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I used to think my father loved me. Not in the way songs speak of love, not loudly, not fiercely—but in the way men like him were capable of. Quietly. Protectively. Like a fragile thing set behind glass.
I was never what the realm wanted. I knew that early. I learned it in the careful pauses of courtiers, in the lowered voices that did not lower quite enough, in the way people spoke of the Queen’s misfortunes and the King’s lack. Aemma Arryn bled sons into the sheets and I remained. A single silver-haired girl where a dynasty was meant to stand.
And yet—my father would return from council after another failed pregnancy, his shoulders heavy in that particular way I came to recognize. He would look at me then. Really look. As if searching for something that should have been there and was not. The same look my mother wore sometimes, when she thought I was asleep. Longing. Regret. A wish unspoken but loud enough to bruise. Then it would vanish. He would pull me into his arms, press his lips to my hair, and murmur apologies he never explained. I learned to accept them without asking what they were for.
When the court forgot to lower their voices—and they often did—I heard everything. The Queen’s misfortune. The King’s burden. The tragedy of a realm left with only a daughter. And every time, without fail, my father would summon me for tea. He would give me a new doll, or a necklace too fine for a girl my age, or some trinket meant to elevate my vanity and soften the sting of words he could not—or would not—silence. I learned early that gifts were apologies in this family.
Each time Syrax burned another bundle and my mother screamed and bled and withered beneath blood-soaked sheets, my father grew closer to me. He hovered, doted, smothered me in attention and affection even as my mother withdrew further into herself. But with every new announcement of another babe, that attention faded again, pulled back like a tide retreating toward hope. I hated myself for the thoughts that followed, because sometimes—often—I wished the babe would die. And when it did, when my mother’s grief hollowed the Red Keep yet again, my father remembered his living daughter. I felt doubly horrid then. A vicious little princess, greedy for scraps of affection bought with blood.
Then my mother died. And that affection that came with my mother's dead babes turned to ash with her. He would not look at me, my father. Did my existence make it harder to forget the woman on whose corpse my father had built his new family, I wonder.
I was the heir after that. I had been caught with Daemon in a brothel later. For an infraction that would have driven the Old King to murderous fury, my father did not rage, did not strike, did not banish me. He simply gave me an ultimatum: marry Laenor Velaryon. Quickly. Politically. Forgetting, as though it had never been spoken, his promise that I would choose my own husband. Perhaps my actions proved Ser Otto’s words true.
And so I sat there, in the gardens, beside my half-brother Aegon—barely five namedays old—under the sharp, distrustful gaze of his mother and the hopeful, almost pleading look of my father. We played childish games while my wedding day loomed closer and the council decided everything about the heir’s marriage without consulting the heir herself. I was lost in my thoughts when I felt a small, insistent poke against my side.
“Why does father love you and not me?”
The question startled me so sharply I nearly gasped. I looked around at once, heart leaping into my throat, to see if anyone had heard him. The nannies had not. Neither had Alicent nor my father. Aegon only stared at me, unblinking, waiting. Indignation flared hot and sudden. How could he say such a thing when he was the precious son my father had butchered my mother for? I drew in a breath to answer him—and stopped. He was only a child. I patted his head, clumsily, and rose to my feet before I quite knew what I was doing. I asked my father for leave and did not wait for his response.
My heart thudded so loudly in my ears that the world felt distant, muffled. I changed direction without thinking, turning not toward my chambers but toward the Dragonpit. My thoughts were too sharp, too jagged. Syrax always gave me clarity. I went through the motions once there: greeting the dragonkeepers, asking after Syrax, telling them not to unchain her, assuring them I only wished to see her. I asked Ser Steffon not to disturb me until I returned. All habit. All rote. Until Syrax nudged her great head gently into my chest in that endearingly inquisitive way she always did, and I folded against her warmth as though I might disappear into it.
Only then did Aegon’s question return. I scoffed softly, bitter and humorless. The gall of that foolish child, to say such a thing, when my entire existence had been spent trying to become what he already was simply by being born with something I lacked. I remembered how my father had rejoiced at his birth, holding him aloft as though he were light itself, proclaiming his son had been born—Baelon, Jaehaerys, Aemon erased in a single breath. As though I had not stood in the corner and watched him cradle a fragile bundle while my mother’s blood still glistened warm upon the floor. As though it had not been my mother in Alicent’s place scarcely two years before.
I had been certain that day I would lose my heirship, standing there like the unwanted ghost of Aemma Arryn while the King smiled upon his new family and his Hightower Queen. Otto had glanced at me then, that victorious smirk already forming, as though I were an aberration that would soon be corrected. Alicent had looked proud—content—in a way my mother never had, having accomplished what the previous Queen could not. I remember thinking I had never seen my father so happy. Not even in those brief hours Baelon had lived. He had never looked at me like that.
I wondered then, as I do now, whether he had welcomed my birth with joy at all. Whether his smile had dimmed when the midwife announced his wife had borne a healthy girl. A daughter. Whether he had held me not as a child but as a promise of future sons, as proof that his wife’s womb was not barren. I remembered the cruel words I had once thrown at my uncle in anger: I will never be a son. It was true, was it not? If I had been born a boy, my mother would not have been forced back into the birthing bed year after year. She would still be alive. The guilt twists in me even now, sharp and familiar.
After my mother died, no one told me she was gone. Not my father. Not my uncle. Not my friend. Not the Hand. I felt the stares first, the sudden carefulness of servants, the way the corridors seemed to recoil from me. I went to comfort her, thinking this was just another loss. I found her instead—cut from sex to chest, her belly split open, her eyes wide and frozen in terror. My father stood over her, a faintly squalling babe in his bloody hands. No one had closed her eyes. No one had covered her. I wondered if my father had reached into her with his own hands for his precious heir.
That night I waited for him. I waited like a child awaiting punishment or comfort or something—anything. He never came. Nor the next night. Nor the one after. I learned later that while I waited, he had found comfort elsewhere. In Alicent. My maid. My friend. It struck me then. Just like I had withered while my father spent his evenings unchaperoned with Alicent, did my mother too wither with silences as my father refused to share her grief? Empty womb, empty arms and empty bed? His silence felt like punishment. Even when he had butchered my mother. Even when I had to burn her body myself. I wonder if they stitched her up with the thread used on wounds or the one used on clothes. Afterall, they had discarded her like the latter. I wonder if my mother's birthing blood had mingled with Alicent's maiden blood on my father's featherbed.
When he named me heir, it should have been triumph. Instead it was bitter. I wanted to rage, to throw something, to shove his face into those countless candles. It had taken my mother’s death for him to see me. And yet a weak, traitorous part of me felt pride. He had chosen me. Finally. Until I learned it had been Otto’s suggestion. Until I learned the council was already discussing his remarriage. Until I watched Caraxes scream as Daemon was banished again and no one thought to tell me. I was heir now. Nothing had changed. I was a placeholder.
That fragile desperate thing that I had tried to convince myself was pride, splintered then, hairline cracks spreading through it. It cracked further when I continued to serve wine at the council table after my announcement, a pitcher in my hands, my new title curling like a mockery around the councilmen's tongues as they tapped their golden cups to be refilled with Arbor Red. It shattered completely when my father smiled—genuinely smiled—as he announced his intent to remarry barely four moons after my mother’s passing.
It was ground to dust beneath Alicent Hightower’s pretty slippered feet as she walked down the aisle toward my father in a sept, at the end of fourteen days of feasting and jousting, while half the court—and I—still wore mourning black for Aemma Arryn, dead less than half a year.
And I drank that dust.
I dissolved it into the wine I poured for smug lords and swallowed it down when, scarcely four moons later, the new pregnant queen summoned me into the garden like the handmaiden she had been, before the eyes of the entire Red Keep,against my will, that my Queen commands it. Aemma Arryn is my Queen, I had wanted to scream then. My father smiled like a fool, indulgent of his new,young Queen. Otto smirked. Alicent waited with that wide-eyed, beseeching look she wore so well, as though she were the wronged party in every room she entered.
The memory still makes my jaw ache.
It only worsened after that. Otto cut me off in council as I stood silent with my pitcher, and my father laughed it away, saying Otto was merely protecting my delicate sensibilities. Alicent ordered me about as though I were her maid, and any defiance was swiftly corrected by my father’s attention. The Lord of Oldtown proclaimed my barely two-namedays-old half-brother as Aegon the Second, and my father’s radiant, guileless smile did not dim even a little.
My allowance was cut in half. My maids dismissed without warning. My jewelry taken. Each complaint I brought to my father ended in shouting, with him calling me a headache and me fleeing before he could see me cry.
Then he began pressing me to marry—Jason Lannister, ships, gold, castles. As though I were never meant to inherit the Iron Throne at all. If I did not know better, I might have thought my father, my uncle, and Otto had orchestrated the brothel incident deliberately.
I was the only one losing anything.
My father repaired bridges. The Velaryons gained blood on the throne. Otto rid himself of me.
Just me.
Reputation. Choice. Love. Perhaps, Heirship too.
Why let the throne pass to a Velaryon bride when there was a Targaryen prince ready?
Perhaps, I think now, my father never loved me at all.
He promised my heirship would remain if I married Laenor. He also promised I would choose my husband.I wonder if he will hold it over my head every time he wants something from me. If this promise—my heirship preserved—will become a blade he keeps pressed to my throat.I wonder how often he will remind me that my crown exists only because he allows it to. I wonder what he will do if Laenor cannot give me children, if the gods deny me quickening, or worse—if I am the one screaming on the birthing bed and he is again forced to choose between wife and child, only this time the wife is his daughter. The thought sends a cold shiver through me, sharp and involuntary.
And then the truth settles, slow and terrible.
My father will not aid me.
If I marry and do not conceive, I will lose my crown and my hand alike. If I conceive and die in the birthing bed, I will lose my crown, my marriage bed, and my life. And he already has a spare. How difficult would it truly be to replace me, when he once replaced his dragon-riding, war-hardened brother with his own fourteen-nameday-old untrained, puppet daughter to simply spite his brother and called it wisdom? I remember the thoughtful look he gave when Ser Otto suggested Aegon—a child—as my husband, until Lord Strong intervened. I remember it too clearly.
Viserys Targaryen cares for nothing but how he is perceived.
Perception.
I remember him screaming the word in my face, spittle flying, his voice hoarse with panic rather than anger. Aegon, I realize now, is both right and wrong. My father does not love him. He does not visit his precious son. He does not play with him, does not hold him, unless there is a court watching. For a child barely five namedays old to know this, one must be remarkably obvious in one’s neglect. But he does not love me either.
I wonder how I missed it.
How he only smiled at me when I was surrounded by courtiers. How Alicent was always my dear, my love—but only in public. How he clasped Mother’s hand only when eyes were upon him. How his exuberance at Uncle Daemon’s return lasted only until the doors were closed.
I pull my arms tighter around Syrax, pressing my face into her warmth as if I can burn the cold dread out of my bones
Perception is all King Viserys Targaryen has ever cared about.
Viserys Targaryen, unknighted. Viserys Targaryen, dragonless. Viserys Targaryen, husband to a woman who birthed only stillborn sons. Viserys Targaryen, father of a single living daughter. Viserys Targaryen, brother to a man who roared just as loudly as he ever dared to. Viserys Targaryen, eldest son of the second son of the Old King, never meant to sit the Iron Throne at all.
Viserys Targaryen, who would do anything to convince the realm he was worthy of the crown his grandsire tore from Rhaenys Targaryen’s hands.
Viserys Targaryen, who would do anything to preserve the illusion of peace. Who would ignore pirates and insurrections, famine and unrest, so long as history remembered him kindly—as a good king, a gentle king, a successful successor to the Old King.
A shiver runs through me, full-bodied and violent.
My legs tremble as I rise. I wipe away tears I had not known were falling and summon a dragonkeeper, my voice carefully even as my chest threatens to crack apart. I ask that Syrax be unchained. I apologize to Ser Steffon—just a little longer, I wish to fly after all—and pray that my voice does not betray me, that my eyes do not reveal the truth of it.
That I want nothing more than to flee as far away from my father as fire and sky will carry me.