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The tension in the hall is hushed, viscous, expectant. The two of them emerge from the shadows hand in hand, amidst salivating spectators greedy for a glimpse of the performers. Last apostles of a long dead creed. Living effigies of dynastic ruin. There is nothing quite like tragedy to titillate the thronging rabble.
The markers of decay are subtle. Rhaenyra’s gown—a luxurious scarlet chiffon embellished with large, lutescent diamonds—falls awkwardly above her ankles and bunches tightly around her waist. Daemon’s vicuña tuxedo is frayed; there are holes where obsidian pearls used to be. None of it is of any consequence. When they take their places upon the dais, illuminated by chandeliers and the burning stares of a thousand voyeurs masquerading as patrons, they are as royalty. The world prostrates at their feet, praying for deliverance.
Rhaenyra arranges herself on the piano stool in the old way—one leg bent at the knee and tucked beneath her, the other dangling over the damper—back when the papers heralded her as a veritable virtuoso, Rachmaninoff reborn. Feather-fingered and hammer-fisted in equal measure. Every flouted rule the quirk of a precocious savant; every broken convention the mettle of a rising starlet. Before the pedestal broke, and the glass shattered, and the fame wilted, and the critics turned. Seventeen and pregnant by her uncle; not even Rhaenyra Targaryen could survive the scandal. Except perhaps she has. The stage and assembly are all hers, and no one commands attention quite like a Targaryen.
The music is odd, notated by hand on scotch-dried ink, blotted and blurred in so many places as to be almost unreadable. In between the bars, in Daemon’s brash scrawl, are incomprehensible performance directions—play as though drunk, and skip every third note, and lento, pianissimo, deceased. The ramblings of a demented genius limited by the crudity of language, or gibberish. The audience will see what they want to see.
The violins lead with quiet, uneasy tremolos, anchored by the heartbeat-thump of double bass. A reedy, wandering flute cadenza twines through the anxious two-two. Rhaenyra’s hand stalls over the piano, then dips down, constructing a low, rumbling, deadly motif. Chords roll like the cresting of thunder, projecting over all other instruments. Fiery brass and percussion amplify the melody. It is a fanfare fit for a queen. Until it is not. Then the theme restarts, a mockery of itself. Rhaenyra attacks the piano with vigorous distaste, assisted by atonal clarinets shrieking towards an incomplete resolution. The melody is chopped and grotesquely ornamented; the harmonies modulate into macabre minors. And when at last the final cadence is played, it is plagal and parodied; cold and unsatisfactory; derisive and provocative. Rhaenyra retracts her hands as though sheathing claws. There is a story here, and it has only just begun.
The first time Daemon ever fucked her she was sixteen, still schoolgirl-sticky and skittish. She had searched—pushed up against soft silks with Cole’s lips latched to her neck; knelt on the bathroom tiles between Alicent’s pudgy thighs; against clammy bodies below naphthalene lights with her blood pumping slow and synthetic—and come away restless, every time, for something she didn’t know yet to want. It was only when Daemon’s calloused knuckles breached the hollow of her cunt, when his sandpaper fists scraped the whorl of her scalp and his teeth purpled the dip of her shoulders, that she felt the slow stirring of greed, banked, and learnt to call it satiety. It would be another year before Viserys caught them, another six months before the tabloids.
Rhaenyra discards the remembrance and repositions her fingers over the keys.
The second movement is a lullaby primarily for piano, variations on a theme sung by mothers and maids to milk-children for millenia. The simplicity of it lulls and twinkles, climbs slowly into complexity as clarinet and strings crawl in. The chime of the glockenspiel adds sprightly naïveté. But as is wont with Daemon’s compositions, there is a twist. Rhaenyra raises her arm and makes a fist and punches the keys knuckle-first. Silence, bewildered. The theme returns through foreboding contrabassoon, punctuated by jagged dynamic contrasts. Rhaenyra follows on the piano—a thin, quivering line—and the bass responds in menacing polyphony, back and forth and back and forth, accelerating messily, until at last the negotiation disintegrates. From the dissonance, the orchestra rises as one, and Rhaenyra trawls the length of the keyboard with large, arpeggiated crashes. It is sublime, and terrible, and a psychological fracturing. Emblematic of the violence of some old, crimson grief. When at last the assault fades, and the music dies, it is that brazen misery which hangs heavy in the air.
In the days that followed their affair’s exposé, Daemon premiered what would be his last composition in over a decade—a piano concerto insolently dubbed King of the Narrow Sea. It sold out halls across the globe, and featured fractured movements, chaotic tuttis, and a cadenza so somber, it baffled audiences mute. Its greatest flaw, however, was that for all its experimental havoc, for all its boundariless bluster, it committed the lone, cardinal sin of music: it was boring. Panned by critics so thoroughly, so vociferously, it forced Daemon and his muse into impassable seclusion in the crumbling halls of their ancestral keep. The opprobrium of failure dogged their heels for a decade—Rhaenyra’s playing picked apart in every classroom, coffee table, and clubroom; Daemon’s sheet music parodied more profoundly than it was ever performed—until Targaryen became synonymous with tarnished. Gone were the glorious heydays; the coin of their legacy was spent.
They had been weighted on the prejudiced scales of excellence, and found wanting.
Interval
Daemon finds Rhaenyra in her dressing room unfolding a gilt-edged napkin fraying at the seams. The light from the mirrors paint her devilish and beautiful, violet pupils melting down into porcelain skin, an oil canvas left to rot in the rain. Daemon pinches the napkin from her palm and drags it over the plump curve of her mouth, across the dip of her cupid’s bow, up to dab at the rouge. The fabric comes away stained and dripping, and underneath she is ghostly. As though all that anchored her to vitality was claret gloss and flesh-toned paint.
“Let me, uncle,” she says, and takes the napkin, folds it in half. Daemon kneels, and lets her tilt his chin upwards.
“Are you sure?” he asks.
“Are you sure?” Rhaenyra laughs, shark-teethed and challenging. When she draws back, the napkin is more crimson and ash than white. Navy veins strain against a translucent wrist. “It’s not too late.”
“Don’t mock me, Rhaenyra,” Daemon says. “I made you this way.”
Rhaenyra spreads her legs, hikes up the planes of her gown to reveal smooth skin mottled mauve and olive, like overripe fruit split open at the seams. “Unmake me then,” she says.
Daemon lowers himself, buries his face in the valley of her thighs, flesh stretched taut over twitching muscle. She sighs and arches, folds and sways. Hips undulate like waves consuming a shoreline; fingers rise to tangle in sweat-slick hair. Time stretches and marches onward, the inexorable weight of duty like a lodestone dragging them both upwards. Towards ascension. The adulation will come later, but this moment is for them. This pleasure, this climax. It is brief and absolute and all they have left. Never again will a story be told thus. Never again will anyone dare.
Daemon kisses her with honey on his tongue, Rhaenyra swallows her own sweetness and waits. Outside, the knock comes like the banging of a gavel. “Five minutes,” the interloper informs.
“We can be a little late,” Daemon grins somberly. He nudges Rhaenyra lightly on the shoulder, and this time it is her turn to kneel.
The third movement is conventional, which in itself is something of a novelty (only Daemon Targaryen could break tradition by adhering to it). The ostinato bass looms larger-than-life, punctuated by brass and timpani, and strings that beckon urgency, but the piano is the martial throughline which weaves the music together. Rhaenyra is hunched low, panting. Exertion coats the line of her brow and drips down her face like tears. The keys clank under her white-knuckled onslaught, but the effect is still rousing. The music ends grim and triumphant, and Rhaenyra’s hands drop. Her forehead clunks against the fallboard. Uneasy curiosity stirs the audience into concern—but none intervene. They are still owed their grand finale, and the beast of rapacity is not so easily denied.
At last, Rhaenyra shudders upright and turns to face Daemon with bloodshot eyes. They are mirror images of each other: chalk-skinned and gossamer-eyed, vibrating with some unnameable frenzy.
The fourth movement is a funeral march. The tips of Rhaenyra’s fingers whisker across the keyboard as Daemon leads the orchestra. Discerning listeners might recognise the theme as a simple inversion of another, older motif (King of the Narrow Sea, III Mvmt. “Rhaenyra’s Song”). It circles quickly into an interlude that is slow and lamenting, and this grief is not wrathful but resigned; the end nears, the night falls, the curtain draws. Then the final section begins and it is a march no longer but a madness. An explosion of fiery colour. Chaotic glissandis interpolate the tempestuous tempo; brass crashes and reverberates at bizarre angles; the piano growls in chromatic staccato. Rhaenyra rampages from key to key, bouncing out of her seat. Silver hair sticks like silk to the lines of her forehead; her body wracks with an ill physicality. She folds forward and coughs, and glutinous red coats the keys, sticks to the pads of her fingers and spreads across the board, stark and damning against ivory. Her vision dims and blurs, but her hands continue to play. She has drilled this piece for years—blindfolded, deafened, starved, dehydrated; baton against her knuckles; tongue between her thighs—halfway to dead is no different. Discordant chords paint pandemonium in strokes of adrenaline. The music races towards completion, until at last, with a desperate flourish, Rhaenyra raises her wrists and throws herself forward to play the final coda. Rage as resolution. Apotheosis as denouement. The audience is both loud and dumbstruck, but Rhaenyra makes no note of it.
The air is weighted with the bittersweet tang of achievement. Exhaustion coats the pores of her skin, from the tips of her nails to the split of her hairs. When she looks up, Daemon is smiling at her, and it is true. The mirth, the merit, the milestone. They have clawed their way to the annals of history, and will no longer be denied their place in it.
The euphoria fades as quickly as it arrives, smothered by fatigue and venom. Rhaenyra turns, releases the last vestiges of control she commands over her limbs, and flops forward. Her forehead hits the keys with an ugly, asynchronous smash. The shocked shrieks of the crowd are sweeter than any music, and it is the last thing she hears before her eyes slide shut.
Daemon stumbles down from his podium and delivers a short, clumsy bow by Rhaenyra’s body. Then—as in all things—he follows her, collapsing.