Mirror Image Masked in Mist

Bad Omens

"I'd really like for you to reconsider."

Missy's voice was as soft as ever, her face half-hidden by the shadows the lamps were throwing. Her embroidery was in her lap. Everything was just like it had been a year ago… except for Aegon's expression. He was staring at her with something akin to the disdain he usually reserved for his sister and queen. "You should not meddle," he said. "Women know nothing of war."

Will you know something of this one, Missy wondered. With his handsomeness turning to fat so rapidly, he could hardly endure the hardships of a campaign, although he, of course, didn't know it yet. He'd learn it the hard way, most likely. "But we know loss and pain," she said.

"The losses will be all Dorne's," he snapped.

"And ours," she reminded him gently.

"No loss is too great a price for greatness," he informed her with the air of someone revealing a great secret. A secret that women, of course, had no access to, except for his magnanimity.

"The women in your realm will beg to differ. They just want their men alive and…"

"Seven hells, it's as if I'm listening to Naerys!" he barked. "Naerys and her gods! The subject is closed!"

Missy knew that her best bet was to follow his wishes but she had to make one last attempt. Anything that might disincline him for starting a new war with Dorne was a good thing. "Princess Mariah is with child. Surely you would not want to place her or the babe in danger?"

He huffed. By now, all of Missy's attendants had dispersed. No one wanted to enter an angry Aegon's sight. "She'll be soon sent to Dorne anyway before her last mongrel is born. Pity that there's no chance that she'll miscarry it out of worry, as fools say. No such luck, she carries and calves like a cow. The best we can hope for is that the child turns out to be a monstrosity, signifying the monstrosity that my son's marriage is."

His ugly words made her shiver to her core. In the beginning, she had thought it was just his fierce temper, his treatment of his family, that he was spouting such ugliness with his tongue and not his heart; now, she had come to realize that those were things he truly thought, all of them.

"It wasn't her decision to come here and wed Daeron," she reminded. "Will it not be better to try and take Dorne with…"

"With peace?" he mocked. "It cannot happen and I don't want it to happen. They don't deserve a peaceful welcome into our realm. And I will not be deprived of my glory."

Suddenly, he rounded on her. "What do you know of war and glory anyway? You only know your small cares, your charities…"

The same one where we take care of women who had lost their breadwinners in the Young Dragon's war and are now too old to make even the modest living they had gotten used to, Missy agreed silently.

"Peace and charity, love and accord all around," he mocked. "That's all that interests you."

And my children, Missy thought. Once, long ago, he had interested her as well, this handsome king. She had been so eager to get to know him… and then she had.

"For years, you didn't give me a son and the one that you finally produced was sick and scarred even in your womb. You couldn't do even this properly. What's next, a series of stillbirths and miscarriages, again like my queen?"

Missy gasped at his cruelty and saw that this delighted him. He had never been this way with her before. Up to the last day of her last pregnancy, he had been doting and showing her off to the world, claiming that she'd give him a proper Targaryen son in the beginning of the Targaryen era in Dorne. But now, his fascination with a kind heart seemed to have started wearing off.

"Daeron will do as I say… and so will you. I'll hear nothing more on the matter," Aegon finished and waved at her to summon her chambermaids and get ready for bed.

For now, he still wanted her. But it wouldn't be long before she'd be free of his ever increasing weight on her at night… and the power of his favour. She and her children would have to fend for themselves. Not for the first time, she wondered what that would entail, what she would do if her successor would not turn as kind as she was.

And still, the visitor she received the next morning set her mind to ease somewhat. The Prince of Dragonstone had obeyed the King's summon, arriving at night. That was the first time Missy saw Mariah of Dorne in almost a year – and she was coming to visit as if she had never left, bringing a gift for the newborn with white hair and red eyes, the newborn declared a bad omen since the moment he had emerged from the womb.

"You will do as I say."

"Indeed I won't."

"She will leave and go back to her sands and snakes. Baelor should have never dragged her out of them anyway!"

The King's voice was rising in anger. Daeron, though, remained calm and patient, as if he were explaining something to their ever curious six year old. "She isn't going anywhere. I am not going to repudiate her, ever."

A crash. Something hurled against the wall, most likely. Mariah turned her attention back to the petition she was reading but it was hard to focus on it when her own fate was being decided in the next room. Her – and her boys'. She had placed her full trust in Daeron years ago and had never had a cause to doubt the soundness of her decision – but Aegon was the King and he hated her. What if…?

"I am not going to suffer an enemy in my home."

"Mariah isn't an enemy". Daeron's voice was still calm. "And it's you who tried to break into their homes anyway, am I not right? It's your war, not theirs."

Mariah felt a surge of relief and pride in him. A new thing hurled against the wall but no crash this time. A golden goblet, most likely. Her goodmother and Melissa had warned them to be prepared for an unpleasant clash and still Mariah felt sick and vulnerable when she heard Aegon offering the girl to Daeron. She couldn't see her, of course, but her own bulging belly and thickened thighs could not compare either way. The other woman could at least see her feet, for sure! The fears of every woman with child came rushing to her mind: the pain, the ever looming presence of the Stranger who arrived in the birthing chamber along with the Mother, each insisting that it was now their time. She could lose Daeron's favour until the birth; she could die and then her children would be left in a place that had already dubbed them "the Dornish ones"; she could indeed deliver a stillborn or even a deformed child as her detractors predicted – and it would be all her goodfather's fault!

"Father," Daeron said coldly and determinedly, his voice a well-sharpened knife, "take your intentions and this girl wherever you want them. I have my Mariah. I am not giving her up."

The slamming of a door. The sound of angry steps echoing against the walls and Mariah's ribcage, on the white marble floor of the hallway. Mariah looked down and took a deep calming breath. It was over. The worst was behind them. Daeron would argue with his father, lose his temper from time to time, Aegon would subject them to japes and minor humiliations but the worst was over – excluding the war itself, of course.

And then she gasped and rose abruptly when she realized that the tremors wracking her body were not because of the slammed door, the stormy steps. She was producing them, her babe's determination to escape feeding them. After three times in the birthing bed where everything had happened in the right time, the right way, the right hardship, she would now deliver her last a month before her time. No matter if it was ready to see the world. No matter who would snatch both of them, the Stranger or the Mother.

With her earlier births, she forgot the worst about them pretty soon. But she remembered this one years later. The sheer agony of it. The potions maesters gave her because her excruciating pains were not strong enough to push her babe out, so they had to be increased. The fear that the child would slip out dead as many at court undoubtedly expected or deformed as just so many undoubtedly hope. Her feverish wish to die, die, die and not suffer a moment longer. The hands reaching inside to correct the babe's positioning – that was something that made her wake up at night drenched in cold sweat months later, her mind able to recreate the torture to the tiniest details. The gasps when the babe emerged and the maesters crowding over him, whispering among themselves, hiding him from her view.

"What?" Mariah asked, her voice rusty as if from a long disuse. "What's wrong with him?"

The wetnurse, selected in great haste by Naerys, came to her, smiling. "All is fine, Your Grace," she said. "They had already prepared linens and herbs to ease his breathing but they cannot figure out how to do it with such a noisy little one."

Mariah listened intently. The girl was right: beneath the old men's words of wisdom, her son was expressing his dislike of his new circumstances most vocally. She smiled and relaxed, finally.

"Give him to me, Your Grace," Lady Butterwell said some time later. "Let me show him to the King."

You think that's going to win you his favour? Mariah wondered. Could the woman really be this stupid? Suddenly afraid of what might happened, she held the newborn tight. To everyone's satisfaction, he had found this new accommodation comfortable and stopped wailing. His breath was small puffs of warmth against Mariah's chest. The little hair he had shone silver in the candlelight. He had yet to grow nails but he had taken suck most energetically. He'd grow up to be hale and hearty, of that she was sure.

"If the King wants to see his grandson, he might visit here," she said. By now, she had been washed and changed, so in the unlikely event that Aegon displayed such a wish, she was decent. "And my husband as well," she added after a brief hesitation. She didn't want to break the Targaryen custom of presenting a newborn to their father right now but the thought of letting the new little one out of her arms scared her too much.

Daeron came in immediately, just as she knew he would. The King, she hadn't expected. And when she saw his dismay at the sight of the small and wrinkled, disproportionate but not misshapen creature, with skin that was translucent but also very fair, hair that was mere strands here and there but silver ones, the eyes Mariah was sure were a shade of purple – when she saw his disappointment at this so Targaryen looking baby, she couldn't help it: she laughed in triumph.