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Helaena knelt beside the bath and inhaled the steam that curled upward from its surface, allowing its warmth to ease away the anxious tension constricting her throat. The dragon dreams always left her this way, with a fist of iron around her lungs that would only allow her to breathe if she obeyed their commands. Usually they spoke of grave inevitabilities that would change her world forever: the eye, the beast…the rats.
This one had been strange in its simplicity—Aegon’s chambers, a warm bath by the fire, a few thin tendrils of crimson swirling among the clear water. Blood, obviously, but not enough to matter. The urgency of this dream had been just as powerful as any other, though, and hadn’t allowed her a moment’s peace until she’d burst into her husband’s room and demanded the servants there draw a bath. Only now that it was done did her heart slow to a bearable pace.
Now she waited on her knees, the fire in the hearth warming her back while she trailed her fingers through the hot water and wondered whose blood would blend with it tonight.
She heard Aegon’s laughter, raucous and outlandish in this world without their son, before he burst through the door, flanked by armed guards. She rose, a dutiful queen upon the entrance of her king, and for the briefest of moments surprise crossed his face at seeing her there, surprise she imagined was mirrored on her own face at seeing him covered head to toe in blood. He recovered himself quickly, though, and his toothy grin beamed white among the scarlet splatter as he strode across the room to take her hands.
“He’s dead, Hel!” he crowed. He pulled her close, caught her face between his palms, and pressed a sticky kiss against her forehead. When he drew back to look at her, his violet eyes were manic but stunningly clear of the haze of drink. “The bastard who killed our boy! I’ve bashed in his skull!” Drunk on violence rather than liquor, then. “I should’ve kept him alive to torture for weeks—the Seven know he’d deserve it—but fuck, it felt so good to feel his bones crumble…”
He crushed her against his chest more tightly than he’d ever held her before; the metallic stench of his blood-drenched tunic engulfed her, making her gorge rise.
“You reek of death,” she murmured in the quiet voice she knew he rarely heard and never acknowledged. But tonight, as if their grievous loss had suddenly awakened him to her existence, he stepped back and considered her with his brow furrowed.
“Gods, you’re right,” he laughed. “I’m so sorry!” He dipped a hand into the tub next to them and used his moistened fingers to slick away a streak of gore his tunic had left upon her cheek while she stared up at him in disbelief. She’d never heard him apologize to anyone in his life, let alone her.
“Out!” he commanded the guards and servants who loitered; they scurried to obey. Aegon didn’t wait for the door to fully close behind the last of them before he began to strip off his filthy clothing and cast it haphazardly aside, layer by layer. Helaena felt her stomach clench in anticipation; his blood was up from the slaughter, so of course he’d want to find his release while she was conveniently present to provide it.
But surprise claimed her once more when instead of bending her carelessly over his mattress, he launched himself into the bathtub, sending a few wild droplets cascading onto her dressing gown. He submerged himself fully for a moment or two before his head burst back through the surface, and, sputtering, he cleared the water from his eyes. He turned to her.
“Help me get this bastard’s blood out of my hair?”
It was more request than demand, and the unusually gentle tone made Helaena all too eager to comply. She knelt behind him, took up the comb and the bar of soap from the tray the servants had placed beside the bath, and set to work.
The lather she worked into his scalp wicked away the evidence of his vengeance in a pink froth that smelled of lilacs and swiftly overpowered the iron stench of blood. She dragged the comb through curls as silver as her own, and when she rinsed its teeth between each pass, she saw the blood swirl away in eddies identical to what she’d seen in her dragon dreams. How peculiar that she’d foreseen such a quiet moment of peace, one that was meaningless in the grand scheme of the storm raging around them. She’d have thanked the gods for this small respite, if she’d believed they cared.
She continued to run first the comb, then her fingers through Aegon’s hair long after the last of the blood had been rinsed from its strands; judging by the way he relaxed against the side of the tub and hummed soft sounds of contentment, he found the repetitive motion as soothing as she did. His eyes had drifted closed, and just as Helaena began to wonder if he’d fallen asleep, he reached back to disentangle her hand from his curls and bring it to his lips.
“I don’t deserve you, sister,” he murmured, then pressed a kiss against her wrist. It was a rare admission from a man who so often railed that he was the king, lest anyone forget.
He craned his neck back so he could look up at her. “Join me?” he invited. “Before the water cools.”
It was another gentle request that drew Helaena like a fly to honey. She rose, moved to stand beside the bath, and shed the green serpent’s skin of her dressing gown. She wore nothing underneath.
Aegon beheld her as if he were seeing her for the first time. In a way, Helaena supposed he was, for this was the first time she’d been naked before him without him being outrageously drunk. She relished the silent adoration in his eyes, the look she had hoped he’d give her on their wedding night, only several years too late.
He placed a hand, warm from the bathwater, on her hip and traced his fingertips along the intricate netting of thin white lines that had appeared there when she’d borne his children. Or Aemond’s—she didn’t rightly know which of her brothers had sired her twins, if she were honest with herself. The markings reminded Helaena of spiders’ silk. “Kissed by lightning,” Aemond had said as he’d pressed his lips to them, before Storm’s End had changed him. He’d covered himself in chitinous armor after that, like the beetles she collected from the garden and kept in glass jars, secluded from everyone.
He never kissed her anymore, since then.
Aegon smoothed his hand along her waist and upward; when his palm grazed over the curve of her breast, the sense memory of a tinier, newborn hand touching her there struck her as hard as a blow, sending a sob flying from her lips. Aegon snatched his hand back and hastily asked, “Did I hurt you?” More words he had never spoken to her before.
Helaena shook her head, her voice catching around the words she sought to explain her reaction. Aegon took her hands and steadied her as she stepped into the bath, and the water surrounded her like a warm blanket when she sank beneath its surface, calming her enough to allow her to speak.
“I used to steal into the nursery to feed the twins, just after they were born,” she confessed. The bathtub was barely large enough for one person, let alone two, so she had to sit on her heels while straddling his thighs to make herself comfortable. The intimacy of the position felt both strange and wonderful.
“Mother said it wasn’t proper for a princess to nurse her own babes, but the ache when I didn’t was unbearable,” she went on. She brought his hands to her breasts as if by touching her, he would be able to feel the echo of her pain. “Your hand…it reminded me of how Jaehaerys would cling to me while he suckled. He always fed so greedily…” Her throat tightened once more as a single tear trickled unbidden down her cheek.
Aegon clutched her arms in a bruising grip and closed what little distance remained between them by resting his forehead against hers. She could feel him trembling as his fingers dug into her skin, could hear the anguish in his voice as he pleaded, “Let me give you another. I know it won’t replace what we’ve lost, but I…I want another chance. Please.” He sounded not like a king in want of an heir but like a wayward father desperate for redemption, a wholly different man from the self-centered young fool she had married.
As Helaena cast her eyes down at the dark water between them, she saw the rest of what her dragon dreams had offered her this night: a chance at creating a new life, one conceived in grief and comfort shared, one that would end in immeasurable sorrow but promised unfathomable love during its fleeting presence. It was her love and sorrow to bear, if she chose.
Her hand dipped beneath the water, and she found that despite his grief, Aegon was ready for her, if she would have him. She shifted her position in his lap so she could ease him inside her; he let out a soft sob of unbelieving gratitude when her hips settled flush with his.
He leaned back so he could look at her and wove his fingers through the hair at her nape as he asked, “Do you love me?”
Helaena didn’t know where the words came from, perhaps the reverberation of a dream in someone else’s past, but when she spoke them, the tears that lingered in his eyes spilled onto his cheeks.
“Of course I do, you imbecile.”