Chapter Text
It was a lovely day in Valyria. One of countless lovely days that blessed the Empire, but this particular lovely day was one that Nettles and Baela took as an excuse to take to the skies and embrace the joys that were the prerogatives of the dragonlords.
To be a dragonrider was unlike anything else in all that Nettles had experienced in her life.
When she tried to make sense of it in ways that she could describe, the best she could do was to think of it as a cross between riding a horse and sailing a ship.
Like a ship, the wings of the dragons worked somewhat like sails in their own way, allowing Sheepstealer to glide over the winds that blew through Nettles’s hair and brought a cold rustling noise to her ears.
It was also like riding a horse in the loosest terms that to ride a dragon was to command and ride a living creature of its own mind, a connection that required trust, respect and intuition to anticipate one another the communicate accordingly, though Nettles would insist that her relationship was Sheepstealer was more profound and intimate that any horse she had ridden.
The two dragonriders were soaring over the mountain ranges that encircled the valley of the dragonlords, dancing, diving and chasing one another in a playful manner as the more nimble and smaller Moondancer bobbed and weaved around Sheepstealer, taunting Nettles to pursue.
“Naejot, Bianorlaodī!” Nettles shouted to her dragon, urging her dragon forward as they followed Moondancer through the sky.
The two riders chased one another around for a while after, outmanoeuvring and swooping over each other’s heads in a playful manner.
Soon, Nettles spotted Moodnancer descending down along the mountain range and landing upon the lower slopes in an area where the surface was not as steep.
“Embrot, Bianorlaodī! Tegot!” Nettles commanded as she brought Sheepstealer around in a circling back as the dragon began to descend.
Sheepstealer came down near Moondancer and dropped onto the slopes of the mountain with a strong thud that jolted through Nettles’s body, bouncing her in her saddle while she was kept in place by her riding harness which hooked her to the saddle.
After unhooking herself from her saddle, Nettles slid down the side of her dragon and dropped down onto the ground.
By the time Nettles landed on her feet, Baela was already dismounted and petting Moondancer’s snout.
As Nettles walked along the side of her own dragon, she ran her leather-gloved fingers along the prickly neck of her dearest Sheepstealer.
When she came alongside her dragon’s face, she reached out and scratched his snout which he tended to enjoy, making him riggle and let out a gleeful purring noise.
Nettles giggled at Sheepstealer’s glee.
There were many who liked to mock Sheepstealer and say that he was ugly, claiming he had the head of a lion lizard, he was far too prickly, the long curled hooks at the end of his wings were unappealing and the various colours of different shades of brown were all unappealing individually let alone blotched all over him.
Nettles once caught some noble lady, whose family was originally from Myr before joining their fleet, speaking insults about Sheepstealer and Nettles punched her square in the nose.
She got a strong scolding from the Empress, from the High Chancellor Corlys and from Marilda for her troubles, but received an approving wink from Daemon, and no one ever insulted her dragon again while she was in earshot.
After giving some love and attention to her boy, she left Sheepstealer and approached Baela.
“Any particular reason we landed here?” Nettles asked her companion as she glanced around the range of rocky mountain peaks that surrounded them.
Baela shrugged.
“Thought we might take a small reprieve before heading back. Take a chance to savour the view and smell the mountain air without the wind flying in our faces at great speeds,” the Princess explained.
“Sound perfect,” Nettles replied.
Nettles and Baela walked out to the slopes and overlooked the vast range of mountains that encircled their beloved valley, where the capital city sat in blissful seclusion.
“Thanks for coming out here with me, Baels. I really needed this,” said Nettles, slinging her arm around Baela’s shoulder.
Baela had always been welcoming and kind to Nettles since they met at Dragonstone, but the night they snuck out of Saera Targaryen’s palace in Volantis and explored the Long Bridge together was the night they truly bonded and became close friends.
The bond was not exclusive to Baela alone, for she also had it with Rhaena, Visenya and over the past year wit h Lady Valena Celtigar, Addam’s betrothed.
She was a good and kind girl, exceptionally spirited and sharp-minded, which was what drew Addam to her when all the nobles of the Empire presented their daughters. He knew from the start that he would wish to take a Valyrian-blooded spouse, so that their children would not be common-haired, but Valena stood out to him, apart from all other women whose fathers bade Addam take their daughter for a bride.
Nettles too had been propositioned by many a suitor who wished to bind with her valyrian blood, even though there were many within the Empire that spoke ill of her behind the back. Her dragonblood alone was what she knew to be her only appealing feature to the noble prospects of the Empire and even that was the only compensation for any to be persuaded to wed someone so lowborn.
Amongst the streets of the Empire, those of valyrian descent, be them dragonseeds from Blackwater Bay or common valyrians from across the Free Cities in Lys or Volantis, many were coveted for spouses to embue their families with valyrian blood, but Nettles’s past, her mother’s profession and her plain features and dark hair made her an undesirable dragonseed redeemed only by the favour of the Empress and her claim of Sheepstealer.
Nettles knew the way people looked at her. She heard the whispers and comments.
Visenya and Aerion were raised in the palaces of Volantis, and their blood was noble and pure in Valyrian lineage. Alyn and Addam were the sons of the Sea Snake and even their mother was respected in the Empire, even though she was lowborn. As Guild Mistress of the Mariners and the daughter of the Shipwright who fashioned Lord Corlys’s finest ships, she had earned the respect of the people.
But Nettles was not so favourably looked upon.
An orphan thief from the back alleys of Spicetown spawned from shanty brothel where her mother worked as a whore. Nettles would probably have been dead long ago if Merlida hadn't taken her in all those years ago, hung or starved most likely.
If only the people of the Empire knew the truth.
The hidden truth that few knew.
It took Nettles a while to figure out… though a part of her suspected deep down longer than she had consciously suspected.
Perhaps it was always there since they first saw one another’s faces in the great dragon dream which began their great fable. Or perhaps it was something that manifested from oblivion as they spent time together.
He knew… he knew since the night Nettles claimed Sheepstealer.
He claimed it was her laugh that made him realise, the laugh of exhilaration and joy as she climbed the skies on Sheepstealer’s bare and unsaddled back. He said it awoke him, like a familiar scent, taste or sound that lights an old forgotten memory.
When Daemon heard Nettles laugh for the first at time, her mother’s face flashed before Daemon, and he went back to the seaside brothel where he met her.
She danced atop a table for the Velaryon sailors and goldcloaks who went out drinking with the Prince before the morrow when they would sail south with Daemon and Lord Corlys to do battle with the Crabfeeder.
Daemon painted a rather beautiful and somewhat poetic story for Nettles, perhaps true or perhaps a merciful gilding to an otherwise lowly story about paying to fuck a common dockside whore.
Daemon said that as he sat back in his chair and watched as she danced atop the table, the Rogue Prince was enraptured by Nettles's mother, held by the ecstasy of her alluring movements. In that moment, all the women Daemon had enjoyed before faded away, he forgot his Bronze Bitch whom he hated and Lady Mysaria who he had taken as his paramour and then there was only Nettles’s mother.
At that moment, she became the object of all Daemon’s desires and at that exact moment, the whore spun twice, titered over and fell right into Daemon’s lap and laughed.
The same laugh which Nettles inherited, the one she had let out when she first mounted Sheepstealer. A pretty story and perhaps half true, but no doubt riddled with embellishments to make Nettles feel like there was more to her conception beyond a short while of grunting and thrusting solicited by four copper coins of halfgroats. That was what Nettles’s mother was paid when Daemon lay with her, so said the madam of the Brothel to cruelly tease her when she was a child. Four halfgroats they charged her that night the soldiers and sailors came down and by the end of the evening she had forty copper coins bundled up in her skirts.
Four halfgoats, that was what Nettles was worth. A four halfgroats amount of a dragonrider.
When Daemon first worked it out that night, he was clearly ashamed of those four halfgoats he had spent since he then after avoided Nettles like a plague in the months after that despite the good night they’d had together in Braavos.
It was instead Princess Rhaenys who mentored Nettles as a dragonrider during the early months.
It was not until after they had reached Valyria that he warmed to her once again.
He helped her acclimate to a ladylike manner that she had been shirking since being raised to a Dragon Mistress. While Addam and Alyn had aspired to their knightly stations from the day they had arrived on Dragonstone, while Nettles clung hard to the ruffian sailor she had been since Marilda saved her from the streets.
While they were scouting the lands of Telos and Tyria, Daemon taught her common courtesies of nobility, taught her how to dress and wash her face and impress those at court and all the good a reputation could do her.
He had even gifted her a curved single-edged valyrian steel short sword that she currently had at her hip.
It took Nettles a long while to figure out why Daemon went through shifting moods of affection and coldness towards her, but eventually, she pieced it all together.
Eventually, she confronted him, and he couldn’t bring himself to deny it. In the privacy of just the two of them, he showed pride and adoration to her as his daughter, but he’d dare not speak a word of her affectionately in public, for she was still a secret, hidden from the world around them.
Only Rhaenyra alone knew Nettles’s true linage, she alone had noted Daemon’s favour for Nettles and the gifts she had received from him and for a time there was strife between Nettles and the Empress, for Rhaenyra believed that Nettles was having an affair with Daemon.
Gross , she had thought when she had first heard it from Daemon. Not only was he her father, but he was over fifty years old and while there were still some women who said Emperor Daemon was a handsome man, Nettles saw no such appeal.
In the weeks that the Empress laboured under the delusion that Nettles was a whore like her mother wishing to seduce her husband, she had not plotted Nettles’s death — as far as the young dragonrider knew — but merely shunned Nettles and gave her cold stone hearted stares when no other was looking.
When Daemon finally revealed Nettles’s lineage to the Empress, Rhaenyra came before Nettles and pleaded her forgiveness, offering herself as a confidant and a friend if Nettles ever wished to talk about her struggles with her lineage.
“So the emissaries will be heading off soon,” said Baela, making conversation.
Nettles snorted.
“Off home to start their malicious plots to wage their wars against us no doubt. Meanwhile, we must make preparations to receive another batch of emissaries from further west,” Nettles recounted as she folded her arms and overlooked the mountains.
“They should be on their way in the next couple of days if not already,” said Baela.
“So this Prince Daeron… he’s the one you haven’t met, right?” Nettles asked, recounting which of Queen Alicent’s sons had been sent to parlay with the Empire.
Baela nodded in response.
“He’s the youngest of the brood. Jace and Luke knew him in their early youth but he was in Oldtown by the time I first met them. If he’s anything like his two brothers, then he’ll undoubtably be a cunt,” Baela said, causing Nettles to snicker.
Baela didn’t often sware in such a way but when she did it was often in the presence of Nettles who was a disruptive influence on her younger sister.
Sister, Nettles thought. Baela and Rhaena had used sister to describe Nettles half a hundred times before in passing as a way of conveying familiarity and affection, but neither of them knew how truly the word rang, for Nettles was, in fact, their sister.
It was all so frustrating and confusing when she tried to make sense of it.
Baela, Rhaena and little Daenys were her sisters. Aegon and Viserys were her brothers. Rhaenyra is her cousin and technically her stepmother. Jace, Luke and Joff were all her step-brothers as well, with Jace also her good brother through Baela and soon Luke would be the same through Rhaena.
Visenya too was her cousin, both of them granddaughters to the Old King Jaehaerys’s children and strangely enough, so were Alyn and Addam.
Nettles knew not the exact points of where Velaryon and Targaryen blood intertwined beyond both the Conqueror and the Conciliator, as well as their sister-wives hailing from Velaryon mothers, but somewhere in all of it, she was bound to have some distant common blood with the two men she had always known as her foster brothers.
Her whole lineage was a confusing mess that wracked at her mind, she wanted to scream but it was all a fucking secret.
She was her father’s shame and she knew it.
He could barely look at her when she was in the same room as his real family and only ever acknowledged her when they spoke in private.
The only thing that consoled her, the only thing that gave her direction and peace was Aerion. Another distant cousin through their lineages, but that was not the way she saw him. To Nettles, he was the only thing that made sense sometimes, her guiding light in the mists and her anchor in the rough waves.
Their hidden trist was her solace where she could escape the games of faces and identities and just be herself. She wasn’t hiding from being Daemon’s daughter, nor facing the scorn of those who saw a baseborn thief sired by a whore.
He loved her, he made her smile and laugh, and feel safe and whole.
Nettles recalled half a year ago she and Sheepstealer went flying with Aerion and Vermithor.
They found a small clearing in the mountains — the northern mountains in the lands of the Long Summer — there was a waterfall, a small lake and a grass field cut off from the outside world.
Aerion made a blanket with his cloak and they lay there in the field all day. Nettles wanted to stay there forever, just the two of them with all the complications of the rest of the world left behind, a place that was just theirs.
All she wanted to do was hide away with Aerion and that was why she turned him down every time he proposed.
She knew that the second she and Aerion announced their intention to wed, the whispers would flood around them. Aerion, the pure-blooded son of an ancient Volantene noble house and a Princess of House Targaryen, the most prestigious form a dragonseed bastard there was, would share the city of Tyria with the daughter of dockside whore who began her life as a street urchin and a thief before becoming a merchant’s ward and finally rider of the ugliest dragon in Valyria. Not even Alyn or Addam was intended to rule any of the great cities of the Empire.
Nettles, a high lady of the Empire worth four halfgoats.
She was a scandal waiting to happen, and if ever someone found out her true lineage, that would make things worse, not better.
Nettles could not bring Aerion down in such a way.
More than just that, Nettles had already been so blessed already. She started her life eating scraps in a whore house and now she was a dragonrider in the greatest empire the world had ever seen, she felt like to ask for any more out of life would be an atrocious act of gluttony that would surely visit overdue tragedy upon her in some form or another.
Everything that Nettles was just told her that she couldn’t be Aerion’s wife and lady, no matter how much she wanted to be.
Nettles’s silent self-pitying was then interrupted by the dragons becoming on guard, drawing Nettles and Baela’s attention away from the horizon.
“Look, out there,” said Baela, pointing out to the distance.
Nettles followed Baela’s direction to the slopes of the mountains a fair distance from them and their dragons where they could see creatures prowling about the mountains.
Quickly, Nettles was able to discern the creatures by their shapes.
“Chimeras,” Nettles stated, gripping the hilt of her valyrian steel short-sword.
Sheepstealer clearly sensed Nettles’s worry, as he raised his head and snarled at the distant chimeras who noted their presence but kept their distance, fearing the dragons.
The specific breed they’d come across were mountain chimeras — cousin beasts to the forest chimera which had almost killed Lord Adreq zo Loraq during the recent hunt.
They were fairly common in shape, lion-like for the most part with scales, caprinae horns and scorpion tails, but their features were still distinct.
Forest chimeras had addax horns, their scales were a mix of grey, brown and dark green that helped them blend with the forests and black scorpion tails with yellow slit-pupil eyes.
The mountain chimeras instead bore Ibex horns, their scales were various shades of brown and grey and their tails were a golden yellow colour, similar to amber in certain lights.
Sheepstealer let out a roar and the two mountain chimeras moved on, pouncing up the mountain’s steep and rocky slopes with the kind of agility found in both a lion and a mountain goat.
Baela and Nettles let out sighs of relief.
“We should probably head home,” Nettles suggested with Baela nodding in response.
“Three āeksiaposse says I make it back before you do,” Baela teased as she raced off towards Moondancer.
Nettles laughed.
“Your on, Princess,” Nettles replied running towards Sheepstealer.
The two sisters then mounted their dragons and prepared to race back towards the dragonmount of Blenon Valyriōs.
Though it was only a race between friends for Baela, while it was a race between sisters for Nettles.
Maybe one day she might have the heart to reveal herself and who she was, maybe one day she might have the heart to be Aerion’s wife, but for now, she was still just a fatherless dragonrider begotten from a dockside whore for no more than four halfgoats.