Chapter Text
Her guards had grown lax in her few remaining years. She was slow now, wrinkled and ugly from age so her great beauty would no longer seduce anyone to her side, and her tongue had grown large and unwieldy within her mouth, meaning her words were lacking the skilled elegance of her youth. Her eyes were the last to go, playing tricks on her. A flash of white hair to her side, Aegon, Aemond, Viserys. Rhaenyra. But it was always her curtain blowing in the wind or nightgown tossed over the folding modesty screen. She was alone. But now, with the guards off tumbling some maid, she crept from the hold fast and down the familiar stairs.
She needed not her eyes along such a well worn path. The red leaves stained her vision and the roots appeared even more twisted than she remembered. Among the roots she settled, and from her side she pulled free the knife it had taken her a year to get. She'd sold off nearly all of her jewelry for it, and the cat's eye blinked up at her in mocking acknowledgment.
She was not brave, not the way Rhaenyra was, or even her own children. She hadn't the courage to throw herself out the window or poison herself, a bloody ode to her son and her daughter. But here, with her eyes closed and head brushing the trunk of the weirwood, stringy white hair tangling into the carved face, Alicent imagined she could feel the weight of a head in her lap, fingers brushing along the line of her jaw. It was easier then, with the ghost of Rhaenyra helping her hand rise to her arm and make the first cut.
How similar it looked to the one she had placed on Rhaenyra, how fitting. In her hazy mind's eye she saw her sons each adding a cut, then Viserys, hale and whole with his wide smile, adding another. All the crying maids holding swollen stomachs added another, then their bloody blond haired babes. Flashing visions of Rhaenyra gripping the knife faded to her father. Finally, her daughter as she had last seen her walked forward and the bells sounded and the pounding of armored feet echoed around her. Helena raised her finger and delicately crossed her throat and Alicent, who was visited most often by her daughter, the one she had failed most, followed exactly as she had said to. As she should have when her daughter told her their fate when she was but a babe, beneath the boards indeed.
It was painful, but only at first, then it was peaceful, even when armored men and unfamiliar Targaryens poured forth to gawk at her. They all wore unfamiliar faces, and looked on with unknowing eyes. Had this been what Rhaenyra had felt in those last moments, as she stared into the maw of Sunfyre and was only watched by the twisted snears of those who hated her?
She let her head slip back and the sunset had the shimmer of Syrax's scales and with her final breath gave a soft dracrarys and imagined the dragon's mouth pouring forth fire to cleanse her clean. She was the Mad Queen of Megor's Holdfast, and she would not give them the satisfaction. Red, red, red staining the bark so that one couldn't distinguish the leaves from the roots.
Then with a painful jerk, as if she were ripped free from her skin, she woke with a shout.
The room swam hazily before her eyes, green and golden with light. It cleared slowly, a painful headache like banging bells inside her skull. Her bed was decorated with embroidered green curtains the like of which she hadn't seen in years. The last yard of green fabric had been sold off years ago and she had been relegated to grays, browns, and the mocking blacks.
There was a shift to her side and Alicent jerked away, her mind halting as she took in the body beside her.
In her mind, she had forgotten that once Viserys had been considered an attractive man with wide shoulders and a kind face. By the end when he was fading in and out of lucidity, she could only imagine him as the weak sniveling man too powerless to stop his wild brother, too soft to rule a realm. Now, he looked young and she realized with a small pang of sorrow that she had outlived him twice over.
She stood on shaking feet, swaying slightly as she made her way to the window. Not the window of the rooms she had taken closer to the hand of the king after her husband's death, nor the cells which had been hers since the war began, but the ones she had shared with Viserys occasionally before they had taken separate rooms. In the distance the dragon pit stood massive and imposing and impossibly whole. Somewhere in the back of her brain she heard the screaming of dragons as they were crushed under the domed roof, but it was broken by the sounds of shuffling from the bed and she fled the room before he woke. She was dreaming, remembering her life right before she died it seemed, she forced down the kernel of hope which grew with each tangible step and brush against solid wall.
Many had called her a coward in her life, now she felt it, running from one dead memory to another. The side antechamber was empty, no maids lighting fires or tending melting candles nor preparing breakfast and she trailed her fingers over their overly large table which they had once used to host breakfast for any family in the keep.
She had forgotten they had done that. It had ended after she birthed her second son and Rhaenyra her first, and used only sparingly after that. It had been a war table once, and she had gotten a special piece made of black stone with bronze casting.
For Rhaenyra, she had said.
Suddenly the door to their chambers seemed insurmountable, just knowing that somewhere in those twisting red halls might be the Rhaenyra of her memories, small and pale and with a smile as bright and dangerous as wildfire.
Her feet moved unconsciously, and she only stopped when she stepped on something sharp.
She raised her foot and saw a spot of blood and a tiny dragon carved from dragon glass. It had been a gift for her husband, before he had gotten sick and his mind began slipping back to his first wife, the one whom she could never quite live up to, no matter how hard she tried.
Picking it up, she realized that there was a small carved rider along the dragon's back, too small for any features besides the small helm. The door opened and a slip of a girl slid in, carrying a tray of rose water and herbs. She gave a near-silent screech when she spotted Alicent standing upright.
"Apologies, your grace. I was not there to wake you." The maid bowed low, hands gripping tightly to the silver tray. There was a vague memory of her somewhere in the back of her mind, but she couldn't quite pull it forward until she bowed and the memory slipped free. She had been one whom she had remarked upon to Larys, her clean beauty too attractive to her spoiled son, and who had been gone from the castle within the day.
"It's alright." Alicent whispered and her voice felt tight as it slid between her teeth. She hadn't spoken to people in what had to have been years and the words felt uncomfortable on her tongue. "Place it here."
The girl did as she was told, keeping her face shielded and racing from the room the moment she was dismissed. Alicent had never asked what happened to them, had always wanted to keep the belief that they were moved or paid and traveled somewhere distant and exotic. Now she knew, after decades of turning it over in her mind, that the truth was bloody. It always was.
Her fingers touched the vials the girl had left, and she felt a sudden hatred for her younger self. She was so foolishly clinging to her youth with any potion or concoctions she could find to compete with the wild beauty of Rhaenyra, though she had shied away from that reason in her younger years.
Softly, she padded over to the long mirror near to her chest of drawers. The image resolved itself, long brown hair fastened tightly to her head with fabric to give herself curls, face pink on one side from sleeping on her side away from her husband, and her eyes–
They looked so old in her face, as deep and fathomless as the sea.
A screech etched through the keep, and Alicent knew it like she knew the shape of her name or the weight of her body. She raced to the window, throwing open the curtain and then the windows to lean out and spot the small bronze blur as it dipped and rose over the sea.
It was overlapped with another dragon with metallic scales, one which shone gold and bright and bloody with a massive missing wing–
Alicent threw on a dressing gown, pulling the bits of silk from her hair and letting the curls fall limp to her waist as she walked determinedly out of the room. Viserys woke when the light from the window spilled in and he let out a frustrated grumble which sounded suspiciously like his dead wife's name before slipping back under the covers. It didn't matter, Alicent felt, when she turned the corner and fearful maids scattered like mice in candlelight.
She had finished freeing her hair right as she opened the door to one of the many balconies in the Red Keep but one which Rhaenyra liked most to land on when she decided to stop somewhere which was not the Dragon Pit. The air was sharp with the wet heaviness of morning dew. Syrax let out another holler, cutting a striking picture as he dipped low, his wings scattering a few loose leaves and the hems of her gowns.
Rhaenyra couldn't have missed her, had to have seen the vivid green dressing gown amid a sea of red stone, yet still she landed. There was a viscous pride in her breast that for all her love for Daemon that grew in their marriage, it was always Alicent to which she looked when she was at her truest.
"Your Grace."
Alicent had begun to realize this was not a dream but she would have known in an instance when Rhaenyra opened her mouth and such complicated affection spilled out. The Rhaenyra of her memories was so often the softer one from before the Dance, before her sons were taken from her, before they split so cleanly down the middle that their insides spilled out. After she was more ice than fire, so chilled she burned, and any vision of the caring mother or beloved princess was only kindling to the flames. This princess who resided between the two was one so rarely in her dreams, presumably because this version of her felt so incredibly distant while she stood close enough to touch.
Her silence was apparently disconcerting, because Rhaenyra watched her with narrowed eyes and Alicent could do little but laugh at how young she looked. All of the heaviness around her eyes, the way her shoulders had grown permanently hunched as if always defending herself. This Rhaenyra with shiny eyes and soft oiled hair had died with her father.
"Hello." Alicent said softly, realizing with a jolt of embarrassment that she stood before a dragon in her nightgown. Then her years caught up to her and the humor set in. It was strange how distance made all the pains feel less fierce and more farcical. "Good ride?"
It was the wrong thing to say, she knew it from the moment her mouth shaped the words, but it didn't matter because it was so easy to rile Rhaenyra up and so pleasant to watch her burn. How often had Alicent asked that question to Rhaenyra when they were young and free of all duties and responsibilities? Syrax responded to his rider's anger, shifting and chaffing and pulling slightly at his saddle but his serpentine head never broke sight of her.
Alicent realized Rhaenyra had said something, presumably sharp and cunning as was her way, and she only realized when the dragon rose on its powerful back legs and slid to the left, angling his wings to the wind to catch the updraft brought in off the sea. Syrax slipped into the current like the leaves which he blew up in three powerful strokes.
Alicent had always done the utmost to remain unaffected by the dragons, awe was unseemly after all, but as the number of dragons had dwindled and their size grew smaller and smaller and no new riders took to the air outside her windows, it was then she had started to question just how much had been lost. How often during the war had the dragon keepers told her there were no new clutches of eggs and that those ones they did have had petrified?
She had heard that when stables burn, the horses scream. She had never seen it, but she imagined the screams dragon's made while their heads were being lobbed off was mighty similar. And Rhaenyra, oh how she collapsed when Syrax had flown away to protect her mother, how she had screamed when the dome collapsed over them. Alicent had screamed with her.
She raised her hand to cover her eyes to better look out along the waves, but Syrax had already vanished from sight.
There were maids tittering around her when she returned to her rooms, clicking their tongues at her loose curls now ruined and how her cheeks were an unsightly pink. Alicent had only eyes for the sky and the deep green dress hanging out, prepared for the day.
"Purple."
The woman stopped, watching her with hesitant eyes. Alicent huffed and waved a distracted hand at the dress.
"I wish to wear purple today."
Maids watched her with wide-eyed confused eyes and she hissed, walking herself to her armoire and being confronted only with green. Green shalls, frocks, and yards and yards of green jewels, jems, and glass beads. She huffed and the maids fled, presumably to scour the castle for a purple gown befitting a queen. Alicent couldn't quite draw her eyes from the dresses.
The truly horrible thing was that she so desperately wished to put on one of the dresses. It was so easy when she was young, when there was no hesitation in her beliefs, when she was not so painfully alone. But, thought Alicent, this version of her had been so painfully empty.
When all of her children died in pain and alone, frightened and fearful, and completely her fault. When again, she folded to her father, her husband, her son, and tried to keep everyone tied together only to have her stitches bring infection and a putrid rot. When all she had left was a granddaughter who looked at her with wild fear and who died before Alicent could see her flowered, everything else seemed rather paltry.
"My Queen!" A maid had reappeared and was holding a beautiful purple gown. It was a lower neckline than she had worn, striving always for the reputation she so desperately clawed for, and was cinched tight at the bust and waist. It looked like something Rhaenyra might–
"Where did you get this?" She questioned even as she knew the answer.
"Pardon, Your Grace," the maid dipped low into a bow because she knew she would be punished. "Only Princess Rhaenyra had such a gown befitting your grace."
Alicent wished to laugh when she imagined the maid stepping into Rhaenyra's room asking about a dress for the queen. How fitting.
"Alright. Dress me." She shrugged out of her dressing gown and allowed the women to slide it over her hips and to use the bodice to tighten it slightly at her back. Oh how she had raged when her stomach grew thick and soft while Rhaenyra remained slim after each pregnancy, now she wondered what her younger self would think of how age would round them out even moreso.
The dress was beautiful and there was a residual warmth to it, as if it had been left in the sun or freshly steamed.
"Did you have the dress steamed?" Alicent questioned as the dress was finally tied.
"No, your grace, well…" she waited for the response, turning her wide hips to see the shine of the metallic purple fabric move. "It seemed the princess also thought to wear purple and was wearing the same dress. She of course offered it to you!"
Alicent had to laugh now, it couldn't be buried anymore. The maids startled and she wondered how many times they had already been beaten to make them so skittish, if not by her than her father.
That was one hard learned lesson she hadn't grasped until nearly three years in solitude. When bringing in flies, it's best to trap them with honey rather than vinegar, and the servants were the same. It was why so many chose to die for Rhaenyra and so many abandoned her like–
Any humor curdled in her stomach just imagining that clubfoot monster who had poisoned her son. How he enjoyed his tortures, how he relished her tortue most of all. She would have him skinned, his head torn from his body, mayhaps she might ask Rhaenyra to burn him with Syrax. She would make a list and have all those betrayer burned.
"Shall we retreat to the solar with the ladies?" A maid asked, a loyal woman whose name Alicent realized, she had entirely forgotten, blocked out to avoid the image of her grandson's murderers removing her head.
"No!" She said sharply, a touch too eager. "I wish to see my children."
The women were again confused, but accommodating, leading her down the hall. She was walking ahead, a slight speed in her step when she crashed into a small body and she instinctively reached out to straighten the boy.
Little Lucerys Velaryon looked up at her with fear in his eyes, frightened in her hands. Alicent jerked back, attempting a smile but clearly falling short. The boy must have thought it from anger, but Alicent couldn't help but imagine his face as he clutched to the severed head of his dragon and fell to his death in the eye of a raging storm.
"Lucerys!" She called and when the boy stopped, near to shaking, she knelt and fixed the boy's collar which had popped up in their collision. "There, all better!"
"Is this mother's dress?" He questioned, reaching out a soot-stained hand and she realized in half wonder that he must have been out picking an egg for his younger brother not yet born.
"Yes, I borrowed it. Do you like it?" She asked and ignored the telling silence at her back. Let the maids gossip, let them decide on some reason for her miraculous change and Alicent would pick the most believable to become the truth. Let her father seeth at how powerless he was from so great a distance. She ran a soft hand down the fabric. "I felt like purple was a good choice for today."
"I like green. Aegon wears green a lot but mother says I can't." Luke said with the guilelessness of a child. How he looked up to her son, the man who would see him killed–
"Mayhaps one day Aegon will wear black and you, green." She settled on and Luke smiled and she realized with a small shiver of horror that he was missing his front tooth, and how he was just a child the way her children had been, her grandchildren, her. She stood. "Have you any idea where your uncles are?"
"No, but Haelena was in the hothouses?" Luke said as he walked beside her. She nearly tripped over her borrowed skirts when Luke's small hand crawled into hers.
It had been years since she had been allowed near a child. They saw what a danger she had been and called her so many horrible things because what mother could fail to protect all of her children and grandchildren alike?
"Well that is where I shall go." She decided. "And where shall you go, Lord Velaryon?"
"Aegon promised me he would spar with me today!"
There was a flame of panic in her heart, one filled with the sight of her son's inflamed eye and the sight of her eldest's pained jerking as the poison tore through his body. But time did as time always does and stripped away most of the hard edges. When all you have to keep you company is memories, they often get worn smooth like a stone in a river. With age came the realization that Aemond was not upset with the loss of his eye, not when he had gained such a respected dragon, and even more clearly, she realized Aegon never wished to be king until she placed the crown on his head; the same, painful way she had never wished to be queen until her father told her to make it so.
The boy slipped his hand from hers and bowed politely, turning and running in the direction of Aegon's rooms, presumably to wake him and demand that spar.
"Goodbye grandmother!"
The maids gave a horrified gasp and Alicent threw her head back and laughed, attempting to hide the tears which escaped her eyes.
The hothouse was newly constructed, mostly to hold any rare Essoi plants which couldn't withstand the occasional chill brought in off the ocean. She heard her daughter before she saw her, crouched down in a pale pink dress and holding some bug in her hand.
Alicent's fingers began to shake and the only memory her mind could conjure was of that night, the one where the men had come to her room and killed her maids, of how the hours crept slowly by with a gag in her mouth as the men stood watch, of her daughter's face as she entered the bedroom. Of the sound she made when the sword cut through her son's neck–
"Mother?"
Alicent shook her head and instead quickly moved forward, taking Helena in her arms. She stiffened, obviously uncomfortable, but Alicent allowed herself a few extra beats to hold her hale and hearty in her arms before she allowed her to step back.
"Something is wrong." Helena whispered, for once keeping eye contact with Alicent. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing. I am just happy to see you."
And that was the horror and the truth. Her children had been so entwined in her sense of duty that she couldn't quite untie her anger from her motherhood and for that her children suffered. Worse, she had become her father.
"Something happened. What happened?" Helena demanded and Alicent could feel tears pricking her eyes and it seemed to frighten her daughter.
"Nothing happened." She forced out. "Nothing will happen either."
"What's done is undone?" Helena whispered and Alicent could do nothing but hold her. There was a fervent gleam in her eye, as if she were looking through Alicent at something beyond her.
An odd duck is what everyone had called her, but Alicent had forgotten just how odd, and never realized how perceptive until it had been too late, until all she had left of her daughter were her words.
The maids had bustled in not long after, as demure as sheep, and that was how she learned that her son-in-law and the Captain of the City Guard had asked for her. Alicent was sure she could figure out why, but it was cinched when she walked into her receiving room and both men's angered faces went blank with confusion when they saw her dress.
"What may I do for you both?" She asked softly, waving away her maids and calling for tea. There was a rush of both terror and wonder when the maids obeyed her without question, not avoided her eye and called her ma'am in place of queen.
"Whatever your anger, this has been taken too far." Laenor hissed. "Leave Rhaenyra out of whatever twisted game you are playing."
Alicent glanced once at the man to his right. He was handsome in a classical way, with a strong jaw and the curls that all his sons had inherited yet were never able to pass on. She imagined she might hear little Joffery's scream as he was tossed from Syrax's back in the voice of the boy's father.
Harwin Strong had been an uncommonly good man, killed by his brother whom she had raised to power. She imagined him as he would have been, burning alive under beams as he beat at a door to save his father as he left three sons fatherless.
"I see. Well, it is heartening to see such care from her husband and… the city guard." Alicent smiled and there was a sharp enjoyment at verbal sparring that she had missed in confinement when not even the maids would speak to her. To take the teeth from her words, she softened her tone and her shoulders. "I understand and applaud your loyalty, truely."
"Do you even have an understanding of loyalty?" Harwin Strong questioned, his golden cloak clashing with her tastefully chosen drapes. Alicent realized in her old age she had forgotten just how much everyone whom Rhaenyra surrounded herself with were often favored because they hated her. Alicent ignored the warmth bubbling up in her belly at the thought of being so singularly important.
"Ser Harwin, I have some inkling." She smiled again, as polite as she could make it but she was out of practice and the men took it for a threat. "Peace, I understand. Was that all?"
She hoped it was because the truly horrible thing is that she didn't care about them. Maybe in regards that their deaths would hurt Rhaenyra, but they were just men, men who could never quite understand the pressure she, they, had to suffer under. How quiet they had been when Rhaenyra was in pain? How stupid to be killed before they could be of use to her?
Guards escorted them out and both were watching her with unabashed confusion with a dash of suspicion but she only had eyes for the small box they had left behind. It was wrapped in thick black wrapping paper and a vivid red canvas bow and she knew without even opening it who it would be from.
Pulling at the tie and then peeling up the paper, she pulled free a book. It was exquisitely bound with gold inlays and a delicate image of a rearing dragon pressed into the buttery leather. She had never seen it before but knew that it was undoubtedly expensive and something Rhaenyra must have been holding onto for months. Alicent quickly moved to the window seat in her bedroom, cracking the window and flipping to the first page.
It was a bestiary of sorts, cataloging all sorts of monsters but the part which warmed her core was that carefully stitched between the drawings in a careful hand, were stories about the beasts. Where they could be found, what they ate, and how they copulated. Many were written in Rhaenyra's own hand.
"Alicent?"
She jerked, closing the book guiltily and flashing a smile to Viserys who had entered. He used no cane, his face was pink but from the walk and not the fever flush of sickness. Even from across the room, she saw that he was only missing a few fingers, not yet the whole arm.
"Yes?" She asked softly. She had never loved her husband, actively hated him occasionally, but she had to have some affection for the way he supported his daughter till the moment he died. It had driven her to madness then but now, more mad than ever, it had folded back on itself and she found herself proud of him. Weak in all but words, at least he loved his child.
Even the bastards. He loved them most of all it seemed, for they were the children of his most beloved daughter.
"The boys were disappointed to not see you while they trained." He peeled himself out of the jacket and she couldn't quite hold back the curled lip of disgust at the pus which stained the sleeves. The anger was back.
"Yes, well I'll head down now." A queen never runs, but Alicent nearly raced from the room and even ignored a call from the king.
The emotions were suffocating, so much so she wondered how she had ever carried them all. It was so painfully clear that Viserys still loves and longs for his dead wife, so why would he bow to her father and marry another? Why lay with her and get her with child, a babe who could contest the throne?
Steel crashing together rang out and she slipped unseen out onto the balcony. She spotted Ser Criston first, the dark hair and the broad lines of his shoulders standing out. He looked so young, so unlike the last time she had seen him where his wrinkles had sunken down his face like warm wax on account of the fact that his head had been mounted on a pike and paraded about.
The children scurried around, and laughs echoed out. She spotted her son Aegon at the forefront, shaking his little nephews by the shoulders and throwing out jabs. Alicent could only look at his face in profile, to look at him head on was to see his plumb cheeks overlaid with his older face, bloated from death and purple with poison. Here, he was young and cocky and she watched worriedly as they fought.
Aemond stood to the side, and the churning mix of anger and grief made it feel as if she might lose her breakfast. He was her son, the one who needed her most, and she had failed him. So brave to claim such a beast, and so bold to have lost himself in the process. Slowly, she walked down the steps and the practicing knights all fell out of their stances to give her proper bows, the likes of which she hadn't seen in a decade.
"Mother?" Aemond asked when she came over and ran a soft hand down the side of his head and then lightly brushed her thumb over his uninjured eye. Aegon smiled then it died when his brother gave a snicker and laughed.
How often had she lost her temper with him, her boy who treated others so poorly because she never gave him a reason not to? Alicent pressed a kiss to Aemond's forehead to smooth out his frustrated bow and then moved to Aegon, pressing a kiss to his forehead too. He stopped laughing.
"Aegon." Was all she could get out. She brushed his long hair from his face, and ignored the pang of regret for his loss and anger for his actions. By the end he was cripled and cruel, bitter and burnt, and she had made him that way.
She moved to the side, waving to Ser Criston to continue and while they did, they often took breaks to watch her questionly. Many of the knights simply left while others watched her with unabashed interest.
A small tug to her dress brought her eyes down to Lucerys and she couldn't help but smile.
"Hello." She said softly and Luke returned it, showing her the wooden sword he had been given by Aegon.
"I'm sorry for looking track of him, My Queen." Jacaerys raced over, finishing his own bout and realizing his brother had gone missing.
Alicent thought about Jace often. He was the only child of Rhaenyra's she had ever been given leave to know, and the only one whom she had ever allowed herself to hold when he was in his swaddling clothes. He had called her gammy and she had yelled at him. Now he was nearly a man grown, but for his soft round cheeks of baby fat still giving him the look of a child. How had he looked when the pirates shot him full of holes, she thought frantically, the only boy besides her son to ever look at her daughter and not treat her like a joke.
Now there was a thought. Alicent wondered if he might care for Helena, if they might find love where her previous match brought only hatred and a growing resentment. A tie between the families, a knot she would strengthen with steel.
Ser Criston had moved on, and now her boys were fighting him together, making bubbling mistake after bumbling mistake. Aegon was too cocky, leaving so many open marks it was a wonder the knight only pointed out one. And her Aemond, so unsure of himself, fidgeted with the waster, tightening and loosening his grip on the wooden practice sword. She was not the one who helped plan the battles nor moved the armies, but there had been long years where Ser Criston had carefully explained each carved war peace on their board and just how each moved.
"Boys!" She'd opened her mouth without realizing it, and her sons both got a smack to the back for their lack of focus. They glared at her as they rubbed their lumps, glancing self-consciously over to where Rhaenyra's children were laughing and swinging their wooden blades. Instead she placed her hands and the side of their faces, bringing their eyes to hers. "Ser Criston is only one man. You are two. Flank him, force him to decide who is the most dangerous and allow the other to take him from behind. Together you stand, divided you fall."
Her sons' faces shifted rapidly through exasperation at another of her talks, then to confusion at her words, then finally contemplation as they glanced back at where the knight watched them with a drawn look in his eyes and along his brow.
A kiss to their foreheads and then she sent them back out, their little faces scrunched up in determination. That is what Rhaenyra had told her when Alicent sat in chains before her on the throne, that to know you will lose only brings out that outcome.
The knight sensed the new determination, eyes flashing questioningly to hers when her sons slowly circled him, forcing him to divide his attention. He couldn't have known, not yet, that his mistake was to keep his eye on Aegon when Aemond was at his back. The first-born, the boy with the golden dragon, always drew the attention when her most dangerous had always been her second-born.
The boys were still unsure, taking too many moments with their eyes which telegraphed their next moves but they had the numbers. Aegon lunged forward, going for a wide block which Criston paried but which left his overextended arm undefended and open to Aemond crashing into his back with a slash, only caught because the silly boy gave out a war cry. Aegon made up for his brother's mistake, making an abortive strike which allowed Aemond to find his footing. They didn't stand a chance, still too individualistic to fight smoothly, but they were better than she remembered. Criston must have thought so too, because when he called the fight, the boys digressing into wild swings, he gave her a small bow.
"Go teach your cousins, mayhaps that will help remind you." She told her sons, brushing the hair from their eyes to lessen her words. Aegon did so without much fuss, but Aemond remained stuck to her side, looking at the two young boys with a trepidation which she hadn't seen in his eyes in years. Not because he didn't feel, but because he got better at hiding it from her.
She heard a shuffle and caught the eye of Ser Strong. He watched her with careful eyes, but there was a lightness to the weight of his gaze, not cool and calculating but as if they knew her thoughts and where her heart lay. And there-a flash of understanding. Of all the men who loved Rhaenyra, Harwin might have been the only one to do so with a quiet awe, and he recognized the same spark in her. She hoped he did.
The rest of the day was, in all, rather boring. She meandered around the castle a bit and when she retired it was in the hope that she could feign sleeping when her husband came in. The room was blessedly empty when she entered and it was only as she passed the soft stone diorama did she pause.
The stone was cold to the touch, and the dragonglass figure had been replaced in the spot of honor among small little houses. She trailed her hand down a tower, and thought back to the years when the keep fell into dingy squalor. Her father had been so focused on keeping the council and court on his side that so many rooms fell into disuse. Servants would not clean rooms which their masters would never see. The last memory she had of Viserys was just after his death when she had slipped from his room and when she had leaned against the table to keep herself standing, her hand had left a print in the dust. She hadn't even realized the servants had stopped cleaning it and she felt heartbroken all over again.
"My Queen?"
Alicent spun around. Rhaenyra stood in the doorway, changed from her ride but the smell of the sea and of smoke still clung to her. She wore a light gray with little touches of red along the hems, nothing fitting a princess, and Alicent thought fondly that she must have tried to pluck the least black thing from her closet.
"I was just ruminating on dragons and towers " Alicent murmured, glancing back at the table. She inclined her head the way she used to as a girl and Rhaenyra responded in kind, moving forward to listen to her, their heads bowed together. She continued softly. "In all the stories the dragon's burn down the towers, or the towers imprison the dragons. One symbolizes the freedom of escaping and the other the stability of structure. One is destruction, the other, captivity."
"Both imprison fair maids." Rhaenyra said softly and Alicent had to laugh, her hair brushing their hands which had slowly connected between their bodies. It felt as if they might block out the world. Rhaenyra ran a soft thumb along the pounding pulse of her wrist. "You have been acting strongly today, your grace."
"Alicent, please, call me Alicent." She pleaded. When had the last person called her by her name? Mayhaps her father before he lost his head. "I had a bad dream."
"What did you see?"
The smile came unbidden. Rhaenyra had always been the one to advocate for Helena's visions, always one to tell of her family and their dragon dreams, and only now from the end could she see the tangled webs of a tapestry Helana had tried so hard to show them. Now, Rhaenyra trusted her, with no reason other than–
"I dreamt of a horrible fight above the God's Eye. I saw dragons fall from the sky."
She had imagined it so often that it floated like a spector in her mind. When the corpse of Vhegar had eventually been pulled from the water, she had been granted the oh so special privilege of being paraded about to see his corpse, that fucker's sword still in his eye.
"Is that why all the maids are worried?" Rhaenyra mocked, but I was a soft sort of mocking, the kind they had shared when they were young, not the biting anger when she had faced her beloved again from her perch upon Syrax, a conquer of the city, a bloodless siege.
"I find myself thinking to the future." Alicent murmured, her shoulder bumping Rhaenyra's. "A bright one. Filled with hope."
"I wish for the same." Rhaenyra replied and oh she did! They ached for it at the end but neither could see the other through the ghosts of their dead children. It was a distance Alicent could not cross and even Rhaenyra balked at the leap. A hand calloused from gripping riding leathers slipped into hers. "It was all I ever wished for."
There was a breath between the moment they were not kissing and the moment they were, though it was warm and smelt of wine. Rhaenyra's mouth was soft and yet there was a quick bite to her, as sinuous and strong as her dragon. Alicent went soft for her, their tongues twisting but not fighting, dancing, she thought wildly. One simply leading and the other following and hands which followed the beat, lifting up satin and gripping tight to sown pearls. Alicent's purple ruffling at her ass was bunched in greedy hands and she found herself yanked forward.
But she was no longer content to be lead, that much she knew, and when she reached out and palmed the warm apex of Rhaenyra's thighs, she was greeted bombastically with a laugh and a smile and another round of kisses.
For the second time in her life, she let herself imagine taking the throne for herself. Of having Rhaenyra at her side as wife and falling to her knees with not a single sword cutting her, of being god-kings whose word was law, damn their fathers and their husbands and the fucking Faith.
Alicent shuffled awkwardly, one of her hands bunching up fabric, then slipping into pale smallclothes then to the wet warmth of her sex. Rhaenyra's fingers tug into the small of her back, forcing her to arch and grinding her fingers between them. Rhaenyra arched like she had never been touched, as if that brown-haired brute had never bothered to touch her like she deserved, like she had learned after years alone.
Rhaenyra came with a beautiful choked cry, panting softly into Alicent's hair. She couldn't help but lean in, smell the expensive hair oil she used, the one which had stopped when the Sea Snake blocked all the ports and Rhaenyra allowed herself to only smell of her dragon's ashy breath and blood.
But not now, for now she smelt of blue winter roses and sex and Alicent. She endeavored to keep her that way, no matter the cost.
She ran a soft hand through Rhaenyra's hair and down her back where she had untied her whale-bone corset. They had half collapsed on the window seat she used to read and in the fading sunlight, the true queen had never looked more beautiful, dozing and drooling against her neck.
Alicent is not sure when exactly she lost her mind, somewhere between Aemond's death and her last granddaughter looking on her with horror, but now it would give her strength, and most importantly, a purpose. Remove the obstacles to the heir of the iron throne, only now she saw the truth, melted to her basest parts and reforged into a blade for Rhaenyra to weild.
She could kill every rat keeper, slaughter every would be assassin. She would slit the throats of the dragon seeds so they might never rise up, hobble her son's ambitions which she had so carefully built, and hope to hinder her middle son's voracious appetite for things which would see him dead. She might even be forced to kill her father, or Ser Cristion, the fucker Daemon or any number of men who thought to exclude her.
Their mistake for not seeing the snake in the grass, for seeing the tower and ignoring the flame. After all, she had a dragon now, curled up and purring contentedly in her lap and she birthed many other dragons which curled around her hips and suckled from her breasts.
She looked out the window and imagined Princess Raenys, beautiful, unburnt, and wished to show her that she was not making a window, no. No, she would burn down the whole fucking castle.
Slipping into sleep, the setting sun lit up the world in the colors of dragon fire.