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i. jaehaerys
Rhaegar’s grandfather dies while Rhaegar is still too young to remember him.
Rhaegar and both his parents gather around Jaehaerys’s sickbed – Rhaella withdrawn and quiet, Aerys full of nervous energy. The last members of House Targaryen draw together in a semicircle, three ashy-pale heads bent toward one another as Jaehaerys whispers to his children.
The sickroom smells of an astringent mixture of medicines and the air feels old and worn-out. Rhaegar’s nursemaid – not the first he’s had and not the last Aerys will send away before his childhood is finished – holds him back from the great bed. But Rhaegar can still hear Jaehaerys’s labored breathing – each inhale a harsh rattle, exhales punctuated by violent coughing.
As Rhaegar tries to get as close to his nursemaid’s skirts as he can without actually hiding, Jaehaerys painstakingly raises himself higher on his pillows. Rhaegar twitches when he realizes his grandfather’s gaze has landed on him. He raises his arm and beckons in Rhaegar’s direction. He visibly gathers himself together and it seems like his breathing begins to come a little easier.
There’s a brief exchange with the nursemaid – “He won’t catch ill?” “Just a moment won’t do him harm, surely.”
“Come on, love,” Rhaella whispers and gently pulls Rhaegar forward.
Jaehaerys’s glassy eyes look like black amethysts in the dim torchlight. Dark, like Rhaegar’s own. Rhaegar feels frozen. Pinned down. For a few seconds it doesn’t seem like Jaehaerys realizes Rhaegar is here, but then he says, “Rhae…gar…” and his voice is a ruined rasp.
There’s a loose corner of coverlet close to Rhaegar’s chin and he digs his fingers into it, twisting it around his hand mindlessly.
“It’s going to be him, Father.” Rhaella’s voice still doesn’t rise above a whisper. Jaehaerys’s coughing is by far the loudest sound in the room.
“I’ve given you … all I know. Tried … to do right.” Inhale – gasp. Exhale – cough. “Was that enough? A little dragon … out of the … ashes. Eh?”
Rhaella’s hands are on Rhaegar’s shoulders and he can feel them trembling. Feels the motion when she draws in a long breath.
“We’ve done our duty – look at him. Look at Rhaegar.”
Jaehaerys does. His face is the face of a very old man. He nods, seemingly to himself. His clammy hand reaches out and strokes Rhaegar’s hair once. “Alright,” he wheezes. “Alright.”
Rhaegar lets go of his bit of coverlet. His fingers hurt from gripping it.
Jaehaerys sinks back down into the bed and coughs deeply.
Rhaegar will have no memory of this, or any memory of Jaehaerys beyond faint impressions of gentle fondness. But for many years afterward, if he hears someone coughing in a certain way, he’ll flinch without really knowing why. And when he begins to dream of the Others, their breath will rattle in his ears like dying men’s.
ii. arthur
Even many years later, when he is a man grown, Rhaegar will sometimes be in the Library of the Citadel or the Red Keep’s archives and he’ll suddenly be struck with a memory of the day he first found the scroll. The angle of the light slanting through the windows. The flyaway strands of hair sticking to his cheeks. The rustling sound the parchment makes as he lets it slip out of his arms.
He doesn’t start running right away. A crown prince has more decorum than that. Even with strings of High Valyrian characters like black eels twisting through his head. He slips out of the library on quiet feet, past sets of ever-present castle guards, and out into the sunlight before the black eels send him flying across the packed earth of a courtyard, up some stairs, turning unthinkingly down this corridor and that.
Most of the time, Rhaegar doesn’t mind performing the duties of crown prince. But every so often, something just … spooks him. Later in life, he’ll be able to describe properly what was happening in his mind, on those occasions when everything just became too much. But for now, whenever this happens, Rhaegar hides. The Red Keep has a lot of nooks and crannies, and Rhaegar is as capable at finding them as he is at most other things. So now, when he needs a hiding place more than he ever has, his feet carry him forward automatically until he finds one.
The spot he winds up in overlooks the castle’s training yard. The clangs and shouts of men fighting drift faintly up to him. It doesn’t make him feel any better, but that isn’t why he’s here.
Ser Arthur finds him there, like he always does. Ser Arthur once told him that the servants of the Red Keep all have standing orders to get word of an unaccompanied Rhaegar sighting back to him as quickly and discreetly as possible. Rhaegar isn’t completely sure this is true, but he’s also not willing to say it isn’t true.
“Well? What are you doing up here?”
“… Just watching.”
Ser Arthur looks him up and down as Rhaegar scrunches himself up small in his crumbling arrow-slit. “You could do that from down in the yard, you know.”
“No! No, I –” couldn’t! They think I’m like Baelor the Blessed! In a bad way, I mean! I bet you think it too, don’t you, Ser Arthur? Rhaegar has to clamp his teeth very tightly together to keep the shrill thoughts from making it out of his mouth.
“Well, you are coming down out of there.”
Now that Rhaegar has successfully kept himself from speaking once, he finds he can’t actually make himself speak at all. He just stares hard at Ser Arthur, wondering if Ser Arthur will be able to see what Rhaegar knows, what Rhaegar is, what the gods promised to make of him. Willing him both to see and not see.
“Rhaegar. Tell me what’s happened to you.”
“Do you think it’s true what they say about Summerhall? Was my great-grandfather trying to hatch dragon eggs there?”
Ser Arthur stutters that he really couldn’t say, not having been there.
“Instead they just got me.”
Ser Arthur just sighs and looks at him for quite a long time, like he can see all the dark things swarming around in Rhaegar’s brain.
“I read about some things,” Rhaegar finally whispers.
“What kind of things?”
“Nothing…. Old things. About … my family.”
Ser Arthur sighs again and pinches the bridge of his nose. “Listen. I remember hearing of Summerhall. It was a terrible thing, and it must be a terrible shadow to live under. But none of that is your fault – do you believe me about that?”
Rhaegar looks at Ser Arthur, and doesn’t move. He can’t move. If he does, he thinks, his body will just shatter right onto the flagstones.
Ser Arthur finally gives him a very weak smile. He holds out his hands wordlessly as Rhaegar slowly, slowly uncurls himself from his perch. And though Rhaegar is perfectly capable of jumping down himself, he lets Ser Arthur wrap his arms around him and lift him down like he’s a very small boy again.
“If you don’t want to talk about what’s troubling you, I won’t make you tell me. All I can tell you is that at a certain point, you’ve just got to ask yourself – what are you going to do about it?”
Rhaegar thinks about the dropped scrolls in the library, quite possibly still lying where he left them. He knows, with horrible certainty, that he will go back there. He will pick them and read them again, end to end until he can recite them from memory.
And he looks into Ser Arthur’s gentle, worried face, and knows that he will also go down to the training yard, and do something to take that worry out of his guardian’s eyes.
“I am going to become a warrior.”
iii. aerys
After King Aerys is rescued from Duskendale, no one can deny any longer that the seeds of Targaryen madness have blossomed inside him. He’s sick with fever when Ser Barristan’s men bring him into the Red Keep, but even after his illness subsides he remains in his bed, scarcely eating, snarling threats at anyone who dares get too close to him. He frequently doesn’t recognize even his most trusted councilors. When he does, he accuses them of wildly implausible crimes and schemes. Sometimes he holds one-sided conversations with thin air, or sits staring rigidly at the wall as though enthralled by a shadow-play only he can see.
The maesters say they have hope that his mind will re-orient itself once the memories of Duskendale’s dungeon fade, but their faces betray them as well-meaning liars.
The door of the bedchamber creaks as Rhaegar slips inside and Aerys turns his head slowly, no expression on his face. His hair is loose and uncombed. The bones of his face are all framed in stark relief under his skin.
Rhaegar takes a deep breath. "Hello, Father."
Aerys squints up at him, like he's having trouble focusing his gaze. “Are you happy? Is this – what you want?”
“Father, no! Believe me –” Rhaegar stops because Aerys is still talking.
“Is this what you want, Father?”
He thinks I’m Jaehaerys. Rhaegar can only stand frozen. What do I do? What will bring him back?
“I did it, I got a son on the little bitch. For all the good it’s done us…”
“Don’t talk about – about your sister that way,” Rhaegar finds himself snapping. She’s worth a hundred of you, how dare you make her unhappy – The anger rises quickly and painfully, and without a second’s hesitation Rhaegar pushes it back down. He can’t go down that road. Not now or ever.
“You and her and precious Rhaegar can all bugger off anyway. Going to go and sit him on your knee on the Iron Throne? Like it’ll convince anyone that everything isn’t broken?”
(Rhaegar unexpectedly feels a little pang in his heart. Ser Barristan has told him Jaehaerys used to do that on occasion. Rhaegar wishes he could remember it.)
“Those were better times,” Rhaegar whispers, and dares to step closer to the bed. “We could have some of that still. That’s all I want.”
“Don’t – stare – at me! I hate your eyes. I’ve always just hated them.” Aerys’s voice is growing steadier, his words coming more slowly and with a nasty twist to them. “I should burn them out of your face. I will! I’ll do it if you don’t stop looking at me – like – like you don’t know –”
Rhaegar tears his eyes away from the furious rictus of his father’s face. He can no longer tell if Aerys recognizes him as Jaehaerys or as himself. But if he can just get away now, and come back again when his father is calmer, perhaps he’ll have forgotten this –
Aerys shoots forward, unbelievably fast for a malnourished invalid, and snares Rhaegar’s sleeve in his fingers. His face twists and he snarls, “You … ruined … EVERYTHING.”
A maester Rhaegar doesn’t recognize bustles into the sickroom, no doubt drawn by Aerys’s increasingly loud ranting. “I am sorry, Your Highness, but the king must rest now.”
Rhaegar nod curtly and turns away, unable to think of anything to say. His own heartbeat pounds in his ears and part of him worries the maester will be able to hear it too.
A stream of agitated muttering from the bed follows him out of the room.
After this, the Others in Rhaegar’s dreams start wearing his father’s face.
iv. elia
There is a woman’s silhouette outlined in the sickly moonlight trickling through Rhaegar’s window. Elia is perched on one of his padded benches, leafing through a slim volume of what looks like poetry or stories. She’s always been like that – coming to him out of the blue like an apparition. Once he asked her if it was a spontaneous decision on her part, or did she plan ahead of time which nights to see him? Unplanned, she’d answered. “To give us less time to think about it.”
“What are you doing here?”
Elia stands smoothly. “What is a wife normally doing when she visits her husband’s bedchamber?” She tries to make it a lighthearted jest, but all the lines of her body have tension written along them.
“We can’t anymore. What the maesters said…” She won’t survive another birth.
(The screaming after she’d delivered Rhaenys, when the midwives did – something to her, inside her, to preserve her and the child. Whatever it was, she was months healing.)
(The hours of moaning as she labored with Aegon and the eerie silence at the end, when she had no more strength left to make a sound.)
“You told me the prophecy requires three.” Elia’s face is a silk-smooth mask. If she feels any fear or dread, Rhaegar can’t see it.
“Elia –” Is that how badly you think of me?
Rhaegar told Elia about the prophecy years ago, in a fit of post-wedding candor. He had hoped that Elia – calm, soft-spoken Elia who shares his love of poring over old journals and account books – might be a partner in bearing its weight. Now he thinks perhaps that was a monstrous thing to do to a person.
“The prophecy is annoyingly vague, and I’ve been wrong about it before.” He attempts a small smile. “It isn’t worth your life.”
They shared a true friendship for a short while. Before they were married. Before all that marriage entailed. Before Elia nearly died giving birth to his child.
“I’m not afraid of sacrifice, Rhaegar. It’s the anticipation I can’t take. Worrying for us. For our children. It’s their lives if we get it wrong.”
“I know, believe me –” I’m tired of suffering, Elia. Mine, yours, my family’s. “But we can wait a while, at least.”
Elia turns away from him, rests her arms on the deep windowsill, and in that moment she looks every bit as tired as Rhaegar feels. Not physical weariness, but an exhaustion of the spirit. The silence stretches on and Rhaegar doesn’t dare break it.
Finally she draws in a long breath. “If that’s what you believe, then I trust you. Goodnight.” She steps toward the bench and her forgotten book.
“Wait – don’t go. There’s no reason you can’t sleep here.”
“No. No, I suppose there isn’t.” For a second Elia stays where she is, motionless. Perhaps her shoulders droop a bit – in disappointment? Irritation? But then she swipes her book from the seat and throws a knowing look at the book on Rhaegar’s own bedside table. No matter how awkward things grow between them, at least they’ll always share an understanding of the draw of late-night reading.
Rhaegar never sleeps easily on the nights when Elia shares his bed, and this night is no exception. He sleeps and wakes fitfully, and each time he wakes he lies still and silent in the dark until he is sure he can still hear Elia breathing.
v. lyanna
The most noticeable thing about Lyanna Stark is that she doesn’t stay still. When he first noticed this, Rhaegar expected to find it irritating. Instead, the more time he spends near her, the more he itches to move with her, to let her catch him and pull him into her orbit. Like knowing her has woken something up inside him. The whole time she’d poured out the story of the Knight of the Laughing Tree to him, she’d been pacing back and forth and twisting her braided hair around in her fingers. The next time he’d caught up to her, on a balcony overlooking the tourney grounds, she’d stepped lightly from one foot to another, apparently unconsciously, as she told him about learning the unfamiliar court dances they didn’t practice in the North.
Rhaegar sometimes shudders to think what Lyanna thinks the most noticeable thing about him is. Judging from her expression the first time he asked her what she knew about the White Walkers, he doesn’t think he wants her to tell him.
“If you want to hear all the family ghost stories so badly,” she’d told him, “you should go and ask my old Nan.”
“Please forgive me. You must think me a terribly morbid person.”
The tension had slipped back out of Lyanna’s expression, and in fact, the corners of her mouth had twitched like she was telling herself some secret joke. All she’d said in response to that was, “I don’t think it’s terrible.”
The stories that haunted Rhaegar all through his adolescence don’t seem to hold any power over Lyanna. He can’t quite tell to what extent she actually believes them to be true. Certainly whenever he’s mentioned something he’s read that contradicts what she knows, she’s argued the point with him like someone who believes what she’s saying.
On the other hand, the whole time she does she’s barely holding back a smile and her eyes are shining like winter stars.
Ahead of him, Lyanna slips gracefully through the trees, head tilted upward toward the canopy of red leaves over their heads. Thoughts of the Long Night are swarming through Rhaegar’s mind at full force, but they’re starting to have to compete for space with thoughts about how the light is hitting Lyanna’s unbound hair, and the idea that never in his life has he met anyone he so badly wanted to spend time with.
Without too much trouble, the two of them find a comfortable enough sitting place under the gaze of the weirwood trees. The evening wind is bitterly cold, even though the maesters have sent word that the season has turned to spring. Rhaegar is desperately not thinking about much warmer it would be with the two of them sharing his cloak.
“It’s good the godswood is here,” Lyanna snickers. “Now you’ll have the most authentic experience. Almost like being back at Winterfell.”
“Winterfell sounds like a beautiful place,” Rhaegar says invitingly – secretly, he is absolutely fascinated with the Northern stronghold, though he wouldn’t dare say so in King Aerys’s court.
“Never mind. I’m not in the mood to talk about home now.” Lyanna’s expression closes up and Rhaegar remembers that her betrothed is the son of a Southron lord. How long until she has to leave home? Or has she already said goodbye to it forever?
Lyanna tosses her hair back like she’s tossing away her thoughts. “Anyway. If I can truly shock and terrify you, what will I get as a prize?”
“Hmm. How about … I’ll get you a proper shield painter. One who knows how to paint weirwood trees that aren’t demented-looking.”
“How dare you, ser! My weirwood was flawless!” She whacks him gently (well, sort of) on the arm. He shoves her shoulder lightly in retaliation. Allows himself to indulge the thought that perhaps if he invited her to share his cloak, she would, in fact, accept.
As night falls over the Isle of Faces, Lyanna regales him with all the most disturbing Northern folk stories she knows.
But at Lyanna Stark’s side, Rhaegar’s dreams are only hopeful and bright.