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Alicent had done everything right, yet they had led her down the path of the Traitor’s Walk. She passed into the ground floor with her head held high, even as taunts and jeers came from the common criminals imprisoned there. Though her wrists were unchained, she knew when the king ordered she go, he was not asking. Viserys had summoned her to his chambers, the night after she’d lunged at Rhaenyra with a knife. The night after her son had lost an eye. Like a fool, she thought he’d only wanted his wife.
Her father had laid a hand on her shoulder. “A good opportunity to mend things.” She’d agreed, as she always did. If her body was the tax for keeping her children alive and safe, then she would pay it. She would pay it every time.
But that was not what the king intended. Instead of a few minutes of dull coupling, mixed with the usual lamentations about uniting the family, he had told her that she needed to learn a lesson. He’d taken her by the shoulders, shouting in her face about how she had taken his knife, lunged at his daughter… He had no words when asked of the safety of their own children.
The singular Kingsguard escort led her to the upper floor of the tower that held the dungeons. In it, she found a cozy chamber with a bed and a desk. It was a pretty prison, but a prison nonetheless. “Wonderful. A high tower for a Hightower,” she said, smiling with no teeth. The Kingsguard huffed some miserable excuse for a laugh, said his pleasantries, then took a place outside of her door.
Alicent sunk into a cushioned bench, stewing. After all she’d worked for, was this all she was? Something to belittle and humiliate? A bad dog sent to bed without its dinner?
The space may have been cushy, but it was also austere. The bookshelf was empty of any readings that would interest anyone save a maester, and there were no handmaidens to bother her here. There was a strange clarity in it. No demands, no beautiful things, no children to manage. She found herself dreaming of childhood evenings at the Godswood, Rhaenyra’s head in her lap as the princess stared up at the sky as it filled with stars. Sometimes, in strange moments, Alicent believed Rhaenyra stared at her, too. Not just the stars.
For a long time, she paced the room, thinking of that simpler world. Before children and daggers and missing eyes. Before pregnancies and births and horrors. But her reveries were interrupted, perhaps minutes later, perhaps hours, by a hushed conversation at her door. She could not make out the words, not from inside, but she recognized the voices. She would know that voice anywhere. She stood abruptly, straightened her back, and readied herself for battle.
It was no surprise, then, when her guard presented the princess to her. Rhaenyra’s voice came out clear and cold as she swiftly entered the room. “My queen, you’re looking radiant this evening. Perhaps this environment suits you.”
Alicent kept her face warm, a skill that had always escaped the princess, yet her words had equal bite. “Come to call on me, Princess? Just like your father? Come to taunt and mock and lie?”
“No,” Rhaenyra said. “No such thing. I have come to talk about the enmity between our two lines. I believe it must end.”
Alicent took a few steps closer to the princess. “It’s a shame you’ve only reached this enlightened position after my son has suffered the loss of an eye. How convenient.”
Rhaenyra bristled. She had been different since she was named heir. The girlhood laughter as she danced off of dragonback was nowhere to be found. “Then you agree with me that this petty struggle has gone too far. My son will be king, but that is no call to the headsman for your sons. We are a family. We are stronger together.” Rhaenyra reached out to take her hands, and Alicent’s sat in hers, limp. They had last touched when Alicent had lunged at the other girl with a knife, when she’d wanted to end her with every fiber of her being. “I am asking you for a chance at peace.”
Alicent leaned close to Rhaenyra’s face, her words a whisper. “Peace for your bastard children?”
Rhaenyra snatched her hands away like she’d touched hot coals. “Ever since we were children, you’ve believed your father’s lies about me. Daemon’s had me in a brothel. Some other man has fathered my three children. I must be quite busy, this version of you in my head! Even now, when I have a husband, you insult me. What, because they don’t share his eyes, don’t have my hair? You don’t look like your father, and I think you ought to be grateful for it.”
“I look like my mother,” Alicent hissed.
Rhaenyra rolled her eyes. “Yes, you did. When you started wearing her gowns at the ripe age of sixteen. When you slunk into my father’s chambers. Now I don’t know what you look like.”
Alicent nearly laughed. “Do you think I wanted things this way? Do you think I wanted to replace your mother and marry a man twice my age? To bear his sons? It was your father’s wish. What would you have had me do, throw myself from the roof of the keep?”
“Do not pretend you had no part in this. My father had a plan, it was Laena. He even asked my permission, for Laena! Then you came to call.”
“Then you do not pretend that it is truly me you blame!” Alicent’s voice rose for the first time in the conversation. Only Rhaenyra could get her this hot-blooded. The Hightower game was patience, duty, timing. She believed in the goodwill of the Mother. But on the rare occasion when the princess set foot in her halls, she found no such goodwill. “You act as if I ensnared him, when night after night he calls on me, yet he will not defend my children. He will not defend me. Aemond is missing an eye, and he throws me in this prison! Yet you sit there, unscathed. You’ve always been on a pedestal with him, and you’re so high up you can’t even see it.”
“My father has never defended me!” Rhaenyra said swiftly. “The second my mother was gone, he cast me aside. He named me heir, yet he tried to sell me off to any lord who would take me!”
Alicent pushed harder. “So if that’s true, then how was I to refuse him, the highest lord in the land? He was the king.”
“You could have told me,” Rhaenyra whispered, her resolve faltering.
“What difference would it have made? You’d simply have hated me sooner.”
“We were friends,” Rhaenyra urged. Her hardened mask seemed to fall away, revealing something that startled Alicent: true hurt. Was it possible the princess felt just as wounded by their friendship’s end as she had? “I felt betrayed and surprised, and maybe I wouldn’t have understood, but I would’ve tried, at least. For you.”
“It’s not as if you were transparent with your dealings,” Alicent said slowly, and Rhaenyra’s eyes flicked to the floor.
“I did not want to live a life of misery. A life of misery would not make for a good queen. Perhaps I took one or two pleasures.” The admittance sent shivers down Alicent’s spine. She had been so angry for so many years. About all the lies that replaced the unspoken things they know to be true, about the things they had stopped trusting each other with. Perhaps it had not been judgment or resentment, but jealousy that drove her investigation of Rhaenyra’s maidenhead.
After all, was she not a whore too? Rhaenyra and Damon had coupled, and perhaps she had broken her vows of marriage, but she was right. Alicent had attacked Viserys when he was at his most vulnerable, and now they both suffered for it. Was she truly better because she sold her body for titles, not gold?
“I… never thought I’d hear you say that,” Alicent said, trying to think about what this meant, what game was being played.
“If you repeat it to anyone, I’ll deny it. I’m sure you know that.”
“I don’t need to repeat it to anyone,” Alicent said without hesitation, and Rhaenyra raised an eyebrow. “Tell me—were they kind to you? Laenor, and Daemon, and…anyone else who you coupled with?”
Confusion flickered across Rhaenyra’s face, but she still answered the question. “As kind as they could be. Laenor lacks the interest, and Daemon abandoned me the second he had had his fill. But I think they both cared for me. Harwin does too.”
Alicent nodded, taking it all in. They used to talk about such things as children in scandalous whispers. Which noble boys had the prettier eyes, the stronger jaws. They’d make a game of it, pick a set of three and choose who was marriageable and who’d be off to the headsmen. They’d been far away then, when marriage was a thing of dreams and hope.
Rhaenyra spoke again. “Is he—is he good to you, my father? I never know what’s going on in his head.”
“I don’t think he does either.” Alicent smirked. “I try my best, and we have the children, so…it is all worth it.”
“The things the body goes through, yet us women never get a second of thanks. I thank Daemon for that at least, teaching me of the pleasures a woman can have.”
It shocked Alicent, the way she spoke so easily of such things. Pleasure was never a word she’d associated with marriage, much less her nights with the king. Duty, perhaps. A chore, if she was being honest. “I am not ungrateful for what the king provides.”
Rhaenyra stared at her with intense eyes. “Yet sometimes you wish for more. For someone who honors you, as a lady, not just a body meant for making children.” Rhaenyra’s face was so close to hers, she could feel the other woman’s hot breath on her face, the breath of a true dragon.
“We have husbands,” Alicent chided, not daring to say where she thought this was going, but knowing it could not go on.
“We are ladies,” Rhaenyra whispered. “We are old friends, rekindling long lost affections. No one would begrudge us this.”
“Have you truly sunk so low?” Alicent whispered, but even as the words left her lips, she too felt herself sinking. Rhaenyra’s fingers combed over her skin delicately, and her hands weren’t ice cold and rotten the way Viserys’ were. No, Rhaenyra burned with a calm heat that sent her skin tingling. For the first time in a long time, Alicent’s body felt like her own.
“No more war,” Rhaenyra whispered. “No more children fighting, no more broken promises. We’ll be friends again. More than friends. We’ll keep each other safe.”
Alicent felt tears well in her eyes. “I thought I’d never hear those words from you again.”
Rhaenyra met her gaze with a fierceness, her hands still for the first time in a long while. “We can be a family.”
It was Alicent who closed the distance, impulsively and clumsily, but Rhaenyra’s hands anchored firmly onto her hips, guiding the two of them into something that worked. She had begun the kiss tepid—her lips had been a perfunctory part of her body before, meant for queenly words and courtly lies. But now she understood why The Smith had bothered to give them such things. Alicent dared to take a piece of Rhaenyra’s gleaming blonde hair and tugged it gently. Rhaenyra let out a surprised moan. Alicent didn’t know they had this in them. To think, all that sorrow and anger could have been replaced with this.
So they fell into each other, like husband and wife. At the top of the tower near the Red Keep, where the earth was rended in heat, where dragons lurked above and treachery looked within, they had managed to find something true. There would be no throwing it away this time.