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Alicent’s heart is still pounding when the door to her chambers closes behind her. The absurdity of today is galling, the sheer implausibility, and yet.
Rhaenyra Targaryen was here, in perhaps the most dangerous place on the continent for any of the Blacks, let alone their Queen. The irrationality of it is staggering, but Alicent is sure now that it was not an elaborate daydream. Rhaenyra had kneeled next to her dressed as a septa of all things, as striking and forceful as ever, begging Alicent to stop the coming war and telling her that –
Telling her that she’s been a fool.
Aegon the Conqueror. Alicent has never felt so duped, so utterly stupid, as she did when Rhaenyra uttered those words. Viserys’ final wish has comforted Alicent every night since his death, reminding her that what she’s doing is right, no matter the cost – that she is not only doing her father’s bidding but that this is what her late husband wanted, in the end. She was fulfilling his desire.
It is hard to hide behind that righteousness, now.
She and Rhaenyra had been close to what might have been a reconciliation, for a time. Alicent had destroyed it, desperate to see some reward for all she has suffered, clinging to the prince who was promised, and it has all been for nothing. The floor has dropped from under her feet.
Alicent paces her chambers restlessly as the sun sets. Nobody but the guards walk this wing at night since Jaeharys was taken from them, most assigned instead to Aegon and Helaena, and in the solitude of her rooms there is no distraction from the truth.
Alicent had told Rhaenyra today that there was no mistake. She had lied; and yet, she had not.
It’s as if a veil has been lifted from Alicent’s eyes, bringing to light all she has not let herself see. Her father orchestrated this from the beginning, this plot to control the throne from the shadows. He wanted nothing more than his blood on the Iron Throne, and Alicent has trailed along in the wake of his endless quest for power. She has tried to hold it for herself, and she has failed. Rhaenyra sees that, now, and she’ll doubtless bring the tale of Alicent’s stupidity back to Dragonstone.
Alicent heard Viserys’ words and made the wrong decision. Otto Hightower did not. He has used her, and her children. And Alicent has allowed it.
It is too much. Alicent is but a single ship battered by a storm of truth; it all comes at her in waves, grief and anger and humiliation and horror over the war her family will not stop, and she grasps desperately for the small vial of milk of the poppy the maesters gave her to soothe her ill dreams.
It hardly helps with that, but it does calm the panic until it eases into more of a dull ache. It allows her to slip into slumber, free for a time from the horror of reality.
“Alicent.”
The candles flicker behind Alicent’s eyelids.
The sept has always been a place of comfort and terror, of warmth and guilt. It’s the place she seeks an absolution she knows she’ll never be granted. One she doesn’t deserve. Still, the sound of prayer and the smell of incense bring with them a sense of familiarity. The harsh stone under her knees calms her, even when –
“Alicent.”
Alicent knows it’s a dream. Not since their youth has that voice wrapped so sweetly around her name. Alicent can’t see her beyond closed lids, but she can feel her presence, solid and insistent at her side.
She was always so strong. Powerful, in both stature and in personality. It has always made Alicent feel all the weaker in comparison.
“Rhaenyra,” Alicent murmurs.
Rhaenyra’s blade is cold, but her hands are warm. Both press against Alicent’s arm as the septas begin a Chant to the Seven.
“What a fool you’ve been, Alicent,” Rhaenyra murmurs, giving voice to the very words she sought sleep to avoid. Alicent can feel warm, sweet-scented breath against her cheek. She can still see Rhaenyra’s pale eyes from beneath that septa’s cowl, looking at her with so many warring sentiments – anger, resentment, pleading. Loss. Perhaps even remembrance of what once was.
“I did not know,” Alicent says, her voice hushed and quivering.
“Your whole war, based on a bedtime story. You usurp my throne without the slightest idea what it means.” Rhaenyra’s words are vicious, but her tone is soft. She’d been so soft-spoken in the sept. Though there was a knife in her hand there had almost been a gentleness to the way she held Alicent’s wrist, dressed in the drab garb of the septas and still so striking. It’s a wonder nobody recognized her from sheer magnetism alone.
“I did what I thought was best for the realm.”
The blade kisses Alicent’s neck. She can feel the pain in a detached, dreamlike way, the shallow slice of a sharpened edge across the vulnerable skin of her throat.
“Liar,” Rhaenyra whispers.
Alicent has always considered herself truthful, to a fault. Now she knows better. She’s been acting on the lies of others. Her father and her sons and the small council, an endless trail of deception and ambition in which she was never more than a pawn. She has covered up ill deeds and overlooked lies. Given them power. Does that not make her a liar by association? Does that not make her worse?
“So do it,” Alicent says, finally opening her eyes to look up at the ceiling. The bright paintings and carvings are beautiful, as last sights go. Perhaps she should have let Rhaenyra kill her today. It might have made quite an end. It might even have solidified the Greens' claim to the throne – Rhaenyra the Cruel, who kills babes in their beds and slices the Dowager Queen open in full view of the Seven. “It would only set me free.”
The words are new to her, but strike true. What now does she have to live for? Power? It has been stripped from her, tossed aside now that she has done her duty. Family? Unerringly loyal to her children she has always been, and yet they despise her. She has spent her life making a path for them, and none of them wish to walk it. Not even her father can steer the ship, now. Alicent is without purpose, adrift in a war of her own making.
“That is not what you want, is it?” Rhaenyra is behind her, now. She lifts Alicent’s skirts, the blade pressing cool and sharp into Alicent’s bare knee. “I know what you want.”
A warm hand slides further upwards, taking the fabric with it. Exposing the Queen for all her subjects to see.
Alicent exhales shakily.
These dreams are not uncommon, though they don’t usually feature the sept; Rhaenyra’s presence, however, is a constant. It has been for as long as Alicent can remember having them. They are oft what she calls to mind when she calls Ser Criston to her chambers, if not the reason she calls him in the first place.
After all, had Rhaenyra not had him in these very chambers? Is that not as close as Alicent will ever get?
The dreams had been tinged at first with the gentle, hopeful innocence of youth, but with time and bitterness and mutual animosity they have twisted until most of them feature violence meted out on either side. Though the details shift, the core of them stays the same.
“Father, judge me not harshly for my indiscretions,” Alicent gasps, spreading her legs as Rhaenyra’s hand dips between them. Her head falls back against Rhaenyra’s shoulder in a way almost familiar by now, for the number of times she has dreamed it. “Mother, grant me mercy for my wickedness. Maiden –”
Rhaenyra’s thumb glances over the wet, wanting flesh of Alicent’s cunt, and Alicent whimpers. She doesn’t deserve the protection of the Maiden. The Maiden protects the innocent, the chaste. The virtuous.
What she’s truly begging for is forgiveness for the sin she’s already willfully committing.
In this place, their years of mutual bitterness don’t matter. It doesn’t matter that Rhaenyra hates her, or that Alicent has simmered with resentment since the day she was shackled to the King and Rhaenyra was still allowed to do whatever – or whomever – she wished. It doesn’t matter that Alicent is in the sept, bare and spread in front of the Seven like a harlot on the Street of Silk. It’s Rhaenyra that matters, with her sweet hands and her poisoned words.
Alicent sinks into it.
Rhaenyra’s fingers are clever and quick. Her knife is equally dextrous, pressing against Alicent’s inner thigh and then sliding gently up her front, slicing away thin layers of her dress until it rests against her throat again. There’s blood kissing the blade. There’s even more staining both of their hands. Blood and fire and death.
“Crone, give me the wisdom to resist – resist temptation,” Alicent whimpers, as she does just the opposite – she grips the altar before her, fingers sinking into the hot wax of a spent candle, and lets Rhaenyra’s fingers sink into her.
The Chant gets ever quieter as Alicent’s mind turns to other things. To Rhaenyra filling her cunt with however many fingers it takes, pressing a palm in just the way Criston has never managed until Alicent is whining for it like a common whore. The knife at her throat only sharpens every other sensation. The threat centres her, and makes it all expand under Rhaenyra’s hands.
“Wanton even in your hypocrisy,” Rhaenyra murmurs into Alicent’s ear. The deep rasp of her voice only hastens the inevitable end, her words cutting deep in a way that only seems to prolong the pleasure – it is deserved, all of it, and Rhaenyra sees through every pretense. “How easily you forget your gods and bow to a dragon. Little wonder everything has come to ruin.”
Alicent is too deep now to protest her blasphemy. Rhaenyra pushes on her shoulders until she’s braced on the altar, lifting Alicent’s skirts to her waist to bend her over and fuck her needy cunt with impunity, and Alicent only spreads herself wider for Rhaenyra’s consumption.
“Warrior,” Alicent gasps. Her nails scrape against stone and wax as Rhaenyra fills her, hurts her, fucks her with all the delicious brutality she deserves. “Warrior, grant me strength – in my convictions –”
“Your convictions are falsehoods,” Rhaenyra pants. The exertion in her voice borders on exhilaration – the savage thrill of fucking someone so depraved, so willing to debase herself in the holiest of places. How can Alicent resist, weak as she is, when the movement of Rhaenyra’s fingers is the summary point of all sensation in the cosmos? “The gods have forsaken you, Alicent.”
Alicent sobs her pleasure into the candle flames. She tries to twist around to witness her own defilement at Rhaenyra’s hands, but Rhaenyra sinks a fist into her hair, pulling it with delicious harshness until Alicent’s head snaps back to stare up at the stone faces of the Seven; she’s luxuriating in sin, enveloped by it, and no more able to stop herself than to stop this senseless war as she spirals up and toward the ceiling of the sept.
The heavens look down on her while she bursts into a riot of colour and ascends towards them, joining the seven-pointed stars and holy figures she’s stared at all her wretched life –
Alicent wakes to the heavy scrape of her chamber door.
The night is dark, and the only light is the single candle at Alicent’s bedside. Alicent squints groggily into the shadows – she’s still half in the dream, sweating and panting like an animal in heat, still pounding between her legs with unspent tension as a figure approaches the bed. In blind panic, she grasps for the knife beneath her pillow.
There’s a matching knife at her throat in an instant. A face swims into view, still shrouded in a septa’s hood.
“Rhaenyra?”
“We are alone this time,” Rhaenyra breathes, still just as frantic as she seemed earlier today in the sept. Still just as beautiful. It’s difficult to separate the real woman before her from the dream whose cobwebs still cloud Alicent’s mind. “If you cry out, none will hear.”
Alicent swallows. The blade kisses her throat, pressing her into the bed; shamefully, it only makes her cunt throb.
“How did you get here?” Alicent whispers.
“You forget that I know these apartments better than you do. They do not lack in secret passageways,” Rhaenyra says. She’s leaned over Alicent, a knee at her side and a hand braced on the blankets near Alicent’s shoulder.
Once, Alicent might have had a guard directly outside her door. These days she’s more disposable. Ser Criston has offered to comfort her, to guard her rooms as he once did, but Alicent has denied him until finally he left to march to battle with the army.
If she hadn’t been abed with him that night, if he had been protecting the children, perhaps Jaeharys would still –
Alicent’s eyes burn, but she does not let the tears fall. Perhaps Aegon truly would rather Alicent was assassinated and made a martyr for his cause. Perhaps that would be a kinder fate.
“Coming to the sept was foolish, Rhaenyra, but this is madness.”
The knife bites into Alicent’s skin. Rhaenyra is so close, and so too had been Alicent before she’d been awoken. The remnants of the dream roar through her at Rhaenyra’s forcefulness. “This war is madness. And it all started because of you.”
“You think I do not know it?” Alicent snaps.
Rhaenyra falters. Taking her by the wrist yet again Alicent rips the knife away from her own throat, sitting up in her bed until they’re face to face, and Rhaenyra doesn’t fight her.
“You said there had been no mistake,” Rhaenyra says. “Even now you are too proud, you cannot admit –”
“I am not in control, Rhaenyra!” Alicent says, in all but a shout. She pushes Rhaenyra at the shoulder, almost throwing her from the bed. “Do you not see? I never was, no matter how much I once thought it! Yes, I am at fault. But there was no mistake, because my father sought to put Aegon on the throne since the day he was conceived. Since the day your mother and brother died, and he saw his opportunity. My folly only gave him a more convenient justification!”
Silence descends upon the room like a blanket of ash. Rhaenyra settles back on the mattress, still within the distance of Alicent’s knife, and in a rush all the fight leaves Alicent’s body at once.
What use has fighting ever done her?
“Why are you here?” Alicent asks tiredly. She rubs her brow, still damp from her disgraceful dreaming. “You cannot truly have thought that this would avert the war. The risk you took to come here, unprotected…I know you are more cunning than this.”
Rhaenyra swallows. Alicent watches the bob of her throat, pale and unblemished. She feels for her own, at the gap of her nightgown – her fingertips come away wet with a thin line of blood.
“I had to know there was no other choice. That I had done all I could to avert this conflict,” Rhaenyra says heavily. “And now I have.”
“You had done it already in the sept. Why are you here?” Alicent asks again. “If any of our knights had seen you, you’d have been dragged before Aegon and fed to Sunfyre.”
“And yet you have not spoken a word about my presence this morning. If you had, the city would be at arms.”
Rhaenyra’s gaze is piercing. Alicent has never been able to stand up to it for long, not while they’re alone - it’s among the many reasons through the years that she has ensured never to see Rhaenyra privately, without someone else at either of their sides. No matter what’s happened between them, whatever defences she’s built since becoming queen are like to crumble in Rhaenyra’s presence.
Alicent turns away, but still Rhaenyra does not leave. She stares and she stares until finally, her true purpose is whispered into the stifling silence.
“Why did you turn against me, Alicent?”
It sits heavily between them, that question. Another manacle chained to Alicent’s neck. There could be any number of answers to it, and yet the most petty is the one that stands out amongst the rest. “Why must we speak of it? It is done.”
“Your betrayal stung the most of all,” Rhaenyra says. There’s such weight to her voice that Alicent looks up – the intensity in Rhaenyra’s face makes her breath catch. “For a time I thought that perhaps we might…reconcile. When I came to King’s Landing, before my father died…”
Alicent knows. Part of her – the small, childish, foolish part – had hoped the same. She’d held Rhaenyra’s arm, and for a brief moment she had let herself slip back into the love she once held to dream of a better future.
“I was ready to accept your claim,” Alicent says, her voice low. “Truly. I was ready to go against my father’s plans until I heard Aegon’s name, and I thought…”
Rhaenyra seems terribly close, suddenly. Their knees are almost touching through the barrier of the counterpane. Alicent can see every minute change to her expression, tracking the shift from melancholy to judgement.
Humiliation rolls through Alicent once again.
“The betrayal between us spans decades,” Alicent says finally. “We should leave it be.”
Rhaenyra shakes her head, breaking through Alicent’s walls just as she always does. “I cannot. Not without knowing why.”
The why is the worst part. The most humiliating part. It brings to bear the origin of every mistake Alicent has ever made, every reason she’s ever begged the Seven for mercy.
“All I have ever wanted was to please my father. To do as he asks,” Alicent whispers, letting out a shuddering breath. “And he asks so much.” A stinging sensation at her thumb makes her glance downwards – she’s picked so viciously at the skin that the blood is pooling along the crease of her nail.
She hasn’t picked at her fingers in years. It was drilled out of her, the impulse smothered by her father’s constant judgement despite the pain being the only thing that calmed her. What is perhaps more shocking, though, is that Rhaenyra places her hand atop Alicent’s to stop it.
It’s but a reflex. A dusty remnant of a time long lost. It had always worked better as a balm than Otto’s admonishment – while he chided her for making herself unsightly, Rhaenyra had cared, then. I hate to see you hurting yourself, Alicent. What worries you so?
The last time Alicent made herself bleed like this was also the last time Rhaenyra had comforted her; her wedding night. Between when Alicent had been informed of her duty and when Rhaenyra had found out about it, the wretched truth had almost burned its way up Alicent’s throat every time they met. She’d disfigured her hands so savagely that she could scarcely turn the pages of a book, and her father had made it clear she was to cease immediately.
“I married the King because my father willed it,” Alicent says. Rhaenyra’s palm is warm as dragonfire. “I gave Viserys sons because my father wished to see it done. And I turned against you, my oldest friend, my only friend, because he…”
Alicent bites the inside of her cheek, and Rhaenyra scoffs.
“What did that viper tell you?”
“When he was dismissed as Hand of the King,” Alicent says, her hands twisting under Rhaenyra’s in their desire to pick, “he told me that rejecting your ascension was the only way to save my children’s lives.”
Rhaenyra’s hand retracts sharply. “What?”
“He warned that they would stand in the way of your succession. A male heir would galvanize the realm against the idea of a woman on the throne, and you would put my children to the sword to protect your claim.”
“I would not,” Rhaenyra says fiercely. “Your son is the one who drew first blood.”
“An unfortunate accident, as my many letters expressed. And yet you order the murder of an innocent boy,” Alicent says, her voice raising in an unsteady shout. “My boy. My –” Alicent’s breath catches. Her voice is thick with remembrance – the way his little body had looked in the funeral procession, wrapped thickly and still so small. “My grandson, Rhaenyra.”
A sob catches in Alicent’s chest. To her shock, Rhaenyra grabs for her wrist again – not in a gesture of violence, but one of comfort.
“I told you that was not my doing. It was Daemon,” Rhaenyra says urgently. “He wanted Aemond, a son for a son, and he did not -” Rhaenyra’s breath catches, too. “He did not care the consequences.”
“Daemon,” Alicent spits out. His name is acid in her mouth, and she rips her hand from Rhaenyra’s. “Would that Viserys had executed him as he should have when he stole that dragon’s egg for his pet whore.”
Rhaenyra’s gaze goes flinty. Somehow, the septa’s cowl she still wears only emphasizes the expression. “You hate him as your father does. Have you still no opinions of your own?”
“Daemon corrupted you. His influence, his depravity, he -” Alicent chokes on the truth, so close to spilling out in the safety of the darkness. He took you away from me.
Rhaenyra stands, her hands clenching into fists. “Is that what you think? I told you that I did not lie with Daemon that night, and to know that you are still so obsessed -”
“But you did lie with Ser Criston Cole.”
Rhaenyra flinches as if she’s been struck.
“And then you lied to me,” Alicent says raggedly.
Rhaenyra, for once, seems lost for words.
“You thought I did not know? He confessed his sins to me the night before your wedding to Laenor,” Alicent spits. She should be saying none of this – if not giving ammunition to Rhaenyra, she is at the very least showing her many weaknesses. And yet she cannot stop. “I stopped him from taking his own life, and he swore it to me instead.”
“You came to the feast late. Wearing green,” Rhaenyra murmurs. With one hand over the other she is twisting the rings on her own fingers, and Alicent’s eye is drawn to one in particular – a large ruby on a band of gold, flanked by two smaller pieces of emerald. Achingly familiar. “Things were never the same between us.”
“I defended you,” Alicent says, propelled to candor by the shock on Rhaenyra’s face. Finally something to crack the self-satisfaction. “Your lies. I told the King that I trusted your word, and he had my father removed as Hand for his accusations. For which my father blamed me. I was left alone here, without support. I had to learn the rules of the game to survive, and I knew then that you would do anything to escape the consequences of your actions, just like Daemon.”
“You cannot claim you hate being Queen,” Rhaenyra says hotly. “I have watched you, Alicent. You have revelled in the power it grants you.”
“Did I not earn it, when the price was to be wed to an ailing man who saw me as a vessel? An object to spill his seed into, to labour with his sires, to fill with his worries and angers, to take care of him in his worst days while he yearned for his true wife, without a single care to –”
Alicent bites her tongue against the tumult of words that threaten to spill like vomit across the flagstones. As Rhaenyra said at the sept, she has begun badly; she never should have begun at all. Every word she speaks to hurt Rhaenyra is a weapon Rhaenyra can use in the future.
“If you hated it so, then why agree to Otto’s plot? Why agree to manipulate the King, my father, for your father’s gain?”
Such a simple question, and yet it stokes a fire in Alicent that she has thus far kept suppressed. She stands abruptly, sending the blankets tumbling to the floor.
“Do you think I had a choice, Rhaenyra?” Alicent hisses. The part of her that she has most willingly cultivated over the last fifteen years is sickly satisfied with the way it makes Rhaenyra take a step backward. “If I had disagreed, what would have happened? You were gifted the ability to disobey your father. You could do whatever you wanted, reject a hundred suitors and cavort and rebel and fuck whomever you wished and still be the apple of your father’s eye. He would defend your wrongdoings to the ends of the earth. I did not have that gift. My only protection was obedience.”
It is a venting of vicious poison, and it leaves Alicent gasping for breath. She turns away from Rhaenyra, pressing her shaking palms to her face as she tries to gather what little calm she has left.
“Viserys was not an unkind man,” Alicent says, more quietly. “But you do not know what I have suffered for duty.”
Rhaenyra’s voice sounds thick. “Is that what has made you so cruel?”
“Cruel,” Alicent breathes. She closes her eyes, letting the word wash over her. “I did not ask for the life I was sentenced to. I was sold off to further the ambitions of my father, and now I am spent. My purpose fulfilled, the council discards me. And if I am not a purpose, what am I?”
Alicent does not expect an answer, but Rhaenyra never did like anyone else getting the last word.
“I do not know,” Rhaenyra says. “What are you? What did you want, before all of this?”
Alicent keeps the real answer tightly held. I wanted you.
“I have never been permitted to want,” Alicent says instead. “And yet –”
Alicent swallows the rest. And yet she does want. She wanted then and she wants still, even when it is utterly impossible. There was a time when she would have been happy to keep on as they were as children, sharing each other’s company without the weight of a war on their shoulders. That became impossible decades ago.
“Why did it matter so much to you whom I bedded?” Rhaenyra asks. Alicent turns toward her again, gripping a chair for balance.
“You lied –”
“Before that,” Rhaenyra says more sharply. It reminds Alicent of days spent arguing in the council chambers – Rhaenyra is dogged when her mind is set to something, and Alicent has all too often been in the path of her fury. “At the very thought that I had lain with Daemon you lost your head that day in the godswood. You acted as if you were a scorned lover, Alicent, and we were barely friends then! Why -”
Rhaenyra stutters. Her breath gets uneven; something in her face shifts.
Alicent’s stomach plummets.
“Alicent,” Rhaenyra whispers. So much is caught up in that single utterance of Alicent’s name, but the worst of all is understanding.
Alicent turns on her heel, striding to the door. “You must leave.”
“Alicent!” Rhaenyra calls.
“The guard patrol will pass soon, they will hear raised voices,” Alicent says hurriedly, pressing her ear to the door – all outside is quiet, for now. “Unless you wish your head to decorate a spike on the walls of the Keep in the morning, you must go.”
Alicent feels Rhaenyra’s presence behind her before she hears it.
“You said my name.”
Alicent shudders out a breath. The shame is overwhelming, the desire to fall to her knees and beg forgiveness from the gods looming stronger than ever – it is one thing to harbour impure thoughts, which can be prayed away with hours of quiet toil. But to have Rhaenyra know, to have her see –
“I heard it, before I opened the door. You called for me,” Rhaenyra says. “It’s how I found you. I did not know where you slept, now that Aegon has been crowned.” Her voice is almost gentle now, bringing with it inconvenient memories of days spent reading in the godswood with Rhaenyra’s soft hair spilling over her lap. Nights spent giggling within these four walls, hiding from her maids and refusing to return to her own chambers.
Tears roll down Alicent’s cheeks. Only Rhaenyra could flay her like this, cut her open to the point of letting tears fall. She presses her forehead to the heavy oak of the door, one hand on the latch.
“As the Dowager Queen, I could not keep my old chambers.”
“There are countless apartments in the Red Keep. You chose these rooms. My rooms.”
Rhaenyra is closer now, closer and closer until Alicent can feel a warm body pressing against her back.
“Do you dream of me?” Rhaenyra murmurs.
Alicent’s heart rattles in her chest like the bell of the Red Keep. She still has a knife grasped in her left hand, where Rhaenyra put hers away; with a flick of her wrist Alicent could be the hero of the small council.
She slips out from between Rhaenyra and the door, fleeing to the opposite side of the room once again. “Does it matter?”
Slowly, Rhaenyra raises her hands to lower her cowl. The hair beneath is as luminous as ever, and it settles silvery-soft around her face. “So much hatred has been held between us. And yet when I look upon you, it is not always loathing I feel.”
Such naked phrasing sends joy and terror through Alicent in equal measure. “Rhaenyra, you forget yourself.”
“I remember myself,” Rhaenyra snaps back. “Do you?”
The answer to that question is unequivocally no. Alicent has excised so many parts of herself over the years to ensure her own survival that whatever she is now would be unrecognizable to the person she once was. She is a shell. A hollow puppet, her strings still pulled by her father.
“I dream sometimes of how it used to be,” Rhaenyra says more softly. “We shared something, as girls. I have not forgotten it.”
Alicent has not forgotten, either. In the sweet summer of their youth, before betrothals and betrayal, Alicent had been so tied up in knots over the future. Rhaenyra had meant to comfort her, to show her not to fear another’s touch once she was sentenced to the marriage-bed. She’s never been able to forget it – Rhaenyra’s breath against her lips. The light, quivering touch of Rhaenyra’s hand. The sweetest kiss she’s ever known.
She’s also never been able to forget the sting of her father's words when the chambermaid relayed what she overheard, or the hours spent praying for forgiveness in the sept until her knees were bruised.
Perhaps Alicent deserves every bit of this, for all her many sins. Perhaps they’ve accumulated over the years to wash over her all at once.
“It was no more than childish fancy,” Alicent says, gripping the handle of the knife desperately as she sinks down onto the bed again. Something about Rhaenyra’s expression has made her entirely too aware that she remains only in her nightgown. “Impure thoughts best left in girlhood.”
Rhaenyra gives no thought to Alicent’s attempt at putting space between them. She sits to Alicent’s right, so closely that their hands almost brush when they brace on the sheets.
“If I had I been born a boy, as perhaps I should have been…”
Alicent turns sharply. Rhaenyra is looking into the middle distance, her expression pensive.
“Rhaenyra,” Alicent says. It is for lack of anything more intelligent to say, and Rhaenyra knows it – she turns back to Alicent, looking utterly exhausted in a way Alicent did not expect.
“I would not have had to consider any other bride. I have always known it,” Rhaenyra says. She sounds almost wishful, as if this is not the first time she has thought this. “It would have been you. Does that not illuminate the foolishness of this conflict? That all of this would have been averted if I had only been born with a cock?”
Alicent cannot but agree. “But you were not.”
“I was not,” Rhaenyra agrees quietly. “I wanted to fly with you on dragonback to see the wonders of the world, remember?”
Alicent could never forget. Her heart had soared like Syrax when Rhaenyra had said it, though she has never been able to admit it. Nor has she been able to admit that if what Rhaenyra is saying had been their reality, if Rhaenyra had been born a boy…Alicent likely would not have wanted her so.
Alicent is silent for so long that Rhaenyra sighs, shifting away as if to stand.
Alicent clasps Rhaenyra’s wrist. Her hand rests over the scar she left all those years ago, the texture of her own mania rippling under her fingers.
“And eat only cake,” Alicent murmurs.
Rhaenyra smiles. It’s a sight so long-forgotten and yet achingly familiar that it makes Alicent’s chest ache. “You do remember.”
“That is not the world we live in.”
“No. The world we live in is about to descend into a needless war,” Rhaenyra says, settling again when Alicent releases her hold. “I had hoped to dissuade you from it by coming here.”
Alicent scoffs. “It was a foolish plan. As was coming to my rooms. I had almost forgotten your rashness.”
“I needed to see you again.”
“Why? I sent letters,” Alicent says, looking for the truth in Rhaenyra’s bright eyes. “You never answered. Why risk your life like this instead? A shout from me in the sept, and you’d have been killed.”
“I knew you would not shout.”
“And how did you know that, exactly? The years between us have changed us both. Years of hatred, of bitterness and vitriol. Death and blame and deception. I could call out right now,” Alicent says feverishly, raising the knife in her left hand. “I am armed. In an instant I could –”
Rhaenyra’s kiss cuts her short.
Alicent forgets to breathe. Or perhaps Rhaenyra has stolen the impulse from her – her mouth moves against Alicent’s hungrily, a hand alighting on Alicent’s thigh. Rhaenyra kisses the life from Alicent, and all perception of the world narrows to those points of contact.
Her hair still smells of smoke and dragonfire.
Rhaenyra is the one to pull back. She hovers a finger’s width from Alicent’s still lips, her warm breath coming quick against the sensitive skin – she looks, to Alicent’s stunned eyes, almost frightened. Of herself, or her series of rash decisions. Of this war. Of her desire, perhaps, but not of the blade in Alicent’s hand.
The knife clatters to the floor at Alicent’s feet. Her hands go to Rhaenyra’s shoulders, to cup the face that haunts her dreams, and she surrenders.
They fall back against the pillows. Rhaenyra is laid atop her, their skirts tangled, and through the rough, simple fabric of her septa’s robe Alicent can feel her body; Rhaenyra’s silver hair falls like a curtain to brush softly against Alicent’s cheeks, igniting a thrill in her she did not think possible. The taste of Rhaenyra is all she has ever shamefully yearned for, the passion of her lips and tongue opening Alicent to a want like she’s never known. It is a yawning chasm in her chest, a devouring force, a –
It is a dragon, roaring and stretching its wings.
Rhaenyra fits herself between Alicent’s legs. The hem of Alicent’s nightgown slips down, exposing her knee to the cool air, and then her thigh. Rhaenyra’s hand chases it, like a flame licking upwards.
Alicent pulls back, gasping for breath. Rhaenyra’s fire has eaten away all the air in the room, the burning intensity in her eyes sending fissures of desire dancing across Alicent’s skin, and yet guilt presses at what little part is not held in her sway.
Rhaenyra’s mouth moves to consume the wanting flesh of Alicent’s throat. Her teeth scrape mercilessly, and Alicent can feel her smile at the resulting moan.
“It is a sin,” Alicent gasps to the canopy, and yet she cannot bear to stop. She has one hand tangled in Rhaenyra’s hair, the other clenched in the blankets like an anchor. “Rhaenyra -”
“Then let us sin,” Rhaenyra sighs. She bites hard at the side of Alicent’s neck, hard enough to mark, and presses a thigh forward between Alicent’s until the perfect pressure makes her cry out. “And fuck the gods.”
“We cannot do this,” Alicent mumbles capturing Rhaenyra's lips again. She’s compelled by shame to resist, but she cannot willingly tear her mouth from the heat of Rhaenyra’s kiss. “It is immoral. It is absurdity.”
Rhaenyra pulls away, keeping Alicent in place with a light hand at her jaw. “And so what if it is? In the morning, we will be enemies once more. We will return to those women who have caused each other such pain. The next time we see each other it may well be through dragonfire,” Rhaenyra says, stroking Alicent’s cheek. There’s a life to her in this moment that Alicent hasn’t seen since their youth, a searing intensity that Alicent watched grow more dull over Rhaenyra’s farce of a marriage and her years in the Red Keep. “But perhaps I came here not only to belay war. Perhaps I also came to mourn what never was. To say goodbye.”
Not only an intensity, there’s also a desperation in Rhaenyra that Alicent has never seen. An anxiety so antithetical to her usual brash confidence and endless strength. It’s fear.
“You do not believe you will make it through this war,” Alicent whispers.
It isn’t a question. Rhaenyra does not treat it as such.
“My dreams have been dark. I fear the moves have been made already which will decide my fate,” Rhaenyra murmurs. She traces a rough thumb over Alicent’s lips. “I cannot see a way forward that does not end in fire and blood for both our houses.”
Dipping upwards, Alicent touches their foreheads together. It had been a familiar gesture of comfort, once. It works like a balm.
“Sometimes I fear I am going mad,” Alicent whispers. “That the sum of my legacy will be a lifetime of suffering. I think we both will not see the other side of this conflict.”
“Then let us have this night,” Rhaenyra says, gripping at Alicent’s thigh. A grounding hold. “A night to forget, to be the girls we once were. To see them off before it all ends. They deserve that.”
“Do they?” Alicent asks. Do I? Did I ever?
Rhaenyra grins. It reminds Alicent of the look she used to get when she’d snuck into the Dragon Pit when she was supposed to be studying. “If they do not, then let us take a thing we do not deserve, as any man would. Let us give it to each other.”
Rhaenyra’s thumb brushes Alicent’s lips again, and this time Alicent opens them to draw it into her mouth. She sucks at Rhaenyra’s fingertip, relishing the way it makes her pale eyes darken. When she releases it, Rhaenyra drags the wet pad of it downwards until her hand rests just under Alicent’s breast.
“You would betray your husband for me?” Alicent says, arching into Rhaenyra’s palm.
Rhaenyra’s smile tinges with regret. “Perhaps we both should have betrayed much more. How different things might have been.”
Alicent can scarcely imagine how different. Perhaps it might have been something like the dream that carried her through the earliest days of her marriage – riding to freedom with Rhaenyra, abandoning duty and flying up on Syrax’s back into the clouds. Running away from the nightmare her life had become to live a life of indulgent sin somewhere in the Free Cities. A wild fantasy, seeing as Rhaenyra half hated her already by then. A scream in the dark from the deepest pit of her despair.
Alicent captures Rhaenyra’s lips, this time. Her decision made, she falls forward into desire.
The mood shifts quick as lightning from melancholy to frantic. Alicent tugs at the simple septa garment, leaving Rhaenyra in her smallclothes, but Alicent’s nightgown is her only layer. When Rhaenyra pulls it up and over Alicent’s head, she’s left utterly bare.
It is not the first time they have been naked in each other’s presence. They used to dress together, bathing and lacing each other into their dresses, but their bodies have changed since then. Alicent has been softened and scarred by time and children, as has Rhaenyra.
Even so, Rhaenyra is strong. Dragon-riding has given her powerful thighs and solid shoulders, in stark contrast to Alicent’s. Rhaenyra does not seem to see the distinction. She strips her smallclothes, and presses her body to Alicent’s fully. Breast to breast, hip to hip.
It is as if Alicent has only taken half-breaths until now, and once Rhaenyra has fit her hips between Alicent’s thighs it gives her leave to fill her lungs for the first time. Her head swims with the rightness of it. Rhaenyra is not Viserys, an old man thrusting pathetically into her as Alicent prays for it to end quickly. She is not Criston, who works so desperately to please Alicent and fails more often than not.
Rhaenyra is the blood of the dragon. Rhaenyra is present with her, not preoccupied with seeking her own pleasure using Alicent’s body. She bites possessively at Alicent’s throat, sucks at her nipples until Alicent is on the verge of begging, and when Alicent finally drags one of Rhaenyra’s hands between her legs she takes to the task with all the single-mindedness Alicent expects.
It’s all Alicent can do to keep from shouting her pleasure to the whole of the Red Keep. Rhaenyra’s fingers are devastating – somehow they find every corner of Alicent’s disgraceful need, filling her with a precision her dreams never did. This is what she sought with Cole, and this is what he’s never quite given her – something that blots out the catastrophe her life has become. Something strong enough to make her forget, for a time. A passion so great it supersedes every mistake she’s ever made.
Of course it is only Rhaenyra who can provide it.
Their bodies move together like any desperate back-alley coupling in King’s Landing. Silver hair spills across Alicent’s breasts; she’s sweating, her body slick against Rhaenyra’s as a fourth finger is added to join the other three. The seven-pointed star on its chain around her neck seems to burn against her skin, and yet Alicent does not pray.
Alicent does not let her head fall back. She does not close her eyes, or stare at the ceiling. She keeps them on Rhaenyra, watching every moment raptly and committing it to memory.
And the end is approaching all too quickly.
“Rhaenyra,” Alicent gasps. “Please -”
Her hips move in perfect tandem with Rhaenyra’s hand, spread wide and wanting. She’s close, teetering on the knife’s edge, and the looming loss of control is more frightening than she expected. In her dreams she doesn’t get so far – she oft wakes up before this point, and either dulls the ache with wine or calls Criston to purge the feeling. He sometimes manages to do so, but the result is never this explosive. She cannot stop this. She doesn’t want to.
Rhaenyra stays the course. She puts more weight into her thrusts, using her hips for leverage and pressing her palm upwards in a move that sets Alicent’s blood aflame, and she holds her gaze.
“Alicent,” Rhaenyra pants. With her free hand she grasps one of Alicent’s, lacing their fingers and holding tight. Her voice cracks with unspent emotion. “I have missed you.”
It is that, above all, that tips the scales. Those four words bring to mind a reality that could never be – one where this could have been her wedding-night, betrothed to the Princess rather than the King. Where Rhaenyra’s ascension was guaranteed. Where heirs did not matter, only youthful love. Where a marriage between two women was a thing to be celebrated by the gods rather than reviled.
One where this could be every night, rather than one single shining moment before the oncoming darkness.
Alicent breaks, biting hard on Rhaenyra’s shoulder with her fingers white for their grip on her hand. The force of it staggering – it hits, and then it hits again. It sweeps over Alicent like the religious rapture the septas sometimes claim, that profound and all-encompassing moment of ecstasy that Alicent always thought she was not worthy of – but here it is, crashing through her in blissful waves.
Each reminder that Rhaenyra is the cause seems to prolong the peak. Alicent clings to her through it, shuddering and wretched, and though she is satisfied physically in the wake of it she somehow only feels more ravenous. She wants more. She wants everything. She is an unholy creature, an abomination shaped by need alone, and this is her one night to be free from her cage.
Alicent writhes beneath her enemy, dragging her nails insistently down Rhaenyra’s back. Rhaenyra shivers pleasantly.
“I wish to touch you,” Alicent murmurs, pushing on Rhaenyra’s shoulder until she acquiesces to reversing their positions. Her fingers land just over the harsh red mark left by her teeth. “I wish to – to taste you. To drink of you.”
Rhaenyra’s stomach twitches under Alicent’s hands. Auburn hair mixes with silver before Alicent dips lower - Rhaenyra too bears the marks of childbirth on her belly and her breasts, and Alicent traces them with lips and tongue.
She has never had an impulse like this. To please. To indulge. She has gritted her teeth through service, and she has felt the power in being served; now, for the first time in her life, Alicent wants to bend the knee. Though Alicent has never done it, Criston’s efforts have given her an idea.
The hair between Rhaenyra’s legs is as light as the rest, coiled into tiny silver ringlets and wet with her arousal. When Criston had done this for Alicent, she had bade him kneel on the stones while she was seated; here she simply shifts to the end of the bed, guiding Rhaenyra’s legs apart and settling between them. Two queens on equal footing.
She almost expects Rhaenyra to taste of fire itself, licking its way into her mouth to burn her from the inside. Instead she tastes as human as Alicent does; sweetness and salt, and all the more appealing for it. She sighs when Alicent drags her tongue through it, easing a hand into Alicent’s hair.
Alicent wonders, in an act of brutal self-flagellation, how many times Rhaenyra has had this done for her. How many times Rhaenyra sought pleasure while Alicent suffered. She wonders if Daemon has done it, or if he is a selfish lover. If it pleases her.
Silently, Alicent vows to supersede any before her. If she can only do this once, she will ensure the memory will accompany Rhaenyra back to Dragonstone and beyond.
Rhaenyra’s openness is almost enough to bring Alicent to her own pleasure again. She moves greedily against Alicent’s mouth, twitching and gasping at every flick of her tongue, and her heated gaze never leaves Alicent. Her hand in Alicent’s hair is taut, just enough to pull at the roots. When she uses her grip to hold Alicent’s head in place as she rolls her hips, Alicent’s eyes almost slip closed in pure, decadent pleasure.
She does not let them close for long. Alicent’s need to absorb each moment is paramount. Being the singular object of Rhaenyra’s wanting gaze, just this once.
“I wish you could see yourself,” Rhaenyra gasps, gathering Alicent’s hair more firmly as if to keep her own view unobstructed. “So beautiful.”
Alicent moans into her cunt. It’s far from the things Rhaenyra says in her dreams, the unspeakable truths and chastisements whispered by Alicent’s own mind. Rhaenyra is seeing her this way, and thinks it is beautiful. It is base, it is vulgar and carnal, and yet it is rapturous. A form of worship more profound than kneeling in the sept.
“Put your fingers inside me,” Rhaenyra says.
Without a moment’s hesitation, Alicent does so. Her hand fits easily underneath her chin, two fingers and then three sliding into Rhaenyra as she whines her satisfaction, and Alicent stumbles into a rhythm that feels meditative. A push-and-pull, alternating suction and friction and pressure, following every minute reaction until Rhaenyra is trembling beneath her, every muscle taut and tense.
Alicent has sat in the King’s chair, and made decisions for the realm in his stead. She has argued with Lords, and pulled strings out of sight to get her way. She has raised the boy who now sits the Iron Throne.
Never before this moment has she felt true power. Rhaenyra’s pleasure is in the palm of her hand, pooling there as she begs wordlessly for just that little bit more, and it is Alicent’s decision to grant it.
When Rhaenyra finds her peak it’s with a cry of relief so loud that it echoes against the stone walls. It is dangerous and deeply unwise, but Alicent cannot find it in herself to care – she follows the erratic twitching of Rhaenyra’s hips, curling her fingers and drinking of her until Rhaenyra finally falls back, sweaty and spent.
Alicent drags her slick mouth along the inside of Rhaenyra’s thigh. Rhaenyra is prostrate before her, flushed pink and wet and still spread around Alicent’s fingers, and Alicent only pulls them free when Rhaenyra asks for it.
For a brief and sublime few moments, Alicent allows herself to pretend things are not as they are.
At Rhaenyra’s request they end up sprawled across the bed, Alicent sitting up against the headboard with Rhaenyra’s head in her lap. Silver hair fans across Alicent’s thighs. Alicent cards her fingers through it, humming a quiet tune – Under the Dragon’s Eye. A favourite of Rhaenyra’s, once.
“You know, if I had known this was an option,” Rhaenyra says, a hand tracing over the light marks across her own belly, “I daresay I would never have had children.”
Alicent laughs.
She does not remember the last time she laughed. It feels as if she shouldn’t, and yet much like with all else tonight she does it anyways. Rhaenyra grins up at her, as if in the safe confines of her old rooms she too has forgotten the years between them.
Rhaenyra catches Alicent’s hand, pressing a single kiss to her palm. “I have tarried here too long, I think.”
“Just a little while longer could not hurt,” Alicent says, smiling, but the mirth is short-lived.
In the hall, the clink of heavy armour marching towards them pops the bubble.
Alicent sits up straight. Rhaenyra props herself on an elbow, her hair falling across her back, as a steel-plated hand knocks thrice.
“Queen Alicent? A shout was heard,” says a muffled voice. Not one of the Kingsguard – simply a watchman on patrol. “Are you in distress?”
Rhaenyra’s eyes meet Alicent’s. There’s panic in her face, and rightfully so - were the door not latched, were there something happening in the castle again that might warrant a guard coming inside -
“An ill dream,” Alicent calls. Her voice shakes. “I am fine. Continue your patrol.”
“As you wish, Your Grace.”
Their footsteps recede, and Rhaenyra lets out a long breath.
“Once they pass it will be less than a candle-mark before another comes,” Alicent says quietly, all previous lightness leeched from her. “They circle the King’s quarters, then the children’s wing where Helaena sleeps. Now is your best chance to escape.”
Rhaenyra nods. She reaches for her smallclothes and dress. “Then I must go.”
“And if someone does see you?” Alicent says, rising and pulling her own nightgown back over her head. “What then?”
Rhaenyra shrugs, once again donning her septa’s cowl and hiding her hair behind it. “My disguise has served me thus far.”
Affection swells in Alicent, a beast she thought long dead. This is the Rhaenyra she loved, and the Rhaenyra she loathed. Brash and thoughtless and brave.
Once again they are left at opposite sides of the chamber, the gulf between them seeming uncrossable. The septa’s cowl hides the mark Alicent knows she left on Rhaenyra’s shoulder. Something in her wishes it were permanent – that if Rhaenyra does fall in one of the coming battles, her body would be found with the stain of Alicent’s irrational, sinful love still clinging to her. Perhaps forever.
“So this is the end,” Alicent whispers. The room is so quiet that Alicent can hear the light patter of her own tears landing on her nightgown.
“Yes.”
“You’ve remembered all the reasons you despise me.”
Rhaenyra swallows. She does not answer.
“You should go,” Alicent says, hurriedly wiping the tears that still fall. “I do not think your death should come this night.”
“It could,” Rhaenyra says softly. “You have had countless chances tonight to end this conflict.”
Alicent’s knife still lies on the flagstones between them. It points, in a happenstance that feels like a betrayal, directly at Rhaenyra.
“It would not end,” Alicent says, admitting what she has known to be true for some time now. “The whole of the realm is involved, now. What we have wrought will outlast us both.”
Rhaenyra nods. “To war, then.”
Alicent cannot speak further. Her throat is too thick, her tongue tangled in a hundred unspoken words.
“Goodbye, Alicent,” Rhaenyra murmurs.
And then, she is gone.
In a daze, Alicent goes to her vanity. She opens her jewelry box, moving bracelets and necklaces and jewels aside to reach the bottommost compartment; in a small velvet partition carved into the base is a ring. Gold, with a large emerald inset flanked by two smaller rubies. A mirror to the one Rhaenyra still wears. A matching set. It had been a gift, once, from the Princess to her dear friend. Many times Alicent has been tempted to throw it into the hearth to melt, but instead she buried it here.
With an unsteady breath, Alicent slips it onto her finger.
“To war,” Alicent whispers.