Chapter Text
In her dreams, the land was as dead as dragons.
Coloured rust-red, parched, and barren as their wombs. A warrior’s fresh corpse was cocconed in a chrysalis of worn leather and Myrish silk atop of a pyre made from hewn logs. Rotting, stinking flesh and bloodied meat surrounded by his earthly treasures; a dragonbone bow and the carcass of a horse. Scattered over it all was sun-bleached sweetgrass.
In her dreams, Nysera could smell all of it. The rot, the corrupted wound, the dark fragrance of Dothraki burial oils; the musky kind of a fighter, all scorched earth and horse-shit and blood.
The sun was being swallowed by the wasted land. If it weren’t for the whispering of smoked air through her silvery hair, she might’ve thought this was the end of days. But she could taste the sweetness of that fragrant oil and see the silhouette of a witch tied to one of the funeral pyre’s posts. Above her, night’s appetite was festering into every corner of the unfruitful sky. In the middle of that sterile sea of indigo-blue, the bloodred of a comet was cutting its way through fainter stars and wispier clouds. A dragon’s tail.
Tendrils of smoke carved their way up to where the fire-red of the dragon’s comet was splintering its way through the night. The cinders twinkled like newborn fireflies as the flames danced and twirled like Dornish brides in the finest of yellow and tangerine veils.
Her feet touched over the scorched sand as the heat of the burning and dying earth lapped at the napes of her ankles like a scalding bath. The kind she’d take as an infant in that drowning tub in her mother’s apartments; skin cerise but she daren’t flinch, lest Cousin Aerion bared those nasty teeth of his into a doggish smile and told her she wasn’t a real dragon.
The fire engulfed her as if it were an old friend. A chorus of horror and curses crescendoed around her—her blood, she thought dimly; her family gathered in this wasteland to see the afterbirth of this end-beginning born from the meat and oils and slain stallion of the pyre. They needn’t wail nor pray. Nysera was her parents’ daughter, and fire cannot kill a dragon.
When the fire was but a whisper, Nysera was unscathed. A pale apparition throned upon something far more macabre than her uncle’s ghastly seat in the Red Keep. It was not made of melded swords that prick at the soft under-thighs of the unworthy, but charred logs and burnt bones and the ashes of her own silks. Entirely bare to the world, but alive.
A knelt brute was at her feet. At her left breast, a hatchling with gold markings and cream-coloured scales nestled, another of jade-green at her right. There was a third beast, as the sigil preordained. This one had snared its wing of crimson sinews over her shoulders, nuzzling its snout under her chin as ribbons of pale smoke billowed from its nostrils. Nysera couldn’t see the congregation. The faceless members of the family that scarcely accepted her, no doubt stood in awe at her altar at what she had brought forth from the mouth of fire and blood.
She was a saint, looking at her own soot-blackened limbs and the gaunt basin of her clavicle, tickled by the translucent fleshiness of the black dragon’s wing breadth.
Just before she woke up, that barren land started to bloat with long-dead songs of dragons.
Nysera awoke to a hollow world where they no longer sing, where their skulls were ornaments of a time where their dynasty inspired fear and awe, tucked now in the bowels of her ancestor’s ugly castle. To a hand on her forehead, too. Cold as a corpse’s, but delicate in a way only a woman’s might be; spindly fingers, pale-blue veins, the tender smoothing of her own sweat-slick hairs from her glistening temple.
“Mother,” she breathed into the summer-swollen air.
“You were dreaming again, ñuha embar.”
Shiera Seastar moved her hand so those long fingers of hers were raking through Nysera’s curls. They must’ve looked like wretched mirrors of each other to an outsider’s eye. Nysera rather thought that sweetish smell of blood about her was stronger that morrow, not too dissimilar from that of raw carrion.
Nysera didn’t bother lying. She learned at a ripe age that lying to either of her parents was a child’s folly.
“I was,” she admitted, sitting up slowly against the headboard of her bed.
Her mother hummed. “About what?”
“Dragons.”
Nysera glimpsed over Shiera’s shoulder to the open balcony of her bedchambers. The gossamer drapes were swishing gently in the calm breeze. It was eerily tranquil for King’s Landing that morning, as if the entire city was holding its breath for something. Even so, Nysera could smell the grotesque nature of the capital wafting through those murmuring curtains; the vomit, the pox-ridden commoners rotting in alleyways, the putrefying of rodents.
It was enough to smother the faintness of blood on her mother’s tongue as she turned back to her, half-droll with a snide, “Isn’t it always dragons?”
Shiera smiled those pearly teeth of hers. Nysera was always so surprised not to see them rubied.
“What did you See this time? Where were you?”
“Not here. It was strange. Scorched, almost. The land was not alive and there wasn’t a castle, nor any building at all, that I could see…” Nysera’s frown deepened. “Do you think I Saw the kingdoms burnt by dragons? Their revenge, perhaps. For us letting them die during the Dance…”
“The dragons would not blame us, ñuha qēlos. They are us,” comforted Shiera, her dainty thumb smoothing over Nysera’s browbone. “This scorched-earth you Saw, could it have been across the Narrow Sea? In Essos, perhaps?”
This disconcerted her daughter. “Essos? Why would there be dragons in Essos, Mother?”
“It was only a thought, ñuha embar se qēlossās.”
Ñuha embar. My sea. Ñuha qēlos. My star.
“Well,” Nysera emptied her throat, “I cannot say surely. It did not look like anywhere I have been in Westeros, so…” she wet her lips thoughtfully, “you might be right, Mother. But why? Do you think this means exile? That the lords will rebel, chase us out of these lands, all the way across the Narrow Sea?”
“You needn’t fear about that, daughter. I did not mean to frighten you,” sung Shiera. Her hand slipped away from her face, tracing the willowy line of Nysera’s shoulders and the length of her arm until she was touching her fingers, covering them entirely with her own like a bride donning her lord husband’s shroud. “If that were to ever happen, it shall not be in your lifetime. I promise you this.”
“But you think it might, muña? Rebellion. Our blood, exiled to some barren land of savages and slavers and–”
“Ñuha embar, do you not think that if dissent was to plummet the Seven Kingdoms so presently that I would know about it? That your father would not know?” Her mother slanted a knowing smile when Nysera shamefully melted back into the goosefeathers of her pillows. The witch used the gentle curve of her blunt fingernail to trace the knots of her knuckles. “Maekar’s household shall arrive soon, I rather suspect. His brood alongside, bringing their chaos with them…”
The reminder soured Nysera’s mood like spoiled milk in the pit of her belly. She’d been disgruntled for the last fortnight ever since news spread that Maekar and his insipid offspring were to visit the Keep for the king’s nameday.
It has been almost ten moons since she last saw that feral lot. It had been for Daella’s nameday, daisy-fresh and the king’s first granddaughter, and she’d gone with her parents and the rest of the king’s retinue to Summerhall. Most of her time spent there, whilst scarce, were fond memories. The air there smelt like laburnums and moonblooms. She gouged herself with lemon cakes and honey tea, hid in the tallest blades of grass in the marches away from the buttinsky of her septa. Other memories, however, weren’t so fond.
Summerhall was indeed sweetest in midmorning, when the dewdrops glistened on that yellowish grass as pretty and pearlescent as the opals on her mother’s collarbone. Nysera woke before her septa came knocking, slipped from her temporary chambers barefoot and dishevelled, and wandered where she pleased. The invisibility of being a bastard. There were fewer eyes out there in the marches than in the Red Keep. With the air so thick, it was trickier for whispers to carry.
Nysera had been crouched low in the outer gardens, fingers plucking the heads from a pale cluster of moonblooms. Their dove-grey petals came away too easily, surrendering like bird-bones. Their bitter scent lingered on her skin. She had not heard his approach, the prowling footfall of a nosy wretch of a princeling, hellbent on wrecking peace and making her wroth.
“You are spoiling my mother’s blooms, Waters.”
His voice had not yet deepened yet, not like his elder brother’s, which was heavy and careworn from cloying Arbor wine and screaming his throat raw. To compensate, he’d honed a certain bluntness to it, as flat as a blade’s sword-edge.
Nysera did not startle. Her chin merely touched her shoulder to regard him disinterestedly. Aerion, second son, at the edge of gooseberry brambles.
“I am not spoiling anything,” she retorted.
“You spoil everything,” he corrected, stepping closer. His boots bent stems and crushed petals. Nysera watched his own spoiling without comment. “It is presumptuous of you to wander around this place alone. Where is your septa? Your handmaid? They let you have those, don’t they?”
“I was alone. You ruined that.”
“And you’re ruining my mother’s flowers.”
“I am not–” Nysera began hotly, before falling short at the amused slant of his brow. She pursed her lips, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of her belligerence. She turned her head forward again, to the ribbons of the unravelling plant in her silk lap. “Should you not be sparring, or conducting yourself with some other princely activity? I had not realised that you displeased your father so much he lowered your stations to gardener since I last saw you.”
She could not see him, but the image of his contemptuous sneer was easy enough to picture.
“I should have your tongue for that, you impudent bastard,” he said nastily.
“Hm. My father would not allow it.”
“My father will have it served to me on a platter next morning when I break my fast, should I wish it.”
“Why would you break your fast with my tongue? Is my blood not sullied, bastard as I am?” teased Nysera, still not glancing at him.
“I did not mean that I would eat it, you idiotic girl!” Aerion seethed indignantly, and she could then picture the vague ruddiness to his gaunt cheeks too. “I can’t understand for the life of me why they allowed you to live. Pity that your witch of a mother’s umbilical did not strangle you when you tore your way through her cursed womb.”
Nysera had felt her eye twitch. “You really are a foul little thing, aren’t you?”
“Little–”
“If you shall not leave, I will. My peace is in tatters, anyway. Along with your mother’s flowers.” Nysera got to her feet, dusting the severed heads of the moonblooms onto the small depression her bottom had made in the grass. She alas looked at him, and his eyes were narrowed into enraged slits of violet, as pretty as the blooms sprouting from the bushes just behind him. “Good-day, my prince.”
“I did not give you leave!” Aerion had protested as her skirts trailed away from him, almost snagging on the bare twig of a fig tree.
“I had not realised that giving leave was in a gardener’s jurisdiction?”
Aerion had always been unpalatable.
Daeron, his elder brother, would oft exchange letters with Nysera. He’d tell her of his nightmares, and she’d sometimes indulge in the goriness of her own. He fondly remembered his brother as being a glad child, once. But Nysera was not as convinced nor hopeful.
It was different for brothers, she supposed. She did not have siblings of her own, but there was a love there that could be understood by anyone else. One she’d resigned to never experiencing with a rather light heart, as little Egg told her horrors of Aerion drowning his beloved cat in a well and tormenting his little sisters by prying the porcelain heads from their dolls.
Daeron may remember his little brother as a cherub-faced babe with round cheeks and mirror-bright eyes at the stone-ledge of a harbour, using his grubby fingers to pry open the bellies of black cods and trouts. Nysera would always think of Aerion as the splenetic creature that spent the better half of his boyhood days at the Red Keep tormenting her, calling her Waters and witchling, delighting in the way she’d tremble with wroth.
“I think, Mother,” muttered Nysera then, pretending to look solemn as she stared forlornly at the gathered sheets in her lap, “that my stomach feels quite unsettled. Perhaps I may have to skip tonight’s festivities, lest my condition spreads and ruins Uncle Daeron’s celebrations.”
Her mother’s eye, the peridot one, twitched. “You cannot lie to me, ñuha embar. Do not tell me this is because of your childish grudge with Aerion.”
“It is no grudge, Mother. He tortures me. He calls me Waters and mocks our line!”
“You are not a Waters. You are a Seastar. You are as much of a bastard as your father, as I, as Blackfyre, as Bittersteel. You are ñuha embar se qēlossās,” said Shiera, holding Nysera’s hand so tight now she felt her bones kiss, “do not concern yourself with the opinion of a boy who fashions himself as Brightflame. Any Targaryen who must say, ‘I am the dragon,’ is no true dragon.” Shiera moved her other hand then to put her thumb to the pillowiness of Nysera’s bottom lip, almost pinching it. “You shall do well to remember that.”
Nysera tasted metal on her mother’s thumb as her lips moved dully around the slender digit. “Yes, Mother.”
Smiling to herself, Shiera moved the thumb away, smearing a small anointing of spit onto Nysera’s jawbone. “Good. Now, get dressed.” Her mother rose from the edge of her bed, smoothing her lily-white palms over her gown. It was a pretty thing, of course, like every other dress the witch owned. Of ivory and lace, cloth-of-silver. Sapphires dangled from her ears like lost stars. “We shall be there in the Great Yard to greet my nephew when he arrives.”
“Very well, Mother.”
Shiera’s kiss fell upon Nysera’s temple like a snowdrift and then she went.
The periwinkle of Nysera’s shift pooled around her calves as pale and diaphanous as water. Her vanity wasn’t far from her bed, an ornate thing, bone-white and weirwood, a gift from her father. The reflection in the mirror was a wretched bleeding of Seastar and Bloodraven. One eye from Bryden, a blood moon. Another from his sister-lover, blue as the waters around Tarth. Her skin was as translucent as a lily. Hair of spider-spun, wan silk. Pearly, waifish limbs.
Nysera looked like a Valyrian girl’s doll.
Her fingertips ghosted over the angular line of her collarbone, touching at her necklace. Queen Rhaenyra’s necklace. Then, at the column of her throat, unblemished and sallow. There was a time where it was haunted by a crimson blotch, not too dissimilar from her father’s winestain birthmark…
“You wear our colours as if they’re yours…” Aerion had murmured, mouth breathing hot-air right over her jugular as his fingers curled around the chain of her necklace. “You wear Valyrian steel as if it belongs to you…”
The pair of them were as obscenely close as twin ribbons of smoke in a window alcove. In Summerhall’s great hall, just down the corridor, the room was swelling with the tinkering of a flute and laughter as the party all fawned over the deerworthy princess. Aerion had her against a wall. He’d been choleric at Nysera’s choice of silk that night. His family’s colours, he’d seethed at her, not his. Red and black didn’t belong to her.
His canines grazed over the pulse in her neck as he pressed his hand into her hipbone, keeping her flush with the stone wall behind her. “I thought you were proud of your blood, witchling. Where are your mother’s colours now?”
“This–this is wrong,” managed Nysera hoarsely, angling her face away from him as awry strands of silver-white tickled her underjaw. “Someone might see–”
“See what? A prince of the blood reminding a lowly bastard of her place?” Aerion bared his teeth at her cruelly. “You think your parents make you above other illegitimates? You’re as based-born and depraved as them.”
His tongue suddenly laved over one of her veins, where her heartbeat felt like a hummingbird. Nysera had squirmed, tried to thrash out a leg to kick him between the legs, but Aerion was quicker. His hand moved from her hip to her thigh, his touch bruising even through the swathes of burgundy silk.
Nysera’s breath hitched. She wished she could’ve said it was out of fear alone, but it was the suffocating closeness of him. The heat of his body pressed against hers, all bone and sinews and muscle.
“Let go,” she gritted without bite.
Aerion’s laugh had been humourless and derisive. “Where’s that fire of yours gone, Waters? Wearing our colours does not make you one of us if you cannot even burn.”
“I am one of you.”
“No.” His fingers pressed deeper into her thigh. “You are what happens when our blood forgets itself. You are an abomination. A stain. You and your whore mother, your cuck of a father–”
Nysera felt fire in her belly. “Fuck you!”
“If I wanted to lay with a whore, I’d join my fool brother in Silk Street.” Aerion roughly let go of her then, without warning. Nysera stumbled, making him smirk nastier. “Change,” he said darkly, “do not return to the hall until you're wearing something befitting of your station.”
Moons had passed. Sweltering heat, dizzying afternoons learning histories, ignoring the tormenting memory of his mouth on her tender skin as the Red Keep’s machine of intrigue and politicking kept spinning. She hadn’t seen him since his sister’s nameday. She yearned to say that she hadn’t thought of him since, and yet…
“M’lady?” Her mild-mannered maidservant, Essie, stood willowy and patient in the doorway. “Your lady mother says you must be presentable for the arrival of Prince Maekar. Would you like the cloth-of-silver, to match with Lady Shi–”
“I would like to wear the red today, Essie,” Nysera interjected.
Essie faltered where she was now a hairsbreadth from Nysera’s wardrobe. “M’lady?”
“The red gown. With the silk from Asshai?” Nysera stared right ahead at her mirror, at her mismatched eyes and tall cheekbones. “I’d like to wear that one.”
Her handmaiden looked disconcerted by this request but she did not deny her. Essie’s chin dipped to her chest shallowly, murmuring a soft, “Very well, m’lady,” before opening the doors to the wardrobe.
Nysera hoped that the red silk might darken her into something less doll, more myth. That Aerion might choke on his wroth and know that she was as Valyrian as him, if not more.