Chapter Text
Lady Rhea Royce was the eldest daughter of Lord Yorbert Royce, Lord of Runestone. Born in 79 AC, not much was said to be notable about her until 97 AC when the Good Queen Alysanne wed her grandson, Daemon Targaryen, in a move to further strengthen the Crown's relations to the Vale following then-Prince Viserys's wedding to Lady Aemma Arryn.
But the Rogue Prince found naught in the Vale to his liking; not his wife, nor the weather, nor the environs of which he found utterly hostile. He declared that it was no place to raise his child, and absconded with her back into the folds of his brother's court in 103 AC. The heir of Runestone sent ravens south, demanding the return of her child or to risk war against the royal house.
Numerous accounts reported that Prince Daemon merely laughed and threw the trussed raven into the jaws of his dragon.
—'The Complete Annals of Targaryen Ancestry Vol. II' by Archmaester Perestan
"Out of all the selfish, idiotic things he's done over the years, to incite war with my family—"
"Oh, dear cousin, the family is in the room." A stringent pause. "Would you have the dragon raised in the mountains? She has my name and my blood. I will not have her sequestered away with no idea of who she is. She is a Princess. It was high time she came to King's Landing and be raised in the presence of kings."
"And what about the girl, Daemon? Her nurse. Her handmaidens. Her mother, by the gods. Do you not think of how this place will be entirely unfamiliar for her? "
"Rhaenyra and her are of the same age. Toss her into her lessons and let them bond as girls do. Your daughter is bold enough for the both of them."
"Do you think it is as simple as that? Rhaenyra does not take to change lightly."
"You are the king, brother. Command her to obey."
The king laughed. "If that is how you still think it is with a daughter, I do not know whether to envy you, or pity your wife for having to raise such a well-behaved child."
You shrunk into yourself. Made yourself as small as you could. Your father's cloak was heavy and warm around your shoulders, but you still felt strange inside. Cold all over. The bench he had sat you on, where he had ordered you to stay was not like the ones back home. There were too many cushions. It felt as if you were sinking in.
You turned to look out the stained glass window behind you that coloured the sunlight streaming in and stared out to the pink sky. It had been a long flight from Runestone to here. Your eyes were so heavy, and your stomach growled. You wondered when you would go home.
"The bronze bitch will no longer have a hand in my child's life. If you do not welcome her into your court, I will not serve on the council."
"Daemon." Said in a tone that implied that the king thought of your father as nothing more than his unruly little brother. You recognized it because it was the same your handmaiden would scold you just because she was six-and-ten and 'knew better.'
"Those are my terms."
"I wonder, husband," Aemma cut in, the winds of the Vale frosting the edges of her words, "if it is less of a matter of caring for the child, and more on a matter of pride."
"Is this how you see me?"
"It is how you are, cousin."
Your father's approving laugh echoed down the hall back to you. You lifted your chin towards the doors where two tall men with white capes stood. Kingsguard. One of them noticed you staring, and tilted his head. You could not see his face from so far away, but when he lifted his hand to wave, you mimicked him quickly just as your father began to speak again.
"Your wife is victim of being with child. You named me Master of Coin, Viserys. In return, I only ask that you allow my daughter, your own niece—the only one you have—to stay. And I will serve you faithfully. As I always have. It cannot be so hard to say yes."
The two men in white exchanged glances.
"Say that the Crown supports the kidnapping of a child? Daemon…"
You turned away and closed your eyes. Rested your head against one of those feathered pillows. Hoped your father would not begrudge you for falling asleep as the words faded into a mumbled blur. Snatches floated to you, bits and pieces that you couldn't differentiate between dream and waking as you tucked your legs beneath yourself.
"…that insolent boy… yes! He is no man. Only one year older than me yet still he acts as if he is but six-and-ten…"
The sun warmed your cheek as you slowly let go of your father's riding cloak. It slid down your arms as the gentle breeze sweeping in from the many open courtyards nearby tickled your nose.
"…do, Aemma? Turn them away?"
"I would have you keep the peace in your Seven Kingdoms, Your Grace."
You wondered what Mother was doing. She would be upset that you snuck out of your room in the middle of the night. Septa Elissa, too. She always thought you'd catch the chills and she'd find you dead in a snowdrift. Before they went out of your rooms, she insisted on piling furs and wools on you until you nearly drowned from your own sweat.
It made you feel weak, in a way, to be shrouded from the sun for the sake of warming yourself up. It didn't make sense.
As the two great doors swung open, you drifted off into a sunny sleep. Footsteps came hard and rhythmic, fine supple leather boots coming to a stop before there was a harsh sigh. You saw his shadow behind your closed eyes before two arms scooped you up, and you turned your face into the deep, thudding heartbeat pressed to your ear. The broad, warm chest and strong arms, and muscles that coiled around you, clutching you as a dragon coiled around its eggs. Too hotly. Too tightly.
You wanted to squirm, but there was a stuttering feeling in your chest that made you keep still. You squeezed your eyes tighter. Held your breath.
They walked for a long time. You felt sun on your face, then cool shade, and then sun again like flickering images as your fingers wrapped tight around the breast of a fine, woolen doublet.
Between dreams of flying and the touch of scalloped bronze scales beneath your fingertips, you heard your father speaking as if he was very far away. He sounded angry. Quiet.
Your stomach cramped and hardened, and that coldness inside you began to spread deeply, quickly. Your limbs sunk into crushing waves of snow. Your father was not a quiet man. He was explosive. Sharp. Painful in his rage. A cleaving sword that slashed through flesh of allies and enemies alike.
His fingers dug into your body, and you whimpered before you could stop yourself
Kepus, you wanted to say, but all that came out was a slurred mess of a word.
He paid you no heed. Continued speaking to himself in a rumble of High Valyrian as if you had not made a sound.
Dragon and heir.
Brother and war.
The servants prepared your chambers that very night, but you did not rise for an empty bed in unfamiliar quarters. Father's apartments were a bit dusty, but it smelled like him. There was evidence of him everywhere. From the clothes to the decorations. Trophies from past hunts. Things picked from the beaches or from his travels across the Kingdoms.
You curled into a tight ball against his chest, his arm still haphazardly thrown around you and his legs tucked beneath him. Where your head met his collarbones was where the sun began, and when your father ordered the maids to leave them to their rest with a muttered 'fuck off' you felt his gaze land upon you. "My daughter still sleeps."
Did he manage to spy the sly curve of your smile when he said this?
Did you know he smiled down upon you, too?
You learned quickly the ways of King's Landing. That was to say, it was not all so different from Runestone.
There were set rules that never changed no matter where you were, it seemed.
Don't go off without your septa. Attend your lessons. Study well. You were a princess, and that was much different from a lady.
All of your clothes were discarded and the seamstress came in every other week for your measurements. You were growing fast. You needed summer gowns of silk and cotton, not woolen dresses trimmed in fur, and as you ran your fingers over dragon detailing, and red instead of bronze thread, you wondered if your mother missed you.
Your next name day hadn't even passed yet before you were the one missing the biting air of the mountains and the cold fluffy snow that would crust your balustrades every morning. How you would wait until passing guards would walk beneath your rooms and shove snow down off your balcony and onto their heads. Their scolding around their smiles. Precious girl, they'd call after you as you scampered back into your bed and hid beneath the covers. Do that to the wrong man, and he shall not be so forgiving.
Everyone here bowed their heads and called you Princess.
No one called you precious.
It took another year for that realization to fully seep into your understanding and become less of a foreign hollowness that robbed you of your mood, and more of a familiar feeling you woke up with and carried with you into the night. King Viserys had soothed the Vale's temper through the skin of his teeth two years ago when you had been first seen in his court—announcing that you were to be his wife's companion as you grew into the image of the Targaryen Princess.
You knew then that to go back would be to undo all the work he had done, but the loneliness was harder to shake. Once Daemon had been satisfied that you would not run away, the father who you once thought to rely on was a scarce presence. You had excused it with his new duties. Master of Coin. Master of Law. The king's brother, his presumed heir.
But perhaps it would have been better to deem it old habits. The Rogue Prince who prowled the Street of Silk with his Dark Sister had returned and you learned swiftly what sort of business your father partook in. Rarely did you see him, and if you did, he was barely awake and crawling in at the crack of dawn, or drunk. Either way, he reeked of sex.
You turned your cheek and moved on, watching as the king and queen doted on their own daughter. You determined that they must be some sort of outlier. An illusion. Fathers were busy. That was in their nature. Dragonlords, more so than most. You were sure you were right.
Coped up in the library with an old maester and your cousin, you raised your head from between two pages of some dusty old tome they'd been forced to read. A loose air of drowsiness filled the room, compounded by the warm sunlight filtering through the windows and illuminating the motes of dust that floated through the air. You stared absently out the window as the maester read over your essay before letting out a long sigh, drawing yourself back into your chair.
Rhaenyra groaned. "The seventh sigh today. Are we short on air?"
"What? Oh, no, I just was thinking."
"About what?"
The crisp sound of a sheath of paper being shuffled. You glanced furtively towards your tutor. "About... dragons. About Targaryens from before the fall of Old Valyria and their breeding practices regarding their mounts. I, uhm, Maester?"
The balding man looked up. "Yes, Princess?"
"It's not about the Conquest, but it was about dragons." Rhaenyra's eyes weighed heavy on your cheek. She had stopped scratching letters ages ago, and instead etched a bust of recently-bonded Syrax into the corner of her notes, Out of the corner of your eye, you saw the small group of stick figures next to Syrax. One tall and with a crown; one short and with long hair, and the shortest a bit of both; crowned, long-haired, smiling. You shifted in your seat. "When dragons lay their eggs, or when they hatch, do they ever display any sort of… instinct such as hounds or horses do? To protect their young."
"No, Princess. If a hatchling is weak, a dragon will eat their own in order to conserve resources. If the weather turns or the whelp is simply too fragile to survive, it sees no reason to keep it alive." At your appalled face, he added hastily, "See it as a mercy, and not a cruelty, Princess. Please, a mercy. For to live means the dragon deems its young strong."
"Survival of the fittest," said Rhaenyra. She added a bow to the hair of her stick-figure mother. You looked away and something hot and bitter rose in your chest like a crashing wave. "It's most practical."
"Exactly. Eh, moving on, here when you wrote that Black Harren began his pursuit in building what would become known as Harrenhal—" and here, the maester wobbled over to you with your essay in hand— "he could not have foreseen the sheer amount of resources that would be needed to construct the walls. And while that is true, I ask you to consider..."
In truth, you would not remember much of the correction the maester gave you. That night, you waited for your father to return, staring out the latched balcony doors on the far end of your bedchamber, ears pricked for his footsteps. When he did not return, you carefully undid the latch of your door and peeked your head out and down the hall.
A long web of silver caught your attention and you slipped out of your room, keeping your footsteps light, your shoulders pulled back and your fear bottled tightly behind your heart. Dragons didn't cower at their own shadows. Or at least, you reminded yourself, they didn't let it show.
Daemon's chest barely rose from where he was strewn on the rug.
You stared down at him, and it was as if a fist unfurled in your chest and left you too much space to breathe in. It made you wary. It made you shake. He reeked of something burning yet musky, as if there'd been a stretch of roasted flesh left in somewhere dark and damp, but as you inspected his front, you found nothing but a large sweat stain glueing his shirt to his skin.
You crouched down by his head, your hands tight to your chest. He rocked onto his side,his nose turned in to the rug. His cheek was clean in the faint moonlight. No blood, so no tears. In the tongue of Old Valyria: "Kepus. Where had you gone?"
He did not stir. You settled a hand on his shoulder and felt the steady pulse of his blood. The same blood that gushed through your veins and forced you forward. You rested upon your knees and shook him carefully but Daemon still did not rise. Instead, as you raised your hand from his body, his own shot out blindly upwards, groping at air, at rug, then snagging on the skirt of your night dress.
Twisting the cotton tight in his grip, he tugged at it the way one tried to yank a pillow beneath their head, and the sounds of threads snapping mimicked the ticking of your leaping heart with every passing second.
Eyes widening, your fingers wrapped tight around his wrists and you shuffled forward frantically, hissing out."Kēlīs! Kepus!"
But you could not stop him. Daemon always did what he wanted, even in sleep it seemed.
Snick. Snick. Snick.
Hot humiliation burned across your cheeks as the dress nearly gave way. Scrambling at the fabric, you tugged it back towards where it used to be attached at your waist and debated between jolting your father awake and trying to keep him asleep when the heavy head of Daemon Targaryen lifted and settled, this time, in your lap.
You froze.
Long and slender as the tail of a dragon, Prince Daemon was just as strong, just as well-muscled. A sharp turn could knock a small man off his feet if he wasn't being careful. With his dead weight on your legs, you could not move.
His nose pressed into your other knee, a soft rush of a breathe came and went as you listened to your head thunder as hard as hooves striking the dirt. Your eyes darted up and down the hall, breath quickening, lungs shrinking until you could only take tiny gasps for air.
Were you imagining it, or were the sounds of plate and leather growing louder down the stairs? Did the mice have eyes? Could a serving girl come across them, and scream at the pale shadow of your father, the ring of white around your violet eyes?
You stared down the steps and counted the seconds until your death. Why? Why had you decided that tonight would be the night you asked your father if he thought you strong?
Another clueless, heavy sigh. A murmur of a word. Daemon twitched in your hold, captured by his dreams, and his lips moved feverishly, his knees bending and pushing against the rug. You jerked back, chin tucked to your chest as his hand found the stray lapping white of your dress again and pulled. You grabbed his wrist, but he struggled back and as you shoved with all your might to hold one hand to the ground, you placed another upon his chest.
"Calm, kepus. Calm." But still he kept speaking, rocking beneath your palm. You grimaced. "Say it to me one more time." You bent over him, tilting his head up carefully and turning your ear to his mouth. He swayed a bit onto his back, silver strands sliding over his face, and his nose bumped into your jaw as you waited for his soft inhale.
"Zaldrīzes." He uttered it as gentle as a kiss upon your cheek. Dragon. "Dārilaros."
Heir.
You pulled back slowly, your eyes searching his closed ones, flicking from the arch of his nose, to his prominent brow furrowing even in rest.
To his barely parted lips.
"Sparos, kepus? Sparos?" Your hands cradling his head. Your throat tightly knotted, knees aching. Blood rushed. All aspects of this moment sharpened and rang and burned. Your thoughts dashed from one to another. Rhaenyra. Queen Aemma's unborn child only announced this morning as they broke their fast, proclaimed yet again to be a boy. Daemon Targaryen, your own father. You, heir of the heir, dragonless still. Unworthy where your cousin always bloomed— "Which dragon? Which heir?"
Your father had made it a habit to turn away from you.
If you begged him, he would not answer you now.
You woke in the hall to Queen Aemma crouched before you, her hand on your cheek. Dressed in shimmering Arryn blue silks and chained in silver at the throat and wrists, she cocked her head aside when she noted you stirring. The sunlight fell behind her, cresting her silver hair and limning her crown in gold, and as you squinted against the blurring shadow she cast upon you, you realized she was saying something.
"…all night?"
She said your name again, quietly, gently. Her thumb brushed your cheek.
"Gods, even Rhaenyra had not yet pulled a stunt such as this," she said.
You blinked the sleep from your eyes. Then, with flustered squawk, you realized that you weren't in your bed and the ache in your neck wasn't just from sleeping awkwardly on a pillow.
You jolted upright, something warm and heavy sliding off your shoulders as you stumbled to your feet. Head spinning, you swung your gaze from where your bedroom door was still open ajar, to the empty halls and you let out a tiny squeak, scrambling for fistfuls of your skirt. The winds that swept through the hall snuck through the tears at your waist and made you shiver as you sunk into a curtsey.
"Your Grace! I apologize. Did you send for me?"
"No. No, of course not. The sun has barely risen. The maids simply saw you collapsed against the wall and came to fetch me before finding the maester. I think they thought you were dead and feared to face your father." Procuring a handkerchief, she pressed it fondly to your chin. You touched your face, grimacing against the dried drool along your chin. Taking the silk from the queen quickly, you scrubbed it away. "You're not often out so late. What were you doing?"
"I simply… I… I was simply—" Strangled, you glanced down at the dark fabric pooling around your feet and stepped out of it, bending over swiftly to scoop it up into your arms. It smelled of horse and dragon, and you made a face. "I wasn't sneaking out to kiss stable boys, Your Grace. I promise."
"Of that, I have no question. It concerns me though if unaware handmaidens trip over your legs because they thought themselves unaware of a newly acquired and pretty wall fixture. But more importantly, if a growing girl does not get her sleep. You should be abed at this hour."
"My father is never abed at dusk or dawn," you muttered. Queen Aemma's eyebrow rose archly. "He is never abed at all."
"Daemon does not abide by the laws of the common man," the queen said with rueful smile. "If your father did not bring you to court as a sleeping babe on the back of Caraxes, I would not believe him to be your father in the first place. Perhaps a long lost cousin—gods know my grandsire had enough children to start a whole dynasty—but no. No, I knew when your father dismounted with a bundle in his arms and Caraxes did not so much as purr so that you would not wake, that you were his."
The cloak held tight against your stomach, the torn seam of your night dress pressing shut as the queen took the handkerchief from your full hands and helped fold the spilling fabric more neatly into the crooks of your elbows.
You smiled gratefully and as Queen Aemma's gaze passed over your face, a wistfulness swallowed the blues of her eyes. The corner of your lips pulled into a faint frown. "Your Grace?"
"You were not even five moons old when I first saw you. But he wanted to bring you to the Dragonpit, have you take a look at the new clutches of eggs and see which one you would crawl to first. Of course, our grandmother forbade it. You were a babe barely longer than the length of his forearm, and still he insisted. He picked out this beautiful egg for you, bronze with dashes of white."
Your brow creased. "I don't recall having an egg with me at Runestone, though."
"Perhaps the casualty of another explosive dispute between your lady mother and father," suggested the queen.
"Or something I left behind back home." You hugged the bundled cloak tighter to your chest. "I've been wondering if I would ever be allowed to return. If I petitioned His Grace to bid me leave, would he? Not forever. Even just for a short while…"
A moment of silence. You looked hopefully at the queen, but she merely smiled prettily as she always did and placed a tender hand upon your wrist. "I will bring your request to the king, and tell you what he says. Now, to bed with you. I'll send message to your handmaidens and to your tutors. They shall not bother you today."
In the warm afternoon that same day, the warbling screech of the Blood Wyrm Caraxes woke you.
Through your open balcony doors, you watched as a graceful red shape in the distance soared over King's Landing and over Blackwater Bay. If you pricked your ears to the sea, you would hear the unfamiliar sound of your father laughing.
And you would hear, too, the Realm's Delight, shouting from the wall of the holdfast at her uncle's unrelenting shadow.