Chapter Text
i.
Laenor gets her mugshot framed and hung on the wall behind his couch, which comes as a surprise to Rhaenyra even if firmly in his nature. “It’s chic,” He insists when she sees it for the first time, her own vacant eyes staring from below the words The Empire Strikes Back - Targaryen Heiress Arrested After Public Brawl!
“Could you have picked a classier rag?”
“They didn’t run it in the Times, I’m afraid.” He comes to stand next to her, tilting his head at it although it is some puzzling piece of art, “Paris Hilton called, and she’s shaking in her boots.”
“Let her rest, would you?” Laena emerges from the kitchen into the living room, a cocktail in each hand and one balanced in the crook of her elbow. She passes them around and Rhaenyra takes a sip of hers; it’s tart, verging on bitter—cranberry, perhaps?—she drinks half of it in a gulp, “Oh, Laenor, you didn’t frame it, did you? You’re so gauche.”
But then Laena looks up at the picture too, tilting her head as well, until she and her brother are perfectly symmetrical to one another.
“It’s not the worst picture I’ve ever seen of you, if I’m being honest.”
Even now, Rhaenyra cuts a worse picture than in her mugshot. The mullet that had, at that time, been fresh and stylish, is now overgrown like an untended lawn hedge. The black eye that gave her stare in the photograph a rugged intensity is now faded and pitiable. As for the proud leer on her face — well, she hasn’t been feeling much of a sense of pride in herself. Not lately.
It’s then, in the middle of coming up with some no-doubt scathing retort, that Rhaenyra notices the polo laid out on the couch. It is a hideous, deep blue, the kind of blue that one might find on a bounce house for a child’s birthday party, and her name is embossed rather demurely on the front right hand corner—Rhaenyra T., the rest of it left off for anonymity’s sake—and the other corner pronouncing Velaryon Pools & Landscaping.
She frowns, “I’m not wearing that.”
Laenor’s eyes flick to it, then he rolls them, “Everybody has to wear the uniform. Leana and I had to wear it.”
“You were 17,” Rhaenyra asserts, aghast at the lopsided comparison, “I’m almost 30.”
“Think of it this way,” Laenor turns to her and lays a hand on her shoulder. Looking into his eyes, Rhaenyra sees both a man and the little boy she’d grown up with, whom she’d had to protect from rumors and schoolyard bullies. She’d even once offered to marry him, when they were children, because it had seemed kinder than letting him tread water in the echelons of high society that did not take very kindly to sensitive, effeminate, gay men, and he’d had to remind her that Valyrians hadn’t made a habit of incest since the middle ages. Well. “Paris Hilton did A Simple Life…”
“Grimly committed to the Paris Hilton metaphor, I see.”
“I argued against it,” Laena comments from beside them, not looking at them, with the veneer of offhandedness she puts on when she’s trying to stir the pot, “But your father insisted.”
Rhaenyra squints, “Of course he did.”
*
Two Weeks Prior
Rhaenyra barely talks her way out of rehab this time, in spite of the fact that she’d been close to sober when she cracked Criston Cole — a man who, by the way, had sorely deserved a cracking — upside the head. Her father does not acknowledge this fact, Rhaenyra suspects, because doing so would come dangerously close to acknowledging that Rhaenyra might just be like this.
She and Viserys are in his office doing what they always do when they fight, which is to say that they are eating McDonald’s on the surface of his ostentatious oak desk and talking very loudly over one another. Rhaenyra’s mother, when she was alive, used to be driven to madness by it—shouting matches over meals, that went from bedroom to living room to garden, that lasted whole days simmering like a stew pot, then boiling over, then simmering again.
That was, of course, before Aemma started to see all the love hiding behind it—she’d still been driven to madness after that, but it was a fond sort.
“—You could do anything you want, Rhaenyra, do you understand that? Anything. You were born with ten silver spoons in your mouth. And the one, the one thing you have to do, is not get arrested. That’s all.” Viserys is shaking a fry at her for emphasis, and Rhaenyra passes a cup of ketchup across the desk for him to dip it in, says:
“Gods above, this again—give it a rest, would you—”
“A rest? A rest?”
“You think that one mugshot is going to ruin my chances of being, whatever, a philanthropist or something—” Rhaenyra swipes her tongue over her teeth, swallows, takes another bite of her burger and speaks around it, “—I know you did worse when you were younger. And look at you, a CEO.”
“I kept it out of the tabloids,” Her father bellows. He’s set the fry down, which means to Rhaenyra that he’s being very serious. She rolls her eyes, “And I kept it out of the tabloids when you took your fanny out in public—”
“I took a piss in a bar alley! Gods above, if we let that one go—”
“But this—” He picks up a copy of the Daily Mail that he has been keeping next to him on his desk for dramatic effect, her own black-eyed stare looking back at her. It gives Rhaenyra a moment of pause, “—I cannot do everything for you. I cannot make you have common sense, as hard as I try.”
“I have common sense.” Rhaenyra argues weakly.
“You are a spoilt hedonist,” Her father hisses, “Who has never had a job, who has never faced consequences for your actions.”
“And your favorite child, don’t forget.”
Viserys pauses. Looks at her not unkindly, “You’re my only child, Rhaenyra.”
“Right. But, if you didn’t like me so much, I reckon I wouldn’t be such a spoilt hedonist. Don’t you think?” She looks at his untouched fries, “Are you going to eat those?”
“Yes.” Viserys deadpans, then looks thoughtful, “You’re right.”
Rhaenyra squints, “I am?”
“This is my fault, isn’t it? At least partially, if not entirely.”
“Come on now, old man,” Rhaenyra says. She has the vague tickle of danger in the back of her brain, that which had been passed on to her by her ancestors lower on the food chain, “The good stuff’s your fault as well.”
But Viserys keeps looking at her in a way she isn’t sure she likes, and Rhaenyra suddenly has the urge to sit on her hands, like she’s ten years old again, and then he says, “When your cousins were children, Rhaenys had them both get jobs with the landscaping company. To teach them responsibility. And look at them now.”
This is not the first time that Rhaenyra has been compared unfavorably to her cousins. Nor is it the first time her father has expressed a vague sort of envy over the landscaping company that Corlys had started after he’d left the marines. He found it all very salt of the earth.
It was a little on the nose, to Rhaenyra. Go to the marines, then make your living cleaning pools? She’d be tired of the water by that point, no doubt about it.
Now is not the time to say so. “Well, when the company invents a time machine,” She says, “You can go back in time and make me mow lawns for minimum wage. I fear the damage is already done, for now.”
But he’s still looking at her, a light flickering behind his eyes that Rhaenyra doesn’t like. And then he opens his mouth, and he says “Rhaenyra, I’d like to offer you a deal of sorts—”
*
Many, many years ago
Once upon a time, Rhaenyra Targaryen had been something. Been somebody. She’d had a mother living and gone to a very posh boarding school, one which had seen marginal royalty and the children of actors.
She’d gotten top marks and her aggression, when she experienced it, was released through lacrosse and morning rowing practices. In those places, she was one among a sea of anonymous, pretty, wealthy girls, each hiding their affluence beneath regulation sports kits.
At times, when it was very good, it was almost like they became one body—rowing the boat, moving for the ball—
(During one exhilarating, never forgotten moment, lofting Rhaenyra for all to see after she scored a winning point, sweaty and dirty, their limbs like so many leafy beaches on a tree, gripping her, exalting her)
—And then Aemma died. And there was the business with Harwin, and the baby she’d decided not to have, and her father had plucked her from the school to finish her studies with a private tutor on their sprawling estate. Life after that had seemed beige and Rhaenyra distant from her own self.
Her tutor had once taken her to the Targaryen portrait gallery in the west wing of the house, hoping that it would kindle some long-dead interest in her academics. She’d known, of course, that there were kings and queens lingering in her bloodline, and that they had some very distant relation to the current monarchy. Rhaenyra did not know anymore what number she was in line for the throne, but it was the high double digits.
She’d looked into the faces of people, long dead, to whom she held only a passing resemblance—the silver hair characteristic of their people, the queer shade of their eyes (then, violet, now, watered down by inbreeding having gone out of vogue, more of a deep, serious blue)—and felt only loneliness and a disinterest so deep that it bordered on spite.
The next day, in a fit of madness with no release valve, she’d met up with school chums home on holiday and they’d stolen, then totaled, one of their father’s very expensive cars. It hadn’t started that way. It had started with one friend telling her that he’d nabbed the keys to his father’s Aston, and that Celesse Strickland was going to be there, and that Celesse Strickland may or may not have told him that she fancied Rhaenyra, sort of.
Well, Rhaenyra could work with sort of. In the back of the car, she and Celesse sat pressed together with no seatbelts on, trading swigs from a half pint of whiskey. When the car hit a turn on the long country road, they slid together, back and forth.
And when, 10 minutes before the spin-out into a ditch that would leave them all rattled but miraculously unharmed, her friend suggested she stick her body out the sunroof, Rhaenyra did. She did because she thought it would impress Celesse, that she might get to second base in a petrol station parking lot while her friend bought crisps and mixers inside.
Her tutor had told her, once, that Targaryens were rumored to be gifted with sight—or, psychic, for those not completely old and dull—and Rhaenyra, at times, thought that she was the greatest argument for that not being true. She could see nothing ahead of her except for that which she coveted.
She could not, for instance, see the crash at the end of the speeding car ride. Only the fantasy of a kiss with a girl she liked. So she stuck her body out of that sunroof, and, for one breathless moment, as she felt the wind whip in her hair, Rhaenyra Targaryen was somebody again.
*
Present
“—it’s really not so bad,” Laenor is telling her, “It's one client, twice a week. The Hightowers, brother and sister I think. Your father asked us to put you on something a little out of the city, to avoid the fallout from—” He gestures with his head to the photograph, “You know.”
The Hightowers, as Rhaenyra would learn later, were not brother and sister. This was a clerical error drafted by the employee who had made the initial visit to produce a weekly cost estimate for the work. At the end of the walkthrough, he’d asked the older Hightower for her number, and she’d told him that she didn’t date because of her son, and gestured outside to where a silver-haired boy was flying a drone in the front yard.
The employee had assumed that she was letting him down easy—which, for the record, she was—and later, when recording the occupants of the house who would be home during service, listed Alicent Hightower as the primary occupant, as well as her little brother, Aegon.
Rhaenyra is pulling her bottom lip down with the rim of her glass.
“It’s only for the summer, anyway.” Laena continues, “Then you’ll have your inheritance back and all will be right with the world again. You’ll barely even have to mention it to your friends.”
Rhaenyra frowns. She no longer has friends, really, most of them having dispersed after the release of the dreaded mugshot. In truth, part of her Viserys-induced probation was swearing off anything that could splash her back onto the cover of a tabloid—namely women, fun, and drugs contained through the nose. This has snuffed her social life like a candle.
It is, it seems, a validation of the fear that had first rooted in her all those years ago—that without the drugs, the women, the criminal activity, she would go back to being nobody again. An empty shell, if not filled with the history of her bloodline.
The only person who has bothered to call is Harwin. He is, if nothing else, dependable, and they have maintained a standard appointment for a conversation on what would have been their child’s birthday. In the 13 years since they’d last had sex, he has only pushed the issue of their reconciliation once, and never again after Rhaenyra had confessed her then-burgeoning lesbianism.
He is married now, and has real children, and so it is always surprising to Rhaenyra that he unerringly remembers the fake birthday of an ill-timed bundle of cells. She has nurtured a fear for many years that he does it only out of a sense of deep, platonic affection. She has nurtured another fear for the same out of time that she feels the same way.
This is confirmed when he calls off-schedule, three days after the mugshot is released to the world, and asks her if she is alright. Rhaenyra tells him no, that she is not alright, and begins to cry, to her own deep personal shame.
It is the first time she’s wept over the ordeal, and will be the only.
“My father is trying to humiliate me.” She says to her mugshot.
“Definitely.” Replies Laenor, “But not much you can do about it.”
“I can refuse to do it.”
“And do what else?” Laena says with genuine curiosity. It’s not meant to be an insult, but it becomes one by the very nature of Rhaenyra’s situation.
She cannot do anything else. She’s never had a job, has no way to acquire her own money. Her inheritance, and the promise of a cushy job waiting for her, is really all she has. And so if Viserys says jump, if he says, spend a summer cleaning pools, she must only say—how high?
ii.
The Hightower house is the finest in its neighborhood of nice houses, almost ostentatiously so. It takes Rhaenyra, in her blue polo with her bucket of bits and bobs, a full minute to trudge up the driveway cutting through the immaculate lawn and to the front door.
She fumbles with the paper Laena had given her spelling out the instructions, then follows a cobblestone path around the side of the house and to a fence wrapped in ivy and obscured with hedges.
Hedges she’ll have to trim. A lawn she’ll have to mow. Rhaenyra groans and lets her head fall back for only a moment, despair coursing through her, then punches in the code to the gate and walks through. She decides she’ll start with the pool.
The pool sits placidly, bracketed by white tile, and beyond that a shock of fragrant greenery. Big, sleepy hydrangeas, drooping tree branches, hedges. Rhaenyra edges around the back of a chair and sets down her bucket of particulars on the edge, regarding it.
It being the dead start of June, Rhaenyra would generally expect an errant pool towel, or a plastic ball bobbing over the surface of the water. But there’s nothing, nobody, the whole area looking like it’s been staged for some home decor magazine.
She wrinkles her nose, looks behind her. A pool house interrupts the iron wrought gate. White paneling and blue shingling on its roof. The spigot of an outdoor shower on its side.
Uninterested in actually doing work, and waylaid for a moment by curiosity, Rhaenyra tries the door. Locked. She frowns, jiggles it—it doesn’t open.
“Hello?” Rhaenyra is startled to hear a boy’s voice behind her. The place, while elegant, has the liveliness of a morgue, and she hadn’t expected anybody to be home. But when she turns around, she sees a silver-headed boy, dressed in a black t-shirt and sweatpants and with chipped black polish on his nails, looking at her curiously from the side door of the house, “Are you breaking into our house?” He asks, voice tilting with non-urgent curiosity.
Rhaenyra’s hand drops from the door knob. “No, sorry, I’m the—the new, er, pool…person?”
The boy squints at her. Rhaenyra’s skin heats. She’s unused to this feeling of…embarrassment, is it? Shame, or a close cousin. She has read the intake form, and so knows that this must be the little brother, whose name is escaping her.
“The pool house is always locked.”
“Noted.” For good measure, Rhaenyra folds her arms behind her back, sucking her teeth. The boy keeps squinting at her and she realizes, with a fresh wave of unexpected shame, that he is recognizing her.
Despite Laenor’s jests, Rhaenyra is not quite Paris Hilton. But the picture had certainly floating around.
“You’re that girl from the rags.”
“And who are you?” Rhaenyra snaps, forgetting herself, suddenly peevish. Irritated at the fact that, before she’d even begun to try this whole work charade, the rug is going to be pulled out from underneath her.
The boy pauses, tilts his chin up. Rhaenyra realizes that he can’t be more than 16, all lanky sinew and edgy clothes, “I’m the man of the house.” He says with ironic haughtiness, and Rhaenyra barks out a laugh.
“Are you, then? Isn’t there supposed to be an adult here with you?”
Something passes over the boy’s face, “She’s gone for the week.” He says, then, “I’m Aegon.”
“Rhaenyra.”
“I know. Are you certain you’re not here to rob us?”
“I’m here to clean your pool.”
“Aren’t you rich or something?” Aegon is back to squinting, leaning against the doorframe with his arms folded.
“Fallen on hard times.” Rhaenyra, satisfied now that she’s not about to be, whatever, fired by a 16 year old, moves to her bucket to get something to shock the pool—though it hardly needs it. The thing is pristine.
“So you are trying to rob us.”
“Are you always so nosy?” She snaps with no malice, “Why on earth are you here alone on a beautiful day? Shouldn’t you be out…” She waves a hand dismissively behind her, “Riding bikes or something with your chums?”
“You work for me, you know,” Aegon replies brattily, but without menace. He’s now settled himself into a pool chair, even though it’s sweltering and he’s dressed head to toe in dark colors. “Is it true that you sent that man to the hospital?”
Rhaenyra bristles again. She thins her lips. Nobody has ever spoken to her like this before, not really. “I don’t really want to talk about it. If it’s all the same to you,” Still in a crouch, she makes a mockery of a obsequious bow, “My liege.”
This tickles Aegon, who smiles. The corners of his eyes wrinkle, “I just didn’t know they’d send somebody so cool.” This momentarily disarms Rhaenyra, who has no idea what to say in return. This, it turns out, does not matter, because Aegon has plenty to say for the both of them, “I heard you knocked one of his teeth clean out of his mouth, is that true? That’s so unbelievably sick—”
*
Aegon follows her around for three hours like a puppy who’s taken a yen. He prattles with the overconfidence of the young, about school, about the drone he’d gotten for his birthday.
At first, Rhaeyra thinks, am I going to have to entertain this kid all fucking day? But by the time she’s trimming the hedges and Aegon is describing in great detail the politics of his Minecraft Discord server, Rhaenyra realizes that this is the most human contact outside of her cousins that she’s had in about a month, and she sort of relaxes into it.
“When are you coming back?” Aegon asks when she loads up her car, and Rhaenyra says:
“Thursday.”
He nods, shaggy hair falling momentarily in front of his eyes, “I’ll see you then.”
*
On Thursday, Rhaeyra finishes an hour early, on account of the fact that the place is a museum. If anybody has ever so much as dipped a toe in the pool, or had a lay out on the big, lush lawn, she can’t see a sign of it.
Must be because his sister is gone, she thinks. Aegon only mentions his sister once, calling her the lady of the house in a hoity-toity, Catherine Hepburn sort of accent, in a way that leads Rhaenyra to believe that he is not fond of her. Or, at least, that he’s shunned her in the way that teenagers do to their older relatives who only want the best for them.
“She’s a barrister, so she’s off doing barrister things. Who knows what,” He says. They are in the house, and he’s fetching them full fat Cokes from a big stainless steel refrigerator. Rhaenyra is doing a bad job of pretending she’s not snooping.
The kitchen, which is also immaculate, looks out over the pool. It yawns into a palatial living room with an unlit fireplace littered with pictures, the only evidence that Aegon isn’t just squatting in some unused house between buyers.
She takes one of them in her hand for closer inspection. A redheaded teenager holds a fat, silver haired baby in her arms. She is smiling.
“Want to go on my skateboard?” Aegon asks, starling Rhaenyra. She puts the picture down so fast that she almost topples the rest of them over.
He’s got the Cokes in his hand, a straw in each, and looks eager. What the hell he’s doing here, all alone, when he is a teenager and it is summer and he appears to have all the money in the world to do whatever he wants, floats again across Rhaenyra’s mind.
Then again, what is Rhaenyra doing there, all those same things being true of her except for the teenager bit, and about to agree to go skateboarding with a 15 year old boy? She’s done with work. She could go back to her flat.
But go back to her flat and do what? In the past, she had her pick of the litter. Parties and dates and galas. Now she has a bottle of whiskey and true crime documentaries on Netflix.
And maybe Aegon, she thinks, is doing that same math—not the best. But good enough.
*
Aegon outfits her in an oversize helmet and elbow pads. His apparent concern for her safety is queer but welcome.
Rhaenyra has never been skateboarding, ever, but she doesn’t mention it, and realizes with another shock of humiliation that it’s because she wants Aegon to go on thinking that she’s cool.
What’s become of me? She thinks grimly as she saddles onto the skateboard. It wobbles this way and that. Aegon must sense her discomfort, because he says, “Just hold your balance. I’ll give you a little push.”
She’s got the Coke in her hand and is drinking it from a straw. It’s 7 PM, and the sun is winking somewhere around the tree line. Cicadas are roaring. Their street is otherwise quiet.
Rhaenyra feels a strange tightness grip her chest, some horrible, sopping nostalgia. She wishes for a moment that she could be with Harwin, or Laenor, because for a moment everything is so peaceful, so good. But then, that longing to share a beautiful moment with another person humiliates her afresh.
“I’m ready.” Rhaenyra says grimly. She wants to go on the skateboard so fast that she falls over.
“Are you sure?” Aegon asks behind her. Rhaenyra nods once. “I’ll count you off.”
“Just do it.”
“Alright.” Then Aegon’s hands are at her back. Then, Aegon is pushing her forward.
iii.
Rhaenyra’s life starts anew on the Tuesday afternoon that she meets Alicent Hightower. She has given Alicent no thought until that point, has not even bothered to learn her name. Until that Tuesday, she is Aegon’s older sister. The indifferent, absent lady of the house.
When she arrives at the pool gate around 4 PM, her bucket of things jostling against her side as she ascends the driveway, Aegon is already there and swinging it open for her. His face is flushed with a morbid, boyish excitement. For a fevered moment, she thinks that he is about to take her hand.
“Come look,” He says, exhilarated, “Come look at the pool.”
What else could it be, Rhaenyra supposes, other than a drowned rat floating on the crystal clear surface of the water. What would capture a 15 year old boy’s excitement quite like a rodent meeting an untimely end? Fishing it out will at least give her something to do other than mow 1/15 of an inch off their pristine lawn or shock a pool that hasn’t yet known the touch of a human body.
“Are you grossed out?” Aegon asks, eyeing her askance. Rhaenyra regards him coolly.
“Were you trying to gross me out?”
“I dare you to get it out with your hands.”
She considers this. Once, in secondary school, she’d eaten a whole worm to impress a girl she’d liked, and so this is not strictly speaking outside of her variety of skills. “How much is it worth to you?”
“You’re already rich.”
“I’m also not stupid enough to touch a dead rat for free.”
Beyond the fence, she hears a car pull into the driveway. A door shutting. Rhaenyra turns. She peers over the fence.
There is a woman emerging from a boxy blue car—at first, based only on the datedness of her chariot, which appears to be from the 90’s, Rhaenyra assumes that this must be a maid, or perhaps that Aegon has a tutor.
But when she sees the red hair clipped back from the woman’s face, Rhaenyra understands that this is Aegon’s sister. She’s dressed in an unflattering brown skirt suit, half a size too big and hitting her halfway over her knee. The blazer of it is unbuttoned and slipping down to the elbow of one arm, in which she is struggling to attempt to hold three paper bags from the shop. She’s wearing hose and, on her feet, what look to be a pair of gray men’s trainers.
Rhaenyra understands, of course, when women are dressing to camouflage themselves. She’s never felt the urge—she likes to be seen—but knows the place that it grows from.
However, Aegon’s sister, the woman who she will later come to know as Alicent Hightower, is so startlingly attractive that it makes the entire endeavor seem farcical. Even from afar, even in her boxy brown blazer, Rhaenyra sees her and feels a horrendous mess of butterflies and earthworms squirming in her stomach.
“Aegon,” She whispers, eyes following the shock of red hair as she tries to close the door of her car with her foot, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but is your sister single?”
“Who?”
“Your sister.” Rhaenyra gestures with her head to where Alicent is now leveraging her hip into her venture.
Aegon, suddenly seeming aged well beyond his 15 years, gives Rhaenyra the tired look of a boy—nay, a man—who has heard this question a hundred times before, “That’s not my sister, you twat, that’s my mom.”
“Your mom?” Rhaenyra cranes her head, “She looks my age!”
“That’s because she is your age. Stop doing the math.”
“I’m not doing the math,” Says Rhaenyra, who is right in the middle of doing the math. She has, of course, seen the picture of Alicent and baby Aegon, and it is taking on a new, sharper context now, “What was she, 15?”
Aegon rolls his eyes, “Mom,” He calls, shouldering past Rhaenyra and to the garden gate, “Do you need any help with your bags?”
“That would be wonderful, sweetling,” Alicent says, a touch of surprise in her voice. Rhaenyra reckons that help from Aegon is not much of a common occurrence in the Hightower household.
When Aegon departs, she turns back to the floating rat, as bamboozled as she’s ever been by anything in her life. She hears the sounds of a door shutting and conversation in the house, and then the side door to the kitchen squeaks ajar and Aegon sticks his head out.
“Rhaenyra,” He calls, “Mom wants to meet you.”
Rhaenyra stupidly looks down the front of her blue polo as if she might be able to change it. There’s no helping the situation, of course, except for the faint hope that Alicent might be uglier up close.
She steps into the kitchen, daring to dream, and sees Alicent putting apples into a big bowl at the kitchen island. Alicent glances up at Rhaenyra and Rhaenyra is equal parts thrilled and appalled to find that no, she certainly isn’t ugly.
“You must be Rhaenyra,” Alicent says, stepping around the island and extending a hand to shake. She has a black elastic around her wrist and something about the idea that she does not even color match her hair ties to her hair makes Rhaenyra bizarrely knock-kneed with want, “I’m Alicent, thanks so much for your help with the yard.”
“Nice to meet you, I’m Rhaenyra.” Rhaenyra says, takes her hand, realizes what’s come out of her mouth, and winces.
Beside her, Aegon rolls his eyes, “I’m going to my room.” He mumbles and darts toward the stairwell. Alicent turns her head to call after him,
“Aegon, I don’t want you spending all night on your comp—” A door upstairs slamming. She turns back to Rhaenyra with a strained smile, “Boys, at this age. Can’t tell them anything.”
Rhaenyra realizes, at the same moment that Alicent seems to, that their hands are still clasped together. They jerk away from each other.
A nervous laugh erupts from Rhaenyra, “Aegon’s a nice kid.”
Alicent’s face twitches, but she doesn’t drop her smile, “He’s told me a lot about you.”
Rhaenyra realizes with sudden, humbling clarity that Alicent must know exactly who she is. She’s torn between mortification and awe at Alicent’s ability to pretend that she is a perfect nobody.
She clears her throat, desperate for something to say. For a reason to linger a moment longer in the kitchen. “He said you’re a barrister, is that right?”
“Mm, in the city.” Alicent has gone back to arranging the apples in the bowl, “And you? Have you always—” She waves a hand, “—done yard work?”
Rhaenyra suppresses a smile, “Family business.”
“Is it really.” And then silence befalls them and Rhaenyra knows that yes, the time has come for her to go back to her place at the pool.
Were she still her old self, Rhaenyra thinks, Alicent would never dismiss her. Were they to meet at a bar, perhaps, or some charity event, and Rhaenyra were to be wearing a suit instead of a humiliating blue polo, she’d buy Alicent a drink with the inheritance she still had and tell stories with an acerbic wit and make Alicent laugh.
Rhaenyra, of course, hasn't the foresight to see what comes next for them, and so allows herself to wallow in this moment of self pity, “I’d better get back to it. Nice to meet you…” Alicent’s name almost slips out of her mouth, and then she remembers what Laena had told her about treating customers with respect even if you’re technically richer than them and related by blood to the royal family, and blurts: “Ms. Hightower.”
Alicent’s eyes dart back to Rhaenyra, dancing with amusement. Her mouth twitches, not quite a smile, “Ms. Hightower? That’s a little Upstairs, Downstairs, isn’t it?” There’s a little spark of schoolgirl meanness in her words that delights Rhaenyra, “Alicent is fine.”
Before Rhaeyra can respond, Aegon’s heavy footfalls come from above, and he sticks his head over the railing. He looks breathless like he did when Rhaenyra arrived, “Mom,” He huffs, “I forgot there’s something I wanted to show you.”
Puzzled, Rhaenyra crumples up her face. It's not until Aegon has dragged Alicent halfway out the kitchen door that she remembers the rat and turns to go after them, exclaiming, “Aegon, I don’t think—”
Too late. There’s a yelp from outside that tells Rhaenyra that Alicent has seen what’s in the pool—she steps through the threshold just in time for Alicent to shoulder past her back into the house in a tizzy, saying: “Can you get that thing out of my pool, please? Seven above.”
When she’s gone, Rhaenyra looks at Aegon. He’s smiling, pleased and coy. This is likely the reaction he’d been hoping he’d get from Rhaenyra.
“Did you see her face?” He says to her, as if the two are co-conspirators. Rhaenyra frowns. “She was—hey!” Rhaenyra has shoved the pool skimmer into his chest. He gawps down at it, “What’s this for?”
“It’s not funny to be a cunt to your mother,” Rhaenyra says, using her free hand to press a finger into his chest, “Get that thing out of the pool.”
“You’re the pool person!”
Rhaenyra shrugs, walking to her bucket to get the chlorine. “I’ll give you a tenner if you do it with your bare hands.”
More gawping. She thinks for a fevered second that he’s going to throw the skimmer down and tattle on her to Alicent.
But he doesn’t. He frowns, he huffs. But Aegon takes the skimmer and gets the damn rat out of the pool.
*
And so the great paradox of Alicent Hightower unfolds itself in the periphery of Rhaenyra’s vision. On Thursday, when she comes out to check that Rhaenyra has sanitized the pool after the rat incident, Rhaenyra learns what the elastic is about—Alicent moves to pick at her nail bed, then snaps it harshly against her wrist and moves her hands behind her back. The whack of it against her skin makes Rhaenyra shiver.
Alicent is wound painfully, deliciously tight. Violin strings should be jealous of her. Everything has a purpose, from her matronly skirt suits hiding her body, to her elastic reminding her not to pick her nails, to her unsullied lawn announcing to people that happy, well tended people live in the Hightower house.
It slips, though. It slips enough that even Rhaenyra starts to notice.
On Tuesday, Aegon lets Rhaenyra into the kitchen for a glass of water. Alicent is on the phone behind a set of curtained french doors. At first her voice is only a sharp but unintelligible hum. Then, out of nowhere and crystal clear:
“That man wouldn’t know a fiduciary duty if it stuck an unlubed finger up his arsehole—”
Rhaenyra’s eyebrows shoot up and she glances to Aegon, who shrugs. “She thinks I can’t hear her.”
Which is when Rhaenyra realizes that all that stifled emotion has to go somewhere. Oh, the thought makes her palms damp.
She mentions nothing of her preoccupation to Aegon, who seems world-weary of derelicts like Rhaenyra trying to shag his mother. He still sits and talks with her all day while she toils, both before and after Alicent arrives home from work.
If he has other friends, he never mentions them. If he has hobbies beyond Discord, Minecraft, and mischief, he doesn’t mention this either. No sign of a father, a step father, an uncle with a paternal interest in his life.
Is that what Rhaenyra is becoming to him, she wonders? Should she teach him to fix a car, shave his face? But Aegon seems content to hear her talk about TPing the Headmaster’s quarters on Halloween, and the ensuing suspension.
And then, on the following Thursday, it rains.
Rhaenyra is skimming the pool when the first troubling gust of wind blows through. She turns her face up to the sky, regards the clouds. Then she turns back to her work.
Another flurry. The leaves rattle. The temperature drops. Rhaenyra is scarcely able to take her earbuds out before the sky opens up and a curtain of rain comes pouring down, soaking her.
She runs to the kitchen door and knocks with what she hopes is a non-desperate amount of urgency. Alicent opens it not a moment later, face open with shock, “Rhaenyra,” She gasps, “Gods above, get in here—there, stand there a moment. I’ll be right back.”
Rhaenyra shivers and drips onto the kitchen linoleum until Alicent returns with two towels. She drops one on the floor for her to stand on and wraps the other around Rhaenyra’s shoulders.
She’s changed into a Cambridge sweatshirt and a pair of joggers and her hair is loose around her shoulders. It’s a deep, sanguine red, and the humidity has it frizzing this way and that.
Alicent’s cheeks are pink, and Rhaenyra wonders if this is the most excitement she’s gotten all day. Sitting cooped up in her office, reading documents or whatever it is that barristers do. She blushes too, thinking about it.
“That came on all at once didn’t it?” Alicent says, followed by a strangled little laugh, “We haven’t had a good summer rain yet this season.”
“No,” Rhaenyra agrees, “It's been dry as a bone.”
“Let me, er,” Alicent begins to pick at a nail, snaps the elastic, “Let me make you a hot tea. I’m sorry I don’t have much in the way of dry clothes.”
“That’s alright, tea would be lovely. If it’s not too much trouble.”
“None at all.” And then Alicent takes the box from the cupboard, and then she clicks on the gas range and moves the kettle over it. They stand together in the strained silence of strangers for a moment, each taut with something unsaid.
Rhaenyra speaks first, “I think you must have the cleanest pool I’ve ever seen.” She blurts in a clumsy attempt to fill the silence. In the moments after she considers climbing to the second floor balcony and flinging herself off of it.
Alicent glances at her, “Was that a compliment?”
“I don’t know.” Rhaenyra responds with more honestly than the moment calls for, “It’s an observation. From cleaning it twice a week.”
“I don’t think that either of us has ever swam in it,” Alicent admits, “Me or Aegon. I don’t even know if Aegon owns a bathing suit, to tell you the truth.”
Rhaenyra stares at her, dumbfounded. The kettle shrieks. Alicent pours the water into a big soup mug, and the smell of peppermint fills the kitchen.
“Just a question,” Rhaenyra says as the warm mug gets passed into her hands. Their fingers brush as Alicent does it, and a live wire snaps between them, “But what exactly is it that you think you’re paying me to do while I’m here?”
Alicent smiles somewhat ironically, “If we have the pool, it should be clean. What if Aegon wants to have his—” She waves a hand, “—his school chums over?”
“Aegon has school chums?”
“You would know better than me. He rarely talks to me about anything.” Alicent stands in front of Rhaenyra, regarding her hawkishly, “Except you. He talks with you out there all day. And in the days between he talks about you.”
Rhaenyra pales. She thinks, stupidly and for the first time, of the optics of the situation. For a woman who had given birth at 15 to watch her 15 year old son spend all day with a strange adult—Gods above. “He just needs somebody to talk to, I think. But next time he comes out, I’ll send him away. I didn’t even think—”
“No. No, that’s not what I meant at all. When he started at his new school this year, I had hoped…” Alicent swallows visibly, “I had hoped that he would make some friends in his year. This isn’t ideal, obviously, but I’m glad he’s talking to somebody.”
“Is that a compliment?” Rhaenyra half-jokes. Alicent doesn’t smile. She clasps her hands in front of her. One finger fiddles with the elastic on her wrist.
“I know this is a little odd, but I wanted to ask you a favor.”
“A fav—okay.” Steam is billowing up into Rhaenyra’s face. She blinks through it, “Sure, what do you need?”
Alicent moves to a kitchen drawer, opens it. She pulls out a lime green flier and hands it to Rhaenyra, who stares down at it.
Shakespeare Camp, July 22 - August 20 - Ages 13 - 17
“You want me to join an acting camp for teenagers?”
“I want you to suggest this to Aegon,” Alicent replies. Snaps the elastic once, then twice, then gives up and picks at her cuticle anyway.
“Erm, I don’t know Aegon that well, but he doesn’t quite seem the…the Shakespeare type.”
“Yes, but he needs—” Alicent pauses. She takes a deep, steadying breath, “He was kicked out of weightlifting for dropping the weights off the roof of the school,” Alicent says, “He was kicked out of AV club for replacing what was supposed to be a copy of Gattaca for a biology class with Faces of Death. At the beginning of the summer I put him into swim club and he punched another student.” If Alicent notices the way that Rhaenyra’s face changes at this, she does not let on, “And now word has gotten around. Nowhere will take him. Except for this,” She reaches out and taps the flier, “He cannot stay in this house all summer. I can’t—” For a moment, Alicent looks well and truly flustered. Her eyes are wet and her cheeks have pinkened further. She’s tugging at her top lip with her teeth, moving her mouth around like she’s trying not to cry. “—Gods, you must think I’m a crazy woman. Talking to you like this. Forget I said anything, I’ll just—”
She reaches out to take the flier, but Rhaenyra grips it. Won’t let Alicent take it. A surge of warmth has risen from the pits of her stomach up to her throat, “No, I’ll talk to him. Leave it with me.”
Alicent flutters her eyelashes, “You will?”
Outside, the rain clears. Sun pours through the windows. Rhaenyra hasn’t touched her tea, “Yes, I—well, I like Aegon,” She says, and is surprised by the truth of it. When had she forgotten to see him as a pest, a gnat buzzing around her head while she works? When had she let her guard down and begun to enjoy his company, “So if you think this’ll help him…”
“I do. It’s not good for him, being here all day. It makes him…I don’t know. He’s seemed so much angrier to me lately. I don’t know. Morose.”
Rhaenyra regards her. “Do you know who I am?” She asks suddenly, a surprise even to herself. The question is gentle, probing. She studies Alicent’s face when she asks it.
Alicent stares back at her. Blinks. Keeps her face carefully blank, then tilts her head somewhat. Maybe, Rhaenyra thinks, she should be the one taking acting lessons, “Should I?”
Rhaenyra nods once, sets the tea on the counter. She folds the flier and places it into her pocket, “I’ll talk to Aegon.” She confirms, “And see if I can’t get him to do it.”
*
On Tuesday, Aegon cuffs up his black jeans and dips his feet into the pool while Rhaenyra sweeps leaves from the patio. She’s got the stupid flier folded in the back pocket of her shorts and is running through ways that she might segue this into a conversation on the merits of the Bard.
She has not told anybody, even Leanor and Leana, about what she’s agreed to do for Alicent. They would have counseled Rhaenyra about the unprofessionalism of getting involved in this petty domestic drama, which is exactly the kind of sound advice she doesn’t want to hear.
Because here is Aegon, a forlorn silver-haired nuisance, a princeling cooped up in his castle for the summer with a mother who seems frightened of him and no father to speak of. It's so on the nose that Rhaenyra almost can’t believe it’s real.
And she can’t exactly tell if she’s feeling charitable, or nostalgic, or keen to impress Alicent when she sits beside him and puts her own legs into the pool. “Where were you on Tuesday?” She asks. Aegon doesn’t turn his head to her.
“In my bedroom, playing games,” He squints against the sun, “I heard you downstairs talking to mom.”
“I got rained out. I had to leave early because I had no dry clothes, even. I’m a little surprised you didn’t come down to witness my misery.”
He turns to her, his young face terribly serious, “You should know that she exaggerates things. When she talks about them. She’s very emotional,” Rhaenyra lifts her eyebrows, “So if she said anything about me, you can’t exactly believe it.”
“So the Faces of Death thing—lie? Because I actually thought that one was pretty clever.”
Aegon’s face opens in surprise, “She told you that?”
“And more. That you took a swing on one of your swim teammates. I rather thought your interest in the subject was purely academic.”
“He deserved it.” He says, and splashes some water with one of his feet. Rhaenyra can’t tell exactly if he seems proud of these misdeeds or ashamed of them. Perhaps both.
“So did mine,” She replies, “One of my friends was too drunk to stand and he kept trying to get her into a car home with him. Wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
Aegon regards her for a moment, then says, “He called my mom a slag.”
“Well,” Rhaenyra ponders this, “If she is, I suppose it’s not any of his business.”
“I’m at her old secondary school now. The one she was at when she got pregnant with me. Did she tell you that? No, she wouldn’t. She only ever wants to talk about me and the bad stuff that I’ve done.” He sniffs and wipes his nose and it makes him look so young that Rhaenyra feels her heart turn brittle to the verge of breaking, “We used to live in this terrific apartment in the city, and nobody knew us. And then out of nowhere she brings us here, and everybody knows about her and my dad. Except me.”
Oh Christ, Rhaenyra thinks, we’re so deep in that we’re talking about his deadbeat father. She has daddy issues, yes, but has yet to surmount them and thus has no idea how to counsel a 15 year old on his own. “Do you…see your father very often?”
“I’ve never met him.”
“I’m sorry, Aegon, that’s really—”
“He was a nonce,” Aegon interrupts, “And if I ever did meet him, I’d thump him too for what he did to my mom.” It isn’t lost on Rhaenyra that what he’d done to Alicent was Aegon. She reels for a moment, “I never thought about him when we lived in the City. Now I think about him all the time.”
The smell of chlorine hangs heavy in the air. Inside, in the kitchen, they can hear the muffled sounds of Alicent shuffling about. But Rhaenyra is only looking at Aegon, how troubled he seems, how angry, like rapids cutting furiously through a river. “After my mom died, my father married his 20 year old secretary. She was three years older than me. I used to go into her bedroom and hide tinned fish in the vents and crevices and things. It drove her so crazy that they tore the wall out thinking it was dead mice or something,” The memory still makes Rhaenyra smile, “I can’t say for certain that that’s why they got divorced, but it can’t be disproven, either.”
Aegon laughs heartily, “Tinned fish in the vents, why hadn’t I thought of that?”
“Please don’t tell your mother I gave you any ideas.”
“So she’s spoken to you about the Shakespeare thing, I reckon,” Aegon turns a hawkish look to her, “Hasn’t she?”
“Perhaps I just have a keen interest in the Bard,” Rhaenyra is removing the flier from the back pocket of her shorts. Aegon rolls his eyes.
“I’ll save you some time. No. Why do you even care?” He scoffs, kicking the water, “You’re literally just our pool person.”
“I don’t care. In fact, if you do this, I’ll have nobody to help me start the lawnmower,” Rhaenyra says, “But your mother cares. And it would be so much worse if she didn’t.” Perhaps Aegon doesn’t see this now, but Rhaenyra knows with painful certainty that he will later on. Later on, he’ll wish he’d seen the stupid Shakespeare camp for what it is.
She holds the lime green flier between them, waiting for Aegon to take it.
“She doesn’t care. She just wants me out of the house,” Aegon turns a piercing look to Rhaenyra, “She hates me. You couldn’t tell?”
“You two are both sort of hard on each other, aren’t you? But you’ve only got one mom, mate, and she’s only got one of you.”
He pauses, and Rhaenyra reflects on what she’s just said. She might be just as startled by it as Aegon seems to be.
Aegon takes the flier from her, he looks at it. Then he tears it in half and lets the halves drift into the pool, “l’m not doing it,” He says, “But if she asks I’ll tell her that you tried your best.”
“Fair play,” Rhaenyra replies, “But you can’t just spend all summer wasting away here, your only friend to speak of being the 30 year old lesbian who cleans your pool.”
“That seems like something you made up just now,” Aegon responds lightly, “Rather than an actual rule.”
*
When Rhaenyra next arrives, the house is shuttered and sedate. She notes Alicent’s car at the top of the driveway, but when she pushes through the garden gate Aegon is nowhere to be found, nor can Alicent be heard puttering in the kitchen.
She crouches at her pail of tools only to find that, of course, there’s no chlorine. Rhaenyra puffs out her cheeks, glances around.
There’s the pool house, of course, that Aegon had informed her was always locked. Were Aegon there, he might’ve been able to procure her a key. No such luck.
But then again, Leana had given her a set of keys—for emergencies only, she’d cautioned Rhaenyra, not for snooping. Rhaenyra fishes them from her shorts pocket. There’s one labeled house, one labeled garage, and one unlabeled.
She shrugs to herself. Worth a try.
However, when Rhaenyra approaches the pool house, she swears she can hear something. Some movement. There are windows on the front and sides, but the shades are drawn.
She puts her hand on the doorknob, and realizes that she won’t even need the key—it’s already open. Rhaenyra pushes the door in.
“Gods above!” The first thing to register to Rhaenyra is the smell of cigarette smoke. The second is Alicent up on her knees on a loveseat, reaching onto a side table ashtray to snuff out her smoke.
Rhaenyra blinks, suspended for a moment in shock. She registers what she’s seeing. The pool house is half storage area, half living room, with a couch and side table pressed against one wall and life jackets and pool widgets against the other.
“Rhaenyra?” Alicent asks, her voice high and harried. Rhaenyra snaps back into reality, as strange a place as it happens to be, and shakes her head.
“I am so sorry, the chlorine in my bucket ran out, and—is that Twilight?”
There is a book on Alicent’s lap. She covers the cover with both hands. “No.”
“Are you…in here having a cig and reading Twilight by Stephanie Meyer?”
“There’s chlorine in the clear bin on the shelf,” Alicent points a finger to the other side of the room, her other hand still covering what is most definitely Twilight.
Rhaenyra goes to the bin, fishes the bottle out. Then she stands for a moment facing Alicent. The room is cramped and they’re no more than a few feet from one another.
“Is it any good? I confess I haven’t read it since secondary school.”
An exasperated look from Alicent, “Please don’t start. I come out here to avoid ridicule.”
“I’m not ridiculing, I’m simply inquiring.” Rhaenyra puts her hands up in a defensive gesture. She’s smiling, she can’t help it. “Does Aegon know about this?”
“Of course not, he thinks we use the pool house to store old furniture. That’s the point.” Alicent lets her head fall against the back of the loveseat then, exposing the long column of her neck. Rhaenyra thinks about how much time it would take to run her lips up that neck, and then she’s not smiling anymore, “Seven help me, what is happening to me?”
“Are you alright?”
“I’m fine, just having another totally normal run in with my pool cleaner,” Alicent’s head comes back up, “Does this happen to you a lot?”
Alicent now has a sort of lunatic intensity about her. Her eyes are dark and her face is flushed. It puts Rhaenyra on her back foot, “This…specific scenario? I—what’s that?”
“What’s what?” Alicent follows Rhaenyra’s eyeline until she lands on a magazine laying out on the side table.
Her flush turns a bright red. The red of a cherry tomato ready to eat. All at once Rhaenyra is on her front foot again, and what a relief that is. She’d begun to think that she was losing her edge.
“Is that me?”
“Is it—hmm, well let me—yes, so it is! How odd.” Alicent picks up the magazine and pretends to study it for the first time. It’s the same one that ran the story of Rhaenyra’s most recent squabble, but Rhaenyra understands by the woman she’s with in the photograph that it must be from some years ago.
She can’t see the whole headline, but it begins with Realm’s Delight Indeed! Heiress Rhaenyra Targaryen Seen Out with Model—
“I knew Aegon must’ve said something to you.”
“He didn’t need to. The agency sent your name ahead of time.” Alicent’s eyes flick down to the magazine, then back to Rhaenyra, as if comparing the two images, “I thought it sounded familiar.”
“Is that Mysaria?” Rhaenyra juts her chin to the magazine. Alicent blushes, as if the acknowledgment of the other woman in the photograph has made her shy. Perhaps it should — they’d been leaving a bar after screwing in the bathroom, and looked like it. “That was three years ago. Where’d you get it, the National Archives?”
“It’s just what we had laying around the house.” Alicent shifts on the couch, sitting a little forward. Rhaenyra wonders if a part of her isn’t relieved that the charade is over, “Truthfully, I was looking for some clue as to why you’re mowing my lawn twice a week.”
“It’s a boring story. And convoluted,” Rhaenyra shrugs, “You probably wouldn’t believe me if I told you. Rich person bullshit.”
“Humor me.”
“Well,” Rhaenyra blows out a breath, reckons that this is fair play for busting in on Alicent in what is clearly a sanctuary of some sort, “I assume you’ve heard about the Criston Cole business. And the arrest. My father thought that manual labor might set me straight—I don’t know. This is my cousin’s business.”
“You’re nearly 30, aren’t you?”
Rhaenyra rolls her eyes, “And still dependent on my inheritance, which my father controls. Should’ve thought about all this before I dropped out of university, probably.”
“Hm.” Alicent sits back again. The excitement has made her only prettier. She looks overwrought, like she’s just come in from a run, “She’s pretty.”
Alarmed, Rhaenyra’s brow furrows, “What?”
“The woman,” Alicent does not say her name, which Rhaenyra tries and fails to read nothing into, “She’s gorgeous.”
“Are you surprised?” Rhaenyra is delighted when Alicent bites back a smile.
“Just trying to piece it all together, I suppose.”
“I would recommend leaving the pieces be, if I were you.”
“It makes sense, though, Aegon’s fascination with you,” Alicent continues, undeterred, “The business with you punching that fellow in London. He likes that sort of thing.”
“Where is he, anyway? I haven’t seen hide nor hair of him.”
Alicent’s brow furrows, then smooths as she seems to realize something, “Of course, you two haven’t seen each other since last week. He’s at the camp.”
“He is?” Rhaenyra knows that her surprise is plain on her face.
“He told me what you did. That you talked to him, I mean.” Alicent unfolds herself from the couch, the book and magazine sliding off her lap, and takes a few steps across the room to stand before Rhaenyra. Rhaenyra is not prepared for such close proximity and again finds herself outwitted by Alicent’s lovely face and faint, sweet smell. “Thank you. I know it was an odd request, and you didn’t have to do it.”
“The whole thing’s a bit odd, isn’t it? It was no problem, really.” A harsh swallow. They’re staring at each other hard, as if each of them is trying to solve a challenging math equation, “I swore off drugs after the cock up in London, so one has to make their own fun, I suppose.”
It’s a nervous, off kilter joke. Alicent’s face remains tranquil in the wake of it. “Swore them off? I would imagine a little cocaine would only help your pool cleaning abilities,” A beat, “It would go quicker, at least, and I’d have to pay you less.”
Rhaenyra erupts in a surprised, delighted laugh. Alicent smiles in wry pleasure at her own joke, “Aren’t you a barrister or something? And how did you guess cocaine? That feels a little pointed.”
“Was I wrong?” Alicent asks, and Rhaenyra laughs again. In what feels like half a second, they’re no longer strangers to one another. It’s so odd, so sudden, that Rhaenyra feels it in the exact moment it happens like a thunderclap, “What are you doing tonight?”
“These days I mostly go to my flat and ponder my life choices.” Rhaenyra replies, taken off guard.
“Why don’t you stay for tea? As a thank you.” Alicent asks. Rhaenyra glances down and catches her fingers reaching out for the elastic, then retreating, “There’s a pizza in the freezer. We’re all out of cocaine, I’m afraid, but there’s, erm…four, maybe five beers in the garage fridge from the last time my brother came round.”
Rhaenyra’s heart starts hammering like she’s been asked to get on stage and perform a monologue. She has heretofore considered talking to women one of — or perhaps her only — strong suit, but is, for some reason, rendered stupid and sweaty palmed by the simple request. “Fortunately for you I’m a cheap date. Pizza and four-or-five cold beers sounds like a treat.”
“Not cold, exactly. The garage fridge has been fussy for weeks.”
“You didn’t have to lie, I would have done it just for the pizza.”
“Did I lie?” Alicent raises her eyebrows, “I only said that they were in the fridge, not that they were cold.”
“Gods above, you really are a barrister, aren’t you?”
Alicent laughs then. What a terrific laugh it is, too, and telling of something about Alicent that Rhaenyra doesn’t yet know. It’s light and girlish and a little surprised. Rhaenyra feels proud, like she’s earned it. When it’s over, she wants to play it back to hear more of its nuance. “Aegon will be so pleased.” She says, then reaches out and squeezes Rhaenyra’s bicep. “Thank you again, Rhaenyra.”
Rhaenyra finishes her work that day thinking, we’re not strangers anymore. She finishes it thinking of the little faux-living room that Alicent had built up in that pool house, and the bits of herself she’d been squirreling away in there, away from Aegon.
She thinks about Alicent curled up on that couch with a cigarette, reading about Rhaenyra in an old magazine. That she, Rhaenyra herself, had inadvertently become one of those secret things.
“Hey!” Rhaenyra whips her head around to see Aegon sticking his head out of the side door to the house. She realizes that she’s been crouched by the edge of the pool, staring at her own reflection, “Thought we were paying you to clean, not admire your own reflection.”
“Can I help you, Egg?” Rhaenyra stretches into a standing position, bending her back somewhat. It cracks. “Your mother told me that you lied to me about skipping that camp, by the way.”
“She told me that you said you’d stay for tea tonight,” Aegon is smiling now, “True or false?”
“She’s promised me five lukewarm beers for my trouble. So, true.”
Inside the kitchen, there’s an opened beer on the island and an ambient heat from the oven. It smells like warm grease and plastic cheese from the pizza, and Alicent is cobbling together a salad out of some half-used vegetables and a head of lettuce.
They interrogate Aegon about the camp — how was it (“Fine.”) — what show will they be doing (“A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”) — and what role will he be playing?
Aegon has been picking bits of tomato from his salad. He pauses at this question and glances up at Rhaenyra, who is seated across from him at the island, “They’re doing tryouts next week. Everybody gets a role, even if it’s just as a tree or something. But I was wondering if I could practice with you sometimes. While you’re skimming the pool or something.”
Rhaenyra pauses mid-chew, remembers to not let her shock be too obvious, and finishes her bite, “‘Course mate, whatever would help.”
She sees Alicent’s pleased expression out of the corner of her eye, but knows that she cannot dwell there for too long.
After dinner, Aegon insists on one round of Mario Kart on the living room couch. In passing, she sees the photograph of Alicent and baby Aegon again.
It occurs to Rhaenyra suddenly that that’s around the age she was when she read Twilight for the first time, back when it was popular. Back when all the girls in her dorm were obsessed with it.
Yes, Alicent would have been somewhere around her third trimester when it came out. Or perhaps Aegon would have been a squalling, breastfed newborn.
Rhaenyra suppresses a hard swallow. She blinks against the sudden, painful warmth in her chest and turns to the couch where Aegon and Alicent are already seated. “Coming, Rhaenyra?” Aegon asks, tooling around with one of the controllers.
“Coming to kick your ass,” Rhaenyra says, and then, when Alicent shoots her a dirty look, “Your butt. Coming to kick your butt.”
*
There is only one Rhaenyra v. Alicent Mario Kart matchup. Rhaenyra is assured by Alicent that Alicent has never played, and then is promptly creamed on the rainbow road.
“She lied,” Aegon says from the other side of the couch. He’s fussing about on his phone, the white light bright on his face, “I hear her down here playing all the time after I’ve gone to bed.”
Rhaenyra gapes at him in disbelief, “And you sat there and said nothing?”
He shrugs, looks up from his phone. Smiles cheekily. Looks to his mother and she looks to him, fond as anything. She pinches his ear. He squirms away, laughing.
Rhaenyra smiles. Finds herself not really caring that she’s lost.
*
“You’re being a good sport,” Alicent says. The porch light is casting shadows all over her face. Inside, the faint sounds of Aegon doing the washing up, “About all of this, really.”
From her place beneath Alicent on the footpath, Rhaenyra looks up and smiles, “Not really. I had a nice time tonight.”
“Gods, don’t humor us.” Alicent laughs good-naturedly. She wraps one arm around her middle and uses the other to play with one of her earrings, “I know you must have better things to be doing with your time than spending it with some lonely single mother and her miscreant son. Whom you technically work for.”
Rhaenyra used to think that that was true. Now she isn’t sure. When was the last time she’d had a night quite as nice as this one? She has a full belly and is pleasantly lightheaded from three out of the five beers, which were only barely cold as promised.
More than that, her chest is buzzing. A crush, she thinks, but not the adult sort. Not the kind that one could easily see the outcome of. It's the kind of juvenile feeling she hasn’t had in a decade. An infatuation with no safety net.
She feels nauseated, she feels ripe like a good piece of fruit. She feels anxious to know when she and Alicent will see each other next, and what they will do when it happens.
“Not really,” She answers truthfully, and is pleased when Alicent looks both confused and delighted by this answer, her nose scrunching sweetly. Rhaenyra herself feels pleased by it. No, she’d had nothing better to do that evening. Dinner with Alicent and Aegon was, oddly enough, exactly where she was meant to be.
Rhaeyra raises her hand in a wave as she turns to head back down the footpath. The sky is a bruised purple-orange. The cicadas are going at high volume. Nothing is certain except for one thing, one island that lingers out in the oblivion of time and of things yet to come: “I’ll see you Tuesday, yeah?”
*
Interlude.
Tuesday is as hot a day as they have had all summer. It’s the kind of heat that nothing can touch, both dense and wet. It quiets the cicadas and keeps people in their houses.
People, but not Rhaenyra, who has to mow the front lawn at the Hightower house. Her skin is covered in a thin sheen of sweat and she’s even pulled back what’s left of her mullet into a sad, tiny pony tail that pokes out from the base of her skull.
Aegon isn’t there, won’t be back from camp until an hour into her shift at least. Alicent is nowhere to be found. So she pulls off that Gods-awful blue polo and tucks it half into her khaki shorts, leaving her in only a white sports bra.
Perhaps it will cause a minor neighborhood scandal, but Rhaeyra doesn’t find that she really cares. She yanks the engine cord of the lawn mower until it roars to life and pushes it, biceps flexing with exertion.
She’s done two passes in a vertical line before she can feel herself being watched. Rhaneyra pauses, pulls an earbud out of her ear. She turns.
Alicent stands on the porch step, watching from afar. She’s playing with one of her earrings again, and Rhaenyra can see that she’s sucked her bottom lip into her mouth. Despite the hot weather, she’s in her usual voluminous trappings.
There’s no mistaking that she’s looking at Rhaenyra. Watching her, really, and so intensely that she doesn’t seem to realize that she’s been caught until Rhaenyra kills the lawn mower engine and calls, “Alicent?”
Alicent drops her hand and sucks in a breath, seeming to blink back into reality. Rhaenyra removes the polo from her pants and uses it to mop some sweat from her face as she strides across the lawn and up to the front step.
“Everything alright?” Rhaenyra asks when she’s in front of Alicent, now toweling the top of her head with the polo.
“Your shirt,” Alicent says, and Rhaenyra glances down at herself, a blush rising on her cheeks.
“Shit, I’m sorry, it’s just that it was so hot this afternoon—”
“No, not at all,” Alicent hastens to say. Her cheeks, too, are pink, “It might cause a stir with old Mrs. Danvers next door, but whatever makes you most comfortable.”
“Alright.” They look at each other in a moment of potent silence. Rhaenyra is studying Alicent’s face, her peculiar expression. Trying to puzzle out what it could mean, “Anything…else?”
Alicent blinks harshly and seems to remember herself, “Gods, yes. I’m sorry. I came to ask you if you’d like a glass of water.”
“Water would be amazing.”
“Right. Excellent. Water it is, then.” Alicent laughs once, cursory and awkward, then tightens her face and turns back toward the front door. “I’ll just be a moment.”
Rhaenyra looks down the front of herself and back up to Alicent’s retreating form. How odd, she thinks.