Chapter Text
110 AC
On the sixth day of the seventh moon, one-hundred-and-ten years after Aegon’s Conquest, Queen Alicent began the labors of her third pregnancy. All through the night she screamed and bellowed, the servants say, sounding more dragon than woman – though she herself was a Hightower.
Her third labor was far worse than the labors she endured to bring young Prince Aegon and sweet Princess Helaena into the world, and thrice the maesters fled her chamber under the guise of questioning King Viserys on what ought to be done to ease his Queen. In truth the sight had been terrible to behold, and one that all present had been eager to escape; the screaming, the blood, it had overwhelmed at least two handmaidens and left more than one maester with shaking hands and stammering words. For surely such torment could only be endured for so long, and as the hour of the dragon passed, the babe had yet to end its mother’s suffering.
Yet soon as the sky lit with the dawn, a blaze of oranges and pinks and reds of the rising sun on the horizon, Queen Alicent brought into the world two dragons of her own. The second child was small, unexpected, and for all the pious present, a gift from the Seven, for it was the seventh day of the seventh month. At the time the Queen had wanted to scoff at their holy reverence as she lay naked up to her waist and covered in blood, still panting and sweating like an animal as the blazing dawn cast its heat throughout the stifling chamber. Unfamiliar faces of witless handmaidens and prying maesters swarmed her vision as she looked around frantically for the babes she had just given life to. Her mind raced – they were gone, someone took them, someone took her babes, someone-
“A Prince and a Princess, Your Grace,” a faceless maester spoke from somewhere at her side, “hale and beautiful.”
She vaguely felt the two bundles wrapped in fine silk being arranged in her arms as another handmaiden she did not recognize - through tears she hadn’t realized were welling – gently wiped her brow with a cool cloth. Immediately she looked down at the two babes in her arms, desperate to see what so much pain and agony had bought her. In the instant she looked upon them, all of the space held in her heart for Aegon and Helaena was shoved aside only to be filled to the brim by her newborn twins. Their skin was softer than any silk she’d felt in her life, the most perfect shade of the palest pink – unmarred and perfect. Identical, as far as she could tell, and only a year later would she learn that they were not. But in that moment, her little Prince and her little Princess both had the faintest wisps of silver-blond hair, and violet eyes that only opened enough to allow her a small peek.
Two dragons, she mused, not Hightowers.
She knew it was folly to hope for a child bearing the dark locks and emerald eyes of her own lineage.
‘The blood of the dragon is strong,’ Viserys had said when she voiced her innermost desire for a child of her own likeness – even just one, ‘there is no blood in any living man that can overcome it.’
Long moments of studying her babes pass before Viserys is entering the bedchamber, his smile wider than it had ever been with the birth of Aegon or Helaena. He’d undoubtedly been informed of the omens and good fortune that the birth of their twins brought forth. Congratulations was heartily offered to Visery from all of those in the room as Alicent remained silent, looking down upon the silver-dusted heads of her twins. She tried to ignore the feeling of the stiff and drying blood beneath her thighs, and the salt of the sweat that dripped into seam of her closed lips. Her chestnut hair clung dryly to her forehead and neck. She was suffering the aftermath of her childbirth as the fire of the sky’s horizon blazed through the open window, turning the blood on the sheets sticky against her skin.
“How fare the children, my Queen?” Viserys asked from his sudden place beside her, looking down over her shoulder at the bundles in red silk.
I am suffering.
Alicent remembers her courtesies, remembers there is an entire court present in her bedchamber as she schools her expression into one of Queenly contentment.
“The maester assures me they are healthy, Your Grace.”
I just wanted a babe who looked like me.
“Wonderful, wonderful!” Viserys practically shouts, causing the babes to startle and cry.
Perhaps he will allow me to name my daughter in honor of my mother…
But before the thought even passes her mind, Viserys has turned from her. “Grand Maester, see to it that word is spread quickly, and that the bells of Baelor are rung for the remainder of the day. Have ravens sent to every Lord in Westeros that the Queen has given birth to Prince Aemond and Princess Valarra.”
Alicent’s second hope died in her chest. Her babes were given names not of her choosing – names of long-dead Targaryens that had never much mattered to her. But with Viserys grinning from ear to ear at his proclamation, she mustered what little effort she had left in her to give, and she smiled. She smiled at her husband as he stole yet another desire from her, even if it was a theft unintended. His blood would always overpower hers and her children would always be a reminder of that. Her lineage would die with her – another broodmare to further the Targaryen line, though for a gentler stallion she could not have dared to hope. Viserys was kind to her, if a bit absentminded and blissfully unaware at times. He would make a good father to – he was a good father. But what would her children say of their Hightower mother in the years to come, when her vibrant green faded into the background of red and black? Would they see her as she saw herself most days? A lesser vessel to further a greater line?
No, she resolved vehemently, they would not.
Targaryen they would be in blood and appearance, such was true. But Aemond and Valarra would be hers. She would raise them as her own mother had raised her – to be kind and gentle, to conduct themselves with the utmost courtesy and dignity, and to find appreciation in things besides dragons, and war, and a dead Kingdom on the other side of the world. Her twins would be taught justice, and humility, and propriety. She would cast out as much of the Targaryen ways as she could when it came to her twins. They would not marry their cousins, or aunt, or uncle, or nephew, or niece. She would not allow it. The Hightower bloodline did not flow through such foul ties, and neither would the blood of the babes in her arms. Viserys had already made plain his desire to wed Aegon and Helaena, and she knew there would be no swaying him when he began saying things such as ‘the Valyrian way’ and ‘blood purity’.
Her stomach still churned at the thought of her son and daughter together; wedding, bedding, begetting heirs.
It was unnatural.
It was sinful.
It was an abomination against the Gods.
Yes, she would raise them as Hightowers. Targaryen they may be, and dragons they may ride, but their mother’s blood would flow just as strongly. And for once she would silence Viserys’ words, and show him that Hightower blood was not so easily subdued. She would make sure of it. She would dress them in green and silver if she had to. She would breath her own fire and set aflame all expectation that simply because their hair was silver and their eyes were the color of amethysts that they were any less descendants of their mother’s blood. Viserys would not take this opportunity from her. Not again. She would right all of the wrongs in the Targaryen bloodline until she brought forth something new, far less black than green.
But suddenly, as if every spirit of every dead Targaryen heard her treacherous thoughts, the babes in her arms let out blood-curdling screams. And as she quickly looked down, she saw her twins bathed in the red of the sun’s rising, wrapped in the red silks of her Dragonlord’s house, and could not deny that they looked to be truly made of fire and blood.