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Someone has to leave first. This is a very old story. There is no other version of this story.
***
Alicent’s breath slices sharply through her chest. The chill of the morning air is unrelenting, nearly unbearable. The flash of Rhaenyra’s silver dress evades her where the princess has plunged ahead up the hill before them.
“Would it kill you to slow down?” Alicent shouts, voice cracking with exertion. “Rhaenyra!”
She stumbles slightly, and suddenly Rhaenyra is right before her, steps sure even as she walks backward, smile wicked with mischief as it tugs up the left side of her mouth.
“It’s not my fault you’re so slow.” Rhaenyra extends both hands palms up, then scampers backwards when Alicent reaches for her assistance. “Keep up.”
Rhaenyra is lean and wild like the boys their age, muscles hardened by hours on dragonback, legs strengthened from long mornings spent holding true to Syrax as she waves to Alicent from her perch in the sky. It’s no wonder Alicent can hardly keep pace, finally succumbing to the rigors of scrabbling up the steep incline and allowing her hands to find purchase on the ground as they complete their ascent.
“You are exhausting.” Alicent can hardly hold herself upright for the heaving of her chest, stomach aching with the effort of the climb.
“And you are always doing your best to be a bore.” Rhaenyra stands at the top of the hill, arms folded, smile already challenging, beckoning. “Lucky thing I’m here to save you from yourself.”
“My knight.” Alicent mutters, scraping dirt from her palms with one fingernail. “Such a savior you are.”
Rhaenyra’s arms are an anchor, sudden and surprising, latching around Alicent’s waist as the princess tumbles them both into the grass. Alicent lets out a shout, twists her body in a desperate attempt to free herself, but Rhaenyra latches on like a vice, breath heavy in Alicent’s ear as she crushes them together.
“Gods,” Alicent gasps when Rhaenyra finally relinquishes her grip. “You’re not a knight, you’re a beast.”
Rhaenyra bares her teeth. Alicent laughs, lets herself be tugged back into her friend’s grasp.
“A dragon.” Rhaenyra sprawls onto her back, pulling Alicent to crash down with her. Her shoulder lodges into the chest of the princess, who lets out a grunt but continues nonetheless. “Dārilaros.”
Alicent presses herself up on one palm to hover over the princess, gazing down at her friend.
“Enough of this Targaryen talk,” Alicent says, grinning around the lilting jab. Rhaenyra’s jaw drops in mock outrage, wielding back underneath her.
“Is that treason, I hear?” She rises up on her own elbow to meet Alicent’s eyes. “From the mouth of the Hand’s daughter, no less.”
Rhaenyra reaches, fingers seeking as always, taps her knuckles under Alicent’s chin. Alicent ducks her head away from the gesture, teeth digging into her lip to control her own smile. When she returns her gaze, Rhaenyra is still watching her, face filled with something slightly too foreign to be fondness.
“What captures your thoughts, princess?” Alicent asks, shyness creeping into the corners of her syllables.
“Nothing,” Rhaenyra hums. Her hands are searching again, this time roaming the wrinkles at the hem of Alicent’s dress. “I’m just admiring you.”
Alicent intends to laugh, but it comes out all wrong, shaky breath and a slight stammer. Rhaenyra returns her smile, sweet, subdued.
“Princess.” Her voice shakes, but Rhaenyra is steady, sure as the setting sun. “I swear you will be the death of me.”
***
Sometimes you get so close to someone you end up on the other side of them.
***
Rhaenyra’s newfound docility feels like a blow to Alicent’s face every time she encounters it.
“You summoned, my Queen?”
The princess stands at the head of the great table in the queen’s commons, hands folded before her, chin lowered in a posture of deference. Alicent knows it isn’t genuine, knows Rhaenyra is merely play-acting to rush the interaction to its end as quickly as possible.
“I had hoped you could assist me with the preparation of next week’s welcome for the lords to the North.” Alicent forces a smile, hopes it feels familiar. “I recall your interest in the Wall and the stories beyond it.”
Alicent’s mouth still tastes of bile from a morning spent heaving the remnants of last night’s dinner. This child is a violence within her. Alicent allows herself a fleeting moment to wish that she could speak to Rhaenyra of it, that Rhaenyra could be the one crouched over her as she breaks the quiet of each morning, fingers carding through her hair to ease the discomfort.
“Whatever you may require, your grace,” Rhaenyra murmurs.
Somehow, Rhaenyra’s detachment tastes more acrid than the remnants of her own sickness.
“It is an invitation.” It is a battle for Alicent to keep her voice level, soft. “Not a command.”
Rhaenyra lifts her chin fully, and there is a flash of it — the arrogance, the petulance. Alicent should hate this, hate the way Rhaenyra glares at her, but at least this is real.
“Apologies, your grace-” The princess bites down on each word hard, like a bone she wishes to break. “Are they not the same when proffered by a queen?”
“I just-” Alicent stumbles over her words, fingers twisting over one another. “I thought it might be the kind of thing you’d like.”
“And what would you know about the things I like?” Rhaenyra’s chin is lofted now, prideful, fearful, lip wobbling with the hardly contained furor of a child.
She is a child, Alicent thinks. We both are.
“Is this all we have ever been?” Her voice is pleading. Alicent doesn’t care. If they are playing a game, she doesn’t wish to win, just wants it to end. “I tire of warring, Rhaenyra.”
Perhaps there is a flash of something softer in Rhaenyra’s eyes. Perhaps it is an imagination, a mirage made by Alicent’s wanting.
“I have meant no offense.” Rhaenyra casts her gaze to the floor, to the unsteady shift of her feet. “I just want to be alone.”
If she looked up at this moment, Rhaenyra would see the way Alicent bent to her words, the way the queen’s face cracked open in naked hurt, in something that resembled wanting. If she looked up, Rhaenyra would see the way the queen faltered, halting herself in a half-motion to reach for her former friend.
She doesn’t look up.
“And what if I refuse to leave you to yourself?” Alicent is still learning to lead, to give orders when it is required of her. The inexperience grates in her voice. “You are not built for solitude, whatever you may think.”
When Rhaenyra looks up, Alicent’s face is stone, is a mirror reflecting her own betrayal.
“You already left,” the princess whispers.
***
Something’s not right about what I’m doing but I’m still doing it — living in the worst parts, ruining myself.
***
Rhaenyra balks in Alicent’s door, overwhelmed by the newborn cries echoing inside. She hates herself for her own hesitation, loathes the meekness seeping into her movements as she builds up the will to announce herself.
For a moment, she considers escape. There is still time. No one asked for her, no one wants her here. If she left, it would all be the same.
Then Alicent looks up, eyes vulnerable in their exhaustion, and she is trapped.
“I thought I would-” Rhaenyra forces herself over the threshold. “I had hoped to see our new princess.”
“Rhaenyra.” Fatigue coats Alicent’s voice, but relief breaks through all the same. “Of course.”
It’s been many months — a year, perhaps — since Rhaenyra entered the queen’s chambers. The last time she stood in this room, she still considered it her mother’s, not Alicent’s. Rhaenyra’s eyes devour the new tapestries along the walls, heart aching at the absence of the ancient Targaryen weavings her mother once favored.
Alicent approaches slowly, a tamer attempting not to spook a horse, Helaena bundled in her arms. The child seems too large against Alicent's slender frame, wisps of white-blonde and lilac eyes in stark contrast against her dark curls.
“She is truly beautiful,” Rhaenyra murmurs. She can’t remember the last time she told the queen something true.
Alicent’s eyes trace across Rhaenyra’s face, scanning for her meaning, seeking something familiar.
“She looks like her sister,” Alicent says.
It is a peace offering. Rhaenyra stiffens as if it is a blow nonetheless, Alicent’s words falling in heavy clefts.
“I will accept that as compliment, your grace.”
Rhaenyra battles against the vice at her throat. This should be nice. It is nice.
(It is not. Everything is foreign and awful — the new bed in the chambers where her mother once slept, the soft babbles of this strange sister, the smell of oranges and duty peculiar and unfamiliar on Alicent’s skin.)
“Were your labors-” Rhaenyra’s eyes ghost across Alicent. She seems well. Perhaps she is well.
“It was easier than the first,” Alicent assures.
The princess still remembers the final weeks before Aegon arrived — Alicent confined to her chambers, Viserys pacing the halls, worry acidic in Rhaenyra’s stomach even as she battled to maintain her distance.
“It must be exhausting,” Rhaenyra murmurs.
“It isn’t all bad.” Alicent accepts her shackles with a shrug.
This is how she has always been. Rhaenyra wondered often, as a child, when Alicent first realized her life wasn’t her own. When she embraced the hopelessness of her own freedom. She wonders now why she never asks, why she never questioned Alicent’s obedient surrender to the fatalism of her future.
“It’s a cage all the same,” Rhaenyra mutters and Alicent flinches. Her eyes never leave her daughter.
“A cage you will one day occupy yourself,” the queen says softly, voice level like that of a mother instructing her child.
“Maybe there are other ways to live,” Rhaenyra says.
“For you, I suppose.” Alicent glances up, eyes glassy, empty. “Not for me.”
It's sudden, the way Rhaenyra’s hands itch all at once to reach, grasping at Alicent’s shoulders, thumbs digging into the soft curve of her arms.
“You could try, Alicent.” It’s an urging, a begging, a desperation.
They do not know it yet, but this will always be their story. Alicent, frozen in place. Rhaenyra, running away. If only Alicent could let her go, if only Rhaenyra would stop insisting on turning around, perhaps this would end another way. But it will not. They will not.
Rhaenyra will never stop stretching her hand, begging. Come with me. Fly away. Escape. Alicent will never stop calling for her, frantic. Come back. Stand at my side. Don’t you dare leave me.
Helaena’s cries split the silence, shatter the moment. Alicent shakes her head. Rhaenyra jars back on her feet, as if remembering where she is, when she is, her face flushed.
“I’ve taken too much of your time,” Rhaenyra murmurs, head ducked, shoulders tensed as she bolts toward the door. “My congratulations again, your grace.”
“Rhaenyra.” Alicent’s newfound command of her own voice has its uses. Alicent used to cajole her into listening, turning her back and striding away if Rhaenyra became immovable, never needing to glance back before the patter of her footfalls signalled the princess had bent to her will once again.
But now, Alicent doesn’t need any tricks, any coaxing. Her voice alone brings Rhaenyra to a standstill in the arch of the doorway, even if she doesn’t turn fully to face the queen.
“Trying only breaks your heart.” There is a tremor in Alicent’s voice. Rhaenyra’s shoulders match it. “Trust me.”
***
Sorry about the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine.
***
As a child, the small council bored Rhaenyra to no end. Her legs fell asleep as she shifted from side to side, flagon growing heavy in her hands as she darted between droning men to pour more wine. It was an honor, yes, and she understood this. But it was a chore nonetheless, tedious and tiresome, and she never failed to complain about her long hours spent in meetings as she laid across Alicent’s lap, head lolling back in a recreation of her own boredom.
Now, Alicent understands. The small council is exhausting even when it is interesting, burdened only further by Rhaenyra’s own presence across the table, alert and piercing, a pacing animal prepared at any time to pounce.
Rhaenyra is always sharp in the council, even when she appears distant. Even now, only days after the birth of her third son, the princess reclines only slightly in her chair to cast furtive glances around the council table, fingers drifting across the polished wooden globe beneath her fingertips.
When Rhaenyra jerks to her feet to capture Alicent’s attention, her intent is resolute even in its unwieldiness. It takes little effort now to fend off Rhaenyra’s sentimentality, a simple set of her shoulders and firming of her lip. If she stands upright, spine steady enough, it is nothing to look at Rhaenyra.
(Alicent is kidding herself. Everything takes effort. Nothing is easy. She can’t remember the last time she breathed deep enough to fill her lungs.)
“We are one house.” Rhaenyra’s voice trembles. “And before that, we were friends.”
Their eyes meet and for a moment Alicent is a child again.
She is eleven and Rhaenyra has fallen asleep on her shoulder in the middle of their lesson, breath soft and steady as she slumps into slumber. The septa will turn any minute now, voice stern and eyes flashing, but for now she remains quiet. Rhaenyra’s hair is soft where it falls in her lap, nearly silver in the dim light of the library, and her lips quirk into contentment as she raises one hand to the nape of Rhaenyra's neck, nails scratching idly against her scalp, heart skipping just half a beat when the princess shifts closer.
She is thirteen and her hand is bloodied, twitching where Rhaenyra has stilled it in her lap. Already she wishes to return to the comfort of her fidgeting, to tuck the softest part of her most recently healed ring finger into her mouth, to peel away at the skin until the nerve is raw and the pain is fresh. But Rhaenyra holds firm, in a way that Alicent cherishes, that she clings to with dogged certainty, calmed for this moment and perhaps the next under her touch.
She is fifteen and Rhaenyra’s fingers are stuttering across her lips, eyes fixed upon hers in something near reverie. A whispered question, a rushed nod. Rhaenyra’s mouth tastes like candied lemons when it brushes against her, delicate in a way that is almost fearful. She pushes back, bites down, draws blood. Rhaenyra gasps, tips her head, relents under her hands, whispers, heart crying softly: I love you, please don’t stop, I love you.
She is seventeen and the king’s hand is a vice on her own and Rhaenyra’s eyes are those of a stranger. The feeling of the princess watching her used to be a comfort, a tonic, an intoxication. Now it prickles against her skin, leaves her shifting and restless, forces her burrowing deeper within herself, further down, where she can hide and hide and hide. Maybe this is a blessing. Maybe this is a burial. If Rhaenyra can’t recognize her, maybe she doesn’t exist anymore.
She is nineteen and she is alone and she is howling at the gods, knees digging into the mud under the weirwood, hands crushing against her own ribcage. Her stomach aches, her chest aches, her throat aches. Still she screams. Still no one comes, no one hears.
Alicent’s eyes snap away, her entire body flinching from Rhaenyra’s gaze. She can feel Rhaenyra’s eyes still on her, even as she deflects the offer, even as she turns to the king. Alicent averts her gaze with a vengeance, with a violence.
If she looks back, even for a moment, Alicent fears she’ll be lost in a past that has long vanished.
***
But we both know how it goes — I say I want you inside me and you hold my head underwater, I say I want you inside me and you split me open with a knife.
***
It is the first time Rhaenyra has touched Alicent in a decade.
Whatever violence Alicent meant to wage on Rhaenyra’s sons evaporates at the moment of their collision. They sink into each other like a blade into flesh. Rhaenyra’s fingers dig into Alicent’s shoulder, clawing for purchase, for recognition. The bare skin of Alicent’s wrist burns her palm, but Rhaenyra pulls tighter, tearing apart the carefully measured breach they had built over ten years of calculated loathing. Their eyes rake across one another’s faces with brutality, desperate to memorize every detail washed away in these years of holding themselves apart.
Rhaenyra pushes. Alicent pulls. Neither can win while the other still struggles. It is the same song they seem to have always cried to one another, out of tune, despondent, a singular wail that cracks both their throats: Let me hurt you, let me break you, let me crack you open and pour myself into you, let me, let me, let me.
“You have gone too far,” Rhaenyra hisses.
It’s a lie. Rhaenyra wants her to go further. Wants Alicent to drive the knife into her arm, into the supple muscle of her chest. Wants her to break skin, to hit bone, to dig in until she unearths cartilage. Rhaenyra wants Alicent to crack open her rib cage, to locate the source of the pain that clings in her chest, to excavate every inch of longing from her belly. Wants it to bleed, to bruise, to scar, to hurt.
Rhaenyra leans toward the blade, begging for baptism, for her own blood to wash her clean.
Alicent breaks first, and that is a repetition, another cycle of their tragedy. The dagger bites into Rhaenyra’s arm in desperation — not to strike, but to escape, to force Rhaenyra to relinquish her grip. It is a desertion, not an assault.
Hazily, Rhaenyra recognizes the shifting of metal, the press of Corlys against her back, the roar of near-battle around her. But all she can feel is the hollowness left by the lack of Alicent’s body against her own.
Rhaenyra stares down where her blood drips from her fingertips to the floor. It doesn’t hurt enough.
***
Let me tell you a story about war. A man says to another man, Can I tell you something? The other man says, No. A man says to another man, There is something I have to tell you. No, says the other man. No you don’t.
***
Alicent’s eyes narrow as Vhagar swoops low over the Kingswood, Sunfyre following in her stead. For months now, she has been insistent on her boys flying each morning, dragging them from their beds and into their saddles to practice maneuvers necessary for dragon combat.
Viserys sits beside her on the overlook, ostensibly available to offer advice, but his eyes keep drifting shut in pursuit of sleep. The morning chill bits into Alicent’s skin as she tugs her furs around her chest, half-awed as always at the dragons as they weave through the air.
“Rhaenyra used to beg me to fly with her.”
The memory was meant to be a secret. Alicent isn’t sure why she offers it. At her side, the king shifts, discomfort and longing drifting across his features at the mention of his daughter’s name.
“She was relentless on the issue. Made the smiths craft a two-seated saddle to fit Syrax.” A smile, almost wistful, ever painful, threatens to break her countenance. “I wish I had accepted.”
“Vhagar might not take to the invitation, but I’m sure Aegon would be delighted to take you flying,” Viserys offers, not unkindly. The king’s voice is weak, just a hollow shell of that which used to command the realm.
Alicent flinches. There is no use in explaining the fruitlessness of the offer. Alicent has never wished to fly with her sons, or even her daughter. The only prospect that ever tempted her toward the skies was the outstretched hand of a young girl still innocent, her smile raucous and tempting and sweet, her own reply teasing: Perhaps one day.
But this is a promise sworn for a ghost. The girl who accepted it was buried long ago. The woman who yearns for it can’t recognize her face. This memory is a haunting.
Alicent understands the deal she cut with the gods. At some point, she allowed any joy left in her life to slip into the past tense. Alicent doesn’t cherish this bargain, doesn’t resent it. Sometimes, things just are, life just is. This is a truth Alicent has always understood.
Still, there is a memory or two that Alicent will hoard to herself. White blonde hair, sun kissing the tops of the trees in the middle of autumn, leather soft under her hands as she’s gifted a promise worth more than gold. The images hound her with the relentlessness of a specter, yet she knows they do not matter, that they offer nothing useful to her, predict nothing of the future to come.
In half a year, her children will wage war against the first, the last, the only love of her life.
“No, my king.” Alicent sighs, turns away as her sons swoop behind her, their joyful cries still unbridled and pure with youth. “Any dreams of the sky are long behind me.”
***
Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us. These, our bodies, possessed by light. Tell me we’ll never get used to it.
***
“Tell me a story.”
Alicent rarely makes demands of Rhaenyra, but she feels emboldened by the flush of the unseasonably warm afternoon. A blade of grass tickles at Alicent’s ear where her head rests in the grass. Rhaenyra shifts beside her, removing the hand that she had thrown across her eyes to block out the sun.
For once, the girls didn’t need to sneak away from their lessons early, the septas granting them reprieve to soak in the beauty of the day. Rhaenyra’s mother will want them back in an hour, maybe less. For now, the hollow beneath the weirwood is their sanctuary.
Alicent tips her head to the side, nose falling even with Rhaenyra’s shoulder where they lay, heads aligned, feet pointed in opposite directions. Rhaenyra gives a light grumble of dissatisfaction, no weight to it at all.
“You know I’m not one for stories,” the princess whines.
“Please.” Alicent shifts a breath closer, brow crinkled in pleading. “It can be a dragon story.”
Rhaenyra glances at her, that smirk tugging at the corner of her mouth. Rhaenyra’s smile is always capricious, hiding something — a joke, a retort, a thought she won’t disclose without begging.
“All good stories are dragon stories,” Rhaenyra says.
Alicent casts another entreating look at the princess, accompanied by a slight tug at her wrist. Rhaenyra acquieses with a groan.
“There once was a lady from a house of green,” Rhaenyra begins. “She loved books more than cake, dresses more than duels.”
“You speak as if her priorities are misaligned,” Alicent murmurs. Rhaenyra’s eyes flash in response.
“Hush, it’s my story.” The princess raises her chin, lip shaking with the effort of disguising her own smile. “The princess was kept in a high castle-”
“Clever,” Alicent interjects once more. This time, Rhaenyra can’t control her own grin.
“Quiet, I said,” Rhaenyra snaps, eyebrows quirked as she waits for Alicent to subdue a rush of giggles.
When Alicent has finally grown quiet, body molding into the grass beneath her, Rhaenyra begins again.
“Most days she felt safe in the castle. The tower was warm, cozy. The king brought her everything she could need. Flowers and books, furs and meats and mead. The lady spent her days wandering the halls, reading to herself, watching the sun rise and set from her window.”
Alicent tucks one arm behind her head, tilting her chin to watch her friend. Rhaenyra is rarely like this — still, almost solemn in her seriousness.
“But some days the lady felt trapped. She wondered what lands lay at the point where the sun fell from the sky. She watched soaring birds and wondered where they nested each night, where they learned the songs they sang to her each morning.”
Rhaenyra reaches out, seemingly without thought, one fingertip tracing across the blue of Alicent’s dress. She closes two fingers around a blade of grass, tugging it free of the ground.
“One day, the lady awoke to a knock at her window. When she opened it, a knight stood on her balcony, where he had climbed under the cover of the dark night.”
“How romantic,” Alicent teases. “I didn’t take you for the type.”
Rhaenyra says nothing. Alicent turns her chin just enough to search the familiar slope of her jaw, her nose, her cheek, waiting for the jest to register, for her retort to come quick and fiery. But the princess seems enthralled, in the sky above her head, in this story of her own creation.
“The knight asked, ‘Will you go with me?’” Rhaenyra continues, voice soft, almost dreamy. “The lady considered her escape, but she saw quickly it was a trap. The knight didn’t wish to free her; only to bring her to his own tower in his own castle, where he would keep her for his own.”
Alicent hums, the sound soft. Her breathing has slowed against her own recognition, transfixed against Rhaenyra’s voice.
“‘No,’ said the lady. ‘I quite like my own tower.’”
This is unlike any of the stories in either of their books. The lady always chooses the knight. It is not even a choice. There is never a question asked.
“Weeks passed into months and months passed into years. The lady grew accustomed to her castle. She thought of the knight less and less. Then one day, she awoke to another tap at her window. The lady looked out into the sky, expecting to see her knight, but instead she saw something new: a dragon.”
Rhaenyra’s eyes flutter shut, then open again. Alicent wonders if she thinks of Syrax, wonders if that’s how Rhaenyra truly sees herself — larger than life, looming and glittering and splendid, a creature out of place and out of time anywhere but the sky.
“The lady asked, ‘Are you here to take me home with you?’ And the dragon said, ‘No.’ So the lady asked, ‘Where would you take me?’ and the dragon replied, ‘Where would you like to go?’ and the lady thought for a long while before asking: ‘Where is there?’”
Rhaenyra’s voice grows softer still. Alicent strains to hear her.
“The dragon laughed. ‘Everywhere,’ he told her. ‘There is only everywhere.’”
Above them, a bird circles — a raven, perhaps. The sky is a pale blue, matching the hue of Alicent’s dress. Her breath comes steady with the peace of the quiet, tucked warm and sheltering around them.
Beside her, Rhaenyra’s eyes drift close. There’s a ghost of a smile painted across her lips, but Alicent swears she detects something deeper, something somber, almost bereft.
“Is that all?” Alicent whispers, despising herself immediately for the way it breaks through the serenity coloring Rhaenyra’s features.
“What did you want, a happy ending?” Rhaenyra mutters, face scrunching in reply, in a look that Alicent might describe as self-conscious if she didn't know the princess better. “I told you I wasn’t any good at telling these stupid stories.”
“No- it was a good story.” It is in Alicent’s nature to rush into soothing, even though the princess is already smiling. Rhaenyra’s ire burns too hot to ever hold for long. “Although I truly expected a battle or two, given your love for bloodshed.”
Rhaenyra rolls her eyes. Alicent laughs. Somewhere above them, the raven lands in the weirwood, flutter of wings the only sound beside each other’s voice either of them have heard in what feels like hours.
“I didn’t wish to upset your delicate constitution.” There it is again, that wicked smile, fleeting. “Next time you ask for a story, I’ll make sure to include plenty of blood.”
Alicent shoves at Rhaenyra’s shoulder. The princess captures her hand for a moment, touch running light as she scrapes a nail across her palm, the pads of her fingers tracing off the small wounds that Alicent had worried into her own skin.
“Was your story about us?” Alicent’s voice is a whisper, her question a plea.
Rhaenyra’s breath stops. Alicent wouldn’t notice if she wasn’t looking closely, if she hadn’t spent every day of her life studying the princess from the corner of her eye, if she hadn’t already doomed herself to a lifetime of noticing Rhaenyra.
Alicent wonders if Rhaenyra can hear the message playing out in her heartbeat, desperate as it raps against her ribcage: Say yes. Offer everywhere to me, I will say yes, I promise, I would never deny you.
Their fingers brush again. Alicent swallows. Rhaenyra’s lips stutter around a smile, as if her tongue holds a half-offered promise, as if her mouth can’t find the right shape for their secret.
“It can be.”