Chapter Text
Heat pressed upon Volantis as though a slab of iron lay across the city’s ribs. On the terrace of the sunkissed villa each breath felt earned. The wind here carried spice, the sour tang of stagnant canals, and the syrupy reek of fruit rotting under the sun. Thick and tainted, it clung to skin and hair.
Alicent Hightower (though part of this thin, rebuilt life meant letting that name die; in Volantis she was only Alicent, from nowhere, of no house important enough to speak aloud) had never grown accustomed to it. Yet.
King’s Landing stank of salt, smoke, and unbridled sewers, a sharper breed of foulness, yet in quieter moments she grasped the common truth. Anything left too long beneath a pitiless sun decayed. Volantis baked its dead in stone coffers while Westeros let its refuse drift through the Blackwater, and the stench rose identical when the noon light burned white.
She stood in the bathing chamber, sleeves rolled to her elbows, walnut dye staining her hands dark as old blood to the wrists. The paste lay cool and gritty between her fingers, smelling of linseed oil and crushed nutshells. These same hands had once poured wine for a king, rested crowns on small heads, and smoothed lengths of Myrish silk. Now they pressed cheap dye through a man’s hair so that Volantene dockhands would notice only a weathered foreigner instead of a Targaryen prince the world believed lost beneath the God’s Eye.
Daemon sat on a low stool, a towel gathered around his shoulders, his torso bare. Scar tissue spiraled across his back like melted wax, rising from hip to jaw, a permanent witness to the blast that ripped two dragons from the sky. His left leg, broken when he struck the water, lay stiff on a cushion. Even in exile the old wound ruled the way he rose, the way he stood, the span of time he could pretend he was still the figure praised in song.
The realm thought he sank beside Aemond and never breached the surface. Only Alicent knew which one had fought free of the lake.
“Hold still.” Alicent commanded.
“It stings,” Daemon grumbled yet he obeyed while she worked the paste into a bright strand at his temple.
“Good.” Her fingers pressed harder than need required. In earlier days she might have whispered a prayer to temper the hurt. Now she left the pain in place. It stood, in her mind, as the nearest measure of justice either could claim.
Alicent kneaded the walnut paste into his scalp and hid the bright Valyrian silver beneath a drab brown. Every few weeks they repeated the rite, each stroke dulling the hair that once commanded awe in the halls of the Red Keep.
The Rogue Prince, the figure mothers named to cease their children’s cries, faded beneath her stained fingers into the color of any dockside sell-sword. In that small erasure she tasted a harsh solace, for here she alone decided how much of him the world would be allowed to see.
“You missed a spot near the ear,” Daemon stated, glancing at the bronze mirror on the wall.
She followed his stare. The man there scarcely resembled the figure who once prowled the Keep in black and red. Age had hollowed his cheeks and pain had carved the angles sharp. Fire puckered one side of his face, dragging his mouth into a fixed half snarl. His eyes, always hard, were rimmed red as if still scouring lake water from his vision after all these years. He looked like a ghost denied its grave, doomed to haunt the body it could not abandon.
“If you prize your vanity so highly,” she said, grinding the walnut paste into the streak of silver by his ear, “take the paste and do it yourself next time.”
"I am not vain," he growled but it was more of a rasp. The God’s Eye had stolen more than bone; his voice had never healed, roughened now as if every sentence climbed over old screams. "I prefer not to be recognized. If the Triarchy learns the dead prince lives, they will not be kind."
There was a time he hungered for recognition. He strode through the Stepstones with banners aloft, daring the Crabfeeder and every captain from the Free Cities to face his silver hair and remember the scorch of dragonfire. She first heard those tales in the Red Keep, watching Otto’s mouth tighten whenever victory carried Daemon’s name. In those days the name Targaryen and the glint of that silver had been weapons he wielded with delight.
“They would not know you,” Alicent said as she wiped the walnut stain from her fingers. “The warrior who burned the Stepstones drowned in that lake.”
She meant the words. The Daemon Targaryen she had once despised, the prince who strolled the court with Dark Sister at his hip and a sly smile for every intrigue, was gone. The man before her leaned upon a cane when pride allowed and braced himself against walls when it did not. He woke choking on lake water that was not there, on a name he never finished speaking. He had become a vessel for her grief, a place to pour anger when it threatened to drown her.
“Father!”
The cry split the humid stillness. Alicent felt him flinch beneath her palms. He twisted on the stool, the old break lagging his movement half a beat behind his will.
A little girl burst through the doorway. Bare feet smacked the tiles, elbows and knees flashing. She cradled a beetle the size of her fist, its shell gleaming in the lantern light. Her hair, bright and unmistakable, poured in pale waves down her back. It was the silver Daemon must hide and the one grace Alicent would never darken. That untamed Targaryen shimmer remained the last unbroken piece of their stolen life.
“Elaerys.” Daemon let the name breathe.
At once his face altered. The lines carved by pride and pain eased, the scar on his cheek tugging oddly as a smile took shape. The effort seemed to hurt him, and Alicent found the sight more unnerving than any fury he had ever shown.
“I warned you not to run,” he said gently. “This floor will have you on your back.”
He spoke no more than truth. Volantene marble turned slick when swept by sea air. Alicent’s instinct was to chide in the old way—You must heed your father, you must not shout indoors—yet the words halted in her throat. Once she had offered such correction for Viserys, knowing he would not. Once she had scolded Aemond for less and watched the shame bloom into iron behind his single eye.
“Look!” Elaerys cried, oblivious, shoving the beetle toward Daemon’s face. “It has wings. A little dragon.”
Alicent’s stomach tightened at the word. Dragon. She saw Daemon’s gaze shift from the beetle’s gleaming shell to the pale cascade of his daughter’s hair. For one breath, she felt his old hunger, the man who once believed fire and blood could solve any wrong. But the light died at once, smothered beneath a frail tenderness.
“Not a dragon,” he said, voice gone very soft. “Just a beetle. Dragons are gone, sweetling.”
“But you said—”
“I know what I said,” he cut in, too quickly, the words snapping off sharp. Alicent saw his jaw lock, the old fury rise and recede like a tide forced back. Even crippled, he wrestled his temper for this child’s sake.
Her hand closed on Elaerys’s shoulder, feeling the birdlike bones beneath thin cotton, the quick, insistent life there that neither lake nor throne nor old ghosts would take, if she could help it.
“Set it outside, little one,” Daemon murmured, touching Elaerys’s cheek with a hand that trembled more than he would confess. “We keep nothing caged here.”
Here. As if Volantis offered freedom rather than another ornate prison. Still, the words were a vow, and he uttered few of those now. Elaerys’s pout vanished as quickly as it had come. She nodded and spun away, bare feet slapping the wet marble, the beetle cradled like a treasure in her hands. The door struck its frame behind her, and the room widened, hollow without her small presence.
Alicent stood listening for the child’s voice announcing the beetle’s flight. When silence settled, she turned to the man on the stool. His sins and hers were woven so tightly she could no longer trace their seams. This daily witnessing was her penance. He poured more care into Elaerys than he had ever shown, or been permitted to show, to Aemond. He sought their late son’s peace through kindness to his little sister.
The effort felt pitiable, and it felt vital.
“You know,” she said, for silence would drown her, “you cannot balance the scales with her.”
Daemon’s shoulders knotted beneath the towel. He did not turn. “I am not fool enough to think I can. The ledgers lie in ruins. I can only keep from adding fresh lines.”
He once had tried to reckon every debt. In King’s Landing, on the Stepstones, he had counted insults and triumphs, weighed each cruelty until it felt earned. A son for a son. A crown for a crown. She had kept her own tally in green, turning every slight from Rhaenyra into cause to thrust her children forward.
“She is not him,” Alicent said, more softly. “No more than Jaehaera was Helaena. Or I was my father’s sins.”
“I know she is not,” Daemon snapped, harsher than intended. He drew a long breath and let it out. “I do not ask her to be.”
“You are trying not to be who you were with him. That is not the same thing.”
He turned, letting the ruined side of his face catch the lamplight. The unscarred eye narrowed.
“Would you prefer I shouted at her?” he asked. “Drag her to a saddle and hurl her at the storm?”
Memory answered for her. Aemond rode Vhagar once more, his jaw set, shoulders square, one eye calm as he cut through wind and lightning. She had called that moment his bravest. Now, with years and loss between her and that night, she wondered if it had not been the first step into a fate he was never given a chance to refuse.
“No,” she muttered. “I would have you stand aside. Yet we passed that mercy long ago.”
She turned to the basin and scrubbed the walnut stain from her hands, watching the water cloud and darken beneath her nails. She felt his gaze rested on her back for a few heartbeats more, then the soft scrape of his cane on tile told her he had risen and limped away. She remained with the cooling water and the ghosts that never left.