Chapter Text
There is a mercy, he supposes, in how quickly Matarys had gone. He had not lingered in much pain, so the maesters tell him, and Baelor has tried to take whatever comfort he can in that. That for whatever else, his boy had not suffered.
It is meager, made more so by the fact that the gods have seen fit only to allow that to one son and not the other. It has been hours now of sitting at Valarr’s bedside, stroking sweat-matted hair off his brow, and watching him toss and turn. Not quite asleep but not quite awake, breathing shallow, face pinched with pain. Every wet rattle of Valarr’s lungs feels like a needle shoved under a nail, and Baelor almost wonders if perhaps he is dying too.
They have tried to avoid it. When Matarys first fell sick in the morning, Maester Andrey had forbidden anyone from approaching his chambers in the hopes of containing the plague. And not even a day later, when his son had been dead, the doors had been barred still. Baelor had allowed it, even despite Valarr’s protestations, for all the good it had done.
It had taken only a few hours after Matarys had gone for Valarr, already half sick with grief, to vomit up blood on his doublet. Andrey had known better than to propose Baelor stay away this time too.
The gods punish me, Baelor thinks to himself now. For not being with his little boy in his last moments. For failing to adequately protect Dragonstone when he knows the rest of the country is being ravaged. For not taking Maekar’s offer to bring his family to Summerhall while there was still time. Perhaps even for the mess at Ashford. Let them. If they wish to lay him low, for whatever sins, Baelor will let them, so long as they pull their hands back from Valarr. His firstborn, his heir, the only child who remains to him now. His wife is dead, his youngest is dead, and now he must countenance watching his Valarr suffer slowly too.
Baelor holds his pale, clammy hand and wishes he were the one in the sickbed.
Baelor does not turn when the door creaks open in the pre-dawn hours, nor when it clicks shut. He is counting the beats of his son’s heart. They are thready and stuttered, dangerously so even to someone with his limited knowledge. But they are there, so he holds Valarr’s hand, fingertips pressed to the delicate skin of his wrist, and counts.
“Any better?”
Now, he turns. His brother makes his way toward him like some pale ghost. With Valarr’s rooms shut up as they are, Baelor cannot see his face. But he feels the weight of Maekar’s stare on him. It has always been like that, ever since they were children. Even without looking, he can feel those eyes on him always; he can pinpoint exactly where Maekar is in a room.
“You ought not be here.” His voice is hoarse with disuse.
Maekar shrugs. “If it is already on this island, already in the castle, I am not sure it matters if I keep to separate apartments at this point.” Maekar is at his shoulder, and Baelor’s head throbs.
The blood had run hot, after Ashford. Back at the Red Keep, when Grand Maester Ryam had firmly decreed that he was not going to die, he had found himself incensed at his brother. Enraged almost, that he had allowed Aerion’s foolery to get as far as it had, that it had nearly resulted in the orphaning of his boys, that Valarr could have found himself a king at too young an age and too little prepared, all for the sake of Aerion’s cruelty and Maekar’s pride.
Maekar’s temper had always burned fierce as dragonflame in his turn, and there had been no exception then. “I did not force you to side against family for the sake of a peasant would-be knight,” he had snapped. “Nor am I the one who coaxed him into demanding a trial by combat in the first place.”
“Can you imagine what the realm might have said if I had not?!” Baelor's head had been pounding and his face was hot. “I have told you time and time again and yet you never listen, we must be seen to be honorable even more than we must truly be honorable! How can you still not understand?!”
“Oh I understand.” Maekar’s eyes had narrowed. “As I understand that there were ways to showcase your fucking honor that could be done without preventing me from helping my son.”
“Ser Duncan was not going to kill Aerion.” Of that, Baelor was certain, even with how muddied his memories of the last moments of the trail had been.
“You did not know that,” Maekar had hissed.
They had gone in circles. Recriminations for not letting Maekar render aid to Aerion in his moment of pain and panic, recriminations for the blow that had near killed Baelor, recriminations for everything in between. Shouting had hurt his head, but he had done it still, and his little brother had given as good as he had gotten before he had finally stalked off back to Summerhall. Maekar could hold a grudge, Baelor knew, and doubtless he would, for having been fought against by his own brother, as much for the injuries his two eldest had incurred. Baelor for his part had fanned the flames of his own anger every time Matarys clung to his hand as if terrified he might vanish in smoke and with every dark circle under Valarr’s eyes during his healing.
Maekar coming to Dragonstone had been an attempt at rapprochement. For all the good it has done.
“You ought not be here,” Baelor says again. He can feel Maekar stiffen at his side, no doubt expecting a dismissal from Valarr’s sickroom. “You should be at Summerhall. You should be safe.”
“There is no reason why Summerhall should not be stricken as well.” Maekar’s voice has gone thick. Daeron is at Summerhall. Aegon and the hedge knight who now serves Valarr are also at Summerhall. And their father is here. Away from them. With his dead and dying nephews.
“Reports from King’s Landing say Dorne and the Marches remain untouched.” Yet even Dragonstone is stricken. Baelor presses his face to his son’s limp hand and tries not to retch at the unfairness of it all. “I should have listened to you. When you offered to have us at Summerhall, I should have said yes.”
It had seemed a touch too much, too soon. Walking Maekar’s halls, seeing his children. He had not felt ready for it, nor felt that the boys would be ready for it either. And he had thought Dragonstone’s island fortress might be better protected. Fool, he thinks to himself. You utter, wretched, son-killing fool.
“You were not to know,” Maekar says quietly.
“My son is dead.” The words burn him. “It is a father’s duty to do whatever he can, anything he can, to protect his children.” And I have failed. “If I had acquiesced and gone to Summerhall with you, my children would be safe. You would be safe.”
The plague has taken his son. It seems like to take another. How long before it comes for his brother, his baby brother? Will he now be the brother responsible for robbing children of their father, rendering them orphans, all through his weakness at keeping Maekar here?
The dragons are dead and their family is weak. Weak to rebellion, weak to wounds, weak to disease. Weak to the machinations of its members who bring death down through pride and their lesser inclinations. Baelor has half a mind to send Maekar away, if he did not know his brother. His stubborn little brother, downright mulish, who never does what he’s told. Who is still standing at his side in the dark of Valarr’s room.
Maekar places his hand on his shoulder; Baelor shudders. “I am made of sterner stuff. As is your Valarr.” Baelor presses a kiss to his son’s sweaty palm at that. “At Ashford, he stayed by your side unwaveringly until you were deemed safe, and he still made the necessary arrangements for your convalescence, for the aftermath of the entire business. He did everything that needed to be done. Unflinchingly. He is strong.”
Baelor hears the consolation behind the words, and with his free hand reaches up to grab at Maekar’s fingers in thanks. It is, he realizes with a dull pain, the first time he has touched Maekar with any true intentionality since they returned from Ashford Castle. Crisis oft reunites old bedfellows, and even with the pain in his skull the tourney field seems so far away compared to his brother’s presence and his brother’s touch.
He tries to take Maekar’s comfort. That he will leave Dragonstone alive and unharmed when all of this is over. That Valarr will too.
Perhaps his remaining son can survive this.
His head pounds fiercely, as it has for months now. In times of stress and sleeplessness it aches fiercely, though Baelor has been assured it does not threaten his life. Just a mere consequence of surviving what he survived.
And he is certainly stressed and sleepless now. He presses a damp washcloth to Valarr’s feverish brow and listens carefully to his ragged breathing; he presses his fingers to his wrist and throat to feel the beating of his heart.
He does not know what he will do if he no longer feels it. Die himself, perhaps. The way it seems he should have done at Ashford.
Is this how his boy had felt, after the trial of seven? Desperately searching for whatever he could, in the hopes of staving off the devastation of loss? Yet fathers oft die before their children. It is the everyday order of things, cruel though it may feel. Baelor himself has outlived his own mother, and will outlive his father too when the time comes. He has always known that.
But it is unnatural for a father to outlive his son. It is not right. And Baelor will already burn one; he cannot burn the other.
Baelor kneels at his son’s bedside and clasps his hands.“Please,” he whispers. “He is my son. He is my first son. My first and my last.” He reaches out to stroke his hand through Valarr’s hair. “He is all that remains to me now.” What more could you want to take? “And he is young. He has more life in him to live.” Baelor presses his hands to his eyes; he has not felt this adrift since his grandfather’s reign, marked out as different and therefore lesser, when even in the crowds in the throne room he’d felt so alone. But he is more bereft now than he was even then. “So let him live it. Let him live. Let him live and let him live long, that is all I ask. Let him live.”
You may have anyone else. He does not say it aloud, but the gods will hear him all the same. It is unseemly, unkingly, to think, but he still thinks it. Because Valarr is his. His firstborn. His boy. Baelor will not lose him, and he will not see him suffer more than he already has. The gods will have to take someone else. Anyone else.
“Please let him live.”
After one of the losses, Maester Andrey had come to tell him that Prince Valarr had gone “missing”. To others, perhaps, Baelor had thought wryly to himself. Not to his father. He had known exactly where his son was.
Ever since he was small, Valarr had needed his distance from others. Not often, but when he grew too weary of crowds and noise and expectations, he had his places he retreated to. Oft high up, lofty battlements or the more precarious towers or even some spots on the Dragonmont when he was feeling bold. It is easy enough to find him, if one knows where to look. And from the first time Jena had told him someone had spotted their six year old boy sitting at the windows of Dragonstone’s rookery, Baelor has always known where to look.
Baelor found him atop the Watchtower, curled up in a ball against a stone dragonwing, chin resting on knees tucked up against his chest and arms wrapped tight around his legs. He had been staring at the surf intently, as if the white caps held the answers to all his questions.
“I thought I might find you here,” Baelor had said. Age made him less nimble than his son, but he had managed to sit himself down next to him all the same.
Valarr had not looked up, but he had tilted his head ever so slightly in Baelor’s direction. “I am not neglecting anything.”
“I did not think you were,” Baelor had told him. Were it any other occasion, he might have gently ribbed his son, for his constant fears of scolding. But these days, the emotions are raw, not just for his boy but for him as well.
Valarr’s shrug had been jerky. “I just…I wanted a moment alone.”
“That is understandable.”
Children lost in the womb or the cradle is not a new thing. Baelor was fortunate it never touched his own marriage bed, but the babe his grandmother had died birthing had not lived long afterward, and even gentle Rhaegel had mourned a stillborn boy before the twins.
Valarr always took the deaths especially hard, every single time.
“I made a mistake.” Valarr had said it tonelessly. Not with the contrition of a child looking to atone, but of a man resigned. It was not something Baelor ever wanted to hear from his son. He was too young to have a voice so heavily laden with despair.
“What sort of mistake?” he had asked carefully.
Valarr had sighed then, and somehow managed to curl tighter on himself. “I have warned myself not to get attached. Multiple times, in fact,” he had added with a bitter little laugh. “But I thought…I thought this one would be a girl. A little girl. And I started thinking of what to call her.” He bit down hard on his lip, hard enough that blood had beaded up between his teeth. “I wanted to name her Jaehaera.”
“After the Conciliator?” It was the only reason Baelor could think of. There was only ever one Jaehaera, the tragic little girl born to the second Aegon to sit the Iron Throne, and he doubted Valarr would want to tempt the gods to a similar fate for his own child.
Yet Valarr shook his head. “It starts with the same letter as Jena,” he had said quietly. “I wanted to name her for Mother.” He had taken in a deep breath, long and shuddery. “I wanted her to live on, through my — through my daughter.”
His voice had cracked sharply, stone split down the middle, and Valarr had buried his face into his knees. His shoulders shook under the hand Baelor had placed on him.
“I keep wanting them.” His voice had been teary, pained. “Every single time, and I know I shouldn’t. I should know better by now. But I want them still.”
There are times when Valarr does not like to be touched. It is the same instinct that compels him to high places when he is overwhelmed; he has had his desire for independence and his need to keep parts of himself tucked away from others since he was a boy. And perhaps this was one of those times, but all Baelor had thought, in the face of Valarr’s quiet weeping, was that he had been the first person to have ever held his son.
They had placed that little baby in his arms first and he had marveled at how someone so small could feel so heavy to him. And then something in his chest had torn itself neatly in half, and had never healed.
That same spot had been aching when he had pulled Valarr to him, atop the Watchtower. His son had gone easily, fisting a hand in his doublet and pressing closer with a hiccuping sob. And just as he has ever since the first time he ever heard Valarr cry, Baelor’s eyes had stung.
He had pressed a kiss to Valarr’s hair. “That is no fault in you,” he had whispered into that one streak of silver. “I wanted you, and your brother, from the moment I first knew you existed. Since the moment the potential for you existed.” From the very first. There had been no hope for it. “There is no way for any parent to avoid it. I wish to all the gods there were, for your sake. But that does not mean there was a mistake.”
He had held Valarr tighter to him then. The wind was cold, this high up, and the waves large enough that even here Baelor could taste salt. His arms were a poor protection against it, a poor protection against grief and against death as well. But he had clutched at his son all the same.
“You have done nothing wrong, do you hear me?” Never.
His son has done nothing wrong. He does not deserve to die.
Baelor wishes that he were as selfless as men have made him out to be. That he could understand that if his sons were tired, if it was their time to go, that he could let them go.
But he has never been that man. He has always held his boys close to him, too close even, spent as much time as he could at Dragonstone when they were babes and then brought them to court as often as he could when they were older. He had prayed more fervently than he had ever prayed for anything that Matarys might survive the day, and it has been two nights now since he last let go of Valarr’s hand.
Valarr tosses and turns, never quite waking but never truly asleep, and perhaps Baelor should let him go. He is suffering, and has suffered before this. Perhaps it is time to let him rest.
Instead, Baelor holds his hand.
Baelor throws caution to the wayside and opens the windows. No doubt Andrey would bleat at him that he mustn’t, that the sickness must be contained, but it is already on Dragonstone. It has claimed lives, the most precious lives. And Valarr has always liked the scent of the sea on the wind.
There is a spring breeze on the air. Cool but not cold, the air warm but not hot. It brings the smell of salt and sound of gulls into this miserable room; it caresses itself on Baelor’s back like the softness of a mother’s touch and it ruffles through the strands of Valarr’s hair. Baelor does the same, smooths out that dragonwing of silver and brushes his thumb over the crease between Valarr’s eyebrows.
His eyes burn from sleeplessness and his head still throbs; it feels almost half a dream when his son turns his head to nuzzle at his palm. “Father?” Soft, sleepy, young.
Alive.
“Valarr.” Fatigue gone, he moves to sit on the mattress, cradling Valarr’s face in both his hands now. “Valarr, can you look at me? Can you open your eyes, sweetling?”
It takes effort. Baelor can see it, and he knows it well himself. He remembers waking in Lord Ashford’s chambers with his skull already in thumping agony, bruises aching all over his body. He remembers how his eyelids had felt like they had been sewn together, and peeling them open had felt as though he were tearing flesh. He remembers not even wanting to open them at all, save for the fact that he could hear Valarr’s voice. Since he’d first been born, that sounded superseded all of Baelor’s other wants.
Valarr manages to crack his eyes open. They are bleary and bloodshot, and there is still a glassy cast over both of them, but the skin beneath Baelor’s hands is cooler than it has been, and those mismatched eyes ( his eyes ) see him with clarity. They recognize him. The ache in his head eases, and the weight on his shoulders seems to lift.
The relief that rings through him feels like betrayal. He ought to be grieving Matarys with everything he has; he ought not feel any sort of happiness ever again. But Valarr is alive. His boy, his first baby, lives.
“There you are, my darling.” Valarr pushes against the hand Baelor uses to brush his hair back from his forehead. His eyelashes flutter; it is movement, proof of life. There is living color in his cheeks. Baelor caresses his face.
“I dreamt…” Valarr’s voice rasps. “Matarys?”
He wants to be told it was a nightmare. Baelor can see it in his face. He wants to hear it as badly as Baelor wants to say it. Gods above, what he would give for it. To wake up in his own chambers and realize that this has all been some dream, some horrid fantasy concocted from the blow to his head and the gods taunting him with his own worst fears made manifest. A temporary caution to keep him humble. He had only imagined it, the low noise he had trapped in his throat to prevent himself from crying out like a child and his knees going so weak he’d had to sit, the retching sound Valarr had made and the cold that had shocked its way into Baelor’s bones the moment he had the words Prince Matarys has died.
A terrible illusion.
Not the new reality.
When Baelor says nothing, when he grinds his teeth and breathes deep and says nothing, Valarr shuts his eyes again. The gulls cry out from beyond the window; it sounds almost like screaming. “I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I’m sorry.”
His Valarr, who always carries too much on his shoulders and holds himself responsible for too much. It hurts to hear; it always has.
“Hush.” Baelor maneuvers himself so he can pillow Valarr’s head in his lap. Like he would do when he was younger and had trouble sleeping, padding into Baelor’s rooms and asking to be read to from whatever book or ravenscroll he had been preoccupied with.
Like Matarys would do even a few months ago, still young enough to ask his father to come and spend a few moments with him at night. To keep the shadows at bay, to light a taper in his room and promise him that no, papa is not going anywhere for quite some time, because Matarys was young enough to believe those promises. To kiss his cheek still rounded with a child’s softness and make sure the blankets were tucked tight around him so that he could sleep well.
The memory lances through him with physical pain. He feels the ache in his chest, in the hollow of his throat, behind his eyes. Death is not new to him. He has mourned his grandmother, his mother and Jena both, even Daemon and his boys, in spite of what they did at the end. But they had lived their lives. Matarys was still too young to even squire, still young enough to need to ride ponies rather than horses. He had more to live, too young to have lived at all.
And he will never grow older.
Baelor closes his eyes and blows out his breath, deep and even. His fingers card through Valarr’s hair; he draws strength from it.
“You’re here.” He strokes his hair and shudders in time with his son. He is strong, Maekar had said. It is Baelor’s turn for that strength now. He is still a father, even if to one son rather than two. “You’re here,” he says again. “That is what matters now.”
The little figure on the pyre looks so small. Baelor is almost surprised by how shocked he is by it. With the glare of the sun glinting off the water, it is hard to look at it directly.
It. The body. Matarys. His little boy. His youngest, the last gift Jena ever gave him. A thing to be consigned to the flames now. The sun and the haze in the air eclipses the red of his hair, the freckles on his face, the scar he received from tumbling out of a tree while playing with Daella at Summerhall when he was only three. Erased now and soon to be burned away forever.
“Perhaps Mother’s family has the right of it.” Valarr’s voice is still rough with disuse. “Burying the dead in crypts. Keeping them close.”
“There is another side to that.” The sun on the water makes his eyes water. Just the sun. “Baelor the Blessed felt that our customs allowed us to ascend to the seven heavens faster. Burning ourselves brings us to the gods quickly when we need it the most.” He is not sure how readily he believes his namesake. From the look he is given, his son does not believe it at all.
“Neither option seems good,” Valarr says dully.
Baelor thinks that he agrees. Burning or burial, neither appeals to him now. But it will not serve to tell Valarr that, not when he walks stiffly to the pyre to say his final goodbyes. Baelor watches him smooth back Matarys’s hair from his face and press a kiss to his forehead, murmuring something too faint for anyone to hear over the wind and waves.
He is here at his own insistence. If Baelor had his way, Valarr would still be resting and recuperating. He can barely walk unaided and gasps for air every other sentence. But he has known for some time that when Valarr squares his shoulders and starts lifting his chin as if preparing for a physical altercation, there is no hope of dissuading him from what he has set his mind to. So when he had said that he would come say his farewells to Matarys even if he had to be bodily carried, Baelor had let him.
Perhaps he is being selfish again. Perhaps he simply does not want to be alone.
He has kept everyone else away. They are at one of Dragonstone’s more distant outcroppings, and Baelor has ordered that everyone stay back, septons and guards and attendants and even Maekar. Matarys disliked crowds; it is why Baelor has kept him at Dragonstone more often than not, even when he himself was needed at court. It felt cruel, in some queer way, to subject him to it now, in the last moments Baelor had to see his face.
He waits until Valarr has said what he wanted to say without an eavesdropper before he approaches, torch in hand. It does not take much fire to burn a little boy. But the flames are still hard to look at. When the pyre catches alight, he has to look away; the idea of watching Matarys’s little face melt like wax brings a curl of nausea to his gut.
Valarr leans against him. Baelor puts an arm around his shoulders and pulls him in easily. He is still weak enough from sickness that Baelor is carrying some of his weight, and the order for him to go back to the castle and rest is on the tip of his tongue. But he doubts that the order would be obeyed without a fight, and the spring winds are cold on Dragonstone today. He does not want to lose the warmth of Valarr, alive and at his side. It is his lesser nature rearing its head, but he cannot help it. Not when he watches one son burn and feels the other shudder against him.
Baelor presses a long kiss to Valarr’s hair when his son turns to push his face into his shoulder. The air smells of salt and smoke; the gulls are screaming again.
Underneath the birds and the waves and the dull roar of his baby boy’s funeral pyre, Baelor can hear the huffing and puffing of someone not used to Dragonstone’s dips and peaks making towards him. For the first time in a long time, for the first time since he began to make an effort to shape himself into what a future king ought to be once he realized how many men refused to see him as such, Baelor feels rage. He had been easier to anger in his youth, with all the self-assuredness of not having lived long, but Redgrass Field and the whispers against him and his mother at court had changed that. No one wanted a hot-headed Dornish king who cannot control his temper, not when there were silver-haired bastards still in the east.
But now he feels that anger again, whipping his head to glare at Andrey as he runs toward him. “I have given strict orders —”
“A thousand pardons.” It is not in Andrey’s nature to interrupt; he is deferent almost to distraction. “But there is a message from King’s Landing. From Brynden Rivers.” His hand shakes slightly as he extends the ravenscroll. The seal is already broken; Baelor has a moment, a fleeting second, to think Oh. “King Daeron the Good is dead.” And he bows low at the waist. “Your Grace.”
Valarr jerks away from him sharply. Baelor feels so much colder than he did before, and his fingers feel numb when he takes the missive from Andrey. Bloodraven keeps his message short and to the point. The King took a fever this morning and was dead by evenfall. Aerys and Rhaegel are well. The city is still awash with plague. I implore you to wait on Dragonstone until the worst has passed and it is safe for you to come. We will enthrone you as soon as we can. I will write with more news when I have more to give.
Baelor reads it once and then reads it again. From his periphery he can see his son, swaying unsteadily on his feet. He can feel the heat of his gaze. He remembers the prayers that have kept that gaze on him.
I did say anyone else. The gods heard him. They spared Valarr, and found someone else.
“Fuck me.”
Baelor does not reproach the curse. He almost wants to fling his composure to the wayside himself, to act as Maekar and slump heavily in a chair, staring blankly at the ground, flinging obscenities in every direction. But that will not serve him, not now and not ever. That is behavior unbecoming of a king. So he says nothing instead; he rereads the ravenscroll again. The words have not changed, but still he reads it, staring at the swirls in the ink of Bloodraven’s spidery handwriting, as if it may offer him some of clarity he wishes for.
Maekar buries his hands in his hair before running them over his face, rubbing furiously at his eyes. He shakes his head like a confused dog, like a soldier disoriented by a blow to the skull. Unbalanced.
“I thought you would have more time.” His little brother says it so softly, but it cracks like thunder all the same.
Baelor makes an attempt at a smile; it feels stiff on his face. “I still have a little,” he says with a shrug. “Our uncle seems determined that we all stay here until the city has been thoroughly cleansed of the sickness. I doubt I can do any efficient ruling before then, ensconced on an island.”
“How shrewd of him.” Maekar scoffs when he finally lifts his head. He looks tired, Baelor realizes with a start. His baby brother. “It allows him to hold onto power for a while longer, sequestering any who might oppose him here. Far and away from any armies to muster.”
“You speak more harshly of him than he deserves.” There are things Baelor might reproach his bastard uncle in turn, things he has done and choices he has made and paths he has taken and made others take with him that Baelor would not countenance and took time to forgive; he still remembers how bright the blood of the surrendered were after Redgrass Field, after the aptly named Bloodraven was done with them. But he is loyal. Loyal to their family, to Baelor’s inheritance and his brothers’ protection and his son’s rights in turn. And Bloodraven is loyal to his trueborn brother above all else.
There are things Baelor might doubt in Brynden Rivers, but never his loyalty. Never his fight for King Daeron the Good and his kin.
“He is mapping the right course,” Baelor continues. “It would be of no good to anyone for us to wander into the lion’s den before it is safe. And Brynden has his share of experience in governance, he can keep the realm in hand until it is safe to be in King’s Landing, whilst we confer by raven. And Valarr is still too weak to travel besides.”
His son had been adamant about it. There had not been much time for conversation, not when Baelor knew that he needed to find his brother and tell him the news, but Valarr had insisted that when Baelor left for the Red Keep, he would accompany him, with that same stubborn set in his face that made it clear he would kick up a quite un-royal fuss if denied. And Baelor can see the purpose of it; the realm will need to be assured that the succession is secured, and Valarr will need to be formally invested as Prince of Dragonstone.
But not quite yet. Baelor is king, but his boy has a handful of moments where he might still remain a boy.
“Well, I trust you a good deal more than fucking Bloodraven,” Maekar mutters. “Since he is already doing half of it now, I imagine he is a candidate to be your Hand?”
“I had not given it that much thought, in truth.” Maekar gives a wry twist of his mouth that might almost be a smile in Baelor’s direction. “It will be Valarr, eventually, if the gods are good, but he needs time to learn.” He shrugs. “Perhaps I will name you.”
Maekar gives him a startled look at that. “Fucking poor choice, as anyone at court would tell you.” Perhaps. It would not be politic, not when Maekar has no natural acumen for governance.
But the truth of it is that Baelor feels himself worn down to raw from these months. From Ashford and his long recovery and the weight that bows his son’s shoulders and the arguments with his brother and the death of his son and father both. And he is the blood of the dragon; dragons hoard their treasure. He does not want to languish in King’s Landing while Maekar broods at Summerhall and Valarr stoically endures ruling Dragonstone.
Baelor wants to hoard; it is why he looks Maekar full in the face and says, “I would still have you on my council.” Maekar blinks at him, face gone slack. “Bring the children with you if you wish it. But I would have you.”
Their father is dead, and their mother has been as well for some time. Aerys and Rhaegel already live at the Red Keep. Baelor is the dragon, curling tight around his piles of gold and gems under the mountain.
Maekar sighs. “This was not meant to be such a fucking mess, was it?” He sounds as tired as he has looked.
“No.”
His brother was right; there was supposed to be more time. Baelor was not meant to suffer any lingering afflictions from the second Trial of Seven in Westerosi history; the realm was not meant to be ravaged by a plague that struck down the highest and lowest alike. Their family was meant to be united, and they were all meant to be better prepared.
“You will sort it,” Maekar says, with the confidence and faith only a little brother could have. And even with everything, Baelor cannot help but smile at him for it.
In the dark of the night, after he has composed and sent off his reply to Brynden Rivers, propped up on his pillows and rereading the latest other missives from the capital, there is a knock at his door. Baelor is both surprised and not that, when he calls for entry, it is Valarr who comes.
He sets his papers aside immediately. “Is anything the matter?” Do you feel ill, overly tired, are you dying again?
Valarr shakes his head as he shuts the door and moves closer. He is already dressed for sleep, and Baelor is hit with the memories of when his son was smaller and would come to his rooms in the night. Sometimes he would already be asleep, only to start awake to the feeling of being watched and see Valarr peering at him in the gloom, studying the rise and fall of his chest with apprehension far too old for a child. Most times, Baelor was still awake when he heard the patter of little feet, and was easily able to take his son into his arms and soothe whatever worries he had, about training at arms or his studies or whether Baelor would be gone for long when he next departed for King’s Landing.
Valarr is no longer a little boy now. He is a man grown, pale and wan in his recovery, but still easily acquiescent when Baelor motions for him to sit on the bed. “I remember how I felt, after the trial,” Valarr says carefully. His hands twist. “When I thought you were like to die. As I remember what it was like when the babes…” He gnaws at his lip. “Not quite the same, I know, but still. I thought perhaps you would not want to be alone.”
He is tired, hollowed out; his head is beginning to pound and his eyes burn. But Baelor still smiles at his son.
“My good boy.” He opens his arms. “Come here.” And Valarr comes, as he always has. He is no longer a little boy, but he still fits so easily into Baelor’s side just as he always has. “Your grandfather was old. This was not entirely unexpected, much as we would have all liked for it to come later than it has.”
“Still.”
Baelor sighs. Yes, still. Father having been old does not lessen the sting of the loss. He misses him, the steadiness of his presence and the way he would ruffle Baelor’s hair, the soft happy lines around his eyes and mouth. Even from afar, he can feel the absence of his father in the world so keenly. The lack is its own ache.
“And you?” he asks quietly. “How are you faring with all of this?”
He feels a shrug. “Not much has changed for me, not compared to you.”
“You are a step closer to the throne than you were even a handful of days ago.” Baelor was not much older than his son when his own grandfather finally and blessedly died and his father had ascended. He still remembers how the realization of just how proximate he now was to the crown had felt. How awe inspiring and terrible it had been. “Should anything befall me, you would immediately become king.”
“No.” Valarr sits up suddenly, fixing his father with a hard stare. “You cannot say things like that. Not now, when it is only the two of us.” His voice cracks, and Baelor’s chest aches to see the shame of it twist his mouth.
Had he died from his wounds at Ashford, Valarr would be king now. His Valarr. His boy who still fiddles with his hands when he is nervous, who still likes to clamber up to high vantage points when stressed, who loves horses and prefers mere riding to jousting, who enjoys his evenings best when curled reading old histories from lands across the sea as far as the Bone Mountains.
Baelor’s hands come up to cradle Valarr’s face. “I have no intention of dying soon,” he says. Cold comfort, when he had no intention of dying in the trial but nearly had anyway. “Not until you are even older than I am now. But you must know the score of things, no matter how it hurts.” He swallows. “Especially after all of this.”
Hundreds, if not thousands, are dead. The king is dead. Matarys is dead. It is, as his son said, only the two of them now.
Baelor had thought something similar, after Jena’s loss. Matarys was only an infant, newborn, and it had felt as if the only two people on Dragonstone now were him and Valarr. His son, his heir, his partner in raising his own brother, his voice to the world in times when it’s been needed, his successor and his hopes for the future. His boy with his eyes.
He could have lost him. As Valarr could have lost him at Ashford. The weight of it is staggering.
Baelor brings him in and presses a kiss to his son's forehead, almost perfectly between the eyes. His lips linger there, on the soft and un-creased skin. His hair, where Baelor cards his hand through it, smells faintly of ash and the sharp sting of medicinal herb teas.
“I love you very much.” Baelor does not say it often, but it makes his heart thud painfully in his chest whenever he does.
Valarr makes a small sound and nuzzles himself closer. Baelor allows him. He can feel the puffs of air from Valarr’s breathing on the skin of his neck; he feels the warmth of it, the reminder of his son’s life. Valarr breathes, and thus he lives. Baelor winds his fingers in the white strands of his hair, the way he would do when his son was smaller and would rest on his knee. And just as he always has, Valarr pushes his head gently against the touch.
“Might…” Baelor hears the click of his swallow. “Might I stay with you, tonight?”
When he was younger, he would not ask. Valarr would crawl onto Baelor’s lap, or into his arms, or just worm his way into the bed without asking nor waiting for any sort of invitation, all of the confidence of youth. Life and loss and growth have made him cautious. Baelor’s arms tighten around him.
“Of course.”
In the dark, just as he has for days now, he stays awake and listens to Valarr breathe. Baelor relishes it now. Now, there is no hoarseness, no damp rattling, no shallow gasps or moments where the sounds seem to fade to nothing at all. When Baelor rests a palm upon his chest, it rises and falls deeply, with steady ease. His heartbeat thuds regularly. His blood rushes cleanly under his skin.
Baelor should sleep. His head is heavy and his eyes sting with the want of it. But he forces himself awake for a bit longer, to listen to the evidence of Valarr’s survival. He matches his own breathing to that of his boy, in his bed, and even with everything, offers his thanks to the gods. They have taken much, and may indeed take more, but they have acquiesced and kept him and his son alive.
There is naught more a king could ask for.