Chapter 1

They tell you the story so often that it stops sounding like your own.

Queen Aemma Arryn died on her birthing bed, soaked red with blood, screaming for a long awaited son after several failed pregnancies with only one surviving daughter, Rhaenyra.

They cut you and your brother from her like a butcher clearing a carcass, because King Viserys wanted a boy heir so badly that the maesters were told to save the child over the mother if it came to a choosing. It came to a choosing. Your mother lost.

Your brother was born first, and he was born right. Silver hair, fine as spun glass, damp and curling faintly at his temples. Eyes the pale violet of a bruise just starting to yellow at the edges. Valyrian eyes, the eyes of Old Aegon and Rhaenys and Visenya, eyes that had crossed the world on dragonback and never once diluted, or so the singers liked to claim. They named him Baelon, for his grandfather, and for one day the Red Keep rang with bells and the promise of a boy heir who would carry the line forward, clean and unbroken.

He died the next day. No one has ever told you why. The Maester wrote something in a book you were never permitted to read, and by the time you were old enough to demand it, the book had been quietly lost, the way inconvenient things in the Red Keep have a way of being lost.

You were born second, an afterthought, a girl the maesters almost didn't bother to warm by the fire because they were already tending the boy. You did not have silver hair. You had hair the colour of a dead leaf in autumn and it grew in soft and unremarkable and entirely without ceremony. Your eyes were not violet. You could have been mistaken for half the smallfolk in the Seven Kingdoms, the kind of person that has never so much as glimpsed a dragon egg, let alone Valyria.

You have heard the whispers your whole life.

Are we certain the septas did not mix up the babes?

A trueborn Targaryen does not come out looking like a commoner.

Perhaps the Queen strayed.

That last one used to make your father's face go grey and still whenever it reached him, because Aemma Arryn had loved him with a devotion that bordered on the tragic, and everyone at court knew it, and still it did not stop them saying it, quietly, behind their hands, whenever you passed.

The only thing that has ever silenced the whispers, not answered them, only silenced them, is this: you came from the same womb, in the same hour, as a boy everyone agrees was purely, unmistakably Valyrian. Twins share a womb and share the seed, whatever the common folk mutter. So you are a Targaryen. You must be. The alternative is a scandal too large to survive, and so it is never spoken of directly, only implied, forever, in every look that lingers half a second too long on your dark head at the feast table.

You used to search your reflection for some hidden mark of it. A fleck of violet at the centre of your eye. A strand of silver. You never found proof. You stopped looking somewhere around your eighth nameday, when you understood, with the flat clarity children sometimes have about cruel things, that looking would never make it true.

Rhaenyra was six when you were born and with it, the death of her mother and brother. Old enough to remember her mother's voice, and to decide, with a ferocious unfairness, where to put her grief. She put it on you.

It was in the way she never quite looked at you at table, the way she spat ‘sister’ in front of the court and something colder in private, the way that when you were small and reached for her hand crossing the godswood, she would find some reason to need both her hands elsewhere. You do not think she hated you, not truly, not in the storybook way. You think you were simply the door through which her mother left, and doors do not get to be loved, only walked through and occasionally slammed.

Your father loved you, in his own way, distracted by grief and by the crown and later by Alicent. When he looked at you there was none of the searching, cataloguing look other people gave your face, checking it against the family portraits and finding it wanting. He simply saw you. It was not enough to build a childhood on, but it was more than nothing, and you learned young to be grateful for more-than-nothing.

Alicent and Rhaenyra used to be best friends, now they could barely be in the same room together. Alicent bore more children with your father. Boys. Heirs. Your father finally got the boys that your mother died for.

Silver haired children soon crowded the court, and so you were left to your own entertainment. You read histories of Valeria. Of dragons and dragon riders. Rhaenyra claimed Syrax when you were just a babe. You grew up jealous. You wanted a dragon. The dragons didn’t want you.

You visited the dragon pit regularly, praying to the Gods that one of the dragons might see something in you. They never did. You were three and ten when you overheard a sailer on the shore talk about how an entire ship had been wiped out by the cannibal Dragon.

“Father?” You shout as you round the corner to his chambers.

“Yes my child?”

“What is the cannibal dragon?”

“an ancient wild dragon, you mustn’t go near him. He roosts in a pit filled with the bones of dragons, men and any animal unfortunate enough to cross his path. Why do you ask?”

“No reason, father”.

You went straight to the library and poured over books for an entire moon’s cycle. You learned that Cannibal lived apart from the other dragons, in a scar of black rock at the Far Eastern point of Dragonstone where the cliffs dropped straight into the sea and the dragonkeepers did not go if they could help it. He was older than the Conquest, some said — older than Balerion, even, though no one could prove it and no one much wanted to test the claim by getting close enough to measure. He had never suffered a rider. He was rumoured to eat dragon and rider both, and whether or not that particular tale was true, enough half-true ones had accumulated around him that even seasoned keepers crossed themselves at the sight of his shadow passing over the yard.

You started sneaking down to the cliffs when no one thought to watch you closely. You would sit on the rocks and watch, for hours sometimes, the great black shape barely stirring below, and something in you that never settled anywhere else in the castle went quiet in his presence, the way a held breath finally lets go.

You were caught, of course, more than once. Septas and guards hauled you back up the path by the wrist, white-faced, praying under their breath the whole climb. A sworn guard found you there once and did not scold you so much as go grey and silent, the way men go when they've glimpsed something they'd rather not have to report to the King. When asked, you never mentioned Cannibal. You always lied and said that you were in search of an egg, so you could raise a dragon of your own.

Your father, when the news reached him, knelt down to your height and held your shoulders and said, with more fear in his voice than you had words for yet, more than once, more than a dozen times over the years, not to go searching on that side of the cliffs, and you always agreed, and you never quite meant it.

You could not have explained, even to yourself, why the warnings never stuck the way they were meant to. Only that down on the black rocks, watching something ancient and unbothered by any of it, you didn't feel like an outsider. You just felt like a girl, watching a dragon, the way any normal Targaryen child might.

It was your nameday feast, which Rhaenyra had not wanted to attend but had attended anyway after your father insisted, with a cup in her hand that emptied faster than the servants could well refill it, sitting beside your Uncle Daemon.

You do not remember what started it. Something small, a comment about the shape of your face in the candlelight, someone's idle wondering aloud, not for the first time, whether the wet nurse had ever mixed up two cradles. You remember that you tried to laugh it off, the way you always did, because laughing it off was the only defence you had ever been permitted to develop. Alicent stood and squeezed your shoulder, clearly seeing that you were upset.

“Don’t listen to them, child” Alicent whispered into your ear.

It was Rhaenyra who stopped being idle about it.

"She killed them both, you know," she said to Daemon. Not to you, past you, purposefully not a whisper, loud enough that anyone who was listening could hear. Her voice pitched just loud enough to carry over the chatter. "My mother. Her own twin. She came out of the womb and left a prince and a queen dead behind her, and now she sits here every year expecting a song for it”.

"The youngest kinslayer the realm has ever seen," Uncle Daemon joked, and laughed, and it was the laugh more than the words that took the floor out from under you, because he said it like a jest, like something clever, like your whole existence was a joke he'd finally found the punchline to, and no one at that table, not one single person, told him to stop, apart from Alicent, who was quickly told to silence herself as to not cause a ruckus. Viserys just watched on, stoic.

You do not remember standing up. You remember the hall tilting, the candlelight smearing into long gold streaks the way things do when your eyes have flooded before you've given yourself permission to cry, and you remember running. Out through the side passage, past guards who knew better than to stop a princess mid strop, out into the cold, salt-heavy dark, down the cliff path you had walked a hundred times before, the one every septa and knight and your own father had told you, over and over, not to walk alone.

You were not thinking about surviving the walk. That is the truth of it. You went to the cliffs that night because some cold, exhausted part of you had decided that if you were already a kinslayer in every mouth but your own, you might as well let the wild dragon on Dragonstone finish you off.

Perhaps he had heard you coming. Perhaps he always knew.

He rose up out of the dark like the mountain deciding, at last, to take notice of you. Wings unfurling with a sound like sailcloth tearing, green eyes finding you and holding, the heat of him rolling off his hide in waves even at a dozen yards. He was larger than you expected. He was larger than anything should be allowed to be.

He roared, and the sound went through your chest like something physical, like a hand closing around your ribs, and every instinct you had screamed at you to run, but you did not run. You stood there on the black rock with salt wind tearing your hair loose from its pins and tears freezing on your face and you thought, with a calm that frightens you still, looking back: this is it.

He stalked closer. Close enough that you could feel the wet heat of his breath, close enough to see the old scars crossing his snout like a map of every fight he'd survived that other things hadn't. His jaws opened. You did not close your eyes. You have wondered, since, whether that was courage or simply the absence of anything left to lose, and you have never fully decided.

He did not kill you.

He held there, jaws wide, heat rolling off him in a wave that scorched the loose hair from your temple, for a long moment that stretched out past anything you could measure, and then, with a violence that had nothing gentle in it and everything deliberate, one great foreleg came down and closed around you, not crushing, though it could have crushed you as easily as a man closes a fist around an egg, and lifted you off the rock as he beat his wings and took the black sky in one enormous, gut-dropping surge.

You screamed. You are not ashamed of that. You screamed until your voice tore and then you simply held on to the one claw crossing your body like a bar, because that was the only thing left to do, thirty feet up and climbing, then a hundred, then high enough that Dragonstone's torches shrank to a scatter of orange sparks below and the whole black weight of the night closed in around you.

You had no control of him. That is the plainest way to say it. He did not fly where a rider directs a mount; he flew where four hundred years of appetite and instinct took him, and you were cargo, not a rider, clinging to a claw with hands gone numb from cold and terror both, certain, truly certain, for the whole endless first hour, that he meant to drop you the moment he tired of carrying you, or worse, that he did not mean to drop you at all. You thought of the cats in Flea Bottom playing with mice before they ate them.

Cannibal did neither. He flew through the night and into the grey hour before dawn, over black water and then over land, hills and then the gold-green sprawl of the Reach unspooling beneath you as the sky went from black to bruised purple to the pale gold of true morning, and somewhere in that long unbearable flight the terror burned itself down into something more like awe, because whatever else was true of him, he was magnificent, and some traitor part of you that had gone to those cliffs wanting to die found itself, instead, wanting quite badly to live long enough to see where he was taking you.

He set you down, at last, on a rock shelf above a sea cave in cliffs, so gently after that violent flight that you nearly wept from the incongruity of it. You both stood, staring at each other for a moment before he nudged you, causing you to fall on your back. You suppose he was attempting to be gentle but how gentle can a beast his size truly be? Then he retreated into the cave mouth, coiled his great black bulk into the dark, and simply growled at you with his green unblinking eyes very much saying “piss off, now”, while the sun came up properly over a city which from the cliff, you could see a giant white tower built upon a rock in the middle of a bay.

You did not have a rider's bond with him. You do not have one now, five years on. He does not come when you call and he does not carry you where you ask; he comes and goes as he pleases, and you have simply learned to be present, and grateful, on the days he allows it. But he did not kill you, that night on the cliffs when killing you would have cost him nothing at all, and in the strange arithmetic of your life, that has had to be enough to build a kind of faith on.

He disappears for days, sometimes weeks on end. You’re not sure how many lairs he has, and you’re not sure what he does while he is away. You just hope he is not recklessly eating other dragons.

You found your place in the outskirts of Oldtown, you tutored local children. Taught them how to read, how to write and how to weave. Lessons you had learned being brought up in the royal court. You kept who you were a secret. To everyone in Oldtown, you were known as Waters. A bastard from the Crownlands but no one asked questions.

Word of the missing princess reached Oldtown before you had fully found your feet in it, sailors' gossip first, then something closer to official, a description sent down the coast by raven. A Targaryen girl, vanished from Dragonstone in the night. Feared taken. Feared dead.

You read one such notice yourself, pinned to a board outside the Citadel's outer wall, months after you'd arrived, and felt almost nothing reading it. The strange, hollow nothing of hearing a stranger's history recited aloud. No one in Oldtown ever looked twice at a plain haired girl with an unremarkable face and connected her to it, and you understood then, with a bitterness that had gone strangely thin and workable over the months, that the very thing which had made you an outlier at court, the absence of any of Old Valyria in your face, was the thing now keeping you safe. You had spent your whole life being told you did not look enough like a Targaryen to be believed. In Oldtown, for the first time, that was a mercy instead of a wound.

You opened your mouth and closed it again. You are not entirely certain, even now, what would have come out of it, whether some careful half-truth would have arrived in time to save you, or whether the whole of it might have spilled out instead, years of silence breaking against the particular focus in his eyes, because there is a kind of tired that makes even the most practiced liar careless, and you had been tired of your own careful architecture for longer than you'd admitted to yourself.

The solar door banged open hard enough to knock the air from your lungs, and Lord Ormund came through it with Daeron marched ahead of him by the shoulder, and whatever had been building between you and Gwayne collapsed at once into something smaller and considerably less important.

"Look at him," Ormund spat, to the room in general, in the particular sharp, aggrieved tone of a man who has been personally wronged.

“Look at the state of him. Sword-fighting in the yard with the master-at-arms’s boy, rolling about in the dirt like a stableboy. How am I supposed to dine across from him. I shall be tasting his stench instead of my meal”.

"I am sorry, Uncle," Daeron offered, with the particular wounded dignity of an almost-five-and-ten-year-old.

"I don't care if you’re sorry. Fix this mess. You are a Prince. Not a pig”, Ormund shoves him further into the room and leaves, angrily.

Gwayne, who had risen from his chair the moment the door opened and arranged his face into something appropriately neutral, did not quite manage to suppress a flicker of amusement.

“I am not even that dirty,” Daeron murmurs under his breath once Ormund had left.

"I don't doubt it. Come now, let me brush your hair and get you ready for supper, you will not wish to anger Lord Ormund any more than you already have”, you say as you guide him from the room by his shoulders.

Gwayne left before you could decide whether he had dropped his line of questioning or was simply waiting for another opportunity to confront you, and you stood behind Daeron, brushing his dark auburn hair in his chambers for a long while afterward, listening to the ordinary sounds of the household going on around you. A servant's laugh in the corridor, gulls crying somewhere over the harbour, and thinking, not for the first time, that the lie you had built your life on top of was never going to hold forever, only for as long as everyone around you found it more convenient to let it.

Ormund's fastidiousness was a small and constant thread running through the household's daily life, the sort of thing you learned to navigate the way you'd learned to navigate weather. He could tell, apparently, when the kitchens had burned the bottom of a sauce from two rooms away. He complained, with real and lasting bitterness, about a particular groom who insisted on using a certain tallow soap that lingered unpleasantly on the leather of the tack. He inspected Daeron before any occasion of consequence and Daeron, who loved the yard and the practice swords and the honest, animal smell of exertion rather more than he loved being presentable, bore the inspections with the long-suffering patience of a boy who had simply decided, somewhere along the way, that this was the price of being permitted to be a boy at all in the hours his uncle wasn't watching.

You became, without quite meaning to, the household's quiet mediator in the matter. The one who made certain Daeron was scrubbed and correct by the hour his uncle expected him to be, so that the hours before it could remain entirely his own. It was a small thing. It did not feel small to Daeron, who thanked you for it more than once with the particular fierce, uncomplicated gratitude that showed he understands, even if he cannot say so plainly, that someone has gone quietly out of their way to protect the only freedom he has.

It was on an ordinary grey afternoon, rain streaking the solar windows and the lesson abandoned in favour of a fire and a shared, companionable silence, that Daeron asked you the question you had spent years dreading and had somehow, foolishly, stopped expecting.

"Do you miss your family?" he asked, without looking up from the book he had been reading.

"Sometimes," you said, which was true, and left it there, hoping it would be enough.

It was not enough. Daeron had never, in all the time you'd known him, been a boy easily satisfied with the smaller half of an answer.

“What was your mother like?”

Your hand went still on the page you'd been reading. You have had years to build an answer to this exact question, turned it over enough times in the privacy of your own thoughts that you might have expected it to come easily, yet it did not come easily at all.

"She died when I was young," you said, which was, in its bones, entirely true, the truest thing you had told him since you'd arrived. "I don't really have any memory to miss, not really, only the idea of one, which isn't quite the same thing."

"That's sad," Daeron said, with the plain, unguarded gravity children bring to grief that isn't yet their own. "What's it like, do you think? Having a mum?"

You thought, before you could stop yourself, of Alicent, his own mother, leagues away and in the middle of a war in King's Landing, a woman he had not laid eyes on since he was small enough to be sent south for his own safety, and understood, with a sudden ache that caught you entirely off guard, that the question was not really about you at all.

Alicent, you remember, had granted you a small kindness the night you ran. A small squeeze of your shoulder. The last gentle touch from a family member before you became a nobody.

"I imagine," you said carefully, "it's rather nice, having someone who worries after you more than is strictly reasonable. Someone who'd rather you smelled like a stable boy and were happy than smelled of rosewater and were miserable, whatever your uncle says on the matter." That won a small, surprised laugh out of him, exactly as you'd hoped it would, and you pressed on before he could ask anything harder. "I think Alicent loves you a great deal, Daeron. Distance doesn't undo that. It only makes it heavier to carry."

He was quiet a moment, turning that over the way he turned over everything, with more care than most grown men bothered to spend on their own feelings. "Do you think she'll send for me? When the fighting's done?"

"I think so," you told him, and meant it, though you had learned enough of the shape of the war gathering beyond Oldtown's walls by then to hold that hope rather more loosely than you let him see.

It was only once you had resumed your reading, that you noticed, with a small, cold jolt, that Gwayne had arrived and was standing just beyond the rooms half-open door, still as a man who has heard something he was not meant to hear and has not yet decided what to do with it. He did not come in immediately. When he did, some moments later, settling into his usual chair by the window with his usual half-finished cup of tea, there was something different in the way he looked at you, something that had shed a layer of its old wariness and replaced it with a quieter, more careful kind of attention altogether, the look, you thought later, of a man revising an opinion he had been fairly settled in, and finding the revision confused him more than he'd expected.

He said nothing of it that day. But he stayed for the whole of the hour before supper, which he did not always do, and when he left, he paused at the door long enough to say, "You're good to him." and was gone before you could work out how to answer.

You went to the cliffs more often that autumn than you had in years, though you could not always have said why, except that there was something in you that autumn straining toward its own kind of answer, the way Daeron's questions had been straining toward his.

Cannibal did not acknowledge you, most days. He rarely did. But you had noticed, over the years, small things that might have meant nothing and might have meant everything, that the low, constant rumble of him, banked like coals, seemed to still rather than sharpen when you settled onto the rocks above his cave; that once, only once, in a moment you have never fully trusted your own memory of, he had lowered his great head to the ledge beside you and simply left it there, warm and vast and utterly still, while you sat with your hand not quite touching the ridged black scale nearest you, too afraid of shattering the moment to test whether he'd have allowed it.

‘Fire cannot lie’, your father had told you once, a lifetime ago, holding your face in both his hands.

You had spent years believing that meant nothing where Cannibal was concerned, that whatever recognition dragons were meant to carry for their own blood, he had simply never had it, or had had it and judged you unworthy of it regardless. But sitting on those cliffs in the thin autumn light, watching smoke curl lazily up from his nostrils in his sleep, you found yourself less certain than you once had been. He had not killed you when you wanted him to, the night you ran. He had carried you here, of all the places in the Seven Kingdoms a wild and ancient thing might have chosen to fly, and had let you live in his shadow ever since without once driving you off for good. It was not a bond. You would never have called it that, not honestly, not to yourself. But it was not entirely nothing either, and you had begun to suspect, in the quiet unexamined part of yourself that still remembered what it was to be a girl who wanted, badly, to belong to something, that whatever recognition dragonfire carried for Valyrian blood, it did not always announce itself the way the songs claimed it would. Sometimes, perhaps, it only meant being permitted to stay.

You never told Daeron any of this. You never told anyone. But you thought of it, that autumn, rather more than you let yourself admit even in the privacy of your own head, and found, each time, that the thought settled something in you that little else did. The weight was getting heavier to carry.

Word of the request for help reached Oldtown on a fishing boat before it reached the Citadel by raven, the way the worst news in a port city always seems to arrive — sailors' gossip outracing anything official by the better part of a day. By evening it was being read aloud from the steps of the Starry Sept in the flat, careful language of a proclamation: the Hightowers would send a battalion to aid Prince Aegon’s claim for the throne.

You stood at the back of the crowd with Daeron's hand gripped tight in yours. You felt something in your chest go very still and very cold, the way it does when a life you thought you'd left behind reaches out, uninvited, and touches you again.

“Lord Ormund Hightower shall raise the armies of Oldtown and march north to the Riverlands in support of the rightful King Aegon’s claim to the Iron Throne”.

Three days later, you were waking the market stalls with Daeron, escorted by three guards. The crowds were thick with the particular volatile mood of a city that has been called into a war, and knew it had very few days left of normalcy. Daeron was interested in the waxes from house Beesbury, and the fine furs that had travelled all the way from the North.

You saw him a half-second before he moved, which you have never afterward been able to explain, except to say that some old instinct, court instinct, the instinct of a woman who had spent her whole life learning to read a room for its dangers, read the wrongness in his stance before your mind had caught up to naming it. You did not think. There was only your body moving, shoving Daeron hard sideways into the table of a cheese stall. The knife that had been meant for a prince's ribs ripped a long, ugly line across your forearm instead as you caught the assassin’s wrist and did not let go.

You do not remember screaming. Daeron told you, later, white-faced, that you had, that the sound of it was what brought the nearest guardsmen at a run, that you had held onto the man's wrist with both hands even with blood running warm down to your fingers, until three men in Hightower colours dragged him off you and put him on the ground hard enough that he did not get up again unassisted.

You remember Daeron's face more clearly than anything else about it, how young he looked, how entirely undone, kneeling in the market dust beside you with his hands pressed uselessly over the gash in your arm as though sheer will might close it, saying your name, your false name, the only one he had, over and over, like a boy trying to keep something from slipping under water.

"I'm well," you told him, in a slurred voice, which was not entirely true, but true enough to matter. "I'm well, Daeron. Look at me. I'm well."

You were three days abed with the wound before the maester declared you fit to rise.

He did not say very much, the first time. He stood in the doorway with a stiffness that did not suit him, looking at the bandage on your arm the way a man looks at a debt he does not know how to begin repaying, and said only, "I would be dead, if you weren’t there," and then, "The maester says it will scar."

"Most things worth doing leave a mark, my Prince."

Something in his face did something complicated at that, and he came further into the room than courtesy strictly required, and sat, in the chair by your bed, and stayed for the remainder of the day, talking about dragons, the book he had been reading, Tessarion’s progress and so on.

“Uncle Gwayne has left. My mother requested that he aid her newly appointed hand of the King”.

“And who would that be?”, you ask curiously, wondering if you knew of the name from your childhood.

“Ser Criston Cole. I have heard Uncle Gwayne doesn’t much like him,”

“Oh, and why is that?” you enquire, innocently.

“Well, he has replaced Lord Otto, obviously.. Gwayne’s father”.

“I apologise, my Prince. I find myself rather behind with news of the crown these days”.

“I wouldn’t expect anyone to care for the history of the Targaryen rule, other than a Targaryen themselves. I have been raised with the knowledge of my lineage, regrettably”.

“Yes, forgive me, they seem most peculiar at times”.

It was at that moment that Lord Ormund appeared.

“Peculiar indeed, Lady Waters, which is why Prince Daeron has been raised with the values of house Hightower. We would wish not for any of those pesky Targaryen traits to reveal themselves in such a promising young man”.

“Of course, my Lord”.

He takes a deep inhale of the room. “The salve has the most pleasing smell, does it not?” he asks with a smile on his face.

“It is rather pleasant, yes. I believe the maesters use Lavender, which is perhaps what you are able to smell”.

“Hmm, you continue to surprise me, Lady Waters”, he states as he approaches. Your eyes meet with Daeron’s, some what confused.

“The maesters tell me you are fit to rise, if you wish to join the boy and I for supper?”

“Oh, uhm, of course, my Lord. I should quite enjoy that”.

“Allow me to set eyes on the injury caused by a blade intended for the Prince, my Lady”, he requests, glancing toward your bandaged arm.

You begin to awkwardly unwind the bandage from your arm but a larger hand stops you and takes the bandage. You gulp and meet eyes with Daeron again as Lord Ormund slowly reveals the wound, unwrapping the bandage himself.

He tsks his lips together as the injury is uncovered. “It pains me to see such a scar on otherwise unblemished skin. You have proven yourself immeasurably, my Lady. I wish to reward you, yet I cannot yet decide what with”.

“That won’t be necessary my Lord, Prince Daeron remaining well and uninjured is reward enough”.

“You will move chambers, closer to mine. You shall have a guard at your disposal. I find you rather pleasing to spend time with. I should hate for you to become a victim of this war from within Oldtown’s walls”.

“Th- thank you, my Lord”.

He stands to leave, looking pleased with himself.

“Dinner shall be on the hour, reapply the lavender salve. For the sake of healing, my Lady”.

And then the door closes, and you and Daeron are alone again. Silence stretches for a long moment. Daeron stares at you, while you stare at the closed doors Ormund had just left from.

“He likes you”.

“Is he always like that?”

“Like what?”

Your eyes flash between Daeron and the door.

“Like that.. odd?”

“He has his ways.. I guess. I find myself used to it now”.

“When shall Ser Gwayne return?”

“I am not sure, I pray soon, lest we have to deal with Ormund undiluted”.

You reach over and squeeze his hand. “I am sure everything will be alright, young Prince”.

Everything was not fine.

The war came for Oldtown the way it comes for every great house eventually, not all at once, but in a steady accumulation. Ravens flew more frequently. Lord Ormund's face, at supper, grew angrier and more distracted by the week. Talk in the yard of levies being called, of the Reach's strength being mustered, of Dragons and Dragon Riders dying. You heard of Heleana’s son, an infant, beheaded in his sleep. How could your sister be so cruel? You heard of Lucerys and Jacaerys. So much needless death.

You hadn’t seen Cannibal for many weeks now. You feared the worst. You pray he hadn’t flown over a battle at the wrong moment and succumbed to this war as well.

It was on a normal evening, with the harbour gone the particular bruised gold it turns just before a storm, that Lord Ormund told you that he was preparing to march North.

"I have had word from Alicent, Cole and Gwayne require my assistance. I wish to take Daeron, and his dragon”, he said. “It will be a long journey, I plan to march for Tumbleton. I sent word to Alicent advising Cole and Gwayne go East, instead of as planned to Harrenhal”.

You kept your hands very still around the railing you were holding. "When do you leave?"

"The morrow."

"And what of myself, Lord Ormund?"

“You shall stay here and pray for our swift and safe return, I find myself rather fond of having you in my presence, but the road is no place for a lady”.

He reaches for your hand, brings it to his lips, and places a soft kiss to your knuckles.

"Make your goodbyes with the Prince”, he said, too quickly, and then, more slowly, "I shall leave a small guard to watch over Oldtown while I take to the front line."

"Thank you, Lord Ormund," you said, while a billion other thoughts rattled around your head.

“Be safe”, is all you can come up with.

"I intend to," he said.

They left before dawn the next day, riding out through the western gate with the Hightower host at his back, and you stood on the sea wall to watch them go with Daeron's final words spinning in your head. You did not let yourself cry until the column had shrunk to nothing more than a smudge of colour on the coast road, and even then, only a little, and only where no one could see.

Somewhere unknown, unbothered by any of it, Cannibal slept on a stack of bones, and you thought, watching the now empty road, that whatever recognition your blood had ever earned from him, it had not yet taught you how to be as unafraid as he was of what the world might take from you next. You just hoped he would return soon.

Cannibal disappeared for the first time in the second spring after he'd carried you to the cliffs, and you did not sleep properly again until he came back.

You had not expected his departure to frighten you so badly. You told yourself, in the days that followed, that you had no claim on him, that whatever debt he owed you for not killing you, he had already paid it, twice over, by carrying you here and letting you live in the shadows ever since. He did not belong to you. He had made that plain from the first night, growling you off his ledge with a look that needed no translating. But you had gotten used, without quite noticing you'd gotten used to it, to the shape of him being there. A black weight against the cliffs that you could see from certain angles of the coast road, proof that the strangest and most important thing that had ever happened to you had not simply been a fever dream you'd had the night you meant to die.

He was gone eleven days that first time. He came back smelling of salt and old blood and something scorched, and settled into the cave without so much as a glance in your direction, and you sat on the rocks above and cried, quietly, from relief.

After that, the disappearances became a rhythm you learned to live inside rather than fight. A few days, sometimes. Once, the better part of four moons. You stopped keeping count. Oldtown's markets and taverns and dockside gossip have a way of finding you eventually, whether or not you go looking for it.

You were three years settled into your life as Jayne Waters, long enough that the name no longer felt borrowed, long enough that the children you tutored in the outskirts of the city called you by it without a flicker of doubt.

A shepherd's flock gone missing from the hills south of the Hightower road, not stolen, not scattered, but vanished. The grass around the pen scorched black in a wide, deliberate circle. A fishing skiff found capsized off the coast with no bodies and a stern bashed in by something with claws the width of a man's chest. Sailors in the dockside taverns, well into their cups, telling and retelling a story about a black shape in the night sky, wingspan eclipsing the moon.

“The rogue dragon”, people had started calling it.

You knew, of course, before anyone said his name, whose shadow they meant.

You went to him that week, climbing the cliff path in the hour before dawn with your heart going hard and fast against your ribs, rehearsing, absurdly, what you might say to a dragon who had never once given any sign of understanding a word you'd spoken to him in three years of trying.

You cannot do this. You'll bring the Citadel's fire ships down on this whole coast. You'll bring hunters, and you'll bring them here, close enough that they might find me too.

You did not know if any of that was true of how the wider realm might respond to one wild dragon's appetite. You only knew you were frightened.

He was in the cave when you reached it, aware of you the moment your foot found the ledge, his green eyes rolling toward you and then, deliberately, rolling away again, as though you were a gull that had landed too close and would, eventually, have the sense to leave.

"You cannot keep doing this," you told him anyway, standing at the mouth of the cave with the wind snapping your skirts around your legs. "They're calling you the rogue dragon from here to the Arbor. They'll send hunters."

He did not so much as look toward you. He was preoccupied, you understood that the moment your eyes adjusted properly to the gloom of the cave, understood it with a lurch of nausea you were not proud of, with the wide, sprawling midden of bones that carpeted the cave floor behind him, old ones gone yellow-grey with age stacked beneath newer ones still faintly, sickeningly fresh. Sheep skulls. The long curved ribs of something larger, a cow or horse perhaps, or worse. He had arranged himself in the middle of it all with the loose, satisfied sprawl of a cat that has eaten well and sees no reason at all to apologise for it, tail curled possessively around the edge of his hoard, and when his eyes did finally slide back toward you, there was nothing in it that looked like guilt. If anything, and you have never been able to shake the impression since, he looked rather pleased with himself.

"You could at least have the decency to look sorry," you murmured aloud, and your voice cracked on it in a way that embarrassed you, and he yawned. An enormous, unhurried, entirely dismissive yawn, showing you rather more of his teeth than was strictly necessary, and a furnace of unleashed fire at the back of his throat, and then settled his head back down onto his folded claws, done with you.

You stood there a while longer, because you did not quite know how to leave a conversation that had never once been a conversation. Then you climbed back down the cliff path in the full light of morning, cold through to your bones, and did not go back to the cave again for the better part of a month.

You never did find a way to stop him. You want to be honest about that, looking back. There was no clever solution, no moment where understanding passed between you and something in him softened. He simply did as he pleased, as he always had, and you learned, again, the same lesson the cliffs had first taught you the night he chose not to kill you: that you had no leverage with him at all beyond his own inclination, and his inclination was not yours to manipulate.

It was Lord Ormund Hightower, in the end, who changed the shape of your days. He sent a household steward in Hightower livery to fetch you from down in the outskirts of the city. He asked after the woman who taught the dockside children their letters, and had eventually found you, ink-stained and startled, in the middle of a lesson on the counting of coin.

"His lordship requires a tutor for a boy of ten and two," the steward told you, with the flat, faintly bored courtesy of a man who has delivered a great many summonses and expects this one to go no differently than the rest. "The maester teaches him his numbers and his history well enough, but his lordship wishes for someone to see to his letters, his courtesies, the parts of an education a busy maester hasn't the patience for. Word has reached the keep that you're well thought of with the children hereabouts."

You should have said no. You understand that now with a clarity you did not have in the moment, that walking into the Hightower's own household, was the single most dangerous thing you could have done with the careful, anonymous life you had spent years building. But there was a boy at the centre of the offer, and possibly good coin.

"I'll come," you told the steward, and that was that.

You met with Lord Ormund and the boy on a bright morning in the Hightower's second-floor solar, sunlight pouring gold and generous through tall windows onto a floor scattered with abandoned papers and wooden play swords.

“Lady Waters, I’m glad to finally meet you,”

“Lord Hightower, it is truly a pleasure. Is this the boy you wish me to tutor? Your son?” you assume.

Lord Ormund looks you up and down, as if measuring your worth, “my nephew, actually. Come and say hello, Daeron”.

Daeron.

Daeron Targeryan?

He had Alicent's colouring. He was a handsome boy, sturdy and round-cheeked, but he was not a Targaryen-looking boy, not the way the word usually meant, and you stood in the doorway of that sunlit solar for one long, disoriented moment feeling the ground tilt very slightly under your feet. He was like you.

You did not know what to make of it.

"Are you to be my new tutor?" the boy asked, entirely unbothered by your silence.

"I am, if you'll have me."

"I'm Daeron," he said, politely.

Lord Ormund, thankfully, decided to speak to save another awkward silence.

“Lady Waters, the young Prince was sent here when he was eight, by his mother, the Queen, for his safety. I have managed his education up until this point myself however I have found myself rather busy with developing political tensions - nothing a Lady should concern herself with - so I won’t go into great detail, which is why I have sourced you, to help with Daeron’s lessons”.

“I understand, my Lord”.

“Good, you shall start tomorrow”.

You were given a small room in the household's outer wing, modest, plain, a narrow bed and a washstand and a window that looked out over the sea, and if you looked far enough, you could see Cannibal’s favourite rock. You were to have lessons with the young prince every morning save the Sept's rest days: letters first, then courtesies, then whatever remained of his patience.

He spoke of them constantly. Dragons in the margins of his lesson book, dragons on the backs of his courtesy exercises, dragons in charcoal on the stone windowsill when he thought no one was watching closely enough to scold him for it. Some of them were creatures of pure invention, wings too large for their bodies, teeth in improbable rows. But most of them, you came to understand, were one dragon in particular, a slim, quick shape, blue as a summer sky, with wings he always coloured carefully darker at the edges.

"That's Tessarion," he told you, the first week, with the offhand pride of a boy who has said the name so many times to so many uninterested adults that he has stopped expecting anyone to be properly impressed by it. "She's mine. She hatched for me when I was four. She's not big yet, not as big as Vhagar, not as big as Meleys, but Uncle Gwayne says she'll grow fast, dragons do, when they're young."

"Is she here? In Oldtown?"

"Yes. I visit her every evening, when my lessons are done." He said it like a fact so obvious it barely needed stating, and then, watching your face with the sudden sharp attentiveness children have when they suspect they've said something interesting without quite knowing what, added: "Do you like dragons?"

You have gotten better, over the years, at the particular art of telling a mostly-true thing in a voice that gives nothing away. "I've always found them extraordinary," you said, which was true.

You did not tell him that somewhere south along the cliffs, close enough that Tessarion might one day, on some ordinary flight, cross paths with him entirely by accident, there was a dragon six times her size and immeasurably older, who ate whatever he pleased and answered to no one and had a taste, for the flesh of things smaller and slower than himself, which turned out to be most things.

You thought about it more than you let yourself show. You thought about it lying awake in your narrow bed in the outer wing, working out, again and again, the ways it might all go wrong. A hatchling dragon still finding her wings, straying too far south along a coastline her inexperienced rider had no reason to think was dangerous, and Cannibal deciding, on a whim you could never predict or prevent, that she looked like easy prey. You had no way to warn anyone without unravelling every careful thread of the life you'd built. You had no leverage over Cannibal at all, and never had. All you could do was hope, with a quiet, constant dread you never once let show on your face, that the sky over Oldtown was wide enough to keep the two of them apart.

Ser Gwayne Hightower returned a year later. You had heard so much about Daeron’s uncle, but never met him. He had been fighting a war you did not care to learn about. It was clear Daeron thought a lot of Ser Gwayne.

You were in the middle of a lesson with Daeron, almost four and ten now, when you met Ser Gwayne. You were helping Daeron with his high Valerian pronunciation. You had learned to keep these lessons a secret from Lord Ormund, as he was displeased whenever he saw a glimpse of Targaryen traits bleed through Daeron’s carefully sculpted Hightower persona.

The sound of the solar door easing open, and the settling of a long frame into the chair by the window interrupted the lesson

He did not interfere, at first. He watched, mostly, with an unhurried, faintly superior stillness and a look on his face that gave away considerably less than you suspected he intended it to.

“Uncle Gwayne!” Daeron announced excitedly.

“Hello, Daeron. You’ve grown since I last set eyes on you. Why don’t you introduce me to your tutor?”

“Of course: Uncle Gwayne, this is Lady Waters, I have told you about our lessons in the letters I sent while you were away”,

Ser Gwayne stands and slowly walks over to greet you.

You curtsy for him and send a small smile his way, “a pleasure, Ser, I likewise have heard all about you from your nephew over the past few moons. He thinks the world of you, it is clear to see”.

“That is most kind, Lady Waters. Now don’t let me interrupt, I wish to see what the boy has learnt while I’ve been away”.

You met eyes with Daeron as if to ask wordlessly if it was alright to continue the lesson in High Valerian, as you knew Lord Ormund wouldn’t allow such things.

“I am perfecting my Valerian, Uncle Gwayne, so I may speak with Tessarion”,

“Wonderful, I bet she has grown in my absence as well, you will have to take me to see her later on,”

“I shall, Uncle!”

Daeron had been struggling with a word from an old Valyrian book, a simple thing, but tangled enough in its grammar that his patience had worn through within minutes, and you had corrected him, gently, and then, without entirely thinking about it, translated it yourself, smoothly, in an accent that had been drilled into you by the septas from your previous life, who did not suffer sloppy vowels. You then proceeded to repeat a phrase you had told Daeron for many moons now.

Zaldrīzes rȳbus, lo mērī udrirzi Valyrio eglio ȳdrassua

There was a small silence after you finished. You looked up to find Gwayne watching you with an expression that had shed its lazy edges entirely.

“It means ‘A dragon only listens if you speak in High Valyrian’ Uncle, which is why I need to be perfect, so Tessarion knows what to do in battle”.

Ser Gwayne looks is if he is considering something.

"That's rather good High Valyrian," he said, "for a girl who, my cousin told me, teaches dockside children their letters."

You should have had an answer ready. You had rehearsed a hundred smaller lies over the years for exactly this kind of moment, and in the instant it mattered, every one of them deserted you at once.

“Thank you, Ser,” you practically gulped.

He did not press it further, not then. He let the lesson continue, and you told yourself, walking back to your room that evening, that you had recovered well enough, that a man's idle curiosity about a servant's unusual education was not the same thing as suspicion.

You have since learned that you were wrong about that.

He began appearing at more of the lessons after that, and you did not know how to feel about it, because there was a version of that attention that felt almost like the easy, unthreatening company you might have let yourself enjoy on quieter terms, and there was another version of it that felt like being catalogued, weighed, found not to add up.

You overheard him once, asking one of the Hightower's own household maesters, in a voice pitched to sound idle and not quite managing it, whether any record existed of a girl called Jayne Waters born in the Crownlands within the last two-and-twenty years. You were not meant to overhear that. You have wondered since whether he knew you would.

He asked Daeron, too, in the offhand way a man asks a child things he suspects the child won't think to lie about, where exactly his tutor had come from before Oldtown, and Daeron, who adored you by then with the whole uncomplicated heart of a boy who has decided you belong to him, answered honestly that he didn't know exactly, that you'd never said, that it had never once occurred to him to ask.

You knew that something in Gwayne Hightower had shifted from idle interest into something with edges. You told yourself it did not matter. You had survived years on nothing but caution and a plain, unremarkable face, and you were not about to unravel now.

You were wrong about that too.

He found you alone in the library on an ordinary evening, long after Daeron had finished his lessons.

"You've a very particular routine," he said, without preamble.

"I do, my Lord? I confess no one's ever complained before. If I am to stay in the household, I shall. I just fancy the fresh air is all”,

"It's not safe to walk the rocks before dawn, there is word of a wild dragon. I saw it fly over on my ride home. Whispers say it spends its time between here and Dragonstone." He said it lightly, the way he said most things, but there was nothing light underneath it, and he came a step into the room, then another, unhurried, the way a man closes a distance he has already decided he means to close.

"How unusual, I know little about Dragons, I must admit”, you lie.

“Perhaps the Prince can teach you, he is fascinated with the beasts. It is odd that the first time I set eyes on you, you correct my nephew's High Valyrian like it is your mother tongue rather than his, yet you claim to know nothing of dragons."

Your hands had gone very still around the book you were reading. You made your voice come out level. "I don't know what you imagine you've found, my lord."