Chapter Text
—I defy you, stars.
William Shakespeare, “Romeo and Juliet”
Jace was surprised to find Aegon in the godswood. He had searched all of Maegor’s Holdfast, or so it felt to his aching legs and winded lungs, the courtyard where they trained, and even the stables, but the godswood was the last place he expected to find him. He wished he had thought of it first. He might have avoided getting the mucky stink of the stables stuck to him. “There you are,” he called out, for Aegon hadn’t noticed him yet.
The older boy was laying on the grass under the cloistered cover of leaves. He looked almost like he was sleeping, if not for the leg he kept pulled up. His head rested on the basket of his arms, eyes closed as he basked in the warm light dappling across his face. It was a pretty sight, Jace thought. Like a painting. He held back the words, for he was not so young that he did not know prettiness was an insult to men and boys. Even if he did not quite understand why, yet.
Aegon barely shifted in recognition at his voice, only squinting at him through the sun before flopping his head back down. He waved lazily. “Where else am I supposed to be?”
“I don’t know.” Jace flopped down at the base of a tree, watching him. Aegon was less sulky than he had expected to find him. “I was just looking for you. Couldn’t find you.” He rubbed at his nose, somewhat embarrassed at his efforts. Particularly as Aegon wasn’t near as unhappy as Jace feared he would be after the news they had learned that morning, breaking their fast. There had been rumours that the Queen sought to betrothe her two eldest children for weeks now, but it was that morn the King and Queen announced it truly. Jace had never seen a face fall so fast as Aegon’s had, though Aemond’s had come close.
“Mmph,” Aegon said in vague acknowledgement.
Picking at the grass, Jace eyed the other carefully. He wasn’t entirely convinced by his performance of apathy, but neither was he sure that it was a lie. If he dared broach the subject, he risked ruining his mood and earning his ire. That was the last thing he wanted to do. “Are you… How do you feel?”
“About what?” The edge beneath his lofty tone betrayed his awareness.
Jace pulled his knees to his chin self-consciously. “About the betrothal.”
“What do you think?” Aegon snapped, like Jace was the stupidest person in the world.
“I was just asking,” Jace grumbled back, neck growing hot. He turned his attention to the same sky Aegon now watched, clotted with leaves of summer-shades and weirwood red. The air was fresh and almost sweet, undisturbed dew from yesternight’s rainshowers glittering like jewels amongst the grass and trees. He could hear the faint ruffle of wings as unseen birds housed themselves in the tops. All the clouds of the night afore had moved on, leaving only a clear expanse of blue beyond the leaves.
“Well I’m not pleased about it,” Aegon finally said after a moment of silence. It was an optimistic sign. There were days where he would have just stood up and left, or told him to bugger off.
“Why not?” His curiousity was sincere. Marriage had never seemed an unhappy notion to him, nor had he ever fully understood Aegon’s antipathy about his sister. When it came to other members of his family, Jace could better understand his complaints, but Helaena was the most pleasant of them. She had her strangenesses, he supposed, and he had heard the maesters call her simple, but he thought that was harsh. She was clever enough, especially about insects. He had always admired that as a sign of bravery. Jace had never been much good with bugs. Not least the ones with a thousand legs that Helaena was so fond of.
That, in his estimation, was a rather valiant and unusual trait to have in a wife. She was courtly and quiet, not the sort of boisterous nature that Aegon preferred in his company, it was true, but she was kinder than most. Jace wondered if this was one of those instances where Aegon was complaining about nothing, as he was wont to do. It was hard to tell, sometimes. So often he complained for good reason, it was easy to forget that not all of his qualms were righteous.
“Oh, I don’t know, Jace, why would I be unhappy about being made to marry my freak sister?” Aegon sighed. “You can be so stupid.”
“She’s not a freak,” Jace defended hotly, “and I’m not stupid. I just don’t understand what you mislike about her so much… Helaena is prettier than most, and nicer, too, and you know her. That’s better than wedding a stranger, isn’t it?”
“Knowing her makes her worse. You don’t know because you don’t have to spend as much time with her as I do. Stranger or not, any woman in the Seven Kingdoms would be better. She’s—” he fought for the words, frustration furrowing his brow— “odd, and she unsettles me with her constant muttering. Nothing she says ever makes sense. And her spiders, ugh, her horrible insects—they’ll be everywhere if we have to share a room.”
“Husbands and wives can have their own rooms,” Jace interjected.
Aegon scoffed, pulling himself upright. “What’s the point in having a wife if we cannot stand to share a bed? I want a woman I would enjoy touching.”
“Aegon,” Jace said, blushing. It felt obscene to talk about such things about any woman, much less a Targaryen princess. Though he was sure they were alone, he could not help but check to see if their conversation had been overheard by some unseen audience hidden in the trees. He found no spy, but the tension in his chest did not ease. “Don’t be so rude. And improper,” he added, flustered.
“Don’t be so rude and improper,” Aegon echoed in a high, mocking voice. “That’s what you sound like. You sound like Aemond. Worse than Aemond, even.”
“No I do not.”
“Yes, you do—and I’ll tell you what I told him. You marry her, then, if you think she’s so perfect. It would save me the trouble.”
“I cannot.” Jace sank further into his arms, half-ashamed.
“Why not?” Aegon demanded, voice sharp. “Rhaenyra has my father wrapped around her finger. If she insists upon it, because you insist upon it, then he will make it happen.”
He shook his head. “It isn’t that simple.” Guilt heavied his stomach, though he could not name who he guilty for, nor what sin he had committed to earn its weight. All that he knew was that he was guilty of something. “Mother tried, but…” he trailed off, suddenly aware that he was on the verge of saying too much.
Unfortunately, he had already caught Aegon’s attention, pale violet eyes piercing right through him. Of course now he listens to me, Jace griped inwards.
“But what?”
Jace looked away. “But nothing.”
“You can insist on keeping a secret, but I’ll just kick it out of you,” he said airily.
“You wouldn’t.” He would. He had done so plenty of times before. Pinched him, too. Pulled his hair, shoved him, broken his toys—Aegon could be very persistent in getting what he wanted.
Aegon stood. “I wouldn’t?” he dared, languid as he walked over.
“No,” Jace said, not believing it for a moment, but he had to hold strong. It was worse if he spilled the secret out of cowardice. If Aegon hit him, Jace had no choice but to tell him the truth. Or so he justified it to himself.
He screwed his face as Aegon came closer, squeezing his eyes shut as his shadow fell over him. The smack came hard and quick at the side of his head, a jocular hit rather than one meant to sincerely hurt. It stung all the same. “Fine,” he relented, dodging the next feinted hit. “Fine! I’ll tell you!”
“Pitiful display, Velaryon,” Aegon snorted, smugly aglow as he pulled back and sat down across from him, crossing his legs.
Jace only scowled at him, rubbing at the sore spot on his head. “Shut up.” Perhaps it would have been more honourable to suffer a few more hits before he surrendered, but Aegon was stronger than he realised, adolescence giving him a clumsy strength. Jace wasn’t quite willing to get a few bruises for something Aegon might be able to find from some squire’s gossip. He sighed. “She doesn’t know that I know, so you can’t tell anyone.”
Aegon rolled his eyes.
“I mean it,” he warned.
“On my honour,” Aegon said with feigned solemnity. Jace wasn’t sure if the obvious jest negated the integrity of the promise, but it was good as he was going to get.
“It was something I overheard a few moon-turns ago,” he hesitantly explained, “a conversation between my mother and father. She said… She said that she had put forth a betrothal to the King and Queen, one between Helaena and I.” The rapt way Aegon stared at him made him nervous. “The King thought it was a good idea, but the Queen refused. Mother used the word ‘unyielding’.” She had used quite a few words that Jace dared not repeat about Alicent Hightower. Or at all. He had never seen his mother so insulted. Again, that nameless shame reared its head. “She was disgusted by the idea.”
Aegon fell back, defeated. “That’s it, then. There’s no hope of stopping it.” His hopelessness was palpable, sapping the light out of the godswood air until its dullness oppressed Jace’s own heart with the same misery. Ashamed, he looked away. There was no world where the Queen would accept him as a good-son, nor allow him to besmirch her daughter with the stain of his name. He was old enough to hear the rumours, and the rumours gave sense to the stares Jace always felt burning into his back when they thought him unawares. Old enough to recognise he bore no feature of Laenor Velaryon, despite the coat-of-arms he wore, halved with the dragon of Targaryen.
His mind fled from his gloom, searching for any hopeful thought. His mother had always advised against dwelling on one’s ugliest thoughts. “There could be a way,” he said suddenly, the idea striking him half-formed, wanting terribly to take that look of abject resignation off of Aegon’s face. He regretted it as soon as he spoke it, for his memory of it was flimsy, and he feared he would only disappoint him further.
But the regret disappeared when he saw how Aegon brightened with a cautious curiousity, even as he hid it with a lazy look towards him. Jace was good at seeing past the bravado Aegon wore more and more with the passing years. Most of the time, at least. He had learned he needed to pay a special kind of attention to his uncle’s capricious moods. They weren’t always what they appeared. Sometimes, Jace thought they weren’t even what Aegon meant to express. It was his eyes that most often betrayed him. They were staring right at him. “Like what?”
Jace’s face grew hot. “I mean, it’s—it might be a stupid idea,” he warned.
“Nothing unusual from you,” Aegon jabbed with a smirk, though his eyes were still bright with anticipation.
“Shut up,” he mumbled, avoiding his eye. The grass had become deeply interesting. “I might be remembering it wrong, too. I read it in a book a long time ago.” Now that he had to explain it, the thought embarrassed him. Aegon was surely going to laugh at him.
“Spit it out then.”
Jace picked two blades of grass and idly braided them, focusing intently on weaving the strands together as he spoke, too aware of how he could feel Aegon watching him. Waiting for him to give him a way out. “Do you know of the Valyrian custom of lunar weddings?” He did his best to sound nonchalant and certain, chancing a look at him. Aegon’s expression showed his ignorance, brow pinched.
“No.” He pulled up to rest on his elbows. “What is it?”
“It’s a form of… of…” he fought to remember the word. It was a difficult one to say. “Polygamy. Like Aegon the Conqueror and his sisters. They were following a Valyrian custom, though it doesn’t translate well to the common tongue or Westerosi tradition.” In his mind’s eye, he saw the weathered pages of the tome he’d found it in, and summarised its hefty prose as best as he could. Foggy spots remained where time had erased the finer details, but as he spoke, some of the fog dissipated into a tentative clarity. “There is solar marriage, like your betrothal to Helaena, and lunar marriage which serves the sun-marriage.” He frowned in thought. “There was something about how there is only one sun, but there may be many moons…”
“I don’t see how that helps me,” Aegon said, frustrated. “Mother won’t marry her to you either way, what does it matter what you call it?”
Jace’s face grew hotter until he felt the tips of his ears burning. In truth, he hadn’t been thinking of Helaena at all. “It wouldn’t…” He found he didn’t have the bravery to say it outright, fearful of how it would sound, dreadfully anticipating the humiliation of being misunderstood. “Moon-marriages don’t have to follow the laws that we know. You can compare it to, um, Dornish paramours.” He had hoped that would illuminate something for Aegon, but his stare remained flat and dull, missing the hint. And he calls me stupid sometimes…
He inhaled, and said it all quick and succinct, as resigned to embarrassment as he had been to the hit of Aegon’s hand. “Two men can wed, like a man and woman may. That’s what I mean,” he added quietly, still evading Aegon’s eye. In his hands he had made a tight, short braid of grass. He twisted it anxiously in the silence that followed.
There was an eternity in the quiet, or so it felt. Jace swore the air had shifted colder, a new vigor to the breeze that curled under his collar and chilled his skin. A mercy was in it, for it cooled his cheeks and took away some of its betraying heat. Aegon shifted to sit straight. At last, Jace made himself meet his gaze. He smothered a wince at the baffled look he found there, mouth twitching before he chuffed a disbelieving laugh. Jace’s stomach plummeted.
“Are you asking me to marry you?”
He snapped the grass-braid in two and folded his arms tight across his chest. “Not like that.” Feeling small, he let his legs relax, unwinding somewhat out of the tight ball he had found himself in. “Just… As a way to end the betrothal, if there truly was no other way… I told you it was stupid.” He slumped, wishing for the conversation to be over, and for Aegon to forget he said anything at all. Jace was just trying to help.
Aegon snorted. “How would that even help? Do you think my mother would let such a strange thing happen? Valyrian tradition or not, it’s deviancy. The gods forbid it as a sin. She would never let me stain my reputation like that.”
“It was just a thought,” Jace snapped, hiding his hurt. “You were complaining so much, I thought it might quiet you.”
The loftiness of Aegon’s mood sharpened as he sneered. When he looked at him like that, it made Jace feel like the muck on his boots. “Funny. It was you who was desperate enough to come bother me about it. You stink of the stables, by the way. You reeked as you walked past. What, did you think I was hiding in the horse-shit?”
“No!” He reeled for something smarter to say, or else something that would soften the mood, but his emotions were high and blinding, and his ego too bruised to allow anything too forgiving. “Oh, what-ever …” he huffed, standing up. He angrily dusted the dirt and pebbles that clung to his breeches, tugging on his tunic to make it sit properly. “I didn’t have much time to sit around, anyway. I just wanted to know where you were in-case anyone had need of you,” he lied, storming off.
“Then I guess I’ll have to find a different hiding spot,” Aegon shouted back. “Somewhere you or anyone else cannot come and pester me again.”
Jace said nothing as he left, the dense thicket of the godswood shrinking behind him as he returned to where he had left his protector. The man sat idly, boredly scratching lines into the dirt with his blade. He stood abruptly to attention once he saw Jace, but the young prince paid no attention to his sworn sword. The most sudden, ineffable urge to cry stung his eyes.
It wasn’t the first time Aegon had found a way to insult him without meaning to, but it was one of the worst—and the fault was only Jace’s for saying something so absurd. He had only meant to comfort him, but he had disgusted him, just as he had disgusted the Queen.
Alicent Hightower’s distaste wounded him, yet it was an injury he could heal from, knowing that she had always misliked him. But Aegon was his friend, and that didn’t make anything different. It had nothing to do with fondness or mislike, but the plain fact that Jace was an aberration. He did not know the precise meaning of the word, but he knew it meant something like ‘a mistake’.