Chapter Text
When his mother wanted to take him to Dragonstone after his father’s death (which father they speak of doesn’t matter. They’re both dead either way), Jacaerys Velaryon had said he would rather flee across the Narrow Sea and become a dirty, dragonless peasant than leave King’s Landing. All he had left of his fathers was here.
His mother, dressed in Targaryen black and red for reasons which would become clear to him via blood rituals and Daemon Targaryen, flicked him on the ear and told him to stop being dramatic. Jace had heeded her as a good prince should, stuck his nose high and suffered Dragonstone for what it was. He suffered Valyrian lessons, a new father, becoming fourteen and then becoming older. Most importantly, he suffered seclusion. To be fair, his family was better than most: his mother loved him, Daemon loved his mother how she deserved, his brothers were only as annoying as they were loyal, and both Baela and Rhaena made excellent company. But Dragonstone was an island and Jace was a crown prince of Targaryen blood. Fire always wanted more.
Jacaerys Velaryon was also, unknown to his mother, both incredibly worried at all times and exceptional at hiding it. He learned to be king with the grace of one, but every new task leveled onto his shoulders just made him worry more. Words slipped through cracks in trickling rivulets, and his disquiet grew as he thought of his uncle Aegon and his grandmother Alicent, far away in his childhood home warming the seat of his grandfather’s throne. His mother’s throne.
Suffice to say, Jace was altogether the most perturbed and anxious boy in Westeros, and hiding it as best as he could. His saving grace was that he hid it well. In his opinion.
“You know what helped my mother when she was upset?” Baela had whispered one night, as Jace pretended he stared at the ceiling of his room with contemplation rather than paralyzing levels of stress about the latest news from the mainland. His grandfather was growing more ill. Alicent Hightower grew more powerful. Aegon, who had once been something like a friend, grew more twisted. Aemond grew- well, taller, Jace supposed. In all other respects, Aemond had always been exactly what he was.
“What?”
“Flying.” Her words twisted with rueful envy, but she didn’t mean them any less. “Perhaps it would help you.”
“Moondancer will be large enough to ride one day.” Jace had said, but he was already thinking of something more. Vermax was just large enough to ride, and like Jace, positively sick and tired of the damp stone pit they were all stuck in.
The first ride did not go well.
“It’s alright,” Daemon said, trying and failing to comfort Jace as the maester stuck his shoulder back where shoulders were supposed to reside. “We all fall off our dragons at least once.”
“Did you?” Jace panted as the maester tied his sore arm to his torso. Daemon took on a very self-important look.
“No, but I was special.”
Apparently his mother was special as well. Jace was not. He fell off Vermax twice more before he managed to take his beast around Dragonstone without incident. But when he landed, wind-reddened and hair stuck in all directions, he’d never felt more like himself.
He began going out every night, pushing Vermax to his limit. He would take the dragon up to touch the clouds, plummet to the sea and pull straight so close to the water that he felt the spray against his face. Deep down, he knew that he was not Velaryon by blood. But here, covered in seaspray on dragonback with his hands off the reins and Vermax chittering with glee, he felt like his father, his mother’s last husband, was right next to him, telling him he was proud. Telling him he was a good son.
Every night of every month for years, he felt Laenor’s presence.
His worry lessened with every beat of Vermax’s wings. He understood how Aegon the Conqueror had the gall, the strength to conquer a continent. No man could stop a dragon.
“Were you out again?”
Jace’s windswept glee fell face first into the mud at the sound of his mother’s voice.
“Erm…” he said, turning slowly. Rhaenyra clasped her hands expectantly in front of her, below the barely-visible swell of her stomach heralding another full-blooded Targaryen sibling for Jace. Her eyebrows raised expectantly. Jace grimaced at her, stripping off his riding gloves.
“Well, what can I say, Mother?”
“You can say you won’t do it again, but I wouldn't believe it.” she sighed, probing her forehead tiredly. She was always tired, regally tired in a way only those who loved her most could ever really see. Jace supposed having so many children under one roof while worrying about an impending usurpation did that to you. “Please just…be careful. You push Vermax too hard.”
“Daemon says-”
“Daemon’s dragon is fully grown and experienced.” Rhaenyra retorted, “Vermax is barely more than a child.”
Jace felt his lips press together against his own will. He knew the connotations of that sentence. As far as his seventeen (nearly eighteen, such a number was important) year old self was concerned, he was a child no longer. He was an heir, a soldier, “Mother, please.”
“I have ridden dragons for longer than you have been alive, Jacaerys,” her voice was cutting, queenly. “Vermax still balks at large birds. He needs time to be fully trained, and so do you.”
“Perhaps I would have had more time in King’s Landing.”
Rhaenyra’s mouth snapped shut, and Jace, faced with his mother’s brewing anger, was forced to pretend like that was what he meant to say all along, rather than the contrite apology to be made and the hurrying off to study High Valyrian to be done. He was a man, after all, and men stood their ground, even if it wasn’t truly what they believed.
“I understand,” Rhaenyra started warningly, “That this was not a choice you would have made-”
“And when Aegon and Aemond can outstrip me, where will that leave you?” Jace snapped, shoving his hand so hard back into his glove that the leather seams scraped along his skin. Already, his stomach turned with the thoughts. Aemond on Vhagar, larger than any dragon, and Aegon’s blinding Sunfyre, ripping and tearing and-
“Jace-”
“I am going out, Mother.” Jace grit out, barring the thoughts behind the weak wall he had constructed in his mind, “I’d lie to you about where, but I think that’d be a bit insulting for both of us.”
He didn’t hear his mother call after him. He could barely make his way back to the dragonkeep, where Vermax chittered at him lightly on sight. The men handling his dragon did not ask questions, and Jace would not have been fit to answer them. His mind was too busy being consumed with the sounds of dragonfire burning and the coldness of his uncles’ voices.
He remembered a time when he and Aegon had liked each other. Now, all he could fathom from years of separation and rumors and worry was that it must not have been real at all, a trick of some Hightower concoction. No jokes, no nights spent tricking Aemond, no sparring in the yard. All that was real was Vermax underneath him and the open sky above.
Vermax took off with a shake of his wings, and Jace steered him for the mainland. It was not his father by name he sought tonight.
Jace had come to both love and hate the word ‘strong.’ He knew he was strong in more than one sense of the word, and he had harbored a deep love for the man who had bestowed it upon him. It was not even that he hated the word itself. He hated how he was forced to deny it all, that he was doomed from birth to shame, and so more often than not, he turned away. But tonight, Jace needed something different than seaspray and the encouraging troublemaker’s laugh of Laenor Velaryon hidden in the crow of gulls. He needed something steadier.
The shadow of his dragon passed over the rippling sea and soon dappled the land. This part of the crownlands was empty, hollow of towns and rich with the forests once ruled by something older than time. Targaryens did not believe in gods. They had dragons. But Jace could feel the forest call, stained the deep blue of night and something more familiar. A colour he wore often.
Vermax roared into the quiet night, and in the rumble of it, Jace could hear a deeper voice, calm and solid like a brace. Vermax roared again and the echo seemed to cut through the bloody images screaming across his eyelids, of blood across iron and fire across stone. His eyes slid shut, and in the wind rushing past his ears, Jacaerys Velaryon could hear the voice of his Strong father. So close that if he reached out, he could touch it.
But the night was dark and Vermax was young. His mother was right.
Combine one startled dragon, one flock of shadowy birds which seemed to crow with one voice rising in tandem from the trees, and one idiot prince who had taken his hands from the reins. The answer is very simple.
As he fell from the sky, watching his dragon flee from the birds who feared him, Jacaerys Velaryon did not mourn himself. His last thought was of his mother.
When Alder Tierney’s father had desperately shoved every gold dragon he had saved into her hands three years ago, she’d thought he’d gone truly mad.
Halvin Tierney was a man who many thought had already gone mad, seventeen years ago. Once, he was a gifted blacksmith, with three young boys that swore to be knights and lift their family to bannership. He had a wife who served the Starks. He was well respected, well thought of. The kind of man who lived a warm, unremarkable life, and died comfortably unknown to the annals of history.
What had gone wrong? Well, sickness cared not for reputation, and took Halvin’s wife in their youngest son’s second year. They say the grief of it drove old Halvin mad. He fled Winterfell, taking his three boys to the farthest north they could get before the Wall. In a town only known as Holdfast to the forty-odd people who lived there, half of which served in the local brothel, Halvin left his sons and disappeared. Six months later, he reappeared at the brothel, where his sons were being well raised by a combination of whores (dutifully referred to by said sons as “women of languorous disposition” to this day) and their customers, the men of the Night’s Watch. In his arms were two babies, swaddled and green-eyed like his late wife.
Put plainly for those burdened with idiocy, Alder had been one of those girls. The other had been her beloved twin sister Lyra, named after Halvin’s late wife. When asked where he had procured two babies so far north (the brothel mother had nearly pitched a fit until she realized there was no possibility of any of her women being responsible), Halvin had said he found them nestled in the roots of an alder tree north of the Wall.
Like everyone else, Alder had assumed he was a liar until she realized the creek didn’t speak to anyone else.
It wasn’t just the creek. The wind, the stones, the snow and dirt and the metal of the swords her father hammered out for the Night’s Watch. All of them whispered in her ears, jokes and questions and pledges of fealty. Only Lyra understood, for she could hear the giggles of leaves and joy of flowers, the boredom of the penned goats and the sardonically dirty-mouthed collection of rodents which lived in their attic.
Her brothers knew, of course. It was the eldest, Gage, who had first walked in on his little sisters, one bending metal around her hands like liquid and the other beckoning the bloom of plants in the dead of winter. Being eight at the time, he hadn’t really questioned it. His childlike brain was simple. These are my sisters. They're a little odd. I’ll protect them with my life.
Slowly, Alder learned that the wind lifting her into the air and causing the bathwater to float around the room with her in it was not acceptable for civilized children. She tucked it away, and it became a tool like any other. She threw herself instead into the trials of her brothers. The people of Holdfast thought Halvin a madman all over again for allowing his daughter to wave swords around, until they realized that said daughter could beat her brothers before her twelfth year.
It wasn’t their fault. She was the favourite of all her father’s swords. They liked to let her win.
Everything seemed well for this haphazard family until Lyra took ill. And thus came the shoving of coins and Alder believing, for the first time in her short life, that her father was a madman after all.
“You want me to abandon you?” She’d gaped. Halvin had drawn a hand over his face and when it came away, tears glimmered across them. They floated off his cheeks before they could freeze there, dropping to the ground with a clatter.
“Take your sister south.” he’d rasped, lungs black with smithing smoke, “The warmth will help her recover.”
So Alder had. She’d bid her father and brothers goodbye and taken Lyra, coughing and sniffling, first to Winterfell and then on, and on.
Alder’s brothers had given her a gift each before she left the great castle of the Starks where they hoped to make their mark on the world. Gage had gifted her two swords, as neither could bear to be parted from the other. Leafe had given her an old horse to ride, so she wouldn’t have to walk south. Strickon, her youngest brother, had given her a new pair of boots, and a warning for good luck.
“We are a family built for solitude.” he had told her, “No one can know what you are.”
Their journey had ended in the Crownlands, a warm and flowery place that sang in a tune Lyra found pleasing. They built a little home in a clearing in the middle of the woods, stone-walled and tatch-roofed, with a large hearth to warm Lyra's lungs and no one for miles around except the sea. The closest men to be found an island away. And Lyra had breathed well that night.
But all stories must end before the next begins. One sister, who can regrow forests and heal men with a simple word, gentle and so nurturing was she, cannot heal herself no matter how hard she tries. One sister, whose only company has no blood nor heart, lives on in solitude.
One dragon flies over a creek whose water tastes freshest. One prince falls from his dragon, and the creek catches him. Well, put succinctly, one girl asks the creek to catch him and the creek obliges.
Alder Tierney looked at the brown-haired boy, moonlight glimmering off his serenely empty face, and quietly ignored her brother’s warning. Part of her thought it was because the boy looked so pathetic, lying there as the water rushed around him. Part of her ached to talk to someone who could answer back.
The wind carried the boy back to her little home, and she barely remembered to wick the water out of his clothing before it dumped him onto the floor in a heap. The boy did not wake upon contact with the earth, simply rolled onto his back with a sleepy sigh, and Alder leaned over to really look at him.
He was very fine-featured and obviously well-born, even she could tell with her relatively little experience with men who bathed regularly and had never broken their noses before. His cloak was fine fabric, silk which sang out to her in unfamiliar cadence. And she was no fool. She knew how dragons felt on the wind. Lyra had loved their proximity to Dragonstone, tentatively communicating with the dragons housed a sea away. Alder was not so sure about them. A beast so big did not seem to belong in their little world.
This was a Targaryen. Alder knew they existed, knew that a few resided on Dragonstone. Lyra would often remark on the comings and goings of the heartbeats residing in the stone hall between coughs. The stone hall itself was rather uppity.
“Which one are you?” She whispered. There were only two possibilities. Elder or younger? Heir or spare?
The boy sighed peacefully in his sleep and worry ignited itself in Alder’s stomach. Would someone come looking? Would they view her at fault? She was an excellent fighter, but even she had never fought a Kingsguard. And while she was rather sure she could beat one or two, it seemed that this boy warranted a fair few more.
She strapped her swords to herself just in case. If not for protection, for the familiarity and the weight against her spine. For the fact that her father had smithed these blades and she had learned to coax them sharp under his watchful eye. But the air was tense around her. Protection would be needed tonight. No one would miss the dragon riderless.
The ground rumbled hoofbeats before she heard them, so she was feigning nightly chores with her cloak over her blades when Rand Rolliver and his men came storming up to her doorstep.
Rand was a local bandit leader who exacted payments through intimidation from secluded settlements, and had really stumbled onto Alder and Lyra by accident two years ago. One of his men had been brutally wounded, and Lyra had healed him without question, working something just far enough from magic that it was merely a miracle. When Rand came back next time, he only pretended to exact a tithe. The arrangement continued until Lyra…until she was gone. And the grace went with her.
“Rand,” she greeted as the slim rat of a man slid off his horse and approached her with two men at his back. “It’s late.”
“It is,” Rand answered in his rubbery voice, “But we’re on the hunt.”
“For what?” She asked innocently, embodying Lyra in temperament as well as looks as she tossed her long hair over her shoulder. Rand’s eyes softened slightly.
“A dragon was seen tossing its rider.” He answered, “We’re searching for him.”
“I’ve seen no dragon nor man.” Alder lied through her teeth, just as Strickon taught her. “Just me, as always.”
“Mind if we check, then?” One of Rand’s men asked menacingly. He was new. Alder didn’t recognize his stride on the dirt. Before his question was even asked, he was already stepping towards the house. His foot landed too near to the cairn of stones Alder stood by, and she saw white.
Steel sang out of the sheath on her hip, and Rand flung a hand out to stop his men from drawing.
“You nearly stepped where you shouldn’t.” Alder pressed her voice through gritted teeth, choked and violent. Her arms and blade nearly ached to take the man’s dirty foot off as she pointed it at his throat. “Watch yourself.”
The man scoffed, but Rand didn’t. He knew what the cairn was, and somewhere deep inside him, he knew what Alder was. He had the instincts of a survivor. It was what made him so good at his job.
“We will return,” he said, almost an apology if he was capable of giving one. “In the morning, to see if you've seen anything more. Sleep well, Tierney.”
Alder watched them ride out, and waited outside still until the rumbling faded. It wasn’t until then that her sword returned to its sheath. She turned and was met with an unwelcome sensation. Several in fact. They went as follows:
The prince was awake and upright.
He had found himself a knife.
He was currently standing with it brandished high, waiting with bated breath for her to re-enter the home.
The last of these was quite ungrateful, but she would let it go. She turned and looked at the cairn and pretended she wasn’t as tired as she felt, nor as excited.
“Shall we?” She asked. The stones did not answer.