Chapter Text
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Rhaenyra had not slept well since the raven came from Storm's End.
That was the plain truth of it, the kind she permitted herself only in the small hours before dawn when the castle was quiet and there was no one to perform steadiness for. She had not slept well and she had not eaten well and she had stood at the window of her solar on six consecutive mornings looking at the sea and thinking about all the things she could not afford to think about, and she had done it anyway, because grief was not a thing you could govern by deciding not to feel it.
Luke was dead. He had fallen into the sea. Aemond One-Eye had —
And then the second raven came.
She had been standing at that same window when the Maester brought it. She had seen the seal of House Tarth on it, and even before she had opened it a sense of dread and longing had built inside her.
When she had got the courage to open the letter, the familiar handwriting almost made her heart stop.
To Her Grace Rhaenyra Targaryen, Queen of the Seven Kingdoms, from her son Lucerys Velaryon, written at Evenfall Hall on the Isle of Tarth.
She had not moved for a long time.
The two weeks between that letter and the arrival of the Salted Maid were the strangest of her life, which was saying something, given the life she had lived.
She had told herself, in the first hours after the second raven, that she was simply relieved. That what she felt was the straightforward, physical relief of a woman who had believed her child dead and learned that he was not. She had told herself this with great conviction for approximately one day before she understood that it was not the complete picture.
Luke's letter was in her solar, read so many times that she had memorized it word for word. She took it out at night and looked at it, as if it would disappear and all of this would end up being a cruel dream.
I don’t think Aemond meant to kill me, Vhagar disobeyed him. Arrax fired on Vhagar because he was afraid, and the she-dragon took revenge.
She had read that particular passage more times than any other.
She knew Luke. She had held him minutes after he came into the world, red-faced and furious, and she had watched him become a man over fourteen years.
She knew his handwriting and his voice and the way he tilted his head when he was thinking and the precise quality of the laugh he gave when something delighted him.
She also knew that Luke did not lie, but something still unsettled her..
The Luke she knew would have been angry. Would have been frightened, and then angry, and would have come home wanting her to do something about what had been done to him. He was not a violent boy, he was the gentler of her sons, the one who deflected rather than escalated, who would rather find a way around a conflict than through it.
But this was different. Arrax was dead, and the Luke she knew would have had feelings about that other than asking her to stay her hand.
She had asked Daemon about it.
Daemon had looked at her with those eyes he had that could mean seventeen different things simultaneously and said: "He survived Shipbreaker Bay. I imagine that changes a man's perspective." Which was not an answer, and they both knew it, and Daemon had smiled very slightly and changed the subject.
She had asked Jace, who was seventeen and grieving his brother in the effortful way of a young man who believed he was not allowed to show it, and Jace had said, "Luke was always smarter than he let on," and gone quiet.
She had not asked anyone else. She did not have the words for the question she was actually trying to ask.
She had not intended to go to the dock.
She had intended to receive him in the great hall, with appropriate dignity, with the restraint that she had been training herself toward since the second raven. She was a queen. She was receiving her son, not — she did not finish this thought.
She was standing on the dock when the Salted Maid came around the headland.
She was not sure how she had gotten there. She had walked, presumably. Jace and Joffrey were behind her, and Daemon somewhere at her back, and a handful of guards at a distance that was meant to look natural and did not. She was standing at the end of the dock in the last of the afternoon light and she was watching the ship come in and she was not performing anything. There was nothing left to perform. Two weeks of restraint had used it up.
She saw him at the bow.
He looked smaller than he had just weeks ago, and weaker. He was standing at the bow of the merchant vessel with his hand shading his eyes and looking at the dock, and he was the right height and the right shape.
He found her across the water. She raised her hand.
He raised his’.
The ship took the rest of the distance from her and she did not entirely register the gangplank going down or the creak of it under his feet, only that he was walking toward her. Carefully, she noticed, like someone with a reason to be careful, and she filed this away with the part of her that never stopped cataloguing her children's small hurts even in the midst of everything else, and then he was there.
She had prepared something to say. Some composed, queenly acknowledgment. She did not say it.
“Mother”, Luke said, and that was all Rhaenyra needed to hear.
She put her arms around him and pressed her face to his hair and closed her eyes and did not say anything at all for a long time, and he held on in a way that told her, without words, that he needed to.
She had meant to give him the night. She had meant to let him eat and rest and find his footing before she asked anything of him. She had these intentions very clearly in the first hour, and by the second hour she was sitting across from him in her solar with a fire between them and two cups of wine he was not drinking and she could not hold onto them any longer.
"Tell me what happened," she said.
He looked at the fire. He had bathed and changed into clothes from his own chest, and someone had done something about the wound on his shoulder that she could see the edge of through the collar of his shirt, and his face in the firelight was fourteen years old and also, somehow, not.
She had been trying to locate the quality of the not since he walked off the gangplank and she could not. It wasn't in any specific feature.
Luke never sat still, always needing to do something. And yet here he was, sitting still, his eyes taking everything in before he did anything, with the sort of patience that she associated with much older men, with men who had seen a great deal and had learned to take a moment before they reacted to what they were seeing.
"There was a storm," he said. "I don't know if it came on us or if Vhagar drove us into it — I couldn't tell, in the middle of it. Arrax was frightened." He paused. "He did something he shouldn't have. I couldn't stop him."
"He fired at Vhagar," she said.. "At Vhagar."
"Yes." Something moved in his face. Gone before she could name it. "Vhagar answered. She — it was very fast. Arrax was — " He stopped. "It was very fast," he said again, differently.
She waited.
"I fell into the water, but I don’t really remember it fully. I think I went unconscious. I remember waking up on the shore of Tarth, and then the Tarth patrol finding me." He met her eyes. "That's what happened."
She looked at him. "And Aemond."
The word sat between them. She had been carrying it for two weeks like a coal she could not put down and could not close her hand around.
"I don’t think he meant to attack us, Mother. Only frighten. He did follow us into the storm, but I don’t think—" He considered. "Vhagar is very old. I don't think anyone tells Vhagar what to do, including Aemond."
“The idea that you can control dragons is largely an illusion”
Rhaenyra recalled the words of her father, maybe they had more wisdom than she had thought previously, and yet — "He still followed you,"
"He followed me," he said. "Yes. I don't know what he intended when he caught us. I know what happened." A pause. "They're different things, Mother."
The word Mother came out of him right, the same way it always had, the cadence of it familiar, and yet she found herself catching at it slightly, turning it over. She was not sure what she was listening for.
"You think I should do nothing," she said.
"I think," he said carefully, "we should plan out our next moves carefully. I know you and Daemon and Jace are furious at the Greens, I am too! But we need to think of our next actions and plan it smartly.”
She stared at him.
"I'm sorry," he said. "That was —"
"No," she said. "Don't apologize for it."
She stood and went to the window. Outside, the sea was black under a half moon, the harbor lights reflecting in broken lines across the water. She had looked at this view ten thousand times. She stood and looked at it now and tried to sort through what she was feeling, which was difficult because there was a great deal of it and it was not cooperating.
She was angry. That was the bottom layer, the one that had been there since Storm's End. She was angry at Aemond and at Borros Baratheon and at the war that had sent her son on that errand in the first place, and underneath that she was angry at herself for sending him, which was the anger she could not look at directly.
She was relieved. That was still there too, layered over everything else like a wash of color over a dark painting — he was alive, he was in this room, she could hear him breathing.
And she was, she admitted to herself slowly, unsettled.
She was unsettled by her son.
"When did you get so old?" she asked, without turning from the window. She said it lightly, as though it were a joke.
Behind her, a small silence.
"I don't know," he said, before replying with the cheek that she so adored "After I survived being killed by the great she-dragon, maybe. Who else can boast about that?"
She laughed slightly at his absurd reply, and turned to look at him. He was watching her with those eyes that were the right brown, the right shape, the shape she had looked into ten thousand times, and they were also older than they should be. Not wiser, precisely. Something more specific than wise. The eyes of someone who had thought about something from every angle until he had used up the angles.
"Your grandfather will want to see you tomorrow," she said. It was a retreat and she knew it. "He's been — he has been very concerned."
Luke nodded. "I'd like to see him."
"And you should rest. The ribs —"
"Are healing."
"I know things heal, Luke. I'm your mother. I'm allowed to fuss over you."
Something happened in his face then. A small involuntary almost-smile that she had seen on him since he was four years old, when someone said something that caught him off guard and he was not quick enough to decide whether to let it show.
There he was, she thought. There was her boy.
She crossed the room and sat down again and looked at him across the fire, and the look she gave him was the honest one, the one she did not give to councils or lords or the careful political world she moved through every day.
"I don't know what happened to you," she said. "I don't mean after you fell. I mean — I don't know what happened. You are very different and I don't know how to say that without it sounding like a complaint, which it isn't. I'm not complaining. I'm trying to tell you that I see it."
He held her gaze. He did not deny it, which she had been half-expecting him to do. He did not offer an explanation. He simply sat with what she had said, and the sitting with it was itself a kind of answer.
"I know," he said. "I'm still — it's still me, Mother. I want you to know that."
"I know it's you," she said. "I just don't know all of what that means right now."
"Neither do I," he said. "Some days."
She looked at him for a long moment. Then she reached out and put her hand over his on the arm of the chair, and he turned his hand and held on, and they sat with the fire between them and the sea outside and the sound of the castle settling into its nighttime self, and she let herself not understand things for a little while.
That was when the door opened.
She had not heard Daemon cross the hall and she did not know how long he had been standing in the doorway before she noticed him. Long enough, probably. Daemon's version of arriving anywhere generally involved a period of observation that preceded the actual arrival.
He looked at Luke.
She watched the look. She had known Daemon for twenty years, in one form or another, as her uncle, and as her husband.
She had learned to read the things he did with his face, which were mostly about subtraction: what he removed, what he chose not to show. He had removed a great deal right now. What was left was an attentiveness that she recognized as him thinking very hard about something.
Luke looked back at him with a steadiness that should not have been there. Boys of fourteen, meeting Daemon Targaryen in a doorway, did not look at him with steadiness. They looked at him with fear, or with performance of not being afraid, which was its own kind of fear. Luke looked at him the way you looked at something you had already considered and formed a preliminary view of.
Daemon said nothing.
He looked at Lucerys for five full seconds, which was a long time for Daemon to look at anything he had not already decided about. Then he looked at Rhaenyra. Then he looked at Luke again.
Then he said: "Welcome home."
Two words. Completely neutral. She could not read them at all, which meant something, because she could usually read Daemon.
He withdrew from the doorway. She heard his footsteps going back down the hall, unhurried, and then she did not hear them, and he was gone.
She looked at Luke. He was looking at the place where Daemon had been.
"He'll want to talk to you," she said.
"I know," Luke said.
"Are you afraid of him?"
He considered this with what seemed like genuine attention, as though it were a real question that deserved a real answer, which perhaps it was.
"No," he said. "Why would I be afraid of Daemon?."
She thought about asking what word he would use. She decided to leave it for tonight. There would be time for it. He was home, and the sea had given him back to her, and tonight she was willing to let the strangeness of it rest.
She would look at it more carefully in the morning.
That was what she told herself, pouring the wine he had not drunk back into the decanter and kissing his forehead when she sent him to bed, listening to his footsteps recede down the corridor toward his chambers. She would look at it more carefully in the morning.
She stood at the window for a long time after, looking at the black sea.
She was not sure she would know what she was looking for even when she found it.