Chapter Text
The Queen had a secret.
Not the kind of secret that most ladies of her standing had — a discreet lover, a quiet act of charity, a hidden talent for poetry — but something more extraordinary, more dangerous. Something very Targaryen, despite the fact that she was half Arryn.
Her ladies-in-waiting were the first to notice.
It started with Lady Jeyne Templeton, who had served Aemma Arryn since before she was Queen. Jeyne was not given to fancies or flights of imagination — her feet were planted too firmly in the practical soil of running a royal household for that — but of late, she had developed a crease between her brows that refused to smooth.
She slept in the antechamber of the Queen’s apartments and woke three times in a fortnight to find the Queen’s bed empty, its sheets cold. On the first occasion, she raised the alarm — a breach, an abduction, a Queen stolen from her chambers while the Red Keep slumbered. The guards searched every corridor, every garderobe, every shadowed alcove. They found nothing.
And then, an hour later, the Queen returned.
“Your Grace!” Lady Jeyne had cried, rushing to her. “What happened? Where have you been?”
The Queen had looked at her with eyes that seemed more alive than usual. “I could not sleep,” she said. “I walked in the gardens and lost track of time.”
The gardens. The gardens were within the walls of the keep, their paths smooth and manicured, their gates locked at sunset. They did not explain her disheveled hair, or the blood — Seven save them, there were traces of blood on her white linen shift — or the peculiar scent that clung to her skin.
Jeyne did not press. One did not press a queen, especially a queen who had buried six children and still smiled at court as if her heart were not a graveyard.
But the pattern alarmingly continued.
“She’s gone again,” Jeyne murmured to Lady Elinda Redfort, the other of the Queen’s closest and most loyal ladies-in-waiting, as they stood in the Queen’s solar, the early morning light slashing through the high windows and falling upon an empty chair. The embroidery frame before it held a half-finished dragon, its silver thread tail dangling loose, abandoned mid-stitch. The tea beside it had gone cold.
“Yes, but… Gone where?” Elinda asked, twisting her hands together. “The maester said she ought to be abed most of the time. I went to her chambers myself, but she wasn’t—”
“She wasn’t there,” Jeyne finished. “No. Nor in the sept, nor the library, nor the gardens.”
The two women exchanged an uncomfortable look. The Queen had always been a gentle, somewhat fragile woman, prone to retreating into herself when the losses came. And the losses had come, one after another — the cradle empty again, the small shrouds, the silence that fell over the court whenever the Grand Maester emerged from the Queen’s chambers with his face carefully arranged into sympathy.
Could she truly have become involved in some sort of escapade? The word felt absurd even as it formed in Jeyne’s mind — a queen, a woman who had buried six children, sneaking out of her own chambers like a thief in the night. It was unthinkable.
Thankfully, His Grace King Viserys had the decency not to call for nightly visits or request the Queen’s presence in his chambers as often as he once had. Not yet. The maesters had told him the Queen needed rest to recuperate.
Even the Princess Rhaenyra was not admitted as freely as before. The way she stormed into the chambers to see how her mother fared was deemed taxing for Her Grace — especially when she arrived in the company of her uncle. Prince Daemon was the most detrimental influence in the whole royal family. Or so said Ser Otto Hightower, the King’s Hand.
Yet there were moments when the secret came perilously close to being discovered.
The King, for all his respectful deference to the Queen’s delicate condition, was still a husband who sought the comfort of his wife’s presence. He had taken to paying late-night visits to Her Grace’s chambers — not for the marriage bed, not so soon after all she had endured, but simply to sit with her, to talk in the soft candlelight, to share the burdens of the crown. On one such night, his visit coincided with her absence.
The ladies heard his step in the corridor — even before the Kingsguard could announce his presence — and froze. The Queen’s bed was empty. The sheets were cold. The window, Jeyne now noticed with a lurch of her stomach, stood slightly ajar, the night wind stirring the curtains like ghostly fingers.
“Lady Jeyne.” The King’s unsuspecting voice came through the door. “Is the Queen abed? I thought I might sit with her awhile.”
Jeyne moved before fear could root her feet to the floor. She slipped through the door to the antechamber, closing it behind her just enough to block the view within, and curtsied deeply.
“Your Grace,” she said, and her voice, by some miracle, did not tremble. “The Queen retired early this evening. She was greatly fatigued and asked not to be disturbed.”
Viserys frowned — with worry, yes, but with something else too. A flicker of suspicion, or perhaps the shadow of it, passing briefly across his face like a cloud over the sun. “Fatigued?” he repeated. “Has the maester seen her? Should I send for him?”
“That will not be necessary, Your Grace. She simply needs rest. You know how these episodes take her.”
The King hesitated. He was the King, after all. There were no closed doors to him in the Red Keep, no chambers he could not enter, no explanations he was owed. He had only to push past her, and the empty bed would tell him everything.
But Viserys had never been the sort of king who pushed.
“Very well,” he said at last, more sad than angry. “Tell her I came. Tell her I...” He trailed off, visibly struggling to find words that would not sound foolish. “Tell her I hope she sleeps peacefully.”
“Your Grace is most kind,” Jeyne murmured, and curtsied again to hide the rush of guilty relief that flooded her face.
Behind the door, pressed flat against the wall of the Queen’s bedchamber with her hand over her mouth, Elinda Massey did not breathe until the King’s footsteps faded down the corridor.
When Jeyne returned to her, they stared at each other in the darkness.
“That was too close,” Elinda whispered. “If he had insisted—”
“He didn’t.” Jeyne’s voice was steady, but her hands, she noticed, were shaking. “That is what matters.”
“For now.” Elinda’s eyes were wide and wet. “But how long can we keep this up? How long before someone less trusting than the King comes knocking?”
Jeyne had no answer. She only felt that the weight of this secret was growing too large for two ladies-in-waiting to carry.
And yet…
What could be the reason for such drastic change in habits? A woman did not transform overnight — from a pale, fading creature who could barely keep down a cup of broth to a creature of midnight appetites and secret excursions — without some cause. Grief, perhaps. Grief drove people to madness, to strange comforts, to the arms of strangers.
The thought crept in unbidden, as such thoughts often did — in the small hours of the night, when the castle lay still and the candle had burned down to a stub. Jeyne sat rigid in her chair by the dying fire, Elinda curled on a cushion at her feet, and between them hung the question neither wished to give voice to.
“A lover,” Elinda whispered at last, the word barely more than a breath. “Could it be? Is that where the Queen goes?”
Jeyne closed her eyes. She had tried not to think it, tried to shove the suspicion into the same locked coffer where she kept all the other things she could not afford to examine too closely. But the evidence was mounting, piece by damning piece.
“If it is true,” Jeyne said slowly, “and if it is discovered—”
“We will hang,” Elinda finished, her voice trembling. “We will hang beside whatever man she has taken to her bed, by the order of the King, and they will write it in the histories that we were her accomplices.”
“Then we must pray it is not true.”
“We should tell someone,” Elinda said, breaking the silence. “The King. He loves her. Surely he would be merciful.”
Jeyne let out a sound that was not quite a laugh. “The King loves her,” she agreed. “But he is still a king, and kings do not suffer cuckoldry quietly.”
Elinda flinched. “The Lord Hand, then. He is prudent. He would know how to handle it discreetly.”
“Otto Hightower is prudent for Otto Hightower,” Jeyne replied bitterly. “A queen’s infidelity is a weapon, and he would wield it. Against her, certainly — but more than that, against Princess Rhaenyra. If the Queen is disgraced, what becomes of her daughter’s claim to the throne? No, Elinda. We cannot go to the Hand. We must hope the Queen has chosen a lover who knows how to keep a secret as well as we do.”
Elinda wrung her hands, the knuckles whitening. “That would be treason. What are we to do? We ought to tell them at least something.”
“Tell them what?” Jeyne’s voice was sharp, sharper than she intended. She lowered it again. “That the Queen takes walks at odd hours? That she is restless in her grief? They’ll dose her with dreamwine and confine her to her chambers, and you know what confinement does to her after a loss. It will break her, Elinda. Whatever peace she’s found, wherever she goes — I won’t be the one to take it from her.”
Jeyne had seen the Queen’s face when she returned from these midnight excursions. There was a flush to her cheeks that no amount of powder could replicate, a brightness in her eyes that recalled not the pale, fading woman they had tended these past years, but the girl who had first arrived at court from the Vale: fresh-faced, terrified of dragons and loud noises and the weight of the responsibility. And most importantly, back then Aemma had possessed a quiet spark — a flicker of something stubborn and alive beneath the shyness. That spark had been extinguished slowly, drowned in blood and tears and the endless, grinding machinery of royal expectation. But now it had returned.
And so it went.
Each morning, the ladies entered the Queen’s bedchamber with a dread that had become almost routine. More often than not, Aemma was absent, and each time they discovered the empty bed and the cold, tangled sheets, the weight of their complicity pressed heavier upon them. They smoothed the linens, closed the window, and said nothing — but the silence grew harder to keep.
Until the morning when the Queen surprised them even more.
The door opened, and the Queen walked in.
Aemma Arryn looked as though she had just returned from a morning ride — wind-flushed, bright-eyed, her silver-gold hair escaping its braid in wild wisps. There was dirt on the hem of her gown, a smear of something dark on her wrist that might have been soot or old blood. She smelled of air, and salt and something else that pricked at the nostrils in a strange way.
“Your Grace,” Jeyne breathed, curtsying. “We were worried.”
“Oh dear, were you?” The Queen’s smile was a quick, secretive thing. “There was no need. I told you. I walk in the gardens.”
“Yes, but without a proper escort, Your Grace.”
“To hells with the escort,” Aemma replied, not unkindly. “May I not have a moment alone?”
She did not elaborate. She crossed to the window and threw open the shutters, letting the pale morning light flood the solar. Then she stretched — a full-body stretch, arms overhead, spine arching, like a cat waking from a sunbeam — and turned to face them.
“I’m ravenous,” she announced. “Send to the kitchens, would you? I want a proper breakfast. Chicken legs. Eggs. Sausages. A joint of beef, if they have it. And wine, I think. Red, not watered.”
The ladies stared. Jeyne recovered first. “Of course, Your Grace. Shall I also send for the maester? Your color is… improved, but he may wish to examine you.”
Aemma laughed. It was not the polite, controlled laugh of a monarch practiced in courtly artifice. It was a real laugh, sincere and unapologetic in its boldness.
“I have no need of maesters today, dear Jeyne. I feel quite well. Better than I have in years, in truth.” She glanced down at her soiled gown, seemed to notice the dark smear on her wrist for the first time, and smiled again — a different smile, private and pleased. “I should wash before breakfast, though. Have a bath drawn. Very hot. As hot as the servants can manage.”
She swept toward the inner chambers, then paused at the threshold. When she looked back, her eyes — Valyrian violet, a legacy of her Targaryen mother — caught the light in a way that seemed, for a moment, more alive than ever before.
“And Jeyne? Elinda?”
“Yes, Your Grace?”
“You are loyal ladies. The very best.” The smile softened, grew almost tender. “I know you worry. But I promise you — there is nothing to fear. Not anymore.”
Then she was gone, leaving the two women alone in a silence that hummed with questions neither dared voice.
Jeyne looked at Elinda. Elinda looked at Jeyne.
“Chicken legs,” Elinda said faintly. “She has never once asked for chicken legs. She said the grease upset her digestion.”
“Well, that was before. I think,” Jeyne replied, her voice thick with bewilderment.