Two-Headed Mother

by rtyytr

Summary:

It’s wrong, Baelor thought, alone in his study, poring over treaties and petitions. It’s the only thing that feels right, the dragon replied, hanging on his back, watching from his shoulder as he stood deep in the Kingswood, listening to Maekar whistle through his teeth to recall his hawk, arm held to the wind.
Knowing is enough, he had told himself, half aware of the lie. Having is for fools. Not kings.

 

n. formless and void

 

Everything Baelor dreamed, he dreamed in twos. Two swords, flashing in the sun; two horses, running in step through the saltgrass; two dragons, tails entwined in sleep. 

He had not the gift for prophecy. His dreams were his alone, and for that they were worse, for they reflected no true thoughts or desires but his own. 

 

i. dog teeth

 

Baelor pretended at sleep, watching through drowsy eyes the slight rise and fall of his mother’s great belly as she slept. Amidst the downy blankets and finest furs she should have been comfortable, but it was clear even to Baelor that she was unwell. Her long hair, usually so resplendent with shiny curls, now lay lank across her pillows, a dark fan crowning her head. Sweat stood out on her fine brow and upper lip, and her breathing, although even, was shallow and raspy. Her two previous pregnancies had not been like this, as far as Baelor remembered, and he had begun to realize for the first time that even the solid walls of the Red Keep and his king father’s good will could not protect a soul from everything.

In the queen’s solar the light of noon was beginning to turn golden as it fell through the small breaks in the heavy curtains, and Baelor curled up a little closer to his mother, not wanting to wake her but being too scared to leave her. He imagined himself to be a small cat– his mother was fond of cats, and often had two or three lounging around her apartments– and tried to be as unobtrusive as possible.

Just this morning she had been fine as they broke their fast, cramped together in the chair of her study; Myriah, Baelor, and the unborn baby. He was perhaps a bit too old, having passed his sixth name day not three months prior, to be squished into the same seat as her, but in truth he could not bear to leave her. While his younger brothers Aerys and Rhaegel were content to play in the nursery with their maesters, he had clung to his mother’s skirts like a child.

Baelor had finished his plate and was being fed from Myriah’s– her appetite had wavered often of late between voraciousness and utter apathy– and Baelor was more than happy for a couple extra mouthfuls of egg or ham as they sat in content silence. Both of them had been resting a hand upon her stomach, and so they both felt it when the baby kicked. His eyes had immediately met hers, and mother and son shared secretive smiles.

“Will the baby come soon?” Baelor asked, wide-eyed and hopeful. 

“I think… yes, I think so,” Myriah said. The brave face she had put on for her son flickered slightly before smoothing over, unnoticed by the boy.

“And am I to have a brother or a sister,” Baelor said, pressing his ear to the curve of her stomach as if the babe would tell him itself. He was reminded of the time his mother had presented him with a huge pink conch shell, brought to the Red Keep by a visiting cousin of hers. Listen to it, she had told him. They say you’ll hear the sea. Baelor had dutifully pressed his ear to the cold, smooth curve of the shell, and from within he had indeed heard the crash of waves. 

“The Mother will grant us with a child as she sees fit,” Myriah said in response to his question, not quite in the tone of a septa but much loftier than her usual speech. Baelor hid his laugh behind his hand and nodded, solemn, playing along. 

“However,” Myriah leaned in conspiratorally– at least as much as her massive stomach allowed– and Baelor leaned in too, wanting to hear and know her secrets, as she mock-whispered, “I believe it to be a girl.”

Baelor gasped, delighted. “A girl? Really?”

Myriah nodded, smiling, and said, “Only the gods know for sure. But I have given your father three little princes already, and want a little princess of my own. What do you think of that?”

In a burst of childlike excitement, Baelor jumped to his feet to stand on the seat of the chair, throwing his arms around his mother, who hugged him in turn. “Good, Mother! I think that sounds good!”

A sister. He would have a sister. He hugged his mother tighter and hid his smile in her hair.

But that had been hours ago; her condition had only worsened as the morning slipped away, and now afternoon was at hand, hot and hazy. In through the muffled window of the solar came shades of the sun and the quiet whistle of wind, which carried with it the softest of birdsong.

Myriah finally sighed softly, stirring from sleep. Any semblance of peace seemed to flee her as she awoke fully, and her breathing grew deeper and heavier, pained. She blindly reached out her hand, found Baelor still nestled against her, and with a yank on the back of his sleep shirt, pulled his head to her lips.

“Baelor,” she whispered, voice hoarse. “My son. Go fetch your father.”

“Mother?” Simple fear was behind him now, and true terror reached for him in a cold, unyielding grip.

“Go!” Myriah gasped, bringing her other hand to her bulging stomach. “Go now!”

Baelor fled.

It was only after he had found his father and sent the king and maesters running that he realized that the whole of the left side of his shirt and breeches had been soaked through not with blood or urine, as his panicked mind initially thought, but the clear water of pre-birth. He shed the clothes, still standing in the corridor, and walked, dazed and clad only in his smallclothes, to his own room, where he waited. 

He waited, and waited, and waited.

Nearly a full day and half of another had passed before he was allowed to see her again, and, having spent the time mindlessly roaming the castle, his blood was afire with a jittery restlessness that made him sweaty and shaky. He could only vaguely recall when Aerys and Rhaegel were born, but those days had not seemed as steeped in shadow and anxiety as this day, where the clouds rolled massive and white against the sun and the men and maids of the castle could only rush by him, faceless and unremembered. By the time a runner had been sent to find him, tucked in a windowed alcove and staring out at those looming clouds, the nervousness had faded into an all-consuming worry, his little mind a vortex of motherbabymothersistermother.

He had to be led to his mother’s room, despite knowing the way by heart. With his head in so strange a state he sometimes stopped abruptly and had to be prodded gently to move again, and all the while the thought of either of them coming to harm circled his mind the way a dragon circled a flock of defenseless sheep before swooping down, jaws filled with fire. 

But the sight that greeted him upon reaching his mother and father was not so dire: his father stood next to his mother’s bed, holding a bundle of white cloth in his arms. Myriah was sitting up, looking pale and withdrawn but alive. Nursemaids and septas hurried about, but in the center of all that activity were a man, his wife, and their child, still and at peace. Baelor breathed a heavy sigh of relief, and both parents turned to him, Daeron with a tired, jovial grin and Myriah with a faint but fond recognition.

“Come, Baelor,” the king bade, and Baelor went to him on unsteady legs, trying and failing to blink back the tears of an overwhelmed boy as the white bundle was placed gently into his thin arms. 

Baelor looked down at the child, pinched faced and precious and already showing fine white whorls of Targaryen hair, and asked, “A sister?” 

When his mother did not immediately answer, Baelor looked to her, expectant. Her eyes were far off, tired, nearly dejected. She had a small, solid frown dragging down the corners of her lips.

A hand came down on his shoulder, jostling Baelor out of silent communication with his mother so that his father could inform him of one thing he knew, and one thing he didn’t. “A brother! Your brother, Maekar.”

“Yes,” Myriah said, her voice as distant as Valyria. “Your brother.” And then she laid back, closed her eyes, and immediately passed into sleep.

Baelor stared, first at her, and then, slowly, towards the baby Maekar. A brother.

King Daeron chuckled, and, with his hand still clasping Baelor’s shoulder, guided him from the room. Once they had cleared the exit and the door had shut behind them Daeron said, more seriously, “I know you and your mother are very close, but after this day she will need her space for a time.” Baelor clutched his brother tighter, the fear returning. “It was a difficult thing,” the king continued, and Baelor saw his own feelings reflected there, unhidden. “We nearly had to birth the child by way of the knife. Thankfully, it did not come to that, but your mother has suffered and we must give her time to heal. Alright, son? Do you understand?”

Baelor nodded. His mind raced but no clear thoughts emerged.

“Be good,” Daron said, and gently clapped Baelor on the shoulder. He held his arms out– for a moment Baelor did not understand and nothing made sense– and then he was handing over his brother to be given into the care of the wetnurses. He stood, unmoving, as the baby was carried away from him.

A brother. His brother. Baelor thought again of the little face, pinched as if in anger, the small tufts of white hair, and smiled. He then spun on his heel with all the speed a child could muster, heading for the lower levels of the Keep.

He had a dragon egg to find.

 

A tiny babe who clutched at his finger; a toddler whose unsteady legs pushed him to crawl and then wobble and then run behind Baelor; a little boy, with his toy swords and toy knights and toy dragons; his brother.

Baelor needed only to call his name and the child would come, as loyal as a hound, as present as a hawk on the arm. He had the bright eyes of a hawk as well, and Baelor loved him, easily and dearly. It was as if the world had come together, full and final, and those early days passed in the manner of all childhoods: warm and exciting and unbelievably fast.

 

The septons say we must love our brothers, his mother had told him once, and so Baelor did. But whatever the septons said of how mothers might love their sons, Baelor did not know, and from what he observed, he wasn’t sure if he cared to know. Mostly, he simply watched.

Myriah was not hostile, nor was she cruel, but there was a difference with which she treated Maekar that Baelor did not experience, nor did Aerys or Rhaegel. The realization and understanding of it crept up on Baelor, silent until it appeared all at once, fully formed as the way of things, another facet of life. When Baelor shirked his duties for an extra hour of swordplay, or Aerys slipped out of the watchful eyes of the maesters to hide in the library, or Rhaegel went frockling through the garden in naught but his breeches to chase butterflies, they were reprimanded, sometimes harshly, depending on the offense, and then corrected with all the grace a little princeling was deserving of. Their mother held to her words; she was not soft, and duty gave her reason to prepare her children well. She was never sharp with them, unless they were truly foolish (and Baelor knew better than to ever try and put a sword, even wooden, into Rhaegel’s hand again). Gentleness was not her manner. Kindness was. She could cut them and their meager justifications for wrongdoing apart with words better than any sword, and then send them away with a kiss to the forehead. The boys did what she said because she was most often right, and also because she was just.

But for every telling off Baelor, Aerys, or even mild Rhaegel received, Maekar got only her sad and weary disappointment. When he crashed an antique to the ground with his wooden sword, Myriah merely waved her hand, telling him to fetch a maid to dispose of the broken vase. When he was caught outside of his rooms after dark, wandering the deep halls of Keep well into the hour of the wolf before being brought to her by guards, she only sighed and told him to go to bed. He and his antics seemed to hold no sway over her, and, when first noticing it, Baelor feared Maekar’s reaction would be to lash out. Next the curtains would be found torn apart, or the septons would find their work run over with ink, or the castle cats his mother loved so dearly would start to disappear.

None of these things happened. If anything, Maekar learned from his mistakes quicker, and as he grew up he became more reserved, his actions checked at every moment, although for fear of her renewed apathy or desire for her approval, Baelor could not quite figure out. All Myriah’s dismissiveness, Maekar returned in kind. How would the septons ask a son to love his mother, Baelor wondered. His mother and youngest brother had grown into two people determined to ignore each other, it seemed. 

“She’s your mother,” Aerys had argued with Maekar once, safely from the sidelines of Maekar’s section of the yard. “Come see her a moment, she’s quite ill.”

“I’m busy,” Maekar had replied with all the severity a round-faced boy of six could manage. To his credit, the wooden sword he held whistled as he swung it, quite severely hacking to pieces a pell stuck deep into the dirt of the yard. He spent the majority of his time there, drilling with swords and spears, and the knights were glad to play at sparring with a little princeling who could be counted on not to cry if he fell or complain– too badly– when he lost. 

Aerys, meanwhile, had rolled his eyes and left. He cared not for arguments, at least not those he considered base and unacademic, nor for other people’s relationships. It was below him and his books. Baelor and Rhaegel had stood a moment longer, as if their presence would sway their brother into acceptance. It did not. After smashing the post in half Maekar threw down his sword and turned to look at them, breathing hard, sweat sticking the short crop of his hair to his forehead. He needs a weapon of strength, Baelor thought mildly, forgetting their mother for a moment. He’s good with the sword, but with a mace, perhaps…

“She never came to see me,” Maekar said suddenly, and his voice seemed solitary and echoing despite the clash of training knights around them. “Last year. I owe her nothing.”

“No one could see you last year. I tried!” Rhaegel protested in earnest. “You were, um,” he trailed off, looking to Baelor, who did not want to mark this day with the words contagious, or worse, pox. Maekar still carried those scars, and likely would forever, and although their mother was running a fever it was not so severe as that terrible disease; even so, the thought of it scared him, and he evaded the topic instead. 

“It would be nice of you to go to her,” he tried, but Maekar only scoffed.

“I am not nice, then. People say it, and it’s probably true.” He stooped to pick up the wooden sword and brushed the dirt off the hilt, and Baelor cursed every single knight and cook and maid and maester and anyone else in Westeros who spoke the unkind truth for his brother to hear. 

“Do people say that?” Rhaegel whispered to Baelor, but he whispered like a child (loudly, obviously) and Maekar looked up to hear Baelor’s response.

“Try a mace, this time,” Baelor said to him instead, pointing behind Maekar to the weapons rack, steel glinting in the morning sun. Maekar narrowed his eyes, but nodded and trudged off, leaving some poor squire to replace the pell and fetch the sword he had once again discarded in favor of Baelor’s suggestion. He and Rhaegel took their leave before their brother could return, although when Baelor looked back, just before heading into the Keep, he saw Maekar already watching them, unswung mace hanging limp from his arm.

There could be no placating either mother or son, no foundation for warmth between them, at least as far as Baelor’s efforts went. If he sat for dinner in his mother’s solar, talking politics and alliances and history, he would return to find Maekar’s cold shoulder, his brother unwilling to meet his eyes. If he brought Maekar along with him to gatherings his mother arranged between various lords and ladies, she would simply affix them both a tired look and never include her fourth son in the conversation, although not so severely as to be noticeable to the guests. The relationship between mother and last son had cooled into frigidity, and Baelor could do nothing for it as the months and then years passed. Eventually, he relented; he gave up. 

The septons say we must love our brothers, Myriah had told him, and instead Baelor thought of mothers and sons. He had kneeled with his mother once under the watchful eyes of the seven heads of god, the sept filled with the hazy scent of smoke and flickering in the light of old candles, and thought of asking her. But even as the idea crossed his mind he dismissed it, some part of his child’s mind already seeing the connected thread of events, from the way Myriah fawned over her sister’s new daughter to the way she sometimes sat at the dinner table and stared at Maekar while Maekar watched Baelor. He was not the child she had wanted or expected, and while she would not outright dismiss him, something within her could only look at him and see a thing she had never owned or been owed and yet lost regardless: a daughter. 

 

Time, slow in the warmth of a summer childhood, sprinted as the wind blew cold across the continent. Baelor was eleven and soon to turn twelve, the age in which his father would allow him to enter tourneys, and with his name day fast approaching, he and his brother were spending their mornings and nights in the training yards, preparing for the day. Baelor had been squiring for Ser Quentyn Ball as a result of his own father’s disinterest in war games, and although Ser Quentyn had told him there was no finer squire in all the seven kingdoms, Baelor would beg to differ. Maekar was better than to him than he had ever been to Ser Quentyn.

His brother made sure his armor continued to fit well, that his weapons were maintained to the highest calibre of sharpness, that his horse was groomed and shoed; even if Baelor suspected that almost all of these things were done by other, lesser servants and squires at Maekar’s command, it was still his command that got it done. He also liked to sit in the yard and say helpful things as he watched Baelor train, like “You drop your elbow on your counterstrikes,” as well as unhelpful things, like “You look a fool when you do that,” when Baelor overextended his reach or tripped over newly fitted boots.

Maekar would also occasionally don overlarge armor to give Baelor someone of similar age to spar with when the late Aegon’s Great Bastards were nowhere to be found. Even when the bastards were to be found, Maekar stayed close, and had one time even gone so far as to enmesh himself in the combat between the older boys when Daemon Waters had nearly struck true for Baelor’s single violet eye. The fight had earned them both a scolding from their father, but that had made the minor clash all the more worthy a memory to reenact and reminisce over in the later weeks.

Today, however, the yards were a bit quieter, and devoid of any bastards, great or not. Baelor was running through a litany of drills to test his attacks, parries, footwork, ability to disarm, center of gravity— anything that a young prince would need once he’d been thrown into the mud of the tilts. 

“I took your horse to the farrier earlier,” Maekar said. He had somehow managed to sit on the thin wooden gate that resembled the barrier that would be present in a real tourney, and in his hand he held a small dagger that he was carefully sharpening with a stone. Baelor practiced beside him, trying to gain a sense of the space. He didn’t want to fall from his horse and push himself out of the dirt only to then get his sword caught on the post as a knight bore down on him. “He’s dumb as a mammoth. Almost rent my arm when I tried to lead him, but he’ll serve you well enough in the tilts.”

Baelor grunted his thanks and reset his stance to begin anew. The days were often like this now, with he and Maekar spending the majority of their time together between their lessons and tournament preparation. It seemed like the world would turn forever, and so would they in this circle of beaten bodies and tired smiles, but even as he wished for it in the way all children wish for simplicity, he knew it was not true. Every day the demands of court grew, and time had to be allotted to the far-off concept of kingship, of rule and debate and decisions. While Baelor sat, drowning in the education of courtesy in great halls, Maekar would be there, not saying anything, watching. But both had his mind on the other, and the sun drenched yard, and the sound and shine of steel.

By the time he had pulled his sword back into the first stance and prepared to run the routine again, he noticed that Maekar, usually so observant, was not watching him; his gaze, hard now, had found something else to be critical of. Baelor stopped his drills, sword dropping to his side, and turned to look in the same direction. It was Myriah, observing them from the top of the stairs that led from the Red Keep and down into the yard, looking regal and tall with her crowned braids and deep red dress. When she saw that he too had spotted her, she began to make her way down the stairs, nodding gracefully as the knights and squires around her stopped what they were doing to stand back and greet her with loyalties. 

He could hear Maekar grinding his teeth and quickly shot out a hand to grab his face before he could escape, making sure to turn his back to block the line of their mother’s sight. “Quit that,” Baelor said, giving his brother’s jaw a shake. “You’re going to ruin your teeth.”

Maekar pulled himself free, but not before snapping a bite at Baelor’s hand. “I’ll get new teeth then, and they’ll be made of dragon bone,” he sniffed, as if Baelor had been acting uncouth, and slipped from the rail, purposefully bumping their arms together. Baelor tried to imagine his brother with a black, mirthless grin and had to stifle a smile of his own. Both boys were at attention by the time Myriah reached them.

“I have need of you,” she said to Baelor, and then inclined her head in the vague direction of his brother. “You have leave to do as you will.” Maeker gave her a short bow, turned on his heel, and promptly left. Baelor hoped he would wander past Rhaegel; if left to his own devices, Maekar would brood over the interruption for hours, and then complain of it when he wormed his way into Baelor’s bed later.

Baelor dutifully followed his mother back into the castle, wary but not particularly nervous. This wasn’t the most uncommon of situations, and the possibilities that ran through his mind were mostly related to telling-offs for forgotten duties or being informed of some minor lord's incoming arrival, at least until they passed the main rooms of his mother’s apartments and headed for the rear of the castle. His thoughts turned darker as they passed through shadows.

She led him through a maze of corridors that Baelor had not explored since his early childhood games of hide and seek, deep into her personal quarters until they reached a door that opened into a small, tidy room, which was relatively sparse save for the small table and two comfortable if inornate chairs beside it. The space was full of light, and the light highlighted the neat rows of parchment, letters and envelopes and wax ready to be melted into a seal, the queen’s seal. In the corner of the room, in the shadows, was a raven on a silver perch. When Baelor and his mother walked in, it raised one beady eye to look at them.

Myriah sat, and then gestured for Baelor to do the same. He did, silently taking the seat next to her, both of them staring down onto the stack of half opened correspondences. The raven, still watching, croaked once.

“Baelor,” Myriah said, and she sounded distant, nearly toneless. “I think you’re old enough that we can be honest with each other, would you agree?”

“Of course, Mother,” Baelor said, aiming for composure and landing on plain confusion even to his own ears. 

“Mother,” the crow repeated, a craggled and strange sound. Both mother and son ignored it.

“It is in regards to your brother–”

Baelor’s spine straightened. “Maekar? What’s the matter?”

“You know,” Myriah said wryly, “you have two other brothers.”

“But this is not about them, is it?”

“No,” she agreed. “It’s not. Baelor, I’m simply worried. I can see clearly that you love your brother well, as your mother I must look upon all of you and judge you as I see it.” Gently, she reached over and took his hands in hers. “You’re a very sweet boy, Baelor, and I know this is painful to hear, but I must have you understand. Your kindness is not repaid. Maekar is… well, he’s a bit concerning to me. I’m sure you’ve noticed it– the staring, the scheming. He’s always watching you. It’s very odd, Baelor, and I fear it will only become worse as he gets older. I do not want you to jump at shadows but neither will I have you unprepared for knives at your back. Stop giving in to him, and tell him to leave you be.”

“But he’s my brother,” Baelor said, voice faltering. Something sick and green like shame had begun to crawl through his gut, and he pulled his hands away. “He’s supposed to be with me.”

“Is Aerys with you at all times? Does Rhaegel walk in your every footstep?”

“Well, no, but–”

“It’s not fair that you should treat one different from the others,” Myriah said, not unkindly. 

“Maekar is not the same,” he protested lamely. 

“Then explain.” 

“I love him… differently. Like a sister, I suppose,” Baelor said.

“And how, pray tell,” Myriah said, an unquiet note of danger in her voice, “Would you love a sister?”

How would he love a sister? Like he loved anyone else, Baelor figured. But there was something different about Maekar, something special. Aerys would not sit for hours to watch him train; Rhaegel would not sneak off to sleep in his bed when the day had gone by without their paths crossing. Maekar could not be defined by relationships Baelor already had. A memory came to him, one of Maekar and himself flipping through a history book and tracing their lineage to the Conqueror and his sisters. So Baelor shrugged, turned to his mother, and offered the next best thing. “Like a wife.”

“Wife,” the crow shrieked. 

A man could have many sisters, but he could only have one wife. Unless he was as great as Aegon I, which Baelor was not, or as wicked as Maegor the Cruel, which Baelor felt he also was not. And while Baelor had three brothers, neither Aerys or Rhaegel, however much he loved them, were the same as Maekar, who trailed faithfully behind him and whispered cunning remarks about their guests and sneered at those who spoke to Baelor (or Aerys or Rhaegel or anyone else Maekar happened to like, although the list was short) and had never once held back when they played at war. No, Maekar was not the same, and it was for the better. 

It was clean logic to Baelor; not so for Myriah. For the first time in his life, Baelor found his mother looking upon him with an expression so bewildered and distasteful that it bordered on disgust. It was, Baelor realized faintly, the way she often looked upon her youngest son.

The moment stood, then stretched. Myriah seemed to wrestle with herself, her expression shifting several times in the space of a few seconds until it settled upon the one she wore most often while sitting beside her husband while at council, a look that told her audience that not only was she hearing him speak, she was also filing away every move he made, every pause he took, and every way his eye trended towards because the information was useful, valuable, and would tell her more than whatever words he spoke would. She was studying him. 

“Has your brother ever…” she started, and then fell into a terrible silence; what she may have suggested, he could never guess.

“Mother?” he asked, long after he could no longer bear it. The word seemed to pull her out of a dark place in her mind, and when she looked at him again it was focused, assuring.  

“You’re to be engaged, someday,” Myriah said, each word separate, a promise. “A lord’s daughter will be your wife. What will become of your brother then?”

Baelor had never thought about that, and cursed himself for it. “Well, then, he’s still my brother. She’ll be my wife. But he’s important to me,” he could not help but add, pleading rather than defiant. 

Myriah sighed, and her political mask fell away into the face of a tired mother. She bent across the table to hold his shoulders and look him directly in the eye. “You are a prince, and the heir to the Iron Throne besides,” she said finally. “You have responsibilities. You must think before you speak. People will not look at you and see someone worth following if you cannot prove it to them. And if you do love brother, love him as he is, how you’re meant to. And…” she paused, brow drawing in as if the words were strange and painful to her. “Despite the history and… nature of your father’s line, Maekar being your sister would still make him only your sister, not your wife. There are no dragons, however many eggs were placed in your crib. We marry for alliance, and try to let the love grow after. Does that make sense, Baelor?”

“Sense! Make sense!” The crow babbled, and Myriah waved a hand in frustration as the bird fluttered its wings and silenced itself.

Baelor blinked. Not particularly, he wanted to say, and then thought immediately after that: you must think before you speak. 

“Yes, Mother,” he said instead. “I understand.”

But when he had lain awake in bed that night, her words continued to run through his head. Why would she ask something of him that made so little sense? Maekar was odd; his moods ran from foul to fouler more often than not. He was disagreeable, and annoying, and prone to skulking about the castle for reasons incomprehensible. 

Sometimes he did look at Baelor strangely, although the meaning of this strangeness was another thing Baelor could not hope to guess. Maybe this would all make sense if Maekar had been his sister. Then he could have shipped her off to Dragonstone, his very own Alysanne, waiting for the day Baelor was crowned and knew what to do, finally old enough to understand it all. The thought of that was hot in his chest, and he imagined a tiny dragon living there in his heart, belly burning with all the things he could not yet comprehend or fix, and willed it to be quiet.

How similar they were, he thought, his mother and Maekar, with their hidden double faces and silent sentences. Myriah, who walked behind layers of secrecy, and Maekar, his intentions forgotten behind a rude remark. Maybe it mattered not. Baelor loved them both. Perhaps in time they could learn to love each other, too. 

Baelor sighed and turned in his bed, glancing towards a panel in his wall. When the knock came minutes later, he was not surprised, and when Maekar slipped into the room, into Baelor’s bed, he was glad for it, the inevitability of it. He wrapped his arms around his brother, lulled by his mindless, righteous chatter, and turned himself over to a dream in which two dragons took wing, soaring high above the earth where nothing touched them but the wind.

 

ii. half-engraved 

 

Baelor, sweating and breathing hard, rounded his horse and trotted back, pulling up his reins when he reached his brother. Maekar had stopped his own horse on the crest of the hill they had climbed up and was looking out towards the sea, a far drop from the cliffs bordering the fields. The salty wind whipped their hair and snapped their cloaks, and the horses swayed against the tumult. 

“Can’t keep up?” Baelor called, all mock sincerity.

Maekar rolled his eyes and forcefully swung his horse to face Baelor’s. “The wretched thing would rather sleep than run,” he said, and pressed a heel to his mount’s flank; true to his word, the horse took a few slow steps before stopping again, more interested in eating the long grass than galloping through it. Maekar’s lip curled, nose wrinkled in disgust. 

Baelor grinned, charmed. Maekar did not get along well with people, or horses, or even most dogs (save for the ones he kept and trained for hunting, and those had grown personalities as irritable as their master’s; in fact, the only animal Maekar seemed to like at all was his hawk). Idly, Baelor wondered what his brother would have done with a dragon. 

“You can get a better horse once you learn to ride,” he said diplomatically. The horsemaster would only part with his favored animals if the rider were up to standards that Maekar, however determined, constantly failed to meet, and so here they were, leagues from the Red Keep with the realm’s laziest mare, not to mention its surliest young prince. 

“I can ride just fine,” Maekar said darkly. The horse continued to chew, contradictorian that she was.

Baelor brought his own horse in a circle around his brother, trotting easily. Maekar pretended that he was not watching. “The septons say pride is a sin.”

“And envy, to be sure,” Baelor said, matching his brother’s tone. Despite teasing, he eased back, letting the animals amble along side by side, pacing his bored horse with Maekar’s stalling mare. The poor boy had had enough embarrassment in the last two days alone, and Baelor would not add more to it— at least not more than what any brother naturally would. 

Baelor thumbed at the silver clasp on his cloak, embossed with the three headed dragon. Between the feast, the dancing, the tilts… yes, it had been an embarrassing few days, and not just for Maekar. His finger slipped, scraped across the raised claws of the little dragon, and a tiny drop of blood welled. Baelor pressed it between his thumb and forefinger, watching it spread and dissolve and stain his skin.

A feast two days ago, the jousting the day prior, all to celebrate their father’s name day. Both had been more for Baelor’s benefit; Daeron enjoyed good company and a good meal but cared not for the tilts, and had taken Baelor aside to tell him as much.

“House Dondarrion will attend,” he had also said, as if it were a passing statement and not an implication to perform well. Daeron, while kind, was not always as subtle as he liked to think, not that it mattered. Baelor had been exchanging letters with Jena for months. They knew what was expected of them.

Expectation, for that matter, was the fact of life. If Baelor dreamt not of dragons, it was of that sword hanging over his head.

It was a given that, if a feast was held, there would be dancing, too. And while he and each of his brothers were passable in his own right, it was Rhaegel who could be counted on to impress, and so, leading up to some event, he and Baelor and Maekar and even Aerys, if he could be pulled from his studies, would gather and make a time of it. Just days before Baelor had sat on the edge of Rhaegel’s eternally unkept bed, laughing as Rhaegel attempted to teach a Dornish style of dance to his only younger brother. 

“Think of it like a duel,” Rhaegel had said, “the way you and Baelor fight,” and then resumed humming a melody more lively than any of them were particularly accustomed to dancing, leading a stumbling Maekar around the room in a dizzying twirl of motion. Rhaegel did not look as fragile as bookish Aerys tended to, but on occasion he would wander, lost in the castle he had lived all his life; he could not always explain his strange actions, and sometimes even failed to remember them. For all that, he was still a lively young man, good natured and excitable, and on the better days he held his mind as safely as Baelor held his own. 

That day had been one of the better days, and as he swung Maekar about in sprawling circles he laughed, wearing a wide, unmarred grin. Maekar was smiling too, in the softer, almost gentle way he reserved for the youngest of his elder brothers. Other small differences marked the two; all of Rhaegel’s lithe grace in stark opposition to Maekar, who had only recently gotten taller than his older brother. He was starting to fill out in form, shoulders and arms more defined from the years of swordplay, and his silver-white hair had grown nearly as long as Rhaegel's own, sitting below his shoulders. Even so they looked remarkably alike, and sitting to the side Baelor could almost feel that infinitesimal difference between himself and them like a real weight upon his shoulders, at least until Maekar caught his eye and they exchanged a glance– humored and a bit exasperated– and then once again Baelor was one of them, part of the whole.

Rhaegel abandoned his humming to sing, and his voice, high and clear, filled the room. Maekar was not caught off guard entirely, but he struggled a moment with the tempo change, and both brothers laughed when he corrected himself midstep, managing to trample over both Rhaegel’s feet and his own. 

He did not make the same mistake the following night, dancing with a Dornish girl of about his age, the two of them gliding around the room, their low conversation lost to the sounds of feasting and dancing, of shoes tapping the floor and catgut strings being struck. Baelor had watched, turning from his circle of conversation to track them as they passed, trying to decide how he felt. The dragon that lived within him was hot with something unspeakable; the prince sighed in turn, accepting the inevitable. The girl had her hand up in a mirror of Maekar’s, and their knuckles brushed as they stepped in time with the song, perfectly aligned with the other dancers.

“Has Maekar finally got a girl of his own?” Jena Dondarrion had appeared at his side; she always managed to sneak up on him. Her long red hair was tied into twin braids, wrapped in green silks, and the ends of one of those ribbons was being twirled around her finger as she leaned in to him. She had taken leave of her ladies in waiting, it seemed, to talk to him, and Baelor was glad for the distraction.

“It would appear so,” he said. “I hope she goes easy on him.” 

Jena scoffed, not unkindly. “I hope he doesn’t scare her off. They look quite handsome together.” 

And they did. The girl’s long hair was covered by a gossamer web of fine lace, studded with stones like stars and held in place by an unadorned band of silver that crowned her head. The lilac layers of her dress twirled around their feet as they danced, a shimmer of light against Maekar’s pale darkness; two entities in each other’s orbit. Neither of them were smiling outwardly, but Baelor saw the look in their eyes, and smiled to himself instead. It would be good for Maekar to find in this girl what he had found in Jena. 

That thought had led to another, and he offered his hand to her. Jena grinned, lip curling, and placed a fine-boned hand to her chest as if to say oh, me? She was fun, Jena, and the rest of the feast passed in a whirl of soft colors and easy talk and rich food. He lost track of his brother, and tried to think little of it.

The attempt, as always, failed. The night shifted into the hour of ghosts, and like ghosts the guests disappeared, off into the chambers of the Red Keep or back to their coaches, horses retrieved from the stables by yawning young boys. Jena was fetched by one of her ladies in waiting, the girls fluttering off together with a wine-helped laugh, and Baelor was left alone to wander the halls, knowing the secret passages and corridors so well that he came across no one he did not wish to. Something was shifting within him, and he needed to sort it out before it solidified, made itself real, made itself a part of him. He imagined a black bolt, a scorpion, whistling through the air, piercing through his heart. Buried but not dead, he felt, and decided it was enough. 

 

He found Maekar later, tucked into an alcove with the same girl, the bright shine of her hair a curtain to hide their faces as they talked quietly. The girl had noticed him and stood first, Maekar unfolding to stand beside her. Unrushed and courteous, she gave Baelor a short bow, and then glanced back at Maekar. Again, Baelor did not see either one smile, but something passed between them; they shared a nod, and then the girl was disappearing down the hallway in a flash of silks. 

Baelor and Maekar stood in the wake of that passage, each silent, in his own thoughts. 

“She’s pretty,” Baelor said finally, and turned to grin at Maekar. “How did you manage that?”

“Fuck off.” Maekar looked away, but not quick enough. Baelor saw easily that he’d gone quite red in the face.

“She’s Dornish, too,” Baelor felt his smile stretch, and he hooked an arm around Maekar’s shoulders, teasing. “Mother would like the match.”

“Fuck off,” Maekar huffed, eloquent as ever. Still, he did not try to wrest himself from under Baelor’s arm, and instead tucked himself into his shoulder. Baelor held tighter; under the dirt, his buried heart shifted.

“It’s a good thing, Maekar,” Baelor said, sounding genuine this time. While his brother didn’t say anything in return, he had agreed with a little tilt of his head, and when he left Baelor to find his chambers his fingers had been mindlessly tapping the beat of a dancing song against his thigh.

In his own chambers, Baelor had forced himself to press his hot forehead against the cool glass of the window, unseeing eyes gazing into the city of King’s Landing below. What had passed between them, his brother and that girl, in a silent, unsmiling stare? What had happened the moment they’d stood, hand in hand, to join the dance? He didn’t know, and he couldn’t ask. There was an unspoken void between him and his brother; like Valyria, it burned with unknowns. Maybe monsters lurked in the depths. Perhaps salvation. Either way, it was a mystery. 

 

When he awoke the next morning, it was off the wings of a dream in which the hall had been empty but the music still played, and Maekar, dressed fine in layers of black upon red upon black, had come to him with hands open and half a question on his grim face. 

A dream could be denied, he told himself, and not for the first time. The unconscious wandering of a sleeping mind, uncontrolled and unconcerned by waking morality, could be easily dismissed. But the same was not true for the thoughts that ran through Baelor’s head, taking up the space he was meant to use for politics and courtesies and law. When Baelor laid a hand on Maekar’s shoulder and he turned his face away while leaning his body into the touch; when Maekar pissed off some minor lord and then stood behind Baelor while he made the apologies, never quick enough to hide the self-satisfied glint in his eyes by the time Baelor looked to him; when it was quiet in the libraries of the Red Keep and they sat slumped together, pretending to study but really only breathing as one, existing as close as they could; those things took up Baelor’s mind, and sometimes it felt as though very little else fit in there. There were things he wanted and could not have, fresh desires flooding his veins only to find the arteries slit with the knife of reason. Baelor had found he could bleed. He could bleed a lot.

He had stupidly reached for Maekar, still half within the dream, only to realize his bed was his alone. They were getting too old for sharing, at least with each other, and if Baelor imagined anything through the slanting lines of dust dotted sun like images from another world, then it was for him and him alone to know. 

Expectations, Baelor thought. Duty. He dragged a hand across his face, pressed it to his chest, refused to move it further, and got out of bed. The tilts.

The day was bright and hot by the time he’d made it down to the staging area, the racket of metal on metal and hoof and heel on hard dirt enormous. From the wings of the arena, he could see out into the crowd gathered in the stands, rows upon rows of bright banners and finely woven dresses and fur stitched cloaks. When the first riders pranced out it was to a cheer like thunder. Baelor scanned the box in which his parents and brothers sat, and was mildly surprised to see his mother seated between his father and Maekar. His brother would not be squiring for him today– that dubious honor had gone to Jena’s little brother, a very excited young boy who fluttered around Baelor like a puppy– and that unhappy fact was obvious on his face. Maekar sat rigid with injustice, barely noticing the conversation Rhaegel attempted to make with him (and was quite adept at making and keeping up without him). 

Jena was there as well, behind his parents, seated with her own. Ever the perceptive girl, she noticed him and sent a small wave his way, a clever smile upon her lips. Next to her, to Baelor’s surprise, was the girl Maekar had been dancing with the night before; both were wearing shades of lilac and lavender, and shining with jewels that winked in the sun. Jena leaned to the girl to whisper something, and then she too was watching Baelor. She tilted her head, and Baelor thought of a hawk.

The deep bellow of a horn sounded, drawing his attention away, and the first of the day's jousts began, a wild crash of horse and man and lance. The lists were seeded so that he would not be participating until later in the day, until only the proven were able to stand against him, and he spent the time watching, waiting to see who would fall and who would prevail. A hedge knight got far into the tournament before being felled by a Lannister, and the Baratheon boy showed similar promise once he’d manage to unhorse his opponent after three broken lances. One tilt had the men Beesbury and Mormont break nine against each other before the tenth saw them sprawled in the mud; both had managed to stand, but only the Mormont man kept his feet after striking true with his massive battleaxe. A squire had painstakingly dragged the Beesbury knight unconscious from the field while the crowd surged in approval, cheering as the ax was hefted and displayed in victory.

Several knights had favors tied or slung around the hard wood of their weapons, and Baelor thought his father would like it if he asked for Jena’s. He was turning the idea over in his mind when a laugh, loud and hearty, cut through the noise of the day to reach him, and he pulled his horse further out into the arena to see what had happened. 

It was the Baratheon knight, a young man with a wide grin and wild eyes and a ridiculous crown of stag antlers upon his helm, pushing his lance into the king’s box and asking for Maekar’s favor as if he were a princess with a laurel in her lap. Everything turned shades of red; Baelor’s vision, Maekar’s face. Myriah held her composure better, but seeing her there next to his brother with the same indignation screwed into their brows lit something in Baelor he could not immediately identify– it was like rage, only colder, as sharp and icy as the tip of a nocked iron arrow. Baratheon saw it too. Below, in the mud, the stag merely laughed again, as though they had proved his point; mother and son, alike and unalike in more ways than one. Something Baelor loved about them, demeaned and brought low. 

It was a foolish jest, Baelor told himself, every muscle tensing. A stupid, idiodic thing to do. It meant nothing. Even so, he pushed his horse further into the arena, and caught the boy’s eye with his own. He could not know the look on his own face, but Baratheon, incredibly, grinned wider upon seeing it, and leveled his lance in a challenge. There was nothing to do but accept.

It was not, perhaps, the fairest of fights. He had several years on Baratheon, better training and more experience. The stag fell from his horse after two passes, landing in the dirt with a loud thud and a louder laugh. Baelor hadn’t seen it; instead, he’d looked up to see Maekar standing, hands clutching the wooden ledge of the stands, something wild and fierce in his eyes. 

That look alone had set Baelor’s blood on fire, and it came as a surprise to him when, several heart pounding runs later, he had been declared the victor. He hazily remarked that Jena Dondarrion would be his queen of love and beauty, and in the celebration that followed he remembered very little but the fact that she had patted his face and kissed his cheek while the scent of the flowers crowning her red braids overwhelmed him. 

Again, after the day had finished, he’d been forced to seek out Maekar, who had hidden himself away from the crowd filing into the feasting hall as soon as possible, an impoliteness that even Myriah would not blame him for. Baelor certainly didn’t. He’d left Jena rather unceremoniously with her ladies in waiting after a perfunctory few courses and walked past Maekar’s dancing partner on his way out the door without a proper introduction, a decision he would not be able to defend but would hold to anyways.

He had found his brother in the gardens, tucked into the roots of an old tree as the night deepened around him, relieved only by the occasional firefly. He and Maekar and Rhaegel used to play here, Baelor remembered fondly, and it was strange to see the boy so changed from those bright summer days. Now he was wrapped in his cloak, shoulders hunched, white-knuckled around the lined fabric. His eyes burned, and he turned his face away when Baelor approached, hands raised as though in surrender.

“You missed a fine meal,” he had said, as if common conversation would change his brother’s mood. 

“You missed striking Baratheon down,” Maekar retorted. 

“Merely prolonging his shame, of course,” Baelor said, glad he was the better liar of the two of them. Maekar huffed in disbelief anyways.

Silence stood for a moment, and Baelor took it to sit down, steadying himself with a hand to Maekar’s shoulder before crushing himself between the roots of the tree and his brother. It was not an easy fit anymore; there was so much they were outgrowing of late. Maekar leaned into him, and they jostled at the knee and shoulder, each chasing a more comfortable position that might also land an elbow in his brother’s side. They managed to settle, and then sat staring out into the star studded night as the sounds of the garden and the far off workings of the Red Keep echoed like figments from a dream. Baelor casually twisted one of his rings. Maekar continued to train his eye outwards, away, only able to accept a small tenderness like this closeness if it was shrouded with indirectness. He would hit Baelor before he would willingly hug him, and Baelor had long since resolved to take it.

“It was a foolish thing to do,” Baelor ventured after a while when it became obvious Maekar would not speak. “But you mustn't give in to goading like that. Everyone will know soon enough what you’re capable of.” It was true. Maekar had all the trappings of a fine warrior, deadly on and off the tilt.

Maekar only shook his head. “Obiviously,” he muttered, uncaring. 

Baelor felt his eyebrows draw up; evidently, he’d guessed wrong at what caused his brother’s wrath. If it was not a matter of worth, then what?

Maekar would not force him to guess.

“If I had a favor,” he had said suddenly, turning to Baelor for the first time with eyes as dark and violet as fresh bruises, “it would be yours. And that idiot reeked of rotting venison.” He pushed himself up, remembering to shove harmlessly at Baelor’s chest as he did so, and stalked away, leaving Baelor there with nothing but his beating heart. 

Everything Baelor had painstakingly boxed in his chest promptly unfolded, demanding acknowledgement. It’s a good thing, he had told Maekar the night before. It would be yours was a better thing. It fed the dragon that lived in his gut. 

The beast was starved; it wanted blood, and Baelor gave it scraps, half of a heartbeat or a cautiously unraveled thought. Hunger reared its heads, guiding Baelor’s eye and mind, clawing for glimpses of thin skin under the unbuttoned collar of a shirt, greedily swallowing the memory of weapons clashing hard enough to send shivers deep into bone. His brother, with his white Targaryen hair and violet eyes and raw strength, his sharp teeth and sharper words, his iron will and hard stares. 

It’s wrong, Baelor thought often, alone in his study, poring over treaties and petitions. It’s the only thing that feels right, the dragon replied, hanging on his back, watching from his shoulder as he stood deep in the Kingswood, listening to Maekar whistle through his teeth to recall his hawk, arm held to the wind.  

Knowing is enough, he had told himself, half aware of the lie. Having is for fools. Not kings. 

Kings had responsibilities, to their kingdom and to their people, most of all. Peace in the realm, a queen to govern, an heir to pass the torch to; these were the things Baelor ought to desire, and he did, in a way. He spent long nights awake, thinking of it: sitting the Iron Throne, hand raised to pass his justice. He would have the power to do something good. But every thought he had of progress was shadowed by a dark sister, an echo of the past, a taut line of blood stretching from before the conquer to him, pooling and then bled from his veins unspent. Need and want, he had come to find, were separate animals. Like comparing a lizard to a dragon. There were similarities to be sure, but only one could breathe fire. Only one could rent flesh, destroy a man whole. Need pushed him, in his lessons, in the training yard, in the long, exhausting hours spent in court. Want, consumed him, so strong he felt as though he could bend the whole world to his will; desire to reach, to hold, to have warping everything he touched.

A king belonged to his people, but in this one selfishness he would hope to indulge, because it was not his secret alone. Not his desire alone. He would catch Maekar’s eye across the table or while riding through the woods or standing on opposite sides of a circle of droll conversation between lords and Baelor would know that they’d both rather be anywhere else, no matter what their duties may ask of them. Just a moon’s turn ago Maekar had woken Baelor up in the middle of the night, sneaking into his room through their old passageways. They had crept out of the castle and down to the cliffs of the sea below, where the tide had come in and the small coves and sloped valleys of sand hid the fact that two young princes had stripped down to their smallclothes to swim in the ocean, roughhousing and contesting the length they could hold their breath and diving beneath waves that shone black in the night. They’d lain prone in the sand after, exhausted, and Baelor had watched the water run off his brother’s back, pale skin white in the moonlight. Maekar had turned his face away, tucked into folded arms. The wings of his shoulders jut out slightly, and Baelor imagined thin bones like fingers tearing free of the flesh, growing, stretching out into the night, translucent skin taut between them. He’d reached out, possessed, and placed his hand there, palm aligning with spine, and Maekar had sighed, a low, tired sound. His brother, a sleeping dragon he could not let lie. 

And now here they were, wandering the hillsides, the weight of the future bearing down on them. Maybe one day, when Baelor’s hands were not tied, their lives would be their own to live. He didn’t have that power yet, but a time would come when Baelor would be able to shape the kingdom with the tilt of his hand, and he could make it safe for them to do as they pleased. Was it not in a king’s power to conquer? To have? Knowing would not always be enough. 

He would not set in motion something he could not restrain himself from, not while his climb to the throne remained unfinished. In the meantime, he must content himself with dreams, with the vivid flashes of a future with Maekar always at his side, dark brass pinned to his shoulder to mark him as Baelor’s own. 

The wind picked up, cold off of the sea, and he heard once more trod of hooves, the swaying of grass. Maekar had fallen behind a few paces, and Baelor turned his head to find his brother already staring at him. Caught, Maekar looked away, his already wind-chapped face turning a darker shade of red, a harsh line appearing on his brow. Not enough, Baelor decided, letting the slower horse pass him to set the pace, allowing his eyes to flicker over the line of his brother’s shoulders and think of wings. 

Their day would come, and if he had to make it so himself he would. Expectations, duty. They had their price, and it was patience. Baelor would gladly pay it.

Somewhere, someday. But not yet. 

In the meantime, he leaned back in the saddle, eyes closed to the evening wind, letting his horse trot behind Maekar’s. Doing nothing, thinking of somewhere, someday, bright and hot as the sun setting next to them. Baelor shuttered his mind to it. He turned his eye instead to the cliff edge and wondered what it would be like to ride a dragon; to look across the open skies and find his brother there, too. 

iii. what resembles rage

 

It was a violently bright summer morning, and the tourney in King’s Landing to mark one hundred and ninety years since Aegon’s Conquest was a thing both so splendid and overrun with knights and maids and lords and smallfolk (not to mention the merchants, artisans, musicians, pickpockets, and prostitutes who appeared at every gathering of people with coin to spend) that Baelor felt, for the first time in his life, as overwhelmed as King’s Landing was populated. The tourney would not merely celebrate the Conqueror, either: on the morrow, Lady Dyanna of House Dayne would be married to Maekar Targaryen.

With his own wife Jena in attendance, Baelor had been looking forward to a day of knights and jousting followed by his youngest brother’s wedding; everything, he figured, would finally be sliding into place, the rest of their lives locked into a decided (and therefore maneuverable) fate. Now that it had arrived, however, an ill wind seemed to nip at his heels. It was not the pure wind of the world, but a wind like that born from the wings of a dragon, cold and unyielding. 

He’d dreamt, the night before, a writhing confusion of skin and scale and dark bone, and come awake panting and drenched with his own sweat. He could trace the origins easily enough. A recent hunt had given him a strange sight: two snakes, fangs sinking into flesh as their long bodies wrapped each other in their own death throes. Small snakes, deep green in color and skinny as cord whips, there in the grass under the hooves of his horse, so curled together that seeing them at all had been miraculous. He’d stared, transfixed, before moving on. Apparently, the snakes had lingered in his memory anyways. Better to dream of snakes than teeth and hands and blood on a day like this.

Under the heavy rays of the hot sun, pressed down by the sounds of the awaiting crowd, Baelor stood with his horse, a blood bay outfitted in black steel armor that matched Baelor’s; an ornate dragon graced his helm while wings lifted from the horse’s chanfron. He ran his hand one final time along the animal’s flank, murmuring encouragement, slipping her a slice of apple to chew on while the crowd roared again. The sound made Baelor signal his squire, and the boy waited, lance in hand, while Baelor hooked his foot into the stirrup and mounted up. He thanked the boy, shut the helm’s visor, and prodded the horse forward into the blazing white sun. 

If they had been roaring before, the crowd was infinitely louder now as he allowed his horse to prance into the arena, making a good show without flaunting. He could see the box in which his parents sat; Daeron and Myriah, elbows and heads bent together. Jena sat beside them now, and even from here he could see the bright shine of her eyes, the sharp flash of her smile, the braided twists of her red hair. Rhaegel had personally enforced Aerys’s own attendance, and the two of them acknowledged his arrival, simultaneously different. Rhaegel waved, a big gesture that used his entire arm, while Aerys tilted his head forward, invested, for once, in something that was not his books. 

Below them, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees, face cradled in her palms, was Dyanna Dayne. She was usually more composed, he thought, and let himself stare knowing that she would not see him; her eyes, as usual, were only for his brother, still in the shadows of the other side of the arena. He thought back to a few days earlier, when Maekar had presented her to him upon the Dayne's arrival to King’s Landing.

“It’s good to truly meet you,” Baelor had told her, eyes flicking from his brother to the girl in front of him. His only thought was that she had not changed much over the years– long, dark hair, big, wide eyes. Unsmiling, but carrying the ghost of one upon her lips, like it was waiting to unfold for someone who had earned it. She was mysterious and unyielding, and Baelor got nothing from her.

“You as well, Your Grace,” she had replied. “Although I will admit, I feel I know you already.” She had glanced at Maekar, who looked back, and Baelor, feeling cold, was cut from their silent conversation entirely. 

That had not been well. He’d asked Jena later what she made of it, but she’d only shrugged. “He can’t be your little brother forever,” she said, easily, plainly, as if it were the simplest thing in the world. She’d been looking out the window of her borrowed room as she spoke, staring into the mists of night haunting the red face of the Keep, other things on her mind that her husband’s brother, and Baelor had resolved to keep his doubt to a single sigh and an indulgent slump in his chair.

He was not slumping now. Nor doubting. Being with Maekar had a way of making things clear as the day was bright, and when his brother finally pulled his horse into the arena, sun alighting on his dark armor like living flame, it was like a calmness had descended upon the world. This was about them. No one else.

Maekar, on the other side of the long, muddy track, swung into his horse. His squire handed him a lance, and Baelor watched as he tested the weight of it in his hand. 

“You’ll do well,” he had said to Maekar earlier that morning, leaning in close, gripping one dark pauldron and shaking him as if to emphasize the point as they stood in the shadow of the armory. “None of them stand a chance.”

Maekar had yanked his shoulder out from under Baelor’s hand with a muttered curse, prematurely jamming his helm over his head. Even now his temperament was clear, his horse stamping its feet, tossing its head as Maekar pulled at the reins. He really was in a terrible mood, Baelor thought, and decided it was for the better. Anger had always been Maekar’s gift, for good or evil. In the end it did not matter; Baelor had been right. None of the other knights had stood a chance, and the competition had whittled down to two princes and eighty yards of ruined, trampled mud. 

Across that terrain, Maekar steadied his horse, signaling his readiness with a tip of his head. His armor was a deep black, three-headed dragon detailed in red across his chest. Small wings flew from his helm while large spikes crawled across his shoulders and down his back, cruelly sharp and dragonlike. His hair had been cut short sometime in the past year, and now white locks curling with sweat stuck out from the eye slit of his helm, which was still splattered with blood from an earlier bout that had ended with his mace at the Baratheon knight’s throat as he yielded with a laugh. Even at a distance, Maekar’s shadowed eyes glinted, pale and bright, and Baelor felt the thrum of anticipation low in his stomach as both brothers wheeled their horses around the tilt, positioning on opposite sides of the barrier. 

Baelor stared him down, feeling Maekar’s return look like a physical press, like a body sunk into mud. The crowd held its breath. There was complete stillness. 

The deep bellow of a horn sounded, and they took flight. Heels dug into flanks, lances tucked and aimed with precision. A crash of noise erupted as the onlookers cheered and stamped their feet, men and women screaming for blood. The horses raced down the track, closer, closer, closer. 

Baelor saw the dragonfire in his brother’s eyes (closer, closer!) and knew that Maekar meant to destroy him. It was exhilarating– no, it was more, it was everything, the world narrowed to a single purpose, the destruction of their bodies against one another. Baelor leveled his lance, all his focus on the glint of dark plate barreling towards him. Come on, he thought, the pounding of hooves in time with his beating heart. Come on, come on, hit me. 

Maekar hit him, his tourney lance breaking off Baelor’s shield and splintering into a thousand needles, same as Baelor’s against his, already screaming at his squire for another as they charged to opposite ends of the tilt. Baelor threw down his broken lance and caught the new one thrown to him, spurring his horse, no time between the first run and the next. They were perfectly matched as the horses sprinted down the track, mud flying, closer, closer, shattering wood flying as they broke lances once more. They circled the tilt like carrion birds, thinking only of the sweet taste of raw flesh straight from the bone. New lances, another splintering, around they went. Like sparring, like dancing, they spun in a whirl of wood and steel.

The lances broke; again, again, again. 

Baelor rounded the tilt, hearing only his breath exiting sharply from his lungs. The crowd, the world, even his labored horse, everything has slowly dimmed as he’d pressed onward, and now it was gone. It was him and Maekar out here, alone but for the weapons they held. He dug his heel into the side of his horse, and charged.

Across the way, Maekar copied him, mirror images racing down the track. Impossibly, the world narrowed further, down to the single point in which he meant to strike armor and take the day; Baelor Breakspear, he was called, and so he would. 

At the last moment, the reflection broke. Maekar shifted his lance with ten, seven, five, meters to go, the end lifting up. Baelor saw it all at once, but too late. His eyes widened, grip tightening.

Both lances struck true. Wood shattered like glass, falling like black rain. 

There was a sound like shredding metal; a noise like thunder. A scream, faint and high. Then there was nothing but darkness.

 

When Baelor woke, it was to a lighter darkness; a living one. For a few brief moments, his memory was murky and fluid until a single deep breath put him back to rights, the past hours (days? weeks? no, hours) slamming back in a distorted jumble with all the force of a well placed lance. Baelor would know. 

He attempted to sit, but his head tilted and the world went with it. He groaned, flopping back into the cot in a manner that did not befit a prince, and pressed the heels of his palms to his eyes. 

“Peace, Your Grace,” came a soft voice, and Baelor pulled back his hands, surprised. Dyanna Dayne swam into view. She was still in the gown she had been wearing in the king’s box, colored a light silken lilac, so he couldn’t be too badly injured if the day had not yet passed. He was tucked into a cot in one of the infirmaries of the lower levels of the Red Keep, and the light came from a single slit of a window far above both their heads, allowing everything in the room but the two of them to fade into shadow.

“Dyanna,” he said. “What’s happened? Why are you here?” Not his most polite response, but he could blame it on the ringing between his ears. He blinked, hard, and tried to settle his body into something manageable. 

“At the behest of your brother. He asked me to check on you.”

“I’m fine, of course. Maekar, is he well?” All Baelor could remember were flying splinters of wood, a deafening sound, the sun like hot iron.

Dyanna nodded, a small tilt of her head. “Yes, Your Grace.”

Baelor waited. No additional response came. Instead, the girl held his eyes, looking for something he could not determine, and he was forced to tamp down on the sudden fire that flared within him. Who was she to withhold information about his brother from him?

“Where is he, then?”

“With the maesters. You struck each other off your horses, but only you didn’t get up.”

Baelor winced to think of it, but pride began to glow in his chest along with the pain. He was not so mature that he’d let a chance to say I told you so pass him by. Taking inventory of his injuries was another matter. He could feel bruising all along the left side of his body, smell the cloying evidence of the maester’s intervention, and when he pressed a hand to his temple he found a row of even stitching.

“I’ve seen men in worse states,” Dyanna said, and Baelor looked to her. She cocked her head, adding, “I mean to say, I believe you’ll heal fine, Your Grace.”

Baelor studied her for a moment, and then smiled. “Yes, thank you. How does my brother fare, though? Better than me, I suppose.”

“He fell, same as you, but the lance hit his shield and not him. If I may be selfish, I am glad to say his face has been preserved.” A slight red tinge appeared on her own face, and for the first time she looked away from him. It was only for a moment, and then her wide eyes were back on him, clear and cool. “I do not mind getting married to a man who bears a wound he’s won– in fact, I welcome it– but I’m partial to his face.”

“Of course,” Baelor agreed. It was easy enough, but the idea put him on a darker line of thinking, and as the silence held, Baelor found he wanted nothing more than to leave this room and find his brother, see the look on his face when he told Baelor he had won the day. 

“He wept,” Dyanna said suddenly, as if she were testing Baelor; her voice held a note of tightly restrained curiosity. “When he saw what he had done to you. I could not stop him, he was determined to find you after they took you from the tilt. He would be here still if your mother and the maester hadn’t put a bit of sense into him.” She sighed, and Baelor wondered at it— her intention and the possibility that his brother had actually cried. Maekar was quick to anger and easy to frustrate but rarely had he let those furious tears fall; Baelor couldn’t remember seeing him in such a state after perhaps his twelfth name day. Had he let go of that out of regret for Baelor’s injury, or because it had been Dyanna with him? Was she lying to provoke some sort of response from him? He didn’t know which would be worse. 

Dyanna spoke again, pulling him from his thoughts. “If I may, Your Grace, I am to be a part of your family, but I do not know, or maybe do not understand, its inner workings. He would not wish it said, but your brother loves you dearly—” Baelor’s heart dropped, painfully, as Dyanna continued, “—and any true harm caused today is unintentional. I can see it, but to everyone else it seems like he stands in your shadow with a knife prepared for your back.”

Baelor tried to laugh; his bruised chest turned it into a croak. Maekar was the shadow behind Baelor, and it was more than like he had a knife or two on him, it was true. 

“He’s always been like that,” he admitted, unwilling to impart the true depth of the emotion. 

“And it seems you’ve always let him be,” she said, and the words were gentle but unkind. “Your little shadow. He sometimes speaks like you do it all on purpose, to torment him, but he doesn’t actually believe it. I do.”

“You think me so callous?” He could not hide the surprise in his voice. The anger was better masked. He would say something of that nature? To her? Then, a worse thought: did he mean it?

“Not callous, Your Grace. I simply think you like having your brother around.” She stopped, waiting for a reaction. He gave her none. “Which I can understand. But it is not a shared sentiment. When the lords and ladies speak of Maekar it’s always polite but never kind, and they are never quite so quiet about it. No one ever opposes it, either. If I hadn’t known him beforehand, I would have thought the marriage a death sentence.” She paused, considering, and then seemed resigned to continue. “My own relationship with my older sister was not well. Forgive me if I spare you the details, Your Grace, but surely you can imagine how well a child’s petty quarrel can last,” Dyanna laughed, the sound humorless. “When she left our home several years ago to be married, we were in such a rage with each other that I refused to see her off, and that was a terrible thing. The Stranger came for her and her newborn not six months later.”

“I’m sorry,” Baelor said honestly. He reached for her hand, but she pulled away.

“I’m not telling you this so you can be sorry,” she replied. “I’m telling you because I love your brother, and do not wish the same fate for the two of you that I now face. I was a terrible sister, and now I can never make it right again.” Stars briefly shone in her eyes, winking out as she blinked them back.

Baelor stared at her, uncomprehending. Maybe she was not the level-headed girl he had initially perceived. There was no hate between him and his brother like she was describing, no dislike that had them at odds. When Baelor had left for Dragonstone a year earlier he had done so after bestowing a kiss to his brother’s forehead and a new dagger to his palm, and while the distance had been hard (impossible sometimes, like a moon bereft of tides), it wasn’t like Maekar had not taken ship every couple months, towing Rhaegel along with him. A raven could make the distance between King’s Landing and Dragonstone in a matter of hours, and there had been no shortage of birds to make the crossing. With Maekar married, he could continue at the Red Keep or even come to Dragonstone, as Baelor hoped, after the marriage was settled. Dyanna and Jena got along, and now, perhaps, they could be something for each other that they had thought lost. It all seemed to fit so well. Somewhere, someday, the dragon whispered. Soon.

“I appreciate your concern,” he said to Dyanna, “but I do not think the situation is so dire. Maekar will be glad to have won once he knows I’m well, and tomorrow will be a good day for all of us. You especially,” he added gently, hoping it would soften the correction.

“Yes,” she agreed, but a crease had formed in her brow. “Tomorrow will be nice but after that…”

Baelor waited as she pulled her lip between her teeth, hesitating, and realization struck. Dyanna knew something he didn’t; then she caught his expression, and now she knew he didn’t know. She seemed to steel herself, shoulders drawing back.

“Your Grace, your brother and I are leaving. Your lady mother informed me earlier today, while the two of you waited for the match–”

“Leaving? Baelor interrupted, forcing himself up. His head pounded, not only from the lance strike, and the shift had put the line of white sun directly into his eyes.

“Yes, to Summerhall, in the Stormlands. On the morrow, after the ceremony.” Dyanna tilted her head, and the sun receded into a halo around her. “Were you not aware?”

She was being sincere; it burned anyways. 

“No,” he said lightly. “I wasn’t.”

“I see.” Baelor wondered if she did. “In any case, if it matters, Your Grace, your brother will want to see you before we go. Please, give him something that I cannot give to my sister now. He needs to know. If you’ll excuse me, I must attend to him.” Dyanna rose and gave Baelor a curtsy, and then turned to leave, a graceful flow of skirts in her wake. The sun was in his eyes again.

Baelor shifted back into the bed, into the shadow. If it matters. He would scoff if it didn’t hurt so badly. He needs to know.

But what more was there to know? They had always been on the same page, understood the same things. Maekar was like him, and not, and he was like Maekar, and not. They balanced each other, the sharp blade and the well-crafted hilt of a knife resting on a calloused finger.

Maybe he could speak with their father, tell him he wanted them for Dragonstone, for his own household, at least until he was made Hand. Surely Daeron would accept; there was no reason not to. Summerhall was leagues away, practically in Dorne— not, Baelor decided, an ideal somewhere. Let Aerys have Summerhall, or Rhaegel, whether it was filled with books or music did not matter. What mattered was having his brother with him.

He slept a while after that, letting the sun fade behind the window, dipping to hide from him and turning the room cooler, less comfortable. By the time he awoke the evidence of another person’s coming and going was clear by his changed blankets and rebandaged wounds, but aside from that the whole castle seemed quiet and remote and deserted. It was the hour of ghosts, he decided, if only because it felt right in this hollow, echoing rock of a room. 

With a pained groan, Baelor swung out of the bed, wincing as his bare feet touched the cold stone floor. Finding his balance took a minute, and with one hand braced against the wall he stood until his head stabilized to a level he was satisfied with, just enough so that he could start making his way to his own bed, or Maekar’s, whichever he could find first. He had little doubt his brother would also be seeking him out eventually; might as well make it easy for him. 

On his way out of the room, he managed to catch his face in a wall-hanging mirror. Both eyes had been bruised and blackened, and while his nose had been spared from breaking it was tender and raw to the touch. Strange, it was, to feel proud of it, of the fact that it was Maekar that had done it. He moved past the mirror, out of the medical ward and further into the castle, intending to find his brother, walking on stilted, uncooperative legs through overlong halls and endless staircases before a commotion had him first turning his head, and then scooting into a corridor to hear better.

It was raised voices, coming from behind a closed door— Myriah’s apartments. Baelor slowed his steps to listen.

“— absolutely sickening,” someone was saying, and it took a second for Baelor to understand it was his mother. He had never heard her speak like this before, with such force and anger. He hadn’t known she was capable of it. “And in front of all the lords as well. It will be a miracle if that poor girl doesn’t flee in the night.”

“Mother, please,” Markar interjected, but with no success, and that surprised Baelor too. Since when did Maekar not fight back, tooth and nail? 

“No,” Myriah said. “No. You have gone too far this time. Your brother may not see it, but I do. Everyone does. Your obsession is out of control.”

“Obsession?” Maekar echoed, voice croaking like a raven, but even as he spoke Myriah continued her assault.

“I have spent years watching you covet your brother, and I cannot do it anymore. Do you understand? I cannot continue to have this conversation with you. I care not whether it’s his throne or him you’re after, neither are for you, and if you haven’t figured that out yet then you may well never.”

Baelor’s heart hammered in his chest, harder than he’d ever felt in his life. He pressed closer to the door, trying to be light on his feet so as not to alert the two inside. 

“– not true,” Maekar was insisting, a hard edge like steel present there in his voice. “You’ve got it wrong.”

“Some babes are born twisted, you know,” Myriah spoke over him. “Some Targaryens. Right from the womb, with scales and tails and horns. I used to pity those mothers, but no longer. At least they could see immediately what their children were.”

Silence. Baelor held his breath, wide eyed. 

Both voices began to speak again but they had dropped, too low for Baelor to hear anything but the cadence in which their fury ran its course. The sound evaporated completely, and Baelor had only a moment for realization to strike; he stepped back quickly just as the door swung open.

It was Maekar, blotches of red high on his cheekbones, wild and wary eyed as he registered Baelor and then brushed by him with nary a word. He had been cleaned of blood, but bruises had already started to form, dark and malignant, peeking out from under the loosened collar of his tunic. Baelor watched him stalk off, shoulders reaching uncomfortably towards his ears.

“I feel sorry for his wife,” a light, calm voice said, and Baelor turned to see Myriah in the doorway, arms crossed over her chest. “His temper is unbecoming.” Her tone changed from one of disappointed acceptance to sweet concern, and she asked, “Are you well?”

“Well enough,” Baelor said, head swimming. “What was that about?”

“Nothing for you to concern yourself with,” Myriah said, and laid a gentle hand on his arm. “I’ve handled it.”

“Is he alright?”

Myriah gave Baelor an odd glance. “Leave it be,” she said. “You should take your leave, get some rest.”

Baelor nodded, a halting motion that sent shivers of pain through his head, but his mother took no notice. She bid him goodnight and withdrew back into her rooms, shutting the door with a definitive thud. Baelor wavered, head adrift and legs unsure, before pushing himself away from the wall to start after Maekar. 

He felt restless, fidgety, his blood too hot for his body as he walked rigidly along, each step getting stronger as his legs remembered their purpose even as his head spun. Twisted babes, he thought, feeling sick. Covet your brother, the dragon reminded him, silent words as sharp as black teeth on his ear, and then his blood felt hot in an entirely different way. 

Had their mother been the driving wedge all along? Not rule or custom or taboo or even plain shame but the careless, or perhaps too careful, words from mother to son, splitting a sea’s length between him and his brother. He had known their mother was not overfond of Maekar or their close relationship, but never had he thought that she could see all the way through them, that she could cut them to the quick for it. 

The wheels of their lives— Dragonstone to Summerhall, he thought with a sudden and violent despair— were already set in motion, a churn of life unconcerned with the hearts of princes, and Baelor found he could not yield to it without a fight. He could accept Maekar’s turned face, his dismissals and harsh words and ambiguity when they came from the same place that originated Baelor’s own secrecy, all bent around timing and duty, but to think Maekar had been driven off by Myriah was intolerable. Not only for the fact that she had done it, but because Baelor had been unable to see it.

He had to find Maekar, find the truth of the matter. Baelor understood his brother, better than anyone ever had or ever would, and knew that Maekar would not say anything he did not want to unless he were raving with madness or near to death. Baelor would have to tread lightly. If, even then, Maekar proved to be uncooperative… 

Provoke him into anger, Baelor decided, rounding into a corridor and making for the door at the end. Just enough so that we can get what we want.

It was not quite the honorable thing to do, but he was out of options and time. Baelor would give his brother a chance, of course, but they needed to have this out one way or another. 

He knocked on the door. 

It opened after a moment, but only partially. Maekar glanced out at him, pale and raw, a faint red rim to his eyes. “Baelor,” he said, and his brow drew in. The door wobbled a moment, knob still in his hand, and then he was pulling it open and stepping aside to let Baelor through. “You look terrible.”

“Thanks to you, I hear,” Baelor said. He glanced around his brother’s room and was unsurprised to find it sparse. Maekar was usually tidy, but now everything held a look of abandonment, from the empty weapons rack tucked into the corner to the heavy wooden desk cleared of papers and correspondence. “Nice trick, going for my helm. I wouldn’t have guessed it from you.”

“You should have,” Maekar said, but it sounded less accusatory than the words implied. Baelor shrugged, a loose gesture, agreeing without saying it outright as he took a turn around the room, drawing the moment out. He could feel Maekar watching him, eyes like talons digging into his back.

“Are you prepared for what tomorrow will bring?” Baelor asked, stopping to look over Maekar’s desk, bare, dark wood marred by knicks and dried ink. He ran his hand over one such mark, feeling the slight give of the chipped wood under a fingernail as he pulled a splinter free, rolling it between two fingers before flicking it away.

“Obviously,” he heard Maekar reply, suspicion seeping into his voice. “Same as you were.”

Baelor turned to him, saw that he was still standing beside his door. “And your wife to be?”

After a beat, Maekar smiled, his reluctant full toothed grin. “She is as beautiful as she is kind, and as kind as she is cunning. She’s truly—” he stopped abruptly, and then dropped his eyes to the floor before saying, in a much more controlled tone, “I greatly enjoy her company. We’ll do well together.”

Baelor eyed his brother before agreeing. “Yes, she’s quite charming.” It was the easiest thing to say; it helped that it was true as well.

Maekar nodded, his affection obvious. Fair enough. The girl was all that he had said and more. It was not mere duty at play here; like Baelor, he had found a partner, someone to share the load, the responsibility of noble birth. It should not have troubled Baelor, but it did. He had always been there for Maekar– what more did his brother need? 

“And you’re sure you’ll be quite content with her?” Baelor laced the question with all the things he could not say. They had never been outright, never had to be, but something was different now. Once, while on a tour of King’s Landing’s localities with his father, he had watched as a butcher displayed his skill, shearing and skinning and flaying a sheep, the draw of the knife crossing pink flesh to pull the skin back and reveal the tender meat beneath. In his head he could imagine the same cuts he would make from his brother, and found he cared not to use words in place of the blade. But he was without a knife, so words must suffice. 

All his subtlety and implications only worked to anger his brother. He rounded on Baelor, brows drawn and jaw clenched so hard Baelor imagined he could hear the strain of muscle. “Speak plainly, I know you overheard,” Maekar hissed. “I have no need of your accusations, and if this has to do with our mother, I have no interest in hearing it.”

Baelor raised his hands, offering surrender. “If she was wroth with you after the tourney, it is forgiven by me. Do not think on it now.”

Maekar scoffed. “She has had nothing but contempt for me, and now I’ve scarred you.” His glance flashed to Baelor, the stitching along his temple. 

“Trivialities,” Baelor said, pressing his own fingers to the fine line of gutstring to prevent himself from laughing. “These things happen, she ought to know that.”

“She doesn’t. Not when it comes to you,” Maekar said, fists clenched, and Baelor stared at him until he calmed down, shoulders falling. Maekar took a breath, weak and rasping. “I cannot win, with her. If I’d lost today, it would shame me. And yet winning at the cost of your blood is no victory.”

“Part of the game,” Baelor said easily. “Did you think I don’t know that? Don’t enjoy it? It’s a victory, Maekar. Take it.”

“The way they all looked at me,” Maekar said, and suddenly he was far away, seeing a memory rather than Baelor’s face in front of him. “After I’d struck you. It was like you’d died, and I’d killed you.”

“I’m looking at you now,” Baelor said, and pressed his palm to his brother’s shoulder, close enough to his throat that Baelor could sink his thumb into the divot between bruised collarbones, the skin so thin he could feel the bone’s defined curve.

Maekar’s eyes flashed, and then he pulled away, out from under Baelor’s thumb. “You cannot keep talking around the matter, and you always defend her. She hates me, Baelor, she always has, and you refuse to see it. If you would at least acknowledge–”

“Mother wanted a daughter.” The words came from his mouth unbidden, and he felt something within him break to expose his mother’s unspoken sorrow; even worse, though, had been that look on Maekar’s face. He could not stand for it. “Before your birth, we thought you’d be a girl and I suppose it was hard on her when… when you were not. She does not hold it against you, Maekar, but it was a surprise, and one that I do not think would hurt so bad had she been able to carry another child. That’s all it is. Do not take it to heart.”

Maekar had stilled at his initial outburst, and now he stepped back, putting a heavy distance between them. His face was a blank slate, and he would not meet Baelor’s eyes, choosing instead to focus on the wall behind him.

“I cannot help what I am,” he said, voice heavy, as if the sentiment had been long thought over. 

“I know that, and so does she,” Baelor said, even as he wondered if it was true. His hand drifted towards his own wedding ring. “Perhaps a good-daughter will soften her to you.”

Maekar nodded, not in agreement but in acquiescence, and made no move to continue the conversation. Baelor spun his ring around his finger and stared out the window instead, waiting. If Maekar wanted to brood, he could brood.

He wondered, as he often did when looking at the empty sky, how it would feel to see a dragon riding high over the clouds. The flash of a shadow over the moon; the growing darkness between stars.

“And you?” Baelor turned back, surprised his brother had spoken so soon. “You said we,” Maekar added, his voice so flat a line it might have sounded from the plucked string of a badly tuned harp. “You wished for a sister as well?”

Despite asking himself the same question years earlier, Baelor found he still had no answer, even as he was confronted with the thought of it. It was spoken, and now there would be no taking it back. 

Did he wish Maekar as his sister? His own Alysanne, he used to think, as they slept curled together like dragonlings. But Maekar would not be the man Baelor knew without indeed being born male. There would have been no childhood rivalries, no swordplay in the yard, no hunting and hawking in the open fields, no squire and knight. 

Neither could he deny remembering that certain expectation, something that had burned into desire, and the later knowledge of his brother’s eyes on his back. He thought of Maekar dragging him out of the mud, pulling him aside when the feasts became tedious, handing him his lance, sleeping in his bed. It wasn’t a sister he wanted; it never had been. He was selfish, he wanted the rules to change. He wanted Maekar.

“No,” he said slowly, making it a certain thing. “I like you as you are.” Maekar turned away from him, but huffed an acknowledgement, and Baelor took a step closer. “Though it would have made things easier for you. For us.”

His brother, still turned away from him, grew rigid, shoulders drawing in. He shook his head, a tight, jerking motion. “Idiot. I know nothing of what you speak. You’ve lost your senses.”

“I haven’t,” Baelar said, speaking to Maekar the way Maekar spoke to his hawks. All he had to do was pull the hood. “It’s a matter of simplicity. All of this would be avoided had you been a woman. Even so, I must admit,” he added, voice dropping to almost a whisper, “if you had come to me, I would not have been able to deny you.”

Maekar stared at him, violet eyes wide, his scarred face pale and drawn as he shook his head. He took a step forward, towards Baelor, and the fingers of one hand spasmed minutely as if all his will had poured into enacting and then preventing his own movement. He seemed in paralysis, but Baelor knew he would not stay silent for long. His brother was not a man who held his opinions close.

“Do not act the fool, because you are not,” Baelor said in a rush, “I know your mind, and you know mine. I merely wish that we had the right, that there had been nothing in our way. You belong at my side, and I intend to see it done.”

“I do not understand,” Maekar lied, and even as he said it Baelor saw the initial shock melt into indignation. Maekar understood, and he simply wanted to act as if he did not. He could not understand why Maekar would deny him this. Myriah made sense, but Baelor himself? It had always been so obvious, so right; denial was a fruitless endeavor.

“Do you not?” Baelor came closer, glad that an inch still separated him from his brother’s height, forcing Maekar to look up. He pressed one hand low on his brother’s stomach, trailing it up, ghostlike, to rest once more at the base of his throat. His heart was a wild thing under Baelor’s palm. “Do you not see me here, now?”

“Your wife,” Maekar said, and he sounded nearly desperate now, as if there were a logical loophole he needed and could not find. Baelor didn’t bother hiding his laugh this time, even as the sound of it turned his brother’s face dark with fury. “Jena is far more interested in her ladies in waiting and her women’s courts than she is with me,” he admitted, although it was no great hardship. He did love her, and she was the kind of person who would make a good queen, a loving mother. They had set their own terms; he had no problem turning a blind eye to the long nights she spent in her own apartments with her girls. 

Maekar stared at him, in disbelief or rage. It could be difficult to tell with him. “You’re a fraud.”

“And you’re craven,” Baelor shrugged, knowing it would hurt more than any knife. Fraud, the dragon hissed in his ear, and Baelor waved it away like a bad tempered crow. Maekar always managed to cut him the deepest. He withdrew his hand and backed away to circle his brother slowly, every footfall a clear and precise sound, making sure Maekar was looking at him as he did so. He still stood rigid, a tremor barely hiding in his shoulder and spine.

“You would speak of this now,” he said after a long moment, dangerous in his anger. “Now, Baelor?”

“I have had no other time–”

“You have had sixteen years!” Maekar suddenly reached out, grabbing the front of Baelor’s jerkin and pulled him in close enough that he could feel the words as they hit his skin. “Sixteen years where I followed your every step, listened to your every word. I would– I would have–” he stopped suddenly, and pushed Baelor away, hard, hands curling into fists. He turned his back, retreating to the other side of the room where he paced like a dog in a kennel, back and forth.  

“All this time and you would lay this burden at my feet,” he hissed, still pacing. “Do not ask me to bear your sins for you.”

Sins. He could be so obnoxious. Men, brothers, what did it matter? They were Targaryens, exceptionalists by right. And for Dornish proclivities, they were absolved as well. Their blood ran testament. It was not Baelor's fault they had to bend to Westerosi sensibilities. Be secretive, not ashamed. “Really, Maekar. Is the history of either of our houses–”

“History? The fuck? I’m talking about you,” Maekar jabbed a finger at Baelor, and Baelor realized his hands were shaking with rage. “If this is a joke at my expense, you make a very poor fool. I’ll not embarrass myself at your hands again.”

“There is no jest,” Baelor said, and had to check himself; unconcealed heat and derision had colored his statement. He was losing control of the situation– what had been his purpose in the first place? Everything he had said had only furthered their divide. 

Maekar was already shaking his head, sneering, denying him even as he said the words. “I cannot believe you. This is some sick game you’re playing at– you’re mad for the tilt, for your embarrassment. You cannot stand to have me—"

“I could,” Baelor interrupted. “Although I’d rather not.” The flush that crept across Maekar’s face and neck and down to his bruised chest would, under any other circumstances, feed the dragon in totality. But these were not other circumstances. “There is no jest,” Baelor repeated, simple, careful. “I remember the day you were born. I loved you then, and every day since. Maekar, I loved you from the first.”

Silence. 

Then: a small, nearly inaudible crack. Maekar’s tooth, Baelor thought, detached. I told him that would happen. All his life had seemed to bleed out of him when he had spoken, and now he was exhausted. He and Maekar could only seem to break each other.

Maekar wiped his sleeve across his mouth. They both ignored it when the white stained to red.

“You say you know me, you know what I want, but you won’t give to me by rights what is yours to give or say what’s yours to say. Because it’s not quite… decent, now, is it?” Maekar’s voice was quiet, his face dark. “You can’t be anything but perfect. You won’t degrade yourself, but you’d ask me to.”

Fuck exhaustion. 

Claws sunk into Baelor’s back, a dragon with three heads. It whispered to him, and he obeyed.

He leapt, catching Maekar around the waist, pulling them both to the floor where they tussled like boys half their age. They rolled, each trying to gain control of the other, and it was no childhood game that gripped them— they wanted blood. Maekar smashed Baelor’s shoulder into the floor with a force that left him wheezing; Baelor struck an elbow to Maekar’s jaw, sick with his own satisfaction by the sharp click of teeth that followed. Blood flew. There is your decency, he thought, and when Maekar’s hands rushed to his own face Baelor took the break in the onslaught to roll his brother onto his back, pinning his arms with his own legs. Maekar stared up at him, furious. One of his knees came up to knock Baelor in the back, but all that managed to do was push Baelor forward, hands gripping his brother’s shoulders. 

It was too much— it wasn’t enough. Maekar’s split lip pulsed with blood, spreading over his face, down his neck, dark against white skin.

By rights yours to give… yours to say… Baelor’s mind whirled. The situation was devolving by the moment, every one worse than the last. He had to do something. 

Blood below the skin, blood spilt over it, both turning Maekar’s face shades of red. He was breathing hard, Baelor could feel it under his hands— every inhale, every exhale— and his eyes were wide with an unfolding storm. Heat lighting might crack there, violet and violent. 

I see you. Tell me you see me too. Tell me you felt it too, that it was both of us all along, that you knew I wanted you and you wanted me too. Baelor would not beg so, but the dragon had its claws in his back, heads lowered to whisper in his ear, teeth nipping at flesh. It is your right, by birth, he said so. Take it. 

But when he thought about it— and he had, Seven damn him, he had dreamed of it— it was intense and even violent but it was not like this. This was all wrong. He couldn’t start something he would be unable to stop, not now. He couldn’t think.

Maekar was still twisting under him, muttering curses; he wasn’t helping matters. Baelor slammed his shoulders down and then held him there, pressing his full weight down on his brother and watching as he gasped, winded. Blood glistened on his bottom lip, black in the darkness, and he went still. Everything seemed to.

“What are you going to do, Baelor,” Maekar whispered, voice hoarse and breathless. His hands gripped the back of Baelor’s thighs where they held Maekar’s arms above the elbow, his hips shifting when Baelor didn’t move. The storm in his eyes broke; they flashed with rage. “Do something.”

Baelor stared, overwhelmed. He couldn’t do anything; he cut his eyes away—

And felt his nose crunch.

“Fuck!” He threw himself off of Maekar, backing away on unsteady hands, feet kicking. 

He heard his brother take several deep breaths as the black spots in front of his eyes cleared, and then he saw that Maekar had Baelor’s blood swiped across his forehead from where he’d struck him. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“Me?” Maekar said, lip curling. “What’s wrong with me?”

Baelor touched his nose as carefully as he could and pain immediately ran through his head once again. Broken, for sure. “Yes, you. Don’t you understand–”

“I understand enough. If this is your love, it is scraps. I want none of it,” Maekar interrupted, voice hard, eyes glazed. 

“Then you’ll get none of it,” Baelor said, childishly, stupidly, hollow. His nose pulsed like a heart, and the feeling reverberated through his head; his mind drew back to that night they spent on the beach, and the way the ocean waves had stayed within him while he had laid in the sand, a gentle, consistent, endless rock. 

Maekar stared at him for a long moment before dropping his gaze and rolling over and up, one hand pressed to the wall to help himself stand. Having sprawled to the center of the room, Baelor had no such luck, and got unsteadily to his own feet, stumbling once as he righted himself. There was no hand to steady him, no shoulder to lean on. The meager distance between them seemed an eternity. A single beam of the moonlight came through a window to cut directly between them like a physical barrier, and behind that white light Maekar looked nothing so much like a ghost, pale in every aspect save for the blood on his face, his hands, his stained shirt. 

“This is not what I intended,” Baelor said into the emptiness. He knew it wasn't enough. 

Maekar hesitated, and then nodded. “You should go,” he said, and gestured to the door, the movement jerking a lock of bloodied hair into his face. He reached into the pocket of his tunic and pulled out a folded cloth, ivory in color and stitched with a deep lilac thread. “Here,” he said unkindly, stepping forward, hand passing through moonlight, and Baelor took it, pressing it to his bleeding nose even as Maekar prodded him out of his room, past the door. 

Baelor slipped into the hall, and heard the heavy door shut with a thud before he could even say goodnight. 

The lock clicked.

The sound registered, but only barely, and Baelor accepted it with a sigh, not having the strength for anything else. He pushed himself away from the door on legs that were sturdier than he felt, and turned to leave the corridor, return to his room, and commit every detail of the night to memory. It might be all that he had of his brother for a long, long time. He had been wrong, so wrong it was laughable. They had never danced around each other, thinking what if? what if? when? as he had always imagined. There had never been a somewhere, someday, not really. Instead, Baelor had led his brother like a wild dog on a line, and then cut him loose, expecting his love for free. But wild dogs do not beg for meat at the door; wild dogs snarl and bite and make corpses of men. Knowing is enough for now, he had told himself, over and over, but Maekar hadn’t known, and now there was nothing left to have.

Do something, Maekar had said, and Baelor had done nothing. He had done the right thing, or the wrong thing— the right thing felt wrong, and vice versa— but now it mattered not. Opportunity had passed him by like an osprey over the ocean, an effortless slide from a world in which everything unrealized was still possible to the reality of countless missed moments. The overlarge bed, the childhood garden, the rolling hills, the secret passages, the lonely coast; they held the ghosts of his longing now. Baelor sighed, and tasted blood that was not his own and yet belonged to him. 

The quiet shuffle of feet broke him out of his reverie, and Baelor looked up from his boots. His mother stood at the end of the hall, silhouetted by the full light of the moon streaming in through the window behind her. Baelor could not see her expression. He did not have to.

His footsteps echoed as he made his way to her, unable to look at her face, unwanting his fears to be realized. Even so, when she reached out to take hold of his arm as he tried to pass, he did not pull away. 

Myriah drew him closer, further into the moonlight, the hand on his arm pulling the cloth away from his ruined nose. “Did he do this to your face?” she whispered hoarsely. “Baelor, answer me. Now.”

Baelor turned to look at her, with her wide eyes and drawn brow. He saw his brother in her features. They were so alike. “He only returned what I gave him in kind.”

Those eyes narrowed, and he looked away, unable to bear neither her scorn nor her resemblance. “I’ll not have him at you like this,” she said after a moment. “He’s to be sent to Summerhall, after the marriage. Let him have his own court there, and we’ll not worry ourselves with… any of this.” 

“I know. And very well.” Baelor attempted to pull away, but she held him fast. 

“I love him just as much as you do, but it’s been long enough, Baelor. Let him go. You are not children anymore, neither of you. He doesn’t need you looking after him, and you do him no favors with indulgence.” She shook his arm gently, as if to better impart her words. 

When he remained quiet, the corners of her lips pulled down, a stubborn line appearing briefly on her brow. “I know you can see it as I do, Baelor, and I am sorry for my part in this. I never thought his heart would set in stone. I should have been harsher with him.”

Not his heart. Only mine.

Baelor closed his eyes, praying for the Seven to show him mercy. He wanted his room, and his bed, and the sleeping warmth of his wife. “Mother, please. It’s over. Leave it be.”

Myriah released him. She stared at him for a long, hard moment where Baelor could not look back. “Goodnight, son,” she said, and then slipped into the shadows. Baelor did not even hear her leave. Silence reigned. 

 

The wedding, of course, was beautiful. 

The sky was a solid, bright blue, the sun hanging high and warm at its zenith. A slight breeze ruffled the coats and dresses of the men and women in attendance and carried with it the clean scent of the ocean, and birds, coming home to roost for spring, flocked in the sky and along the sandy dunes, singing their airy songs.

The ceremony, a simple affair, was held along the coastal cliffs bordering King’s Landing and the Blackwater Bay, where long threads of pale thin grass grew in earnest. Flowers of lavender and spindling twists of green vines arced over the heads of the couple as the septon stood between them on a raised dais, speaking their vows for the congregation to hear. 

Dyanna, draped in silks of white and violet and dripping with jewels as varied and well wrought as nature’s seashells on the shore beyond, was a sight to behold with her long, dark curls and large eyes. A latticed veil had been pinned to her hair, and its long trail curled like dove’s wings around her shoulders all the way to the dais, where it fluttered in the wind. Maekar was outfitted with similar splendor, his own garments colored bone white and blood red in accordance with Valyrian custom. He stood tall, sea breeze catching short hair, with a look on his face Baelor had never seen him wear; for the first time, he understood that his brother was in love. Even the dark bruises along his jaw could not hide that.

From within ornate robes the septon pulled a small knife, black and bright like the night between stars. Speaking ritual words in High Valyrian, the septon pressed the driftwood hilt into Maekar’s hand and then stepped back, allowing the couple to proceed.

Baelor watched, unable to breathe, as Maekar raised the knife to Dyanna. He thought he saw his brother’s hand tremble, but it was not so; he gently cut a thin line down Dyanna’s bottom lip with the edge of the blade before handing it to her. She took his bruised face in one hand to steady him as she did the same, drawing a line on his lip with blood.

Baelor stared. How effortlessly she brought the blade down. How easily the broken skin split anew. 

I made him bleed first, Baelor thought, and cursed himself to all seven hells. 

He blindly grabbed for Jena’s hand, and was glad for the strength she gave him when she held tight. Thoughtlessly, he turned to look for his mother, finding her after a moment between his father and Dyanna’s mother a few seats down. She looked tired. She looked like a soldier who knew the battle was over but not whose army had won it. 

On the dais, Maekar sliced Dyanna’s palm, and she his; their joined hands were wrapped in white linen that weeped with mingled blood. When the septon pronounced them husband and wife, Maekar pressed his uncut hand to Dyanna’s face, said a few quiet words for her ears only, and kissed her.

The crowd, although small, cheered loud, and when, with hands still clasped, Maekar and Dyanna turned their blood stained faces to their friends and family, they shared twin smiles, wide and joyous and all their own.

Baelor heard nothing but wind, and saw nothing but small drops of red blood on dry, brittle grass.

 

iv. all hell and its fire waits for us

 

Red blood on grass, movement, a wave like the sea, smelling of rot.

The day was over; the year was over, but the year had happened in a day, or so it seemed to Baelor. He sat mounted upon his destrier in the midst of the spearmen, pain lacing through his shoulder, his sword clenched in a hand that could not let go, a hand on his sword that had been blessed seven ways that morning as he had stood with his head bowed low enough to respect the gods but not so much that he couldn’t see Maekar looking back at him, perhaps for the last time, as they and their men stood circled around a wizened septon, white palm raised over gray steel. May the Warrior grant you strength, he’d intoned, and Baelor had felt strong, had felt the weight of his brother’s gaze and held it tight like he held his sword. He owed him that much. 

That was then. Baelor flexed mailed knuckles over the leather grip, closed his eyes to the sound of screams. Which of the Seven will grant me time?

A year in a day. And all day, a year. 

The fight often felt that way; endless, with no beginning. It was a primal state of being, war, and it felt neither wrong nor right. It was simply a thing that had to happen, a stone on the path to a desired outcome. 

But that was the inside of the battle, and now, standing outside of it, all Baelor felt was a bone-dead exhaustion. He breathed out once, a hard sigh that sent all the air from his lungs, and opened his eyes. 

“Your Grace!” Ser Donnel hailed, red splattered cloak trailing behind him. Dark bruises and flecks of black blood spotted his face, but his eyes were alight with the adrenaline of war.

“What news?” Baelor called back, sliding down from his horse to genially clap the knight’s shoulder. It had been several months since he stopped reveling (and berating himself for reveling) in the fact that the horrors of war had nearly knocked him down to the level of a man. 

“The last of those sorry whelps are being run down by Lord Arryn’s van,” Donnel said, grinning with bloodied teeth. “I’m already hearing it was your brother that was leading them.”

Fierce pain, fiercer pride. “Can we expect to regroup soon? ”

“We’ve not lost hardly any of your spearmen and rallying them back to camp will be no hardship. The Stormlanders have taken harder losses but their training will not fail them now. As for the van, if Arryn has indeed ceded command to Prince Maekar I have little doubt they’ll already be on their way back. If I may, Your Grace,” he said soberly, “I believe we’ve just won a war.”

Baelor looked out upon his men, more of them than he had expected to see once the sun had turned to set, and beyond them the true carnage of the day, a once green field now slick with red and pockmarked with feathered arrow shafts, littered with the corpses of horses and men and blanketed by crows. “It’ll not end until Blackfyre is dead,” he said, but nodded in agreement. This was no clean triumph, but it was a decisive one. If the Pretender and his sons still lived, it would not be for long.

He dismissed Ser Donnel with instructions to organize an effort to round up their casualties, as well as to begin preparations to make their way back to their camp, some few miles south. Pitching tents on this red land seemed an ill omen, and Baelor had enough ill omens of late to last a lifetime. Instead, he focused his mind on the far off ridge to the west, imagining how Maekar would (would, he would, no uncertainty now) appear there soon with his men, a black spot of iron on the horizon. He thought of that silhouette, worried at it like a tongue worried the flesh around the empty socket where a tooth once resided; he daren’t touch the wet meat of the emptiness inside. His brother was alive, and he knew it because it was inconceivable to think he would not have felt the death blow, too. 

Fear not, he told himself. Maekar at his back with the knife– the sword, the morningstar, the mace. It mattered not. That is what he had always counted on. Maekar’s presence, right where Baelor knew and expected him to be, and they had marched like so this morning until the raven had landed on Baelor’s arm with a note scrawled in his uncle’s hand: Arryn disbanded. Pretender rallies from the east. Make haste. He had shown the slip of paper to Maekar, gauntlets scuffing in the passing of it, watching as his brother’s face darkened before looking back to him, steady and determined. 

The plan had been his; their split had been Maekar’s. Baelor saw the scope of the war, what action would have what reaction, reaching not only to the days to come but to the years that followed. Maekar saw only the enemy waiting in the path of his mace, surefire destruction.

“We need someone else to rally the vanguard,” he’d argued as they rode, lip curled in frustration as his horse trotted anxiously beneath him.

Want and need. It always came back, full circle. Baelor had groaned, because Maekar was right. They were good together, better than they had any right to be; to split was to risk it all, but split they did. Maekar had ridden off with his detachment, and when Baelor had arrived at the sullied field an hour later it was to banners flying a quartered dragons across the grass, joined with Arryn’s cerulean falcon, and a wall of shields so wide it might as well have dropped from the far North. 

Baelor did not relish war. But when he saw those distant dragons, red on black, knowing the only thing between himself and the man they represented was bastard meat and blood, everything became so fine and clear and purposeful he could laugh for joy. 

But that, of course, was then. Time, he prayed now, standing in the carnage, wishing he had a bit more of his namesake’s piety. Which of the Seven will grant me time?

 

The last major battle before the bloodbath at Redgrass Field was fought in some muddy riverbank stuck between the Trident and Maidenpool; the men, the horses, the flies, all smelling of death, so covered in mud that armor and banners alike had become indistinguishable. It was sloppy, every man standing in no less than a foot of water so dark with viscera it could be purely blood. 

Horses had fallen like stars, legs broken in the muck. Baelor lost his horse, then the horse of one of the Kingsguard, then Maekar’s horse when his brother abandoned it to fight on foot after that. His men could not see him, could not find him— two of his bannermen killed in the melee— so he screamed at runners to carry tactics by word of mouth, but the young men must have gotten lost in the chaos, for chaos was all that came of his orders. 

By the time the day had drawn to a close, sun setting red in the sky, it was less that Baelor claimed victory and more that the last men standing happened to be his men, his and Maekar’s, and Maekar was nowhere to be found. 

Everything hurt. The constant wet slog of the fight had taken its toll, and blood trickled from his split brow, his broken nose, from somewhere within his layers of armor. He hadn’t felt it; hadn’t been able to feel it, not while there were things left uncertain, bodies left unfound. He must have looked a fool, pushing through his men, only the barest acknowledgments to the ones he recognized. There would be time for that later. He always, always seemed to be searching for–

“Your Grace!” It was one of the knights, as dirty and crusted with mud as the rest of them, and he was calling for Baelor, who turned to him with as much difficulty as a trained hunting dog called off the scent of a bear it can taste on the air. “Your orders?”

Get the men out of here, all of them, as far away as possible from this godsdamned watery grave. Find my brother. Leave. Never look back. His head swam, and he fought to keep his steps from lurching.

“The injured first,” he called back to the waiting knight, struggling to get to him over the reeds and bodies still reaching for his heels. “Return them to camp immediately. The dead must wait.”

The knight— and Baelor nearly did not recognize him through the stained white armor but it was a man of the Kingsguard, Wylde—  had been nodding when his squire ran up to him, speaking in a rapid accented tenor that Baelor would have had trouble understanding even if he hadn’t been concussed. 

Wylde’s eyes had widened, then hardened, and then he had looked at Baelor so gravely that the unsteady tick of his mind jumped to its worst conclusions immediately. “First casualty report is in. Close to two thousand men. Your Grace…” he hesitated, less than a moment, but Baelor had heard it for what it was.

“My brother,” he said stupidly. It did not sound like the question it was. Everything was suddenly unraveling, falling apart in his hands. A horse screamed in its death; men died in the waste, final rebels cut down, drowning in mere inches of blood-run river. A dragonfly flew across Baelor’s vision to land on his temple, and he killed it there, between steel gauntlet and skin, leaving the wreck of it to join the rest of him. 

“They’ve found him, he’s with the other wounded,” Wylde said. The squire said something else, and Wylde added, “They need a maester.”

Baelor’s heart sank, and he looked around wildly for a runner or his squire or— a horse. Some clean lordling prancing about in the aftermath, having stayed behind the lines of his dying men, letting his horse pick through the desolation. Baelor hadn’t bothered to check his sigil. Instead he grabbed at the reins as the horse passed, drawing the man down to hear him, his voice low and dangerous.

“See the sun, there?” The lord’s head turned to see the last curve of the sun sinking over the treeline and nodded a silent yes. “If you can’t bring a maester to me before it’s gone, I’ll have your head on a pike. Understand?”

The man understood. He raced off, hollering whatever it is minor lords holler to get the attention of their thralls, and within moments a young boy, no older than perhaps six and ten, appeared through the crowd of iron and mail.

“Your Grace,” he called, hand raised, and Baelor took him by the arm to drag him along, ignoring how the boy shook. There would be time for niceties and politeness after his brother was saved.

Following the sound of Wylde’s voice, Baelor and his stumbling companion made their way to a section of the riverbank that had been cleared of dead men and debris, leaving only the rows of injured casualties being seen to by other soldiers trained in field medicine to supplant the lack of maesters on the front line. Mud and filth had turned them indistinguishable, but Baelor would know his brother in life or, gods forbidding, death. 

Maekar had been laid out, helm removed, his long hair no longer the fine silver-white Baelor knew and loved but dyed to wretched darkness, clotted with dirt and blood, the watery ground beneath him sending rivulets of it running over his face, which had also been tarnished past its natural paleness. Mottled bruises covered the left side of him from temple to jaw, both eyes beaten into dark, swollen circles. His nose, at least, had not been broken.

Maekar’s breathing was shallow, but his chest did rise and fall— that was the important thing. His black armor had been wrecked beyond anything Baelor had ever seen of him before; the iron had been destroyed under a thousand strikes, and two arrowheads were still embedded in the place above his heart. It was a terrible sight to behold. 

His right hand clenched, flexing; he’d lost his mace. There was no other movement besides; just the low breath, the fist tightening.

Baelor dropped to the ground, knees sinking deep into the mud. “Caution, if it pleases you, Your Grace,” the young maester said lightly— he had already taken action, kneeling at Maekar’s side to begin his ministrations— and Baelor considered the world of violence he could bring down on this poor idiot before coming to his senses and backing away slightly. 

Still, he’d had to fight for control of his voice. “What does he need? Tell me, and you’ll have it at once.”

“He needs to not get cut up so,” the maester said, and although his voice warbled he was carefully pulling the armor off, quick hands working the leather straps as easily as any squire. “I can stitch him here, but it won’t be all that clean. The risk of moving him is great, though, and I would recommend against it. Perhaps some water?”

Baelor, still kneeling in the flooded riverbank, heavy in waterlogged armor, stared. Then he sent his squire running, and the squire of Ser Wyld, too. Maekar had gone nearly silent by then, eyes heavily lidded, breath coming short and rasping and uneven. Baelor leaned over him, careful not to let water or blood drip and ignoring the protesting huff of the maester, and took his brother’s face in gauntleted hands, smearing blood and filth. 

“Maekar,” he said, and had been powerless to stop himself from giving his brother’s head a sharp shake. Maekar winced, pained, but the pain refocused him a little and he saw Baelor. He tried to speak, and nothing but air escaped his lips. Even so, Baelor saw the look in his eyes: an honest, terrible, unobstructed love. Love and relief, softening his features, showing sharp canines that matched Baelor’s own in a horrible, stained smile.

“I’ll kill you if you die,” Baelor said, hating that look, knowing Maekar would never show it of his own free will. Too open, too bare; the face of someone ready to slip from the world. If Baelor was a better man, he might tell Maekar to think of his wife and children, or even of Rhaegel who’d seen them off in tears when they had marched from King’s Landing. He was not a better man. He clutched his brother’s face, cold iron to reddened skin, and said, “You cannot leave me. I forbid it.”

The years since that bright, stark day when two kids were wed under the lavender and twisted vines burned away like thin kindling in dragonfire; whatever bruised and beaten animal residing in Baelor’s chest had awoken when he’d returned to King’s Landing and seen Maekar there, already dressed for a fight, glinting in black steel, older and taller but grim as ever. Baelor had found war at the end of his sword and war in his heart. Duty would have seen him back home to Dragonstone, but Baelor already felt talons clawing from within his chest, the whetting of an appetite. To lose Maekar was to face his own death, if not of the body, then of the soul. 

If Maekar had understood that, he didn’t show it, and the stupid dying smile stayed on his face until the maester uncinched the chestplate from the rest of his armor with a wet snap. 

“Ah, fuck,” the maester said, and Baelor whipped his head around, desires to either curse the boy or hold his tongue warring hard in his mind. Both thoughts had fled when he saw what the maester uncovered.

Some damned man’s sword had cut clean through a chink in Maekar’s plate, digging into the mail and scoring the skin and muscle beneath in a deep, vivid slash. Maekar breathed in, a hitched, impossible noise, and Baelor watched in horror as fresh blood welled and pooled. 

“Hands,” the maester said. “I need your hands. Now, if you want to keep him alive.”

Baelor shoved his hands up and the nearest Kingsguard, Donnel, unclasped the gauntlets, tearing one mail and leather glove off with his teeth when Donnel proved too slow. The maester was threading an iron needle pressed between his lips with one hand and attempting to clear the wounds with the other, but the blood kept coming, pouring out of the ragged, cut flesh. Something moved within. I can see his guts, Baelor thought, and had to clench his jaw to keep from being sick. 

“Gonna stitch the muscle first, Your Grace,” the maester said. “Then the skin over it.” All the boy’s earlier nervous energy had disappeared. Maybe he could see Baelor’s thoughts through his head and realized he would be losing his own if he failed. A real possibility, since he seemed to read Baelor’s mind again when he added: “And nothing for the pain. I am sorry, but he’s weak enough. I want his mind here.”

Baelor nodded, the action a little too clumsy, too desperate for someone meant to sit the Iron Throne one day. He pressed his hands into the blood and mud and held his brother together.

 

Night had fallen, and inside his pavilion Maekar lay tucked into a cot just long enough to hold him, pressed on all sides by woven blankets to keep him from shifting in his sleep and pulling a stitch loose. His face had been cleaned, his hair cut by knife and necessity, and he looked not at all like Baelor’s brother; he looked small and tired and, gods help him, weak.

Baelor himself had been sitting, quill pen raised, not moving, Dyanna written on the otherwise empty page. Eyes open, seeing nothing, imagining the flicker of fire against the ocean waves. How to tell a wife of the possibility of losing her husband? To tell a child the possibility of losing his father? Baelor shuddered; the concept of both losses paled in comparison to losing a brother. Husbands, sons, friends. All replaceable in a way a brother was not, in a way Maekar was not. 

Myriah would need to be told as well. Baelor felt sick at the prospect, knowing that, if things were to make a turn for the unimaginable worse, upon seeing her again he would find a look in her eye like gratitude, like relief. If their roles were reversed— Maekar living and he dead— his brother would not come home to that look. The same woman; a different mother. A snake with two heads and one heart.

He could not find it in his heart to be angry with her. He understood now himself. He was a father and would eventually be a king, and his son would suffer both of those men.

A small noise, a rustle of fabric, pulled him from his thoughts. A glance had him rushing to his brother’s side; Maekar had managed to push himself up on one elbow, shaking like a foal as he blinked hard against the dim candlelight.

“Baelor,” he said, or tried to. It was more of a muddied syllable than a name.

“Yes, I’m here.” Baelor pressed one hand to his shoulder, easing him off his arm and back to the cot. 

“I found you,” Maekar had said, and this time the words were stronger. He blinked rapidly, but could not shake the sleep from his mind– he would not be able to, the little maester had seen to that.

Baelor smiled and shook his head. “Where else would I be?”

“Dead. I thought you were dead.”

He still had blood in his teeth. Baelor used one thumb to lift his lip into a grimace, the short nail of the other to scrape away the worst of it. “At the battle yesterday? You should not have left me, then.”

But Maekar yanked his head free from Baelor’s hands, eyes glazed over, lost in another world. “I was walking in darkness, looking for you. I could see nothing… but I knew you were there, that I had to find you.”

“Did you?” Baelor asked, the softness in his voice belied by the grip he held his brother’s arm with. This was no memory– Maekar had dreamt of him.

Maekar’s brow had drawn in, teeth flashing in a wince. “There was a light. I went to it. There was a… sound and I saw it. The dragon, out of nothing.” His voice had gone from quiet to nearly silent, more breath than words. Baelor leaned in closer. “There… was fire. It started in the stomach, came up the neck. Like… a star, falling in reverse. Then it was in the mouth, behind the teeth. Baelor,” he gasped suddenly, hands reaching out, grabbing blindly. “Baelor. It burned me up. I felt it.”

“I’m sorry,” Baelor said, taking his brother’s hands in his own, holding tight as if he alone could keep his brother in the waking world. He pressed down, folding his brother’s arms to his chest, hoping the pressure would let him rest.

“No,” Maekar muttered, settling, eyes closing. “It was right. It was good.” Then he slipped back into sleep, and left Baelor with that. 

Two days more passed, Maekar drifting in and out of consciousness; if he dreamed again, Baelor did not know. Two more days of Baelor deep in the waters of the battlefield barking orders, deep in his own thoughts of ink dripping across blank parchment. The second day had been bad. A scouting party found the last remnants of a band of rebels hiding out in the woods, half buried in the soft earth as they hid, biding their time until they could flee back to safety. Fools, the lot of them, and foolish more for the trophies of war they had kept, for amongst the blunted steel and chipped iron lay a black mace, blood still clinging to it like rust. Baelor saw it and thought only of a mailed fist, twitching in the watery mud, and decided that his returning caravan had no room for more prisoners. 

The news upon his return to camp was worse. 

“He’s not improved,” the young maester said, shaking from exhaustion as he stood outside Baelor’s tent. “The fever, Your Grace, it will not recede.” He stood, hands clenched behind his back, reporting as stoically as any field commander, and Baelor could only wave a weary hand to dismiss the poor boy. He’d done what he could. 

Baelor had entered his tent, the sameness of it all a blessing and a curse. No funeral pyre to build, no good news to send home. He sat beside his brother, hands uselessly grasping the thin blankets as Maeker lay shivering and sweating as the fever burned through him. Baelor had not seen him all those years ago when he’d been a boy of five and the pox had taken him; perhaps this was the gods way of making sure he was treated to the sight, for when he looked at his brother he could only see the child he had been.

No strong warrior, no cunning strategist. Just his baby brother. Baelor sat there, and he thought of nothing. Then, because he could no longer help it, he thought of everything. 

The return from Dragonstone: a soft kiss to Jena’s cheek, a softer one for his infant son’s. Sailing across the bay, tension coiled in his stomach, the duty and the expectation and the anger like swords on his back, at his side, in his hand; his own weapons now, ones of war. King’s Landing, and above it all Aegon’s High Hill, with the Red Keep looming on the horizon like the flame god of Essos. He and his retinue had been welcomed back with a grandiose splendor he had no heart for, his parents and uncles and brothers all together to see him and greet him and ask after his new family, the one he had been torn from so soon, they said, too soon. And of course, at the end of them all, his brother. Taller than him now– and wasn’t that something– but still his little brother, armed to the teeth and awaiting Baelor’s command. Everything had changed; everything and nothing. He gripped Maekar’s mail-clad arm with his own, holding near tight enough to leave indents in the metal, and relished it beyond any other honor when Maekar did not smile back but graced him with that look he had, the one that promised his life and his loyalty and maybe even his love. Maekar had long since forgiven him in the way all brothers did; silently and implicitly. 

The war councils: dark castles, darker tents. Hushed conversation, heads bent low together. The little lords and their agendas, all believing themselves more important than the other while a man named Waters styled himself as Blackfyre, as Targaryen, as a dragon, with his white hair and deep violet eyes and the ancestral rage and determination that conquered a kingdom. How to proceed, which army to take, who would own the glory; Bloodraven and his Teeth with their bows, his information and his sly influence; Maekar at his shoulder, sitting at their war tables and vouching for his plans even as he took issue with every one behind closed doors. “You take on too much risk,” he would argue, and it was so easy to refute because Baelor had spent his life knowing that people would not look at him and see a king. He had to prove it, with fire and blood, and that was something Maekar, for all his concealed concern and gritted teeth, could understand. 

And, of course, the horror of battle: the endless crush of metal on metal, the indistinct yet undeniable knowledge that this could be the last time he raised his sword, the last time he could look right behind him and see the black spiked outline of his brother. It was a slog, and terrible, and yet the worst parts of him did love it, the ease in which a sword could solve the problem of one man after another, the simple knowledge that anyone left alive in his wake would be crushed under the iron and steel of his brother’s mace. All year in a day, and every day its own year; the day they’d lost half their forces in a victory so hollow it was mourned as loss; the day the enemy had rained down wildfire upon them and turned the sandy knolls that skirted the Dornish Marshes to a glassy ruin, men burning to ash where they stood; the day Baelor had been beaten so bloody he’d lost two teeth, spit from his mouth in the midst of the fight, and the night that followed, when he’d stumbled into Maekar’s pavillion and collapsed next to him in his cot, both of them too exhausted to remove their armor, too hurt to do anything but curl around each other like wounded dogs. Dazed, half from the bloodloss and half from something else entirely— relief, maybe, or maybe something worse— Baelor had wrapped his arms around his brother and stupidly pressed his lips to the back of his neck, the only soft part of him that he could reach. When the morning came and they were both alive Baelor had clapped a hand on Maekar’s shoulder with a grin, all brotherly comradery that Maekar shook off with a grimace while Baelor furtively wiped away the red stain evidence of his weakness.

He thought of everything. He thought of himself as a dragon, black and dreadful and burning from within, and seeing Maekar standing between his curled claws; of jaws opening wide, the taste of flesh and the shifting of thin bones on his forked tongue; of swallowing whole, unbroken. 

He took his brother’s hand between his, so like his own that it might as well be, smoothing his thumb over the heel of the palm and then over broken and bandaged knuckles. 

If his brother died, life would go on. Duty. Expectation. Baelor had a part to play in the act of life and he would do it well; he did not need his brother for that. This had never been about need, though. It was desire, pure and simple and raw, just as it had always been. Around them, the workings of the war camp had simmered with the setting sun, and only the hushed conversations of crickets and crows could be heard beyond the canvas. The quiet darkness of night fostered an honesty Baelor found he could not resist, and he leaned low over Maekar’s ear.

“I do not want to do this without you,” Baelor whispered. “So wake up.”

Maekar could not or did not listen and slept on, and Baelor let go of his hand lest he crush it. He supposed he could not expect more; Maekar had always been insolent, and Baelor had always loved all of him. 

Action had done nothing, confession even less. His brother’s life hung in the balance beyond Baelor’s reach, and he would live or die as the gods he so often doubted saw fit. Maekar’s pale, bloodless face, slackened in sleep to boyhood, did not move, and it was early into the hours of the morning when the young maester came for Baelor and pulled him to his own canvas pavilion, to his own bed, tugging him along like a farmer with a lame aurochs ready for the slaughter. 

Baelor slept, and dreamt only of blood and death, and when he had awoken the next morning to see that Maekar had drawn a chair into his room and had been sitting, waiting— scowling even as he slumped half-awake, mindlessly picking at the jagged line of the maester’s stitching crawling up his side— it felt like the inevitability of fate. He dare not question it.

“You look like shit,” Maekar had said at some point, likely having heard Baelor shuffle awake, and Baelor could turn and look past the angry red scar and the broken fingers and the blood still staining the edges of his brother’s teeth because suddenly, everything was fine. “Your eyes are closed,” he noticed.

“So I don’t have to see you looking like shit,” Maekar had said, and Baelor couldn’t help but smile. He had gotten what he wanted. The world did not shift on its axis to satisfy Baelor’s whims, but a thing could be so right, so true, that it felt that way. Maekar had lived, and had done so with the self-righteousness of a red blooded dragon and a presumptive simplicity that was all his own. That, at least, could not be taken from him. 

 

Time, Baelor prayed again. Not to go back but to have it going forward, to have the years stretch out in front of him, unspooled and unspent, to do with as he would. Death would cut it like a thread.

He needed that feeling, the world changing shift, standing as deep in the blood soaked grass now as he had been in the waters of that terrible river. Crude desire washed over him, not a primal need of the body but one borne purely of the mind; a desire to hold and protect, to have one man at the center of all things and selfishly allow everything to warp around him. 

A raven swooped low, startling Baelor out of his memories as it cawed and circled his head until he held an arm up for it to rest. Into his outstretched hand it dropped a rolled up piece of parchment, battered and stained. Bloodraven, Baelor thought, and was proved correct when he unrolled his uncle’s letter, a notice that the Pretender and his sons were dead by way of the bow wielding Teeth.

Good, Baelor thought. Good. He clenched the note in his fist and once more exhaled as low and long as his lungs would allow. Blackfyre dead, his sons dead. If asked, if forced to choose, would Baelor have paid for their blood with his brother’s? If the gods were good, he’d never have to find out.

The sun was beginning to fade, early stars already winking into existence, and Baelor paced the field, attending to his captains and passing orders along his lines of command. Maesters and their poultices to the wounded, Silent Sisters in their habits to the dead. He found Ser Gwayne and his one remaining eye and sent for a carriage; he held down a soldier– no more than a boy, really– as his leg was set and splinted. He waited, and waited, and waited. 

He was still waiting, standing in a rough circle with the spearmen’s leaders when a ragged cheer began to arise from the west. The vanguard! a soldier yelled, and as more took up the call the clamor got louder, more excited. There was a cloud of dust, indeed from the west, and Baelor’s heart soared with it, mingling in the humid air of dusk. 

Horses, and banners above them, blue and white and black and red, and the sound of hundreds of men talking all at once, not that Baelor heard much of it anyways. It would not befit a prince, he knew, to push his way through the crowd, shake down every man until he found what he was looking for, but once again, Maekar spared his pride. Only when he heard cries of Your Grace! and Lord Arryn! and Prince Maekar! did he change his course, turn left, look directly into the setting sun, and see his brother.

Maekar slid from his horse, ungraceful and damaged with his armor dented and cracked, every deadly dragon spike coated with the slick shine of traitor's blood; he had seen Baelor before Baelor had seen him and he was striding across the grass, purpose in every limped step. It happened in an instant. First he was on one side of an army and then he was right in front of Baelor, alive, with all the time in the world at his back and something like fire in his eyes. He said something Baelor did not hear for ringing ears— he could be saying anything and Baelor would bereft— but it didn’t matter, because Maekar was alive, and when he crashed their iron helms together, the resounding clang echoing in their twin facades of black and red, it felt like a kiss. It felt like victory.

 

v. strike the chord

 

The horse startled, and Baelor lifted his head, pulled from his drifting mind at the sharp movement of his mount. Maekar pulled up rein beside him, and was staring at him with a thinly veiled curiosity (as well as a bemusement that he had not bothered to hide at all). Baelor winced, annoyed not only that he had been jolted awake but that he had nearly fallen asleep in the first place. He was merely nine and thirty, but they had been a very long nine and thirty years, and although he was still far removed from old age he was not the same man he had once been, spending weeks more on his horse than not in the midst of the war. Perhaps all the reckless hurts of youth had been stored in his shoulders, waiting for middling age to burn through him.

“Five miles to the inn,” Maekar said conversationally. As a rule, Maekar did not say things conversationally. Baelor leveled a flat stare in his direction but his brother turned away, even though they both knew he didn’t have to see it to feel it.

They were riding near to the front of their small troop; scouts passed through first, days before their own horses would set foot, followed by a man or two of the Kingsguard, then Baelor and Maekar and whichever of their sons wanted to feel important before growing bored of his father’s discussion with his uncle and returning to the bulk of the caravan, the middle section where a couple carriages rolled along, slower and louder and putting a storm of dust into the air. It would be better for the two of them to ride in the center, Maekar liked to say perfunctorily at daybreak, leaving from whatever inn or castle hosted them the previous night as they kicked their mounts to the front, away from the clamor and bored eyes so they could ride alone, as alone as men in their position could. But the distance was minor, and in the lowlands of the mountains noise seemed to carry as easily as a raven on the wind.

Behind them, another bout of shouting went up, shrieks of rage and angry yelling that had Baelor trying very hard to keep his face neutral while Maekar shoulders inched up to his ears, a nearly palpable fury radiating from him. There was a loud crack, another yell, and then they were back to the regular droll noise of three dozen men and their horses and wagons, a caravan now nearly at its destination. Two days more, Baelor reminded himself. Then, regretfully: Only two.

“Your sons seem lively, today,” Baelor hedged, knowing well Maekar’s own feelings on the matter. “I’m sure Aerion will do well in Ashford.”

Maekar scoffed. “He and Daeron both will do well if they care to come back in one piece.” 

Baelor held back a sigh. Aerion was not worth mentioning, but his eldest nephew was a different matter. “Daeron barely rides a horse without toppling, incoming lance notwithstanding. He agreed to this?”

“Of course he did,” Maekar said, and even now when it was not needed the threat was laced between every word. His brother had high standards, for himself and for his children; it was no easy thing to defy his will once it had been set upon your shoulders.

“Perhaps he would be better suited to other sports. Whatever happened to his hawk?” That had been one that father and son could manage together, the silence and the waiting of the hunt.

“Perished,” Maekar said shortly, and offered no explanation. It was not difficult to assume what had happened. “I have three sons left to me,” he said after a moment. “I do not think it is too much to ask for them to do well in this.”

Ask is not how Baelor would have defined his brother’s manner of request, but far be it from him to criticize Maekar’s children while his own…

He glanced down the column of riders behind him to spot Valarr and his pretty wife Kiera, heads bent deeply to a low conversation they held with only their horses as witness. It was sweet, Baelor thought. Sweet and dull, the kind of thing he ought to expect of his sons; why should he fight wars, break the kingdom to remake it stronger, if it meant his children and theirs could not reap the benefits of a peaceful life? 

Maekar seemed to be reading his mind when he added, as near to wistfulness as Baelor had ever heard him, “They are not much like us, are they?”

This, Baelor could not dispute. He thought sometimes of the war, how it had not forged but refined him and his brother into beings sharper, deadlier than they had been before; he tried to imagine Aerion, smiling gently with his intestines exposed to the air or Valarr gritting his teeth to keep from being sick. The scene would not come, and all he could see were the two dead bodies of children who’d never known life as it was meant to be lived. Valarr jousted because it was asked of him, drew his sword in the training yard when called upon; on the opposite end, Aerion sought violence the way a loose dog sought a rabbit. If Baelor and Maekar had been pared down, stripped of some integral, unimaginable thing, their sons would appear fully formed. Baelor without his teeth, Maekar without his heart. Or his brain, Baelor thought, less fondly. In the distance, he could hear the bickering of his nephews once again reaching towards crescendo, and resolved to put as much distance between himself and their arguments as the road would allow. 

“Come,” he said, and spurred his horse into a trot, knowing without having to look that Maekar would be right behind him. He waved away the preceding Kingsguard as he passed them, wanting to be with his brother, wanting to be selfish while he still had the time. They flew, racing each other, horses bounding forward, all their coiled strength from the slow days finally released. Trees became blurs, the mountain ridges around them nothing more than a grey outline against the darkening sky. When Harvest Hall appeared in the distance, nestled in a green valley, the horses broke into a gallop and Baelor couldn’t help the laugh that burst from him unbidden. 

By the time they had arrived the late afternoon had fallen to early evening, and their less than grand arrival was quick and polite, the overzealous young squire and cordial Lord Selmy receiving them and showing them to adjoined rooms in one of the hall’s high towers. The scouts that had preceded them had given the castle time to prepare for their royal guests, and both quarters, with their dark floorboards and low wooden vigas lining the ceilings, had banners of red and black bearing the Targaryen dragon hanging from the walls. At a glance, it was more cozy than anything, and Baelor found he liked the simplicity of it; the large bed, the sturdy desk, a floor-length mirror tucked next to two overstuffed chairs situated by a hearth that flickered with a flame low enough to merely deny the night it’s chill. Large windows overlooked the mountain range surrounding Harvest Hall, and when Baelor leaned against the frame he saw nothing made by man– just the gray peaks, the wild line of trees, and the cloudless sky, littered with stars and crowned by a horned moon just starting to appear over the mountains as the sun died away. 

To his left, a door opened, and Maekar swept into Baelor’s room from his. “Brother, good that I find you here,” he said brusquely, and Baelor grinned to recognize his tone. “I’ve urgent need of you. Check my teeth, I believe they’re beginning to rot.” He bared his teeth in an unenthusiastic smile, lip pulling down.

“Yes, the boy was very sweet,” Baelor acknowledged, unable to suppress the memory of the squire, who could not have been older than five and ten, bowing repeatedly and stumbling over his own feet and fumbling over their titles while Baelor and his brother and Lord Selmy watched with varying levels of embarrassment. 

“To you, perhaps,” Maekar said, although there was no real heat in it now that they were alone. The boy had initially announced him as Aerys, having either confused the princes’ names or assumed the man in front of him would be the king’s second son rather than his last. The look Maekar had given him had the poor boy wringing his hands and stammering all the worse. 

“Allow the youth to learn from his follies. Surely he will remember your name on the morrow.”

“Very diplomatic,” Maekar groused. “Save further efforts for your small council.” 

Baelor bit down on his smile and let the topic drop, moving instead to fall into one of the chairs and unlace his boots. Maekar ungracefully heeled out of his own before bracing one arm against the desk, leaning slightly to press the heel of his thumb into the arch of his stocking-clad foot. The both of them, Baelor supposed, were getting old; still strong, still able, but far past the boys they’d been. New lines were drawn on Maekar’s face, gifts from his grief and stress and children alike, and the barest of gray was threaded through his hair, nearly unnoticeable against the white. 

Baelor had missed him terribly. When Maekar stood, one hand pressed to the center of his lower back in an easy stretch, he looked away, knowing it was not any expression that would reveal him, but the fact that he had looked at all. 

But Maekar must have caught his glance anyway. He walked to stand behind Baelor’s chair and pressed a hand to the back of his neck, thumb sliding down until it hit the knot in his shoulder. Baelor tilted his head and sighed, thinking that death in this manner, with his brother’s hands on his neck, would not befit a prince but would certainly befit him. He felt Maekar’s hand tighten its grip so briefly as to mean nothing before it was gone, brought to the clasp on his cloak so that he could, in one easy and careless motion, draw it from his shoulders and fling it to rest on Baelor’s bed. It must have been that— the long look, then the hand from his skin to the draw of the cloak to the bed— that had Baelor saying, quite a bit prematurely, “I have something for you.”

His voice was strange, even to his own ears, but when Maekar looked at him he held it, unwavering, and Maekar shifted his feet, suddenly unsure in that obstinate way of his. 

“Let’s see it then,” he said, arms crossing as if he expected nothing at all like a gift.

“Close your eyes,” Baelor said, and stood, the creak of the wooden chair too loud as he left it to stand in front of Maekar, close, but not enough to scare him. He could see that Maekar was aware of his presence, the subtle shift of his boots on the thick carpet silent and damning, the careful way he held himself. When Baelar slipped a hand to his shoulder to turn him in the direction of the mirror, he was pliable enough; the line in his brow deepened, but he did not resist. 

From his own coat Baelor unclasped the pin, brass, painstakingly wrought and intricately carved. A hand, one that, with a simple twist, was unlinked from the ornament dragon scales that winded across his shoulders. Baelor affixed the pin to the front of Maekar’s surcoat, gently brushing his hand over it to angle it correctly, thinking he might have a new one made when the time came. He should have waited until their return to Summerhall, or until he could commission something special, but these days restraint was hard won and hardly kept when it was. He stepped around his brother and again pressed a hand to his shoulder— not to move him this time, merely to feel the warmth of him— and took a moment to observe their joint reflections. Maekar was slightly taller, slightly wider in the shoulder, and he half-eclipsed Baelor, hiding the fact of his mismatched eyes. Targaryen violets, a row of three.

In the slanting shades of weak sunlight entering from the open window, they could almost be twins; Maekar in the dark, Baelor with the sun upon him. For all their different coloring, they had the same nose, the same set to their eyes. Martells and Targaryens both, their very own beasts. They were amphitheres, they were wyrms, they were dragons and snakes. They were the same.

“Look,” Baelor said, and Maekar looked. He had opened his eyes already staring at the spot on his lapel where the pin was, and no new reaction overcame him save for a sudden stillness. 

Then he set his jaw, hard, only noticeable to Baelor due to the angle, and he did for a moment wonder if his brother had cracked any more teeth doing that same thing in recent years. 

“That’s a bad habit, you know,” Baelor said. Through the mirror, Maekar’s eyes flicked to meet his, if only for a nearly unnoticeable second. Baelor resisted the urge to grab his jaw and instead smiled, earnest, wide, like a dragon. 

“What are you up to now,” Maekar said flatly after a long silence wherein his gaze could not be moved, from the mirror reflection of the hand on the pin. “I am in no mood for games.”

“But you’re so good at them,” Baelor said lightly, and received an elbow to his stomach in return. Maekar quickly pulled out from under his hand and made to move away before Baelor could reach him again. He did not get far. If the hand to the shoulder would not ground him, Baelor reasoned, something else would have to do. Instead, he slipped his thumbs through the tough leather of his brother’s belt, and pulled him back into place. Maekar was strong— he always had been, and Baelor had an idea that he always would be. He could leave if he wanted, but he let himself be reeled in, a fish on a line.

“Our father is getting up in his years,” Baelor said, serious now that he had his brother well in hand. Maekar knew their father’s health had been declining for the past few months, enough so that Baelor found himself burdened more with the responsibilities of a king, rather than just his Hand. “I spoke with him before we left, and he agreed. We must prepare for the day when the crown will pass to me.”

Maekar’s shoulders did not relax. “And we must discuss this now?”

Baelor nodded, still looking over his brother’s shoulder to watch his reflection. “When I ascend to the Iron Throne, I will need a Hand, Maekar.”

“Aerys has two, I recall,” Maekar said. He would not look back. His eyes remained on the pin. 

“Aeys also has no desire for the position.” Baelor said, “I want–”

“You have already asked him?” 

“No,” Baelor said, annoyed. “I do not have to, and besides, it’s not him I need. I don’t need Aerys and his books, nor Bloodraven and his eyes. I want you.” 

Maekar’s jaw tensed, a visible line of muscle. He was so still in Baelor’s hands.

“Let Daeron take your seat in Summerhall,” Baelor said, voice lowering conspiratorially, close to Maekar’s ear. “The maesters will help him, of course. He’s a smart boy when he has to be; trust me when I tell you he’ll manage. I’ll not let the home you shared with Dyanna come to ruin… but now I want you with me.”

Maekar’s breathing had become unnaturally even. A count of three in, a count of three out, repeated. So rare was this kind of restraint that Baelor almost wavered, almost loosened his grip. Mentioning Maekar’s late wife was a risk— she had been loved, so loved that Baelor could still see it now in that tightly drawn brow— but there was a line to draw, a connection to be made. Dyanna to Baelor, present to future. The love Maekar had sought and love he’d rejected; but there was one more line to draw, one final dot to connect. Baelor imagined pieces of his brother scattered, of stitching him back together, red catgut threading heart to artery to muscle to skin, not to make him anew but to finally discover the whole, to have it laid out in front of him, ready to be understood. Kill him, gut him, flay him, stitch him— anything to make him into the man who would accept the pin on his shoulder. 

So Baelor drew his lines. Love Maekar sought and love he rejected, and before it all, locked in the past, was the love he’d been denied. Baelor would bring it out, show Maekar its face, and then give him something better.

“What did she say to you,” Baelor asked. “On the day before you were married, at the tourney where you knocked me from my horse so hard the smiths had to tear my armor off of me. What did our mother say to you?”

Maekar inhaled; his breath hitched once, nearly inaudible. It was not for the abrupt change in topic, Baelor knew. “How the fuck do you remember that?”

“I remember everything,” Baelor said easily. “But now I want to know. What did she say?”

Maekar closed his eyes and sighed, jaw working. Baelor waited patiently, thumb and fingers still gripping his belt. 

“That she— she cared for me,” Maekar finally admitted. “But that she had gone wrong with me.”

“Gone wrong?” Maekar needed prodding along sometimes. Baelor would be gentle.

“She didn’t know how to be my mother, she said.” He shifted under Baelor’s hands, discomfort clear in his tone and on his face. When Myriah died he’d stood much the same at her funeral, tired-eyed and clipped when spoken to, trying to mourn a woman he had never really known nor been known by while Baelor held their father and kept his tears for solitude. If she hadn’t known how to be his mother, he did not know how to be her son. The same thought must have occurred to Maekar, and he added, “Well, I know now what it is to have an unruly son. A pity she did not live to see her justice wrought.” The short laugh that followed was not entirely devoid of humor. It faded as quickly as it had come on, and once again he was unsmiling and severe, caught up in the past. “She had been so certain of my intentions to usurp the throne from you.”

“It wasn’t just that though, was it?” Baelor held the belt tighter and the leather whined in protest; it was a quiet sound, and still the loudest in the room.

Maekar’s eyes met his in the mirror, and he slowly raised his hands, scarred and calloused, to cover Baelor’s. With a gentleness Baelor often forgot he possessed, Maekar pulled his hands off of the belt and held them away from his body before letting go and stepping away, carefully out of Baelor’s reach. “Not just that,” he agreed. 

Baelor let the silence hang, let Maekar escape him to brace himself against the table, arms and shoulders taut, as still and silent as the stone beasts that watched over the halls of Dragonstone. He felt the shift when it came; the air heavier, Maekar’s shoulders dropping beneath the weight.  

“She had the right of it,” Markar said, voice low as if speaking at all was a pain to him. “She was only doing what she thought best.”

Baelor hummed in agreement. Of course she had. What else could a mother do? 

“Would you like to know what I think is best?” He stepped closer, close enough to see Maekar’s hands on the table, knuckles clenched into a bone white. 

“Youve never failed to inform me before,” his brother said almost waspishly, as if Baelor were still playing some game he didn’t have the heart for.

“Not always.” Baelor put his hand on Maekar’s arm, turning him so that they faced each other. “I’ve not always been so honest with you.”

The muscle ticked in Maekar’s jaw again. Baelor wondered what it tasted like. From the outside, from within. He pressed close, closer, and was rewarded with the faint ghost of Maekar’s breath across his cheek. If he only turned a little… 

“I would be honest with you now, if you’d let me.” 

Maekar’s head dropped, forehead pressing into Baelor’s shoulder, the side of his neck, his hands coming up to grip at Baelor’s waist and back, fingers digging into the heavy wool of his surcoat, the top clasps of which had already been undone so that Baelor could feel breath on his bare skin. Blood rushed, hot as wildfire, violent as wind under wings. 

He let his hands pass over Maekar’s shoulders, feeling the angle of his back taper down to his waist to clutch at the wide belt he wore, holding him and all his heavy layers together. He wanted nothing more than to peel it all back, to reach inside and see and hold and taste, to devour completely. As carefully as he would act with a skittish horse, he pressed a kiss to his brother’s temple. “I want you to come back with me to King’s Landing, and to stay by my side. Please.”

Maekar shifted against his neck, and Baelor felt the first press of his lips there, so quick and soft that it may have gone unnoticed had Baelor not been waiting for that very thing: the acquiescence. The acceptance. He buried one hand in his brother’s hair, not to guide but to feel the movement against his palm as Maekar, needlessly emboldened, kissed his way up Baelor’s neck, his jaw, teeth catching on his ear and then his cheekbone, nearly to the corner of his mouth, barely closing in where Baelor wanted him most. His hand, low on Baelor’s back, drifted up, pressing hard along his spine and feeling the breadth of his shoulders, wandering until he reached the pulse thrumming in Baelor’s neck where he paused, holding down just enough that Baelor could feel the beating of his own blood.

Maekar’s hands framed Baelor’s face and he closed his eyes, waiting to see what his brother would do. Thumbs passed over his eyelids, as if Maekar could not bear the thought of Baelor seeing him like this, and Baelor endured it for love, for the first press of Maekar’s lips to his. 

It was tentative, almost reverent. Maybe it was. 

Then Maekar tilted his head, and it was anything but. Baelor tasted teeth and tongue and thought only of blood. 

Hands were in his hair, then at his sides, his back, pushing, backing him up until his legs hit the edge of the desk. He felt Maekar’s exhale, almost a sigh, warm against his open mouth and breathed him in, relishing in every half-restrainted gasp as he cradled his brother’s face, working his thumbs into the line of his jaw both to see his expression slacked and to save his own tongue from being bit off in another attempt at futile self-control. Maekar, for all his temperamental rage and irritability, would keep himself in check as he deemed it necessary; it mattered not that he often did not deem it necessary. It was the fact that he could do it, and was doing it now; Baelor wanted none of it. In this, he would not spare his brother’s pride.

Inspiration struck like lightning, and he took Maekar’s bottom lip between his teeth and bit down hard, groaning when his mouth filled with warm blood. He still held Maekar’s head, fingers digging into hair and the flesh beneath, keeping him steady as he first jerked in surprise and then leaned in all the harder, the hands at Baelor’s waist and shoulder pulling them tighter together, but Baelor pushed back, away, wanting to look. His teeth had cut true, and the gash that he had opened was deep, welling and spilling red, the surrounding skin already starting to color with bruising; Baelor, with all his rings, could have hit Maekar for the same effect. 

Maekar raised a hand to his lip, and his expression shifted when he realized his blood had been drawn. He looked at Baelor, brows coming in, always so severe, so serious, because of course, he already understood. He dragged his thumb over the cut and then held his hand up between them, letting red stained fingers catch in the faint light from the window. Then he laid his hand on Baelor’s face and, after only the barest of hesitations, brought his thumb down, spreading the blood in a straight line over Baelor’s bottom lip in confession.

Dark wood rafters, the last of a dying sun through the shuttered window, no sound but their ragged breathing. Nothing like lavender and white heat and the faint sea. It was a thrill, a deep and deadly thrill, and Baelor could feel it radiating out from his chest, into every corner of his being. Madness, he thought, wild with joy. This is madness. 

Maekar’s eyes were dark, his teeth clenched, watching the blood drip from Baelor’s lip. Baelor brought his own hand up, dragging it along his strong arm all the way to the hand still hovering near his own face before holding tight, drawing it closer. Carefully, he licked the thumb clean of blood, never drawing it into his mouth but keeping it close enough that he could play with the possibility, the temptation. 

Maekar didn’t give him the chance to do more; instead, Baelor received another crush of lips and hard clink of teeth, demanding and insistent. He felt the wet smear of blood against his chin and along his jaw as Maekar bit a line of kisses to his throat before coming back to his mouth, a man starved. This was not the exploration of a body as before; this was want, this was everything, the thought of having it all laid bare and ready for the taking, the giving. Maekar’s thigh was a hard press of muscle between his own, his hands everywhere, on Baelor’s face and in his hair and sinking into the front of his surcoat to pull at the clasps, exposing more of his neck, his chest, as he pulled it away. He was saying Baelor’s name, and few other things besides; fuck, when Baelor tore the buttons from his expensive high collared doublet; gods, when Baelor unclasped his heavy belt and used it to pull him closer. Baelor swallowed the words from the source, insatiable as clothes dropped around their feet.  

Every desire that had spent decades tucked away unburdened itself from that internal darkness. Baelor yanked harder on Maekar’s belt and they lost balance, falling to the floor and unable to separate themselves enough to save the back of Maekar’s head from hitting the woven rug, barely thick enough to protect from the hard wood beneath. Neither minded. Baelor kissed the wince from Maekar’s mouth, felt it when his lips curled into a wicked grin. 

He pushed himself up, bracing himself on Maekar’s shoulders, not wanting to let go but doing so anyway to pull off his linen shirt, exposing his broad chest. Baelor ran his hands from neck to stomach, over faint white hair that trailed down to his navel as well as deep scars, the worst of which he traced, remembering the day it had been sliced into Maekar’s body. A strange fear rose within him, but it was quickly overcome when Maekar shifted, aligning their bodies, and pressed his hands to Baelor’s thighs, thumbs digging in at his hip, the movement sending a rush of heat through him so violently that he nearly collapsed forward. 

He caught himself on Maekar’s chest, pushing him down when he tried to rise. His hair was tousled where Baelor had run his fingers through it and a deep flush had spread across his face and down his neck. Blood was splattered across his lips and chin, caught in his beard, red on white. His hands were strong on Baelor’s thighs but he was trembling, not bothering to hide it, and the look he gave Baelor was so open with want that it was like a tangible power; he’d watched Maekar wield instruments of death, iron and steel and his own raw strength, none of which had a fraction of the power that Maekar held him with now. 

His breath was coming short and ragged, and Baelor leaned in to kiss him lazily before trailing gentle bites down his throat, teeth catching over his pulse, working his way down to his chest. He sunk his teeth into the flesh there, gentle at first, thinking only of bruise-littered skin, then harder when he couldn’t resist the slight uptick of the heart below; maybe if he bit hard enough, he could taste that, too. The pain must have been sharp. A pitched sound came from Maekar’s throat, and Baelor pulled off him to eat that, too. Blood beaded in the indents his teeth had made, and Baelor hummed in approval when he saw it. Let Maekar carry this scar the way he carried the others. His body could handle it. He could bear an act of love just as well as he bore the crossed and faded attempts on his life. 

The world turned, sudden and violent, and he found himself breathless with Maekar sitting heavy over him, bloodied chest heaving, heavy desire in his eyes. He leaned to kiss Baelor, chaste in comparison to a moment ago even as he dragged his hips over Baelor’s, giving them cause to groan in unison. Baelor reached for the laces at his sides but Maekar shifted back, not out of his reach but enough that Baelor understood his intent.

“The bed,” he groaned, pushing himself further upright, both hands flat on Baelor’s bare chest. Baelor exhaled, just to feel the weight of it. “I’ll not do this on the floor.”

Baelor laughed. “Not good enough for you, Your Grace?”

“No, you fool,” Maekar’s eyes rolled to the side, only half-playing at annoyance. “We’ve been riding for days. My fucking back hurts.”

Baelor put an elbow to the floor, pushing himself closer to Maekar, close enough to be rewarded with a kiss. “I must warn you, I’ve nothing for you that will ease the pain.”

That made his brother grin, a wild, excited thing, all flashing canines and flushed skin. “I’ll risk it,” he decided, and in one dizzying motion he stood, bringing Baelor up with him. 

The bed was mere feet away, and yet it took minutes to reach; between kisses Baelor took his time divesting his brother of the rich fabric of his breeches and then, with a lack of immediacy that had Maekar shivering and grabbing mindlessly for Baelor’s shoulders, his smallclothes. 

He pushed Maekar back and he let himself be toppled onto the bed, legs spread to make room for Baelor to fall upon him, and for a while everything else disappeared; everything but fire and blood and want of the other.

 

Brief shadows flickered over starlight, an instant of endless night and rustling, leathery wings. Bats, roosting in the early morning hours, clustering in the hollow beneath the window’s overhanging canopy. Baelor could see the black, pearish shapes of them cradled together like brothers dark against the glass.

Next to him, Maekar stirred, and with his head nestled to his chest Baelor could feel the change in his breathing as he slowly woke. His hand came to rest against Baelor’s temple, half-obscuring his view of the window as his fingers combed through Baelor’s hair, gentle as anything. Time passed; if Baelor were any less himself, he might wish for it to last forever.

“Why now?” He was unsurprised Maekar had spoken; he’d never really known how to let a moment sit quietly. No rest, Baelor supposed, for the weary and lovesick.

He had little intention of moving, and his voice came out a bit muffled when he said, quite genuinely, “I couldn’t not.”

“You’ve shit timing,” Maekar mumbled, exhaustion slurring his speech. “Be honest. Why ask me now?”

“I wanted to,” Baelor said, enjoying the freedom in saying it. “I am tired of waiting and I am tired of missing you. I had to do something.” He sighed, thinking for a moment. “I used to think that just by placing the stones I could build the castle. But a castle needs more than–” 

“Must everything be a lesson with you?” Maekar muttered even as Baelor felt him relent and press a kiss to the top of his head. “Tell me plainly.”

“A castle,” Baelor repeated, and suffered Maekar’s sigh before continuing, “needs more than one man to build it. I believed I could make something for us on my own.” He nudged his head upwards, tipping Maekar’s chin and kissing him there before rising enough to settle on his elbow, looking down on his brother. “Everything we have can be taken so easily. It is my responsibility to keep the kingdom together, and to keep us together. I’ll not stand for anything less.”

“Very noble of you,” Maekar said, not nearly as sarcastic as he usually sounded. Sleep still pulled at him, and he looked at Baelor with eyes half-lidded; a memory lit up in Baelor’s mind, of dead water and dragonflies, and he welcomed it now that he knew the end. “So you’ve built your castle. Now what?”

“I haven’t,” Baelor said. “Listen to me. Come home to King’s Landing, rule with me in everything but name. That is where we lay our foundation. Our castle, our keep.” He took Maekar’s hand and aligned it with his own, a mirrored reflection. “We’re stronger together, you and I, and I intend to do whatever is necessary to keep us that way.”

Maekar looked at him for a long moment, assessing. Then the line faded from his brow and he hummed a little agreement, mumbling something that might have been sweet or scathing. He shifted his hand to interlock their fingers and he turned to his side, pulling Baelor over and around him, back to chest. They had slept like this as children, Baelor remembered. Entirely different and yet exactly the same. Even with his eyes closed he could see everything so clearly now: a single line from past to present to future so long it curved with the world, bent to its will, infinite and endless and inevitable; a circle, a dragon, ouroboros. Death sustaining life.

Outside the window, in the pale light that preceded dawn, the bats fluttered and then stilled. Like them, Baelor slept, and he did not dream.

Notes:

thank you for reading <3 you can find me on tumblr @hexersword

title from the ethel cain song of the same name
songs referenced in section titles:
n. ethel cain — arsony
i. ethel cain — god’s country
ii. fall out boy — bang the doldrums
iii. slipknot — snuff
iv. the amazing devil — king
v. paul cauthen — slow down