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Prince Daemon Targaryen will not be king.
But King Jaehaerys cheers when Daemon unseats Ser Otto Hightower at the tourney for the birth of Prince Viserys’s firstborn child. Daemon roars as the crowd roars, beating his escutcheon with a gauntleted fist. At six-and-ten he is the youngest Targaryen in a century to be knighted. He could set his teeth on the world.
Amidst the uproar, the king lays his hand on Viserys’s shoulder.
Daemon raises Dark Sister high.
“Ah, yes, Daemon, thank you for coming.”
Daemon is yet young enough to look at Viserys with stars in his eyes. “You had a request of me, brother?”
“Indeed.”
The older prince gestures to the Lady Rhaenyra Targaryen, sweet and pink and cooing in her crib. Daemon washes his hands in the nearby basin before offering his niece his pinky. She holds on to it and shakes it like a rattle.
“The maesters are saying,” Viserys goes on, “that for the princess to become fluent in High Valyrian, she must have someone to speak to her in the language and only the language. Well, they didn’t teach Aemma too much of it in the Vale, and my own Valyrian has gone to rust. At any rate, you always were better than I was. Rhaenyra will have formal tutoring, of course, but, if you could speak with her, as often as you can…”
Daemon smiles down at Rhaenyra. “Hen rhinka,” he says. “Rytsas, byka zaldrīzes.”1
“I want Rhaenyra.”
His grandmother laughs. “The Vale is not so horrid you need promise yourself to a babe.”
“I would have a Targaryen wife,” Daemon insists, “in the tradition of our house. Since I do not have a sister to wed—as Father did, as Grandfather did—I would have the Lady Rhaenyra.”
“Rhaenyra will be for one of her own brothers in time. Perhaps she will even be Queen.”
The Queen’s lips twist. She has made no secret of where her favor has lain for the choice of her lord husband’s successor—with the Princess Rhaenys, over Daemon’s father Prince Baelon.
Daemon has no sympathy for the Queen. As it is, he is a son of the king’s chosen heir, and Rhaenyra might still be the Queen with him.
“The Lady Rhea stands to inherit Runestone,” the Queen adds. “It is no small honor. By all accounts she is as wild and fierce as your dear mother was.”
“Brother married Lady Aemma.” Herself a Targaryen, though Daemon is certain Alysanne needs no reminding. “We already have our alliance with the Vale.”
“This is a fine, rich match.” Alysanne’s tone brooks no further disrespect. She presses a papery hand to Daemon’s cheek. “I would see you happy, Daemon. And I believe you will be.”
Daemon will say this for the Vale: there are plenty of sheep to fatten Caraxes and otherwise nothing else. He spends his days venturing East, taking his spoils from the lands across the narrow sea. His visits back to King’s Landing are few and miserable besides—grandmother and father dead and gone in his years of fostering at the Vale. But as the Great Council looms he plays his part in cementing Viserys’s claim, building up an army of sworn swords and mercenaries. When Viserys emerges triumphant and their grandfather, too, is lost with Old Valyria, the new king invites Daemon back to King’s Landing—not as the Hand, an honor wasted on the old cunt that’s held it since their father passed, but as the master of coin.
He is still fuming as Caraxes breaks through the clouds over King’s Landing. Soon he notices another dragon in the air, its scales like burnished gold. Caraxes cries out, joyful, and Daemon knows at once the white flash of hair in the saddle is the now-Princess Rhaenyra. The last time he saw her, the morning after Prince Baelon’s funeral, he had flown her on Caraxes just as the Princess Alyssa had once flown him on Meleys.
His niece would be seven now, and even then only just. The youngest dragonrider he can name, and he knows the dragonlord histories well. Daemon spurs Caraxes closer. Rhaenyra and Syrax meet them. The smaller dragon, Syrax twists in daring circles around Caraxes. Daemon holds a steady course, close enough now that he can hear Rhaenyra’s girlish laughter in the air.
His aspirations for betrothal are long abandoned. Rhaenyra is his treasure despite this, her stubborn spirit a roaring echo of his own. And, if it bothers Viserys that Rhaenyra would sooner fly with her uncle than fill her father’s cups, Daemon can hardly complain.
Together, they fly toward the Dragonpit. When they land, she will leap into his arms, babbling in their shared secret tongue, and he will spin her around and offer her gifts of jade from Leng Yi.
That night, Daemon will ask his brother if he can be made free of his marriage, and, as ever, the crown will deny him. Years later, when Viserys has lost everything, Daemon will ask only that he be allowed to remain at Viserys’s side, to protect him, and the king will send him to exile.
When he clasped their heritage around her neck, Daemon did not yet know Rhaenyra would take everything from him. But, even as she taunts him with the truth of it, dares him to defy his fate, he knows there is no world in which he would strike her down. He would sooner rally men to her claim as he did for her father’s. So he leaves her at the bridge to Dragonstone, disgusted by the ease with which she has unmanned him.
The object of your ire.
Daemon spends the night in a lonely bed, Mysaria having long taken leave of him and his deceptions. It is in the sleepless hour of the owl that it occurs to him Rhaenyra is nearly six-and-ten.
War is glorious purpose. He had once drenched the cobblestones of King’s Landing with the blood of murderers and thieves, mixing in the morning with the offal of the butcher’s pigs. The shores of the Stepstones he now baptizes, wetting Dark Sister’s blade as though to slake her unending thirst. Daemon knows himself best when he is reduced to the animal, elevated to the primordial, adrenaline singing in his blood, steel singing against steel, greater and greater glory promised with each death he offers the gods. Viserys forgets—violence is the true language of Valyria. It rubs itself against Daemon’s skin, leaves its scar-script on his body, reeking of dragon and ash.
Daemon offers Viserys his crown.
He basks in his brother’s subsequent affections—Daemon is not above adulation—but underneath his anger simmers, raw and rapacious, in want of a needle with which to prick Viserys and watch him bleed. He has not forgotten the insult of his brother’s “aid;” the answering violence in his spirit has yet had its fill.
And then there is Rhaenyra. Nine-and-ten and ravishing, shining as only the blood of the dragon can shine, she is long past marriageable age. As he understands it, she is recently returned from a courting tour. Ridiculous. Let the worthy suitors come to King’s Landing and pay their tithes of devotion, he thinks. But she chafes at the yoke of marriage as he once did. In her entrapment, he remembers his own, the abandonment that twisted in his gut like a knife.
Two birds with one stone, then.
Deep in his cups, he does not expect how far he is willing to take it.
And how much further she wants him to go.
Hunger flaring in her eyes. That old dragon’s greed. If she were a man, she would be relentless. As a woman, Rhaenyra is more terrifying than any battle he’s rushed into, headlong, reckless. And yet she is every inch the treasure she was when she flew in shy circles around him, when she stood him down at Dragonstone with fire in her eyes, when she gazed at him sweetly under the heart tree, his fingers on the brazen claim around her throat.
Daemon exits the pleasure den in a storm of displeasure. He barks down the nearest cupbearer for another taste of oblivion.
His hands are shaking.
“I want Rhaenyra.”
As soon as he says the words again, Daemon knows them to be true. Bone-deep, blood-thick, brimming with feeling heavier than that of a boy of six-and-ten’s desperate desire to be one with his family. So he trembles; so he waits. For what, he cannot name. Only that it should have been larger than this, more terrifying. Where was this horror for which he’d sunk himself in so many cups? Where was this monster, then, from which he’d fled into dark fingers of night, he who never ran from anything?
Yet what greets Daemon first is lightness.
To shape his mouth around the words once more, to give his wanting form and color, to dream the world within it. A world in which he speaks every day with the language of his heart and under his touch pink lips part like a flower blooming. A world in which he can stand beside brother and beloved in the sunlight, brilliant, beckoning.
Rhaenyra, he realizes, madly, is a cause worthier than war.
But in this world the sunlight only blinds him, his head throbbing in time with his black, black heart.
In the years to come, he will tell himself he spared her. He will remember his brother’s steel at his throat and renounce that he ever insisted she was a woman grown. Indeed she was a child. Easier to convince himself of this than to reckon with the truth—that Viserys had been desperate to wed his daughter to any lord but him, a Targaryen prince, no matter that Viserys had chosen their cousin, that their parents and grandparents had been siblings wed, that Rhaenyra should be Daemon’s by rights.
And with yet more vitriol he turns away from another truth, a darker current, deeper and more cutting—that Rhaenyra had seen him for what he was and thrown it in his face: unable to fight for her for all his warrior’s glory, unequal to the moment despite the mad desire roiling his blood. Daemon had killed for her, and it was not enough.
He had nothing left to offer.
At Laena’s behest, they take the girls to be presented at court. Astride Vhagar, Laena is glorious, Rhaena strapped to her chest as Baela is strapped to his. Daemon could not be prouder of his wife, the best of the extant Valyrian lines converged in one woman, nor of his girls, the two stars shining in the night-black of his heart.
When they stand before the Iron Throne, the princess is first to congratulate them, even if she does so looking down her lovely nose.
She is not as he remembers her—girlish lankiness replaced by fulsome curves, flush with pregnancy. A small dark head shadows her skirts, staring out at him with her eyes.
Daemon wanted to believe the years would take the edge off of his desire. Surely Rhaenyra would be as weathered by time as he is, not the maiden flowering at his fingertips but the mother hardened by the ravages of rearing. Her artless impetuousness replaced by jaded cynicism. The bright fire in her young heart spent to dim embers.
But this Rhaenyra is a Valyrian goddess of old—unbowed, unflinching, dragonfire dancing in her morning-sky gaze. Daemon feels the old want writhing in his belly like a dragon rising with the dawn. But he offers only a cool smile. His fingers drum dirges on Dark Sister’s pommel.
Later he will insist to Laena that they do not stay the night.
Laena allows Daemon his dalliances. She understands this much of the dragon in him, perhaps even cherishes it; she has only ever seen him in shades of rose and gold. But he is no courtly knight, no shining prince, and this Pentoshi man’s lips, however lush, are cold comfort. For all of Essos’s wonders, here he is haunted by the same ghosts that stalked him in the Vale. An emptiness yawning open in his chest, devouring.
Dragonfire flashes behind his eyelids, unceasing. Daemon shows his daughters the remains because he must. He holds them close, though there is nothing he can offer that would set this tragedy to rights. Their young girls’ despair is dizzying, overwhelming, a weight too delicate and too precious for his ugly soul to bear.
It is only alone that he grieves Laena and the child he will never know.
At Driftmark, Vaemond Velaryon has the gall to use his niece’s death as a platform for his accession. As a threat to Daemon’s own niece. Ours must never thin. He meets Rhaenyra’s eyes, and the farce of it stuns him to laughter. His wife and child in the grave along with Rhaenyra’s lover, and Westeros is unchanged, festered with fat leeches. Was this what he had yearned for in shadowy corners? Was it worth it?
He cannot keep from watching her, even in the searing haze of his fury. It recalls another afternoon much like this, years gone by: the way she pulls his gaze into orbit, a sun burning then in the godswood, flaring now over the sea.
On many a cold night Daemon has kept himself warm with the memory of what could have been. But this woman is nothing like the young girl, feral and naïve, he has dreamt of splitting open. Rhaenyra wields her sensuality as she does a native tongue, moving through the gathered throngs in an easy prowl, betraying nothing of the hungry hound of grief that must also bite at her heels. She smirks at him, her elfin eyes flashing, the naked adoration of her girlhood replaced with something far more cunning. This is a woman on the cusp of being king. Daemon considers if it might not be he who will have to split himself open, given the chance.
A chance long gone.
He has no kindness to spare Viserys, even as his brother hobbles over to him, crown gleaming sadly against the pitiful ravages of his body. Finally they have this in common: the loss of a wife, the loss of a babe. Daemon finds no satisfaction in it, nor in the king’s hollow grasping at reunification. Thrice over Daemon has begged: to be beside Viserys, to take Rhaenyra for his own, to live a better life. Now there is no place for him anywhere.
Except:
“I want you.”
Once Daemon wanted to possess her. Now he is unmanned, undone, humbled by a longing even years and miles could not efface. He moves slowly, holds her softly. Ample opportunity for her to swallow back the words, to dig her nails into his scars and cast him again into the sea. She does neither. He moves inside her, even as she knows him to be craven, knows him to be depraved, looks that black heart of his in the eye and takes it between her teeth. It shames him to remember how he pawed at her as a younger man, drunk and desirous; this is a holy thing now, the moonlight shining in her hair, the way she looks at him and holds him close, and when she comes around him her breathing is louder in his ears than the rushing of the waves.
This time he will not run away. If she only asked she would never be alone again.
It is grand spectacle to see his House implode. Rhaenyra at the center of it all, gorgeous, glorious, a mother dragon roaring over her clutch, blood dripping down her teeth.
In the end there is nothing Daemon would deny her. Not a life he would not end. Not a life he would not spare.
The taste of her blood is hot in his mouth when he bends her over the painted table. They have shed their dragonkeepers’ robes like a second skin. Daemon leaves her in nothing but her crown and her bandages, wrapped over the wounds left by Valyrian steel and dragonglass. Byka zaldrīzes, his first thought. Mine, his next.
She sighs as he kisses his way down her bowed back, her breasts a milk-laden offering, heavy in his hands, the dark rubies of her nipples rolled in his fingers. He comes to his knees behind her. He can smell the musk of her cunt even before he spreads her legs open. He has his fill of her, and more, lapping at her cunt like a man dying of thirst. Her thighs tremble. “Jorrāelagon ao2,” her voice is an aching contralto, demanding more even as she flutters around his tongue, “I need you, Uncle. Husband.”
Need is love, in the right slant of light.
Daemon rises to his feet. She is wet enough that he seats himself in one long thrust. He presses his hand hard against the soft of her belly, luxuriating in the warm hold of her. She rolls her hips against him, resting the back of her head on his shoulder. Her pale throat glows golden in the candlelight. He takes the tender flesh of it in his teeth, fucking her as dragons fuck. Had he wings he would cloak her in them, too. Instead his free hand spreads wide over hers on the table’s edge. Their bodies cradle each other as they once did in the darkness of a pleasure house. Had he known then what it was like to be one with Rhaenyra, he might not have let her flee to the Red Keep. He might have bound and claimed her in the old way, no matter how she kicked or screamed, stolen her on dragonback to Dragonstone before first light.
As it is she has claimed him first.
This time neither of them is gentle, ancient rites stirring them to animal fucking. Soon Rhaenyra’s pleasure peaks over the Realm’s mountains and seas. Her cunt’s grip around his cock drags Daemon along with her, spending himself inside her, praise spilling from his mouth in something like prayer. My Queen, he will call her someday, and he will belong to her as he always has, her King.
“My wife is not giving birth at King’s Landing.”
Rhaenyra shoots him an exasperated glance. “They will want to see the child.”
Daemon remembers his mother. He remembers Aemma. He remembers Laena.
And he knows now of Rhaenyra’s previous births. Not even for the Realm would Daemon have Rhaenyra perform for the court like a Flea Bottom mummer.
“They’ll have to wait.” He places a hand on her belly, a dark frisson dancing down his spine at his child’s answering kick. “In the meantime, Dragonstone will wait on you hand and foot.”