As Rhaenyra walks to her bedchamber, she marvels at the unfolding of it all. A heaviness fills her as she ponders what is soon to be lost. How long, the princess thinks to herself, has Laenor been a but thorn in my side? The way they'd been tonight was rather how she'd imagined her marriage, back when they first set their arrangement all those years ago in Driftmark – a playfulness between them as they acknowledged each other's conquests. And yet the years insisted on taking their toll. The time they spent in court froze over any gaiety between them. For both husband and wife became so lost within the roles they played in public, that they ceased to remove their masks on the rare occasion they should find themselves alone.
And how for long, she reflects, has Qarl been but a nuisance? Rhaenyra had always found the knight to be a source of embarrassment – an obvious thing to be discreetly tucked away. And yet it was he, she muses, who held the key to our salvation. She feels close to him and Laenor tonight, no longer alone in the castle as she awaits her uncle's return. The candor with which they'd spoken is a boon to her spirits – quite different than that which she feels during her talks with Daemon, for theirs are still fraught with all the things they leave unsaid, undone: she'd nearly kissed him on the beach, and she knows he would have let her; and yet she was afraid of breaking the spell that was moment between them. She feels frightened to touch him – as if he'll vanish into the wind the moment she presses her lips to his. It is a foolish thing to think, she knows, but it is one thing to know a thing in one's own mind and another thing entirely to know it in one's body. And so she took his hands instead and led him back toward the castle, the wind kissing both their faces as they walked beneath the stars. There was also, of course, the matter the child steadily growing in her belly. Rhaenyra was not certain until after Daemon's departure, but the question had been weighing on her mind in the weeks leading up to it.
Just one time it had taken, she thinks to herself with a laugh. And she had been atop him on the bridge – one would think it should take a few more nights with her lying upon her back! Nothing between us for the past ten years has come so easily as this child, she thinks to herself and smiles in the darkness. An accident it was, but she wants nothing more than this child.
What shall he think? Rhaenyra wonders. Harwin had been thrilled every time, his grin lighting up his face in a joy so earnest only he could muster it – uninfluenced somehow after all his years spent in King's Landing; uncorrupted he remained by all the games played at court. He never once complained when Laenor held their children in his arms and called them sons, for he was content to be her secret. She misses him tonight, for he had always known exactly what to say to make her laugh when he knew she needed a break from her troubles.
Rhaenyra has been worried about Daemon's response to it all, for unlike Harwin, her uncle lacks the skillset for avoiding attention. She knows she cannot ask him to place their newborn babe into the arms of Laenor Velaryon. Nor does she want to.
And now she shall not have to, thanks to Qarl Correy. Kin. That is the word that floats to her mind as she thinks on Qarl and Laenor. She has not felt this ease with others, this plain intimacy unmarked by politics or lust, since she was a girl. Since Alicent, she thinks before pushing the thought away.
When she arrives at her bed, she blows out her candle and lies awake for several hours in the dark, turning it over in her mind, until she drifts into an uneasy sleep.