Chapter Text
134 A.C.
“The storm is coming in from the south,” observes Valaena as she gazes out the window. Her brother Joffrey stands on a chair beside her, his eyes flitting between the swirling clouds in the sky and the choppy waves beyond the isle’s shore. She waves her hand in the same direction as the gusty breeze, and his eyes follow as though he can see the wind. “That means it will have left Storm’s End, and Luke will be able to fly home soon.”
After their grandsire, King Viserys, had passed away a week before, their uncle, Aegon, had usurped the Iron Throne from their mother, Rhaenyra. Their mother had been crowned regardless, and plans for war had soon followed. As part of the effort to rally allies, their brothers Jacaerys and Lucerys had been sent to different lords of the realm to remind them of the oaths they had sworn to Rhaenyra in her youth. Lucerys had gone on dragonback to Storm’s End, less than a day’s ride away, but has yet to return.
“I’m afraid not,” calls a voice. Attention stolen from the weather outside, Valaena and Joffrey turn around to see their step-father, Daemon. Joffrey hops off the chair and rushes over to him. Daemon pulls the boy to his side with a surprising amount of tenderness, running his hand through Joffrey’s curls. Ever since news had come that Viserys had died, he has been cold and distant from the rest of the family, consumed by his quest for fire and blood. Seeing him as he is now, hesitant with his face contorted in something akin to pain, sends Valaena alight with panic.
As has become her habit in moons past, her hand falls to her swollen belly, rubbing over it in wide circles in an effort to soothe herself. “What’s happened,” she asks.
Daemon sighs. “Sit down.” He gestures towards the chair Joffrey had vacated.
She does not move. “Tell me what has happened,” she demands, using her most queenly voice. Now that her mother is queen, new but not unexpected responsibilities have been foisted onto Valaena. She is Princess of Dragonstone, and with that role comes people asking after her opinion day and night in matters of the household, the isle, the crownlands, the Seven Kingdoms, and the conflict the Dowager Queen Alicent has created. She has learned quickly that she must be the very picture of authority at all times.
Daemon moves his hand to Joffrey’s shoulder, gripping it tightly. “Lucerys and Arrax were cut down over Shipbreaker Bay.”
Valaena feels the blood drain from her face and pour into her limbs, making her feel laden and unable to move, as Joffrey gasps and whines. “Luke is dead?”
“Yes,” answers Daemon without reprieve. Joffrey, who is too young to quell his emotions, bursts into tears at once, sobbing and pressing his face into Daemon’s waist.
For her part, Valaena herself does not join him in his cries, though her body does, crying out to echo her brother’s agony. Pain erupts in her lower back, so sharp as to make her think she has been stabbed. She moves her hand to the base of her spine and presses down, and the pressure moves to the floor of her pelvis, growing the longer it sits there. She grits her teeth as she wills herself to think past the discomfort. “That is not possible. Lord Borros and his men haven’t the means to slay a dragon, even one so small as Arrax.”
Daemon does not dispute this. “It was Vhagar.”
Unable to keep herself quiet at this, Valaena groans and clutches at her stomach. The pain in her spine has returned, but she is almost blind to it. All she can think of is little Lucerys, flying through a storm on his fledgling dragon, trying to make his way out but to no avail. How frightened he must have been, staring down the maw of a beast as fearsome as Vhagar, the terrible, ferocious mount of her terrible, ferocious husband.
“Aemond did this,” she gasps. She turns wide eyes on her step-father, desperate for him to deny it. Fervently, she wishes for him to relay a tale of the old dragon gone rogue, having leapt from the ground without her rider on her back.
“He threatened Lucerys in the Round Hall and pursued when he tried to flee,” he says instead.
“He will die for this,” Joffrey screams with all the ferocity an eight-year-old can muster. He tears himself away from Daemon and makes for the door. “Tyraxes will burn him to ash!”
Valaena surprises herself with how quickly she moves into his path. She grabs her brother by his shoulders, keeping him at arm’s length as she kneels before him. Blinking through her own tears, she stares into his watery eyes, entreating, “No, Joffrey, I cannot allow you to go.”
“But he killed Luke,” screeches Joffrey, his fists balling at his sides.
“I know. I know,” she heaves. She moves her hands to caress his cheeks, keeping her eyes on his face even as all she sees are Lucerys’s own upturned nose and round eyes. “Trust me, valonqar, he will be made to answer for his—agh!” An anguished cry cuts her off as her pelvis explodes with pain. Distracted from calming her brother, she drops her hands to the floor to keep herself from falling on her front.
“Damn it,” Daemon curses. He appears at her side and wraps one of her arms around his shoulders. “You’re just like your mother. Joffrey, help me take your sister to her chambers. The babe is coming.”
“No,” she argues as Daemon hefts her to her feet with Joffrey pushing her up on her other side. He drags her out of the room even as she struggles against him. “Daemon, I cannot—I cannot have his child, not now, not after this.”
Daemon huffs. “It is too late for that, riñītsos.”
Climbing the stairs to reach her rooms is an arduous task. They have to stop twice and move slowly once her feet begin to slip on stone steps made slippery by her own leakage. Once at their top, Daemon forgoes dragging her about, walking off and disappearing around a corner. Without him around to bully her, Valaena has half the mind to stop where she is, but as another contraction hits, she realizes she cannot hope to pretend that her labors have not started. Gloriously unhappy, she trudges down the hall with Joffrey’s hand clasped tightly in her own.
Once in her rooms, she sends him off in search of their mother as she collapses onto her bed, where she lies on her side until another contraction forces her onto her knees. That is how Maester Gerardys and the midwives find her, squatting atop the mattress as she struggles to rid herself of her kirtle. One of the midwives steps forward to help her, and once the oppressive garment is off, she gasps out, “Where is my mother?”
Gerardys replies, “Your mother collapsed when news arrived that—” He stops, gazing at her as though to glean how much of the truth she knows.
“Luke,” she mewls, answering his unspoken question. Her eyes squeeze themselves shut as her muscles contract again, and she sees his face behind her eyelids. His dark, curly hair, his pale skin, his plump, rosy cheeks, his precious, little smile—
What happened to him, she wonders. Had he been burned beyond recognition? Had he fallen from Arrax’s back and been devoured by the sea? Had Vhagar swallowed him whole? At the thought of his fate, her stomach rolls and, when added to the sensation of her womb revolting, turns.
She pitches to the side and retches over the side of the bed. The youngest of the midwives shrieks and jumps out of the way, prompting Gerardys to snap at her to clean up the mess. Valaena, for all that she would normally apologize for getting sick on someone, is unrepentant, throwing up again and again.
When she has emptied her stomach, she is clammy and trembling. The midwives urge her to lie back on the mattress, and she complies, too sapped of her energy to resist.
This is not how she imagined her labors would be. For months, she had been preparing to give birth in King’s Landing, but all that had changed last week with that disastrous final supper with her entire family. She had wanted to make the best of things on Dragonstone, but when her mother had begun her labors early four days ago, every last optimistic thought had fled her mind. Still, she had not anticipated an early birth for her own child, one she could only hope would survive as her little sister Visenya did not.
For the first several hours, Valaena pushes every time the midwives command it. She pushes and pushes until her voice has gone hoarse from screaming and every ounce of sweat in her body has found its way onto her skin and into her long, black hair. She pushes so hard that at one point, she fears her eyeballs will pop out of her skull, and the thought sends her into delirium.
Aemond was meant to be here with her, she remembers. He had sworn he would be. He had begged her not to venture to Dragonstone without him. He had said he would follow, but he never did. He put his hobrenka brother on her mother’s throne instead. He killed her brother. Aemond, Aemond—
Aemond killed her brother.
She pushes and pushes, but the babe stays where it has been for the last eight months, spiting her just as its father has.
After a while, her strength leaves her. She lies back on a mountain of pillows and allows her own body to ravage her as the world around her dims and sputters like a dying flame.
A dying flame. Lucerys.
“Lucerys,” she weeps, crooning out the name of a boy she will never see again as every muscle in her body clenches. She moans it over and over again, stopping only to grind her teeth together every minute or so. She is stalled only when someone is bold enough to grab her by her shoulders and shake her back into lucidity.
“Valaena,” her mother groans. Valaena blinks to clear her vision of the black spots that have been marring her sight for some time now. Her mother stares down at her, her face ashen and her mouth drawn into a miserable line.
Valaena means to say something in response, something reassuring and clearheaded, but she is not sure any words make it past her lips.
Rhaenyra turns her awe-inspiring attention onto someone else. “Why is she like this? This birth should be easy. It is her first, and she is only nine-and-ten.”
“The princess is distraught, Your Grace,” answers a gravelly voice Valaena knows to belong to Gerardys. “Sometimes, a woman’s emotions can make even her natural burdens too perilous for her to bear.”
“Do you mean to say she will die,” asks another voice, tinged with panic. Rhaena.
There is a beat of silence before he answers. “It is too early to tell, my lady, but the princess is weak. She has emptied her stomach and refuses drink, and the babe has moved little.”
Defeated, Valaena lets her eyes fall closed. How pathetic, she mourns, dying on the birthing bed at the start of a war. If she had the strength, she would haul herself outside to die a dragonrider’s death like her Aunt Laena.
There is more conversation happening over her head, but she tunes it out. She focuses instead on the wispy movements of the babe inside her. All throughout her labors, the babe has been moving around, kicking her as it tries to shove its way into the world. It is a shame for it all to end like this, she thinks. She had so wished to meet the babe. Her baby, a perfect blend of her and Aemond. Aemond—
Aemond, who killed her brother. Aemond, who now threatens to kill her, too. Aemond, that wretched, vile, soul-sucking viper. How could she have let him fool her for so long? How can she let him be the end of her?
Set astir, Valaena opens her eyes and lifts her head. She reaches for her mother, whose head swivels in her direction as soon as her hand brushes her arm. “Help me,” she rasps.
Her mother seems to know exactly what she needs. She cleaves herself to Valaena’s side at once, pulling her up so that she squats atop the mattress once more. At her mother’s insistence, Rhaena helps hold her up on her other side.
“You can do this, sweetling,” encourages Rhaenyra. “You are strong, my perfect, brilliant daughter, my heir. You will not allow them to take you from me, too.”
Valaena nods jerkily, tearing up as another contraction comes, stronger than any others have felt for hours. Groaning, she bears down, silently urging the babe to leave her womb. After another ten minutes of pushing, she turns to beseeching it aloud, screeching, “Get out! Get out! Move, you little—ahh!”
Another hour passes before the babe begins to crown, but once it has, her labors come to a swift end. Valaena spreads her legs so wide that they burn from her hips to the tips of her toes and squeezes around her child until it slips from her and lands in the arms of a matronly midwife.
The babe howls, clearing its lungs of her blood and waters. Her mother and Rhaena cheer for her, and the midwives chorus them.
Their jubilation chafes, and she shoves them all back. She falls onto her hands and knees and wails during the afterbirth. Valaena drowns out the babe’s cries, her own yowling without words but carrying an oath of vengeance all the same. A clap of thunder and a flash of lightning accompany her roar, cementing the vow.
The babe in her arms has wisps of white-blond hair and dark violet eyes. Ever since she and Aemond had been betrothed, she has envisioned children with pale hair and purple eyes, children who would never have their births questioned, but now that such a child rests in her arms, it is a bittersweet victory.
She had toiled ceaselessly to be content in her marriage. After much time and effort, she had thought that she and Aemond were of the same mind, but she had been woefully mistaken. Surely, her husband holds no affection for the woman whose brother he would enthusiastically murder. This leaves her to look upon a boy who bears his father’s likeness not with joy but with morose sentimentality.
Despite her misgivings, she feels no less devotion to her son than she had expected she would a month ago. She knows already that she would do anything for his sake. Still, it feels strange being so attached to the babe now that his father has betrayed her so thoroughly.
“I love him,” she confesses, quiet and timid.
After her labors had finished, she had suffered fussing from the midwives and visits from Joffrey and Baela. Eventually, near everyone had cleared out, allowing her to rest for the evening.
Only her mother remains. Rhaenyra sits on the edge of her bed, absently petting along one of her legs. She has been silently stewing since they had been left alone, doubtlessly plotting how to retaliate against the Greens given the murderous expression that occasionally slips past her façade. She manages a tremulous smile for Valaena’s sake. “It will fade.”
Valaena is quick to rebut her mother’s assumption. “No, not—” She cuts herself off, unable to say his name. “Not him. I would say he is dead to me if not for the fact that I wish to send him to the Stranger myself.” Her mother grins approvingly at her. Valaena sighs. “The baby. I love the baby.”
The contempt in her eyes melting away, Rhaenyra places a hand on her knee. “Oh, jorrāeliarzus, of course, you do. He is your child, your firstborn. I love him also.”
Valaena bites her lip. Her thumb strokes along the crown of her son’s head. “But what if I should come to resent him for his father’s sins?”
“You will not. You always love your children no matter what their father has done,” her mother assures her. Disbelieving, Valaena’s face twists in a way her mother must recognize. “I know this to be true.” She brushes Valaena’s hair from her face. “I know because of you.”
“How can that be,” questions Valaena, her gaze dropping back to her son’s face. She finds it difficult to keep her attention elsewhere. Her eyes trace the line of his brow, the curve of his miniature nose, and the bow of his tiny, pink mouth. “My father was a good and honorable man.”
“He was,” Rhaenyra takes a deep, shuddering breath, “but I speak of your true father.”
Breath caught, Valaena’s eyes snap to those of her mother. In all her life, her mother has never confirmed that Laenor was not truly her or her brothers’ father, not even to them. The fact that she is willing to do so now unnerves her. She hesitates before replying, a part of her loath to have the lie end. “Ser Harwin was a fine man, as well. He was loyal to you.”
Her mother’s sad smile returns. “He was, but he was not your father. In truth, my love, the man who sired you was Ser Criston Cole.”