Archive of Our Own

They’re twelve and they don’t know that there’s potential for a they to exist yet: a category of Rhaenyra-and-Alicent that is separate from the rest of the world. There’s just Alicent, twelve years old and good in all the ways that she should care about, walking into a room on shaking legs, sitting down properly, taking a breath, then folding those legs over one another, making sure her skirt does not ride up –

And then a stranger sprawls out on the sofa across from Alicent – trousers, some kind of dress shirt, hair cut blunt and a bit tangled, there’s an implication in the air that she detests conditioner – and scoffs.

‘Who’re you?’

Alicent introduces herself. She’s good at that. She makes up for having no idea who she is by being adept at learning phrases by heart: not just their content, but also the ways her voice should modulate on certain words, where to put the emphasis. I am A-li-cent High-to-wer. I’m here with my fa-ther. Nice to meet you.

The stranger scoffs again. This is the first time Alicent is meeting someone her own age and does not feel like she’s meeting a child. This is something else: not an adult, no, but something coltish, lengthened. There’s a fire there, just underneath the skin, an expansiveness. It is possible to imagine her sneaking cigarettes or going to a party or doing all of these other forbidden teenage activities Alicent has only seen in movies. She’s holding her breath, isn’t quite sure why, but then the stranger responds to her introduction in kind: in quick succession, Alicent learns that Rhaenyra is called Rhaenyra, that her father is Viserys, and that she is twelve, too. To Alicent, it seems she might as well be twenty-seven and forty-six and one-hundred-thirteen all at once, because she’s an absolute, the sort of person who simply is, whose core remains immutable and unchanging by sheer force alone. This, of course, is wrong.

‘These things are always so boring,’ Rhaenyra suddenly whines, and just like that, the strange overlay of adulthood on her body shatters like frost on a fresh green leaf, and she’s a kid, a child just like Alicent, bored at her parent’s party. Alicent – shocked, somehow, by this sudden revelation – stares at Rhaenyra, this new, younger version of her. Cautiously, she agrees with her: like it’s a secret, a secret they’re sharing now.

At Alicent’s yes they are, something lights up in Rhaenyra’s eyes. A certain kind of hunger. It occurs to Alicent, for the first time, that this stranger across from her might be lonely.

Alicent is rarely lonely. She’s also lonely all the time. It’s complicated.

‘Wanna go out and feed the ducks?’ Rhaenyra asks. It’s the childishness of the request – to go out and feed the ducks in the pond outside, like toddlers do– that makes the smile punch its way to the surface of Alicent’s face. Sometimes, being twelve feels like having the ground ripped from under your feet, as your friends start wearing makeup and reading magazines you still only half-understand and scoffing at playing with toys even as you all know, deep down, that you’re only pretending, that you all still take out your dolls when no one is watching. Rhaenyra drags childhood back out into the open: she wants to feed the ducks. Not hide in the bathroom with a bottle of wine, not steal cigarettes from a coat-pocket in the cloakroom. A weight lifts off Alicent’s chest, a demand is lifted.

They go back out into Otto Hightower’s grand living room, where glossy adults mingle and one sickly man Alicent now knows to name stands with Otto by the window. But they don’t care about those adults: giggling like lunatics, they dart between them, small and agile, and grab a breadbasket each from the tables to hide behind their backs. For the first time in a long, long while, Alicent feels something other than a vague sense of dread with no discernible source.

Outside, the air is cold, crisp, with a needle-toothed bite to it. It’s still too early for fireworks, but something in the air feels charged already, like it’s ready to spark. Rhaenyra leans over the pond dangerously, flinging out her arms as she tosses bits of bread to the birds. Alicent calls out to her, tells her not to be an idiot, she’ll fall in. Something about how she says it – her tone with its half-haughty properness undercut with genuine anxiety – and the cold-shattering bluntness of Rhaenyra’s answering laugh sets a dynamic that clicks. Thrillingly, they both notice its clicking. When Rhaenyra looks up at Alicent with bright eyes over cold-red cheeks, there’s an offer in the air: that mysterious director of the theatre of life is holding out two costumes to them, for two roles they could play very well. Alicent-the-careful an Rhaenyra-the-reckless, Alicent-the-proper and Rhaenyra-the-brave. Do you want these? Life seems to ask. Do you feel they fit?

They are twelve. They do not know what is being offered to them, only that it’s better than anything that’s ever been offered before.

They take the costumes. They shrug them on like cloaks. They feel them settle over their shoulders. They do not understand that to take up these costumes, to shrug them on, will necessarily turn Rhaenyra into a liar and Alicent into a coward. By the time they run back inside – Alicent two steps behind Rhaenyra, calling out for her to be careful on the icy stones – they’ve buckled them up firmly, laced up every closure.

The firmness of those closures, the way doing them up was easy and intuitive, feels very much like love.

-o-

They’re thirteen and it’s summer now, and Rhaenyra and Alicent pour themselves outside, into the sun-soaked interminable garden of Rhaenyra’s family home, far away from their fathers. The housekeeper brings them strawberries and lemonade, sandwiches, mint water in sweating ice-cold pitchers. Rhaenyra’s hair bleaches bone-white, Alicent’s threads through with copper.

They….play, there’s no other word for it. It’s childhood’s last, glorious encore, just before the curtain call.

They pretend to be robbers and highwaymen, knights and princesses. Behaviours that Alicent has long buried under her act of the tiny adult, the well-behaved young lady, the mature old-soul tragic motherless girl who copes so well, are dusted off, are resurrected. She shrieks with laughter, pretends a stick is a sword, eats more fruit than should be possible for a person of her size.

Rhaenyra draws her scraped knees (seersucker shorts, bleached from the sun) up to her chin, grins under the messy strawy mop of her hair (layers upon layers of chlorine and sunshine; there’s a pool here, Alicent keeps all her swimsuits in a drawer in Rhaenyra’s room), taps her strawberry-stained tongue against the sharp edge of her upper canine. Alicent flops back against her chair and looks up at the wide high summer sky until her head spins, until she’s lost connection with the ground, until she’s flying, flying, flying all the way into the brilliant, brilliant blue.

She fly-falls into the Targaryen home in the same way: into its long, sleek, modern hallways with their echoes, its high-ceilinged white-on-white designer rooms. Her daily presence, her every-morning ring at the doorbell, her additional plate at mealtimes, is accepted unquestioningly, yet it would be wrong to call the household hospitable. There’s a lack of resistance rather than a presence of invitation. The hallways are long and empty. The housekeeper and gardener look at her and Rhaenyra with detached bemusement as they crash through them, let their laughter echo. The cook asks whether she has any allergies – she does not – but does not ask her name. She catches sight of Viserys rarely, and only in moments of transition: his sickly face bent over paperwork at the big dining room table with the glass-chrome chandelier hanging overhead, oh, good morning. Let me get out of your hair. He accepts her presence in his home the way he accepts the presence of new kitchen gadgets lugged in by the staff: huh, how did that get here? Well, it’s nice, I suppose.

Even Rhaenyra is not hospitable, not as such. Hospitality implies the status of a guest, and Rhaenyra does not want a guest. She drags her into this home, into the grand white cavern of it, with an insistent hand, and outlaws the rules of polite distance. Alicent, just take it from the fridge. Alicent, just wear your pyjamas. Alicent, just sleep here. There’s a hunger to it, an altogether unwholesome desperation that Alicent mirrors.

On the big chrome staircase, Rhaenyra pretends to be a dragon. Crouching on the topmost step, she growls at Alicent, who shrieks delightedly where she stands at the bottom. She’s supposed to be – she has forgotten. A knight, maybe, here to rescue a princess. A thief, to steal the dragon’s fortune. Right now, she’s just Alicent, laughing like a maniac even as she tells Rhaenyra to be careful, the steps are slippery, but then Alicent jumps up the staircase all the same, happy and hungry for that happiness, and runs into the dragon’s lair.

-o-

They’re fourteen and in Rhaenyra’s bedroom, which is so messy that Alicent sometimes starts tidying up when she’s over, berating Rhaenyra all the while. She secretly enjoys her own outrage during those episodes, and enjoys Rhaenyra’s tolerating them even more. It’s proof of something important – their closeness, their specialness to one another – that Alicent is allowed to do this without Rhaenyra getting angry: to rifle through her things and call her a slob whilst she does it, to open up her drawers and shriek in disgust at what she finds.

This time, Alicent is holding up a pair of crusty socks and muttering along about seriously, Rhaenyra, what are you, a teenage boy, oh my god whilst Rhaenyra can’t keep it together where she’s sprawled on the bed, laughing into her pillows, Alicent, please, you sound like a grandma –

Neither of them ever use the word ‘mother’ as a term of comparison. This is where the love lies: the ponds of dark water that they step around, and the times they choose to wade into them. Rhaenyra is the only person Alicent ever took to her mother’s grave. Alicent is the only person Rhaenyra ever told that she could not cry during her own one’s funeral.

Alicent huffs and flops down onto Rhaenyra’s bed with her. Tells her, for the fourth time in the past ten minutes, that she’s disgusting. She’s fourteen and disgust is an important emotion right now, one that delineates the boundaries between normal and abnormal. The undefined dread of her late childhood has been replaced with a conviction of her own, equally indefinable, dirtiness. Alicent is fairly certain she is doing a lot of things wrong, from a moral perspective, though she could not tell you how. These things include the acts of dressing herself, speaking to her father, eating, studying, her as-of-yet mostly unsuccessful attempts at masturbation, in short: more or less the whole of her life.

The source of all that disgustingness within herself is somehow, indefinably, connected to the fact that she can call Rhaenyra ‘disgusting’ five times a day and mean it, and still like her more than anyone else in the world.

-o-

They’re fifteen and Alicent brushes past Viserys Targaryen (smell of medicine and camphor cologne, he still wears cologne, how absurd) in the hallway. They both stumble a bit, he catches himself with her body, and for just a second, his hand lingers on her waist.

They both freeze. He stares at his own hand – mottled, liver spots on bony knuckles – like he’s seeing it for the first time and it horrifies him (what about it? Its age? The bruised mess where the IV line was until this morning? Or its position on the cotton of her blouse?).

Alicent stares at his hand, then at his face. His eyes are not Rhaenyra’s colour.

He draws his hand back like she’s burnt him. Apologises, titters a nervous laugh. The shackles around them break apart into a thousand shards of glass: she is free again, but sharp objects now line the floor, ready to cut her wherever she goes from here. Alicent nods, produces a nervous giggle of her own, delivered over her shoulder as she’s already halfway up the stairs, no worries!

Rhaenyra is already leaning out of her room, hair messed up from sleep (Rhaenyra Targaryen, queen of lazy midday naps despite her homework not being done), and Alicent’s heart skips a beat as she watches her mouth stretch into that near-sleazy grin she’s started doing this past year. The grin turns wider, childishness bleeds back into it, unconstrained joy.

‘C’mon, I want to show you something – ‘ Rhaenyra calls (still a bit of gravel in her voice from sleep, Alicent’s heart hasn’t calmed much since the incident in the hallway) and drags Alicent into the room.

Another Targaryen hand on her: Rhaenyra’s, this time. Its long-fingered familiarity with the callouses along the pad of her thumb, curled around her wrist. Easy proprietary. Rhaenyra gets to touch. Gets to touch people, gets to touch Alicent. Does not worry about not being allowed.

Alicent wonders where she learnt that.

-o-

They’re fifteen and it’s been four days since Viserys’ hand was on Alicent’s waist, and Alicent sneaks into the psychology section of the local library furtively, looking over her back as she goes. She has noted down the titles she is looking for on a scrap of paper that she will rip apart until the writing is illegible and then toss into a public trash can, later.

Gavin de Becker: Protecting the Gift: Keeping Children and Teenagers Safe.

Sandy K. Bukele: Off Limits: A Parent’s Guide to Keeping Kids Safe from Sexual Abuse.

Maggie Klein: Trauma-Healing Your Kids: A Parents’ Guide for Recovering Confidence, Joy, and Resilience.

She finds her books easily. She checks them out herself, using the scanning machine provided, and hides them at the bottom of her bag. At home, she deposits them in her underwear drawer, below the neatly folded cotton of her underpants.

She sits on her bed and stares at the wall and thinks of the liver spots on Viserys’s hand.

She knows she could outrun him. Punch him, even. He’s fragile, he’s sick, his bones are brittle and his skin paper-thin. She knows this.

But she also remembers looking at the labels of the drugs her mother took, in the end, and failing to read their names: those polysyllabic incantations so complicated she could not even sound them out.

Life, in her experience, holds capacities for horror so far beyond human understanding that to evade them is impossible. There are always twists you cannot anticipate, depths you cannot even fathom. Life is smarter than you could ever be, and more cruel.

Alicent understands the way horror does not come from above in sudden lightning strikes, but rather boils up, slowly, sleekly, draws closer and closer to your skin, presses more of its weight onto you until you choke. The inevitable announces itself not with bangs of thunder or the fanfare of trumpet brass, but with a creeping heaviness.

She reads her books. It feels not like preparing for battle, but rather like preparing for the aftermath: soldiers cut and bruised, Alicent cleaning the wounds.

At no point does it occur to her to wonder at how she – a child afraid of harm– selected only books written for the caretakers of such children. For their teachers, their fathers, their…mothers, one might suppose.

Alicent has no mother, but she is not without a mother’s love. If ‘to love’ is a verb, it can be measured by the effects of its actions: meals cooked, clothes mended, solace provided.

In the Hightower household, the meals are cooked. The clothes aren’t mended, but then, they don’t need to be, they have the money to buy new ones. Someone reads books on child abuse because they worry for Alicent.

If it’s Alicent herself who does it – how does that change the effect?

Her mother is dead.

Alicent, four times a year, selects new flowers to plant on her grave.

She tends the flowers. She reads the books.

She turns the page.

She tends the flowers.

She reads the books.

She grows the things the ground has taken. She wonders which ground took what.

Viserys never touches her again. She will ask herself, for the rest of her life, whether it was because he was a good man, or because she was a well-prepared girl, or just because the ground took him before he ever had a chance.

-o-

They’re still fifteen and Alicent, who has just finished her curriculum of books and self-parented her way into a new mode of interaction with Viserys Targaryen, sits as far away from him as possible at the Targaryen dining table.

Daemon is home. He treats Rhaenyra with boyish, rough-and-tumble familiarity. Earlier, in the kitchen, he mussed her hair as he put her in a headlock, and she laughed and kicked him in the shin.

He’s telling a story, now. Something fun, raucous.

Alicent watches the spark in Rhaenyra’s eyes as she listens to him. He calls her ‘kiddo’, and this choice of term emphasises her adultness, his perception of her adultness, precisely by how it’s objectively too young for her by now. She only half a child anymore. By addressing her as one, he’s drawing up the contrast, heightening the parts of her that the word no longer fits.

Provide opportunities for your teen to confide in you without judgement, Alicent remembers from her books.

Once, a storm blew a branch off the great oak tree next to her mother’s grave, and Alicent plucked a twig from it: rootless thing, cut off from its connection with the ground, that earthen web of white-firm tendrils. She put it in a jar of water on her windowsill.

It grew roots. That was very important to her, back then. Those fragile nerves, bone-white: they were proof of something.

Eventually, she planted the twig in her father’s garden, in well-cultivated earth, right next to the tulips their housekeeper fertilises every year. It died there, in that black, fine-milled ground.

Alicent wonders, sometimes, whether it would have lived if she’d planted it in the hard wild clay of the woods, instead.

-o-

They’re sixteen and Alicent is sitting on the edge of the bathtub in Rhaenyra’s ridiculous-even-by-Alicent’s-standards ensuite, and she’s laughing so hard she almost falls into the tub at the sight of Rhaenyra trying to get a terrible knot out of her hair.

‘Why – does – it – Jesus fuck,’ Rhaenyra curses as the brush fails once again.

‘That’s what you get for sleeping on it till noon,’ Alicent says, then damn-near collapses backwards once more at the sight of Rhaenyra’s growling face.

‘Want me to try?’ she asks, because Alicent is sympathetic even when she gloats. It’s out before she can think of the implications: skin on skin, Rhaenyra’s hair in her hands.

They still touch a lot. Alicent is half-aware of the problems that are starting to present themselves. She chooses to ignore them, bury them deep.

Rhaenyra turns to face her, narrows her eyes. ‘No,’ she says, very slowly, in her thinking voice.

Alicent rolls her eyes. ‘Oh no. You’ve had an idea. May the Lord protect us all.’

‘Amen,’ Rhaenyra says with faux solemnity, but then she grins – sharp, wolfish – and reaches past Alicent in a split-second motion to get to the cabinet under the sink.

She produces a pair of scissors. Long, sharp, gleaming.

For a mad, mad second, Alicent somehow thinks she’ll stab her with them. Her heart skips, her mouth falls open. Then she understands.

‘C’mon,’ Rhaenyra says, holding the scissors out to Alicent so she can grasp the handle. ‘You can see the back.’

‘You’re crazy.’

‘Yep.’ She pops the p.

Alicent stands up slowly. Very, very slowly. The world has slowed down, her heartbeat is deep and even in her ears.

‘Come on,’ Rhaenyra whispers. Whispers, as if she’s suddenly struck by the moment, too. ‘Right – here.’

She draws a line across her neck, just over the topmost knot of her vertebrae. Where a guillotine would strike. Where a guillotine did strike, on more than a few of Rhaenyra’s ancestors who had the misfortune of living in countries with more of an appetite for violent revolutions than this one.

Alicent sees her hands take the scissors. She hears herself saying, sit.

Rhaenyra sits. Alicent, playing the role of herself even now, lays a towel around her shoulders to catch the hair.

Long gleaming blades, sharp as a whisper. The heavy, not particularly soft rope of hair sacks over the back of her hand with all its weight, like a snake she’s decapitated.

Snip-snip-snip go the scissors. Boom-boom-boom goes her heart. Her hands: girlish hands, delicate, well-moisturised. Alicent files her fingernails. Rhaenyra most certainly does not condition her hair. It’s too rough for that, rougher than it looks. Alicent always found that fascinating: how you can feel every single strand of it like thin silver-gilt wire, roll it between your fingers and almost hear a sound.

When Rhaenyra stands up again and turns to grin at her – her toothy, wolfish grin – she blows a strand of hair out of her face, and it’s light enough to fly up, away from her forehead, but then it falls messily across her cheekbone instead.

‘God,’ Rhaenyra groans, from deep within her chest. She draws a hand through it, musses it up. Her neck rolls, newly light, Alicent hears the pop of a joint. ‘This is great.’

-o-

They’re still sixteen and Alicent realises, suddenly and stunningly, that other girls like her better than they like Rhaenyra.

The thought seems absurd. Alicent does not like herself. It’s easy, figuring out who to like if you do not like yourself. You just look for whatever is opposite to you, for whatever it is you aren’t. Rhaenyra, then. The idea of someone not liking Rhaenyra is bizarre to her.

But here the two of them stand – sixteen years old at a birthday party of one of Alicent’s other friends – and the circle of girls they’re with is talking about a movie, an actor, then someone’s cousin who is an actor, and it becomes apparent to her in sudden, stunning clarity that whilst she can participate in the conversation, say the right things and make people laugh and nod and smile, Rhaenyra cannot.

Alicent, shellshocked by this realisation, spends the rest of the night watching Rhaenyra. Watching the other girls around her.

There she is. Drink in her hand. Hair choppy and short and windblown, clothes expensive but careless, the housekeeper can’t iron them faster than she can wrinkle them. All those accoutrements of teenage life – drinks, cigarettes, parties – that Alicent used to fear have appeared in their lives over the past few months, and she’s taken to them more fluidly than she ever thought she would. With surprising competence, she refuses cigarettes, accepts white wine, and leaves parties a half-hour before they get too raucous. She has discovered that for the most part, this new aspect of life can be managed with her ever-present skills at polite conversation: it’s just the setting that has changed, the backdrop. How did that test go for you? Alicent used to ask at innocent, supervised playdates. Now she asks it in large houses whose owners have left for the weekend, leaving their children to their own devices. But the question remains the same, and she’s always been good at asking it.

Rhaenyra, on the other hand –

She’s better at some of it. Saying yes to the cigarettes, the tequila shots. She can loll on couches, grin sleazily, hang a lazy wrist from a chair’s armrest.

But to ask how did that test go for you –

She cannot do that. Never could.

Alicent watches. Rhaenyra stands with a group of girls on the other side of the room, clearly bored out of her mind, drink in hand and mostly silent. When she notices Alicent looking at her, she rolls her eyes, makes a face, Alicent, can you believe these people.

Alicent watches. Rhaenyra gets another drink, gets Alicent one, too. This girl just talked my ear off about her horse for half an hour, Al, she whispers, grinning. Alicent grins back, but thinks, for the first time, you could have asked her a question about something else, anything else. The girl in question, Alicent knows, is a very good violinist who recently spent time in Tokyo.

Alicent watches. She watches the other girls glance at Rhaenyra with something like polite confusion. She notes the difference between them and Rhaenyra: Rhaenyra’s short hair to their long one, the sinewiness of her torso that she emphasises with her choice of shirt. The way she can’t sit still, can’t sit politely, can’t quite follow the rules set up by forces Alicent has always understood intuitively.

‘She’s an odd one, your friend,’ the violinist with the horse tells Alicent when they’re both getting more white wine from the fridge. Her voice is not necessarily unkind. Rather, she seems to treat Rhaenyra as a benign curiosity that just comes with Alicent: the way you’d treat the strange pet a good friend of yours keeps. Alicent is fascinated and vaguely horrified by the implication that for these people, it’s Rhaenyra who is Alicent’s sidekick, not Alicent who is Rhaenyra’s. Alicent is the one who gets invited, Rhaenyra is the one she brings along. Alicent is the one who is wanted here, Rhaenyra a condition of her presence.

Alicent sips her white wine, watches Rhaenyra with the group of boys who have just arrived. She was better with boys than girls as a child, Alicent notwithstanding, Alicent always the grand exception. Now, there’s a barrier there, too: they look at her and see a girl.

Alicent looks at her and sees –

She downs half of her wine in one burning ice-cold gulp, and refuses to finish that thought.

-o-

They’re seventeen and they’re drunk together, just the two of them, at a New Year’s party their fathers made them attend. Company event, family event, the lines get blurry in both of their households. Rhaenyra’s aunt is here, so is Alicent’s brother, back from whatever it is he does at the French outpost.

Rhaenyra and Alicent hide away in the room they met in: that little private sitting area off from the main living room, where Alicent once sat down on a chair and Rhaenyra sprawled across the sofa opposite from her. This time, they’re both on the sofa, cross-legged and facing each other from either end of it, passing a bottle of pilfered wine between them.

‘No seriously, I swear to Christ she’s got a tattoo, she just hides it from her parents – ‘ Rhaenyra drunkenly laughs about her cousin Laena. ‘It’s on her hip, reaches onto her ass, I swear – ‘

Alicent scoffs. ‘I’ll believe you when you show me,’ she says, and grasps the bottle from Rhaenyra’s hand. Their fingers brush, cold from the icy glass.

‘Alright, I’m just gonna go up to my cousin and tell her to get naked in front of you,’ Rhaenyra laughs, rolling her eyes, but since it’s Rhaenyra, she also makes to get up from the sofa, because in her world, that’s a reasonable request to make of someone. Alicent shrieks, reaches out with her hand, grasps Rhaenyra’s wrist, drags her back onto the sofa.

‘You will do no such thing, you lunatic,’ she laughs. ‘We will not tell your cousin to undress in front of me – ‘

‘Awww, would that be against the ruuuuules?’ Rhaenyra sing-songs. Her grin has that wolfish edge again. Her torso has flopped forward, face close to Alicent’s. Her canines have always been so fucking sharp.

‘Against all the rules,’ Alicent breathes.

For a moment, they look at one another. The conversation outside is muffled, blurred, interspersed by the occasional gunshot sounds of the still too-early fireworks.

Rhaenyra’s eyes are sheeny, a bit feverish from alcohol. Still: that colour. The sharpness of it. Grey so cold it borders on violet. The purple tint of steel, of chrome, and, absurdly, of pigeon-breasts.

Alicent breathes deeply and leans backwards, grasping the bottle once again. The moments breaks apart. She takes a long swig: cold, cold wine. Too cold. They got it directly from the wine fridge in the cellar, where the bottle must have been chilled for too long.

‘Daemon’s not here,’ Alicent suddenly hears herself saying. ‘Did him and your father argue again?’

She knows that’s wrong. Provide opportunities for your teen to confide in you without judgement, Alicent remembers from the books she read a few years ago. Provide opportunities, not ask questions. Especially not in this tone: this isn’t inviting motherly faux-detachment. There’s a jealousy to it, a bitter bite even she can hear.

Rhaenyra’s face shutters closed. That is the true horror of it, for Alicent: that there might be thoughts and feelings in that brain that she is not privy to. She remembers how Rhaenyra told her about her mother’s funeral, years ago. The stuffy heat of the blanket they’d both hidden underneath, her whispery, raw voice.

‘You know how they are,’ Rhaenyra says, and it’s the wrong answer for the mother inside Alicent, but the right answer for the part of her that let that terrible horrible jealousy bleed into her tone.

I’m not telling you, that answer says. But I’m acknowledging how much you know. How well you know me. The people who made me.

The people I love.

That mad, mad part of her, let loose by glasses and glasses of wine, roars like a dragon.

You know how they are. Yes, she does.

But if it were the other way around, if Rhaenyra said to Daemon you know how she is and meant Alicent –

He’d have no fucking clue.

This is not a healthy response. It is not the one her books taught her.

Alicent has no mother. In a second orphaning, she gets worse and worse at being one the older she grows.

She looks down at her hand around the neck of the bottle. She’s grasping it too hard, wringing it.

‘I know that one girl from your school invited you to her party tonight,’ Alicent suddenly hears Rhaenyra saying. Her voice is very, very quiet. Alicent’s head snaps up.

‘Why didn’t you go?’ Rhaenyra whisper-asks.

Alicent’s mouth falls open. ‘I didn’t even consider it – my father asked me to be here weeks ago – ‘

‘That’s why?’

There’s that mirror-moment: the seething jealousy in Rhaenyra’s tone. Alicent isn’t quite sure what she’s jealous of, what it is she covets. The invitation, the social acceptance it implies? Or rather –

Both options seem absurd, to her. But Alicent knows how to say the right things.

‘No,’ she says. ‘That’s not why.’

She wonders which part of Rhaenyra that answer was right for, but whichever part it was, it was the important one. Rhaenyra nods firmly, takes the bottle from Alicent, and downs the last three gulps in it in one quick, fluid motion.

‘C’mon,’ she says, getting up and holding out her hand for Alicent to take. ‘I want to feed the ducks.’

-o-

They’re seventeen and fireworks are crashing overhead, and Rhaenyra tosses a handful of breadcrumbs at the confused, frightened ducks, who cower by the reeds on the side of the pond and dare not come out from their hideaway no matter how Rhaenyra tries to coax them.

Red sparks drip across the sky like someone has cut a gash into it, a bleeding wound.

‘Rhaenyra,’ Alicent whispers when it becomes apparent that the ducks will not be moved. She grasps Rhaenyra by the sleeve of her coat – men’s, for a horrible moment, Alicent wonders whether it’s Daemon’s, but then she remembers how Rhaenyra has taken to buying menswear for herself sometimes – and tugs her back from the pond. Her motion is more gentle than she’d anticipated. Rheanyra, confused, looks at her and blinks.

They’re still drunk. Everything is swaying a bit, circling. Above them, fingers of glow-powder bloom. Hands reaching out across the dark sky, flowers unfurling.

‘Rhaenyra,’ Alicent repeats, very softly. ‘They’re not going to – ‘ She swallows.

This place right here: that’s where her childhood, which she’d mostly written off as a failure up until then, started its glorious second act. Rhaenyra feeding the ducks, Alicent telling her to be careful on the slippery stones.

Wanna go out and feed the ducks? Rhaenyra had asked, an eternity ago. She’d dragged childhood back out into the open. It had been possible, back then, to resurrect it. To clap so loudly it came back on stage, ready for an encore.

A veil of golden sparks bleeds across the sky. Smoke lingers, backlit by the green halo that bursts up next to it. The ducks, frightened, cower beneath the reeds.

The encore is over. The singers have to depart from the stage. A different act is scheduled, now, and the venue needs to stick to its programme.

‘Look,’ Alicent whispers, and points up at the sky. Rhaenyra blinks at her, confused, eyes trained on Alicent’s face, until she notices Alicent’s hand pointing upwards. She lets her head fall back – uncoordinated motion, crack of her neck. The colours bleed over her face: green, blue, yellow, red.

There’s something frighteningly young to her. Alicent keeps her grip on her sleeve, fingers ice-cold; she’s forgotten her gloves. She imagines her fingers freezing in position, the two of them stuck together for the rest of their lives.

Alicent, who became her own mother at the age of nine, spent all her childhood frightened by the dangers of growing up. But here she is now, seventeen years old and very convinced that she’s mostly managed it. She’s amassed all the accoutrements of accomplishment available to someone her age: the grades, the friends, the capacity to accept white wine and reject cigarettes. Being seventeen, she believes that is all there is to it.

Rhaenyra, who was brave enough to voice her desire to feed the ducks, stands across from her, connected by the grasp Alicent has on her sleeve. She was very, very good at being a child. So good at it that she made Alicent better at being one, too.

Alicent – who is unaware of the childishness of that thought, the absurdness of that desire – believes very strongly that she can repay her the favour, now.

The ducks cower. The fireworks go off: gold-green-red. Jewels smashed under a hammer, shards raining down.

Alicent believes that she has managed to make her way over shards before, and let her feet remain uncut. She also believes that she could carry someone, if it became necessary to do so.

-o-

They’re eighteen and Viserys dies.

Alicent stands next to Rhaenyra in the pew during the funeral service. She tugs her down when they need to sit, tugs her up when they need to stand, opens their hymnal onto the correct pages and holds it up between them so it looks like Rhaenyra is singing, too.

When it’s done – when it’s all done – Rhaenyra catches sight of Daemon, who arrived late, after the casket has already been lowered into the ground. A mad, hungry look dawns up on her face. She looks more alive than she’s looked in days: for one twisted moment, Alicent feels nothing but relief. But then Rhaenyra wrenches her wrist out of Alicent’s grasp and says, without looking at her –

‘Sorry, I’ve just got to – ‘

She stumbles towards Daemon like she’s tugged forward by a rope. Alicent remains standing, mouth open, caught in a breath. She watches as Rhaenyra falls into his open arms and then, horribly, starts crying: crying the way only children do, with great wracking sobs right from the centre of herself, snot and tears and blotchy cheeks.

Daemon’s hand covers the back of her head as he rocks her from side to side.

He’s crying, too. Not like Rhaenyra, but still: there’s a tear making its way down his cheek.

That’s the part Alicent won’t ever forgive him for.

-o-

They’re eighteen and at some stupid graduation party that Rhaenyra insisted on attending despite Alicent telling her thrice over that they did not need to go, that Alicent did not want to go, that they could stay home and watch a movie and Alicent would even smoke a joint with Rhaenyra if that’s what it took to get her to sleep, but Rhaenyra insisted, with that hollow manic twinkle in her eyes that hasn’t disappeared since the funeral two months ago, and now she’s gone, up and disappeared, and Alicent can’t fucking find her –

‘Are you sure you didn’t see her in the basement?’ Alicent asks the violinist, who was kind enough to recruit an entire group of girls into Alicent’s search of the house. Alicent can hear the panic in her own voice. The kindness in the violinist’s eyes when she shakes her head and reaches out to touch Alicent on the arm just about does her in.

‘I’ll go check the bedrooms again,’ the violinist says, because she is a kind girl, a kind girl who, it becomes apparent to Alicent in that moment, does not give a flying fuck about Rhaenyra. To the violinist, this is a moment of crisis not because a recently orphaned girl is gone, disappeared from a party. It is a moment of crisis because that girl’s friend is distraught, and the violinist cares about that friend.

Alicent briefly considers punching the violinist. Instead, she thanks her. Her voice is choked, her throat too tight. The violinist nods and marches off, only to be replaced by the girl whose parents own the house.

‘Listen – ‘ the girl starts, biting her lip. ‘Listen – it’s good of her to check the bedrooms again, but I don’t – ‘ The girl breaks off. Breathes. Then says: ‘Do you want me to check the ring cam? The one at the door?’

Her voice, too, is gentle, kind. Kind to Alicent.

Alicent feels a bone-deep defeat. ‘Yes,’ she says. She is a hundred years old.

She is led into a chilly little office-room on the first floor. The girl sits down at her father’s mahogany desk and clicks around on a sleek computer. She draws up the video, and Alicent knows what she’ll see before she even clicks play.

‘Do you know that car?’ the girl asks, halfway between relief and panic. Relief, because here’s the lost party guest, the potential tragic story she, as a host, would be marred by for the next decade or so, evidently alive and with all limbs attached. Panic, because the lost party guest is getting into a sleek dark car with a stranger, a strange man to boot.

Except he’s not a stranger to Alicent.

‘Yeah,’ Alicent hears herself whispering. ‘I know that car.’

Her host breathes out, from deep within her chest. ‘Oh thank god. Who is that guy?’

‘Her uncle.’

Another breath. So fucking relieved. Alicent gets it, she really does: who wants to have to explain that? To be that: the girl at whose party tragedy occurred?

‘So she probably just wanted to go home and texted him to pick her up,’ the girl says as if she’s calming herself with that thought, but then, she frowns. ‘But Jesus, how fucking inconsiderate of her to not tell you – not tell anyone – we were all looking for her, and look at you! You were so fucking worried, and I mean, I get it, after what’s just happened with her dad – ‘

‘Please don’t talk,’ Alicent whispers. The girl – who is kind, kind – freezes. Her mouth falls open, her eyes go wide.

Alicent starts crying.

The girl – who is so fucking kind Alicent can’t stand it – remains frozen for one more second, but then she wraps her arms around Alicent and holds her, shushes her like a mother.

-o-

They’re eighteen and Alicent is cradled within the comfort of a group. Two girls – the host, the violinist – take her into the host’s bedroom. The violinist makes her a cup of tea. The host – who is so gracious about it, so fucking gracious – tells her it’s all good, all fine, she can stay here for the night if she wants. The violinist stays with her as the host leaves to attend to the duties of her role. They talk: mindless things.

After the noise of the party has died down, the host slinks up again and takes over for the violinist, who is heading home now. It occurs to Alicent that she would have left hours ago if it wasn’t for her, if she hadn’t wanted to take care of her.

Alicent is handed pyjamas, a toothbrush. In the host’s bedroom, the very first early-morning birds can already be heard even though it’s still pitch-dark outside. Alicent, feeling jittery, lays flat on her back, staring up at the ceiling.

‘Listen,’ the host whispers from the other side of the bed, after they’ve been quiet for a long, long while. ‘I don’t know what happened tonight – I don’t know what the two of you have going on – but I’m just saying – ‘ She swallows. Breaks off. Starts up again.

‘You’re really nice, Alicent. Like, really nice. And that – leaving like that – was a bit fucked of her.’

Alicent feels something choke up in her throat. She keeps it down.

The girl next to her reaches out and gives Alicent’s hand a squeeze.

‘Thank you,’ Alicent – who has been raised right, who has raised herself right – whispers.

-o-

They’re eighteen and Alicent stands alone in the emptiness of her childhood bedroom, which suddenly feels foreign to her, like the objects within it hold no connection to her at all. It’s still morning. The girl who stepped out of this house last afternoon is not the same one who returned half an hour ago.

Alicent looks out of her window. The windowsill drips with sunshine.

We need to talk, she texted Rhaenyra an hour ago, still from the party host’s kitchen, where she had been given breakfast.

Rhaenyra where are you, she texted her fifteen minutes ago, as she hopped out of her boots with the block heels in her father’s hallway.

Rhaenyra what the fuck did you do last night, she texted her just now, staring out at the place where she planted the oak twig years and years ago, the spot where it could not survive.

-o-

They’re eighteen and what strikes Alicent the most about the entire miserable conversation that follows isn’t that Rhaenyra is lying to her, it’s that for the first time since she was twelve, Rhaenyra’s home does not feel like Alicent’s home, too. This big white dining room with its high ceilings: she was a child here, and now she is a stranger, because the girl across from her – the one who huffs and bangs about with the coffee things and won’t look at Alicent as she tells Alicent to fucking let it go, just let it go, it wasn’t like that – that girl is a stranger to her, and in her strangeness, has made Alicent a stranger to herself.

-o-

They’re nineteen and Alicent goes away to university and, for the first time in her life, has to explain who she is without relating it to either Rhaenyra or her father.

I am A-li-cent High-to-wer, Alicent introduces herself to girls who seem to like her on sight. They don’t notice that she says it like she’s sounding out the words without knowing their true meaning, the way she used to read out the names of her mother’s medicine. Meth-o-trex-ate. Ar-i-mi-dex.

Oh, my mother is dead, she always ends up explaining – explaining lightly, off-handedly – after a few months of acquaintance, when the topic of parental professions and childhoods comes up.

Ohmigod I am so sorry, many kind girls then tell her.

There is never a spot to fit the thing Alicent wants to say into conversation:

I had a friend. Or something like that. I’m really not sure what happened. But we don’t talk anymore.

There is no expected space in the rhythm of conversation, of getting to know someone, for that to fit into. Parents. Breakups. Boyfriends. Those are facets of biography that are asked about, eventually. Space is provided for them.

Since there is no space provided for this particular kind of loss, Alicent digs a hole inside herself and keeps it there, in its own little makeshift grave with no headstone. She wouldn’t know what name to mark that headstone with, anyways.

She still returns home four times a year to select flowers for her mother’s grave. She plants them: soil soggy with rain in autumn, hard and frozen when she cracks it to wedge pots of poinsettia in front of the headstone in winter, cool and fresh-smelling in spring, loose and body-warm in summer.

The problem with this new loss is that such ritual does not exist for it. There are no spaces provided. All her life, useless condolences have been offered for the death of her mother. For this tragedy now, no one offers much of anything: in fact, no one even acknowledges that tragedy has occurred.

Alicent returns to university, to groups of people who seem to like her, to cocktails in bars and shared clothes all the other accoutrements of girl-friendships. She returns to study sessions with her roommate on their soft living-room carpet, to giggly nights out discussing boyfriends with the lovely little group she met during fresher’s week.

She attempts to turn the page.

She tends the flowers on the wrong grave.

She grows the things the ground has taken, and wonders whether they’ll ever bear fruit.

-o-

They’re twenty and Alicent manages, sometimes, to think of herself as more than a half-thing, a part of a they that has been separated from the other. She’s good at school, good at friends, good at life. She attends birthday parties and lectures, writes essays and thank-you cards.

Girls like her. It is important to her to be liked by them, to be invited into their groups and confidences. She kisses them, sometimes, when she’s drunk: friendly girlish moments, giggly and tasting of cocktail fruit. These kisses are surprisingly unerotic. Afterwards, she finds herself in the bathrooms of the clubs and bars they occur in, and stares at her own reflection in the mirror: eyeliner smeared and blurred under her lashline, prints of glossy lipstick around her mouth.

When she’s sober, she reassures herself with the lack of eroticism inherent in those kisses, but in those drunken moments of bathroom truth, she knows this lack of eroticism stems not from them being girls, but rather from the kind of girls they are. In those blacklit auto-confessionals where she is priest and sinner at once, Alicent knows what kind of girl she notices, eroticises: not the sort who wears glossy lipstick. Not the sort who giggles when she makes out with her friend in a bar.

Boys like her, too.

Alicent likes –

Alicent likes being liked.

She meets a boy called Criston, friend of a friend of a friend at a friend’s birthday party, dark hair and dark eyes, very likeable.

Alicent isn’t sure she likes him, but she likes that he’s likeable.

She’s fairly certain she can make this work.

-o-

They’re twenty-one and Alicent stares at the ceiling of her bedroom, mulling over a sentence in her mind.

Move in with me, Criston had asked.

She thinks – she thinks of things she can’t quite name. Viserys’ hand on her waist, old and splotchy-skinned, knuckles swollen. Criston’s hand in the same position, young and tan and beautiful with calloused finger-pads. How they feel different and the same.

She thinks of the books she checked out of the library in secret back then: the ones about the harm that can come to children.

She thinks of the books she didn’t dare check out, didn’t even dare look at too closely: those colourful covers, the pictures of cartoon-women grinning as they look into one another’s eyes. She remembers one that featured a hockey player, tall with windswept blonde hair.

The wrong kind of blonde, though.

She thinks of the right kind of blonde. The feel of it under her fingers as she cut it. The weight of it slumped over her hand.

She thinks of ropes. Ropes around necks. Ropes tugging forward. Rhaenyra falling towards Daemon.

Rhaenyra, Rhaenyra, Rhaenyra.

The weight of her hair, again. The way it suddenly went lax when the shears snipped together. Alicent with her scissors in hand, raised blades.

She thinks of the ropes inside herself. The ones tugging her forward. The ones tying her to the ground. The way they felt like roots, once: things she needed to draw nutrients from the soil.

She grows the things the ground has taken.

But here she is, twenty-one years old, and she’s sucked the ground dry. It’s given her all it could, and she finds herself starving, finds herself parched and near-feral with it, finds herself hungry for –

She thinks of that twig she planted next to the tulips as a child. She thinks of different plants, plants she saw when she went to the botanical gardens with Criston, once: airborne things, tillandsia and epiphyte orchids. Their silvery roots spongy and thick, drawing water straight from the air, clinging to bark and high-up branches.

Viserys’ hand on her waist. The ground lined with shards.

The ground she’s planted her life in is neither particularly fertile nor a firm foundation. There’s things in there that can cut you: glass shards, artefacts of history. She was just always very good at avoiding them. She has a talent for agriculture: for cultivating useless soil until it bears fruit it by rights could not support. She has a talent for digging holes, too: unmarked graves inside herself, where she keeps things whose names she refuses to mark on their headstones.

She still knows their names, though, if she’s truly honest with herself.

Alicent takes out her phone and thumbs through the contact list. She finds not Rhaenyra, but Laena Velaryon.

Hey this is Alicent she texts. Can we talk?

-o-

They’re twenty-one and for the first time, it’s not they. This is just Alicent. Alicent in dark boots and a dark coat and a dark scarf, feeling like herself, feeling straight-backed and determined, as she marches into a coffee shop where Laena sits at a table already.

Alicent plants herself across from her decisively.

‘Hello,’ she says. Fine-voiced, but firm. Like she’s sure of it.

She’s surprised to find that she is.

Laena blinks up at her, taken aback. She hasn’t changed much. Still those large eyes, that white hair. Not quite the right shade of blonde, either: more silvery than Rhaenyra’s, less gilt.

‘One latte, please,’ Alicent orders in a firm voice, and watches in fascination as Laena follows suit. Bizarrely, she thinks of asking her about her tattoo, whether it’s real. She has a different thing to discuss, though, and for the first time in her life, she is not interested in the truth of playing herself, but the way playing herself can get her the truth.

‘I want to talk about Daemon,’ Alicent says.

Laena swallows. Leans back.

Alicent takes a sip from her coffee, then sets it down firmly once she realises she’s not particularly interested in drinking it.

‘Did he?’ she asks.

‘I don’t know what you’re – ‘

‘Leana.’

Laena sighs. ‘With whom?’ she asks. ‘Me? Rhaenyra?’

‘Both. Either.’

‘Well. In that case – not as such. Maybe. It’s complicated. More with me than Rhaenyra in some ways, more with her than me in others – but never quite fully. But – in a way.’ Laena laughs. Half-fond, half-bitter. ‘Him and I got a tattoo together once. The one on my hip. A dragon. I thought it was very cool when I was sixteen.’

Alicent nods and leans back in her chair. Something settles in her gut.

‘Viserys, too,’ she says.

Laena’s eyes go comically wide. ‘With Rhaenyra?’

‘Jesus, no. With me. Well, not as such, but you know – it’s complicated.’

Laena looks like she’s been slapped. She falls in on herself: that proud neck, those fine features.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says.

‘Me, too.’

They sit in silence. Alicent looks at her coffee, finds she’s recovered her appetite, and takes a few sips. It’s good. Hot, but not too hot. Strong, but not too strong.

‘Rhaenyra says hi,’ Laena whispers. ‘And that she’s sorry, too.’

‘She’s got nothing to be sorry about,’ Alicent says, staring into her coffee. Then she discovers, bafflingly, that she’s not afraid of the eye contact she was avoiding out of habit, and looks straight at Laena instead.

‘She kind of does. She could be a prick, as a kid,’ Laena says.

‘I could, too.’

‘No, you were just stuck-up.’

Alicent laughs softly. ‘Still am.’ She sighs and leans back in her chair. Legs stretching out. Funny – she never thought she was quite that tall, that sizeable, capable of stretching her limbs that long.

‘Tell her I’m sorry for texting you instead of her,’ she says. ‘Tell her that makes us even.’

-o-

They’re twenty-two and texting all the time. It’s a world outside the world: just letters on screens, faceless and secret, none of the risks of looking one another in the eye.

Jesus fuck I still have so many boxes to unpack, Alicent texts, accompanied by a picture of a tower of Babel built out of cardboard: her books, her clothes, her things, all stuffed into brown boxes.

She sits on the herringbone parquet floor of her new, sundrenched flat with her legs stretched out in a V in front of her. She’s wearing leggings, her knees are dusty from where she crawled under the kitchen sink earlier to install a pipe herself. She’s learnt to do that from YouTube, of all places.

This is the first time in her life she lives alone. No father. No flatmates. No Criston.

Jesus fuck are those the same socks you had as a kid? Rhaenyra texts back, and for good measure, circles them in the picture Alicent sent.

Alicent grins at her phone and leans back with one hand on the warm parquet behind her. It’s old, well-worn, trod so smooth it almost feels soft under her hands.

They are, she writes, and wriggles her toes in grey cotton printed with cats.

This is how they map each other’s bodies, if not their faces: slivers at the edges of photographs, disembodied hands caught in a shot.

Rhaenyra, as Alicent therefore knows: still sinewy, still lean, still floppy-wristed and sprawling. More menswear, now, but she still tends towards clothing that’s oversized.

It’s all less wrinkled, though. Like she’s learnt to iron.

Alicent, as she therefore reveals: still fine-boned, still with good posture and neat cuffs. But there’s a flash of her leather jacket draped over a chair at the very edge of a picture she shares, and the shoes in the shot of her freshly-waxed parquet are trainers, old and beat-up. Her clothes have lost that sweetness they had when she was a girl. She’s discovered an adult, slightly sharp professionalism for herself: blouses with long full sleeves in dark fabrics, skirts that sit tight at the waist. Draped necklines, a dab of dark gold glitter under her eyes when she goes out.

There’s those other things in the backgrounds of Rhaenyra’s pictures, too. Things Alicent studies, subtext she reads.

A small flat. More colour than back in the Targaryen home. Plants, which are dying all the time, which Rhaenyra then texts Alicent about in exasperation. A kitchen that looks like she uses it, and like she cleans up after. A picture of Rhaenyra and Laena on a windowsill, Leana poised and beautiful as she looks straight into the camera, Rhaenyra’s face smeared in shadow where she tucks it into her cousin’s shoulder. Alicent zooms in, discovers that her hair is still short-ish, still choppy, still windblown, but a bit less unruly now, less rough. She’s started using conditioner.

People, too – pictures from evenings in bars. Laena. Laenor. Jokes about the ridiculousness of naming your twins like that. No Daemon in sight.

Alicent shares the backdrop of her own life, allows conclusions to be drawn without defending them. Her new flat, where she lives alone. The neat row of her shoes in the shoerack she built herself: flats, mostly, interspersed with low block heels for her brand-new office job.

In her flat, there are just a few pictures here and there: a shot of the violinist she knew at school, whom she makes an effort to see more often these days. One of her mother.

None of her father. None of ‘the ex’ she refers to in gender-neutral terms despite knowing full-well that Rhaenyra knows who he was. It’s not about hiding him, it’s about revealing something else.

She’s, like, absurdly hot, she texts Rhaenyra as they are both watching the same Gillian Anderson movie at the same time, separated only by physical space, which Alicent, who knows how graves work, knows is the least important form of separation.

I know right, Rhaenyra texts back.

-o-

They’re twenty-two and Alicent, sitting at her own table in her own flat, eating her own cooking made of ingredients she bought with her own money, tells the violinist she’s gay.

The violinist chews a bite of pasta thoughtfully before she swallows and tells Alicent that all things considered, that makes a lot of sense.

‘Did you – ‘ she asks, waving her hand around a bit. ‘With your friend, back then?’

Alicent leans her chin on her hand. ‘No. And yes. It was – complicated.’

‘Seemed that way.’

Alicent laughs, despite or because of herself. Depends on which self you look at.

‘Is it simpler now?’ the violinist, who has always been smart, asks.

‘Yes,’ Alicent says, with the easy truth she’s discovered is available in life as of late.

-o-

They’re twenty-three and Alicent stares at the text her father has just sent her to invite her to the glittery, sharp family Christmas party. With clear and sweeping calm, a path blooms out in front of her.

She opens her miles-long text thread with Rhaenyra and selects not the button to send a message, but rather the one to call her. She picks up after the second ring.

‘Hey,’ Alicent says.

‘Hey,’ Rhaenyra answers. A bit shellshocked, a bit breathy. Her voice is different and the same: still posh, still drawling, still a bit stretched and sleazy on the vowel of the word. But softer. Warmer. Alicent wonders how her own voice changed: some of her changes she sees in the mirror, others she discovers when the violinist tells her of them, but most are mysteries even to herself. It is the greatest change of all that she – a woman who was a girl obsessed with maintaining control over how she was perceived by others – is most delighted by that mystery. She thinks it’s because this time, even though a particular aspect of change might be unknown to her, she knows the thing that brought it forth. As a girl, she knew what she looked like, but had no idea what caused it. As a girl, she built herself from the outside in: constructed an image and hoped that one day the inside would match.

She’s older now, and she knows that when growing things, the most important part is choosing the ground which you will till.

‘I’m wondering whether you’d like to come visit me for Christmas,’ Alicent says. ‘Stay through New Year’s, if you want.’

-o-

They’re twenty-three and staring at one another in slight disbelief where Rhaenyra stands on the threshold to Alicent’s apartment. Alicent, mouth slightly open, shocked by the reality of her, blinks at Rhaenyra twice.

She spent all her adolescence staring at that face, and over the course of her Rhaenyra-less adulthood, it had become an amalgamation of dozens of different versions of Rhaenyra: Rheanyra at twelve, with her sharp pointy canines. At thirteen, during that gangly, awkward growth spurt that gave her overlong arms for a year. At fourteen, shovelling food into her face impolitely; fifteen, when she’d started to grow tired of her hair. Sixteen, coming into that uncanny androgyny, still fascinated by her newly short hair enough to be unable to keep her own hands out of it. Seventeen: louche and wrinkled and crumpled and arrogant and terribly lonely. Eighteen: suddenly younger than Alicent had ever seen her, suddenly sad, suddenly angry.

Rheanyra at twenty-three is all of those people and none of them. She’s lost baby fat in her cheeks and somehow, it hasn’t really made her face sharper, which Alicent attributes to the different expression in her eyes. She looks like she gave up smoking for good. Her hair is cut by a professional. Her clothes are clean, but not outrageously expensive. She arrived – which Alicent knows because she looked out the window for her – in a silvery European car, but a small one.

In her left hand, she carries a suitcase. In the right one, a potted houseplant: a weird thing, spindly and dark-flowering. Its bizarre zig-zag roots jut out from the pot.

‘Brought you this,’ Rhaenyra says, slightly sheepish, and holds it out to Alicent. ‘Remembered you don’t like bouquets.’

‘They always just die,’ Alicent half-whispers, half-laughs. ‘Do come in.’

-o-

They’re twenty-three but also sixteen and also twelve and also everything in between. Their Christmas is a mess: Rhaenyra clatters about on Alicent’s stove, insists that she’s learnt to cook since they were kids, I took a class, Al, a real class – there was a chef and he taught us how to make pasta and all that, I’m fucking proficient –

Alicent, who is no longer her child-self, watches Rhaenyra from her kitchen chairs and laughs her arse off as she pokes about a pot with a heavy frown on her face, telling Alicent that she’s sure this should work, Jesus fuck, why is it that colour –

They go buy a tree and lug it up the four liftless floors to Alicent’s flat. As they proudly stare at their glossy green acquisition, complimenting one another on how well-formed and upright it is, they discover, stunned, that neither of them own decorations for such an item. They go to an antique market to purchase some, trudging around the greyish sleety snow. Alicent wears her dark belted coat, Rhaenyra a puffer jacket, both of them slightly ridiculous bobbled hats. Alicent’s was gifted to her by the violinist, who recently got into knitting. Rhaenyra’s comes courtesy of Laenor, who suffered a similar episode a year or two ago.

As they stalk between the stalls – two girls who were princesses or close to it, turned into these adults that still have the air of the other around them but have learnt to embody it – Alicent first loops her arm through Rhaenyra’s, and then – slowly, carefully – inches her hand downdowndown, until, in the warm dark secret space of Rhaenyra’s jacket-pocket, their fingers tangle together.

-o-

They’re twenty-three and for the first time in their lives, that means they’re grown enough to talk to one another about what happened. With Daemon, with Viserys.

As is common for things like that, what actually happened doesn’t look like much, when you first lay it out and name it. Glances. Touches. Implications. Hands on waists. Ghosts of kisses. Half-real, half-not. The damage is not in the itemised list of actions. It is in the way they take root, branch out. One hand here, one glance there. A small thing on the surface, and then a web of fine mould underneath.

Alicent sprawls out on her sofa, mulled wine in hand. Outside, snow falls softly.

‘I should have told you,’ they both say.

‘No you shouldn’t have,’ they both answer. ‘I would have been shit at reacting to it.’

They’re not sure which of those statements, if any, is correct, but they’re grown enough to be fine with that. The not-knowing.

-o-

They’re twenty-three and it is New Year’s Eve, which marks precisely eleven years since they first met one another. That is a surprisingly short time, Alicent thinks, but then again, it is a time filled with changes. They were children then. They are not, now.

They stand on Alicent’s balcony, watching the first fireworks go off. Four floors below them, on the street, Laena and Laenor squabble with the violinist on how to position the empty champagne-bottles from which they want to fire rockets. The three of them left Alicent and Rhaenyra up here alone tactfully once they’d told them they wanted to watch from the balcony, because they’re nice people, because Rheanyra and Alicent have learnt to surround themselves with nice people.

It’s bitingly cold. Neither of them put on their jackets, but they took a heavy wool blanket from Alicent’s sofa and are sharing it now, draped around their shoulders like a loose cloak, closed up with nothing but their hands. Their shoulders brush.

Down on the street, Laena’s laugh shatters through the air as the crackle of their first rocket gives way to the high-pitched wheezing sound of it tearing upwards, into the sky. Then a great bursting crash as it explodes, then the blister-sound of green-red sparks raining down.

‘Those have got to be illegal,’ Rhaenyra laughs softly, and carefully wraps her arm around Alicent’s waist under their blanket.

‘She brought them from Japan,’ Alicent says, meaning the violinist. ‘Smuggled them through customs.’

‘Never knew she was that kind of fun when we were kids.’

‘Well, you were convinced you were the only fun one around when we were kids,’ Alicent laughs, and drops her head onto Rhaenyra’s shoulder. Rhaenyra chuckles, then smears a kiss onto Alicent’s temple. Alicent can feel her shake a bit, shiver, whether from cold or nerves. She sneaks her own arm up behind Rhaenyra’s back, strokes through the still-rough-but-now-conditioned short bits of hair at the nape of her neck.

Laena’s laugh, again. Then a haze of golden sparks against the sky, lighting the night clouds bruise-purple.

‘Your cousin is a pyromaniac,’ Alicent murmurs, then noses into Rhaenyra’s neck. Ghosts her mouth, softly, into the space where it meets her shoulder.

‘Runs in the family,’ Rhaenyra breathes. Her voice is shivery, too. Her hand tightens around Alicent’s waist. Delicious feeling, that.

Alicent hums, low in her throat. ‘I remember you cackling like a lunatic that one time the neighbour boy dropped his cigarette outside and set fire to the lawn.’

‘And I remember you running inside and getting the extinguisher before it’d spread more than ten inches – ‘ Rheanyra laughs breathily, shakily.

‘I’m a problem-solver. Doesn’t run in the family, I’m afraid.’

Rhaenyra’s chuckle is thin, reedy. Her next kiss against Alicent’s hair has something desperate. There’s a thread between them, close to snapping.

Alicent, who is a problem-solver and also (still fascinating, that) the brave one between them, raises her head. She looks into Rhaenyra’s face. Fireworks up ahead again: blue-green-red-yellow, jewel-tones. Laena’s laugh, Rhaenyra’s eyes blown wide, the greyish purple of steel, of chrome, and, absurdly, of pigeon-breasts.

Alicent goes up on her tiptoes and kisses her. A soft thing, made of breath and a brush of lips. She tastes cold air and the champagne they had all night, not stolen from a family cellar, but purchased with the money they all make these days.

Alicent curls her hands into the blanket-robe they’re wearing, cocoons them both into it as they wrap themselves up in each other. It’s a warm, soft kind of garment, with no closures except those of their will.

Soft lips, slightly chapped. No glossy lipstick in sight. Alicent would be very surprised it Rhaenyra owned any. This will leave no traces, at least not any traces of that kind. At least not on her: Rhaenyra will be stuck with the imprint of the darkish, matte red that Alicent has taken to wearing these days.

Alicent taps her tongue against the sharp canines she spent half her life noticing, then drops back down to the balls of her feet.

Breath between them, visible in the cold, a clear cloud between their faces that shimmers purple-gold-lilac as another illegal firework explodes up overhead. The spark of it mirrors itself in Rhaenyra’s eyes, catches the odd colour there.

Alicent hums and tucks a strand of silvery hair behind her ear. Her hands are warm, she knows, because she’s mostly kept them under their blanket, or tucked up against Rhaenyra somehow. Rhaenyra chuckles, half-relieved, half-afraid, and nips at them with a playfulness that’s still a bit too shaky to land as a joke. Alicent grins back regardless and kisses her again: firm, like a seal. First on her mouth, then on her cheek.

Then she rests her head against Rhaenyra’s chest and listens to the beat of her heart as Rheanyra wraps her up in her arms and the blanket, and together, they sway side to side a bit, watching the sky until the clatter of people they chose makes its way up the stairs again.

-o-

They’re twenty-three and the clock shows one forty-seven and for the first time in her life, Alicent is not a gracious host. She taps her feet under the table, catches Rhaenyra’s eye time and time again, and waits until their guests have got the hint and leave.

‘Bye,’ the violinist breathes in the hallway. Laena bundles Laenor into his scarf, then hugs everyone goodbye.

In the sudden quiet, Alicent and Rhaenyra face one another in Alicent’s parquet-floored hallway. Rhaenyra, suddenly sheepish, shifts her weight around on her feet.

‘I just want you to know – ‘ she starts, but then breaks off. ‘I – I think I always – Things just got – ‘

She breaks off. In a stunning reverse of the way adulthood shattered off her like an overlay made of frost the night Alicent first met her, it seems that now, childishness leeches out of her like a fever coming down. Its absence reveals someone taller, straight-backed. Alicent suddenly realises the worth of adulthood, the goodness inherent in no longer being quite as young and innocent. You get to grasp things, if you know how to reach out.

Everything has its time and its place and its season. She’s glad the season for childhood has passed.

‘Hm?’ Alicent asks, cocking an eyebrow. ‘You always?’

Rhaenyra laughs and shakes her head. ‘Forget it. Nonsense. Not for right now.’

‘Agreed,’ Alicent laughs, and reaches out to tug her closer by the front of her shirt. Men’s, crisp, with an ironed collar. Rhaenyra comes willingly, but not with a stumble. Just two steps on Alicent’s nice waxed floors. It’s all easy and simple as that: two steps forward, a mouth meets a mouth, Alicent’s hands come up into Rhaenyra’s hair, Rhaenyra’s settle around Alicent’s waist.

Again: no closures. Just hands, holding on.

-o-

They’re twenty-three and Alicent understands the fuss about sex for the first time in her life.

She rips at Rhaenyra’s clothes with the efficiency of someone who has eyed them all night, calculating her points of entry. Cufflinks: heavy, silver, but not initialled. Mother-of-pearl buttons down the front plaque of her shirt. The zip and button of her trousers. Rhaenyra, for her part, seems a bit shellshocked, a bit out of it, until Alicent huffs and turns around in front of her, gathering the heavy mess of her hair in her hands to expose the zipper of her party dress.

She hears Rhaenyra step forward. Something shifts in the air: a stillness, but not the calm kind. Alicent’s breath catches, her heart skips a bit.

Rhaenyra’s hands come down not on her zipper, but on her shoulders. One on each side.

From there, they stroke down: all the way down Alicent’s arms, a firm slow stroke with the flat of her hand.

Rhaenyra tucks her face into the side of Alicent’s neck from behind. Ghosts her nose against that spot behind her ear. Alicent’s breath hitches again.

Fingers tangle into hers. Soft, but there’s something proprietary about the gesture. Rhaenyra has always been taller. Not by much, but by enough to make her feel more solid, substantial somehow.

She presses a kiss against that spot behind Alicent’s ear. Wet, heavy. Then nips, with her teeth, just underneath. Alicent gasps.

One arm comes up around her front, bracketing her in. Fingertips trailing the underside of her breast, the cup of her bra. The other hand, finally, grips the zipper and pulls it down in a firm, smooth stroke. Rhaenyra’s mouth is still against her neck, nip of teeth and huff of breath.

Alicent shimmies out of her dress and turns around again. Rhaenyra’s eyes are dark, blown wide, and Alicent is deeply gratified by the fact that she is staring.

Alicent steps back until the back of her knees hit the bed. Rhaenyra stands still, watching.

Alicent sits down on the bed. She’s wearing good underwear, because she’s not an idiot, she knew where this would lead.

Rhaenyra watches, watches, watches. Still in her sports bra, trousers open and drooping low on her hips where Alicent didn’t quite manage to push them off, earlier.

Alicent reaches behind herself and unclasps her bra, lets it fall away, is very gratified by the widening of Rhaenyra’s eyes, the way she goes stock-still.

Underpants, next. Lace down her legs. Rhaenyra’s hand twitches, down at her side.

Alicent lets her legs fall open. Gathers her hair in her hands to tie it back – an almost imperious gesture.

‘Now come on,’ she murmurs.

There’s a sound from Rhaenyra – something raw, flayed-open. Next Alicent knows, she’s on her knees in front of her, with her hands on Alicent’s thighs, nosing her way up, and then –

Alicent gives a reedy moan and drops back onto the mattress blindly. Rhaenyra, somewhere between her legs, echoes the sound.

Alicent realises at some point halfway through that the noises she makes are undignified to the highest degree, and finds that she doesn’t give a damn. There’s just her hands, tangling in the sheets as she gasps, then in Rhaenyra’s hair as the gasping turns into a mewling kind of sound. Rhaenyra’s hand comes up to pinch her nipple, and she moans full from the throat as her head whips to the side. Vaguely, she’s aware she’s sweaty, and breathing hard like she’s running. Fingers get involved, long and crooked up inside her. Alicent fucks herself back against them until Rhaenyra – who’s always been stronger, who finished first in her class when they had to run the mile in school – pins her down by the hips. Something about that trips up a wire in Alicent’s brain and gets her muttering nonsense like a lunatic.

‘Rhaenyra’, she chokes out as it starts to overwhelm her, ‘I’m – Oh god. Oh god – ‘

She shivers through it near-painfully, caught in slow sweet agony as a long whine punches its way through her throat.

Once it’s done, she raises her sweaty head with its ruined curls, only to see Rhaenyra – entirely too satisfied with herself, but then, Alicent can’t blame her – licking her fingers down between Alicent’s legs.

‘You lunatic,’ Alicent suddenly finds herself laughing, feeling both very young and free and entirely like the adult she is, ‘You absolute menace – ‘

‘You’re a problem-solver,’ Rhaenyra sing-songs, with a breathiness to her voice. ‘But I’m a troublemaker.’

Again: laughter from both of them. Young, very young, but also possible only because they’re both grown enough to recognise it as the joke it is. Roles to slip in and out of at their convenience, a bit of wink wink-nudge nudge. Not an absolute truth of their beings, not a way to relate to each other.

‘Come up here and I’ll show you trouble,’ Alicent mutters nonsensically, dropping her head against the mattress. Rhaenyra, grinning, clambers onto the bed, on top of her – bangs falling forward, tickling Alicent’s face – and Alicent grins back at her like the lunatic she is. Up close, there’s a crackling something in Rhaenyra’s eyes, something very close to desperation.

It suits her, Alicent thinks. One day, she’ll tease it out all the way: tie her to the bedposts, make her beg for it.

Not now, though. Now she kisses her, instead: slow and filthy, until Rhaenyra moans into her mouth and then gasps when Alicent pushes her hand into her trousers, which somehow stayed on through all of this.

There’s something gratifying – oh so very gratifying – about the way Rhaenyra’s arms, with all that lean muscle, start shaking, something even more gratifying about the way she moans Alicent’s name: Al-i-cent, syllable by syllable, clear and crisp, and Alicent knows exactly who that is, who uses that name to introduce herself.

-o-

They’re twenty-four and it’s the height of summer. A blue summer, a sky-wide-open one, the kind of summer that seems like it will never end. Rhaenyra laughs at Alicent as she reapplies sunscreen for the third time in as many hours, but bends down dutifully for Alicent to smear a dollop of it onto her nose.

They’re making their way across a graveyard. Not a particularly old one. Alicent always found that bit funny: two families like theirs, and both of their mothers are buried in land that has served this function for not even seventy years.

Behind her, Rhaenyra lugs a handcart full of flowers. Alicent carries a bag full of little shovels, scissors for trimming, and in her other hand, a watering can.

They make their way across the dry grass, talking of nothing and everything, and dig up the earth of two graves that bear names they know. They plant things for the ground to take: take down to those who lay underneath it, bloom up over their heads. It is a bit like fireworks, Alicent thinks: all those colours, up where those for whom they’re lit can’t touch them.

Maybe that’s why you plant flowers on graves, she thinks: because you hope the people laying underneath will look up to watch them grow and bloom and wither, and in doing so, will catch sight of your face next to your lover’s, laughing as you bicker about where to put the dahlias, where the marigolds.

After they’re done, they sit next to the dusty white marble of Rhaenyra’s mother’s headstone and pass a bottle of water between them, from dirty glove to dirty glove. Rhaenyra grins, sweaty with heat, and blows a strand of hair out of her face.

Alicent lets her head drop against the headstone and touches the velvet-smooth petals of the dahlias with her fingertip.

She lets her hand drop to the ground: warm with summer, soft, alive. Not hers to grow in.

When the sunlight turns a golden copper, they get back up. Alicent tugs her gloves off her hands and tosses them in the cart. They tussle a bit as they figure out how to hold hands whilst carrying all their stuff, Alicent calls Rhaenyra an egomaniac who cannot figure out how to share space. Rhaenyra laughs and kisses her: that slightly wolfish grin against Alicent’s mouth.

They walk out of the graveyard together, hand in hand somehow despite the bags they have to carry, and Alicent feels the roots underneath: the roots of the flowers, of the great oak trees. She feels them, that fine-woven web, feels the way it goes deep.

She feels it and walks over it, and does not think it's hers.

The rusty iron gate creaks when they shut it, and up ahead, in the wide-blue summer sky, clouds puff by in their darling way.

They’re twenty-four years old and they’re Rheanyra-and-Alicent, a category very much separate from the rest of the world. But when Alicent introduces herself these days, it comes out as a smooth, clear flow: She is Alicent Hightower. She’s here either with her partner – that blonde one over there, yes, the one in the suit – or with a friend – that one over there, yes, the violinist, and those two over there, yes, they’re twins – or by herself. The introduction remains the same, though: She is Alicent Hightower. She knows the things the ground has taken. She knows which ground took what. She knows what she can grow in it, and what requires a different substrate, a different kind of root.