Chapter Text
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“I hope you are well, niece.”
‘Rhaenyra’ offers the visitor a small smile—or at least what she hopes it could be. She hopes it seemed familiar though. She attempted to stand up to curtsy—thank the Sentinels that her previous noble education seemed to have some use here. Not much use back in Septimont, where nearly everything was solved with battle. Nor in Lahai-Roi… oh how she is going to miss that.
Warm hands stopped her from getting up from her bed, and she looked up to see pools of purple of light amethyst—much like her own—and one dark. “You do not need to greet me. Your fever has just broken,” brown hair streaked with white. Perhaps by age? The family who visited her over the course of a week only seemed to have silver—or some light platinum gold.
Who was this man again? Rhaenys had dark hair, but Rhaenys was a woman. Her mother, Aemma, also had dark hair. Unable to think anymore, she mumbled, “Thank you, Uncle.”
If Rhaenyra had looked up, she’d have seen the look of surprise that Baelor and his retinue sported. But alas…
The silence that followed stretched and coiled in the space between. Rhaenyra kept her eyes downcast, watching the fine linen of the bedsheets bunch beneath her fingers. Had she said something wrong? The man’s hands had stilled on her shoulders, the warmth of them suddenly feeling more like brands.
Sentinels, what was his name? Uncle. Yes, uncle. But which one? Daemon was the rogue prince, everyone knew of him. Viserys? No, that man was her father, they’d made that clear when she first woke in this impossible body, with its soft hands and its aching head and its memories that weren’t memories, like dreams half-remembered upon waking.
“Rhaenyra?” his voice was careful now, probing. The way one might test ice before trusting it with their weight. “You called me Uncle.”
She lifted her head then, and the mistake was confirmed by the look on his face.
“I…” she swallowed, and her throat was dry as Septimont in summer. “Forgive me, my lord. The fever. Everything is still…” she gestured vaguely at her head, hoping he would fill the silence with understanding.
But he did not. He simply watched her with those mismatched eyes—one the purple of Old Valyria, one as dark as a Dornish night—and waited.
What was his name? Think. The family tree the maester had drawn, the names she’d tried to commit to memory between bouts of sweating and shaking. Baelon? No, Baelon was dead. Her grandfather. The Old King was her great-grandfather, Jaehaerys, but he was also dead. This man was younger, perhaps thirty, handsome in a worn sort of way. The white in his hair was not dust but permanence. Grief, perhaps. Or illness. The servants had mentioned…
“The fever has left me confused, Uncle Baelor,” she tried the name like a key in a lock, and something in his expression clicked into place. Relief? No, not quite. Wariness, still, but tempered now with acceptance.
“Baelor,” he repeated. Not a question, but not quite an affirmation either. “You have not called me that since you were a child small enough to sit on my knee and demand stories of Dorne.”
Gods above and below, there were Stepstones involved in something, weren’t there? Some war, some conquest. The maester had mentioned it, but she’d been too focused on the immediate family, on the names she would need to survive the first few days without being discovered as the fraud she was.
“I remember,” she said, and it was not entirely a lie. She remembered the way the light fell through the windows of this room, the way the tapestries shifted in the breeze.
But she did not remember Baelor. She did not remember sitting on any knee, in any Stepstones, listening to any stories. Those memories belonged to the girl whose body she now inhabited, the girl who had died—when? How?—and left this shell for a wandering soul from Rinascita to fill.
Clever, this one. Too clever by half.
“Would you prefer I call you something else, my lord? Perhaps I should address you formally, since my illness has apparently stripped me of the right to familiarity.”
"You may call me whatever pleases you, niece. Within reason," he released her shoulders and stepped back, allowing her space to breathe. A kindness, or a retreat? She could not tell. "The maester said the fever might leave you... unsettled for some time. Confused. Prone to strange fancies."
Strange fancies. Yes. That's one name for waking up in a body that you had long forgotten was even yours..
If she focused, she could almost feel them—the ghost-impressions of the life she’d lived more than half a decade ago. Of the real Rhaenyra’s—not hers, never hers, lingering like perfume in an empty room. The unmistakable coppery scent of blood in a large solar… and… pain? A flash of silver hair laughing. The feeling of the wind tearing through her hair and her skin as she soared throughout the skies of this world on dragonback.
“What did the maester say?” she hears her uncle ask one of her ladies-in-waiting. It felt unusual calling them that. Though she had been a noble in Ragunna—ladies-in-waitings were a tradition considered ancient. As a Fisalia, Rhaenyra was distrustful of everything within her vicinity, and as such, the thought of someone shadowing her every move was unthinkable.
Just thinking about those jellyroses… Rhaenyra bit back a shudder.
“...perhaps a flight on dragonback would liven up her spirits?”
“Do you remember Syrax, niece?”
If the pregnant silence that had blanketed their conversation was not enough proof that this Rhaenyra, indeed had no inkling of who or what this Syrax was, then the blank expression on her face sure was. Something in Baelor’s face seemed to darken, before he sighed, retreating. “Once you are well, you must let Laena accompany you to the Dragonpits. Dragonriders often heal faster when in company with their dragon, especially one so close with you.”
Accompany what now?
Her uncle turned to whisper to one of the maesters in a low voice, in a tone she was not meant to hear—a pity that her uncle will never know she’s a Resonator. Resonators have always had keener senses; keener hearing being one of them—and his actions did absolutely nothing to stop her from hearing his inquiry.
“Has Valarr stopped by?”
“No, Your Highness, I’m afraid not.”
“What is that foolish boy doing?”
“... he has… lingered by the Princess’s door when she was in the worst of her fever…”
“Do not defend him, Yormwell. Where is my son?”
Valarr?
Was that her husband? Viserys mentioned it briefly once, though that statement had more venom in it than she’d expected. Her ladies-in-waiting tossed it around from time to time, but never out loud, only while whispering when they thought she was asleep from the strange anesthetic the maesters gave her to drink. Prescribing this much anesthetics to someone who’s had a fever was definitely not a healthy practice, but she had full faith that her resonance energy would burn the anesthetic up.
What happened between us?
She reached for the ghost-memories, the impressions that floated just beneath the surface of her consciousness like fish in murky water.
Valarr.
The name brought with it a feeling—complex, tangled. Something that might have been affection, once. Something that might have been disappointment. Something that definitely was pain.
She pressed her palm to her chest.
Not mine, she reminded herself. These feelings are not mine.
But they lived in her body now, just as surely as the soft hands and the aching head and the memories that weren't memories. The real Rhaenyra had loved someone, or been loved by someone, or perhaps both.
Sentinels, she thought, what a mess.
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The afternoon passed in a blur. Elinda returned with broth, which Rhaenyra drank because her body demanded sustenance even if her mind was elsewhere. Another lady—Marra, this one, with hair the color of autumn leaves and a perpetual worried frown—had taken on the job of styling her hair and dressing her in more luxurious clothes, talking idly about the situation at court, and of her half-siblings. A maester came and went, pressing cool fingers to her wrist, peering into her eyes, pronouncing himself satisfied with her progress.
Through it all, Rhaenyra smiled and nodded, saying the least, while absorbing as much information as she could. She was Princess Rhaenyra of House Targaryen, grand-niece of the current reigning King Daeron the Good through his brother, the Spring Prince Baelon. She is the daughter of Prince Viserys, who currently had two wives; one by arrangement and one by a moment of ‘unguarded passion’.
His first wife; Aemma Arryn, a Targaryen as well through her mother, one of the late king’s daughters, Daella Targaryen, bore him only one child—her, after a string of miscarriages. The second, Alicent Hightower—though named only as a concubine—bore him three sons, and one daughter.
Quite the large number, for something her father insists was a drunken moment of unguarded passion, if she says so herself.
Three sons and a daughter, Rhaenyra thought as Marra's clever fingers worked a ribbon through her hair. And me. The only child of the first wife. The one who should have been enough.
The bitterness that rose with that thought was not entirely her own. It came from somewhere deeper, somewhere in the ghost-memories that lurked beneath her consciousness like crocodiles in murky water. Perhaps she’d felt this once—the weight of being the sole survivor of her mother's endless attempts, the knowledge that her father had sought elsewhere what her mother could not give him.
The word ‘miscarriages’ did not convey the reality of what Aemma Arryn must have endured. Body after body failing to bring life into the world. Hope after hope dying between her legs. And then, finally, a daughter who lived—only for her husband to find solace in another woman's bed not long after.
“Do my children not miss me?” Rhaenyra nonchalantly hummed as she sifted through the various jewels.
Marra’s hands stilled in her hair. The rest of her ladies-in-waiting seemed to have frozen from where they stood. “Children, Princess?”
“Forgive me, do I only have one child?” she unconsciously rubbed her belly. When she’d bathed for the first time, she was still too overwhelmed by her reality that she failed to notice the stretch marks that decorated the expanse of her stomach. By the second time, she’d come to realize that it was reminiscent to the ones her aunt wore after she’d given birth. Though hers was quite faint, Rhaenyra would never fail to recognize a previous pregnancy if she saw one. That, and there was a crib in the room.
So the question was, where were said children? Or child?
And now Elinda stood with her hand pressed to her mouth and tears in her eyes, and Marra's fingers had gone so still that Rhaenyra could feel them trembling against her scalp, and the other ladies—she didn't even know their names yet, there were three of them, hovering by the window and the door and the wardrobe—looked at her with expressions that ranged from grief to pity to something that might have been horror.
Sentinels, she thought. Sentinels, what did I walk into?
"Princess." Elinda's voice cracked. She lowered her hand from her mouth and took a step forward, then stopped, as though uncertain whether she was allowed to approach. "Princess, you... you don't remember?"
No, she wanted to say. I don't remember anything. I'm not even her. I'm a stranger wearing her face, drowning in her life, and every question I ask opens another grave.
But she couldn't say that. So instead she said, carefully: "The fever took many things from me. Memories among them,” she let her hand fall from her belly, let it rest in her lap where she could see it, where she could remind herself that this body was hers now, however it had come to her. "Tell me."
Elinda looked at Marra. Marra looked at the lady by the window—tall, dark-haired, with the kind of face that had learned to show nothing. That lady gave a tiny nod, barely perceptible, and Marra's shoulders sagged.
"Three times, Princess," Elinda whispered. "Three times you carried. Three times we hoped, and prayed, and prepared the nursery, and—" She stopped, swallowing hard. "The last was just before the fever took you. A girl. She lived long enough to be named. Just."
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