Chapter Text
213 AC
The Red Keep was a beast of stone and shadow, and on nights like these, it wore its beauty like armor.
Ten thousand candles burned in the Great Hall, their flames doubling in the polished steel of the Kingsguard, tripling in the dark eyes of Dornish princes, scattering across the silver-gold hair of the dragon's get like light across water. The hall swam in it, that warm, honeyed glow that made old men look distinguished and young women look divine. It was a light meant to seduce, to dazzle, to make men forget that beyond these walls, autumn had begun to bite and somewhere in the north, the old powers were stirring in their graves.
Prince Baelor's forty-fourth name day, though wise men did not count the years of kings-in-waiting too loudly.
High on the dais, King Daeron the Good sat slumped upon his throne, his famous eggshell eyes gone milky with age and too much reading. He smiled when the crowd cheered, raised his goblet when the toasts were made, but his thoughts were elsewhere, in his books, perhaps, or in the grave with the family who should have sat beside him. Beside him, Queen Myriah of Dorne held court with the effortless grace of a woman who had spent almost thirty years learning to love a kingdom that had never quite loved her back. The Dornish queen's face was a mask of pleasant interest, but her eyes… those dark Martell eyes never stopped moving.
They found her sons in the crowd. They always did.
There was Baelor himself, the heir, moving from lord to lady to lord again with the easy confidence of a man who had never known what it meant to be overlooked. His sons trailed behind him like ducklings; Valarr with his widower's grief etched into the lines around his mouth, Mataryys red-faced and laughing, already deep in his cups though the night was young. Good boys, all of them. Strong boys. The future of the dynasty, shining and golden.
Farther down the table, Prince Rhaegel sat staring at nothing, his hands twitching in his lap like frightened birds, while his wife pretended not to notice. Prince Aerys had not been invited to this celebration; everyone knew why, though no one said it aloud. Some dragons could not be tamed, and some could not be trusted near the flock.
And in the corner of the hall, where the candlelight did not quite reach, stood the prince they never seem to notice.
He had positioned himself between two pillars, half-hidden in the shadows, as though even the light had learned to avoid him. His hair was silver-white, but not the sleek silver of his brothers. It was cut strangely, it framed his head in a rounded line that ended just at his ears, neither longer nor shorter, as though excess itself had been deemed a weakness and removed. A Prince with a bowl cut. His clothes were fine enough, black wool with red silk stitching, but they hung awkwardly on his frame, pulled and twisted by restless hands that could not keep still.
No one approached him. No one looked at him. The crowd flowed around his corner like water around a stone, and if any eyes happened to drift his way, they slid past just as quickly, trained by years of habit to see that space as empty.
He had been invisible for most of his life and he preferred it that way.
On the other side of the Great Hall, Zyra Tyrell had heard the whispers long before she ever saw the Red Keep.
Rumors traveled faster than ravens, faster than riders, carried on the breath of septas and serving girls, whispered in the corners of great halls from the Arbor to the Neck. The Targaryens, they said, and then the voices would drop, and the names would come out like secrets.
The Good King, bless him, but he's old now, so old, they say he doesn't even recognize his own grandsons sometimes...
Prince Baelor, yes, a fine man, a worthy heir, but his sons, the oldest one, Valarr, lost his wife, did you hear? Terrible tragedy...
And the middle brothers, well. Rhaegel dances with puppets when he thinks no one is watching, and Aerys... Aerys was sent away. No one says why, but they sent him away...
And the other one. The Anvil’s twin.
The whispers about the other one were the worst. Zyra had heard them all, sitting quietly in her mother's solar while the older ladies gossiped, pretending to embroider while they forgot she was there. Maelor, they called him. Prince Maelor Targaryen, born second in a batch of two, though the midwives said he came out fighting clawing, almost, as though he had spent nine months in the womb wrestling his brother for space and had not quite learned to stop.
They say he's mad and cruel.
They say he's killed people. Women and girls in horrible ways.
They say the queen protects him. She's the only one he listens to. The only one who can control him.
They say Maekar, his twin, used to protect him too, when they were boys. But not anymore. No one can protect him now.
Zyra had listened to all of it. And then, because she was her mother's daughter, a Hightower, raised on books and reason and the uncomfortable truth that people were seldom as simple as rumors painted them she had set the whispers aside.
She would judge the man when she met him. Not before.
The godswood was quieter than the hall.
Zyra had slipped away between dances, her slippers worn thin and her hair escaping its pins in soft brown curls. The night air was cool against her flushed skin, carrying the scent of pine and something older… something that might have been magic, once, before the dragons came and burned it all away. She stood at the railing of the terrace, breathing deep, letting the silence settle into her bones.
That was when she saw him.
He sat on a stone bench at the edge of the trees, half-hidden in shadow. His hands were busy with something like a twig, she saw, or perhaps a piece of broken branch. He worked at it steadily, peeling bark, snapping small pieces, arranging them on the bench beside him in a pattern that might have meant something to him and him alone. His lips moved as he worked, shaping words she could not hear, and his head was tilted at an angle that should have been uncomfortable but seemed natural to him.
He did not look like a monster, he just looked like a man who had spent his whole life alone, building small things in the dark because no one had ever taught him how to build anything else.
In that moment she made a decision. Zyra stepped off the terrace and onto the grass, her slippers silent against the soft ground. She did not approach quietly to spy, she approached openly, letting her footsteps be heard, letting the rustle of her skirts announce her presence. When she was a few feet away, she stopped.
"My prince?"
He flinched.
The twig snapped in his hands. His head whipped toward her, and for one brief, terrible moment she saw something in his eyes that made her heart stutter. It was not madness or cruelty. It was wounded surprise, frantic and raw, the look of a man who had been struck so many times that he had forgotten what it felt like to be approached without a blow.
Then it was gone, and he was just a man again. An awkward man, with strange hair and nervous hands, staring at her as though she were a ghost.
"I did not mean to startle you," Zyra said softly. She gestured toward the broken twig. "I am sorry if I interrupted."
Prince Maelor looked down at his hands, at the snapped wood, at the careful pattern now scattered by his sudden movement. For a long moment, he simply stared, as though the destruction of his small creation was a wound he could not quite process. Then his jaw worked.
"It... it does not matter," he said. His voice was lower than she expected, rougher, as though he did not use it often. "It was nothing. Just... nothing."
Zyra took a step closer. "It looked like something. What were you making?"
He stared at her. The suspicion was back now, warring with something else like confusion or the faintest flicker of hope. "Why do you care?"
It was not a challenge, but rather a genuine question, asked by a man who genuinely could not understand why anyone would want to know.
Zyra considered it. She could lie, offer some polite fiction about courtesy and good breeding. But something in his eyes made her want to be honest.
"I saw you at the feast," she said. "And then I saw you here and it looked like you were building something so I wanted to see it."
Maelor looked down at the scattered twigs. Then, slowly, hesitantly, he reached out and picked up one of the pieces. It was curved, almost graceful, with a smaller piece still attached that might have been a wing.
"It was a dragon," he said. "They told me we once rode dragons, therefore our house sigil. We used to fly among the clouds. But I... I know I’ll never do that or own a real dragon. So I make them instead. Little dragons. Little... things."
He held it out to her and Zyra took it carefully, as though it were made of glass. It was nothing, really, just a snapped branch with bits of bark missing. But she could see it now, the shape he had seen. The curve of a neck. The suggestion of wings. A dragon, small and grounded, waiting for something it would never have.
"It is beautiful," she said.
They talked for nearly an hour after that.
He was strange, she would not lie to herself about that. His thoughts jumped from subject to subject without warning, and sometimes he would stop mid-sentence to stare at something she could not see, his eyes going distant and his hands resuming their endless movement. But beneath the strangeness, she found a distinct intelligence and a loneliness so vast it made her chest ache.
He asked her about Highgarden. About the roses, the labyrinths, the way the light fell across the Mander at sunset. He asked about her mother, the Hightower lady with her gold-spun hair, and her father, the Longthorn with his silver temples and his careful ambitions. He asked about her dreams if she have them? What did she see when she closed her eyes at night?
No one had ever asked her so many questions. No one had ever listened to the answers so intently.
In return, he told her about the twig dragons, the stone dragons, the dragons he drew in the dirt with his finger when no one was watching. He told her about Summerhall, where his brother lived, though his voice grew tight when he spoke of Maekar. He told her about Maekar's children, six of them, motherless now, growing up in a palace that had never quite felt like a home.
"He does not smile anymore," Maelor said, and for a moment he sounded almost sad. "My brother. He used to. When we were young. Before..." He trailed off, his hands twitching.
Before what? Zyra wanted to ask. But something in his face told her not to push.
Instead, she said: "You have six nieces and nephews, then. That must be—"
"I do not see them, the younger ones at least." The words came out flat, matter-of-fact. "My mother says it is better that way. She says children are... confused by me. Afraid. She says it would hurt them to know me." He looked up, and for a moment, his eyes were clear and utterly, terrifyingly sane. "Is that true? Do you think children would be afraid of me?"
Her throat tightened. She thought of the little ones at Highgarden, her cousins, her siblings, the children of the household knights. She thought of how they would react to this man, with his peculiar hair and his twitching hands and his eyes that burned too bright.
She thought of how they would react to anyone who had been whispered about their whole life.
"I think," she said carefully, "that children are afraid of what they do not understand. And no one has ever tried to help them understand you."
Maelor stared at her for a long moment. Then, slowly, his mouth curved into something that might have been a smile. It was not a warm expression, no, it was too unpracticed for warmth but it was genuine.
"You are… surreal," he said. "No one talks to me like this."
"Perhaps more people should."
"Perhaps." He looked down at the twigs in his lap, then back at her. "You will come back?"
It was not a demand. It was a question, small and fragile, asked by a man who clearly expected the answer to be no.
Zyra smiled. "If you would like me to."
Something shifted in his face. The wariness eased, replaced by something younger, almost hopeful. "I would. Like that. I would like that."
"Then I will find you." She rose after looking up at the sky and noticing it was getting late. "Goodnight, Maelor."
"Maelor," he echoed. "Yes. Goodnight. Zyra."
She walked back toward the terrace, feeling his eyes on her the whole way. At the door, she glanced back.
He had not moved. He sat on the bench, surrounded by scattered twigs, watching her with an expression she could not quite read. But when their eyes met, he raised one hand in a small, awkward wave.
Zyra waved back, stepped inside, and the door closed behind her, and she told herself that the whispers had been wrong. They had to be, right?
Lord Leo Longthorn did not speak until the wheelhouse was rolling through the darkened streets of King's Landing. Then he turned to his daughter, his face carved from stone.
"You spoke with him."
"His name is Maelor and yes, I did." Zyra met her father's eyes steadily. "He was alone. I kept him company."
"Zyra." Her father's voice was heavy with warning. "That man is not— He is not like other men. The queen protects him because she must, because he is her son, but everyone knows—"
"Everyone knows what, Father?" Zyra's voice was gentle, but firm. "They know rumors. They know whispers. They know stories that have been passed from servant to servant for forty years. Do you know what I saw tonight? I saw a man who builds dragons from twigs because he wished for one. I saw a man who asked me about Highgarden as though it were a fairy tale. I saw a man who has been told his whole life that children should be kept from him, and who believes it."
Lord Leo was silent for a long moment. Then, quietly: "You do not know what he has done."
"Neither do you. Neither does anyone who was not there." Zyra reached out and took her father's hand. "I am not foolish, Father. I will be careful. But I will not judge a man based on whispers. Mother did not raise me that way."
At the mention of his wife, Lord Leo's face softened. He sighed, long and heavy.
"Your mother," he said, "would tell me I am a fool to worry. She would say that you have her head and my heart, and that is a combination that has never failed anyone yet." He squeezed her hand. "Be careful, Zyra. That is all I ask."
"I will."
But even as she said it, she was thinking of Maelor's face when he asked if she would come back. The hope in it and the fear.
She would be careful, but she would also keep her promise.
In the Red Keep, Maelor sat alone in his chambers.
He had gathered the twigs before leaving the godswood. All of them, even the broken pieces, even the ones scattered too far to be worth the effort. He laid them out on his bed now, arranging and rearranging, trying to remember the pattern he had made before she came.
But no matter how much he tried, he could not concentrate.
She had spoken to him. She had smiled at him. She had sat beside him on the bench, close enough to touch, and she had not flinched away when he talked too fast or stopped too suddenly. She had called his dragon beautiful. She had said she would come back.
No one had ever called anything of his beautiful. No one had ever promised to come back.
His mother would be angry when she found out. She was always angry when he spoke to strangers, when he forgot himself, when he did something that drew attention to his... his difference. She would tell him again that no one understood him like she did, that the world was cruel and only she could protect him. She would remind him of all the reasons he needed her.
But Zyra had not been cruel, she had been kind.
Maelor picked up the largest piece of twig who was the dragon's body, before he broke it and held it to the candlelight. His fingers traced the curve of its neck.
He thought of her smile. The way her eyes had crinkled at the corners and the way she had said his name.
"I will make a new one," he whispered. "A better one. For her."
And in the darkness of his room, with the city sleeping around him, Prince Maelor Targaryen began to build.
He did not hear the footsteps outside his door or saw the shadow that paused there, listening.
But Queen Myriah of Dorne heard everything. She always did.
And as she stood in the corridor, her dark eyes fixed on her son's door, her expression was not soft or warm. It was the look of a woman calculating odds.