Chapter Text
Her eleventh babe was born too early and arrived in the world as a sickly, frail thing—half the size of his brother closest in age. The labor had been long and arduous, the maesters and her husband hovering over her for days before, during, and after her son had been born, fearing for her life. But she recovered from the birthing bed and demanded to hold her son when she was strong enough, though the babe Jaehaerys delivered into his wife’s arm was weak, his ting lungs wrecked from a rattling cough. As Alysanne looked tenderly upon her newest child, the kindest of the maesters stepped up to the bed and warned her it would be a miracle if he survived the year, while the others remained silent, too cowardly to tell their queen the truth; but Alysanne paid him no mind.
“Gaemon,” the Good Queen whispered as she wiped the sweat from the baby’s face with the soft fabric of her nightgown. “His name will be Gaemon.”
Jaehaerys’ smile was shallow, but he nodded approvingly. “Gaemon,” he echoed as she could guide his searching, gasping mouth to her nipple.
Alysanne kept a vigilant eye on her son, hovering obsessively over him, but even her determination could not provide her infant with stronger lungs and better health. When three months after his birth, Gaemon fell ill, the maesters once again warned her that the babe was almost sure to die. Alysanne stayed with him throughout the night, and, miraculously, he still drew breath on the next morn. Soon he past his first nameday, and King Jaehaerys and Queen Alysanne threw a celebration as King’s Landing had never seen.
Gaemon slowly, and not surely, grew and astounded everyone with each nameday he survived. His constitution never improved, and he was constantly in poor health. His sickly nature and weak lungs confined him to his rooms more days than not, doom to watch from his windows as the world passed him by. On the rare occasions he was well enjoy to join his siblings, it was bound to be full of merciless and mean-spirited jokes played by Saera and Viserra, who say that his sickness transferred to his dragon egg and killed it in its shell (though they had no dragons themselves to speak of either). However, Gaemon was a gentle soul and never took the mocking jests to heart and, although he often preferred the company of sensitive Daella and sensible Magelle, he grew fonder of Viserra and her haughty beauty each year.
How unfortunately ironic it is, then, that Gaemon was the brother Viserra disliked the most. First was his frailty had caused her the affection of her mother as the queen sat beside Gaemon for years. Second was that Viserra was a girl, and then a woman, motivated by greed, vanity, and pride. She had no interest in kissing games or boys, and she played with them as she used to play with puppies, no more likely to lie with one of them than a dog itself. She never yearned for love; she yearned for the fame and power of the throne and of a strong husband, ambitions to which Gaemon could offer nothing.
Her other brothers, however…
Two of her three surviving older brothers were married—and Vaegon would sooner die than marry any woman or man—but marriage can be such a temporary thing. For most of her life, she watched her brothers Aemon (six-and-ten years her elder, who had married Jocelyn Baratheon before she had even been born and had a daughter, Rhaenys, just three years Viserra’s junior) and Baelon (four-and-ten years her elder, who had married their sister Alyssa when Viserra was four) with hunger. Not for who they were or how they looked, but for what they were—princes in direct line for the throne.
Marriage to one of them would put her in line to become queen. If Jocelyn Baratheon was to die and she to marry Aemon, she was directly in line for the throne. If Aemon were to die without producing a male heir, then the crown would fall to Baelon and his sons, Viserys and Daemon. (Viserra knew well the intricacies of appeasing the Seven Kingdoms and knew of the uproar that would follow if Jaehaerys maintained Rhaenys, a girl, as his heir over Baelon. The Targaryen tradition of intermarrying was already bad enough in the eyes of the common men, that it had already caused one uprising. The Doctrine of Exceptionalism, which pardoned the Targaryen tradition, had been founded on shaky grounds, but at least then a king has still made it—not a queen.)
When Alyssa passed in 84 AC, leaving behind two sons, Viserra did not weep but rejoiced. For months and months after Alyssa’s funeral, she tried to convince her mother and father to betroth them, to marry her to him, but they refused. Rather, Alysanne was determined not to prevent such a marriage but knew the only way to stop Viserra was to have her marry herself. She discussed her betrothal with an aging Theomore Manderly, who had already been widowed four times in late 85 AC. Viserra begged her father to reconsider, but he refused to intervene. Enraged at the news, Viserra tried to seduce Baelon by slipping into his bed, drunk and naked, but he, too, sent her away.
Her only saving grace from the marriage came in the unlikely form of Gaemon, who upon hearing of the almost certain engagement of Viserra, approached their parents in an uncharacteristic moment of bravery.
Only three-and-ten and barely recovered from yet another infection of his lungs, a stained kerchief pressed to his lips, Gaemon stood before King Jaehaerys and Queen Alysanne and asked for his sister’s hand.
How could she deny her youngest son, who had never asked for anything before, his only wish? And, she reasoned with Jaehaerys, it might be the only way to prevent Viserra from following in Saera’s path (who, following a simultaneous amorous relationship with three men, was disowned, attempted to steal a dragon egg in retaliation, sent to serve as a novice in the Faith in Oldtown under her sister Septa Magelle, and then fled to serve in Lyseni pleasure house before turning to Volantis and starting her own). While both parents knew Viserra would truthfully never do something so incriminating, too sly and too conniving and too uninterested in the pleasures of flesh to do the same, they both agreed it was a worthy compromise.
And so they announced the betrothal of Viserra Targaryen to her bother Gaemon Targaryen on the first day of the new year. The two were set to marry by mid-summer of 87 AC. It would be sooner, but Gaemon was still a boy.
To say Viserra was displeased by the news would be a kind understatement, she all but shunned her brother until the day of the marriage itself a year and a half later, though she did not become as incensed and reckless as she would have been if she’d been married to Manderly and sent away from King’s Landing. While Gaemon was not in line for the throne, unless Aemon, Baelon, and her nephews Visery and Daemon died, he was at least still of Targaryen blood.
On the day of their wedding, which was conducted at the sept on Dragonstone in similar fashion as their other siblings’ weddings, Viserra waited in front of the septon and guests for her brother-husband for an hour. Though the hot summer sun made her gown and cloak unbearably hot to wear, flushing her pale skin red, her beauty remained incomparable across the Seven Kingdom’s. Even the absolute rage and murder on her fair face of seven-and-ten could not detract from it, and many men in the crowd started to whisper among themselves that it was such a pity for her to be married to a lame brother. When the hour dragged on, Jaehaerys had knights sent for Gaemon, but when they searched the palace, he was worryingly absent. Alysanne nearly fainted from fear until Baelon caught her, smiling with ease, and told her that Gaemon was fine. Jahaerys grabbed his second son’s shoulders and glared at him, demanding he retrieve his brother from whether he had decided to hide.
Before Baelon could answer to his father’s command, a reptilian screech echoed in the air, and people ducked as the ground shuddered. When they all rushed outside the sept, hands held up to block out the blazing sun, they found the sickly prince, dressed in his wedding clothes, atop a dragon with black scales tipped with gray. All in the audience were stunned to silence as the dragon’s chest rumbled and Gaemon slipped carefully from the beast, falling into his personal knight’s steady hands. As Alysanne fussed over her son and his singed clothes and hair, Jaehaerys gaped at the beast with glee.
“One of the wild dragons,” he remarked.
“H-his name is Skorios,” Gaemon said hoarsely before coughing into his sleeve and taking his long-awaited place by Viserra’s side. “He’s…he’s for you,” he whispered quietly to his sister-bride.
Viserra eyed him with a new sort of gleam in her eyes that made her siblings present and her parents concerned and, for the first time in her life, smiled at him.
“What a wonderful wedding present, Gaemon,” was all she said they all reentered the sept and the ceremony finally proceeded.
In Gaemon’s private journal, he wrote that that summer day was the happiest day of his life. Not because he bonded with one of the wild dragons, barely escaping death, not that he consummated his marriage with Viserra, but because Viserra’s smile was brighter than the sun and because the way she called his name, only once the entire day, was the sweetest sound he had ever heard. In a letter from Viserra to a friend, she wrote that her dragon was the most wonderous of beasts and made no mention of her new husband.
Viserra and Gaemon’s married life was odd to everyone who beheld it—it was rarer to see them together than apart. Gaemon trailed after Viserra like a puppy to its master, yet Viserra only had eyes for the black beast gifted to her. Only Aemon and Baelon had dragon mounts; she was the first of her sisters. The power in such a beast…it was exhilarating. It’s said that the morning after her wedding, and every morn following, Viserra ordered Gaemon to take her to the Dragonpit to visit Skorios. And he would, if only so that she would lay her fair eyes upon him each day.
Many in court began to speculate, and cruel rumors started to be whispered in the cracks of the castle. Some suggested that Viserra’s dominant and cruel disinterest satisfied some sexual deviance in the young prince, while others believed him merely touched in the head. Or, perhaps it was merely true that Gaemon was a man and Viserra a beautiful woman.
When Viserra and Gaemon first announced that she was with child a few months following their marriage, there were talks of the prince playing a cuckhold and that the babe would be born with the brown or gold hair of two of Viserra’s minor lordling ‘friends.’ In the autumn of 88 AC, Viserra went into an easy, successful labor and gave birth to a boy. The babe, born with Gaemon’s style of straight, silver-gold hair and blue eyes that settled in a deep purple, was unquestioningly a product of their union. Viserra named him Aerion, a name which had displeased her mother and father for it was the name belonging to the cruel and arrogant man that would issue Maegor himself. Nonetheless, Jaehaerys and Alysanne celebrated Aerion’s life with a royal celebration, equal to that thrown from Rhaenys, Viserys, and Daemon’s births.
While Viserra continually passed Aerion off the wetnurses in order to not ruin her perfect breasts and could not stand the babe when it cried, she was otherwise often found with her son, watching him play on the carpet or sleeping in the crib with a scheming aura about her. She fondly nicknamed him ‘Her Heir’ and would often refer to the prince as such whenever anyone asked of him (for if Jaehaerys would follow the traditions of Westeros for succession, as she so believed, her son had some claim, no matter how small, to the throne). When the gray egg that had been placed in his cradle hatched to reveal a mossy silver she-dragon, Viserra was positively ecstatic and kissed her son on his silver-gold curls for the first time. It was her son alone, not Aemon’s or Baelor’s issues, whose dragon had hatched. From the moment the creature had burst from its shell, Viserra spent more time in the presence of her son.
Gaemon took to a more passive approach to fatherhood well and was tender yet tentative in his care with his son…when he could and didn’t risk passing on whatever illness plagued him at the moment. He adored his son almost as much as he adored his sister-wife.
While it was widely believed Aerion would remain an only child, Viserra was with child once more in late 90 AC. Similar rumors circulated although with less force than it used to, and in the early summer of 91 AC, a few months before Aerion’s third nameday, she gave birth to a girl which was also undeniably the product of a pure Targaryen union. The babe came early, with a long and difficult labor reminiscent of Gaemon’s own, and Viserra’s screamed curses echoed through the entire Red Keep for two days as she struggled. When the girl was finally born, Viserra refused to hold or even look at her. She screamed at the attendants and maesters get it away from her.
Viserra was confined to the birthing bed for weeks as her body, torn from the birth, healed, and in all that time, she refused to look upon or name the girl. She often called Aerion to her bedside and watched him play with his toys, but she threatened to smother the girl if they dared bring her into the room. It only grew worse when the red egg placed in the girl’s cradle did not hatch. Viserra debased the girl a parasite and a disease and refused to let the babe near her. Alysanne and Jaehaerys begged her reconsider—at least the gods’ sake give her a name—but their daughter ignored them and isolated herself and Aerion, often taking the boy of two years down to the Dragonpit to visit Skorios and his female hatchling. The king and queen then pleaded with to Gaemon, but he did not wish the name the child without input from Viserra. Days turned to weeks and the babe remained nameless, so Queen Alysanne and King Jaehaerys took matters into their own hands.
They named her Caelaerys Targaryen, first of her name.
Viserra and Aerion were noticeably absent during Caelaerys’ first nameday celebration.
The babe was raised exclusively by her grandmother, her young aunt Gael—who was only ten years her senior, and then Daella’s daughter and Caelaerys’ cousin, Aemma, once the younger girl married Viserys It’s funny, then, that Caelaerys should grow to look so similar to her mother, with soft curls the same shade of silver-gold as Viserra’s and eyes the same hue of bright amethyst as Gaemon’s, with a sly temperament to match. She was constantly escaping her personal knight and nurses, hiding in nooks and cracks around the palace, simply to listen to conversations little girls had no business overhearing. By the time she had passed five namedays, she was more articulate than her brother and knew exactly when and what to say to get what she wanted. She was a quiet but precocious child, who seemed to hear too much and know too much, traits which made her grandfather and grandmother trade worried glances in private.
With Caelaerys being the last, King Jaehaerys saw the birth and survival of five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren by 101 AC.
By 101 AC, King Jaehaerys had also buried his wife and all but two of his children.
In 51 AC, Aegon was born too soon and dead three days after his birth.
In 60 AC, Daenerys, the ‘darling of the realm’ died from the Shivers less than two days after she complained of feeling cold.
In 77 AC, Valerion was born as sick as Gaemon but with none of his older brother’s luck. He died a fortnight before his first nameday.
In 82, Daella fell ill with fever and died following the birth of her daughter Aemma.
In 84, Alyssa never recovered from the birth to her third son Aegon and only held her third son for a few weeks before she was gone. Aegon did not survive to his first nameday.
In 92 AC, Aemon drowned in his own blood from a crossbow bolt to the neck during the Myrish Skirmishes.
In 96 AC, Maegelle fell just as ill as the patients she attended and died alongside all the other greyscale patients.
In 99 AC, Aerion, then eleven, had snuck down the Dragonpit to see his she-dragon, Vyrfyre, in the dead of night. The skittish dragon accidentally trampled him to death and crushed Aerion’s skull crushed beneath one of its large red feet before the boy could even scream. When Viserra was told of the incident the next morn, she drank herself into a stupor and absconded from her chambers. In a fit of mad drunkenness and some might say grief, she raced through King’s Landing with six companions. Near Aegon's High Hill, her palfrey collided with the other’s mares Viserra was thrown from her saddle into a wall, and she died of a broken neck. Gaemon passed from a cold in his chest naught but four weeks later. Naught but half a year passed before Gael drowned herself in a river when the bastard child sired by a traveling singer was born stillborn and her lover was nowhere to be found.
In 101, the Good Queen herself could no longer take the pain of burying her children, having outlived all but three, and moved to Dragonstone where she died of a wasting illness.
In 101 AC, after five days of illness and a pain in his side, Baelon’s belly burst.
King Jaehaerys had lost so much…so much.
But there was more to do, always more to do.
As one of his last acts, heart heavy and burdened with the loss of his queen and yet another child, he called the Great Council of 101 AC and changed the history of Westeros forever to come.