Chapter 1: 111 AC

There is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy.

—Love’s Work, Gillian Rose

After their silent return to the Red Keep, they share a silent dinner. Daemon watches both Viserys and Rhaenyra fail to eat anything. He only drinks wine himself.

The first sound is a harsh scraping of wood against stone as Rhaenyra abruptly pushes back her chair and stands shakily. Her face is very pale, eyes red-rimmed. Hightower’s girl half-stands to follow her, before sinking back down into her seat when his niece chokes out, “Excuse me. I wish to be alone.”

Viserys, staring into the middle distance, does not even look over as his daughter stumbles away from the table, her footsteps echoing with a startling loudness in the oppressive hush as she hurries across the room. Daemon’s eyes follow her as she weaves her way unsteadily to the door.

“You should go to her,” he hears a voice say, and that’s when he realizes he’s half-risen from his seat himself.

Otto Hightower shoots an admonishing glare at his pretty, mousy little daughter for even daring to speak to Daemon, presumably. Just yesterday Daemon had asked for her favor at the tourney, enjoying the idea of Hightower’s pique, and enjoying too Rhaenyra’s flush of injured vanity, her jealous pout, the roll of her eyes that told him she knew exactly what he was up to and she thought him very absurd.

And all the while Aemma was dying.

Alicent looks back down at her plate, fiddles with her knife. But for once, she is not totally cowed. Focusing intensely on her own full plate, she murmurs, “Apologies for the impertinence, my prince. I believe the princess may desire the comfort of family.”

He’s never given much thought to Hightower’s daughter beyond her presence as Rhaenyra’s devoted little shadow. This raises her a bit in his estimation.

And shames him.

Daemon has not known what to say. He’d gone to Viserys and the bewildered rage and grief in his brother’s eyes had almost pushed him from the room even before Ser Steffon told him the king wished to be left alone. He’d not even gotten into Rhaenyra’s chamber, for little Elinda Massey told him at the door that the princess had also asked to not be disturbed. It was not his grief, not precisely, and Viserys and Rhaenyra did not seem to want him in theirs.

He should have pressed. He should have told the good ser to get fucked, he should have shoved the Massey brat out of the way. The thought of his brother and Rhaenyra alone in their quarters, Aemma cooling on some stone slab with those shriveled old crones waving incense over her…but what succor could Daemon provide? The Hightower girl might soothe his niece better, do whatever girls did—stoke her hair, let her weep into her lap. Viserys’ models seemed to provide greater comfort than Daemon had managed in years. He’d fucked off to Flea Bottom instead.

Hightower is being Hightower, which is to say, a cunt: sanctimoniously telling his daughter off by finger-wagging that the princess had expressly asked to be alone, as if he gave a damn about Rhaenyra’s wishes. Should they all just sit here? Her mother was dead.

“Thank you, Lady Alicent,” Daemon says. Quietly, but it shuts Otto up. He pushes back his chair.

Viserys still doesn’t look over.

Rhaenyra is faster than she looks, and by the time Daemon catches up to her she’s in the hallway outside her chambers. “Rhaenyra,” he calls softly, absurdly almost frightened of her beating him to her destination and having the door barred to him again. But he knows when he’s being a coward. He can admit it. He has never been less eager to do pretty much anything than try and fail to find some words that could lessen Rhaenyra’s misery right now. What had he said on that hillside? Your father needs you now more than he ever has. They would need each other. Perhaps Viserys might accept comfort from Rhaenyra; perhaps Rhaenyra would be able to draw on some reservoir of sustaining strength to be there for him. The gods knew it would never be the other way around.

At the sound of his voice, Rhaenyra collapses. Her legs give out from under her, and she's a miserable little pool of black fabric in the middle of the hall. Daemon reaches her in two long strides.

When Daemon is standing over her and she turns her face up to him, there are still no tears. Her face is bone-white, rigid as a death mask, the eyes almost frantic. The armored boots of Westerling following his charge ring out behind, and a maidservant makes her way toward them from the other direction. He’s struck with the sudden urge to sweep her in his arms and carry her off somewhere. He waves Ser Harrold back, glares at the girl who has stopped to gawk. He extends his hand to her and murmurs, “Come on.”

Rhaenyra takes his hand and he pulls her to her feet. She staggers, leans against him as they make it the last few feet into her room.

She slides down his side and to the floor again once they are alone. “Uncle,” she whispers. Then she wails. The wordless cry of a wounded animal. She bends in half and buries her head in the skirt of her mourning dress.

He freezes, staring down at the silver fall of hair further obscuring her face, listening to her gasp in sick, wrenching heaves. He has never been called upon to do this. He remembers coming to his good-sister’s chambers after her first stillbirth—Rhaenyra hadn’t even reached her second name day—and Aemma, wan and lovely, smiling up at him from her couch and saying, “Daemon, perfect. Just the company I wanted. Come and make me laugh.” Daemon had even by then found not many people found him amusing, but Aemma seemed to appreciate his wit, such as it was. It was a week after her lying in. His brother and his wife had shed their tears, held each other in a sorrow Daemon knew better than to intrude upon. He came after the tears were done.

Rhaenyra’s tears—those he is familiar with. Or had been; he can’t recall the last time he saw her cry. But he had been witness to her tantrums, her effusions of childish despair over an unfair punishment or a treat denied. Daemon had known his role well. To tease her and tickle her until her giggles broke through. But it had been Aemma she turned to as she cried. Holding her little hands up so she might be lifted into her mother’s arms, so Aemma might pace the room with Rhaenyra’s arms twined about her neck and her legs wrapped around her waist, rocking and shushing her as Rhaenyra sobbed against her neck. And when she’d finally cried herself out she’d look over her mother’s shoulder, a queen waiting for her due: her uncle pulling faces at her until she shrieked with laughter and squirmed to be let down.

Aemma had the power to stop her tears. And Aemma is dead.

Daemon’s chest is tight as he kneels beside his niece. He reaches out and runs his palm over the back of her head. She jerks up. Her mouth is twisted around the howl that has just been cut short and her eyes are fever-bright, but still no tears.

“Oh, Rhaenyra,” he says. His brave, stubborn girl.

“Don’t say it,” Rhaenyra hisses.

“Say what?” He can do this much, push her hair back from her hot face. He had seen Aemma do such a thing, fussing, and Rhaenyra stilling.

“Alicent said it. You can cry, Rhaneyra,” she lisps in mimicry.

He feels oddly pleased about this, that Alicent hadn’t gotten her tears, her confessions. His subsequent thought is even stranger: they’re mine. They’re for me. I’ll get them from her.

“You can, you know. Your mother is—” he cuts himself off.

“Dead,” Rhaenyra moans. “She’s dead. Dead. She’s fucking dead. What would crying help? It won’t make her less fucking dead.”

Daemon doesn’t know what to do with this. He can’t say she’s wrong. He can’t say he believes crying would help.

You’re a big lad now, aren’t you Daemon? His grandmother’s hand had held his before the pyre. Her own voice unsteady. She hadn’t said it cruelly, but Daemon had forced himself to stop sniffling.

“Well, you can,” Daemon says stupidly. He would never ask Rhaenyra to deny herself anything and it seems like she is: her jaw rigid with tension, her eyes blinking furiously.

“I know that,” she snaps. “I’m not some stupid little girl.”

“You’re a baby,” Daemon responds unthinkingly, his heart aching with how true it is. In his head it had been bewildered, aggrieved. She is a baby, a fucking baby. He can’t imagine having ever been this atrociously young. It emerges from his mouth differently: cooing, coaxing.

Rhaenyra blinks wet inky lashes at him, her bottom lip stuck out stubbornly, her chin wobbling. “I’m not,” she says in a whisper.

There you go, he thinks. A bit closer now.

“You are. My baby niece.”

She’s shaking her head slowly, breathing heavy. “I’m not. I don’t want anyone to think—and especially not you.”

Daemon digs into that sore spot. “You always will be to me. I knew you when you were a baby. There’s no need for this, Rhaenyra.”

The end comes out stern, but Daemon shifts—he feels ancient, crouching on the balls of his feet like this is no longer something he can easily do—so he is sitting on the floor beside her. He rubs his hand up her arm. Just ancient: that’s one thing he feels as he recalls the day Aemma had placed this girl in his arms—Viserys worried he would drop her, but Daemon would have rather died, not a Dothraki horde bearing down could have made him drop her—ancient, and other things. A nearly physically painful tenderness. It almost hurts to breathe; he almost has to gasp for air like his niece.

A tear slides down Rhaenyra’s cheek and she rubs at it angrily with a knotted fist.

“A baby,” he tries again, watching closely how it makes her lips tremble before she clamps them tight.

She’d cried as a baby. He’d held her as a baby. Lifted her in his arms and whirled her around. Perched her on his lap at meals and fed her sweetmeats from his fingers.

The last few years, though—even this past year he’d become more conscious of how she was growing up, that the free and easy way they’d always touched each other was now something different. It hadn’t the first time, Rhaenyra two-and-ten, slung over Daemon’s shoulder after some tart remark so he could spin her around and then put her down so she staggered around, dizzy, when he’d looked up with Rhaenyra’s toes digging into his stomach to see Viserys watching disapprovingly from the doorway. After, he’d taken Daemon aside and spoken of how Rhaenyra was no longer a little girl but a lovely maid, her body developing into a woman’s—

Daemon had cut him off then, nauseated and angry. Stomped out, fucked off for a week or two. Rhaenyra had been a skinny scrap of a thing, freckled and horsey. Obscene to even think—but in the last year. Yes, she was lovely. Yes, he’d noticed. A hand on her shoulders when he gave her his gift, that was permissible. The hugs, the sitting in his lap, the stroking of her bright soft hair, the tickling—no.

But when she was a baby, his tiny darling, hadn’t he—just like this, hands under her arms—dragged her into his lap, just so?

She comes, stiff in his arms, prickly, puffed up in indignation like a frightened kitten. What would Aemma do with this stubborn child? Rhaenyra would thrash in her embrace sometimes, furious, unwilling to be placated. A stern word, a gentle hand.

“There’s no need for all this,” Daemon says firmly, no-nonsense. “Not with me, Rhaenyra.”

“No,” she whimpers. “No.”

Another shake of her head, as he pushes it towards his chest, hand cupping the delicate eggshell of her skull. He can feel it in her frame—something titanic, unstoppable, moving up through her body.

“It’s me, Rhaenyra. Nyra,” he says softly, the Valyrian diminutive he hasn’t used in years coming easy here. “Sweetling. Darling girl. My baby.” The names that spilled from Aemma’s mouth, in the Common Tongue that was the only one that orphan of the Vale spoke.

His niece chokes. The cries that rip out of her sound like they hurt, like they are screaming their way through her insides and taking something essential with them. One small hand scrabbles at his arm as she keens, rolling her face against his jacket, heedless of the buckles that scrape at it.

He rests his chin on top of her head. She’s very small in his arms. She fits perfectly, naturally, no matter that she is on the cusp of being a woman-grown. She is still so small, like she was in her mother’s lap. His body envelops her. He feels himself start to rock back-and-forth. It is not conscious. He does not think of imitating Aemma, now—it is just what the body wants to do, when it cradles a small, hurting thing. He knew so well what his body could do by instinct alone, but he hadn’t known this. How could he have known?

Daemon’s eyes sting. Oh, Aemma. It floods in, holding her only girl. He’d been half in love with her, once, the silver bride his brother brought back from her mountain fastness, this long-lost cousin.

It’s a lance aimed at the heart he tries unsuccessfully to parry. He hadn’t seen her in months. The last time, the last time he’d been at the Red Keep prior to bringing Rhaenyra her gift before the tourney, had been at the beginning of her pregnancy. Rhaenyra had been with her in the godswood when Daemon sent a page to find her, and so Aemma had snared him, called him to her with his niece nowhere to be seen. Her eyes glittered with wry amusement as he cast his around the garden. She’d asked him to sit with her a while, and he’d insisted on standing. She was clearly already ill.

“Very well, Daemon,” she’d said with a sigh. “I know you are always prepared for a lecture and sometimes I provide, but I just wanted to say your new role seems to suit you.”

“At long last,” he’d tried to sneer. But with her, it came out relieved.

“Mm,” Aemma said. “You’re growing up. That’s all I wished to say. You seem steadier. They say your goldcloaks are formidable."

“That’s a pretty way to say that paying the lads to carouse in every stinking den in Flea Bottom is a good method for buying their loyalty,” he muttered. He still felt the shamefaced boy with her, in a different way than he did with Viserys. It was mostly more pleasant.

“Rhaenyra is in the gallery,” his goodsister said, sighing again.

He’d looked at her dubiously.

“Yes, go do your whispering,” she said fondly.

“Viserys doesn’t much care for it.”

“He thinks you’re too alike. It worries him.”

“I’m a bad influence.”

“Mhm. She is young. I despair of her myself at times. But she will learn to channel it. As you seem to have done.”

“Are you suggesting I might be a good influence?” he’d said, amazed, turning his face towards her for the first time instead of staring up into the red leaves latticing the sky. Gods, she’d looked exhausted.

“I’m saying she loves you.” She’d given him one of her searching gazes then. “And she nearly collapsed in joy when your message arrived. And I might fuss, but I have never been able to refuse her anything. So go—and maybe stay for dinner instead of running off again, hm?”

He hadn’t stayed for dinner.

His eyes sting. Some inexorable grief of his own moves through his body, making him shudder with it, tighten his arms around Rhaenyra. He rubs his cheek against the top of her head.

He will not make her happy now, he knows. No smiles will break through these tears to reward him, to flatter him. He thinks of Viserys’ relief on the far side of Rhaenyra’s tantrums, whenever he’s given her what she wanted to make it stop, or bought her off with an alternative she could pretend sufficed: now that’s better, isn’t it?

Yes, that’s what his brother always wanted. Everyone smiling. But sometimes it wasn’t better.

Where the fuck is his brother while his daughter cries? And cries, and cries, and cries, not stopping, until Daemon starts to worry that in starting this he’s broken something.

He pulls back so he’s looking down into her face. Red, slick with tears, with snot. There’s desperation in her eyes as she continues to sob. Daemon strokes his thumb over her burning, sticky cheek. Wipes away saliva and tears from the corners of her open mouth.

It rests for a moment on her snotty lip, and that’s enough.

Rhaenyra licks it into her mouth, cutting off her cries as she sucks, hard—she’d sucked her thumb as a baby. They’d tried everything to get her to stop. Daemon remembers.

Her eyes go glassy, pacified, dreamy, the inside of her mouth hot and wet around him as her cheeks pulsate with the force of her self-soothing. Then a panicked jerk of her head as she realizes what she’s doing as she spits it out, her sounds of grief louder and more wrenching than before.

Daemon doesn’t think about it. He puts his first two fingers on her tongue. His other hand cradles her head. Her eyes flutter shut and with a small moan closes her lips around them, sucking hard. Her head lolls against his shoulder, body going limp. He presses a kiss to her hair, to her forehead. Her sobs break off into sniffles.

They sit there for a long time, until the room is pink and gold with the setting sun.

I wish she were my daughter, he thinks, an unspoken, unspeakable wish that has lived with him for years. Here was another thing Viserys was unworthy of, so consumed by his own ambitions and vanity and delusions and self-absorbed grief that he left this one perfect thing he’d been gifted to mourn alone, that he spurned it so obviously that she knew it. The rage simmers in him as Rhaenyra falls asleep in his arms with her head tucked into his neck, as he lifts her up and carries her to bed, as he listens to a midnight council meeting where Otto declares him a second Maegor in the making and they bandy about the idea of placing a crown on Rhaenyra’s head as tears continue to leak from her eyes even in her sleep, as his steps turn towards the pleasure house he will buy another little bit of loyalty with should his family ever need it.

But thank the gods I’m not her father, he thinks. For what a useless one Viserys was. Yes, that was all.

Chapter Index.