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The hounds chased the boar and the men chased the hounds; Rhaenyra and the less lusty men followed at a leisurely pace. Only the distant baying of the dogs broke the bright summertime peace of the Kingswood.
Rhaenyra dropped the reigns of her chestnut gelding to loosen her collar and fan her neck. With blue summer days came muggy summer heat. “Have you ever killed a boar, Ser Steffon?”
She might have asked Laenor, but he was in hot pursuit of the boar with the rest, while the thick-faced kingsguard remained at her heel, as ever. “I have seen them killed, by my father and brothers and kin, but I have never been a great hunter myself, princess”
“I’ve never seen one die.” Rhaenyra had joined the royal hunts only after Laenor had suggested it a little after their marriage. It was what a king did, and the lords needed to see her as the equal of King Viserys in every way, especially as the king’s health grew worse. “Do they die more like men or deer?” She had seen many deer deaths. Three harts were on their way to the kitchen already.
Ser Steffon answered readily. He was too long in service to be surprised. “Each animal always dies in its kind’s particular way. It’s men who die differently from each other, princess.”
The hunters abandoned the reckless chase of the boar in the late afternoon and retired to the lavish camp where the remainder of the court, including the king, his health too poor to spend a day ahorse, had gathered for the midsummer celebration. Lord Lyonel had labored for many weeks to arrange the necessary servants, guards, and supplies for a feast so deep in the Kingswood. Rhaenyra thought it a poor use of coin and time, and said as much in small council, one of a thousand contentious issues, but the king and queen had insisted on all of it and it was done.
Despite her public opposition, Rhaenyra was privately grateful for an escape from the Red Keep. Her dreams were full of tapestries with watching eyes and whispering walls. Her son Jacaerys, when he wasn’t screaming from colic, was a healthy, happy boy who had arrived to his first name day with a thick head of chestnut hair. The rumors dragged at her like riverweed pulled a drowning man.
By late evening, the camp was a site of pure decadence. The rich food, lavish tents, and rousing songs of the musicians encouraged excess and the shadows between the trees, beyond the circles of light cast by torches and braziers, invited debauchery.
Rhaenyra wandered with a cup of Dornish red that barely touched her lips. She'd lost interest in drunkenness after that incident with Daemon, and then her pregnancy had made her tongue change and now the taste of anything fermented made her queasy.
My mother hated olives before I’d been born, but craved them her entire pregnancy. Whenever there were olives at supper Queen Aemma retold the story until Rhaenyra had heard it to boredom. She would roll her eyes at her father and he would laugh and smile fondly at his wife.
Would that be her, Laenor, and Jacaerys, someday? Gods willing, Jacaerys would grow to a man, and a father, and grandfather. He would drink his wine with grandchildren at his feet and remember how his mother, decades gone, lost her stomach for wine when she’d carried him. A tear on her lash she quickly flicked away unsettled her.
Rhaenyra choked down a swallow of the wine, tossed the bronze goblet to the ground, and went to find her father within the grand pavilion tent at the heart of the camp.
The tent could comfortably shelter a hundred and was woven with a hundred Targaryen crests with pigeon-blood ruby dragon eyes and a lord’s ransom in golden thread. King Viserys was seated next to the gold-leafed central pillar, happily entertaining a circle of lords, including Lord Lyonel Strong, and not a young man in sight.
As Rhaenyra came to her father’s side the lords nodded and bowed to her without rising from their haphazard collection of stools and benches. She acknowledged them and gave her father’s shoulder a kind squeeze. He patted her elbow.
“I hope you’re enjoying yourself, daughter.” His wan face was filled with ruddy life for once. “Is it true Lord Culler nearly had a six-tine stag if it hadn't been for a rabbit spooking his horse?” The men laughed loudly, including Lord Culler Mullendore, a greyed and paunchy man older than her father.
“I beg off, the princess has too keen an eye.” Lord Culler stood and swept a bow to Rhaenyra, wobbling and swaying on his feet so badly the lords on either side of him had to grab his arms. “Princess Rhaenyra, spare an old man the humiliation, let him keep his wives tales! When you get to my age, it's all you have left!”
She liked Lord Culler. He was an unassuming man with a nose for power. Decades ago, King Viserys’ had supported Culler’s inheritance of the Mullendore lands and Culler, though sworn to Hightower, had been fiercely loyal to Targaeryan since.
Rhaenyra graciously smiled. “I had thought it a eight-tine stag, but if Lord Culler insists it was six, I won’t argue.” Hardly a masterful piece of wittery, yet it sent the king slipping down his chair and several into coughing fits.
“My lords, what has sent you all into hysterics?” Queen Alicent went to King Viserys’s other side and lightly kissed his forehead. Ladies-in-waiting and Hightower lackeys trailed her like a cloud of mosquitoes. She wore an emerald green dress that bared her milky shoulders and her auburn curls, curled in a hairnet studded with pearls, glowed like copper in the fire light.
“A jest by Princess Rhaenyra.” The king patted Alicent’s hand and smiled up at her as he’d once done with Rhaenyra’s mother. Rhaenyra had to look away to keep the anger from choking her. “Is our son still about? I don’t think I’ve seen him recently.”
Little Prince Aegon, a spirited terror at nine years, had gone out with the men. He’d spent most of the day swinging his toothpick sword at branches until the blade was dull and bent.
“I had Ser Criston gather a guard and return him and his nursemaids to the castle,” Alicent said. “Our little lord is safe and well.”
“He’s a lord already? I had not heard.” Rhaenyra, though not drunk, felt a rush of unwise heat in her head. Her and Alicent had argued in small council the day before, for the thousandth time, over Daemon. For the thousandth time, Rhaenyra was forced to argue her uncle’s case while he was fucked off across the Narrow Sea with his young wife. She did not relish the task, and she did not enjoy that everyone had become so tolerant of Alicent’s presence at the council table.
Alicent, who cradled a nearly empty goblet, turned a heated glare on Rhaenyra. “He is the king’s son. He will have someday have an inheritance worthy of that, even if he is not to be king anymore.”
“I also had not heard he was going to be king,” Rhaenyra said.
The queen’s cheeks flushed a bright red. “I mean merely that if you’d had no children, the assumption any of us might make is that Prince Aegon would take the throne after you. No more than that.”
One of the lords clicked his tongue and another chuckled. Rhaenyra’s lips pressed into a thin smile. “That is a very bold assumption, your grace. I shall be naming my heir without regard to the assumptions of others when the time comes, I promise you.”
“Not satisfied with arguing over my grave, are you?” The king scowled up at each of them. “Now you must argue over Princess Rhaenyra’s, as well?”
Rhaenyra breathed out. I must not rise to the bait. I must remember I am the one that truly has something to lose in these spats. A ruling queen, woman though she may be, could not be seen to argue like one. “I apologize, father. It’s late and we’ve had much to drink.”
But Alicent was like a dog with a bone. The gentle, appeasing maid Rhaenyra had grown up with was gone--killed about the time of Lord Otto’s exile. “Is the idea truly so offensive to you, Princess Rhaenyra?” Alicent’s laugh was sharp exhale. “That your brother be king after you? There’s no shame in that. We are all very glad for Prince Jacaerys, but he is a babe still.”
Lord Lyonel Strong cleared his throat. “My queen, the wine tonight has been strong and the night quite hot. I think, perhaps, you are not feeling well. A cool bath in your chambers might serve. I would be honored to escort you…”
“Lord Hand, I assure you I am well,” Alicent snapped. “I don’t see what I have done to so offend everyone. I made a simple comment on the laws of inheritance that we all know to be true.”
“Gods save us, I thought we were free of Lord Otto.” The sly comment came from the lords; a mutter to a friend that happened to carry. Someone else tittered. Rhaenyra snapped her head to the crowd but couldn’t identify the guilty man. None of them would meet her gaze.
“Enough! Gods, enough.” King Viserys looked a hundred years. “Prince Jacaerys is a healthy boy, Alicent. Do not tempt the gods with your…I can only call it greed. Our children will have titles and lands and honor aplenty. Do not trouble me with this any longer.”
The men did not hide their pity. A hysterical mother, embarrassing herself before half the court. But it was Rhaenyra who Alicent desperately looked to.
Certain habits were hard to shake. The memory hard to forget. Rhaenyra looked away. Well, that friendship was a long time gone, and who had broken it? She had no answer Alicent wanted.
The queen stiffly curtsied and left with her mosquito swarm. Lord Efrich made a comment about the quality of the king’s new litter of hunting dogs, and slowly the conversation warmed and the easy flow returned, until Alicent’s outburst was nothing more than a little misstep in an otherwise pleasant night.
Rhaenyra was always aware these men were the ones who would carry her to the throne and remained at the king’s side to hear their stories and listen to their woes. She was restless, however, and her thoughts kept returning to Alicent.
Every conversation between the two of them had turned into an argument for the past many years, but not once had Rhaenyra wished to humiliate Alicent. They were the queen and princess butting head over the ruling of a kingdom, not mistresses brawling in the street over the same man. The queen should not have been treated such. She cared for her children, that was all. Alicent herself was no real threat. It was Lord Otto and his allies that Rhaenyra lost sleep over.
Rhaenyra begged the lords’s pardons and excused herself. Alicent's handmaidens said her majesty had asked for some time alone, but thought she had gone towards the horses. At the coral, Rhaenyra startled the pages and stableboys playing a game of dice. From them, she learned the queen had made them swear to tell no one and rode towards King's Landing.
Is Alicent truly so upset? Rhaenyra had her horse brought and followed the dirt track, barely a cart’s width, that was the path out of the royal woods. She traveled by the high and bright moon with no lantern or torch.
Alicent wasn’t a fool that would wander off the path. Rhaenyra was certain she’d find her. Rhaenyra spurred her horse to a gallop. She had no fear in her heart, though the dark woods went for many miles, and only last year a hundred men from the city watch had gone out to clear a pack of bandits. She was the blood of the dragon. She did not know fear.
What she did not expect was to round a corner and nearly collide headlong with Alicent going the opposite direction. Alicent screamed and Rhaenyra pulled back so hard her horse nearly reared, saved at the last moment by Rhaenyra dropping the reigns.
“Rhaenyra! What in seven hells! You might have killed us both!” Alicent was struggling to get her little silver palfrey to stop prancing and turning. “Charging down this sort of path--” then her eyes, shining in the moonlight, widened in fear. “Is something wrong? Has something happened?”
Rhaenyra’s rising panic was snuffed with the confirmation of Alicent’s safety and anger at the queen’s senselessness replaced it. “You ran off, that’s what. Did you think you’d make it all the way back to the castle on your own?”
Alicent’s face pinched. “I can’t have a single second of peace in my life? Is that it? And how can you claim I’ve done something dangerous when you’ve gone and done the same.” She threw her hand at the nonexistent guards behind Rhaenyra.
Oh, so she had. Rhaenyra was very glad the night hid her blush. “That…makes it no less dangerous.”
A handful of heartbeats passed between them. The flanks of Rhaenyra’s gelding rose and fell between her thighs and Alicent’s palfrey, still upset from the near-collision, pawed the ground. Why had Rhaenyra ridden out by herself? She should have taken Laenor, a kingsguard, Lord Lyonel, anyone.
Alicent defeatedly sighed. “Thank you, Rhaenyra, for coming out to find me. Clearly, you’re the only person who cared enough to notice I’d gone.”
“Ser Criston would have noticed if you hadn’t sent him back to the castle.” A little tug at Rhaenyra’s heart as his name passed her lips. She’d changed since her marriage and children and could see how abominably she’d treated him. And to rue the ally she had lost and Alicent gained.
“One person. Heartwarming. Nevermind the other kingsguard whose job it is to protect me” Alicent nudged her horse and passed Rhaenyra. “Let’s return. They might notice you’ve gone, heir as you are.”
Rhaenyra remained. “Why did you run off, Alicent?”
She cast a disbelieving look back. “You’re asking me why I left? After the king and the princess humiliated me in front of the court?”
“You embarrassed yourself, Alicent, with your obvious agenda. You know how much the king hates any discussion of inheritance. The king sent your father away from King’s Landing because he couldn’t let it lie--his Hand of twenty years, Alicent, and his wife’s own lord father!”
“Mother save me, do you think I don’t know all that?” Alicent hissed. “Do you think I’m some half-wit?”
Rhaenyra brought herself up alongside. If they were going to have this argument Rhaenyra would see Alicent’s face as best she could. “Then why do it?”
Alicent’s expression was surly. She wore no cloak and her bare shoulders looked ghostly white in the moonlight. Rhaenyra had remembered her cloak, and she still wore her riding dress, and there was an annoying, niggling worry in the back of her mind that Alicent might be cold.
“You have a son now,” Alicent said. “Do I truly have to explain it?”
Rhaenyra reflected and…no. She let her own shoulders, tightened into a defensive wall, fall. “I would walk the length of the world for Jacaerys.”
Alicent reached for her hand and without dwelling on it Rhaenyra took up the offer. Their fingers intertwined. “Understand, then, everything I do is for the safety and happiness of my children.”
“Do you fear that when I take the throne, I’ll…” The idea was so repugnant to Rhaenyra she couldn’t even form the words. Her own siblings? The children of this woman who had once been her dearest friends? She could not believe it was Alicent that thought her such a monster. That was certainly Lord Otto’s poison. “They’ll not be harmed. They’ll get their honors and titles. I swear by the seven gods that is true.”
“Maybe you won’t harm them,” Alicent said, gently, like coaxing a child through something difficult. “But can you guarantee me none of your allies? None of your knights? None of your council? There will be no greedy lord who would jump at the chance to climb a rung in the ladder?”
Forced to admit it: no, she could not. The lords would be unruly during her early reign. Oaths and honor and dragons aside, that was inevitable. It was her fervent hope and goal that period would pass quickly. “They’re as much a threat to me as I am to them. A good reason for us to stay as one.”
Alicent’s hand slipped away. “You have the king’s blind optimism.”
“And you have Lord Otto dripping poison in your ear.” Rhaenyra shook her reigns and tapped her heels. “Enough of this. We’ll return.”
Alicent’s hand shot out again, this time grabbing Rhaenyra’s arm and not waiting for permission. “Wait--do you hear that?”
Rhaenyra held her breath and turned her ears to the forest. Some sort of rustling in the bushes. The noise was too full of cracking twigs and branches for a fox or squirrel. Too loud to be a person attempting an ambush--she hoped.
“Go!” And Rhaenyra kicked her horse at the same time Alicent did, but before their horses could get two steps a monstrous dark shape squealed and thundered across the path.
Both horses startled and reared. Rhaenyra’s gelding returned to earth still under her control. The palfrey’s only concern was to flee danger and it shot like an arrow into the woods with Alicent. Away from Rhaenyra and the path, and away from the damn boar the men had spent all day running around after and two unarmed women found, at random, in the dead of night!
Before she could think, Rhaenyra chased. Alicent had lost the reigns and thrown herself flat against the horse’s back, arms wrapped about its neck, in such terror no scream or cry squeaked out of her.
Rhaenyra needed to pass, to get ahead to grab the reigns and grab Alicent, but there was no room to navigate in the forest. It was a miracle the palfrey ran like it did as branches whipped its hide and shrubs tore its knees. Rhaenyra could feel her own gelding beginning to resist her commands. She did not allow it to slow a single moment. She had the wherewithal to bend a dragon to her will, she could handle a common beast. The headlong speed wasn’t unlike riding Syrax--if Syrax couldn’t see in the dark and had to worry about things like tree branches and rodent holes.
“The reigns! Grab the reigns!” Rhaenyra shouted.
Alicent raised her head and looked back. A thin branch glanced off the palfrey’s neck and hit her head with a crack like a whip. Alicent wavered in the saddle, but didn’t fall.
Rhaenyra’s heart jumped into her throat and with a reckless cry she kicked her horse with all the strength in her legs, willed it to go fast and heedless, and finally came up alongside. She leaned out and with her right hand grabbed the back of Alicent’s dress and with her left grabbed the flapping reigns.
It was a dangerous action, as likely to tear Rhaenyra off her horse as stop them, but thank the gods it worked, and with a firm tug the palfrey slowed and stopped and they both remained ahorse. Rhaenyra swiftly dismounted to get Alicent down.
Alicent kept a hand pressed to the right side of her face and winced as she slid into Rhaenyra’s arms. Alicent had always been somewhat slighter than Rhaenyra, sharpened where Rhaenyra was rounded, but that was a small difference exaggerated by close comparison. Yet Rhaenyra lifted Alicent and half-carried her to sit beneath an oak like she weighed nothing at all. Not just panic lending her strength. Rhaenyra had grown while Alicent had waned.
Alicent remained upright under her own power and drew an embroidered handkerchief from her sleeve to press against the wound, but made no sound other than a tiny whimper. Rhaenyra tied the horse reigns tightly to a tree branch. If they spooked again and ran off the two of them would be in true trouble. As it was, Rhaenyra felt she could find the way back to the path, and if she couldn’t, they would simply wait until morning and use the sun to travel north.
Rhaenyra knelt at Alicent’s injured side and pulled back the handkerchief. The blood looked black in the dark and traced a finger length scratch along her cheekbone. Rhaenyra relaxed a hairsbreadth.
“It’s nothing,” Alicent muttered. “My vision went black for a moment. It scared me, but I’m well now.”
“You’re not dizzy? Or nauseous?” When Syrax was a fledgling he had whipped out his tail and struck a dragonkeeper in the head. The man had been confined to bed for many weeks with splitting headaches and never been quite right afterwards.
“No, no.” Alicent pushed away Rhaenyra’s hand. “I’m fine.”
“Be that as it may, we’ll rest a moment and then return. There’s no rush.” The last was a lie. By this time Rhaenyra’s absence had certainly been noticed, and Alicent’s too. Ser Harrold would send every available hand searching. If they were still on the road, the matter would be trivial. Out in the woods, they might not be found until they wished it.
Alicent shivered and immediately Rhaenyra gave over her cloak. Alicent tried to insist it wasn’t necessary, but Rhaenyra wouldn’t hear it.
After a time, only the huffing of the horses and a distant yip of a fox breaking the deep silence of the kingswood, Alicent sighed. “Why am I here,” she murmured. “I’ve born him three children. Two of them sons and all three healthy and strong. I can't even manage my own horse! I have to be rescued, like I'm some dull-witted maiden in a story. What is the point of me anymore.”
Rhaenyra had never heard Alicent talk like this. “The horse was just unlucky, Alicent, there's no embarrassment in the fact you're not a horsewoman. And your point is to love and care for those children. To guide them. To be the king’s ally and companion. You sit on the Small Council and guide the realm."
She ruefully shook her head. “None of them need me. I feel like more an annoyance to the king than a comfort. I had to beg to get him to let me sit in on the council only to be ignored except when you want an argument. Aegon’s already bored by me. Helaena is…incomprehensible. She’d rather chatter away to some horrible spider than talk to me.”
“Aemond adores you, I’ve seen that.”
“For now. Aegon adored me once, too.” Alicent closed her eyes. “Rhaenyra, I want my life to mean something to this world. And if my son was king…”
Rhaenyra silently forgave Alicent for the treasonous words. What mother didn’t want the world for her son.
“And have you heard this?” Anger leeched into Alicent’s voice. “The king wants Aegon and Helaena to marry when they’re of age. That would be a truly terrible match. Helaena is too sweet for Aegon’s temper. He needs a wife who’ll match him, not cow to him. I am certain a lady like that would be best for him.”
“It’s the custom of the Targaryens.” Rhaenyra thought of Daemon and her father. If one of the brothers had been born a woman, they might have married, and all the tragedy of their lives avoided.
“Custom,” Alicent spat. “It is also the custom that eldest sons should be the ones to inherit.” Alicent gave no weight to the comment in the moment, it was just a passing snarl. “Just because it is custom I must be content? Despite what my common sense and faith tells me?”
“The Targaryens are an ancient family and we carry on ancient traditions. We are dragon riders. We do not belong to the ranks of normal men and cannot be held to their rules.”
Alicent rolled her eyes and spoke with bitter resignation. “That you so wholly believe the Doctrine of Exceptionalism certainly explains you.” King Jaeherys I, to avoid another religious rebellion, had convinced the Church of the Seven to create the Doctrine of Exceptionalism. It affirmed the special nature of the Targaryens--their descent from Old Valyria, their dragon riding--and formally granted an exception from rules about incest. There remained a strain of anti-Doctrine thinking among septas and septons and it would not surprise Rhaenyra if Alicent was sympathetic to that old heresy.
Did Rhaenyra herself believe the Doctrine? It was the easiest thing in the world to think oneself special. She wasn’t not--she was the heir to the Iron Throne, a dragon rider, a direct descendant of Old Valyria. Yet she still belonged to the race of man. Were those things that made her special truly so much more important? Could she accept the oceans of blood spilled in her family name might have been in the name of nothing?
She thought of Daemon. If being blood of the dragon meant nothing…if she was just a young woman, and Daemon her father’s brother…if they held no special destiny, no connection beyond simple blood… “I believe the gods have a fate chosen for me. Be it good or bad.”
“I can’t deny that,” Alicent sighed. An owl hooted overhead and they both looked to the treetops. A breeze made the leaves flicker silver, like sunlight dancing on the ocean. “I sometimes forget there is a real world outside of the Red Keep.”
Rhaenyra did not share that. Her great-great-grand-uncle had killed every builder, mason, and stone carver who knew the castle’s secrets. Another uncle had led his young niece to the dungeon tower, down its corkscrew stairs to a place devoid of light, and he’d smiled when he snuffed the torch before they entered the black cells. “Some places it is better to be blind,” he had promised, and guided her through that stinking, screaming horror. For months she was plagued by nightmares.
By a year later, she had realized Daemon’s purpose and was grateful for the lesson. She walked the castle halls never forgetting that the eighth hell was underneath her feet. The Red Keep was built on bones and blood. There was nothing more real than that.
She would not suggest Alicent go through the same initiation. That would be an unsurpassed cruelty.
Alicent pressed her hands over her eyes. “Do you ever feel something has been stolen from us?”
Rhaenyra laid a gentle hand on Alicent’s back. Her fingers lingered over where Alicent’s soft flesh dipped into the hard line of her spine. “We’ve made our choices.”
“I’m not certain the choices were ever ours.” Alicent leaned her head against Rhaenyra’s shoulder. Her hair tickled Rhaenyra’s nose and smelled of rosewater. “When we were very little, when there was first talk of you being named heir, I thought perhaps I had been brought to the court to prepare to be your queen. Because the person who sat the Iron Throne was the king and a king needed a queen, you see? I thought the idea very exciting. I even asked my father if I was right. He had to explain how marriage actually worked.” Alicent chuckled. “Now I am a queen and a Targaryen, but I would have preferred the little girl’s misunderstanding.”
Rhaenyra brought her into a proper hug. An old habit she quickly found the shape of again. “That does sound nice.”
There was nothing more to say. Come the next day, the Blacks and Greens would be at each others throats and this moment meaningless. Alicent was queen and Rhaenyra queen-to-be and they could scream “peace” until their lungs gave out, but the lords and the lordlings and the knights and the septons would plug their ears and do as they wished. There was no ending the game. It was win or die.
If I was more like Daemon I would threaten to send everyone who stood against me to the Dragonpit and have Syrax set them ablaze. She smiled at the thought, but it was just a passing notion. She did not wish to be remembered as Rhaenyra the Bloody.
Torchlight bobbed between the trees. Rhaenyra tensed so suddenly and fiercely Alicent startled and grabbed for her, bewildered, until voices followed, and their fear turned to relief as the shouts clarified into calls for “Queen Alicent” and “Princess Rhaenyra.”
“Here! We’re here!” Rhaenyra yelled back and helped Alicent stand. They shook dirt and leaves from their clothes as they called out for the men that, this time, had come to their aide.