A/N: Does anyone use the term "plot bunnies" anymore? This one has been hopping around in my imagination and I finally caught it. I'll keep this story as my fun little side-piece while I get back into the groove of updating The Sanguine Witch…and speaking of,can this count as my unrepentant walk of shame seeing as I haven't updated it in over three years? Ha! I haven't abandoned it, I promise.
This work is intended for adult audiences only, so please cultivate your media experience accordingly. If you would like to see the full tags and warnings for this story please visit the cross-post on AO3 under my username.
Without further ado:
The servant quarters beneath the kitchen in the Red Keep tended to start stirring just before sunrise; for Dyana, it was one of the steward's private cupbearers who would come knocking to her shared room each day with a gentle rap of curled knuckles on the doorframe and a weak brew of stinging nettle tea to bid her and her room companion rise. Robert was a young man, just ten and nine, but his height and stature suggested a man much older than himself. That morning just before the dawn he had no teapot to pass her, however, and something worried was pulling down at the brow over his kind blue eyes.
Dyana had begun reaching for his rough hands with her own before she could consciously stop the action. The hallway behind Robert was cool and shadowed, and Dyana instinctively pulled him closer as if to save him from the encroaching dark. His palms were slick with panicked sweat in her own. "It's Laera," he rushed to explain, his grip tightening on hers with urgency. "Last night, she went into the holdfast with Miranda and—and—"
"Hush, now, come inside," Dyana bid him in a whisper. The women of the kitchens were forbidden from taking men into their bedchambers, but she pulled the flustered man inside anyway, much to the surprise of her startled room companion. "What happened to Laera?"
The silence that engulfed the small, windowless chamber was stifling. Malla, just now waking at the commotion from the two by the door, simply stared at Robert with wide, sleep-fogged eyes with her bed furs clutched protectively in front of her chest. "It was Prince Aegon," Robert confided heavily. Dyana saw tears bead at his lashes and she felt her heart flutter with anxiety at the mention of the crown prince. "Laera and Miranda were separated somehow and that inbred bastard put his hands on her," he choked.
Malla's voice was small and tight. "He's not a bastard," she corrected quietly.
"No," Dyana agreed grimly. She guided Robert onto the nearest low stool and poured him a cup of water from their shared carafe with shaking hands. "Not a bastard, but perhaps something worse."
"This wouldn't have been the first time. Remember Greta? And Wilhelmina?" Malla continued. She was just a girl, ten and two, but she had heard of Prince Aegon's cruelties just as the rest of the Keep's servant class had. No one had quite understood why Miranda hadn't been on the receiving end of the crown prince's attentions, but it was a small blessing that she seemed to have been spared from such indignity. They had learned over time it was safest to send her to do the evening servings, and curious as to why she had taken Laera with her. "This would make the third time he's forced himself on a serving girl in just as many years."
"Has Laera been given moon tea? Is she badly hurt?" Dyana rushed to ask. She perched herself on the end of her cot and didn't relinquish Robert's hands despite his increasingly crushing grip. The man's fragile composure was beginning to break under the weight of his emphatic grief, and if he hadn't been so obviously distracted by his own emotions Dyana would have felt a sliver of self-consciousness at her bare legs and thin shift in his presence. "Has anyone sent for the maester?"
Robert's face seemed to crumple even further, and with a pang of remembrance Dyana recalled his burgeoning romance with Laera with heavy regret. Though not a man of noble birth, Robert was from a Minor House and would never be allowed to marry poor Laera now, no matter how much he cared for her. "It's worse," he breathed.
"Who? Who was told?" Malla asked.
Robert slid his hands from Dyana's and scrubbed them fiercely down his face to quell his wave of angry tears, his fingers coming to tug angrily at his closely cropped beard. "The Kingsguard found them and told the Queen."
And as always, life continued.
Dyana wouldn't have counted Laera as a friend, not really; the winsome brunette had been a firm favorite amongst the royal family and there had been whispers that she was to become one of Princess Helaena's personal handmaidens in the soon future. Alma, current handmaiden to the princess and almost twenty-and-three, was betrothed to a merchant of the north and would be leaving her service in just four moons. The current clutch of rumors elevated Laera, with her easy grace and docile manner, as the next for promotion into such a coveted position. Laera had been kind and quick to smile, but Dyana hadn't had much cause to interact with the serving girl. Dyana spent her days with knife in hand, battling ingredients in the kitchens and sweating before the fires—Laera spent hers prettily delivering trays and treats. Even here, in the bowels of the Red Keep, social stratification kept fraternization at bay between those born into different economic standings.
But Laera had been nice to her. She had shared the leftover treats on forgotten silver platters with the other women of the kitchens and was always quick for camaraderie, even when it didn't serve her directly. Beyond Dyana's passing fondness, there was also the moral matter of the whole thing: the girl hadn't deserved to be raped.
The notion that any girl deserved such a thing had, unfortunately, become a heated matter of debate that tended to be drawn along gendered lines. From what Dyana could glean from passing whispers, some seemed to think that Laera had wanted it to happen; why else would she be in the company of the crown prince, alone, after dark?
"You should see the tits on that one," a stable boy had laughed crudely to the butcher that morning, his dirty hands gesturing at his own chest as if grasping at two melons. Dyana recognized him; he stole away into the kitchens each morning after breakfast call to steal heels of bread after he'd gobbled his double portion. "Probably thought she could use 'em to entice the poor lad, she did, maybe curry favor—you know how these serving girls get—"
Dyana had thrown down her knife on the bloodstained cutting board and angrily wiped sweat away from her forehead with the back of one slick arm. Her hair was bound tightly in her plain linen bonnet, but a few stray blonde tendrils had managed to escape and were curling defiantly in the humid kitchen's heat. The sensation itched and it only stoked her anger hotter. "Oi!" she called to the stable boy and the butcher. Both men turned quickly from their stance by the door and gaped at her with raised brows. "Take that lying filth from my kitchen. I won't be hearing such slander this morning or any morning. Leave before I have you both over my board next," she threatened, shaking the carcass of her eviscerated quail for rough emphasis.
It was the butcher who snorted, his thick arms crossed across his chest as he planted himself ever stiller. His white apron was stained with blood and the hog he had hauled in for the evening roast was currently wrapped at his feet, yet untouched. "And who do you think you are, girl, to be bossing us around?" he spat. "If dear Laera was the type of company you keep I wager you'll be bent over the prince's night table next."
Before Dyana could recklessly launch her chopping knife straight at the butcher's thick, leathery neck, a firm hand clamped to her shoulder in silent reprimand. She didn't have to turn her head to know it was Cook.
"Listen to my girl," Cook warned. "I catch ye speaking lies in this firepit and I'll have you on the spit with the pigs!" The rough woman then turned and Dyana heard her spit to the floor with disgust. "Out! Both of ye!"
The men's laughter echoed through the din of the kitchen as they retreated out to the courtyard beyond the door. Dyana felt angry tears well into her eyes and she relinquished her white-knuckled grip on her knife, now back in hand and shaking in her palm. How dare they? she thought with venom. She wished she had the power to summon them both back and take their tongues for their cruel accusations against Laera. Poor, poor Laera, who no one had heard from all morning despite the girl's name being on every lip in the servant apartments.
"You best get back to work, girl," Cook roughly bid her. The hand on Dyana's shoulder softened and Dyana turned to look at the large, wizened woman whom she considered a surrogate mother. "Those wagging tongues won't be stopping at your behest and it only brings pain to refute them. Let them speak lies. We know the truth. Laera was a good girl, she was."
Dyana bit her lip and nodded mutely. "I hate them," she hissed, gesturing with the tip of her knife to the now-closed door. She shook the blade at the trussed hog as a surrogate target for her impotent rage. "How could they say such things about sweet Laera? She was always so kind to them."
Cook clucked her tongue and raised a thick finger to tuck Dyana's blonde curls back under the gaping lip of her bonnet. "Some men will take kindness and won't give any in return. You'll do best to remember that. Now get these herbs on that quail before you lag us behind, girl."
Dyana returned to her chopping, slightly numb and still seething.
Laera's disappearance from direct table service minorly disrupted the ecosystem of the food servants; the steward himself had made an appearance into the kitchen that afternoon, and judging by the sweat immediately beading at his brow and the uncomfortable way he tugged at his finer leathers, he was not a man accustomed to much physical discomfort. His service to the Crown was in logistics, and it was his team of servants that typically carried out his orders. This order, as it were, was too delicate to be passed in the hands of the runner boys.
He clapped his thick hands twice and drew the attention of everyone in the kitchen. Laera, finally done with her rubbing of the quails, had been monitoring the vented firepit when he called the servants to him. "We all have heard the…rumors of what happened last night," he began. A gentle tittering erupted but he silenced it with a gentle raise of his hand. "I am capable but not omniscient, and thus we are now short one girl for serving this evening. Where is Miranda?" he asked.
Miranda, wrist-deep in her wad of dough, raised her face in acknowledgement. "Aye," she called.
The steward turned to her. "I trust your judgement, girl—which of these wenches has enough learning to behave herself among the royal family?"
Miranda didn't even have to pause. "Vira," she responded, tilting her chin to a tall, dark-skinned girl who had paused in the middle of chopping root vegetables. "She has the most graces of this lot by far. Used to be a lady in waiting for House Dhazak in Meereen."
The steward appraised Vira with a nod. "And what are you doing with this lot, Vira of Meereen? House Dhazak surely afforded you higher standing than being a Crown kitchen girl."
Vira's voice, patrician and lightly accented, was dry in response. "I was not brought here of my own volition," she stated coolly. "Ser."
The steward knew better than to bristle in front of Cook's watchful eye, but Dyana found it surprising that he wasn't aware of the girl's history. How capable of a steward must he be if he didn't even keep track over where his servants hailed from? Vira's unshakeable demeanor fanned a burst of sharp admiration in Dyana's breast.
It was Cook who spoke up next. The woman's voice was rough and loud, and if possible, the kitchen stilled further when she spoke. Of anyone in that room, she had the most status. Perhaps it even rivalled that of the steward, as sought-after her skills were. "No," she barked. "I will not give you Vira. I need her with me—she's the only one who can make the tarts the Queen enjoys so much." It went unspoken, also: she's too pretty. Vira was certainly the loveliest of the servants and it was Cook's protective streak that wanted to keep the girl far, far from the reaches of the royals. Vira had wit and grace, but Cook wasn't confident that the girl would be able to fight if it came down to it. "Take Dyana—Miranda will agree she'll be sufficient."
The steward turned to Dyana and jerked his thumb over his shoulder. "Upstairs, now. I need you cleaned up and dressed proper before I have you laying trays."
Dyana had to pick her jaw off the floor in shock. Her eyes darted to between Cook, Miranda, and Vira; she wasn't sure whether to feel flattered at Cook's praise, fortified by Miranda's nod, or offended that she was the less lovely option to parade in front of the Targaryens. When she opened her mouth to argue Vira silently mouthed a single word: Go.
Dyana held slight pride in her position as a woman with a sharp tongue and the spirit of an alley brawler, but it still stung for her reputation to be leveraged for such a purpose.
Stunned for the second time that day, she abandoned her post by the spit and followed the steward up the stairs into his solar, the watchful eyes of the other kitchen staff hot on her back as she went.
From somewhere in the Keep the steward had summoned for lesser ladies in waiting, Dyana saw, when they entered the solar; they were frighteningly young, most likely all of Minor Houses, but they were gentle to Dyana as they drew her a quick bath in a metal tub and scrubbed the odor of roasting meat from her skin with a plain, stinging soap. It had been a long while since Dyana had taken an actual bath like this—usually she was left to do her washing by hand, the only aid a flagon of cold water and a threadbare cloth. Kitchen wenches had no use for smelling pretty beyond basic hygiene, as it were. "There we are," one of the girls praised, roughly conjuring a small towel to pat Dyana dry with. "Fit for presentation, I think."
Dyana appraised her body as they combed out her hair before the fire. She was tanned and large, arms and waist thick from her kitchen post; her hair, the color of sun-kissed wheat and thick down her back, wasn't let from it's braid very often. Dyana knew these girls were just going to tie it into a presentable style, nothing regal, but this was perhaps the cleanest and prettiest she had felt in a long time.
The girls bullied her into a corset outerdress and Dyana was grunting with unfamiliar discomfort as one of them pulled the simple laces tight. "Not what you're used to, eh?" the girl asked. This one had lighter skin than Vira, but judging by her ochre tone and the fine gold necklace glinting from the hollow of her throat, she might have been from the same region. Dyana was unfamiliar with the higher dynamics of servants above her own class but it made sense, she guessed, that even Minor Houses would have ladies-in-waiting also. With any luck this young girl would never come near the likes of Prince Aegon, as protected as she must be. "We had trouble finding a dress to fit someone your size. Luckily Cook was able to provide one from storage! It's older but it will suffice."
Dyana smiled. "We eat well in the kitchens—I'm sure you can imagine."
The girl laughed and settled, smoothing her small hands over the corsetry and patting her back lightly. "Yes I can. Have you laid dinner service before?"
Dyana shook her head, only to be lightly smacked with the back of a wooden brush in reprimand. She winced and stilled, allowing the other girl to finish her plaiting uninterrupted. "I haven't but I'm sure I'll learn."
This time, it was Miranda's rasping voice from the doorway that answered her. "Yes, you will. Is she ready?"
The girls tending to Dyana agreed and Dyana rose to greet her friend. "Ready," she confirmed.
Family dinners were not Aemond's preferred evening pastime.
They had become more and more infrequent; the King's failing health was worrisome, but his Queen mother often soothed his questions with small smiles and half truths—the King is just tired, my boy, you know how he needs to rest. As comforting as his mother's gentle affirmations were, there was always a spark of discomfort that flared hot in Aemond's gut when he thought too closely of his distant father's frailty. A family dinner hadn't been called in two moons; typically the Targaryen children supped alone in their mother's empty solar, the Queen absent as she tended to her husband. Their grandfather, as involved in the affairs of the Keep as he was, was rarely present to bask in the company of his grandchildren. Most nights it was just Aemond and Helaena in that spacious anteroom to their mother's private chamber, no conversation passing between them, the only acknowledgement of the other being their ankles touching, physically locked in a mooring embrace under the cover of the small table. Of all of his siblings, Helaena's company was the most tolerable to the prince. Even Aegon had begun to shirk these small gatherings for favor of Flea Bottom and whatever debauchery he could immerse himself with there.
Aemond sat stiffly between his mother and sister, back straight and gaze low, and tried not to clench his fists too tightly from where they rested beside his dinner plate. "Where is Aegon?" His mother asked him. She was harried and sleepless, he saw—her auburn curls were pinned back but one errant twist was bouncing beside her temple as she leaned forward to hiss the words in her middle son's canted ear.
He resisted the urge to reach up and tug at it as he might have when he was a boy. "I do not know," he responded quietly. It was lucky his mother was sitting on the side of his good eye, for he didn't have to turn his head too much to watch her. "Am I to be my brother's keeper?"
Queen Alicent huffed and picked at her hands. When her father joined the hall she made painful effort to still them. "Have you seen Aegon?" she directed to him.
Otto Hightower gave his daughter a blank look and straightened his Hand of the King pin on his lapel before he swept into the empty chair beside Helaena. This was Daeron's usual seat, but given the boy's absence, he took it for his own. "I have not, but I heard tale that he was in the stables earlier this morning following…"
Alicent raised a quick hand and shook her head. "No, father. We won't speak of it at the table."
The Hightower patriarch offered his palms in supplication. "Perhaps it best he not join us this evening? Surely the lad needs to sleep off…whatever it was he had ingested to cause him to do such a vile thing."
Aemond suppressed the derisive snort that threatened to burst from his mouth. He would have smothered his smirk with a goblet if the table had been set; as bare as it was, he had no physical barrier to shield his expression with. "I don't believe my dear brother needs the encouragement of drink to enact on his baser desires, grandfather," he drawled.
"Aemond!" hissed his mother. His sly words were rewarded, however, by her small hand reaching under the table to clasp angrily at his thigh. It was gratifying to encourage such small affections from her, as sharp and reprimanding as they were. The press of her blunt nails through his breeches made him shiver.
"Am I wrong?" the Prince asked at length, cutting his violet eye to his mother's brown ones. It was wrong of him to relish the pain he saw on his mother's face—and slightly depraved, he mused, for him to derive pleasure from it. Good, he relished darkly as the hall's doors opened and the smell of dinner roast wafted in to signal the arrival of their meal. She deserves it. It was small and petty, but somehow sweet to be the cause of such an expression on her face. Better than the open anguish she wore like a wound, at any rate.
The sore of his rapacious and slovenly brother maintaining royal precedence over him throbbed keenly every time something like this happened; his half-sister Rhaenyra may boast title as Heir, but a sinking suspicion in his bones informed Aemond that she may not hold that particular honor for much longer. Each day she spent with her uncle-husband Daemon at Dragonstone was another day longer she was removed from the proceedings of the Targaryen seat of power—a seat which wouldn't be occupied much longer, if the lean of his King father told him anything.
The King was masked this night, slumped half-sideways, and the slackness of his jaw told Aemond that his mother had added more drops of milk of the poppy to his evening tea than strictly necessary. How the man would eat in such a state Aemond didn't know; he was certainly lost to the world at the moment, too drugged to follow the suggestive conversation at his own dinner table. For the best, perhaps.
The servants began laying the trays and he settled back a polite distance in his chair. To his left just out of his range of sight he could feel a slight presence before a goblet of Arbor Red was placed before him. He turned his face without thinking and saw the tanned arms of a stranger lift a small jug. "Water it down," he instructed quietly to the serving girl.
She startled as if she hadn't expected his address, and one of her elbows brushed his shoulder. Aemond's unmarred eyebrow rose in surprise at the physical slight and waited for her gushing apology; when she didn't respond to him as custom he turned his face to the left to look at her—only to quell an urge to startle once more.
This one was new.
Aemond had always kept a careful eye on the retinue of servants that orbited his family; should secrets be sold or loyalties turned, he wanted to know which faces most likely perpetrated such treasons. He knew the countenance, if not the names, of every servant that had ever yielded to the Targaryens in his lifetime. This one, blonde of hair and calloused of hand, didn't have a face he recognized. When their eyes met—his single violet to her uncommon green—he noted the small pinch of her mouth and the quick furrow of her pale brow. Not used to serving tables, he noted.
But her presence at dinner did make sense, so he settled. The other serving girl, his brother's date from the night before, had been banished from the Keep just that morning. Of course the steward would replace the lovely brunette with someone younger, plainer. When Aemond moved to address this newcomer again, he did it without looking in her direction. "Keep to my right side," he ordered quietly, resolving to forgive her earlier transgression with grace. When she stilled beside him, pausing in serving his plate, he turned again to fix her with a deadpan stare.
The sudden blush to her cheeks was vermillion and pleasing. "Yes, my Prince," she stuttered, nearly tripping over her feet to rush to his other side. His good side.
As dinner commenced he found himself tracking the new serving girl from time to time, an errant resolve to watch her forming somewhere in the back of his mind. He was sure Aegon's wandering eye wouldn't stray to the new girl, but when her attention would cut to him from her subservient post just left of the sideboard, he couldn't truly be sure.
Dyana had seen the Targaryens in person a handful of times before—she had caught glimpses at tourneys and state addresses, and of course markets in Kings Landing sold all sorts of iconography depicting them and their fearsome dragons. The Targaryens were closer to gods than men, it was said, and it made sense to Dyana that so many artisans would try to capture their likeness in tapestries and paintings for those who didn't have business with the Red Keep itself. Everyone had a passing curiosity with the strange, foreign family; from their unusual, dominant coloring to their incestuous marriage customs, everything about them piqued the imaginations of the smallfolk. Dyana wondered with wry humor if their supernatural command of dragons was the most ordinary thing about them—and why wouldn't it be, for this warring, conquering dynasty?.
But whatever Dyana expected of their demeanor in privacy, it wasn't this.
King Viserys was so much sicker than Dyana had imagined; the man was masked and leaning, but beyond a cursory glance, Dyana kept her eyes steadfastly off him. Miranda had warned her with clipped words that she wasn't to stare, no matter what she saw—the King was ailing, but to the public, he was to be in quiet observance. He could not feed himself this night, and Dyana quashed down her immediate feelings of disgust and alarm at how feeble the man seemed. She didn't often worry herself with the squabbles of the ruling class she served, but she found it quietly disheartening that this was the Protector of the Realm.
Queen Alicent, by contrast, was lovelier than the songs cast her; an obvious beauty of House Hightower, it was easy to see why the King chose such a woman as his second wife after the late Queen Aemma. Dyana knew her in passing reputation to be quiet, studious, and faithful to the Seven—she was a perfect picture of the Mother and held herself before her subjects with a certain rigidity that highborn women came to possess with age. Dyana hadn't expected her eyes to be darting, her hands to be wringing, and her overall countenance nervous. The Queen's obvious favor for the ailing King was nearly painful to observe, second only to the stilted interactions she had with her children.
And oh, the children. Two of them were present, but thankfully not Prince Aegon; there was Princess Helaena, who seemed lost to her own world beside her clearly doting Hand-of-the-King grandfather, and Prince Aemond, who inspired such instinctive and casual terror in Dyana that she briefly imagined he took more after his infamous Uncle Daemon instead of his own father.
If it hadn't been for Prince Aemond's unsettling, unwavering stare, Dyana probably wouldn't have felt so nervous. It was well known that the prince had lost an eye in an accident as a child, but the sight up close was jarring. Such a pretty face, Dyana couldn't help thinking, her eyes casting to his sharp jaw and full lips. It was a shame to see his pale countenance crossed with the thin red scar, one undoubtedly intense eye closed under simple leather eyepatch. How horrifying would his unfettered attention be if he had two violet eyes to glare at me with?
His attention on her didn't escape her notice. She had been embarrassed, earlier, when she hadn't minded his personal space and knocked him with her arm. Working in the kitchens had taught her to sometimes squeeze into spaces where she could, if only to accomplish a task—the practiced niceties of laying a table while minding the space of the seated patrons were lost on her. She managed to scrape by, mimicking Miranda who kept careful watch of her from across the table, but she was aware that her movements weren't as practiced as the other three women serving with her that night.
And when he had commanded her to stay on his right…oh. The humiliation had been hot and quick, because of course—no one would want to have someone lurking just out of sight, feeling vulnerable, and especially not the highborn warrior Prince Aemond was most likely training to become. She had hastened to serve him from his right but it hadn't seemed to cool his sharp, watchful attention from turning to her in silent judgement every few minutes.
The hall's fireplace, roaring merrily at his back, haloed him in orange light and cast his sharp face in shadow. He supped cleanly and with elegant hands, but even the illusion of shadow couldn't conceal the hard flick of his good eye to her each time she moved from the sideboard to approach the table with more wine. He was an unsettling man, handsome, but inwardly Dyana felt pity for whichever highborn wife he would surely take soon. Who would want to invite such an individual into their bed, a man who more resembled dragon than man?
A/N: The character "Dyana" is an adaptation of the character of the same name present briefly in House of the Dragon s1e8. In the show she was the blonde girl who Aegon raped...here I've decided to give her a different story.
Good or bad, I always enjoy hearing your thoughts so feel free to drop me a line ^^