king consort

HBO's House of the Dragon (2022, United States)

♚ 𝐀 𝐃𝐄𝐑𝐈𝐒𝐈𝐕𝐄, 𝐈𝐍𝐂𝐑𝐄𝐃𝐔𝐋𝐎𝐔𝐒 𝐒𝐂𝐎𝐅𝐅 𝐓𝐎𝐑𝐄 𝐈𝐓𝐒𝐄𝐋𝐅 𝐅𝐑𝐎𝐌 𝐑𝐇𝐀𝐄𝐍𝐘𝐑𝐀’𝐒 𝐓𝐇𝐑𝐎𝐀𝐓; the sound freed from somewhere visceral, venomous, a place darkened with rot and the remnant soot of devouring flame. Her fingers tightened around her silverware until the metal bit into her flesh and her knuckles blanched to ivory. Her jaw clenched taut with accumulated ire, with the bristling indignation of betrayal. And her chest — Gods, how it burned; her ribcage a blazing crucible of roaring dragonfire, so fierce and untamed that for one suspended breath she was certain the conflagration would burst forth if she dared part her lips, razing their bedchamber to cinders and bitter ash. He had spoken with such casual timbre, as though the atrocity was a gift laid at her feet rather than a dagger slipped between her ribs. The words had scarcely settled before Rhaenyra let the fork slip from her grasp. The sharp clang as it struck her platter echoed sonorously in the hush betwixt them, as though the very knell punctuating the princelings life. She rose with abrupt, violent grace, the chair legs scraping across the flagstones in a piercing screech that tore the very air asunder. Violets narrowed and fixed upon him with merciless force, shackling him beneath the seething wrath at what he had done in her name. She had buried a father and two children within what felt as though the same breath; Visenya’s pyre had scarcely cooled before Lucerys’s own flames had climbed the sky, the agony of such losses a macabre cruelty she would not, could not, wish upon any mother, least of all sweet Helaena. It was the usurper’s head she had wanted, not the poor, innocent proxy of his son. And all her husband had accomplished was crown her before the realm as Rhaenyra the cruel.

❛ Gods, how brave of you, Daemon, ❜ she snarled, every utterance doused in unforgiving sarcasm. Her eyes flashing with dangerous flame, her head tilting, jaw clenching, in near-draconic manner. Instinctive compulsion guided one hand to the other, fingertips finding the rings that adorned her digits. ❛ How remarkably fearless to strike down an unarmed child slumbering in his cradle. ❜ Three swift, assertive strides brought her to his side, her fingers curling into the woodgrain of the table's edge as she leaned forward — looming over him like a dragon over wounded prey. Her gaze captured his and held it fast; she would grant him no reprieve from the fire in her eyes. No escape. No softness. He was not deserving of it. Daemon had made it difficult, tortuously difficult, to defend him. To still see in him the man she had once regarded with such fierce awe and reverence; the rogue prince whose wild, untamed spirit she had desperately wished to claim as her own. He had disobeyed her. And there was little Rhaenyra despised more than the theft of her agency, the quiet subversion of her rule by those who should have been her shield. She would not watch the eighty years of peace Viserys had entrusted her slip through her fingers as though naught but dust.

❛ The price of my usurped throne is not the blood of some innocent child who has scarcely learned to speak. It should have been Aegon’s head — and the heads of every traitor who supported his treason. ❜ Rhaenyra continued, her skin aflame with the fervid intensity of anger; crimson climbing up her chest, her collarbones, bathing her throat in the hues of seared flesh. She was no idle sovereign; oh no, she intended to take her revenge, to reclaim what had been stolen and punish the brazen thieves in fire and blood. But it was to be done on her terms. It was to be under her command. Not those whose reckless whims would see her rule over a realm of ash and bone. She wished to rule over people who still trusted her judgment, people who could look upon their Queen and see not a monster, but a sovereign worthy of fealty. But how could they trust her if those who claimed to act in her name struck down children in their cradles? Her standing was already a fragile thing, and Daemon, in his hunger for vengeance, had handed her enemies the very spark to set her own pyre alight — the small, decapitated body of Prince Jaehaerys Targaryen.

❛ You defied my command. You plotted in the dark as the Greens once plotted against me. And now you presume to seize a war that is mine to wage. How dare you betray me as such? How am I to trust a man whose impulses rule him more than his Queen’s word? You forget that it is I who bear the crown. I choose the path we walk. If you cannot stomach it, then go — find some forsaken rock upon the sea and name yourself its king. You may rule it however you please, but I will not suffer you diminishing or defying my rule here. ❜

𝐏𝐑𝐈𝐃𝐄 𝐑𝐎𝐒𝐄 𝐅𝐈𝐑𝐒𝐓, 𝐁𝐑𝐈𝐆𝐇𝐓 𝐀𝐍𝐃 𝐕𝐄𝐍𝐎𝐌𝐎𝐔𝐒 𝐀𝐒 𝐃𝐑𝐀𝐆𝐎𝐍𝐅𝐈𝐑𝐄.  Against kings, knights, and cowards, Daemon had always known which face to wear; against Rhaenyra, every mask felt suddenly poor. He remained precisely as he was, his hands still laid upon the oak, though the fingers had curled inward now, slow and involuntary, the knuckles mirroring hers in their blanched and bloodless rigour. Beneath his grip, the stem of his goblet gave a faint complaint. A little groan of metal. Pitiful. Mayhaps that was all men were beneath sufficient pressure: soft matter pretending at strength, bending in the fist of what they loved. Once, he would have reached as if reaching were his right. Fingers to chin, thumb to cheek, hand around the nape, drawing her wrath close enough to turn it into heat. Their lives had been full of such thefts; glances stolen across feasts, hours stolen from duty, kisses stolen from the mouths of propriety and kinship and shame. ( Gods curse her. Gods keep her. Gods help him, but she had learned too well how to put a hand through the joints of his armor. ) A son for a son. Such a small, tidy phrase. Such a kingly little fiction. Men loved their ledgers, their balances, their old laws of blood and recompense. His mouth twisted. The fork still lay where she had cast it, a small and glinting accusation amid the ruins of their supper, the cold capon and softened carrots and broken bread bearing mute and pathetic witness to the domesticity that had reigned here only moments before, in that brief and vanished age when they had been merely husband and wife at table rather than queen and consort locked in a war of wills that threatened to unravel the fragile tapestry of their cause. A wiser man might have bowed his head and named his guilt cleanly, before pride could draw breath and turn the truth into a quarrel. Daemon Targaryen had been neither lesser nor wise in any hour that had mattered. Pride lived in him old as Valyria, hard as dragonbone, bright as a blade held too long in fire. ❛ I did not plot in the dark, ❜ His voice came low, almost quiet, ❛ I plotted in the open, before the men who serve us, and I would do so again before the eyes of every lord and smallfolk from here to the Wall. I make no apology for the manner of it. ❜ A pause. His throat worked, and the sweat at his nape, a jagged, traitorous prickle, had gone cold, as though his body had already begun to cool in anticipation of the frost she was casting over him. ❛ Only for the... miscalculation. ❜

Silence took the chamber by the throat. His eyes flicked to her brow, bare though it was. In his mind, gold still rested there, pressing into the silver of her hair, naming her before gods and ghosts and men too cowardly to kneel until victory made kneeling safe.  ❛ They stole your father’s crown before his body had gone cold. They locked your servants away, silenced your allies, crowned that drunken green whelp before the realm, and sent ravens in your name as though you were already ash on Dragonstone. Aemond murdered your son and came home to be embraced by traitors. The realm looked upon the rightful heir and waited to see whether she would weep or strike. ❜ His jaw tightened. ❛ Do you think your enemies would be moved by mercy? That Otto Hightower lies awake trembling at the purity of your restraint? That Aegon will descend the Iron Throne because you have shown him the tender parts of your heart? ❜  No song had ever been made for the mercy of wolves. His breath snagged. A small, involuntary, almost inaudible hitch in his throat, barely perceptible, swiftly and brutally smothered, but he knew well she had heard it, for her ears were as keen as her teeth, and she missed naught that fell from him. When he looked upon her once more, the fire had banked, the furnace door closed and latched and sealed, and what remained was stripped of every artifice and every defense. Violet met violet, flame met flame, and somewhere between them the chamber seemed to warp with heat. Rhaenyra’s anger had a sovereignty all its own. His wrath for her will; his hunger for her justice. His certainty for her command. How often had he scorned men for that very sin? The thought sickened him more than the child’s blood had at first. Perhaps that, too, was its own damnation. He was not a good man; he had never labored under that delusion. But he had thought himself faithful.  Faithfulness had been his last vanity, the bright coin he kept hidden even from himself.  ❛ I did not think of Helaena as I ought, ❜ The admission came hard, scraped raw by pride. For all the blood he had spilled, all the names blackened by his hand or his command, Daemon had ever preferred his sins plain. He could wear murder when it suited him. He could clasp cruelty at his throat like a prince’s chain. But this acknowledgment of carelessness sat ill upon him His jaw flexed once, twice. ❛ There. Have that from me, if you would have blood with your truth. I did not think of her. I thought of Luke. I thought of you. The true queen. ❜