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Maester Orwyle thinks, privately, that the keep looks better in red and black. The green had always stood out too much amidst the pale red bricks, in his humble opinion, and it had always saddened him a little how poorly King Aegon, no, Aegon the Usurper had honoured the dragon effigy of his ancestors. The corridors are the same, the torches keep burning and the guards keep patrolling the corridors, only the colours of their capes now brightly spun gold. The road to the Holdfast is the same, especially miserable on nights like tonight when the Seven see fit to grace the earth with rain and thunder and lightning. Some would take it as an omen, he imagines, but he does not think it wise to court strange thoughts so few days after something so monumental has happened. There have been whispers floating around about some preacher or other in the streets of the city railing against the Queen, and how they’ve been found with their throat slashed floating face down in the river. The Rogue Prince’s work, most assuredly, but he’s never been a brave sort. He does what he is asked and what he believes is right, and he would give a few rings of his chain in exchange for being certain never to attract such attention.
The guards at the gate barely look at him, a common sight for the past few days at the hour of the bat. The Queen had called for him on her first night in the royal chambers and had asked for something to induce sleep, her bloodshot eyes fixed somewhere above his head. Prince Daemon had insisted on making him taste the milk of the poppy first before letting her grace touch it, hand on the hilt of his sword, but had seemed placated after he’d swallowed a few drops. The following night again the summon had come, and now he just makes his trip unprompted, two vials that promised uninterrupted sleep tucked inside his sleeves.
The Queen’s chambers are guarded by a Queensguard whose name he cannot recall and ser Harrold Darke, statues of white marble standing vigil. After a knock Darke opens the door and ushers him inside, where Her Grace sits at the desk with a quill in her hand, studiously ignoring his arrival.
“Your Grace,” he says with a shallow bow. “I bring your draught, if you require it still.”
Silence follows, heavy and uncomfortable, for a minute at least before the queen raises her head with a tired movement, fixing her violet eyes on him.
“I would forgo it tonight, Maester.” Her voice, though thin, sounds better then the day before, he thinks. More assured. “I found sleep, in truth, but I had not accounted for the dreams. I am sorry you came all this way for nothing.”
“Your Grace should not worry. After all, I must bring some to the Lady Alicent as well, so the trip was not in vain.”
He sees her straighten immediately, eyes sharpening like those of a wolf smelling prey.
“And why, pray tell,” and she stands now, and even if she’s not that much taller than him it seems to him that her shadow fills the whole room. “Would the lady Hightower require such a draught?”
He sees, then, that he would have done a better job and been a better friend had he held his tongue, but there’s little he can do about it now.
“She has been having difficulties sleeping as well, Your Grace. Had it been anything more substantial I would have requested your permission before granting her request, but it seemed innocuous enough.”
The queen does not move, does not answer, does nothing but keep staring at him. “When did this start?” And oh, he can feel now a strange note in her voice, something between rage and fear.
“The day of your ascent, Your Grace. Her maid came to relay her request to me that same night.” He’s proud to hear that his voice does not waver, but the noise that echoes in the room threatens to turn his knees into water. The best way he will describe it, after, when he pours all of his final years into his memories, will be a growl entwined with an half choked sob, so inhuman that it takes him a moment to realise that it comes from the queen.
“Give the vial to me, Maester. I will make sure it gets to her.” Her voice brooks no argument, and in truth he is not brave enough to deny a queen with two guards poised at his back. There is little he can do save handing her the potion and, with a bow, leave the room.
- - -
The length of corridors between her room and Alicent’s is 482 steps. She counts them one by one while walking there, forcing herself not to run. Her guards had insisted that the keep wasn’t safe yet, that they could not let her take such risks, but they relented in the end. She only had to invoke the ghost of ser Lorent, who had chosen to fall on his sword, to remind them how little wisdom was to be found in trying to control her.
It seems to her she walks for hours, even though she knows it cannot have taken more than 5 minutes. She can feel the air thinning, somewhat, like when Syrax decides she wants to fly higher and higher still and breathing requires more of an effort; she’s nearly panting but not from effort, because she thinks her lungs have need of ever more air and she cannot fill them. You killed her father and she had to look upon his head, one voice says. Did you expect she’d thank you? But there’s another, dark and pleased, that murmurs If he’d not been there years ago she would have been yours, and then again and again You should have had him killed years ago, Too little and too late, He deserved worse until her head spins and her hand grasps at the stone of the corridor, breathing fast until she manages to regain a modicum of calm.
The door, she notices, is now only a few steps away. No guards. It is the matter of seconds to raise her hand and knock. Faster still comes a voice from the inside, inviting the Maester She calls him Orwyle, the voice supplies unhelpfully, and she enters.
Her first thought is that she looks awful. Her hair is gathered at the back of her head but some strands are falling out, frazzled. There are circles under her eyes that she now sees are red and rimmed, and she sits at a barren desk almost hunched over the surface, nothing in front of her save for the naked wood.
It takes Lady Hightower Alicent, suggests honey sweet that traitorous voice, a moment to register that it’s Rhaenyra and not the maester in the room, but when she does she scrabbles to rise as fast as she can and bows, eyes downcast and studiously avoiding hers. She thinks she hears her say something, ‘Your Grace’ perhaps, but she doesn’t understand. Her mind flies from detail to detail, from the way her shoulders appear to tremble slightly from the devastation evident near her nails, bloody and swollen, and her fist tightens helplessly around the vial when she remembers that they didn’t look like that when she was in Dragonstone.
“The maester told me you require this for sleeping.” Her voice is steadier than she feels inside, and it makes her confident enough to push forward. “Did he tell you about the dreams? Nightmares upset you once, I recall, and I fear you would find no more comfort in this if you keep using it every night.”
“I will not drink it if you so wish, Your Grace.” And it’s wrong, her voice sounds wrong, hollow, like an echo coming from an empty cave.
She steps forward and makes for her to get up, makes to touch her shoulder but Alicent’s gone back four paces in a moment, palms pressed against the wall and oh, her eyes meet hers and they’re wild, terrified.
“It is not my custom to mete justice at this hour behind closed doors, my Lady.” She needs to stay calm. She needs to, or Alicent will be even more terrified. “I am not here to hurt you.” She puts the vial on the desk and steps back a few paces, already decided on leaving the room for good. She’s done enough damage, and for a moment there’s an image flashing in her mind, her a girl of three and ten watching from the shadows while Alicent was talking to her father and suddenly Alicent flinches and draws back as if awaiting a blow; she swore right then and there that she’d do anything to protect her, and now twenty years later she finds that killing him did not serve, not even for this; she just took his place. She’s the one frightening her, the one whose touch she recoils from. The stench of death must surround her still. She wonders, fruitlessly, if she’ll ever be able to scrub it away.
She puts the vial on the desk and steps back a few paces, already decided on leaving the room for good. She’s almost closed the door when her eyes fall on something unremarkable, after the Lady Hightower has already taken ten steps forward and her hand is closing on the glass. There’s something dark on her wrist, a smudge of black and purple that she mistakes for the shadow of her sleeve but then she actually grasps the vial and the fabric rides up and oh. There’s bile at the back of her throat, she thinks, acrid and sour and rising fast. The door shuts with a clang and she stands still in front of it, Alicent looking at her wide eyed. She can see the shape of fingers on her wrists, mottled imprints with a sickly yellow hue at their center.
“Who did this?”
- - -
“Who did this?”
Alicent thought she knew fear when her father announced that she’d be betrothed to the king by the week’s end. She thought she knew terror when her son was brought in front of her with his eye cleaved in two and the culprit walked free. She realises now, with Rhaeny- the Queen looking at her with wrath in her eyes, her shame now bare before her, that she was wrong. What courses through her veins now is stronger, more suffocating, the certainty that now she knows, that she’s sullied in her eyes as well as those of the Gods makes her want to throw herself at her feet and beg for her father’s fate.
The terror in her eyes must be clear enough to see, because the next time the Queen speaks it’s gentler.
“Who did this, Alicent? Was it the guards?”
A sob forces its way through, sudden and undignified and far too loud in the quiet of the room and she can’t, she can’t, she feels her legs hit something hard and knows that she fell to the floor but she cannot stop crying. The vial in her hand shatters, she thinks, from the fall; there’s something dripping through her fingers and she can’t tell if it’s the potion or her blood Her father’s body on the floor, blood flowing through the pavement’s cracks,
It would have been better if Daemon had taken my head as well.
A shadow kneels next to her and with a jolt she realises that it must be the Queen, but she has no strength left to care. Here’s what she expects: a hand on her wrist, being dragged outside and being sent to the cells or, worse still, to the sept to suffer the statues’ cold judgment. What else is there to do with someone who finds herself so outside of the grace of the gods?
Here’s what happens: there’s a hand cradling hers, another lightly tugging up the sleeve to see the damage, she thinks, up and up until she can’t stand it anymore and then some more, a voice far too kind to be the Queen’s that murmurs something it’s the princess’ voice, she thinks, like when I fell ill and she stayed next to my bed all day, that tells her that she’s safe now, that no one will hurt her again
You did, though, you did, you killed him
You killed him too late, you let him hurt me
She does not know how long they stay like this. Too long, certainly, for a Queen to kneel on cold stone like a servant, but she does not move. When the tears stop the room is quiet, and there’s nothing that can stop her from hearing the soft “Tell me their name and I will give you their heads”.
She feels… drained, perhaps, is the best word, and Orwyle knows. Orwyle knows, and it must have been him who told her she is taking the draught so if she doesn’t say anything the Queen will ask him, and then what if she loses her temper with him? No, no one else must suffer for her shame.
Father, give her strength.
“The day before you arrived, there was… an accident.” She can feel her voice stumbling over the words and she cringes at the way it breaks, choked by another sob. “I thought I had dissimulated my meeting with ser Largent well enough, but…” she almost names him, almost, but she finds that she cannot. “Someone noticed. He accosted in my room and accused me of treason, he…” The tears threaten to flow freely once again, but when she dares to raise her eyes the fury she reads in the Queen’s eyes is more than enough to turn them to ice.
“He put his hands on you.” And then lower, almost a growl so similar to her golden dragon. “Who would dare…”
“You have to tell me his name, Alicent.” The Queen raises to her feet and extends her hand, offering it to her. No other choice but to take it, of course, so she gets up and makes to move but her hand is still caught.
“To raise a hand against the royal family is to lose it. Just punishment must be meted out.” She chooses to ignore the fact that she believes Alicent is still part of the royal family, for her own sanity. She looks at her though, really looks, and sees in her eyes the same fire she had when she was a girl of four and ten, only now there are years of darkness between them, a gulf with waters so bitter that to drink them is to die, and still she sacrificed and still she laboured and here Rhaenyra comes and has everything, and still more she takes.
“And what is the punishment for rape, my Queen? It is by the Maester’s grace that I escaped violence.” Her voice is tinged with frost, and she hopes, selfishly for once, that it is enough to feel seen, to make her understand that all that she has now is thanks to her machinations and that what she suffered has been, in some way, in her name. You couldn't protect me, after a while. No one could.
What she doesn’t expect is for the Queen’s visage, usually marble white, to go even paler still. Her hand clutches at her side in a manner reminiscent of how Gwayne had done sometimes, when something called for a sword in hand and he’d left his in his room.
“What is the punishment for…” it must have taken her a few moments to truly understand what she’d said. She sees her eyes flitter all over her, almost as if to check that she was unharmed once again, but then she strides forward, covering half the room in two steps, and takes her hand again.
“Tell me his name, Alicent. He cannot see the sun rise on the morrow.” The rumours about the madness that grips the Targaryen come to mind. She does look half crazed, pupils wide and a snarl etched in her fair mouth. Her hand is starting to squeeze too tight. “Tell me the name of this worm, so that I might have Syrax trample him. No, he is not worthy to perish under a dragon. I will take his hands, and his tongue, and I will have him gelded and served his own…”
“Rhaenyra!” She looks at her almost dumbly, as if she could not fathom why she’d stopped her rambling. “He is a member of the council. A noble. You cannot have him executed, you need…”
“Do not tell me what I need. What I need is to see him dead, whoever he is. Either you tell me his name, or I will find out myself. There is not one world in which he survives the night, I swear this to you.” She’s frantic now, words coming faster and faster. “Please, Ali.”
It is the name that breaks her. She hasn’t been called that in years, not since her betrothal to the old king was made public. She does not see the Queen in front of her. It is Rhaenyra she sees, the same Rhaenyra that convinced her father to send a Lannister boy away after she’d confessed in her chambers that he made her uneasy. ‘You can trust me, Ali, always,’ she’d said. ‘There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you.’ There’s a corner of her mind that still looks like those chambers.
“Jasper Wylde.” A whisper. Not even fully voiced, and yet Rhaenyra hears it. She hears it and a sort of savage joy gleams in her face.
“I’m glad I told Daemon not to kill him when he asked. He deserves to suffer more.” She spares a glance to the vial, in pieces on the floor, and on the droplets of blood falling from her hand. “I’ll send Orwyle to attend you. But do not drink the potion; open your window, listen for Syrax’s roar as the bastard dies and let that be a balm for your soul.”
It’s like she’s a woman possessed, incapable of staying still for more than a couple of moments. Already she is marching out of the room, shouting for a Queensguard to stand vigil in front of her door
And oh, how that will rankle Daemon when he finds out, that still she is under her protection. She almost wishes to see his face.
and to one of her maids to call on Orwyle again.
It is at least half an hour before he appears, panting and clutching ointment and bandages enough for a small army. She sits at the window, looking at the courtyard bathed in red, orange and yellow, the walls shaking from furious roars, smiling.