Aelys almost felt as though she had been handed something precious, only to have it taken back before her fingers had properly closed around it.

She had never mistaken her grandsire for a gentle man, nor had she ever expected tenderness from him. But she had respected his mind. She had admired the sharpness of it, the patience, the way he could look at a room and see the pieces moving before anyone else had even noticed there was a game being played.

And for one brief moment, she had thought he saw that same thing in her.

Perhaps he did. That was what made it sting.

"Perhaps I shall run the household very well, then," Aelys said, mild as ever.

"No doubt you will." Otto did not appear to notice, or did not trouble himself to acknowledge, the small change his words had caused. His gaze drifted back to the gowns, to the seamstresses. "You have been busy on her behalf, I see, Alicent. New silks, new lace, a seamstress summoned for the third time this month." He did not finish the thought aloud. He did not need to; the shape of it hung plainly enough in the space he had left for it. "I take it you have been thinking of her future."

"I think of all my children's futures," Alicent said. "It is a mother's duty to."

"Of course." Otto's mouth curved again, faintly. "Though it happens I have news that touches rather directly on the future you are apparently already dressing her for."

Something shifted in the room at that. Alicent set her needlework aside entirely.

"Mella," she said. "Leave us the cloth and go. You as well." This to the younger girl, who bobbed a hasty curtsy and fled without needing to be told twice. Mella followed more slowly, gathering pins into a small cloth pouch, casting one unreadable glance at Aelys before she pulled the door shut behind her.

"And you, Aelys." Alicent's voice had gone brisk, the tone she used when she wanted a thing done and saw no reason to dress the wanting up as anything else. "Go find your septa. I will send for you when the gown is ready to be finished."

"Yes, Mother." Aelys stepped down from the stool, gathering her skirts with the pins still bristling at the hem, and dropped a small curtsy to her grandsire.

Otto inclined his head to her, already half turned back toward his daughter, his mind visibly elsewhere before Aelys had even reached the door.

She let herself out, but she did not go far.

The corridor beyond the solar bent sharply not ten feet from the door, toward the stair that led down to the yard, and it was there, pressed into the shadow of the turning where the torchlight did not reach, that Aelys stopped. She did not consider it eavesdropping, not truly. They were speaking of her, of the life that would be made for her and the man whose name would one day be joined to hers. If they wished such things decided in her absence, then that was their right; but she saw no reason she ought to remain ignorant of them. So she stayed where she was, quiet and still, and listened.

She heard the low murmur of her mother's voice through the wood, and beneath it, quieter, more measured, her grandsire beginning to speak.

Aelys closed her eyes, pressed her shoulder to the cold stone, and listened.

"—sent word this morning," her grandsire was saying, unhurried as ever. "Rhaenyra proposes a match. Jacaerys, to Aelys."

Aelys's heart did something strange and immediate at that, a hard, uneven lurch against her ribs that had nothing to do with fear, and she pressed her hand flat to the stone as though the wall itself might steady it. She had never once let herself think it. She realized that now, standing in the dark of the corridor with her pulse going too fast to properly count — she had never once, in all the quiet hours she had spent imagining the shape of the man she might someday be given to, let herself imagine Jace, because to imagine him and then lose him would have cost more than never imagining him at all.

Not even after the garden.

Not even after that strange, awkward afternoon two years before, when she had fled the palace with tears she had been too proud to let anyone see. Aegon had been cruel that day in the careless way he so often was, finding amusement in things that hurt because he had never been made to fear the sharpness of his own words. He had told her that she was no beauty, that she lacked the silver perfection people expected from Valyrian blood, that no man would ever look upon her and desire her. A wife, he had said, needed more than a name and a title. She needed something worth loving.

She had hated him for saying it because some small, frightened part of her had feared he was right.

Jace had found her there afterward, and had not laughed, and had not offered the easy, useless comfort grown people gave children when they only wanted the crying to stop. He had simply sat beside her in the garden until she was ready to speak, and when she finally told him what Aegon had said, he had looked at her as though the very idea were absurd, and then, with all the solemn seriousness of a boy who had not yet learned that grown people had a talent for making simple things complicated, he had told her he would kiss her — not because Aegon was right, and not because it meant anything, only because neither of them had ever done it, and if kissing truly decided whether a girl was beautiful or wanted or worthy of love, then perhaps they ought to discover for themselves what all the fuss was about, rather than take Aegon's word for it. He had admitted he would likely be terrible at it. She had told him she likely would be as well, and that they could at least be terrible together, and laugh about it after.

So they had. Their noses bumped. They both laughed halfway through it, and pulled back afterward in an embarrassed, companionable silence, and agreed, with matching solemnity, that the singers and poets had made rather too much of the matter — that whatever they had just done was not magic, was not some great revelation, was only a kiss, filed away afterward as a small, private experiment between friends and never spoken of again.

It was only in the two years since that she had noticed the rest of it: a small turning in her stomach every time she caught sight of him across a room, a warmth that arrived before she'd even realized she was smiling. She had always called it friendship. What else could it have been, when Jace was the one person who had never once looked at her as something to be judged and measured. Of course she felt differently around him. That was friendship. She had believed that, or told herself she believed it, for two whole years.

But here it was, laid bare and unbidden in her Grandsire's flat, unhurried voice, and the wanting she had never permitted herself came up all at once, so sudden and complete that she had to close her eyes against the strength of it.

Jace. Not a stranger weighed and measured and handed to her out of some lord's ambition, not a man she would spend years learning to merely tolerate, but Jace. Jace, who had taught her to sit a horse before she was tall enough to reach the stirrups without help, who never once made her feel foolish for asking a question, who had learned to braid her hair because, when she was little, she would allow no one's hands near it but her mother's and his. After long days spent running through the gardens until their clothes were stained and their hair full of leaves, when Alicent could not always be there to mend the mess they had made of themselves, it had been Jace who sat her down and patiently worked the tangles free, his fingers gentle despite having no more idea what he was doing than she did. Somehow, he learned. He was kind in the plain, unpolished way. He made her feel safe in rooms where she otherwise had to remember, always, to watch her footing. And he was honorable — truly honorable, not the performed, court kind of honor her Grandsire wore like a second doublet, but the real, unglamorous kind that showed itself in how a person treated servants and horses and younger cousins when there was nothing at all to be gained by it. 

They would not become her mother and father. She knew that the way she knew her own name. Whatever her parents' marriage had curdled into over the years, whatever silence and calculation had grown up in the space where warmth should have been, she and Jace already had the thing Alicent and Viserys had apparently never managed to build at all — an ease with each other that asked nothing and cost nothing and simply was. She let herself imagine it, standing there in the dark with her hand still pressed to the stone, greedy for it in a way she was faintly ashamed of and could not make herself stop: Dragonstone in the autumn, the black castle wreathed in its own private storms, rain against high windows while she and Jace sat before a fire in the library with cups of warm milk and a plate of the almond cakes he loved entirely too much, reading to each other, inventing better endings for the histories that had disappointing ones. It would be peaceful. It would be, she thought, almost unbearably easy.

Then her mother's voice came through the door, and the warmth went out of the corridor all at once.

"A whore's game," Alicent said, and there was no composure in it now, none of the careful measured stillness Aelys had grown up learning to read like scripture — only something raw and furious, barely held inside the shape of words. "One bastard she could scarcely explain away. Two, and the court had already begun to grow tired of pretending not to count. Three, Father, and she offers me her firstborn as though I ought to fall to my knees in gratitude for the privilege of laundering what she's done with my name. She has no taste for duty. She never has. She spreads her legs for a sworn knight of her own father's Guard and calls the result a Velaryon prince, and now she means to smear the mud of it onto my daughter as well."

"Alicent—"

"I will not have my daughter used as a blanket to cover her shame. She would put one of her bastards beside a trueborn princess of House Targaryen and expect us all to smile?”Aelys heard the sharp breath that followed, the brief silence of someone struggling to gather words and failing.”"She thinks because she wears a crown she may do as she pleases. She may break vows, crawl into whatever bed she wishes, and the rest of us must smile and call the fruits of it princes." Alicent's voice had gone thin with anger. "And now she would have MY daughter take part in it. How many more must there be, Father? How many more must be made to suffer because she cannot deny herself anything? She would put one bastard in my daughter's bed and have her raise another generation of bastards after him, and the realm is expected to close its eyes?”

Her voice fell then, but not because the anger had left it.

"It may yet be the wisest offer anyone has made this family in a decade," Otto said, and his voice had not moved an inch, which somehow made the words land harder than shouting would have. "It binds both lines into one. It makes the question of legitimacy—"

"Why should the question matter at all," Alicent cut in sharply, "when it is Aegon who will sit that throne regardless of whatever answer we give to any of this?"

Aelys went entirely still.

She had always known, in the vague, unexplored way, that her parents despised Rhaenyra — despised her enough that Aelys had learned, young, never to speak the woman's name warmly in her mother's hearing. She knew that there was some fairness buried in that contempt, even if she did not share the whole of it. Rhaenyra was not, by any honest measure, a woman built for the burden the realm had placed on her. She kept poor company with her own reputation, seemed to court gossip rather than avoid it, and had shown, so far as Aelys could tell from a distance, precious little appetite for the actual grinding work of rule — the councils, the ledgers, the slow unglamorous business of holding a kingdom together. But she was kind. Aelys had seen that much herself, and kindness was more than her brother Aegon had ever once demonstrated an interest in offering anyone who could not pour him wine. And beneath all of it, beneath every fair complaint anyone might raise against her, Rhaenyra was still her father's chosen heir, named before the whole realm at his own command, and Aelys had been raised on the same principle her mother recited to her at every turn — that duty did not trouble itself with what a person would prefer instead. If duty meant anything at all, it meant that. It meant Rhaenyra, whatever her failings, however poor a fit she might be, however loudly the whispers followed her — because her father, the King, had chosen her, and that was what honor was for.

To hear her own mother speak so plainly of Aegon taking the throne, as though the matter had already been decided and the realm merely awaited the proper hour to acknowledge it, was to see at last the shape of the cage that had been built around her, piece by piece, for years.

It was treason. Aelys knew the word, knew its weight, and made herself hold very still against the stone so that no sound of her own breathing would carry through the door and betray how thoroughly the floor had just shifted beneath her.

"It may not need to come to a fight for the throne at all," Otto went on, unbothered, as though he had said nothing more remarkable than a comment on the weather. "Kings die, Alicent. Sickness. A fall from a horse. A hunt gone wrong. Look to Aenys, if you doubt me — a king with sons enough to fill a hall, and still his reign came apart in his own hands, weakened past saving by the deaths and failures of the very heirs meant to secure it. Fortune does not ask anyone's permission before it turns. I am not telling you to expect such a thing. I am telling you it would be foolish, given all of that, not to have more than one door left open, should the one we are counting on close before we are ready for it. Aelys wed to Jacaerys is such a door. It costs us nothing to keep it unlocked."

"No." Alicent's voice had gone low now, low and hard in the way that Aelys had learned, over years of careful listening, was far more dangerous than shouting. "You will not use my daughter as a hedge against your own uncertainty, Father, not this one, not after everything else I have already spent to make certain this family does not need such a door at all."

A silence followed that Aelys did not like the shape of.

"In a few weeks' time," Alicent said, and something in her voice had gone flatter now, more deliberate, the voice of a woman laying pieces on a board one at a time, "Vaemond Velaryon will come to this court and make his claim before the King. That the title of Lord of the Tides, and the inheritance of Driftmark, ought to pass to him rather than to Lucerys — that he, and not some boy the whole realm already whispers is no Velaryon at all, is the last true blood of that house left to hold it."

"You know this," Otto said slowly, "because—"

"Because I have spent the better part of a year making certain the whispers he intends to stand on are loud enough for him to stand on with confidence." There was no shame in her mother's voice at all, only the same flat, careful precision. "It is not so very difficult, Father, if a woman is patient, and knows which septas gossip freely and which handmaids are loyal enough to carry a story where you wish it carried and forgetful enough never to remember afterward that it was you who first told it to them. Viserys grows sicker by the month. You know this as well as I do. And if Vaemond wins Driftmark, he brings the Velaryon fleet with it — a fleet that will owe him its loyalty, and he will owe Aegon his, because it is Aegon who will have delivered him the one thing Rhaenyra never would." She paused, and Aelys, straining against the door, could hear something in the pause that was almost, almost like doubt, quickly mastered. "So no. I will not now hand my daughter to the very boy whose name and honor I have spent a year quietly unmaking. It would ruin her as surely as it ruins him. I am not fool enough to burn a thing down with one hand and warm myself at it with the other."

There was a long silence on the other side of the door.

"I confess," Otto said at last, and something had entered his voice that Aelys had rarely heard there before — not quite surprise, something closer to reassessment, a man quietly moving a piece he had misjudged the value of, "I had not thought you capable of playing so patient a game, Alicent. You have always been a woman of conviction. I did not know you had also become a woman of strategy."

"I had a good teacher," Alicent said, without warmth.

"Apparently so." A pause, still and quiet. "Driftmark and its fleet would matter a great deal, if it comes to placing Aegon on that throne. You have done this family a service, whatever else I might have wished done differently." Another pause, shorter. "Then we will let the girl's marriage rest a while longer. Rhaenyra can wait for her answer. It will do her good to wait."

Aelys stood in the dark of the corridor with her back against the cold stone, and for a long moment she could not have said which of the things she had just heard hurt worse — that her own mother had spent a year quietly grinding down two boys' names and futures to arm a stranger's claim against them, or that Jace, the one soft, easy thing she had let herself want for the length of a single unguarded breath, had just been set back down on the table like a piece no longer worth playing this turn.

She felt something in her chest go tight and cold and furious all at once, an anger unlike any she had let herself feel in that solar an hour before, when she had still believed the worst her family was capable of was cruelty dressed up as concern. This was not that. This was treason, spoken plainly, in her mother's own voice, without a single flinch of guilt attached to it — a scheme aimed at unmaking a boy's whole life and name to buy a fleet for a war that had not yet been declared, against an heir her own father the King had chosen with his own mouth before the whole realm.

She could not stop Vaemond. She understood that much already, standing there with her pulse still too fast and her hands gone cold at her sides — a girl of her age had no way to unmake a claim a queen had spent years building, no seat at any council that mattered, no voice anyone in that solar would trouble themselves to hear even if she found the courage to raise it. But Luke was gentle and undeserving of what was coming for him, and Jace, her Jace deserved better than to have his name eaten alive by gossip his own kin had planted like seeds.

She did not know yet what she could do. But she knew, standing very still in the dark with her mother's voice still hanging faintly on the other side of the door, that she was going to do something.

———

Ser Howland was standing his usual post outside her door, straight-backed and unremarkable in the way he had trained himself to be for as long as Aelys had known him, and whatever he saw in her face when she came around the last turn of the corridor was enough to make him straighten further, though he said nothing at first beyond the small bow of his head that was his habit whenever she passed him.

"My lady." A pause, his eyes moving over her once, quick and assessing, the look of a man who had spent a great many years learning to read her moods before she troubled herself to voice them. "You look as though you have seen a ghost."

"I have seen worse than a ghost, Ser Howland." She did not slow to explain it further, and to his credit he did not press her, only fell into step a half pace behind as she pushed open the door to her own chambers, the particular privilege of a room that was hers and no one else's to enter uninvited.

Inside, Septa Wenna sat by the window with a worn copy of the Seven-Pointed Star open across her knees, waiting, as she did every third afternoon, to resume whatever lesson on the Mother's mercy or the Warrior's duty Aelys had left half-finished the week before. Grunhilda knelt by the clothes chest sorting ribbons that did not need sorting, the particular busywork of a woman who had run out of other tasks and did not care to sit idle in front of a septa. Both looked up when the door opened, and both, Aelys saw at once, read something in her face that neither troubled to hide their reading of.

"Princess." Septa Wenna set the book aside. "What's happened?"

Aelys said nothing for a moment. She stood just inside the door with her back nearly against it, and for the length of several breaths she was aware of nothing so much as the size of the thing sitting in her chest, too large, she thought, for the room to hold if she let it out.

These were the only few people left to her who had never once made her feel she was being weighed and measured for what she was worth to someone else's purpose. Grunhilda had covered for her a hundred small sins over the years — a torn hem from climbing over the kitchen wall, hours unaccounted for spent in Flea Bottom in a plain wool cloak, the smell of woodsmoke and someone else's cooking clinging to her hair — and had never once carried a word of it back to her mother. Septa Wenna had taught her her letters and her prayers both, and had also, more than once, quietly arranged for a lesson to run long so that no one would question where the princess had truly spent her afternoon. Ser Howland had walked half a step behind her through the worst parts of the city and had never once told her she oughtn't go, only that she oughtn't go alone, and had made certain, every time, that she never did.

She trusted these three more than she trusted her own family. She had trusted them for years without ever once having to test the trust against anything that mattered.

This mattered.

That was precisely what made her hesitate now, standing with her back to the door—not doubt of them, but the plain, cold reality of what she was about to hand them. A torn hem was nothing. A secret afternoon in Flea Bottom was nothing. What she had heard through a solar door an hour past was not nothing; it was the sort of knowledge that, once spoken aloud, could not be unspoken, and could very easily cost the person she spoke it to their position, their safety, perhaps their life, if it ever found its way to the wrong ears. She had no right to hand any of them that weight without asking first whether they wished to carry it. And beneath even that, quieter, uglier, the thought she did not want to look at too closely: what if they did not want it. What if this, finally, was the thing that made even these three step back from her.

But she thought, too, of the alternative—of carrying it alone, saying nothing, watching Vaemond Velaryon stand before the King in a few weeks' time and call Luke and Jace bastards to their faces while she stood silent, the truth of how that claim had been built rotting in her chest, doing nothing at all because she had been too afraid to trust the only people in this castle who had ever given her reason to. She thought of Jace, and of what was coming for him, and when she weighed the two fears against each other, she found the second heavier by far.

"Bar the door," she said to Ser Howland. "And come inside. All of you, sit."

Something shifted in the room at that — not alarm exactly, not yet, but a stillness, the particular readiness of people who had served her long enough to know that Aelys did not ask for closed doors over nothing. Ser Howland did as she bid, the bolt falling into place with a sound that seemed, to Aelys's ear, unnaturally loud, and came to stand near the window rather than sit, his hand resting easy and unconscious at his sword belt, the way it always did when he sensed her about to say something that required him standing rather than seated.

Aelys told them.

She told it plainly, without much art, the way she had learned from her grandfather that plain truths carried further than dressed ones — Rhaenyra's offer of Jace's hand, her mother's fury, the flat and terrible ease with which Alicent had said that Aegon would sit the Iron Throne regardless of anything Rhaenyra was owed by law or by their father's own word. She told them of Vaemond Velaryon, and Driftmark, and the year of quiet, patient gossip her own mother had spent sowing to arm a stranger's claim against two boys who had done nothing to deserve it beyond being born to a mother the court had already decided to despise. She told them, last, because it was hardest to say aloud, that this was no longer simply cruelty dressed as family quarrel. This was treason, spoken plainly, by the queen.

When she had finished, no one spoke for a long moment.

Septa Wenna's hands had gone still in her lap, the practiced stillness of a woman accustomed to keeping her face schooled through worse counsel than this, though her eyes, when she finally lifted them to Aelys, held something that was not quite calm. Grunhilda had stopped pretending to sort ribbons entirely. And Ser Howland's jaw had tightened in a way Aelys recognized from the handful of times she had seen him truly angry — not loud, but present.

"Your Grace's mother," Howland said at last, choosing the title with obvious care, "is playing a very dangerous game, telling this so openly."

"She does not know I heard it." Aelys folded her hands in her lap to keep them from betraying how unsteady she still felt. "No one does."

"And what is it you mean to do with what you heard?" Septa Wenna asked gently.

"I do not know that I can do anything about Driftmark. Vaemond will make his claim whether I wish it or not." Aelys drew a slow breath. "But the whispers that will carry him there were built. Deliberately, patiently, over the better part of a year. If they can be built, they can be answered. Not with proof—I have none, and could not use it even if I did, without naming my own mother a plotter before the whole court, but with doubt."

She looked from Septa Wenna to Howland.

"If all I can buy Luke and Jace is time, then I will buy them time."

"You mean to fight her rumor with a rumor of your own," Howland said slowly, working the shape of it out as he spoke, the way a man tests ice before trusting his full weight to it.

"I mean exactly that."

Septa Wenna was quiet for a moment, studying her, and when she spoke again there was something almost rueful in it, the look of a woman who had taught this girl her letters and was only now beginning to understand what she had helped build. "You will need more than three of us to spread anything wide enough to matter, Princess. And more of us telling it directly only widens the thread that could be pulled back to your door, should anyone go looking for the source."

"I know it. I had thought perhaps a handful more — people we trust absolutely, who might each know one or two others of their own." Aelys hesitated, hearing, even as she said it, how thin the plan sounded stretched that far. "I had not yet decided who."

It was Grunhilda who spoke into the silence that followed. "You already have more of an army than you know, my lady, if you'd only think to call it one."

Aelys looked at her surprised.

"You've spent four years walking among the smallfolk in that plain grey cloak of yours, thinking none of them the wiser," Grunhilda went on. "Feeding the orphans at motherhouses with your own coin. Sitting with the fishwives at the Mud Gate market as though you were one of their own daughters and not a princess of the blood. You did not build that goodwill for this. But it is there all the same, whether you meant to spend it or not, and there is not a soul in Flea Bottom who would think twice before repeating a worried word passed to them by someone they already love." She paused, and something almost fond crossed her weathered face. "You want to know who could carry a rumor faster and further than any lord's men could, and quieter besides? Half this city already would, Princess, for your sake alone, if only someone troubled to ask them."

Aelys felt something in her chest loosen, very slightly, for the first time since she had pressed her back to that cold stone corridor an hour before — not relief, not quite, but the particular, humbling recognition of having been handed a weapon she had been carrying, unknowing, the whole time.

"Then," she said, "I suppose we had better decide who to ask first."

She turned to Grunhilda before the moment could pass her by, before caution could talk her back into silence. "There is one more thing I would ask of you before we plot anything further. I need word carried to Princess Rhaenyra — not a letter, nothing that could be found and read by the wrong eyes, only enough said quietly, by someone she would have no cause to distrust, to warn her that Vaemond comes with more support behind him than he ought to, and that the whispers against Luke were fed to grow, not grown wild on their own." She held Grunhilda's gaze. "You have kin in her service, if I recall rightly. Could it be done through them, and done quietly?"

"It could, my lady." Grunhilda did not hesitate over it, though something careful entered her voice in the saying. "My sister's girl serves the princess. She has never once given me cause to doubt her discretion."

"Good." Aelys let out a breath she had not quite realized she was holding, and then, because it needed saying plainly and not left to sit unspoken between them, she looked to all three of them in turn.

"I know what I am asking of you," she said. "All of you. This is not a torn hem, or an afternoon's absence I can explain away with a lie about a headache. If any part of this is ever traced back to this room — to any one of you — it will not end with a scolding, or a dismissal from service. My mother does not forgive lightly, and my grandfather forgives less. It could cost you your position. It could cost you your life, and I would have no way of shielding you from it." She made herself hold still, made herself say the rest of it without softening it, because they deserved the truth of the risk more than they deserved her comfort in the giving of it. "I would not think less of any one of you for saying no. I have no right to ask this at all, only the desperation of not knowing what else there is to do. So I am asking, plainly, rather than assuming it of you the way I have let myself assume a great many smaller things over the years. Will you help me?"

For a moment none of them spoke, and Aelys made herself sit with the silence rather than fill it, the way she had learned, that a question asked honestly deserved an honest span of quiet before its answer.

"You did not need to ask, Princess," Ser Howland said at last, low and steady. "But since you have. Yes."

"Yes," Grunhilda said simply, as though the answer required no more ceremony than that.

Septa Wenna was the last to speak.

"The Mother teaches mercy, and the Warrior teaches courage, and I have never yet found a verse that asks a person to choose only one of the two." She folded her hands. "Yes, Princess. Whatever it costs."

———

The days that followed moved the way Aelys imagined a change of season must move for people who had never troubled themselves to watch for it — all at once, and yet so gradually that no single hour of it could be pointed to as the one where things had truly turned.

Grunhilda had carried the warning within a day, quietly, through her niece who served in Rhaenyra's own household — not a letter, nothing that could be found and read by the wrong eyes, only a few careful words passed between two women who trusted each other, in a corridor of the Red Keep that saw a hundred such exchanges a day and remembered none of them. It would have been easy enough, Aelys thought, to simply seek Rhaenyra out herself. No one would have blinked twice to see her with Jace; she spent half her days in his company and always had, and no one thought anything of it beyond the ordinary fondness of cousins raised half in and out of each other's households. But Rhaenyra was another matter entirely. A princess of Aelys's age did not simply call upon the King's own heir, alone, unannounced, for no occasion anyone could name — not without someone asking afterward why, and Aelys could not afford to be the answer to that question. Better a message with no name attached to it than a visit no one would forget. What Rhaenyra had made of the warning, Aelys did not yet know, and made herself not ask after too eagerly, for fear that the asking itself would become a thread someone else might pull. The other work moved slower, and stranger, the way she imagined seeds must move under soil before anyone above it could see the first green proof that anything had been planted at all. Septa Wenna had spoken to an old friend at the Great Sept who kept close with the wives of half the guild-masters in the city. Ser Howland had let a single, unhurried remark slip in the training yard, to another sworn shield who owed him a debt from some old campaign Aelys had never asked the particulars of, about how curious it was that every whisper against Prince Lucerys seemed to profit the very people spreading it loudest. And Grunhilda, who knew better than any of them how far a kindness could travel once it was set walking on its own legs, had simply gone about her ordinary errands in the ordinary way, and let the ordinary people she'd always been kind to be kind to her in turn, with the particular unguarded honesty people kept only for someone they trusted completely.

By the fourth day, Aelys heard a fishwife's version of it secondhand, relayed by a stable boy who had no notion whose words he was truly repeating — something about the Queen's uncommon interest in Driftmark. She had almost laughed, hearing it, at how thoroughly the words had already stopped belonging to her.

It was on the sixth day that Helaena found her in the gardens.

Aelys had come out to sit by the low stone wall above the kitchen beds, where the last of the season's asters still held their color before the frost took them, mostly because Septa Wenna's lessons had grown too heavy this week to sit through indoors, and because the noise of the training yard on the other side of the wall — the ordinary, unbothered clatter of swords and boys shouting at each other — was a comfort she had not known she needed until she had it. Helaena came to find her there without warning, as she often did, trailing the hem of her gown through beds she'd been told a hundred times not to walk through, her attention fixed entirely on something cupped between her two hands.

"Look," Helaena said, by way of greeting, and opened her fingers just enough to show a moth, dust-brown and patient, walking in small circles over her palm. "It came in through my window last night and would not leave. I think it likes the candle better than the moon. That seems a foolish thing for a moth to prefer, doesn't it? The moon never burns you."

"Perhaps it doesn't know the difference," Aelys said, "until it's too close to matter."

"Mm." Helaena considered the moth with the particular unhurried seriousness, and lowered herself onto the wall beside her sister, still cradling it. "Jace is to marry Baela, did you know? Mother told me this morning, while I was dressing. Rhaenyra sent word last night, it seems — I gather it was arranged rather quickly, once she'd made up her mind to it. Luke is for Rhaena." She turned her hand slightly, watching the moth adjust its circle to the new angle of her palm. "I think that's tidy of them, don't you? Keeping the dragons in pairs. Vermax and Moondancer have always gotten on well, when they're flown together. I don't think Arrax and Morning are as fond of each other, but perhaps they'll grow into it."

Aelys said nothing.

She was aware, in some distant, careful corner of herself, that she had not moved at all — that her hands were still folded in her lap exactly as they had been a moment before, that her face had not done whatever it wanted to do, that from the outside she must look precisely as she had looked before Helaena sat down, as though the words had simply passed through the garden and out again without finding anywhere in her to land. She was aware, too, that this was, in its own small way, a mercy, because Helaena had not said it to wound her, had not said it at her at all, had only been thinking of moths and dragons and would never think to look for a wound in her sister's face because it would never occur to her that one might be there to find.

"That's good," Aelys heard herself say, from somewhere that did not feel entirely like the front of her own mouth. "Baela will make him happy, I think."

"I think so too." Helaena opened her hand fully, and the moth sat a moment longer on her palm before lifting, unhurried, into the last of the afternoon light, tracing one slow circle above the aster bed before it found the shadow of the wall and was gone."There. Now it can go and decide about the moon on its own."

Aelys watched the space where the moth had been for a moment longer than there was any longer anything to watch.

"I should go in," she said. "I told Septa Wenna I would finish the chapter on the Mother's mercy before supper."

"You always say that," Helaena said, not unkindly, already turning her attention to a beetle making its slow, determined progress along the top of the wall, "and you never seem to finish it."

Aelys had risen halfway from the wall before Helaena spoke again, in the same mild, unhurried voice she used for moths and beetles.

"Beware the moose, sister. It will take the thing you love most."

Aelys stopped. But Helaena had already gone, in the way she so often went, back into whatever quiet country she kept for herself — her whole attention settled once more on the beetle's slow progress along the stone, as though she had never spoken at all, as though the words had simply passed through her and left nothing behind for her to remember having said.

"Thank you, sister," Aelys said softly, and smiled, because there seemed nothing else to do with it.

She knew, from long practice, not to press Helaena for more than Helaena offered on her own. Her sister said strange things at least once a fortnight — about eggs that would hatch and eggs that wouldn't, about a beast beneath the boards, about a dream she'd once had and never finished describing to anyone — and most of it, Aelys had learned, was only the ordinary weather of Helaena's mind, harmless rambling. She let this one go the same way she let the others go, quickly, without dwelling on it.

It left a small shiver behind anyway, one she could not entirely account for, and did not try very hard to.

Aelys smoothed her skirts with hands that felt, distantly, as though they belonged to someone else, and walked back toward the godswood at a pace that cost her a great deal more effort to keep even than it should have.

The godswood was empty at that hour, as it usually was. Few at court still had much use for the old gods. They kept to the Seven and the bright new sept, leaving the ancient grove to its own quiet, like an empty chair no one had the heart—or the need—to remove from the table. It was a small thing, as godswoods went, no more than an acre pressed in against the castle's thick walls above the Blackwater — elm and alder and black cottonwood grown up close and unruly around a heart tree that was not the pale, red-leaved weirwood of the songs at all, but a great brown oak, gnarled with age, wound about in smokeberry vines that had long since stopped asking anyone's permission to climb where they liked. It made a poor place of worship by any southern reckoning, more secluded garden than sept, and most of the court treated it exactly that way — a quiet corner to walk through on the way to somewhere else, rather than a place to kneel.

Aelys had always liked it best for precisely that reason. Nothing in it required anything of her — no bearing to hold, no face to keep still for an audience that might read too much into it. She was not devout, not in any way a septon would have recognized or approved of; she said her prayers to the Seven because she had been raised to say them, the way she had been raised to curtsy and to hold a fork correctly, and had never once felt the Mother or the Warrior lean any closer to her for the saying of them. The old gods were different, in some way she had never managed to put into words even to herself, and had certainly never confessed to her mother, who would not have known what to do with a daughter who preferred a nameless oak to the Seven her own faith was built upon. She could not have said what the old gods were, or whether they were anything at all beyond old roots and older silence. She only knew that when she sat beneath that gnarled brown tree, she felt listened to in a way she never quite felt inside the sept's brighter, more crowded quiet.

She sat on the flat stone near the oak's roots, the one she had claimed as hers years ago without ever telling anyone she'd claimed it, and let her face finally do whatever it had been wanting to do since the moment Helaena had opened her hand and let the moth go.

It came out of her strangely, not all at once the way she had expected grief to arrive, but in pieces that did not seem to want to agree with one another.

The first piece was simple enough, and she let herself have it without much resistance, because there seemed no use pretending otherwise now that she was alone. She was going to lose him. Not lose him as a friend — Jace would still write to her, still tease her about her books, still be the same easy, unguarded person he had always been whenever their paths crossed at court — but lose the other thing, the thing she had never once let herself name plainly until a solar door had cracked it open in her without her permission. She had built a whole soft, private future out of almost nothing — a handful of afternoons in a library, a habit of feeling safe in his company that she had never examined closely enough to notice it had become something else. She had never had him. That was the part that made it worse rather than better, somehow; she could not even properly mourn a thing that had truly been hers, only the shape of a thing she had let herself imagine without ever once asking whether imagining it was allowed.

The second piece arrived harder on the heels of the first, and she almost hated it for how little it cared about the first piece's feelings. Because Jace was safer now. Luke was safer now. A betrothal to Baela and Rhaena bound the Velaryon fleet to their claim in a way no amount of arguing legitimacy in front of a council ever could have, and made the boys harder to strip of their names precisely because two old, unimpeachable houses had just staked their own honor on standing beside them. She had wanted that. She had worked for that, in her small, hidden way, passing a warning through Grunhilda's careful hands because she could not bear to do nothing while her own family sharpened a knife for two boys who had done nothing to deserve it. She had gotten exactly what she wanted. It should have felt like triumph, and some small, treacherous part of her did feel it as triumph, warm and real underneath everything else, and that made her feel worse than the grief did, because it meant she could not even hate the outcome cleanly. She had helped build the very thing that had taken him from her, and she could not honestly say, sitting here with her face wet and her hands cold in her lap, that she would undo it even if the gods themselves offered to let her.

And beneath both of those, rising last and ugliest, was the anger, and it did not know quite where to point itself, which only made it worse. She was angry at Rhaenyra, a little, for moving so quickly, though she knew perfectly well Rhaenyra had only done exactly what Aelys herself had all but asked her to do. She was angry at her mother, more than a little, for making any of this necessary in the first place, for spending  years grinding two boys' names down to nothing so patiently that Aelys had been left with no better tool to fight it than her own heart. She was angry, worst of all, at herself — for being fool enough to want a thing she had known, every single day of her life, that a princess of her blood was never going to be permitted to keep, and for somehow still being surprised, still being wounded, when the wanting cost her exactly what she should have known it would.

It was not fair, she thought, with the fierce, unreasonable anger of someone who knew, even as she thought it, that fairness had never once been asked of the world she had been born into. It was not fair that doing the right thing, the only decent thing, should have to cost her the one soft hope she had let herself keep. It was not fair that she could not simply be glad for Jace, cleanly, the way a good sister ought to be glad, without this ugly tangle of grief and pride and rage all knotted together so tightly she could not have said, if pressed, which thread was truly hers to pull.

She sat with all of it a long while, until the light through the canopy had gone from gold to grey, and did not try to make it make sense.

When there was nothing left in her to cry with, she found herself speaking quietly.

"Keep him safe," she said, her voice breaking around it. "Keep both of them safe." She pressed her palms flat against the cold stone to steady herself, because her hands would not otherwise stop shaking. "I do not wish to hold him. To keep him for myself. Maybe I would like to. But if the price for his safety is my own happiness, I would gladly pay it. I would pay it every day and never once complain of the cost." She pressed her forehead down against her own knees, begging now in every way but the word itself. "Please. Please keep him safe."

The grove said nothing back, the way it always said nothing back, and Aelys had never once expected it to. But something in the saying of it settled in her chest regardless, and she found, when she finally rose from the flat stone to walk back toward the keep, that she could breathe a little easier for having said it aloud, even to no one, even into silence that never answered.

———

The council had emptied by the time the true business of the evening began — Grand Maester Orwyle the first to rise, gathering his notes on the King's condition with the particular weary care of a man who had given the same unchanged report too many times running; Jasper Wylde and Lord Beesbury trailing after him still arguing some fine point of precedent between law and coin; Ser Tyland Lannister the last of them to bow himself through the doors, pausing only to exchange a brief word with Otto before he, too, was gone. Only three remained at the long table beneath the carved weirwood faces of the Small Council chamber: Otto in the Hand's seat he had occupied so long it had long since stopped looking borrowed, Alicent in the chair she was not, by any law of the realm, entitled to, and Larys Strong at the table's foot, his ruined leg drawn beneath him at the angle he always favored, his face wearing the same mild, unbothered patience it wore whether the news he carried was trivial or ruinous.

"Say it plainly, Lord Larys," Otto said, without preamble, once the doors had shut. "You did not linger after the others for the pleasure of my company."

"No, my lord Hand." Larys folded his hands atop the table, his voice as even as still water. "There is a great deal of talk moving through the city just now. More than usual, and stranger in its shape. I thought it best you both heard the whole of it from me, rather than in pieces, from men less careful with what they choose to repeat."

"Of Driftmark," Larys said. "And of Prince Lucerys and Prince Jacaerys. And, I am sorry to say, of you, my queen."

Otto's expression did not change, but something in the set of his shoulders did, the particular stillness of a man who had already guessed the shape of an unwelcome thing and was merely waiting to have it confirmed. "Go on."

"The city has learned why Lord Vaemond comes to King's Landing, and the people have begun asking who stands to profit by it. They find the answer rather too convenient for comfort." Larys recited it without inflection, the way a maester might recite a list of a patient's symptoms, careful to color none of it with his own opinion of the diagnosis. "That every voice raised against the boy's legitimacy seems, upon a moment's reflection, to belong to someone who stands to gain a fleet and a throne by it. That dragons do not suffer bastards to ride them, and all three of Princess Rhaenyra's sons have claimed one regardless, which the smallfolk have decided is proof enough of blood, whatever their hair might say to the contrary."

He continued, unhurried. "There is also a good deal of talk of the boys' grandmothers, of all things. Queen Aemma was brown-haired herself, and Lady Rhaenys carries the blood of the First Men through her mother's line, blood that is said to show itself again after generations of Valyrian silver. The smallfolk seem perfectly content with this explanation, and pass it from mouth to mouth as if it were an old truth." He smiled faintly.

"And," he said, with no particular emphasis, though Alicent felt the words land regardless, precise as a blade slipped between ribs, "that if hair alone were proof of parentage, the city wonders aloud why no one troubles to ask the same question of Princess Aelys, whose coloring, they are fond of pointing out, is rather more golden than silver — Lannister coloring, some call it, and joking that the Queen ought to look nearer her own daughter's head before she goes hunting after some other woman's sons."

The chamber was very quiet for a moment.

"They dare?" Alicent's voice broke like a whip. "They dare put my daughter in the same breath as that shameless woman and her bastards?"

“They dare a great deal more than that, it seems.” Otto's hand came down flat against the table. “This is no idle tavern muttering, Larys. This is argument, built with care, aimed with precision—at Vaemond's claim, at the very foundation we have spent years laying beneath it. Someone has set these whispers loose, and they have done so now for a reason.”

His eyes moved to Alicent, then back to Larys, sharp and demanding.

“Find me the source. I care not whose mouth it began in. I want the root of it, not the branches.”

"I am already pulling at what threads I can find, my lord Hand. It is slow work. Whoever set it walking took great care to leave no single hand upon it — a servant here, a guardsman's idle word there, nothing that traces back further than a shrug and an I heard it from someone in the market." Larys's gaze, mild as ever, drifted toward Alicent for the length of a single unhurried breath before returning to Otto. "Whoever built this understood exactly how gossip is made unkillable. It is, if I may say so, rather elegantly done."

"Elegant," Otto repeated, with open disgust, "is not the word I would choose for treason dressed as marketplace chatter."

"There is one thread I have managed to follow further than the rest," Larys said quietly. "A woman selling eels near the Mud Gate told one of my people she'd had it from a girl called Taya — one of the women who keeps the orphans at the local motherhouse, feeds them, clothes them, as best the Faith's charity allows. Taya could not say where she'd first heard it herself, only that it had been on a great many tongues in that quarter for some days now, spoken of as settled fact rather than rumor." He paused, mild as ever, watching neither of them in particular. "It is, as these things go, a very small thread. But it is the closest to a beginning I have yet found."

Alicent went very still.

She knew the name. She knew it the way a woman knows the names of the people her own coin has quietly kept fed for years without ever once setting foot in the place herself to see it done — because Aelys had come to her, near four years past now, with a request so small and so uncharacteristically earnest that Alicent had granted it without troubling to ask many questions behind it: a monthly sum, modest enough not to be missed from the girl's own allowance, sent to a woman at a motherhouse. Taya. Alicent had signed the household ledger entry herself, more times than she could now easily count, and had thought no more of it than she thought of any of her children's small charities, the harmless, forgettable kindnesses girls of a certain age liked to practice before duty gave them heavier things to spend their kindness on instead.

There was no one else it could be. Alicent understood that with a certainty that arrived all at once and did not require further questioning. Whatever else this rumor was built from — a guardsman's idle word, a servant's careless tongue, all the other small threads Larys had not yet managed to trace — it had begun, in the end, exactly where her own daughter's quiet, unremarked-upon kindness had always quietly begun, in a corner of the city Alicent had never once thought to watch closely enough.

She thought, with a coldness that had nothing to do with the chamber's draft, of how many years she had spent trying to put some proper distance between her daughter and that boy — separating their lessons where she could, seating them apart at feasts, finding reasons, gentle and plausible ones, why Aelys's company might be better spent elsewhere. It had never once truly worked, not the way it had worked easily enough with Aemond, who had wanted no closeness with his Velaryon cousins to begin with, or even with Aegon, whose indifference to anyone outside his own pleasures had done Alicent's work for her without her needing to lift a hand. Only with Aelys had the effort simply failed, quietly, year after year, the girl's fondness for that boy proving sturdier than every careful arrangement Alicent had ever made against it.

She had known that much for years and had told herself it did not matter, that a girl's fondness for a childhood companion was a harmless thing, easily outgrown, easily redirected once a proper match was found for her. She had not imagined — had not once, in all her careful watching, thought to imagine — that the fondness ran deep enough to turn her own daughter into a weapon aimed back at her own family.

Alicent did not say any of this aloud. She was aware, distantly, of Larys watching her — not Otto, not the table, but her, with the same mild, patient attention he gave everything, and she wondered, with a small, unpleasant twist of something that was not quite fear, how much of what she had only just now assembled in her own mind he had already assembled a great deal earlier, and simply chosen, for reasons of his own, not yet to say.

"Keep pulling at your threads, Lord Larys," she said at last, her voice giving away nothing of what sat beneath it. "I find I would very much like to know where they lead."

"As you wish, my queen." Larys inclined his head, and if there was anything like satisfaction in the small, unhurried movement of it, he was far too practiced a man to let it show on his face.

Otto was already speaking again, already turning the conversation back toward Vaemond and the morning to come, the particular relentlessness of a man who did not permit himself to dwell long on a problem he had already handed to someone else to solve. Alicent let him speak, and did not trouble to correct the shape of his attention, because there was a colder, quieter thought sitting beneath all of it now that she had no intention of sharing with either man at this table.

Her own daughter had chosen, deliberately, to work against her own mother's interest, in secret, at considerable risk to herself and to whichever poor souls she had trusted to help her do it. Not out of malice — Alicent could not, even now, quite make herself believe it had been malice — but out of some soft, misplaced loyalty to a boy who was never going to belong to their side of this war, whatever affection Aelys had allowed herself to feel for him. That her own blood, raised in this castle, taught the same catechism of duty every one of her children had been taught, could still turn so easily against the family that had raised her, for the sake of a boy she had no true claim upon, was a thing Alicent found she could not yet look at directly without something in her chest going tight and airless.

It was, Alicent thought, precisely the kind of mistake a girl made when no one had yet taught her, plainly enough, where a daughter's loyalty was meant to end and a house's began.

She would have to correct that. Soon, and thoroughly.

———

The throne room had never felt so large to Aelys as it did that morning, and she had stood in it a hundred times before without once feeling small inside it the way she felt small inside it now.

Ser Laenor had been dead the better part of a year, found dead on Driftmark after a quarrel with Ser Qarl Correy that had ended with more questions than answers and more whispers than truths. The household had never spoken of it plainly in Aelys's hearing, though the court had done what courts always did when a noble death came too suddenly — it filled the silence with stories. Some said Ser Qarl had acted alone, that anger and wine and a moment's madness were enough to end a man's life. Others whispered that there had been more to it than that, that perhaps another hand had guided the blade, and that Princess Rhaenyra had found herself in need of a husband who was no longer standing between her and Prince Daemon.

Aelys had never believed that last part.

The court was fond of making monsters out of people it disliked, and she had known Rhaenyra well enough to know that ambition did not erase every kindness a person had ever possessed. She had seen the way her aunt cared for Laenor in the years before distance and disappointment had settled between them, seen the affection that had existed there even if it had not been the sort sung of in the songs. Whatever else Rhaenyra might be accused of, Aelys had never been able to believe she would have ordered the death of a man she had deeply cared for simply to make room for another.

But true or false, Laenor was gone, and in the months that followed, the question of who would sit the Seastone Chair after Lord Corlys had grown from a quiet worry among old men into the very thing that had brought half the court to watch this morning.

By law and by custom, the answer should have needed no debate at all — Lucerys was Laenor's trueborn son, named heir before the whole realm years past. But custom had never once stopped a man convinced of his own claim, and Vaemond Velaryon, Lord Corlys's own nephew, had crossed half the Narrow Sea to make certain the realm heard his objection before any ruling could be handed down unchallenged.

The court had gathered in the numbers it only gathered in for occasions someone wished remembered, and it had arranged itself, as such crowds always seemed to arrange themselves without anyone troubling to give the order aloud, into two halves that did not touch. Her own family stood to the left of the Iron Throne, where they always stood; Rhaenyra's stood to the right, where they always stood; and the long, empty stretch of marble between the two halves of the hall felt, to Aelys, wider that morning than she had ever known it to feel before.

Viserys sat the Iron Throne wrapped in the heavy ceremonial robes that had begun, this past year, to look less like garments and more like scaffolding built to hold a collapsing thing upright a while longer. His hands trembled faintly where they rested on the arms of the throne, half-hidden beneath the swordblades and barbs the old conquerors had melted into its shape.

On her own side of the hall, Alicent stood very straight, her hands folded before her, wearing the particular composed stillness Aelys had learned long ago to read as its opposite. Otto beside her wore no such tension at all, only the flat, satisfied patience of a man who considered the outcome already decided. Aegon stood a little apart, weight shifted onto one hip, eyes drifting over the crowd with the glazed boredom of a man doing arithmetic on how much longer he would be kept standing here. Aemond stood very still beside him, his single eye moving across the hall with an attention that missed nothing, the faintest suggestion of a smile at the corner of his mouth that never quite finished becoming one. Helaena stood beside Aemond because it was where she had been placed, her eyes fixed on their father.

Across the width of the hall stood Rhaenyra's family, and Aelys found her eyes drawn, before she could stop them, to the two figures at its head — Rhaenyra and Daemon, wed now these several months past, standing close together. They looked, Aelys thought, the way she imagined two dragons must look circling the same stretch of sky, matched rather than merely paired, neither one waiting on the other's permission to simply be exactly as fierce and as certain as they already were. She let herself feel the small, private ache of that for exactly as long as she could afford to, and then made herself look past them, to where Jace stood with Baela close at his side, and Luke nearer his mother, and Rhaena beside him.

The horns sounded, and Vaemond Velaryon entered the hall.

He knelt before the throne with proper form, and rose, and Aelys watched her father draw the kind of breath a man draws when he already knows a conversation will cost him more than he has left to spend on it.

"Say what you have come to say, Lord Vaemond," Viserys said. "Let us have done with this matter."

"Your Grace." Vaemond's voice carried to every corner of the hall without needing to be raised. "I am of the blood of Old Valyria, born of House Velaryon, and I will not see that bloodline passed over for a lie. I come to claim what is mine by that blood. When my uncle dies, Driftmark and the Velaryon fleet ought to pass to me, and not to a boy this court has spent a decade pretending is something he is not."

He must have expected the hall to murmur its agreement at that. It did not. The sound that moved through the assembled lords instead was thinner, uncertain — a lady near the back murmuring something to her neighbor with the shape, if not quite the words, of who profits most from such a claim, one wonders; a lord further along repeating, half beneath his breath, something about dragons and the blood they were said to know better than any court could. Not disbelief, not openly. But not the clean assent Vaemond had come prepared to receive, either, and Aelys, standing very still on her own side of that wide marble floor, felt something in her chest she did not examine too closely and did not let show on her face at all.

Beside her, she saw her mother's eyes move once across the crowd, quick and sharp, and something in Alicent's composed stillness tightened by a degree Aelys did not think anyone else in the hall would have caught. Otto's jaw had set, faintly, the look of a man recalculating a sum he had believed, until this moment, to be settled beyond any need for recalculating.

"With respect, Your Grace," Vaemond went on, "a king's word may make a thing lawful, but it cannot make falsehood truth. There is not a man in this hall who does not know what his own eyes tell him when he looks upon that boy."

"You forget yourself," Rhaenyra said, from the right side of the hall, her voice even, though Aelys could hear, beneath the evenness, something that had been worn thin by having to say some version of these words too many times already. "My son is trueborn, and I will not stand in my own father's hall and hear him called otherwise."

"My lord Vaemond." Otto's voice, when it came, was measured, almost gentle. "This is a grave charge to lay before the whole realm."

"It has been spoken quietly for years, Lord Hand, and nothing has come of quiet but silence bought with royal favor." Vaemond did not so much as glance at Otto either. "I will say it here, before the whole court, because it is here that Driftmark's succession will one day be settled in truth, whatever this hall decides to call the settling of it today."

"I have heard your claim, Lord Vaemond, and I have already given you my answer." Viserys's voice had gone hard, though it cost him visibly to make it so, the effort pulling at the corners of his mouth. "Lucerys Velaryon is the lawful heir to Driftmark and the Velaryon fleet, and that ruling stands. You would do well to accept it and take your leave of this hall with whatever dignity you have left to carry out of it."

For a moment Aelys thought it might end there — a ruling given, a door closed, a bitter man made to swallow a defeat in front of the court that had come to watch him receive it. She saw something in her mother's face tighten at the thought of it, the particular strain of a woman watching years of careful work threaten to end in nothing at all.

Then Vaemond's composure finally broke loose of whatever had been holding it.

"Bastards." The word rang through the hall. "All three of them. They have been dressed in our colors and given our name, but no cloth and no decree can make them Velaryon. They are Harwin Strong's sons, and I will not see the blood of Old Valyria set aside for a lie."

The word landed and did not stop landing. Aelys saw Jace's jaw go tight across the width of the marble floor, saw Baela's hand tighten at his arm, saw Luke's face go the particular white of a boy trying very hard not to let a room see him flinch.

"Enough," Daemon said, low and very controlled, which Aelys had learned, even from a distance, to find far more frightening than shouting would have been. "You will not stand in the King's own hall and call my nephews bastards to their faces."

"I will call them exactly what they are, Prince Daemon, and you above anyone in this hall know better than most how little Velaryon blood truly runs in them."

"I will have your tongue for that," Viserys said, his voice shaking with an effort that seemed to cost him everything he had left to spend on it. He turned, already reaching for command. "Ser—"

"He can keep his tongue."

Daemon's voice was quiet. Aelys did not see him move.

That was the thing she would remember afterward, turning it over sleepless that night and many nights after — that one moment Prince Daemon stood at the edge of the dais, and the next Dark Sister was already free of its sheath, already moving, and Vaemond Velaryon's head was already leaving his shoulders before the sound of the blade had finished traveling through the hall.

The scream that followed did not come from Vaemond. There had been no time left in him for one. It came from somewhere in the crowd, high and short, cut off almost as quickly as it started, and then the whole hall seemed to hold its breath at once, a thousand people gone perfectly silent in the same instant, staring at a dead man's body folding slowly to the marble floor with blood already spreading black and wide beneath it.

And Aelys smiled.

She did not decide to. She understood that clearly, even as it happened, even as she felt her own mouth curve before any better sense in her could stop it — some small, ungovernable, ungracious part of her simply glad, fiercely and uncomplicatedly glad, that a man who had spent his final breath calling Luke and Jace bastards to their faces had paid for the privilege before the whole court, in the one currency this family had ever truly respected.

It could not have lasted more than a moment. She felt it leave her face almost as quickly as it had arrived, schooled back into the careful blankness she had spent a year learning to wear in rooms like this one.

But a moment, she understood, turning her head and finding her mother already watching her, was more than enough.

Alicent's eyes held hers across the width of the dais, and there was nothing uncertain left in them at all — no question, no half-formed suspicion still waiting to be confirmed, only the flat, quiet certainty of a woman who had just been shown, plainly, in her own daughter's unguarded face, exactly what she had already begun to suspect in a council chamber some days past. Aelys felt the whole of it pass between them without either of them saying a single word, and understood, with a coldness that had nothing to do with the dead man cooling on the marble a dozen feet away, that her mother knew.

Around them the hall was already breaking apart into chaos — a lord shouting for the Kingsguard, a lady somewhere behind her being half-carried from the room in a faint, Viserys's own voice raised in something between horror and command that Aelys could not, in that moment, make herself listen closely enough to understand. Otto's hand had gone to Alicent's arm, not gently, already moving her toward the doors at the hall's rear, away from the blood and the noise and whatever might come next in a room where a prince of the realm had just taken a man's head off in front of the assembled lords of the Seven Kingdoms.

But her mother did not look away first. Aelys did. She made herself do it, made herself turn her eyes back toward the dais, toward the body, toward anything at all that was not that flat, terrible certainty in her own mother's face, and told herself, with a conviction she did not entirely believe even as she reached for it, that whatever came of that look, she would find some way to bear it.

———

The dragonpit smelled of scorched stone and old smoke, and Aelys stood at the top of the wide stone steps above it, watching Rhaenyra's household prepare to fly for Dragonstone, because she had told herself, coming out here, that she wished only to watch, and had not let herself examine the lie too closely before believing it.

Below her, the business of readying the dragons for a long flight went on the way it always did — chains unlocked link by link, handlers calling to one another over the low, constant rumble of restless wings, saddlers making their last careful checks of girth and strap before stepping well clear. Vermax was already loose of his chains, pacing a slow, impatient circle across the scorched ground, his long neck curving now and again to watch the men working near his flank with the particular wary attention dragons always seemed to give anyone standing close enough to matter. Overhead, high enough that she had to shade her eyes to find her properly, Moondancer cut a lazy circle against the grey autumn sky, Baela already mounted and waiting, in no apparent hurry to come down.

"You came to see us off, then."

She had not heard Jace climb the steps behind her, which she thought, afterward, was rather unlike her — she had made something of a habit, these past weeks, of hearing people before they announced themselves. But it was only Jace, and some part of her had simply stopped bothering to guard herself quite so carefully whenever it was only Jace.

"I came to watch you fly," she said. "Whether that counts as seeing you off, I suppose you may decide for yourself."

He smiled at that, though it did not sit as easily on him as it usually did, and came to stand beside her at the top of the steps, his eyes going, as hers had, to Vermax below rather than to each other. "I don't like it," he said, after a moment. "Any of it. I don't want the court to forget us, Aelys. It's easy enough for them to do it, if we're not standing in front of them every day — easy to forget my mother's the heir, easy to let a whole city talk itself into thinking Aegon would simply be the tidier answer, once we're not there to remind anyone why he shouldn't be."

Aelys said nothing for a moment, only looked at him.

"They won't forget you," she said finally, short as she meant it to be, and smiled. "I'll make sure of that much myself."

Something shifted in his face at that. "I know you will." He held her gaze a moment longer than the words alone required."My mother told me what you did. Not just the warning — the rest of it too. The talk that's been moving through the city this past month, the doubt about who truly profits from Vaemond's claim, all of it. She knows whose hand set it walking, even if she'll never say the name aloud to anyone but me." His voice had gone quieter, more serious than she was used to hearing from him. "It's helped us more than you know, Aelys. More than I think even you meant it to, maybe.”

"It hasn't undone anything, though." Aelys kept her eyes on Vermax rather than on him, because it was easier to say plainly to a dragon than to a face. "People still talk. I couldn't kill the whispers outright."

"No," Jace said softly. "But you changed them."

She looked at him then, uncertain.

"That is not a small thing, Aelys. A whisper is most dangerous when it has only one shape. When everyone hears the same words and believes they already know the truth." He shook his head. "You did not need to make them forget. You only needed to make them wonder."

The dragon shifted beside them as Vermax moved his great head toward the sound of the city beyond. The world outside the dragonpit carried on as it always did — merchants shouting, nobles scheming, servants carrying tales from one corner of the Red Keep to another. There would always be voices eager to speak of things they did not understand.

"They still believe it," Aelys said quietly. "Some of them."

"Some always will." There was no anger in Jace's voice, only a tired sort of understanding. He had lived too long beneath other people's doubts to expect them to disappear simply because someone offered them another truth. "You cannot force people to trust us. You cannot silence every cruel word spoken in a hall or whispered behind a closed door."

He looked toward the city, toward the people who would one day decide whether to accept him or reject him.

"But you gave me something far more useful than silence. You gave me uncertainty.” His expression changed then. The softness faded, replaced by something steadier — the look of a boy who had spent his life being told what he lacked and was finally beginning to understand what he could do."Now it falls to me."

Aelys watched him carefully. "To do what?"

Jace straightened, not like a boy trying to convince himself he was a prince, but like one trying to become worthy of the title. "To give them something better to believe in." 

He paused, his eyes returning to Vermax before settling back on her. "I cannot answer every whisper. A prince who spends his life chasing every rumor will never have time to rule." His voice grew firmer. "But I can stand before them. I can show them that the man they doubted was never the man they imagined."

A small smile touched his mouth, though there was little amusement in it."You opened the door, Aelys. Now I must have the courage to walk through it." And then, quieter: "I must act as a prince ought to."

"You make it sound almost simple."

"It won't be simple." His mouth curved, wry rather than certain. "But you handed me a door I didn't have a month ago, and I mean to walk through it properly, if I can."

He was quiet for a moment, something softer replacing the resolve in his face. "My mother's grateful too. More than I think she's found the words to say properly, even to me. She didn't reach out to thank you herself — she was afraid of exactly what would happen if anyone ever traced a thread between the two of you, after everything. But I wanted you to hear it plainly, from someone, at least once, before we go."

Aelys only smiled, because she did not entirely trust her voice with anything larger than that.

Jace's hand found hers then, without any particular ceremony to the taking of it, the way his hand had found hers a hundred times before across a hundred smaller moments neither of them had ever thought twice about. "I'm grateful too," he said, quieter now, his thumb moving once, absently, over her knuckles. "I know what you risked for us. I don't think I've properly said that yet, either."

For a moment there was nothing else in the whole dragonpit at all — not the shouting handlers, not the restless wings, not the grey sky waiting to take him from her. Only Jace, and his hand around hers, and the particular unguarded warmth in his face that she had spent a fortnight telling herself she had imagined into being. She was entirely lost in it, and did not, for that one suspended moment, trouble herself to pretend otherwise even to herself.

Vermax broke it first, ambling over on legs too long for the delicate way he placed them, and shoved his great snout between the two of them with the blunt, unapologetic insistence of a creature who had decided he had been ignored quite long enough. Jace staggered a half step, laughing, and Aelys laughed too, the sound surprising her with how easily it came.

"He's jealous," Jace said, steadying himself against one great foreleg. "Thinks if I'm not looking at him, I've no business looking at anything."

Aelys reached out and laid her palm flat against the warm, rough scale beneath Vermax's eye, and the dragon leaned into it, slow and deliberate, a low sound rumbling somewhere deep in his chest that was, unmistakably, something close to pleasure. She pressed a kiss to the ridge above his nostril, and another, and the rumbling only deepened.

"He still doesn't let anyone else this close, you know," Jace said, shaking his head with the particular fond exasperation of a boy resigned, long ago, to losing this argument every time. "Not the stable hands. Barely my own mother, half the time. And you he turns into this the moment you're within ten feet of him."

"Because I'm charming," Aelys said.

"I'm not so sure of that anymore." Jace shook his head, mock-solemn. "I think if you ever decided you wanted a dragon after all, Vermax would leave me standing in this pit without a second thought and go looking for a new rider."

"Then it's a good thing I have no intention of claiming one," she said, and something in her own voice went a little more serious than she meant it to, before she pulled it back to lightness on purpose. "Vermax is yours. I'll settle for borrowing his affection secondhand."

They laughed together a while longer, easy the way they had always been easy, and then, because there seemed no better moment left to say it before a worse one arrived in its place, Aelys said, "Congratulations, by the way. On the marriage."

Jace flushed, unmistakably, happiness moving plainly across his whole face in a way he did not seem to know how to hide even if he had wanted to, and Aelys felt something in her chest crack very quietly at the sight of it.

"Can I tell you something," he said, "that I haven't told anyone else?"

"Always."

Jace hesitated, though only for a moment, as if the words had been waiting behind his teeth for some time and he was only now deciding whether he trusted her enough to let them out. "I've been in love with Baela for a long while now."

He said it almost sheepishly, the way a boy might confess to a secret he had carried carefully and privately, something too precious to be spoken aloud too often. "Her hair. Her eyes." A small smile touched his face. "That dark violet, you know the one. I used to think no one else at court had eyes quite like hers."

He shook his head, laughing softly at himself. "Which is foolish, I suppose. Every Targaryen has them. Or close enough." His smile remained, because whatever reason told him it was foolish, his heart clearly did not agree. "But hers are different. I know that sounds ridiculous, but they are. They are brighter somehow. Like flowers in the sun. Like they were made to catch your attention."

His gaze drifted for a moment, as though he could see her standing there instead of the walls of the dragonpit around them. "Everyone sees silver hair and violet eyes and thinks they know what a Targaryen ought to look like. But Baela..." He smiled faintly. "Baela looks like herself."He seemed almost surprised by his own words when they left him. "I don't know why I'm telling you this."

"Because we tell each other things," Aelys said, and kept her voice admirably even, and did not let him see what the words had done to her — that they had confirmed, plainly and without any cruelty intended, precisely what she had always half known and never let herself say aloud even in the privacy of her own thoughts. Baela was white-gold and violet-eyed, Valyrian in every particular the realm had ever prized, and Aelys was neither of those things, and never would be. Some truths, she understood then with a clarity that cost her more than she let show, were not made kinder by pretending otherwise.

"We'll write," she said instead, because it was easier than anything else she might have said. "Properly. Often. And you had better be more consistent about it than Daeron, because that boy has never once managed to fill an entire page before he runs out of anything to say."

Jace laughed, grateful, she thought, for the lightness she'd handed him. "I promise. Properly and often." Then, more careful again, his eyes searched her face in a way that made her wonder exactly how much he had already seen there and simply chose not to name. "Will you be all right dōna (sweet one)? Here, I mean. Without—" He stopped, seeming to hear how the sentence wanted to finish itself, and did not finish it.

"Of course," Aelys said, light as she could make it. "You're hardly my only friend in the world, ñuha perzys (my prince)."

It did not sound as true as she wanted it to sound, and she knew it the moment it left her mouth, and Jace's face told her, gently, that he knew it too.

He did not argue with her. He only pulled her into a hug instead, long and unhurried, his arms coming around her the way they always had, easy and familiar and entirely without the weight she had let herself hang on it these past weeks — and that, she thought, was somehow the cruelest part of it, that it cost him nothing at all to hold her like this, while it cost her everything she had not to close her hands into the back of his doublet and simply refuse to let go.

Aelys pressed her face into the curve of his neck and breathed him in — leather and horse and woodsmoke and something underneath all of it that had simply always been Jace, some scent she would have known blind in a crowded room after ten years apart — and let herself have it, greedily, shamelessly, for exactly as long as he was willing to give it to her, because she understood, with a clarity that ached all the way down into her chest, that she did not know when she would next be permitted to stand this close to him and call it nothing more than a sister's embrace. She wanted to memorize it. The weight of his arms. The particular unhurried way he held on rather than merely touching and stepping back. She wanted, foolishly, achingly, to make it last long enough that some small selfish part of her might carry the shape of it through however many months came before she saw him again — and hated, faintly, how much of herself she was willing to spend on a moment that meant to him only goodbye, and meant to her almost everything she had never once been permitted to say aloud.

This was the last of it, she understood, holding on a moment longer than she had any right to. Not the last time he would embrace her — he would go on doing that for years yet, easily, without a second thought, the way brothers embraced sisters at feasts and farewells for the whole of their lives. But the last time it would be only hers to have, before he belonged, fully and rightly, to someone else. He had been hers first. Her Jace, before he was ever anyone's husband, before Baela's violet eyes had a claim on him older than Aelys's own. After tonight he would still be kind to her, still write, still call her sister in the same warm, unthinking voice he always had — but some small, private corner of him that had once simply been hers to keep would belong, from this hug onward, to another woman entirely, and Aelys held on for the length of a few more heartbeats, saying goodbye to that alone, before she made herself let go.

Caraxes came down beyond the pit's outer wall in a rush of wind and dust, Daemon swinging himself from the saddle before the great red dragon had even fully settled.

"Jacaerys." Daemon's voice carried easily across the scorched stone, not unkind, but final in the particular way his voice always was. "It's time."

Jace drew back from her slowly, his hand trailing once down her arm before letting go entirely. "I'll write," he said again, as though repeating it might make it truer.

"I'll hold you to it," Aelys said.

She watched him cross to Vermax, watched him mount, watched the great dragon gather itself beneath him and drive hard into the grey sky, Luke following a moment after with far less grace and a great deal more shouting from below, until the dragons found each other above the pit and fell into a loose, easy formation, climbing east and out over the water, growing smaller with every beat of their wings until Aelys could no longer say for certain which shape among them was his.

She stood at the top of the steps a long while after they had gone, watching the empty sky where they had been, and did not go back inside until the cold had found its way through her cloak and she could no longer pretend to herself that she was still watching anything at all.

The cold had already worked its way fully into her by the time Aelys let herself back into the castle, and she was thinking of nothing beyond the fire she meant to build up in her own hearth when she pushed open the door to her chambers and found she was not alone in them.

Her mother was sitting in the chair by the window, in the dark, without a candle lit anywhere in the room, and Aelys understood, before either of them had said a single word, that the shape of the evening had already been decided without her.

"Mother." She kept her voice even, though her heart had already begun to climb. "I didn't know you were waiting for me."

"I have been waiting rather longer than I would have liked." Alicent did not rise. Her voice, in the dark, had none of its usual careful composure left in it — something colder and more exposed underneath, the sound of a woman who had spent the whole walk here rehearsing calm and arrived with none of it intact. "Sit down, Aelys."

"I would rather stand."

"I did not ask what you would rather." A silence, brief and sharp. "Sit down."

Aelys sat, because there seemed no further use in refusing so small a thing when she could feel, already, that a much larger refusal was coming and would need whatever strength she had left to spend on it.

"I have failed you," Alicent said, at last, into the dark. "I understand that now, watching what you have become capable of. I taught you your letters and your prayers and thought that was duty enough. I never once sat you down and told you, plainly, what I should have told you years ago — that a princess of this blood does not lower herself to bastards. That whatever affection you let yourself feel for that boy, it was never yours to spend on him, and I let it go unspoken for years because I thought the fondness was harmless, a girl's foolishness she would grow out of on her own. I see now that I was wrong to leave it untaught. That failure is mine, and I have sat in this room a long while turning it over, deciding what I mean to do about it."

"Jace is not a bastard." Aelys was on her feet before she had decided to rise, the words coming out of her louder than she meant them to, louder than she had spoken to her mother in years. "He is a Targaryen the same as I am, and you know it. He has a dragon, Mother. Vermax answers to him the way Sunfyre answers to Aegon. Do not sit there and speak to me of duty when these last years you have done little but teach a whole city to lie about two boys who never once wronged you."

The slap landed before Aelys had finished the sentence, hard enough that her head turned with it, hard enough that for a moment the whole dark room went white and ringing at its edges.

She had never been struck by her mother before. Not once, not through every quiet cruelty and every cold silence Alicent had ever handed her instead of warmth. The shock of it was, for a moment, larger even than the pain.

But the fear that should have followed it did not come. What rose in its place, hot and sudden, felt almost like relief — as though some part of her had been waiting years for her mother to finally show her exactly what sat beneath all that careful, terrible composure, and was, the Gods help her, almost glad to see it plainly at last.

"Strike me again if it makes the truth easier to bear," Aelys said, her own voice shaking now, but not with fear. "It will not make it less true. I am not the one who forgot what this family is meant to stand for. You are."

"It ends," Alicent said, and her voice had gone low and shaking in a way Aelys had never heard it go before, her hand still raised as though she had not yet decided whether it was finished. "The treason. The disrespect. I know what you did, Aelys. I have known for days, and I let myself hope, foolishly, that I was wrong, because the alternative was a thing I did not want to be true of my own daughter. But I am not wrong. I watched your face the day Vaemond died. I saw exactly what you felt, and exactly whose side you had already chosen, long before that morning ever came." She was breathing hard now, her composure entirely gone, something raw and furious standing naked where it had once been. "You worked against your own family. In secret. At the risk of everyone foolish enough to help you. You turned my own weapon back upon me and thought, I suppose, that I would never trace it back to my own daughter's hand."

Aelys's cheek burned, hot and sharp, but she did not step back, and did not lower her eyes. "Because what you were doing was wrong, Mother. Wrong in every way that word has ever meant anything, in every prayer you have ever taught me to say to the Seven with a straight face. Vaemond would have taken a boy's whole name and future to buy a fleet for a war that hasn't even been declared yet, and you helped him do it, and I will not apologize to you for refusing to stand by and watch it happen simply because standing by is what a good, obedient daughter is meant to do. If that is treason, then I am glad of it. I would do it again tomorrow."

"You could have! You should have. That is precisely what duty asks of a daughter of this house — to stand by, and hold her tongue, and trust that her family knows better than she does what this family needs to survive." Alicent's hand closed suddenly around Aelys's jaw, not gently, forcing her face up and toward her own, and Aelys went very still, because there was something in her mother's eyes in that moment that frightened her more than the slap had. "You will marry Edric Baratheon. The arrangements are already made. The wedding will be within the week."

The words did not land properly at first. Aelys heard them the way a person hears something spoken underwater, distorted, wrong, refusing to resolve into meaning she could use. "Edric," she repeated. "Borros's son. He is—" She stopped, because she did not, in that moment, know which fact to reach for first — his age, his temper, the whispers she had heard about him even in passing, none of them kind. "He is a monster. You cannot mean that."

"I mean precisely that." Alicent released her jaw, though the mark of her fingers stayed printed into Aelys's skin a long moment after. "You will learn what it means to serve this family rather than betray it, and you will learn it in a household with no one left in it to help you forget your duty again."

Something cold and desperate rose up in Aelys's chest, the particular helpless fury of a creature realizing, all at once, exactly how small its cage truly was. "I won't do it." She said it again, louder, stepping toward her mother rather than away from her. "I won't marry a man I have never met so that you may punish me for having a conscience you apparently traded away years ago. You may lock me in this room, you may call it duty, you may tell yourself whatever story lets you sleep at night, but you cannot make me want it, and you cannot make me stop knowing exactly what you are for having done this."

Alicent laughed, short and without any humor in it at all. "Won't you." There was nothing left in her face of the mother who had once, however coldly, however distantly, still loved her. "And what precisely do you imagine you will do instead, Aelys? You have no army. No dragon — you never claimed one, did you, for all your fine principles about chains and cages, and now see what that fine principle has purchased you. No coin of your own that I have not given you. No voice on any council that matters. You are a girl, with no power of your own beyond whatever your family permits you to borrow, and I am done permitting you anything at all. You are, if I am honest with you the way I have perhaps too rarely been, the least useful of all my children in every practical sense that matters — Aegon will be King, Aemond has his dragon and his blade, even Helaena will give this family heirs one day. You have given this family nothing but trouble and a taste of its own gossip turned back upon it, and I find I have grown tired of waiting to see what use you might yet make of yourself."

"Then let me be useless." Aelys's voice cracked on the word, fury and grief tangled too closely together now to keep fully apart. “I would rather be useless in your eyes than useful in the way you wanted me. At least then I would know which of us still remembers what family ought to mean."

Alicent did not answer that. She only looked at her a moment longer, something almost like pity moving briefly across her face before it closed over again entirely, and Aelys understood, watching it close, that whatever fire she had just spent had bought her nothing at all — that her mother had already decided, long before walking into this room, that nothing Aelys said tonight was going to change what came next.

"You will stay in this room until the wedding," Alicent said, already moving toward the door, her voice gone flat and administrative now, a queen issuing an order rather than a mother delivering a verdict. "A guard will see to it that you do not leave it unescorted. I would tell you I am sorry it has come to this, but I find, standing here, that I am not sorry at all. Only tired. And disappointed in a way I did not know I still had room left in me to be."

She left. The door closed behind her, not loudly, which somehow made it worse than if she had slammed it.

Aelys sat alone in the dark a long while after, her cheek still stinging, her jaw still faintly marked, and did not cry at first, because the shock of it seemed too large yet to fit through anything so small as tears.

When it finally came, it came all at once, and she curled into the corner of the window seat her mother had just vacated and wept the way she had not let herself weep since she was a very small girl. And somewhere in the middle of it, unbidden, she found herself remembering the godswood — the cold stone beneath her palms, her own voice breaking apart as she begged whatever sat beneath that old brown oak to keep him safe, to keep both of them safe, to let her own happiness be the price and let it be paid gladly.

A short, disbelieving laugh tore out of her before the next sob could arrive, ugly and entirely without humor in it. The old gods had listened, it seemed. She had asked them to take her happiness in exchange for his safety, and they had taken it so thoroughly, so precisely, so far beyond anything she had thought she was bargaining for, that she could almost admire the cruelty of the accounting. Edric Baratheon. A man twice her age, known even at this distance for wine and women and a temper that left marks on more than one tavern floor, and she was to be handed to him within the week and expected to call it duty. She would live the rest of her life in a cage built specifically to punish the one decent thing she had ever done, and somewhere across the Narrow Sea, Jace would go on being safe, and happy, and entirely unaware of precisely what his safety had cost the girl who had prayed for it.

"You heard me," she said aloud, to no one, her voice cracking somewhere between a laugh and a sob. "You heard every word of it."

———

The waiting was the worst part.

Jace sat on a bench outside his mother's chambers with his hands pressed flat against his knees, as though holding them still might hold everything else still too. He was five years old - old enough to understand what was happening behind that door, old enough to have heard the stories. His grandmother Aemma had died bringing his mother into the world. He had not known her, but he knew what it meant: that sometimes mothers did not come back. That sometimes the door opened and everything was different after.

The corridor was quiet except for the occasional murmur of servants passing and the distant sound, muffled but unmistakable, of a woman in labor.

His mother's voice.

He had been told not to worry. His grandmother had told him that Rhaenyra was strong, that the maesters were skilled, that there was no reason to expect anything but good news.

But Rhaenys had also placed her hand on his shoulder when she said it, and her grip had been firm, and she had not smiled.

Adults did that. They told you things were fine while their hands said something else entirely.

Beside him, so small she barely reached his elbow even sitting, Aelys swung her feet back and forth above the floor.

She was not worried. She was too young to be worried, too young to understand what the sounds from behind the door might mean. Her strawberry-gold hair had been pinned back from her face but was already escaping in soft wisps around her temples, and her pale green gown - chosen by someone who did not understand how rarely small children stayed clean - had a smudge of something on the sleeve that she kept examining with great interest.

"Babe," she said, for perhaps the dozenth time. "Jaja. babe."

"Not yet," he said.

"Babe," she repeated, as though he simply had not heard her correctly.

He almost smiled. Almost.

Then another scream came from behind the door - sharper, more urgent - and his whole body went tight again.

"Jacaerys."

He looked up.

Rhaenys stood before him, tall and striking in a gown of deep sea-blue that made her lilac eyes seem almost violet in the corridor's dim light. Her face was lean and handsome rather than soft, the kind of beauty that commanded rather than asked, and her black hair - still more dark than grey, though the white had begun to thread through it at the temples - was bound back in a simple coil that spoke of a woman who had better things to do than fuss with ornamentation. She had been pacing earlier, though she would never have admitted to pacing. Now she stood still, watching him with those clever pale eyes that always seemed to see more than he wanted them to.

"Your mother," she said, "has done this before. She brought you into the world safely. She will do the same for your brother."

"You do not know it will be a brother."

"No," Rhaenys agreed. "But I suspect."

Jace looked at his hands. "My other grandmother died."

He had not meant to say it. The words simply came, the way words sometimes did when you were frightened enough that your mouth stopped waiting for permission.

Rhaenys was quiet for a moment.

Then she moved closer and lowered herself to sit beside him on the bench, an action so unexpected that Jace stared at her. Princesses of her stature did not typically sit on wooden benches in corridors. They stood, or they occupied chairs that had been placed specifically for them, or they swept through spaces without pausing at all.

But she sat.

"Your grandmother Aemma," she said, "was not as strong as your mother. That is not a failing - some bodies are made more fragile than others, and there is no shame in it. But Rhaenyra has her father's constitution beneath all that Targaryen delicacy. She is tougher than she appears." A pause. "As are you."

Jace looked at her.

Rhaenys looked back, and for a moment something softened in her face - something that was not quite a smile but lived in the same territory.

"You have my coloring, you know," she said. "The maesters like to trace bloodlines as though they were rivers, always flowing in one direction. But blood is more complicated than that. It remembers things from generations back. It finds its way into unexpected places."

She reached out and touched his brown curls briefly, the gesture almost absent, as though she were confirming something she already knew.

"My mother was a Baratheon," she said. "Jocelyn. She had dark hair, as I do. As you do. The Baratheon strain runs strong - it always has. Half the Stormlands shares that look, the Strongs among them. Brown hair on a child of this family means nothing except that blood is blood, and it does as it pleases."

Jace did not fully understand why she was telling him this.

But he understood that she was telling him something important. Something that mattered. Something that was, perhaps, an answer to a question he had not yet learned to ask.

"My little prince," Rhaenys said quietly, and the words were warm in a way that her voice rarely was. "Whatever anyone says. Whatever you hear. You are my grandson. That is not a thing that changes."

Before Jacaerys could respond, the door opened.

Laenor emerged first.

He was beautiful in the way that Valyrian men sometimes were - fine-boned and almost delicate, with silver-white hair that fell past his shoulders and purple eyes set in a face that artists would have begged to paint. His features were soft, nearly feminine, saved from prettiness only by the aquiline nose that gave his profile a hawkish sharpness. He looked young in that moment - younger than Jace had ever seen him, younger than fathers were supposed to look - and his eyes were bright with something that might have been tears or might have been relief or might have been both.

When he saw Jace on the bench he crossed to him immediately and knelt, careless of his fine clothes against the stone floor.

"You have a brother," he said.

Jace felt something loosen in his chest.

"Mother—"

"She is well." Laenor's hands found his shoulders, gripped them firmly. His fingers were slim and elegant, a musician's hands, but his grip was steady. "She is tired, but she is well, and she is asking for you."

The relief hit Jace so hard his eyes stung.

"Truly?"

"Truly." Laenor smiled, and it was a real smile, unguarded in a way his smiles sometimes were not. When he smiled like that, his whole face changed - became warmer, younger, almost boyish despite the silver hair and princely bearing. "Come. Come meet your brother."

He rose and offered his hand, and Jace took it.

Aelys, who had been watching this exchange with the intense focus of a child trying to follow a conversation slightly beyond her reach, immediately slid off the bench and attached herself to Jace's other hand. Her small fingers wrapped around two of his with absolute certainty, as though she had decided she was coming and no one had yet presented a compelling argument otherwise.

Laenor glanced down at her, and something in his expression softened further.

"And you as well, little princess," he said. "Come meet the babe."

"Babe," Aelys said, by way of agreement.

Behind them, Rhaenys stood as well. Corlys had appeared from somewhere - the council chamber, perhaps, or wherever it was that important men spent their time while women did the difficult work of continuing their bloodlines. The Sea Snake was striking in a different way than his wife: tall and broad-shouldered where she was lean, with pale skin and silver-gold hair that he wore shorter than his son's, and purple eyes that held the particular calculating patience of a man who had spent decades building an empire from salt and timber and will. He moved to stand beside Rhaenys with the stillness of a man who was satisfied with an outcome he had expected all along.

His gaze passed over the children - Jace holding Laenor's hand, Aelys holding Jace's, the three of them linked together like a small chain - and for just a moment, something that might have been warmth flickered across his weathered face before it settled back into its usual careful neutrality.

"Another grandson," he said.

"Another heir," Rhaenys replied.

Corlys inclined his head slightly. If there was any question in the word, any doubt, it did not show on his face. The Sea Snake had never been a man who engaged with rumors when silence served him better.

Laenor led the kids through the door.

The chamber smelled of blood and herbs and something else - something warmer, something that Jace would later learn to associate with new life and would never be able to name properly. The windows had been opened to let in the afternoon air, and the light fell soft and golden across the bed where his mother lay propped against a pile of cushions, her silver hair damp at the temples, her face pale with exhaustion, and in her arms—

"Jace," Rhaenyra said, and her voice was tired but her smile was real. "Come here. Come meet Lucerys."

He approached the bed carefully, as though the floor might give way beneath him if he moved too quickly.

The child was small. Smaller than Jace had expected, though he was not sure what he had expected exactly. A red, scrunched face. A tuft of dark hair - brown, like his own, like Rhaenys's. Tiny fingers curled into tiny fists. Eyes that were closed, and a mouth that was open, making small sounds that were not quite crying but were not quite silence either.

"He is so small," Jace said.

"You were smaller." Rhaenyra shifted carefully, making room. "Sit. Here. You can hold him, if you are gentle."

"I—" Jace hesitated. "What if I drop him?"

"You will not drop him."

"But what if—"

"Jace." His mother's voice was soft but certain. "You are his older brother. You will hold him, and you will not drop him, and you will love him. That is what brothers do."

Jace climbed onto the bed with great care and allowed his mother to settle the bundle into his arms. The babe was warm. Heavier than he looked. Jace held him the way he had been shown to hold things that mattered - close to his chest, supporting the head, not too tight but not too loose.

Lucerys made a small noise and turned his face toward Jace's heartbeat.

Something cracked open inside him.

"Hello," Jace whispered. "I am your brother."

Aelys walked closer to the newborn.

She scrambled onto the bed with considerably less care than Jace had used -Rhaenyra caught her with one arm before she could fall to the ground  - and immediately fixed her attention on the child with the fierce possessive interest of a very small child encountering something new.

"Babe," she said, with great satisfaction. "My babe."

“He is your kin,” Rhaenyra said gently.

Aelys ignored this completely. "My babe."

Jace laughed - the sound surprised out of him, unexpected and bright in the warm room.

Aelys leaned in close to examine Lucerys with the serious attention she gave to everything that interested her. Her strawberry-gold hair fell forward across her face, a shade so different from the silver and black around her that she looked almost like a creature from another story entirely. Her small fingers reached out, and Jace shifted instinctively to protect his brother's head, but Aelys only patted the child's cheek with exquisite gentleness.

Then she leaned down and pressed a kiss to his forehead.

"My babe," she said again, quieter this time, almost a promise.

She looked up at Jace then, her green eyes bright with satisfaction, and pressed another kiss to his cheek as well - wet and clumsy and entirely sincere.

"My Jaja," she said. "My babe."

As though she had sorted out the whole of her world and found it acceptable.

At the foot of the bed, Laenor watched with an expression Jace would not understand until he was much older - something raw and tender and complicated, something that lived in the space between what was true and what was chosen. His pretty face was soft with a love that asked no questions and demanded no proof.

Laenor loved these boys.

That was the thing that would matter later, when the questions came, when the whispers grew louder, when Jace lay awake at night wondering about blood and legitimacy and all the things no one would say to his face but everyone seemed to know anyway.

Did he know?

Did he love me anyway?

The answer, Jace would eventually realize, was yes to both.

But that was later. That was years away, a grief he had not yet learned to carry.

For now there was only this: a summer afternoon, golden light through an open window, his mother alive and smiling, his brother warm in his arms, and Aelys pressed close against his side with her small hand resting on his shoulder as though she meant to keep him there forever.

Rhaenys watched from the doorway with Corlys beside her. Her lean face, usually so guarded, had softened into something that was almost tenderness. Her lilac eyes rested on Jace - on the brown-haired boy holding the brown-haired babe - and whatever the world might whisper about what that coloring meant, her expression said only one thing.

Mine.

"My little prince," she murmured, too quiet for the children to hear.

Corlys glanced at her, his silver brows lifting slightly.

"Princes," he corrected, his voice equally low. "Two now."

Rhaenys smiled - small and private and fierce.

"Yes," she said. "Two."

It was the kind of moment, Jace would think much later, that you did not know to hold onto until it was already gone.

But for now - for this one afternoon, in the golden light, with his family around him and no shadows yet long enough to reach them - he simply held his brother close, and let Aelys kiss his cheek again, and let himself be happy.

———

The summers came and went, and Aelys grew.

Not quickly - she had always been small for her age, fine-boned and narrow-shouldered, built more for books than for anything requiring physical presence - but steadily, the way children do when no one is watching closely enough to notice the change until it has already happened. One year she was a toddler clinging to Jace's hand in a birthing chamber. The next she was a girl of four, then six, then eight, her strawberry-gold hair lengthening past her shoulders, her green eyes sharpening with the particular intelligence that made adults uncomfortable when they noticed it.

By the time she was ten, she had read more books than most ladies twice her age, spoken more languages than her brothers combined, and developed the habit of asking questions that no one wanted to answer.

Her father found this last quality delightful.

It was a late afternoon in the waning days of autumn when she found him in his private study - not the formal chambers where he received petitioners and councilors, but the smaller room behind it, the one with the tall windows that faced west and caught the last of the day's light. The walls were lined with shelves, and the shelves were lined with books and scrolls and curiosities collected over decades: a Valyrian steel dagger with a dragonbone hilt, a chunk of obsidian the size of a child's fist, maps of places that no longer existed, histories of people whose names had been forgotten everywhere except in ink.

Viserys sat at his worktable, bent over something that glinted gold in the fading light. His model of Old Valyria spread before him - towers and walls and dragon-roads, all rendered in miniature, painstakingly assembled over years of quiet afternoons just like this one. His hair had gone greyer since she was small, and the lines around his eyes had deepened, but his hands were still steady as he fitted a tiny archway into place.

He looked up when she entered, and his face softened into a smile.

"Aelys," he said. "Come. Sit. Tell me what mischief you have committed today."

"No mischief," she said, crossing to the chair beside his worktable - her chair, the one that had been placed there years ago and never moved. "Only reading."

"Reading is often where mischief begins." He set down the small golden tower he had been holding and turned to face her fully. "What were you reading?"

"Septon Barth's writings on dragonkind."

Viserys's brows rose. "That is... ambitious."

"It is fascinating." Aelys folded her hands in her lap, a habit she had learned from her mother but deployed in an entirely different spirit. "He believed the dragons were not natural creatures. That they were made - shaped by blood magic in the old Freehold, bound to the Valyrians through sorcery rather than simple mastery."

"Many believe that."

"Do you?"

The question hung between them, direct and unadorned. Viserys studied his daughter for a moment - this strange, serious child with her Hightower coloring and her Valyrian soul, who looked at him as though his answer genuinely mattered.

"I believe," he said slowly, "that the truth of Old Valyria is buried beneath so much legend that we cannot know for certain what was real and what was story. But I also believe that the bond between dragon and rider is not... simple." He gestured toward the model before him, the tiny towers with their carved dragon-perches. "We call it claiming. We speak of it as though the rider masters the beast. But I have ridden Balerion, Aelys. When I was young. And I can tell you - in that moment, when you are in the sky with fire beneath you and wind in your face, you do not feel like a master."

Aelys leaned forward slightly. "What do you feel like?"

Viserys was quiet for a moment.

"Permitted," he said at last. "As though the dragon has decided to allow you this. For now. For reasons of its own."

Aelys turned this over in her mind, fitting it against everything she had read, everything she had thought, everything she had felt in the pit when she stood before the great beasts and watched them watch her back.

"Father," she said. "May I tell you something?"

"Always."

"I do not want to claim a dragon."

The words fell into the golden afternoon light and lay there between them.

Viserys did not look surprised, exactly. But he did look curious.

"Your siblings have dragons," he said calmly. "Aegon has Sunfyre. Aemond does not, and it eats at him daily. Helaena has Dreamfyre, though she rarely speaks of it. Daeron has claimed a hatchling in Oldtown." He paused. "You are the only one of my children who has not even tried."

"I know."

"The court notices."

"I know that too."

"And still you do not wish it?"

Aelys looked down at her hands, then up at her father. Her green eyes - so unlike the purple of his, so unlike the silver and violet that marked the rest of the family - were steady and serious.

"When I go to the Dragonpit," she said, "my heart breaks."

Viserys blinked. "Breaks?"

"They are so large," Aelys said. "So beautiful. And they are chained there in the dark, in caves built to hold them, fed on a schedule, brought out only when someone wishes to ride. The wild dragons on Dragonstone - they come and go as they please. They hunt. They fly. They live." She swallowed. "The ones in the pit only exist."

She had never said this to anyone except Jace. The words felt strange in her mouth, too large for polite conversation, too honest for court.

"I spoke with Jacaerys about this," she admitted. "Some time ago. He... he did not tell me I was foolish."

Viserys smiled at that, something warm and knowing entering his expression. "Jace is a good boy. You can always find truth with him - he has not yet learned to hide it as thoroughly as the rest of us." He reached out and touched her hand briefly. "But you can speak truth to your father as well, little one. That is what I am for."

Aelys took a breath.

"I think," she said, "that claiming a dragon means taking something that is not mine to take. Binding a creature that was born to be free. Making myself feel powerful by making something else feel less." She shook her head. "I do not want power that way. I do not want to look at a dragon and see a tool. I want to look at a dragon and see... what it actually is."

Viserys was quiet for a long moment.

Then he leaned back in his chair, and the smile that crossed his face was not indulgent, not dismissive - it was something closer to recognition.

"You know," he said, "the Targaryens like to believe we control the dragons. It is the story we tell - that we are special, chosen, that our blood gives us dominion over fire itself. It is a useful story. It makes other men fear us. It makes us feel that our power is deserved." He gestured at the model again, at the gleaming towers of a civilization that had destroyed itself. 

Aelys watched him with wide, wondering eyes.

"That old world is gone, Aelys," Viserys went on, quieter now, his gaze drifting to the little golden ruins in front of him as though he could see past their scale into the streets they had once been. "Not merely the city. The whole way of living that made it possible - riders and dragons moving as they pleased, a hundred houses of dragonlords answering to no one but themselves, the sky over the Fourteen Flames thick with wings. That world burned with the rest of it. It cannot be brought back here, in the Seven Kingdoms, by wishing it so. And I am not certain it should be."

"Why not?"

"Because the people of this land did not grow up beneath dragons, little one. Not the way Valyria did. To them we have always been something strange that arrived from across the sea - conquerors with fire in our blood, wearing faces that do not look like theirs, riding beasts that could unmake any castle they had ever built to keep themselves safe. They have made their peace with us, mostly. But it is an uneasy peace, built as much on our restraint as on our strength."

He turned the small tower over once in his fingers.

"A dragon that came and went as it pleased, hunting where it liked, answering to no one - even if it harmed no one, even if it only wished to live as the old wild dragons on Dragonstone live - would frighten people who already halfway believe we are not quite human. And frightened people are not gentle people, Aelys. They do not reason their way out of fear. They act on it, and they are not always careful about who is standing nearest when they do."

Aelys frowned. "You mean the dragons are safer chained. Not only for the smallfolk. For themselves."

"I mean a frightened stableboy with a torch cannot harm a dragon in the sky over Driftmark. But a frightened lord with an army, and a court full of frightened lords behind him, convinced that House Targaryen has finally let its monsters off the leash - that is a different danger, and not one that only falls on us." He looked at her then, and there was something old and tired in his face that she did not often see him show. "We are guests in this realm still, in a way none of your brothers like to admit. A hundred and fifty years is not so long, as history runs. We keep our dragons visible, orderly, seen to be governed, because it lets the rest of the realm believe we can be governed too. The moment they stop believing that, Aelys - the moment they think us as wild and ungoverned as the beasts we ride - I do not think it ends well for anyone wearing our name. Better that they love us, and love the dragons alongside us, than fear what we might do if we ever stopped pretending to hold the reins."

Aelys was quiet for a long moment, looking not at the model between them but at her father's face, at a tiredness there she did not often let herself notice.

“So the chains are not truly for the dragons,” she said slowly. “They are for us. To show the world that we may be governed, so that none need fear what we are beneath.”

Something in her voice caught, very slightly, on the last of it.

“That is very sad, Father.” She held his eyes as she said it, steady even with the small tightness gathering in her throat. “I understand why we do it. I even believe you, that it keeps us safer, keeps everyone safer. But I do not think that understanding a thing makes it less sad. We have to make ourselves smaller and gentler than we are, always, forever, just so that no one has to look at us like we are some kind of monster.”

Viserys watched her a moment without answering.

“You do not agree with it,” he said at last.

“I understand it," Aelys said." But that is not the same as agreeing with it.” Something moved behind her green eyes then, quiet and private and entirely unlike the mild, dutiful girl the court believed her to be—a small fire her father recognized at once, though he could not have said from where in her it came, fine-boned and soft-spoken as she was.

“Some part of me still wants to see them fly wherever they please. All of them. I do not think that part of me is going anywhere, Father, whatever is safest.”

He reached out and cupped her cheek, his palm warm and rough against her skin.

“You are the least Valyrian-looking of all my children,” he said, his voice quiet—almost a whisper, as though the words were meant more for himself than for her. “And yet you may be the most Valyrian in spirit. Certainly you are the only one who reads the old texts for pleasure. The only one who speaks the old tongue as though it were your own.”

Aelys felt heat rise to her cheeks. "Mother insisted we all learn—"

"Your mother insisted you learn enough to recite prayers and greet envoys. You learned enough to read Septon Barth in the original." His eyes crinkled. "That is not the same thing."

Aelys was quiet for a moment, weighing something in her mind as she always did before she said the thing she actually meant to say.

"Jace and I have been reading together," she said. "In the mornings, before his lessons with the master-at-arms. Not dragon-lore. Histories. The reign of King Aenys. The reign of King Maegor after him. The old Dornish wars from your great-grandsire's day." She hesitated. "We started arguing about something, and I could not stop thinking on it after."

"Arguing about what?"

“What makes a man want the throne so badly?” she looked up at him. “Not what makes a bad ruler — that is easy, everyone can list the sins after the fact. I mean what drives a man to it in the first place, to want it so much that nothing else matters, or to fear losing it so much that he cannot think of anything else.”

She shook her head slowly.

Viserys was watching her closely now, the model of Valyria forgotten between them.

"And what did you conclude?" he asked. "You and Jace."

"Jace thinks it is fear," Aelys said. "That men who grasp for power are afraid of what happens to them if they do not have it - afraid of being small, forgotten, ruled over instead of ruling. He says even cruel kings are often frightened kings underneath." She twisted a lock of her hair around one finger, a habit she had never quite managed to break. "I think it is something else. I think some men come to believe that power is the same thing as being loved. That if enough people must obey you, it does not matter whether they love you - it will feel the same from the inside. And so they chase the obeying, because the loving never came, or they cannot trust that it is real."

"That is a very old thought for a girl of ten."

"I am nearly eleven."

Viserys laughed - a real laugh, warm and surprised, the kind that made the years fall briefly away from his face. "Forgive me. Nearly eleven changes everything."

"You are teasing me."

"I am delighting in you, which is not the same thing, though I understand why you might confuse them." He grew serious again, folding his hands atop the model of the city that had swallowed itself in fire. "I think you and Jace are both right, in their way. Fear and hunger for love are not so different as they seem - a starving man and a frightened man will both do things a full, safe man would not. Power promises to make a man safe. It promises to fill him up. It rarely does either, but the promise is enough to build a life around, and sometimes enough to end one."

"Then how does a good ruler resist it? The hunger?"

"Ah." Viserys leaned back. "Now that is the question they do not put in the septon's histories, because no one has ever answered it to everyone's satisfaction. But I will tell you what I believe, for whatever a tired old king's belief is worth." He held up one finger. "A good ruler remembers, always, that the realm was here before them and will be here after them. They are a steward, not an owner. The moment a man begins to think the kingdom belongs to him rather than the other way around, he has already begun to rot, even if no one can see it yet." A second finger. "A good ruler surrounds themselves with people who will tell them true things, even unwelcome ones - and then, harder still, actually listens when they do." A third finger, and here his voice softened. "And a good ruler loves something more than they love being obeyed. Their children. Their people. The land itself. Anything, so long as it is a love that asks nothing of anyone's submission. That love is what keeps the hunger from swallowing everything else."

Aelys considered this with the particular gravity she brought to everything she considered.

"Do you love the realm more than you love being obeyed?"

It was, perhaps, the most interesting question a child had ever asked her father in that room, and she asked it as simply as she had asked about Septon Barth.

Viserys smiled. "I have tried to," he said. "I do not always succeed. No man does. But I think trying is most of what separates my grandsire from a Maegor - not the trying alone, but the willingness to notice when you have failed, and to grieve it, rather than explain it away. Your great-grandsire Jaehaerys found the realm broken after Maegor, Aelys, broken near past mending, and he spent sixty years mending it anyway, one small patient choice at a time. He is why I sit where I sit today - him, and a council he called at Harrenhal to settle who should follow him, a choice I have thought on more than you might guess." He looked at her a long moment. "That is the other thing, Aelys, and perhaps the truest one. Fate hands every ruler the same choice, over and over, dressed in a thousand different costumes: will you serve, or will you be served? Most men do not even notice they are choosing. They think they are simply doing what a king does. It is only afterward, if they are honest and if the gods are kind enough to let them live long enough to be honest, that they see how many times they chose wrong without knowing it was a choice at all."

“Do you believe in fate, truly? Or only in choices?” Aelys asked, leaning forward slightly. She looked up at her father as she spoke, a quiet admiration in her gaze, warmed by the feeling that he was trusting her with thoughts he shared with few others. She felt, in a simple and certain way, blessed to be his daughter — and proud that the king she admired most in the world was also kind enough to speak to her as an equal.

“I believe,” Viserys said, “that fate hands us the roads, and choice decides how we walk them. I did not choose to be born the son of a prince, or to inherit a throne I never much wanted at your age. I did not choose to dream, some nights, of a promise my father made me swear before I understood what it would cost. But I choose, every day, what to do with the crown fate set on my head — whether to wear it as a burden I resent or a duty I honor, whether to let it make me small and frightened or to try to make it something worth the wearing.” He touched her cheek again, softer this time. “You will have roads too, little one. Dragon or no dragon, crown or no crown. What you do with them will be yours to choose, whatever anyone tells you fate has already decided.”

Aelys sat with that for a long moment, the westering light turning gold and then amber across the little towers of a fallen empire between them.

"I think," she said finally, "that is the most sense anyone in this castle has made to me all year."

Viserys let out a soft laugh at that, shaking his head slightly as if the thought alone amused him.

“Don’t tell your mother I said kings should serve rather than be served. She’ll have the septons preaching about it before supper and I’ll never hear the end of it.”

“Your secret is safe with me,” Aelys said gravely. “I only tell Jace secrets.”

“That,” said Viserys, still faintly amused, “does not comfort me even slightly.”

Before Aelys could respond, the door burst open. Her brothers spilled through it in a rush of laughter and half-finished arguments, filling the quiet study with the noisy energy only boys seemed capable of carrying.

"Boys."

Viserys did not raise his voice. He did not need to. There was a quiet authority in it, honed over a lifetime on the Iron Throne. Both princes stopped where they stood. Aegon's expression, however, suggested the silence would not last.

"I was having a conversation with your sister."

Aegon glanced at Aelys as though noticing her for the first time. "Oh. About what?"

"Dragons," Aelys said sharply. She frowned at the interruption. Her father had precious little time to call his own, and what remained was too often claimed by the realm before it could belong to his children.

“You do not have a dragon,” Aegon said, his tone faintly mocking. “What is there to talk about?”

"Aegon." Viserys's voice sharpened.

"What? It is true. She does not have one. Aemond does not have one either, but at least he wants one. Aelys just sits about with her books—"

"I would rather read than ride a dragon I did not earn," Aelys said quietly.

The room went still.

Aemond's head turned toward her, something flickering in his pale eyes - not quite anger, not quite agreement, something more complicated than either.

"What does that mean?" he asked.

It means,” Aelys said. “Sunfyre came to you as an inheritance, not a choice. You never had to stand before him and wonder whether he would have you.

Aegon's face reddened. "Sunfyre chose me—"

"Sunfyre was a hatchling. He did not choose anything. He was placed in your cradle and you were the first warm thing he knew." Aelys met her brother's eyes steadily. "That is not the same as a dragon choosing to let you ride."

For a moment, the tension in the room pulled tight.

Then Viserys laughed.

It was a real laugh, surprised out of him, and it broke the tension like a stone striking still water. Aegon looked offended. Aemond looked thoughtful.

Only then did Aelys notice Helaena.

No one had seen her come in. She sat in the corner as though she had always been part of the room, something small and quiet in her hands—a beetle, Aelys thought, or perhaps a moth, turning gently between her fingers as if it had never known fear.

Helaena glanced up once, mildly curious at the laughter, then returned to her study of the creature as though the world beyond it had no particular importance.

"Sit," Viserys said, gesturing to the chairs around his worktable. "All of you. Since you have interrupted, you may as well make yourselves useful."

"Useful how?" Aegon asked suspiciously.

"By learning something." Viserys turned the model of Valyria so that its towers faced the children. "Tell me what you see."

Aegon squinted. "Towers."

"What kind of towers?"

"...old ones?"

Viserys sighed. "Aelys?"

"Dragon-towers," Aelys said. "Built to house dragons at their peaks. The architecture is designed to channel heat upward - you can see the venting structures along the spines. And those—" she pointed to a series of smaller structures along one edge, "—are the bloodmage halls. Where the sorcerers worked."

Aemond leaned forward, studying the model with new interest. "How do you know that?"

"I read."

"In what language? None of the histories I have seen describe the buildings in such detail."

"Rȳ Eglie Valyria," Aelys said - High Valyrian, spoken with the fluid ease of someone who had practiced until the words stopped feeling foreign. " Té'xdhzion issa uēpa. Oldë'rhtor tk'hántor Vējes, oldë'rhtor tk'hántor Ērinagon." The texts are old. Older than the Doom, older than the Conquest.

Aemond stared at her.

Aegon rolled his eyes. "Must you show off?"

"It is not showing off," Viserys said mildly. "It is scholarship. Your sister has taken the time to learn the tongue of your ancestors properly. Perhaps you might do the same."

"I know enough—"

"Skoros ex'auchdlyrys gaomagon ao gīmigon?" Aelys asked sweetly. What exactly do you know?

Aegon's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.

"That is not fair," he muttered.

Helaena looked up from her beetle. "The towers fall," she said, in that distant, dreaming voice she sometimes used. "They always fall. But the stones remember."

The room went quiet.

Helaena did that sometimes - said things that sounded like nonsense and poetry and prophecy all tangled together, things that made Aelys's skin prickle with something that was not quite fear and not quite understanding. Their mother called it ramblings. Their father called it nothing at all, because he did not seem to know what to call it.

Aelys thought it might be something else entirely.

"Yes," Viserys said softly, looking at his strange, dreaming daughter with an expression that held both love and loss. "The stones do remember."

He reached out and drew Helaena closer, settling her into the chair beside him. She came without resistance, still examining her beetle, her silver hair falling across her face.

"Now," Viserys said, looking around at all four of his children - his difficult, complicated, impossible children, each of them carrying something of him and something entirely their own. "Let me tell you about the Fourteen Flames. And the dragonlords who thought they could master fire itself."

Aegon groaned.

Aemond leaned forward.

Helaena hummed softly to her beetle.

And Aelys settled into her chair, her father's voice washing over her, and thought: this is what family is supposed to feel like.

Not the formal dinners and the public appearances and the careful choreography of court. This. Four children and their father, gathered around a table in the fading golden light, talking about dragons and doom and the things that came before.

It would not last.

She did not know that yet - could not know it, could not see the fractures that were already forming beneath the surface, the resentments and jealousies and political machinations that would eventually tear them all apart.

But for now, in this moment, they were simply family.

And that was enough.

———

The storm came in from Blackwater Bay like something with intent.

Aelys had been woken by the first crack of thunder, which was strange—she should have been too tired for anything to pull her from sleep. Only hours earlier she had still been at the table with her father and siblings, lingering long after they should have gone to bed, caught in stories and half-remembered histories, listening to her father speak of the past as though it were still close enough to touch. That warmth should have followed her into sleep like a weight.

Instead, the storm cut through it cleanly.

For a moment she lay perfectly still, heart hammering, as lightning turned her chamber into something unfamiliar—every shape wrong, every shadow sharpened beyond reason. In those brief white flashes, the room seemed to remake itself entirely, only to be swallowed again by darkness, leaving her blinking into a world that didn't quite hold still.

Rain struck the windows in sheets. The shutters rattled against their latches. Somewhere below, she heard the groan of old wood and older stone shifting against the wind, and the sound made the Red Keep feel less like a fortress and more like a ship - something that could move, could tilt, could be taken.

She was too old to be afraid of storms. She told herself this firmly. Yet, she wanted her mother.

It was a childish want. She knew that. She was old enough now that she should not need to be soothed through bad weather like some infant frightened of shadows. Alicent would say something gentle but firm. She would smooth Aelys's hair and tell her that the storm would pass, and that fear was natural but ought to be governed, and that a lady did not let her composure be shaken by weather.

But she would say it kindly. She always said things kindly, even when they were corrections.

And Aelys wanted, very badly, to be told something kindly right now.

She pushed back the covers before she could talk herself out of it.

The stone floor was cold against her bare feet, cold enough to make her flinch. Her nightshift was thin linen, cream-colored, falling just past her knees, and the air in the chamber had turned chill with the storm. She found her robe by feel more than sight - soft wool, dark green, too long for her so that she had to gather the hem to keep from stepping on it - and pulled it around herself before moving toward the door.

The corridor outside was darker than her room had been.

A few torches still burned in their sconces, but the flames guttered and jumped with every gust that found its way through the arrow slits, casting shadows that moved when they should not have. The stones here were old and uneven beneath her feet. She kept one hand on the wall as she walked, steadying herself, feeling the cold damp of the rock against her palm.

She knew the way to her mother's chambers. She had walked it dozens of times, hundreds perhaps, though rarely at this hour, rarely in the dark, rarely with the Keep groaning around her like something wounded.

Lightning flashed through a narrow window and she stopped, breath catching, waiting for the thunder that followed. When it came, it was loud enough to feel in her chest.

She kept walking.

The guards she passed did not stop her. They noted her - she saw their eyes move, saw the brief assessment - but a princess walking the corridors of her own home was not their concern, even barefoot, even storm-frightened, even small and strange-looking in an oversized robe with her strawberry-gold hair loose and tangled from sleep. One of them nodded to her. She did not nod back. She was too focused on the destination, on the idea of her mother's voice, her mother's hands, her mother's calm.

The door to the Queen's apartments was not guarded from the inside.

This was not unusual. Alicent often dismissed her attendants late in the evening, preferring privacy for her prayers, her letters, her small rituals of preparation before sleep. The outer guards stood at the end of the corridor, far enough to offer discretion, close enough to come if called.

Aelys approached the door.

She meant to knock. That was the proper thing, the correct thing, the thing she had been taught. You did not enter a room without announcing yourself, even if the room belonged to your mother, even if you were afraid, even if the thunder was still shaking the stones around you.

But the door was not fully closed.

A gap, barely wider than her hand. Enough that the faint glow of candlelight spilled through it in a thin warm line across the floor. Enough that sound carried.

She heard her mother's voice first.

Low. Strange. Not words exactly - or if words, then none Aelys could make out. A sound that rose and caught and fell again, rhythmic, uneven, like breathing that had forgotten how to be quiet.

Aelys went still.

She did not understand, not immediately. Her mind reached for explanations - illness, perhaps, a nightmare, pain of some kind - and found none of them quite fit the shape of what she was hearing. There was something beneath her mother's voice. A lower sound. A man's breathing, heavy and measured, and the soft rhythmic creak of wood, of a bed frame shifting under repeated weight.

She stepped closer to the gap.

She should not have. She knew even then, in the moment, that she should not have. Some part of her already understood what she was about to find, the way a girl of ten understands such things when she is no longer entirely a child - not from any wickedness in her, but because no one manages to keep the whole of the world from a clever girl however hard they try. Her septa had explained, in the careful, bloodless language reserved for such lessons, what would someday be asked of her as a wife. She knew the shape of the thing, if not the feeling of it. She had never expected to learn the feeling of it by standing outside her own mother's door.

But she looked.

The candles had burned low. The chamber was cast in amber shadow, warm and dim, the great bed half-curtained so that she could see only part of it through the narrow opening. Part of it was enough.

Her mother was not alone.

Alicent lay back against the pillows, her dark hair loose and spread beneath her, her nightgown unlaced and pulled aside so that the pale shape of her body was visible in the candlelight. Her eyes were closed. Her lips were parted. Her hands gripped the bedding on either side of her hips, knuckles white, and her back arched in a way Aelys had never seen a body move before, as though something was being pulled out of her slowly, over and over again.

Above her, moving with her, was a man.

Aelys saw the broad line of his back first, muscles shifting beneath skin, the dark fall of his hair against his neck. She saw the way his hips moved, slow and deliberate, pressing forward and drawing back in that same rhythm she had heard from the corridor. She saw her mother's hands release the sheets and rise to grip his shoulders, pulling him closer, deeper, and she saw her mother's face change into something she did not recognize - open and unguarded and hungry in a way that had nothing to do with duty or prayer or any of the things Alicent had ever taught her about how a woman ought to be.

Then the man turned his head slightly, reaching for something, and the candlelight caught his profile.

Ser Criston Cole.

Aelys felt the recognition like cold water.

She knew that face. She had seen it a hundred times - at feasts, in corridors, at her mother's side during audiences and walks and every formal occasion the court required. Ser Criston with his white cloak and his solemn courtesy and his place as the Queen's sworn protector. Ser Criston who spoke of honor as though it were a living thing he personally tended.

Ser Criston, whose body was bare and moving above her mother, whose hands were on her mother's hips, whose mouth found her mother's throat in the dim gold light while Alicent made a sound that was almost a word and almost a sob and entirely, horribly, unlike anything Aelys had ever heard from her.

She did not look again. She had seen enough to know, and knowing was already more than she wanted.

Aelys stepped back.

The motion was silent. Her bare feet made no sound on the stone. Her breath had stopped somewhere in her chest and showed no sign of returning. She moved backward, one step and then another, her hand finding the wall again, her eyes still fixed on that narrow gap of light even as the distance grew between her and the door.

She did not run.

Running would make noise. Running would draw attention. Running would require her legs to work properly, and they did not feel entirely connected to the rest of her at the moment.

She walked.

Back down the corridor, past the torches with their guttering flames, past the guards who noted her passage with the same indifferent professionalism as before. The storm still raged outside. Thunder rolled across the sky like something vast turning over in its sleep. Aelys heard none of it.

She was thinking about her mother's face.

Not the face she had just glimpsed - though that too would stay, had already carved itself into some part of her memory that would not be dislodged - but the other face. The one she knew. The one that had bent over her through childhood fevers, that had corrected her gently and praised her carefully and taught her that virtue was a thing built through discipline, built through restraint, built through the daily practice of being what you ought to be rather than what you wished to be.

Alicent had told her once that desire was a test.

The Seven placed it in the heart to see what you would do with it. Would you master it, shape it, make it serve the proper order of things? Or would you let it master you, let it make you weak, let it turn you into something you could not respect when you looked at your reflection?

A lady governs herself, Alicent had said. A queen governs herself absolutely.

Aelys reached her chamber.

She closed the door behind her and stood there for a moment in the dark, the storm still howling beyond the windows, her heart beating so hard she could feel it in her throat.

Then she crossed to her bed and climbed beneath the covers and lay very still, staring up at the canopy she could not see.

Her mother was not what she pretended to be.

The thought arrived first as a strange, hollow calm, and then, underneath the calm, something else began to move - slow at first, like the storm had been, building from a distance before it broke.

Grief came first. It surprised her, how much it felt like grief and not like anger - a loss, sudden and total, of a person she had believed in without ever quite noticing she believed in her. Her mother had built her whole life around being unimpeachable. Every prayer, every correction, every careful lesson about what a woman owed to her house and her husband and her gods had been, Aelys understood now, a kind of architecture - a beautiful, solemn building that her mother lived inside and asked everyone else to admire from the street. And it had never once been true, not all the way down, not where it mattered most. Her father sat across the supper table not an hour ago, greying and trusting and utterly unaware, and her mother had let him sit there believing in a woman who did not, entirely, exist.

The anger came slower, but it came, and it came for more than the obvious reason.

Aelys thought of every time Alicent had spoken of Rhaenyra with that low, sorrowful disappointment, as though the Princess's failings caused her genuine private pain rather than any pleasure. She thought of every remark about Rhaenyra's sons - about their parentage, their coloring, the whispers Alicent never quite started herself but never discouraged either, delivered always in the voice of someone reluctantly, virtuously, forced to notice an inconvenient truth. Aelys had loved Jace since before she had words for love. She had defended him, in the small ways a child can defend anyone, against the currents of doubt that moved through the court like a smell no one named aloud. And she had watched her mother stand at the center of those currents, robed in piety, judging a woman for exactly the kind of transgression Alicent herself had just been discovered committing not twenty feet down the corridor - the only difference being that Rhaenyra, whatever she was, had never once pretended to be anything else.

That was the part Aelys could not forgive. Not the act itself - she was young, but she was not foolish, and she understood dimly that grown people wanted things and sometimes did them badly, and that this alone did not make a monster of anyone. What she could not forgive was the years of quiet superiority. The gentle, devastating certainty with which her mother had judged a woman for a sin Alicent herself apparently could not resist, while calling her own restraint virtue and everyone else's want of it weakness.

And beneath even the anger, something more complicated stirred, something Aelys did not have a clean name for. She had always half resented her mother's perfection - had spent years feeling smaller beside it, feeling as though no amount of reading or cleverness or careful behavior would ever quite measure up to a woman who seemed incapable of putting a foot wrong. But she had also admired it, fiercely, in the way a child admires anything that looks like certainty in an uncertain world. Her mother's faith had seemed enormous to her, a kind of fortress. Now the fortress had a door standing open in the dark, and Aelys did not know whether to feel that the whole structure had been false, or only that it was smaller and more human than she had ever been permitted to see - a woman doing her best inside impossible expectations, the same as anyone, and failing sometimes, the same as anyone.

She hated her a little. Not enough to stop loving her - she understood that much already, lying there in the dark, and it frightened her more than the storm had. You could hate someone a little and love them enormously, both at once, and neither one would cancel the other out. That seemed like the cruelest thing she had learned all night, crueler even than what she had seen through the door.

And there was the last weight, the one that settled over her chest like something physical and did not lift: she could never tell anyone.

Not her father, who loved her mother in his tired, steady way and did not deserve to have that love detonated by his own ten-year-old daughter standing in his doorway with the truth in her mouth. Not Jace, though she wanted to, wanted it so badly it ached, because Jace was the only person who had ever made her feel that telling the truth was safe - but this was not her truth to give away, and giving it to him would only hand him a blade with no safe way to hold it. Not anyone. If this ever became known - truly known, spoken aloud, proven - it would not stay a private grief. It would become a weapon, and men at this court had killed for weapons far smaller than this one. Aelys was ten years old and she understood, with a clarity that felt far too old for her, that the secret sitting in her chest was not merely painful. It was dangerous. To her mother. Perhaps, in ways she could not yet map, to everyone she loved.

So she would carry it. Alone, and silently, starting tonight.

She would sit across from her mother at breakfast and let herself be corrected on her posture. She would kneel beside her at prayers and listen to her voice rise, clear and devout, in the same register Aelys had just heard break into something else entirely. She would watch her judge Rhaenyra again - because she would, Aelys had no doubt of that - and she would say nothing, and some small true part of her would curdle a little further each time.

Perhaps no one was what they seemed.

Perhaps that was the lesson the storm had come to teach her, cracking the sky open until something in her cracked open too.

———

The Red Keep had forgotten how to breathe.

Summer had come to King's Landing like a siege - patient, total, and without mercy. It pressed against the stone walls of Maegor's Holdfast as though the city itself were being slowly crushed beneath a fist of heat. The torches burned lower than they ought to have. The air tasted of salt and iron and the sourness of too many bodies kept too long in too little space, and no amount of burned rosemary or scattered lavender could disguise what this room truly was.

A place of pain dressed in silk and called a blessing.

Queen Alicent Hightower - Alicent of House Hightower, Queen Consort of the Seven Kingdoms, Mother of the Realm - had learned long ago that titles were only chains given finer names. She had been handed many of them, each with ceremony and smiles, each settling more tightly about her throat than anyone ever meant to acknowledge.

She bore them as she bore everything.

Quietly. Correctly. Without complaint.

She was not quiet now.

The birthing chamber had been prepared for weeks. Grand Maester Orwyle had seen to that with the careful satisfaction of a man who believed order itself a virtue. Fresh linens. Beeswax candles instead of tallow, because tallow was for common women and she was not common. Bundles of dried clover and wormwood hung near the hearth, and the bed curtains had been tied back for air, though no air worth having entered the room.

The room was full.

That was the thing no one had warned her of. Not the pain - pain was expected. Pain had been explained to her in careful euphemism before her wedding bed and then in savage honesty by every birth that followed. Pain, at least, was truthful. It never pretended to be other than what it was.

It was the people she had not been prepared for.

Two maesters. Three midwives. A septa moving her lips in silent prayer in the corner as though the Seven required help finding the room. Four handmaidens. Two ladies of the court with no useful purpose there except to witness that a queen was never wholly alone, not even inside her own suffering.

"Your Grace, if you would breathe-"

"I am breathing," Alicent said, her voice clipped enough to cut. The midwife - round-faced, city-born, smelling faintly of chamomile - did not flinch.

"Deep, Your Grace. From low, as I showed-"

"I have done this three times before. I know the business of it."

She regretted it at once. Not because she was wrong, but because she felt the room shift around her words: the handmaidens glancing sideways, the septa's prayer faltering, the faint pause that always followed when a lady forgot to be gracious.

A lady does not snap.

Her mother's voice. Or her septa's. Or her father's - always her father's, beneath the others, built so deeply into the frame of her thoughts that she could no longer be certain where his ended and her own began.

A queen endures. A queen is gracious. A queen does not make her suffering visible.

She closed her eyes.

The heat pressed at her from every side. Sweat gathered at her temples and beneath the linen at the nape of her neck, and she hated it with a petty, irrational humiliation. Queens were not meant to sweat. In tapestries and songs, queens suffered beautifully, with composed hands and serene faces, never with wet hair clinging to their skin and white-knuckled fingers digging half-moons into the carved bedpost.

The pain came in waves.

That, she thought, was the cruelest part - not the height of it, but the retreat. The way it pulled back just far enough to let her remember herself before it returned and took her again.

She was between waves now.

In that small reprieve she became aware of the room once more: the candlelight smeared amber across stone; the open window admitted the distant noise of the city but little breeze; the herbs burned earlier still clung to the air. Outside, King's Landing baked under the summer sun. Inside, she labored in a dark gold chamber and tried not to think of why she was here.

She had not agreed to this.

She had agreed to a marriage. She had been agreeable and obedient and grateful in the way her father had taught her to be grateful - visibly, gracefully, without allowing gratitude the indignity of complexity. She had sat beside the king and smiled and listened and learned the names of those at court who mattered.

She had been a good queen.

She was still being a good queen.

This - her body, this room, this necessity - was only another part of what that goodness required. Heirs. Sons, if the gods were kind to men and not to women. Sons to carry swords and names and castles and justify the great machinery that had placed her here.

For the good of the realm.

She had heard that phrase so often that she no longer heard the words so much as the closure of them. A door shut in the face and named duty.

"Your Grace-"

The next wave struck without warning.

Alicent gripped the bedpost and did not scream - she had not screamed for Aegon, nor Aemond, nor Helaena, and would not begin now - but a low sound escaped her all the same, involuntary and stripped of dignity. She hated the room for hearing it.

Hands touched her. Too many hands.

Someone at her back. Someone at her knees. The midwife's voice remained steady, practical, impossible to resent and impossible to bear.

"Do not touch me-"

"Your Grace, I must-"

"I said-"

They did not stop.

Of course they did not stop. She was the queen and she could command a hall, a council, a household - but not this. Not her own body. Not this room. Not the plain fact that if they obeyed her now they might kill her.

She had never been in command of this.

Seven save her.

"Push, Your Grace."

She pushed.

The first cry came small and furious, indignant as though the child already objected to the manner of his arrival. The room changed with it at once. Alicent felt the release before she understood it: the held breath loosening, the attendants moving with swifter purpose, the air itself made lighter by relief.

She opened her eyes to see the child lifted up.

"A boy, Your Grace."

A boy.

The room warmed around the word. Not loudly - these were trained attendants, not fishwives in a market - but she heard the approval in it all the same.

A son. Another son.

Daeron, she thought. She had chosen the name weeks earlier, in the quiet hour before dawn when the king slept elsewhere and her thoughts were briefly her own. Daeron. Valyrian. Suitable. Her father would approve.

They brought him close enough for her to see - red, furious, squalling, fists clenched as though prepared already to quarrel with the world - and the ache of love came at once, helpless and complete.

She did not hate her children.

She never hated her children.

She hated what their existence confirmed about the shape her life had taken.

"Your Grace," the midwife said, and there was a different note in her voice now. "The labor is not yet done."

Alicent turned her head slowly.

She had known it was possible. The maesters had told her. Two babes, Your Grace. We believe-

A doubling of blessing, the septa had called it.

Blessed.

She drew breath.

The work was not done.

The second birth was harder. Her body had already done the great thing required of it and now it was asked again, and she had nothing left to offer except the same exhausted stubbornness that had carried her through everything else she had survived.

For the good of the realm.

In the worst of it she thought, for only a moment, of her mother, dead in childbed before Alicent had been old enough to remember her face with any certainty. She did not often allow herself that thought. It was not useful. But pain made a liar of discipline.

She was here, Alicent thought. In a room like this. And she died of it.

"Push, Your Grace."

She pushed.

The second cry was different.

Thinner than Daeron's. Searching rather than furious.

And what followed it was not quite the same warmth. Not the same instant bright approval. It came slower, more carefully, like sunlight through cloud.

Alicent turned toward them.

The midwife moved with practiced hands, but Alicent watched her eyes. Watched them flick once toward Orwyle. Watched the Grand Maester arrange his face into something professionally smooth.

"Your Grace," the midwife said. "A girl."

A girl.

Alicent held out her arms.

She was not silver.

That was the first thing. The thing no one in the room would say aloud and yet all of them had seen. The child was red-faced from birth and damp with it, but the soft suggestion of hair upon her head was not Valyrian silver. It was lighter than Alicent's own brown, warmer too - a soft strawberry-gold already visible even under the wetness of birth.

Her eyes, when they opened, were green.

Not purple. Not even the uncertain grey that might yet settle into purple. Green. Hightower green. Sea-green under shadow.

The child looked imprecisely toward her, unaware that she had entered a room already measuring what she was.

"She is healthy, Your Grace," Orwyle said at once, all reassurance and careful warmth. "Strong lungs. Good weight. The Seven have given you-"

"Aelys," Alicent said.

The room went quiet.

Not silent - Daeron still cried from where he had been laid, cloth rustled, one of the midwives moved at the bedside - but quiet in the way a room did when the course of something had shifted.

She had not fully planned it. The name had been sitting in the back of her mind for weeks. Not wholly Valyrian, though near enough in sound to pass without open objection. Not wholly of Oldtown either.

Something in between.

Something that did not belong cleanly to either world.

Orwyle met her eyes.

"Aelys," he repeated carefully. "Yes, Your Grace."

It would go into the ledgers that way. Into letters and announcements and histories. Carried by raven and ship to every corner of the realm.

Aelys.

Alicent looked down at the child in her arms - at both of them now, Daeron red and furious and already loudly himself, and Aelys with her green eyes and strawberry-gold hair and her unknowing little face.

The world will require something of you too, she thought. It will call it a blessing, though it will mean only duty.

------

The sept was cool in the early summer.

Its stone floor held the night's chill after the rest of the Red Keep had begun to warm, and the air smelled of candle wax, old incense, and dust caught deep in the woven prayer rugs. Morning light fell through the narrow arched windows in long white bars, turning the drifting ash of incense almost holy, which Aelys thought was likely the point.

Septa Johanna stood before her with her hands folded into the sleeves of her grey-and-white robes, as upright and severe as one of the carved maidens set into the wall niches. She was a thin woman, all sharp nose and sharpened patience, her mouth drawn into the line it seemed to prefer whenever Aelys was present.

"The Seven are not to be questioned," she said.

Aelys sat on a hard wooden bench with her ankles properly crossed and her back arranged into the shape required of princesses. She was dressed in pale cream that morning, soft summer wool with small green vines worked at the cuffs. It was one of the few gowns chosen for her that she truly liked. Unfortunately, it also hung perilously near the floor, and the floor was stone, and stone was filthy whether or not it looked so.

"They are to be received," Septa Johanna continued.

At the far side of the room, beside the door, Ser Howland stood watch in patient silence. Broad-shouldered in a dark green cloak, sword at his hip, brown hair cropped short and beard kept neat, he looked slightly too large for the little sept. His face had the stillness of a man who knew that guards found laughing on duty were often given additional duties.

Aelys had noticed, however, that he was sometimes amused anyway.

"The Maiden represents purity of purpose," the septa said.

"And obedience," Aelys answered dutifully.

"And the path of the righteous soul."

Aelys tipped her head. "What does that path look like?"

Septa Johanna blinked once. "Princess?"

"The righteous path. Is it an actual road in the mind, or more a feeling, or a direction? People speak of paths very often, but no one ever describes them plainly."

Ser Howland lowered his eyes rather quickly.

Septa Johanna drew breath with visible care. "It is a spiritual image."

"That is not plainer."

"It is not meant to be literal."

"Then why call it a path?"

"Aelys."

"I ask in earnest."

That, unfortunately, was true. She did ask in earnest. She merely had the habit of asking such things in the tone most likely to make grown people wish they had forbidden speech altogether.

Septa Johanna's eyes narrowed. "Some truths are understood by faith."

Aelys folded her hands more tightly in her lap. Her fingers were small and pale against the cream of her skirt, but there was nothing meek in the way she held them. "If faith explains everything, why do the gods permit so much misery without explanation?"

The room went still.

Septa Johanna stared. One corner of Ser Howland's mouth moved before he stilled it.

Aelys went on, because she had already crossed the line and saw no point in stopping midway over it.

"If the Seven are good, they are strangely tolerant of hunger. If they are just, they are strangely patient with cruelty. And if they are powerful, I do not see why they require so many prayers while children still starve in Flea Bottom."

"Aelys." The septa's voice sharpened. "You speak of sacred things with great irreverence."

Aelys looked toward the nearest window, where a narrow blade of brightness lay across the opposite wall. Beyond it was the city, loud with want and prayer and people forever telling one another what the gods intended. "I think sacred things ought to withstand a question."

Septa Johanna closed her eyes briefly, as though appealing inward for strength.

From near the door came a suspiciously disguised cough.

Aelys looked at Ser Howland. He had resumed perfect stillness, which only proved guilt.

That improved her spirits at once.

"The princess," Septa Johanna said with careful emphasis, "will remember her place."

Aelys thought that was precisely the difficulty. Everyone seemed to have a place prepared for her already, and none of them were places she had chosen.

Septa Johanna resumed. "Again. The Maiden represents-"

"Purity, obedience, and the righteous soul's path," Aelys recited. "Yes. I know. It does seem unfortunate that all the virtues most praised in girls are the ones that keep them quiet."

This time Ser Howland coughed so abruptly he had to bow his head over it.

Septa Johanna turned on him with a look cold enough to frost glass. "Is something amusing, ser?"

"No, Septa," he said at once. "Forgive me."

Aelys liked him very much in that moment.

"I need air," she announced, rising before anyone could stop her.

"You need discipline."

"I can be disciplined after I have had air."

But she was already halfway to the door, lifting her skirts clear of the floor. Ser Howland stepped aside in time to let her past and then, after the smallest pause, followed at the respectful distance expected of a guard who had not been told to escort her and yet had no intention of losing the king's daughter in the Red Keep.

The corridors beyond the sept were warmer. Sun had touched the outer stones there, drawing from them the dry mineral smell of old walls. Aelys moved quickly, slippers whispering over worn flagstones, one hand still gathered in her skirts. She knew the quieter ways of the Keep now: which stair was busiest, which hall too exposed, which turns let one pass unseen.

The Red Keep liked to pretend it was orderly. In truth it was a maze built by generations of ambition and habit, patched with hidden stairs, cramped passages, blind corners, and old stone arteries through which people passed unseen if they knew how.

She took the narrow eastern passage, cool and dim and smelling faintly of soap, rushes, and clean linen from the servants' stores. Behind her, Ser Howland's footfalls were measured and unhurried.

"You know," she said over her shoulder, "I am not escaping into the sea."

"I know, princess."

"You follow me as though I might."

"I follow you as though you are inventive."

Aelys glanced back. He had a dry sort of face when he allowed it - weathered, steady, more capable of humour than he liked to advertise. "That is very nearly a compliment."

"It is meant for one."

She forgave him for the following.

By the time she climbed the servants' stair and stepped out upon the gallery above the training yard, the air had changed entirely. Warm morning light spilled through a row of open arches. It brought with it the smell of sun-struck stone, trampled dust, sweat, and the sharp oaken crack of practice swords meeting below. Beyond the arches the yard lay wide and bright: squires gathering shields, boys stepping through drills in pairs, knights calling corrections, grooms crossing the far side with reins looped over their arms.

Jace was already there.

He sat upon the broad stone ledge beneath the second arch with one knee drawn up, a book opened across it. He had the look he often had of late - no longer quite a boy, not yet a man, all growing height and solemnity before ease. His dark training tunic was plain but well made, laced at the throat, sleeves pushed back to show his forearms. His brown hair curled a little at the ends in the heat. At rest his face was serious, his mouth thoughtful, his whole bearing faintly braced, as though he expected the world to test him and meant to be ready when it did.

"You're late," he said.

"I am not late. We did not agree upon a time." Aelys moved to the arch and leaned out just enough to look into the yard. "I was detained by righteousness."

That made the corner of his mouth lift. "Was it fierce?"

"Endlessly. Apparently the soul has a path."

"And this troubles you?"

"It troubles me that no one can tell me what sort of path it is."

Jace laughed softly, closing the book over one finger to keep his place. "You asked your septa that, did you not?"

"I asked one sensible question and was given several unsatisfactory answers."

She sat beside the ledge rather than upon it, arranging her skirts carefully before the stone could offend them. From there she could see nearly the whole yard. Sun glanced off helms and sword-hilts. At the far end Ser Harwin Strong moved among a line of boys with the easy certainty of a man wholly at home in his own body, correcting a stance with one touch to a shoulder and a small shift of the foot.

Aelys liked watching him teach. People showed themselves most plainly in the things they did without thought.

"You have been with Vermax this morning," she said, noting the smear of dried mud at Jace's boot and the faint scent of dragon-smoke that still clung to him.

Jace glanced at her. "How do you know that?"

“You stink of it.”

That drew a proper laugh from him.

When he laughed, his whole face altered. The careful heaviness lifted. He looked younger then, kinder too, more like the boy he might have been had he not grown up beneath whispers.

"He is well," Jace said. "Hungry. Larger."

Aelys rested her chin on her hand. "I suppose everyone says that with pride."

"Would you not?"

"No."

His brows rose. "Still refusing to admire dragons?"

"I admire them very much. That is precisely the trouble."

He turned more fully toward her. "Go on."

Aelys looked past him to the slice of blue sky above the yard. "They are enormous and terrible and beautiful, and everyone in this family speaks of them as though the highest glory in the world were to possess one."

"Bond with one," Jace corrected gently.

She gave him a look. "That is the prettier word, yes."

He quieted at once, listening in that careful way of his.

"I think," she said, "that the old Valyrians wished to feel themselves gods. So they bound the largest and fiercest creatures in the world to their blood and called it greatness."

Below them wood struck wood in a steady rhythm as the boys repeated a drill.

Jace was still for a moment.

The others never grew still when she said such things. They corrected. They dismissed. Jace considered.

"You pity them," he said at last.

"Yes."

"The dragons."

"Yes, Jace. The dragons. They should be free."

That helpless, fond smile touched his mouth again. "No one thinks as you do."

"That is because no one else troubles to."

He shook his head, affection softening the motion. Sunlight caught in the brown of his hair. He would have been handsomer if he smiled more often, Aelys thought, but the court did not often give him reason.

Other children bored her. They were loud, shallow, and cruel in the careless way of children who had never needed to think. Jace was different. Jace read because he wished to know. Jace listened as though what she said were worth hearing.

And when his mother was there, the whole world seemed easier.

Rhaenyra never looked at Aelys as though measuring where she had failed to behave properly. She let the warm strawberry-blonde of Aelys's hair go half loose on hot days. Once she untangled a ribbon from it with her own hands and said there was no law in the realm requiring a child to be uncomfortable. She taught Aelys scraps of High Valyrian because Aelys wished to learn them, and before feasts she would sometimes murmur that the gods could survive a shortened prayer very well.

Rhaenyra felt like open windows and air.

Alicent felt like silk laced too tightly at the ribs.

Aelys loved her mother. That was the worst of it. If she had not loved her, resentment would have been easier. But Alicent's beauty was as familiar to her as prayer: the dark shine of her hair, the fine line of her throat, the careful grace of her hands. So too was the quiet pressure of being forever shaped by that grace. Alicent moved through the world as though duty sanctified every burden. She loved her daughter, Aelys never doubted that. But hers was the sort of love that wished always to improve what it held.

And Alicent had forbidden Jace.

Not dramatically. Her mother did very little dramatically. It had been said in that cool, even voice which made disobedience sound less like rebellion than a defect of character.

Keep a wiser distance. You are too young for such complications. Prince Jacaerys is not a suitable companion for you.

As though affection followed rules once named.

As though Aelys had any use for suitable companions.

"He was with your mother yesterday," she said.

Jace's gaze sharpened. "Who?"

"Your grandsire. They spoke after supper. Mine sent me away before they had done pretending not to quarrel."

Jace made a face, slight but genuine. "And what do you think they quarreled over?"

"Something tedious and important."

He huffed a laugh.

Aelys studied him sidelong. He was older than she was, though not so much older as to seem distant. Only enough that she had always found something steadying in him, almost protective, though he himself lived beneath such expectation it was a wonder he did not bend beneath it. Court whispered bastard when it thought he could not hear. Court watched him at lessons, at courtesies, at arms, as though waiting to discover whether excellence might compensate for doubt.

So he worked. He read. He trained. He listened. He was building himself into something no one could put aside easily.

Aelys understood him because she too knew what it was to feel misplaced in one's own blood.

Helaena belonged to mysteries no one else could reach. Aegon and Aemond belonged to noise and ease and the entitlement of boys told the world would make room for them. Her twin had been sent to Oldtown to be made properly Hightower, as though one half of him could be chosen and the other politely set aside.

And Aelys belonged nowhere without argument.

Except, perhaps, here.

Except, perhaps, beside Jace.

"You are frowning," he said.

"I am thinking."

"That is usually when you frown."

"Then perhaps I am doing it correctly."

"What are you thinking?"

She hesitated only a little. "That I like your mother better than I am meant to."

Jace looked curious rather than offended. "Because she lets you do as you like?"

"Partly. Also because she does not behave as though every interesting thing about me ought to be corrected before I am grown."

Something in his expression gentled at once.

"I think she likes you because you speak to her as if she were a person," he said.

"She is."

"A surprising number forget it."

Aelys looked down into the yard, where the boys now circled in pairs, striking and resetting while dust rose around their boots. "I like that she never makes me feel foolish for asking questions."

"She does enjoy questions. Mostly when they are not about her."

"That is one of her better qualities."

"And mine?"

Aelys looked at him then.

Light from the arch lay across one side of his face, catching the brown in his eyes and the thoughtful line of his mouth. The court had laid caution over him like armour, but his mother's openness was still there beneath it.

"You listen," she said simply. "That is rarer here than dragons."

For once he had no answer ready. A little colour touched his face. He looked down at the book in his hand.

Aelys smiled to herself.

Then, because truth came easiest with him, she said quietly, "I know my mother does not wish me here."

At that he looked at her again. His voice, when he answered, was careful. "Then you ought to be cautious."

"I am cautious."

"No. You are bold, and think it caution if you have considered the matter first."

"That is an unfair distinction."

"It is an accurate one, dear aunt."

She would have argued, but he was unfortunately right.

Alicent did not fear scandal, not truly. Aelys was still young enough that no one would give childish devotion an uglier name. It was politics her mother feared. Blood. Legitimacy. The dangerous shape of love when it did not keep to its proper side.

But Aelys loved where she loved.

Her father knew. She was nearly certain of it. Once or twice she had caught the soft, wistful look that came over Viserys when he saw her near Jace, as though some gentler version of the family had appeared before him and he had not the heart to banish it.

"She cannot forbid me to care for you," Aelys said.

Jace's whole posture shifted inward, protective. "You should not say such things aloud."

"I am saying them quietly."

"You say quiet things as if walls keep secrets."

"They often do."

"Not in this castle," he said. "Never."

That made her grin.

Then the grin softened.

He was not her brother, not in any simple sense the court would accept. Yet there was a steadiness in him she had always reached for, some older, kinder shape of companionship that made her feel less alone in this splendid, suffocating place. He did not speak down to her. He did not ask her to make herself smaller for the comfort of others.

With Jace, she did not feel like the inconvenient daughter forever standing a little outside everyone else's design.

With Jace, she felt chosen.

From below came the barked call that ended the drill. Wooden swords lowered. Boys broke apart with the loose-limbed relief of release. Somewhere a squire laughed. A gull wheeled above the walls, white against the summer sky.

Aelys became aware again of time.

"I ought to go back," she said reluctantly. "Before Septa Johanna declares me in rebellion against heaven."

"Are you not?"

"Only against the tedious parts of heaven."

Jace smiled, but it softened quickly into something more serious. "Your mother will be angry."

"Yes."

Aelys rose, brushing dust from her skirt that was not there. A few strawberry-blonde strands had worked loose near her temples. Alicent would have fixed them at once. Rhaenyra would likely have left them.

Jace noticed them too, she thought, but wisely said nothing.

"If I am caught," Aelys said, "I shall say you kept me."

Jace looked up from the history book on his knee. "Kept you."

"Yes."

He lifted a brow. "Against your will?"

Aelys gave him a look. "Do not make it sound so dire, nephew. I shall merely say you began upon history and I was too well-mannered to interrupt."

That drew a quiet laugh from him.

"I do not inflict history upon people."

Aelys looked pointedly at the book in his hand. "You do. Constantly. You sit with some old keep or dead king in your lap and expect the world to care for it."

Jace glanced down at the book as though it had betrayed him. "It is not about a dead king."

"No? Then an old keep."

"It is a history of Dragonstone."

"That is worse."

His mouth twitched. "Worse?!"

"Much worse. If I stayed another moment, you would tell me who repaired which tower and in what year, and then I should never escape at all."

"I would not."

"You would," she said, stepping backward toward the passage. "And you would enjoy it."

He smiled properly then, and it softened his whole face. "A little."

"I knew it." She adjusted her sleeves with great dignity. "Very well. If anyone asks, I shall say my nephew detained me with old stones, dead kings, and intolerable seriousness."

Jace shook his head, though he was still smiling. "You are very rude, Ely."

"And yet here you sit, enduring me."

"I am patient."

"You are scholarly."

"I am both!"

Aelys grinned. "That may be the truest thing you have said all morning."

He pointed lightly toward the passage with the closed book. "Go on, then, before your septa sends half the Keep to look for you."

She ought to have gone. Instead she stood a moment longer in the warm morning light, the noise of the yard rising below them. He looked very much himself so - dark tunic, serious eyes, hair fallen a little loose with the heat, a history book still in hand as though he had been born holding one.

When she smiled again, it was softer.

"Later, Jaja."

He stilled, and that small helpless look crossed his face before he hid it with a smile.

No one else called him that. No one had for years. When Aelys had been very small and unable to manage Jacaerys, he had become Jaja instead. Alicent had disliked it at once. Viserys, to Aelys's lasting satisfaction, had laughed aloud the first time he heard it. After that the name had survived only in private.

Jace looked down at the book in his hand, then back at her. "Only you still say that."

"Because only I remember you before you became ancient."

He laughed again. "I am not ancient."

Aelys lifted one shoulder. "You keep better company with dead kings than living boys. You like hunting. You rise before the sun as if the realm depends upon it. You prefer mead, mistrust sweet things, and are forever drawn to matters no child ought to care about. So yes, dear nephew. You were born half an old man."

"I am wounded."

"Truth is often unkind."

He rose just enough to nudge the hem of her skirt with the edge of his shoe - not enough to wrinkle it, only enough to vex her.

"Go back, little menace."

Aelys drew her skirt away at once, glaring up at him with no real force. "Later, nephew."

"Later, Ely."

Ser Howland was waiting just inside the passage, where shadow and sunlight met across the floor.

He fell into step beside and slightly behind her without a word at first, letting her keep the silence. The corridor felt cooler after the open gallery, the air still carrying the dry smell of stone and old mortar. Aelys held her skirts clear of the floor as they descended the narrow stair, her slippers making almost no sound at all.

It was not until they reached the turn that he said, very mildly, "You might try being somewhat less plain about it, princess."

Aelys glanced up at once. "About what?"

Ser Howland's face remained straight, though there was something suspiciously patient in it. "About the prince."

She frowned. "I am not plain."

He looked down at her.

Aelys lifted her chin. "I am not."

A pause.

"Of course not," he said.

She narrowed her eyes. "That was agreement in a rude voice."

That earned the smallest shift at the corner of his mouth.

They went on. Light from a narrow window cut across the stairwell wall, catching on the links at his wrist and in the warm strawberry brightness of her hair.

"He is my nephew," she said after a moment, as though that settled the matter entire.

"I know."

"And I love him. As I love all of them. But people are crueler to him than they are to most. They watch him more. They speak of him more harshly. They act as though he must earn kindness where others are simply given it." She tightened her hold on her skirts. "So perhaps he needs more love than the rest. That seems only fair."

Ser Howland looked at her then - truly looked - at the small lifted chin, the stubborn mouth, the fierce certainty in her face.

In this castle, affection was usually disguised long before it was spoken aloud. Softened. Redirected. Made useful. People loved one another carefully here, if they loved openly at all.

Aelys did nothing carefully where her chosen people were concerned.

Something in him gentled.

"That is kinder than this court deserves, my lady," he said.

"There is nothing wrong with it."

"No," he said quietly. "There is not."

That seemed to satisfy her somewhat.

She adjusted her grip on her skirts and continued down the stair. "Everyone behaves as though there were."

"Everyone in this castle behaves as though honest feeling were dangerous."

Aelys thought about that.

Then, quieter, "It should not be."

"No," Ser Howland said. "It should not."

By the time they reached the lower corridor, the hint of a smile had returned to him.

"Still," he said, "he is dearer to you than the rest. You look at the prince as though you mean to defend him with a knife."

Aelys looked mildly offended. "I would use words first."

"I am greatly comforted."

"And if words failed-"

"I know," he said.

That made her smile despite herself.

He had been in courts and castles long enough to know how rare such open-hearted loyalty was - rare enough to be foolish, perhaps, but rare enough also to be beautiful. The little dragon princess loved without bargain. Loved as though no one had yet taught her to fear the cost.

He hoped, not for the first time, that the Red Keep would be slow in teaching her.

"Walk faster," he said as the sept drew nearer. "I have no wish to be accused of aiding sacrilege."

Aelys brightened at once. "You did laugh."

"I did not."

"You did. I saw it."

"You saw nothing."

"I saw your mouth betray you, ser."

He gave her a long look. "Forward, princess."

Aelys kept precisely the same pace.

"That is not faster," he observed.

"No," she said. "I am thinking on your age."

"My age."

"Yes. If I hasten, I may forget your knees are not what they once were."

For a beat he only stared at her.

Then, against all dignity, Ser Howland laughed - low and brief and entirely real.

Aelys looked very pleased with herself.

"My knees," he repeated.

"You are very old."

"I am not."

"You are at least fifty."

"I am not!"

"Nine-and-forty, then," she said generously, and swept ahead before he could protest further.

Howland followed with the helpless look of a man discovering that guarding one very small princess was a stranger duty than any tourney or night watch had prepared him for.

"Forward," he said again, though there was no force in it now.