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In another life, ten-year-old Jaehaera Targaryen meets her end on the spikes below Maegor’s Holdfast, like her mother.
In this one, she lies bruised and bloodied on the tiles of the courtyard, her small body crumpled and broken — but still, miraculously, alive. There are screams, and hands grasping at her, and then there is Grand Maester Munkun with his poultices and opiates. Jaehaera will live, but her body will be broken for the rest of her days.
“Like your father,” the Grand Maester whispers (conspiratorially, like most mentions of the elder Aegon these days), and tips milk of the poppy into Jaehaera’s mouth.
At one time, Jaehaera was someone’s daughter. She has only a distant memory of her father; his attention was infrequent and cursory, and he seldom held her, even as a babe. She knows that nobody likes to speak of him, which suits her fine, because she never likes to ask.
She does remember her mother. She thinks she sees her sometimes, when the light filters through the curtains at just the right angle. It’s like her mother is right there, just beyond the sunlight, her face and body half-shrouded in shadow, with sorrow and horror in equal measure eternally written into the lines on her face.
That’s usually how Jaehaera knows it’s not real. Her mother never lived long enough to have lines on her face.
In the years after the attempted assassination, Jaehaera seldom ever leaves her rooms. Her husband visits her just once immediately following the incident, as a courtesy, then never again.
She learns to walk again, with much effort, though she requires a cane and can’t go far before the pain and exhaustion grow too great. She knows that people at court whisper about the feeble queen, her body and spirit both broken beyond repair. Imagine if she had died, they say. Imagine what kind of a queen we’d have by now.
Her flowering comes late at five and ten, and with it, discussions of whether she and her husband should begin producing heirs. Some argue that he should get it over with as soon as possible, lest some other tragedy befall the young queen; others say that the king would be better off fathering bastards than crippled children.
Jaehaera, for her part, prefers not to think of such things. And luckily for her, her husband seems just as disinterested in producing heirs as she is. She can pretend she isn’t a queen here, locked away in the heart of the Red Keep, away from all the prying eyes. Daytime hours can be difficult to bear — the sounds of other people, even just walking past, bother her — but at night, she sits by her window and stares out at how the world sprawls out before her. It’s a world she hopes never to touch. She has touched it before, many years ago, and it never did her any good. But she likes to look at it, and she likes the quiet.
She likes the hour of the wolf best of all. Darkness is like a cloak falling over the whole world. Jaehaera wishes she could be hidden away by it too.
All through Jaehaera’s upbringing, maesters have tried to educate her on various topics in hopes that she’ll find passion in something, but she has no interest in the histories, and little regard for government. Eventually they give up, teach her to sew, and set her to embroidering.
In truth the only books that interest her are those that belong to the Faith of the Seven. In all her childhood memories, very few are pleasant, but Jaehaera does remember once sitting on her mother’s lap in the Grand Sept, her grandmother praying at their side.
She doesn’t remember where her brothers were. She tries not to remember her brothers much at all.
Jaehaera doesn’t think she’ll ever return to the Grand Sept — the mere idea of crossing King’s Landing is enough to send her into a panic — but one day, when she is seven and ten, she calls on the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard in the middle of the night and asks him to escort her to the royal sept inside the Red Keep.
If he’s surprised, he does a good job of not showing it — indeed, the queen has never willingly strayed far from her rooms. Thankfully it’s so late that there is nobody around to stare incredulously as she sits in her rolling chair with her cane across her lap, Lord Commander Ruskyn pushing her to the royal sept. The chair was made for her years ago, and has gone unused ever since. Until now, that is.
The sept is silent as a tomb when they arrive. Since she’s incapable of kneeling, the Lord Commander leaves her chair by the altar and quietly exits to guard the door. Jaehaera stares at the rows of candles, her hands fidgeting with uncertainty. She has a hazy idea of how these things are done, remembers seeing her grandmother light candles, but in the moment all she wants to do is look. She looks up at the statue of the Mother, gazes upon her stern but loving face, and wonders if she looks kindly upon motherless children, too.
In the months that follow, Jaehaera’s visits become a habit. The Kingsguards assigned to guard her begin to expect that on any given night, the young queen might open her door at the darkest hour and ask to be taken to the sept. She already sleeps little and takes pleasure in nothing else, so they keep her secret dutifully, and ask no questions.
Eventually she begins to light candles. Her mother and brothers always get a candle each, along with a whispered prayer. Sometimes she includes her father, sometimes her grandmother. Morghul gets his own candle whenever moonlight floods the altar and makes her think of the sky that neither of them ever got to touch.
In the daytime, Jaehaera begins to read about the Faith. She pores over The Seven-Pointed Star and memorizes her favorite passages. She wears the veil that her mother wore at her brother’s funeral. Her attendants allow it because it’s black. She is not permitted to wear green, even in her own rooms.
Little by little, Jaehaera begins to feel the wounds closing up. It’s not likely she’ll ever feel whole again — if indeed she ever did — but plunging herself into the world of her mother and her mother’s mother helps to make her feel like she understands the shape of her own life for the first time in a very long time.
Then, one evening, her husband sends for her.
At first Jaehaera isn’t sure what to say, when her handmaiden enters and hesitantly tells her that her husband wishes to see her. She hasn’t laid eyes on her husband in the last eight years. She hardly ever even thinks about him. But she accepts his summons, and has her handmaiden push her chair to her husband’s apartments.
Her husband is sitting facing the window when she arrives. The handmaiden moves her to the center of the room and hurriedly excuses herself, clearly just as apprehensive of what might happen. Jaehaera sits, silent and uncertain, and watches the back of her husband’s head.
It takes a few moments for him to turn around and acknowledge her. When he does, she’s struck by the look on his face — empty and detached, his eyes a hollow blank. He stands with the regal stature that befits a king, but even that looks like a well-practiced performance to her. He’s like a puppet on strings.
“Wife,” he says. “Jaehaera.”
Jaehaera says nothing as he approaches slowly with his hands behind his back. Up close, she can see the dark circles under his eyes and the permanent furrow in his brow.
“I’m told,” he says, “that very soon, I will have reigned for ten years. My councilors have advised me to delay no further in producing heirs to the throne.”
Dread settles in the pit of Jaehaera’s stomach. She’s been told how the producing of heirs happens, a long time ago, and has never found it anything but repulsive. Her husband seems to sense her discomfort, and averts his gaze in response.
“I can tell you do not wish to lie with me,” he says. “It is not my wish to force it upon you, but I called you here because I felt it my duty to warn you that soon, you may not have a choice. We may not have a choice.”
Jaehaera swallows hard to keep the bile from rising and nods in understanding. Her husband catches her eye again, and there’s something new in the look on his face, something hesitant and breakable. She thinks of the moment they were wed to one another and wonders what he sees when he looks at her. Does he see her father, or her mother, or both? Does he despise her?
She doesn’t see either of his parents when she looks at him. She doesn’t even know what they look like.
Her husband gestures at her chair.
“May I…?”
Jaehaera doesn’t know exactly what he’s asking, but she nods again. He moves behind her and pushes her chair to the bench by the window where he’d been sitting when she entered. Her breathing grows uneven — she’s nervous all of a sudden, though she’s not sure why — as he positions her in a way that will allow her to sit by him as he takes his place on the bench again.
“I know that you make visits to the royal sept at night,” he says.
Jaehaera casts him a quizzical sidelong glance; he catches her meaning.
“I heard you coming past my rooms the first time, and I asked Ser Ruskyn about it in the morning,” he says. “I hear you all the time, in fact. Sometimes I open the door after you’ve passed and watch you disappear down the hallway.”
Her husband looks over at her.
“I prefer the nighttime,” he says by way of an explanation. “I like the dark and quiet.”
Jaehaera looks back and can’t tell what she thinks of him. They’ve been married for ten years and never once had a real conversation. She can count the number of times they’ve been in a room alone together on one hand. They are nothing and everything to each other. The tattered remnants of their family’s war.
“I like it, too,” she says, feeling like her voice is just now learning to work again. Something like the ghost of a smile flickers across her husband’s face as he turns his face back to the window. A sense of tentative amicability settles over them. The stars are beginning to peek out across the night sky.
A few nights later, her husband asks her to take dinner with him. Jaehaera, to her own surprise, accepts.
Jaehaera knows very little about the opposing side in the war that took everything from her. She knows little about the war at all. She knows that her father’s sister led the other faction, and in the end was burned by him. She knows that her dragon and her brothers and her mother are all dead.
Her father’s sister. Her husband’s mother. Every part of the war is so terrible and tied up in itself that it makes her head spin to think about it. Nothing is left of the family she knew, and the family she didn’t know is sitting across from her at the dinner table, his silver hair catching the candlelight’s glow.
He buys her a new dress, in a teal that hews as close to green as it possibly can, as though he’s trying to reconcile with the part of her that’s permanently missing. Jaehaera wears it every time she goes to see him, which becomes once a week and always at night. Both of them value the quietude and privacy that nighttime grants them, and Jaehaera, though fearful and wary at first, has grown not to mind being near him. They seldom touch — her husband prefers not to be touch or be touched, and wears black gloves to avoid it — but just his silent presence at her side as she reads or sews isn’t at all an unpleasant one.
They do not speak of the war, or their families, but sometimes Jaehaera can feel its presence bearing down on both of them, like the ghosts of all they’ve lost are sitting heavy on both their shoulders. She wonders what her father would think of her, sitting in companionship with his bitterest rival’s son. She wonders what her husband’s mother would think of him, so close to her killer’s only heir, yet uninterested in seeking revenge.
Her husband could kill her at any time, Jaehaera knows. In fact she’s not certain he didn’t try to eight years ago. But the more time they spend together, the less afraid she feels of him. He never asked for this, either.
At one time, Jaehaera was someone’s sister. In her very earliest memories, the ones she has to concentrate very hard on in order to find, she’s holding her twin brother’s hand. Sometimes she looks at herself in the mirror and tries to find his features in her face, tries to envision what he would look like now, had he lived. None save their mother and father could tell them apart at a glance as children. Would that still be true today?
She tries and tries to see his face in hers, but it never quite happens. He was six when he died; he’ll be six forever.
Jaehaera doesn’t know why her brother had to die. Why either of her brothers had to die. Little about the war that took them makes sense to her. On the nights when the silence between them feels especially strained, Jaehaera glances across the room at her husband and thinks about how he’s still a brother to someone. The thought that creeps in after that — that his family is the reason she’s all alone now — makes a wave of bitterness wash over her, one that could almost bring her to tears, and is always followed by guilt. It’s the closest she ever gets to hating her husband. She hopes he can’t tell.
One night, while Jaehaera is visiting the king in his rooms as has now become customary, she notices him eyeing the copy of The Seven-Pointed Star she’s left on his table and asks if he’s interested in the Faith.
“Not particularly,” he says. “My… mother had an aversion to it, and I’ve never found the teachings to be especially enlightening or useful. I don’t understand it the same way you do.”
“Understanding is only one part,” Jaehaera replies. “It’s also about how you feel.”
“I confess, I am curious,” he says.
“About what?”
“My lady wife visits the royal sept with such regularity,” he says. “It’s natural that I would take an interest in the Faith’s practices, isn’t it?”
“Perhaps you can accompany me sometime and see for yourself,” Jaehaera says, so fixated on her embroidery that she doesn’t even notice it’s the first time she’s ever requested her husband’s presence in something, rather than the reverse. When she looks back up at him he’s gazing at her in such a way that she can’t tell what he’s thinking.
“Tonight,” he says. “At the hour of the wolf. Take me there.”
Jaehaera swallows and lowers her head.
“Yes, Your Grace,” she says.
The sky above the royal sept is pitch black when the king and queen arrive together. Jaehaera sits nervously as her husband pushes her towards the altar and stops just in front of it. He stays standing behind her, his hand resting lightly on the back of her chair.
“Now, wife,” he says, low. “Show me.”
Jaehaera has no idea where to begin. But as she looks at the candles stretching out across the altar, she starts to understand what he needs.
“The candles are underneath the altar, as are the rushes to light them with,” she says. “Take one of each.”
She can feel him tense up behind her, and for a second she thinks she’s gone too far by ordering him around so casually. But then he steps forward, bends down to reach under the altar, and does as she tells him to. He looks back at her for further instruction.
“Kneel,” she says.
Her husband sinks to his knees. She can’t see all of his face, but she can see the line of his neck and the stiffness in his shoulders.
“Place a candle upon the altar and light it,” she says. “We light candles to honor those we love. Think of someone you wish to honor, speak their name, and leave them a prayer.”
“I don’t know the Faith’s prayers.”
“You don’t have to,” Jaehaera says. “Just think what you feel.”
Her husband lights his candle, his movements hesitant, and bows his head over it. He speaks the name, softly, as though he’s whispering to the candle flame. Jaehaera watches him curiously as he closes his eyes, his silent prayer dissipating into the air like smoke. She wonders if he’s truly finding any peace from this, or if he’s just humoring her. Either way, there’s something strangely thrilling about being here with him, in a place where she’s gone to be alone for so long.
Eventually her husband opens his eyes again and turns back to look at her. His eyes are glistening in a way they weren’t before; the sight of it stuns Jaehaera for a moment. For the first time her husband looks torn apart, the openness of his face almost frightening. Jaehaera’s heart starts beating quicker at the sight of him.
“Who…” she starts, trying to tamp down his effect on her. “Who did you light the candle for?”
“My mother,” says her husband, his shiny eyes fixed completely on hers, and there’s a low rasp to his voice that makes a strange heat coil in Jaehaera’s stomach. “Tell me what to do next.”
“Lord husband,” Jaehaera says hesitantly. “I… don’t know what you wish me to say.”
“Tell me,” he says again, insistent, “what to do.”
Jaehaera’s lips part as she finds her breathing grows shallower. Unconsciously, she clenches her thighs together as he continues to look at her with intensity and tenderness in equal measure. The king of all the Seven Kingdoms is kneeling before her, waiting for her command. For the first time she feels like a queen. For the first time that idea doesn’t make her shrink from it in fear. Instead the place between her legs is suddenly throbbing, almost painful.
“Come closer to me,” she says.
Her husband the king obeys. He moves up to where she sits and kneels at her feet, his chest rising and falling quicker than usual. His skin is blazing golden in the candlelight.
Slowly, Jaehaera lies back in her chair and grasps at the folds of her dress. Her husband watches breathlessly as she carefully and deliberately lifts her dress up to reveal her bare legs and smallclothes.
“Closer,” she murmurs, heart pounding. She feels all aflame, both emboldened and embarrassed at how brazen she’s being. And with the eyes of the Seven upon her, their towering figures surrounding her, she should be appalled at herself. She should be mortified.
But as her husband moves closer still, Jaehaera finds it hard to care about the Seven. His black-gloved hands creep up to touch her knees and gently push apart her legs, his eyes carefully fixed on her face to see if she feels any pain. She lets him do it and forgets why she came here in the first place. She forgets about honoring her family. She is not her family. Her family tore itself apart. She owes nothing to the gods, or to them. This is for her. This is her own.
“What now?” her husband asks, an undercurrent of desperation running through his voice. She can see him trembling slightly and lets out a shuddering breath at the sight. She isn’t entirely sure what comes next, but she knows that she wants to be touched, and she knows where.
“Between my legs,” she says. “Touch me.”
Slowly her husband moves forward, and for a moment Jaehaera wonders how much experience he has with this kind of thing. It’s expected for royals in unsatisfactory marriages to sample the offerings of Flea Bottom, but she has a hard time reconciling that kind of behavior with her husband’s withdrawn nature. Perhaps he has a lover in the Red Keep. Or perhaps they’re both learning this together.
She’s expecting him to touch her with his hands, so when there’s a wet warmth on her smallclothes all of a sudden she gasps out loud. Jaehaera looks down to see her husband kneeling between her legs with his hands behind his back, mouthing at her with a kind of messy indulgence that sends jolts of pleasure arcing up her spine. She bunches her skirts up even more and resists the urge to wrap her legs around his head — he wouldn’t like it very much.
Her husband licks a stripe up her cunt, mapping her out through her smallclothes with his tongue, and Jaehaera has to clap her hand over her mouth to stifle the squeak that he draws out from her throat. She clutches her skirts even tighter and bites her lip to keep from crying out as his mouth glances over the part of her that’s most aching for his touch, then leaves it wanting.
“Go back,” she manages. “Up.”
Her husband listens. He’s a good listener. With some more direction he’s able to find that spot again and, seeing how it makes her shiver, begins to focus his attention there. What he lacks in finesse he makes up for in enthusiasm, his tongue stroking up and down her in a way that makes her toes curl, his mouth relentless and ravenous. Her smallclothes are soaked by now, both from his mouth and her wetness. Jaehaera gasps for air and spreads her legs wider to the point of pain, the pleasure seeping through her body so intense that she no longer cares how wanton she’s being. She manages to look down at her husband’s silver head as it moves. His hands are still clasped behind his back.
“A — Aegon,” she chokes out, writhing, his name falling from her mouth unbidden.
That agonizing pleasure builds and builds until finally it reaches its peak. Jaehaera lets out a long, drawn-out whine, heedless of who might be listening, and arches up in her chair. The whole world seems to collapse in on her for a moment; she doesn’t even realize until she’s coming back down, slowly, that Aegon’s mouth is still on her, coaxing her through the aftershocks. Only when he’s sure that he’s wrung it all out of her does he draw back and sit back on his heels, panting like a dog. His mouth and chin are glistening in the low light.
He gets to his feet again, his eyes still on her. He lifts his hand to wipe his mouth. Jaehaera looks down to see a dark stain on the front of his trousers.
In the moments after, thoughts of their lost family come flooding in again. How their forebears would loathe them for this. Jaehaera can’t help but think of the elder Aegon. She only saw her father briefly in the final months of his life, skulking around the Red Keep in his twisted form, his eyes hollow and haunted by the ghosts of the past. Her grandmother refused to see both him and Jaehaera, most of the time. The three of them were all that was left of their broken family, and still they remained fractured, flung apart. The last time Jaehaera saw her grandmother, she had stroked her hair and called her Helaena.
Her Aegon had watched as her father slew his mother. He could beat her for it, hurt her, kill her. But she is not her father, and he is not his mother. Instead he has knelt before her, his eyes alight for the first time since she began to know him, and made her forget her place in the miserable tide of history, albeit briefly.
Silently he bends down, grasps her skirts, and begins to fix them for her. Jaehaera watches as he rearranges them just so and smooths the fabric down, so nobody would ever know. She feels dirty, her thighs sticky with sweat and slick, the seat of her dress all damp. He’s retreated back into himself, too, his face closed off once again. Jaehaera finds it hard to look at him as he moves back behind her chair.
“Let us return, wife,” Aegon murmurs. Jaehaera casts one last glance at the statues of the Mother and Father before turning her face away.