seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from Pakistan
seen from Estonia
seen from Japan
seen from China
seen from China
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from Spain
seen from Türkiye
—-Queen Rhaena Targaryen with the head of Maegor the Cruel
naerys daenerys . just finished moving!
Together again… 🌊
Jaehaera & Morghul "Vēzot" - up
Fire Against the Gullet
- Summary: A betrothed princess and prince face war, duty, and dragonfire as the Dance reaches the Gullet.
- Pairing: cousin!reader/Jacaerys Velaryon
- Rating: Mature 16+ (blood and gore)
- Tag(s): @oxymakestheworldgoround @sachaa-ff @idenyimimdenial @albekstime @human169 @ilocuras24 @celestrys
The singers would have made lies of it, if singers had been allowed near the truth.
They would have said the sea opened for love. They would have said the copper dragon descended like some god out of old Valyria, claws bright with sunset, wings beating the smoke away, and that Princess Y/N Targaryen reached through flame and storm because no prince promised to her could ever be claimed by water while she still had breath left in her body. They would have given the moment beauty, because singers were paid to take the ugliest parts of war and polish them until fools mistook blood for rubies. They would not have spoken of the smell. They would not have remembered the burned pitch, the torn sailcloth, the wet choking stink of men drowning under armor, the groan of hulls split open by dragonfire and ram alike. They would not have known how the Narrow Sea looked when it was full of splinters, corpses, burning oil, broken oars, dead horses, and screaming sailors from Lys, Myr, Tyrosh, Driftmark, Hull, Dragonstone, and every miserable corner of the world that had been dragged into the Dance because Targaryens had never learned to break a crown without breaking everything beneath it first.
You remembered all of it.
You remembered the morning before the ravens came, too, which was worse in some ways, because the morning had pretended to be ordinary.
Dragonstone had been grey under a low sky, the sea restless below the cliffs, the castle crouched in its black volcanic bones like a beast refusing sleep. Queen Rhaenyra had held the painted table with a face gone thin from grief and command, surrounded by men who called her Your Grace and then watched her sons with the careful fear of men who knew heirs were more fragile than banners. Lord Corlys Velaryon had stood with both hands braced upon the table, silver hair bound back, eyes fixed upon the carved channels of Blackwater Bay and the Gullet as if he could hold the sea itself by staring hard enough. Your father, Prince Daemon, had not been there. He was away with Caraxes, away with his own war, his own rage, his own secrets, because that was what Daemon Targaryen did best. He left scorch marks in history, then expected those left behind to warm themselves by the ashes.
Jacaerys stood near his mother, taller than he had been when you were first told you would marry him, though still not yet broad in the way older men became after years of command, wine, and arrogance. He had grown harder since Lucerys died. Not crueler, not yet, but the soft places in him had gone guarded. His dark curls were tied at the nape because he had taken to wearing them so when he meant to look older. It never worked on you. You had known him when his voice still cracked during arguments and when he tried to look solemn at betrothal feasts while Baela kicked him under the table and you nearly choked on laughter into your cup. You had known him before war made everyone speak in titles first and names only when afraid.
He felt your stare and looked toward you across the chamber.
For a moment, all the lords and captains and maesters between you seemed to blur into the smoke from the braziers. He gave you the smallest nod, almost nothing, a prince acknowledging a princess in council. But his hand shifted against the edge of the table, fingers closing once, and you knew him well enough to understand the rest.
Stay.
Do not follow.
Do not make this worse by loving me where everyone can see it.
You almost laughed at him for it. Quietly, viciously, in your own throat. Men were unbelievable creatures. Give one a dragon, a claim to the Iron Throne, and the affection of a woman who had spent her life among Targaryens and Velaryons, and somehow he would still imagine he could protect her by standing three paces farther away in a council chamber. Absolute strategic genius. The Citadel would probably write six dull scrolls about it.
“Lysene galleys have been sighted near the Gullet before,” one of Corlys’s captains was saying. “The Triarchy has not forgotten the Stepstones, my lord. Nor Prince Daemon.”
“No one has forgotten my father,” you said.
The room quieted just enough to prove that everyone had been thinking the same thing and no one had wanted to be the fool who gave it voice. You stood beside Baela, with Rhaena behind you near the carved wall, your sisters silent in different ways. Baela’s silence always had teeth. Rhaena’s had sorrow in it, deeper and more private than people understood because they mistook gentleness for weakness. You were the eldest of Laena Velaryon’s daughters, born before the twins, raised between tide and flame, and people had been watching your face since you were old enough to sit beside your mother without fidgeting. They had watched for Daemon in you. They had watched for Laena. They had watched for Velaryon salt and Targaryen madness, as if blood was a cup they could peer into and judge its contents.
Corlys looked at you, and the grief that crossed his face was gone so quickly a careless person would have missed it. You were Laena’s daughter before you were Daemon’s, at least to him. “Your father’s enemies have long memories.”
“So do his daughters.”
Baela’s mouth twitched.
Jace’s did not. He was watching you too closely now, his eyes warning you away from whatever he thought was building in you. He had always known when you were about to do something inconvenient. It was one of the reasons you loved him and one of the reasons you occasionally wanted to shake him until his princely restraint fell out of his ears.
Rhaenyra’s voice drew the room back. “Our fleet holds the Gullet. The Sea Snake has made that plain. If the Triarchy comes, they will find Velaryon sails waiting.”
“And dragons,” Jace said.
He spoke calmly, but something moved through the hall when he did. He had gone to the Eyrie and to Winterfell and returned with promises, with oaths, with men speaking well of him. He had found dragonseeds for his mother, bastards and lowborn and doubtful blood made mighty by fire: Addam of Hull on Seasmoke, Hugh Hammer on Vermithor, Ulf White on Silverwing, Nettles on Sheepstealer. A pretty harvest of desperation, plucked from Dragonstone’s shadow and handed weapons that could unmake cities. You did not despise them for it. You would have mounted anything with wings too, had the world given you hunger instead of a title.
But dragons were not swords. Dragons had moods, memories, tempers. Dragons chose. Dragons grieved. Anyone who thought otherwise had never looked into a dragon’s eye and seen something older than language looking back.
Your own dragon had chosen you before your tenth nameday.
Rhovagon was copper from snout to tail, not the bright useless shine of a new coin, but the deeper color of hammered metal held near flame. Along his neck and shoulders, his scales darkened into bronze, and under his wings ran thin veins of green like old patina spreading through a statue left too long in sea air. He was not as monstrous as Vhagar, not as famed as Caraxes, not as beautiful as Sunfyre was said to be, but he was clever. He listened more than other dragons. He watched the water with particular hatred, as if he personally resented anything that swallowed heat. Your father had once said Rhovagon had the temperament of a suspicious old admiral trapped inside a young dragon’s body. Your mother had laughed and told him that was why he suited you.
You had not thought of that in years without pain catching under your ribs.
“Dragons, yes,” Rhaenyra said, and her gaze moved from Jace to you with the careful heaviness of a mother and queen trying not to let either part of herself win too completely. “But dragons must be sent with purpose, not pride.”
Jace lowered his head. “I know that, Mother.”
“Do you?”
The words landed harder than a shout. Jace’s jaw tightened. He bowed, but the hurt showed because he was not as good as hiding it from you as he wished. Rhaenyra saw Lucerys whenever she looked at danger now. She saw Arrax ripped apart above Shipbreaker Bay. She saw one son lost to Aemond’s monster and another standing before her, offering himself to war with all the earnest courage that made boys die and old men write about valor afterward.
Your hand curled around the back of a chair. You wanted to speak, but this was not your mother. This was not your council. This was not your place, though you had been promised to its heir and would one day, if any of you survived this family’s talent for catastrophe, stand beside him as queen. Wonderful institution, monarchy. Everyone bled for rules no one could keep straight once the dragons started eating each other.
After the council, Jace found you on the windy path below the castle, where black stone steps led toward the dragonmont and the air tasted of sulfur, salt, and ash. You had gone there because Rhovagon was restless and because you did not want to sit in chambers while women embroidered fear into silence. He came without guards. That alone told you his mood.
“You should not speak so sharply in council,” he said.
You turned from the cliff edge. Below, waves struck the rocks hard enough to burst white. “There he is. My promised husband, brave heir to Dragonstone, terror of Lysene sailors, corrector of women’s manners.”
His brows drew together. “That is not what I meant.”
“It never is.”
“Y/N.”
Your name in his mouth softened something you had meant to keep difficult. Annoying, really. Affection had no discipline. It just wandered into arguments and ruined perfectly good anger.
Jace stepped closer. He wore black and red, not Velaryon sea colors, and he had a sword at his hip though he still looked more like a prince than a killer. His face had changed since Lucerys died. There was a line between his brows now that did not leave easily, and grief had taught him to hold still. Before, he had burned brighter, laughed faster. You missed that boy with an ache you did not know where to put. You loved the young man before you too, but that love was more frightening. It had teeth around the edges.
“I do not want you in the first flight if the Triarchy comes,” he said.
“There it is.”
“I mean it.”
“So do I.”
His nostrils flared. “Rhovagon is swift, but he is not so large as Vermithor or Silverwing. If the galleys carry scorpions, if they have learned from the Stepstones, if they loose enough bolts at once, a smaller dragon is no small risk.”
“And Vermax is made of Valyrian steel now?”
“Do not twist my words.”
“Then stop giving me such useful ones.”
He looked away, toward the water. Gulls screamed beyond the cliffs. Somewhere deep under the mountain, a dragon answered with a low, irritated rumble that seemed to pass through the soles of your boots. “You are Laena’s daughter.”
“I had noticed.”
“She died trying to reach Vhagar.”
Cold passed through you. Not the air. Not the sea. Something older and more personal. Your mother’s death was a wound people handled either too gently or not gently enough. Jace knew better. Usually. The fact that he had said it told you how afraid he was.
Your voice lowered. “Finish that thought carefully.”
He turned back, regret already in his eyes. “I only meant that I cannot watch you fly into certain death because pride demands it.”
“Pride?” you repeated. “You think this is pride?”
“I think you would rather burn than be left behind.”
“Yes,” you said. “And you would rather drown than admit you need anyone beside you.”
His mouth shut.
The wind pulled loose strands of your silver hair across your face. You did not brush them back. You let him look at you half-obscured, half-wild, not because you planned it, but because you were tired of standing neatly inside everyone else’s fear. “I am not Baela. I am not Rhaena. I am not your mother’s ward to be placed behind walls until the realm becomes polite again. I am Daemon Targaryen’s daughter, yes, and Laena Velaryon’s. I am promised to you, not owned by you. Rhovagon answers to me, and if ships come through the Gullet to burn my grandfather’s seat and take my kin, I will not sit in my rooms with my hands folded because you have decided love means locking me away from danger.”
Jace stared at you for a long moment.
Then, quietly, “I do not know how to lose another person.”
The anger went from you as if someone had opened a vein.
He looked ashamed of having said it. That was Jace. He could stand in council before Corlys Velaryon, Rhaenyra Targaryen, and half the proud fools on Dragonstone without faltering, but one honest sentence to the girl he was meant to marry and he looked as if he had stripped himself bare in winter.
You crossed the space between you and took his face between your hands. He shut his eyes when your thumbs brushed his cheekbones. His skin was warm despite the wind.
“You do not get to choose that,” you said, less harshly now. “None of us do.”
“I know.”
“No. You command. You plan. You make yourself useful until people forget you are frightened. That is not the same as knowing.”
His eyes opened. Brown, not violet. Familiar, stubborn, alive. People whispered about that too. They whispered about him and his brothers as if hair color mattered more than courage, as if blood was only true when it performed prettily for witnesses. You had hated those whispers long before you loved him. Jace had carried them since childhood, and instead of making him smaller, they had made him determined to earn every room he entered. It was noble. It was exhausting. It was also likely to get him killed one day if no one dragged him back by the collar.
He covered one of your hands with his. “And what do you do when you are frightened?”
“Become unpleasant.”
“That is not only when you are frightened.”
“Careful, my prince.”
For the first time that day, he smiled. Barely. Enough.
You leaned in and kissed him before the smile could fade. It was not soft at first. Neither of you had been raised in softness, and war had stolen whatever patience courtship might have taught you. His hand went to your waist, fingers tightening in the fabric of your gown. You felt him inhale like he had been struck. You had kissed before, in corners and corridors and once in a storage chamber that had smelled strongly of apples and old wine, which Baela had found so funny she nearly told half the castle out of spite. But since Lucerys, since Blood and Cheese, since rookery messages came in black ribbons and everyone began measuring life by which raven arrived next, each touch had changed. It had become a claim against loss. Not ownership. Never that. More like proof. Here. Warm. Breathing. Mine because I choose and am chosen.
When you drew back, his forehead rested against yours.
“If I ask you again to stay behind?” he murmured.
“I will pretend not to hear you.”
“That sounds like you.”
“If you try to command me?”
“I would not.”
“If you try?”
His lips brushed the corner of your mouth, lighter now, almost sad. “Then you will become unpleasant.”
“Violently.”
His laugh was short and unsteady, but it was there.
Later, you would think of that laugh. You would think of it when the sky turned black with smoke and the sea took Vermax beneath its burning skin.
The ravens came before dawn.
Not one. Many. Their wings beat at the rookery windows until servants ran half-dressed through the corridors and bells began to sound across Dragonstone. The Gay Abandon had been taken. Aegon and Viserys, the queen’s little sons by Daemon, had been aboard, sent away for safety because adults were forever arranging children like pieces on cyvasse boards and then acting shocked when the board caught fire. Aegon had escaped on Stormcloud, wounded, terrified, his small dragon torn and dying beneath him by the time he reached Dragonstone. Viserys was gone. Taken, drowned, dead, sold, hidden. No one knew. The not knowing was its own kind of knife.
Rhaenyra’s scream carried through stone.
You were already dressed when Jace came for you.
He did not knock. He entered your chamber with his riding leathers half-fastened, hair loose, face pale under the fury gripping him. For a wild instant, neither of you spoke. The castle beyond your door was chaos: running feet, shouted orders, sobbing servants, horns, the distant answering roars of dragons disturbed from sleep. You could smell smoke though there was no fire yet. Fear had a smell close enough.
“Viserys,” he said.
“I heard.”
“Aegon says ships. Many ships. Triarchy colors. They attacked the cog and took him from the sea.”
Your hands were already moving, buckling the straps at your wrists. “Where is Aegon?”
“With the maesters. Stormcloud is dying.”
Jace’s voice broke on the dragon’s name. Not loudly. Barely enough to hear. That made it worse.
You came to him. “Jace.”
“They took him,” he said. “They took my brother. My mother thinks him dead. Aegon saw them take him, and he could do nothing.”
“He is a child.”
“So was Luke.”
That one landed between you like a blade.
He turned away, breathing too hard. “I am flying.”
“I know.”
“The dragonseeds are being called. Addam, Hugh, Ulf, Nettles. All of them.”
“And me.”
His shoulders stiffened.
“For once in your life,” you said, “do not waste time arguing with me.”
He looked back. Rage and terror made him look older than he was and younger than he wished. “If something happens, I cannot turn back for you.”
“Good. I would hate to discover you had become stupid at the worst possible moment.”
“That is not a jest.”
“No,” you said. “It is an order.”
He stared, then crossed the room in three strides and kissed you with all the words neither of you had room to say. This one was not stolen sweetness. It was fierce, bruising, almost angry, his hands in your hair and yours gripping the front of his leathers hard enough to strain the seams. He tasted of salt and sleeplessness. When he pulled back, his eyes searched yours as if committing your face to memory, which you hated so much you almost slapped him.
“Do not look at me like I am already dead,” you said.
He swallowed. “Then do not die.”
“Same to you.”
He nodded once.
That was the last gentle thing.
The dragonmont was thunder by the time you reached it. Vermax was shrieking from the lower slope, green scales dark with dawn mist, wings half-spread, lashing his tail so hard stones cracked under him. Rhovagon waited above him, copper hide catching the first miserable light of morning. He saw you and lowered his long head, smoke curling from his nostrils in hot gusts that smelled of iron and char. His eyes were molten orange, awake and terrible. He knew before you touched him. He always did.
“Rhovagon,” you said, pressing your palm to the warm scale above his jaw.
He rumbled. Not comfort. Agreement.
Beyond him, the other dragons gathered or lifted already. Seasmoke moved with pale, restless elegance under Addam of Hull, who sat him better than many highborn would have liked to admit. Addam had a Velaryon look to him despite his birth, and a steadiness you trusted more than Hugh Hammer’s broad-shouldered swagger. Hugh sat Vermithor like a man drunk on being chosen by a god. Perhaps he was. Vermithor’s bronze immensity made the air shake when he moved, old power wrapped in muscle and flame. Ulf White laughed too loudly atop Silverwing, though the sound cracked near the end, betraying the fear under the wine and bravado. Nettles was the strangest among them, small and brown and sharp-eyed, perched on Sheepstealer with a confidence that did not need announcement. Her dragon was mud-brown and lean, ugly by courtly standards, which meant he had probably lived longer than most pretty creatures through the radical strategy of not giving a damn what princes thought.
Jace was already mounted on Vermax.
He saw you climb into Rhovagon’s saddle. His face hardened into command because others were watching. Yours did the same. It was almost funny. Two children dressed as legends, about to fly into a naval battle because every adult in the realm had failed upward into disaster.
Lord Corlys stood below with his captains, shouting to men racing toward the harbor. Baela was there too, furious at being held back, Moondancer too young and too small for such a fight, though Baela looked ready to claw the sky open with her own hands. Rhaena stood beside her, arms wrapped around herself, eyes fixed on you.
“You come back!” Baela shouted.
You looked down at your sister and forced a grin you did not feel. “Bossy little beast.”
“Promise me!”
That cut deeper than expected. Baela did not beg. She demanded, threatened, mocked, charged. But promise me came out of her with childhood still inside it.
You looked from Baela to Rhaena. Rhaena’s eyes were wet, but she did not look away. Sweet sister. Quiet sister. The one everyone underestimated because she survived pain without making theater of it.
“I promise,” you said.
A stupid thing to say before battle. Necessary anyway.
Then Vermax leapt.
The sky took him.
Jace rose hard and fast, and Rhovagon followed.
Dragonstone dropped beneath you, black towers and smoking vents shrinking as the wind slammed cold against your face. The saddle straps bit into your thighs. Rhovagon’s wings opened in full, copper membranes snapping taut, and the world tilted into speed. Around you came the others: Seasmoke pale as sea fog, Silverwing gleaming, Vermithor vast enough to make clouds seem thin, Sheepstealer cutting lower with Nettles crouched forward like she had been born out of his spine. Vermax flew at the front, his green body arrowing toward the Gullet, toward smoke already staining the horizon.
You had flown all your life, but never into anything like that.
At first the battle was only a dark smudge over the water.
Then it became fire.
The Gullet was burning from end to end. Warships crawled across the sea like black beetles, some in Velaryon formation, others flying banners of the Three Daughters: Lys, Myr, Tyrosh, old enemies wearing new purpose. The Triarchy fleet had come in force, dozens upon dozens of ships, their decks crowded with archers, crossbowmen, sailors, sellswords, men who had fought dragons before in the Stepstones and learned just enough to be dangerous before dying anyway. High Tide and Spicetown were under attack behind the main press, smoke rising from Driftmark in long torn ribbons. Velaryon ships fought in the channel, their oars churning red water. Men leapt from burning decks. Others burned where they stood. Some tried to swim and were dragged down by armor, ropes, wreckage, or the simple cruel weight of panic.
Through the wind, you heard Jace shouting commands. Not to you. To all of them.
“Lysene galleys! Break them before they scatter!”
He did not sound like a boy then. He sounded like what Rhaenyra needed him to be. That terrified you more than weakness would have.
Vermax dove first.
Green wings folded, and he dropped through smoke with a scream that split the air. Fire poured from his jaws, golden-orange and furious, sweeping across the nearest galley. Sailcloth vanished. Men became torches. The ship’s mast cracked, fell, and crushed the deck in a spray of sparks and bodies. Seasmoke followed from the left, Addam bringing him low along the line of fleeing ships, white-grey fire washing over oars and rigging. Vermithor did not so much attack as erase. Hugh Hammer brought the old dragon down upon the Myrish line, and three ships burned in a single breath, their hulls bursting apart under heat too great for wet wood to bear. Silverwing passed higher, flame raining in a wide, terrible arc. Ulf whooped as if he were at a tourney, the idiot, but his dragon knew her work. Sheepstealer moved with ugly precision, diving at stragglers, tearing sails with his claws, setting one ship afire from stern to prow before Nettles pulled him sharply aside from a storm of bolts.
Then Rhovagon descended.
The first blast of his fire struck a Tyroshi ship attempting to ram a Velaryon galley. Copper light filled your vision. Rhovagon’s flame was not as pale as Seasmoke’s or as vast as Vermithor’s. It came dense and roaring, red-gold at the core, edged in green where the heat caught pitch and painted shields. Men screamed below you. You smelled hair and tar and blood boiling in armor. You banked hard, knees clamping against the saddle as arrows hissed past. One struck Rhovagon’s left shoulder and glanced from scale. Another tore through the loose edge of your cloak. A third flashed close enough that you felt its wind against your cheek.
“Rhovagon, up!” you shouted, and he climbed.
Below, the Triarchy ships tried to scatter, but the Gullet was crowded with death. Burning ships drifted into whole ones. Oars tangled. Men leapt between decks, some aflame, some trying to drag water buckets through chaos as if a bucket could argue with dragonfire and win. The sky filled with smoke so thick your eyes streamed. You wiped them with the back of your glove and looked for Jace.
Vermax was ahead, too far ahead.
“Jace,” you hissed.
He had seen something. You knew it before you knew what. Vermax angled toward a cluster of Lysene galleys breaking from the main fleet, their sails cut loose and oars driving frantically east. They were not fleeing blindly. They were guarding something between them. Smaller vessels. Prize ships. Captives.
Viserys.
Of course Jace saw it. Of course he did.
You dragged Rhovagon after him, cursing him in every language you knew and several you invented on the spot. “No, no, do not be noble now, you stubborn fool.”
Vermax dropped lower.
The Lyseni were ready.
From the decks below came the snap and groan of scorpions turning. Huge bolts rose like black needles into the smoke. Crossbows lifted in hundreds. Archers packed the rails. Men shouted in bastard Valyrian, in the trade tongue, in the rough clipped commands of sellsail captains who had known dragons once in the Stepstones and carried that terror back with them as instruction. Vermax opened his jaws and bathed the nearest ship in flame, but he was low. Too low. Smoke swallowed half his body. A scorpion bolt cut through the air beneath him. Another tore past his wing. Jace leaned forward in the saddle, driving him on.
“Jacaerys!” you screamed, though the wind stole most of it.
Rhovagon heard the panic in you and answered with speed that nearly ripped the breath from your chest. You dove after Vermax as the sea rose fast below, black and red and glittering with patches of fire. A Lysene galley exploded under Vermax’s flame, its mast flinging upward in a burning arc. Vermax swerved. A bolt struck his wing membrane. Not deep enough to kill. Enough to ruin the rhythm of flight.
The green dragon lurched.
For one instant, Vermax fought the air and almost won.
Then his claws struck a mast hidden in smoke.
Wood shattered. The impact twisted him sideways. Jace was thrown hard against the saddle straps. Vermax’s wing folded wrong, and dragon and rider crashed into the sea with a sound that seemed to silence the battle for half a heartbeat.
Water swallowed them.
Your own scream tore your throat raw.
Rhovagon tried to pull up by instinct. Dragons hated the sea. All fire hated the thing that could smother it. But you drove your heels down and hauled the reins, not away, not up, but toward the place where Vermax had vanished beneath foam and burning wreckage.
“Down!” you shouted. “Rhovagon, down!”
He snarled, furious, terrified, offended to his bones, and obeyed.
The heat vanished as you plunged through smoke toward the water. Arrows rose around you. A bolt glanced off Rhovagon’s breast and spun away. Another buried shallowly near his flank, drawing a roar that shook the air from your lungs. You did not look at it. You looked at the sea.
Vermax surfaced once.
His head broke through with a spray of foam, jaws open, screaming. One wing thrashed. His tail struck wreckage and sent men flying. Jace was no longer in the saddle.
No.
There. A dark shape in the water near the remains of a broken mast. Jace, one arm hooked over splintered wood, hair plastered to his skull, blood running from his temple into his eye. Crossbow quarrels struck the water around him. One caught his shoulder. You saw his body jolt.
Something in you went quiet.
Not calm. Calm was a virtue for septas and corpses. This was older. Cleaner. A narrow place inside fear where there was no room for anything except what must happen next.
“Rhovagon,” you said, voice wrecked but steady. “Take him.”
The copper dragon screamed in rage and folded his wings.
You hit the air above the water so low that spray lashed your face like thrown gravel. Rhovagon’s claws reached. The first pass missed Jace by the length of a man’s arm because Vermax’s thrashing sent a wave between them. You swore so violently your mother’s ghost probably sighed somewhere in whatever afterlife tolerated Targaryens.
“Again!”
A ship below you loosed everything it had. Arrows peppered Rhovagon’s underside. Most broke. Some stuck. A scorpion bolt shrieked past your leg and punched through the trailing edge of his right wing. Rhovagon’s body bucked under you. Pain blasted through the bond like red lightning. You nearly lost the saddle.
“Hold,” you gasped. “Hold, my heart. Again.”
Rhovagon banked, wounded wing dragging, and came around over the water.
Jace looked up.
You saw him see you.
Even from above, through smoke, through blood, through the insane battlefield blur of fire and sea, you saw recognition break across his face. Not relief. Horror. He understood what you were doing. He tried to lift his good arm, not to reach for you, but to wave you away.
That stupid, noble, beloved idiot.
You leaned so far from the saddle that the straps carved pain across your hips. “Take my hand!”
He shook his head once, hard, and shouted something you could not hear.
“Take my hand, or I swear by every god this realm has wasted prayers on, I will follow you into the sea and haunt you until the end of days!”
That, apparently, reached him.
Jace let go of the wreckage.
For a moment, the water claimed him again. Your heart stopped with him.
Then Rhovagon’s claws closed around his body, not cleanly, not gently, one talon hooking through leather near his ribs, another catching the back of his riding harness. Jace cried out. Rhovagon beat his wings once and rose, but Vermax screamed below, still sinking, still fighting, one wing ruined, neck tangled in ropes and broken mast lines from the wrecked ship. A dragon’s scream in pain was not like any other sound. It seemed to tear open the world and show the bones underneath.
Jace twisted in Rhovagon’s grip, blood streaming down his face. “Vermax!”
You heard that. Everyone heard that.
Rhovagon climbed a few feet, struggling under Jace’s weight and his own injury. Below, Vermax thrashed, dragging wreckage with him. The sea around him boiled, not from heat but from the violence of his dying struggle. Crossbowmen on the nearest surviving galley cheered, and the sound turned your vision red.
“No,” you said.
Rhovagon snarled as if he already knew.
You could save Jace and leave Vermax. That was what a sensible person would do. That was what commanders would praise later in careful voices. A dragon was a weapon, yes, and a terrible loss, but the heir mattered more. The promised husband. The boy in your dragon’s claws with blood pouring down his arm. You could climb now. You could live. He could live.
Vermax screamed again.
Jace made a broken sound that was worse.
Damn all sensible people.
“Rhovagon,” you said, and pressed yourself low to his neck. “We pull him out.”
The dragon’s answer was a roar so furious it shook ash from the sky.
He dropped again, Jace still held in one claw, and seized Vermax’s tangled harness and wing-root with the other. His talons slid once on soaked scale. Vermax snapped blindly in pain, teeth closing on air close enough to Rhovagon’s foreleg to tear flesh if he had found it. You shouted Vermax’s name, then Jace did too, ragged and desperate, and something in the green dragon recognized his rider’s voice. He stilled just enough.
Rhovagon beat his wings.
Nothing happened.
The sea held Vermax like a jealous god.
“Again!” you screamed.
Rhovagon pulled.
His injured wing faltered. You felt muscle tear through the bond. He screamed, but he did not let go. Vermax’s head rose higher. Ropes snapped. A mast fragment dragged beneath him like an anchor. Rhovagon’s body strained so violently you thought his spine would break. The saddle lurched under you. Your hands slipped on blood-slick leather. For one absurd instant, you thought of Baela demanding your promise and Rhaena’s wet eyes and your mother laughing in Pentos sunlight before death came to your house wearing fever and smoke.
Not yet, you thought.
Not him.
Not me.
Not like this.
A shadow swept over you.
Seasmoke.
Addam of Hull came down through smoke with his face pale and set, Seasmoke’s claws out. “Princess!”
“Cut the ropes!” you shouted.
Addam understood faster than most lords would have, which was another point in favor of bastards and fishermen’s sons over highborn council fossils. Seasmoke blasted flame across the wreckage tangled beneath Vermax, controlled enough not to burn the dragon but hot enough to char ropes, sailcloth, and splintered spars. Smoke burst upward. Rhovagon pulled again.
This time Vermax came free.
Half-drowned, wing torn, body shuddering, but free.
Rhovagon could not carry both. Not truly. He had Jace clutched beneath him and Vermax gripped awkwardly by broken harness and neck ridge, enough to keep the green dragon from sinking but not enough to lift him clear. Seasmoke moved beneath Vermax’s side, buffeting the water with his wings, helping push him up from the surface. For several insane moments, dragons became cranes and lifelines while men below forgot war long enough to stare. Then the Triarchy remembered itself and loosed another storm of bolts.
One struck you.
At first you did not understand. There was only a heavy punch beneath your left ribs, hot and stupidly intimate. You looked down and saw the quarrel buried through leather and flesh, the shaft trembling with each beat of Rhovagon’s wings. No pain yet. That would come, because the body was petty and always late with paperwork.
Jace saw it from below.
Even dangling half-conscious in Rhovagon’s talons, the fool saw it. “Y/N!”
“I’m busy,” you snapped, though it came out wet.
Rhovagon climbed. Seasmoke helped Vermax rise just enough for the wounded green dragon to beat his own good wing, then the other, clumsily, horribly, dragging water in sheets. He could not fly well, but he could stay above the sea in ugly, lurching bursts. Jace was still held by Rhovagon, and that was good because you did not think Vermax could have borne a sparrow then, let alone his rider.
Vermithor swept over the ships below in answer to your injury, or perhaps Hugh simply saw a chance for glory and burning things. Either way, the result was useful. Dragonfire engulfed the nearest galley, the one whose men had been cheering. Their cheers became screams. Silverwing crossed behind him, fire pouring bright into the smoke. Sheepstealer tore through another ship’s sail and sent it crashing into its neighbor, Nettles bent low over his neck, hair whipping loose, eyes hard as old nails. For all their rough edges, for all the danger of giving dragons to untested hands, in that moment they fought like fury given wings.
“Back!” Addam shouted. “Get him back!”
Yes. Back. Dragonstone. Maesters. Ground. Anything that was not this burning sea.
You tried to answer, but blood filled your mouth.
That was inconvenient.
Rhovagon knew before you sagged. His whole body convulsed with panic. Not fear of the sea now. Fear of you. The bond between dragon and rider was not a song, no matter what poets claimed after too much Arbor gold. It was hunger, heat, instinct, memory, command, and something stranger threaded through blood. Rhovagon felt your wound as wrongness. He felt your weakening grip. He felt death looking up from inside you and hated it.
“Fly,” you whispered. “Rhovagon, fly.”
He did.
The retreat was not clean. Nothing in war ever was, despite men drawing arrows on maps afterward as if battles were tidy little lines instead of thousands of people discovering what their insides looked like. Rhovagon climbed with Jace still in one claw, Vermax half-flying beside and below him with Seasmoke guarding his flank. Addam stayed near, calling encouragement in a voice that cracked from smoke. Behind you, the battle continued to devour itself. Vermithor and Silverwing burned through the scattered Triarchy ships while Sheepstealer harried those trying to flee. Velaryon sails regrouped below, battered but not broken. Driftmark still burned. Spicetown’s smoke rose thicker than before. The Gullet had become a grave no victory could cleanse.
Jace kept trying to speak. You heard pieces.
“Y/N. Stay awake. Damn you, stay awake.”
You wanted to tell him not to steal your commands. You wanted to tell him Vermax lived. You wanted to tell him that if he ever waved you away from drowning again, you would marry him solely to make the rest of his life difficult. Good promises, all of them. Very motivating. Unfortunately, your tongue had become a useless lump of meat and your vision kept narrowing.
The flight back stretched strangely. Dragonstone appeared, vanished behind smoke, appeared again. The sea below turned from battlefield red to ordinary grey, as if it had not just tried to swallow a prince and his dragon. Rhovagon’s wingbeats became uneven. Each one jarred the bolt in your side until pain finally arrived in full, white and immense. You could not breathe around it. Your left hand slipped from the saddle grip.
No, you thought, irritated more than afraid. Not after all that.
A laugh bubbled in your throat and became blood.
Rhovagon screamed.
The castle alarms answered. Men were running on the shore. Tiny figures. Useless, frantic ants. Some pointed upward. Some scattered as Vermax, barely controlled, came crashing toward the lower landing ground with Seasmoke beside him. Rhovagon followed, but his descent was wrong. Too steep. His wounded wing dipped. The ground rushed.
“Rhovagon,” you tried to say.
He turned at the last possible instant, taking the worst of the fall through his shoulder rather than his chest. The landing shattered into impact. You were thrown forward, saddle straps catching you cruelly. Jace fell from Rhovagon’s claw into a churn of ash and gravel, rolling hard before men reached him. Vermax struck the earth beyond with a broken howl, one wing dragging, claws tearing trenches through black soil. Seasmoke landed nearby and roared at everyone who came too close, which was sensible. Men were generally at their most useless when rushing at injured dragons with good intentions.
Hands grabbed at you.
You snarled at them. Or tried to. It may have been more of a wet cough. Humiliating.
“Do not pull her yet!” someone shouted. “The bolt, mind the bolt!”
“Princess, can you hear me?”
“Get the maester!”
“Where is the prince?”
“Seven hells, look at Vermax.”
Rhovagon twisted his head toward you, eyes wild, smoke leaking between his teeth. He would burn them all if they hurt you. You knew it as clearly as you knew your own name.
“Lykiri,” you whispered to him, because the old word came easier than the Common Tongue. Calm.
He did not calm. But he did not burn them, which under the circumstances counted as remarkable personal growth.
Jace crawled to you.
Not walked. Crawled. His shoulder was bleeding heavily around the quarrel lodged there, one side of his face masked in blood, his lips blue from sea cold. Men tried to hold him back, and he fought them with the blank, stupid determination of someone too injured to understand injury applied to him.
“Move,” he rasped.
“My prince, you must let us look at you.”
“Move.”
That voice moved them. Or maybe his expression did. He reached Rhovagon’s side and hauled himself up by one of the saddle straps, swaying so badly a groom had to catch him around the waist. He slapped the man away without looking.
Your vision cleared enough to find him.
He looked dreadful. Truly dreadful. Pale, soaked, bleeding, shaking, hair plastered flat, one eye swollen, mouth trembling from cold and fury. The future king. Pulled from the sea like drowned laundry and still trying to command the tide by glaring at it.
“You look awful,” you whispered.
He made a sound halfway between a laugh and a sob. “You have a bolt in you.”
“I noticed.”
“You came back.”
“You told me not to die.”
“I told you not to die. I did not tell you to get shot.”
“Your instructions lacked detail.”
His face crumpled, just for a moment, and that frightened you more than the pain. Jace took your hand. His was freezing. You tried to squeeze back. You were not sure your fingers moved.
“Vermax?” he asked, barely able to force the word out.
You shifted your eyes toward the landing ground.
Vermax lived.
Barely, perhaps. Badly, certainly. The green dragon lay on his side while dragonkeepers shouted over one another and approached with chains, hooks, prayers, and long experience with creatures who could kill them by accident while dying. His wing was torn. Blood and seawater streamed from his body. But his chest moved. His jaws opened, and a weak plume of smoke slipped out. When Jace heard him, his own breath broke.
“He lives,” you said.
Jace bent over your hand and pressed his mouth to your knuckles. His shoulders shook once. Only once. He was still surrounded by men. Still a prince. Still trapped inside all the ridiculous machinery of rule and bloodline and expectation. But you felt the tremor of it through your joined hands.
Then Rhaenyra arrived.
You had never seen the queen like that. Not even after Luke. Her hair was unbound, her gown hastily thrown on, face stripped of all paint and ceremony. Aegon the Younger’s blood was still on one sleeve where she must have held him before running here. She stopped when she saw Jace alive. Stopped as if the sight had struck her in the chest.
“My son,” she said.
Jace turned his head. “Mother.”
Rhaenyra crossed the ground and fell to her knees beside him, gathering his wet, bloody face between her hands. For a moment, he was not heir, not prince, not commander, not any of the names war had placed on him. He was her boy. Her firstborn. Alive when history had already opened its mouth to swallow him. She kissed his brow, his cheeks, his hair, murmuring words too low for others, and Jace let her because he had no strength left to pretend.
Then her gaze moved to you.
Something passed over her face that was almost impossible to read. Gratitude. Horror. Calculation, because queens could not stop being queens even when blood was on the ground. Memory too, maybe, of Laena, of Daemon, of promises made between houses to bind wounds that kept reopening.
“She saved me,” Jace said.
Rhaenyra looked at the bolt in your side, at Rhovagon bleeding beneath you, at Vermax shuddering nearby. “I can see that.”
“I am going to marry her,” he said.
Even wounded half to death, you managed to blink at him. “That was already arranged, you dramatic ass.”
Someone nearby choked. It might have been Addam of Hull. If so, your opinion of him improved further.
Jace did not look away from his mother. “No. I am going to marry her. Not only because grandsires and councils made contracts. Not because Velaryon blood must answer Targaryen blood, or because the realm likes neat lines drawn between quarrelsome houses. Her. I choose her.”
Rhaenyra’s eyes softened and focused at once. “Jace.”
“If I live,” he said, and his voice faltered there, “if she lives, there will be no more speaking of it as duty.”
You wanted to tell him this was a deeply inconvenient moment for declarations, considering you were actively bleeding onto your dragon, but the words would not form. Besides, some part of you, weak and furious and embarrassingly moved, wanted to hear it.
Rhaenyra looked at you again. “Princess Y/N.”
“Your Grace,” you breathed.
“You brought him back to me.”
“Vermax too.”
“So I see.”
“Do not let them hurt Rhovagon.”
Her expression shifted, and for the first time since you had known her, Rhaenyra Targaryen looked at you not as Daemon’s daughter, not as Laena’s daughter, not as a useful betrothal, but as a girl trying not to die while worrying about her dragon first. Something like grief moved through her gaze. Something like kinship.
“I will not,” she said. “You have my word.”
A queen’s word. Almost as sturdy as a wet paper shield in this family, but it was something.
The maesters finally took command, because apparently even princes and queens ran out of usefulness once wounds became complicated. Jace fought when they tried to separate him from you. He had to be held upright by two men, which made the fighting less impressive than he likely intended, but he gave it real spirit. You appreciated that. The maester, an elderly man with the dead-eyed calm of someone who had seen too many royal injuries and perhaps wished he had chosen a career in turnip accounting, told him plainly that if he did not sit down, he would bleed to death in a very undignified manner before anyone could remove the quarrel from his shoulder.
Jace said, “See to her first.”
The maester said, “There are other maesters, my prince.”
“See to her first.”
“Jace,” Rhaenyra snapped, queen and mother returning together. “Sit.”
He sat.
Not gracefully.
They cut you out of the saddle because moving you cleanly was impossible. Rhovagon snarled at every blade until you managed to touch his neck with two limp fingers. “Let them.”
His great eye rolled toward you.
“Let them,” you repeated.
He obeyed, trembling with rage.
The pain became worse when they lowered you. That seemed unfair. You had already done the difficult part by not dying in the sky. But bodies were vulgar little kingdoms, full of rebellion. Men carried you toward the castle on a litter while Jace was half-dragged beside you on another, refusing to be taken anywhere he could not see you. Rhaenyra walked with him for several steps, then stopped when a messenger came running from the harbor with more news. War did not pause because sons survived. Viserys was still gone. Driftmark still burned. The Velaryon fleet had lost ships and men. The Triarchy was broken, yes, but at a price no sane person would call victory unless paid to do so.
As they bore you up the stone path, you saw Baela and Rhaena.
Baela reached you first, face white with fury. “You promised.”
“I came back.”
“You look like shit.”
“Runs in the family.”
Her mouth twisted, and then she bent and kissed your forehead hard enough to hurt. “Do not leave us.”
Rhaena appeared on your other side, tears running openly now. She took your hand with careful gentleness. “You saved him.”
“I had help.”
“I know,” Rhaena whispered. “But you went down first.”
You could not answer that. Not because it was untrue. Because it was.
Jace turned his head on the litter beside yours. His eyes were half-lidded, fever already threatening at the edges, but he was still conscious. Stubbornness had apparently replaced blood in his veins. “Baela.”
“What?” Baela snapped, wiping her cheek with the heel of her hand like she could bully tears out of existence.
“If she dies, she will haunt all of us.”
Baela let out a strangled laugh. Rhaena covered her mouth.
You looked at him. “Especially you.”
“I know.”
“I would be unbearable.”
“You already are.”
You smiled, or tried to.
The maesters took you into the chamber nearest the rookery because it was warm and had tables enough for bandages, basins, knives, and all the other charming instruments by which healing resembled murder with better manners. They put Jace on a bed across from yours because he refused anything farther away and because everyone had realized arguing with the heir while he was bleeding was a waste of energy better spent keeping him alive. Your riding leathers were cut away. The quarrel was snapped short. Wine was forced between your lips, then milk of the poppy, bitter and heavy. You tried to refuse too much of it. You wanted your mind clear.
The maester leaned over you. “Princess, the bolt must come free.”
“Then pull it.”
His mouth tightened. “It may have caught deep. There will be pain.”
“I ride a dragon. Do I look unfamiliar with pain?”
“No,” he said dryly. “You look like a young woman who believes defiance is a treatment.”
From across the room, Jace gave a weak laugh and then groaned when another maester pressed cloth to his shoulder.
You turned your head toward him. “Do not encourage him.”
“You like him,” Jace murmured.
“He has spirit.”
“He insulted you.”
“Yes.”
The maester sighed. “Royal patients are a plague.”
“There are worse plagues,” you said.
“Indeed,” he replied. “Most of them listen better.”
Then he pulled.
The world went white.
You did not scream at first. You were proud of that, later. You bit down on leather until your jaw ached and your vision broke into sparks. Then something tore hot and deep inside you, and sound came out of your throat despite your best efforts. Rhovagon answered from outside with a roar that shook dust from the ceiling. Every servant in the room flinched. The maester did not. The old bastard really had chosen the correct profession if he enjoyed standing between dragons and death with only linen and nerve.
Jace tried to rise. “Y/N!”
“Hold him down,” your maester barked without looking.
“I am the Prince of Dragonstone.”
“And currently the prince of making my work harder. Down.”
You would have laughed if you had not been busy trying not to vomit blood.
The bolt came free. Blood followed. Too much, judging by the sudden grim silence. Hands pressed cloth to your side. Someone called for boiled wine. Someone else called for needle and silk. The room tilted. Jace was speaking to you, but his voice came from very far away.
“Stay with me. Y/N, look at me.”
You forced your eyes open.
He was pale as bone. A bandage had been wrapped tight around his shoulder, already staining red. Another cut marked his brow. His lips were cracked from seawater. He looked young again. Not boyish, exactly. Just mortal.
“I told you,” you whispered, “no looking at me like I am dead.”
“I am looking at you like I love you.”
“That is worse.”
His mouth trembled.
You regretted the words the moment they left you, because his face changed and you did not have the strength to fix it prettily. So you did the crude, honest thing instead.
“I love you too,” you said. “Unfortunately.”
Jace made a sound that was almost laughter and almost grief. “Unfortunately?”
“You are very troublesome.”
“I am?”
“Constantly.”
He shut his eyes. A tear escaped anyway, slipping into the blood at his temple. “I thought the sea had you.”
“Not me.”
“No. Me.” His voice lowered, roughening. “I thought I was gone. I saw Vermax go under. I could not breathe. Then I saw you above me.”
The maester pushed a needle through your skin, and you gripped the table hard enough that your nails bent. “Romantic. Terrible timing.”
“I waved you away.”
“Yes,” you said. “I plan to be angry about that later.”
“I knew you would come down.”
“Then why wave?”
“Because I am an idiot.”
The maester stitching your side muttered, “At last, a sound diagnosis.”
Even Jace laughed at that, faintly. The room seemed less likely to collapse for one breath.
Night came strangely. You did not remember the sun setting, only that the windows went from grey to black and candles multiplied until the chamber smelled of wax, wine, blood, herbs, and smoke carried in from the wounded dragons outside. Reports came and went. You caught pieces through fever and poppy haze. The Triarchy fleet had been shattered, though enough ships had fled to carry horror back across the Narrow Sea. Driftmark had suffered terribly. Spicetown was ash. High Tide had burned. Thousands dead. Velaryon power wounded but not destroyed. Aegon the Younger lived, though Stormcloud did not. Viserys remained missing, presumed lost by many, though no body had been found. Rhaenyra moved through the castle like a ghost made of iron, mourning one son, nearly losing another, unable to stop being queen long enough to simply break.
Vermax lived through the first night.
So did Rhovagon.
So did you.
Barely, because your body had decided to be dramatic about blood loss, fever, and a crossbow bolt through the side. Jace did not fare much better. The quarrel in his shoulder had missed the worst by less than a finger’s width, according to the maester, who said this in the tone of a man personally offended by luck. Jace had swallowed enough seawater to cough half the Narrow Sea into cloth, and bruises spread across his ribs where Rhovagon’s claws had held him tight enough to save him and nearly crack him at the same time.
By the second morning, they moved your beds closer.
No one admitted who ordered it. You suspected Baela, because she had the face of someone daring the entire household to object. Rhaena sat with you often, reading softly from books neither of you heard. Addam of Hull came once, awkward in the doorway until you opened your eyes and told him he looked like a man waiting for permission to exist. He smiled then, uncertainly, and said Seasmoke was healing well.
“You saved Vermax,” you told him.
He glanced at Jace, then back to you. “You went for him first.”
“I had already done something stupid. It seemed rude not to finish.”
Addam laughed under his breath. “Princess.”
“Addam.”
He hesitated. “They will tell it differently.”
“Who?”
“Everyone.”
That did not surprise you. Everyone always did. By tomorrow, half the castle would say Jace had saved himself through princely courage. The other half would say you had bewitched Rhovagon into dragging a dragon from the sea through sorcery inherited from Daemon, because if a woman did something inconveniently brave, someone eventually blamed witchcraft. Across the water, the Triarchy would probably claim they had killed you both and three dragons besides. The Citadel would reduce the whole thing to a dry paragraph and then spill more ink debating legitimacy than survival. History was a corpse men fought over after the living had done all the bleeding.
“Let them,” you said. “You know what happened. So do we.”
Addam nodded slowly. “Aye.”
When he left, Jace turned his head toward you. Fever had made his eyes too bright. “He is a good man.”
“Yes.”
“I chose well with him.”
“You chose well with Nettles too,” you said. “And Hugh and Ulf, though I reserve the right to dislike them both personally.”
Jace’s mouth curved. “Ulf was drunk when he mounted Silverwing.”
“I noticed.”
“Hugh frightens some of the lords.”
“Hugh enjoys frightening them.”
“And Nettles?”
“Nettles does not care what they think,” you said. “That may make her the wisest person on Dragonstone.”
Jace looked toward the ceiling, his smile fading. “We won.”
The words hung there, false and true at once.
“Yes,” you said.
“Then why does it feel like defeat?”
You watched candlelight tremble across the beams. Outside, somewhere beyond the stone walls, Vermax gave a low, wounded rumble. Rhovagon answered, softer than usual. Dragons speaking in pain across the yard like old soldiers after battle.
“Because only men who are not there think victory feels clean,” you said.
Jace was silent for a while.
Then, “Viserys may yet live.”
“He may.”
“If he does, I will find him.”
“I know.”
“If he does not…”
You turned your head despite the pull of stitches. “Do not finish that tonight.”
“I should have been faster.”
“No.”
“I should have seen the ships sooner.”
“No.”
“I should have saved him.”
“You saved who you could. So did Aegon. So did I. That is all anyone ever does in battle, though men dress it up afterward so they can sleep.”
Jace swallowed. “Luke died alone.”
The chamber seemed to still around his brother’s name.
You had no clean answer for that. There was none. Lucerys had been a boy on a young dragon under a storm-black sky, chased by a kinsman with a monster beneath him. No speech could make it noble. No revenge could make it whole. So you gave Jace the only thing that was not a lie.
“Yes,” you said softly. “But you did not.”
His eyes closed.
“I saw you,” you continued. “Vermax saw you. Rhovagon saw you. Addam saw you. The whole damned Gullet saw you fighting for your brother. If songs come of this, they will be full of nonsense, but that part will be true.”
Jace breathed unevenly. “You came after me.”
“Yes.”
“You could have died.”
“So could you.”
“I am not worth your life.”
That angered you enough to cut through the fever. You shifted, regretted it immediately, and hissed through your teeth. “Do not insult me while I am too injured to throw something.”
His eyes opened.
“I decide what my life is spent on,” you said. “Not you. Not my father. Not your mother. Not Corlys. Not any council stuffed full of men who mistake age for wisdom because their knees hurt. I chose. I would choose again.”
Jace stared at you as if those words hurt more than the quarrel.
Then he reached across the narrow space between your beds.
It took effort. His arm shook. Yours was weaker. Your fingers met halfway, clumsy and cold.
“I would choose you too,” he said.
“You did. Very loudly. In front of your mother. While concussed.”
“I remember.”
“That is unfortunate.”
“I meant it.”
“I know.”
He held your hand with what little strength he had. For a while, neither of you spoke. There was no need to fill every silence. You had been raised around enough people terrified of quiet to appreciate its uses. The castle groaned around you. Servants passed beyond the door. Far below, the sea went on chewing at the rocks as if it had not been denied its prize.
Near dawn, Rhaenyra came.
She entered without attendants, or perhaps dismissed them outside. Her face looked carved from exhaustion. She had changed gowns, but ash still clung in her hair. Queens were supposed to seem untouchable. Rhaenyra looked very touched by everything: grief, rage, sleeplessness, motherhood, rule. She stood between your beds and studied you both.
Jace tried to rise. “Mother.”
“Do not,” she said. “If you open that wound again, I will let the maester lecture you until you beg for mercy.”
He sank back. “Cruel.”
“I have had practice.”
Her fingers brushed his hair from his brow. The touch lingered only a moment before she turned to you. “Princess.”
“Your Grace.”
“Rhovagon has taken food.”
Relief moved through you so strongly it nearly hurt worse than the wound. “Vermax?”
“Not yet. But he drinks. The dragonkeepers say that is something.”
“It is.”
Rhaenyra looked toward the window, though nothing could be seen beyond the dark glass. “Aegon asks after both of you. He thinks himself a coward.”
Jace’s face twisted. “He is not.”
“No,” Rhaenyra said. “He is a little boy who watched his brother taken and his dragon die beneath him. Try telling him that when you can stand.”
“I will.”
Her gaze returned to you, and there was something in it you did not know how to receive. “You kept me from losing another son.”
You held her stare. “I kept myself from losing him too.”
The corner of her mouth moved, not quite a smile. “Yes. You did.”
“I could not save Viserys.”
“No.” Her voice thinned, but did not break. “Nor could I.”
Jace reached for her hand with his free one. Rhaenyra gave it to him. For a long moment, the three of you remained joined by silence, by wounds, by the missing child whose absence pressed into every corner of the room.
Then Rhaenyra drew herself back into shape. You could see it happen. Mother folding into queen because the realm would not wait for her to finish bleeding.
“When you are recovered,” she said to Jace, “we will speak of the declarations you made while half-dead on the landing ground.”
Jace glanced at you. “I stand by them.”
“You cannot stand at all.”
“Then I lie by them.”
Despite everything, you laughed. It hurt badly enough to bring tears to your eyes. Worth it.
Rhaenyra looked between you, and for a fleeting moment the grief in her face eased. “Rest. Both of you. The war will still be here when you wake.”
“Comforting,” you murmured.
“It was not meant to be.”
She left before either of you could answer, because queens also had a talent for making exits before emotions became too inconvenient. A family gift, apparently.
The day after that, the fever worsened.
You drifted in and out. Sometimes you were in the chamber with Jace’s hand near yours and Rhaena’s voice reading. Sometimes you were above the Gullet again, falling through smoke while Vermax vanished beneath the water. Sometimes you saw your mother walking towards flame, calm and terrible, choosing fire over the bed that had become her battlefield. You tried to call to her, but your mouth filled with seawater. Then Rhovagon would roar outside, and you would claw your way back to the room.
Once, you woke to Daemon.
At least you thought you did.
He stood near the foot of your bed in black, hair pale as moonlit steel, face unreadable in the candlelight. For a moment you were a child again in Pentos, running barefoot across warm tiles while your sisters shrieked behind you and your mother laughed from a shaded couch. Then the vision focused. Your father was not smiling. His hand rested on the pommel of Dark Sister.
“You are late,” you whispered.
His eyes moved to your face. “So I have been told.”
“By whom?”
“Your dragon nearly killed three handlers and one maester when they tried to change your bandages. I took that as complaint.”
“Rhovagon has good judgment.”
“So does his rider, when she is not diving into a sea battle after doomed boys.”
You turned your head slightly. Jace slept on the other bed, face turned toward you even unconscious. “He is not doomed.”
Daemon followed your gaze. For once, he said nothing cruel. Nothing clever either. That was rarer.
“You pulled Vermax out of the sea,” he said.
“Rhovagon did.”
“With you bleeding in the saddle.”
“Addam helped.”
“I heard.”
“I suppose people are already making it sound cleaner than it was.”
“They are calling it the Copper Descent.”
You closed your eyes. “That is horrible.”
“Yes.”
“They need better names.”
“War rarely attracts poets of quality.”
That made you smile, faintly. “Did you come to scold me?”
“I considered it.”
“And?”
Daemon’s silence lasted long enough that you opened your eyes again.
He looked older than he should have. Not frail. Never that. But worn at the edges in a way men like him usually hid behind danger. “Your mother would have been proud.”
The words entered you more deeply than the bolt had.
You looked away fast, but not fast enough. Tears slid into your hair. You hated crying in front of him. Not because he mocked it. He rarely did when it mattered. Because Daemon carried grief like a blade, and you had inherited enough from him already.
“She would have said I was reckless,” you whispered.
“She often said both.”
“Was she proud of you?”
His mouth curved without humor. “Not as often as I deserved.”
“More often than you deserved.”
This time his smile was real, brief and cutting. “There she is.”
You breathed through another wave of pain. “Viserys?”
His face closed.
That was answer enough.
“No word,” he said.
“He may live.”
“He may.”
“You do not believe it.”
“I believe many things when useful.”
“Father.”
Daemon came closer and sat beside your bed. It startled you. He was not a bedside man. He was made for dragon saddles, battlefields, council insults, bad decisions, and rooms full of people afraid to turn their backs. But he sat there and took your hand carefully, as if only now remembering you could break.
“If the boy lives,” he said, “we will find him.”
“And if he does not?”
His fingers tightened. “Then someone will pay.”
There he was. Your father, reliable as murder.
You were too tired to argue. “Do not let payment become the only thing left.”
Daemon’s eyes flicked to Jace, then back to you. “You sound like your mother.”
“Good.”
“Yes,” he said quietly. “Good.”
When you woke again, he was gone. You were not sure whether he had truly been there until you found a thin smear of ash on your blanket where his glove had rested. Proof, then. Or close enough. With Targaryens, proof was often just the most convincing ghost in the room.
Jace improved before you did, which annoyed you. Not because you wanted him worse. Because he became insufferable the moment he could sit upright.
“You need broth,” he said on the fifth day, propped against pillows with his arm bound tightly to his chest.
“You need silence.”
“You have eaten almost nothing.”
“I have been stabbed. My appetite is shy.”
“You were shot.”
“Same family.”
He gave you a stern look. It would have worked better if he did not still have bruising across half his face. “The maester says you must regain strength.”
“The maester also says royal patients are a plague. Perhaps he is not the authority you think.”
“The maester is correct on both counts.”
You accepted the cup only because Rhaena was watching hopefully from the chair by the window. Betrayed by your own sister’s soft eyes. Disgusting. You drank three mouthfuls, which tasted mostly of salt, onion, and obligation.
Baela entered without knocking. “Excellent. You’re eating.”
“I was coerced.”
“You usually are.”
“Cruel family.”
Baela crossed to the foot of your bed and looked at Jace. “Your dragon bit a keeper.”
Jace straightened. “Badly?”
“No. More insult than wound. The keeper says Vermax is becoming irritable, which means he will live.”
Relief moved over Jace’s face so nakedly that Baela looked away, pretending interest in the window. Rhaena did not. She smiled at him, gentle and open, and Jace managed a small smile back.
“And Rhovagon?” you asked.
Baela rolled her eyes. “Eating like a lord at a wedding and glaring at anyone who walks near him. One wing still pains him. He snapped at Father.”
“Good boy.”
“Father laughed.”
“Of course he did.”
Baela leaned against the bedpost. “Corlys says songs are already being made among the sailors.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“I forbid it.”
“You are not queen.”
“I am injured. That should count for something.”
Jace looked amused. Traitor. “What songs?”
“One calls her the Copper Bride of the Gullet.”
You shut your eyes. “Kill me.”
Rhaena giggled. Actually giggled. The sound was so unexpected and lovely after days of grief that none of you scolded her, not even when she covered her mouth.
Baela continued, delighted by your suffering because sisters were made by the gods as intimate enemies. “Another says Rhovagon dragged the sea itself into the sky.”
“That did not happen.”
“And one says Jace kissed you while dying.”
“He did not.”
“I wanted to,” Jace said.
You turned your head slowly toward him.
He looked back with fever-thinned innocence.
Baela made a delighted noise. “Disgusting.”
“Leave,” you told her.
“Absolutely not.”
Rhaena was smiling harder now. “It is sweet.”
“It is revolting,” Baela said. “They almost die once and become poetic at each other.”
Jace’s voice softened. “Once?”
The room quieted.
There it was again. The war beyond the door. The dead beneath the sea. Luke in the storm. Viserys missing. Stormcloud gone. Driftmark burned. The war had given you a few minutes of laughter and then returned to collect interest like some ghastly Braavosi banker.
Baela’s expression changed. “I did not mean…”
“I know,” Jace said.
You set the cup down carefully. “We are alive.”
“For now,” Baela muttered.
“For now is not nothing.”
No one argued with that.
That evening, they opened the windows despite the cold because the chamber had begun to smell too strongly of medicine. Sea air moved through the room. Smoke still lingered over the island, but less than before. You could hear dragons outside. Wounded, restless, alive. Jace had persuaded the maesters to let him stand for a few moments, which had gone poorly, then moderately, then poorly again when he attempted a step. Still, he had stood. Now he sat in the chair beside your bed looking pleased with himself in the aggravating way of men who accomplished one medically inadvisable thing and expected admiration from the civilization they endangered.
“You are smug,” you told him.
“I stood.”
“You nearly fell into the basin.”
“Nearly is not did.”
“Royal wisdom.”
He smiled, then looked down at your joined hands. This had become habit. Whenever no one was actively cutting, bandaging, feeding, scolding, or reporting disaster to you, his hand found yours.
“I keep thinking of the water,” he said.
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
He rubbed his thumb over your knuckles. “In my dreams, Vermax sinks first. Then you.”
“In mine, you wave me away and I let you.”
His grip tightened.
“I never would,” you said.
“I know. That is the problem.”
You turned your head on the pillow. His face was serious now, stripped of the small jokes you had both been using like shields. He looked at you for a long time before speaking again.
“When we were first betrothed, I thought you hated me.”
“I did not hate you.”
“You told Baela I looked like a solemn trout.”
“You were thirteen and standing beside the table as if someone had nailed your feet to the floor.”
“That was a formal betrothal supper.”
“That was trout behavior.”
He laughed softly. “I was terrified of you.”
“You hid it badly.”
“I hid it very well.”
“No. You tried to impress me by explaining the political importance of our match.”
“I was being responsible.”
“You were being a trout.”
His laugh faded into something warmer. “When did you stop thinking so?”
“That you were a trout?”
“Yes.”
You pretended to consider. “When you returned from the North.”
His brows lifted. “That late?”
“No. But that was when I saw what you would become.”
“What did you see?”
A boy carrying winter promises back across half a realm. A prince with grief hidden under duty. A bastard in whispers and an heir in action. A young man who wanted so badly to be worthy that he might spend himself to bone proving what blood alone should never have been asked to prove.
“You,” you said. “Only more.”
He took that in quietly.
“And you?” you asked. “When did you stop being afraid of me?”
“I didn’t.”
You looked at him.
Jace raised your hand and kissed your fingers. “I merely learned to enjoy it.”
“That is the first intelligent thing you have said all week.”
“Only first?”
“Do not become ambitious.”
His smile tilted, but his eyes stayed solemn. “I saw you with Rhovagon when we were children. Before the betrothal. You were small, all elbows and silver hair, and you walked straight up to him while three handlers were telling you not to. He lowered his head to you. Not because you commanded him. Because you expected him to understand. I remember thinking I had never seen anyone look less afraid of fire.”
You remembered that day vaguely. Rhovagon had been smaller then, still dangerous, copper wings tucked tight to his body, eyes following every movement. You remembered your mother standing at a distance, one hand pressed to her mouth, not stopping you. Laena had understood dragons better than almost anyone. She had known fear was not the same as respect.
“I was afraid,” you said.
Jace shook his head. “You did not look it.”
“I am Daemon’s daughter. We learn theatrical arrogance before sums.”
“You are Laena’s daughter too.”
“Yes.” Your voice softened. “That matters more.”
“To you?”
“To me.”
“To me too,” he said.
The room went quiet around that. Outside, wind dragged against the shutters. Somewhere below, men shouted over repairs, and gulls circled the cliffs, utterly indifferent to royal suffering. Sensible birds.
Jace leaned closer, slowly enough that you could stop him if pain made the movement too much. You did not. His lips touched yours with a care that hurt more than hunger would have. The kiss was soft, not because either of you had become gentle people overnight, but because your bodies had been battered into humility. His good hand framed your jaw. Yours rested weakly against his wrist. There was no urgency in it. No stolen corridor, no war council about to begin, no sister about to laugh from behind a tapestry. Only breath shared carefully between two people who had nearly run out of it.
When he drew back, his forehead rested lightly against yours.
“I thought I would never do that again,” he whispered.
“You worry too much.”
“You dove into a sea battle.”
“You flew too low.”
“You followed me.”
“Yes. That is usually how saving someone works.”
He smiled despite himself. “Marry me when this is done.”
“That was the plan.”
“No,” he said. “Not when the war is done. Nothing waits that long anymore. When we can stand. When you can walk without fainting and I can lift my arm without the maester threatening to sedate me. Marry me then.”
You looked at him. “Your mother may object to haste.”
“My mother owes you my life.”
“My father may object because he enjoys objecting.”
“My mother can fight him.”
“That would be entertaining.”
“Y/N.”
There was fear under it. Hope too, which was worse because hope was fragile and reckless and had terrible survival instincts.
You squeezed his hand. This time your fingers obeyed. “Yes.”
His breath left him.
“Yes,” you repeated. “When we can stand.”
Jace kissed your knuckles again, and this time he did not hide the tears in his eyes. You let him have them. You let yourself have yours too. War had taken enough without stealing every softness to prove a point.
Outside, Rhovagon roared.
Vermax answered.
The sound rolled over Dragonstone, wounded and defiant, two dragons alive who should have been dead by every account the world had meant to write. Men in the yard shouted. Someone laughed. Someone else began praying loudly, which felt excessive but understandable. You closed your eyes and listened to the dragons calling across smoke and stone.
The Gullet had tried to claim Jacaerys Velaryon. It had taken ships, sailors, towns, children’s sleep, a young dragon named Stormcloud, and whatever innocence had survived the first blows of the Dance. It had dragged Vermax under burning water and reached for Jace with a thousand cold hands. It had nearly taken you too.
But not all songs were lies.
Sometimes the sea opened and gave back what it had stolen.
Sometimes a copper dragon flew where fire had no business going.
Sometimes a girl promised to a prince refused to let history have him.
And sometimes, by spite, blood, love, and the reckless stupidity that seemed to run through House Targaryen as strongly as dragonfire, the doomed lived long enough to make the singers revise their verses.
Princess Baela Targaryen in traditional Valyrian clothes with a sword offered by her muña Laena Velaryon.
A Dragon claiming YOU
Iconic behavior
