Chapter Text
Castles has such a way of projecting onto the very land they sat, that it would seem that they had always been there – such was Winterfell, such was the Wall... Rhaena did not quite understand, but one did not remain wife to a king descended from Bran the Builder, and sister to a king equally keen to pave the Realm with roads, without appreciating that large construction projects brought its own permanence.
Such a thing was the Red Keep.
Of the Southern Realm’s great castles, the Red Keep was certainly the newest of them. The seat of the House of the Dragon at King’s Landing, the last that Rhaena had seen of the edifice was when her father’s Hand of the King, her uncle Prince Aerion, had set up its construction as one of a few public works projects in the wake of the First Shivers. By the time Jaehaerys had become a man grown, there had risen the walls of King’s Landing, the castle, the Dragonpit, and the bare bones under King’s Landing were laid – not to mention, the loyal troop of builders who had helped carve all of this had become a troop of its own.
The Prince Aerion’s Yeomen Builders was already passed from their uncle to Jaehaerys, who took it a step further with the Realmroads, but by then Rhaena had married and settled north in Winterfell, so she cared not. Yet, as a stranger looking from outside, Rhaena could honestly attest:
The Red Keep was smaller than Winterfell.
No doubt it was unfair to the castle. Rhaena had grown up in Dragonstone, home of dragon-lords and dragons, the citadel in the wet waste surrounded by storm and salt, with the shadow of the smoking Dragonmont looming over. Rhaena had then married to Winterfell, the ancient seat of House Stark that endured the Long Night, where the stones retained warmth from the hot springs underneath, where summer seemed a permanent host of the glass gardens, where the garderobes mucked themselves out, and where the three acres of godswood that formed its heart stayed some strange otherworld.
Walton had japed that it was from the pool before the heart tree, where millennia past a Stark had found a sleeping godling. Given that the Lord Commander was still around, Rhaena mistrusted if it was instead some half-forgotten recount of a Ned Stark and his White Wolf. Either way, the godswood was a place of the Old Gods and not of dragons.
The point, however, was that for all of its drum-towers, massive curtain walls connected by steps slithering up and down Aegon’s High Hill, or the castle-within-a-castle that was the main Holdfast, Rhaena still found herself awoken in the cold sweat of paranoia by Lady Sam.
“Your Grace, I…” the lady’s animated manner was unusually restrained, the reason for which was soon accounted when her fellow lady-in-waiting Lady Cerwyn brought in the glaring snowy owl hanging from one arm.
Rhaena sat up straight under the knowing gaze of the fowl thing. “…Lady Anya?”
One clawed leg jutted out, showing the scroll tied to the leg.
The owl’s glare deepened.
Rhaena hurriedly untied the scroll, after which the owl barked and took flight for the nearest window anon.
Rubbing the scum from her eyes, Rhaena unrolled the scroll to scan before her groan was heard over the bustle of her ladies prepping her ablutions.
“They know,” Rhaena told Lady Sam as she was dressed for the day – a light gown as she was not expected for Court. “Lady Anya especially wrote to notify that Maeve ran into some river-pirates by the Rush.”
As for how the Winterlands’ mistress of whispers managed to hear of such an event, when Rhaena herself at the Red Keep had barely heard of it… no doubt, magic was involved.
“Mistress Strix is always in a huff,” Lady Sam peaceably reasoned, using the common epithet that many a servant at Winterfell referred to the aforementioned mistress of whispers. “But the common river-thief should not pose a danger to men of the Winterlands, Your Grace, much less the princess.”
“They suspect some link to the mad Septas at Maidenpool, who attacked my sister in her bath so many years ago,” Rhaena’s brow furrowed in thought, even as her hair was combed and twisted into a simple updo. “They believe, and I concur, that it is no more than a lone attack, though caution is merited.”
“His Grace of Winter would disagree,” Lady Sam murmured.
“No doubt when she informs His Grace, his brother and Nuncle would have to sit on him lest he runs past the Neck down South,” Rhaena mused. “Is it not a mother’s instinct, to fear for her daughter in this world? How is it then, that my lord husband is the indulgent parent of us two?”
“Beg pardon, Your Grace, but I doubt ‘indulgent’ an apt choice,” Lady Sam huffed. “His Grace is far beyond that – no king would allow their daughters to make their own choice of groom. I would think Prince Aegon would be the ideal groom for the princess, and King Jaehaerys no doubt wished the match.”
“Jaehaerys can ask. Walton was being entirely serious when he declared that our sweet daughter would marry when she likes, whom she likes, and anyone who doesn’t like that can face Ice,” Rhaena’s lips curved, indulgent even as she checked herself in the small looking-glass that they had brought along. “Else Walton would borrow the Lightbringer – the White Wolf is strict on some matters, but he would stand behind Maeve’s choice.”
Rhaena remembered that, at her own majority, when Dreamfyre had the reign of the skies and went as far as Harrenhal and Tarth, and had dared as far as Seagard north before Dreamfyre would fly no further over Cape Kraken. Rumour full of tongues had plagued her back then, as though any manner of man would have visited her thighs and plagued her kingly father to marry her to young Egg – her younger brother, another Aegon, as soon as he could.
Rhaena’s daughter would not be made to marry.
Rhaena would wait for Jaehaerys to realise that her daughter, her sweet intoxicating Maeve, was wild and free, and had as her shield her father, with his terrifying self and the hosts of the Winterlands. Not to mention, her own startling abilities with blades and magic. No doubt she was well-defended – as much as any princess stubborn enough to step on a battlefield could be.
“I admit that I do miss the Winterlands custom of nuncheon,” Alysanne complained when Rhaena joined her at the queen’s apartments. Overlooking the Blackwater Bay they enjoyed rissoles of apples and figs, washed down with a camellia tisane, very strong and barely sweetened with a dollop of rich cream. “I could not last the day without at least bread and butter and a tisane now, but I always feel terrible when it comes time for contrition. The Arch-Septon would call it a case of gluttony…”
“You will pay him no heed,” Rhaena severely cautioned. “A pregnant woman will have her cravings, as the gods will they do, so how is it a sin to follow as they willed? Not to mention, you are eating for two… are you eating for two now, Alysanne?”
Alysanne’s hand slowed, and she pondered the thought. “A few moons… but there is yet to be quickening. Surely not…?”
Rhaena herself had never awaited a quickening. Maeve’s conception had been announced following Alysanne birthing young Aegon in Bitebay by the White Wolf. Aelfraed’s own presence was heralded by the same man a few years later, when he was passing by Winterfell to drop off some sticks of reindeer butter from the Wall. Midwives up and down the Realm took the White Wolf’s word as divine truth, and history showed its efficacy; Rhaena herself had seen that medical prowess save her queenly mother years afore, and Walton had spoken once on his first wife, the late Princess Barba – how she had fell pregnant against the Wolf’s advice in rashness, only for mother and child to pass in childbed, and left Walton free to marry when the two of them had first met that night in Bitebay...
“As I see it, you would either summon the Grand Maester now, and Jaehaerys would be summoned alongside to hobble your every path,” Rhaena noted. “Else, you would take a care in these final moments of freedom afore the long prison of pregnancy.”
“…the children are coming home,” Alysanne pondered, before her eyes grew stern. “And with them your daughter. My magical niece. I must go to them.”
“……”
Rhaena comforted herself that, if magic was anywhere in the Realm, it was on the side of defending her children – her sweet daughter Maeve before her, and Aelfraed tucked safe behind the walls of Winterfell and his princely uncles under the White Wolf’s gaze.
“Attacked! By river-pirates! Aegon, you must keep the children safe under watch!” Alysanne twittered over the entire retinue, and then to her firstborn the Prince of Dragonstone, and most especially her younger children – even if said children insisted that they were well and brave and good, and that Maeve had torched the miscreants before any harm was done.
“Only one?” Rhaena blinked at her daughter after the latter was done escorting Vaella and Galatea down the gangplank and onto solid ground. “Gods above, your father would be complaining about the lack of public order down South.”
“There are many more people and not enough infrastructure to support the maintenance of public order, Mother,” the princess played the demure daughter. “Look at this city.”
Despite herself, Rhaena huffed at her daughter’s jape. King’s Landing had neither the weight of Wintertown, nor the beauty of White Harbour, and certainly not the industry of Salt Quay on the shores of the Saltspear. The cobbles were caked in silty mud, the faint stench of ordure lingered, parts of the widened streets threatened to be overtaken by the shantytown of unapproved construction once the kingly gaze was away, and the City Watch of King’s Landing was heavily outnumbered. Looming over the city was the Dragonpit at the Hill of Rhaenys, the Sept of Remembrance atop Visenya’s Hill, and the Red Keep – two of which would be barred to Maeve as princess of a foreign court or worshipper of the Old Gods, and the third merely another stop before their destination to Dragonstone.
There was nothing of King’s Landing to look at.
“We extend a warm welcome to my aunt and cousins,” Prince Aegon stepped up now to extend his greetings, having handed the reins of his palfrey to a waiting guardsman before extending a hand to receive them. “My lady cousin. I trust that the Red Keep would make an impression.”
“The impression is yet to become,” Rhaena’s sweet daughter demurred to the Stark mask of stoic manner. “Although, I am certain that the entirety of King’s Landing would be an… interesting sight.”
Aegon’s eyebrow lifted. “Well, then. Would my lady cousin take the wheelhouse… or mayhaps you would stretch your legs? I only speak of this as you were in close quarters for the better part of the sojourn here. The guards at the bronze gates have been instructed should you choose the latter, cousin.”
…oh.
Rhaena exchanged a glance with her daughter.
Her nephew wanted an Einheri running around King’s Landing… interesting.
“…Aegon?” Alysanne was the first to react, and would have bodily stepped up to check her firstborn had Rhaena not discreetly slid to block her way with her own body.
“That sounds a wonderful idea,” Rhaena purred, thus extending her maternal permission.
Maeve grinned, and the grin soon took on a fiery cant as she erupted into flame and startled many a sumpter horse in outracing them for the Red Keep.