Chapter Text
They are married in the godswood. Rhaenyra has not seen Daemon since he left her in the bowels of the pleasure den three days previously. And when she does see him, standing beneath the boughs of the heart tree, his gaze upon her shadowed and strange, the only emotion she can summon is anger.
You used me, she thinks, vitriolic. As if I were a child, easily led and easily left behind. He had played her as deftly as you would a lyre.
She would say it if they were alone. She would make him listen.
But they are not alone, and so Rhaenyra only smiles, her head held high, and meets his gaze. He is the one to look away first, his gaze flitting to the branches overhead. It does not fill her with the triumph she had expected.
“Princess,” he says when she reaches him.
“Uncle,” she responds.
His lips quirk, like it were a joke, and Rhaenyra thinks she might like to claw that smile from his face.
Instead, she only offers him her hand, palm up.
.
The ceremony is brief. He presses his lips chastely to hers, and then they are wed. When he pulls back, his expression is unreadable. She could be anyone beneath him. He views marriage as a weight around his neck, she knows. Now she has added another chain.
The thought fills Rhaenyra with a sudden sadness, and she must blink as if to stave off tears, though her eyes are dry.
He is a weight, too, she must remind herself. The shackles are not one sided.
She has never thought of Daemon so. She has never imagined them wed at all.
The guests are richly clad, but they are few, and the wedding has the feel of something hastily arranged, and hidden from sight. Afterwards, they go to the balcony, overlooking the city down below, and Daemon takes her hand and raises it skyward. The commonfolk cheer for them, but Rhaenyra wishes she could think of something, anything but the play he had shown her days before. The Realm’s Delight. She had thought that meant she was beloved. Now, she thinks that she is something like a freak to trot out on display.
A girl. They would never love a girl. If I were born a man, she thinks, I could fuck who I wanted and no one would care.
But she is not a man.
It does not matter what they think, she reminds herself again. I am a dragon. A dragon does not care.
If she repeats it enough, perhaps it will become true.
.
At the feast, Rhaenyra sits beside Alicent. Daemon is on her father’s other side, staring stone-faced at the jesters and drinking steadily from his cups. He might as well be at Dragonstone for how far away he feels.
Rhaenyra is drinking, too, trying to match pace, and she now feels dizzy and out of sorts. Alicent has been quiet all night, and Rhaenyra knows that even if she doesn’t say it, she is angry, too.
“You lied to me.” The fifth bard has finished his tune, a hastily composed ode to Daemon’s victory on the Stepstones. He sang sweetly, but Rhaenyra had hardly listened.
“Alicent.”
“Your Grace,” Alicent says. Her jaw is trembling.
“Your Grace,” Rhaenyra repeats.
“I stuck up for you. With the king. I was on your side, even when nobody else was.”
“And a lot of good it did me,” Rhaenyra says, before she can think to take it back.
“So you did fuck him.”
Rhaenyra wonders if saying, no, I just let Daemon finger me in a pleasure house and then I went and fucked Ser Criston, would make it much better. She doesn’t think it would. Everyone knows now she is no maiden.
“I don’t think the truth really matters,” Rhaenyra says. “Isn’t that what this whole thing is about?”
“The truth matters to me,” Alicent says. “I have always told the truth to you.”
“How about when you were planning how exactly to fuck my father? Did you tell me the truth then?”
Tears flood Alicent’s eyes, and Rhaenyra thinks , it is Daemon I am angry with, not you, but she can’t explain the truth of that either: why it is that she is so angry. It just buries itself like a knife inside her, rancid and festering.
“You have never forgiven me for that.” Alicent glances at the king. It is a swift, worried glance, and all at once tiredness sweeps over Rhaenyra, diffusing her anger.
Her father has not, Rhaenyra thinks, looked at either of them once this day. Instead, he stares off into the distance, his gaze unseeing, his expression unhappy, as if he cannot imagine how he wound up here, in this hall, with this daughter, this brother.
“This marriage,” Alicent says, softly, “is not one that I chose. If I could choose… I would have chosen someone I loved, and who loved me in return.”
Rhaenyra stares down at her cup, glassy with wine, and wonders who she will be when she reaches the bottom of it.
“I didn’t choose this either,” Rhaenyra says, at last.
.
It is deep night when the feasting ends, and they make the journey up through the Keep towards Rhaenyra’s bedchamber, attendants trailing them. There is a raucous cry from the men as they leave the hall, but Rhaenyra keeps her head forward, her hands clasped behind her back. Daemon walks beside her, and Rhaenyra thinks, if it were four days ago, I would take his hand. They would have walked palm to palm.
Now she keeps them clasped behind her.
Her bed is shrouded with sheets of gauzy fabric. It has turned the familiar strange, and Rhaenyra avoids looking at it, glancing backwards instead at the members of the court who have stayed to confirm their coupling
There is no pleasure to be found here in this room, she thinks, submerged as they are beneath disapproving gazes. Rhaenyra wants to snap at them to turn round, to leave them, but tradition dictates they stay, and she has stretched tradition as far as she is able of late. And so she only begins the business of undressing.
Her ladies help her pull off her outer dress, and then her skirts, both sewn from a deep gold silk, until she is left with only her shift.
She shivers against a sudden chill.
In the pleasure den, Rhaenyra thinks, she had felt a heat within her, coiling inside her belly, like Daemon only had to breathe to stoke it higher. But just now, dread has settled its mantle over her, and she feels icy-cold.
She doesn’t want to do this.
She looks up, and meets Daemon’s gaze.
He has stripped of his clothes, too, so he wears only a long white shirt, and he is smiling.
Together, they get inside her bed, kneeling so they are facing each other, as if they are children playacting adults.
Rhaenyra looks at him, expectant. He places his hand on her waist, and then leans forward to kiss her.
Rhaenyra skirts her head to the side.
Daemon tries again, a quick dart of neck and lips, and she turns her head to her shoulder, avoiding him once more.
An attendant coughs.
When he pulls back again, Daemon’s gaze is amused, like the whole thing, the scandal, the marriage, the men and women watching them through the gauzy fabric, has no effect on him at all.
I want to affect him, Rhaenyra thinks. She wants to push past the boyish insolence that he wears wrapped tight around him like a cloak to ward against the chill. She’d thought once that if anyone could do it, she could.
“Something to say, wife?” The words are Valyrian, meant for only her, but Rhaenyra still glances back over her shoulder at the others as if they could hear. She meets the gaze of Lady Barathean, who is watching them both with a frown marring her face.
They’d had an audience before, too.
He kisses her, and this time, she lets him. Her hand cups the back of his neck, holding him to her. His skin feels feverish-warm. He is a dragon, after all, the same as she is.
She wonders if she could claw at him now. She’d leave bloody marks all along his back so in the morning he could not forget her.
His mouth opens, and then he’s licking at the seam of her lips, and Rhaenyra makes a sound low in her throat.
She can feel desire rising in her, in spite of all the rest of it. How easy it is for him to draw it out of her. How foolish. This is not the freedom either of them had asked for.
It is the Princess in this gilded bed. The Would-Be-Queen. There is no room here to be a woman.
She had thought—
But the thought is too embarrassing to finish. She is a disappointment to him. He has, at least, made that clear to her.
Why else would he have left her behind?
.
Daemon leaves when he is finished, and the rest of the attendants file out, so that Rhaenyra is at last alone. All day, this is what she has longed for, but now that there is no one to watch her, she feels hollow, and she wishes someone had stayed behind. She wishes for Alicent, the Alicent of her girlhood, before she had been the Queen, for that sweet, easy familiarity they’d had between them. She could have told that girl anything. Now Rhaenyra feels as if all she does is lie and trade barbs. Daemon’s seed is still on her thighs, and she wipes at it with the sheets, nails scratching at the tender skin. It had not been terrible, him inside her, but it had not brought her much pleasure. And for all Daemon’s talk of taking what you wanted, their fucking had not seemed to bring him much pleasure either.
There is no blood on the sheets, but Rhaenyra doesn’t know who she is kidding anyway. She leaves the sheets untarnished.
.
If Rhaenyra had thought the whispers were bad in the days after the brothel, it is nothing compared to what people say after the wedding. The match is ill-liked by both the court and the common people, and wherever she goes, the whispers follow. She knows what they think of her, that they consider her marriage a perversion. The Targaryens are meant to be above such whispers, she knows. They have always chosen husband or wife as they liked, since the days of Aegon the Conqueror and his sister-wives, no matter how the Septons and their disciples twittered. And yet, Rhaenyra cannot help stopping to listen, watching how their faces change when she walks into a room.
The Realm’s Delight. How wrong everything has gone since she was named heir in Daemon’s stead. None of it has panned out how she thought.
Either Daemon had tricked her into degrading herself with him in order to get closer to the throne he’d long coveted; or it was Rhaenyra herself he had coveted all these years, and he had been so overcome with desire for her that he had forsworn his vows to the Seven to take only a single wife. Rhaenyra knows the second theory to be a falsehood. After their wedding night, he has not returned to her rooms, and she has not gone to his. And she tries not to think too hard on the first.
Instead, every night, she has lain in bed, staring at the hidden door he had shown her, wondering if she were to push it open, to follow the passageway down and out, to escape beyond the walls of the Keep back to the Street of Silk, if she would find him there, fucking some other woman, someone who did not remind him of duty, of his Bronze Bitch.
Perhaps, she thinks, married life is not so different than her life before. Somehow though, Rhaenyra feels lonelier. When she had only been his niece, he had loved her, this she knows. Now that she is his wife, it seems he wants little to do with her.
The only place she is not followed is the skies, and she takes to flying most days, soaring high on Syrax until Kings Landing has disappeared into the distance, and she is gliding upon waves of air. I am a dragon, she will think. What does a dragon care of whispers?
.
Daemon finds her camped on a deserted island off the coast. She had seen Caraxes in the sky and had been expecting him, but she pretends she has not seen him yet. She is lying on the sand, her hands crossed behind her head as she watches the sky. This way he appears to her upside down.
“You’ve been avoiding me,” he says, as greeting.
“Have I?” He’d started the conversation in Valyrian, but she answers in Common. She does not want to swap intimacies with him.
He sits down beside her, stretching his legs out as if the sand is no bother.
“I fucked Ser Criston,” she tells him. “That night.”
Daemon doesn’t say anything for a moment, and then. “All right,” he says. “Though I wouldn’t recommend you doing it again. I can’t imagine his son would look much like mine.”
Rhaenyra releases her breath, and then closes her eyes so she does not have to see even the edge of him. “Is that all you care about?”
She feels light pressure on the side of her face. He is brushing her hair back.
Then those same fingers are on her lips, pressing her mouth open. “Hmm,” he says.
He is hovering above her, his expression that same unreadable thing. Stupid, Rhaenyra thinks. She still finds him beautiful, even through the anger. There is no one she likes looking at more. And he is her husband. So why is it that she feels like something is throttling her, squeezing tighter and tighter around her throat?
“Do you still fuck her?” she asks.
His gaze drifts up from her mouth to her eyes.
“Your whore.”
Daemon only smiles, and then he is pressing that smile to her mouth. Rhaenyra opens her mouth for him automatically. He makes a pleased sound at that, and moves to straddle her, his thigh slotting between hers.
Why now? she wants to say to him. Why does he act like he wants her now when he has spent weeks showing her that he couldn’t care less for her company?
He rocks down on her, a slow, languid grind. Gods, she thinks and then, gods , when he does it once more. She had not felt this way with Ser Criston, like her body was something out of her control, and all at once, she longs for that night, the childish nonchalance with which she’d kissed Ser Criston, stripped him of his armor, and rode him. With Daemon, she wants too deeply, and it makes her feel like she’s grasping at sand, feeling it slip right through her fingers.
He could burn her. He had burned her before. He had left her. She’d been wet and aching for him, and he’d left her.
She cups his face in her palms, and kicks out with her leg, throwing him off balance and then rolling them so that she is atop him. She pushes both hands against his chest and holds him there. His hair is disheveled and his cheeks are flushed red. He does not look like he does not want her. But then she has been fooled before.
“Stay,” she tells him in Valyrian, and then reaches between them for his trouser ties.
He groans when she puts him inside her, his hands clenching on her hips. “Stay,” she tells him again, and rolls her hips into him, and “Stay,” again, timed with her next thrust. Her hand clenches in the leather of his jerkin — somehow he is still almost fully dressed — and her knees dig into the sand, and it feels different this time, with her astride him. She feels full, spread wide and vulnerable, for all that he is laid beneath her.
“Daemon,” she says.
He is smiling. Fuck him, he’s smiling. “Yes, Princess?”
But she doesn’t need to say what she needs. He rolls them so that he is the one fucking her, deep and satisfying with every thrust. It hurts, a too large, too fast, too much stretch, but still, Rhaenyra thinks, yes, yes this is just what I needed. A pain so sweet it could swallow you whole.
.
The next day, Daemon leaves for the Vale and Rhaenyra wakes to blood in her bed. Late in the morning, Alicent finds her in her solar in a foul mood. She cannot ride in this state, though she had considered it, had thought of hunting him down on dragonback and hauling him back home to Kings Landing. Instead, she watches the sky through the little window, and contemplates just what she’ll do to him when he returns.
“It has been awhile since I have seen you,” Alicent says, taking the seat beside her. She has brought her needlework, and one of her ladies, a timid girl of four and ten that reminds Rhaenyra of a doormouse.
“You saw me at dinner last night.”
Alicent gives her an admonishing look. “You are still angry. I would have thought—”
“You would have thought what?”
“You and Daemon have always been so close.” There is a hesitancy in Alicent’s voice, and Rhaenyra thinks of how she had said that day, you Targaryens have some queer customs, how she had looked at Rhaenyra as if she were a stranger, how Rhaenyra had felt it, that strangeness within her that Daemon seemed to stoke with ease. It had taken up all the space between them.“I would have thought you would have been happy with this choice of husband.”
“I had no choice at all,” Rhaenyra snaps.
It is petulant, she knows. Perhaps she’d had a choice, of sorts. That night in the brothel, she had followed Daemon. She had known where he was leading her, if not in full, at least in part. And she had taken his hand and let him lead her right into the heart of it, consequences be damned.
She just had not imagined here was where they were heading.
Rhaenyra raises her hand to her temple, feeling it throb. “I am sorry,” she says. She glances again out the window, as if she looks hard enough Caraxes will appear in her sightlines.
“It was the kings order,” Alicent says, gently.
Rhaenyra looks back at her.
“Daemon is vassal, but he has not been to the Vale for many years. It reflects badly on the crown.”
“He could have—”
Taken me with him, Rhaenyra wants to finish, but she knows he could not have. It would be foolish to take her to see his other wife. He does not love her, she reminds herself.
And yet, he did not love Rhaenyra either. She had thought herself special to him, that if he had loved one person, it would have been her. But he is still Daemon, after all.
“He could have at least said goodbye.”
.
Daemon comes back two months later with news of his wife’s death. He delivers it with a smile, and a flourish of a bow, which Rhaenyra can tell her father finds tasteless.
That night, there is a knock at the door. Not the main door, where Ser Criston still stands guard, but the innermost one. Rhaenyra lies in bed, glaring angrily at the ceiling, and then exhales in a huff and opens it for Daemon.
“Took you long enough,” he says. “Are you coming?”
Rhaenyra is in her nightgown, and his eyes dip down, regarding the peaks of her nipples where they press against the fine silk, before returning back up to her eyes.
“I haven’t a costume,” she says. “I burned the last one.”
She moves across the room to the cart where she keeps her wine, and pours herself a glass. He takes a spot by the fireplace, regarding her lounged in the chair where she herself normally sits.
“So you don’t want to go then?” he says.
“And where are we off to this time, Uncle?” His voice is sharper than she means it, tinged with emotion she had not wanted to give to him. It feels childish, this anger she still has buried within her, and yet, everyday it grows larger, spreading like wildfire through her veins.
“To celebrate,” he says, at last. “The bitch is dead.”
“And yet you are still not free.”
Daemon looks surprised, or as surprised as Daemon can look.
“You are still shackled with me.”
Daemon snorts at this. “Yes,” he says. “I suppose that’s true.”
He pushes to his feet, and starts for the exit, and Rhaenyra stares after him, wine cup still clenched in her hand. Anything she would say to call him back would sound too desperate, so she lets him go.
.
Several days later, he calls for her after nightfall and she makes her way to his room. He has kept the same rooms ever since she was a girl, but she has not been back here in some time. He is more unkempt this time, hair ruffled, and just in trousers and a shirt.
“I am bleeding,” Rhaenyra tells him, crossing her arms over her chest.
“So you aren’t pregnant then, I suppose.”
She scowls at him. “No,” she says, tersely.
“You’re happy then, I imagine. To not be squeezing out heirs.”
“I suppose.”
“Are you still fucking what’s his name? Ser Crispin?”
“You know that isn’t his name.”
“Yes, but it’s more fun this way.”
The firelight has turned his white hair golden, and there’s a sardonic way that he’s looking at her, as if this is all some grand joke he has arranged for them, that makes Rhaenyra feel tired to the bones. When she had thought of who she would be forced to marry, she had imagined herself listless and bored, not whatever it is Daemon makes her. Unmoored. Lost, sailing somewhere. Still skyborne.
“If you’re not going to fuck me then I’m going to bed. I’m tired.”
She starts for the door.
“Do you want me to?”
He has not moved, not an inch.
Rhaenyra’s hands clench. “You know that I do.”
He rises to his feet, and walks towards her, so they are standing toe to toe. “You need only ask,” he says. He is close enough that she can feel his breath on the shell of her ear. “Ask, Rhaenyra.”
Her body is softening, warming from his closeness, and she thinks of how she has lain in bed alone these months, and touched herself to the memory of him, again and again. How many years he has lived only in her head, a fantasy made of pure wanting.
His hand finds the small of her back, and he pulls her into his body so they are connected pelvis to pelvis. “Ask,” he says, in Valyrian this time.
She is breathing heavily, and she wants him so badly it feels like an illness, like its killing her, eating up her insides until it is black bile she spits up.
She had asked him, she thinks, and he had said no.
She pulls back from him, disconnecting them. “I have to go,” she says, and flees.
It does not feel better, she finds, once she is back in her own room, her heartbeat thundering in her ears, to be the one leaving him.
She had thought that it would.