Rhaenyra held no resentment toward you—only a quiet, distant pity.

After Alicent Hightower’s unfortunate death in childbed—delivering what was claimed to be King Viserys’s fifth child—the court had fallen into an uneasy hush. No one dared question how a bedridden, poppy-milk-dependent king could have fathered a child in such a state. Yet whispers persisted like rot beneath polished floors.

The babe, unnamed and motherless, wailed through the corridors with a head full of dark curls and a complexion far too reminiscent of the late queen’s sworn protector, Ser Criston. No accusations were voiced. None needed to be.

Rhaenyra paid it little outward mind. The boy would be raised by wet nurses and courtiers, his legitimacy forever questioned in silence. Her father, frail and fading into milk of the poppy and memory alike, had accepted the child as his own.

Then came the summons.

Rhaenyra had expected council matters. Political maneuvering. Perhaps further unrest over the babe. She had not expected a wedding.

The letter from King’s Landing had been explicit. Her father could no longer sire children. His body, frail and failing, would not endure it. This marriage was not for heirs. Not for succession. Not for legacy.

Which left only other reasons.

Her father remarrying again—this time to a noble girl from a house so minor Rhaenyra had scarcely spared it thought in her calculations of alliances—felt less like dynastic strategy and more like...indulgence. Or sacrifice. And she could not yet decide which disturbed her most.

What unsettled her was not the babe or her father seeking company. It was the pattern on his more than questionable tastes—her mother, Aemma Arryn, wed at twelve. Alicent, scarcely thirteen when she was summoned to read to the king. And now you.

Rhaenyra did not yet know your age. She found she did not wish to ask too closely—only that the thought of it sat heavily in her chest. Her father had once been a gentle man. Loving. Weak, perhaps—but not cruel. Yet weakness, she had learned, allowed cruelties to happen all the same.

She felt no threat in you. None at all.

If anything, she felt something far more dangerous to the game of thrones—an instinct she had inherited from Aemma rather than Viserys. A quiet, coiled protectiveness.

At sunrise, Rhaenyra departed Dragonstone with her family and her uncle-husband, Prince Daemon Targaryen, who seemed the most agitated of all. That Viserys had chosen to wed again—especially in such frail condition—clearly struck a nerve.

Still, Rhaenyra doubted this had been wholly her father’s doing. Viserys was pliable in his illness. Decisions could be pressed upon him gently, framed as necessity, whispered as duty. Someone had motive. Someone had guided his hand.

Now she walked once more through the halls of the Red Keep.

Under Alicent’s regency, they had been draped in the symbols of the Seven—heavy with incense, candles guttering beside every archway, the air thick with sanctimony. Now, the Targaryen standard reclaimed its dominance. The towering sigil of the Seven had been torn down, replaced by an unfinished stained-glass window depicting the three-headed dragon in crimson and gold.

The change almost stirred a smile upon her lips.

Daemon exhaled sharply beside her. “It seems the new queen has wasted little time undoing what should have remained undone since my father lost the will to rule,” Rhaenyra murmured. Daemon’s answering smirk was edged and knowing.

They approached the king’s chambers, their footsteps echoing in the long corridor.

Rhaenyra’s thoughts, however, were not on her father. Not on politics. Not even on succession.

They were on you. On the girl who had been brought into this viper’s nest. On the bride whose face she had yet to see. On whether you walked these halls freely—or if you had already learned to move quietly.

A small, instinctive worry stirred within her—an unspoken thought that you might be ill-prepared for what awaited in these corridors.

Her gaze flicked toward the side corridors without thinking. Where were you?