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Lucerys Velaryon is a plump little thing. Next to her son, he looks a different creature all together.

Rheanyra dresses him in doublets of red and black, the colors of her house, not those of the father she claims is his, not those of the house he will inherit. It’s not proper, and the red is unflattering on him. It makes him look even more round and ruddy. For a time, Alicent thought he would have a late growth spurt—but his majority is long come and gone without much change. 

He is dwarfed by Aemond beside him, and he is always beside Aemond these days. She flinches when she sees the boy has grabbed her son’s hand, again. Aemond is too much the gentleman to refuse.

“The decision is not ours to make,” Father is saying placidly from his position on the Iron Throne. “It was Viserys’s last request, that Aegon take the throne.”

Alicent flinches. Her husband is not dead yet, but nearly so. Rhaenyra is at the base of the steps, her rage rolling off her in a wave that is darker even than the late summer storm blustering against the windows of the throne room. “And you were there to hear this, I suppose?”

“Not I, but my daughter.” Father nods to Alicent. She did not want to speak in this, but she is no coward. 

She pulls her eyes from her son, from the boy beside him. “It’s true, Rhaenyra. He spoke of Aegon.”

“He is not even dead yet and you would dethrone him and steal the crown for your son. Why? Why have you done this?” 

“I swear it. I swear on my life, it is true.” And it is, though Rhaenyra will hate her for it. 

Daemon, who has been uncharacteristically silent, barks a loud laugh. His hand is always on the pommel of his sword and now it’s clenched around it. “It will not stand,” he says. “I will not stand for it. Rhaenyra—”

She looks back at him, nods in some unspoken agreement. To Alicent she says, “If you swear it, then we have nothing more to say.” 

She turns then to go. Her husband follows, her children after. One does not. Lucerys has hidden himself behind Aemond, ever the coward, ever clinging to her son’s coat. “Luke,” Rhaenyra says sharply.

He looks at Aemond, releases him at last, and follows his family from the hall. Aemond stares after them for a long while.

Rhaenyra and her family leave in the night, a cowardly flight. They are not alone. News of their dragons’ flight from the city brings rumors of war. By morning, smallfolk are loading wagons, hoarding provisions, making way from the city. Aegon is tepid on his impending ascension. He is not at breakfast, nor is Aemond. When they show for the noon meal, she can almost smell the sick taint of wine coming off Aegon, but Aemond looks equally tired, with black bruises under his eye and his hair out of place the way it never is. He has no greeting for any of them but pauses at the door and gives them all a black look.

“She'll regroup on Dragonstone, no doubt,” Father is in the middle of saying with his brow heavy and wrinkled. “To begin calling in her allies. I wish she would see sense. War will bring unnecessary pain to those who can least afford it.”

“She will see sense,” Alicent says and hopes very much that it’s true. 

“Sense? You took her throne,” Aemond mutters. 

She thinks she’s misheard until she catches his eye. He has never looked at her like this before.

Father says quickly, “Aemond, if we may find some consolation in this, it’s that the betrothal between you and Lucerys is certainly out of the question now.”

“Consolation?” Aemond asks. “Consolation? You had us betrothed for ten years!”

“And you bore that burden with grace,” Father says. 

And it’s true. He had. At no more than ten, to be told he would wed his sister’s son, the very boy who maimed him on what should have been the night of his greatest joy. She raged against Viserys when he made the command, raged and bartered and appealed and it made no difference. Aemond was good and loyal. He said he would do his duty, his face pale beneath the great wound across his eye and cheek, and her heart broke for him. It breaks now. 

She reaches for his hand where it's fisted on the table; he draws it back.

Gently, Father says, “Have you thought of who you would prefer? We must secure the Stormlands—I have heard Borros Baratheon’s daughters are of great beauty and wit. He may be open to an appeal.”

Aemond stands, half crouched over the table. “Ten fucking years you had me thinking I would wed Luke! Why bother if you were going to take his mother’s throne the whole time!”

“Aemond,” Alicent admonishes.

Father tells him, “It is not her throne.”

“No? Then to hell with you. What was it for? Now you’ll have me wed one of Baratheon’s ugly, impoverished little chits so Aegon can have his little chair? Please.”

She stares. Father shares a look with her and says, as if talking to an animal, “Your brother will, of course, grant you your own holdings. I’m sure.” He looks to Aegon who is half sunk into his chair, pinching crumbs off his bread and making a small mountain out of them on one side of his plate. 

He looks up when he realizes he's been spoken to and mutters, “If he wants.” 

“There. Far better than being consort to a, well. I suppose there is no cause to be delicate now. To a bastard.”

Aemond hits the table. He hits it, with the flat of his palm. “He is not. You will not say it again.”

“Aemond!” she shouts, but it only serves to get him looking at her.

“Or do you admit that you would have had me wed a bastard when it was convenient? No. I will not believe that.” He looks between them, hand flat on the table, his considerable height half bowed over it. “No? So then, for the promise of some rundown blister of a holdfast on the ass of the Crownlands, you would have me give up Driftmark and Luke.”

Ah. They come to it. He did spend three moons there at the height of summer two years back as his fiance’s guest, over Alicent’s considerable protest. Viserys’s will once again ruled out all others and the Sea Snake hissed the right words in his ear. Anything to deprive her son of his peace, sending him back to that place, the root of all his pain. But a single moon’s absence turned to two, turned to three, as they conspired to keep him there in torment. He returned at last, freckled like a peasant from his time in the sun, wearing strange, loose clothes, filled out on their too-rich food, utterly insouciant in his pain as he spent another moon staring out windows and nursing himself on sighs.

She sees it now, the full manipulation. To show the wealth of High Tide as a balm for his pain, to give gifts to sate his rage. To convince him a cage could be a home. She could weep for her son. “Aemond, we need not discuss another betrothal now. You need time.”

“No. I need an answer. What, pray tell, do we get out of this farce?” He looks at Aegon with violence; Aegon ducks away.

“Safety,” Father answers easily. “Security. The certainty you and your brother will not be murdered in your sleep.”

“And Rhaenyra was such a threat? She did not give two fucks about us. Certainly not about him.” He points at Aegon. 

Aegon, who had been sinking ever lower in his chair, begins to slip.

“You will come to understand,” Alicent promises. “It was the king’s will, and he is a wise man.” In some things. Well—in this one thing, naming Aegon over Rhaenyra. She will believe that.

“And what are you going to tell Lord Corlys? He will not take your part. We have no ships that are not his! You will let them marry Luke off to their advantage now? No lord in Westeros or in Essos would side with you if they could take Luke’s hand instead, but no. You’ve thrown it all away for that!” He looks like he might leap across the table at Aegon, but Aegon is well hidden behind the wood of the table.

“I had no part in this,” Aegon’s voice comes, somewhat muffled.

“You’ve ruined this family. And me, with you.” Aemond looks at them all in turn, and then turns for the door. He doesn't wait for the guards to open it but slams out. 

The sound of his boots down the stone hall is sharp until the door closes again.

They stare at it in silence, until Aegon’s chair scrapes back along the floor. He rises, patting the table with both hands as if to make sure it won’t go anywhere, his color green more than white. “I think we ought have discussed all this first. As a family.” He stifles a hiccup, gagging briefly, and then he is gone, too.

Alicent and her father sit in renewed silence. Helaena had not wanted to eat with them today, and she sees now why. “I thought Aemond would be happy.” She had. It was the only thing she’d been sure of.

“He will see sense. A man long chained to ill-fate may be reluctant to believe it when he’s freed.” Her father is, as ever, a smart man.

Her father is a smart man, but not, perhaps, smart about this. She believes him for a time, that day, the next. Ravens fly from the Maester’s Tower as thick as clouds in the morning—by whose order she no longer knows. Alicent spends her time in the bright sept, lighting candles for her three sons, for her daughters, for her father, and for her husband who she goes to after. She dabs the sweat off his brow and listens to his mumblings. Only then does she seek out her second son.

Aemond is not hard to find. He’s in the bailey, hacking away at dummies, his usual haunt. Their straw flesh is spattered all around him. No one is training near him or talking to him. Cole is nearby, but it must be hard to engage Aemond in conversation over the rhythmic shing and whack of his efforts. He is red, and sweat soaked, and does not give Alicent more than a dark glance when she enters.

“Your Grace.” Criston comes to her, draws her aside. “You shouldn’t be down here in all this dust.”

She lets herself be drawn away. They don’t go far, only up on the wall where they can watch without being watched. Below them, Aemond’s sword parts a straw arm from a straw body. He hits it again, once it’s down. She flinches. She will not mince words with Cole, her most loyal of companions. “My son is upset”

“Ah.” Cole gives him a sideways look at the same moment Aemond divests the straw man of his arm; it goes flying and narrowly misses three men standing nearby. One yelps. “Yes.”

“I cannot see why,” she tells Cole. “Is it that he wishes Aegon to be passed over and the crown given to him?”

“Perhaps.”

“Does he fear a war?”

“...I doubt that.”

“Then I cannot make sense of it. Does he wish for the wealth he might have had with that—that boy?”

“It’s not gold he lusts after.” Cole bows his head. “Forgive me for saying so.”

Lust. She catches his meaning, though the word is foreign on her tongue. Lust? Aemond? He is a sweet boy even if no one else will see it. He reads, he studies, he is loyal and true and sensitive, too easily taken in by those who lead him astray. “Lust…” she repeats. “Not for that boy. Surely.”

Criston bites his tongue. “I advised against it. Their attachment.”

“But they’ve been betrothed for years. Lucerys is still a boy.” What she means is: he’s barely even a true omega, looking as he does, acting as he does, running wild with his alpha brothers. He presented some years past, yes, but he will never really be fit for his station—not a prince, not of the blood, certainly not a lord in the making and never a proper bride.

Cole chews on his words. At last, he says quietly, “They exchanged favors.”

“Who did?”

He stares at her. “Aemond. And Lucerys. I advised against it,” he repeats.

“When?” 

“Some time ago. I’m not certain.” 

The exchange of favors. Pretty words for a blasphemous custom, the province of those eastern countries over the narrow sea, of old and ruined Valyria. An item marked with scent is exchanged to soothe an alpha through their rut, an omega through their heat. It’s a lascivious act unsanctioned by The Faith for nothing should soothe but a marriage bed or prayer. 

The air is unaccountably hot for a fine autumn day. She cannot breathe. “Why? Why would he do this? How did you hear of this?”

“They… have not been private in their affections. I thought you knew.”

She musters herself. “It is that boy.” He is so much like Rhaenyra, so much like her, gusting around like a wild breeze and pulling everyone along in her wake. Only, she had not thought with his chubby cheeks and his timid ways that he would be. She had not thought her son could be pulled anywhere.

“Don’t think harshly on him, Your Grace. He was doing his duty, as he saw it.”

His duty was not to exchange soiled clothing with a bastard boy, but she is a good woman, and she will not say this. “Tell me true. Has my son been tempted into anything untoward?”

“I could not say.” He ducks his head.

They stare down as Aemond, with one smooth swing, beheads the straw dummy. He kicks it then. It topples back and joins its ruined brothers. He kicks it again, once more, and then goes to prop up another.

It must be broached. If he has been led somewhere by that vixen, she will stand beside him, she will pull him back from that edge. She goes to his rooms that evening. It’s not uncommon for her to do this; the door is always open for her to come, to sit beside him as he reads and do her embroidery. Their shared silence was the most she could offer him through his solitude. No friends, barely siblings, and a father who did not care for any of his children but the one who deserved it least.

He barely looks up at her entrance. A book is open in his lap, one leg crossed over the other, ankle hooked over his knee. His jaw flexes with whatever he is not saying. She sits down beside him, sorting her skirts. 

“You are angry.”

He grunts, not looking up from his book. 

“Aemond,” she chides. 

“Yes. I am angry. However could you tell?”

She will not rise to the bait. Sometimes, the obvious must be said. With him, more than most. “Do you care for the Velaryon boy?” she asks plainly.

“We are betrothed.” He enunciates the last word, adding syllables to it. 

“Many are betrothed who care nothing for their partner.” But of course, Aemond would not be one of them. He is good and loyal and dutiful. 

Aemond turns the page of his book without responding. 

“Have you spent time with him?”

“Some.”

She swallows, asks what she must. “You have exchanged favors?”

“And if we have?”

And that’s a yes.

“I must ask then.” She makes fists of her hands, leans in to lower her voice. “Have you and Lucerys… It would not be your fault if you were led into acts outside of the Faith,” she finishes weakly.

“Where is it you think I’ve been led?”

“Into sin, perhaps. Into the pleasure of a marriage bed.”

He stares at her. “You think I fucked Luke.” 

She startles at his words. He stands then, book snapping shut. “Enough of this.” He heads for the door of his rooms. She follows, reaching for his hand, and catches his sleeve as he opens the door. 

“It would not be your fault.” She tries to keep her voice low, insistent. There are others about and it would not do for them to hear this conversation.

“Yes it would,” he says at full volume. “If I took his maidenhead and got him with child, it would not be my fault?”

“I know that would never be your intent—” Oh, gods. It had not even occurred to her, the possibility of a child coming from this, but of course if Lucerys could tempt him to a bed, he would tempt him to that greatest of sins. She braces herself. “If he is with child, there are ways it can be handled.”

He searches her face. “...No. I would dishonor myself if I did not take responsibility. For our child.” His lilac eye brightens with an odd fire. “It would be a shame on our house if I did otherwise. A shame on this family.” He looks around, suddenly, wildly, and says too loud, “I would shame our family if I did not claim my unborn child and wed Lucerys Velaryon!”

“Aemond!” she hisses. A Kingsguard down the hall looks at them, and quickly away. “Aemond, that is not what I meant.”

“But it’s true. It’s true, I did. I have. I have done terrible things and I must pay for them.” His eyes are lit with madness.

She grips him tighter. “Your brother will make provisions for this when he’s king. It need not be known by any but us.”

“No, it must. I’m sorry, Mother. I would not be a man if I did not stand for my mate and child.” At mate and child, his voice rises. The Kingsguard at the end of the hall looks back. A maid exiting a chamber fumbles her basket of wash and then hurries away.

“Mate.”

“Yes?” he says with a raised brow, and, “I mean, yes. Certainly. We are mated.” 

“Hush this madness.” She knows her son; she knows what it sounds like when he lies. She squeezes his wrist, hard, but it’s like trying to stop a storm. He pulls from her and marches on down the hall.

“Where are you going?”

He pauses, and says with great drama, “To confess.”

The High Septon is the first to hear of it, though they say later he would just as well have not. By the next morning, rumors the Velaryon heir has been pupped have breached down into the lower Keep. By the dinner bell, they have made their way back to her. Aegon bursts through the door.

“Mother, I have heard the most egregious story.” He smells, again, of drink. “They say Aemond has—”

She closes her eyes.

“—wed Luke in secret and gotten him with child!”

“Wed?” she says.

“They say Father wed them. Before his coma. That old dog.” 

“Where did you hear this?”

“Down in F—” He stops, picks his shirt. “Down in the kitchens.” 

Down in the kitchens. Right. Certainly. She is tired. She is so very tired. 

“Would Father really have wed them?”

Viserys would have. He adores Lucerys and always thought the match was the best work he'd ever done for his children. He would have—were he not comatose at the time. It’s ridiculous, and ridiculous again when Father says, “This is a serious accusation. We cannot act rashly.” She can see his mind already turning with the possibilities.

Aemond comes when he’s called. He’s smiling for the first time in some days, a sickly, hideous thing. “So you’ve heard,” he tells his grandsire. 

She stabs at her embroidery rather than looking at him. 

“You’ve complicated our strategy in this, but we may position you as the dishonored party. Questions of the boy’s fatherhood linger; we might bring them to the fore and weaken Lord Corlys’s position in the doing.”

“And what of my son?” Aemond ask archly.

She stabs through the embroidery, into her finger. He says it with such certainty, and it’s this that gives him away. She looks up from the dragon she had been maiming with her needle. “A son,” she murmurs. “Goodness. It must be far along for you to name it so.”

After a pause, he nods.

“How far along? We’ll find out eventually. Best to have it out now.” 

Aemond purses his lips. She cocks her head at him and adds, “Your father has been ill for so long now.” He has done no more than groan and wheeze for a long while. “Two moons?” she hazards. “Three?”

He nods, again after a pause.

“Aemond,” her father says in a broken tone. 

But she knows her son. She knows what it sounds like when he lies, and she is not finished. “Then that’s it.” She stands, setting aside her embroidery. “This cannot go on. If it’s as you say, then I must write to Rhaenyra. No doubt she’ll have noticed her son has been absent his cycle for three moons and will be worried. I’m sure Lucerys will have the same story for her.”

Aemond makes one of his grunting sounds and half-nods. 

“So I will write to her. Right now.”

“Alicent, we should discuss this,” Father starts, but she is looking at Aemond. 

“I will go right now to the Maester’s Tower and write to her about what you and Lucerys have done.” 

Aemond is biting his lip. She heads for the door and hears as he trips over himself running after her. “Is there something else you’d like to say?” she asks without stopping.

“No.”

“No?”

“I will accompany you. The walk is dangerous this time of night. The stairs are difficult to see. Are you sure you wouldn’t like to wait until morning?”

“No.”

“Should I not be the one to write? To explain myself?”

“No, no. This is a mother’s duty.”

Together they walk, Aemond still a step behind. The walk is long and awkward and they catch many odd looks and many more knowing ones now that the entirety of King’s Landing is aware of her son’s imagined indiscretions. Shame, she thinks. Shame. And then at the steps of the Tower, he stops her. 

“Mother.” 

Oh, she is tired. She has done nothing but be honorable to her husband and his will and she has lost friends for it, suffered every injustice, tried to keep faith and been rewarded by ungrateful children. “What? Would you admit you’ve lied? Started rumors? Brought us all shame? Your father wanted Aegon to ascend, but without you at your brother’s side, it won’t be possible. You would rather waste your life as that boy’s consort when you might have been lord of your own castle with a good woman at your side! I hardly know you.”

He has the grace to look guilty, even as he says, “You have not tried to know me. Not in this.”

She flounders. She, who has witnessed all his pains and fought for all his joys. She does not know him? 

“Luke is mine. You can’t take back what’s already been promised.”

“He cut your eye out!”

“And I will take his castle, his children, and his cu—his currency as recompense! I have asked for nothing and yet I will be denied even this?”

She curses, and then covers her mouth for the shame of it. What thanks a thankless child? But he is her child. She will love him. “If it will satisfy your pain, I will take your part. But no more of these lies.” She reaches out and touches his cheek. 

“You won’t write to Rhaenyra?”

“No, I will not.” The rumor may reach her besides. A week it may take, on the outside, and then they will have her wrath.

He covers her hand, pulls it away gently, and holds it for a moment. He is still her son. He releases her and it’s all the thanks she’ll get, she knows. Her mind is already turning on the ways this will unwind. Even if she does take his part and argue for the betrothal, it won’t happen. He does not see it yet. Lucerys Velaryon was never his, just as Rhaenyra was never hers, never Laenor’s. She will save him from this, even if he hates her for the rest of her days for doing so.

They part in the yard. She remains alone, staring after him. Cole is there at the fringe of her sight as always. She beckons him. “Guard the Tower,” she orders. He will send no ravens tonight; he will make no plans with the boy who has seduced him away from sense. “Guard him.”

Cole nods. 

It’s rather unfortunate, then, that Rhaenyra arrives the following morning.

She’s spotted at first light, gold Syrax blazing in the dawn and much smaller: the silver flash of what must be Lucerys’s dragon in the sky behind her. Daemon follows, Caraxes a red wound across the sky.

Their ride from Aegon’s Hill is escorted. Bold of her, Alicent thought, to arrive without her personal guard, but when enters the Great Hall, two Kingsguard move to flank her. Beesbury has called his knights up; they, too, take her part, and a few men who look like they only just took off their gold cloaks. Daemon still has his friends. Alicent had not realized quite how many. 

Only after this show of force does she say without any niceties, “That Hightower dog has debased my son.”

Lucerys, half-hidden behind his mother, keeps his eyes fixed on the floor. His curls are in a great messy mop today, making him look both younger and more like his alpha brothers, nothing like the omega he ought to be. 

“Who has told you this?” Alicent asks, staring at Aemond who has the audacity to look betrayed—as if Alicent were the one who started this rumor and brought it to Rhaenyra’s door. 

“My son has told me.”

Alicent watches it happen, watches Lucerys look up and catch her son’s eye, watches Aemond return the look, watches the unspoken pass between them.

Father recovers quickly. “And what am I to believe? By whose will was this engineered? Prince Aemond is a man of honor. I will not believe your son was blameless. …Should a maester not examine him for the veracity of this? I’m certain there are other parties at whose feet we can lay blame.”

Aemond’s low growl is drowned out by Daemon’s shouting: “But not Aemond’s? He pupped a boy in first flower! Without even handfasting! 

Lucerys looks up at this, nearly in tears. 

And then Aemond steps forward. He says, very loud, “We are. We are handfasted. My father saw us wed before his illness took him. It was done in secret, before the eyes of the Seven and the king.” He adds, saying it clear, enunciating each word. “It was done three full moons ago, at the Hour of the Eel.” His voice grows softer; he’s looking at Lucerys. “We—we kept it a secret in our grief over my father’s poor health.”

Rhaenyra turns to her son, flummoxed. He looks back, flummoxed, and then says quickly, “Y—yes! Yes. Right. At the Hour of the Eel.” He picks at his tunic. “Everyone was asleep.”

“In his sitting room,” Aemond adds. 

“In his sitting room. Right. I… couldn’t wait. I did not want to think he would never get the chance to see us wed. It’s my fault. I insisted on it.” He blinks his big eyes at his mother.

Rhaenyra draws a deep breath. “When you told us, you might have said you were wed.” 

“I… I assumed you knew I would never have lain with anyone outside of a marriage bed. My worry for grandsire’s illness was so great… I didn’t want there to be feasting in a time of so much sorrow. I’m sorry, Muna.” He blinks his great, dark, wet eyes at her.

She clasps his shoulder and draws him into a quick hug, mutters some private words that have no doubt absolved him of any evil in this. Alicent can do nothing but watch this charade play out as the audience—which has grown as more courtiers piled into the edges of the room—begin to nod and whisper between themselves. She feels her nails bite into her palms. They are watching a play being put on by two children and taking it for truth. Madness. Utter madness.

A voice not her own though the words could come from her own head says then, “You expect me to believe that you were wed, mated, and pupped, and this all happened outside our knowing and right under our noses in the Keep? And that my bedridden brother engineered this for you?” Daemon’s voice is low. His hand is firm on the pommel of his sword. 

Alicent finds herself nodding, but she never thought to see sense in a man like Daemon. Perhaps time and age have tempered him. “Well spoken,” she says. “Sense must reign here, if my husband cannot.”

Aemond raises his hand. “By my love for my father, I swear it’s true. He saw us handfasted. He was wise and caring and he knew the peace it would bring our family.”

Daemon snorts.

“...As he knew the peace my sister’s reign would bring,” Aemond continues pointedly. “He said so, to us both, did he not?”

Lucerys, the little chit, is quicker this time. “Yes. He said he only wanted peace between us all, when my mother was queen.”

“He was quite insistent on it.” Aemond blinks at Daemon. “I do not think he lied in that, do you?”

Daemon stares at him for a long moment. His hand clenches reflexively around his sword once more, and falls away. “...My brother is a wise man. What a relief to see the quality has passed to one of his sons, at least.” Alicent can almost hear the gritting of his teeth as he says it.

Aemond blinks at him in his way, expression unmoving. “I hope you will not blame us for our eagerness.” He moves smoothly to Lucerys’s side and takes the boy’s hand in his. Rhaenyra and Daemon allow this. Alicent allows this. There will be no stopping it now. 

“Th—that’s right,” Lucerys says, stumbling over his words, face as red as his tunic. Aemond brings the hand to his mouth. It’s a considerable distance given he has more than a head on the boy. He tucks it against his side when he’s finished, standing now with Rhaenyra rather than his family. He says to Rhaenyra, “I am sorry, sister,” but he does not sound sorry at all.

Lucerys repeats it, softer, a little more sincere. “Mother. I’m sorry. I should have told you.”

“There will be a formal ceremony,” Rhaenyra tells him. “And soon. Lord Corlys must be summoned.” 

And then, before his family, before the whole of the court, the little whore asks, “How soon?” He places his free hand over his stomach, which is plump, yes, but only with sweets and breads.

Rhaenyra watches this act play out, face paling. “Soon.” She looks around the Great Hall. “You are all dismissed,” she says to the assembled courtiers and knights. “This was a family affair. And you—” she points to Otto, though she need not. Her voice is a dagger all its own. “You may absent yourself from my father’s throne. I wouldn’t want you getting cut.” 

That night she knows she'll get no sleep. She stays up after with a cup of rich red wine, nursing it—she must say something, anything, to her son. This cannot pass. She thinks of little Lucerys holding his hand, little Lucerys hanging off his coat, little Lucerys dragging him into sins she will not imagine. Nothing but a round, plain boy. Her son cannot care for his appearance, and she cannot imagine he truly hoards his wealth. It cannot be that she has misunderstood her son so thoroughly. Something else is at play here.

One thing she is certain of: he will regret this marriage. By and boy, the boy will show his breeding. Aemond will be led to ill, disposed of as Rhaenyra disposes of those she no longer requires. She has but one chance to talk him out of it. It must be done soon—now—before his mind is poisoned fully.

She goes to his door and finds a light still beneath it. When she knocks, she gets no answer. Deep inside, she can hear someone speaking. 

Gently, she pushes open the door. He is not in his sitting room; candles are still lit here, his books open. A silvery cloak is tossed over one chair, one far too short for her son to wear. 

The voices come again, from Aemond’s bedroom. She wonders if he’s speaking to himself. “Miserable,” he’s saying—whining? “It was miserable.”

A soft voice makes a consoling hum. She goes to the door and peers inside. Her son is pointed away from her, kneeled before his bed and the figure sitting there. No; he’s on his knees, as if he’s fallen there. His head is on the figure’s lap, his arms loose around their waist. His hair is free from its tie, his eyepatch discarded on the floor beside him, and the person has their fingers sorting through his long locks. Her son is letting someone pet his hair. The figure is half-hidden from her view by the door.

A low sound issues from her son, a whining groan. “Miserable,” he repeats, as she’s never heard him before. “They wanted me to wed a Baratheon.”

“Which one?”

“I didn’t ask,” he scoffs. 

“Were you tempted?”

Aemond raises his head. “You jest,” he says in a voice more animated with disgust than she has ever heard it. “A fourthborn Baratheon bitch?”

“I’m sure she would have been prettier than me.”

“Do not fish for compliments. It’s unbecoming.”

“It’s true.” The figure’s hand rises out of view. “No matter what I wear, I look the same,” they laugh. 

“Then you’re welcome to dispense with your clothes.”

The voice stutters out, “Y—you can’t say that sort of thing.” It’s the stutter that gives it away. It is Lucerys Velaryon. Lucerys Velaryon is in her son’s room. Her son is kneeled before the boy that took his eye. 

Aemond returns his head to the boy’s lap. The boy’s clumsy hands return to petting his hair. She can’t see Aemond’s face, but she hears his sigh. 

“I missed you, too,” Lucerys says at length. It's too deep for an omega, too rough, she always thought. “They didn't try to promise me to anyone. I sat in my room pretending to cry until I came up with a plan.”

“A plan,” Aemond quotes. “Accusing me in front of the court?”

“I didn’t know she’d drag us here. I thought—a raven, maybe. Anyway. You had the same plan.”

“At least I said we were wed.”

“Yes. Clever. But three moons? Aemond… What will we say in six?”

“That we were mistaken.” Petulant, he adds, “It wouldn’t be a problem if you’d let me, as I asked.” He picks at Lucerys’s long tunic, as if lamenting its existence, but the parts of this are all wrong: it should be Rhaenyra’s son suggesting these indiscretions, not her son. Aemond has been tempted somehow into this, made to think it’s his own idea, perhaps.

Lucerys catches the hand now wheedling into the folds of his tunic. “I told you no,” he says in the tired cadence of an old argument. “Not until we’re properly wed.”

Aemond presses his cheek into the boy’s lap, looking up at him. “You could at least let me taste,” he pouts. “What can it hurt now?” He slips his hand then, beneath the tunic, and Lucerys gasps. Alicent stifles one of her own, her hand covering her mouth. 

“W—wait,” Lucerys says.

“You would not have our first time be at our bedding, would you?” he asks. “Have I not waited long enough? Have I not courted as I should? Have I not been patient, Lucerys? Have I not been kind?” He stands then, knees onto the bed, takes Lucerys’s face in both his hands. “I will be gentle, I swear,” he says in a sweet voice, but she knows her son, and she knows what it sounds like when he lies. 

Whatever else Lucerys has to say on the matter is lost as she flies from the door and the room on silent feet, hand over her mouth still.

You have not tried to know me, her son said. Not in this.

He’s right. She did not. She wishes now she never had.