Author note; For those who dislike how Barristan Selmy comes off as a creep about the teenage Ashara Dayne in his memories of Harrendal and how he did NOTHING to help Rhaella in her abusive marriage, this chapter is hopefully very delightful to read. / Rogercat
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Roughly half a year into the year 292 A.C, King's Landing, the Red Keep:
Robert knew that he and Cersei were not happy together in their marriage, even if he tried to be a better husband than what he previously had been, but not even he was cruel enough to ignore that she clearly was not in good health laterly. He did not recall her looking like this during her previous pregnancies, at least, and the servants had confirmed that the Queen had never been ill in this manner while carrying the other royal children. It was as if the drought of her homelands somehow affected her as well, stealing her energy and just made her bad-tempered pretty much every single day now over something minor that often made no sense. And the way she kept drinking goblets of wine, eventually becoming drunk…
"How is the Lord Commander?"
But Cersei was not the only one who looked visibly ill laterly. The Kingsguard members had mentioned that Barristan Selmy was haunted by nightmares at night that did not allow him any rest, and more than one of the maidservants had run away screaming in terror from the chamber where Rhaella Targaryen once had been living in.
"...worse, Your Highness, he is so exhausted from lack of sleep that he would risk collapsing on his post if he left the bed."
Robert himself was not a believer in ghosts or anything such, but no one had a logical way of explaining those mysteries in the Red Keep. Curses? The maesters insisted that magic no longer existed, but Robert did not doubt that there were a lot of people who desired harm against his family, old royalists who once followed the Targaryens.
"Need to train with Lyonel tomorrow...promised him that today…maybe even try to give the girls some new fabrice to get new dresses for their dolls..."
The king had almost nodded off from boredom over that the small council once again came into the subject of the strange drought in the Westerlands, but suddenly he was forced awake by a shrill scream in the air:
"YOU ARE NO TRUE KNIGHT, BARRISTAN SEMLY! YOU WERE SWORN TO PROTECT EVERYONE IN THE ROYAL FAMILY FROM HARM, YET NONE OF YOU COWARDS STOPPED AERYS FROM HARMING ME!"
A female voice, yet it was not Cersei having one of her tantrums whatever she tried to demand something from him.
"What in the seven seas?!" Stannis exclaimed, for once looking just as shocked as Robert felt. Then another scream was heard, and the two Baratheon brothers dashed towards the door.
On the way to the throne room, several terrified maidservants ran past their king and Hand, acting as if they had not even been there.
"Queen Rhaella! The last Targaryen Queen is here as a wraith!"
As much as the Baratheon brothers did not believe in ghosts, they suddenly realized something; that Barristan Semly was the only one left of the Kingsguard for Aerys outside Jaime Lannister.
"Robert...did you order another member of the Kingsguard to guard Cersei?"
No, he had not, Robert recalled. Barristan would always guard Cersei at this time every seventh day, unless he was ill in some manner.
"Damn it!"
Inside Maegor's Holdfast, the royal children had also noticed that something was not normal. Therefore, Lyonel and Argella quickly closed the door to the nursery, locking the door in the hope of keeping their mother and siblings somewhat safe.
"No, Mother! Mother, do not come out from the nursery!" Lyonel responded to the sound of Cersei slamming her fists on the other side of the thick oak door, ordering him to let her out. Trying to ignore the very foul name-callings about them showing themselves truly being the offspring of Robert, Argella glared towards the Queen chamber, where something was attacking Barristan Selmy, the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard.
"Craven! CRAVEN, CRAVEN WEAKLING! YOU SWORE TO PROTECT WOMEN AND THE WEAK AS PART OF YOUR OATH AT BECOMING A KNIGHT, YET YOU BROKE THOSE OATHS WHEN NOT STOPPING AERYS!"
Valuable luxury items of Cersei were aimed at his face, his helmet somehow getting knocked off his head, and the royal twins could see invisible nails clawing on Barristan to leave bleeding lacerations. Was that invisible attacker aiming for his eyes?
"WHAT?! LOSING YOUR DAMN TONGUE, SER BARRISTAN THE COWARD?! ANSWER ME, I AM YOUR QUEEN!"
Lyonel trembled in his whole body from fear over the sight, and Argella could not blame her brother, feeling scared herself. They knew of how Rhaella Targaryen had been treated by her brother-husband in the last years of their unwanted marriage, and without doubt, Rhaella would hold a deep grudge against Barristan and the other Kingsguard members of that time for not saving her.
"Since Jaime was kind enough to leave me a widow, I will let him be. But you, ser Barristan Selmy, lost your honor as a knight the very first night as you did nothing to stop Aerys treating me as he did!"
In horror, they saw how Barristan suddenly began to grow blue in the face, his gloved hands clawing at his throat as if something was choking him. And there was nothing Lyonel and Argella could do to save him, only a fool would risk their life to further infuriate a revengeful spirit.
"Cersei! Children!" Robert was heard calling in the distance, just as the wraith vanished into thin air. But even as the King and the Hand arrived to defend the royal children and the Queen from whatever danger that could be present, there was nothing to be done to help Barristan.
"What...is going on laterly?" Robert muttered for himself, seeing how the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard clearly had died from suffocation yet there were no marks on his throat to explain a possible death by strangling or something inside his throat that could have blocked his breathing.
"Your highness! The Queen has gone into labour!" one of the nursery maids called out, making Stannis open the door and they all saw Cersei laying on the floor, holding her stomach as if she was in pain. Cursing, Robert ordered that the body of Barristan Selmy would be removed so Cersei could be brought into the Queen's bedchamber for the birth.
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On the dawn of the following day, a new Baratheon prince was born, yet he showed clear signs of being sickly even if he would be lucky to survive. And just like his cousin Rhea Baratheon, the second daughter of Stannis, the distant Targaryen blood made itself a clear reminder:
Even with the clear features from both House Baratheon and House Lannister as proof that he was a legal son between the King and Queen, the pale golden hair was almost white, and his eyes were like a blue lavender.
Yet for Cersei, the sight of this son seemed to trigger something. Her eyes widened in open confusion at first when she was handed the infant for her first holding of him, and then into clear anger.
"REMOVE THIS FREAK OUT OF MY SIGHT! GET IT AWAY FROM ME!"
To the horror of everyone in the room, she even threw the baby away from her, and the little prince would have risked to crack his fraile head against the hard stone floor, had not Holly acted quickly because as the septa in change of the royal children, it had been natural for her to be present as well.
"Cersei! What are you doing?!" Robert yelled over the terrified cries of the baby, grabbing his wife by the arms before she tried anything else that could risk harming the newborn.
"How dare you make me pregnant with a mockery of House Targaryen!? Father promised, he promised that I would be wed to Rhaegar and be his queen! I would bear his children instead of that Dornish whore!"
She was ranting nonsense in his face, as if she somehow had lost her mind. The mention of Rhaegar caused Robert to feel how his anger raised, yet at the indirect mention of Elia Martell, he also recalled what Ned had said to him in the throne room after that they had learned of her mysterious disappearance with her two children sired by Rhaegar:
"Princess Rhaenys is only one year younger than Mya."
Instead of physically harming her for the words she just said, Robert instead chose to simply hold Cersei still long enough for Holly to escape with the infant.
"I do not like the idea of locking you up like how Queen Rhaella was by Aerys, but you are not giving me any other choice, with how you almost came close to killing our shared child right now. You are staying here, until that you can be trusted to not harm our youngest son or any of our other children, Cersei."
Her behavior was out of control, and Robert was no longer blind to how she acted around the royal children. Her dotting on Myrcella and Tommen could be explained by that she was just happy to no longer stick out like a sore thumb by being the only blond in the otherwise black-haired royal family, but he had also noticed how she would ignore Lyonel, Argella and Elinor. Paternal favoritism was one thing, but to act as she did…
"No," Cersei said in open denial, as if she had not even heard him, "I am the Queen, not some whore you can just bed and then throw away! I am the Queen and the daughter of Tywin Lannister!"
But Robert would not change his commands. The midwives were given enough time to clean her up after the birth, and then Cersei was quickly sent over to the Maidenvault, basically finding herself locked up until that he could trust her to not try to do the same thing again.
In the royal nursery, Holly had managed to calm down the newest prince after how close he had come to death thanks to his own mother, the chosen wetnurse had given him his first milk and he was now sleeping in the cradle once shared by his older siblings.
"He looks just like cousin Rhea!" Elinor commented when she peeked into the cradle, recalling what her uncle had mentioned of his second daughter.
"Aemon," Robert finally chose as the name for his third son, after looking soundlessly for a long time into the cradle, "for the Targaryen Prince who wed Jocelyn Baratheon and was the father of Rhaenys, the Queen who never was, and the Dragon knight."
It was a name that was not solely limited to the disposed House Targaryen, some of their names were not unusual to give to sons and daughters in other noble Houses of Westeros either.
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In the Temple of Shadows, Visenya felt exhausted as she opened her eyes to see herself surrounded by worried faces of her peers, the other young girls who showed promises of having magic and possibly be chosen as Consorts to their Master as well.
"Visa, you did not wake up earlier when we tried to check if you were really deep asleep or even unconscious. Did you find yourself in an unplanned spell or something such? The Consorts have forbidden us to try anything like that without them around, the Master will be angry!"
The scolding was not intended to be mean in nature, only the result of worry and fear that something had happened to Visenya without any of them noticing it.
"I helped the spirit of a deceased lady to take some long-awaited revenge on someone who should have protected her better while she was alive. You can not hold the epithet of being called "the Bold" forever, if you end up proving yourself unworthy of it later in life."
It had actually been her who had killed Barristan Selmy, by using the hate and feelings of betrayal from her paternal grandmother Rhaella that still existed inside Maegor's Holdfast. Rhella's faith in the Kingsguard had been broken when none of them stopped Aerys from abusing and raping her, so it was only natural that she would not think of them as true knights anymore.
"Oooooh, hope that the lady spirit will feel better afterwards! Come on, we must hurry to the dining area for breakfast and then get ready for the lessons in weaving today!"
Yes, today they would learn how to weave the black robes that their Master wore, if they were to become the future Consorts then they had to know how to make those robes perfectly.
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To the relief of those who feared that Lyonel and Tommen would remain the only royal princes of their generation unless Robert made Cersei pregnant again, Aemon survived the critical first days outside the womb and then the following weeks, yet there was no doubt that he would be sickly, both as a child and a adult.
"I am sure that we can find a way for him to feel useful outside being a knight," Holly promised her older royal changings when Argella proved herself a very well-trained big sister and was able to calm down Aemon whatever he cried because he did not want to be alone.
"Yes, perhaps a scholar of some kind, like the former Prince Consort Ihsan Joydayne of Dorne!" Lyonel agreed, making Elinor pull on his west and asking what he might know, because as far as everyone knew, she was still formally betrothed to Quentyn Martell, the grandson of Ihsan though his oldest son Doran. At the tender age of two and one year old, Myrcella and Tommen were still too young to pay much attention to their older siblings.
Yet as the following months passed, Cersei did not seem to change her behavior from the day she gave birth to the third Prince. The maid servants reported to Robert that she would often stare into nothing, muttering about that she should have been wed to Rhaegar instead. Some days she went into a massive temper tantrum, throwing things on the walls and screaming that she wanted to see Joffrey, the stillborn son from six years ago, and trying to command that she was the Queen and would NOT be treated like this. After only a few weeks, Robert refused to let the royal children meet Cersei, because far too often she did actually try and harm them physically. Especially her two oldest daughters and the Crown prince.
"Did something happen with her the same night as Selmy died? It is like she is possessed by a demon or something…"
Yet even without Cersei, a female leader had to be found at the royal court, as Chief Court Mistress. After a long look on a list of suitable noble women, Robert ended up choosing his own cousin, the widowed Lady Emma Estermont, who had lost her husband during the siege of Storm's End, but had been married long enough to have a son of her own, the young Owen Estermont, a few months before Robert had wedded Cersei.
"I am hoping that Cersei will calm down soon, her last pregnancy was not...kind to her in various ways, I have been told," he told Emma when she arrived at court to act as the Chief Court Mistress until further notice, basically replacing Cersei in nearly all the official duties of a Queen sans for sharing bed with the King and bearing his children.
"Cousin, her pregnancy with Prince Aemon happened at the same time as this mysterious drought has fallen upon her homeland. Her twin brother is crippled without any of the former strength he once had only a few years ago. And if it is like she mentioned, that Tywin originally hoped to wed her to Rhaegar Targaryen, perhaps even praying for that Elia Martell would die in childbirth with her son Aegon in order to make the widowed Prince need to remarry after the customal period of state mourning, then it is no longer that she may have felt that Prince Aemon is a mockery of what she once thought her life to become."
As a mother herself, Emma Eastermont had a few personal, unspoken guesses about why Cersei acted as she did. But it was well known that Tywin was not the most warm person or a father to openly show that he was proud of his children. Perhaps spending nine years in an unhappy marriage where she was constantly pregnant, and feeling like she was only useful as a pretty breeding mare, was the cause for why Cersei acted as she did now.
"Thank you for allowing Owen to become a page at court, cousin. I am sure that Prince Lyonel will be happy to have more people around, and a few possible friends, that are not Lannister relatives."
With Emma Estermont as the Chief Court mistress, the Lannister influence at the Red Keep sunk even more with Cersei locked up in the Maidenvault. As expected, Tywin was furious over the news that his daughter had acted so illogical against her newest child, but he could not leave the Westerlands now because of the uprisings that started in various places over lack of food distributed to the poor, and the still present threats of the strange monsters, aka the orcs from Moria, that kept popping up in the mines that they tried to clean from all the sand in order to keep delivering precious metals to weapons and other items.
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Author note: About why Cersei acted as she did with newborn Aemon; she basically snapped at the sight of a son that outside the Baratheon features from Robert, looked like how she imagined a possible child between her and Rhaegar. She has also been affected by the curse Khamûl sent on Tywin, with the intention of ruining Tywin's legacy in a lot of creative ways. If Cersei were to become known to have gone insane after not even a decade as Queen, then his dream of having his golden daughter as Queen would be tainted beyond repair
Rhea Baratheon is the second daughter of Stannis and Selyse, born in chapter 10 of the side-story Young stags, lions and falcons that focus on the child OCs in Westeros. She is the reincarnation of her own great-grandma Rhaelle and share the Targaryen colouring as well
Emma Estermont is my name on the in-canon unnamed female Estermont cousin of the Baratheon brothers who was indeed widowed during the siege of Storm End. It is mentioned that she once slept with Robert at some point, but I imagine that she feared how Cersei may react on her getting pregnant with a royal bastard and chose to make a abortion because in this AU, she had a infant son to think about
Chief Court Mistress is the title of the senior lady-in-waiting in the royal courts. With Cersei currently locked up in the Maidenvault to prevent her from doing any harm to her children and neither she or Robert having any sisters or alive mothers, it would likely fall upon the Chief Court Mistress to take over the duties