Chapter Text
Her forehead was still powdered with sweat when Rhaenyra was forced to come to her. Screams came from the door, so loud and fierce that for a moment Rhaenyra thought the queen had sent for her in the midst of her labors. Yet when she entered the birthing room, the bloodied bedsheets had long been cleared away.
“Rhaenyra,” Alicent said over the screams. Her smile was haggard, but faintly pleased. “It is so good of you to come.”
“I would do no less for the birth of my brother. Half-brother.”
The queen never heard the reproach with the cries so close to her ear; the king, crouched by her side, gave Rhaenyra a sharp look but made no comment.
Alicent held her son in her arms, a little boy with lungs loud as Balerion come again, wrapped in fiery crimson cloth. His purple eyes closed to the world, his mouth scarce larger than the moonstone on Rhaenyra’s finger, it seemed almost impossible for such a small thing to be at such a great fault.
All around the queen, maesters and maids alike fluttered, whispering gossip and pleas for an end to the screaming. One maester brought a small cup of milk of the poppy, only to be pushed away by Father’s affronted hands.
The bloodied sheets had been changed, the queen enrobed in a loose gown of light silk to better cool her burning skin. Rhaenyra stood by the foot of the large bed, hands clasped before her stomach, robes still smelling of dragon from her flight on Syrax.
“I wish to call him Aegon,” Father was saying over the din. He had never sounded prouder. “Aegon for the first king. A fitting name, you do not think?”
“Yes, Your Grace,” Alicent said. Her voice was light and gentle despite her harsh labors.
Viserys made to kiss the child’s head, but Prince Aegon had other ideas. He jerked away, and Father’s lips pressed against an ear. Laughing, Viserys said something, one that Rhaenyra could not hear.
He turned his head to Rhaenyra. “Come closer,” the king called. Father had a wide smile on his face. He beckoned with his left arm, the one with two fingers the maesters said he was like to lose by the turn of the year. “Come, see your new brother and the joy he has brought us all.”
The room still stank with the bitter salt of blood and bile. Someone had bathed the covers in lemon water and brushed the queen in pressed rose water, but it did little to chase away the stench lingering under Rhaenyra’s nose.
“Do you see?” he said, when she had approached. “How hale he is. He has the lungs of a commander, the lungs of a dragon , I tell you. Do you see, Rhaenyra? He closes them now, but his eyes are purple like the Valyrians of old.”
Rhaenyra looked at Aegon. His cheeks were dry. He had not been crying: only screaming, howling as a lone wolf might have beckoned the glow of moonlight. “He is loud,” she said.
Father only chuckled. Alicent smiled tightly.
“Come, now, Rhaenyra,” he said. “Look at the strength. The vitality. He is Aegon the Conqueror come again, I tell you.”
And reaching, he took Aegon from Alicent hands, and cradled the child in his arms. If the screams, so close to his ears now, bothered him, Father never let it show. He laughed at the way Aegon’s hands pounded against the swaddling cloth, cheered when Aegon’s screams seemed to grow and grow and grow.
“I am sorry about his screams,” Alicent told Rhaenyra. Her hands, free of child, picked at her nails. “He is - a loud one.”
Rhaenyra offered no response.
“You need not stay,” Alicent went on, watching Aegon with a pained smile. “I, too, would flee at such a holler.”
Their gazes turned to Aegon. There was something to be said of his cries, the way they split the air as a raptor might have dived after prey; sharp, cold, swift to carry and slow to end. Rhaenyra had been at Driftmark in the weeks after her cousin Laena had been born, and young she might have been, she could scarce remember ever hearing screams as monstrous as this. Even stallions, dying on the blood-soaked sands of tourney grounds, could command no such force.
Did Alicent see the same? The king did not, for certain; Father embraced his new son with all the joy that had left him in the months after Mother’s death. And as for Alicent - Alicent’s fingers picked at her nails. She knew, then.
Rhaenyra looked around the room. Otto Hightower spoke in low tones to Grand Maester Mellos, a pained tilt to his chin; Father bore Aegon in tight arms, swaying him gently as if the child had never been screaming. Everywhere they went, the eyes of the room darted to the new Prince Aegon, and though he cried and shrieked and bellowed, there was a tight elation: a boy. A male. A male heir.
None had so much as spared a glance for Rhaenyra, none but Alicent. Rhaenyra did not know what to think of that.
“He will quiet soon, Your Grace,” a maid was telling the queen. “Soon.”
“Is he - hungry, perhaps?” Alicent’s hands were clasped tight, fumbling. “The maesters say it’s too early, but perhaps I could try feeding him -”
“There are wetnurses for such things. Your Grace need not concern herself with such tasks.”
“But - a mother’s touch -”
“Rhaenyra,” Father called suddenly. He brushed Aegon’s head, not at all flinching when the child screamed just a little louder. He ignored the pleading wetnurses, turned to Rhaenyra. “Would you like to hold him? Your new brother? If, of course, the mother will allow it.”
Viserys was at Rhaenyra’s side then, a great smile stretched wide on his face. He had not smiled like this, so content and unadulterated since Mother’s pregnancy. Certainly Rhaenyra could not begrudge him this. “Alright,” she said, and nodded hesitantly at Alicent’s smile.
Viserys never turned to his wife; he pushed Aegon into Rhaenyra’s hands, adjusting her arms so that she might better bear his weight.
She stood awkwardly. Up close, Aegon did not seem as cruel as his screams. Only as another child might have looked: pale skin, eyes scrunched, untouched by those around him.
The swaddling cloth was thick and warm, bordered in golden embroidery. Aegon was heavier than he seemed, but so small, small like Syrax had once been. And warm. The blood of the dragon.
Rhaenyra swayed gently as she had seen mothers do.
The room was silent. Aegon had stopped screaming, abruptly as lightning topples the tallest of trees. His mouth, a pale line, lay closed. His eyes, black like the night sky, stared back at her.
They were dark, purpled as the shadows brought by a golden torch, blackened as the edge of Valyrian steel.
Alicent let out a cry. Murmurs began to grow.
“His eyes,” Rhaenyra heard Father say. He alone sounded delighted. “They are beautiful. A marvel.”
And so they were: hazy with all the depths of the world, but - empty. Empty as a well sapped dry of life, empty as a sky stolen of stars, empty as a chalice dried of drink. He was horrifying, then: monstrously still where he had spent all his short life writhing and screaming; quiet as the last breath before death.
For a harrowing moment, Rhaenyra thought she had killed her own brother. But then Aegon blinked, and on his purple eyes stared.