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When the queen presented him with a daughter, three years after Aegon was born, it is said that the king’s eyes came alight like fireflies.
“Aemma” he declared, and did not stay long enough to watch his queen’s face fall.
Aemma first heard this story when she was two years old, from three gossiping handmaidens who did not believe her old enough to understand, or remember. They were wrong on both counts.
Later, she heard it again. And again, and again. Only, the story was no longer being told before her, but whenever her back was turned; whispered in the corridors of her father’s keep, between the lords and ladies of her father's court. They spoke, in hushed tones, of a queen with starlight hair and moonstone eyes; a queen the king missed dearly. A queen who was not her mother.
A queen by the name of Aemma.
“Mother?” Aemma called, once the brush in her hair went still for a little too long. She stared at the looking-glass, at her mother’s brown eyes fixed sightlessly on her scalp, watching the way the light danced on her silver hair. A spell, like the ones in storybooks.
Her mother blinked, and the spell was broken. “Yes, Em?”
Em. Not Aemma—never Aemma. “You stopped.”
A frail smile. “Apologies, dear. I was lost in thought.”
When the brushing resumed, Mother tugged at her locks just a little harder. Aemma winced, but said nothing.
Even as the story kept living in her memory—as stories are wont to do—she never spoke of it. Never asked her mother if it was the truth, because she already knew. When Queen Alicent Hightower looked at her daughter, a ghost stared back. A ghost of her own husband’s making.
So Aemma squeezed her eyes shut, and said nothing.
Aemma didn’t particularly like her brother. She didn’t like him, but she loved him, because he was family and because, even though he was stupid and reckless and pranked her all the time, family always came first. Mother taught her that. It was the meaning of duty : to stand by one’s family, no matter what.
Rhaenyra was her family, too, but Mother never said it of her.
So, once she learned from her Septa of betrothals and Targaryen customs, how Aegon the Conqueror married both his sisters to keep the line pure, she assumed she would have to marry her Aegon, too. It didn’t thrill her, but it was duty.
And, according to the whispers, it might put a crown on her head.
So, when she held her mother’s hand through her labors, screaming and begging and pushing through the tears, she welcomed her sister into the world with open arms. Literally. She held her first, for the midwife put her straight in Aemma’s lap, all bundled up in a cloth too white to mask the blood. Her mother’s blood. As the handmaids flew around in a joyous frenzy, like bees around a wildflower, telling someone outside the door that the queen had given the king another beautiful daughter, Aemma wondered what it meant. If her father had done this—made his wife bleed.
The babe, however, was a sight to behold. Tiny, and still speckled with red, but with a dusting of silver hair and pale violet eyes that spoke of the height of her birth.
Her mother held out her arms, and Aemma deposited the small bundle in her arms, watching the queen’s face break into a smile.
A real smile.
Before she said anything else, her mother said: “Helaena”.
A few months later, her little sister was officially betrothed to her older brother, and the whispers said she would be queen.
Aemma tried to resent Helaena. She truly, truly did.
But her sister was powerful. She had moonlight in her hair and twilight in her eyes, and she looked at Aemma like no one had ever looked at her. Like she wasn’t someone else’s ghost. Helaena knew nothing of dead queens and marital betrayals: all she knew was Aemma.
One the night she gave up her crown—mourned it the way one would mourn a fairytale; a pretty illusion that was never going to be—she looked into her sister’s eyes, fixed and unblinking, and swore to herself that she would never do to Helaena what her mother did to her. That she would do it to no one.
She pressed a kiss to her sister’s head, and whispered her name to the stars.
(She did not mourn her engagement.
“Good luck” she murmured to her quiet sister. For she knew, by now, that marriage was pain, and that she would need it.)
By the time she was eight, Aemma knew that life wasn’t fair.
“The Pink Dread!” Aegon and Jace announced, smirking as her cheeks grew as red as the pig. Behind them, her younger nephew giggled.
Bastards, Aemma spat, but only in her head. She was aware of the whispers—always had been—and she was even more aware that they were whispers for a reason. Most whispers could not be risked saying out loud. Sometimes, they weren’t even true.
But this one is.
By the time she was eight, Aemma knew life wasn’t fair. She was a princess with no name, an eldest with no betrothal, and a dragon with no dragon of her own. All while the children of Ser Harwin Strong were born with eggs inside their crib.
Which is why, when she saw an opportunity, she took it.
“Vhagar was my mother’s dragon!” cried Baela, her sister Rhaena by her side and Aemma’s nephews at her heels.
“Your mother’s dead” Aemma spat back. The words tasted like dark satisfaction.
“She was mine to claim!”
“Then you should’ve claimed her!” Aemma yelled back, defiant. Even now, after subduing the biggest dragon in the world, she was struck by the way the tiles kept falling: Rhaena’s hand around Baela’s, Jace and Luke on either side of her, all of them looking at Aemma like she was the monster in the story. Again, she was alone.
So, when the venom in her heart bubbled up to her lips, she did nothing to hold it back. “Maybe your cousins can find you a pig to ride. It would suit you.”
Punches flew. Screams echoed. But it wasn’t until she said the quiet part out loud that the seven hells truly broke loose.
“Bastards.”
Suddenly, everyone was on her, and Aemma hated them all. She hated the two girls who got to mourn a loving mother; hated Jacaerys Velaryon, who stood to inherit the Iron Throne with the blood of Harrenhal in his veins; and she hated Lucerys, too, for always picking someone else’s side. For being the kindest of them all, but never to her.
Aemma Targaryen never got to see the best of anybody, did she?
But, soon, she didn’t get to see anything at all. Soon, her vision filled with red, and her world exploded in pain.
She fell backwards, and the last thing both her eyes saw was Lucerys Velaryon, standing over her with a bloody knife in his hands.
For the first time in her life, her mother fussed over her.
Aemma’s face was throbbing in pain, but even so, her mother’s touch felt gentle. Warm. The princess leaned into it, pushing past the agony to let the queen run her fingers over the ridge of her stitched-up wound. Committing it to memory.
She didn’t catch everything about the squabble that followed. All she understood was that the whispers were no longer whispers, that they were being shouted—and that her half-sister was furious for it.
Good.
Her remaining eye fixed its stare past Rhaenyra’s skirts, where her second son was hiding. For an instant, their gazes met.
Lucerys. The quiet one. The sweet one. Aemma never would’ve thought he’d have it in him. Her empty socket throbbed, a thump-thump-thump that could almost pass for a heartbeat. Slowly, a new kind of hate began swirling in her stomach. The kind that made her want to tear him apart.
Her nephew quickly looked away, but Aemma didn’t. Aemma kept her stare trained on him the entire time, a predator’s glint in her single, violet eye.
She only looked up when she heard her mother scream, demanding Luke’s eye in return for hers.
Alicent and Rhaenyra didn’t clash like dragons. They clashed like lions, each one with her fangs bared, both willing to draw blood to protect their cub. Their second child.
It was the first time Aemma felt her mother call her hers.
In the end, blood was drawn. The queen demanded it, her cub already maimed, and Rhaenyra gave it willingly. She wasn’t looking to do more than defend Luke anyway. If she had, her mother would be gone.
The thought was suddenly too much to bear.
“Do not mourn me, Mother” Aemma rasped, rising from her chair with wavering steps. “It was a fair exchange.” She placed her hand on her mother’s arm; her mother who forgot, for a night, who her daughter was. A Targaryen queen’s ghost, come back to haunt her. “I may have lost an eye, but I gained a dragon.”
Just like that, she was reminded.
After the scar had healed, her mother called for a jewel-maker.
The man, old and wrinkly, limped forward and spread an assortment of precious stones on her vanity: rubies, sapphires, emeralds.
"Which one would you like, Em?" her mother asked, oh-so-sweetly, but without looking her in the eye. Aemma supposed it was easier now that she only had one. Even with half her face forever marred, her other half still called forth a specter.
Carefully, she trailed her fingers over the gemstones, one by one. She lingered on the sapphire the longest. It reminded her of Driftmark. Of its tides.
She considered the emerald, too. Wondered if her mother would find it easier to look at her if she bore her colors. If her left side became more Hightower than Targaryen.
But then, her eye caught a smooth, pearlescent pebble. It was round, no bigger than her fist, and glimmered in the shades of the sea at twilight. Violet and silver, with the barest hint of blue.
A moonstone.
"This one" she declared, watching her mother's lips press into a thin line as she forced a smile and nodded.
The setting was a short affair. The grandmaester offered her milk of the poppy, but she didn't take it. She wanted to remember the pain.
It was, after all, the most enduring sign of love.
As a child, Aemma was too young to have any suitors. So, in the absence of an early betrothal, her hand was left unspoken for.
But a one-eyed maiden, as it turned out, was hard to give away. Therefore, Aemma wasn't surprised when her fourteenth nameday came and went with no proposals from the lords in attendance and their sons.
"It is not your eye, sister" Aegon chastised her, washing down his food with a flagon of wine he'd stolen from the table of their parents. "Not the missing one, at least."
"Oh?" Aemma asked, deciding to entertain her brother's drunken musings.
"You scare them." A burp. "You look at them the way a dragon looks at sheep."
"And what, pray tell, are they?" Aemma replied, humor in her voice. "Look at them, brother" she said, gesturing at the gathering outside the tents. "All day they've been hunting, and they haven't brought back a single deer. Lions, wolves, bears—and not a claw on them." She leaned against the wall, surveying the crowd's lords and lordlings exactly how her brother described. "I've got half a mind to bring one into the kitchens for dinner."
On the floor, Helaena followed a trail of red-headed ants. "Sheep don't bite" she commented, walking her fingers along the trail. "Sheep don't roar."
Aegon scoffed. "How about you get one, then? A deer."
It was said in jest, but Aemma paused. "Perhaps I shall."
When she mounted her horse and rode away, a quiver of arrows and a bow at her back, she wasn't serious about it. All she wanted was some fresh air away from the lords, their sons, the celebrations of her name. She never understood what there was to celebrate.
She was not halfway out of the woods and onto the cliff overlooking the sea below, when she heard it.
Aemma turned slowly. She stilled her horse, kept his eyes fixed firmly on the horizon while her single one met with long, winding antlers.
A stag.
And not just any stag.
The beast was enormous. It towered over her from a distance, despite being downhill from her; its antlers curved towards the sky like the tongues of a forest fire. Its eyes, dark and beady, returned her gaze placidly, without a hint of fear. Its coat, thick and soft-looking, was white as snow.
If Targaryen weren't dragon riders—if they mounted stags and wore a sigil in their image instead—Aemma thought it would look like this one.
But a Targaryen was no Baratheon, and a stag was no dragon.
Slowly, Aemma plucked an arrow from her quiver. Taking aim was not easy, but throughout it all, the stag stood still, watching her. Without drawing breath, she stared.
The eyes of Lucerys Velaryon stared back at her, and the arrow struck true.
When she rode back into camp flanked by her father's hunting party, her path paved in the blood of the dragged carcass, she fixed her single eye on each lordling in turn.
They all looked away.
She knew, then, that none of them would make a good husband. For love was pain, and they could not give it.
When Aemma turned seventeen, her sister married.
It was a beautiful ceremony. Dreadfully long, enough that Aemma was half-tempted to call on the Stranger just to get out of it, but beautiful nonetheless. Helaena was a vision in the colors of their mother’s house, and Aegon was only slightly drunk. He held it together until one-third into the wedding lunch, which was more than he’d done ever since he discovered the miracles of fermentation, so.
All throughout the ceremony, the Sept of Baelor shone in holy light and holy silence, the way it did before a sacrifice.
After the banquet, Aemma found herself a quiet place to survey the guests. She leaned on the far wall, sipped from her cup, and watched. She did not mind this hobby. Sometimes, she thought she saw more with her one eye than she ever did with two.
She spotted Lucerys before he spotted her.
"Enjoy yourself, nephew?"
The prince nearly jumped. Aemma did nothing to hide the smirk on her face.
"It was a beautiful ceremony" he echoed diplomatically, and Aemma rolled her eyes. Always so tactful, the little prince.
Though not so little now, the princess considered. He was still one full head shorter than her, and his face still carried a softness that, she suspected, he would never be rid of completely. But his shoulders were broader, and his hands were wider, and he was already more man than boy.
Aemma supposed even bastard dragons grew.
"So it was" she echoed back, a non-conversation between unwilling parties. At the very least, her nephew seemed to be crawling out of his skin. They had not exchanged many words since the day of Laena's funeral. The day he put himself forever in Aemma's debt, whether he knew it or not.
Though, going by the way his gaze lingered on her eyepatch, it seemed that he did.
"I do hope" he said, swallowing around the heavy silence, "that we might find ourselves again here soon, for a ceremony of your own."
Aemma burst out laughing. "Do you yearn so for my funeral, nephew?"
"I did not mean—"
"Oh, I know what you meant." She rounded him up like a snake rounding prey. Her nails tapped at the golden cup, and she wondered what it would feel like if it were the prince's neck instead. "Calling me an old maid. You do always wound me so."
She tucked her hair behind her left ear, fingers brushing along the edge of her eyepatch, and Luke's lips tensed like a scar.
"You know that is not what I meant" he forced out, voice quavering. Aemma drank it in, found it sweeter than any wine, drained every last drop.
"It never is, is it, my lord Strong?"
Luke's face darkened. He pushed off the wall, straightened up even more, and Aemma realized she had won too quickly. She did not wish for their game to end.
He began striding off, and she called after him: "Lucerys."
He stopped.
"Save your concern for my dear sister" Aemma said, and her nephew turned. "She will need it more than I."
"Why?" the young prince frowned.
Just then, the room broke out in song. The bedding ceremony was starting, and the couple was being lifted in willing arms. No stripping—in her piousness, or perhaps as a last act of protection towards her frailest daughter, the queen had forbidden it.
Aemma watched as her sweet sister's eyes went wide, as wide as a doe's, and her heart clenched.
"Dīnilūks iksis ōdres" she answered simply, watching the doors close behind her sister's back.
Marriage is pain.
They did not find each other again in the Sept of Baelor. Instead, they found each other at a bloodbath.
Aemma watched the whole ordeal from her family's side of the throne room, not without a small measure of delight. Let Rhaenyra be called to task: let the bastards lose.
But Lucerys Velaryon did not lose. Lucerys Velaryon never lost a thing.
Lucerys Velaryon only gained. And, that night, he gained a seat and a betrothed.
When Jace stood up to lead Helaena in a silly dance at dinner, Aemma followed.
"Come, dear nephew" she crooned, holding out her hand. "Surely you would not want me to dance alone?"
Hesitantly, Lucerys took it.
She relished the glare from Baela, burning on her back all the way to the center of the room. Aemma settled in front of the fireplace, and pressed her palm to his.
"Congratulations" she smiled, walking in a circle. Lucerys mirrored her movements, a wary expression on his face and uncertainty in his step. Aemma imagined he did not get many occasions to dance on Dragonstone. In part, she envied him.
"Thank you" he replied cautiously, and Aemma laughed.
"Oh, come on, Luke. Can't an aunt be happy on her nephew's behalf?"
Luke did not reply, but his eyes said everything for him.
"It seems that your wish is going to come true after all" she added, switching directions nimbly. Lucerys followed suit. "The next time we meet, it may very well be in a sept."
Luke blushed. So pretty. Aemma wondered how a deeper red would suit him. "Perhaps the time after that as well" the prince muttered back.
Aemma, who was by now nineteen and held no such illusions, simply quirked her good eyebrow. "Kind words." A beat of music, and they spun again, hands meeting at their fingertips. "Though I fear the lords have yet to spin poetry about me." She leaned in slightly, watching the flames dance on Lucerys Velaryon's face. "It is, after all, rather difficult to profess undying devotion while staring lovingly into a lady's eyes when she only has one."
She felt her nephew's fingers stiffen against hers, and knew she had drawn blood.
But she wasn't satisfied yet. "Is that how you charmed her? Looked into her big eyes and sank on one knee?" The music turned, and so did they. "Perhaps two?"
"Careful, aunt."
Aemma was not going to be. "I did say a pig would suit her." She tilted her head. "Are you a pig, lord Strong?"
Something passed through Luke's eyes, then. Something close to a flame. "No more than your first dragon, I believe."
Aemma grinned. There you are. Show me your claws again.
"You know" she purred, leaning closer still. Like this, their shoulders almost touched. She could feel the heat of his skin, and she knew he must feel the warmth of her breath. "If you ever need to learn how to please a woman, you need not venture as far as my brother's quarters. I would be more than happy to teach you." She raised her single eye, and watched him swallow.
Like this, they were almost head-to-head. Luke had grown in their time apart, and while Aemma was always a tall girl, he now matched her exactly. If Aemma were to close the distance between them, would he stop her? Slowly, she brought her hand to his cheek, wondering if she was about to rob Baela Targaryen of yet one more claim.
"Though I cannot guarantee it will work on a pig" she breathed, and the prince's hand shot up.
His fingers closed around her wrist like dragon fangs. Aemma felt it, and pleasure snaked down her spine.
Suddenly, the music stopped. Eyes gravitated to them, their isle of fire at the center of the room.
"You have no honor" Lucerys spat under his breath, and Aemma laughed.
"It is you who has none, dear nephew." She could feel her face split into a savage grin, teeth exposed, a manic glint in her single eye. "For if you had any honor" she murmured, forcing herself closer, close enough that her next words came out as a whisper in his ear, "you would have asked for my hand instead."
Lucerys released her, and once more, all seven hells broke loose.
Later that night, in her bed, Aemma admired the purple marks around her wrist.
She touched herself, and brought the bruises to her lips.
The next morning, Aemma awoke to a dead father, a missing brother, and a mother speaking words of treason.
But Aemma knew duty. And, as her mother stared her in the eye for the first time since she lost the other, she knew what her duty was.
She dragged Aegon from the bowels of Flea Bottom kicking and screaming. She dragged him the same way a mother drags a child into the world. She shoved a throne at his back, a crown on his head, and a noose around his neck, and wondered which one would kill him first.
No doubt, it would be his mother's love.
And then, suddenly, her hand was valuable. Not coveted—Aemma would be dead long before she would be wanted—but desirable. Useful.
The sons of lord Baratheon still looked at her the way they looked at Vhagar.
But soon, the princess was not looking at them anymore. Soon, the matter of which son was drowned together with the silence of the great hall as the heavy doors were pushed slowly open.
And then, there he was.
From the moment he came in to the moment he turned away to leave, Aemma’s eye did not leave him. Suddenly, they were back at Driftmark, staring at each other with the promise of blood in the air.
Only, this time, his mother’s skirts could not protect him.
"Wait. My lord Strong."
She relished the look of horror on Lucerys Velaryon's face as she ripped her eyepatch off. Quivered inside with the shock in his eyes as they both gravitated towards her fake one. A smooth, pearlescent moon. There was nothing the Lord of the Tides could do but to obey the pull, raging powerlessly beneath the surface.
But then, a wave of sadness washed over those eyes. Soft, sincere, and deeper than any sea.
Aemma wanted it gone.
"Give me your eye."
Once more, he ran.
This time, she followed.
She chased him through the skies.
She chased him through the skies, and she laughed. She laughed with mirth at Luke’s vain attempts to escape Vhagar; to escape the shadow of death on wings. To escape her.
By now, he should’ve known better.
Aemma wanted to kill him. She wanted to taste his blood the way a dragon would have. She wanted Lucerys’ dying scream to haunt her nights forever.
Vhagar almost made that dream a reality.
Not yet, she commanded, and Vhagar’s maw caught the edge of Arrax’s wing.
The dragon wailed. Aemma watched with delight as he and Lucerys struggled to keep themselves airborne on one good wing. But the storm sang around them, and the sea raged, eager to swallow its fake master.
Not yet, she said once more, and Vhagar’s tail whipped them both towards the cliffside.
The cliff caught the prince and his dragon, but the buckles did not hold. Arrax landed inland, and Lucerys skidded like a pebble, halting mere inches away from death by sea. Vhagar landed between the two of them, cutting off any chance of escape.
“Mīsagon, Vhagar” the princess ordered, dismounting, and she walked towards the edge of the cliff.
The prince was breathing hard, his back propped up by the irregular terrain of the cliffside. When she reached him, Lucerys Velaryon glared up at her with pure, unabashed hatred. It filled her heart with joy. Hate me more.
He threw himself against her with a battle cry, all pretense of chivalry forgotten, and Aemma laughed.
Tackling him back to the ground was easy. After a fall like that, no one would be able to fight. Once he was back down, she pressed her boot against his sternum, and Lucerys cried out in pain, the crack of his broken ribs sweeter than any music.
Even still, the prince caught her ankle, looking up at her through drenched hair. Like this, the raindrops on his face looked just like tears.
“Skoro syt?” Lucerys asked, simply, like Aemma could have a simple answer to give. Why?
Aemma sank to her knees. “Kesrio syt iksā ñuhon.”
Because you’re mine, she said, and yanked him up for a kiss.
It wasn’t a gentle kiss. It was a dragon’s kiss, hungry and impatient and always, always out for blood.
Surprisingly, Lucerys kissed back.
There was nothing sweet about his kiss, nothing like he would have given his betrothed. There was helplessness, and rage, and guilt. As if he wished desperately that he didn’t want this; that he didn’t want her. But he did, and he drowned in shame for it.
Perhaps, Aemma reasoned, he took comfort in the fact that she saw him for the worst that he was. That he could not fall farther than Aemma had already cast him. There was freedom in that, she supposed.
And dragons, even bastard ones, would always yearn for freedom.
“Aemma—” he gasped once the kisses became two, three, a hundred more. Not Em; never Em. On his bloodied lips, her name sounded every bit like the curse it was.
Again. Say it again.
He tried to push her off, but Aemma just caught his hand and pressed it fully against her chest, earning a sharp intake of breath. She straddled his hips, felt him hard and willing under her, and her blood sang.
When she pinned him harder to the rock bed, jagged and sharp as the Iron Throne itself, Lucerys cried out. When she ripped into his clothes, leaving him exposed and shivering in the raging storm around them, Lucerys whined, scrambling to still her wrists and failing. “Aemma, no, we can’t.” When she took him in hand, Lucerys gasped out in a panic: "Aemma, aunt, please stop—"
But Aemma didn't stop. Aemma sank onto him with a shudder and forced him deeper, as deep as he would go, even as her insides burned because the stretch was too sudden, too rough. She squeezed her eye shut and rose, then slammed back down, again and again, like the broken steps of a dance. Her nephew half-sobbed, half-moaned, trying his hardest to swallow the sounds he was making: sounds of pain and pleasure and everything in between.
She sank, and she rose, and she took. She took everything Lucerys Velaryon had to give.
And then, when there was nothing more to take, she took him.
She took him back to the castle. Back to the Red Keep, to her mother and siblings. Soon, she would be taking him back to her chambers, too.
She would take him before the eyes of the Seven. She would wrap a cloak around his shoulders, a vow around his heart, and she would keep him.
For marriage was pain, and Lucerys Velaryon would make a fine husband.