Chapter Text
The rot has a voice.
It rasps through the king’s chambers in Viserys’ lungs, a wet, guttering rhythm that Queen Alicent Hightower counts like prayer beads. Her cloth glides over his fever-cracked lips, leaving trails of moisture that shimmer like snail tracks on a corpse. The sores have spread since dawn—violet blossoms erupting across his skin, their roots sucking greedily at what little life remains. Like lichen devouring a tombstone, she thinks, and for a dizzying moment, she is not a queen but a girl again, scrubbing her mother’s grave moss from the Hightower crypts. Beyond the sickroom, the Red Keep thrums with the indifference of the living. Steel shrieks in the training yard where Ser Rickard Thorne bellows at squires.
“The king fells a stag the size of a horse in the Kingswood last week!” he lies, flexing a gauntleted fist for the wide-eyed pages. “Aye, His Grace’s arm is stronger than ever!”
Nearby, handmaidens giggle into lace sleeves, rehearsing the court’s sanctioned fiction: Viserys’ “gout”, a humble ailment for a humble king. As if rot could ever be humble, Alicent thinks. As if decay is not a king’s final pageant. In the chambers she shares with her dying husband, the air clots with blood and sweet-sour putrescence. She drifts between bed and bureau, her emerald gown stained gray by the ash of failed remedies. The maesters’ tonics crowd the shelves like relics of a farce—vials of goodberry syrups too pink for truth, tinctures of dragonbone powder ground from beasts long dead. She burns the last one herself when Viserys heaves it onto the carpets, the flame licking the lie from her palm.
Now, she relies on darker remedies.
“Husband,” she murmurs, cradling his skull—lighter than a child’s, now—to tilt the clay cup to his lips. The draught inside bubbles like a swamp’s breath, a brew of poppy, wormwood, and three drops of shade-of-the-evening (smuggled, bled, bartered). To quiet the mind, not heal the body , the Lyseni apothecary warned, but Alicent is no longer a custodian of hope. She is an alchemist of mercy. Viserys’ right arm, once a pillar that hoisted Blackfyre, lies flayed and skeletal, a dragon’s wing stripped bare. The lesions weep opalescent tributaries—a grotesque coronation for a corpse still breathing.
He gulps the brew, his remaining eye glazing like milk-thickened wine as it fixes on the model of Old Valyria. The figurines are coated in dust now, their gilded towers chipped by his trembling hands. “The… Balerion,” he rasps, clawing at the bedsheet as if it were the sky itself. “Needs… its wing reattached.”
“I’ll see to it,” Alicent lies. Later, she finds the broken dragon half-buried in the rushes, its wing snapped clean—a casualty of last night’s thrashing. She pockets it, the jagged edge biting her palm through the silk. Her days are not deceptions but excavations: peeling back rot to prop up his reign, shoveling ash into the shape of a king.
At dawn, she reviews petitions stamped with his seal—her seal, really. A white tower crowned with wildfire, stamped in smoke-gray wax beside the three-headed dragon. She denies Lord Celtigar’s tariffs, her “No” inked in iron-gall finality; approves repairs to the Rosby road, though she knows bandits will bleed the coffers dry by winter; and drafts a reply to Rhaenyra’s letter.
The truth is simpler, crueler: Viserys sees nothing but shadows now. The infection gnawed through his eyes first—one clouded to milk-white, the other swollen shut, as if the Stranger pressed a thumb to his skull. The maesters murmur of humors and miasmas, but Alicent knows better. Rot is not an imbalance. It is a conqueror.
She sets the quill down, fingers trembling—not from grief, but rage. Rhaenyra’s letter lies open, its edges charred like a witch’s offering, the raven’s ash still clinging to the parchment. The handwriting stabs at her: bold loops and slashing T’s, inkblots pooling like old blood.
Father,
I pray this letter finds you in good health. Jace has begun his training with Ser Steffon, and Luke has taken to the skies on Arrax. They ask after their grandsire often, and I tell them of your strength, your wisdom. I would bring them to you, if you wish it. Let them know the man who will one day be their king.
Their king . The words are a dagger, twisting. Alicent’s jaw tightens, a key turning in a rusted lock. She hears Rhaenyra’s voice as if she stood in the room: Let them know the man … A courtier’s eulogy for a corpse still breathing. Their king. As if Jacaerys’ reign is a foregone conclusion. As if Alicent’s sons are footnotes in a history Rhaenyra has already written.
She seizes the quill, stilling her hand with a queen’s discipline. The king treasures your words…
She pauses. Treasures . A hollow word, a goblet drained. What has Viserys ever treasured but his model cities and Aemma Arryn’s ghost? Alicent knows that he loved his first wife like a moth loves a guttered candle—burned wings, endless circling.
Her gaze drifts to the window. The Blackwater sprawls below, a sheet of beaten silver dulled by stormclouds—or is it smoke? Somewhere beyond the horizon, Rhaenyra broods in Dragonstone’s salt-scabbed halls, surrounded by her brown-haired boys and Daemon’s blade-sharp grin.
She looks down at the letter again, her vision blurring. “The king treasures your words…”
A knock at the door startles her. She straightens, brushing a hand over her skirts. “Enter.”
Otto Hightower strides in like a stormfront, the scent of damp wool and wolf’s bane clinging to his robes. His face is a mask, but the torchlight carves hollows beneath his eyes—canyons dug by ambition, not grief. The Harrenhal fire still smolders in the realm’s throat, a tragedy chewed to ash: Lord Lyonel Strong and his heir Harwin, reduced to bone-dust and a punchline ( Burnin’ Harwin , the smallfolk jeer). Her father has wasted no time, clawing back his pin of office, the court sighing “stability at last” as if he hadn’t carved the vacancy himself.
But Alicent knows better.
Larys Strong, the surviving son, slithers into the charred remains of his house. Where Lyonel’s honor and Harwin’s brute charm once anchored their legacy, Larys weaves shadows into snares. His favors are rotten fruit—sweet to taste, foul in the gut. A misplaced word here, a vanished letter there. He binds her with cobweb bonds, his loyalty a serpent’s coil around her throat. She craves her father’s counsel, but not at this price. Never at this price.
“The Small Council awaits, Your Grace.”
Alicent does not look up. She traces the edge of Rhaenyra’s letter, the parchment rough beneath her fingertips. “They can wait a moment longer. The realm’s burdens are not so urgent that they cannot endure a queen’s breath.”
Otto steps inside, shutting the door with a click. “You’ve grown accustomed to making kings wait, it seems.”
Her spine stiffens. “Viserys has not held court in moons. The waiting is all they know.”
“And you?” His gaze flays her open, dissecting. “What do you know of the king’s condition?”
Lies. Rot. The sweet-sour reek of meat left to spoil. “The maesters say his humors are unbalanced. Rest will right them.”
“Rest.” Otto’s chuckle is dry as bone. “A curious prescription for a king whose lungs rattle like a beggar’s cup.” He moves closer, his voice lowering. “How long, Alicent? Weeks? Days? The council murmurs. The villains sharpen their knives. If the king dies without—”
“He will not die.” The words hiss out of her, too quick, too desperate. She presses her palms flat on the desk, the wood biting into her skin. “He cannot.”
For a heartbeat, Otto’s mask slips—a flicker of pity, or perhaps impatience.“You’ve done what you can. No one could nurse him more… vigilantly .” His pause pools between them, black as a confession. “But even you cannot hold back the Stranger’s tide.”
She turns away, her eyes scalding. Beyond the window, Aegon’s laughter floats up—a lyre string snapped mid-song. He lounges in the yard, prodding a straw knight like a bored cat, his wooden sword trailing in the dirt.
“Have you prepared him?” Otto asks, following her gaze. “While I was… away?”
Alicent’s throat tightens. Prepared him . As if Aegon were a scroll to be annotated, a song to be rehearsed. As if the boy who once vomited over a visiting lordling’s doublet after mistaking Arbor gold for apple juice could ever be carved into something resembling Daemon’s ruthlessness or her son Aemond’s coiled discipline.
“He reads histories,” she says, her tone clipped. A gust snaps the banners overhead—Conqueror’s dragons fraying into skeletal threads, their crimson scales bleached to sepsis-pink. “Studies laws as best he can. Ser Criston teaches him swordsmanship.” When he bothers to attend , she does not add. Last week, she’d found Aegon sprawled in the godswood like a sacrificial offering, reeking of sour Dornish red, lichen crusted on his cheek like a bastard’s heraldry. His laughter had bounced off the heart tree, hollow as a rotted log: “Can’t learn laws from dead men, Mother. They’re all just bones and… hiccup …bones.”
Otto sighs, softer than a blade parting silk. “And when the lords kneel? When they demand a king who knows their harvest yields, their border squabbles, their bastards’ names? Will he recite Lives of the First Kings at them?” His knuckles brush her sleeve—a father’s bait, velvet over steel. “He needs more than books, Alicent. He needs to be seen. To be feared.”
Like you were? The thought boils up, rancid. She remembers the shutters rattling the night Otto was banished as Daemon crowed to the court about weak blood and spineless cravens. Viserys’ hand had clutched hers afterward, trembling. “A loyal wife, ” he slurred, spittle flecking his beard. “Not like those vipers.” Below, Aegon stumbles away from the pillar, laughing as he sloshes wine over the training yard’s edge. Ser Criston’s shoulders stiffen—the twitch of a man biting his tongue bloody. For half a heartbeat, Alicent catches a shadow in her father’s face, sharp as Valyrian steel. The unspoken truth: there are other sons. Ones with steady hands and eyes who’ve already claimed dragons.
“He is only a young man,” she whispers. Young, yes—if not in years, then in the unguarded tilt of his chin, the petulance with which he still flings goblets when she mentions council meetings. Once, as a child, Aegon had stabbed a nursemaid with a butter knife for hiding his sweets. “The blood’s the same,” Viserys had slurred when she’d wept. “Dragons will out.” But Alicent had seen the truth in the nursemaid’s mangled flesh, in Aegon’s snot-streaked face as he sobbed into her skirts that night. No dragon—just a boy who craved sweetness, then wept when the world bled.
Otto’s voice gentles, yet his gaze remains fixed on the courtyard. “Youth perishes faster than summer roses in winter. When the lords come, they’ll not ask his age. Only his mettle.”
Aegon’s slurred taunt cuts through the yard—“Ethelred the Cunt!”—followed by the crash of a goblet against stone. Alicent closes her eyes. In the darkness, she smells Viserys’ rot, sees the glint of her father’s schemes, hears Helaena’s whispered riddles about beasts beneath boards.
“Rhaenyra’s bastards are younger,” her father’s voice slicks once more through the silence, “yet they ride dragons. Do you think she hesitates to parade them as heirs? To plant them in the realm’s imagination as princes?”
Alicent’s gaze drifts to the courtyard below, where Helaena sits alone beneath the heart tree, threading beetles onto a silver chain.
The letter trembles as she rasps, “She wishes to bring them here for a visit. To court.”
Otto’s signet ring strikes the windowsill, a soft, deliberate click. “And you would allow it?”
“Viserys would.”
“Viserys is a fool.” The unlit brazier hisses, ash snowing onto the floor. Otto’s derision thins to sepulchral calm. “He clings to a maggot-riddled dream. But you—you birthed this realm’s future in blood-slick sheets. Those boys are no visit. They’re a dagger at your throat.”
Alicent whirls, the letter crumpling in her fist. “What would you have me do? Bar the king’s own grandchildren from his halls?” She huffs. “Shall I burn their rooms and salt the floors like a Dornish widow? Make enemies of Rhaenyra and Daemon before the pyre’s even lit?”
“I would have you open your eyes!” Otto’s palm slams the desk. The astrolabe leaps, its rings snarling into a ruined constellation—stars strangled mid-orbit. When he leans close, she smells Oldtown’s clinging musk of incense and damp stone. “This is no game of cyvasse. It is butchery. And wars are won with cleavers, not prayers.”
Silence thickens, clotted by the ghost of Alicent’s childhood lessons. Seven save us, wars are won by mothers, Father , she thinks wildly. Mothers who cut their sons from their wombs only to watch them march into the Stranger’s arms. A distant bell tolls—five sonorous strikes. Her gaze snags on the withered rose crown Viserys wove her years ago, now crumbling in its gilded cage.
“You speak of Aegon’s readiness,” she says at last, “but readiness requires more than lessons. It requires loyalty.” Her finger traces the cracked Seven-Pointed Star on the desk. “The Velaryons command fleets. The Starks forge warriors in winter’s womb. What power do we hold? Hightower gold? And… vermin?”
She lets the word skitter between them. Larys’ spies skulk in the walls; Otto’s whispers strangle the realm in silk nooses. Her father’s face hardens, but not before she catches the flicker—a rat darting from a lantern’s glare. Shame? Hunger?
“We have the law.” His voice smooths, slippery as a eunuch’s reassurance. “Aegon is the king’s firstborn son. The realm will rally to him—if his mother does not falter.”
Alicent’s jaw locks. She tastes blood, iron-bright, where her teeth split her cheek—a wound worn raw from a lifetime of swallowed screams. The parchment of Rhaenyra’s letter crinkles under her sandal, its broken seal a butchered heart, wax-crusted edges flaking like dead skin. Firstborn son. The words fester. She remembers Viserys’ rattling breath as he praised Jace’s “Valyrian bearing” at a feast, the boy’s face lit by firelight like a young conqueror, while Aegon spewed his inadequacy into the rosebushes, weeping between curses.
“I have not faltered,” she hisses, whirling. The ivory comb in her hair—a bride’s gift from Viserys, its teeth yellowed as a corpse’s smile—slides loose, skittering across the table like a severed bone. “I have held this realm together on prayers and poultices stinking of camphor and desperation, while you nursed your pride in Oldtown’s shadow.” She pauses as she gulps for air. “Do not mistake my caution for weakness, Father. I learned patience scouring rot from a king’s sores.”
Otto’s mask fractures—ice cracking under a hammer. A twitch at his temple, the ghost of a hand raised to strike. Beyond the window, guards shout as the wind tears a banner loose—the Targaryen dragon spiraling like a shot raptor, its wings tangled in gilded thread. For a breath, they mirror each other: queen and Hand, daughter and father, twin serpents coiled in a pit.
He bows, “As you say, Your Grace.” The title sweetens and sears, a paradox only blood could bind. His cloak swirls as he retreats, smoke from a doused pyre. Alicent’s gaze falls to the Myrish rug, where Aegon’s spilled wine blooms like a bruise. Firstborn, she thinks, nails carving half-moons into her palm—trophies for a queen who rules graves. She retrieves the comb, its spine cracked like a wishbone. Tomorrow, she’ll wear its teeth like a crown.
Later that day, the Keep exhales its rot as dusk bleeds into its corridors. Alicent moves through the sour-smelling shadows, her body a puppet queen jerking on duty’s gilded strings. The day’s venom clings to her—Lord Beesbury’s wheezing lectures on tariffs, Lannister envoys braying about mine yields, Otto’s veiled rebukes that a queen governs, she does not nurse. Her knuckles throb where Aegon slammed a door on her hand earlier, his briny laughter chasing her down the stairwell. A king, she thinks bitterly. A squalling young man who drinks his valor from Dornish skulls.
Viserys’ chambers reek of corpse lilies. The maids have stuffed them in every urn to mask the gangrene festering beneath his bandages. Fools. The sweetness curdles with the stench of his necrosis, a brew that makes her gorge rise as she crosses the threshold.
“The Stepstones…” The king’s voice claws from the bed, a rusted blade dragged across bone. “Pirates… send Daemon to…”
Alicent’s spine stiffens, her chapped hands gripping the bedpan as she kneels beside him. Ser Cole found this one in the dragon vaults—chipped Myrish glass glazed with grapevines, its curves cruel mockery of the Iron Throne’s blades. All thrones cut , she thinks, pouring rosewater over his waste. The liquid swirls milky pink, strands of dead flesh floating like river weeds.
“Daemon is gone, my king,” she murmurs, watching his milky eye track candlelight on the ceiling. Gone, but never far. She can almost hear his laughter in the draft slithering through the stones. Come to me when he forgets your name , Daemon had purred once, stroking Dark Sister’s hilt. You’ll beg prettier than your father did.
Viserys moans, a sound like wind through a hollow tree. His hand—three fingers now blackened stumps—flops onto her knee.
“Alicent... m’love... the dream...”
Always the dream. A kingdom of ash and song. She peels his rotting touch away, wondering how many layers of linen it would take to staunch the despair.
Midnight finds her in the rookery’s bone-chill, her bloodshot eyes scouring another useless scroll. Citadel seals mock her from pigeonholed replies: pertaining to the Grey Death of 57 AC... YiTish annals mention ‘bone-rust’... Valyrian glyphs warn of zhōbry ānogar—the stone dream, wherein flesh becomes memory, breath becomes cinder...
“Poetry,” she snarls, flinging the parchment into the brazier. The flames leap hungrily, blue tongues licking at her father’s meticulous notes in the margins. Weak. She grinds her fist into the table, pain blooming clean and bright. Her healing scabs split—blood beads along inked sigils, marrying her rage to Hightower arithmetic.
“Y-Your Grace?”
The scribe, Elios, quivers like a plucked lute string, his lamb’s eyes wide. She looms, thrusting her sketch of Viserys’ lesions beneath his nose—rot’s cartography: chest mapped in charcoal, cracked valleys of necrosis, blisters swollen like dragon scales.
“Copy this for the Citadel.” Her voice cracks from sleeplessness. “Note the black sputum, the urine stinking of singed bristle. Demand their anatomists split open every festering thing in their libraries. What breeds in their lungs?”
The boy pales. “R-rats, Your Grace?”
“Are you simple?” She places her palm down, sending ink pots dancing. Somewhere in the rafters, a raven shriekes. “Rats. Hogs. Whatever vermin scuttle in their libraries. “I want answers, not milksop whimpers about ‘t’was ever thus’ .”
As Elios flees, Alicent collapses onto the bench. Her reflection wavers in lamp oil—a wraith queen crowned in frayed braids, her eyes swallowed by bruise-hollows. From her sleeve, she withdraws the cracked ivory comb, its teeth yellowed as a grave shroud. They bite her palm as she drags it through her hair, snarling strands hissing like serpents. One hundred strokes , her mother’s ghost chides. A lady’s ritual. A queen’s penance.
She makes it to three and forty. Three-and-forty—the count a dirge, a widow’s tally. Three-and-forty, and her hair rebels—copper tangles snarling around the comb’s broken spine, roots screaming as they tear free. The ritual crumbles. Four-and-forty. A knot vices her scalp. Five and forty. The comb jerks, splitting with a crack like a snapped neck. Her reflection writhes in the oil lamp’s glare: a specter queen, lips bitten bloodless, braids unspooling into a crown of thorns. The girl who once gleamed at tourneys, her hair a sunset river, is entombed beneath moth-eaten regency. Mother would retch , she thinks, to see her songbird turned carrion crow.
Six-and-forty. The comb slips, gouging a crimson crescent into her temple. A bead of blood wells, bright as a whore’s jewel. It slithers down her cheek, a ruby tear.
Seven-and-forty. The comb halts mid-stroke. A sound splinters the silence—not ravens, not wind. A wounded animal’s keen. Three heartbeats thunder before she recognizes it as her own.
The dam breaks. Trembling wrists. Salt-rusted cheeks. The iron-sweet stink of blood. Weakness —her father’s hissed litany. She surges upright, the chair screeching like a butchered beast, and hurls the comb at the wall. It shatters—an ivory skull exploding, shards skittering like scarabs into shadow.
“Your Grace?”
The scribe hovers, a parchment-pale moth fluttering in the doorway. Alicent does not turn. She presses her palms to the table until the wood grain etches itself into her flesh, her voice cracking yet crowned: “Summon the Grand Maester. Tell him the king’s dressings need changing.”
“A-At once, Your Grace,” the boy stammers. She catches the tremor in his voice, the way his shadow quivers against the floor as he bows too deep before scurrying backward into the hall. His footsteps echo until they dissolve into the Keep’s eternal murmur. Alone again, Alicent exhales. The sound rattles loose from her chest, raw and unsteady. Her reflection glimmers in the polished tabletop: a queen carved from wax, features melting under the weight of crown and crisis. Dressings . As if silk and salve could stitch a corpse back into a king. Some nights, she swears she sees the Stranger perched at Viserys’ bedside, picking at his flesh like a crow. Yet tomorrow, she’ll kneel again, scrub again, pretend again.
Beyond the window, dawn bleeds like a gutted stag, horizon glowering red. Shadows stretch—splintered talons raking her skirts. She does not flinch.
The chamber thrums with the hiss of vellum and the cloying of dying candles—tallow weeping stalactites down bronze sconces. Ash motes swirl through the sunlight’s blade, alighting on Alicent’s gold-stitched sleeves like dying stars drawn to a funeral shroud. She presides from Viserys’ carved seat, its hollow eyes glowering behind her. Its shadow slices the table in two, a blade-sharp divide between queen and Hand. Tyland Lannister lounges to her left, his lion’s paw ring tap-tap-tapping a smug rhythm against goblet-gilted wood, while Otto’s quill scratches like a termite devouring a coffin plank.
“The Stepstones fester like a gangrened limb,” begins Grand Maester Orwyle, unspooling a map. “Pirate lords carve out kingdoms there under stolen Targaryen banners. They name themselves heirs to the Crabfeeder’s folly.”
Tyland snorts, balancing a gold dragon on a scarred knuckle. “Let the crabs gag on their sand kingdoms. Our galleys hemorrhage gold each moon defending rocks that birth rot and delusion.”
Alicent’s fingers still. She knows this dance: Tyland’s greed veiled as pragmatism, Otto’s silence weighing the scales. The Velaryon knight stationed at the door—Corlys’ absent wrath made manifest—stiffens, his seahorse cloak rippling.
“Lice bite,” she says softly, “and arrogance burns.” Her nail taps a fleck of crimson wax on the map—a dried droplet from Viserys’ last attempted seal. “These pirates play pretend and crown themselves with my husband’s heraldry. How long before their ambition sails for richer shores? Before they pillage Duskendale’s docks… or strangle Driftmark’s throat?”
Tyland’s smirk falters. The Velaryon knight’s armor creaks as he shifts.
Otto sets down his quill. “What would you propose, Your Grace?”
Alicent straightens, the emerald silk of her sleeves whispering like snakes. “We let the pirates claim their victory.” She trails a finger along the coast of Duskendale. “Your repaired ships, Lord Tyland, will play the crippled prey—sails patched, holds empty. An easy prize for scavengers.”
Tyland’s coin trembles mid-spin. “You’d sacrifice my fleet to those bottom-feeders again?”
“Not sacrifice. Befoul.” Her nail taps the wax fleck, red dust clinging to her skin. “When they tow your vessels to the Stepstones, they’ll find their new treasures... well-seasoned.”
Jasper comments, “Wildfire.”
A murmur ripples through the council. Otto’s eyes narrow, but his lips quirk—approval.
“Precisely,” Alicent says. “Our alchemists will ensure the casks are... fragile. A single arrow, a stray torch—” She snaps her fingers. The sound echoes like a pyre igniting. “Let the flames cleanse their arrogance and your ledger, Lord Tyland. After all,” she adds softly, “we wouldn’t want auditors questioning why Lannisport’s coffers bled dry for ‘repairs’ that never docked.”
Tyland’s knuckles blanch to bone-white around his goblet, Arbor gold sloshing like fresh blood over his fingers. The unsaid truth thickens: his cousin’s smuggler fleet, “idled” yet stinking of spice and stolen silks. Let him choke on his own rot.
The Velaryon knight steps forward, helm tilting. “And my lord’s role?”
“Your ships will shadow theirs,” Alicent says. “Let the pirates gorge on Lannister scraps. When the fire fades, House Velaryon will sweep in—heroes who cut the viper’s head while it gorged.” She leans in, her voice a blade wrapped in silk. “Imagine the songs: Velaryon valor surpassing even the Sea Snake’s glory. Corlys’ name etched deeper into history.”
The knight’s gauntlet clenches—ambition warring with pride. Corlys would loathe the Lannister stench on his glory… yet hunger to eclipse even his own myth.
Orwyle dabs his sodden brow. “And the Targaryen banners they fly? If Princess Rhaenyra’s allies claim we burned her kin—”
“Kin?” Alicent arches a brow. “These are thieves cloaked in stolen sigils. When the ashes cool, only Lannister gold and Velaryon arrows will remain.” She pauses, letting the lie cradle them. “They won’t die as martyrs. They’ll vanish as... embarrassments.”
Otto’s quill resumes scratching. “A tidy solution.” Too tidy , his tone implies. Alicent reads the flicker in his eyes—pride edged with caution. Her father’s mind, still underestimating hers.
Tyland slams his cup down, wine sloshing like spilled blood. “You’d make me both villain and fool. My ships burned, my kin scorched—”
“Your name unscathed,” Alicent interrupts. “Or shall the realm hear how your cousins peddle Myrish nightshade to Flea Bottom’s orphans?” She smiles, saccharine venom. “Burn the ships, and the Crown blinks. Refuse…” She shrugs, green sleeves rippling. “The Iron Throne remembers.”
Silence.
Jasper’s laugh grates, harsh as a saw. “A pretty cage, Lannister.”
Tyland’s jaw works, but he bows, a puppet’s spasm. “As you command, Your Grace.”
As the council disbands, Alicent palms the comb in her sleeve. Six-and-forty strokes—two for Tyland’s pride, one for Corlys’ ambition, the rest for Viserys’ hollow crown.
Otto lingers, fingertips brushing the shattered wax. “You juggle vipers.”
She stares at the map, her shadow a ghost over the Stepstones. “Vipers keep rats at bay, Father.”
He leaves without praise. He doesn’t need to. In the silence, she counts the grooves in the comb. Seven-and-forty. Alicent lingers only a moment after the lords disperse, her fingers absently tracing the grooves of her seat. Duty above all , she reminds herself, as if the mantra might steady her. Today, duty wears the face of motherhood—a crown heavier than any wrought of metal.
Talya, her handmaiden, appears like a shadow given breath at her side. “Your Grace?”
“My children,” Alicent says, turning sharply, the green silk of her sleeves hissing like a sigh of leaves. “Where have they hidden themselves today?”
Talya’s gaze softens—a familiarity honed by years of watching Alicent’s love and unease twine like ivy around a dagger.
“Prince Aegon took a flagon of spiced wine to the library tower. He said he wished to… read.” The pause lingers, a wine stain on parchment. Aegon’s idea of scholarship begins and ends with the dregs of a cup. “Aemond is in the training yard, Your Grace. He’s been drilling the squires since dawn. Ser Criston said he knocked two into the dirt and demanded a third opponent.”
Alicent’s jaw tightens. Of course. Aemond’s fury is a living thing, coiled beneath the surface since the night he lost an eye and claimed a dragon in the same bloody hour. She sees him still—the leather patch over his scarred socket, the raw crescent moon of flesh, his remaining eye bright with a violence that could cut glass.
“Helaena…” Talya’s smile is a fragile bridge. “The princess is in the eastern garden, watching the spiders spin their webs.”
Alicent exhales. Helaena’s quiet strangeness is a balm, even when her murmurs of “bone-white branches” and “blood-drop rubies” fray into prophecy. She’ll find her daughter barefoot in the dewy grass, whispering secrets to beetles.
But beneath the answers hums an omission. Daeron. The name is a splinter in her throat. Her youngest, sent to Oldtown as a boy to ward with her father’s house—to secure his ties to the Reach, Otto had urged, practical as a surgeon’s blade. How many moons have slipped by since her last letter? Five? Six? Daeron’s replies have grown crisp, distant, polite as a stranger’s bow. He is four-and-ten, she tells herself. Too young for resentment. And yet—
“Send a page to the rookery,” Alicent says abruptly. “I’ll write to Daeron tonight.” Talya nods, but guilt pares Alicent’s voice to parchment. “Tell them to ready the finest… the blue-edged sort. He liked that once.”
She moves through the corridors like a wraith, her mind a shattered mirror—Aegon’s indolence, Aemond’s wrath, Helaena’s riddles, Daeron’s silence. Each child a shard of her failures, each a blade she forged herself, poised at her throat.
Aegon first. She pushes open the library door to find him slouched in a window seat, the wine flagon half-drained beside him like a carcass, a tome on dragonlore splayed facedown on the cushion. Its spine cracks faintly, a dying thing. His lazy grin slips when he sees her, though the defiance lingers in the tilt of his chin.
“Mother,” he drawls, lifting the flagon in mock salute. “Come to scold me for expanding my mind?”
The flagon glints in the thin library light—a dulled blade, a provocation. Alicent’s silence stretches. She studies him—the sunken sprawl of his limbs, the wine-purple shadows beneath his eyes, the stench of wine clinging to his collar like a second skin. This is her firstborn. The child she once cradled while humming hymns to the Maiden, his small fingers curled trustingly around hers, soft as dove feathers. Now those same hands, stained and slack, grip nothing but the promise of ruin.
“You smell of Arbor Red,” she says finally, her voice low. “Not parchment.”
He barks a laugh, but it rings hollow. “A prince needs his libations. Or is drinking another of my myriad failures?”
Failures. The word splits the air. She recalls his tenth name day, when he presented her with a clumsily inked drawing of their house sigil—the Hightower tilting like a drunkard, its beacon smudged to ash. “For you, Mother,” he’d said, sunlight caught in his lashes. She framed it, hung it in her solar. Years later, she finds it buried in a chest, edges torn like a battlefield. When did you stop trying to please me?
“You are reading of dragons earlier,” she says stiffly, nodding at the discarded book. Balerion, the page shows—the Black Dread coiled in splendor. Aegon follows her gaze, his expression flickering.
“A passing fancy.” He shrugs, but his thumb lingers on the illustration’s gilded edge, tracing the beast’s spine as if it might shudder to life. He still dreams of glory, she realizes. Of a time before his father’s indifference hollowed him like a gourd, before her father’s ambition saddled him with a crown of thorns.
“Your ancestors rode such creatures to build the realm you’ll inherit,” she presses. “Do you ever envision yourself astride one? Leading, rather than... this?”
“Leading?” He leans forward, the scent of sour wine pooling between them. “To what end? To play your piece in the game?” The flagon clatters, a dissonant chord, as he sets it down. “I know what you and Grandsire whisper. ‘Aegon must be king. Aegon must fight.’ Shall I don a crown just to watch you pull my strings?”
Her breath hitches—a tiny fracture. There it is, the poison they’ve sipped for years. She has molded him for a throne he never wanted, and in doing so, she has gifted him a lifetime of inadequacy.
“You think I don’t see how you look at me?” he continues, rising unsteadily. “Like I’m a broken hilt. A disappointment.”
“You are my son,” she hisses, the words cracking like a whip. “Every breath I take is to secure your future. To protect you.”
“From what? Her? ” His laugh is bitter. “Or from your own fear that I’ll never be the weapon you need?”
Alicent stiffens. Rhaenyra’s face flashes in her mind—the rival queen, the mother of Alicent’s deepest dread. Her dear friend once. Aegon’s defiance is a spark in dry tinder. But beneath his scorn, she glimpses the boy he’d been: eager, earnest, desperate for praise she’d hoarded like gold.
“You are born to rule,” she says, softer now. “Not because I command it, but because the blood of conquerors is in your veins. You need only... reach for it.”
Some days, she envisions Aegon crumpled at Rhaenyra’s feet, his throat bared to Dark Sister’s blade as their father’s corpse cools in the crypts. “Traitors’ blood must spill,” Rhaenyra hisses, crowned in smoke and the Conqueror’s rubies, Alicent’s screams stifled by the roar of Syrax overhead. On those days, the council’s schemes feel righteous—a mother’s gauntlet thrown down, a son armored in precedent and prophecy. But then, like fog over Blackwater Bay, doubt creeps in. She watches Aegon at supper, sloshing wine onto the tapestries as he slurs japes at Aemond’s expense, or catches him snoring in some shadowed alcove, reeking of a brothel’s musk. Is this the boy who will steady a kingdom? Who will wield Blackfyre, negotiate with Tyrells and Lannisters, outmaneuver a queen as cunning as Rhaenyra? Viserys’ legacy will crumble beneath his indifference. The realm will fracture, not in dragonfire, but in the rot of apathy.
I have armored a ghost, she thinks . Aegon the Unworthy, the Unwilling—my greatest failure, wearing a crown of my making.
The conflict gnaws at her like a rot. When she bargains with the Crone for clarity, all she hears is Viserys’ voice echoing from their last argument before his sickness ate him alive: “The boy is not made for this, Alicent. Must you forge a crown from his bones?” She hisses back, through bared teeth, “Would you instead let Rhaenyra forge a coffin from mine?” But in the hollow hours, when even her ladies sleep, she wonders if Viserys had seen the hollow core of their son—a boy too soft for the viper’s nest she’s hammered him into like a square peg into a realm’s round hole.
At times, she caught glimpses of another Aegon: the toddler who’d clung to her skirts, wide-eyed, as Balerion’s skull loomed in the throne room; the nine-year-old who’d begged to ride Sunfyre, not for glory, but pure, trembling wonder. “Look how he glows, Mother!” he’d cried, pointing to the dragon’s golden scales, his voice still sweet with the sour-milk scent of childhood. That boy had not yet learned to recoil like a singed cat from her touch, or to drown his laughter in Dornish red until it curdled into silence. Was there a path where he might have been happy? A second son, perhaps, chasing honeyed ballads and hatchlings, wed to some sweet-tempered Reach girl who’d kiss his tears instead of his sigil?
But such fantasies are treason. The gods—and her father—have scripted a harsher fate. Each time she tries to loosen the leash, to let Aegon falter or flee, the consequences claw at her. Rhaenyra will never allow a rival claimant to breathe, mercy be damned.
In the silence, something raw and vulnerable flickers in his gaze—a child’s plea. Then he grabs the flagon, turning toward the window.
“Spare me the sermons, Mother. I’ve a kingdom of dust and old books to tend.”
Her sigh is a burial shroud. Alicent leaves him to his rot.
Aemond is easier in his way. Alicent lingers at the edge of the training yard, her spine rigid as Aemond’s blade carves the air—a silver blur, relentless, precise. The squire, a freckled boy with straw-colored hair, scrambles backward, his shield sagging like a drunkard’s grin. Too young, she thinks, her stomach knotting. Too much like the child Aemond had once been, before blood and fire had remade him.
“Again!” Aemond barks, his voice edged with a violence that makes the other squires flinch. The boy stumbles to his feet, his breaths ragged, but Aemond gives no quarter. His sword arcs downward, stopping just shy of the lad’s collarbone. The threat is theater. Cruelty, Alicent knows, is a lesson he has learned too well.
My doing , she thinks bitterly.
She remembers the night she inspected his ruined eye, weeping crimson as he told her, “I lost an eye, but I gained a dragon.” Even then, there are no tears—only a feral triumph that hollows her chest. She treated his wound herself, stitches clumsy with trembling fingers, while he stared past her, jaw set like iron. What have I bred here? Now, as he turns his head slightly, his lone eye catching hers, Alicent sees the question in his gaze—not a son’s plea for approval, but a conqueror’s demand. Look at me. See what they made of me. His face, all blade-sharp planes and stormcloud pallor, could have been chiseled from the Warrior’s own altar. Beautiful, but frostbitten to the core.
He pivots abruptly, driving the squire into the dust again. The boy’s yelp prickles Alicent’s skin, but Aemond’s expression doesn’t flicker. He thrives on this: the clang of steel, the flinch of weaker things. He learns early that power lies in being feared , she muses, and who teaches him that, if not me? She thinks of Aegon—his indolent sneer, his hands forever stained with wine. Aemond is everything his brother is not: disciplined, unflinching, hungry. What barbed throne will he forge with such fury? Will he devour the realm to prove himself its master?
Hunger . Not the feral, wanton hunger of Aegon’s vices—but something colder, tectonic. Aemond’s is the hunger of a second son, Vhagar’s roar living in his marrow now. Alicent can almost see the beast’s shadow in his lone eye, green and unyielding as wildfire. What have I made of you? The doubt slithers through her nights. Aemond will rule as Aegon never could—with a fist of iron, a will unbent. But iron can shatter. Will he fashion his throne from threats and blood, each decree a fresh scar on the realm? She pictures him clad in black, Blackfyre unsheathed, grinding dissent into dust beneath his boot. For the good of the family, he’ll say. For you, Mother.
And perhaps it is true. Aegon’s crown rests uneasy; the realm’s loyalty is a trembling fawn. Aemond’s? Forged in terror, but unassailable. Yet terror breeds knives in the dark. Whispers. Betrayal. He might raze cities to prove his might, blind to the ash in his wake. Aegon’s crown, too big, too dull. Aemond’s, too sharp, too bright. Do the gods despise her so, that they gift her sons as opposite and doomed as sun and storm?
Now, watching him drill the trembling squire, she wonders: Has she fed that creature with her own hands? When she sewed his eyepatch, when she praised his ruthlessness at council, when she let Otto whisper “ Aemond is our true sword” —has she birthed a prince, or a conqueror who will swallow the realm whole to sate his ache for worth?
The blood of the dragon, Viserys often says in his softer moments, is a bargain with chaos. Alicent has bargained, all right—wagered her sons against a queen’s wrath. But as Aemond’s blade kisses the squire’s thigh, drawing a thin scarlet line, she fears the chaos has already slipped its leash.
Alicent meets Criston’s gaze, a silent plea trapped between them as she glances at the whimpering squire. The knight gives a curt nod, his jaw a blade’s edge. He pities the boy, she thinks, tasting the sour tang of Criston’s disapproval. Once, she admires his honor, that unyielding code that bound him to her side after Rhaenyra discarded him like a soiled glove. Now, it feels like a relic, worn thin by years of compromises buried like shards in their shared history.
As she turns away, Aemond’s stare sears her back—a brand of defiance. She knows that look. It accuses, it demands: You made me this. Now flinch at what I’ve become. Her steps quicken, the gravel crunching like bones beneath her slippers. Is this truly strength? she wonders. Or has she let her second son mistake brutality for valor, vengeance for kingship? The memory of his voice rings in her ears as he recounts gutting a stablehand who’d mocked his patch. “He’ll not mock me again,” he said, flicking blood from his dagger. She praised his resolve. What else can she do?
Helaena sits cross-legged in a nest of clover, sunlight dappling her silver-gold hair. In her palm, a spider traverses the labyrinth of her lifeline, its legs delicate as quill strokes. Alicent hesitates, struck by the tableau—her daughter, half-child, half-sibyl, whispering secrets to creatures most recoil from.
“They weave the future,” Helaena murmurs, not lifting her gaze. The spider pauses, silk glinting as it descends toward the grass. “But the threads stick to their legs. It’s messy.”
Alicent kneels beside her, the damp earth seeping through her gown. Like the blood on my hands, she thinks, watching the silk snag on a blade of clover. Helaena’s mind is a tangled loom, visions threading through her words like needles. Once, Alicent dismisses her ramblings as childish fancies. Now, they coil in her chest, serrated and ripe with meaning.
“What do they weave, sweetling?”
Helaena rarely tolerates touch, but today she leans into Alicent’s shoulder, her scent a mix of mint and something darker, like burnt incense.
“A net.” Helaena’s finger follows the spider’s path. “To catch the falling stars. But the holes are too wide. They slip through.” Her voice sharpens, sudden and clear. “We slip through.”
A chill prickles Alicent’s neck. We . The word hangs between them, a hook. Does she mean their family? The realm? Before Alicent can press, Helaena sighs and shakes her hand, sending the spider tumbling into the grass.
“Silly thing. Doesn’t see its own web.”
Alicent’s throat tightens. Is that all I am? A spider, blind to the trap I spin? She glances back toward the yard, where Aemond’s drills have resumed, the clang of steel echoing like a dirge. Helaena hums softly, plucking a clover flower and twirling it. Her innocence is a blade, too. It cuts deeper because it is untainted, because Otto’s scheming has never managed to smother it.
“Come,” Alicent says abruptly, rising. The dampness clings to her knees, a petty reproach. “Let’s find your nursemaid. You’ll catch a chill here.”
Helaena tilts her face upward, her violet eyes glinting with an unchildlike knowing. “They’re already here, Mother. The chills. In the walls. In the soup.” She sighs again, but Alicent shudders, pulling her close.
Gods forgive me , she prays as they walk, Helaena’s hand limp in hers. I have made monsters of my sons. Must I make an oracle of my daughter too? Sweet, strange Helaena. The only one still unsullied by the throne’s rot. Alicent adores the way her daughter’s mind weaves tapestries from dust motes and shadows, how her laughter bubbles like a spring despite the vipers coiled around them. But that very softness terrifies her. The court whispers of the princess’s “fancies” as if they are madness, not visions. Alicent dismisses them once, too—until Helaena’s murmured warnings of “beasts beneath the boards” precede the ratcatcher’s discovery of a poisons cache in the nursery. Now, she wonders if her daughter’s cryptic truths are a different kind of armor, frail but unbreakable.
She’d agreed to bind Helaena to Aegon not out of ambition, but desperation. Keep them close. Keep them safe . How many nights had she paced, listening for shouts from their chambers? Aegon’s sneer lived in her mind: “Don’t look at me like that, Mother. She’s your choice, not mine.” Did he mock her? Neglect her? Worse? Helaena never complained, but her silence echoed louder than tears.
Alicent glances at her daughter now, sunlight gilding the downy hairs on her cheek. Would you be happier in a tower, my love? she thinks, guilt like a shard in her throat. With scrolls and spiders and no crown to crush you? But towers are not safe—not for women, not for Targaryens. The world devours gentle things. In trying to shield Helaena, has she only thrust her into the path of the storm? The girl hums softly, her free hand plucking at the air as though unraveling invisible threads. Alicent’s chest aches. I arm Aemond with fury, cloak Aegon in entitlement—what do I give you, but brittle hope and a husband who withers your light?
They pass a stained-glass window, its colors drenching Helaena in fractured rubies and emeralds. For a heartbeat, she looks every inch a princess—radiant, untouchable. Then she crouches abruptly, chasing a ladybug across the stones, her murmurs scattering the illusion. Alicent’s eyes burn. Let her keep this, she begs the silent gods. Let one of them remain unbroken.
The candlelight webs the page with frail shadows as Alicent’s quill hesitates above the parchment. Dearest Daeron , she begins—then immediately scratches the words into a jagged smear of ink. The boy is a prince of the realm now, fostered under the stern gaze of her father’s kin in Oldtown. He has no use for a mother’s tenderness, only a queen’s guidance. Yet her chest tightens at the memory of his small hand clutching hers the morning he left—not crying, as Aegon had at that age, nor stiff with Aemond’s cold resolve, but quiet. Solemn. His eyes, the precise shade of wet cedar bark, fix on hers with a question she dares not answer: Am I not good enough to stay?
She dips the quill again, watching the ink bleed into the vellum. Prince Daeron, she writes this time, her script formal as a decree. The title feels like a betrayal. Names hold power, and the Red Keep has a way of corroding even the sweetest ones. From Aegon’s indolence to Aemond’s ruthlessness, she sees what that gilded cage can hatch. Daeron, at least, has been spared the worst of it. But for how long?
Orwyle’s concoctions had finally dragged Viserys into a fitful sleep down the hall. The king’s rasping breaths seep through the stone like a dirge. She wonders if Daeron remembers his father’s face before the sores and the stench, when Viserys could still lift him onto his lap to name the dragons in the tapestries. "That’s Balerion," he’d say, "and this one is Meraxes, who burned whole castles with a snap of her jaws." Daeron would giggle, unafraid, because to him dragons were stories, not warnings. Alicent envies him that.
Her letter turns brittle with half-truths. Your father is well , she lies, picturing the rot gnawing at Viserys’s flesh . Helaena speaks of you often— another falsehood. Helaena speaks of beetles and spools of thread, of dreams that leave her shaking. But Alicent weaves the tale anyway, spinning threads of normalcy: Aegon’s hunting exploits (omitting the drunken tumbles from his horse), Aemond’s progress in the training yard (his cruelty reframed as “vigor”). She even mentions the new laurel tree planted in the courtyard—though its roots are already choked by blight.
The hardest part comes last . It gladdens me to hear of your studies with the maesters , she writes, recalling his last letter. He describes Oldtown’s libraries in vivid strokes, the way the dawn paints the Hightower in hues of pearl and flame. She can all but see him there, hunched over a tome too large for his lap, ink smudged on his cheek . But remember, Daeron, the Citadel’s books are not the only slates upon which a prince’s mettle is tested. Her father’s words, regurgitated. A sharp mind must be paired with sharper instincts. The court is a pit of vipers, and even the choicest stems can poison.
Her quill hovers, trembling. Write to me of your heart , she nearly adds, longing to claw through the parchment and grasp the child who still draws stars in the margins of his letters. But Otto’s voice slithers through her mind, cold and unyielding: Sentiment is a luxury sworn off with the crown. She signs it Your Queen and Mother, then blots the ink fiercely, as though she can seal away the parts of herself that ache to beg forgiveness. To whisper: Stay soft. Stay safe. Let the dragons devour the rest of us first.
When she pressed her seal into the wax—the Targaryen sigil, not the Hightower’s beacon—it felt like burying a body.
Viserys sleeps deeply, his breath a raw, wet tide beneath the opium-sweet veil of milk of the poppy. It is in these rare, stolen hours—when the king’s pain recedes into myth and the Red Keep holds its breath—that Alicent allows herself to slip into the nursery. Here, the air smells of rosewater and damp linen, of life unblemished by thrones or daggers.
Helaena sits by the hearth, her hair a silver tangle in the firelight, humming a melody that seems to fray at the edges. In her lap squirm the twins: Jaehaera and Jaehaerys, their small faces puckered like summer plums. Alicent lingers in the doorway, watching. Her daughter’s hands, once fluttering and restless as moth wings, now move with purpose—cradling a head here, smoothing a swaddle there. A mother , Alicent marvels, though the word feels incongruous. Helaena, who still weeps over crushed spiders and buries her trinkets in the courtyard soil, now navigates motherhood as if it were another half-sung riddle.
“They dream in colors,” Helaena murmurs, not turning. Her voice is the scrape of a needle through silk. “Jaehaerys sees scarlet. Jaehaera... violet, like rot at the roots.”
Alicent stiffens. Prophecies, again. Always. She crosses the room, her shadow pooling over the babes. “They’re too young for dreams, sweetling.”
“No one’s too young.” Helaena tilted her head, her eyes reflecting twin flames. “You dreamt for me, didn’t you? Before I was born. Dreams of crowns and ruin.”
Alicent’s throat tightens. She had dreamt—visions of a daughter swaddled in green, a queen’s diadem slipping through her fingers like smoke. She reaches for Jaehaera, the girl’s tiny fist closing around her thumb. The child’s grip is startlingly strong. Mine were once this small , she thinks, tracing the downy curve of the babe’s cheek. Aegon, red-faced and squalling; Aemond, silent and watchful even then. She cradles them just so—king and beast, made in her image.
“You fret,” Helaena murmurs. “Your thoughts are loud, Mother.”
Alicent sinks into the chair beside her, Jaehaerys now cooing against her shoulder. “Do I?”
“You’re counting my breaths. Measuring my worth.” Helaena’s fingertip traces the edge of Jaehaera’s swaddle, her nail catching on the embroidered dragon coiled there—a beast stitched in gold, now fraying.
Alicent shifts Jaehaerys closer, the babe’s warmth seeping through the silk of her sleeve. The fire crackles, casting serpentine shadows on the walls—a dance of old terrors.
“Worth is not measured in breaths, Helaena,” Alicent says, too softly. Lies, her mind hisses. Every breath here is currency. Every whimper, a ledger entry.
“You tally them still. Father’s coughs. Aegon’s japes. My... quirks.” Her gaze lifted, moon-pale and piercing. “Even his.” She nodded at Jaehaerys, now drowsing against Alicent’s collarbone. “Will you blame yourself when his ledger fills? When the dragons come for him?”
Alicent’s hand spasmed, the old scar on her palm—Aegon’s cheek under her strike, the bloom of shame in his eyes—throbbing faintly.
“No one is coming for them,” she says, iron in her voice, a queen’s decree. Yet the words curdle as she speaks them. Through the window, the distant torchlights of the palace guards flicker like watchful eyes.
Helaena leans forward, her silver hair a curtain grazing the twins’ faces. “They already walk in his dreams,” she whispers. “The one-eye prince. The sea-gorged god. And her... always her , with hair like flame.” Her thumb brushes Jaehaera’s brow, and the babe coos, a sound too sweet for the acid rising in Alicent’s throat. Rhaenyra . The name is a brand. How many times has she prayed her old friend’s shadow would never darken these halls again?
“Enough,” Alicent snaps, sharper than intended. Jaehaerys stirs, his tiny fist clenching, and she forces her rigid shoulders to soften. Monsters are not born, she thinks, staring into his scrunched face, they are carved. By hands like mine.
Helaena tilts her head, studying her mother as if she were a shattered vase held together by glue. Slowly, she reaches out, her cold fingers grazing Alicent’s wrist—the one circled by a bracelet of seven-pointed stars.
“You mistook the war for a game, muña ,” she says, the High Valyrian endearment a relic from a time when Helaena’s world was simples and spiders. “But the board was set before you drew breath. We are all echoes here.”
A log collapses in the hearth, sparks erupting like a swarm of fireflies. “Echoes fade,” Alicent replies, a plea disguised as wisdom. She presses a kiss to Jaehaerys’s temple, his skin milk-soft, untouched by the world’s blade. Yet.
Helaena leans back, her riddle-spun smile returning. “And yet,” she echoes, plucking the thread from her finger and releasing it into the fire. They watch it catch, flare, and vanish—a brief, bright scream. “Tell me, Mother... when the flames come, will you thank the gods? Or will you finally scream with us?”
The nursery door creaks open, a servant’s timid voice announcing the king’s stirring. Alicent rises, her joints stiff as a crone’s, and lays Jaehaerys in Helaena’s waiting arms. For a moment, their hands brush—queen and prophet, mother and daughter—all the lies and lineages they carry between them.
“Sleep, sweetling,” Alicent says, though she does not know which of them she means to comfort.
As she leaves, Helaena’s lullaby follows her, a mournful tune twisted into something like a dirge:
“...dragons three, and dragons four...
The tide will rise and wash the shore...”
In the corridor, Alicent presses her scarred palm to the cold stone wall, grounding herself in its unyielding truth. Above, the Iron Throne looms, its jagged edges hungry for fresh blood. Below, the twins’ cries fade, swallowed by the Keep’s ancient bones.
The Keep’s seldom-used eastern gallery is filled with dusty shafts of late afternoon sun slicing through the tapestries. The air smells of iron and dried roses, relics of a tourney decades past. Criston waits three paces behind, as always, his armor muted in the dim light, but his eyes sharp as ever. The silence between them is a blade they’ve honed together, sharpened by years of glances cut short and confessions choked back. He knows the contours of her guilt better than she knows his face. Alicent’s fingers trail the fractured edge of the stained-glass Maiden, the crack splitting the figure’s beatific smile into a grimace. Ser Criston’s boots scrape softly against the stone floor, his presence a constant shadow. Always there, even when she wishes to drown in solitude. Or is it the other way around?
“You’ve never asked,” she says abruptly, her voice startling a spider into flight.
Criston’s helm tilts slightly, sunlight skating across its surface. “Asked what, Your Grace?”
“Why I never questioned you.” She turns. “That night you came to my chambers—reeking of pride and Arbor gold, begging for absolution. You spoke of her. Of Rhaenyra’s… indiscretions. Yet I never demanded the full truth.”
His gauntleted hand flexes, the leather creaking. “Truth is a luxury in this court. You taught me that yourself, Your Grace.”
“Strange, isn’t it? We both loved her once.”
Loved. The word lingers like poison.
She means Rhaenyra, of course. The girl who had been her shadow-sister, her confidant in stolen hours, her heart’s lodestar—until the throne, the prophecy, the hunger for crowns split them like an axe through sapling wood. Criston’s love was different: a knight’s vow bent into a beggar’s plea, spat upon, then forged into a dagger.
He steps closer, his armor glinting dully in the half-light. “You mistake duty for love, my queen.”
“Do I?” She arches a brow, daring him to deny it. “You stood by her side long after duty demanded it. You braided her hair. Laughed at her japes. Protected her, even from herself.” Her voice lowers, realizing she’s referring to her days with Rhaenyra than Criston’s. “Until she discarded you. As she discards all things that cease to burn bright enough.”
His jaw tightens, a ripple beneath stubbled skin. For a moment, she sees the ghost of the man he once was—proud, golden, his honor untainted. The man who’d knelt before Rhaenyra with a white cloak and a heart ripe for breaking.
“Discarded,” he echoes. “Is that what you call it?”
Before Alicent can reply, a servant finds them, the boy’s face ashen as he prostrates himself in the gallery’s threshold. “Your Grace—Ser Criston—the King...” He gasps, trembling. “The maesters beg you come. The wound...it festers anew.”
Alicent’s spine stiffens, her throat tightening as if a gauntlet has closed around it. She does not flinch, but her knuckles bleach white against the russet silk of her gown. A fortnight ago, Viserys had managed to sit upright, his weathered hands clasping hers as he rasped promises of reconciliation—vows she no longer believes. Now, the stench of rot blooms even here, three corridors from his chambers. The Iron Throne claims its due , she thinks bitterly, its jagged teeth never sated.
Criston’s voice cuts through the silence, low and urgent. “Your Grace, we must go.” His hand hovers near her elbow, not touching, but steadying. Alicent nods once, a queen’s composure armor enough to cloak the dread pooling in her gut.
The king’s solar reeks of clove and vinegar, sweet-sour disguises for the truth festering beneath. Maesters swarm like carrion crows, their gray robes streaked with rust-colored stains. Viserys lies shrunken beneath embroidered quilts, his skin translucent as vellum. The wound—that cursed wound from the throne’s jagged barbs—glows malevolently on his forearm, red tendrils snaking toward his heart.
“He refused the milk of the poppy, Your Grace,” murmurs Orwyle. “Insists on... clarity.”
Alicent steps forward. The king’s breath rattles like pebbles in a tin cup. For a heartbeat, her resolve fractures: This is not the man who crowned me, who sired my children. His eyes flutter open, clouded yet startlingly lucid.
“Alicent...” he wheezes. A skeletal hand twitches toward her. Does he mistake me for her? For Aemma?
“The maesters say the fever must break by dawn,” she says. If not, your reign does not outlast the moon. She swallows the words, chokes them into silence.
Viserys coughs—a wet, ragged sound. “Aegon... where is...”
Her pulse stutters. He asks for our son now? Only now? A hot needle threads through her ribs. She leans closer. “Rest, my king. The realm needs you strong.”
Behind her, Criston watches, his shadow a fortress at her back. The maesters exchange glances, their fear a tangible thing. Later, in the torchlit gloom of her chambers, Alicent’s hands tremble at last. Blood crusts beneath her nails—gauze torn away when Orwyle dared suggest amputation. The Seven’s faces loom above, dispassionate as Viserys’ gods ever were.
“He clings to pride as the flesh falls from his bones,” she whispers, more to herself than to Criston.
“Pride and duty,” Criston counters. “A king’s burden.”
A king’s folly , she thinks. Viserys’ obsession with legacy blinded him to the rot within his own house. To Rhaenyra’s treacheries, to the vipers coiling in his court. And now, as he fades, the realm hangs on a thread.
“They will blame me,” she says softly. “Rhaenyra will blame me. When the Stranger comes. They will say I nursed his decline.” She turns toward the window, where moonlight fractures on the city. Would she come if I wrote? Or would she see it as weakness? A trap?
“Princess Rhaenyra has dragons,” Criston says carefully. “And sharper ears than the king. She will learn of his state soon enough, with or without your hand.”
“Yet if I tell her...” Alicent trails off, her throat raw. If I tell her, it is an act of contrition. Athread of bridgework over the chasm he carved between us. Memories flicker, unwelcome and vivid: Rhaenyra, the day after she was named heir, threading her fingers with Alicent’s beneath the heart tree. “Someday I’ll make you Hand, ” the princess had teased, “and we’ll rule the realm together.” How easily that girl had laughed. How lightly she wore her legacy. Now Rhaenyra’s laughter lives only in scrolls sealed with dragon wax, her letters pared to courtesies as thin as a weirwood’s bark.
Would she even believe me? Alicent’s fingertips press into the desk’s edge, grounding herself. Rhaenyra, who wears suspicion like armor. Rhaenyra, who guards her sons as jealously as Syrax guards her hoard. For years, Alicent had let her anger calcify—rage at Viserys’ blindness, at Rhaenyra’s arrogance, at the cruel farce of legitimacy. But tonight, the rage feels leaden. Exhausted. Across the room, Criston shifts, his silence a question. They have not spoken of the princess in years. Not truly.
“If you send word,” he says, voice edged with caution, “you grant her power. The power to act... or accuse.”
“She is his heir,” Alicent fires back, too quickly. “I must see to Viserys after some… pondering. If you would excuse me, Ser—”
“I understand, Your Grace,” Criston says, bowing before he heads to the door to stand guard. The quill trembles in her hand. Ink pools, a black star blooming on the parchment. She writes three words before faltering: The king is— Dying? Failing? Unworthy? She nearly laughs. What truth remains unpoisoned between them? But then she sees it—not Rhaenyra the rival, but Rhaenyra the king’s daughter. A woman who will soon kneel beside a pyre, who will grasp, too late, the weight of a crown. Alicent’s chest tightens. Is this not what friends do? Spare each other the waking nightmare of loss?
She writes swiftly then, before doubt can stay her:
The king’s condition worsens. The maesters fear the infection will not relent. Come, if you wish to see him.
No title. No plea. Just the cold marrow of fact. As she seals the scroll with the green wax of House Hightower, she imagines Rhaenyra’s fingers breaking the seal. Will she recognize the tremble in the script? The absence of venom? She asks a servant maid to send the message to the rookery before she makes her way to Viserys’ chambers. The air in the king’s bedchamber is a living thing—thick with the reek of gangrenous flesh and sour sweat, weighed down by the murmurs of silent prayers from the septons huddled like carrion birds at the bedside. Alicent’s steps slow as she crosses the threshold, her eyes adjusting to the gloom. The curtains hang heavy, smothering the daylight. Only a single candle flickers, casting a jaundiced glow over Viserys’ sunken face.
He stirs weakly, his gruesome left arm cradled to his chest, its flesh blackened and split like overripe fruit. Alicent’s throat clenches. He holds onto that wound like a talisman, she thinks. As if rot could absolve his failures.
“Leave us,” she commands. The septons scatter, their censers trailing bitter smoke.
Viserys’ eyes crack open, milky and fever-bright. When he speaks, his voice is not his own. It rasps like wind through a crypt, each syllable layered with the weight of visions. Like Helaena’s sleep-songs. Like doom.
“My queen... the crown... it bleeds in your shadow.”
Alicent stiffens. “Save your strength, husband.”
“No,” he hisses, suddenly animate. A hand shoots out, clamping her wrist with unnatural strength. His skin scorches hers, bone-white and brittle as chalk. “Rhaenyra will be queen... but not yet. Red wings will clash... fire and ash... storm and fury.” His breath rattles, spittle flecking his cracked lips. “Guide her... protect... the boy... the prince who was promised...”
His grip tightens, nails drawing blood. Alicent jerks backward, but Viserys arches off the bed like a man possessed. The candle gutters. Shadows crawl up the walls, twisting into shapes—dragons with broken wings, crowns melting into puddles of gold.
“You will burn it all... unless you shield the green... protect the dream...”
“Stop this madness,” Alicent whispers, shaking now, terror and fury warring in her veins. Is this prophecy? Or the delirium of a rotted mind?
Viserys collapses back, his voice softening into something pitiful. Human . “Aemma... my Aemma... swear to me. Keep them safe... keep her safe… Steady the realm…”
The name is a knife plunged between Alicent’s ribs. Aemma. Not Rhaenyra. Not even Alicent. The ghost of a dead queen, not the flesh of the one who warmed his bed, bore his heirs, and wiped the rot from his brow. Her fingernails dig into her palms, sharp as the bite of a guileful god. Twenty years, she thinks. Twenty years a shadow to a woman long ashes, and still he mistakes me for her specter. The bitterness floods her, acrid and alive. But she does not scream. Years of practice keep her still, a statue draped in Hightower green. He sees only the women he failed , she realizes. Aemma, butchered for a son. Rhaenyra, armored in his guilt. And Alicent—trapped between them, invisible even as she holds his crumbling kingdom together.
For a heartbeat, the girl she once was wrestles with the queen she has become. But she remembers Aegon’s sneer, Aemond’s hunger for vengeance, the whispers of lords who would sooner see her children fed to dragons than kneel to a woman’s rule.
“I swear it,” she whispers.
He releases her wrist. His exhale rattles the room, a dolorous echo of the bell that once heralded his coronation. Moments later, his chest stills.
A fly lands on his open eye.
She does not weep. She does not scream. There is a grim arithmetic to grief, and she has spent her ration on a living man who deserved none of it.
She steps back, tearing a strip of linen from the discarded bandages heaped beside the bed. The door groaned as she pushed it open, its hinges echoing the ache in her bones.
In the hall, her father waited.
Otto stands ramrod straight, moonlight sieving through the arched windows to carve his face into jagged halves: one side a noble mask of polished marble, the other drowned in shadow. His hands are clasped behind his back, the posture of a commander surveying a battlefield stripped of survivors. The air here is colder, sharper, scoured clean of death’s cloying sweetness.
“Daughter,” he says gently. Alicent halts a pace from him, the linen strip coiled like a serpent in her fist. The silence stretches. He has come to measure her grief, she realizes. To weigh it, barter it, mold it into a weapon.
“He is gone, then.” Otto’s voice held no question.
She tilts her chin, her lips parting not to answer but to let the truth hang between them, sharp and gleaming. Otto’s gaze hardens. She knows that look—the flint striking against iron, sparks ready to ignite a war. He clasps his hands tighter behind his back, the creak of leather gloves punctuating the silence.
“The hour is late, daughter. There are protocols. Announcements.”
She pictures the ravens already penned in their cages, ink clotting the tips of scribes’ quills. How quickly death becomes politics. How eagerly vultures gather.
“We shall summon the maesters,” he continues, stepping into the narrow band of light that fractures the corridor. It reveals the tightness around his eyes, the hunger he can no longer mask. “The Silent Sisters shall prepare the body. The court must be told he passed peacefully. A lingering illness—a show of dignity.”
Alicent’s fingers twitched, the linen bandage still coiled in her palm.
Otto misreads her silence for acquiescence. “We must act before the rats scuttle from the walls—”
“Gather the council.” Her voice does not waver.
Otto stares at her. She wonders if he sees her now: the girl who once wept into his shoulder when her mother died, or the queen who stands before him, her grief calcified into something monstrous. His lips thin. “Delaying will gut this kingdom if you let it fester. We shape the story, Alicent. We say he passed in his sleep. A gentle end.”
“My husband the king has just died...” Her murmur is as frail as the cobwebs glinting in the chamber’s corners.
Otto’s sigh is a hiss. “There is much to think, much to do—”
“Yes.” Alicent lifts her chin, meeting his gaze in the guttering torchlight. Her eyes are dry. “But let the council first know of the king’s passing.”
Otto hesitates before his features soften into something resembling sympathy. A mummer’s mask. His hand settles on her shoulder.
“I grieve with you for your loss, Alicent.”
She does not flinch. Does not recoil. But beneath her skin, her blood roars. Grieve with her? He grieves only for the power that slips through his fingers like smoke. She longs to claw his hand away, to scream that her grief is not his to share.
Her father withdraws his hand, mistaking her stillness for submission. “I shall have the bells tolled at dawn,” he says, already turning toward the hallway.